#and also i got a piece of moonlight from some other episode and put that over the ground | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

in-ky · 3 years

Note

Hi! I’d love a story about Negan being a serial killer who only kills “bad people” (like in Dexter) and maybe he saves the reader from her ex who’s about to kill her and Negan can save her and takes her in because she’s a mess but she’s actually a killer herself (who kills rapists etc/ only the bad ones) and Negan and the reader start fighting and then get caught up in steamy hot sex 🥵 thank you!

Savior - Negan Killer AU

Warnings: Warnings: GORE + violence, smut, domestic abuse, swearing, dirty talk ig? idk how to tag this lol

A/N: hey! i struggled over this one for a while lol. ive only seen like. 3? episodes of dexter so. i really hope this meets your expectations! also forgive any mistakes its late, im tired, and i wanna get this up lol. also, is negan batman? maybe. 3.7k words

"Will, stop you're hurting me!" I hissed, grabbing at his wrist. He tugged me out of the bustling restaurant and into the dark street.

"I don't really give a shit," He snarled, throwing me into a secluded alleyway a few buildings down from the restaurant. Will had taken me out to a business dinner with his boss in hopes of showing me off and making a good impression. But things didn't quite go according to plan. "You embarrassed me in front of everyone!" He pushed me against the brick wall of the closed department store.

"What was I supposed to do?" I sneered, trying to wiggle away from him "He kept commenting on my body, saying how he wished he could take me home at the end of the night and do all kinds of 'unspeakable things to me'."

"You were just supposed to shut up and take it!" Will said, voice filled with rage "But no, you and your untamable fucking complex just couldn't handle a compliment. You threw your drink in his face! You're lucky he didn't fire me right then and there. You made me look like some pussy who can't control his whore."

"You're an asshole." I shouted, tears welling at the edges of my eyes. Will's face contorted further into a look of pure, unadulterated hatred.

"What the fuck did you just call me?" He seethed, clasping his hand tightly around my throat and constricting his fingers around my airway.

"I said you're an asshole who cares more about his dead-end career than his fucking girlfriend." I croaked. I hated him. I hated him so much. My vision clouded with the combination of disgust, loathing, and lack of oxygen, so I hit him where I knew it hurt. "There's a reason you needed me for arm candy tonight. It's 'cause you're a boring, piece-of-shit, lowlife who has no skill whatsoever. How does it feel knowing you need me to make something of yourself?" With that, he threw me to the ground by my throat. He wasted no time and pinned me to the cold concrete. His knees dug into my shoulders and his hand flew to his back pocket, whipping out the switchblade he carried as a precaution against mugging. My eyes widened as they caught a glint of the moonlight off the sharp knife. He brought the blade up to my throat and slapped me over the cheek harshly with his free hand.

"You better take back those words, bitch," He hissed, pressing the blade into the soft skin of my jugular "or they might just be your last." A dribble of blood ran down my neck with the pressure. Realization flashed through my mind. I could die right then. That could have been my last moment. Was I scared? No. Why wasn't I scared? Maybe it had to do with the shadowy figure that was slowly approaching us from the ally entrance.

There was plenty of time for me to warn Will that someone was coming. But I didn't. Instead, I stayed quiet and watched as the shadow figure pulled Will from my body with ease and tossed him to the side. Everything was kind of a blur. I was still oxygen starved and filled with a whirl-wind of emotion. I heard Will cry out in surprise and indignance. The shadow figure said nothing. It saw the switchblade with a steady line of my blood. It kicked Will in the chest, knocking him to the ground. Then it lifted up a baseball bat over its head and cracked it down over Will's skull. He continued to beat Will until he stopped squirming. The shadow figure paused and swung the bat over his shoulder. I had regained my breath and pushed myself to my elbows. The shadow noticed me moving and took a few heavy steps in my direction. I squirmed away slightly, instincts telling me to get away from the thing that had just pulverized my boyfriend. The shadow entered a stream of moonlight. It was a man. He had peppered hair and a blood-speckled face. He had dark brown eyes and a small smile perched on his lips.

"You okay, sweetheart?" He said. His voice was deep. I was partially surprised. He wasn't a bulky man. He was tall and had a broad frame, but his limbs were long and his body was lithe. He wore a leather jacket and his boots were slick with what I could only assume were Will's brains. I didn't want to look at his bat.

"W-Why did you do that?" I whispered. It was all I could muster.

"He was going to kill you." The man sounded confused, like I was supposed to know who he was and why he saved me.

"You don't know that." My voice was quiet. My eyes were glued to a spot behind the man, unblinking. He let out a throaty chuckle and dropped to a squat, leveling with me.

"Doll, he had a knife pressed to your throat," His words were gentle "Looked like he was gonna fuckin' kill you." He hesitantly reached out two fingers in the direction of my face. I didn't move. He was wearing leather gloves. The ridged fabric ran along my injuries. "Seems like he did some damage before I could step in. Damn. Sorry about that. Listen, I live a few streets down. If you want, I can get you cleaned up."

"Okay," I said softly. I let him help me up to my feet. He guided me along with one arm while holding his bat with the other. As we walked out of the alley I couldn't help but look down at Will, or what remained of him at least. His forehead was split in half, a pool of chunky blood bubbling on the ground. I clenched my jaw and forced myself to swallow the bile that had risen in my throat. And yet, I didn't feel sad. I didn't mourn him. Maybe it was shock, maybe it wasn't. "Thank you?" I murmured, though it was more of a question. The man and I stepped out onto the street and I was grateful there was no one around to see us leaving the scene of a very heinous-looking crime.

"No problem, doll," The man hummed, setting a brisk pace down the sidewalk. "The name's Negan, by the way." Cool. Negan: my Savior.

~~~

"So you're like Batman?" I asked Negan as he dabbed the blood away from my neck. He gave a short chuckle and tore away the sticky part of the band-aid.

"I guess you can say that," he mused, splaying the bandage over the cut the knife had left "but I specifically go for people that I know have hurt others. The baddies, if you will."

"Is that legal?" I tilted my head, crossing my ankles as they dangled over the bathroom counter. My palms were flat on the surface of Negan's marble sink top, fiddling with the wrappers of the medical supplies he had used to clean and bandage my small cuts and bruises.

"I haven't been caught," Negan shrugged "besides, it's less work for the police. They don't have to do any interrogation bullshit or anything. I usually catch people in the act, like tonight. Then I do my thing."

"Do you kill everyone?"

"Only the bad people," He reminded, tossing away a bloody tissue "only people who have hurt others. But, yes, usually the offender ends up on the business end of Lucille over there." He pointed out the door into the living room, where the still-bloody bat rested against a chair. I furrowed my brow.

"Well, doesn't that make you a bad guy?" I pressed. He tapped my knee and I dropped down to the tile floor, tucking my hair behind my ear and gathering some of the scraps.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you still kill people, right? Even if they're bad? So doesn't that still make you a killer?" Negan was quiet for a minute. "Let's put it this way," I continued "What would you do if you came across someone who was like you; someone who hurt the bad people. Would you still kill them. They're hurting people." Negan took a deep breath and let it out with a contemplative sigh, itching his bearded chin.

"I'm not sure," He mused "I've never really thought about it before. See, I don't consider myself a bad person per say. Yea, what I'm doing might be considered fucked up. But I'm doing it for the right reason. I'm protecting people by attacking their attackers. In the end, someone's saved." He brushed off his hands and led me out of the bathroom, flicking the light off. "Would you rather me not have saved you tonight?"

"No," I said immediately "thank you. Really, thank you. You saved my life. Will is...was...always a dick, but I never thought he'd actually hurt me. I guess that proves people can have a whole bunch of layers." Negan nodded and moved to the kitchen. He raised a bottle of whiskey as an offering. I shook my head but he poured himself a glass.

"I was just doing my job," Negan grinned sympathetically "I'm sorry your boyfriend was an asshole who tried to murder you." I shrugged, amusement in my eyes.

"Eh, it happens to everyone." I smiled as he let out another laugh. I felt as if I shouldn't be laughing, but at the same time, everyone has their own responses to almost getting stabbed to death in an alley. So I let myself have this moment. Besides, Negan was a good guy to be around. He made me feel safe, comfortable, secure. Everything I needed right now. "So, Negan, what do you do? Surely vigilante-ing can't pay well, and this apartment is really nice."

"I'm a retired baseball player," Negan said, sipping his whiskey and settling into one of the armchairs in the living room "Hence the bat."

"Were you any good?" I asked. He let out a loud scoff.

"Was I any good?" He mocked "Sweetheart, I have a whole damn trophy room. I was fucking amazing. I just got old."

"So you're rich with no real job, you kill bad guys, and you have a massive ego," I listed "You really are like Batman, aren't you?"

~~~

Negan let me stay on his couch that night. It was leather, like everything else that man seemed to own, but it was comfortable. I woke up to the smell of bacon filling the air. I groaned and rubbed my fists against my eyes, clearing them of sleep. I stretched my arms above my head in a yawn and rolled off the couch, stumbling into the kitchen. Negan was hunched over the bubbling pan, dodging pellets of grease as they shot up at him.

"Smells good!" I purred, closing my eyes and taking a deep inhale.

"Good," He grumbled "You better fucking enjoy it because I've gotten burned at least three times." I laughed and walked up to him examining the small red patches that dotted his arms.

"You didn't have to make me breakfast you know."

"Yea, but I wanted to make sure you were comfortable," He sighed, turning off the stove and scooping the cooked bacon onto a paper towel. "Besides, I was craving some bacon when I woke up. I haven't had someone to share a meal with in a while."

"Well, if you want, you can come by my house for dinner." I offered, crunching down on a piece of bacon "I've been meaning to whip out the family alfredo recipe for a while, maybe a hot date would give me that incentive." I gave him a playful wink and he chuckled.

"Sure thing, doll," He hummed, putting the pan in the sink "I love me some fucking spaghetti. I'll see you around seven?"

"Sounds good."

~~~

I ran down the sidewalk, chest heaving. There was enough darkness to cover me, but I still kept my head down to prevent recognition. I held my hands close to my stomach, praying that the blood on my fingers wouldn't drip on the pavement and leave a trail. I had been on my way home from the store when I heard some commotion coming from an alley. My first instinct was to run, but then I heard the girl crying for help. Negan came to mind, what he did, how he helped people. I couldn't turn away. I marched down the alley and saw a greasy man pinning a woman to the wall of a building. Flashbacks of the night before hit me like a train. I looked on top of the alley dumpster and saw a crowbar perched on one of the lids. I grabbed it and stormed up to the man, whacking him upside the head with the weapon. I kicked him to the side and brought the crowbar over my head before swinging it down. It connected with his face in a sickening 'thwack.' I thought of Will. I thought of what might of happened if Negan had never stopped him. I thought of all the times that bastard had gotten drunk and told me I was nothing. I let the rage bubble up and fuel my beating. By the time I was pulled back into the moment, my muscles were screaming, the woman was gone, and the man's face was unrecognizable. I tossed the crowbar into the dumpster and ran back home.

Dried blood is extremely hard to wash off. It sticks to your skin in flakes, creating a pattern of red veins crawling over your hands. Fuck. I scrubbed as hard as I could under the rushing water of the sink, pumping more and more soap into my hand. It was under my fingernails. It was stuck in my palm prints. Shit, did I leave fingerprints at the scene? Would they be coming for me? With a hiss, I rubbed even harder at my skin, small flecks of blood turning the sink water red.

Suddenly, my door opened.

"I'm ready for my s'getties!" Negan boomed with a wide smile. My head whipped around, looking at him with wide eyes. His grin faded and he crossed the room in record time, grabbing my wrists and turning the sink off. "Is this fucking blood?" He snarled, bringing my hands up to my face. I clenched my jaw and dropped my eyes to my feet. "Jesus, who's is it? Answer me!"

"I-I heard someone screaming on the way home," I said quietly, eyes still downcast "I thought I would help..." His jaw went slack and he let go of my hands, running his fingers through his hair.

"Jesus fuck, you can't just go around killing people!"

"Why not?" I snapped, eyes meeting his "You do it all the time? What's the difference? Why can't I help people?"

"Because it...Because you just can't!" Negan growled, shaking his head.

"Why are you so special?" I hissed back, drying my hands off on a towel before tossing it at him "It's not like you can get a permit for fucking murder. Why do you do it, anyways? Is it some perverted thing? Do you get off on saving people from attackers?"

"Watch yourself." Negan warned, eyes darkening.

"Pfft, or what?" I laughed, tossing my head back "What are you gonna do, kill me? I'm not afraid of you, Negan." As soon as the words left my mouth, he charged me. His hand flew to my throat, squeezing my airway lightly. His hips pressed me against the counter. I let out a small gasp when he shoved his face next to mine.

"Oh, but doll, you really fucking should be." He spat, curling his lip "I could snap your neck right here, right now." He gave a small squeeze to emphasize his words. I let out a strangled moan. We both froze. "Are you turned on right now?" He muttered, furrowing his brow. I licked my lips and squirmed in his grip, pressing my thighs together slightly in an effort to alleviate the warm pressure growing in my belly.

"No," I lied, voice weak. A sinister grin curled over the bottom half of his face and he licked his tongue over his teeth.

"And I'm the perv, huh?" He sucked on my earlobe and peppered kisses down my jawline "Sweetheart, tell me, do you want me to fuck that pretty little pussy of yours? Do you want me to make you cum harder than you ever have?" I whimpered at his dirty mouth. "Use your words, doll, or I'll leave right fucking now."

"Y-Yes!" I breathed as Negan's lips sucked on the sweet spot right beneath my ear.

"Yes, what, princess?"

"Yes, I want you to fuck me, please!" I groaned, clawing at his shirt. He let out a short chuckle, muttering something about how needy I was, but I didn't care. Right now, the only thought running through my head was that I needed Negan. I needed all of him. And damn me if I wasn't going to get it.

We clawed at each other's clothes like rabid animals. Once we were completely bare, Negan moved his kisses down my body. His large, calloused hands kneaded my breasts, twisting my nipples between his thumbs. My arms flew around his neck and I dragged my fingernails up his back. He shivered against my touch and slid his hands further down my body. They settled firmly on my hips as he captured my lips in a fervent kiss.

"Fuck, sweetheart," he grunted, pulling back for air. I looked at him. His tawny eyes were now black, pupils far beyond dilated with lust. Both of our lips were swollen and red from the intensity of our kisses. Negan's chest inflated and deflated quickly as his eyes roamed over my body. "You're so damn perfect." I smiled sheepishly and pulled my bottom lip between my teeth, looking up at him through lidded eyes.

"You're not so bad yourself," I reached out my hand and used my pointer finger to draw a line from his collar bone down the center of his chest and through his navel, finally ending right over his pulsing cock. He sucked in a breath as my fingers closed around him. My thumb swept over the hot tip, gathering precum on the pad of my finger and rubbing it around.

"Shit," He hissed as I slowly pumped him "I'm not gonna fucking last if you keep doing that." He gently pried my hand away and took a step closer to me. I could feel his hardened length resting against the inside of my thigh. The thought of him being so close made a burst of heat rush down between my thighs. Negan took a long finger and ran it through my folds, collecting my wetness. I moaned as he teasingly dipped the first knuckle into me. He pulled back and let out a low whistle. "Damn, girl," he chuckled, raising his finger to my face "You're fucking dripping. Who's that for?" His slick-coated fingers glistened in the light of my apartment. I let out a deep groan as he slid them between his lips and sucked.

"You, Negan!" I whimpered, wrapping my legs around his waist "It's all for you." A wolfish grin spread over his features as he tugged me off him and pulled me down off the counter. He spun me around and pressed gently between my shoulder blades until my chest was flat against the cold surface.

"Then if you don't mind," Negan cooed, lining himself up with my entrance "I'm going to take what belongs to me." With that, he slowly pushed into me. I gasped at the stretch, balling my hands into fists as he continued to split me open.

"Fucking shit," he groaned once he bottomed out "you're tight as hell. I bet you've never had a dick as big as mine." He pulled out slightly and I let out a moan at the growing emptiness inside. The moan soon turned to a yelp when he brought down his hand against my ass. The smack was loud and he rubbed the red spot tenderly. "Have you?"

"N-No!" I gasped when he thrusted into me for the first time "Never. Fuck, you feel so good." Negan's thrusts sped up, his hips snapping against my ass in an obscene rhythm. Grunts and moans of pleasure slipped from both of our lips as he plowed unapologetically into me. I could feel every inch of him. He was hitting every spot, dragging against my walls in a sinfully perfect way.

"You're doing so good," He purred, kissing and biting my shoulder "So good for me. You're so perfect." I tossed my head back and he grabbed my chin, tilting my face towards him so he could give me another bruising kiss. I could only keep up for so long, though, and the white bliss of pleasure he was giving me soon became overwhelming. My jaw went slack and my head dropped against the cool tile of the counter in an attempt to ground myself in the moment. "I want you to cum, doll, cum around me. Wanna feel those walls squeeze me." His thrusts were starting to become sloppy and I could tell he was getting to his end. One of his fingers danced down my spine and found its way to my clit. He circled it with just enough pressure to get me to the edge that I was so willing to jump off. "Now." Negan growled. I obeyed, feeling the band in my lower abdomen snapping violently. We reached our releases simultaneously. My walls clenched around him, milking him of every drop. I screwed my eyes shut and screamed his name, holding in a large breath as the world around me spun. Negan eventually pulled himself out and collapsed on top of me. We both were breathing heavily, sweaty bodies entangled as well as we could over a counter. I swallowed, my throat dry from panting through my orgasm. When my eyes fluttered open, I could see Negan's thumb tracing circles over the love bites that were starting to darken on my shoulders.

"Are you going to kill me?" I rasped, running a hand through my wild hair "I guess I'm a bad person now." Negan chuckled, still out of breath.

"I think I'll make an exception," He mused, pressing a sweet kiss to the shell of my ear "I don't think I'm ready to let you go just yet."

#negan x reader #negan x y/n #negan smut #negan x you #negan smith #au!negan #the walking dead #twd smut #twd negan

161 notes · View notes

helliontherapscallion · 3 years

Text

Recovery? (Adrenaline Junkie Part 5)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17

Spotify Playlist (collaborative)

Warnings: PTSD, sleep paralysis, hallucinations, swearing, mentions of death/injury, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation (marked so you can skip if it’s a major trigger for you), self harm (also marked), phantom pain syndrome

Word count: 3,722

Disclaimer: I have not experienced PTSD, sleep paralysis, hallucinations, or phantom pain syndrome, so I’m sorry if they aren’t portrayed correctly

When a wild bird can’t fly, it’s defenseless. It feels trapped even if it can still walk away. It feels alone even if it’s surrounded by other birds. If a bird loses the ability to fly, a piece of it is missing. A piece of itself. Something that it values as something unique to it and only it. It loses most mental stimulation and becomes numb until it can feel freedom again.

It’s been about two months since you respawned and you honestly felt so restless. You wanted to fly through the sky again, feeling the air move freely between your feathers. You wanted to weave in and out of the clouds. You wanted to feel something other than fear. When you’re not scared, you don't feel anything. You missed skydiving. You wanted, no, you craved the feeling of adrenaline flowing along every little nook and cranny in your cardiovascular system.

You found out that you get flashbacks whenever you see someone or something hulky and covered in a dark green color. You still haven’t told your family about this, you thought that it was something silly to be afraid of. You tried your hardest to avoid Philza the most; he always wore his favorite color with pride. You still haven’t apologized for screaming death threats at him when you were going through an episode.

You only had one other major hallucinogenic episode since the first one, but it wasn’t as bad as the first one.

You woke up in the middle of the night with the moonlight beaming through your window illuminating the silhouette of The Warden standing in the corner of your room. You willed yourself to open your mouth to scream for your brothers, but you couldn’t move. You could only watch it.

The telltale glowing drool fell from the corners of its wide mouth, mixing with the blood dripping off from its long claws. Its chest rhythmically glowed as the things writhing in it managed to squeeze through the small gaps between the bony confines of its ribs. The white wisps flew around your room freely, bouncing off your walls with thuds and eventually settling to float in front of your face.

You watched with wide eyes as their permanently gaping mouths struggled to form words. Somehow, you could see desperation in their empty eye sockets. A flurry of whispers met your ears, but you couldn’t make out anything they were saying. It was too jumbled.

You heard The Warden slowly drag its feet along your carpet over to your bed. The wisps started to thrash about and scream as it reached out and scooped them all up easily with a single swipe of a hand. It shoved them into its mouth and they reappeared behind the confines of its ribcage, the screaming getting louder and more distorted as they got swallowed. Multiple voices were shrieking with agony and anguish as The Warden turned its attention towards you. It bent over and hovered its face over yours as its drool and drops of blood started to drip onto your cheeks. You felt its rancid breath fan over you. It had hints of iron and rot.

Your mind was screaming at your body to move away, but you couldn’t. You didn’t have control anymore. Your breathing picked up as you felt your heart beat out of your chest. It just hovered over you doing nothing, like it was enjoying seeing your fearful eyes. Like it enjoyed the feeling of having complete power over you.

Your breath caught in your throat as it got closer to you, its mouth getting dangerously close to engulfing your entire head. You squeezed your eyes shut and tried with all your might to move any part of your body. After a while, your head slightly moved to the side. Gradually, you worked your way up to moving your head fully to the side. You felt all your muscles activate at once as you shot up from your bed with a strangled gasp.

You frantically flattened your body against the wall, reaching a shaking hand between the wall and mattress to grab the iron dagger you hid there. Holding it defensively in front of you, you scanned the room. There was not a single thing out of place. Everything was just as you left it before you went to bed.

You covered your mouth as sobs threatened to burst from your chest like the wisps in The Warden’s. You brought your knees up to your chest and buried your head in them. You didn’t sleep for a few days after that.

Other than the major episodes, your imagination placed The Warden everywhere you looked. You saw The Warden whenever Philza walked past you. You saw glimpses of it whenever you looked into the woods at night. You saw it behind you in the mirror reaching for your other wing. Sometimes, you thought you could hear the screams of the wisps in the distance.

Your entire family was constantly hovering over you; you always had at least one of the boys with you at all times. They wouldn’t let you out of the house.

Out of all of your family, Wilbur was probably the lesser of the evils. He didn’t judge you or question you, he just let you do your own thing. He would softly pluck the strings on his guitar and sing to you while you would lay on his bed. Those moments were one of the only moments where you would fully let your guard down and relax.

Hangouts with Techno were also pleasant, but he hasn’t looked you in the eyes since he helped you during your first episode. That was the only downside to it though; he would give you some of his mythology books to read or read them to you. His voice always soothed you as a kid. Sometimes, he would give you a hug when he saw that it was a rough day for you.

Tommy’s hang outs were kept to a minimal, the family didn’t trust him much because they thought his rambunctious and extrovert personality would overwhelm you. You were alone with him only twice out of the last two months. Usually, you both would lay on his bed and just talk about his life with the jukebox running softly in the background playing the discs that you and Philza gifted him during his first birthday with the family. He tried to get you to open up to him, but you always deflected. He shouldn’t know how fucked up you were, you vowed to protect him when Philza first brought him home. You would always protect your little brother, even if it was from yourself.

Before the incident, you would’ve killed to get more alone time with your father. But now, you tried to avoid Philza at all costs. You couldn’t help but see The Warden whenever you saw his tall form, green clothes, and large wings. When you had to hang out with him however, you wouldn’t look at him. You two would usually go to chop down trees or cook dinner together.

You felt incredibly guilty that you still haven’t apologized to him for everything you’ve put him through. Whenever you brought yourself to glance at him, he was always looking at you heartbroken. You knew that the outcomes of your first death gave the entire family some form of trauma, but you saw that it hit your dad harder than the others. You did threaten to kill him in graphic ways and you did hit him in your panicked stupor. You really needed to apologize for that. You probably should tell him about your silly little fear of green. You were going to wait until he was in his pajamas to apologize; they usually didn’t have much green.

You loved your family of course, but you were always the type of person to require some alone time to function, even before the incident. You felt incredibly drained physically, mentally, and emotionally. It took you a tremendous amount of effort to get out of bed in the mornings. You didn’t see any meaning in life anymore. Everything was gray and the only thing you actually felt was fear, so you didn’t see any point in getting up. The only reason you left your bed was because your brothers would coax you out. Everyday was monotonous.

*************************SUICIDAL IDEATION/SELF HARM*****************************

Your mind was always coming up with intrusive thoughts about killing yourself. When you did the dishes, you always imagined yourself gliding blades vertically along your wrists and just letting the blood pool out and mix with the dishwater. When you cooked breakfast, you would imagine placing your hand inside the burning flame of the stove. When you were staring out of the window at night looking for The Warden, you would imagine yourself disappearing into the woods to look for a creeper to blow you up. When you passed the potion chest, you imagined chugging poison so you could feel something before you died. Whenever you used an ore during crafting, you always thought about going back to the cave so you could be put out of your misery again. It did a damn good job at killing you the first time. Who knows, maybe The Warden would be merciful this time. The most common thought was finding a tall cliff or mountain and jumping off to finally feel the wind between your feathers and the adrenaline running through you for the last time. You daydreamed about that last one a lot.

The little scrapes you got on the little tasks given to you by your family gave you a smidge of pain. A smidge of feeling other than numbness or suffocating fear. So, in a desparate attempt to feel something, you started to cut yourself You have a dagger hidden in your room that your family didn’t know about and you constantly wore a long sleeved cloak to hide your wing so you could easily hide the cuts. It would give you some light in the dark abyss that was your current mental state.

Sometimes, you would make small cuts on your wrists and thighs when everything was too overwhelming, but the relief it gave you wouldn’t last throughout the day. You were scared to cut deeper. You didn’t want to deal with infection or smuggling healing potions underneath your family’s noses. You would probably get caught and they’d take away the very little freedom and control you had in your life.

**********************SUICIDAL IDEATION/SELF HARM OVER*************************

You grunted in discomfort as you chopped some wood with Philza behind your house. It was a bad day for the phantom pains in your absent wing, you felt shooting pain and itchiness along where it was supposed to be all day long. You heard him pause his actions and walk over to you. When he placed a gentle hand on your shoulder, you squeezed your eyes shut as you remembered the way he grabbed you the day you respawned.

“Are you alright hun?”

Shrugging off his hand, you continued to chop lumber. “I’m fine Dad.”

“Are you sure? You looked like you were in pain.”

You sighed, “It’s… it’s just a bad day for the pain.”

“Where does it hurt? I can go grab you a potion.”

He sounded like he always did when he talked to you, concerned. You wanted to be treated like a normal person again. You didn’t like it when your family walked on eggshells around you constantly, it made you feel like a stranger in your own home.

“My right wing hurts. And potions don’t help, I’ve tried that. There’s nothing you can do.”

He paused for a second. You imagined him furrowing his brows and tilting his head lightly to the side as he contemplated what you said. It was the first time you opened up to him about anything. “...Your wing still feels things?”

You grunted as you swung the axe down onto the log, “Yeah, it feels things sometimes. It’s mostly a shooting pain or an itching sensation where I don’t have a wing. There’s nothing I can do about it, so I’m learning to live with it.”

“How long has this been happening?”

Your mind flashed back to the conversation you two had a year ago. “Since I lost it.”

“Why don’t we turn in for the night? The sun is starting to set and we’ve got enough wood to last us a week.”

You silently nodded and bent over to pick up the logs you chopped. Grabbing as much as your arms could hold, you put the planks into the chest next to the back door. Turning around to grab more, you jumped back when your eyes met with Philza’s chest. His hand was outstretched towards you. You hugged your body as you looked away from him.

“(Y/n), you’re not okay. Please just let me help you.”

“...I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m fine.”

“You haven’t spoken to anyone about your emotions, bottling it up isn’t good hun.”

“That’s because I don’t have anything to talk about.”

He sighed, “Why don’t we get your brothers to cook dinner so we can have a little chat. Meet me in your room.”

Wordlessly, you walked back into the house and straight up to your room. Sitting on the bed, you put your head in your hands as you waited for the inevitable vulnerability. After a couple of minutes, you heard a gentle knock on your door. It opened to reveal your dad smiling at you.

Glancing back at your hands, you slipped your hand under the sleeve of your cloak to pinch the skin so you could try to ignore him when he walked over to sit next to you. You turned your head away from him.

You felt the mattress shift under his weight when he sat next to you. You felt his breath tickle the top of your head as he spoke to you, “please, talk to me.”

“I’ve already told you, there’s nothing to talk about Dad.”

“...You’ve been seeing The Warden whenever you look at me, haven’t you?” He sounded so broken. It must be hard to have your own child avoid you because you reminded them of their murderer.

You were quiet for a few moments while you battled against the tears that threatened to leak from your eyes. Swallowing thickly, you shakily said, “I’m sorry Dad, I’m so sorry. I-I see it when I see you. I see it everywhere.”

“Hey,” he gently said, “it’s alright. Nothing’s your fault, you can’t control it. Is there anything… specific that reminds you of it?”

“...Yeah, I see it vividly when I see something tall and… and dark green. I can’t help but to see it when I see you.”

He felt his heart sink. He always wore green, no matter the day. He was basically torturing his child just by being around them. God, what kind of father was he if he didn’t realize that sooner? He felt like a failure.

You spewed reassurances at him when you heard his breath hitch. “Dad, it’s not your fault, you didn’t know about it. It’s just a stupid fear and it’s my fault for not getting over it. I-I’ll do better. I can-”

“Stop. Nothing is your fault and it’s certainly not stupid. You’re traumatized, (y/n), you’re traumatized and it’s nobody’s fault except The Warden’s,” it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Would you feel more comfortable if I changed clothes?”

“You- you don’t have to. I don’t want you to change anything because of me.”

“(Y/n), I’m your father. I’ll do anything if it means you feel better, I want to help you get better. Changing what I wear isn’t a big deal. I’ll be right back.”

“You really don’t have to, Dad.”

“Nonsense, I’m going to go change. It’s really not a big deal.”

He stood up and speed walked out your door. You felt awful, he was changing because of you. Because you were scared of a fucking color. You needed to get a grip. You were weak.

The door opened again to reveal Philza dressed in an old white t-shirt and gray sweatpants. His wardrobe was very limited when it came to colors other than green; it was strange seeing him in anything but green. You felt a little more at ease around him, but you still couldn’t look him in the eye. You still felt guilty.

Sitting next to you again, he fiddled with the hem of his shirt. “It’s been a while since I’ve worn these, I uh forgot how comfy they are.”

You two sat in an awkward silence. It was obvious that he was lying to you about liking them. He was shifting his wings around uncomfortably and shifting on the mattress. With wings, it was hard to find fabric that didn’t irritate the base of the wing. The base of the wings were more sensitive than any other body part.

“You’re lying.”

“Lying? About what hun?”

“About being comfortable. They’re irritating your wings aren’t they? This is why you shouldn’t change anything about yourself for me, I just screw things up for everyone.”

“No you don’t-”

“Yes I do, Dad. Let’s be honest here, I’m a complete fuck up. I mess up everything I’m near. I messed up the family. Everything’s different because of me.”

He moved to kneel in front of you, placing both his hands firmly on your shoulders.

“Look at me, (y/n).”

When you didn’t make any move to look up from your tightly clasped hands, he gingerly moved your chin up and put his hand back on your shoulder. His face was stern and his blue eyes were blazing. Oh god, you really fucked up didn’t you? You knew you shouldn’t have told him anything.

“You are not a fuck up. Do you hear me? You. Are. Not. A. Fuck up.”

“But-”

“Ah,” he sharply chided, “I’m not done. You aren’t a fuck up. You couldn’t control what happened to you. You didn’t know that you’d die when you went into that cave. You didn’t know that you’d lose a limb. You didn’t mess up the family, you could never, ever, do that… (Y/n), change was bound to happen sooner or later. Everything changes, that’s just how life works. Even if we didn’t want change, it’s inevitable.”

He could tell from your bloodshot eyes and wobbling chin that you were about to cry, it was always your tell as a child. In that instance, he saw you as the kid that came running to him after you scraped your knee. An innocent kid that always saw the good in the world. He pulled you into his chest and gently wrapped his wings around you, humming the song he would sing to you when you had a nightmare as a child.

“It’s alright, hun, let it out.”

You finally broke, throwing your arms around him and sobbing into his chest. Your body shook with muffled sobs as you released all the pent up emotion you’ve been deprived of in the last two months. It felt nice to talk to your dad again, to be close to him again. For the first time in two months, you felt completely safe. Your dad will always protect you.

“It’s been so hard Dad,” you blubbered out. “I don’t know what to do. I’m broken, Dad. I can’t be fixed. I feel so empty.”

“Hun, no. You can be fixed, it just takes time. We’re here for you. Me, Technoblade, Wilbur, and Tommy. We’re always going to be here for you no matter what. We’ll help you.”

You fell silent as your body convulsed with silent sobs. You two sat there for what seemed like hours before you finally ran out of tears. You pulled back from him and wiped at your snotty nose.

“I never apologized for what I said to you two months ago. I-I shouldn’t have said any of those things. It hurt you in ways that I’ll probably never understand, and… I’m sorry Dad.”

“(Y/n), you don’t have to apologize. You were scared and you were trying to protect your brothers. That was really brave of you to do, I’m proud of you.”

You threw yourself at him again in a tight, one-winged hug. He chuckled as he hugged you back.

“…Thank you Dad, for everything.”

“Anything for you,” he glanced at the clock you made on your wall. “It’s almost dinner time, let’s go see if your brothers burnt down the kitchen.”

You genuinely smiled at that, remembering the last time your brother cooked together. It was a couple of years ago when you and Philza were coming back from visiting a nearby village. Philza thought it was a spectacular idea to give your brothers the task of cooking dinner. That day, you two came home to a fire engulfing the entire stove and your brothers arguing about whose fault it was. Since then, they weren’t allowed to cook together.

“That’s a good idea, remember the last time they cooked together?”

He chuckled. “Don’t remind me, I nearly pulled out all my feathers cuz of the stress it gave me. I think it even gave me a few gray hairs.”

You snorted. “Well, they’re quiet. Too quiet. We need to go down there before they burn down the house.”

He kissed your hair before you stood up and started to walk to the kitchen. He followed suit, throwing an arm over your shoulders and pulling you into his side. Surprisingly, they didn’t burn down the kitchen. Instead, they actually cooked dinner well. Some of it was burnt, but to their credit, they hadn’t cooked together in a while.

At the dinner table, you felt like you were part of the family again. You laughed with your brothers when Philza scolded them for something they said. You felt like there was a giant weight lifted off from your shoulders. Of course, you were still traumatized and had other issues you had to work out, but now you knew you had your family to help you through it. You wouldn’t ask for anything different.

Taglist (comment if you want to be added):

@acecarddraws @goldenstarofthunderclan @ravennightingaleandavatempus @dirtydiavolo @yeiras-world @immadatmostthings @hee-hee-haw @jackalopedoodles @m1lkmandan @vanhakirja @im-a-depressed-gay @coolleviauchihadreamerlove @questioning-sanity @camisascam @bongwaterflavoredgatorade @kakamiissad @jayistrash @lifestylesleep @speedymaximoff @sun-shark-tooth @appetiteofapeoplepleaser @lestrangenymph @kinismanditory @dragons-lurk-here @rinzyx05 @the-wandering-pan-ace @sparkling-gayyyy @angelic-scent @shinipii @dont-hug-me-im-a-fander @izzydimensional

526 notes · View notes

naminethewriter · 3 years

Text

America’s Favourite Gameshow!!

Day 2 and I’m still on track! It’s way too late though and I hope I get done with the other prompts sometime before 12am 😴 Anyway, have fun with this silly little fluff story 💙💚🥰 @intrulogicalweek2021

Here on Ao3

Masterpost | Intrulogical Week 2021 Masterpost

Characters: Remus, Logan

Relationship: romantic Intrulogical

Rating: G

Words: 1,480

Summary: Logan just wanted to make sure his boyfriend ate something. Remus wants entertainment more.

Logan walked along the halls of Remus’ castle in search of his boyfriend who had run off after breakfast to continue some project of his. Now, hours later, Logan wanted to ensure that he had eaten since then because while they didn’t require to eat, considering they were just figments of Thomas’ overactive subconscious, it had proven to be beneficial to their wellbeing as well as Thomas’. It had taken Logan almost a year of research to come to that conclusion but it had been well worth the effort.

But both sides of Creativity were prone to forgetting the passage of time while working on one of their passion projects, hence Logan’s decision to check on Remus this afternoon. He had already looked through most of the grounds and was now on his way up into a tower. It was pretty much separated from the rest of the castle and nobody but Logan and the Duke himself had access and Remus spend a lot of time up there doing whatever he wants without disturbance. The only reason that Logan had put off checking there first is because he disliked the long, long staircase leading up. About three fourth of the way up, Logan could hear cluttering sounds, so it seemed reasonable to assume his search would soon be over.

After another five minutes of climbing he finally reached the top, only one door separating him from whatever mess Remus has caused this time. Logan took a few deep breaths before pushing it open.

Pure Chaos laid before him. He couldn’t even begin to describe it. Furniture overturned and broken. Paint or something colourful had gotten everywhere. Glass shards, papers, confetti, everything scattered randomly around the room and Remus in the middle of it.

Logan didn’t even attempt going any further in. Instead he called out to his boyfriend who turned to face so fast, his head rotated more than it should with a sickening crack.

“Lolo!” he grinned, pulling his head back into the right position before climbing over the rubble to the door. As soon as he got into touching distance he wrapped himself around Logan in a tight hug. His boyfriend just patted his arm until he let go. “What brings you here, starshine? You horny?” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, causing Logan to roll his eyes.

“No Remus, I am not horny. I simply came to check on you since I haven’t seen you since breakfast.”

“Ah shit, is it already evening? Damn time flies when you’re busy, huh.”

“What were you doing in the first place? This entire room is a mess.” Logan immediately regretted asking when he saw the smile spreading across his boyfriend’s face. “No, Remus, please-“

Too late.

Remus snapped and suddenly there was a spotlight on the two of them, two more swinging across the room that was now notably darker. Some kind of jingle started playing and an invisible audience started applauding. Remus, now in a suit, brought a microphone to his mouth.

“Ladies and Gentlemen! You have waited patiently and now it is finally time to play America’s favourite gameshow! It’s” – the fake audience yelled along the next words –

“Art or Science!”

“The rules are simple,” Remus continued alone. “Our returning champion, Logan ‘Logic’ Sanders, has five minutes to survey the room and then he has to decide: did I cause this chaos in the name of Art or Science! He is allowed to ask me three things to specify, not one hint more. Our contestant has a success rate of 66% so far and I’m sure we are all curious to see the result of our fourth episode of-!” Remus held the mic away from him and again the imaginary audience shouted:

“Art or Science!”

“Now, Logan. Are you ready to start?” Remus held out the mic to Logan this time who groaned and levelled him with an unimpressed glare.

“Is this really necessary, Cephy?” Remus laughed and threw his arms open.

“Of course not, but it’s fun so we’re doing it!” Logan massaged his temple. Ever since Thomas had taken to binge watching SNL sketches on YouTube, Remus had been practically enthralled with their game show parodies. Especially if Bill Hader (Remus’ favourite cast member) played the host. His top spot shifted between ‘What’s that Name?’ and ‘Who’s on Top’ every five minutes and Logan couldn’t deny that the chaos of those concepts fit Remus very well, so it should be no surprise that he thought of his own little show. It just annoyed Logan that he was the only contestant ever having to deal with it.

Well, at least it was short. He could play along for five minutes.

“Fine, start the clock.” Remus cheered, as did the audience, and the light returned to how it was before, with the entire room evenly lit.

“As always, please don’t hesitate to give us play-by-play commentary on your thought process, Sherlock,” Remus giggled and Logan nodded absentmindedly, already scanning the room for clues. He took the first minute to simply think and his boyfriend let him but Logan knew he would grow impatient eventually.

“Clearly there is both art supplies as well as lab equipment present and I have witnessed you using both for the others intended purpose, so that does not provide any essential hints. The furniture is mostly broken and out of place. Especially that table that seems to be hanging out the window and only hangs on with one leg anchored inside. The glass was most likely smashed by said table. This could point to a possible explosion that resulted after a failed experiment, favouring science as its cause. Though again, I have seen you set off an explosion to create an art piece of yours so it is not concrete proof either.” Remus nodded along to his descriptions and a spotlight also shone on the areas he talked about.

“Now for my first question, I would like you to confirm whether the dark red substance in that corner is blood or not.”

“It’s not, though I tried my best to get it to smell the same.” Logan nodded, again falling silent for a moment to think. The quiet was broken by a croak and something moved though it was hidden enough that Logan couldn’t quite make it out.

“You used live specimen. Not unheard off for your art but more common with experiments. Especially frogs.”

“Toads, not frogs actually.”

“I can tell apart a frog croaking and toad doing the same, Remus. That sound was a frog.”

“Nah, you see, I like how toads look better but frogs sound more appealing, so I made a toad that croaked like a frog.”

“Fascinating. Could you show it to me later?”

“Sure! Also that counts as your second questions.” Logan glared at his boyfriend for a moment but relented.

“Fine.” He continued to point out other details about the room and whether they pointed towards art or science and soon Remus announced that he had only 30 seconds left. Logan contemplated in his head and came to a decision at the same moment Remus called:

“Time! Five minutes are up, Ladies and Gentlemen! Now Logan, give us your answer, please!” The room had darkened once again, with a spotlight on Logan and Remus and two others moving around the room.

“I say it’s art.”

“Is that your final answer?”

“Yes, Remus, please do not drag this out any longer.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He waved his hand around before getting back into character. “His answer is locked in! Now let’s see if he’s right. Is it art?” A drumroll played and then a bang. Even more confetti poured out of the ceiling, along with balloons, the normal, oval ones and those long ones with two of the former tied to one of the latter (I’m sure you can guess what that symbolises, we’re talking about Remus here after all).

“Coooooooorrrreeeeccccctttt!” Applause roared and Remus threw an arm around his boyfriend, pulling him close. “Another win for our returning champion! With this his success rate is now at 75%! How are you feeling, are you proud?” He held out the mic to Logan, who rolled his eyes.

“I am alright, now please wrap this up.” Remus giggled but complied.

“That was it for this episode of-“

“Art or Science!”

“See you next time, folks!” And with another snap, things returned to normal, the lights, the sounds and Remus’ outfit. “Wasn’t that fun, starlight?”

“It was fine, Remus.”

“You just don’t like admitting it~”

“No matter, that is not what I came up here for anyway.”

“Oh yeah, why did you come here?”

“To ask if you have eaten since breakfast.”

“Oh, rotten shit, I forgot.”

“I thought as much. Come on, I secured you some leftovers from lunch and the rest of the hot sauce.”

“You are the best, moonlight.”

#namiswriting #my writing #intrulogicalweek2021 #day 2: art/science #intrulogical #ts logan #logan sanders #ts remus #remus sanders #fluff #gameshow #remus is the king of chaos #logan is a bit done #just a bit though #he can't deny his boyfriend some fun #sanders sides #sanders sides fanfiction #reblogs and kudos are appreciated!

42 notes · View notes

sunshineandbnha · 3 years

Text

Back Then - Bakugou x female reader

Word count: 3,831 Minor warnings: little boys being a tad rude, a little bit of angst A/n: I had this idea when I watched a few episodes of Anohana, and I happened to finish it around his birthday. I really like this and I hope you will too.

The water trickled over the stones. Leaves rustled in the wind. And sometimes these sounds were completely drowned out with laughs and the voices of children. Children who had nothing better to do than run play in the forest. Then to run back home and hear the sounds of each one’s respective parent call them inside for dinner.

Those were the sounds of your childhood.

Playing hero in the woods with the little boy named Bakugou and the rest of his friends.

“A girl can’t join!” The boy with longer brown hair had said.

You stood before them. Having just asked if you could play with them. Upon receiving such a response, you began to retract in on yourself.

“We need strong brave heroes,” the boy with dragon-like wings added excitedly.

You stood still and bit your lip. Feeling unwanted for something you couldn’t control. The boy with green hair shyly began to open his mouth as if to protest.

Bakugou held out his hand to quiet them. He looked directly at you. “You can join us if you prove yourself. We’ll have a test of courage.” He pointed off in a certain direction. “In the forest, across the log over a stream, are two trees in an X. At night you’ll go grab a bucket on the rock under those trees and bring it in the morning.”

Your eyes stayed locked on his. Yours wavered in uncertainty, until you gave a nod and made the strongest face you could.

That night you snuck out when no one was looking. Unfortunately you had forgotten to bring a flashlight and the world was covered in darkness. However, you weren’t going to risk being caught by having to leave your home a second time. You walked through the lit up town. The only lights for miles shined artificially. You prayed the clouds covering the moon would go away.

You were feeling much more nervous than you were expecting and wanted to turn back so badly. But you weren’t a coward. You weren’t a useless girl that couldn’t be strong or brave. That could be left out. You couldn’t come back without that bucket.

It became much harder once you were at the entrance to the forest. The one that spiky blond haired boy had shown you. The streetlights faded away as you walked deeper in. You walked very slowly. You didn’t want to trip. Your heart pounded in your chest. You had to keep going.

In the end you decided to go down and step over the stream rather than cross on the log. Your prayers must have been answered, because the moon peeked through the clouds. When you looked up, you noticed that the majority of the clouds had moved on. By then your eyes had adjusted somewhat and the moonlight helped, but it was still difficult. Thankfully, the two trees weren’t far from the log. If Bakugou hadn’t told you which direction to go, you might have missed them in the dark. What helped were some shiny rocks in the moonlight, where it reflected and caught your eye.

You walked closer, the light extra bit of light the rocks appeared to give off prompted you to move more quickly. The grass was soft under your feet. The two trees that formed the X seemed to have started to fall some time ago, but were caught by the other trees standing around them. And right where he said it would be, was a bucket sitting on a large piece of stone.

You ran to the bucket and picked it up, hugging it close to you. Then you looked back. You were on a slight hill and you thought you could see some of the lights from outside the forest. You almost dreaded going back. In the beginning, you had treated it like it would all be done as soon as you got the bucket, but you quickly realized that was only half the journey.

With a small sigh, you began to walk back. Though, you briefly stopped to scoop up one of the shiny stones and slipped it into your pocket. It was pretty, and you liked it. It was like they were placed in the moonlight just for you. And you were grateful for it.

You weaved through the trees. Your eyes drifting between the ground and your target.

A sudden noise caused you to jump. Rustling in a nearby bush. Assuming the worst, you gripped your hand around the rock in your pocket, and raised it, prepared to throw in case some wild animal leaped out at you. You pulled your lips into a thin line and tried to make a brave face while you trembled.

It was coming out. You were preparing yourself to throw, your muscle tensing and fear running through you. Until you noticed it was a person. Someone your age. You could feel his eyes regard you.

“So you got it,” Bakugou, whose name you had yet to learn at the time, said.

You let out a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding in. “What are you doing here?” you asked gently holding the bucket close to you and dropping the stone back in your pocket.

“I didn’t feel like staying home, I thought I’d come too and make sure you did it.”

You nodded, shifting on your feet. There was a pause of silence. The lights in the distance illuminated the horizon like an artificial sunrise or cluster of clouds. The only sound present were the crickets and running water if you listened hard enough. You turned back towards the way home. Bakugou lifted up a flashlight he had with him and flicked it on.

The bright light made you blink as it illuminated the world in front of you. The light partly shown on his face, with his back still in the dark. It made him somehow look different than when he was fully bathed in sunlight. You didn’t know why, and you didn’t know why it seemed to give you a strange emotion.

“You didn’t bring a flashlight?” he asked as you had both started walking downhill.

“I forgot,” you said quietly.

He laughed, “Dummy.”

“Hey!” But something about the smirk playing on his face made you know he was joking and forgive him immediately. You even found yourself laugh too.

Eventually you were found out and got into some trouble when they realized you left the home alone at night. But in your eyes, it was worth it. You were able to bring the bucket to show the other kids. Ever since that you would explore and play hero in the forest. Typically, Bakugou was the main hero or even had his own agency. There were sometimes when you would play as the citizen in need of rescuing, but you also got your share of playing hero too. You spent so much time memorizing those trees and the countless things they could be. A tower, a base, a bank.

The grass became your carpet. The forest became your home. And it and your friends became your world.

Those were the most fun memories of your childhood.

And then it ended.

“Hey, Kacchan!” one of the little boys said, after resting from running around.

“What?” Bakugou raised an eyebrow.

“Do you like (Y/n)?”

It was a small question. But it felt like an earthquake. And years later it would feel like the Earth breaking in two.

Bakugou only paused for a few seconds, his eyes wide, before his face twisted into anger and he exploded. “No, dummy! Why would I like an ugly girl like her—!?” He immediately stopped when he remembered you, only a few feet away.

Everyone stared at you to see your response.

You stared at the ground, which helped to hide your shocked face. Feeling their eyes on you, you looked up to meet their gaze and put on a big smile. An uncharacteristically big smile.

Your happy attitude for the rest of the day felt fake and exaggerated. Once, when no one was paying attention and you thought no one would notice, you snuck off. You wandered through your playground. As you walked, your disguise slowly fell. It became harder and hardly to see clearly and your lip quivered. You didn’t know where you were going, but you knew once you saw it.

You stumbled down by the stream and sat yourself under the log you would walk across with the others. Somehow it felt safe. Being nestled under there with your legs pulled up to your chest. You hoped you weren’t getting your dress too dirty. Your face contorted with sadness as tears poured down your face and you struggled to contain your sobs.

You didn’t even understand why you felt this way. Why the words were repeating. Why your chest was hurting. You wouldn’t understand until you got older.

You stayed out there until it started raining. It started off with a few pitter patters until heavy sheets started coming down. The others had probably left and gotten back to their homes. Safe and dry. You on the other hand were so distraught that you didn’t even consider getting back through the rain. If you waited much longer, you might worry your parents. You had no choice but to walk through it.

You flinched at the cool water at first, but quickly got used to it after you were drenched. You weren’t in a hurry. You didn’t feel like running. So you wandered back home. You were quickly rushed to and dried off once you got back with a brief scolding. But they could seem to tell you were out of it and tired, so they let you off the hook.

The next day you woke up sick. Your little self hadn’t been expecting that since it had been warm earlier in the day, but apparently the rain was colder than you realized. You had to stay inside until you got better. They said that you needed all of your energy to recover and make sure it didn’t get worse.

Then just as you were starting to recover, you learned that you would be moving away.

“But what about my friends?” You had asked. Your arms and hands were pulled close to you.

“Don’t worry. You can always call and write letters,” you were told. But that’s not what happened.

Those words that forever repeated in your mind would become the last thing you heard Bakugou say.

It felt strange to be back. Part of you almost wished you weren’t. All of your old memories were now bittersweet. And it was strange how it looked the same, but so many details were different. A lot of your memories from the past had blurred, though you wondered if you’d still be able to find your way around the forest.

Your family decided to visit some relatives who lived near your old home. They missed seeing you, and for the most part you didn’t get much say in the visit. So you had packed your things and prepared yourself for any heavy feelings that may hit you upon coming back.

Though, as you were walking down the familiar road, you noticed something was off.

“This isn’t the way to their house,” you commented, confident you still remembered he way to your relatives house.

“I know. We decided to see the Bakugou family.”

“What?” You nearly dropped your bag and nervous feelings danced in your stomach.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Mitsuki. And you can spend time with little Katsuki again! It’s his birthday you know.”

You were aware that your parents would occasionally talk with Bakugou’s parents and had some sort of friendship because of your friendship with Bakugou. But you hadn’t imagined it would be strong enough for them to want to meet up again years later. Or for them to even consider your old friend's birthday.

“He probably isn’t little anymore. Neither of us are! We’re in high school. And we haven’t seen each other in years. About… eleven or twelve years.”

“All the more reason to see each other again and catch up.

You sighed. There was no fighting it and you just walked along.

Arriving at the Bakugou residence was a strange combination of pleasant and awkward. The parents greeted you warmly. You stayed to the side as much as possible. They started talking with each other, leaving you feeling like you were stuck in a room with a TV but no remote, and the show on wasn’t one you cared for. Bakugou didn’t seem to be fairing much better and had his arms crossed as he stayed away from them.

At dinner, they purposefully set you next to him. Your muscles kept involuntarily tensing up. Neither of you talked during the meal. In fact, he seemed to completely ignore your existence.

To be perfectly honest, you had started to forget what he looked like. The details of his face in your mind became more and more blurred over time. He had grown a lot more handsome since the last time you’d seen him. And for some reason it infuriated you. You began to shovel rice into your mouth.

Dinner ended, and you thought that would be the end of your anti-climactic reunion. Apparently the universe had other plans.

“Why don’t you two go out and catch up,” your parent suggested.

“What?” you and Bakugou said simultaneously.

And with that, you were practically pushed out the door. You both stood there for a moment before awkwardly deciding to just walk on the street. There were a few people out that you would walk around. It was a nice enough day, not too hot, not too cold. The sun ducked in and out from behind clouds during the day, but currently it was shining down.

You stood side by side with Bakugou. The tense silence poked you like needles. He walked with his hands in his pockets. Just like the rest of the day, he ignored you. He hadn’t even made eye contact with you since you both agreed to just walk around.

No matter how much you wanted to resist having a conversation with him, you preferred that to that agonizing silence. You awkwardly glanced around for a conversation topic. You caught some TVs on display playing the news.

“So I heard villain attacks are on the rise or something. Or was that just where I live?” you started, already feeling as if you failed, but kept going. “What if a villain jumps out here and attacks us?” you joked.

“Haven’t you heard? I’m going to be the number one hero. I would take them down before they could even get to you,” he replied, not even glancing at you.

You froze. Feeling like you had been plunged into ice water as a memory resurfaced. That night when you and him walked back from the forest.

You had been walking through the town with him next to you. You still clutched the bucket as you glanced around. It hadn’t occurred to you until then, but you remembered your mom saying villain attacks were more likely at night. When you first came out, all you could think about was getting the bucket. But now that you already had it…

You had tugged on the hem of little Bakugou’s shirt to get his attention. “I heard that there’s villains around here. What if one comes out and hurts us?” You shivered and sunk into your shoulders in fear. Your imagination wasted no time in showing you every possible kind of villain jumping out from any dark corner.

“They won’t.” He turned his head back to the path before him.

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m going to be a hero. And I would take them down before they got anywhere near you,” he said confidently, though never looking at you.

“(Y/n). Why’d you stop?” a voice dragged you back. Teenage Bakugou glared you down, annoyance evident in his expression. There were also subtle signs of curious along with it, but you didn’t notice.

The sudden rush of the memory was too much. You didn’t know what you were doing, but you just knew you wanted to leave. You wanted to be alone. You began dashing off. If he called after you, you didn’t hear. Why? Why were you hurting again? Why did it feel like your chest was being torn to pieces over memories that took place over a decade ago?

Everything was a blur around you. You had no idea where you were even heading to. You were simply met with the choices of whether to turn left, right, or straight, and decide in the moment. It didn’t even occur to you that you were running into a forest until several seconds after you did.

You ran, and ran. And you ended up back at that stream with the log. The same water trickling over rocks. The same rise of land that allowed for passage under the log. Somehow, after all of these years, you still subconsciously remembered where it was. It felt a lot smaller.

Without even thinking about it, you sat under that log. You curled in on yourself and stared at the water. Flowing over the small rocks, creating ridges in the clear liquid as the stones interrupted the flow.

You sat and stared. You didn’t even care, and pretended not to notice, when Bakugou slowly walked up and sat beside you. He didn't look at you. You did look at him. Neither of you made eye contact. Like the other was a ghost. But there was a strange mutual understanding that you acknowledged the other. That the silence and emotional distance was out of respect.

After all of this time, you were there again. Like you were kids once more. It was strange how, in a way, that forest raised you. You had certainly become more bold afterwards.

“What was that all about?” he said. But quietly.

You didn’t answer, opting for curling in further on yourself.

He paused. Hesitant on how to handle your silence. "I asked you a question."

"Nothing." Your voice was barely louder than a whisper.

"Don't run off because of nothing! Idiot. I had to follow you all the way here."

Birds filled the silence. Chirping songs to one another. Trees rustled in the breeze. It all created as harmony you were too familiar with. One you were both too familiar with.

"It's been a while since we were here," you said.

He nodded with a grunt.

You shifted your knees closer to yourself once more. But as you did so, you felt something slip out of your pocket. In brief confusion, you looked down. The blond followed your gaze.

Ever since that night, when you got the bucket, you kept that stone with you. It had perfectly been there when you needed it. And ever since you put it in your pocket that night, it hasn't left your side. It had been a good luck charm for you. A piece of your childhood. A sign that maybe someone out there was looking out for you.

“That’s… I—!” Bakugou’s eyes widened, but he stopped himself. He turned away as his face went pink.

“That’s what?” you asked confused.

“I… nothing. Just it looks like one of the rocks from around here.”

“Yeah. I'm not sure how you can tell that just by looking, but it is. To be more specific, it was one from the night I did that Test of Courage. I was actually pretty nervous. It was dark and I was stupid enough to forget a flashlight,” you softly laughed at yourself. “And… those rocks were there. It was a miracle that they were, otherwise it would have been a lot harder for me to find the bucket. I dunno, it’s weird, but for some reason, the way they were placed in the moonlight made me feel like someone out there was looking out for me.” Why were you even saying this? He probably didn’t care.

You looked over and saw him staring at the stream. His guard still seemed to be up, but his facial expressions looked softer for some reason.

You exhaled. "God, I missed it here." Then the memory resurfaced again. "But…" Tears started to well up again.

He looked at you with confusion, and concern? If you weren't mistaken.

"What is it this time?"

"Nothing, just." Your lies seem to only strengthen the flow of tears. "I'm sorry. I thought I was over this. Why am I crying again? Sorry. It’s stupid."

"What is?!"

"You called me ugly! Is it true?" You didn't mean to say that. You didn’t even want to know the answer… actually, that wasn't true. You did want to know the answer. You were just afraid of what it would be.

"No!"

You blinked. "I'm not?"

"No, of course you aren't," he grumbled and looked away from you.

"Are you talking about now or back then?"

"Back then--" he suddenly stopped himself, his eyes suddenly wide, like he was saying something he wasn't supposed to. "And now too."

"Wait." You sat up. "But if I wasn't? Why did you say that?"

He quickly looked away. "No reason."

"What? No, it’s not. Tell me." You turned your body to face him, inching slightly closer.

"It's none of your business!"

"Is it because you thought I was ugly then? Are you lying so I don't feel bad--?"

"NO! IT'S BECAUSE I LIKED YOU!" He slammed his fists on the ground.

Your heart sped up when you realized how close you were. His face burned pink when he realized the same thing. He backed up and looked away.

"Idiot."

You thought for a few seconds.. "So… do you still--?"

"Don't even ask that."

You let out a breath of a laugh. "You know, maybe sometime you can show me what you've been learning at U.A." You tried to say lightheartedly.

"Maybe."

You thought back to when you'd play in the woods. "I bet you're a great hero."

"Of course I am."

You rested your head on your knees. You tapped a finger against your arm until you had an idea. You got your phone out, pulled up a 'create contact' page and handed it to him.

"Here."

He stared at it for a second. Letting out a snort, he turned his head away. You gently set your phone down next to him. He ignored it for the first few seconds. With a "tch" he picked it up and started typing.

"Why are the keys so small?!"

You laughed.

"There." He shoved it back to you.

"Thank you," you said as you tucked your phone away.

It was quiet. But the comfortable kind. You both sat there. Enjoying yourselves and the moment. You took a breath in and savored it. You already knew what you would text when you'd have to leave.

"It was nice seeing you again."

#bakugou x reader #bakugou katuski x reader #katsuki bakugou x reader #bakugou birthday bash #bakugou birthday #happy birthday bakugou #bakugo x reader #bnha bakugou #mha bakugou #mha bakugo #bnha x reader #mha x reader #bnha #mha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia

99 notes · View notes

gentlemancrow · 3 years

Text

Written in the Stars Will Have to Do

OK so I saw @hey-there-hunter ‘s JMart Wedding Challenge and I pretty much fan ficced immediately?? Like it was an instantaneous plot bunny that stabbed me in the brain and would not let me free until I made it exist. SO HERE YOU GO! Read it here or head on over to AO3 below! And enjoy some unapologetically aggressive fluff with weddings! Also subtitled someday Crow will stop abusing excessive astral imagery and symbolism for extended metaphors, but today is not that day.

Read on AO3 instead!

Written in the Stars Will Have to Do

Jonathan Sims always thought of himself as a man with a deep appreciation for the great literature of the world. A passionate turn of phrase, crystalline motes of clear imagery like snowflakes reflecting light in his mental scape, a devastating contemplation on the nature of good and evil in the hearts of all mankind, everything that could express the beauty and tragedy of the world in ways he never could. Prose was a bright paintbrush on a ragged canvas of the universe he had known from an early age was swathed in shadow and pain and evil, and those words on those pages, for at least a moment, were another world he could hold in his hands, could cradle and protect, could mourn. He liked the power of them as well, of the tinkling brightness of alliteration, the oaky sophistication of a well-aged metaphor, the evocativeness of the idiosyncrasy in a simple simile, laying bare truths in ways he never could have articulated for himself.

There was one thing he could not abide by in language, however, one cardinal sin liable to besmirch any piece of lush and sparkling verse or prose and taint it forever. And that was idioms.

Jon loathed idioms and their dismally quirky cliches dressed in familiarity’s tacky clothing almost as much as he hated spiders. Perhaps it was something about their reliance on common knowledge and repetition. He couldn’t bear reading the same book twice, or even a book that felt too familiar, it only made sense that hearing a hackneyed phrase repeated in that awful singsong sardonic tone of someone who knows full well they’re saying something asinine that has been repeated ad nauseum for millennia would scrape at the back of his skull and down his spine. They were too whimsical and blasé, crutch words for when one’s limited lexicon came up empty, or worse, for ill comedic effect. They reinforced that staunchly English notion of skirting about the true depth and breadth of emotion for clipped niceties and unfeeling banalities. Idioms to him were mere verbal window boxes, colorful and meaningless, dressings for untold disasters behind the shining windows they peacocked before.

He hated them all with vaguely equal rancor, but there was one he could definitely single out as the one he hated the most, and that was the one about hanging the moon. Such and such thinks you hung the moon, to me you hung the moon, and so on. This particular rhetorical felony attracted his wrath only marginally because any moon symbolism never failed to feel outlandish and infantile, a mawkish image of love and care rampant in nursery rhymes and cheap commercialized slogans for t-shirts and wall art. That was the least of it. He hated the idea of hanging the moon mostly because once, another lifetime ago now it seemed, Tim Stoker had lobbed it in his face in a fit of smoldering rage and he had been completely, complacently, ignorant of its magnitude.

Funny thing was, he couldn’t even remember what the actual fight had been about any longer. Though he could remember exactly where he was standing, cornered next to the file cabinet for the year 1985, January through February, and the label had been peeling up on the upper left-hand corner. He remembered he’d discovered a hole in the elbow of his jumper that morning and he had been obsessing over it all day, fussing with the dangling green thread and tugging at the knit as if it might magically close the wound. He’d put his finger clean through it with his arms crossed haughtily over his chest without even realizing he’d been fiddling with it when something flippant about Martin came out of his mouth. It hadn’t even been cruel, he couldn’t even remember how Martin had come up in the argument in the first place, he could only remember Tim’s mouth moving like he wanted to say something else, then him forcibly stopping himself before he snarled.

“Yeah well, god knows why, but he thinks you hung the moon, so you might try treating him at the very least like a human being once in a while.”

It was such a small thing. Small words for a small feeling cloaked in a chintzy veneer of idiomatic dismissal. A trembling little bird cupped in his scarred and battered hands and smothered. Or so he thought. Sometimes trembling little birds turn out to be phoenixes, and those who looked to someone else to hang the comfort of a wise, silvery moon in the sky already have the hammer and the picture wire at the ready.

As far as Jon was concerned, the moon only rose on their Somewhere Else because Martin deigned to pull the strings every night, not him.

It was Martin who brought him tea every morning, set it down on the breakfast table with that little flip of the tag and the deft, one-fingered turn of the handle toward him. It was Martin who scolded him because whites are a separate load, Jon, were you raised in a barn? Martin who talked him through every episode of the Doctor Who reruns that were the only thing their ancient aerial could pick up. Martin who planted flowers in the garden and brought muffins from the sweet old lady at the grocers because they traded baking recipes. Martin who still looked at him with diaphanous pools of ethereal moonlight in his eyes and his smile like he alone hung it in the sky over his head to wash him in its radiance.

Even after everything.

Even after it had been Martin who had to hold the knife buried in his chest as he lay gasping wetly for breath in an alleyway in Another Chelsea to keep the hemorrhaging at bay. Martin who had cupped his face in his bloody hands with tears streaming down his and forced him to focus, furious love blazing in his sea mist eyes as they locked with his, screaming at him and him only, heedless of anything else.

“Look at me. LOOK at me, Jon! Stay with me! Stay with me, DAMN YOU!”

Stay with me had not been a plea, it had been a command. He had never once said please because it was never an option. Shivering, breathing blood through his teeth, the streetlights a fading, star studded halo in Martin’s strawberry blond curls be damned, he was right. Against every tangled thread of fate twisted deep into his flesh, or perhaps because they had been the only thing that held his torn innards together, he made it to the part where he awoke a few fractured times to nothingness, and then to fingers he knew every inch of inextricably bound up in his and a fierce whisper in his ear.

“I’m here, Jon. I’m still here. I’ve got you. I’m going to fix this. I’m going to get us out of here. We’re going to be okay.”

It had been Martin who orchestrated their clandestine escape from the hospital the moment they both agreed he was well enough to survive under his rudimentary medical care and before the authorities got too invested in an urban ghost story of two men who didn’t exist. Not to mention one of which should, by all medical and logical law, be dead. It had been Martin who had stolen the necessary antibiotics, drugs, and wound care supplies, Martin who had picked enough pockets to buy passage on a midnight train to the only place they could think to go, and expressly told Jon not to ask where he learned how, even though he knew full well he would later. Martin who had fought for everything and kept him hidden and safe while he lay in a dingy hotel room somewhere in Scotland, drifting in and out of consciousness between kisses, cold compresses, spoonfuls of whatever he could get him to swallow and keep down, and desperate ‘I love you’s.

Martin had been the one who hung the moon even on the nights Jon couldn’t see it, just so he knew it was there, that the light might finally guide him home. Not him. He could have never done something so selfless and simple and beautiful. No not him. Not The Archivist. How could he have ever known that? Stupid, myopic, pedantic, all-seeing and blind. A blustering, sanctimonious Tiresias in a sweater vest and half-moon glasses. And how important was the moon, anyway that he was expected to hang it too? Would not night still come and the stars still shine? The stupid, vapid saying should have been about the sun anyway. Something that nourished and guided and warmed. Not the moon. Not the thing of night and hungry wolves and quiet loneliness. Not a thing of the darkness they fought and still not won, not exactly, not in a way that mattered. How could he have known the weight of such a thoughtless, frivolous, meaningless phrase and how far and how long Martin had borne it for him to protect he who hung his moon?

He could see the weight of it so clearly now. He could see it especially on the darkest days, which came, in grotesque mockery, the moment they found something like their safehouse and rest at last. Jon had conned his way into a job at the village library with an ancient head librarian who didn’t care much for too many questions, or background or credit checks, and was more than happy to pay in cash. With Martin’s help of course. Martin himself had taken up stocking at the village grocers, and their life had teetered onto something so close to quaint and normal it suddenly laid bare the gravity of the depths of darkness they had escaped.

No longer did they have to run, no longer did they have to fight, they could finally lay down the chase and curl in upon each other to lick their wounds in quiet. But without the driving, primal instinct to live, to survive, that ushered in the days where all the hurt came back to roost and brood and fester. The days where he couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed, or the days Martin couldn’t bear the sound of his voice, or the days they shouted themselves hoarse, stormed apart for hours then came back, silent and broken, red-eyed and exhausted to hold each other and weep into the spaces between neck and shoulder where it still smelled like love and home.

He could see so painfully clearly the toll following him to the ends of the cosmos and back had etched its marks into his goodness, his body and soul, see how often he would walk down the road from their cabin, just a little ways, to stand on the heather spotted hills and gaze out into the frigid infinity of the gray sea. Cold terror would grip him then, incite a desperate want to run after him, to throw his arms around him and bring him home, but also the fear it would only be to have him turn to mist and slip through his fingers forever. He always had a cup of steaming tea waiting for him when he came back, just in case.

But again, and always. It was Martin who would pick up Jon’s hands, kiss every slender, scarred finger through his tears and be the first one to utter ‘I’m sorry.’ Martin who told him with just a single scathing flash of stern blue eyes and not a single word uttered that he was certainly coming to bed and not banishing himself to the couch like an idiot. Martin who wrapped him in his arms and warmth and boundless love and reminded him, “One way or another. Together. That was the deal, right? You don’t get to back out now. No returns, refunds, or exchanges, I’m afraid.”

And even through the deepest sobs he would find the laugh Jon didn’t think was in him. Martin sifted through the mire and the muck and held fast to the tiny, shining things so easy to lose in the darkness. Things Jon was certain were lost forever, only to be reignited and hung in the brightening sky of their story. Even if they weren’t quite the moon yet.

It had also been Martin who, on a perfectly ordinary day, on a simple walk through the local farmers market, stopped to peruse one of the usual unremarkable stalls filled with crystals and oils and trinkets. Jon had wandered off to procure the parsnips and the strawberries, unrelated recipes Martin swore, he had been tasked with finding. When he returned he found him, a radiant monument tall among the faceless locals, rusty curls caressing his face in the salty breeze, carved of marble and rose quartz and gazing down at a pair of hematite rings on a velvet display box. His eyes were distant, but not in the enthralled, disembodied way they were when he looked at the sea, or the broken way when they weren’t speaking, but in the contemplative, regarding of puzzle pieces way when he would look into the fire during their talks and turn his words in his mind over and over again like a rock tumbler until they were polished just right.

“Getting into crystals now, are we?” Jon had joked, “Surely I’m not so dull to be around that that’s becoming an attractive hobby.”

Martin snorted and shook his head.

“Supposed to mean healing, or grounding, or something. Aligning your meridians, I think the lady said? Whatever that means,” he elaborated, reaching out to touch.

They clinked weightily together, thick and glossy and the dark astral gray of a moonless night. Martin turned over the card that went with them and read.

“’A grounding stone that belongs to the planet Mars. It strengthens our connections to the earth and aids the warrior on their journey. It is a stone of invincibility, but also fragility. It balances yin and yang energies with its magnetic properties for the perfect reflection upon one’s own soul, astral, physical, and spiritual.’”

“Hematite, is it?” Jon asked, “Also more commonly called bloodstone. You know if you scratch it, it leaves a red mark. Like it’s bleeding. Watch.”

He picked up one of the rings and firmly ran it down the corner of the card Martin had been reading from. Sure enough, the black stone had left a faint, but starkly crimson mark on the yellowed paper.

“It BLEEDS?” Martin exclaimed in horror.

“It’s just a kind of iron oxide, so, rust, basically,” Jon explained with a chuckle, “Kind of weirdly romantic if you think about it? This intimidating shiny black stone like armor, made of iron to boot, but with a bleeding heart at its core.”

“I just thought it was pretty, I didn’t know it bleeds,” Martin had laughed in that incredulous way he always did when Jon was telling him something he didn’t actually want to know, but appreciated anyway.

“I find that the strongest, prettiest things often do,” Jon had said in reply. He remembered saying that particularly clearly, waxing poetic, feeling a swell of affection for the hugely beautiful man he leaned against and was adorably aghast at bleeding rocks.

“Yeah, I reckon they do,” Martin murmured back.

And then his cheeks had flushed bright red under his freckles and the stone steps of his shoulders crumbled a bit under the crushing ancientness and vastness of what he had originally been pondering.

“So, I mean, before you spoiled it with the blood thing. I was thinking… Well, I was just having a browse and I saw these and I thought they were quite fetching, and then the lady told me they meant grounding and healing and a journey, like on the card. A-And there were two of them, all by themselves, and everything else was so colorful and flashy these were just so… Um. Maybe the blood and rusty iron thing makes it more poetic now, actually? I don’t know. Sorry I- This sounded so much better in my head.”

It wasn’t his fault, Jon remembered thinking. Martin couldn’t find the words because there weren’t any. Not in this universe or any other. Not for what they’d gone through, and especially not for what they meant to each other.

“I guess I was just thinking. If… I bought one. And wore it. Sort of like. Um. You know. Would… Would you-?” he had asked, his voice trembling.

Jon had never said yes, yes of course he would, faster or with more conviction in his life. And there was that look again, rising from the ashes, that flooding of golden, unbound love and light, of eyes turned sky blue, of looking at the man who hung his moon in the sky come back to him. He could still hang Martin’s moon all over again after so many nights of black clouds and darkness, even if it was only paper. They’d paid for the rings in rumpled bills, exchanged them right then and there, and kissed each other as the crowd of oblivious people in a world they did not belong in flowed like a river around them. Jon forgot the bag with the parsnips and strawberries.

But it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter that Martin’s fit nicely on his ring finger, but Jon had to wear his on his thumb, and even then sometimes on a chain around his neck for fear of losing it. It didn’t matter that it was the closest thing they were ever going to get to a proposal and a wedding, consigned now forever to the shadows in a borrowed reality with only each other. Because it was theirs, and they could begin to figure out how their broken pieces fit back together again.

But like most things that don’t matter, it didn’t until it did.

It began as simple things. Seeing a wedding on some program they weren’t actually paying much attention to and Martin making a flippant, innocuous comment as he combed his fingers lovingly through Jon’s long and silvered chestnut hair in his lap about how he would have loved to have a cake that had a different flavor on every tier at their wedding. Just so everyone could have something they liked. And Jon woke up from his half catlike stupor and looked up at him with such aching regret as those words settled into the pit of his heart alongside ‘he thinks you hung the moon.’

And soon they began to gather a collection of completely innocent remarks that ran the gamut from ‘would they have worn black or white? Or one of each? I don’t know… does it really matter? And were these engagement rings or wedding rings? I don’t know. Neither? both? And do we say husband instead of boyfriend now? Fiancé? Whatever you want, Martin…’ To the heavier, cancerous weights that sank to the bottom of his gut, even below hanging the moon, like ‘I know Tim would have thrown the most amazing bachelor party for both of us, and his mum had always talked about him getting married someday like it was a farfetched pipe dream, but she would be happy for them, he thinks.’

He could never answer those questions. There was too much at stake, too much finality and familiarity in them, a strange weightlessness in a world that weighed far too much. The sun and moon continued their eternal dance of time, ignorant, unbothered, but Jon kept collecting those silent debts of normal life, secreting them away in a hidden singularity in his heart that only grew heavier and metastasized farther the more times Martin walked out at night, not him, beaming starlight from his eyes and his fingertips, to hang the moon again. So soft, so full of wooly cows and pink heather and the smell of tea and sea salt and Martin’s shampoo on the pillow next to him did it become, that it was almost inevitable that one morning Jon awoke absolutely convinced none of it could be real.

The moment he decided that, everything made so much more sense. He could breathe again. There was a reason he could never sit still, never just feel at ease or talk about the future like it was a real thing that could still happen. He knew why the silence made his brain itch and why he still glanced around corners and glowered at anyone who dared let their gaze linger on his Martin too long. Why Martin’s ring fit and his didn’t. There was too much debt to the universe to be paid, too many broken promises, too many corpses in his wake, he had done nothing to deserve this idyllic life of love and peace and smallness and Martin. It had to be Her doing, It’s doing, some carefully woven torture chamber that would lure them to the apex of their joy, the center of the web, where they would just be devoured over and over to empty husks and set up like chess pieces to fill with love and light just to knock down again. He wasn’t free after all.

Jon had been halfway into his coat and halfway out the door to do, he didn’t know, something, anything, to go to the library to use their computer and research something he didn’t know he was looking for when Martin had seized his hand and whirled him around.

“Jon. STOP. It’s over.”

And he’d stopped. He’d looked into those baleful blue eyes, fallen into their depths, landed on the precipice of madness, and broken. It wasn’t over. Not for him. He finally understood. It was still there. The Eye. It always had been. Though not really, he understood slowly as he wept on his knees in their doorway into Martin’s chest, it had indeed closed forever on him, but it lingered as distant static, like a phantom limb, a metaphysical itch that could never be scratched. Martin had cradled him close and listened, listened so patiently as he ripped the jagged black fear from the deepest, ugliest part of his heart, hauled it up bloody and messy from his throat and finally laid it bare for both of them to see. And when it was done and he couldn’t cry anymore Martin had locked eyes with him in a way that made him forget any others could have ever existed outside of crystalline blue and filled with moonlight.

“Listen to me. I know you think you have some cosmic burden to bear. That you’re still wearing some… some fucked up crown and sitting on a throne of skulls and death and eyeballs or whatever image you want to put there, and that you have to sit and hurt and watch over everything so it doesn’t happen again, but... Sorry, Jon, but that’s bullshit. It’s just a scar now. That’s all. Just like the rest of them. Ugly and beautiful and proof that you —Jonathan Sims— are still alive. And you are not The Archivist anymore. You’re just mine. My Jon.”

He’d held his Jon’s stunned face in his hands and peppered kisses over the pock marks in his skin, over the slash on his throat, the burnt fingers that still couldn’t bend quite right, even the one on his chest, the one almost always hidden by fabric but the one he didn’t need to see to find. His heart and fingers would always remember exactly where it was. And he’d kept his lips there a moment, then turned his ear to his chest and wrapped his arms around his waist to listen to his heartbeat like a trembling little bird.

“If I can hear it and feel it. So can you,” he whispered.

Unsteady fingers curled desperately into Martin’s silky locks, hematite loop cool against his scalp, “Thank you…”

Martin stayed for the kiss on top of his head he knew was coming and smiled.

“Okay, so it’s simple to fix if you think about it,” he murmured into Jon’s chest, “We just need that thing, you know? The thing that makes you feel like you’re still doing the thing, but you’re not. What was the word for it again? A placeholder? Like when you quit smoking and you hold a pencil or a straw or something that’s not actually a cigarette so you can wean yourself off the ritual?”

Jon blinked owlishly down at him as he dried his eyes.

“A… placebo? Are you talking about a placebo?”

“Yeah! That’s it! We just need to find you a placebo for Knowing things! That’s all. Like… reality shows, or-or zoo cams or something! We’ll figure it out together. Alright, love? I promise you. It’ll be okay.”

Jon was skeptical, so very skeptical, but if Martin was determined to find a balm to soothe his jagged, ontological scars he would happily play the part of lab rat for him. They’d tried a myriad things to replicate the feeling of Knowing and looking something deep within him still craved. The zoo and animal livestreams were a bust, cute and entertaining as they were, but animals weren’t ever the purview of The Eye and the camera itself was barely a scrap. Reality shows came closer, the more salacious the better, but even that temporary fix wore off when Jon’s disgust with the overall content and participants outweighed any benefit. Martin was just happy to have finally converted him to Bake Off, at least. They tried people watching in the square in the village, but it made Jon far too self-conscious and guilty. He used the binoculars exactly once, and that was to look at the cows in the fields, and the choose-your-own-adventure books Martin had been certain would strike a sagacious chord wound up in the donation bin at the library. But that was when he was struck with a bolt of genius.

Unbeknownst to Jon, which brought him no small measure of glee, Martin ordered, received, and then set up with a literal bow in their back garden the finest telescope he could afford on his meager savings. He’d researched for days, asked on every amateur astronomer forum he could find, and had it delivered to the grocers so he could make it a proper surprise. He’d even gone so far as to attack and blindfold a hapless Jon the moment he made it home from work on the day it was ready, and stood behind him giddily bouncing as he tore the tea towel away from his eyes.

“A… Telescope?” he’d blurted dumbly.

“Yes! It’s perfect, right? I asked around to find the one that had all the best features, and this one has the best overall magnification and the most lenses, but it doesn’t have the little satellite positioning thing? I figured you wouldn’t want that anyway, you always like figuring things out and finding things on your own better.”

Martin had been positively radiant. Jon had just stared at the gawping black tube and chewed the inside of his cheek as he processed what to say.

“I mean… thank you, Martin, really. It was a sweet thought, but if the binoculars didn’t-“

“Screw the binoculars! This is different!” Martin happily insisted, “You can look at so much more! Stars and planets and galaxies and what have you, and it can maybe be sort of like you’re looking for other worlds? Wormholes or whatever? Or signs of The Fears and where they’ve gone? Or even if the stars are the same here as they were back before? Space literally has so many things to LOOK at we can’t even count them! This has got to be it!”

Jon tried to smile and laugh and agree to try it out, at the very least, if only because Martin was beaming so sweetly with pride and hope. Though that first night he didn’t, ushering them back in with promises of tomorrow, Martin, I promise tomorrow. Tomorrow had been a lie. As had been the next night. In fact, it took Jon a full week to even remember they even had a telescope, and that was only after getting the smuggest, Cheshire grin out of Martin after casually mentioning there would be a visible, if partial, lunar eclipse that night. He’d relented, only because he’d entrapped himself, and they’d both bundled up, looked in the manual for the best size lens to view the moon with, poured a few glasses of wine, and turned their eyes to the stars.

Martin had gone first, gripping the eyepiece and adjusting the focus all the while gasping in awe. It was so beautiful he’d burst into poetry with a crooked grin.

“Art thou pale for weariness? Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, wandering companionless among the stars that have a different birth, and ever changing, like a joyless eye that finds no object worth its constancy? Sounds a little familiar, eh?” he joked, casting a wry look over his shoulder.

Jon rolled his eyes fondly.

“Gross. Keats again?”

“Nope, Shelley this time, and even he thinks you ought to have a look at the moon. I think you’ll find you have a lot in common.”

Jon had sighed obligingly and shuffled to the telescope, fully expecting to look at something bright and round with a bit of a shadow on it that was distinctly unremarkable, have another glass of wine, and then go back inside to snuggle by the fire. What he saw in that tiny pinhole of light pierced straight through the hazel brown of his eye and plunged him into another world entirely.

The sands of the moon glowed the purest white in the refracted light of the distant sun with which it waltzed. He could see in crisp, shadowy relief the innumerable scars she bore, the depth and breadth of Ptolemaeus, the boundless lonely flatness of the maria, named for the oceans they were once thought to be, an insult to the rock plains forged a millennia ago in birth by cataclysmic fire. Every crater remained wrought in perfect, frozen detail with no erosion or foliage to slowly heal them over, and she beamed them proudly, ostentatiously in her heavenly light. A hulking, ancient protectorate, hung by the hands of creation at the dawn of time for a fledgling planet, hundreds of thousands of miles away, and yet so crystal clear and unafraid as he perused her millions of years of cosmic sentinel through a lens. It was dwarfing, humbling, viscerally awe inspiring in a way he dared not voice for fear of snuffing out the fragile glow of wonder and excitement welling in his chest he had been so certain was gone forever.

Astronomy had never been something that had particularly interested Jon, back when his entire reality from the moment his childish hands had touched a single book was spent peering into shadows and watching his own back. There was no point in wondering what lay among the stars when danger and death lurked so close behind with slavering jaws ever poised at his throat on terra firma, but now. Now, he had been living in an alternate world, dimension, reality, somewhere, he couldn’t even say for sure. He’d been hurled potentially through the very stars that twinkled coquettishly above, flashed through their nebulous veils and curtains under their indifferent gaseous gazes, but seen nothing. Here was a vast expanse of complete chaotic indefiniteness inviting him in to see what few had ever seen, to guess and hypothesize and gesture wildly at secrets only the stars could keep. To Know.

Jon had jerked back so suddenly from the telescope to survey the entirety of the astral dome above them that Martin had choked on his wine.

“Jon? Are you quite alright?”

“Yes, I…” he’d murmured, only even half hearing that Martin had said anything at all, stars reflected in his wondering dark eyes, “I’m fine, I just… How… How much more can this see? How deep does it go?”

Jon hadn’t seen the victorious smirk on Martin’s face as he set down his wine glass and picked up the instruction manual and lens guide. They’d watched the rest of the eclipse, of course, marveling through the lens at the inky trickle of shadow over craggy white, but then they’d changed the lens to the strongest one, according to the guide, and spent the rest of the evening triangulating their position beneath their slice of the universe and plotting out the various stars, planets, and constellations above. Jon had even dashed inside to grab a mostly blank notebook and had filled several pages with notes and observations and things to research later, all while Martin held back tears watching him come so alive over a project he didn’t even know he needed. Eventually though, sleepiness and cold claimed him, and he kissed his beloved goodnight and left him, more than gladly, to ride out the intellectual flare up until it burnt both him and itself out.

Martin had no clue what time it was when he finally returned, and it didn’t even matter. All that mattered was at some point, a practically frozen Jon had climbed into bed, snuggled up close behind and wrapped his arms around him to kiss the back of his neck so softly like the wings of a butterfly and whisper.

“Thank you.”

Another victorious smirk and a loving murmur.

“Told you so.”

Where there had been nothing but an Eye shaped hole in him, scarred around the edges and aching in its vacuum, Jon had filled it with the names of nebulas and quasars, of the myth of Andromeda, and Orion, and Castor and Pollux, or Hercules, and why they had all been hung in the stars for eternity. The stories were much the same as he remembered, but he’d found slight eccentricities, tiny irregularities in the sky which fascinated him even more so. Night after night he would look at a different astral body, chart it down in his notebook, then come bounding in with starlight beaming from his eyes and his fingertips with some cry of eureka.

“Martin! Did you know here Polaris is in the south and Sirius is in the north?”

“Martin! Did you know the Andromeda Galaxy is actually a little closer to the Milky Way here?”

“Martin, you have to come see this! Oh, no it’s not weird this time, it’s just I finally got Saturn in the telescope and you can actually see the rings!”

His nightly herald would always be different, but Martin would always rise from the comfort of the couch, put his slippers on, and let Jon talk as long as he needed to about his latest discovery, watching him smile again while he, too, watched the matching smile it never failed to ignite illuminate Martin’s face and they lit each other up in the fused brilliance of a binary star.

Martin no longer hung the moon for Jon, he’d finally just up and quite literally given it to him, and there was no mortal way to repay him for that. Or so he’d thought. It came to him, as most flashes of brilliance do, on a night he hadn’t even been thinking about it at all. All he had been doing was sitting in a lawn chair with his telescope long after Martin had gone to bed, chewing his pencil idly, vaguely missing a cigarette and pondering notes on Vega and Lyra between watching it through his lens. He’d been stuck for days on Vega and its potentiality for another solar system and what that could imply for their new Earth and their new sun, as well as Lyra and the tragic tale of Orpheus and his doomed love. Even in their new reality he still turned back at the end of the story, still could not contain the roiling, effusive adoration to his own downfall.

Bitterness had risen like bile in the back of Jon’s throat as he replayed the myth again in his head, unsure why it was vexing him and rewinding in his brain so torturously. “Stupid, stupid man, if he’d only just…” he’d thought again and again, each time giving the star-crossed musician a different decision, a different choice, urging him down another path somewhere, anywhere along his journey, but in the end, he’d always looped back around to the original. It was the point of the story, after all. Not so much the love itself or even the loss of it, but the power of it over one man and the creation born from his mourning and eventual destruction. Patently Greek. But the chorus would always begin again in Jon’s head. If he’d kept his Eurydice, if his songs had been happy, if he hadn’t spent the rest of his life mourning so intensely he was eventually destroyed for it, would he have become the paragon of healing he was, the oracle, the lynchpin of the fate of the world he had eventually become? Which of them was the stupider man?

Jon was only mortal now, he was no longer all-seeing oracle and dark savior, he had no authority to say, but it was a trifle easier to ponder the hubris of Orpheus instead of his own. He couldn’t help but think, achingly, sometimes the heroes just deserved to pull their beloved from the pit of Tartarus, promise to love them for eternity, and then simply get married, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after. A story wasn’t a story if it didn’t write itself upon the very bones and sinews of its heroes, that was the law of the universe, but when the story was done and the cracks and fissures in their tissues had faded to myth and legend, what became of the heroes who did not die a tragic or heroic death and were not hung in the stars? What happened to heroes left behind? Twisting his bloodstone ring on his thumb idly as it caught the shivering fire of those stars in its dark mirrored surface, the musical arrow of the muses pierced his heart, wide-eyed in wonder. He’d asked the universe, but he already knew the answer. He’d always known. He knew, and he knew it with such clarion joy as he had never known anything before.

He could no longer be the man who hung Martin’s moon, he hadn’t been for a long time. That much was clear to him, but he could certainly do something else. Perhaps they had grown past the need for moon hangings in the first place. He knew how their story ended.

It took months of saving, secreting, preparation, and then finally just simply waiting for the perfect, clear night. The moment it came, the moment he knew it was the night, Jon struck without hesitation. Poor Martin wanted nothing more than to collapse onto the couch, into Jon, when he returned from a late shift at the grocers, but found himself instead stuffed right back into his coat with a picnic basket in hand and hauled out into the frigid night in a flurry of Jon with little time to protest. He bounded up the hill behind their little cottage beneath a perfect blanket of stars flaming coldly overhead, trailing Martin’s hand in his behind with his breath coming in silvery puffs of clouds, and paying no heed to the whining.

“Jon, whatever it is, does it have to be NOW?” Martin panted, “I am absolutely knackered and it’s beyond freezing and wouldn’t it be nicer just to curl up with a cuppa and fall asleep in front of Star Wars or something? Doesn’t that have enough stars and space in it?”

Dauntless, Jon only tugged harder.

“There’s tea in the basket, and I’ve seen Star Wars. And yes, it has to be tonight, it’s really important, I promise.”

“Look. I love you. So much. You know this, and please know it is with the utmost love and deepest affection in my heart that I point out that you say that every time, and you’ve still shown me Pluto like, a hundred separate times. While I quite like it, and I still feel sorry for it being bumped out of the solar system and all, it’s just a dot? How many times can you look at a dot?” Martin sighed.

His words finally threw a caltrop into Jon’s warpath, and he paused, turning over his shoulder woundedly.

“What? No, it’s not Pluto, I swear just- Please, Martin? I’ll never ask again if you don’t want to, but just for tonight, please?” he pleaded.

Martin winced, and immediately folded under the onslaught of doleful honeyed brown eyes under a nimbus of stars.

“Oh, lord there you go with the puppy dog eyes. Okay, okay fine, but there better be a nip of whiskey in this,” he chided lovingly with a gesture at the thermos in the basket.

The smile flared back to life brightly on Jon’s face as he turned back up the craggy little footpath to the top of the hill.

“Of course, hot toddy with tea.”

“Ooh, lovely, you do know me.”

The rest of the way was trivially short to the small, flat hilltop surrounded by heather where Jon had already set up a blanket and the telescope over a pristine vista of the dark line where the stars sank into the sea. He ushered Martin to sit down first, then perched on his hip beside him and poured him a generous helping of tea and whiskey from the thermos before pouring his own.

“Thanks, much. Right then, what exactly are we up here to look at that we couldn’t see from our garden?” Martin asked, accepting his cup of potent hot toddy and sipping it gratefully around the lemony steam that billowed up.

Taken aback by the sudden logic lobbed into the center of his romantic posturing, Jon looked momentarily stunned, as if someone had slapped him upside the head.

“Oh! Oh, um, well-! Ahah, that is to say- Uh. There is a reason for all this. It’s not that we couldn’t see it from our garden, we very much could have. B-But it’s so beautiful up here, and you can kind of hear the sea? And it’s nice and peaceful, and the heather is still blooming a bit and um…” he trailed off, cheeks burning.

“Okay…?” Martin probed, frowning a little.

“Er, actually... It’s less about the stars than it is- W-Well it is about the stars. Let’s get that clear. But to be completely honest I mostly just… I-I well. There’s something I need to tell you?”

Jon was ill-prepared for the look of abject horror on Martin’s face as he went paler than the moon overhead.

“Shit, what is it? Did you find something? You saw something? There’s been a sign of The Fears? Oh god it’s not HER is it?” he asked frantically, nearly slopping hot toddy all over his lap.

“What? No! No, none of that!” Jon spluttered, aghast.

Martin regained a modicum of color in his face and breathed in measuredly.

“Okay, so then what is it? Oh god, you’re not… Jon you’re not ill, or something, are you? Please, you can just tell me if-“

“No, I am not ill either, damn it, Martin! If you would just listen to me! I-!” Jon moaned exasperatedly, “I just wanted to do something… nice. Something nice for you. And nicer than I normally would because I am apparently much worse at crafting romantic moments than I thought and-“

“Wait…” Martin cut in, eyes gleaming with realization, “Jonathan Sims… Are you grand gesturing?”

“Well I am certainly trying but you are making it exceedingly difficult!” he retorted, red in the face and breathless.

“Oh my god, you are! I’m so sorry!” Martin laughed brightly, “Oh god Jon you poor thing I’m so sorry, I’m awful, I’m the absolute worst! No please! Don’t let me spoil it. Please go on.”

Grinding the heel of his palm into his forehead, Jon tried to summon the words again, only for Martin’s strong, warm hands to take it from him and tip his chin up to gaze into his eyes.

“Hey. Hey, Jon. Look at me,” he breathed, looking into his eyes idolatrously, “I’m sorry. I love you. You can tell me.”

Taking the steadiness from those clear blue depths he needed, Jon focused on them, on the strawberry blond curls tossing in the icy breeze, of the kiss of chilled pink under his freckles, and that eternal, sunshine smile.

“Okay,” he finally answered, smiling softly.

With a deep, shuddering breath, and a long swig of whiskey laced tea for good measure, Jon drew himself up and fished deep in his soul for the words he had waited a millennium to say.

“Okay… So here it is. Um… I’ve um, I’ve had a lot of time alone lately with my new hobby, as it were. So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. A lot of it is overly complicated and ridiculous and doesn’t deserve to live outside of my head but… a lot of it has been about you, about us. And I know we don’t need to-to put a label on us or put us into a… a box or anything like that. But every time I look at this ring on my finger, I can’t help but remember we never actually talked about what they meant,” he began, holding out his left hand and fidgeting with the loose band around his thumb.

“Oh Jon, don’t worry about that. It was just me being a big sappy, sentimental dork. And if I recall correctly, we’d had a pretty awful row a night or two before, and I just wanted to feel close to you again, I guess? We both know what they mean to us. It doesn’t matter,” Martin assured him sweetly.

“Except that it does!” Jon insisted passionately, “That’s the point! You are a big sappy, sentimental dork, Martin. I bet you were the kid that had a dream wedding all planned in a notebook with pictures cut out of magazines and everything. I adore that about you, but big sappy sentimental dorks should have big sappy, sentimental moments like huge, expensive seaside weddings with three-flavor cakes and all your friends and family and rose petals and dove releases and whatever else your heart could dream up.”

Martin snickered and shook his head, charmed at least by the mental image of kissing Jon on a seaside cliff at sunset while doves flew in glorious formation around them and everyone they had ever known and loved cheered.

“Pfft, I don’t need a grand wedding and all that, I just need-”

“Me. I know,” Jon finished for him with a smirk, “I knew you’d say that. Maybe not. But you deserve one. And I know I don’t use that word lightly, but it’s necessary in this case. You deserve it. All of it. Me on one knee with a ring in a box, you deserve us picking out flowers and tuxedos and arguing over the font on the invitations. You deserve Tim’s awful bachelor party and laughing at me at the altar because I had to read my vows off a card and they’re still so stiff and awkward and they pale in comparison to the beautiful poem you wrote about me. You deserve smiling so hard your cheeks hurt and crying as we exchange rings. All of it.”

Martin weighed his words carefully on his tongue with a sip of his boozy tea to chase away ghosts of things that never even were.

“I mean, sure, not going to say I never wanted that. And I did have that stupid wedding notebook, by the way. But all that became a pipe dream the minute we wound up here, right? No use being upset about something that can never be.”

“That may be so, but the crux of it is… you also contented yourself with the idea of it never coming true not because we’re here, but because you didn’t think I wanted it,” Jon answered, his unspoken truth hanging heavy in the chill night air between them, “Every time you tried to tell me you wanted to be with me forever, I brushed it off and painted it gray and tucked it away and carried on the way we always were like nothing happened and it didn’t matter. Because it was alright, really, you were just so happy to have what we have, that I didn’t die in your arms that night, that we were still together after everything. That I at least kept that promise after I’d broken so many. You were so grateful just for what you were gifted after we thought we would end with nothing you didn’t dare think to ask the universe for more and I am so, so sorry it took me so long to see that, Martin. I’m so sorry.”

His voice broke. The breath caught in Martin’s chest as he reached out to touch his wrist comfortingly.

“Jon, I-“

“No, please. Please let me finish I… I can’t give you any of those things. I can’t give you our friends back, I can’t give you cake and doves and the sunset and crying through vows in front of the vicar. I can’t even give you an elopement at the register office because we still don’t legally exist. And I guess for a long time I resented myself for that. For all of it. For stealing that from you, for dragging you through literal hell only to give you a shadow of a life stuck here with me because I betrayed you. But- no stop, don’t say anything yet I’m not done. B-But now I finally realize. You’re right, Martin. You were always right. It doesn’t matter. Those things are all just… things. I said to you once, a long time ago, and I’m still not even sure if you really heard me, that I didn’t want to just survive. It was true then, and maybe it wasn’t true for a while, but it’s certainly true again. We did not fight tooth and nail to just survive. We fought to live, and live together. So what I’m saying is… I know now I don’t have to give you tuxedos and white roses as long as I give you something… Something to prove to you that you are my everything, my entire world, something to show you that I love you more than I have loved anything in my entire life. That I want forever with you. S-So I…” he trailed off, sucking in his breath to give his gesture of undying love the ardor and grandeur it deserved, “I bought us a star.”

The proclamation rang out like the toll of a bell, its gravity sonorous and quaking. Martin blinked.

“You… I’m sorry?” he squeaked.

Jon set his empty thermos cup aside, flailed his hands in the air and shook his head frantically

“I-I know, I know it sounds mental just hear me out!” he protested, “Technically I didn’t buy the star, if we want to get picky about it. I mean obviously no one can own a star. Just the rights to name it? It’s a thing you can do online. I was a bit gobsmacked it was real to be honest. I just had this silly idea when I was out looking at the stars. I was looking at Lyra and thinking about you and Orpheus, and I… W-Well I just typed it in, ‘can you name a star?’ and it came right up. Right then and there. It um… comes with… hold on.”

Remembrance placed a gentle bookmark down on Jon’s fluttering thoughts, and he rummaged in the picnic basket for a moment before pulling out a navy-blue manila folder covered in stars and full of the paperwork and certificates that had come with registering theirs. He handed it to Martin, who took it in place of his own empty cup, numb, muscles quivering under his jaw, and opened it to the glittering gold typeface that proclaimed ‘Congratulations!’.

“It comes with paperwork, too! See? So, it’s official, at least? The Jon-Martin star. Not a marriage license I know, but at least our names are together on something legal? Our real names? I figured even if we manage the fake identity thing we’d have to get married as not us. Not really. So… I-It could be like our marriage certificate?” Jon explained, chewing his lower lip.

Martin said nothing as his hand turned the pages of the documentation, his eyes distant in a way Jon had never seen before. Not disembodied and enthralled, not broken, not even regarding puzzle pieces.

“Oh! Um, also I-I got us a binary star. I forgot to mention that bit,” he went on, filling the sudden void, “It’s, ah- What a binary star is- It’s technically two? But they’re caught up in each other’s gravity and they orbit each other so tightly they look like one star together, one that just shines a little brighter. They’re bound together forever by the most powerful cosmic force in the universe. Just like us.”

Only silence answered, punctuated by one last crisp whisper of paper, and then the folder closing with Martin’s spread fingers atop it, bloodstone gleaming in the vivid pale light of the night. Jon’s heart pitched frantically in his chest, and desperate, stranded tears pricked at his eyes.

“I uh… I would have rather gotten us a whole constellation. Heh, you know? But they don’t do that, obviously,” he tried softly, his fingers barely brushing Martin’s knuckles, “They record heroes in constellations, after all. Great deeds, doomed romances, lovers who can be together no other way… That would have been a better way to honor us, I think. Our story. A-And who knows? Maybe back on our world there are a few new stars to remember what we did, to mark the place we left it, so that everyone we left behind can look up and remember us. They don’t know how the story really ended, and they probably never will, but we do. We do, and I want to end it right here, right now. With our star shining above us ‘and they lived happily ever after.’”

Martin still said nothing, but his head bowed, casting a slice of shadow over his eyes, and his shoulders quivered as a thin, bright line of wet silver trickled down his cheek. Jon felt the very sky shatter above and begin to crumble around him.

“Please… M-Make no mistake, Martin. P-Perhaps the gesture is silly and meaningless, but it was all I could think to do to go with everything I’ve said tonight. Martin… Martin, don’t you see? These are my wedding vows to you. This is me saying ‘I do’ and also ‘Martin K. Blackwood would you do me the honor of making me the happiest man in the universe?’ All at once. This is me saying I swear to you I will be yours, through everything, until the end of time. M-Maybe I wasn’t before. Maybe I was still punishing myself, but I’m telling you, I’m ready now to have my happily ever after. With you, Martin. If you’ll have me. If I haven’t-“

He would never finish. In a dizzying blur of blue folder, flashing hematite, and a wreath of golden curls, Martin kissed the words off his lips. He kissed him so hard and so fierce, through wracking sobs with his hands woven so raptly into his long, wavy locks he thought his lips would bruise and his fragile soul would finally shatter to pieces in Martin’s arms. Undone, all Jon could do was surrender and kiss him back with equal passion, thumbing away the hot tears as they spilled freely down his cheeks and anointed them both with their cleansing, hoary heat. Their lips parted and they panted softly against each other in the space between, each afraid to break the sacred, pulsing silence.

“You’re crying,” Jon whispered at length, “I’ve said something wrong. Martin, darling I’m so sorry. I never meant to-”

Martin laughed, raspy with tears, but ethereal, sparkling, like stardust floating on the breeze.

“People are allowed to cry when they’re happy you stupid, silly man,” he murmured in between kissing him again, and again.

“Oh. Oh.”

He kissed him one last time, that idiot man who always burnt the toast and always knew the facts but never knew what to say, who finally figured it out and bought him a star, and threw his arms around him, enveloping his slight, fragile form protectively in his embrace.

“I love you. I love you so much.”

Jon sank into that warm, familiar comfort and buried his face in his shoulder.

“I love you, too, Martin. I want to be yours for the rest of my life. I want to be me, I want to be us.”

“I know. I’ve always known. Oh god, you do know that right? I know that you love me, it’s written in everything you do and say. I have never, ever once doubted you love me with everything you are. Even in the moments I was afraid that… that maybe we just weren’t meant to be together, I still knew it wouldn’t be because you didn’t love me. Never because you didn’t love me. Just maybe that we didn’t fit together anymore,” Martin replied in a small voice through his tears as they spilled down his cheeks.

As much as he wanted to vehemently deny there was ever a chance they might have not fit back together again after they had both been so shattered, to kiss him and tell him not in a million years would there ever have been a future where they weren’t Jon and Martin against the world, Jon knew it to be inescapably true.

“I’m so sorry you ever had to be afraid of that,” he swore, digging his fingers into Martin’s back pointedly, “After everything. After we fought so hard to escape fear itself. That I almost let it truly win in the end. That I couldn’t just let go… Because… Because this was never about The Eye, was it?”

A heave of breath and its shuddering exhale shook Martin’s body free of lifetimes of grief, and fear, of ugliness carried far beyond the borders of their souls. His fingers curled tighter in unspoken reply.

“No Jon, no it wasn’t, but I’m so very glad you finally figured that out.”

“Me, too…” he whispered.

They held each other in the quiet wake of being a moment and let the astral plane wheel calmly overhead. An impatient star twinkled.

“Wait… you never answered me,” Jon finally said as he pulled back, sliding his elegant fingers down Martin’s strong arms.

“Huh?” Martin blurted, scrubbing under his eyes with the sleeve of his coat.

“About marrying me tonight. You never actually said yes, so…”

A twinkle in his eye and a slight mischief to his grin, Jon dove back into the picnic basket and emerged with a velvet ring box. Martin’s hands flew to his mouth.

“You didn’t.”

“Of course I did! Nothing fancy, but I thought it was high time to retire the blood rings,” he explained rising from his former perch on his hip to kneel properly.

The box cracked neatly open, and inside lay a simple, white gold band with a tiny circle of milky moonstone embedded in it on a midnight-blue satin cushion, blindingly bright against the dark. Martin sobbed joyfully all over again.

“So, uh… I suppose if it had just been us, if we’d just been together, without everything, and we’d arrived at this moment. I would have done much the same. I would have brought you somewhere beautiful, somewhere I could teach you some inane fact you didn’t actually care about, but liked because it came from me. Emulsifiers in ice cream and rum raisin…” they both snickered, “And I would have tried my best to make it into some sort of romantic metaphor but completely bunged it up and you would be laughing as I got down on one knee, just like this. And it would have just been simple. To the point. Just… Will you marry me? So…”

Jon assumed the traditional position, on one knee, arms outstretched, his every slender point a star in a perfect constellation of love.

“Will you marry me?”

Their eyes met, across a thousand different realities, across a thousand different worlds, carried on celestial winds to fall hopelessly, inexorably, into each other’s orbit.

“Yes, yes I do believe I will.”

With one last farewell kiss upon it for what it had meant for them both, Jon slipped the bloodstone ring from Martin’s finger and replaced it with the delicate band made of starlight. It took its place radiantly, and shone as Martin drew his hand back to admire it with an equally radiant grin before it dimmed with concern.

“But what about you?” he asked worriedly as he watched the old ring entombed lovingly in the box.

Jon only smirked and produced a second box from the basket, which he offered on his open palm out to Martin.

“Naturally, I got one for myself. Couldn’t pass up a chance to get a wedding ring that actually fits, could I? It’s just… Don’t you think you deserve to give it to me the way you would want?” he urged.

Martin took the box eagerly, biting his lower lip in thought.

“Not sure you want to give me that freedom. I had about five different ways of asking you in my head and all of them you would have hated so, so much. But I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t kind of the point,” he answered wryly.

Jon chortled.

“Sorry I, the unromantic one, sprung this on you, the romantic one. But I did want to surprise you. I-I mean you can still write me a vows poem later? If you want to, of course. I’d love to have it, even if I don’t actually get to hear it at our wedding.”

Martin’s face flushed immediate crimson and his eyes darted coyly away as he toyed with the wedding band box in his lap.

“Oh that? A-Actually I… I have it memorized, i-if you really wanted to hear it.”

“You- WHAT?” gasped Jon, his cheeks flushing in tandem.

“Oh yeah, I wrote my vows poem for you ages ago and I’ve gone over it so many times I know it by heart. It was comforting, okay? I-I’d read it again when times were good and I thought maybe you’d actually- um… a-and when times were not so good, when you were gone, in your own head, when I was afraid we were broken for good, whenever I needed it. I’ve read it over a thousand times and never changed a thing from the first time I penned it. Never needed to. I’m surprised I haven’t recited it in my sleep at this point,” Martin admitted sheepishly.

Jon’s entire body flushed with a solar heat that melted his joints and his heart into a swirling flare of adulation.

“I can think of no better way, then, to receive my ring,” he breathed, reaching out to cup Martin’s cheek in his hand, “I’ve had my turn, now it’s yours.”

In mirror ballets of love exchanges, Martin cradled Jon’s hand against his cheek as he spoke the first lines of the vows etched ever on his being softly into his palm.

“Let he who, shadow dwelling, must In paper, pen, and book be bound Shake off the chains of dark and rust And chart his own bright fate unfound.

Let he with lifelong burdens borne Cut paper wings with thread of gold And hand in hand, the sky forsworn Flit clouds and sun in laughter bold.

Let he whose blood and soldier’s ken The world did shield from dark and fear Heal fast those wounds, be whole again And sleep at last, held close and dear.

Bring him to me with spirit free With stars in eyes and music sung From lips a joyful promise be One soul conjoined, one fate’s thread strung.

Two hearts rejoice in love renowned. We lift our heads, alive, uncrowned.”

He waited until the last couplet to pull the ring from the box and slide it onto Jon’s finger where it too, fit perfectly, like it had always been there, and shone defiantly bright in the moonlight. Jon wept. He had been weeping since the first words of verse left his beloved’s lips, but seeing that ring like a piece of his missing soul returned to him undammed the tears effusively.

“God that was… Martin, I don’t have words. I-It was… so beautiful. You’re so beautiful. Thank you,” he cried fervently, “I wish I could tell you properly how much that meant, but I just-“

“Hey… That’s alright. I’m the words guy. You’re the emulsifiers guy. Making you cry is all I need to see to know how you feel,” Martin assured him warmly, reaching out to brush his tears away as he chuckled.

“Yeah… add this one to the running tally.”

“Oh, I have,” Martin snickered, “Speaking of! Now we’ve done the crying through vows bit. Shouldn’t we say the ‘I do’ bit, as well?”

Jon pursed his lips with a shrug as he reached out with his left hand to take Martin’s left as well, twining their fingers together

“Yes, I suppose we should. I don’t see why not. Well then, Martin, do you?”

“I do. And Jon, do you?”

“I do.”

“You may now soundly snog the groom.”

“Martin…”

The emphatic drawl of his name the way Jon only called it when he was frustratingly enamored of him perished gently against Martin’s velvet lips as they caressed his. They kissed slowly and reverently, sealing a pact ordained by the heavens long before either of them had seen the stars in the other’s eyes, lighting with white flame the torch to guide them for the first time, forward. They broke it only to punctuate it with two more featherlight kisses and a breathless laugh, bowing their foreheads together in deference to the forces of fate and the universe.

“I know this isn’t the wedding either of us ever dreamed of, but as far as I’m concerned, it was perfect,” Jon murmured, nuzzling closer into his husband, swaddling the new, fledgling and beautiful word in his heart.

“Well, hey, what is a wedding really other than just a formal declaration that this is it? This is us, we’re forever, no matter what. We did it. And you did it for me, in the STARS, Jon… Can we just remember that again? You put us in the actual stars. I am so writing a ballad for our constellation later, you do know this.”

“Oh lord. Of course you are. But really, it was the least I could do, after you’ve done so much for me, sacrificed everything for me. Waited for me for so long.”

“And you came back to me,” Martin reminded him passionately, “And I don’t just mean back to life, here, in this world. I mean you came back, Jon, MY Jon, the Jon I was in love with the moment I laid eyes on him. The fidgety and obstinate Jon who can’t make a decent cup of tea to save his life, who puts on two different socks in the morning because his nose is already in the paper or a book, who teaches me about bleeding rocks and binary stars and still reacts to the simplest acts of kindness like a warm cranberry orange scone without asking for one like they’re divine miracles he is undeserving of, who looks at me like I hung the moon or something every time. Even when I thought I was a complete and total waste of a human being, you, Jonathan Sims, the most beautiful, amazing, brilliant man to ever walk the Earth, looked at me like I hung the moon. And that was… Still is… everything to me.”

The heavens shifted, the stars wheeled, the last piece clicked smartly, smugly into place.

“W-What did you say…?” Jon asked with such urgency, grabbing his hands so fiercely, Martin startled.

“Wh-I-I don’t-? Which part? The moon hanging part?” he stuttered, rolling his eyes fondly as he realized mid-sentence, “Oh, right. Ugh, Jon are you seriously going to get after me about your weird vendetta against idioms at our wedding? Because if you are that would be annoyingly adorable and so intensely you and kind of perfect, but also can you not on THIS particular occasion?”

The laugh that tore from Jon’s throat was half mad, half euphoric as the weight of the moon lifted from his shoulders and became naught but an indifferent sentinel disc in the sky once more.

“No no no, it’s just… It’s funny, I had more than a few things very, very wrong for a very, very long time. That’s all. Don’t worry about it,” he explained, leaning in and pressing a delicate kiss to Martin’s forehead, “If you’re the one who hung the moon after all, then I suppose ‘written in the stars’ will have to do for me.”

Martin lit up with literary glee.

“Oh ho! Two space related idioms in one go? What a rare treat! Maybe this is your gateway drug into puns…” he teased impishly.

“Absolutely no chance in hell.”

They both laughed, laughed with the billowing icy breath that reached with victorious fingers up to the heavens. They laughed, messily sniffing back the pesky drip of tears and cold. They laughed with lightness of the encumbrance of hematite armor shed, its bloody protections no longer needed to cage wounded hearts and keep them safe and close. They laughed in breath and also in the dancing points of light in their eyes as they fell into one another free from gravity.

“So uh… Do I get to see my star tonight, or don’t I?” Martin finally remembered, relishing the utterly horrified yelp from Jon.

“Oh god I completely-! Y-Yes! Yes of course, it’s already set up at the proper coordinates!” he had already sprung to his feet, “Oh, though, hang on, it took longer to get to the star viewing part than I anticipated, so I might need to adjust it a bit. Oh! And I have a little strawberries and champagne, if you like?”

“I do like, please and thank you!”

Jon set to readjusting the telescope to the proper ascension and declination while Martin poured them two glasses of crisply bubbling champagne. They twined their arms to drink a toast from each other’s glass, ‘to us’ or ‘to happily ever afters’, or to several other messily rambled toast worthy sentiments. They couldn’t decide and toasted to all of it. They ate plump red strawberries and licked the juice from each other’s fingers as they looked at their star, which was, after everything, just a dot, just like Pluto, but Martin had to admit that he rather liked looking at dots after all. And that one was their dot. The warm intoxication of love and champagne begged for music, and someone fumbled in the cold for a wedding playlist on some app, somewhere, it didn’t matter, just as long as they could join hands, gaze into each other’s eyes and dance inelegantly, stepping on each other’s toes, under the umbrella of stars in a gentle rain of moonlight.

“I don’t see your problem with cliches, idioms and all that, really…” Martin mused at length, laying his head on Jon’s shoulder as they slowly spun to the rhythm of a longing ballad and the song of the sea, “Like this stupid, great song. They’re familiar and cozy and everyone knows them. They’re like… like old friends. Always there to rely on when we can’t come up with the words ourselves, because sometimes we can’t. And if something trite and silly sums up the way you feel, why not just let it be? Sometimes things are said over and over again because some truths are universal, you know? They’re just… human.”

Jon pressed a kiss into the mop of curls that tickled his nose and smelled faintly of toasted sugar and lavender and mused on all of the romantic cliches that had just passed through his mind unbidden. Who was he to deny he was but one star in the sky, a single gear in the grand mortal mechanism of the universe. If he had handed himself over to the humanity of it all instead of rusting, stopping, looking outside where there was never anything to see, perhaps he could have had this dance much sooner. It didn’t matter though, until it did, because that night Martin took his breath away, made his world go round, he was head over heels for his match made in heaven, and better than heaven, they were written in the stars.

“You know what, Martin?” Jon laughed in reply, “Tonight, being what it is, I am willing to concede. You are absolutely right.”

“I’m glad…” came the tender acceptance, followed by a distinctly puckish beat of silence, “Then does this mean I can I start saying love you to the moon and back?”

“Don’t push your luck...”

#The Magnus Archives #TMA #Magnuspod #JonMartin #JMart #jmartweddingchallenge #hey-there-hunter #Jonathan Sims #Martin Blackwood #Fan fiction

27 notes · View notes

sanstropfremir · 3 years

Text

episode 9 baby!!! dear lord that was a lot!!

frankly, i'm still in shock that i full on manifested an opera stage, AND it was a rock opera stage at that! plus i got a jazz stage AND a taemin stage??? if they’re pulling out all my favourites now then what on earth are they gonna do in the finale??? this was a very overwhelming crop of stages, i thought i was going to be prepared, but oh no i was not prepared. i'm just going to get right into it because this one is gonna be long and i have many words. i'll discuss in airing order first, and then put my personal rankings for this round at the end.

btob

costume

changsub, you absolute king. spectacular. stunning. incredible. zoot suit riot playing in my brain on repeat. will i finally get the zoot suit revival of my fucking dreams instead of this current drab ill-fitting suit trend? for those who are wondering why in the fuck changsub is dressed like that and what on earth i’m talking about, the specific cut of suit that he’s wearing is called a zoot suit, which were popular in mexican, black and italian american communities in the 30s and 40s, until they were outlawed by the united states war production board as a fabric rationing method as part of the war effort in 1942. there was a huge amount of mob violence surrrounding the wearing of them (there were actual zoot suit riots) as they were direct counter culture fashion to the predominant drab trends of white americans at the time. i'm actually very impressed they got a proper (modernized) cut of zoot suit instead of just putting him in an oversized one; there are actually specific structural differences. the pegged trouser legs, large should pads, and knee length single breasted jacket are key features, and they were often in much more flashy fabrics than a pinstripe, but they get points for effort. i wish they had put all of them in zoot suits but he’s playing the ‘lead’ actor so i will begrudgingly forgive them.

eunkwang those are the stupidest sleeve garters ive ever seen i love them never take them off. they’re like someone decided to repurpose a suspender in the worst way. excellent. i do love that they’ve got three of them in oxford saddle shoes, another great touch.

love the three piece and the fedora* on peniel. it's also in a relatively close period cut; waistcoasts (vests) were generally cut much higher in the neck pre-war, we only start seeing the neckline slide down in the 60s (i think? i don’t remember when exactly). also love to see a proper sleeve and jacket length, it's good practice to have at least a finger’s width of sleeve cuff visible ahead of the jacket sleeve when hanging at rest. also looks like there’s french cuffs on everyone, which is also great.

minhyuk in his slutty lowneck shirt....thank you. in addition to the zoot suit revival i would also like a revival of those ultra low necklines on mens’ shirts from like 2010-2011. i don’t think those are the same boots from the backdoor stage but those are some beautifully cut boots. i also loved the little details of his crewmember look, especially the chunky watch and the string bracelets; those are super realistic, i know so many crew with them and i had several for many years. and who doesn’t love a visible button fly?

none of any of the other costumes are period in any way shape or form but i’m forgiving it because there’s several layers of meta in this stage, and they explicitly based it on la la land, even though we don’t respect la la land in this house. do i wish they had gone more strictly period with at least the jazz club ‘actors’ a little more? absolutely, but i'm not mad about it.

set

again we’ve got a good delineation of the two different ‘stages,’ there’s the club itself in the smaller stage and the soundstage set in the larger space. you can pretty clearly see all the ‘pieces’ of the set on the soundstage, especially the obvious set painting techniques on false prosc frame and the window facade from that first little scene. also the you can see the castors (wheels) on all the setpieces too, which is another nice little versimilitudinous** (triple word score!) touch, as old hollywood movies were made still using theatre stagecraft techniques.

i love how the visual shorthand for ‘this is a set wink wonk’ is just...leaving a ladder on stage. i see it all the time and it's so funny. it doesn’t always make sense because as soon as there’s actors on set the ladders are the first thing cleared because actors cannot be trusted, but yes there are always ladders, so. also psa ladder safety is no joke, please be careful on ladders.

nice streamline of the mnet deco into the club. i’m consistently surprised at how well the designers have been able to mask it or use it to their advantage, because in the normal kingdom stage lighting it is SO obvious and stylistic that it always sticks out.

i'm going to ignore the fact that they implied changsub and miyeon were drinking wine out of martini glasses.

lighting

no complaints, it does its job. everything is visible and super clear. love that the ‘scene’ changes are made through the lighting, it's a really simple and effective device to change atmosphere. purple/blue/amber are the most flattering colours on human skin and that’s why you see it so commonly in stage lighting. also blue/lavendar is the best way to show nighttime/moonlight.

really nice and subtle projection work, especially with the billboard bit and the blue moon sign in the club. despite being obviously meta/’world breaking’ it’s actually very seamless and fits well into the flow of the stage.

sound

i love love love the big band feel in the intro, combined with the piano lead. very duke ellington, as all things should be.

no complaints. i love big band. i love eunkwang’s voice. i have nothing else to say.

staging

i LOVE this movie within a movie within a performance meta nonsense! it's such a fun concept and it is exactly what i wanted ikon’s first round stage to be! i also love to see btob consistently coming up with concepts that are inventive and fun and allow them to showcase their technical performance skills without the aerobics the younger groups are putting themselves through. it provides a really lovely variety and it just goes to show that you can make impressive, dramatic stages without having to be serious or ‘dark.’

i do wish they had leaned into the band director/lead singer with eunkwang a bit more; this could have been a really excellent place for a tap number a la the nicholas brothers or an homage to cab calloway. i know i know this was meant to be la la land themed but la la land is a cheap and whitewashed version of jazz and look me right in the eyes and tell me this isn’t the greatest tap routine of all time. i know i’ve typed this out somewhere before but la la land is just a conglomeration of old hollywood tropes and so stylistically cheap that this would have such a better visual core if they had actually looked back at the real old hollywood musicals like stormy weather. even singing in the rain and an american in paris have such phenomenal visuals and are really beautiful examples of the scope you can pull off with a limited technical capacity and sticking to these old techniques.

now that i'm thinking about it, oh my GOD i would DIE for a lindy hop routine in kpop PLEASE. i know it would never happen because kpop doesn’t like partner dancing and not a single kpop boy has the chops but oh you think fourth gen has too many acrobatics?

this got off track but i think you see my point.

---

ateez

costume

these are really sharply cut suits. and the detail work on the beading??? so beautiful. i'm disappointed that they gave me a rock opera stage without the true ridiculousness of rock opera costuming, because they could have pushed this a lot farther if they really wanted. a tragic lack of gay little outfits, seonghwa’s lace choker is just not enough! two favourite suits: hongjoong’s and yunho’s.

that being said i do actually really like these. this stage is actually very modern opera with a kpop twist and i'm a little surprised by that? i continue to be impressed by the ateez team who are clearly doing their research.

i'm absolutely not going back through their stages to check all the choreography but i wonder if you can track all the ‘wound’ placements to places they’ve been ‘hit.’ i wouldn’t put it past them to have put that thought in but also i’m not expecting that much either.

who is this white grim reaper bdsm executioner chain arm man. where did he come from. i have no idea and i love it.

why is honjoong blindfolded. it was such a fast beat, if youre gonna blindfold someone give it a little longer and some more obvious narrative weight!

seonghwa does that quickchange, runs across that massive stage to the smaller set, and gets into places in like 45 seconds. it's not the hardest quickchange in the world but still, under a minute is fast for any quickchange, especially when there’s travel time involved. i think the fastest, most complex quickchange i ever did was in university which was a 50s cocktail dress into a flannel and culottes with a shoe, hair, and jewelry change in 35 seconds. and that took three dressers. quickchanges are always impressive. the added bonus of this review being later is that i can specifically reference that you can see him book it the fuck off stage in the full cam!

cute moment with the backup dancers dressed in costumes from the previous stages. i'm assuming this is a time travel reference? i'll get more into my thoughts on this in the staging section. regardless, love to see that iconic seonghwa moment again.

set

this is such a restricted space! they really pared down their dancing space with those staircases and ....arms? honestly i have NO clue what these are supposed to be. the only thing i can maybe think of is flying buttresses??? but why?? i mean, i'm 90% sure theyre just there for drama and i agree but i do still have questions.

there’s a lot of moving parts in this set? the buttresses, and the upstage centre staircase. i don’t think the staircase is totally automated because i spotted some dancers securing it in place, but it’s still a moving part. i do really like that we get that expanding upwards energy, because it's really tough to get functional level movement in this kind of a performance, mostly because of its length and because it moves so quickly. so seeing the downward vertical movement and then the upward movement was actually a really nice visual contrast that made use of how tall those fucking ceilings are, and the fact that they had less horizontal space. in sort of similar way to sf9’s jealousy stage, using long, narrow vertical lines really makes it feel like a castle space. the interiors of castles, especially the really old ones, are a lot smaller than you think they would be.

i’ve actually seen that type of small house/tent/thing several times in various types of performances before, but i think this is the first time i’ve seen it used as a time travel device (other than in the say my name mv). aesthetically it's a bit incongruent but i dont really mind because i'm used to watching rock operas that look a lot weirder than this.

lighting

there is so much happening. i have NO clue what the projections are doing. i dont hate it though, so that’s a plus? there’s a clear-ish colour arc even if it does get a bit funky in the middle, which is why the projections dont feel as insanely distracting as some of the other stages we’ve seen.

the climax is a perfect example of how to light a busy stage with primarily red but still maintain clarity on the performers. a little bit of red goes a long way; the spark stage from last week would have looked so much better if they had done what the ateez designers did here.

sound

i know it's only ode to joy, but answer already gets my motor running and then i get so gassed by the guitars and then by the time those vocals come in i'm inconsolable. i don’t know why i wasn’t expecting a rock opera stage but i'm so glad i got that surprise because i genuinely love rock operas so much. it's two of the most dramatic genres in music, what more could you possibly want?

staging

the choreo for answer is so goofy that I'm kinda glad this was mostly terrible mnet boom shots. i love it, but you can't deny that it's goofy. i spotted a couple of moves from their other choreos as well?

choreographing dance fights is just as difficult as choreographing real fights and i think they did a fairly good job here. i think it was a solid mix of dance and conflict that erred on the side of dramatic rather than accurate and i prefer that over trying to be ‘realistic.’ i’ve only ever seen one truly realistic fight scene on stage and that was for a deeply naturalist play (boring and a waste of the medium), but the best fight scene i’ve ever seen was in the prague national ballet’s adaptation of kafka’s the trial where three ballet dancers beat the absolute snot out of the main character with the most beautiful leg extensions. that whole show was probably one of the best pieces of dance i’ve ever seen, holy fuck it was so good.

despite how insane the music and the visuals were going, i actually really liked how sedate this was, on the part of ateez’s performance. there was a really sophisticated and resigned energy from them that is very different from what we’ve previously seen and i think that was a pretty admirable risk to take. reaching the top and then throwing away the crown? especially in a competition where every other stage has involved stealing crowns or royalty and there’s a group competing that got here through that very concept? that shows a real maturity, peace of mind, and foresight that i did not at all expect from a bunch of 22 year olds.

here we come to a very interesting comparison. both ateez and tbz are very heavily leaning on previously established group lore. we all know my thoughts on why it isn’t working for tbz, but here’s why i think it is working for ateez: it's because it doesn’t matter to the audience’s understanding of the stage. i had absolutely no fucking clue what was going on the first time i watched this, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the music and all the weird shit they were doing. i totally believed that they understood what was going on. there’s a loose enough established conflict right at the beginning that draws us in, and really it doesn’t matter who they're fighting because they win in the end. the key here is that they’re so earnest. they believe 100% in every move they make on that stage. there’s no winks to camera, there’s not a drop of irony. they really deeply care about the ridiculousness of it all and that’s what makes it work. i sure as fuck dont know what’s going on, but i can see that they do, and i trust that. this is what i meant when i talked about convincing the audience you belong on stage in my stage presence post. i’ve never once believed that juyeon was anything other than an idol. he’s talented and very beautiful and he may occasionally stand on that stage like he owns it but it's always as juyeon. as an idol. but when hongjoong flaps around in that gigantic fur coat i 100% believe he’s a pirate captain. I believe he’s a punk rebel leader. i believe him a resigned king. there’s always a level of irony you have to fight as a performer because we all start from a place of disbelief. acting is not just lying to the audience, it's lying to yourself too. and if you succeed in convincing yourself? well, you’re already halfway to convincing us.

i checked it out because i wanted to see if they did the blindfold how i expected them to and was genuinely surprised by hongjoong’s fancam. the boy is EMOTING even when he knew the camera wasn’t on him; that’s a real dedication to craft.

ok i'm finished talking about this stage, this is over two pages in my document, there’s so many things i have not covered here but that’s fine, i'm quite sure any further thoughts will end up out there at some point.

---

sf9

costume

let’s get it out of the way......crop top. crop top? crop top. crop top.

ok, besides the crop top, i think i might actually like the backup dancer outfits more...? i find mannequin adjacent looks really fascinating and i thought there was a lot more they could have done here in connecting the two thematically. i actually think a change of costume on the boys would have been very interesting, especially because there was a lot of inference and direct reference to changes of colour.

ALL the backup dancers are wearing the same wig and i LOVE that.

special mention zuho’s.....jacket? the right idea but it absolutely should have been one of those extreme french cut bodysuits, you COWARDS. don’t come at me with this ‘male version of venus’ if you don’t have your whole torso out! come on!

set

not sure if this is meant to be a department store, a factory, or a white cube gallery. honestly you could make the case that they’re all the same place anyways. more on this later.

i loved the movator and wish they had used it more! that sequence was so good and they could have done some more interesting repetition sequences to further highlight the ‘sameness’/the breaking of that sameness.

i feel like the set could have been used more as a whole? i would have loved to see some mannequin interactions with those boxes, because all they did was dump colour everywhere.

....why did they feel the need to include the rain bit? i know it's likely because it's in the mv and at the 2018 dream concert taemin does perform move in the rain, but with the standing still and the box walls with the words it just looks like a department store ad. which i...dont think is what they were intending?

lighting

nothing really to say here. it has a similar feel to the mayfly rap stage, which is fine because the lighting for that was good. i could tell what was going on all the time and that’s the most important part. notable standouts are the lips sequence, that's fun use of pop iconography and very effective, and the scanning lasers at the beginning.

the repeating sequence in the edm dance break is actually done pretty simply, it's just what happens when you point a camera that’s livestreaming to a monitor directly at that monitor. it's a very cool effect and it was neat to see it used intentionally, especially with the handheld leds.

actually i also really liked the lightbox tables, those were cool.

sound

the remix was fine for the most part, it was about what i expected it to sound like. i did however greatly dislike that unnecessary edm break in the middle. what was the point of that? it didn’t add anything to the overall sound or arc of the stage because it was SO out of place. there was no connective tissue around it.

oh i was also not a fan of the effect on zuho’s mic. no one else had a discernible vocal effect so it felt a little out of place. also for some reason his cadence and tone right at the end made me think of some of the voices that bo burnam uses for his vocal masque sketches/songs, especially repeat stuff, weirdly? took me right the fuck out of it. i listened to it again after i slept and i’m still getting it, so maybe i’m just going insane so best ignore this part.

staging

loved the mannequin tree, not a clue why it was there.

do actually think this is a successful cover because it does what i was hoping it would, which is take move completely out of the taemin context and put it into an entirely new one. however, i’m really struggling to figure out what exactly that new context is? and what theyre trying to say with it?

obviously they went for a ‘show your own colours/individuality’ vibe, like i said in the set section, where exactly is this supposed to be? from the start i get factory/mechanized environment, which is fine and grand because mannequins and making repetitive motions and products and all that, makes sense. but then there’s stacked shelving type units happening and curtains and that combined with the mannequins give me pretty big department store vibes, which is also fine, because that’s still a comment on commercialization and the mass production of product. but then we get to the movator and the repetitive movements of the dancers say pretty clearly factory, but the lighting and projections are very pop art referential, plus combining that with the white set, just makes me think of an art gallery. so now is this a comment on the commercialization and commidification of contemporary art? are they making a statement about being ‘real’ artists among the others who have lost the critical understanding of why pop art was even a thing in the first place? and then the rain bit at the end literally looks like a department store ad, so are they then making another statement that they still are that packaged product? maybe the episode has more clarity in it but i’m genuinely a bit baffled by what the underlying statement is here.

i suspect it is not as deep as i'm making it, but i did say that i was likely to be hyper critical of this stage AND i am a grad student, so here we are.

---

tbz

costume

ok of all the ‘fourth gen’ style costumes we’ve seen, i actually like these ones more than most. i'm not entirely clear on the theme but i'm assuming it's meant to be post apocalyptic, and i'll take that.

backup dancers in black!!! we’re beyond this!!!

this will be a running theme with this stage, but i’m disappointed these don’t have more depth.

set

compared to every other stage, the set here seems especially plain. there’s so little set dec that it's disappointing. i do like the movement of the pieces themselves combined with the blocking; that first slide underneath the arches was slick and i would have liked to have seen more of that.

yea ok the big snake was cool and also a fairly complex build, but the transitions around it were a bit awkward for my tastes. especially the turn around, why did they even show that at all? you have control over what the audience sees, you can totally not show scenic transitions. skz were super smart about hiding theirs in last week’s episode.

also if you have a bigass puppet like that, i wanna see some more movement from it! it doesn’t have to be complex, we literally just saw a kraken balloon arm wave around aimlessly, but at least there was movement! that snake had a long ass body, why didn’t they at least take a pseudo dragon dance movement with it, that would have been such fun to watch with the iridescent scales. there was a lot of opportunity here!

lighting

i don’t hate it but also.... not a lot to say about it on the whole.

there were two really smart ideas here, the first being the front projection section, which i was SO glad to see! i explained in a previous review, but the projections in kingdom are not actually projections per se, because they’re actually massive led screens. there are two common types of projections in performance, rear projection and front projection. rear projection is when the projector is behind the screen, and front projection is ‘normal’ projection. rear projection can produce a crisper image because you have full control of the light values, because the projector is in a separate room from the performance space. but the downsides are that the projector has to be in a separate room from the performance space. so if you’re short on real estate, it's not ideal. front projection is much more common, because the tech is a lot cheaper and easier to access, especially now, and it requires less real estate because you can ceiling mount about the audience (you can move a projector wherever, this is just the most common spot in commercial theatres). but! in order to get an actually crisp image, you have to be really careful with your light bounce. it’s exactly the same principle as how you kinda can't see a projected screen when you have all the lights turned on, but when you turn them off it's a lot clearer. front projection works best in pitch dark, so when you use it in a theatre you gotta be smart about it. i use front projection a lot in my personal art practice as a singular light source, and that’s what tbz did here in that traveling/snake intro sequence. it’s a really fun technique that they used as a good gimmick because it’s not something we’ve seen before, and you get some great shadow effects because the projector is throwing light directionally at the performers (they have it set up close to the floor, it’s probably on a wheeled cart of some kind). however i did not like the snake intro. a bit too cheesy and out of place, especially because the asset quality didn’t match the rest of landscapes that we have been seeing.

the second smart idea, which is partially also a set and blocking thing but whatever, was that final image of the eclipse within the circle architecture with all the members standing in front of it. it was a great shot and a great ending pose, but it felt like a concept photo. like someone had that image as the idea that they then built the stage around, instead of a narrative first and then imagery after.

sound

this remix had SO much promise! those first two minutes were SO GOOD. i love that dirty discordant strings bit, it's gross and right up my alley. but it really fell off in the back half and i'm sad about that.

staging

i'm sorry tbz but.....what did you actually do differently than exo here? with the exception of the continual game of thrones references? nothing here felt transcendentally different from the original monster. and especially coming RIGHT after sf9’s move, which did go beyond its original context. this feels more like an awards show stage cover than a stage at the level of the others we’ve seen just this episode.

again like with the skz stage, there’s no conflict here. no tension. yes they do a great job covering the dance but it just isn’t enough! this is obviously personal preference and i'm sure lots of people liked the fact that it was uncomplicated, but even just a hint of narrative tension could have pushed this into more engaging territory. and if they didn’t want to do that, i would have loved to see them make up for that with extra visual spectacle. this is the no limits round! ikon is putting a full jungle on stage and these are grey cubes!

i think this is a perfect example of what i talked about at the end of my tbz section in my episode four review; this is a good performance, there are good elements at play and good ideas at their genesis, but the core of the issue is that nothing about this is transformative. all of the ideas here are just exaggerations of the original song. fuck, the snake was even IN the mv! and they didn’t even include the best part which is the lip chains! ive said before and i'll say it again; being a good artist has two steps, the first is understanding the material and its context, and the second is elevating the material from that context and synthesizing something new. tbz are really good at the first step, but terrible at the second.

---

ranking

btob - the cleanest and the most fun of the round. everything i wanted.

sf9 - fun and a good cover, despite being conceptually baffling.

ateez - very extra dramatic nonsense with an unexpected dose of sincerity. and it’s rock opera, of course i love it.

skz - fun, with some good thematic devices but generally lacking in arc. also australian accents, that’s an automatic ding.

tbz - honestly the first two minutes of the remix and the costume are holding this above 6th. it just wasn’t fully formed.

ikon - aesthetically this is a great set design and although i do love the opening and closing moments, everything else scrapes me the wrong way. super personal preference here, i’m not expecting anyone else to agree with me.

i feel like my rankings were probably pretty easy to guess if you’ve been around reading the reviews for long enough. i do have very specific tastes after all. i know sf9 ranked first in the episode but i have no idea what the other slots are. i’ll find out when i watch the episode in a couple of days, but i think yea a first for sf9 is fair. i do think its mostly because it’s a taemin song and you have to do something horrendous in order to fuck up a taemin song, but there is a lot of thought and work that went into that stage.

ok i'm done now, sorry this was later than usual, but i was busier and there were four stages that i had to review. also technical difficulties because tumblr is a garbage platform and nothing works properly. comments/questions/opinions always welcome, i know i didn't expand on a couple of points that i could have so hopefully y'all have some thoughts too!

* the type of hat that ~society~ has told you is a fedora is actually a trilby. what peniel is wearing is a real fedora, i felt the need to correct this unjust hat malignment.

** meaning ‘the appearance of being true or real.’ you do sometimes hear it used by normal people, but it’s more commonly used as a descriptor in film and theatre. it’s also one of the five rules of neoclassical theatre, which are: versimilitude, purity of form, five act structure, decorum, and purpose. the most prominent playwrights from that era are moliere and racine if youre interested in what those look like in an actual text.

#kingdom #kingdom review #btob #ateez #stray kids #the boyz #sf9 #tumblr is so broken it would NOT let me save this as a draft #does my constant hyperlinking make you angry tumblr? too bad im gonna keep doing it #i played in a jazz band in school for seven years #which is another indicator as to why i am like this #one of the first songs i remember learning was zoot suit riot #i have very strong memories of yelling RIOT during performances #i will however forever question the logic of our band teacher making us learn a song written by 'the cherry poppin daddies'#christ on a bicycle this is TEN pages #and it took a full eight hours last night and then i did like two hours of editing after i woke up #maybe i should go back to bed #ah i forgot to tag ikon again lmao #ikon #kpop analysis #text #if there are any spelling errrors do not tell me im tired of reading this #im pretty sure this is my longest review so far i decided to hate myself and did a wordcount #its 5.2K you're welcome you better get a snack for this one #i hope this is an interesting read for people ive lost all objectivity at this point #pls enjoy my semi-comprehensible word vomit!

25 notes · View notes

iamahugegeeknicetomeetyou · 3 years

Text

okay lemme just sprinkle some yueki into your feed real quick

let’s ignore the fact I’m about to change so much of the canon plot

anyway so

let’s say as in book one they arrive at the northern water tribe like usual sokka has his schoolboy crush on yue and as in canon she is engaged to another man

but on the moonlit meeting instead of just confessing she is married to another man she confides in sokka that she actually also is doing it to cover up the fact she likes girls

The Southern water tribe is very small and I can imagine them being very excepting of different sexualities as they are very close and tightly knit so they are probably very supportive and caring

however we’ve seen how the Northern water tribe is much larger on formalities and with a casual sexism ingrained in their society I can imagine that homosexual relationships are probably disapproved of

therefore being royalty in the Northern water tribe she probably decides that for political power and presentation it will be best just to cover up and marry a man

however ever sokka has been so sweet to her ever since he arrived and coming from a place that she’s heard is more excepting she takes a leap of faith and confesses her true motives for not being with him

and sokka being sokka is just immediately cool and completely supports her so instead of being there as a lover he is there as a friend to distract and support her while she has what looks like a bleak life in front of her of pretending to be someone she’s not

but then comes the fire nation attack and zhao being an absolute piece of trash and kills one of the water spirits and yue has to sacrifice herself

but just imagine as she does this but the spirit only take some of her life force and allows her to live as well almost as a thanks for her sacrifice

and she is overjoyed because she’s allowed to live however now it’s time for the avatar and sokka to move on and she suddenly gets this horrible feeling of being isolated and alone her entire life because sokka was the first real friend she’s ever had and she’s been able to confide so much in him

so she says the fuck it and decided she’s going to escape from the northern water leaving a message for her father admitting the truth about who she is and travel secretly with the avatar among the nations helping them in any way she can

obviously being a royal she doesn’t know that much about the outside world or about combat fighting however with sokka as her teacher and actually knowing a lot about political powers in the outside world I can imagine that she would be a useful ally to the gaang

skipping forward to book 2 episode 12 we finally see suki again but this time yue is there

they first see her when they’re trying to enter ba sing se and right off the bat yue is so into her however here comes the problem that so is sokka and she obviously does not want to hurt him in anyway so she kind of just pretend her feelings don’t exist as she usually does

but it’s actually really hard to see one of the first girls she’s ever felt feelings for and can now be open about them she still has to hide them for fear of hurting her friends

regardless this is the last time she sees or hears of Suki until they invade the fire nation until the day of the black sun when azula mentions she has been arrested and put in prison

then obviously they have to escape the fire nation and take refuge in an air nomad temple but yue hasn’t stopped thinking about Suki ever since she met her let alone now she knows she’s in fire nation custody

and when sokka confides in her that he plans to break her out of prison yue, with her new training decides to tag along on the mission with zuko and sokka because even if she can’t be with Suki romantically like hell she’ll just let her rot in a fire nation prison

the boiling rock episodes go more or less the same where she pretends to be a guard like sokka and helps with the prison break although it’s kind of uncomfortable for her the entire time because she has these feelings for Suki that she has to hide

nonetheless they break her out and she is now free and comes back to the air temple with them

now they have quite a bit of time where they’re just at the temple with aang learning fire bending and waiting until they can attack again

and during this time she actually gets really close to Suki as a friend

at first it’s kind of awkward because they don’t know each other that well and they only met once but gradually as the others train suki notices that yue has dramatically less experience even if she is a diligently strong fighter

so she offeres to help and teach her some of the kyoshi moves

yue absolutely loves this idea until she realises how intimate training can be and how much Suki ends up touching her even if it’s just slightly change her position or adjust her stance she realises that training was probably one of the worst idea she’s ever had because the entire time she’s having the biggest lesbian panic

but aside from training they also begin to become close friends, yue opening up about how much she misses home even though they forced her to be something she’s not and Suki opening up about how much she misses the kyoshi warriors as they are like family to her

but then I can imagine that sometime in the air temple Suki and sokka kind of agree that they just work better as friends and that their romantic relationship was lovely but they just work better in a platonic way

and I head canon that yue absolutely loves to look up at the moon because it reminds her of home but also how she got here and the connections she has to water bending and the spirits so I can imagine while the rest of the gaang sleeps she always sneaks out and just stares at the moon for hours on end

but imagine Suki starts to notice this behaviour and instead of calling her out on it just joins her occasionally and watches the moon silently with her and that they have these quiet intimate moments they have every now and again

however one night Suki seems kind of down when she joins her and yue has noticed that her visits are getting more and more frequent and Suki only really comes out there when she is struggling to sleep herself so she asks what’s up and Suki confesses that her and sokka broke up

anyway even though she’s really into Suki her first priority making sure her friends are okay

Suki explains that it was a mutual decision and she’s not heartbroken in anyway because her and sokka both decided that they work better as friends and their relationship is better when it’s platonic but nonetheless she did really like him and it’s still a shame

and yue is just here listening on the edge of her seat because her crush is finally single

but she also feels really awkward because it’s her best friends ex and also a presumably straight girl so she just decides to pretend once again have feelings do not exist

but from then on every night Suki joins her even if its only for a 10-20 minutes it’s an everyday sort of thing and sometimes they sit for hours at a time in a comfortable silence or talking quietly about things and gradually their relationship grows more and more intimate

until one night they’re just sitting in the moonlight and yue accidentally starts staring at Suki and she doesn’t mean to but she can’t help but admire her beauty so Suki jokingly says “see something you like?” upon noticing yue’s gaze

and yue just lesbian panics so hard and it’s just like “no no just looking at the moon” and Suki starts teasing her jokingly of course but yue actually finds it really hard because she’s trying to deny these feelings and her being all cute about it is not helping

but trying to defuse the awkwardness Suki confesses that she finds yue very pretty too and yue just kind of sits there gobsmacked and Suki goes on to say all of these wonderful things about her about how she’s not just pretty but she’s also kind and caring and sensitive but is also an amazing person with a forgiving heart

and yue is just kind of sitting there in shock because it started out as teasing and now she’s going on this huge tangent about what an amazing person she is and yue swears she’s never been more in love with anyone in her entire life

and the entire time Suki has been staring at this moon must suddenly after she finishes her tangent about how amazing yue is and as she turns to look at her yue realises that in this moment she doesn’t care about anything else but her

so she kisses her

and Suki at first is kind of shocked but she doesn’t pull away until after a few seconds and in those few seconds she stares at back at yue are the most terrifying of yue’s life because she thinks she’s made the most terrible mistake ever and completely misread every signal she gave her and thought that she had a horrible misunderstanding

but then Suki suddenly just kisses yue and her brain just completely collapses in on itself because she has no idea how to deal with all these feelings but they end up kissing for awhile under the moonlight and after some time Suki gently pulls away and rest her forehead against yue’s and just says so delicately “i’ve been wanting to do that for a long time”

and yue just shuts off because this is too much because she just kissed the girl of her dreams and found out that the feelings she feels are not one-sided

but after that they have a long talk about their relationship and about how they both obviously feel more than platonic feelings and about Suki being bisexual and realise that dating is actually something that really love to do but of course with sokka they don’t want to hurt him they decide to secretly date and just go slow for awhile

and it all goes well but yue is a terrible liar and feels horrible from concealing this from sokka so while the rest of the gang are out and the three of them are left at the temple they decide that they should tell him

and they are completely terrified he’s going to be really horrible about it but they sit him down and confesses that they are dating and sokka is just like “took you guys long enough”

and they just sit there opened mouth because they thought that they’ve been so good at hiding their feelings for each other that no one in the group suspected they’re dating

but sokka says he could tell from the beginning yue had feelings for Suki but didn’t wanna push so just left them in peace but then once him and Suki agreed they worked better as friends he was basically just waiting for them to end up telling him that they’ve gotten together

and they are both just so shocked he isn’t mad but he confesses that he is also bisexual and has feelings for zuko that he’s been repressing for awhile and isn’t going to face any time soon but has nonetheless and that he completely support and loves their relationship

and they’re both so relieved and so happy

and yeah from there they go into finally defeat the fire nation and win the war and afterwards yue returns home to her people and she is so overwhelmed by the amount of love and support she receives when she returns home and her father confessing he never meant to make her feel like an outcast but just wanted what was best for her and the water tribe

but yue isn’t ready to come home yet so she continues to travel with Suki for awhile and the avatar as they continue postwar to do whatever is necessary to make peace

but later on she’s called back home as it’s time for her to take the position as chief and she feels she’s going to have to leave all of her friends behind however with zuko as the fire lord and the fire nation as a close ally and the avatar needing to protect all places in the world she’s actually still really close to everyone

and on top of that Suki decides to move to the Southern water tribe with her and she works as a bodyguard and also bring some of her kyoshi warrior friends as well as training some non-benders in the Northen water tribe some martial arts while there

and yeah they are just like bad ass wives in the Northam water tribe together

sorry this is so long but I just felt that this had to be said because like c’mon guys it’s yueki 🤲😩 also if you wanna see any good you yueki edits go onto @/s4ppos page on instagram she has a couple of them I think and they are the most beautiful things I have ever seen

#lgbtq #lesbian #bisexual #yue #princess yue #suki #suki x yue #yue x suki #atla #avatar the last airbender #yue alta #lesbian yue #yue lesbian #suki bisexual #bisexual suki #suki atla #zukka #yueki

62 notes · View notes

sshbpodcast · 3 years

Text

Top Five Star Trek DS9 Episodes

by Ames

Oh my prophets, we’ve made it back through the wormhole and concluded all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and you know what? Overall it’s pretty damn good! Arguably the best as a series, we might say (and we did say), and all we’ve left to do is wrap it up in a nice hasperat burrito now.

In doing so and in typical A Star to Steer Her By fashion, we’ve also assembled the best episodes of the whole series into one big list. Check out the discussion in our DS9 finale episode here (series discussion starts at 1:58:12 after the season chatter), featuring even more bests from our special guest star Liz. And open up the Orb of Prophecy to read all the highlights below; you don’t have to be emissary to the prophets to enjoy these.

“Blood Oath”: Caitlin The Klingons have been one of the most popular races in the galaxy, and Klingon episodes are just as fun, especially when they put in the work to feature some blasts from the relative past whom we saw in The Original Series! And some extra respect to this one because Kor says Trans Rights.

“Hard Time”: Ames Miles suffered a whole lot through the years, so the best of his suffering deserves to be on the best list, doesn’t it? Colm Meaney acts his ass off, the storytelling is clean and interesting, and we actually acknowledge mental health (just a little bit) for a change!

“The Wire”: Ames Speaking of actors who act their ass off. Andrew Robinson’s portrayal of Garak was something we just couldn’t get enough of (can we push for Star Trek: Garak perhaps?), and this episode takes the cake with just sublime acting from one of our favorite assassi– er, tailors.

“Rejoined”: Caitlin She started off rough, but Jadzia really began to bring it at some point in the show and we’ve targeted this episode as where we really started giving a damn about her. Finally, we see both the emotional weight of being a joined Trill and the actual acting chops of Terry Farrell all in one place!

“The Quickening”: Jake Similarly, Julian also started off really rough, but when that bright-eyed, bushy-tailed outlook started losing its brightness and bushiness (and when he stopped creeping on women for a while), we got to really see him as a character, and this episode highlights how great he can really be.

“Far Beyond the Stars”: Ames What more can we say about “Far Beyond the Stars,” an episode that we totally changed guest star Justus’s mind about when we covered it? What could have been a detrimental trope turns into a captivating and pertinent inspection of racism, storytelling, and history. Thank the prophets for this one!

“In the Pale Moonlight”: Chris It’s not a fake: our love for this episode is 100% real! It’s so excellent to see some really difficult ethical decisions get made on this show, highly contrasting the angelic Starfleet portrayals of the past. Science fiction is all about debate – is all about reflecting on the issue – and those are discussions we love to have!

“Duet”: Chris, Jake Two votes for this stellar two-hander that is just an actor’s banquet for excellent character development and every opportunity to utterly devour the scenery. Om nom nom scenery. Kira Nerys started off as one of the most well-written and consistent characters on the show, and she only got better and better from there.

“Second Skin”: Caitlin, Jake Speaking of Kira! Here’s some more well-deserved love for Nana Visitor who donned some Cardassian makeup and really went with it in this excellent character piece that turned her into everything she hated. Talk about an identity crisis!

“It’s Only a Paper Moon”: Caitlin, Chris At the start of the series, who would have thought that the juvenile delinquent character Nog would grow to be one of the most beloved on the show, with one of the most developed arcs? Credit to Aron Eisenberg for the nuance, heartbreak, struggle, and joy that he brought to Nog over the years.

“The Visitor”: Ames, Chris, Jake The Ben-Jake relationship proves again and again to be one of the strongest tenets at the core of Deep Space Nine and this episode really goes for it in telling a spellbinding tale of a boy’s love for his father. With added alternate realities, subspace shenanigans, and excellent guest acting thrown in to boot!

“Captive Pursuit”: Ames, Caitlin, Chris, Jake The one episode that made it on all our lists is actually one of the earliest in the series because we all just loved Tosk so much. What an excellent beginning to the series that starts exploring the ethics of how we treat other people and what we can do about that right out of the gate. We are Tosk!

—

See also: our Bottom Five Star Trek DS9 Episodes list for the less glowing but still fun to hate on stuff!

Considering the wormhole aliens’ nonlinear existence, can Deep Space Nine really be over? Well, I guess yes it can, because our journey through Star Trek must continue! We’ve got more fun planned for this page, so keep watching us here, listen to weekly episodes at our home on Soundcloud, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and we’ll see you in the Delta Quadrant soon!

#star trek #star trek deep space 9 #ds9 #podcast #star trek podcast #top five #blood oath #hard time #the wire #rejoined #the quickening #far beyond the stars #in the pale moonlight #duet #second skin #it's only a paper moon #the visitor #captive pursuit

7 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 3 years

Photo

Heart Beat.

Minari’s film composer Emile Mosseri (also responsible for the Kajillionaire and The Last Black Man in San Francisco scores) tells Ella Kemp about his A24 favorites, Nicholas Britell’s friendship and the boldest Paul McCartney needle drop in movie history.

What do you think a broken heart sounds like? How about a warm, beating one? It’s something that Emile Mosseri has been thinking about for a while now. The past two years have seen him complete a hat-trick of beguiling, transporting scores for Plan B movies: Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails’ The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire and now, the film voted the best of 2020 by our community, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari.

What binds these scores together is a delicacy that knows when to break free and turn into something altogether spectacular. But on Minari in particular, Mosseri is in full bloom, working for the first time in a way he’d always dreamed about. While The Last Black Man in San Francisco saw him compose to a loose edit, and on Kajillionaire he worked to a locked cut, Chung gave him the freedom to write music directly to Minari’s script. “It was a dream to work this way on Minari,” Mosseri says. “It was so beautifully written and so visceral.”

‘Minari’ composer Emile Mosseri.

Minari is an intimate portrait of a Korean family making their way in rural America, and the composer was interested in “trying to figure out musically how you can feel connected to your deepest childhood memories”. These memories belong, in the film, to David—a tiny king played by eight-year-old Alan Kim—as he comes to terms with his new life on a small farm in Arkansas, as his family strives for their own version of the American Dream.

The Yi family is made up of David and his sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho), their parents Monica (Han Ye-ri) and Jacob (Steven Yeun) and their grandmother, Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung). It’s a personal story for Chung, one that Mosseri felt honored to be a part of. “It’s a very intimate story with these five characters, which takes place mostly in this small mobile home—but emotionally, it’s very epic.”

There was something about Chung that had caught Mosseri’s attention early on. “I had met him at the LA premiere of Last Black Man,” Mosseri says, “and I sent him the Kajillionaire score.” Mosseri was already familiar with the filmmaker’s work: “His first film, Munyurangabo, is incredible.” He calls Chung “very open, but also sly” in terms of hitting the right notes and “gently steering the ship”. The partnership between composer and director was about working on “a more emotional level,” Mosseri says. “There was never any talk about what we wanted stylistically.”

The ‘Minari’ ensemble cast.

The result is a film graced with music at once lush and raw, grandiose and vulnerable. Mosseri is keenly aware of these nuances, and always made sure to walk the tonal tightrope in the writing process. “There aren’t sad cues and hopeful cues,” he explains. “Every cue has both feelings. Each musical moment dips in and out of the hopefulness and joy of a family, and then the pain and frustration and dissonance that they hold.”

The way Mosseri’s music swells and flows often feels intangible, magical, even—which comes more from knowing what to avoid, rather than acting with too much forced intention. On his first film, Mosseri brought brass and strings to the streets of San Francisco, and with Miranda July, he worked old Hollywood glamor into the concrete blocks of Los Angeles. Here, we twirl through the tall grass as gentle acoustic guitars and elegant string sections sigh and sway, while the Yi family work through their growing pains.

“We didn’t want to hear Korean music when you see Korean characters, and we didn’t want twangy music when you see an American farm,” Mosseri explains. “We wanted to come at it from the side somehow, in some way that’s unexpected.” ‘Rain’, his collaboration with Minari star Han Ye-ri, which features on the official soundtrack, encapsulates this juxtaposition. It’s an epic lullaby of sorts; Han sings in Korean to a gentle guitar; a pleasing swell of synths climbs alongside her voice. The effect on the listener is as if liquid love is trickling from every vein. “I wanted this score to feel like it had a warm, beating heart.”

youtube

Two of your three feature films to date have been released by A24, and so we must ask: what are your favorite A24 film scores? Emile Mosseri: Three come to mind. First of all, Anna Meredith’s score for Eighth Grade. It’s so adventurous and unexpected and fresh and just brilliant. It’s so pure and out-there. It also does this impossible thing of being hip and exciting and deep, but also hilarious. The pool-party scene fucking kills me.

Then there’s Under the Skin by Mica Levi. I remember seeing that at the Nighthawk theater in Brooklyn and feeling like it was the best score I’d heard in as long as I could remember.

And then of course, Moonlight. That film got under my skin in a way I didn’t see coming. I saw it by myself in a theater, after hearing all the hype for months and months. When a movie has that much hype you can get a bit cynical and it can distract you, so I went in a bit guarded, but I left the film destroyed. For weeks and weeks it resonated with me in a way that was so profound, and a large part of that is due to Nick [Britell]’s music. And the film is just perfection.

Scarlett Johansson in ‘Under the Skin’ (2013), scored by Mica Levi.

You’ve been described as Nicholas Britell’s protégé more than once… It’s funny, I think that came from me being a fan of his and saying nice things about his music. I met him at Sundance two years ago when Last Black Man was premiering. I went with my wife and my brother and I was so excited, I’d been waiting for this moment for so long. We walked in and Nick and Barry [Jenkins] were walking in behind [us]. And there was also Boots Riley, Kamasi Washington… all these people I looked up to. I hadn’t considered that I would see this film in the room with them, and it was the first time I was hearing the final mix and just agonizing.

Nick was incredibly generous and said great things about the score and was super encouraging, and he became a friend and mentor. But I’ve never studied with him or worked with him. Although, if you’re a fan of somebody’s work, you’re a student of any of these composers that you admire. Anything you watch and listen to, you absorb.

What was the first film that made you want to be a composer? It was Edward Scissorhands. Danny Elfman’s score was the first one that made me realize that this was a job. I’m always attracted to big, romantic melodies, and over-the-top sweeping stuff—but done tastefully. In that score, he sets the high-water mark for me. It’s so unapologetically romantic.

And then there are other obvious ones like The Godfather. It’s maybe a dorky choice because it’s the most famous movie ever, but it really is the best. And that got me into Nino Rota, and from there I found [Federico] Fellini and all these movies through Nino, the composer. And then I got really into the score for La Dolce Vita and more movies that he’d written for, which are so beautiful.

The ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (1990) score was an early inspiration for Mosseri.

Which films, new to you, blew you away in 2020? Take Shelter by Jeff Nichols blew me away. It unfolded in a way that was intoxicating and really exciting, and it just really stuck with me.

What’s been your favorite needle drop on screen this year? Aside from Devonté Hynes’ score being stunning, there’s an amazing piece of music placed in an episode of Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are. They use a Paul McCartney song called ‘Let Em In’, and they dropped it in this incredibly tasteful but unexpected way, in a really dark, emotionally loaded scene. It worked in such a beautiful and graceful way. It’s because it’s the most cheery McCartney, it’s full-blown upbeat and poppy McCartney. And this is the darkest-of-the-dark human pain, and it lands in this way that is such a bold choice, such a powerful move.

What should people listen to after watching Minari? One record I’ve been listening to a lot recently is Jeff Tweedy’s Love is the King. It could be a good companion to Minari. I’m a huge fan of his and it’s a gorgeous record. It’s very stripped-down and emotionally raw, and it’s both hopeful and heartbreaking.

Which filmmakers would you love to work with next? I’m always afraid to answer this question because there are so many filmmakers I admire. There are filmmakers I grew up with loving their films—working with Miranda was that for me. Spike Jonze or Yorgos Lanthimos are directors in her world that I also love and would love to work with. But there’s so many others. Derek Cianfrance is amazing and he works with different composers. I love his choice of collaborators musically. I love that he used the late great Harold Budd to do his shows [including I Know This Much is True], and then Mike Patton, and Grizzly Bear… the music is always incredible in his projects, but he doesn’t have a go-to person. His films are so heartbreaking and powerful and really, really raw. He’s fearless.

I feel very lucky that I’ve worked on these three films which are all very much like somebody’s ripping their heart out and putting it on the screen. I feel like Derek Cianfrance does that in his films too, in this unapologetic, super-vulnerable way of just ripping his soul out and putting it out for everyone to see. It’s incredibly appealing to find those projects, because they’re really rare.