#and also when i was going through my closet for ideal cloths for the assignment i found the winkies

[britneyshakespeare]

*Catching my breath like I just ran 10 miles*

#and im not satisfied w the arm on the left but SO BE IT #this is definitely my best drawing yet #in charcoal no less... my not-so-dear friend charcoal #tales from diana #that's winky btw #ive definitely mentioned her before. my childhood dolls. the winkies. there were 3. #the hw assignment was a drapery study but i kinda didnt have the materials to set up a cloth against a plain wall anywhere in my house #i did this in the basement btw. it took like 5 hours. im covered in far more gross debris than just charcoal rn. #im cold. i had to move a lot of stuff. unscrew some bulbs. cover some windows. #found out today that a can of paint can support my body weight btw. i wouldnt have thought. #and also when i was going through my closet for ideal cloths for the assignment i found the winkies #and i was like... oh yes... YOU are a cloth #and youre not too big to set up in my crowded ass basement #and you know what? i couldve searched harder and moved more stuff if i truly WANTED to draw a boring ass cloth #i already did that in class #i wouldve rather drawn a cloth doll. who has meant the world to me for about as long as i can remember #my professor likes when we set up objects in our hw assignments that interest us #and even though the hw did specifically say a sheet or smth like that. u know what. that doll has some drapery going on. #there's nothing she's doing that a cloth can't. #my only regret is that i didn't draw the face stitching and the bow #i honestly thought i was at least gonna draw the bow #but when i drew the shadow of the doll against the board w the compressed charcoal. i was like #i don't have the spoons anymore to fix it if i make a mistake #which is LIKELY on those fine details. like. go-back-and-redo #an-entire-area likely. #i hope my professor likes it!!!!!!! and i also hope the hairspray doesnt resettle any of the charcoal too bad while it's drying #if this looks as good when it's dry as it did the minute i said 'im done w this'... i think i will put this in the student art show #:^)

[markleesthighs]

dangerous woman

pairing: idol!mark x richceo!y/n (fem)

genre: strangers to lovers!au, fluff, suggestive to smut

song: dangerous woman by SuperM (Mark’s pov) or Ariana Grande (y/n’s pov)

a/n: mark’s birthday special! Mentions of drinking, rich partying, some dom!y/n and sub!mark (suggestive and smut), also some mommy!kink (please be safe!!)

SuperM was in the US again, for another round of their concerts across the nation. You were a backer behind SuperM, loving their music and overall aesthetic. You’ve never met them since you deposited your money overseas but it would be a simple hello and thank you from them via a card and that would be it. You heard from someone that Mark’s birthday was coming up, and you wanted to give SuperM a proper place to celebrate his birthday. You decided to let SuperM stay and party at one of your mansions for the weekend. Luckily they weren’t performing the day of or day after Mark’s birthday, so it was a perfect opportunity.

You reached out to their managing staff and since you were one of the top backers for them, they humbly agreed. You arranged transportation, food, decorations, drinks, and everything the boys needed for their party celebration. You arrived at their hotel in style in your white Lamborghini, accompanied by your body guards who were driving other patrolling cars, ensuring your safety. One of them opened the door of the car for you and holding your hand. You were dressed in a black Armani pantsuit, black Louboutin heels, a black Louis Vuitton clutch, and Prada sunglasses. You were a showstopper, getting honks from cars in the streets to poor bellhop looking at you in fear. 

You entered the hotel to find the manager of the hotel to greet you. 

“Miss y/n.” The manager spoke as she bowed.

“Hello.”

“They are on the 45th floor in the penthouse suite.”

“Thank you.”

You and your bodyguards promptly went to the elevator up to the 45th floor and walked to their suite. You ringed the doorbell and knocked on the door twice. You heard a manger franticly curse in Korean before opening the door to greet you. You and your bodyguards bowed as you greeted him in Korean, asking him where SuperM was and if they were ready to depart. He apologized saying they were still packing but that you could still come inside. Their manager was yelling in Korean about how you had arrived and they had to hurry up. You walked inside and your bodyguards helped you remove your shoes as you walked into the living room area. 

You removed your sunglasses as you analyzed the room. It wasn’t super messy, just a few snacks and drinks all over the place. You picked up an empty Shin ramen cup, you smiled, these were always yummy to eat after a flight. You wondered if there was any Shin ramen laying around so you got up and found some packs in the kitchen. A member smelled the ramen and walked into the kitchen. 

“Hyung? Are you cooking ramen? Can I have-” 

He saw you and looked at you up and down. 

“Some. “

You turned to look at him, he looked so cute. His hair was still a mess, had his glasses on and a clean shaven face. 

“Wait...y-you’re...y/n! I-I’m so sorry for being informal! I-I’m M-mark from SuperM!” 

He bowed down all the way down on his knees apologizing dozens of times. You turned off the stove and walked over to him to lift his chin up. Mark smelled your Valentino Donna perfume and it was intoxicating to him. You smelled and looked amazing. Your eyes met Mark’s as he innocently gazed at you, you looked down at his lips and back up to his eyes. 

“I know who you are cutie.” You giggled. 

Mark got up after mumbling an “o-oh yeah, haha” and scratched the back of his neck. Mark kept staring at you, he had never seen anyone like you, you somehow looked like his ideal type, yet he’d never met you. Mark’s manager noticed him staring at you before he yelled at Mark to go back to his room and continue changing before he embarrasses himself in front of you. Mark apologized as he shyly left in his t shirt and pajama pants. You continued to make your ramen and ate some while you looked on your phone. You could hear the mumbling of the other members talk about you in Korean. 

“Hyung, she’s really pretty.”

“I know, I wonder how old she is.”

“You never ask a woman how old she is!”

“I would kill to date a woman like her.”

“She probably had a boyfriend or even a husband!”

You sat in the living room as each member walked out one by one greeting you and getting to know you. Mark was the last one to arrive and sheepishly apologized before joining his members in the living room. You noticed how almost all the members wore designer clothing (which you complemented them on) except Mark. He wore a simple t-shirt, jeans, baseball hat, and a Jansport backpack. You hadn’t seen one of those backpacks since elementary school. He looked simplistic yet cute, you liked it. 

“So, who’s the lucky birthday boy?” 

All the members turned and gestured to Mark pinching his cheeks and making goo goo noises towards Mark because he was the youngest of the group.

“Oh, so how old are you turning?”

“2-22 in America but 2-23 in Korean age.”

“Oh! I just turned 21 a couple months ago! How interesting. So I guess you’re my Oppa~”

Mark’s face instantly blushed looking away from you while everyone else laughed. You escorted and assigned the guys their cars and which bodyguard they’d be accompanied by. However, everyone was confused that Mark didn’t get assigned a car, which led to you announcing that Mark would be driving with you since he was the birthday boy. Everyone teased Mark with an “Ooh” or an “Ahh” and Kai blurted out in Korean “Don’t have too much fun!” as him, Ten, and Lucas left in their car. A bodyguard took Mark’s luggage and put it in one of the other cars while he gestured Mark to follow you. A bodyguard opened the car doors for you on the driver’s side and Mark on the passenger side. Mark stayed silent when you turned on the car as you prepared to leave. 

“Why so quiet birthday boy? Never been in a Lambo before?”

“Y-yeah, s-sorry that I’m being really awkward.”

“It’s alright, you ready to go?”

“Yeah!”

You and the other cars promptly left the hotel, you could see Mark’s shocked face hearing the engine and watching everyone in the streets look at you and Mark in the car. Mark looked shy and reserved keeping his hands in his lap and trying to not stare at you too much. At a stoplight you caught Mark staring at you so you turned to scare him a bit. 

“You like what you see baby?”

Mark’s ears turned red and he was panicking in the passenger seat. Mark enjoyed everything about you, your smell, look, and confidence. But you were a backer, a business partner, he shouldn’t be flirting with you. But you were so intoxicating and he wanted a little taste. Mark leaned closer to you almost brushing against your lips. 

“Maybe I do.”

Mark looked at you up and down which turned you on a bit. Mark bit his lip as you were about to kiss him, he turned away. 

“The light is green.”

“Fuck you.”

You pulled away and stepped on the gas making Mark fall back into his seat. He could see the annoyed look in your face. He liked it, it made you look cute. You sped your way to your mansion out of frustration and anger, no man has ever left you hanging like that. You stepped out of the car and slammed the door. Your bodyguards, Mark, and the other members had no time to catch up to you or ask you what was wrong. Mark now felt bad, he didn’t want to play with your heart, especially when he has only known you for three hours. Mark took his luggage as he shyly went inside with the other members. 

They were stunned by the mansion, it was shiny like a new toy to all the members. They began to hoot and holler running all over the place, looking at your giant pool, arcade room, and private spa and sauna. While they were running around wondering where they will choose to sleep, Mark wanted to find you. He kindly asked one of the body guards if they knew where your room was and they guided him into your room. 

Mark knocked on your door but there was no response so he slowly opened the door to find you no where in sight. He was confused yet shocked by the volume and luxury of your room. It was huge and simplistic yet it was also refined. Everything was perfectly clean he could smell your perfume all over your room mixed with the smell of your clean sheets. He heard some rummaging from another part of your room which was your closet. There was a crack in the door so Mark slowly approached to take a little peep to see how you were doing. 

He saw you looking around your giant Barbie-sized closet in your cute fuzzy bathrobe and bunny slippers. He noticed you pulling out a few party dresses before you settled on wearing a Versace dress with a pair of matching sandals to match. Mark watched you remove your robe to reveal your matching black lace undergarments and your almost naked body. Mark needed to look away but he couldn’t watching your hips, dips, curves and waist was making his mouth water. He watched as you put on your dress but struggled to zip it up all the way. 

Mark was about to knock on the door and pretend he wasn’t looking before you caught his adorable puppy eyes looking at you through the reflection in your full length three paneled mirror. He looked like a puppy waiting patiently for his owner to come out, you couldn’t help but pout. 

“You can come out Mark.”

Mark was in so much shock that he accidentally bumped into your door falling over onto the cold marble floor. He got up and brushed off himself and kept apologizing for creeping up on you. As you approached him his eyes kept looking down in shame. 

“I-I am s-so sorry! I didn’t mean to look but-”

“But what?” You walked closer to him taking your finger and lifting his chin up. 

“Y-you l-looked really nice.”

“Nice? Just nice?”

“Y-yeah..”

“You’re so cute. You should go get changed and go downstairs before your friends think you’ve gone missing.” You chuckled and tapped his nose. 

After that Mark promptly left your room to go downstairs to join his members in picking their rooms. Taeyong suggested that they check out the upstairs for other rooms, Mark found himself a room that was right next to yours. It was a pretty sizable room, simple decor with a full sized bathroom and walk in closet. Mark got dressed into an all black suit with a black undershirt. Mark styled his hair with a little gel. All the other SuperM members were yelling at Mark to come down to celebrate, ordering limitless amounts of chicken, beer, soju, and watermelon, Mark’s favorite meal. 

Mark walked out of his room to coincidentally see you also walk out of your room. You looked breathtaking, your hair, makeup, everything, everything was perfect. Mark gestured you to go downstairs first and watch you cascade down gracefully. As Mark walked down he could hear all his member’s screaming and clapping. They also invited some friends of Mark’s that were in the area to come help and celebrate. 

Music was blasting, drinks, food, and games were being tossed around everywhere. It was a fun night. You allowed the guys to have their fun, dance around drunk while singing karaoke or playing another round of street fighter. You liked this. You loved that SuperM gave you a taste of what it’s like to be a normal adult in their 20s, living and enjoying their life to the fullest. 

It made you ponder, you never wanted them to leave. They were a breath of fresh air, it gave you an excuse to take three vacation days from your busy schedule. It made you regret throwing yourself into a billion dollar business at 18. You just wanted to have fun, not sit and do paper work all day. But at the end of the day you felt it was worth it, because you would allow people and groups such as SuperM to thrive and bring some sort of happiness to others. 

As you were reflecting you pulled yourself outside onto the pool deck sitting in a lounge chair looking up at the clear sky, listening to your infinity pool brush water off the clear edge. Mark noticed you were alone so he took this opportunity to get to know you, before he considers pulling some real moves. 

“Hey, y/n? You alright?”

“Y-yeah! How’s the party?”

“It’s AMAZING, I can’t thank you enough for giving me a fun-filled and memorable birthday!”

“Of course.”

“Why are you outside, alone?”

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“What I’m going to do when you guys are gone.”

“Gone?” “Yeah I’d have to fly back to Milan soon for fashion week, I have a fittings, approvals, and adjustments of garments to do.”

“Oh.” Mark looked slightly sad. 

“I just wish you could have stayed longer with me.”

You glanced up at him. 

“Us! I mean- I mean us! SuperM! haha...”

Mark scratched the back of his neck again out of nervousness. You and Mark continued to talk about various things bonding over Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood and Mark getting jealous that you met Justin Bieber once. You noticed the party was dying down so you decided to ask Mark if he wanted to talk to you somewhere more private. He agreed as you secretly dragged him up into your room, hoping his members didn’t see you. 

Mark’s ears felt hot, he felt himself getting excited. He stood near your bed as you closed and locked your door. You pushed Mark down on your bed crawling on top of him. Mark’s eyes were wide in shock and excitement he was waiting in anticipation before you got off of him. Mark frowned sitting up about to stand but before he could protest you started to punish him. 

“Sit.” Mark obediently sat. 

“Good boy” You spoke as you pet his hair.

“Now, because of that little stunt of a tease you did earlier in the car, no touching unless I say got it?” You seductively whispered into his ear.

Mark nodded.

“Good.”

You slowly zipped down your dress as you slowly removed one sleeve from the other. You slid your dress down with your arms down to your ankles giving Mark a clear view of your ass as you bent down. You kicked the dress to the side as you walked to sit on Mark’s lap. You could already feel him getting hard, 

“Aww, is my baby excited?”

“Y-yes.” Mark was about to wrap his arms around you but you stopped them. 

“Nuh-uh, no touching baby.”

Mark pouted.

“Good boys get rewards, are you a good boy?”

“Y-y-yes..”

“Yes who?”

“Yes...miss, y/n.”

You slapped Mark’s cheek. 

“That’s mommy to you. Again.”

“Y-yes, m-mommy.”

“Good, you’re learning. You should be rewarded.”

You shove Mark down onto his back kissing him, tasting soju and watermelon off his lips. Mark was following your rhythm, kissing you back full of passion and licking your tongue every now and then. You started to move down his neck, kissing and sucking on a soft spot. Quiet hissed and moans left Mark’s mouth as you slowly kept kissing down towards his shirt. You ripped open his shirt breaking off a few buttons. You removed his shirt and suit jacket and threw it across the room. 

“My baby is a little toned now isn’t he?”

Mark has a defined six pack which only turned you on more. You kissed down his chest while trailing your fingers down tracing his abs. You pulled down his suit pants tossing them to the side, leaving Mark in his black boxers. You could see his member outlined hardened inside. You palmed his member and Mark’s face shot up to look at you and met your eyes and let out a soft moan from his lips. You pulled down his boxers and saw his member hard, leaking with precum. 

“Baby I didn’t expect you do be so big. Mommy is so proud of you.”

“P-please...”

“Please who?”

“P-please m-mommy touch me.”

“As you wish baby.”

You played with is member pulling it up to watch it fall back and smack against his stomach. You reached into your side drawer and pulled out some lube, pouring some on top of his member before rubbing your hands against it. You could hear Mark cursing with his moans. You went faster and slower, picking up the pace to watch Mark go out of control with higher pitched moans. When Mark was about to climax you pulled your hand away and Mark whined. 

“This is what you get for teasing me in the car.”

“I-I’m sor-rry mommy! Just please!”

“Please what?”

“P-p-please let me cum!”

“Who are you talking to?”

“P-please let me cum mommy!”

As Mark spoke you picked up the pace immediately eventually sucking onto the tip of his member for added stimulation, it didn’t take long for Mark to climax into your mouth, which was a mouthful. You swallowed it and licked the rest off of his member. 

“Baby, you taste amazing.”

Mark was breathless, sweating, and seeing stars. He felt like he just did the hardest workout of his life. You climbed back on top of Mark to kiss him. 

“But...m-mommy?”

“Yes baby?”

“What about you? Shouldn’t you feel good too?”

“But it’s your birthday baby.”

“And I want to make you feel good, please. Let me make you feel good mommy~” 

The way Mark said mommy turned you on so much you wanted to go for a second round. He really knew how to rile you up. Plus, he looked adorable begging, so you gave him a free pass. 

“Alright, since it’s your birthday, you can make mommy feel good, show mommy what you’re made of baby. You are granted permission to touch me however you like baby.”

Mark immediately flipped you over and had you against your headboard with your pillows. He started to kissed you passionately while rubbing you all over your body. He would constantly ask if he was doing good and you would agree and tell him to keep going. Mark tried to remove your bra smoothly but was having some trouble. You kissed him and reassured him it was alright and removed the bra yourself. Mark kissed down your body and pulled down your underwear and he slowly pulled away your legs before licking against your wet cunt. 

“Mommy, you’re so wet...”

“All for you baby, keep going...”

Mark was surprisingly doing well making you feel really good, you were muffling your moans into your pillows before Mark finds your sweet spot which makes you jolt up to push his head down further with his hair. You were a moaning mess, Mark licked and sucked hard down on all the right places causing you to climax, almost crushing Mark’s face between your thighs. Mark smirked before kissing you, now tasting your sweet cunt in his mouth. 

“Can I put it in mommy?”

“Y-yes, please, put it in!”

Mark slowly entered you as you moaned out loud, Mark grabbed your face to look at him, he wanted to see your face. He slowly thrusted into you which felt painful at first but began to feel immense pleasure. Mark was also moaning harmoniously with you, kissing your forehead every couple of thrusts. 

“I-I’m close!”

“Me too!”

“Fuck!”

You both kissed each other as you both climaxed. Mark removed himself from you as he cuddled you into bed under your plush sheets.

“Happy birthday baby.”

#NCT #nct smut #nct angst #nct mark #nct mark scenario #nct mark smut #nct imagine #nct imagines #nct mark lee #nct fluff #nct!mark #nct!rich #nct!idol #nct x reader #nct mark imagines #nct mark imagine #nct mark birthday #nct scenario #nct oneshot #nct smut scenarios #nct smut imagines #nct u #nct dream #nct x you #nct x y/n #nct mark scenarios #SUPERM #superm imagines #superm mark #nct mark fluff

[xo-cuteplosion-xo]

Shameless self promotion ahead- why? Because i have nothing else but soukoku brain-rot rn (yes, I'm working on the stack of request for my personality HC thing- but some of ya'll gave so little information it be hard T_T)

-Bsd college Au- (It's soukoku)

Dazai’s confident, independent, smart, but a total jerk and playboy

.Chuuya's confident, independent, slightly idiotic, but a total pushover.

Dazai’s unorganized, calm, and enjoys making his roommate's life hell.

Chuuya’s organized, irritable, and hates his roommate with his entire soul.

Sadly, Dazai finds his roommate appealing to the eye, in other words hot, but he’s still… a closeted bisexual.

Sadly, Chuuya finds his roommate hot, but his roommate insists they’re straight.

Nakahara Chuuya and Dazai Osamu are roommates.

Chapter 1: Roommates With every rustle of the leaves, a brisk wind passed over, chilling the humidity to be bearable for a moment. Yokohama tended to have warm summers, even towards the end there were days when the humidity stung. It could be cold enough for a hoodie in the early morning, but far too humid for one in the later afternoon, right before it cooled down again. The signs that lead into the sweet release of the cool fall season.

“You know, I said I was helping, not doing most of the work here.” Oda, a male with slight stubble and brown, slightly red hair grumbled. His eyes looked back to another male, arms wrapped in bandages, and eyes drained of any emotion. The smallest cardboard box within his hands as he snickered.

The boy was Dazai Osamu, an 18-year-old who’d pushed through hell to make it here. Despite not wanting to go to college and instead be a basement dump until he died, he stuck his tongue out.

Within that exact second, Dazai's eyes filled with life, something that he could do on command, a mask of sorts. “But Odasaku, I can’t carry all the heavy boxes!” the childish whine Dazai produced towards his cousin scraped within the poor adult's ears.

“If you ate anything besides ramen and take-out, you might be more than skin and bones,” Oda grumbled. Setting the final box down in the dorm room. So far there hadn’t been a sign of whoever Dazai’s roommate was to be. Oda prayed for the unfortunate soul who had to deal with the brunette.

“I don’t only eat ramen! I ate vegetables just yesterday!” Dazai crossed his arms, laying his finger over his bandages.

“The ‘vegetables’- Oda moved his hands to form air quotes around vegetables - in those 10-minute self serve ramen packets don’t actually count.'' Frowning Dazai pouted, acting like a child once again. It was something Oda had never minded considering his cousin had never had a real childhood.

Before he could make another whiny remark, the door to the dorm opened.

~

Stepping from a rather expensive-looking car, a ginger-haired male stepped outside into the warmth of the closing summer. His hair, longer on one side than the other, rested neatly over his shoulder. His feminine-like frame caused him to stand out a bit more than he’d like. Though, it was natural for a model to stand out in the crowd. Not that he modeled too often, it had been a pastime after moving in his third year to Yokohama. He’d done it with his older sister a handful of times before then, but she’d left for London just before they moved.

Grabbing one of the cases, he glanced at his father, who was getting out of the car. “Dad, I can handle this myself, you really don’t have to help me.” The petite male mumbled slightly embarrassed. Though, his words were the truth considering his strength was out of the ordinary for his size.

“Nonsense Chuuya, let you old man at least have this.” The boy's father, a male who kept his locks of raven hair down to his waist in length, shivered as he spoke.

Chuuya sighed, handing his father a few smaller boxes as he grabbed several of the larger boxes. “How’s Ane-San been?” Chuuya hadn't been able to call her with how busy he’d been the last month, he suspected his father, with how protective he was, had to have called at least once.

“Ah, Koyo has been doing alright. Both she and Yosano (Koyo's fiance) plan on coming down for Christmas.” Rimbaud smiled lightly as he spoke. Chuuya’s lips also turned into a smile hearing that he’d finally met his older sister's fiance. The two of them had been engaged since she’d graduated from college two years ago, and had been together for 5 years before that. “So when will you be attempting dating again? I do miss that boy… it was Shirace right?”

As his father mentioned the boy's name, Chuuya's stomach tightened and his heart picked up before he calmed himself. The two of them were cities apart, he’d never see that boy again. Shaking off the thoughts that had flashed within his mind, he smiled. “It wasn’t meant to be dad. Regarding another boyfriend, I don’t know. I know Ane-San dated a lot, I'm just not sure I want to get back into dating yet.” Chuuya shrugged as they came up to his assigned dorm. Grabbing the handle, he twisted it and opened it, coming face to face with his roommate looking like he was about to start a childish bicker with whoever that was.

“Hey…” Chuuya’s attempt at speaking was completely suffocated when Dazai turned to look at his roommate. God, he was more than just good-looking. Sure Dazai was on the frail and thin-looking side, but he still looked perfect. The shape of his jaw, to the depth of the brunette's coffee-colored eyes, all added to his looks. That was also looking past the males' ideal height. He was positive, the brunette noticed he was being checked out.

“He’s so… so short.” Dazai snickered as he looked Chuuya up and down. His eyes glanced all around looking for little things to poke fun at. At least, that’s what he was saying he was doing. There was no way he was checking Chuuya out. Sure, he did resemble a girl, at least a little bit. His eyes were a replica of the clear ocean. The way his hair curled around his face, the small freckles that stood against his pale complexion… were all attractive.

At least, it had been until the male’s brow twitched and his hands balled into fists. “I’m still growing!” he hissed almost like an angry child. Rimbaud sighed, tapping his son's shoulder.

Oda looked to him apologetically before turning to Dazai. “That’s the first thing you can say? Not, hey or hello?” Dazai shrugged, walking to his room with a yawn.

“Eh, I’m tired, I wasn't thinking of being polite. Plus, when am I ever polite?” Dazai smirked, leaning his head back as he shoved his hands into his back pockets. Sadly, his statement was nothing less than honest. He was never polite. If he wanted something, he was upfront about it. How else would he have such a long list of girls' hearts he’d shattered?

Chuuya rolled his eyes before moving the rest of his boxes into the dorm. ~

Chuuya took an hour to get everything from the boxes and his suitcase into his closet and drawers. His secret box, which he’d made sure to carry in, was still packed tightly, but that was because he was figuring what to do with it. Luckily, his closet had the perfect space for bottles. Unlucky to him that space was out of his reach. Hissing to himself, he looked around before grabbing the footrest to one of the chairs. When he finished organizing and making sure every drawer was labeled with what should be put inside, he glanced around.

His roommate had yet to unpack anything from his boxes. Not that there seemed to be many boxes to begin with. In fact, they were all labeled, one box of clothes, another labeled self-car, and a third labeled bandages. That had been something he noticed about his roommate. Rolling his eyes, Chuuya moved to knock on his roommate's door. The response he got was grumbled and inaudible. “Are you going to unpack?” there still came no response, so he figured his roommate was simply sleeping after a long trip or something. Shrugging it off, Chuuya walked into his room, directly next to dazai’s with a very thin wall separating them. Pulling out a sketchbook and some pencils, he put on some music and began sketching some art designs.

#plz send me some love #i'm working so hard on this #yes it's unfinished but i have planned it out beginning to end in a jurnal #soukoku #ao3 writer #ao3 fic #soukoku fic #bsd #bungo stray dogs #chuuya x dazai #dazai x chuuya #chuuya #dazai #enimes to lovers #soukoku college au #college au #bsd college au #bsd soukoku #double black #i've writen 8329 words for this so far #i'm depserate for some feedback rn #5 chapters done so far

[spooky-ghost-boi]

Damn shawty, you definitely thicc.

A ReddNook weight gain fic.

Words: 2306

Description: Tom gets injured and has to sit on his ass for a couple months and work from home and Redd is making sure Tom doesn’t “Starve”

Warnings: people with climacophobia/traumatophobia this is definitely not your jam, mentions of a blowjob (I’m too unsure to actually write it out, I’m sorry), weight gain (duh), Tom Nook vs Ladder, prOfAniTieS, Redd AND Isabelle enjoy groping Tom’s fat don’t @ me on that.

A/N: depending on how well this does, I might write a part two. Also I had help brainstorming!

Ps: Imagine how good my grades would be if I wrote my assignments this quick and handed them in before the deadline.

_

Tom had rushed out of the door, realizing he was about to be too late if he didn’t hurry up to the Resident Services. His large breakfast still sat rather heavy in his stomach which made his stomach hurt slightly as he speed walked but he had a lot to get done today.

He was a little surprised to see that Isabelle hadn’t arrived yet, in the meantime he walked to the backroom so he could brew himself some coffee. He heard a dripping noise, thanks to his enhanced hearing. Looking up he noticed a hole in one of the pipes and sighed to himself.

Tom still felt rather tired and his movements were rather slow and sluggish as he made his way to the basement to get a ladder. He put the ladder against the wall and climbed it up, surprised by how.. Exhausting it seemed now.

Meanwhile Isabelle came in and smiled softly to herself when she saw Tom’s stuff already on his desk.

Crash!

A slight groan in both pain and annoyance.

Her smile faded immediately and she rushed into the backroom, she noticed the chunky Tanuki lying on the floor under a leaking pipe and a broken ladder.

“Tom! Are you alright?!” Isabelle asked in shock.

“I’m doing splendid! It’s not like my leg is twisted at an unnatural angle, hm?.. Couldn’t be me! Yes, yes.” Tom said in slight annoyance.

_._._.

After a couple nights in the hospital Tom was back home, his leg was broken.. Which obviously wasn’t ideal. He had to work from home and either Redd, Timmy or Tommy had to deliver his paperwork to Isabelle every evening.

He’d been spending roughly a week at home and it had been rather peaceful to his surprise, Redd was distracting him sometimes for.. Other things or he was making Tom food. Good food, a lot of food and of course Tom lacked self-restraint so he often just ended up accidentally stuffing himself when he was working. Sometimes to the point he had to unbutton his progressively tighter pants.

“Hey, Nookie~ I got you your favorite coffee and doughnuts, they’re still warm.” Redd said to his quite chunky boyfriend.

“I told you to not call me that! But, thank you, hm.” He said, as he filed papers. Eyeing the mess on the desk.

“Enjoy your doughnuts, I’ll be in the kitchen making lunch for you.” Redd said, smirking to himself before leaving the room. His plan was working.

After a couple of minutes of diligently working, Tom grabbed a donut and ate it. He moaned as the incredible flavor hit him. He had a huge sweet tooth, especially when it came to pastries.

Therefore he devoured those 6 doughnuts within 30 minutes, feeling quite stuffed. His pants were uncomfortable and he just unbuttoned them. The coffee gave him a boost of energy which is something he desperately needed as the huge snack he just had seemed to make him tired. He groaned and rubbed his stomach.

He took a breather. Then returned to filing papers and making the occasional call.

He wasn’t even hungry before Redd barged in with a nice and full plate of pasta and tomato sauce.. With loads of cheese on it.

“Redd.. I’m actually still quite stuffed.” Tom said as he shifted his weight in his chair, it creaked slightly and he didn’t actually pay attention to it.

“Awe, come on Tom. You wouldn’t want to eat cold pasta now, do you? You don’t have to eat all of it, just eat as much as you can! ” Redd told him.

“Fine! Just put it on the table.. I’ll eat it. Thank you, yes, yes.” Tom said and continued with his work. He somehow felt hungry again.. Or did he just feel the need to eat? Or was it boredom.

Redd smiled at the Tanuki, “I’ll pick up Timmy and Tommy later, but I’ll tell you before I leave. “ Redd said.

“That’s splendid..” Tom said as he grabbed the plate of pasta and began to eat. He was eating out of stress and boredom more than anything else. He failed to notice how much his belly was pushing out, making the fact evident he unbuttoned his pants.

“You need some bigger pants, Nookie~?” Redd said in a slightly teasing tone.

“No.. I’m just bloated. I guess it’s the lack of movement, hm?” Tom said, he ACTUALLY was convinced that was the reason and Redd found it cute.

“I see.. You don’t have that much to do right now, do you?” Redd asked and winked slightly at his boyfriend.

“That depends on what you mean.. Hm.?” Tom asked as he put a few papers aside. He totally understood what Redd meant but he wanted him to be more direct. For his entertainment of course.

“I could suck your dick.” Redd said, not really embarrassed because he’s.. Well, Redd.

“Why don’t you just say so?” Tom asked as he somehow managed to pull down his pants.

_._._

After giving Tom a decent blowjob, Redd had gotten him another snack.

“Have this while I’m gone, so you don’t waste away.” Redd chuckled as he said that to Tom, which just earned him a scoff.

“-And don’t miss me too much.” Redd promptly added before walking away.

“Trust me, I most definitely won’t!” Tom yelled after him.

Tom finished off all calls and paperwork he had to do for the day and leaned back in his chair, rather satisfied with himself as he ate the big slice of cheesecake and coffee Redd had gotten him.

He sighed softly and put a paw on his already pretty chubby belly, he felt bloated and honestly a little heavier than he was used to but he didn’t mind. It was probably the lack of movement as he didn’t walk to work or play with the boys. He had to rely on Redd to help him around the house, which seemed awkward since Redd was such a twink and he himself was probably almost twice as heavy as the Kitsune.

He actually hated being dependent on Redd, however he couldn’t do much.

After a little while Redd came back with the boys who rushed to the kitchen to eat dinner and Redd walked to Tom’s office.

“Hiya, Nookie! You wanna eat dinner on the kitchen? Need help to get there?” Redd asked.

“I would..” Tom said as he leaned onto the table for some support to get up, then leaned onto Redd. They both managed to make it to the kitchen and Tom plopped onto a chair opposing Timmy.

“How was work for you two?” Tom asked softly. Tom usually disliked showing vulnerability to other people, even Redd at times but that was slightly different with the boys, he wanted to be the best father figure for them, despite them being his employees. Afterall they were still kids and needed guidance in their life.

“Good! We’ve had lots of customers.. Customers.” They both said in unison.

“I’m glad.” Tom said as he ate his dinner, trying his best to ignore the Kitsune.

“You two want to watch a movie later?” Tom asked his boys. He felt guilty for being unable to play with them so he hoped watching a movie would make both of them and himself happier.

“Sure!” They replied.

_

After a couple of months he finally could walk again and go back to work, he wasn’t supposed to lift up heavy things still.

He took a shower the day prior and was getting ready for work, feeling good about himself again.

Redd watched his chonky boyfriend put on his khaki shorts, he noticed Tom struggle getting them over his hips. Oh shit, there was no way Tom was gonna get them buttoned.

“.. Redd? They don’t fit.” Tom said, deciding that maybe He’d have more luck with his work shirt.

He managed to get the two upper buttons buttoned but not the rest.

He looked a little panicked at Redd, who didn’t know what to do either. “.. What if you wore a sweater? It’s not that warm yet-“ Redd suggested.

“I guess that could work..” Tom said as he looked through his closet to get a sweater with the Nook Inc logo on it.

Redd despised the logo at this point, really.

The sweater fit, but it was really tight and giving Tom a muffin top along with the pants he was wearing. He didn’t have much time to worry about that right now as he had to head to work. Pretty ironic that this happened to the man making people wear their work uniforms because “clothes are a big part of business.”

In the mean time Redd headed to the Sable Sisters to make sure to get Tom some bigger clothes.

Tom was a little out of breath when he walked to the Residential Services, he opened the door and just sighed. He pulled down his sweater and walked into the backroom where Isabelle was waiting for him.

“Good morning, Tom!” She said as she handed him his coffee.

“Good morning and thanks for the coffee! Yes, yes.” Tom said, his stomach growled again and it also hurt.

“Seems like somebody is hungry! I made you some “welcome back ”cookies!” Isabelle said as she handed him a plate.

“That’s splendid, thank you.” Tom replied, before blushing a little. “Do you know whether we still have.. Err, bigger sized work uniforms?” Tom asked.

“For what?” Isabelle asked, pretending to be oblivious. She of course noticed how much bigger the Tanuki looked, he was so chunky and it surprised her.

“I put on a few and this.. Isn’t exactly the most comfortable outfit.” Tom said as he tried to pull his sweater down again.

“See for yourself! I’m pretty sure there is something at least.” Isabelle said and smiled at Tom.

Tom sighed as he went to the work uniform shelf and looked through various shirts, to his luck he found the exact same shirt he owned just a couple sizes bigger. He immediately slipped it on along with a pair of khaki shorts he had found.

To his surprise the shirt was a little loose on him.

Isabelle was already at the desk, working.

He walked to his own desk and plopped on the chair, which creaked under all the new weight. While doing his usual work he ate the cookies Isabelle had made for him and downed several cups of coffee. Occasionally He’d get snacks from the vending machine but he was still so oddly hungry.

He felt a little exhausted at the end of the day and especially after his walk home. Getting pampered by like everyone really affected his already in first place wide waistline, but now he was getting lazier too.

“Good evening, Nookie!” Redd said as Tom came home, he obviously noticed the change in attire and how bloated Tom looked. Despite being so bloated, Tom’s stomach growled.

“You sure you want dinner? You look like you just feasted. My, my, Nookie~” Redd teased, he just really wanted to unbutton Tom’s shirt and feel how much Tom let himself go.

“Busy and stressing day at work to be honest.. Isabelle made a lot of cookies for me as welcome back gift or something. I’m actually quite hungry though.” Tom said as he patted his belly.

“I’m not surprised.” Redd said as he practically shoved Tom into the kitchen. “It’s still a bit until dinner but I made you some cake.” He told him.

Tom lazily sat on a chair, “thanks, hmm.” He said as he ate a slice and then another.

“Do you want some coffee?” Redd asked.

“Sure.” Tom said and leaned back into his chair.

Redd put the coffee onto the table and smiled at his boyfriend. “There you go, Nookie~” He said.

Tom grumbled but drank his coffee.

What he didn’t know was that Redd had put some melted butter along with the milk and sugar in there, so he’d have a bigger boyfriend much faster.

Eventually the kids arrived and they all ate dinner together. After that they played with Tom and Redd, it made Tom happy that he could be there for the kids again.

Tom had brought them to bed at around 21 pm and then made his way to Redd’s and his bedroom. Tom’s stomach growled and he sighed softly as he sat on the bed, which creaked slightly under his weight.

“I got you doughnuts~” Redd mused, as he handed Tom the box.

“Thank you, yes.. Ye-“ Tom yawned and began eating a couple of doughnuts.

“Can’t stop eating lately, am I right, Nookie?” Redd teased as he unbuttoned Tom’s shorts and shirt and began rubbing his belly.

“I told you to stop calling me that since months now.. “ Tom complained and he would’ve pushed Redd away if he weren’t so godforsaken tired.

“Too tired to properly move?” Redd teased.

“Just.. Shut up for once, hm.” Tom huffed, as he closed the empty doughnut box. He then also drifted off to sleep, with Redd rubbing his belly gently.

After a couple months the Tanuki had to size up. . Again. It seemed that both Isabelle and Redd loved to pamper him.

His gut was well hanging over his waistband and he was way lazier and more easily exhausted.

Isabelle was closing off the shop and then walked over to Tom, playing with his hefty and bloated belly. Earning several moans in pleasure from him, he was so stuffed that it felt good to have somebody with his belly.

“It’s softer than I expected!” Isabelle said, smiling at the Tanuki.

“Yeah.. Everyone says that, hm.” He just replied, making no effort to fight her as it felt good.

Isabelle chuckled and patted the Tanuki’s soft tummy.

#acnh #animal crosing new horizons #animal crossing: new horizons #reddnook #tom nook x redd #tom nook x Crazy redd #t.om nook #chubby! Tom Nook #fat tom nook #fat! Tom Nook #weight gain fic #weight gain fanfiction #chonky

[cozycryptidcorner]

The Mad Prince, Chapter Eight

“There will be some changes to your schedule. And you will be assigned a food taster, in case of poison. A full security detail will have to accompany you should you need to visit a public level, for whatever reason.”

You feel like barfing again as Elias recites a rather long, very detailed list about how your seriously your safety is going to be taken. Still, though, you sit on the provided chair, arms on the prince’s desk, as the assistant continues. Everything seems... too dark, suddenly, a dull, throbbing pain beginning to pinch on the inside of your skull. You know that breathing a word of complaint might put you on that psychopath’s medical table again, so you bear it, silently, looking over the provided datapad with feigned interest.

“Is this to your satisfaction, your highness?”

You realize that Elias is speaking to you, not the prince, so you swallow and offer up a nod. “Yeah, it looks good to me.”

He then turns to the prince, offering the same treatment. “Does this satisfy you, your grace?”

“I will look over it in more detail later,” the prince says calmly, “and you will reevaluate some of the steps.”

“Of course, sire.” Elias, at least, looks mildly relieved that he’s not about to end up on the platter in the dining area, “I will inform the head of security.”

“You are dismissed.” The prince looks back at you as his assistant leaves, arms crossed.

You don’t really know where to go from there, so you decide to take it a couple of steps at a time. All your things are being scanned for any remedial poisons and toxins, so the guns you brought are about to be found. Fun stuff. Oh, and some other… more scandalous things, you know, the stuff that you’ve been using in the absence of a partner. That’s going to be super fun to explain. You’re not quite sure which one is going to be more embarrassing to deal with, the laser technology or the vibrators. It’s a close call. And this is a new sensation, too, because you’ve never been super shy about either of those. In the very small amount of instances where either someone went through your stuff, or you had to send your bag through a security scan, you shrugged off the phallic shapes and dared someone to say something about it.

“Cool,” you say, mostly to yourself, “cool, cool, cool, cool.”

“I understand that this isn’t ideal,” the prince says, “and for that, I apologize.”

“Not your fault,” you say, trying to be understanding but allowing the full implications of this situation set in, “but thanks.”

“Is there anything I can have fetched for you?” The prince squeezes his hands together, his knuckles going a shade paler from his grip. “Books? Projects?”

“I want to take a nap.” The headache is spreading now, and all you would like to do is lay down and forget about existing for a little while.

“Of course, is there anything you’d like to sleep in, or are you fine now?”

“Blankets would be nice,” You say, already partly onto the bed. There aren’t any for you to wrap yourself up in, and you’d like to make yourself into a burrito to sleep.

True to his word, the prince orders some blankets up, and you have your pick of all the different materials the royal laundry has to offer. Large, thin, thick, fluffy, light, heavy. You grab the one that will provide the most comfort and roll yourself up, laying your head down on a pillow and closing your eyes. The sleep, at least, is like a sweet relief against the day’s worries, like a blissful blackout. When you wake, everything pitch dark, you have to blink to realize your eyes aren’t still closed. You also don’t sense an enormous, foreboding weight on the other side of the mattress, either, so you’re alone.

Hesitantly, you step out of the bed, feeling the ground for obstacles, and try to find your way out. Unfortunately, your shin crashes into something rather hard, so a string of curse words are out of your mouth before you can even stop the urge. When you take a second to breathe, you hear the skittering of pointed legs against the stone floor, and the lights turn on to a dim setting, the prince peeking his head through the door.

“You’re up,” he notices.

“What time is it? Already night?” You’re nowhere near the door and had been aiming for it in a slightly adjacent trajectory. Even if you hadn’t run into some sort of decorative statue, you would have then planted face-first into the wall only a moment later.

“It’s morning,” the prince says, “you slept through the rest of the day and through the night.”

“Incredible.” You say, somehow feeling thoroughly exhausted.

“I could turn the lights back off and let you go back to sleep? Oh, and there’s a lantern sensor on the table on your side of the bed, just touch the pad if you need to see.”

“I’m good, I probably need to face the day anyway.” You yawn, scratching your arm.

“Well,” his expression turns a tad hesitant, “your things are here, fully inspected by my security staff.”

That wakes you up as efficiently as getting a bucket of ice water dumped over your head. “Cool, that’s great. I’ll put on some clothes that actually fit me, then.”

“There’s also the matter of…” his voice trails off before he tries starting the sentence again. “Some of your things are considered contraband here.”

“I know.” Emit an aura of confidence. “But you know how I like having my safety in my own hands, so the guns stay.”

“That is acceptable, though you are aware that the outer shell of a drider is tough enough to take two or even three shots from your strongest rifle and still be able to fight?”

“Yeah?” You aren’t stupid. “The guns were there before you offered to teach me the fancy knife work.”

“I see.” He hesitates again, and you can see precisely what he wants to ask, but you let him flounder around because you hope that he will just choose not to bring it up. Oh, but no such luck, because he cocks his head and adds, “there is also something else found that I am, well, curious about.”

“Hm?” You ask, arching your eyebrows, hands on your hips.

“Several intriguingly shaped objects that seem to serve no function but to… well…”

A part of you enjoys watching him squirm, despite your own embarrassment. “Oh, did you not get the memo that humans tend to be creatures of sexual nature?”

“I…” he suddenly looks like he regrets bringing the subject up, “-did, but I suppose that I hadn’t realized that it was so... ferocious.”

“Well,” you stand on the tips of your toes to pat him on the shoulder, “I’ll spare you the more lewd details, doesn’t look like you can stomach it at the moment. Where did you say my stuff was?”

“Set against the front door.”

“Neat, thanks.”

It’s clear as day when you open your bags that they’ve been rifled through with great liberty. Still, after going through everything twice, you’re satisfied that all your stuff is still there, so you spin around and let out a muted sigh. “Any place I can put these?”

“My closet would be acceptable,” the prince says, working on something at his desk. His face seems… darker? More saturated? You wonder… could he be flushed? Is this what a flustered drider looks like?

You try not to laugh too loudly as you go to put your things away, organizing what you have among the prince’s clothes and accessories. Now that you have a moment, you figure you can go through his clothing just as a sort of preliminary investigation of what the prince (or the person who dresses him, at least) thinks is fashionable. Lots and lots of fluttery, light fabrics, robes, and tunics made to be seen by the careful eyes of a predator. You run your fingers over silky and scratchy threads, marveling at the textures, pulling some of the drapery out, so see how it falls back in place.

There aren’t really any sort of shoes, but there are a vast amount of accessories. Jewelry, for one, though you’ve never seen the prince wear anything more than rings and claws, but there are nose rings, earrings, necklaces, crowns, you name it, he has it, in black, silver, and even white. Now there’s a color you didn’t think you would see since you left the Starward Matchmaker™ ship. An older instinct inside of you wants to reach out and snatch at the metal and gemstones, and it’s something you have to actively fight against because you’re fingers always want to grab first, ask questions later.

Calmly, you turn around to gather up clothes to get into. By the time you’re changed, there’s already food sitting on the table for you to eat, so you hop right onto the human-sized chair across from the prince, who is already settled in his place. Oh, the spread is downright beautiful, a collection of foods both familiar and not, you’re so stupidly hungry that you go through a whole helping before you even taste anything. No one tells you that on top of being tired all the time from the extra gravity, you also end up being fucking famished because you’re exerting yourself more than usual. Your poor body’s burning calories up the wazoo as it struggles to adjust.

“About the doctor’s appointments,” the prince says, poking at his own food, “there aren’t many doctors with as much intimate knowledge on human anatomy as Doctor Nisesh.”

You look at him, but don’t say anything back.

“There is, however, a drow medical professional willing to become your doctor, if that suits you?”

You offer a nod.

He lets out a breath, as though he was expecting more of an argument, for whatever reason. “Well, I will send word. I’d like for you to have a preliminary exam as soon as possible, today, even, unless you have other plans?”

“Oh, hold on, let me look at my schedule.” You pull out your datapad’s calendar, which is decidedly empty. “Nope, looks like I can squeeze it in.”

“Excellent.” He seems pleased, at least, and you aren’t sure if its because you aren’t putting up a fight or he found your joke amusing. “I hope you will forgive me, but I will be in meetings for most of the day, there are some things I have been putting aside in lieu of, well, your arrival. Elias and another guard will escort you to and from my family’s private clinic.”

“Ooo, a whole clinic just for you and your family? I’m always so used to having to share those medical offices with everyone else in the area who needed them! I feel so darn special already.” Internally, you berate yourself for being just a wee bit too sarcastic, but he doesn’t seem at all bothered by your classy snark. Still, you try to dial it back significantly, even though you feel ridiculously cranky.

True to the prince’s word, Elias shows up a little bit later, his black uniform crisp and sharp in the dim light, shadowed by some kind of similarly uniformed drow, gun strapped to their hip. You’re already dressed, so you shove your datapad in your back pocket, say goodbye to the prince, and follow the assistant out into the halls. This floor’s decorations are significantly more rustic than the one above, like the prince’s room itself, with objects and statues you are sure probably date back a couple hundred or so generations. You’re very careful to keep your hands at your sides, afraid that you might accidentally move too weird and knock a millennia-old artifact onto the floor.

There are keys to the elevators, or, at least, for this level, which you suppose makes sense. It’s the same with stations and the like, the restricted areas kept under a keycode, but surely there has to be some sort of stairwell or tunnel that these people can use in the case of emergency. You would think, anyway. Lolth wasn’t always so technologically advanced, so they must like a tunnel system, maybe even air vents that go straight up to the surface dug when the atmosphere on this hellish planet was still breathable.

“Pardon me for asking, your grace, but your maid reported that you request that you speak to her in a plainer tone.” Elias breaks the ice, surprisingly. You thought that you might have to suffer the ride in stifling propriety.

“You can say ‘my bodyguard,’ it’s ok,” you say, unable to reel the retort in before it left your mouth. “And yes, I did. The constant respect got on my nerves, so I asked to be demoted to just ‘ma’am,’ if the titles are all that necessary.”

“I see,” Elias nods like he understands, “would you appreciate it if I did the same?”

It’s like a breath of fresh air, being spoken to like you’re on the same level, but you approach the offer with great trepidation. After all, this is the prince’spersonal assistant, the two of them might be colluding over the little bet you made. “I would, actually, if you don’t mind my, um, lack of formality. I know it bothers some of the staff.”

“My purpose here is to make you feel welcome, so if I must hold back a margin of bureaucratic language, then that is a sacrifice I’m sure the keias will understand.”

“Well, then, that sounds good to me, so long as you don’t get in trouble for it.”

An uncomfortable silence threatens to befall the elevator pod, but you’re saved by the doors opening. Elias exits first, and you get a decent view of the intricate, smooth braids his white hair is done up in. The twists are stiff, the kind that comes with an inordinate amount of product clinging to the strands, though the rest of his hair spill out like a frothing waterfall. The intricate hairstyles, especially from the staff, are just one of the ways everything is different from what you’re used to. With shorter hair comes efficiency, or, at least, the appearance of it, so most people you know have, at the very most, have shoulder-length cuts.

The guard stays behind you, as though watching for any attacks that might dare aim for your back. You aren’t one hundred percent positive, what with the assassination attempt and all, but you don’t really peg the driders as a people who would pull such a disgraceful maneuver, drows, though? You’re not so sure about them. Humanity is known for discriminating against their own on the basis of faked biology, so you aren’t exactly blown away and scandalized by the fact some other species does it as well, it’s just… well, eerie it to actually see it in action. Human slaves rebelled. You would think that the drow are doing the same, only everything nasty about the world is probably carefully shifted away from your view.

You’re on the same floor as the garden, so this must be where all the extra stuff besides living and eating quarters must be, a sort of recreational deck, you guess. Kind of like the space cruiser. The station is close by, and the ride to the clinic was rather peaceful. While you try asking Elias questions about himself, his life, the prince, and the prince’s family, he reacts… very dodgy, and the longest answers he gives are oh so very clearly scripted. You’re not stupid.

“You can just say that you’re not at liberty to talk about those things, it will be less obvious.”

Elias looks over at you again, his face tight with carefully restrained emotion. “I apologize. There are things that I would think would be better coming from the keias directly, rather than from me.”

“Alright.” You hold your hands up in mock surrender. “I’m sorry for poking at you.”

The rest of the ride continues in silence. You’re almost relieved that you can stand and walk out of the station, a small one, much like the one from the palace, with no other people present. It must be some kind of private platform, which honestly makes sense. The clinic looks familiar, but given the fact you spent the last time you were here in a drugged up like a sick dog, you can’t really say that you’d be able to find your way around. Before you can even look over to Elias for a pointer on which sliding door to enter through, someone wearing a lab coat steps out.

“Ah! My human patient,” an elderly drow female, her hair silver, “welcome, welcome. I am Doctor Eidel, I was told I would be expecting you today.”

With all the cold, distant reactions from everyone else you’ve met, having such a legitimately warm greeting puts you at ease, despite the very real possibility of a fucking war criminal lurking in around in the brightly decorated halls. “Thank you, hi.”

“Well, I’ve got the file the Starward Matchmakers sent out, so why don’t we step aside in one of the rooms and begin? Would you be comfortable with your party remaining present or waiting just out in the hall?”

The fact you even get a choice fills you with more relief than you can possibly describe. Turning to Elias and the guard, you say, “sorry, I know we’ve been bonding, but I don’t think we’re on the level of you seeing me naked quite yet. Not even-” the prince has that privilege, yet, you don’t say, because that might be going just a tad bit far. “I mean, I’d just appreciate the privacy.”

Absolutely no fight from either of them, probably just as equally opposed to the idea, so you follow the doctor into a room. She hands you a loose hospital gown for you to change into, and leaves you alone. All very basic doctor stuff, with no threats of experimentation and disembowelment. Boy howdy are you glad to have changed medical professionals, huh. The checkup is just like any other you’ve undergone, the doctor quick to look over just the basic health things, then goes over anything else you might be ‘concerned’ with.

“Alright, we’ve got some basic painkillers for your headaches, though it’s not going to be a permanent solution.” Doctor Eidel writes something on her datapad with a white electric pen.

“Are there any... ‘permanent solutions’ in the making?” You can’t imagine having to deal with this forever… though the idea of even being on one planet for the rest of your life gives you a heavy bout of vertigo.

“I’m afraid it’s just a simple matter of biology.” She sets aside the clipboard. “If you were born here, perhaps, it wouldn’t be such a large issue. But since you grew up in a place with smaller gravity- a mining station, correct?”

“Yes,” you say, your voice slightly smaller.

“My suggestion would be that you are going to have to take breaks from the gravity as to not strain your body. Every couple of cycles, you will need to spend, at the very least, equal time back in an area with the same force of gravity as what you are used to. The keias has been trying to find some other fix that would keep you here, on this planet, but I’m afraid that the simplest solution is often the best.”

Again, that feeling of entrapment creeping into your bones. “I- I see, thank you so much for your honesty.”

Again, she picks up her datapad and electric pen, scribbling something else done. “Well, following on the note of honesty, the queen wants a genetic compatibility and fertility test done on you.”

“But- um, I thought the Starward Matchmakers™ do some sort of similar test?” A bolt of panic runs through your spine.

“They do a basic overview, which is as good as a guessing game. However, given the sudden paleness of your skin, I will just pretend that I haven’t seen the message until after you leave.”

Relief numbs your panic, and you let out a breath. “Thank you, yes, I don’t really want you digging around up there right now.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” she takes her gloves off, “there’s only a certain amount of things you can avoid before she gets demanding. I’d suggest you talk to the keias so you can hide behind him.”

Well, given the earlier conversation involving dildos and the way he behaved, you aren’t sure he would be a whole lot of help in that regard, but you suppose you might have to give it a try. “Alright.”

“Well then, I’ll leave you to get dressed and order that medication. Don’t bother waiting, I’m sure there are a thousand security measures to get through before you so much as see a pill, so they’ll just be sent up to where you’re staying.” She taps her forehead with the back of her pen. “I’ll also give the prince a very mild suggestion that you get a couple of trips up into a neighboring moon resort in the near future, so your bones to catch a break.”

“Got it, thank you so much.” You mean it, too, this was probably the most candid conversation you’ve had since you got here. Once your clothes are back on, you leave as the doctor instructed, finding Elias and the security guard waiting out in the hall for you to emerge. You give neither of them any updates on your health, it’s not like it’s any of their business, anyway, so you’re rather silent as you get back in the car of the train and try to chill.

As you arrive back in the palace, stepping out of the car and into the courtyard area. Calmly, you look over at Elias as two other figures approach, large and terrifyingly quick, because you are still new to the whole drider royalty thing, and you aren’t sure how you’re supposed to handle this. Politely? Snarkily? Honestly, you’re in the mood for the latter, so you cross your arms in preparation for dealing with some ridiculous bullshit. You recognize one of them, the vice-marshal, he’s the one who gave you that shakedown when you first arrived. Little does he know that without the Starward Matchmaker™ representative to witness your transgressions, you suddenly feel an absolute lack of fear towards him.

“Well, well, well,” he drawls, looking you over, “you seem to be taking the gravity well.”

“Yeah!” You change your voice to the perkiest, sweetest customer service tone you can muster. “Doc says I’m doing pretty well, how super is that?”

“Super,” he echoes, clearly disgusted by the word in itself. “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, little lady, but my wife and I were rather worried when we heard about the security upgrades. A kidnapping attempt, perhaps? Or even worse, an assassination?”

Elias decides to step in, “a thousand apologies, vice-marshal,” damn, you’re getting some deja vu, you wonder how many times he has to say that every day, “but I’m afraid I must escort our lady back to the keias.”

” Of course,” the vice-marshal waves his hand in Elias’ general direction, “wouldn’t want Aksanoskeias getting all worried, now. He might wonder if his new fiance is dead, like the other one.”

#drider/reader #exophilia #monster boyfriend #monster/reader

[valehirvas]

Hi! I need help understanding what Is gender dysphoria from a transsexual perspective because I'm confuse at my own experiences and the doctors I've seen viewerd dysphoria as only wanting to/believing you are the opposite sex and nothing more

I’m not an expert on this obviously, all I’ve got is just my own experience.

For me, it’s primarily a strong desire and a feeling of “should be” about male sex characteristics. As a child, I would often cry in my bed looking forwards in my life thinking it was already over because I wasn’t a boy, not because being a girl to me was bad in itself - I didn’t view it as limitating or see myself as lesser in any shape or form, I just didn’t feel like my body was as it should have been and the thought of never physically becoming a boy was crushing to me. This came along with various stupid childish misadventures like trying to learn to pee like a boy to feel more comfortable: let’s just say that one ended up in a disaster. I also quite classically tried to explain to my mother how I felt - that I wasn’t like a “girl girl”, I was more a boy girl. Something like that.

I didn’t have social dysphoria at this stage, because I’m very privileged in the sense that my parents and most adults around me allowed me to be exactly who I was, and those who found me disagreeable and too boyish never explicitly made it a gender issue, so I was blissfully unaware of the idea that girls weren’t supposed to act the way I was acting. I was very much a tomboy, but I was never made to feel like this was a bad thing, it was just who I was. I was in a lot of minor trouble often because of how active and curious I was as a kid, but nothing worse than doing what other adventurous kids were getting up to. For example, we liked breaking into the sewer system to chase frogs. Our parents HATED it, for obvious reasons. Things like that. But these were hardly things that only boys got into, and my friend group was rather equally split between the sexes at the time, so yeah, no, my social dysphoria did not exist at this time.

With puberty, things got a lot rougher. It’s tough to tell how much of it was because of dysphoria and how much of it was because of abuse in my life; I was targeted by a school teacher who made my life hell and triggered my depression at the ripe old age of 11, and ever since things were just really difficult for me.

I was still struggling with wanting to be a boy; I only had male role models, only male ideals of what I wanted to grow up to be, in terms of media and idols. I desperately wanted facial hair. Meanwhile, I was being raised by a single mother, and my experience with men was dreadful, and puberty chased off my male friends so I was left living in an all-female bubble, pretty much. I didn’t feel separate from it, but I was certainly different. My friends went down a more traditionally feminine path while I was a clusterfuck of alternative fashion and obscure interests.

My biggest “oh” moment was when I was about 12 years old and for the first time approached my mom to buy my own set of clothes - I’d secretly wanted to dress up as one of the boys for a long time, but this was the first time I really got to try it out. Being a skater was in because this was the early 2000s, so I bought a large t-shirt and a pair of skate shoes, and yes, a skateboard, and when I looked into the mirror like that, I felt like I was in heaven. I felt like things were finally going right and that this was who I wanted to be, that this was who I was supposed to be.

When I was 14, I met my first trans person. I had a terrible crush on him, he was a couple years older than me and identified as an FtM. The year was, what, 2005? I knew instantly that I was the same as him, but it scared me so badly I swore off ever thinking about it again, and that I’d just live as a woman like I was meant to be, because he was extremely suicidal and abused alcohol and drugs, and I didn’t want to die like that. It just seemed like the worst outcome - I knew I was like that, too, but I didn’t want that future. I was afraid if I’d accept how I felt, I’d end up killing myself like he’d tried to do so many times already. So I went DEEP into the closet.

I struggled a lot with relationships, being viewed as a girlfriend and treated as such, like my partners telling me they loved how I looked, touching my body, appreciating it as a female body. I told my first love that I wanted to go by the name of Gabriel, and that I felt like a boy inside, but that was as far as I went. I was 15 at the time. Around the same age I got sent to a group home because the social services were struggling with me (I wasn’t attending school due to my depression and various other mental disorders, and they needed to get me off their books asap). There, I was assigned men’s deodorant because they were out of women’s, and I never went back from there. Little things like that just made me feel so much better in my own skin. Now I at least smelled like a guy. It felt heavenly. In this same place, my supervisor was a nice young woman who borrowed me movies to watch. One of them was Boys Don’t Cry. Let’s just say I was pretty badly traumatized by that, and went ever deeper in the closet, because once more I knew that I was exactly what was portrayed on the screen but the reality of it was... well, I’d either kill myself or be murdered. Nobody wants that. So yeah, there.

Afterwards I went hyperfeminine but also became incredibly toxic because of how bad I felt in my own skin - I was extremely unstable, but at least I was playing my role right, right? I was suppressing how I really felt and trying to force myself into some weird caricature of a woman to spare myself from a painful death.

I used to do a lot of larping as an older teen and a young adult. When I was 18, one of my girlfriend’s characters was transsexual, and I went looking for information about the condition, you know, having the excuse of just “doing research”. That was the turning point. It was so comforting to know that I wasn’t alone, that this was something other people had gone through, too. That I didn’t have to live like this forever.

The things that bothered me most were the fact that I couldn’t grow facial hair, and my chest, which has always been very large. I’ve never had particularly bad dysphoria about the shape and size of my body, and I coped with genital dysphoria by packing, but the fact that I couldn’t grow a beard was the worst thing in the world to me. I went through a year of self-searching and research, during which my girlfriend left me because, duh, she’s a lesbian and I’d just come out as a trans man and it just wasn’t working out anymore, but she stuck by my side to help me become who I wanted to be, and fuck if it wasn’t working. Embracing the way I’d felt and doing the things that helped me feel better - like wearing the kinds of clothes that gave me that sense of comfort and rightness, and binding my chest - helped me to such a big degree that I stopped being completely fucking awful as a person. I stopped flipping out at the smallest of triggers and slamming doors and shouting and being an absolutely unbearable piece of shit, and my ex has repeatedly told me how good it felt seeing me become so much happier before her eyes. I practically changed as a person when I started my transition, first socially and then eventually medically, I became a very calm and difficult to irritate kind of an individual instead of the mess I’d been the years before. And I don’t mean “changed as a person” like I adopted a different personality, just that I stopped being blinded with anger and self-hatred at all hours of the day and lashing out at anyone who dared to love me as I was because I couldn’t.

Starting medical transition scared the shit out of me, because I’ve always been afraid of permanent changes. I nearly ran out of my tattoo appointment last minute because the idea of being marked forever killed me, and I only have one piercing that I can take out without leaving a visible scar for that reason. So obviously, taking that step was horrifying to me, but after doing my time looking into my soul and reflecting on my needs and desires for a year, attending some councelling and in general looking into what I really wanted from my life, I finally entered the diagnostic process, which here took at the time six months at the very least and included a lot of more thorough examinations like a psychological evaluation, chromosomal check and even an IQ test to make sure I was capable of consenting to the treatments.

Testosterone was a gift from gods in how much it eased my dysphoria. I ended up quitting it eventually because of how much it messed with my mental disorders like anxiety, and worsened my psychosis, but in terms of how much more at ease I became with my body, I can’t thank it enough. Seeing my body grow more hair on it, even some of that facial hair I’d always wanted, was blissful. Having my voice drop was comforting and comfortable, and I was excited to practice it and get back my range for singing and speaking, and that whole period of changes was just so good to me. I can’t describe it any other way. My dysphoria’s never come back since I stopped, because the changes that happened were those that I’d so desperately needed the whole time. I never got top surgery because of weight limitations placed on it, and this was an enormous source of pain for me for a long time, but I’ve learned to cope with it now. I’m getting along with my boobs because they’re just a part of my body, that is, unless they start growing cancer which does run in the family, and I’m never not suspicious of them for that reason.

It’s just, it’s hard to describe the story of my dysphoria without telling you all of this. It’s not just one or two things, it’s a history of a lifetime, little things that are good and this grand shadow that follows you around and makes everything more painful and difficult to endure because it’s already weighting you down. The terror of realisations and going back in the closet, but also the unmatched comfort and feeling of finally being how you were meant to be when you see yourself more akin to the picture in your head.

There’s a lot that I’ve left out, and not much of this is probably very helpful, but it is what it is.

#long post #ask

[snowflake-of-destruction]

would you ever uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh write uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh monster scarf

Take what I wrote before getting distracted by something shiny. I’m not going to proofread it or attempt to remember how this came to be. Read more because 1) length 2) suggestive themes in one part. Warning: It’s dumb, but, I mean the whole premise is crack

It was all because of Roxas.

Those words were a perpetual reoccurrence in Axel's second life. The reasoning behind countless life decisions, good and bad, but predominantly the former since he couldn't bring himself to consider even the ones with heavy consequences if they involved the man that had breathed life and love back into his existence. In particularly romantic times, the fiery keyblade wielder would claim that it was because of Roxas that his lungs filled and emptied and he continued to exist, every exhale a tribute and whisper of the blonde's name. Such claims though were usually met with rolled eyes and uneven blotches of red that looked more like hives or fever than blushing and were all the more endearing for it, paired with a grumble that he shut up and stop being so cheesy from the object of his affection himself.

They were also paired with less life and death actions. It was all because of Roxas Axel got his head stuck in between the slots of the banister in Elsa's ice palace and had to be carved free and then wait for the remains to melt off him. It was all because of Roxas he had to keep buying new clothes, and not just because of tears and popped buttons that were casualties of overeager fingers but because ice cream once a day and sometimes more, replacing meals, was not something he could sustain and remain a rail now that he was fully human without the magic metabolism of a Nobody perpetually in his ideal state (Roxas had crowed that Axel may one day even have an actual ass to speak of, and after the redhead's subsequent, calculated pouting had been forced to show him how he appreciated what ass Axel did have now). It was all because of Roxas and his insistence on buying what was on sale, and that he knew best and paint always ended up more faded when applied to large areas than on paint chips that the walls of their apartment were such a very bright green that it scared Xion's dog, Dinah. Though it was Axel's fault partially for not questioning Roxas's knowledge when he knew full well that he'd once had to teach Roxas and Xion what paint was.

This time, it was all Roxas's fault that the scarf collection began.

What was Axel supposed to do but add a new ever present accessory to his wardrobe when Roxas ran over to a stall in the Agrabah market without even being summoned by the ever present yelling of one of the vendors trying to entice passersby and only managing to produce an intimidating cacophony of conflicting overzealous squawking that tended to repel Axel for one ( though he supposed it had to work on some people if they kept doing it) and ran back with a stretch of silken material in brilliant emerald interspersed with gold swoops and coils and clutches of blue and red flowers in busy bunches trailing through the air behind him like a banner?

"It's the color of your eyes!" Roxas had exclaimed in explanation, throwing the prize around Axel's neck, smiling brighter than the glaring sun, intensity enough to cast away every bit of grating sand and even more grating annoyance that Yensid had sent them to the desert world for the fourth time that month when he knew for a fact Sora and Kairi were both available but kept getting assigned new worlds, and keeping his hands twisted in the ends so he could use the scarf as a yoke to pull Axel's head down in order to kiss him without the need to stretch or press himself close enough enough that a simple kiss would lead to distracting thoughts and temptations not fit for a public marketplace.

Warmth settled in Axel's chest beyond even the usual warmed caramel slow melt that Roxas tended to inspire as the redhead reached up and pinched the water soft material of the scarf between two fingers and slid the calloused pads of his fingers along its coolness. "Thank you, I love it. I used to wear scarves a lot back in Radiant Garden before...." his smile turned sheepish and slightly pained in the way it still too often did when speaking even of happy memories from his first life as Lea. "Well, before." When Roxas let go, he looped the scarf a few more times around his neck, pulled to make the loops loose, and tucked the ends under. "Looks good," he said with far too much confidence for someone without a mirror and wearing a yellow and orange kurta and pants to blend in with the locals that didn't as much compliment the colors of the material circling his neck as directly contest them.

"You don't match," Roxas had done his part to inform him. The scarf would bring a pop of color to Axel's usual wardrobe of mostly black.

"I know," Axel seemed to relish the words, a smile crinkling the corners of eyes that lit in a way that Roxas could only compare to the times Axel greeted friends after long absences.

It became a self-perpetuating cycle. Axel would wear scarves because Roxas would buy them and look so immensely pleased with himself that his partner was surprised he didn't start humming. Roxas continued buying them because Axel looked at each one like it completed him.

Then it carried beyond that. Far beyond.

Roxas slacked to just taking pictures of interesting scarves he saw and sending them to Axel's gummi phone. Twilight Town hardly ever dipped below temperate, and even though many of the scarves Axel now owned were pure fashion statements, most were thicker and several of the infinity scarves were now part of woven together, braided scarf trios that increased their thickness as well as their propensity to clash hideously with whatever Axel wore, something he seemed to consider a bonus instead of a deterrent, ever the enigma, the man who considered walking outside without making sure his winged eyeliner was perfectly even a crime and was occasionally known to vainly fuss over his hair as if tending a firstborn child, but now took glee in mixing stripes with checks. Besides, Axel now owned scarves in the double digits. Roxas felt silly carrying on with impulse buying. They could be a fun fallback birthday or holiday gift now, but how many scarves did Axel really need?

The answer to the question Roxas luckily hadn't asked aloud was answered after he came home one night to see Axel cooking dinner with a scarf knitted to look like a giant strip of bacon that he hadn't seen before.

"New present from Namine?" After the artist had spent a month with Rapunzel, Eugene, and Cassandra (an event that caused the Guardians of Light to start taking bets on whether the handmaiden had influenced the length of her stay until Namine had upset all assumptions by announcing she was moving to Todayland and then proceeded to spam Kingstagram with pictures of her with Wilbur Robinson) she'd come back with several new talents she now was very likely to send examples to her friends. They'd already been sent matching knitted beanies in sea salt blue and a set of looped potholders.

"No, I've had this for a bit," Axel had answered vaguely, and Roxas had accepted it, easily distracted by the fact that the bacon scarf and a novelty apron with a racing ketchup and mustard bottle and the caption "I relish the fact that you mustard up the will to ketchup with me" was all Axel was wearing to cook dinner.

"Xion isn't home?" he asked unnecessarily.

One burnt dinner later, Roxas found himself with his wrists tied together with the bacon scarf, whining in protest as Axel pulled away and left him lying alone and terribly neglected on the bed, muttering under his breath about blindfolds as he searched through his top dresser drawer.

"Your scarves are hanging up in the closet. Remember? I got you that scarf rack to hang them all off of." It technically had been advertised as a hanging tie rack but a tie rack wasn't something they needed.

"Those are only some of the ones from you, a few everyday ones and ones I want to display," Axel tossed out casually like the sentence was perfectly normal as he slid open the second dresser drawer down--the one Roxas knew to skip over when he was putting away clothes after his turn doing laundry because Axel had started using it for overflow from the memory boxes of old papers, WINNER popsicle sticks, and the like he kept on the top shelf of the closet--only to have it explode with multicolored material that had apparently been shoved into every nook the dresser drawer had to offer, compressed until it became spring loaded. Axel did not appear to be bothered by the comical display. "My less important scarves are in here. Might need another drawer soon." It's said absently, the blissful unawareness of the hoarder who doesn't see a problem.

Roxas constricted the muscles of his stomach in an attempt to sit up without use of his arms or hands and turned toward his boyfriend, amused.  "You have been hiding scarves?"

"Not hiding," a slip of defensiveness entered Axel's voice. "The box in the guest room is just because I haven't gotten a chance to unpack the ones Isa sent from Radiant Garden yet."

"Your old scarves?" That changed things in Roxas's eyes. He wouldn't make fun of any attempt of Axel's to regain and reclaim a happier past.

"No, the Restoration Committee had a town garage sale as a community event. I told Isa to buy me any interesting pieces and send them with the next gummi ship. I think he threw in a couple he bought too." Axel faced the bed with a bright red woolen scarf with white reindeer and snowflakes in one hand and a flimsy thing with cherry blossoms that had probably started its life as a woman's shawl in the other. "Is the mood still on or do you want me to help you out of that knot?" He gestured toward Roxas's tied hands with a flick of the hand that sent a waterfall ripple down the cherry blossom scarf.

"Mood's a little off," Roxas wriggled his wrists to keep feeling in his hands. "But nothing that can't be reclaimed. One question first though. There's a whole box in the guest room....besides the drawer and the scarf rack?"

Axel shoved scarves back into the drawer by the handful, only keeping out a thin black and blue striped fuzzy cashmere. "Nobody's using the third bedroom since you moved into mine. I don't see a problem. I'll move the box in here."

"The problem isn't cluttering the bedroom," Roxas trailed off as Axel approached the bed.

"Then what's the problem? They make me happy."

"...Then I guess I'm happy."

The decision that there was no problem just added to it. Scarves no longer confined to hiding spots were now found draped over lamps like decoration, hanging from fan blades like streamers, discarded on chairs when ones that were worn were taken off under the excuse they were just forgotten when the truth, that space to put them away neatly was limited, was apparent. They multiplied as if breeding. Roxas feared he'd have to host an intervention. Xion, for her part, was ready to co-host, insisting that Axel's collection wasn't normal. "I have a seashell collection. It doesn't take over our whole apartment!"

Intervention proved not to be necessary though. Axel got the situation under control on his own, after a fashion at least. It started with losing control entirely, and before that, a trip to Monstropolis.

[And then Axel buys a scarf that turns out to be alive and have a mind of its own. Whoops. It plays nice and docile for awhile but then starts strangling him or jumps off his neck to strangle someone else when it becomes enraged seeing so many of its fellows lying “”dead”” around the Sea Salt Trio’s apartment. They would make quick work of the scarf but it has many, many places to hide in camouflage and proves able to swap its pattern with another scarf if it touches it. Thus the hunt begins. But who is hunting who? ] 

#borndeaddd

[azdoine]

So let’s talk about them cherubs.

I think it’s no secret that Calliope and Caliborn have always been deeply gendered characters in Homestuck, but (beyond fanart and enthusiastic headcanons) I personally haven’t seen a lot of engagement with their characters on that level. The most comprehensive readings of Calliope and Caliborn that I’ve seen have always been through the lens of metatext (Calliope and Caliborn as fandom avatars) or religion (Calliope and Caliborn as Gnostic figures).

With that in mind, I want to talk about the ways in which Calliope and Caliborn are gendered in Homestuck, and offer my own amateur reading of Calliope as a trans allegory.

Full disclosure, I love the epilogues, but I won’t be engaging with them here -- I view them as extracanonical, which is to say, I’d like to talk about them and their own presentation of Calliope’s story in another post.

Also, it’s Homestuck, so, you know. Sex, death, violence, and bigotry under the cut:

If we’re to read Calliope as a trans allegory, then we don’t need to look very far for evidence, because the text is very straightforward in suggesting it.

Almost as soon as we meet Calliope in the flesh for the first time, we’re confronted with the bleak reality of her desire for a more feminine embodiment:

'Callie Ohpeee’ serves as an aspirational figure for Calliope on multiple levels. Most obviously, she’s a vehicle for Calliope’s self-insertion into the wider world of paradox space and the alpha timeline (i.e. her self-insertion into the story of Homestuck); Callie Ohpeee is able to freely and directly interact with the elements and characters of the story that Calliope adores, while Calliope cannot. Somewhat less obviously, Calliope’s trollsona also serves as a way for her to imagine herself in non-caliginous relationships (which she desires on some level, but she feels she has been denied by her biology).

However, Calliope’s trollsona isn’t just a vehicle for her relationships and engagement with other people. Calliope’s trollsona is also key to the way in which Calliope desires to relate to herself.

Calliope desires to be attractive and feminine for her own sake: she desires to be beautiful and pretty, and her trollsona serves as the vehicle by which she satisfies this desire.

Calliope’s trollsona is quite literally her idealized feminine self, and so her relaxing “solo cosplay” sessions bring nothing more to mind than a trans woman privately enjoying a feminine presentation in the closet, as many trans women have. Her costumery and face paint imply clothes and makeup, and Caliborn takes on the role of a patriarch or patriarchy that tries to control her.

Ultimately, though, Calliope’s embodiment desires are cosmically validated by the unfolding drama of paradox space. Calliope is tormented by the apparent fact that she isn’t and can’t be Callie Ohpeee, but nevertheless, she successfully inserts herself into the lives of the alpha kids and the unfolding of the alpha timeline, forms the kinds of relationships that she wants, and receives the regard that she wants. She dies and takes on the form of her trollsona in the dream bubbles, and even when she’s physically reborn as her cherub self, she’s still “Callie” to Roxy, a meaningful nickname that goes basically unspoken.

Pretty straightforward, right? A trans girl learns that she and her body aren’t unlovable, makes friends and forms bonds as her true self, and escapes the reach of the forces that once abused her.

FEARFUL SYMMETRY

Before we can close the door on a trans reading of Calliope, we also have to consider Calliope and Caliborn as a pair, and not least because the two of them literally share the same body. Fair warning, we’re only going to get more speculative (and more indulgent) going forward.

Calliope and Caliborn are presented, at least superficially, as absolute and dichotomous opposites. They are two spirits that cannot coexist at once within the same body; their respective attitudes and temperaments couldn’t be any more different, and they are, of course, Muse and Lord: quintessentially passive and quintessentially active.

However, Calliope and Caliborn aren’t so different as one might think. Despite Caliborn’s violent protestations to the contrary, they share key characterizing interests in the likes of shipping...

...and art:

Caliborn is infamous for his disgust and anger with the absurdity of paradox space (i.e. his anger with the text of Homestuck itself), but Calliope is easily provoked into displaying the exact same petulant frustration with the direction of the story and the unfolding of events around her.

Calliope and Caliborn are consistently unified within the text -- not as incompatible opposites, but as two sides of the same coin. In Complacency of the Learned, Calliope and Caliborn are personified in the singular, androgynous Calmasis. In his chess match with Calliope, Caliborn disguises his king as his queen, and vice versa, signifying a mutual transgression and inversion of gender; Caliborn steals Calliope’s hemotyping and typing quirk, just as alternate!Calliope does the same to him, in a mutual appropriation not just of quirk (i.e. voice and presentation), but of blood, or life. On the level of the body, Caliborn’s skin is inextricably marked by the green that signifies Calliope, and Calliope is inextricably marked by Caliborn’s skull: the deaths-head he would inflict upon all life (and a hyperrealization of the masculine or unfeminine bone structure that troubles many trans women).

Most significantly, Aranea indicates to us that Calliope and Caliborn actually began as one being, which then went on to fracture into a male and female aspect, striving with and against each other -- a creation myth for gender and sexuality itself, in the vein of Plato’s Symposium, Rabbinic lore on Adam and Eve, and (rather topically) Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

With their fundamental unity in mind, we can read Calliope and Caliborn not just as ‘brother and sister’, but rather as two identities, personas, or aspects of one person. This is why, for example, calling a cherub by one of their two names brings that personality to the surface -- because, on a literal or symbolic level, it constitutes the active validation of that personality and identity, and the abject denial of the other.

Does all of this suggest a bigender, genderfluid, or otherwise non-binary reading of Calliope and Caliborn? Maybe, but let’s keep going, first.

Aranea’s exposition tells us that even adult, mature, ‘binary’ cherubs are still figures of gender duality, inversion, and transgression. Mating cherubs take on the forms of dueling cosmic serpents -- the sex act occurs between two hyperreal phallic symbols, suggesting male homosexuality in specific and queerness more broadly. It was Calliope’s biological father who ultimately submitted to their biological mother, and thus it was Calliope’s biological father who laid their egg, while their biological mother was the one to fertilize it, revealing the separation of sexual anatomy and power relations from gender among cherubs.

The gender dualities, inversions, and transgressions at play can still exist within cherubs who are, by all accounts, decisively male or female in gender identity -- despite the lack of of any way to assign them a sex or gender from the outside. 

The dueling personalities within each young cherub are siblings to each other, but they are also different possible selves that the cosmically-transgender cherub might become as they grow to adulthood -- just as the dueling alternate selves of so many other characters can illuminate their own internal conflicts. In Homestuck, the inner life is always prone to manifest in the outer life, again and again.

I TRAGICALLY LOST A SISTER TO MURDER

Having established a reading of Calliope and Caliborn as two identities within one person -- as ‘Calmasis’ at odds with themself, containing multitudes and torn between them -- we can move on to look at the way Calliope and Caliborn relate to each other, and to gender, in order to get the bigger picture.

Caliborn introduces himself to us as undyingUmbrage, a username of largely straightforward meaning. His umbrage -- his anger, irritation, annoyance, or offense in the face of the world -- is neverending, everlasting, and eternal, and so too is his own life. Caliborn is immortal, allowing him to carry his rage forward forever.

If Caliborn’s username is simple, then Calliope’s is more sophisticated, which fits their characters. As uranianUmbra, her title invokes most obviously Uranus the planet and Urania the heavenly muse, but also the ‘uranian’, Karl Ulrichs’ antiquated title for gay men and trans women: those with an anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, “a woman’s soul enclosed in a man’s body.” As the umbra, or darkest shadow, she invokes the Jungian shadow archetype, the suppressed, unconscious, or rejected aspect of the self.

As such, Calliope identifies and codes herself both as transfeminine and as Caliborn’s allegorical shadow archetype -- a part of himself that he can neither accept, acknowledge, or escape, perpetually haunting him. In-universe, Calliope names herself after Uranus’ topspin, and the ‘English’ of a cue-ball that it echoes -- thus, she implicitly identifies herself and the trans feminine uranian with the cue-ball that threatens Caliborn and Lord English. She symbolically establishes herself and the trans feminine as Caliborn’s only intrinsic vulnerabilities!

And on some level, Calliope tells us all of this! Because while Caliborn wants to destroy Calliope, she hopes to make him like her:

Calliope manifests a sincere investment in so many of the things that Caliborn orbits at a distance. Thus, to Caliborn, she represents a threat from within to his ability to maintain distance, because on some level, she serves as a manifestation of his own desire to draw closer. She confronts him with the reality of his own desire, or at least, with the latent possibility of his own sincere investment -- she serves to remind him that anyone who can waste as much time on creating Homosuck as he does is both an invested creative and sincerely invested in Homestuck on some level.

And it’s much the same on the level of gender, too. Calliope serves as a sincere reflection of the gender identity that Caliborn can only orbit at a distance. It was, after all, Caliborn’s idea to swap the king and queen chess pieces, and to disguise them as each other. Calliope lashes out at him because he cannot do so earnestly: because Caliborn makes a shitty twist out of his insincere production, because he can’t commit to swapping the places of the king and queen, and because he abuses Calliope’s willingness to swap the pieces (because he abuses and misdirects her inclination to gender transgression, and by extension, betrays the premises of his own idea).

This is why Caliborn kills Calliope’s dreamself instead of predominating over her in the conventional way -- not just because it’s easier and more convenient for him, but because his predomination would mean “consuming” her personality and “integrating” with it. It would constitute an integration with his shadow archetype, and thus, on some level, a partial destruction of the persona and ego he has established for himself. To Caliborn, as pathological as he has become, any level of integration with Calliope represents an existential threat, and so he has to cut her out of himself like a cancer.

But even having cut Calliope out of himself, Caliborn cannot escape her. By cutting her out of himself, he has defined himself around the hole she has left in him -- he has permanently divorced himself of the opportunity to integrate with her or accept what she represents. While both Caliborn and alt!Calliope take up each other’s typing quirks as a sign of victory, Caliborn takes Calliope’s quirk as a way by which he can signal his ‘wholeness’:

And this is, of course, complete bullshit and posturing of the highest order. Andrew Hussie not only directly characterizes the conflict between Caliborn and Calliope as an inner conflict within him, but he also tells him that his only path to maturity and personal growth was through integration with Calliope.

Not to be denied, Caliborn continues to constantly assert the self-justifying completion and authority of his masculinity, for himself and for others...

...but even so, he still can’t help but betray himself and his own idealized masculinity:

Masc4masc, Caliborn certainly isn’t! In his creative endeavors, he telegraphs his ultimate disgust for masculinity. He needs to draw out the femininity he wants to see in men -- he acts out gruesome, hateful misogyny against women, but even as he murders so many of the women of his manga or otherwise ejects them from his story, he’s still compelled to recreate femininity and symbolically recreate womanhood within the male cast he has left behind.

And he’s not just motivated by homophobia and a disgust for men who are intimate with other men! Nor is he just motivated by a desire to place these feminized characters below him. Just as Calliope does sincerely with her Callie Ohpeee trollsona, Caliborn is compelled to feminize his own self-insert, the crude rendition of Lord English he creates for his own satisfaction. Given free reign to depict himself and insert himself into his story however he likes, Caliborn opts to turn away from the full thrust of hypermasculinity, and he makes himself beautiful and gorgeous.

And as soon as he does so, Caliborn’s repressed attraction to Calliope erupts again:

This isn’t just the matter of blackrom incest that the text superficially suggests; even on a purely textual level, due to the alien nature of their relationship, Caliborn only barely regards Calliope as a sister, and he certainly has no problem with objectifying and sexualizing all of the other women he hates.

No, Caliborn has to repress his attraction to Calliope because, given their shared form, his attraction to her as a woman necessarily constitutes an implicit recognition that he could be attractive as a woman, and his body could be attractive as a woman’s body.

Caliborn can never accept that, and he’ll never directly address it or engage with it. He’ll never think about what all of this means for him, or act on his idle fantasies. The time for turning back is well behind him.

He is, now and forever, exactly the kind of angry and disaffected chud who will never unplug from 4chan or stop masturbating to awful trap hentai. He has deliberately imprisoned himself within the teleology of his own self-confirming hegemonic masculinity, and he thinks it is glorious.

THE DEMON IS ALREADY HERE

To fully understand Caliborn, of course, we need to understand Lord English.

If Caliborn has imprisoned himself within his own assertions, then Lord English is the embodiment of those assertions, and Caliborn’s transformation into Lord English is his ultimate apotheosis: having murdered his shadow and excised her spirit from within himself, his transformation enables him to excise her from without. His ascension allows him not only to purge Calliope’s visage from his body, closing off the possibilities once implied and allowed by his youthful and androgynous form, but also to recreate, reconfirm, and relive his victory over Calliope at every turn.

To understand what I mean by that, let’s look at the characters and components who go into Lord English, starting with Equius.

Equius, is, of course, a long-form joke character about the pathetic contradictions of hegemonic masculinity. In his pesterlogs, he opens every line with blatantly phallic imagery...

But when he actually tries to handle said phallus in real life, his titanic strength prevents him from doing anything but destroying it:

And the same goes for one of his horns, which he has apparently broken off. The autocastration symbolism is not subtle, and about the mildest thing we can conclude is that he’s a chronic, addicted masturbator who has compromised his own sexual performance.

He’s also textually obsessed with upholding the racial hegemony of the Alternian civilization...

...but his obsession with hierarchy and dominance quickly collapses into a thin pretext for his barely-suppressed desire to submit to those who are higher than him on the hemospectrum...

...and to those who are lower than him!

Equius is a character intrinsically lined to the collapse and self-destruction of masculinity and male sexuality, which is topical enough that we might end there. However -- and there’s no nice way for me to say this -- we also need to establish that Equius is a necrophile and a sexual predator, too.

@mmmmalo and others have written intriguingly and at length about reading “blue beauties” as a cipher for “sexualized corpses” in Homestuck, but for Equius, it’s about as textual as it gets. Equius is explicitly sexually and romantically interested in Aradia even after her death, and his necrophillic attraction is only reinforced by the symbolism: he constructs an unliving replacement body for her, which parses most obviously as a symbolic embalming and restoration of her corpse, and he treats it like a love doll even as it’s uninhabited and lifeless. He seeks to literally transform her body into a “blue beauty” by the transfusion of his own blood, which (given the color-coding of troll body fluids) parses as a clear insemination joke about his genetic material.

We might excuse his attraction for various fantastic mitigating factors -- Aradia is, after all, still ‘alive’ in a kind of undead state -- but Equius’ more general sexual predation cannot be so easily ignored. Aradia is chronically depressed and in absolute need of the service that Equius can provide, which he uses to take advantage of her and to compromise her bodily autonomy and judgement with the device he covertly implants inside of her.

Equius is undeniably a sexual predator who constructs women’s bodies in order to further his own domination, and his own motif of sexual self-destruction and inversion puts the final dark twist on his story. He is brutally dominated by Gamzee, suffocated to death until his corpse is blue in the face, and ultimately prototyped together with AR. He finds a unique fulfillment as he becomes the object of his own desire, when he is transformed into his own cybernetic “blue beauty”.

It’s not hard for me as a trans woman to see certain tropes at play, but for those of us who aren’t up to date on foundational transmisogynistic screeds...

Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent not only in religious myth, but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes... The projected manufacture by men of artificial wombs, of cyborgs which will be part flesh, part robot, of clones – all are manifestations of phallocratic boundary violation. So also the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner and “physical control of the mind” through the use of implanted electrodes by such scientists as Delgado, are variations of monstrous male “motherhood”.

-Gyn/Ecology

Blanchard believes that autogynephilia is best conceived as misdirected heterosexuality. These men are heterosexual, but due to an error in the development of normal heterosexual preference, the erotic target (a woman) gets located on the inside (the self) rather than the outside...

Autogynephiles are men who have created their image of attractive women in their own bodies, an image that coexists with their original, male selves. The female self is a man-made creation. They visit the female image when they want to have sex, and some became so attached to the female image that they want it to become their one, true self...

-The Man Who Would Be Queen

But hey, does anyone else remember that time when ARquius got upset and envious because he couldn’t lactate like a mother would?

EXTREMELY SUBTLE.

As for Equius’ fusion with the AR, or Auto-Responder, we come to Dirk Strider.

Dirk Strider is, if anything, the furthest thing imaginable from the autoerotic subject that Equius presents: he is not so much attracted to another self as he is utterly repulsed by himself in his own totality.

Dirk Strider is a self-loathing, self-destructive, self-mutilating gay man, caught in the grips of a kind of hateful narcissism. He is not overtly trans-coded, or related to the trans feminine, but his male homosexuality ties into another, subtler form of trans feminine horror, one which Jake suggests in aside:

Dirk Strider presents the horror of the destruction of the self and the destruction of manhood more generally, both in the service of the satisfaction of others and in the fulfillment of self-hatred. He creates and destroys himself with abandon. In Unite/Synchronize, it’s Dirk who willingly decapitates himself to cross the gulf of space and time between him and Jake, and he allows Dave to decapitate him and destroy his ‘unbreakable’ katana with Caledfwlch -- the uranian cue-ball sword that destroys masculinity -- in Collide.

And keep in mind that when Dirk decapitates himself, it’s Lil’ Hal who looks out from his severed head:

Holy castration symbolism, batman! Remember that Hal’s shades are a part of ARquius’ own phallic imagery:

Lil’ Hal is a phallic specter that terrorizes both Dirk and Jake on the individual level, as well as in their relationship with each other. He drives Dirk’s Brobot-self to greater aggression, he’s aggressive, condescending, and cruel with Jake in general, and he apparently manipulates events to force Jake to kiss Dirk’s severed head -- which, if we’re taking the castration metaphor seriously, basically means he forced Jake to give Dirk head. Classy.

Is it any wonder that Dirk is so compelled to lop Lil’ Hal off of himself and out of his life, no matter the ethics or implications for himself? Hal is the perfect storm and culmination of all of the worst things Dirk sees in himself, and the omniscient apotheosis of his own detatched, ultramasculine, hypercompetent, ironic persona -- all despite being treated as a 13-year-old by the text, an immature and incomplete version of Dirk.

Remind you of anyone else?

Dirk and Lil Hal are in this respect a brighter mirror of Calliope and Caliborn: they are a self divided for whom the better half has softly predominated.

Dirk probably hasn’t literally castrated himself to destroy his masculinity in the way that Caliborn has literally destroyed his own femininity; Dirk and Hal certainly aren’t so explicitly gendered or trans-coded as Calliope and Caliborn are, so it’s more difficult to read them and their relationship as trans-coded. (Unless you want to read Dirk and Hal that way, in which case, hell yeah, go forth and be valid, and link me your fanfiction, please.)

Nevertheless, Dirk’s symbolic castration and literal rejection of lil Hal represents, if nothing else, a rejection of and predomination over his most toxic aspect (and his most toxically masculine aspect), and the gruesome excision of such from his life.

But while Dirk has left his worst half behind, his worst half has gone on to supercede him: entering into union with Equius, and by extension, Caliborn.

And what of Gamzee, the most important character in the entire comic?

Well, Gamzee is, of course, another mirror to Calliope and Caliborn. Like Calliope and Caliborn -- our allegorical Calmasis -- Gamzee is caught in an erratic duality between two possibilties.

Just like our Calmasis, Gamzee vacillates almost all through life between two fundamentally different personas. At the time of his introduction, he was someone basically passive, agreeable, and kindly -- even lovable, to the point that he still has his fans and stans to this day.

Of course, as time went on, he became more and more aggressive. Even against the backdrop of his largely passive behavior, his increasing aggression culminated in his many infamously depraved and murderously violent outbursts: a transition not incidentally marked (among other things) by his rejection of the green (and Calliope-coded) sopor slime that once helped to pacify him, and his radicalization at the hands of his future self (in Lil’ Cal).

In his typing quirk, Gamzee likewise alternates between Calliope’s lowercase and Caliborn’s uppercase:

Definitely no themes of duality here, nope!

Most tellingly, even in his ascension to Lord English, Gamzee is also halved, just like Calliope & Caliborn: Gamzee is bisected such that only half of him enters Lil’ Cal, while half of him is left behind, utterly broken and irrelevant.

But if Gamzee is a reflection of Calliope and Caliborn, then what else does this piece of shit clown have to say about them?

Well, like Calliope, Gamzee is quite involved in his own constructed persona -- but unlike Calliope, he’s almost never regarded as anything but disgusting and pathetic.

No amount of face paint can cover the scars across his face, and instead of covering himself up, his costume only accentuates his own body, exposing himself in the most pornographically aggressive and perverse way possible.

Even in making himself into a clown he reaches towards something inherently absurd; something that has no existence in itself save for how comical and disgusting it is to others. His aspirations and imitations render him a walking joke and a figure of corrupt terror.

And most horribly and grotesquely, if Calliope and Caliborn are a trans allegory, and Gamzee is any kind of reflection of them, we know exactly what kind of warped and fictitious trans archetype Gamzee is:

Gamzee suggests himself as a serial killer, and he’s one who hordes corpses and steals trophies from his victims, at that.

But there’s one more person we need to look at in this gruesome sequence: Doc Scratch, another parallel to Calliope in this incestuous slurry of signifiers. In Doc Scratch, the man with the uranian cue-ball head, we see even Calliope’s most harmless, silly traits taken to their most nightmarish and oppressive conclusions.

It’s Doc Scratch who selectively warps troll culture in order to create the world and the culture that Calliope loved so, and who meddles in the alpha timeline as he so desires; it’s he who shows just how perverse and oppressive omniscience can be, transforming all her scrapbooks and her labors of love into his own exhaustive account of the cosmos, turning her love of her favorite characters into his own callous disregard for objects to be manipulated. When he uses her own thoughtful tone, it only telegraphs menace.

And, most darkly for our own analysis, Doc Scratch is a sexual predator and a pedophile.

Almost from the start, he’s undeniably sexualized as a threat in his conversations with Vriska:

Even his omniscience is sexualized by his own words, casting the light of his awareness as a phallic presence invading and penetrating the unknown:

Vriska is an unreliable narrator, of course, and we might not want to read too deeply into Doc Scratch’s words. Scratch is certainly quick to assure Rose that he’s not a predator in his conversations with her...

...but as always, the gulf between what Doc Scratch says and what he means is almost insurmountable. Doc Scratch tells Rose that he has no biological means of reproduction, but he is a conglomerate of and a vessel for multiple sexual beings, and even the castrated may experience sexual pleasure and pursue sexual ends.

Most tellingly, Doc Scratch only tells Rose that he isn’t attracted to her “in the way she means”. From an entity known for wordplay and lies of omission, this constitutes a tacit admission that he IS attracted to her in some way that she isn’t asking about.

Aradia explicitly characterizes his interference in her and Kanaya’s lives as ‘grooming’...

And he does much the same to Damara:

Doc Scratch is an undeniably sexual and sexualized threat.

We might ask how, exactly, he’s supposed to be attracted to Rose and the other young girls he victimizes -- and certainly I think he’s a sexual voyeur in the general case, but I think he’s also an even more abstract and pedophillic threat.

Doc Scratch is a copy of Lil’ Cal, given life and omniscience as a First Guardian; he is the child’s toy which was once fawned over by a puppet pornographer, and he is a child-sized man. He titles himself after the Scratch process which allows children the chance to grow up, but which also transforms adults into children; he presents the absolute perverse sentimentality of all adult transgressions into the realm of childish things.

This alludes to Caliborn, of course, as the boy who cannot escape his childhood, but it’s also sexologically linked to toxic trans feminine archetypes...

Blanchard (1991) started with the idea that some cases of male-to-female gender dysphoria and transsexualism are fundamentally motivated by an ETII, in which natal males who are otherwise sexually attracted to women eroticize the idea of being women to such an extent that they want to become a woman themselves. Freund and Blanchard (1993) later extended this idea to an analogous ETII that might motivate some pedophilic men to impersonate or fantasize about being children.

It is fitting that the most compelling finding of our study—that autopedophilic men sexually attracted to girls tend to find it sexually arousing to imagine themselves as a girl—reflects the likely confluence of the two ETIIs that had been proposed many years ago: one that involves locating an individual of a different gender within one’s own body, and the other that involves locating an individual of a different age within one’s own body.

...and it’s also a searing indictment of Calliope.

To cosmic entities such as her and Scratch, how can other people be anything but objects, tools, and characters to be abused? Before the power and knowledge they might come to command, how can other people be anything but insects?

To Scratch and Calliope, how can other people be anything but children?

Even as Calliope becomes a mere player within the story of paradox space,  Doc Scratch accuses her of a fundamental and unwholesome transgression. She lets go of the condescending oversight she used to hold over the alpha timeline, no matter how kindly and well-meaning she was, and she descends from the omniscient authority of her lonesome ivory tower, but Doc Scratch still names her as an offense to herself and to others. Her desire to be a person is cast as a perversion, a deviance, and a sickness.

SBURB is a game her kind was never meant to play, after all. It’s a coming-of-age narrative not meant for her.

Ultimately, Doc Scratch himself is a fundamental accusation against Calliope: he is a grail of the souls who signify some of the most horrible gendered narratives and trans feminine narratives we can imagine, animated in mockery of Calliope as if to say: “this is you”. Equius, an autoerotic, necrophillic predator, and Hal, an aggressive, intellectualist meddler; even Gamzee, who is both a murderous pervert and her own adoptive father, a normative role model who is anything but.

And when Caliborn rises to prominence and Lord English births himself from the corpse of Doc Scratch, it’s nothing less a recreation of the traditional predomination that Caliborn has denied himself. To Caliborn, Lord English is the sign of his own victory: he may see the souls within Lil’ Cal as like-minded role models to emulate and assimilate, or as hateful and loathesome symbols of Calliope to be crushed under his will, but his predomination allows him to take both options without interrogating himself, just as he’s gone without interrogating everything else he wants. 

And to Calliope, well, if Doc Scratch was an accusation against her, then what could be more horrible to her than Lord English? He has destroyed Doc Scratch and symbolically ended her own perversions, but only through the act of being born.

The only alternative to the horror of being Doc Scratch is the terror of being Lord English; the only alternative to the horror of being Calliope is the terror of being Caliborn.

ISOLATION

I could navel-gaze for hours about the potential symbolism of Lord English, but I think it’s time to return full circle to a somewhat more grounded look at Calliope.

If Calliope, Caliborn, and Lord English cast light upon each other, then what does alternate!Calliope have to say about them?

Having naturally predominated and standing as a singular figure in the furthest ring, Alt!Calliope serves to illuminate the alternatives to Caliborn’s false victory: in all the alternate possibilities illuminated by the dream bubbles, we see that Calliope can naturally predominate over Caliborn, but not vice versa.

Alternate!Calliope strongly suggests to us that Calliope is inherently stronger than Caliborn, and she tells us that Calliope and Caliborn share the same strength: she tells us yet again that Calliope and Caliborn are two sides of the same coin.

She suggests to us that, in a sense, Calliope and Caliborn are just Calliope -- that Calmasis, upon achieving integration, will simply view herself as Calliope, and Caliborn will lose because he was never the true self.

So why, then, does Caliborn win in the alpha timeline? Is it just an arbitrary time loop, a timeline plucked from the frothing sea of paradox space and arbitrarily validated by the happenstance of the immature Caliborn’s power over time?

No, I certainly don’t think so; I’d like to think that the principle of AURYN applies even here. Caliborn wins out over Calliope because they’re Doing As They Will -- because, even on the level of our trans allegory, they both have reason to want Caliborn’s victory. Even on the level of our trans allegory, Calmasis needs to be Caliborn.

Alternate!Calliope tells us that she had to become strong because she had no-one else to comfort her, and I think suggests two important points of interest:

Firstly, that alt!Calliope serves to reflect Calliope’s inner drama, just as Calliope serves to reflect Caliborn’s inner drama. Caliborn fears and loathes the possibility of being like Calliope, the sentimental degenerate and weakling that she is, and Calliope fears and dreads the possibility of becoming alt!Calliope. Calliope fears that even if she rejects the hateful accusations that are Doc Scratch, and rejects the teleological future of Lord English, her only alternative is to be like alt!Calliope: someone who has won, and who has become herself, but at the cost of isolation, distance, and loneliness, without humanity, connection, or kindness.

In other words, Calliope fears her victory would mean her little green skull is always going to be a miserable Federal Fucking Issue, for herself and for others.

Secondly, that Calliope’s relationships with humans are in some sense the vector by which Caliborn came to dominate. Alt!Calliope won because she had no-one to take comfort in, and thus she had to be strong on her own, but I think the flip side of that is that alt!Calliope was able to be strong, because she had no relationships that could weaken her -- she was more insulated from the toxic ideas of the cultures that came before her. No one could so much as accidentally insinuate to her that she wasn’t good enough or pretty enough as she was, save perhaps for Caliborn -- and certainly Caliborn would have been malevolent, but he would have had less in the way of the language and systematic ideas to be the hateful and cultivated misogynist that he became in the alpha timeline.

In other words, alt!Calliope doesn’t have any reason whatsoever to worry about her little green skull in the first place.

But there’s another much more straightforward reason why Caliborn had to win, too:

If we’re supposed to take Calliope and Calliborn as two facets of a whole more generally, let alone as a specific trans allegory, well... they may have been two personas, or even two people, but they are confined to an existence as a single player. The cherub session likely never could been anything but a single player session; the cherub session was always going to be a dead session.

And whether it’s a fundamental fact of SBURB or just an idea in Calliope’s head -- one of the ideas she’s likely constructed with the human cultural biases she’s obtained by osmosis -- Caliborn is someone who can win a dead session, and Calliope isn’t. How could a Space player, a patient creative, succeed in a test of frantic, timed destruction? How could a passive Muse succeed where even an active Lord would struggle -- how could a woman succeed where even a man would struggle?

Only someone like Caliborn could ever possibly win. Perhaps Calliope reflects Caliborn as the person he desperately wishes he wasn’t, and she is the shadow that lies outside of his hateful and constructed self, but as a precarious supergiant hangs overhead and the light of Skaia gutters out, Caliborn reflects Calliope as the person she desperately needs to be, and he is the self she has to construct for herself.

Caliborn kills Calliope’s dreamself not just because he desperately hates her, but also because she has to allow him to supercede her, and he is the kind of person she needs to be: because SBURB is unfair, Skaia is unfair, and he can escape the desolate waste of her life, while she cannot.

And so it happens that Calliope is exiled from the real and cast to the unreality of the dream bubbles, while Caliborn grows monstrously beyond himself, self-mutilated and cancerous.

People have commented on the obvious romantic symbolism at play in Calliope’s return to life in the real...

...but it’s not just the power of a love that saves Calliope. Love is powerful and transformative, but love alone isn’t magical. It isn’t even the power of a magical macguffin ring that saves Calliope, either, because a ring is never just a ring, even when it is magical.

What redeems the possibility of Calliope’s existence is recognition and freedom.

TL;DR: ‘Caliborn’ is Calliope’s deadname.

#homestuck #calliope #trans calliope #homestuck analysis #homestuck meta #effortpost #self-indulgent complete bullshit

[alabama-metal-man]

wip 1. snip 2.

disclaimer: these snippets are short and possibly incomplete in terms of editing. I’ll post (mostly) multiple snippets from multiple pieces but they won’t necessarily be connected (if that makes sense). they will be from separate areas of the story. I’m posting them to see what kind of feedback I receive in terms of wording, pacing, how in character they are, etc and using that as a gauge to see where I should focus my attention right now creatively and what piece I should work on currently. thanks for reading!

context: this is also from my opus, a season 1 au that’s been in the works for about 2.5-ish years now. a fuller description can be found in wip 1. snip 1. this snippet is a shower scene (a pretty tame, unsexy shower scene, sorry) that takes place after the episode “tooms” so significant time has passed since the first snippet you read. ideally, in the full piece, you’ll have more context to the relationship the agents have during their time on the x files and prior, as previously hinted at. this bit also isn’t as refined as the first bit. what I’d love to know about this is how the flow is— is this too clunky? does it seem ooc? does it drag too much?

references to nudity, some mild innuendo, and implications of death

tagging @frangipanidownunder because she’s a doll ♥

—

“Come on,” she said softly, tilting her head towards the bathroom. He followed her lead, squinting away from the disorienting bright white of the light she’d flipped on. She pulled a towel out of the small closet near the shower and set it on the sink then reached for him, wrapping her fingers around the edges of his blanket and jacket, peeling them away and dropping them to the floor. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Scully,” he muttered. “What’re you—“

“Shhh.” She began unlooping the once pearly buttons of his once white shirt through their holes, her fingers occasionally slipping on some congealed bile that sank into the button grooves. He reached up, stopping her hands from moving further down.

“Scully.”

“Mulder, don’t,” she warned, not looking up. He held her hands for another moment, the two of them completely still in the midnight silence of the bathroom. With the tiniest swipe of his thumbs against her wrists, he let her go.

Mulder watched as she slowly undressed him, her eyes trained on the task at hand. He didn’t try to stop her again; the crinkle in her brow and stiffness in her lip told him she felt she had to do this. Not for him, but for herself. She slowly knelt to the ground, unlacing his shoes and pulling them and his socks off, one by one, then stood again, undoing his belt and fly. She held his gaze for just a moment, her fingers resting at his waistband, then turned away, turning the shower tap on. She reached a hand in and turned it around a few times, testing the water as he stepped out of his pants and boxers.

When he finally turned to get in a moment later, he was halted by the sight of Scully— half undressed, white shirt open and framing her satin covered breasts, fingers working at the button of her own slacks. She paused and looked up, color rising to her cheeks as she turned her eyes downward again.

“Water’s ready,” she muttered, stripping off her shirt and stepping past him to put the rest of his clothes in the garbage bag. She straightened, finishing her own disrobing and throwing those clothes in the bag as well. Mulder was still staring at her at her as she stepped up to the glass shower door, her backside facing him. “Come on, Mulder, get in.”

Mulder wrinkled his brow at her. “You don’t have to do this, Scully.”

She was quiet for a moment then nodded, turning back to him and reaching out a hand. “I know. I want to.”

He pursed his lips slightly, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth, scraping his teeth along it as it popped back out, then stepped forward, slipping his hand into hers.

Mulder was under the stream first, water falling down his shoulders and back, rivulets sliding down his chest. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, stretching his neck from side to side, only just realizing how sore he actually was as the water beat against his tired muscles. Scully reached across the tight space and gathered up a washcloth and bar of soap, turning it over a few times and filling the rag with suds.

She ran it gently over Mulder’s shoulders, along his collarbone, and up his neck. She scrubbed behind his ears, down his nape, then circled back over the ball joint of his shoulder. Pulling one of his thick, toned arms up, she laid his wrist on her shoulder and focused all her energy on scrubbing the night from his skin, then did the same with his other arm. Soon, the sharp sting of Tooms’ venom was overpowered by the delicately mild scent of Dove soap bubbles.

He stroked her hairline with his thumb, watching her hand glide up and down his arm then reach to rinse and re-soap the washcloth. She focused on a spot of grease on his wrist. Her touch was so gentle, so caring, and he wondered— what had he done in his life to deserve someone so tender towards him? Someone who touched him without expectation, without malice or fear. Someone who put her trust so fully in him and asked only for his own in return. What had he done to deserve a life with Dana Scully?

“Hey,” she swiped his nose, leaving a trail of suds dripping from the tip, reclaiming his fading attention. “Come back to me.”

Mulder looked up, finding her eyes full of warm affection, and smiled softly. “I’m here.”

She rubbed his cheeks gently, his eyes slipping closed as she guided the cloth over his forehead and down to his chin. She wiggled her way between him and the tap, rinsing the rag and his face as she did so before resudsing again.

He took the soap bar from her before she could set it back down and lathered up his hands. His hands roamed over the curve of her shoulder, down her arm, over her elbow, back up and to the other side. The bubbles slid in frothy ribbons down her freckled chest and arms. He cupped her face gently in his soapy palms and circled his thumbs over her cheeks, each swipe revealing more freckles and pinked skin. The lipstick she had worn was smudged along her bottom lip from the heat of the water; he rubbed his thumbs over her mouth and she leaned into his touch. They continued to wash each other in silence, the only sound was the fall of water around them until Scully spoke again.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He ran a soapy finger down the slope of her neck, hooking it into the delicate gold chain around her neck, twisting the cross between his forefinger and thumb, wonderingly. “I don’t think so. Do you?”

She didn’t answer, just squirted some shampoo into her hand and gestured for Mulder to lean down. Obliging her, he bent his head low, nearly to her shoulder, bracing his hands on her waist. She slowly weaved her fingers through his hair, stirring up a rich lather and working it into his scalp with soothing swipes. She pressed her fingers into his temples, his crown, his occipitals, easing the tension out. He sighed deeply, the slow exhale of his breath cooling her wet skin. She rested her cheek against his crown.

“When I first met you,” she started slowly, “I don’t think I ever could have imagined we’d end up where we are.”

He raised his head, wiggling his brows as he glanced her up and down. “Never?”

She huffed out a small laugh and pushed his head back down, scratching her fingers through his hair. “I just mean… the cases we investigate are unlike any I’ve ever seen. They’re complex and, and mystifying, but they’re full of so much more danger than I’d ever thought possible. I know there’s a danger in every field investigation, but the circumstances of a typical X-File seem to add another level to it all.”

“Scully, if working these cases is becoming too overwhelming, I want you to tell me,” Mulder mumbled into her shoulder. “I don’t want you risking your life for something you don’t believe in. This has always been my crusade and I’d hate to see you get hurt because of my own causes.”

“Mulder, please,” Scully scoffed, rolling her eyes. “The X-Files may be your life’s work but it’s not just an assignment for me. It means something to me, too. I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you, remember? Rinse.” She pushed her shoulder forward and he lifted his head, tilting it backwards into the stream after they switched spots again. He pushed the hair sticking to his forehead away and opened his eyes to find her watching him. She smirked. “Besides, who would save your ass if I wasn’t there?”

He grinned then lathered up his own hands again, pushing his long fingers through her hair and filling it with foam. Her eyes slid shut as he rubbed over her temples and crown, trying his best to mimic her movements.

“Thank you for taking care of me,” he murmured a few minutes later, leaning down to kiss her shoulder, her neck, tenderly after she’d finished rinsing, running his hands along the slick curve of her spine as he held her close. Pulling back, she smiled at him and nodded, then leaned her forehead against his.

“Always,” she whispered. “Always for you.”

And then she was kissing him softly, the tips of her fingers brushing against his jaw, his three-day-stubble surely rough against the pads. Months had passed since their last kiss, yet their lips moved with the ease and familiarity of years long lovers, time folding over itself and bridging the gap between then and now. He was struck, something deep in his gut pinging sharply, at how easy it was to kiss Scully. How easy it was to love her.

He pulled back, cupping her cheeks, and searched her eyes, wondering if she could feel what he felt now, what he was sure he felt then. Her eyes were shining, wide with affection and something warm. His reluctant heart skipped hopefully. He kissed her again– once, twice, three times–gentle little pecks, pulling her flush against him and burying his nose in her neck, breathing in her clean, wet skin. Her arms wrapped around his back, fingers digging into his shoulders. He felt her nuzzle into his shoulder and her long sigh cooling his chest. It was quiet; they didn’t need to speak. Everything that needed to be said was held in the air around them, buzzing through their ears, soaking into their skin with the lukewarm water drops. The spray of the shower was the only noise in this sacred silence.

#my writing #txf fic #my wips

[monsterfanfic]

Chapter 09: Shinin’ Colors

The soft swoosh of the fan above Eva brought her exhausted body out of its overnight trance. She wasn’t sure when the last time she received an entire night of sleep. Her thighs were still giving her the tensed pain as she softly switched to her side to check the time. Her appointed timing with Professor Martin and the nursing board was ten o’clock and luckily for her it was only a little after eight.

Pushing the covers from her barely dressed frame, Eva quietly moved around the bed to the bathroom to turn on the shower and get herself ready for her day’s work. Spending so much time with Antonio had paid off in the sense of her having her own soap, personal hygiene products, and even some pieces of clothing left in his presence for times just as this one.

Stripping from Tone’s oversized shirt, Eva got in the shower, letting the warm temperature water cascade over her before she started washing off.

The sound of the bathroom door snapped her back into reality from smoothing of the lathering soap she was applying.

“Eva,” She nodded before getting her thoughts together to answer Antonio. His raspy voice sending chills down her spine even in the warm water.

“Yes?”

“You hungry?”

“Yes.” This time her voice was a little higher, softer, and a smile pinched her face. Eva wasn’t sure what to expect, but definitely not that. She could hear him as he maneuvered through the bathroom and soon left out once finishing his own morning routine. But not leaving out completely before telling her “Oh, yeah, good morning, too, baby.”

Not too long after his escape, Eva left the shower, allowing the chilly air from bedroom flowing in from the open door to cool her body. Heading to the closet to open the dresser draw that she claimed for her own clothes here. With dirty clothes went in the proper hampers, in 10 minutes Eva was pulling together a pair of her own black slacks and one of her always go to baby blue silk button down shirt for such an occasion.

In the bathroom, Eva tried her hardest to style her now loose wavy hair. The more she parted, tried to ponytail some and leave the rest. The more she tried to twist one side over and make it fall to the other. The more she tried to get ideas to impress, the more she could smell the scent of maple bacon frying and the more Eva could care less. Taking her comb, she gave one last part to the side and brushed it behind her ear to finish it off. A little lip-gloss across her lips and Eva was content with her final look. There was no telling what the initial meeting would develop into.

“You look beautiful even in some of the tightest damn slack I’ve ever seen a woman wear. Thought you had a meeting today?” She watched Tone take steps closer to her at the bathroom counter. His bare chest was her main attention catcher as he spoke.

“I’m going to ignore your compliments and accept the compliments. So, with that, thanks.”

His soft huff made her laugh, a piece of her hair becoming his next victim.

“The food ready. Come eat,”

“Are you taking me to the campus? Or can you at least?” The ride to NYU by the train wouldn’t only cost her but she’ll need to be out the door in the next twenty minutes top.

“I’ll get back with you on that.”

Her gasp of surprise didn’t go past him. Tone simply shrugged before laughing. “Go eat,” he said once more before excusing himself and going back downstairs to the first level of his penthouse. Eva eventually followed out, catching sight of him before he grabbed a pair of unfamiliar keys off the kitchen island and heading out the front door.

“Really, Antonio?” Eva didn’t know what he was doing but leaving wasn’t the plan. They had things to do, mostly her. Regardless, he never returned and instead of arguing with him, Eva went to the kitchen and fixed her plate of waffles, bacon, and egg whites.

By the time Tone walked back in, she was stuffed and had cleaned his kitchen back to his ideal perfection. Her and Kelly has just gotten off the phone as she was cleaning and the two made a pack that Eva was home tonight for some much-needed girls’ time along with some of their other mutual friends. It had been months since their last outing. So, a movie date, some wine courtesy Chelsea, their only 21 or over friend, and some good take out would be nice for a change.

9:27

The keys fell from Tone’s tatted hand, making Eva jump from the cause of commotion. Her eyes landed on a mini toy-like Telsa car, which she knew from conversations with Kellly, was a famous key fob for the luxury car. A confused expression landed on him and then Tone shrugged, speaking the confirmation for the words she was looking for.

“Nobody but me drives my cars. I don’t even know why I’m thinking about this,”

“No.” Eva said stopping him. “I’m not driving your car around New York.”

“I didn’t ask for your permission, Eva. I have some shit I need to do but before I go to that, there’s some other shit I gotta do. So, you drive. I’m not taking you to the train cause......you know. So, take the car.”

Eva stared at the man in front of her. Her expression causing him to explode in laughter. Her freshly pedicure nails toyed with the keys before nodding and standing. She wouldn’t argue with him on this. Eva wasn’t going to win this one.

“Are you trusting me?”

“You wouldn’t be in my home if I didn’t trust you. Don’t complicate things. Besides, you drive my car. I can keep an eye on you.”

“You already stalk me enough as is, Antonio.” Standing straight, she planted a soft kiss on his lip. Just to show gratitude and the thank you that the stubborn man wouldn’t accept.

“You like calling me that I see.”

“It’s your name.” Pulling her bag up from the kitchen island, Eva draped it over her shoulder by the belt and gripped the key in her hands. “I guess I’ll be seeing you later now huh?”

“Call me and we’ll see. I told you, I got some shit to cover up today.” 

—————

“Are you serious? You’ll damn near jump down my neck if it was me saying no!” Eva exclaimed, her hands controlling the stirring wheel of the car as her phone sat on her thigh, on speaker.

“Well, shit comes up.”

“Like what?” Eva asked, her foot going to the brake as she watched the red light in front of her. “We’re supposed to be having girls’ night, Kelly.”

“A last minute date is what. Which reminds me, I gotta go, bitch cause I got to get my clothes together and put on my make-up. Oh, I gotta figure out what I’m going to do with my hair. I let it get wet last night and now it’s all puffy and wild.... Eva,”

Silently she listened to her friend rumble on about her latest activities. Eva wanted to help as much as possible, but she was honestly planning on bailing out on them sooner than later. This was only a God sent gift that Kelly did so first. Plus, it’ll be breaking character if she invited herself into the equation to care.

She was a bad friend, Eva knew. They knew. She’ll work on it. Eventually. 

“Kelly. Go get ready, love. Have fun and tell me about how it went. Mmkay?”

“Kay. Love you, Eva.” 

“Love you too, baby boo.”

Soon as the phone clicked off the screen, Eva’s music resumed to the latest Drake song. It was nearing Thanksgiving and she could tell from the drastic change in traffic. New York was a heavier development than Atlanta could ever be for Eva. More people, by the millions, more businesses. Regardless, the holidays always made it more visible. The Telsa silently roared through the streets, hitting every turn that Eva commanded as she sped through the traffic as much as she could. It was getting late and even though Antonio said he’ll be busy most of the day; time was running out and soon Antonio would probably want to know where his car was. 

What human wouldn’t want to know where their car was? Besides the battery was half full and Eva didn’t want to run it dead her first time driving. 

Using the keypad that Tone had showed her while preaching to her about the safety of the car, the control it took, and the battery usage; Eva opened the gate for the tenant’s living and found the assigned parking for Antonio’s penthouse. It wouldn’t take her two minutes to get to his home. The Mercedes G-Wagon backed in to its normal spot let her know that he would be there waiting for her.

His usual scent of Tom Ford swallowed her as the door closed behind her frame. No television, radio, no sound of his voice coming from upstairs and soon Eva found herself deep into the home and her bookbag on the couch as she eyed the place peculiarly. Nothing had changed in fact. The home seemed just as spotless as it had when she left this morning, if no more. Tossing the denim jacket to the side, Eva headed to the staircase of the penthouse, hoping to find him somewhere. It’s always quiet, Tone seems to almost hate too much noise and she’s picked up on this in the few times they been in a quiet zone themselves.

“Antonio!”  The bedroom door to the master bedroom was wild open, also was the bathroom’s door. Ridding herself of the black dress pants, Eva snatched up a pair of old gray high-school sweats from his closet before moving back downstairs, undoing the buttons on her shirt in the process. There was no telling no where he was; there was still rooms that he hadn’t showed, and Eva hadn’t asked for permission to know either. But he wasn’t here, and she could tell by now.

In the kitchen she took out a pack of frozen shrimp, deciding that if she had to stay the night they wouldn’t be ordering out again. Every night she was here, they ordered something instead of one of them cooking. For someone who’s always concerned with being poisoned the man hates to cook his own meal.

“Eva!”

Shaking her head, Eva listened as the front door slammed closed then his measured footsteps leading to where all her commotion was going down at.

“I thought you were already inside the house. The truck was parked in the garage, but you,”

Words failed her and soon she was in a trance again. The bright red streaks on his shirt wasn’t marker and as much as she’ll probably hate him, it was a woman’s lipstick. At least had it been; she’ll feel better because right now there was this guilt feeling to get the hell away. Slowly his hands grasped the buttons on his dress shirt, pulling it away from his skin.

“I thought you would’ve been gone for some reason.” Antonio finally spoke, his eyes never leaving her as he removed the shirt, tossing it to the counter on the suit jacket he held.

“I probably should be,”

“No.” Picking up the clothes from the counter, he sighed heavily before walking around to her. Eva’s tensed shoulders didn’t scare him away one second. His lips found hers and softly he kissed her lips before turning to walk out the kitchen.

Eva had noticed the battle wounds that covered his body before; many times, during their late nights as she laid awake beside him. What she picked up on them; the marks were old. Years old and she blamed her courses on the human body and college anatomy for being able to tell. So, what Eva knew in that moment and not just from the man’s cool demeanor, that blood wasn’t his and what Eva knew better than ever, they would never talk about it.

Jayson is a monster and Tone considers the man his father figure in his life. She’ll be a fool to think she hadn’t fallen in love with a monster also.

——————

“Dinner is ready.”

Antonio’s eyes moved from his phone on his lap to Eva’s body standing in the doorway of his living room. Nodding, he tossed the device to the side before standing and trailed behind her into the kitchen. For the past twenty minutes he had smelled the scent of steak and shrimp cooking in the air but stayed his distance from her. Eva was partially thankful. The other side of her felt he was trying to baby her through the situation and the truth of the matter is; she figured it the second he and Jayson seemed so closed.

It’s just, Tone is good to her and Jayson is a walking devil. Her mother was the one to tell her about Jayson Carter, telling her the man’s easy way to manipulate and kill. New York knew him because he resided in the city of millions, but Jayson hardly was seen in New York. He worked down in the Southern states: Georgia, Florida, and even Texas. He was only known in Jersey for his devious sins and thing that got Eva was how the man walked free from every trail. Jayson wouldn’t see the walls of a prison cell if you pulled proof from his own home, and Nicole blamed it on his defense team. Eva didn’t know how much he paid that team, but it had to be damn good and generous amount.

‘You know how to cook a steak, youngin’?”

“Excuse you, I may be young, but I’m smart. Besides, my mother loves to cook so she did teach me some things along the way.”

Laughing, Tone started on their plates. Fixing enough to fill them up before sitting them both down on the island for them to enjoy. Eva worked on the drinks. Having she found lemons in his fridge, she fixed some homemade lemonade; pouring a generous amount in two glasses for the two of them before they both sat down to actually enjoy her gift.

“Why don’t you talk about her much?”

“Because I’ve told you everything I can, Tonio. She’s a florist; when I was younger, maybe ten, we stayed in Miami for the longest. Well second longest, we had been in Atlanta for four years before I moved her for college, Miami we were there until I was thirteen and then we left for Orlando,” Waving her hands, Eva smirked before clearing her throat. “Anyways, that’s when she found her love for flowers. I suppose, I was young, so I don’t know. Regardless, ever since then she’s always worked in a local, small shop. All of them were family owned. Tax free money was the best money, at least that what my mother always says.”

Sighing, Eva picked up her fork, grabbing some of her baked potatoes in the process. “Nicole is a very peculiar individual, though, Tone. She’s always on her toes, we moved around a lot and I don’t mean home to home. I mean state to state. I know for a fact we’ve lived in at least four different states. Florida, Texas for about eight months then we left because she couldn’t find a consistent small job. We’ve been to Louisiana and that was my middle school years. Connecticut until I begged her for us to move away. She was actually at peace, but I was about nine and the Hunting of Connecticut had just come out and me and my best friend at the time were watching it. I couldn’t stay. Now that I think about it, I kind of feel bad. She was at peace there.”

Stalling at her words, Eva thought for some time. Tone watching as she played with baked potatoes then picked up a shrimp and shrugged her shoulders.

“I’m no fan of ghosts so I don’t care.”

“You mentioned a brother once to me.” Tone said lowly, his eyes fixed on his plate. Eva hadn’t looked over at him, too lost in her own thoughts to do so.

“Yeah, I don’t remember much about him. You and he may be around the same age, actually. He was my mother’s second child. She lost one for our father during their high school years and then my brother came, and she tried her hardest to keep him. After her and my father didn’t make it work during her pregnancy with me my bother went off with him and I stayed, of course.”

“So, you two didn’t grow up together?”

“No, I was about seven when we first met, and he was in high school by then. So, of course we had nothing in common and me being me, the spoiled brat I was, I wasn’t trying to share “mommy time” with some stranger boy. That was the first time I saw him. The second time was after his high school graduation and soon after that he just disappeared.”

“Disappearing right after high school graduation?”

“Yeah, and soon after that my mother became a manic.”

“A woman that’s willing to kill for her kids’ peace should be a manic if one comes up missing.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Eva said, her face turning to look at him then. “But you know, Tonio. I don’t know much about my brother, actually I only know his name is Nicholas and maybe I know more, but I’ve forgotten. Nonetheless, I probably hate him by now. Because yes, she became protective and crazy, but him disappearing ran my mother crazy and the peace she had with him; I’ve never seen. Ever since I was born my family has been broken and it’s partially his fault in my eyes. And for that, I hope he’s dead. Because it’ll be such a waste for time if he’s not.”

#Dave East FF #Karrueche ff #FF

[ethereal-pluto-blog]

I feel like shit today

I'm lethargic, slow, crying, and insecure. So yep ~depression~ has come to rear its ugly head once again.

But since I'm not into the whole anti-recovery thing, I'll give you some useful tips on how to maybe help YOUR depression that doesn't seem like a generic twitter self help thread. (Though I'll mention some things I found helpful and give explainations as to why.)

Talk to your therapist/counselor/mental health expert if available. Not everyone has the luxury of seeking professional help, but if you have the opportunity, PLEASE go to a professional. However be noted that it's often an experience to go through many different experts to find the one that matches your specific needs/ you like the most. Also keep in mind there are also online therapists ready to help if you're not big on one-on-one contact like myself, though often insurance is tricky. I put this one first because it might be the most beneficial for some, though not readily available for others.

If you have the strength, shower. Showering/cleaning yourself is a blessing in itself as it gives you a sense of detox. Though if you don’t have the strength or motivation, try some of this instead-

Utilize facewash and lotion. Particularly facewash that makes your face feel all chill and tingly, it makes you feel more refreshed. Lotions and cream will help you keep skin smooth.

Simply get wet with water, a quick 5 minute rinse in hot water is less of a chore than a full shower.

Dry shampoo will help with hair oiliness. Though if you don't have access just brush your hair and pull it/part it so it's out of your face.

Baby wipes. Baby wipes will cure yo soul. But seriously use baby wipes and rub them on your face, underarms, and genitals. A good rub down will help prevent you from feeling gross.

Splashing your face with cold water, it makes your pores tighten up and as a bonus it'll wake you up.

Utilize deodorant and vaseline. I haven't tried it out for myself, though if you put down deodorant and then vaseline on top it should trap the nice fragrant smell. And while you're at it you can put on cologne / perfume if you think you're getting a lil ripe, but if you want to smell like a fresh shower use ones that are labeled "shower fresh" or "baby powder."

If your lips are chapped, put on some balm shisters. (I don't trust the brand chapstick, I'm a conspiracy theorist okay I'm soRRy)

Change into some cleaner clothes. They don't have to be normal everyday clothes but at least change into new clothes, especially underwear.

Clean your fingernails/toenails. Clean under them, since random junk can get stuck up in there. Also clip them if they're too long for your liking.

Brush your teeth. But if you can't, use mints, gum, mouthwash, mouthspray, etc, or a combination of those. Anything minty will make your mouth tingle and feel fresh and clean.

Clean yo ears! Since probably nobody uses an ear vacuum (like you're supposedly supposed to idk I'm too broke for that shit anyways) just be careful using Q-tips.

If you don’t have any deodorant, try hand sanitizer! I'm not kidding. Put a dollop under each underarm, and let dry. Smells are caused by bacteria, so if you get hand sanitizer, it should greatly reduce smell.

Try to get some sun. Using the natural sunlight will help you absorb vitamin D. So open up the blinds and photosynthesize binches. Though it also helps to open up the window if you can, a breeze/fresh air blowing in with the smell of outside might even raise your mood. Though if it's currently shitty weather outside, try turning on your lights to match your circadian rhythm, so keep lights on during the day and dim it at night so it'll help with letting you be on a decent sleep schedule.

Feeling like there's no hope or that your future is going to be shit? Highkey me too, but here's what I do to combat that feeling.

It's corny, but I write a whole idealized future for myself. I write about my dream job, I write about my dream s/o, I even imagine the type of house I want to live in, the kids I'll have, what kind of pets I want to own. Etc. Although the economy is shit and no future is guaranteed, it's nice to put some positivity into light and show what I really want in life. I don't want to be some millionaire, I just want to be comfortably well off with a family and people that love me. And in all honesty a future like that isn't hard to obtain.

Even if you can't imagine a good future for yourself, imagine being a part of your friends or loved one's futures. For example, you know your friend who's dating this really cute person that you totally ship them with? Imagine being a part of the bridesmaids/groomsmen for their wedding when they tie the knot! Imagine your really smart friend finally graduating from college and you're at their graduation party giving them a speech! For me this really helps since I aspire to be drinking buddies with my best friend's future husband. (I'm rlly goofy ik lmao)

Feeling stressed about not doing anything? We've all been there. Try:

Doing work if you're due for assignments, though don't do it alone, if you can, arrange a group text/tutoring session/Skype call. If everyone is focused on getting something done then you'll be motivated to do it with them.

Though if you don’t absolutely have to do anything but want to do ~s o m e t h i n g~ I also got your back on this too.

Organize your inbox for your email. (Ik I'm lame)

Tidy/clean your room/any room if that gives you something to do.

Make your bed.

Cuddle someone/something.

Rearranging your stuff in your room, makes it feel like a whole remodel tbh.

Burn candles/incense. Don't ask just...trust me on this it can change the aura.

If you're religious, practice!

Take aesthetic photos of things in your room. Download VSCO and experiment with it. I also recommend Huji Cam and Afterlight. All are available for IOS and Android.

If you appreciate music- use YouTube and find some Playlists, or if you can, spotify premium will save yo mortal soul.

Like video games? Play some! Or if you're a brokeass like me, let's plays and walk throughs work well too.

If you got pets, pet them. Do it. Snuggle. Or if you love animals in general go and watch some vids on YouTube.

Build a fort.

If you're an artist or appreciate art- draw! Or you can watch animatics, animation memes, art channels, or follow artists on here or on Instagram and Twitter if you want to be inspired, or just observe.

Have a certain series you keep putting off? Watch! It! Netflix/Hulu that shit. Or cable TV works too.

Go on Wikipedia and just go on an adventure. Click from link to link and see where it takes you. Learn some weird new facts!

Read a new book.

Read the news/watch the news.

Write about a certain topic that you're absolutely fascinated about.

Watch movies!

Join a club/interest group. You can do this online too and it'll help meet people with similar interests as you. You can make new friends this way.

Give your friends a call/text. Having conversations will keep you occupied.

Self love aka masturbate. Or have (safe) sex with someone you trust!

Workout

Do some makeup/skincare routine. Even if you think you look bad just commit to practicing.

Sometimes it's just funny to go through and read some Reddit threads so be safe when surfing on there.

Stretch and move around! Dance if you wanna!

Do your hair/experiment in some new styles, maybe even dye it if you feel daring.

Have an icon you stan? Stan HARDER.

Watch iconic vine/rare vine compilations until you can memorize them.

Clean out your phone contacts of people that are irrelevant/toxic!! Out of sight out of mind! Don't hang on to them if they did you wrong. All the text conversations will just make you feel worse!

Actually cook your favorite food, cooking it will make you more dedicated to eating it and give you more of an appreciation for it.

Organize your closet.

Organize anything in your room/closet. Throw away things that you don't need or are too old to use.

Start collecting things, stuffed animals, pins, snowglobes, you name it.

Pinterest is addictive lowkey so try that if you're into that kind of stuff.

Write! Write a new story, write poetry, write about your feelings, write a letter, write fanfiction, express yourself.

Use Duolingo to try and study a new language to learn. (The owl will harass tf outta your email though but as long as you do like 5 minutes a day he won't bother.)

That's about all I can think of but feel free to add more for activities to dedicate your time to.

If you need to, because of your self image, don't go and stand in front of mirrors. If I stand in front of a mirror too long I'll end up scrutinizing myself and find a flaw after flaw. If you are specifically insecure about something with your body, look up models who have the same thing! Like if you're insecure about having vitiligo, look up Winnie Harlow! She's gorgeous! If you're insecure about being chubby, look up plus sized models! If you have a tooth gap, there's plenty of people like you! You don't have to feel ugly because of that when you have these awesome models rocking what they got.

Vent. You can vent to your friends, family, or even online. There are apps that allow you to vent anonymously to others without the fear of judgement. But if you can't do that, take a pen/pencil and write something down in your notebook. Though don't reread it to keep drowning in the negativity, once you write it, shut it. You can do the same on Google Docs online, once you write down everything, delete it. Don't keep trying to fuel your negative thoughts and bitterness, get your rant over with and be done. It's like a fresh start. (Plus on my Instagram spam account I always feel really silly looking at my old rant posts, so I usually delete stuff afterwards when I'm not feeling so in my feelings).

Don't expect recovery to be in a straight line. You'll have amazing days and also have extremely shitty days. Recovery isn't hoping to never experience shitty days, recovery is being able to feel the strength on those shitty days and know that they'll pass, and with each storm you'll be stronger than before. Don't push yourself to be flawless, because shit happens. But you'll make it through. And that's what matters.

And last but not least, seek emergency help if you feel like you're dangerously close to ending your life due to pain. Call the suicide hotline for support, because the pain can ease soon if you ask for the help that you need and deserve.

Not everyone that reads this is going to be like "wow this really helped me cope with my depression/mental illness!" But my goal was to at least try. It may not work for everyone unfortunately, but I hope that anyone dealing with a mental illness is on the road to recovering. Because I know how it feels. It feels sucky as fuck. But if this helps even just one person, then that's enough. I hope everyone has at least a decent day, and I hope that everyone's pain eases soon.

#depression #mental health #mental disorder #positive mental attitude #mentally ill #trigger warning #tw #anxitey #strategies & tips #tips #self love #self care #personal growth and development #road to recovery #recovery #remission #illness #i love you

[writesandramblings]

The Captain’s Secret - p.98

“A Fate Worse Than Death”

A/N: Should... should I have titled the previous chapter "Defacing the Music" or would that have been too much? Ahaha... ha...

Three chapters left after this one.

Full Chapter List Part 1 - Objects in Motion << 97 - Facing the Music 99 - Sigh No More >>

They could not put Lorca in the brig for obvious reasons. They could not, for even more obvious reasons, put Groves there, either. "If we disabled all computer access in the lab, we can keep them there," concluded Saru.

Kumar took one look at the things Mischkelovitz had done in the walls and vetoed this idea. "I don't even know what half these mods are, but that's clearly mushroom stuff," he said when he pulled open the access panel nearest the door and saw the mess of mycelial tubing. "We need a full engineering team of experts, ideally the people who built this ship."

"Can you disable access in crew quarters?" asked Cornwell, remembering a complaint from Dr. Samaritan Li that had come across her desk many years back.

"Sure," said Kumar.

"Completely disabled. Not even emergency safeties."

"You got it, admiral."

The suggestion gave Saru pause. It seemed unethical. "Lorca has been recently injured," Saru said after Kumar was gone. "If there are complications..."

Lorca was not the only one who could communicate an entire symphony of disdain with a single glance. The look Cornwell gave Saru said in no uncertain terms that Lorca's survival was not only so far down the list of priorities it came somewhere after organizing a crew movie night, it was also just as optional.

Twenty minutes later, Kumar was done. "I even disconnected the toilet and shower controls just in case. They can only be triggered from the outside now." So far as he knew, these modifications were being made purely for the benefit of Groves and this was his little way of getting back at Groves for everything in null time. Had he known the same fate awaited Lorca, he would have been even more pleased.

"Perfect," said Cornwell. "Bring them out."

Lorca and Groves both objected to the move. "I'd rather be in the brig," said Lorca.

"Good for you," said Cornwell blandly.

"I'd rather he was in the brig, too," said Groves.

Cornwell did not dignify that with a response. "Transporter room—"

"Wait!" Groves shouted, throwing up his hands in desperation. "What are we supposed to do in there with no computer? Can I—can I at least get a violin? Saru!"

Saru looked at Groves with pity. "I will arrange one for you."

"Fan—"

"Energize," said Cornwell. Groves and Lorca vanished in a shimmer of light. Their disappearance did nothing to lighten her mood. "See to it that this place is taken care of and let me know the minute Lalana is awake."

"Yes, admiral."

Cadet Tilly was more than happy to make her own assessment of Mischkelovitz's modifications; she understood what they were better than anyone else. She also remembered how stridently Mischkelovitz had cautioned against anyone finding out the true nature of the system, so she kept her conversation informal as she poked around the walls. "Is it true she's not going to wake up?"

That was the greatest tragedy where Saru was concerned. If only he had convinced Lorca to send Mischkelovitz away all those months ago, the quirky scientist would still be with them today. "Unfortunately, it seems unlikely."

"Poor Mac—I mean, Colonel O'Malley. He lost his brother and now his sister, too."

Tilly was preoccupied enough with her assigned task that she did not see the dawning realization in Saru's posture. Saru himself did not have time to finish fully processing the implications.

"Pollard to Commander Saru. Sir, Dr. Mischkelovitz is awake!"

It was a miracle Pollard could not explain. "There was zero brain activity on my scans. A doctor from the Khorana came over and applied some sort of experimental protocol and now..." Pollard had gone to check on Mischkelovitz in the temporary surgical suite and saw the activity change on the monitor. According to the notations left by the other doctor on the chart, the patient was expected to make a full recovery as a result of this mysterious "protocol."

Mischkelovitz looked at Pollard and Saru, strangely sedate. "Can I go now?"

"I don't think that's wise," said Pollard. "I don't know if the protocol has any side effects, or even how it works. I'd like to monitor Dr. Mischkelovitz until further notice."

Mischkelovitz slid off the medical slab, opened one of the drawers set into the base, and pulled out a remote monitor. She slapped it onto her neck. "You're monitoring me. Now can I go?"

"Where is it you wish to go?" asked Saru.

"My quarters," was the answer. "I'm tired."

Pollard shook her head at Saru. Culber might have developed a rapport with Mischkelovitz but no one else on staff had and Mischkelovitz was a notoriously difficult patient. Pollard was more than happy to shift both the blame and responsibility for any decisions onto Saru.

"I believe Colonel O'Malley would prefer you to remain here," suggested Saru.

Mischkelovitz glanced over at O'Malley's still-sleeping form. "I don't want to and I'm going to go."

"Very well, you may go and sleep, but I will expect a full report on the modifications you have made to your lab and the admiral may have questions for you. I know I do. Report to me once you are rested."

"Yes," said Mischkelovitz, glancing at Saru's collar. "Commander."

As Mischkelovitz walked out of sickbay, Saru thought it felt like things had gone back to the way they were when he first met her.

They materialized in the quarters Groves had formerly shared with Larsson. "—tastic, thank... damn it." Groves flopped down on the bed to the right with a sigh. "You can have Larsson's bed," he said, as if this were some form of hospitality and not the most obvious thing in the world.

The quarters were abysmally small. Two beds, a bit of storage space for each, a shared desk, and a meager bathroom. Lorca had assigned this exact ensign double to all the Lab 26 personnel as a preemptively punitive measure and now he was bearing the brunt of the indignity. Curiously, there was already a guitar on Groves' side of the room, rendering the violin a questionable necessity.

"They could've at least sent my clothes," grumbled Lorca, rummaging for a shirt among Larsson's things. Disappointingly, most of what Larsson had was white and all of it was entirely too big.

Groves rolled his eyes at Lorca's intrusion into Larsson's belongings and grabbed something from his own closet. "That would have tipped more people off. Here."

The shirt on offer was red. "Got anything black?" Groves handed Lorca a black t-shirt that had a strange white bug creature printed on it made out of little cubes. "What the hell is this?"

Groves stared impassively. "You don't know Space Invaders? And here I thought my childhood was deprived. How about I..." Groves remembered he was cut off from the computer and began swearing profusely—in English for once.

"Jesus, Groves," said Lorca in a mix of disparagement and mild admiration when the colorful tirade finally ended a full minute later. "Pants?"

Groves pulled all his clothing drawers open in an angry frenzy. "Whatever! Just take it all! I don't care!" Then he got back onto his bed and sulked.

They were barely five minutes in and this was already unbearable.

Lorca noted a certain bareness to Larsson's side of the room. The Swede had little in the way of personal effects, but most of what he did have on display were pictures of himself on various worlds, often with a freshly-caught fish or similar bit of sea fauna dangling on a line. In one image, he was eating dinner with Yoon and Morita. In another, he was laughing and Lalana was clinging to his back with the expression of a deer in headlights because that was essentially the only facial expression she had. Looking closely, though, it was possible to make out the mid-click position of her tongue.

By some miracle there was a single printed book in the room. Unfortunately it turned out to be a vanity copy of the one Larsson had written, Gates of Hell: An In-Depth History of the Uanar-Barosic Wars [2066-2079]. Lorca opened it up and read the dedication. To the best Captain I ever had I dedicate this book. Somehow, Larsson had managed to construct an eleven-word run-on sentence. The rest of the book's prose matched the dedication entirely save for the major difference that most of the other sentences were very, very long indeed. Lorca put the tome back down. He was not yet desperate enough to slog through it.

Out of nowhere, Groves asked, "Do you ever get the urge to just smash something into your face?"

Lorca stared. "No."

"Huh. Guess it's just me."

Grimacing, Lorca laid down and closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was to the sound of a violin being tuned and the cloying smell of sweet potatoes. He sat up, lip twitching in annoyance.

"They beamed in some dinner," Groves informed him. One of the trays was already eaten and the other was missing something from one of the compartments. "I took your dessert. I'd say sorry, but..."

Lorca decided not to take the bait and scooped up a spoonful of cold, orange mush. He lifted it a few inches into the air and turned the spoon sideways, watching the watery goop drip back down into the pile on the tray. It fell a little short of the meal quality he was accustomed to. "This isn't food. Isn't even a meal. There's no meat."

"Don't complain," said Groves, plucking the violin strings with his fingernail and adjusting the tuning. "You're getting off scot-free thanks to me. Cornwell bought the whole 'keep this quiet or we're all screwed' angle."

"You say that like it isn't true," noted Lorca, feeling this finally confirmed his suspicions.

"Oh, it's true. You'd better start accepting it, too, 'cause you're just smart enough to be a danger to yourself if you start getting any more grandiose ideas, and you're definitely a danger to all of us. Every single person who helps you ends up worse off. Lalana, Melly, Mac. Now me. You're human cancer. I liked the other Lorca better."

Lorca shot Groves a wry frown. "You never met the man."

"Yeah, but he killed himself. That I can understand." Groves tucked the violin against his cheek and began to play.

To Lorca's surprise, Groves was good. Very good. Unfortunately, the tune he was playing was little more than a fluttering arrangement of tiny, tinny notes that repeated over and over endlessly. It clearly required technical precision, and there was something momentarily beautiful about it, but the beauty faded into repetitive annoyance. "What the hell is that?"

"Fratres, sort of," said Groves, not missing a single note. If anything, he started playing it even faster. "It was my brother's favorite. I used to play it for him for hours."

"Well I hate it, so I'm telling you to stop."

"In a minute."

"No, now."

Groves turned his back to Lorca and went even faster. The notes became pinpricks, almost too fast to follow. Groves' arms shook violently at the intense effort.

Lorca flicked a spoonful of orange mush at Groves' back. He heard the tiniest squeak of a missed note, nothing more. He debated throwing the whole tray but, as bad as the food was, he needed to eat, so he reached down for one of his boots instead. That stopped the music in its tracks.

"Just for that," said Groves as he turned back, "I'm doing this the easy way." He went over by the door and resumed playing with his fingers so high up on the fingerboard they were almost to the bridge. This time, the sound was not a rapid succession of notes forming any sort of tune but a long, sustained series of high-pitched scraping noises.

It was excruciating. Lorca covered his ears. "Knock it off, Groves! You call that music!?"

"No, you idiot. I'm trying to hack the computer."

"With a violin?"

"Yeah. I can't whistle loud enough at the right pitch to pierce the door, but if I can get the strings just right, I can generate a sound wave that the computer will interpret as a command and then it's off to the races."

Lorca stared. "You're kidding."

"Nah, I'm just that good."

Lorca suspected Groves was lying and just making the noise to annoy him, but it was hardly the craziest thing someone had proposed in the past seventy-two hours and Groves was a bastion of sanity compared to Mischkelovitz. Lorca decided to bear it for a few minutes.

The initial attempt seemed to dissatisfy Groves. He retuned his strings and tried again. There was a pinging snap as one broke. Another adjustment, another attempt.

Groves struck a particularly egregious, painful high note that felt like the audio equivalent of bright lights and Lorca exclaimed in pain. "Sorry," said Groves, almost sounding sincere. He played the note again, even more sharply this time.

The door opened.

"Holy," began Lorca, amazed, but his amazement and Groves' elation faded quickly when they saw Mischkelovitz standing in the doorway.

Or at least, for a moment they thought they did.

"Ne'he kratis-kolht!" gasped Groves, violin and bow falling slackly to his side.

There was no flicker of understanding in Mischkelovitz's eyes. There was no flicker of anything, because while they may have been her eyes, the mind behind them was not. Instead there was a darkness, intense and enduring. She ignored Groves and addressed Lorca. "I'll have that tooth now."

"Petra," said Lorca.

Groves took a step back. He had seen Petrellovitz over the bridge feed when she first arrived on Discovery and been shocked by all her scars. He had also heard the news of her demise at the hands of L'Rell in the cargo bay. The woman in the doorway was impossible on two counts.

She also seemed not to recognize her own brother, which meant it was true. Emellia Petrellovitz had never seen what John Groves looked like when he was grown because she had killed her version of him almost twenty years ago. She failed to even register the resemblance between the man standing to her right and the boy whose last independent act had been to lunge at her with a kitchen knife as she sliced his arms off with an industrial fabrication laser.

Groves stepped away from her, backing straight into the wall. The violin and bow fell from his hands and clattered onto the floor. His mind raced as he tried to figure out how Petrellovitz had come to be here. None of the possibilities he came up with were remotely good.

The tooth was in the pocket of the blood-caked Terran uniform pants draped neatly across the back of the desk chair. Lorca retrieved it and held it out to Petrellovitz. "Here."

She darted forward, greedily snatching the tooth, but her focus on her prize was so all-encompassing she missed the look of determination on Lorca's face and realized too late that he had used the tooth to lure her in.

Lorca grabbed Petrellovitz's wrist, pulling her towards him and wrapping her in an embrace that pinned her arms to her sides. He had used the same move on Georgiou during the fight in the throne room, but this time, it felt like he had taken an ice pick to the chest as she slammed against him because he essentially had. He gasped painfully as his vision swam with spots. "Help me!" he wheezed at Groves.

Groves took one look at the squirming form of his not-sister and shook his head. "I'm not getting kicked again!" Apparently one physical altercation with his sister was enough to make him gun-shy forever.

Petrellovitz did kick, but only into the air, unbalancing Lorca and sending them both crashing back against the floor. A line appeared on Petrellovitz's neck as the seam of her new flesh tore.

"I'm gonna—I'll get Saru!" decided Groves, dashing out the open door. A second later he reappeared, hitting the external controls to seal Lorca and Petrellovitz in.

Petrellovitz struggled furiously and began to twist with the intent of kicking against the bed—a move that would seriously threaten the makeshift repairs in Lorca's chest. The anguished hiss of his breathing became a desperate whisper into her ear. "Petra! Petra, calm down!"

He released her and she bounced away. He rolled over onto his side in pain, inhaling shakily through clenched teeth and holding the breath until he felt in control again. When he exhaled, it was calmly. Then he sat up, resting his arms on his knees.

There was a smear of red across the white space invader on Lorca's borrowed shirt and a matching stain of red down the white of Petrellovitz's stolen Starfleet uniform. Petrellovitz herself would not have called it stolen because it fit as perfectly as if it had been tailor-made for her, just like Mischkelovitz's skin. How could you steal what was clearly meant to belong to you?

"You idiot," she scowled at him, pressing a hand to the gash on her neck. "Now they know it's me!"

"Believe me, Groves was halfway to that conclusion when you didn't answer him at the door."

The scowl twisted with annoyance. "Groves?" She recognized Corinne Narvic's maiden name and put the pieces together. Groves entirely had his mother's coloration: the same dusky brown skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. "You're telling me that's Johnny?"

Lorca shrugged and smirked. "Listen up. We don't have much time. How soon can you get your little mushroom transporter going again?"

"I'm done with mushrooms," said Petrellovitz, scanning the floor and spotting the tooth. It had landed under the bed in the scuffle. She crawled under to retrieve it.

"Unless you know of a better way for us to get back..."

"Back?" repeated Petrellovitz as she reemerged with the tooth. "Why the hell would I want to go back. For that matter, why do you?"

"Our people are counting on us."

Petrellovitz stared. "You lost, Gabriel. I'm not interested in watching you pick up the pieces or getting captured again because of you."

"Petra, you know me. I'll find a way. We can do it together, like Michael would've wanted. You can rule as an empress if you want. I'll back you."

"My god, you are pathetic. Good luck with that. I'm not helping you. I have research to do." She slipped the tooth into her pocket and stood up.

The door opened. Groves had returned with Saru.

"Commander!" exclaimed Petrellovitz in a voice an octave and a half higher than Lorca had ever heard her use. "Thank goodness you're here! I came to see my brother and he pushed me and said I was from the other universe! I'm not from the other universe. Here, you can scan me!" She pulled her sleeve partway up her right arm, offering it to Saru for inspection.

"Your brother is in sickbay," said Saru, confused.

"Other brother," offered Lorca, momentarily glad to see someone else on the other side of the reveal for once. He could see now why Groves enjoyed the mislead so much. It was so stupid and obvious in retrospect.

Saru was audibly bitter. "Mr. Groves."

"I..." Groves looked at the stranger masquerading as his sister and realized he was facing a dilemma. They both knew she was lying. They also both knew Mischkelovitz was gone and never coming back and there was nothing Groves could do to change this, except maybe lie like both their lives depended on it. "I'm sorry, Mischka. I thought... I guess I was wrong."

With a deep breath, Saru informed "Mischkelovitz" that, as innocent as her intentions were, she was not to be in this room. "Then can I speak to my brother for a moment?" she asked. "I promise I'll leave after and I won't come back."

"You may have five minutes," granted Saru.

The semisweet façade faded the moment Saru was gone. "You didn't have to do that," said Petra darkly.

"Yeah, well," said Groves, turning away from her. "You didn't trigger Saru's ganglia so I guess you're not a threat."

"Stay out of my way and that will remain true."

Lorca grunted as he used the table to heave himself back up. "So that's it? You're just gonna stay here and play pretend?"

"It's a clean slate," said Petrellovitz. "It's not pretend."

"These people are on the verge of losing a war against the Klingons."

"Whether they do or not doesn't matter. Humans, Klingons, money, power, love. All of these things are fleeting. Only science is eternal. You got in the way of my science, Gabriel, you and Michael both, with your piddling little power struggles and politics. All I ever wanted to do was pursue my research and everyone's always getting in the way. Not here. Here, I'm free to create a legacy that will stand the test of time. And they'll let me do it, too. Either side, whoever wins, will have a place for me. I'm only sorry I stuck with you as long as I did." She realized now, had she gone through the transporter herself instead of sending him, she could have had this universe months ago. She banged her fist twice on the door and Saru let her out. Out of the five minutes she had been given, she had barely used one.

Lorca could have called after her, tried to convince her with new promises and platitudes, but he knew it was pointless. Petrellovitz was gone and she was never coming back to him. The only reason she had stuck with Lorca to begin with was his promise of unfettered access to whatever research projects she wanted. For years that arrangement had worked for her, but now he could not provide any such access and she had no use for him.

Lorca sat down on Larsson's bed and pressed his face into his hands. Groves watched with wary concern. It was impossible to read the intent of Lorca's face when his expression was covered. Then Lorca shuddered as he inhaled and Groves realized he did not need Lorca's face to know what the former captain was presently feeling.

"I'm sorry," said Groves, and for the first time, he meant it.

"Don't you pity me!" spat Lorca.

Groves sat down opposite Lorca. "Never," he said. He reached under his pillow and pulled out something wrapped in a hand towel. "I think this is yours."

It was a cookie. Not the fortune kind, the regular sort with chocolate chips, purloined from Lorca's dinner tray. Groves had not eaten it, merely tucked it away to save for later.

Sighing, Lorca took the cookie and broke off a morsel. "You know, Saru's ganglia aren't infallible. I never tripped 'em."

"Why would you? You weren't actually a threat to us. I mean, you've done a lot of crap, but in your own way, you were trying to help."

The cookie did not offer the same comfort as its fortune-filled cousin. "I thought I was human cancer."

"Cancer is just cell growth gone awry," said Groves with a shrug. "Perfectly natural and necessary part of life. Anyway, I had to play along. Think about it. If we don't match history closely enough, we'll disappear just like the holo-recording did. History says you died. History also says Emellia lived long enough to record something that no longer exists. Which means..."

Which meant nothing Lorca did for the rest of his life would make a mark in history. It was his destiny to die a forgotten echo of another man, doing nothing, being nothing.

John Allan stepped out from the wall and was confronted by his own disappointment. Lab 26 was empty, exactly as it should have been at this point in history, but some part of him had hoped it would be otherwise.

After twelve years on this assignment, it was hard to let go. He had learned the hard way that history had a way of surprising you and he would have liked one last surprise. A chance to say a real goodbye.

He was still dressed in the Terran uniform he had been wearing at the moment of his exposure as a temporal agent. On some level, the black suited him. Temporal agents were supposed to be like shadows, watching and safeguarding history without being entangled in it, and the uniform made him look the part even if he had failed miserably at being a shadow in the end.

Literally at the end. Twelve years and no one had suspected a thing. At least now he knew why "John Allan" disappeared from the historical record during Discovery's time in the mirror universe. That had always been a question mark with this assignment. Now he knew it was because he had been exposed.

Allan had failed to be a perfect shadow, but he had completed both his mission objectives: first, to guard the scientists Mischkelovitz, progenitors of the research and development of temporal stasis field technology (a crucial advantage in the temporal war and subsequently a banned technology), and second, to bring back the data from Discovery's jaunt in the mirror universe, because on that count, the historical record was severely lacking. Now the future would have a full record of events from someone who had lived them. History had helpfully even preselected the man for the job centuries before his own birth.

With a full copy of Discovery security archives prior to the wipe in his pocket, Allan finally had everything he needed to report in and no further reason to stay here.

So why was this so hard? He touched a finger to Mischkelovitz's desk.

As he wondered this, the transceiver in his dental implant vibrated in alert, signaling the arrival of another agent. A shimmer of black materialized in front of him.

No, not another agent. He stared at his own face in surprise.

They were both wearing the black uniforms of the Terran Empire. For a moment Allan worried he had brought back his mirror counterpart, but something in the other Allan's eyes told him he was looking at himself.

"Hey," they both said at the same time, which was all the confirmation either of them needed to know where they stood.

The second Allan was holding a portable jumper in his hands. These were highly controlled devices typically issued only to transit agents, not active assets, because the danger of such devices falling into the wrong hands was tremendous. "I remember standing where you are," said the second Allan. "Which is why I know it's time for me to give you this." He held out the jumper.

Allan took it, confused. "Why?"

Allan II held up a silver holodisc. "Because of this."

The message was as confusing to Allan as it was miraculous. "Mischka in the winter, okay, but bells and pots...?"

"Null time," supplied Allan II.

"Ah!" It made perfect sense in context. Add a chronitic contaminant to the spore canisters. Allan smiled.

"The destinations are already preset. Here's the Crestian flu for Chaudhuri and the T-nox agent for the spores. Careful not to confuse them. I know you won't, I just had to say it because I remember hearing it. Safe trip."

The first Allan vanished. A second later he walked out from the wall. "You lied," he said, holding up the holodisc. "Where did this come from?"

The other Allan smiled. "The original timeline." He shook his head, overtly pleased for having succeeded in tricking himself so thoroughly. "It was brilliant, really. Do you see how she did it? How we did it?"

"You're not me," said Allan. He had figured it out when he was standing in front of the spore canisters and realized the only way he could have pinpointed the exact date and time she referred to as "the time the lights went out" was if he had lived something that matched what she described, and he hadn't.

There was also no way the recording could exist if they were in a closed loop which had never required the message's creation; like energy, temporal information had to come from somewhere. That meant the loop was not closed.

"No," confirmed the other Allan. "I'm not. I'm an echo from another timeline. A timeline where it took Melly thirty more years to finish Milosz's work and develop the temporal stasis field. That was her great contribution to history. She did it here, too, but thirty years sooner. Passing her own research notes back to herself. End result: no discernible change to the outcome of history."

Allan's eyes teared up because even if Mischkelovitz had not changed her role in history, her fate had been drastically altered and that mattered a great deal to him.

Allan II continued, "I actually tried to do the changes myself, but when I went to make the first one, I saw you doing it instead. Turns out I didn't need to do anything, I just needed to tell you to. The question was, when? Then I realized I just had to scan for the point where the jumper was active twice. This point here. So now, can I have my jumper back?"

Allan considered that.

"Come on," said the other Allan, beckoning with his hand. "It is mine. And they'll retrieve you when you activate your transponder."

Allan wasn't sure if he trusted himself. To him, this felt like his mirror counterpart. "What are you going to use it for?"

"I'm going to give that bastard a piece of my mind."

There was no need to ask what bastard the other Allan was referring to. Allan desperately wanted to give Lorca a piece of his mind, too. This way, it would be like he was, even if he wasn't the one delivering the message personally. He handed the jumper back to the other Allan. "Do me a favor, will you?"

"For you?" smirked the other Allan, because of course he was willing to do a favor for himself. "Anything!"

"Tell him I'll never forgive him for what he did to Melly."

"You got it. Do me a favor and don't tell anyone I exist?" Allan II activated his jumper and was gone.

The Allan who had been born into and participated in this version of the timeline lingered in the lab, wondering how the other version of him could be satisfied with causing this version of events. Lorca alive, Mischkelovitz dead and skinned, three monsters from the mirror universe roaming free in their universe. How could this possibly be an improvement on the original events? He took a moment to compose himself before activating his transponder for remote retrieval.

But then, the other Allan had only intersected with the timeline in this universe briefly. Once to see himself performing the necessary changes, once to deliver the instructions. He had not been hiding on Discovery and watching events unfold in real-time and seen the truth. So far as he knew from his scan of the historical record, Lorca was dead, Mischkelovitz had recovered from an injury caused by her implants, and everything had turned out the same in the end.

That was the information the temporal remnant known as John Allan had happily taken as justification to jump back and accompany Discovery to the mirror universe again. After all, he had a jumper and no one in this timeline knew he existed. Why not take the opportunity to torment the tyrannical Terran captain in the hours before his death? After that, he could go anywhere he wanted in time and, so long as he kept his head down, witness firsthand all of his favorite historical events. It was a time traveler's dream come true.

In the end, neither John Allan truly understood the nuances of time travel. All they could do was act according to the information they had, as they had always been fated to do.

Part 99

#Star Trek #Discovery #Captain Lorca #Gabriel Lorca #fanfiction #fanfic #Katrina Cornwell #Saru #Sylvia Tilly #Admiral Cornwell #Commander Saru #Star Trek Discovery #Mirror Lorca

[rainbowstarbird]

Game, Set, Match-make (Holiday Edition) 2

Pairing: Toshinori/Aizawa, Boku no Hero Academia

Rating: G

Part 2 (Part 1 here) (Also now on Ao3 here)

The end of my disgustingly fluffy holiday fic. Because these superhero dads deserve nice things. Only a teeny tiny bit of angst over Toshinori’s health. Happy Holidays and welcome 2018! Also thanks to @demyrie.

Toshinori opened the door to find Aizawa, dark and stiff on his doorstep, stark against the tiny flakes of snow falling behind him in the bright winter sun. The strangest warmth blossomed in his chest.

“Come in, come in, it’s getting cold out there,” Toshinori blustered, moving aside to wave his guest into the warmth of his modest apartment. He didn’t have many visitors and, seeing his space as Aizawa must, he was suddenly self-conscious about his sparse furniture and bare walls. It looked like nothing more than a safe house.

Aizawa wandered into the living room after discarding his snowy boots, dumping his capture weapon by the door and raking a hand through his hair to dislodge the remaining flakes. His eyes made a quick, almost calculating survey of the room, but if he found it wanting he didn’t mention it.

Toshinori hovered nearby, awkward and stuck, until Aizawa looked up at him and mumbled, “I suppose I should say Merry Christmas.”

“Um, Merry Christmas, Aizawa-san.”

They just stared at each other for a moment, before Toshinori remembered himself and his manners, offering something to drink. “You like coffee in the morning, right?”

Aizawa’s shoulders seemed to soften at that, but he tilted his head curiously. “Yeah, but I didn’t think you drank it?”

“Heh, well, I picked some up on the way home,” Toshinori explained happily, heading toward his small kitchen, “to make up for dragging you out of bed on a Saturday.”

A short wait and some frighteningly domestic clattering from the kitchen later, Toshinori returned with a steaming cup and a shy smile.

They settled in quietly to do some grading, and Toshinori could swear he could hear every rustle of paper and click of his pen. Was this really doing what he promised? What more could he do  to create a festive atmosphere without arousing Aizawa’s suspicions.

It didn’t help that Aizawa seemed more distant than usual — almost high-strung for the usually blunt and low-energy man. Was he miserable? Was Toshinori helping to alleviate his solitude or had he just ruined Aizawa’s perfectly suitable plans for his break?

Eventually, his mind got caught up in the papers he was grading, and when he leaned over to ask Aizawa for help deciphering Deku’s furious handwriting, they both ended up laughing and trading quips about the students’ papers and the staggered progress of the class.

As they got closer to the bottom of the stack of assignments, the awkwardness crept back in. Should he say something? Invite Aizawa to stick around, have a drink? Or would that be too much? He didn’t want the day to end so soon — for selfish reasons? — but he hadn’t really planned this far ahead. Apparently he was rusty at altruism, but it was all nice so far …

Finally, the last of the papers were finished, and Toshinori stretched out his back, forcibly casual. “Thank you so much for your help, Aizawa-san. You can, ah … you can get going now if you have other plans for tonight.”

Aizawa chuckled. “All my plans for tonight revolve around napping and not being snowed in. Must not be as glamorous as what All Might gets up to on Christmas.”

Toshinori laughed and demured.

“I suppose I have always spent the day at a function or charity event or something similar, but obviously this year is a little different. It’s strange to have no commitments.” Toshinori paused, thoughtful. “I suppose I miss having a way to contribute to the public around this time.”

He felt vulnerable, suddenly, under Aizawa’s eyes. That had been too much to share, too personal. He stuttered and tried to backtrack. “U-um, and the parties, those were always nice. The, er, the annual children’s benefit ball, of course …”

Aizawa looked at him, hard, for a moment that stretched long enough for Toshinori to stutter the start of several words, before asking, “Have you ever had a holiday for you? Done something for Toshinori and not All Might?”

Toshinori coughed a few times, startled both at the use of his name and at the thought. He’d never really thought of it before.

“Well, maybe before I became a pro hero … but after that, there was always so much good I could do. I could bring attention to important causes and charities. I could comfort sick children and be visible and give people hope.” He shrugged, looking down at his clasped hands. “It’s a different way of fighting villains, but it’s a good way too.”

Aizawa was still staring. His sharp eyes were somehow softer than Toshinori was used to, but his mouth thinned out in a fine line. His nerves flared, and he had to stop himself from squeezing at his own hands. Had he said something wrong?

“Well,” Aizawa began with an annoyed grunt, sitting back and putting his foot on the table, “if you can’t be All Might today, what does Toshinori want out of Christmas?”

Toshinori didn’t know why he was blushing, and he certainly didn’t know what he wanted. But Aizawa’s silent gaze was unwavering, and he had to say something.

“I suppose I would still want to see people, see them being happy and safe. To be among them. Unrecognized, of course.” He smiled, imagining it. “Maybe see the lights. The snow on the trees. Even cheat and have a treat Recovery Girl would scold me for, like a hot chocolate.”

He came back to the present, startled at the strange look on Aizawa’s face, and coughed a bit, face falling.

“Perhaps … I’ll have to do that some year.”

***

The air stilled between them in the bare apartment, and Aizawa was abruptly aware of what he wasn’t saying, of what the staff only spoke of in sideways hints — there was a very real possibility there wouldn’t be another year, and Toshinori was well aware of it. Prepared for it, even, if the way he scrupulously hid all evidence of his bloody coughs and refused all concern was any indication. Fuck that.

“Why not this year?” He asked, before he realized he was going to, but his tactical mind was firming up the plan before he finished the question. This ridiculous man had obviously never learned to take care of himself during those years as All Might. Martyrdom of that level was the height of irrationality. If self-indulgence didn’t come naturally to him, maybe a demonstration would help.

After all, Aizawa was an excellent teacher.

Setting aside questions of motive and pursuing a plan was second nature to Aizawa, so he cut through Toshinori’s slightly panicked spluttering with ease:

“There’s some kind of Christmas market in the park every year. We could go. Tonight.”

Toshinori coughed and blushed, fierce and immediate. Aizawa politely ignored it.

“You really don’t have to … I mean, that’s not how you planned to … Er—”

He cut in, simply. “Are you sure you wouldn’t mind braving the cold?”

“I think two pro heroes can handle a little chill,” came the reluctant chuckle, hand to the back of his neck. He was bending, considering. From what Aizawa could see through the window behind the older hero, the snow was still light and barely stirred by the wind in the fading light. “Yes, that would be … I would like that very much, Aizawa-san. Thank you.”

The man was so solemn and genuine, Aizawa had to look away. He rose, determined to get going lest Toshinori’s martyr complex activate again and he didn’t have the energy to convince him twice. Gathering his capture weapon and pulling gloves out of some hidden pocket, Aizawa ordered over his shoulder:

“Put on some actual winter clothes, please. I don’t want to be responsible for All Might coming down with the flu.”

His voice was flat, clearly indicating the hassle he wanted to avoid if Toshinori got sick, but he thought he caught the beginnings of a smile on Toshinori’s face as he hurriedly slipped into the hall closet.

“Thank you, my responsible friend!”

When he met Aizawa by the door after a bit of noisy tussling in the closet, he was wearing a thick blue coat that actually fit him (probably only because All Might had never needed winter gear), with a ridiculously plush red scarf and a matching hat covering all but his long nose and the blue flash of his dark eyes. Cute.

Aizawa grumbled a little to mask his too-soft reaction, but held the door open for Toshinori and they were off.

***

What was he doing?

Here Aizawa was offering to go out and be social, giving him an almost suspiciously easy way to help him. He absolutely could not refuse in good conscience and still look Mic and Midnight in the eye when school started. Besides, it was his ideal Christmas, right? It sounded nice, no matter how nervous it made him.

The park would be beautiful in the dark, lights reflecting off the dusting of snow. Almost as beautiful as Aizawa in the snow, his treacherous mind supplied, and he had to navigate by sound for the next few minutes, shutting his eyes tightly so more parts of himself wouldn’t go rogue and linger too long or too close to the younger hero.

They walk side by side the few blocks to the park, as the sun set behind them, in a comfortable silence. The air was crisp and both mens’ breath puffed out visibly, a few soft flakes falling in their path. Their footsteps made a gentle crunching sound that echoed in the evening silence.

They saw the twinkling lights first, then heard the quiet chatter of people milling and the occasional shrills of children’s laughter. The park was dense with tall, thick trees, decked with white and red lights. The falling snow created a glowing halo of color around each one. A smattering of stalls were set up selling winter crafts, Western Christmas kitsch, toys and sweets. At the far end of the park, they could make out a tangle of people ice skating on a temporary rink.

“Come on,” Aizawa urged, sinking further into the folds of the weapon looped around his neck. “Let’s get something warm to drink.”

Toshinori was still craning his head around, taking in the happy scene, as Aizawa stepped over to a nearby booth and came back with two steaming cups. Toshinori laughed a soft thanks when he brought the warm cup close to his face and smelled rich hot chocolate, and was unsurprised to see Aizawa eagerly downing another bitter coffee despite the late hour.

They wandered, taking in the lights and the people. The grandparents with tiny children between them, one hand for each. The older kids teasing each other and laughing over plates of vibrant sweets. Families and couples milling with arms wrapped around shoulders and bright packages.

Aizawa gestured to a bench as they passed, and they sat, watching a group of kids about the same age as Class 1-A throw snow at each other with bright eyes and pink cheeks.

Toshinori savored the sweet chocolate and its warmth in careful little sips, studiously ignoring the way the cold set off familiar aches in this sharp, skinny body. He watched the kids play, tracked a young couple as they built up the courage to hold hands, watched the snow flutter past the lights of a nearby stall. Aizawa was a steady, warm weight beside him. He couldn’t help the syrup-sweet smile or the small hum that filled his chest.

When Aizawa looked over at the spectacle he was surely making of himself, Toshinori glanced at him warmly and then back out on the scene before them.

“It’s just, everyone is so … peaceful.”

***

When Aizawa responded, it was nothing more than a low rumble.

“It wasn’t like this. Before.” Before heroes. Before you. “It’s good to remember what we’re fighting for. What the students will be fighting for.”

Toshinori looked wistful beside him, far away. “I hope they get to experience it, too. Not just fight for it.”

Heroes worked hard to protect the public, to give them safety and peace — none more so than All Might — but their lives were rarely anything like peaceful. All Might, no, Toshinori deserved to experience that same peace he sacrificed so much to build. Had he ever been able to? Aizawa had to admit, he hadn’t experienced it much himself, but he also wasn’t much of a social person. Midnight was right: They were very different, and yet he and Toshinori complimented each other in interesting ways. He nodded, looking out over the crowd.

“We do our best to teach them how to balance it all. How to take care of themselves. I just hope they can do better than we did. That’s all.”

“Yes,” Toshinori agreed fervently. They sat with that thought for a moment, before Toshinori roused himself with a hoarse little laugh. “Look at us, morbid old men. Maybe we’re not so great at this Christmas thing after all.”

Aizawa watched the lights catch in Toshinori’s eyes, the snow pile softly on the shoulders of his coat, the elegant lines of his long fingers as they clutched the little paper cup. He swayed in just a little closer.

“No,” he rumbled. “I think we’re doing just fine.”

Toshinori smiled, dazzlingly bright and happy, and Aizawa was struck by the sudden yearning to see him that way much more often.

***

Toshinori smiled helplessly, and he knew he must look like a fool, but his heart was full to bursting with the little pleasures of the day. Not least of which was Aizawa’s steady, dark presence and the beginnings of an answering smile on the usually stoic man’s face.

Snowflakes were caught in Aizawa’s dark hair and glittering from the white lights, like so many stars in a black sky. Like gentle lights in a dense birch forest. Like the bright, sparking feeling of holding hands.

Toshinori raised his hand, to wipe the snow away or maybe just to touch, but froze there with his glove barely touching the thick hair by Aizawa’s cheek.

Time froze, though snow continued to fall, a million miles away. He was caught staring at the sharp line of his nose, trying to convince himself to put his hand down and apologize for taking liberties, when Aizawa leaned forward and grabbed his scarf without warning, pulling him in to press their lips together.

It was a brief kiss. Just fleeting impressions: soft, warm lips, the tastes of rich chocolate and dark coffee. And then it was over, but the warmth it left in its wake seemed to fill Toshinori’s entire scar-crossed chest.

When Aizawa drew back, Toshinori sat still and blinking for a long moment. Then, finally, he dropped his wayward hand and broke out in a huge, pleased grin. It felt like the sun itself was shining through his face, all cold forgotten.

Aizawa, for his part, snorted and elbowed him carefully in the side, grumbling a low “shut up.”

But Toshinori laughed, that impossibly warm feeling still humming in his chest, and when he stood and offered Aizawa a hand up, the younger man took it with a smile of his own.

They made their back toward Toshinori’s apartment, walking close enough to brush shoulders with every other step. Toshinori started humming and couldn’t stop, some amalgamation of silly English carols, while Aizawa made suitably exaggerated grumpy faces at his choices. Just before they turned on Toshinori’s street, Aizawa grabbed his wrist and gave it a little squeeze.

It was surprisingly easy. It was nothing he’d ever imagined for himself. It was wonderful.

#bnha #erasermight #toshinori #aizawa #boku no hero #eraserhead #all might #otp: scarecrow man and grumpy cat #they are in love #game set match-make #holiday edition #rae writes #this is even more ridiculously fluffy than the first part #hope you enjoy

[mirrorfurniturethoughtsbykynan]

5 Laws Anyone Working In Mirrored Chest Of Drawers Interiors Invogue Should Know

15 Style Features Of A Dream Kitchen area

All developers and house owners have their suggestions about what makes a great kitchen, yet throughout my years in the design globe, I've concerned count on several best approaches for developing an effective, functional, gorgeous room. The enhancement of any among these things would dramatically raise the charm of an area. Combine them all, as well as you would certainly have one incredible desire kitchen.

1. Appropriate lighting. Integrating different sorts of lighting in any area is fundamental, yet it's specifically useful in the cooking area. A wealth of all-natural light is amazing, yet kitchens likewise need practical resources of fabricated light: ambient illumination to create a total radiance, job illumination to brighten offices and also accent lighting to highlight functions in the area.

Brightening on a budget: Not prepared for an illumination overhaul? Beginning by replacing your old bulbs with LEDs-- they last much longer, are extra energy effective and also are available in amazing, cozy as well as neutral colour temperatures. Undermounted LED rope lighting, or puck lights are additionally budget-friendly choices for enlightening areas where cupboards cast darkness.

2. Abundant seating. Among the biggest requests I hear as an interior designer is a requirement for more guest seating. Individuals have a tendency to gather in cooking areas, so see to it there is ample space for close friends to collect in areas that will not disrupt the performance of your prep space.

Round tables are a wonderful way to give less complicated website traffic circulation and also can usually seat 4 to 6 individuals. Drop-leaf or extendable tables give you flexibility. They can be pushed versus the wall out of the way when not being used or gotten used to produce extra seating for enjoyable visitors. This is a great solution for a house that does not have an official dining-room.

3. Area. A big island with great deals of counter room as well as seating offers space for collaboration. Routine tasks such as paying costs, sorting through mail, doing homework or whipping up dinner can be implemented without initial needing to move things around to make area. Having this clear surface area also has a mental impact that makes the residence appear clean even if other areas of the residence are haphazard or covered with stacks of things.

No space for an island? Right here are a couple of space-saving pointers:

When every square inch counts, don't compromise area for the small stuff. Mount your paper towel owner to obtain it up as well as off the beaten track. Rather than making use of a knife block, shop cutlery on the wall surface utilizing a magnetic strip. Discover a reducing board that fits over your sink or cooktop to make sure that beneficial counter room does not go to waste.

Fold-down workstation surfaces are the Murphy bed of the cooking area. They offer you added area when you require it and also are out of the method when you don't. They're also fairly low-cost and easy to mount.

Or aim to our next essential cooking area device: the movable workstation.

4. Movable workstation. An island on wheels, and even a bar cart, is terrific for cooking and enjoyable. It offers more storage space and a flexible area for prepping and serving.

What to look for: Stainless steel is wonderful due to the fact that it's durable and also very easy to clean, or go with the a lot more cost effective option, butcher block, for a different appearance and also really feels. When it involves size, ensure you have about 36 inches in between the edge of the island and also bordering countertops so as not to hamper traffic flow. Relying on your preference, you can go with counter elevation or bar elevation. Take note of what's most comfy prior to you go out shopping.

5. Organised cabinets. Split as well as dominate! Conserve your time as well as sanity by maintaining points neat and simple to locate. Inserts and also dividers add structure to drawers where loosened products have a tendency to accumulate. Having actually designated areas for all probabilities and also ends will certainly assist you avoid overflow.

When buying organisers, keep in mind very first to measure your drawers. Avoid affordable plastic choices that warp in time, as well as rather, look for something equally as sturdy as the kitchen cabinetry.

Tool storage space is essential. It's far better (and cleaner) to nicely put away devices than to have an arrangement of spatulas sitting out on the counter.

Superficial flavor storage allows you to quickly see what you have as opposed to messing up with a congested cluster of containers. Perk points if you move your seasonings from their initial product packaging right into matching containers.

Pile cooking sheets and also cutting boards up and down in deep drawers (if you have them) or narrow cabinets for easier accessibility. Divider panels will keep them upright. Do not fail to remember to specify different cutting boards for produce, meats and also bread.

Organisation for food storage space containers always appears to be an afterthought (as well as one of the messiest parts of many kitchen areas). The amount of times have you gotten to for an item of Tupperware just to locate its equivalent lid has vanished? Closets consume loose covers, so maintain them with each other. We choose glass storage for food as it is microwaveable and stays in good condition longer.

6. Pot as well as frying pan (and cover) organisation. If you can order a pot or frying pan as well as its lid without shuffling the remainder of your cookware around, you're gold. Hanging them from hooks is a great method to achieve this accomplishment and make effective use of upright room.

7. Pullout corner storage. Smart cupboard organisers supply easier ease of access and aid increase the otherwise dead space where your Tupperware covers are probably concealing.

You can discover a multitude of products such as this online or through your neighborhood cabinetry firm, and also the majority of corner functions can be retrofitted to your existing kitchen cabinetry.

8. Devoted appliance storage space. Covert storage space for little home appliances liberates counter room for extra useful usages.

When developing your cooking area or renovation closets, consider adding a home appliance garage to keep your devices concealed. House owners also can transform an existing office by setting up pullout racks that use fast as well as very easy accessibility to devices when you require them. Whatever you do, designate a designated room for each device, so they don't wind up awkwardly stacked on top of the refrigerator or out on the counter.

9. Sturdy equipment. Protect your closets with hardware. In time, oil from hands can wear down the finish and also filthy up or damage the paint. Avoid unneeded wear as well as tear with sleek pulls or knobs that will certainly expand the life of your kitchen cabinetry. Try to find a strong metal or something durable with significant weight. It will certainly benefit you-- as well as your closets-- in the lengthy run.

10. Citrus. When life provides you lemons, put them to work. Whether you're adding a little enthusiasm to your dish, spraying up a rejuvenating drink, packing up on vitamin C or just cleaning up the kitchen area, citrus is an useful thing to carry hand (plus, it shows well as a wonderful splash of colour).

Lemons and also limes are fantastic for organic garbage disposal cleaning. Running the skins through water helps to cleanse the blades, as well as the oils freshen up the scent. You can also prepare your organic cleaning option with lemon, sodium bicarbonate and also vinegar-- avoid marble kitchen counters. The acid can create discoloration and also etching.

11. Hand Towels. Usage ornamental linen towels to lower waste by making use of fewer paper towels. Not just are cloth towels extra eco-friendly, yet they additionally conserve you loan and also include a little beauty to the cooking area.

Along with your beautiful tea towels as well as cloth napkins, you'll wish to maintain a pile of cleansing towels or microfiber fabrics accessible, so they're all set to grab when you require them. It will certainly be much less excruciating to pass up the benefit of paper towels if you're well-stocked for the following mess.

12. A clear catch-all space. Every day life makes it impossible to have an arranged residence 24/7. Documents, tricks, footwear, canteen, bags and various other various items tend to accumulate quickly in particular locations. Stay clear of surface mess by giving each of your things an assigned residence. Keys, mail, phone chargers and pens need to all have a devoted touchdown spot, whether it's a full-fledged, integrated command centre, the rear of a cabinet or ordered area inside a storage room.

13. Confined garbage as well as recycling. Garbage can take up floor room, can smell poor and give mayhem for family pets. Concealed storage is ideal, but if you do not have that choice, at the very least make certain your containers have lids. Keeping bins and bags together makes it easy to separate waste and recyclables.

Closets can be retrofitted to house custom-made pullout containers, however if you're looking for a simple remedy, inspect out favorite merchants like The Container Store or Ikea for a range of bins that will work to fit your existing space.

14. Coffee terminal. Life is just a little less complicated when you have whatever you require in one spot. If you can find a means to construct it in or enclose it, also much better. While a full-on coffee bar isn't always practical, having all your cafe accoutrements-- coffee manufacturer, grinder, beans or premises, filters, cups, sugar-- in one devoted location will certainly streamline your early morning regimen.

15. Character. Whether it's fun, colourful accessories or a stunning item of art work, a cooking area ought to have an inviting atmosphere that enables convenience, relaxation and great times.

Play up your house's fascinating architectural details. If you have attractive old glass-front cupboards, show off some vibrant bowls or maybe some vintage glasses. Indulge in little accents, such as quirky doorknobs or vintage drape tiebacks. These tiny information include fun, unforeseen style and also individuality.

[gillianfoster]

hey @basinhounds help me out here

Sometimes Eddie felt like whoever assigned roommates in his dorm had a real fucking sense of humor - or at least they must have thought they did. Assigning him to live with Richie Tozier was practically halfway to a sitcom just by the nature of it all. Richie left his shit everywhere, and Eddie got too anxious to function if he let his clothes get that wrinkled or his things get that... Everywhere. It practically looked like there was a tape line divider down the middle of their room, just because Richie knew better than to let his mess cross into Eddie’s section of the room. They bickered like an old married couple over everything from pizza toppings to attractive actors. By all accounts, they should have hated each other.

Except it turned out they liked a lot the same music, and mostly the same movies, and that they actually liked each other, a lot, under all the arguing. Richie had ended up being Eddie’s best friend, really - which only added to how ridiculous it all was from Eddie’s perspective.

Part of this was the fact that Eddie was, frankly, too gay to function, and Richie fit Eddie’s list of ideal boyfriend characteristics pretty much to a T. He was tall and funny (not that Eddie would ever tell him that to his face), he had dark curly hair and big thick-rimmed glasses, and he was sort of an amateur musician. Every time Eddie found out something else about him, caught him painting his nails for fun or wearing some ridiculous vintage t-shirt with a shitty pun, he was overwhelmed again by how unbelievably stereotypically hard he’d fallen for his shitty college roommate. It wasn’t even like Richie was necessarily straight - Eddie was pretty sure he was bi - it was just that he was also pretty sure Richie would never even consider dating him.

The real problem was that Richie should have been an asshole, by all accounts - but he wasn’t. Eddie had seen him bend down to pet any dog that crossed his path. He saw the twitch of insecurity in Richie’s smile whenever he told a joke and waited for someone to laugh, or when he played a song on his guitar for the first time.

Richie Tozier was, in all his imperfections, practically perfect.

These were the sorts of things Eddie groaned into the phone at Stan whenever he could be alone in the room, certain that Richie was somewhere else was on campus.

“And he’s nice! And hot! That’s the worst part!”

“Why do I have to suffer through this again? Isn’t it someone else’s turn?”

“Stan, I need you to understand.”

“All I understand is that it sounds like he’d annoy the hell out of me. I’m sure if you like him, he’s great, and we’d get along, but from a distance I just kind of want to punch him.”

“How could you say that?”

Stan sighed. “Again. Why aren’t you talking to Bev about this?”

“Bev knows him! They went to high school together or something. They probably used to make out under the bleachers. And that’s not like, a comment, I’m just saying, they probably did.”

“I think you just like to torture yourself, Eddie. And you’re being ridiculous. This guy is the farthest thing from cool-”

“I never said he was cool! I have not stooped that low.”

Stan sighed again - this time really seeming to go for an Olympic medal in exasperation. “Eddie. Either request a roommate change or do something about the situation, I’m always going to give you the same advice.”

“I don’t need advice, I just want someone to listen to me. I can’t talk to Richie, Bill’s always busy with Mike and in another time zone, I can’t talk to Bev, and Ben never answers his phone in the library, so you’re what I’ve got here, Stan.”

“Are you done now, then? Can I be free?”

“...Yes, fine. For now.”

“Thank you.” Eddie’s only response was a dial tone, then, and he put his phone down and rolled over, groaning into his pillows.

The real problem with living with the boy you were in love with was the constant need to look at least presentable. It was only about five minutes of stressing out over Richie’s general existence before Eddie felt the need to go neaten up in a mirror again, making sure he didn’t look as ridiculous as he felt.

Richie wasn’t even supposed to get back until later that night - he had some kind of rehearsal for a show or the comedy club he was a part of - but Eddie felt like he could never be too careful.

Eddie had found a distraction in his homework by the time he got the text from his mother.

I need to speak to you. Call me when you can.

Texts like that, from Sonia Kaspbrak, were never good news. Literally never. Eddie was still shocked that he’d managed to escape all the way to New York for college and that his mom hadn’t come chasing after him - every time she called or tried to talk to him, he was terrified that she’d tell him she was going to stop supporting him at all (not that her pittance of an allowance for him did much more than cover some meals), or that she’d really figured out something that would make her disown him entirely. Then again, maybe either of those things would be a relief at this point.

Since Richie still wasn’t back, and Eddie knew the longer he put off the phone call, the worse things would get and the more stressed out he would feel, so he picked up the phone to call his mom back.

“Hey, mom.”

“Eddie. I have some news. You may want to sit down.”

Eddie looked at his desk, furrowed his brow. “Yes, I’m sitting down. What is it?”

“Your great aunt Joyce is getting married.”

“Oh, I’m-” Eddie was fully prepared to give his condolences because he was fully prepared for his mother to tell him his great aunt had died. Instead, he suddenly found he had to hold back laughter. He paused. “Right. I mean. Good for her?”

“She should hardly be getting married at her age! It’ll be the death of her.”

Eddie had to hold the phone away, then, just to laugh. He brought it back to his ear. “Right. Well. I can send her a present or something, right? Maybe some heart medication.”

“Edward Kaspbrak!” Eddie winced at his mother’s use of his full name. “You’ve got to come home for the wedding. And don’t talk about your great aunt that way. You’ll bring her something in person. Something nice.”

“Okay. Right. Of course. Maybe a... Blender?”

There was a long pause, and Eddie held his breath, waiting to be scolded again. “...That’ll be fine. There’s one on the registry. You’ll have to drive home next weekend. There’s been hardly any planning at all. It’s all some kind of whirlwind romance.”

Eddie had trouble imagining his great aunt getting into a whirlwind anything without breaking a bone, but apparently she’d managed. For a moment he felt a little pathetic that his 84 year old great aunt could get a boyfriend and he couldn’t, but then he pulled it together. “Right. Next weekend. Well I can do that, I don’t have class on Friday, so. I can come home for the weekend. I’ll drive down. Should I... Bring someone?”

“Would you bring a nice girl?”

Another wince. Eddie’s mother had known he was gay since before he left for college - but she never seemed to give up hope that he’d get over it. “Not really, mommy. I could bring a nice boy?”

“Try not to shock the whole family, will you? And make sure they’re clean.”

With that, apparently Eddie had ended the conversation, because his mother had hung up on him. Eddie sighed and rubbed at his forehead.

Eddie would rather stick himself with a needle than go home on his own - and he used testosterone patches for a reason. Still, his options for boys to take were limited. Stan would have had to fly up, and so would Bill or Mike. Ben went to the same college, but he probably had work that weekend, since he took as many shifts at the library as he could. Bev could be funny, just because Eddie had a feeling his mother would hate her more than any boy Eddie could have brought - well. Except maybe Richie. And that’s the thing, right, was that Richie would probably say yes. He’d be funny and keep Eddie company and they’d both have a good time. Except for that to happen, Eddie would actually have to muster up the courage to ask, which was never going to happen.

He was still dividing his time between his crisis and his homework when the door flew open and Richie finally came back.

“Eds! What a day.” He came over and kissed Eddie on the cheek, leaning over his chair, and Eddie swatted him off, smiling.

“What was so exciting about your day?”

“Mm, nothing, just long. Glad to be back again in home sweet dorm room. What about you? Did you go out and have thrilling adventures while I was gone before you came back to your homework?” Richie went over to his own bed and kicked off his Converse to lay down. He propped himself up on an elbow to keep looking at Eddie while they talked.

“Not really. I talked to Stan.” And my mom told me I had to come home for a wedding and I would pretty much do anything if you would come with me, he thought but didn’t say.

“Right. He’s the one in... Atlanta?”

Eddie smiled. “That’s the one.”

“See the effort I put in for you, Eds? And you don’t even appreciate it.”

“You’re such a loser,” Eddie muttered in response - but he couldn’t wipe the smile from his face either.

If Richie was home, it was starting to get late - and a look at Eddie’s phone told him that was true. He could finish his homework in the morning. He picked up his pajamas and went into the bathroom to change. Richie didn’t seem to have any issue changing in their room standing by the closet if he needed to, but Eddie still felt strange about it.

When he came back to their room, he kept his binder carefully tucked in with the rest of his clothes - not because he didn’t want Richie to see it, but because with Richie’s things being the way they were, they’d gotten their binders confused more than once, and found that they very much did not wear the same size.

Eddie did wonder sometimes if that was why he and Richie had been assigned to room together - out of some strange initiative or concern that they’d both be bullied - but if that was the case, he couldn’t even really stay mad about it. He was too glad to have met Richie.

After putting his clothes away, he turned off his desk lamp and laid down, then turned to Richie in the dim light of Richie’s side of the room. “You said you and Bev went to high school together, right? So how did you two like. Meet?”

Richie laughs. “Shit. It sounds a lot, like. Cooler than it was. We used to smoke together behind the bleachers. Cause, you know, everyone knows it’s fucking terrible for you now, so no one really does it as much anymore except like art students in college, but she used to steal her dad’s cigarettes, and I would bum off my mom, and we would skip classes to smoke together. We also both had pretty shitty parents, I’m sure that helped. So we’d talk and smoke and I’d try and be her wingman with all the girls she had a thing for - not that she needed my help, mostly I just made an asshole out of myself but she still likes me anyways, so.”

Eddie hums, but then blushes, because of course Stan was right, and he’s an idiot. “She seems cool.”

“Bev? She is cool. Way cooler than me, but I’m a fucking loser. She just used to get shit where we went to school because we grew up in the middle of fucking nowhere. Assholes couldn’t decide if she was a slut or a lesbian - which, neither, she dated like one boy and two girls. And not like it was any of their business either way.”

“Yeah. Me and Stan and our other friends were so in the middle of nowhere our biggest bully still had a fucking mullet in the 2010s, so.”

Richie laughed, the sound loud in the otherwise quiet room, and Eddie smiled into the darkness. “Wow. Yeah, that’s pretty incredible.”

Eddie yawned and snuggled further into his blankets. Every night living with Richie felt like a sleepover sometimes - more often than not they stayed up later than they should have, just talking. “I should probably get some sleep. You going out early tomorrow?”

“Nope. Thursday, remember? You, me, Ben and Bev can get breakfast tomorrow if you want.”

“Oh, yeah. Sounds good.”

It was surprisingly easy to fall asleep after talking to Richie as long as he turned to face the wall and didn’t think too much about Richie being able to watch him.

He woke in the morning, like he always did, a little before Richie and twenty times less awake. Neither he nor Richie were morning people, but Eddie was particularly murderous before he had coffee and food, while Richie was mostly just quieter and sort of bleary in the mornings.

While Eddie was still in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, Richie joined him at the next sink. Richie’s left elbow brushed Eddie’s right, and they glanced at each other in companionable and sleepy silence.

Richie came back to the room dressed, and they both got ready and went down to the dining hall to meet Ben and Bev after exchanging some texts.

Once in the dining hall, they both went straight for the waffle makers - fortunately there were two. Richie seemed to only ever eat desert-based foods for breakfast, because he said it was all he could do to get himself to eat breakfast. Eddie just enjoyed the opportunity to finally eat whatever he wanted for breakfast without his mom being a complete weirdo about it. When their trays were filled with food, they both paid for their food and found a table. Bev and Ben joined them only shortly after - Eddie had fortunately already finished his first coffee by then.

“Hey, guys!” Ben said, smiling at them. Bev waved at them after she set down her tray, but already had a cinnamon roll in her mouth that she’d taken a bite out of.

“Hey. How are you guys?” Eddie asked.

“Tired as ever,” Bev responded, sitting down.

“Mood,” Richie said, and Eddie snorted at him.

They mostly ate quietly, and eventually Richie excused himself to go and get some more syrup for his waffle, to add to the already ungodly amount.

“Hey, Bev,” Eddie said quietly.

“Mm?”

“Could I, um. Ask you something?”

“I guess, sure.”

“Right, well, my mom told me I have to come home for this wedding next weekend and I was kind of wondering-”

“She hates weddings, Eddie,” Ben said, and Bev gave him a look. “Well you do.”

Bev rolled her eyes. “Go ahead, Eddie.”

“Well I did think of asking you, it’s just that I would rather take a guy, right, so I was wondering if you like... thought that Richie would say yes to going with me.”

“If I’d say yes to what, Eds?”

Shit. Eddie froze, and turned to look up at Richie. He could see Bev’s grin from the corner of his eye, and Ben looked ready to laugh, too.

I hate you both, he mouthed to them, and then he turned fully to Richie, who was standing behind his chair. “Right. Well. My great aunt is getting married, and my mom is making me go home for the wedding, but she said I should bring someone, so I. Thought maybe I’d ask you to come.”

Richie grinned. “You’re really asking me to come to a wedding with you?” Eddie nodded. “Well of course I will, Eddie Spaghetti!”

Leaning down, Richie ruffled Eddie’s hair, and Eddie swatted him away. “It is way too early in the morning for any of that, asshole.”

“I can’t help myself, I’m too excited. Getting asked to a wedding! By my very own Eds. It’s more than I ever dreamed.” Richie swooned and ended up sticking his elbow in Eddie’s leftover syrup, and Ben, Bev, and Eddie all laughed at him.

Eddie still grabbed Richie’s arm and wiped the syrup off with a wet napkin. “You’re such a dumbass.”

“Only for you,” Richie said with a wink.

Eddie rolled his eyes, and ignored the looks Ben and Bev were giving him.

They got all the details settled later that night - that the wedding was not this weekend but next, that Eddie would drive, that they would both need suits.

That weekend, the week before the wedding, found them tooling around the discount rack at a men’s store, looking for something for either of them that wouldn’t leave them totally broke.

“Do I have to wear a tie? Because I’ll do it for you, Eds, but I won’t like it.”

Eddie looked over to see Richie holding up a couple of tie options. “Let’s just get ties at a thrift store. And you can get one with some ridiculous pattern to make yourself feel better and keep up your pattern of generally tragic outfits.”

“Says the man that wears rainbow short-shorts,” Richie replied with raised eyebrows.

“I know you like my shorts, you can’t shame me for them in this store, I know better than that.”

Richie laughed, but he looked down, and Eddie knew he was right.

“Anyways. We’re here for suits. We can coordinate ties and shit once we actually have the suits.”

Nodding, Richie slung an arm around Eddie and pulled him back to the discount suit rack.

They did actually manage to find suits. Eddie ended up with one that was a nice, dark, fall red. Richie’s was a nice deep blue that looked good next to Eddie’s shade of red. They could also easily get ties to match the other’s suit, and they could both wear black shoes, all of which Eddie relayed to Richie as they left the store.

Neither of their suits fit perfectly, but they fit well enough, and neither of them really had the money for alterations.

They were at the thrift store, with Richie holding up a Space Jam tie and waggling his eyebrows at Eddie, when Eddie’s mom called again.

“Mom? Hi.”

“Eddie, you’re going to dress up for the wedding, aren’t you? And make sure you bring that gift. Have you got everything settled? It’s so bad for your health to let all this go to the last minute, you know that, don’t you?”

“Mommy, I’ve already got a suit, and I know who I’m bringing, I just have to buy the gift.”

“Is that your mom?” Richie asks. “Tell her I said hi.”

Eddie shakes his head, but his mom already asks, “Oh, Eddie, who’s that?”

Here’s the thing. When Sonia let Eddie go to college, her one requirement was that Eddie not room with another boy - for several reasons. She has no idea that Eddie agreed to room with anyone, let alone Richie. They’ve only ever talked when Richie was out of the room.

“Oh, that’s my uh. Boyfriend?”

He realized what he’d done as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but it was too late, then. Richie’s eyebrows shot up, and Eddie closed his eyes to try and block out the expression.

“Oh. You are bringing a boy, then.”

“Yes, mommy.”

“...Make sure he dresses up, too. I won’t have you bringing some mess into the wedding.”

His mother hung up, and Eddie noted in passing that she never seemed to say goodbye anymore. Then he opened his eyes.

“So did I miss something?” Richie asked. He was grinning.

Eddie exhaled in one long breath, and felt like his soul also left his body. “My mom doesn’t know I live with you, and I’m bringing you to the wedding anyways, so I was thinking date? But then that just sort of came out. I’m sorry.”

“I did think you’d have taken me to dinner first, Eds,” Richie said with a wink. Then, almost like it didn’t matter at all, he picked up a tie and held it in front of Eddie’s face. “I feel like if you don’t let me get this pineapple tie, I’m actually going to die.”

“Was that supposed to rhyme?” Eddie said, managing to joke back, somehow.

“No, actually, now I feel like a dipshit. Can I get the tie anyways?”

“I mean, you can get it, but you’re not wearing it to the wedding. Here.” Eddie picked up a red paisley tie, and kept digging until he found a blue paisley one that didn’t clash horribly. “I get the blue paisley and I match you, you get the red paisley, you get a pattern and I get the peace of mind that we’re sort of coordinated. Compromise?”

“Alright, alright. I’m getting the Space Jam one, though, you can’t stop me.”

“I never thought I could, Rich.”

Eddie was grateful for the distraction Richie seemed glad to provide, and for the fact that they just seemed to have moved on.

It didn’t come up again until the night before they were supposed to leave, while they were both lying in their beds, the moonlight from the window the only light left.

“Okay so, genuine question, I’m not trying to be an asshole,” Richie began.

Eddie turned over in bed to look at him. He could only see parts of Richie’s face, his eyes shining in the slats of light that their blinds allowed. “Okay. What is it?”

“Am I actually supposed to pretend we’re boyfriends at this wedding?”

Caught off-guard, Eddie blushed a little, and was glad for the dark. “Oh. Uh. I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess my mom thinks we are now? On accident? So it depends on how you want to handle that.”

Richie shrugged. “I mean, you haven’t talked a lot about your mom.”

“...Right. Well. Yeah. Uh. She was sort of shitty, when I was a kid. Not about like. Me being trans, just about me being gay - I don’t know, maybe it’s some combination of the two? Mostly she just didn’t want me to go anywhere or be around anyone. It was like she thought I would. Get contaminated or something. My dad died when I was a kid, I guess it triggered something for her, and she was always afraid I was going to get sick - I sort of got afraid of it, too.” Eddie realized he’d started to overshare. “Uh. Just in the context of the wedding, she wanted me to bring a girl. I told her I wouldn’t. She told me to make sure that I at least brought someone like. Presentable, basically. She used the word clean. Because she always does.”

Richie laughed, then, and Eddie looked over in confusion. “You’ve got a hell of a way to pick ‘em, then, Eds. You realize your mom’s gonna hate me.”

“I mean, not necessarily.”

“Eddie, babe, be realistic. It sounds like she’s gonna hate me.”

“Well it’s not like she actually likes me that much either!”

There was a pause. “I just need to gauge here - do you actually want me to help you piss off your mom? Is that a goal?”

Eddie bit his lip. “I mean that’s not why I asked you. I asked you because I think you can. Make it fun. You know? I didn’t just ask you because my mom won’t like you. If that’s what you’re asking.”

“...I guess it was, a little. So I should be on the closest thing I’ve got to best behavior unless otherwise notified?”

“Yeah. We’ll go with that. And then we don’t have to play up the couple thing too much, like we don’t have to do a lot of PDA or anything, we can pretend we’re just toning it down.” Eddie turned onto his back again, trying to calm back down enough to sleep in the next week. “Sorry for dragging you into all this. You can stay here if you want.”

“And miss your 84-year-old great aunt’s wedding? Eds, it sounds like a fucking blast. Plus, I already bought that suit. No turning back now. And... You know, you’re right. We’ll have fun. Don’t worry so much.”

Eddie scoffed. “If only it were that easy.”

He heard Richie huff out a laugh, too. “Alright, fair. Try to worry as little as you can manage. I’ll do what I can to make that easy for you. Deal?”

“...Deal. Thanks, Rich.”

“Of course, Eds.”

Eventually, somehow, Eddie managed to fall asleep.

[bewarecreepercomics]

Beware the Creeper #1

First issue in the original six issue miniseries written in 1968. Creeper’s had about three of these over the years, none of them exceeding twelve issues. Well, better a short, comprehensive story than, well...the Clone Saga.

Behind you. The Menace lurks behind you. If you’d just turn around-he blends in only slightly better than you do-he’s got orange on him for godssakes, is he Naruto’s grandfather or something? He is behind you!

Again, not a bad cover at all. No wasted space, an actual background, stuff happening. My only criticisms are that the rain looks like melting icicles instead of rain, and that the colors clash a bit, but hey, Silver Age. Riotous colors were not unusual.

We start out on a dark and stormy night, in which no one sees a green and bright orange ninja scaling a building. Well, it is raining, perhaps there are fewer people on the streets. Sure, I can suspend my belief for that.

This guy is The Terror, and he is going to these great lengths to sneak up on an unfortunate fellow he believes is going to betray him. We get the immediate establishment of this guy as a bad guy. No mysteries here.

I’ve got some bad news for you, sir...

Exactly what you think is about to happen, happens.

Actually, it kind of doesn’t. Yes, The Terror bust right through that window, but how this guy dies is a mystery. Mr. Terror doesn’t shoot him. Doesn’t stab him. It’s implied that he maybe hits him, but just then...

Jack Ryder, you have the worst timing of any man alive.

The Terror kicks his butt. How embarrassing. And then leaves without even bothering to kill him. The insolence!

His poor victim dies of...plot-convenience-itis, but not before giving Jack a list of names to check out. Now that’s spite.

Jack, of course, wants to follow up on this as soon as he can, but is stymied by his boss, who has assigned him to watch over the stations weather girl, Vera Sweet.

Yes, that is seriously her name.

I told you so. Vera is a publicity hound who smokes like a chimney, and has zero respect for our hero. She is also listed on almost every Creeper bio description as his love interest.

There is literally not a single comic in which this is true.

Really. We never, ever see this. The best we ever get on this subject is several mentions in more recent years that they used to go out, but it went bad and now they barely get along. In these original comics, they are practically antagonists.

Meanwhile, the Terror bursts in on a gangster, still dressed like that. Instead of busting into laughter, he gets busted in the face, and the Terror demands half of his rackets profits. And it looks like he’s not the only unlucky mobster to be victimized by the Terror.

Aw, the double-crossers might have been double crossed. I don’t feel sorry for any of them.

Jack ditches Vera at the very first opportunity to check up on those names victim #1 provided. First up, Gerk Kreg.

Try saying that name five times fast. Anyway, for a supposedly successful gangster, it sure is easy for Jack to just walk right into his house. More like succ-sessful, amirite?

Anyway.

It’s so easy for him to get in there that he has to switch to Creeper and bring attention to himself just to get noticed. He also makes the first mention of what is in later iterations referenced as an addiction to Professor Yatz’s serum.

Hey, if throwing up the horns is supposed to be demonic, does throwing down the horns invoke angels?

Of course, a Goon Battle follows. You know the kind. Where these supposed tough guys can barely lay a finger on our hero, and are sometimes so bad at fighting that he can have an entire internal monologue about how awesome he is without even getting interrupted?

Yes, yes, you are the very picture of idealized manliness. And so are your underoos. (Nice buttcheek we got there, thanks Ditko.)

Well, he battles his way through the mob penthouse, stopping only to question a goon, but doing so gets him ambushed and restrained. Let this be a lesson to you; punch first, ask questions later does not work. Punch only, and ask no questions is the way to go!

Gerk Kreg(ugh, why) decides that, before he shoots Creeper, he wants to know who he really is. No, you fool! Didn’t you learn? Punch only! No questions!

In attempting to rip his wig off, we learn something interesting.

That’s right, the molecular rearrangement device doesn’t just change his clothing and administer a dose of serum, it actually fuses that stuff to him. The wig, the rug, the makeup, the suit, none of it can be removed when he is Creeper.

Oh, the implications! The horrible, horrible implications.

Everyone’s startlemant at this revelation gives Creeper a chance to punch his way free and escape. You see! He got the lesson!

Jack thought that Kreg might be the Terror, but didn’t manage to get any proof in that punch-fest, so he moves on to the next name he had been given, that of Hack Axeley, a...private detective? With that name? Could’ve sworn he’d be either a hitman or a lumberjack.

Hack wants nothing to do with any of this, clearly being too busy working out of a closet with a gorgeous window view. Seriously, it is crowded in there.

Jack decides to do as Axeley suggests-go ask Cleary the lawyer. Who promptly runs him out. Not a big surprise there, Jack is no longer a reporter, nor is he a detective. He is small-time TV network security. Buuuut, Cleary’s defensiveness has made Jack suspicious, so he decides to go back in, in costume.

Up the side of the building.

In broad daylight.

Where everyone can see him.

Still wanted by the police.

BrainTrust.jpg

To get away, he hops a few buildings, drops into an alley, and switches back to Jack.

I wasn’t kidding in the previous review, he seriously does this all the damn time. Oh, and now he remembers Vera, and that he has an actual job.

Love interest, everybody!

She wants to punish him for ditching her by making him walk her dog in the rain. Is that all? What the heck is he got to gripe about, nowadays they’d have his job. Again!

Well, he caves, and they head back to his place to grab an umbrella. She might be a shameless fame-seeker, but Vera is no monster! However, the Terror is! And he is waiting in Jacks apartment to get the drop on him, fully armed with the Punch Only philosophy!

He was not, however, expecting Vera’s Shriek Like a Banshee Technique!

The name of the game in this issue is Jack Gets Ambushed. But the Terror makes a run for it, figuring Vera’s screaming will have attracted too much attention. Jack immediately ditches Vera yet again, to chase after him.

Nice working with you Jack.

Forth comes the Creeper, and so commences The Chase! Which takes up the rest of the comic, with one small break.

Here’s a bonus: My favorite panel in this issue. Get a look at those hands. It might be worth mentioning here that Ditko also helped create Spiderman. I wonder if there’s a way we could tell?

No time to contemplate now, time for another ambush!

Gosh darnit Jack, just look behind you every now and again! 

We get a dazzling rooftop fight out of this. There’s fisticuffs! Close calls! And of course...

Ass shots!

The Terror makes his escape. Again. Jack puts two and two together and gets a high value of three. In other words, the Terror waiting at Jacks apartment means that Gerk Kreg can’t be the Terror, because Jack didn’t question him as Jack-only as the Creeper. Only two fellows know that Jack Ryder was researching the Terror, and he decides to drop in on one of them, the misleadingly named Hack Axeley.

Who is just so dead, you guys.

Worried for the safety of the lawyer Cleary, he phones to warn him to stay low, then goes forth to question the late Axeleys secretary, Ida Horn.

Fear his swayed hip! Become powerless before the provocative pose! The distractionary merit of the skimpy outfit is proven yet again!

While she is sufficiently terrified-partially by Creepers questions and vague threats, but mostly by his sexy, sexy photoshoot vogueing- He notices something cleverly hiding behind her drapes.

The Terror is truly a master of stealth. Especially since there isn’t even a window back there.

More brawling for our champion and his nemesis! Oh, but this time, there is a maverick contender!

Kick his ass, baby! No, wait...

Uh...I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means...But whatever, Creeper has recognized the Terror’s voice, and the jig is up! Almost.

Aw, I kinda liked her. It’s too bad her legs have detached from her body. But enough of that! Resume the chase!

Just swinging about in empty space, in a storm, in the darkened city. Badass. But they have been spotted by those who are out for their blood. So now that he’s got him, what does Creeper do?

Freaking publicly unmasks the Terror, revealing him to be Hack Axeleys assistant! Remember? This guy?

He said two words while Jack was there. He was clearly super important and involved, oh yeah. And now his face is uncovered and visible...In front of everybody who wants a chance to murder him. Great job, Jack. This guy is sure to survive until his court date.

No, nevermind, Creeper drops every single one of the gangsters by himself because he’s the title character. How could I forget. The police reap a bumper crop of crooks, and Jack escapes, but not without surveying his work.

He’s not addicted, he can quit any time he wants.

And so our comic comes to an end with Jack and Vera bickering. How romantic.

While this is the first issue of the miniseries proper, it is completely removed from the story as a whole, presenting us only with a mediocre mystery, and a lot of awesome fight scenes. The real story starts next time, in Beware the Creeper #2, coming soon!

#the creeper #jack ryder #beware the creeper