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thetradeway · 3 years

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Session 49 21 Aug 2021 - Faceless Jim

Duncan is at Matthew and Sophie’s house, so we’re just waiting for Ed (who is with us this week! He is back from the festival with a lurgy, which may or may not be covid. “Several people I was… Well, I was in a car with, have got it.” Duncan: “You can say ‘cuddle puddle’, it’s okay.” He did see Devin Townsend though.) and Mina.

Matthew: “Terrible things happened last week!”

Sophie, remembering: “*Gasp* Oh yeah! Not to anyone important though.”

Ardvack has no face, which was stolen by this creature:

Joe has edited Ardvack’s token accordingly:

We’re in the Underdark, as a reminder. Does Ardvack want Kessler to fashion him a face out of something? Ahleqs pats him on the shoulder and reassures him that we’ll fix him when we get back to the surface. Kessler wants to, in her spare time, work on a way of making Ardvack a face. He bandages himself for now, and casts Disguise Self so he looks like he still has his face. Matthew is able to edit the token and switch between his faces.

“Don’t investigate me too much.”

Tarragon Investigates for mushrooms, and finds two types that could be useful in herbal recipes, so she makes some cuttings and stores them away. One is green and seems poisonous; she could use it for her contact poison. (It’s like the ones you get in Fallout 4.) The second is blue and called a Nightlight mushroom; if you burn it, it releases a relaxing smoke; she could use it in her Relaxing Bark recipe.

Gideon’s ring says that the drift globe is trying to lead us east.

We decide to take a long rest; during it, Ardvack gives Gideon the stone of Shar that we found.

Tarragon makes Kessler some contact poison for her crossbow bolts. She can add a d6 poison damage on ten crossbow bolts - but the poison loses potency once it’s exposed to air, and is ineffective after 1 hour.

Kessler manages to make a slightly creepy leather face for when Ardvack’s illusion drops. “But I haven’t got a chainsaw. I’ll have to make do with a wood saw.” She will make him a better one when we get back to town. He takes it with two fingers and inspects it. He looks her dead in the face and says thank you, and tries to surreptitiously put it in a pocket.

We move on.

We make Perception checks; Tarragon rubs mushroom spores in her eye (nat 1). Gideon notices bones on the floor around us. They’re from creatures rather than humanoids; he makes an Investigation check on them but he’s not sure what exactly. He thinks maybe something medium-sized, possibly canine.

Have the bones been gnawed on, Ahleqs wants to know? He makes an Investigation check as well, but he can’t see any chew-marks.

Have any been cut cleanly? Kessler, Tarragon and Melaina see that some look half sheared, half smashed; it doesn’t look like a weapon was involved. Whatever did this ripped its victims apart; they are of various ages but some are pretty new, and they are clean of meat.

Uh oh.

The scenery starts to change. The large mushrooms begin to thin out, and the place grows more cavernous. The ceilings get lower, and there are stalactites and stalagmites. Kessler, Melaina, Gideon and Tarragon hear clicks and little scraping noises from multiple directions.

Gideon, with rising horror: “Some hideous creature dripping with ichor!”

We listen for more sounds as we move, and they seem to be getting more frequent. Gideon thinks we should check to make sure we’re going the right way, and uses the ring to illuminate the drift globe again. It rushes ahead of us and down into an area of huge stalactites and stalagmites; he extinguishes the globe.

Ardvack: “When I die down here… First off I’m sorry, for literally everything. But I was wondering if I could entrust to you… Carl. It was always my aim to find a cleric who could cast True Resurrection on him, so he could go back to his own family. I want you to promise me you will do your best to find someone who can bring Carl back to life so he can live a full life.”

Kessler wants to know if Ardvack can promise us that Carl wasn’t a murderer. He was bitten by a snake, Ardvack says. He was a woodsman. He didn’t look like a murderer.

Ahleqs points out that if Ardvack dies, we’re not getting out of here either.

Gideon spots some skeletons up ahead. “I fear I’ve made a grave mistake…"

Sophie, OOC: “Pun intended.”

Gideon makes a Perception check - a 12. At the end of the cavern in the direction the globe was pointing, is a large creature with a vulture like head with a carapace and razor sharp claws.

Gideon, eyeing the hook horror: “How important is this wizard, exactly?”

Ardvack realises that without the wizard, we can’t get out. We were teleported down here… Oh, it turns out that once we get back within the wards (where we teleported in) they will know we’re there and teleport us back.

What are we looking at? It’s a skeksis, isn’t it?

It’s a skeksis.

Ahleqs: “… Maybe it wants to talk?”

Joe: “Tarragon and Melaina, would you like to look behind you?”

We turn. There are two more behind us.

Initiative time…

Faceless Jim is up first.

(Duncan thinks Joe is sick of this campaign and is just throwing monsters at us to see how long we’ll survive. Joe: “I asked you if you wanted to go to the Underdark, Duncan, and you said yes so I have no sympathy with you.”)

Faceless Jim’s computer takes a shit, so he has Joe cast Eldritch Blast for him. Both hit for ten total damage. The creature ahead of us emits a hideous screech.

Then one of the things gets a go… It’s the fourth one, that we didn’t know was there. Oh good!

Gideon, who hasn’t turned around yet: “Oh, there’s two!”

It towers over Ardvack and foul smelling drool drips onto him.

Ed: “Does it purr and roll onto its back?”

It does not do that.

One of the attacks is a nat 1, but the other hits and it starts to peck some of Ardvack’s scalp off.

Tarragon hears a thumping noise behind her as one of the others attacks her, but both miss.

Before Ahleqs’ turn, a fifth one appears.

Me: “He is! He’s trying to kill us!”

The newcomer thinks the Grease Wizard looks delicious. It misses as well, fortunately.

Ahleqs casts Shatter. “Why are there so many?”

Joe: “Because they hunt in packs.”

“… Clever girl.”

Joe will let Ahleqs soil himself as a free action if he wants. His muscles are too clenched, unfortunately. Next round, perhaps.

One attacks Melaina and hits, and then it’s her turn. She Bonus-Action-Disengages and retreats into a corner to attack the one in melee with Tarragon. 16 hits. 37 damage! It screams and wobbles.

Ahleqs: “… And dies?”

No, but it looks rough.

Kessler uses one of her new poisoned crossbow bolts - a hit and a natty 20. Noice. Including the poison, 45 damage. Noice! It wavers on its feet and throws up a foul substance right next to Gideon.

Gideon: “Augh! Why!”

Tarragon Thunderwaves the two closest to her. The injured one is pushed away.

Joe: “That one’s having his worst ever day.”

Tarragon, brightly: “Good! I’m glad to have been a part of it.”

Carl is up, but Matthew has to go and collect pizza from the door. Once he returns, Carl dashes recklessly up to one and does a Slam attack. It hits, and the thing is looking tatty; Carl decides fuck it and goes for a bonus action grapple attack; but the thing is bigger than him, and may escape automatically. He gives it a go anyway. He does grapple it, but it has advantage to escape on its turn.

Is the river water, or methane, or what? It’s water? Okay, dwarven combat roll! Gideon lines himself up to get two of them in his sights, and uses the ruler to prove he can hit them both. Both fail the save for Aganazzar’s Scorcher!

“I do 28 roasting damage to these chickens!”

He gets a how-de-do-dis on the one Carl’s grappling - its feathers catch fire and it crumbles into ash. Carl gives Gideon a gauntleted thumbs up.

Ed, absolutely delighted: “Wait wait wait, I got my one liner cause they’re birds!

“I knew this would be a poultry affair!”

Gideon takes a badass sip from his magical ale jug. He is very pleased with himself and puts his hands on his hips.

(Welcome back, Ed.)

Another ninja one appears.

Ardvack, resigned: “Yep.” He drops his Disguise Self spell, and is attacked and pecked by one of the hook horrors.

Joe, entirely too pleased with himself: “What you doing, Ardvack? Apart from being digested.”

He Misty Steps the fuck outta there, and turns for an Eldritch Blast. It emits some high pitched clicks and the others respond; Kessler takes an Attack of Opportunity as it tries to retreat, but misses. It dashes to the back of the cave and is gone.

The two near Tarragon both attack her. Tarragon: “Bring it.” They do, and both hit. Tarragon, surprised but not especially inconvenienced: “Oh. Ouchie.”

Ahleqs does Eldritch Blast on one of them. How-de-do-dis! Yay! “I turn it into chum!”

Now a semi-professional coward, and aware that these things will have to kill a good number of his friends before they get to him, Ahleqs stays where he is.

Melaina hides and does Sharpshooter; 11 just misses.

Kessler steps up to one and punches it in the jaw. She goes for an Animal Handling check to try and tame one, but rolls badly.

Tarragon Rages and goes for an attack with her quarterstaff and rolls a nat 1. Butterfingers: You lose your grip mid-swing and your weapon goes flying (15 feet) away in the direction of your target. She looks over her shoulder to see who noticed; at least Ahleqs and Melaina, possibly Ardvack as well.

“… Well, shit.”

Carl goes for a Slam attack but misses. Gideon goes for an Acid Splash.

Joe: “Not until you do the voice!”

Ed, in Gideon old-man voice, as requested: “Acid Splash!” He moves, and turns his token around - and is genuinely alarmed to see Ardvack, faceless, standing behind him.

One gets a Nat 20 on Carl - he is Frightened of them for five rounds (Joe rolls on the crit table), and he takes 32 damage from just the crit, and then 6 more on top.

Another goes for Kessler but she reaction-Shields.

Faceless Jim again, and after some deliberation he looks in his mirror, re-assesses his face, pockets the mirror again, and does an Eldritch Blast on the one that attacked Carl. He rolls a one and a two on two d10. He basically pets it a bit too hard, like a kid with a cat. Ardvack bonus-action Healing Potions.

The one behind Tarragon hits her twice again. She’s raging so it’s halved to 12.

Ahleqs casts Shatter on that one, at level 3. “BLAAAAAM! Get Shattered, son!” (The somatic component for that spell is gang signs, it turns out.) It hits, and bits and chunks fly off. He has to roll a d20 (he’s been forgetting to do that) and rolls a nat 1, so he has to roll on the chaos table. He casts Levitate on himself.

Melaina rinses and repeats. 16 to hit for 32 damage! It looks rough!

Kessler once more tries to tame the one in front of her, beginning by punching it. The punch connects, but the taming attempt does not. She punches it again.

Tarragon goes bear and rips one apart, going to town on the innards. She lumbers toward the remaining two hook horrors, in melee with Carl and Kessler.

Carl is Frightened so he runs away, and the hook horror closest gets an Attack of Opportunity. 14 hits for 12 Piercing, but he has enough Hit Points to survive it. He runs to hide behind Ardvack, his gauntleted hands on Ardvack’s shoulders. (Bearing in mind that he is both broader and considerably taller than Ardvack.)

Gideon goes for a brilliant Dwarven tactic - the flank! Or - wait, no. He could always summon Rusty…?

We wait, while Ed has ideas. He could do flumph delivery on his spell! Wait, he can scurry - "such as only a dwarf can perform" - so he can properly place his cube, and Thunderwaves two hook horrors. Both succeed the save - and the bones nearby are scattered by the spell to reveal something shiny.

One is very injured and tries to run - Attack of Opportunity from Kessler and Gideon. Kessler’s hits, but Gideon swings with his magical tankard and misses with a nat 1. He rolls on the crit fail table - Sidestepped. Swap places with the target and make a DC 14 Dex save - on fail, you fall prone. The target has gone, and Gideon makes the save. Phew.

Ardvack doubles down and tries again. Eldritch Blast, one hit and one miss. 8 Force damage. He bonus action potions again.

Floating shop boy can’t do much so he stops concentrating on Levitate (even though it was involuntarily cast) and does Eldritch Blast as well. another hit and another miss. Ardvack, with his skinless face: “Attaboy!”

Melaina steps behind some stalagmites and hides with a nat 20, becoming basically invisible. She then misses with her attack. “Bollocks.”

Kessler turns her attention to the last remaining hook horror and warns it that it can end up like its mates, or it can be her steed. It makes some panicky clicks, but none are returned from the gloom. Kessler rolls her third 7 on Animal Handling.

Ardvack, calling from further away: “Just buy a horse!”

Kessler hits it for 7 Thunder damage and winds up the second shot which is a nat 20. Stunning blow: Max damage, and the target must make a DC14 CON save. On fail the target is stunned. It makes the save.

Bear Tarragon goes full Revenant, picks up the hook horror and shakes it until bits fall off. “And then I eat the bits.”

That was the last of them; Gideon goes immediately for the shiny thing he saw. “Gimme. Gimme gimme gimme.”

It’s a wooden ring carved with mice. He wants to cast Identify; have we got ten minutes? Sure!

It’s a Ring of Warmth. While wearing this ring, you have resistance to cold damage. In addition, you and everything you wear and carry are unharmed by temperatures as low as −50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ed, suddenly realising something: “We’re ticking too many boxes - finding rings in caves, oh no!!!!”

We take a short recess for hit dice and tea.

Ardvack does not cast Disguise Self again. We all make Insight checks, even Bear-Tarragon. Anyone above a ten knows we have ticked over to the next day. We are now on the 2nd of Eleasis, in the year 1492. Ardvack reanimates some of the bones and calls the resulting minion Beverly. He is a boy.

Sophie, pinging something on the map: “Joe is this a mushroom? It’s all veiny and weird and I don’t like it.”

Melaina roots around for stuff, and unearths a leather roll of papers, quills, seals, sealing wax and so on. Joe: “I like to think that some poor diplomat has been ripped apart down here.”

Gideon reactivates the drift globe, and we follow. We continue through the caverns, in a general downward direction.

“You can travel at a slower pace and sneak…?”

Gideon, immediately: “No!”

Tarragon can be a bear for up to two hours; she remains so for as long as she can, but reverts back after a while.

We start to hear water. Ahleqs casts Mage Armour.

We are led to a bottleneck, and then a giant cave full of bioluminescent plants - ferns, and flowers, rather than mushrooms. Even the water glows a strange blue. We see a stone bridge crossing a subterranean river which crashes down from a waterfall. On either side of the bridge are two pillars made of skulls.

Ardvack, crossly: “Well this is going to go swimmingly, I assume.” He tells Beverly to cross the bridge - the eyes light up in all the skulls. Necrotic energy bursts from them, right at Beverly.

Gideon, waving: “Bye, Beverly.”

How many HP does Beverly have? And what’s his Dexterity? Not enough. Beverly is dust.

Ardvack turns to us with his skinless face. “You’re welcome.”

Hmm. Who’s next?

Could we wade? The water is glowing, so that’s probably not good. It doesn’t look too deep. Ahleqs wants to know if it’s magic. He makes an Arcana check - a 7. He has no idea. Ardvack takes the Help action.

Joe: “Look at Ardvack, making friends. Someone should have ripped your face off years ago son.”

Ardvack: “… I spit at God.”

The water is likely just glowing from minerals or something. Ahleqs does Eldritch Blast at the pillars; no damage. Melaina and Kessler look at the bridge: they remember when Beverly set foot on the bridge, the pillars adjusted to aim at him. They see burn marks across the bridge where other creatures have been struck before.

If one of us can get across maybe there’s an off switch? Melaina calculates how far she can jump, and aims for a boulder in the middle of the river. The sockets of the skull stay dark and the pillars do not move.

Could we use a mirror to reflect the beams back? Ardvack thinks it won’t work; there will be a mirror and an evaporated person.

Melaina estimates a four foot depth in the water. She can’t jump because she has no space for a run up on the boulder, so she steps in and wades square by square. “Does anything happen?” The skulls stay dark and the pillars don’t move.

Tarragon asks Carl if she can climb up on his shoulders as she would be swept away in four feet of water; he gives her a thumbs up and crouches down. Kessler doesn’t yet have a jet pack, so what will she do?

Carl ventures across, ignoring the boulder and wading right from the start. He lumbers slowly; he’s not a raging cadaver right now. He sets her down gently on the other side.

Matthew OOC: “So I assume Ardvack is eaten by the river monster…?”

As we pass through, we see that the water is perfectly clear. We can fill our water skins if we want. We do.

Gideon and Kessler are still on the other side. Gideon wants to swim. Kessler wants to jump at least halfway, and swim the rest.

Close up we can see that the skulls are carved from stone. Gideon uses his stone cunning to tell us that it looks like Duergar work.

“Oh dear. The Grumpy Dwarves, we call them.”

Ardvack is going to evaporate someone when we get back. He moves three squares and is told “Stop right there!” by the DM.

Here is what happens: There is a 40 foot-ish high ceiling here, with stalactites. We pass through two columns, and something makes an attack: a tendril reaches down from the ceiling and grapples Ardvack. Does 24 hit Melaina? Yes? She is also grappled then. As is Carl, and Gideon.

It then reels Ardvack in - he is raised 25 feet in the air.

It’s a roper!

Ed, OOC: “He’s ‘orrible! Get rid of him!”

We roll initiative…

Ahleqs goes first. After his customary scream, he casts Shatter. “That’s a good spell! BLAM!” He throws his gang signs. It makes the save and takes five damage.

Kessler hits with her poisoned crossbow bolts. Carl makes an attempt to break free from the roper’s grapple, but fails. He makes a breathy, dusty, dry sound.

Gideon wants to cast something, and can do so while grappled, so he goes Fireball. “How dextrous can it be? It’s literally nailed in place!”

Joe: “You say that; it rolled an 18.”

Gideon: “You bitch!”

He hears other screams up there. “Oh no, I think it might have fried our wizard!” He looks at the drift globe; it wants us to continue on through this cavern. He hasn’t cooked our quarry. Phew. For some reason, we never follow up on the screams.

Tarragon runs up to Melaina to hit the tendril grappling her, but misses. Two more tendrils try to grapple her, but miss.

The tendril holding Ardvack lifts him higher, and the roper bites him for 19 piercing damage. Matthew, OOC: “I imagine you all see something pierce me and come out the back.”

Melaina tries to break free. “Bazinga. Twelve! A mighty twelve.” The roper rolls a nine, so she’s free! She moves away and hides - but just before she rolls to hide, she is told to hold that thought.

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

Joe: “Does 18 hit you?”

“*sigh* yes.” She takes four piercing damage, as a maggot type creature hangs from the ceiling onto her head, and gives it a good monch.

She’s at Disadvantage now, with her lovely slug hat.

Ardvack goes for a Shocking Grasp, but rolls a nat 1. (He is having yet another terrible day.) Crit fail magic macro: Not quite what I meant. The target of your spell becomes resistant to the damage type of the spell for 1 round.

Ahleqs makes a Perception check; “Ohhhhh, God.” 15 - high on the ceiling above him he can hear shuffling sounds. He calls up: “No, thank you.” He casts Fireball. The roper fails and takes 30 points of damage. “And is killed. And is killed…?”

In the flash of the fireball, we see that some of the stalactites are quivering and shaking.

He rolls his d20, but is fine.

Carl is still grappled. He wants to grab hold of the tendril and pull back, digging his heels in and trying to pull it off the ceiling. He rolls high, but the roper rolls higher with a nat 20. Dammit.

Kessler shoots with her crossbow. A hit and a miss.

Another Piercer drops down and narrowly misses Ahleqs. He gives it a kick. Gideon is up. “Well then.” He does Aganazzar’s Scorcher again and hits. “I burn ye!”

Tarragon runs forward an smashes Ahleqs’ piercer with her quarterstaff, showering Ahleqs with goo. He uses Tides of Chaos on his Dex check and his hair falls out again. Tarragon heals Ardvack with Healing Word at third level, for which he is not grateful. A piercer falls on Tarragon and hits her for 4 damage, and then a tendril reaches down and grapples her.

Another tendril reaches down and misses Kessler. A third grabs for Ahleqs and gets him. Ardvack is bitten by the roper; he throws up his breakfast in its mouth. It reels Tarragon in.

“I hope I give you the shits!”

Ahleqs is hit by another piercer. “It hits me square in my self.”

Melaina shoots for the roper. “Bollocks. Eleven.” She bonus action hides again “So that my worm friend doesn’t see me.”

Ardvack casts Shillshsldgksdkghsdglhjjhh and bonus action Flaming Blades it. “That much [damage].” Eighteen total, jabbing around in its gullet.

The stone part of the roper is cracking, and weeping some sort of ooze between the cracks.

A maggot drops past Kessler and splats on the floor. “I laugh.”

Ardvack: “Quick! Kessler, Animal Handling check! Make it a mount!”

Ahleqs: “Fuck it, I’m gonna do another Fireball.” The roper fails the save and takes 34 fire damage. “Oooh, hello!”

It is pretty heinously wounded now, and it uses its reaction to drop everyone who’s grappled. Ardvack and Tarragon are going to take some falling damage. Carl refuses to let go of it; he fully intends to pull the roper off the ceiling or pull the tendril off the roper.

Carl makes a STR check - an 11. “Awwww.”

Kessler shoots with her crossbow again - 17 misses, both times.

Gideon does Aganazzar’s Scorcher again, and the roper fails the save. How-de-do-dis!

“I scorch it like Doctor Octopus’ laser beam and it drops down but doesn’t hit anyone - conveniently - and it plops down on the ground.”

We squish the remaining Piercers, as they can’t do much once they’ve dropped. Carl uses one to kill another one.

We’ve solved Joe’s roper puzzle, but there’s still no sign of Ava, or of the wizard.

We take a short rest, before we halt there for this week.

#dnd #thetradeway #campaign diary

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harringtown · 4 years

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so i was thinking.. an au where steve and his girlfriend go to see the movie dirty dancing and then she wants to take some dance lessons with him and its cute and yeah

okay so my brain was gonna turn this into a fic and then i spiralled down the headcanon track which! havent really done but!! i do have thoughts and feelings about this idea that do not quite translate into pretty metaphors!!! hope you dont mind anon!! also this got! long! very fast!

also we’ve all seen joe and maika (can u say power couple??? they are bisexual Energy) do the Lift, so like. picture that in your minds. thats the Vibe we’re going for. also just. god what a video.

Steve doesnt choose the movie, you do, so he’s already kinda like ‘not sure what im walking into but i Love My Girlfriend and its her turn to choose the movie, and oh shit this is actually really sick y/n why have we nOT watched this before????’

steve ends up loving it even more than you, though hes kinda quiet about it

you walk home from the theater, and steve holds your hand and starts swinging it back and forth, and at some point, he ends up pulling you close on the sidewalk and twirling you around not-very-technically but you laugh so loud he starts to think the neighbors might come out

the next day, you and steve are just Hanging and you bring up the dance number and how much fun it would be to learn

and so steve, who has Absolutely Been Thinking This looks into dance lessons

inevitably, they are too expensive for both of your Family Video salaries, but luckily, there is a certain mutual friend who, apart from her instrumental and musical abilities, admits she did take like ten years of dance as a kid

and so, robin buckley becomes the teacher, and the family video carpet becomes the dancefloor.

it starts just as horribly as one would expect, with both of you stepping on the others toes and getting caught up gigglign yourselves sick when steve tries - key word tries - a lift on robin and the two end up sprawled on said-gross carpet laughing

but the three of you keep going, because what else is there to do, and also, steve might not be a great dancer, but he does quite enjoy pulling you close and spinning you around and watching you laugh

if hes being honest, he’s taking longer to learn than is necessary, and that is solely due to how much fun he has practicing

if tommy h or carol or any of his old cronies could see him, theyd rip into him, but he surprises himself by not caring. all he really cares about is the way you close your eyes and tip your head back and laugh when Steve dips you; all he cares about is the press of your fingers on his skin and the rhythm that figures out how to work through him

you and steve spend most of your free time dancing, even when robin is gone, though all of those lessons typically end with someone kissing the other and distracting you both, but eventually, steve and robin nail the lift, and robin gives steve the go ahead to try it with you

‘just so you know, if you drop your girlfriend, she will probably not be as nice about it as ive been’

and youre like ‘yeah its true dude you drop me, we’re done’

and steve goes ‘bet’ because hes a little shit, and you laugh, and robin laughs, and even steve is laughing, and then robin is plugging the song into the player connected to the stores speakers

it may just be a dingy carpeted family video with dim lights and a weird smell, but in that moment, it becomes something - somewhere - else, a place out of time and far out of Hawkins and all its monsters and memories

steve stands off to the side, you in the center, and when he catches your eye, your lips curl up in that smile reserved for him, and the music starts

now ive had the time of my life

the first verses movements arent hard anymore, not after all this time; they are muscle memory, and any reservations steve might have had fly away

which is a good thing, because all he can focus on is you, and the way you move, and the curve of your hips as you shimmy, and the smile that tugs on your lips

he spins you out and tugs you back to his chest, your hands planted over his heart, and though it isnt in the choreography, he drops a quick kiss to your lips before the next step

‘cheeseball!’ robin calls from the desk, but she’s smiling, too

steve fakes his jump, as there isnt a stage to leap from, and makes his way to robin around the desk, taking her hands and pulling her out, the pair dancing and laughing until steve takes his cue to return to you

its hard to hear the music over the heavy beating of steves heart and all of your laughter, but he wouldnt change it for the world

the music changes again, and steve’s mind reminds him not to fuck this up and drop you, and though its the first time youll be doing the entire dance and the lift, steve knows he’ll catch you

steve harrington will never drop or let you go, both inside this dance and out of it.

‘moment of truth!’ robin calls, and you laugh, running toward steve at the nod indicating he’s ready

he takes a breath, and he bends his knees, and he finds your hips as you reach him, and he grips tight and pushes up, lifting you up into the air and tilting his head back to meet your gaze, bending just enough to catch his balance

robin’s cheers are loud enough to fill a stadium, and steve is smiling as he slowly lowers you down, your arms winding around his neck, your chest and stomach flush against his

the moment your feet hit the floor he catches your mouth in his, your lips parting beneath his, your hands flat against his chest, your smiles making it hard to kiss through

you pull back and shift to find Robin, reaching out a hand for her, and she grins before coming to join you

at some point the song ends, but neither you nor steve nor robin notices, too caught up in love and laughter and the tiny, precious life you stumbled into

and as cheesy as it is, steve truly is having the time of his life

#brooke writes fic #technically...#headcanons #there that works!!!!#also these are FUN feel free to send more of these!!!!#i went TOO HARD #stranger things #steve harrington #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington x you

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himbowelsh · 4 years

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hey! can i request the valetine’s day prompt for joe liebgott!! 🥺💛 thank u friend!! :)

@noneofurbusinez asked : i am asking you for some liebgott valentine alphabets. do you accept?

valentines day alphabet ( accepting! )

A : AFFECTION. how does your muse show affection?

He’s got a very carefully guarded tender side, and Joe’s affection is exactly that --- softer than expected. Physical contact is easy for him, so he loves that; he definitely shows his affection through touch, whether claps on the back or more sensual caresses.

B : BOUQUET. does your muse like flowers? which ones are their favourite?

Oh god, he’s absolutely not a bouquet type of person. The only reason he’s ever been in a garden was because he got lost and literally couldn’t find his way out. He tramples flowers and thinks they’ll grow back fine. Florists have him on a watchlist.

C : CHOCOLATE. does your muse like chocolate? which one is their favourite?

Bitch, he doesn’t have a favorite. Give him any chocolate, give him all chocolate. Once someone left a box of Hersheys’ bars in the sun for hours; Joe claimed them before they could be thrown out, and had the time of his life just slurping hot chocolate sauce.

D : DATE. what is your muse’s ideal date? where / who with / etc?

Definitely not your stereotypical romantic date. He’d love to just... explore somewhere new, to be honest --- to make off with his partner and see what kind of hell they can raise. Joe’s got a naturally intrepid and curious nature, interested in other places, other things... he likes just wandering sometimes, and seeing where they end up. Having someone who’ll do this with him is just living the dream.

E : EMBRACE. does your muse like hugs? what are their hugs like?

For the love of god, please hug him. Joe wants hugs more than he knows how to admit; he’s thirsty for them. When given the opportunity, he will be a complete cuddlebug, but nothing makes him happier than having someone else initiate it first. However prickly his exterior might be, he loves physical contact, and really loves holding and being held. His hugs can be a little playful --- he might make a dirty joke or press cold hands to his partner’s back --- but overall he just wants to hold someone for a long time.

F : FLIRT. is your muse good at flirting? how do they flirt?

He’s got this wink that leaves whoever’s on the receiving end feeling mildly dirty and a little overheated all at once. Joe knows he’s a handsome guy, knows the sort of effect he has, and carries himself with confidence. Flirting isn’t something he has to try hard at; it comes easy to him, and he’s shameless with it.

G : GIFT. is your muse good at gift - giving or do they struggle to get it right?

Well... he tries. He gives it his best effort. That’s the absolute most generous thing anyone can say about him, because showing up to a kid’s birthday party with a pack of socks or rocking up to Christmas with grill charcoal is not good gift giving, Joe. He tries to be thoughtful; his gifts always seem like good ideas at the time.

H : HEART. is your muse quick or slow to give their heart away?

That’s the thing. Joe’s lived and learned enough to know that he shouldn’t... but it’s not something he ever means to do. He’s a passionate guy, and doesn’t realize he’s falling in love ‘til he’s already too deep to get back up. It should scare him, but when he loves, he loves hard.

I : I LOVE YOU. does your muse find ‘i love you’ easy or hard to say?

He has a gross soft side which comes out whenever he lets his guards down, and he feels comfortable doing this with no one moreso than his partner. Joe will say it a thousand times, just for the two of them alone. He’ll whisper it in their ear in public; he’ll trace hearts in the back of their hand while watching a movie; he’ll pull them close and mutter it over and over into the crook of their neck, just inhaling their presence. Joe loves saying “I love you”, but for him it’s a private thing. He doesn’t need to put it on display, because no one gets a piece of their love --- no one gets to love his partner the way he does.

J : JEALOUSY. does your muse get jealous in a relationship?

Yeah, and he’s not subtle about it. He’ll straight-out ask his partner, “hey, what’s up with that guy? what’s he think he’s doing, touching you like that?” or, if he’s in a pissy mood, “what are you laughing with them for? I’m not funny enough for you?” It’s something he’ll grumble about, but there’s a line with Joe between sulky and genuinely upset. Once that’s crossed --- like, if something’s been going on too long, or he feels like someone ought to know better --- there might be fireworks.

K : KISS. is your muse a good kisser? why / why not?

Joe Liebgott has a dirty, dirty mouth, and he knows how to use it. He’s rough with his kisses, very passion-fueled, impulse driven; it’s all about taking and giving in return, a fragile equilibrium that Joe subconsciously understands how to tread. He never leaves his partner unsatisfied. All about the lip bites, and he definitely never restricts himself to mouth-to-mouth for long --- he’s a traveller. If he can kiss someone’s neck, their ear, their collarbone... Joe’s kisses happen in four different places at once. He can be overwhelming sometimes, which is just how he likes it.

L : LOVE. who does your muse love?

He loves his Ma to death --- would literally murder for her, or at least help her hide the body, because she’s more than capable of doing it herself. Joe’s very devoted to his family; to everyone he loves, really. That can have its downsides, too --- if he feels like he needs to put distance between himself and his loved ones, he’s more likely to do it fast, like ripping off a band-aid, because he thinks it’ll hurt less.

M : MOONLIGHT. is morning or night a more romantic setting?

He’s a morning person, regrettably, but that doesn’t mean he wants to, like... have sex and stuff. No way. There’s stuff to see, things to visit, places to do... he’s more tired at night, but a tired Joe is at his softest and most romantic.

N : NAUGHTY. what is your muse like in bed?

Again, it’s all about the mouth, baby. He’s everywhere at once, just... exploring. There’s really no stopping him; once he sets his mind to pleasuring his partner, he’s gonna make it good, and no one gets to rush him. Really into hair pulling --- his own, not his partner’s --- and loves to fight for dominance in bed. If his partner is putting up a good fight, trying to wrestle with him for control, it’s a huge thrill. Don’t get him wrong, Joe loves enthusiastic consent. He craves it --- getting to get under his partner’s skin, get them to make those noises, to gasp his name until they’re screaming it, so out of their mind with pleasure that they don’t stand a chance of keeping quiet... Joe’s a dirty talker, sometimes rougher than he means to be, but very enthusiastic in bed.

O : ODE. does your muse have a way with words?

He... jesus, fuck, he doesn’t know. Shit. He tries? Yeah. Fuck. Fuck yeah, he tries, he gives it his damn best, stop fucking questioning him, huh?

(Boy’s got a filthy mouth.)

P : PARTNER. what does your muse look for in a partner? looks / personality?

B o o b i e s . No, okay, Joe likes... he likes something to hold onto, okay? He’s a skinny bastard as it is, but wouldn’t like that in a partner at all. He needs something, be it muscle or softness or something else. Curvy girls and muscley guys are both exactly his type. Aside from that --- Joe needs someone who’ll scream at him, okay? It’s not a kink, except maybe it is, except he needs it sometimes. He needs it like he needs to remember to eat and sleep and pee; he needs a partner who’s not afraid to deck his goddamn halls, and remind him to get his head out of his ass. Joe will holler back, and he needs someone who won’t be intimidated by that; it’s a massive catharsis for both of you to just scream sometimes.

Q : QUESTION. would your muse ask the big question or expect their partner to?

He’s got this, guys. It’s okay, he’s got this. Joe has cycled through about a dozen Perfect Ways to pop the question. Inevitably, when he does, it will be nothing like he had planned; it might even be spontaneous, like over a bucket of chicken wings, or in the middle of an argument. It just comes out, because it’s been on his mind for so long, that he can hardly believe he and his partner aren’t married at this point. How fast can they fix that?

R : ROMANCE. is your muse a romantic or a cynic?

He’s not... a romantic guy, definitely not. He’s not good at all the “candles and gondola rides” cliches... but Joe’s romantic in his own way. He’ll think up surprises just to get a grin out of his partner, watch their favorite movies to cheer them up, make some elaborate breakfast-in-bed because he was “just up early, okay”... he’ll go out of his way to learn an entire Broadway-class wedding dance, just for them. Don’t expect love poetry from him, but he does his absolute best.

S : SWEETHEART. did your muse have a childhood sweetheart?

He had a few girls who thought he was a cutie, but Joe was stuck in the “girls are icky” phase for years --- he had a bunch of older sisters, he was prejudiced! --- so it definitely wasn’t something he wanted to entertain.

T : TRUE LOVE. does your muse believe in true love?

Nah. He believes in love, sure, but he’s too much of a cynic to think there’s anything “true” about it. Nothing’s certain like that.

U : UNREQUITED. has your muse had their heart broken?

In... multiple ways, at various points in his life, most of them not even romantic. Yeah, he’s got a very bruised apple in there.

V : VALENTINE. how does your muse feel about valentine’s day?

It’s commercial garbage. His favorite thing to do is raid all the convenience stores the day after, and buy a horrifying amount of chocolate at half-price. He’ll share if someone asks nicely, because he’s a saint like that.

W : WEDDING. would your muse get married? why / why not?

Oh, hell yeah. He craves that domestic bliss, okay? Even before meeting the right person, he’s got plans, he’s got ambitions, he’s got dreams... and Joe’s not much of a romantic, but when he meets that person, then he just knows. You know the teenage girls who plan their weddings on Pinterest boards and flowery notebooks, right down to the silverware they’ll use and the types of flowers they’ll carry? Yeah, that’s Joe. He’s ready.

X : XOXO. does your muse use / like pet names?

He uses pet names in German, and knows exactly how damn cringy it is, but it sounds better than English somehow. More romantic, y’know? He carries a lot of pet names from his own childhood, like “liebling” and “Mausebär” (his mother’s favorite, always used with Joe when he was a kid --- “mouse-bear”) forward, eager to use them on his own kids. Also very fond of, like... “baby”, “sweetheart”, “doll”, stuff that sounds kind of ridiculous to his own ears but feels right in the moment.

Y : YOURS. does your muse get protective easily?

Do you even have to ask? He’ll kick anyone’s ass. He’ll kick his own ask. If someone he loves is in trouble, Joe’s there and he’s already swinging. He’s ride-or-die for the people he loves, until the moon falls from the sky.

Z : ZZZ. how many people has your muse slept with?

Well, the Torah doesn’t say it’s wrong, does it? Like, does it explicitly say, “no, you’re not allowed to do that”? Is his dick gonna fall off? No? Okay! That’s all Joe needs to know. He’s very open to sex, and is usually willing --- so long as the mood is right and the partner’s a good match, he’s down for anything. So... yeah, there’ve been a good few.

#joseph liebgott #headcanons #wexhappyxfew

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dialux · 4 years

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Oh man I just finished your Booker fic and it’s making me feel so many things, its so good!!! Also Booker having nightmares post-Quynh around the others after not having any for like a century? Oof

!!! That’s the good shit there, nonny! Top tier angst!! Sleep deprivation!!! All the things that make for the best stories!!!!

He startles awake, heart racing.

The details of the dream is already fading, but the after-effects are a fucking bitch and a half to manage: Booker’s wide awake, and jumpy enough to probably break the neck of the idiot that’s sneaking up behind him-

“It’s just me.”

“No just about it,” grumbles Booker, but his voice is thankfully low enough that the other three don’t wake. “Why’re you awake?”

“I don’t sleep well,” says Andy carelessly.

Booker swipes a hand over his eyes and gets up. Stumbles to the kitchen. He feels like such shit, and it’s almost beyond him not to dial into the shipping company and just… re-direct some of the downers to the shores of sunny Lima. Blitz out his locus coeruleus with enough norepinephrine that even his swift healing takes about four hours to fix it. Add another two hours of passing in and out of non-REM and Booker can claim to a proper six hours of sleep: it’s enough to survive. With the alcohol numbing him further, he can stretch that sleep out to eight hours on the really, really bad nights.

Absent the drugs, though, he needs other things to focus on. Their bodies can function on less sleep- the same way they can survive on less food- and Booker’s been experimenting with that for the past couple weeks.

It is not, as Joe’s told him multiple times, going well.

“Doesn’t mean you have to be the same.”

Booker pours out the coffee, mixes it with concentrate of yaupon holly, and then adds a shit-ton of sugar to the brew. Andy watches him with dark eyes, but he doesn’t offer it to her; the last thing they all need is a jumped-up six thousand year old warrior high on the strongest caffeine that Booker can, legally, get his hands on.

“What was the dream about?”

“Fuck if I know,” says Booker, and hisses out through his teeth as he drains half the cup. Christ but it tastes terrible, too bitter and too sweet in equal measure. Still, the trembling ache in his shoulders, tight about his ears, softens. “You know how it is. It’s not like I’ve got a paucity of nightmares. None of us do.”

“You’re the one waking up in the middle of the night.”

“And you’re the one not sleeping.”

“I’m used to it, though,” says Andy.

Booker rolls his eyes. “Dream diaries don’t work. Talking about them doesn’t help. I have tried to literally rewire my brain and it isn’t happening. Turns out that being depressed and missing your family when you die makes it impossible for you to feel anything else.”

Andy rolls her eyes. “Just because you automatically accept the most depressing possible theory doesn’t mean that it’s the correct one, Book.”

“If I could go back in time,” Booker tells her, “I would seduce Nile’s mother and ensure that she remained heartbroken over the handsome French baker who disappeared into the clouds and therefore could not marry Nile’s father.”

“I assume there’s a point to that,” says Andy dryly.

“I liked you a hell of a lot better when you weren’t this fucking optimistic is the point,” says Booker. “And I know that it’s all Nile’s fucking influence. So.”

“So,” says Nile, grinning at him from the bedroom she’s just walked out of, “if I don’t exist, you’d be happier?”

“Your mother doesn’t know what she missed out on,” says Booker, and drains the rest of the brew.

…

A bridge of gold and laughter. A bridge as silver as his wife’s grey hair. A bridge, shining as a gun in broad daylight-

Booker wakes, gasping.

Coffee. Holly. Bitterness down his gullet.

It’s not really new any longer, is it?

…

He takes a knife to the gut, and then sees another soldier sneaking up behind Andy. There’s no time; he’s still barely standing, much less able to voice a proper warning. Instead, Booker lets the intestines he’s clutching inside spill out in a dark, bloody slither. Stumbles. The soldier slips on the sudden viscera: Booker’s yanking his guts back into his own body, mouth open in a silent scream because it really, really hurts.

He wakes up, gasping.

…

He drowns, and drowns, and drowns.

He wakes up, gasping.

...

“Right,” says Nile. “You need help, Booker.”

“Fuck off,” says Booker.

He’s on mile twenty-one of a marathon-esque circuit, and his body’s pretty much hitting the wall; he does not want to talk about his issues right now. Joe and Nicky have gotten tired enough of his grumpiness to escape to the city for the day, and Andy’s off on one of her personal missions that nobody knows any details about.

Booker hasn’t slept in about forty-one hours, and it’s not getting better.

It’s why he left the house and went on this run! It’s why he’s trying to drive his body into- well, not an early grave, but a grave nevertheless!

Booker regrets many things in life. Introducing Copley to Nile ranks high among them, especially after the little shit went and learned how to hack phones from a fucking CIA agent.

“I’m telling you this because you aren’t going to listen to anyone else,” says Nile. “And this seemed like a good time to make sure you listened. Look, Booker, there are things out there- therapists- courses, if you aren’t going to talk to anyone. You really, really-”

Booker rips out his headphones, takes the little molten sun that feels rather like something has ruptured in his chest, and pushes the energy into his legs.

He sprints the rest of the way home.

He’s pretty sure he’s ripped one of the muscles in his thighs with it, and the agony of that is enough for him to focus on something else apart from Nile. Who does not look impressed.

“You need help,” she says quietly, when he finally stops clutching at his own thigh and drops back into the mud and mulch of the garden.

Booker laughs. He laughs, and keeps on laughing, and only manages to stop by rolling over and suffocating himself in the roots of a fucking- plant.

Probably a Cycus aculeata, which means that either Booker’s in the wrong hemisphere or Andy’s been introducing invasive species again because she misses her fucking girlfriend too much.

“Yeah,” he says, and sits up, already planning the lecture and the following plant-removal that he’ll have to do. Then he sees Nile’s face, and Booker pauses, reviewing what he’s just agreed to. “No,” he says. “I mean. Yes, I need help. That’s, like, the fucking- understatement of the century. Past two centuries. But. I’m not getting help from anyone else.”

Nile folds her arms over her chest. With the sun streaming right behind her, she looks like a goddess come to life: haloed, beautiful, the slightest bit unreal.

“That’s fine,” she says. “I’ll just ask Joe to become a therapist.”

“Sure,” snorts Booker. “And I’ll ask Andy to become a pacifist.”

Nile points a finger at him. “Don’t be mean.”

“Ask Nicky,” Booker advises her. “I mean, I don’t think you’ll get anywhere, but. You’re less likely to be laughed out of the room.” At her questioning look, he elaborates: “Idiot was a priest, back in the day. And, you know, all those people- well, priests were as close as you’d get to therapists before all of this psychology stuff came about.”

“Right,” says Nile warily. “So why do you think I’ll be laughed at? Nicky sounds like he’s good for the job.”

Booker stares at her. “What did the man do, the second he had a chance to leave?”

“Er. Leave?”

“He went on a fucking Crusade,” says Booker. “He killed people. He- well, you know, did the whole invader thing. Liked it, too. He only really stopped because he decided he liked Joe more, and Joe was, like, I’m not going to let you kill my people for fun anymore, and they worked out their excess energy by fucking in sand, because both of them are absolute idiots.”

Nile blinks at him. “So. Not a therapist.”

Booker grins at her, and knows it’s more of a baring of his teeth than anything comforting. “I guess your best bet is Andy, then.”

“I cannot believe I’m going to have to get a degree in fucking therapy because of you,” hisses Nile.

“I thank you for your sacrifice,” says Booker, and pats her on the shoulder gingerly.

He gets an armful of a furiously emotional Nile a moment later, hugging him so tight around the neck it feels like a throttling. Then she backs away, and goes into the house, leaving Booker in leaves and mulch and a burgeoning headache.

Fucking invasive species, he thinks, and wishes he’d never studied botany. Really. If he was just like Nicky and purposely uneducated in all the ecological implications, he could ignore it. But Booker had to go and study plants and try to synthesize his own compounds and get tangled up in ecology legislation in the 1980s, and so he knows, goddammit, and he’ll have to face Andy’s hangdog expression tonight when he serves up roasted cycad beside whatever Joe’s preparing for dinner.

Fuck my life, he thinks, but it isn’t half so sour as it might have been just a month earlier. Fuck my life, he thinks, and heads back into the house, whistling the whole goddamn way.

#i have so many feelings about this idiot and his idiocy #esp his belief that everyone else is the idiot in his family oml #the old guard #dialux answers questions #my writing #Anonymous

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littlemeangreen · 4 years

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Since you like my alt-Marauders (WHICH IM SO HAPPY FOR) how about challenge for headcanons of them interacting with the Smashers, as allies or foes or just a chance encounter? No need to, I just thought it might be something you'd have fun with!

@thecorteztwins k I'm suddenly in a big writing mood so!! FINALLY getting around to this I'm so sorry sksksk

For anyone who doesn't know: Thecorteztwins has an amazing au where she's collected Haven (thicc angel lady who was possessed by a demon disguised as a baby), Claudine (Miss Sinister),Madelyne (clone of Jean Grey), Pyro, Sebastian Shaw, Shinobi Shaw and sometimes Alice (a clone being tested by Claudine)!

I feel like the first few days are really testy. Everyone's got some bone to pick, the usual. But the biggest thing? The name. A brief encounter with paparazzi ends with their name and the reactions go from Pyro and Claudine scoffing at how silly it sounds and what a rip off it is (Pyro being a writer?? U KNOW he wouldn't stand for Alt Marauders) to Shaw sighing about the fact that he's been stuck on a team with a cliche super nickname.

Then there's personal names because once again, Pryo and Shinobi both agree that everyone needs a name to reapply make them unique! Hardly anyone goes for it, ranging from Haven's soft "no thank you" to Shaw punting Pyro into a wall. Madelyne is slightly soft for Pyro's RPG themed alias ideas for her and less than impressed for Shinobi's idea of "Mad Milf".

Alice....I'm definitely thinking she gets nicknamed "White Rabbit" or "Wonderland" because; 1) no one can leave her out of getting a name. 2) Pyro 100% would give a cheesy media related name and 3) I like the very small connections of white rabbit to the white and red queens in Alice in Wonderland (and 4) rabbits always get experimented on :).

Gamma Gals having amazing duos with the ladies of the Marauders? Absolutely!!

Jen and Haven, being an amazing duo and I feel like they'd be the two who would have that issue where they're the only ones who can save the day and end up learning a lot from each other? Haven is probably thanking her stars that she finally gets to meet a hero who believes in her kindness just as much as she does (S H A W).

Just....Haven being able to meet an even bigger woman and trading stories and being GalPals(TM). Its a really interesting concept to me that Haven is someone who was deliberately used to destroy and Jen is someone who's entire identity is formed around smashing and destruction. It's probably rather cathartic to be working with someone who purely doesn't want to resort to violence immediately and who has been used (Haven by her demon and Jen by different people).

But also learning something from each other? Haven being able to see that sometimes you do need to fight for what you love and Haven proves to Jen that even after all this time, it isn't the muscle or power that can save everything, it's her and her drive and will alone. Catch Red and Shaw scoffing about it.

Speaking of, those two could either REALLY clash or really get along, no imbetweens. Have we found another old man for Shaw to wrestle with, Roman style??? (Ngl that would be hot in a sick way)

Skaar and Shinobi? Both long haired, beautiful, sons of big figures, grew up in abusive environments,,,,its a duo. Just put Shinobi into a mini team with Skaar and Daken and we have the "Black haired brood squad"

Rick and Pyro working together to have a joint production??? FIrebomb productions baby!! My podcast ideas? Absolutely would happen when you combine these two and its hell. Aka; Rick and Pyro gossip on their podcast and give advice to starting heroes as immortals and smack talk. But also outside of that I imagine they can get along a lot in the "had a hard time accepting stuff" and "we were heroes who often did a lot for others and got disregarded and hurt for it".

Pyro: Hey if I set you on fire can you become a flaming bowling ball

Rick: well let's fine out!!

Red and Shaw....there's a lot there. Both are old men who have been pressed on in their lives and affected by masculine presences in their lives...both are regarded as awful shitbags but they're both MUCH more complex and driven by a need for power and stability...lots of thoughts here.

Shaw and Red are one team you do NOT wanna mess with because two old men who are perfectly willing to do what's needed? Red can respect a man willing to get his hands dirty with clear means and Shaw can probably like a guy who has the drive to do what he believes is the better good. Also big hulk man who can give you endless power.

But also differences in them because Shaw abused and continues to abuse Shinobi while Red neglected and most likely emotionally abused Betty but it seemingly trying to make a difference in it now that she's come back? I feel like these two probably have a SUPER in depth conversation when forced to or alone and then never speak about it again.

Spending of Betty! Her and Madelyne?? What a DUO they're litreally a great mix because Maddie is a clone of Jean, Betty was assumed to be a clone at first and often has to suffer being the "domintrix" she hulk. Both have serious issues with their mental health and identities as well as dealing with their lives being ruled or devoted to men who ruin them. Both want freedom and have such passion! I just....so much to say about these two and the similarities. They're both red.

But yeah Phoenix and Harpy?? Skksks Maddie voice: I'm FIRE HARPY nOW

Am I still yelling for her hero name to be Griffin because of how mystical they are and being a bird and lion??? Yeah.

Also sad thoughts but,,,gals talking about their lost kids (Maddie with Nate and Betty suffered a miscarriage induced from stress), the stress of their lovers and who they've lost to (Jean, Emma, Caiera, Jarella,,,) and being manipulated by men for their power (Maddie by Sinister into Goblyn queen and Betty by Leader into Red She-hulk, Harpy, both died).

Anyway point is I can fully see them two just CLICKING or fighting a lot at first until someone points out just how similar they are. Then? Maddie and Betty out here being the brand new Thelma and Louise. Red and Black styles, willing to use force but protect the innocent, both take Alice and this cute kid that Betty absolutely mother henned in her run and,,,two moms and their talented daughters pls step out the way sir.

Tbh I don't think I have much for Samuel apart form him having a small crush on Claudine (and like,,,,not in That Sense, but Samuel does have a big history of falling for smart women or just...OP women). And then a series of gags where Haven wants to know him because he's like Shaw but also incredibly different in thinking and everytime she walks into the room,,,,Samuel is doing some horrific experiment and she just NOPES OUT. Shaw wants to make use of this but it goes horribly wrong oh God why did he try.

Lyra! I just....feel like there could be a lot for her and Claudine and Alice. Lyra was genetically engineered to be used in a war and was bullied relentlessly for being "half man" which...is rather transphobic and sexist but that's her storyline and it's too deeply embedded for me to headcanon over it so...sighs.

But yeah!!! Lyra taking Alice and giving her a night of being able to just....be whoever that night, not being pressured to have an identity of the sorts from anyone and just being able to fight people with a giant green woman. Probably has a lot of deep talks later that night with Lyra, sitting over a building and eating ice cream because it was one of the first things Bruce shared with her and a first realisation that Lyra could be more than someone's daughter.

100% would picture this with Carmilla (Lyra's sister and...also messy kinda clone) or Laura Kinney hopping along and!! Clone weapon woman team!! I could GET INTO this!!! Just...pls marvel give me a team of women overcoming abuse and forming identities among each other and cool women,,,,

But also Lyra admittedly would respect Claudine for her skills and her...tenacity? Yeah, that. She has strength and guts and Lyra probably actually tells her that she'd rather get experimented on by Miss Sinister than some pig of a man and Claudine just "thhhanks?"

Hulk,,,,funny enough I don't think I have many ideas for him yet? Probably gets into a fair few fights with Shaw and Haven over different stuff, Maddie has a bome to pick for Betty,,,I am,,,blank.

I feel like a lot of things for him would be Haven trying to break through into him, maybe each of the Marauders dealing with different parts of the system? I can imagine Shinobi and Pyro don't have a high opinion of the oversized dad until Bruce turns super ashen pale and immediately Joe starts yelling for some whisky and GIRLS....and a fella or two for matchstick and ghost baby here.

Maddie thinking that he's another Scott and then finding out that Hulk's thing is more complicated than Scott simply looking for Jean again. Also Maddie demands that she will forcefully adopt Hulk's kids and these two bonding over abusive dads???

But uh,,,that's about it!! Hope you liked it!!! I probably could easily delve into more thoughts if there's anything specific for me to set my mind on.

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grimelords · 5 years

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My August playlist is finished and while it does unfortunately begin with Tool it also has two of Elvis’ gospel songs on it so please believe me when I say it takes a turn! Everything you could ever want over three hours of music from 70s christian hippie cult music to a funky remix of Also Sprach Zarathustra to Ante Up.

If you’re interested in getting these emailed to you instead of having them mysteriously appear and clog up your dash, I’ve started a tinyletter you can subscrine to at tinyletter.com/grimelords

but in the meantime,

listen here

Lateralus - Tool: Tool is on streaming now and they've got a new album out and so it's a very nice time to reinterrogate a band that meant a lot to teenaged me that i have almost completely exorcised from my life since. What's interesting firstly is how much better it is to consume their music digitally than it ever was in any physical format. They apparently resisted making it available for so long for nebulous reasons of artistic control and intention, wanting a say in how their music is listened to - they design these long and overwrought albums to be experienced as a whole. My contention is that as a whole album, start-to-finish, is one of the worst ways to listen to this band. Tool have maybe 12 great songs across four albums and every single album is around 70-80 minutes, pushing the limit of the CD. Which means for every great song there's at least two ambient interludes, Bill Hicks samples, 90s alt comedy bits (Die Eir Von Satan is just menacing music and a menacing voice reading out a weed cookie recipe in german, now that's what I call comedy) that really add nothing to the experience of the album on a casual listen. Being actually able to listen to these songs on their own, and playlist them and pull them apart from the mire is so refreshing and makes experiencing this extremely exhausting band actually pleasant for once. That's not to say ambient interludes and sketches and whatever aren't worth it, I absolutely love that shit and a lot of my favourite albums are absolutely chock full of that sort of thing - just like, don't make me do it every time. Their new album seems to reflect this at least a little bit, with the more overarching themes and arcs of the previous albums replaced by more singular and self-contained long songs interspersed with dedicated 2 minute interlude tracks. The runtime blows out to an hour and a half unrestrained by physical limits but it seems to contain more actual music and less funny than any other Tool album which is a welcome change. I'm still lukewarm on the album itself, it seems to just be a complete rehashing of the ideas on 10,000 Days (to the point of almost note-for-note repetition of some old riffs and themes) which is a bit disappointing considering how long they've apparently been working on it. I'll give it more time because Tool albums always unfold over multiple listens but for now they kind of just sound like the dad-rock version of a once extremely edgy 90s band - which I guess they are now so that makes sense. As for Lateralus, I think it's their best song. The perfect combination of Joe Rogan spirit science woo-woo sacred geometry fibonacci sequence 'open your mind' bullshit and good old fashioned riffs, it's the best of both halves of Tool and great starting point if you've never listened to this band and are interested in becoming insufferable.

Mars For The Rich - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard: This album is so good and it's finally converted me to being a full time King Gizz guy so look out for a lot more of that in the future. It's a thrash metal concept album about ecological collapse forcing the rich to flee to mars and the poor to flee to venus where they lose their minds and fly into the fire. I spent a little while the other day obsessing over the insane vocal leap in this absolutely incredible song when he jumps down an 11th on 'mars for the riiiiiiich' somehow effortlessly.

Pattern Walks - Cloud Nothings: The interplay between Cloud Nothings second and third albums is something I think about a lot. Attack On Memory is a visceral experience of depression and living in your own head where Here And Nowhere Else is about being able to finally move past it, and living with it. There's a good quote from the singer on the Genius page for this song where he says "It was almost a response to “Wasted Days” on the last record. It ends with “I thought I would be more than this” over and over and this one ends with “I thought” over a beautiful bit of music which is an easy way to explain the way I was thinking when I was writing this record. I wasn’t as depressed as I was when I was making the last album. Before, I felt like nobody liked the band and I was doing it for three years. I was not in a good place. Now, I had more time to think about why I felt that way. It’s a positive song."

M.E. - Metz: Metz put out a B-sides and rarities album a couple of weeks ago and then they put out this Gary Numan cover on it's own for some reason. It's very very good! I love just putting a generally harder edge on it without taking anything away from the spirit of the original. I also, somehow, didn't realise that Where's Your Head At by Basement Jaxx was a Gary Numan sample until I heard this cover so we're all learning every day.

The Ocean And The Sun - The Sound Of Animals Fighting: Here's what's good: having the last third of your song just be a monotone voice reading from a CrimethInc anarchist zine over swirling guitar ambience. The drums are so good in this, Chris Tsagakis makes me want to muscle through the ska and listen to RX Bandits more, he’s just that good. The extremely crunchy part in the chorus especially, it switches through like three different distortions and sounds absolutely great. I’m a big fan of anyone that can make a very straightforward groove like the main one here really work just by absolutely leaning into it.

Uzbekistan - The Sound Of Animals Fighting: Uzbekistan is the most out-there and wild song on this album which was sort of mostly a way back into post-hardcore for TSOAF after Lover, The Lord Has Left Us.. which was perhaps a little too-out there for most. (seven minute closing track of a guy singing John Cage's Experimental Music essay over formless tabla and mandolin). The drums alone in this are worth it. The way they transition in and out of the super distorted electronic parts is so good. This song fortunately also has a section where someone recites poetry over electronic noise and a second voice whispers 'who holds your strings? wake up..." over the top near the end. I will love and defend dum-dum pretentious music until the day I die.

Gangsta - Tune-Yards: I love Tune-Yards and I'm incredibly interested in the way she interrogates whiteness. It's a complicated thing to get into in this playlist post but when she first turned up, a lot of people assumed she was african american just by the sound of her voice and music - it reaches and pulls from a lot of african music in a very postmodern sort of way and when people found out she was white, straight, cis and from New England it kind of felt like a betrayal for some people. On her 2018 album I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life she digs into it a lot in a way that becomes almost uncomfortable for what is ostensibly a pop album. An NPR article about it at the time said "Ever the student, the Smith-educated Garbus, who writes most of Tune-Yards' lyrics, designed an anti-racist curriculum for herself. She attended a six-month anti-racist workshop at the East Bay Meditation Center. She read the work of noted anti-racist educator Tim Wise and explored the activism of Standing Up for Racial Justice, a nationwide, progressive activism network dedicated to "moving white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority.". That's a lot. This song, Gangsta, from her 2011 album when all the hype was fresh feels like a pretty early look into the mindset she'd later fully fledge out of interrogating white identity and cultural appropriation while also participating in it. The lyrics are simple but they get to a simple point, "What's a boy to do if he'll never be a rasta?" is basically making the same point as Ras Trent by The Lonely Island except it's asking where else does Ras Trent fit? Can a white guy participate in anything like that in a way that's not cultural appropriation, and how can a culture like that participate in the larger world without being appropriated? It's 2013 tumblr discourse but it's still churning for a reason I suppose.

Ante Up (feat. Busta Rhymes, Teflon & Remi Martin) - M.O.P: An all time great Violence Song, in the same genre as Knuck If Ya Buck and X Gon Give It To Ya. Opening with "'this shit feel like a whole entire world collapsed" is such an insane way to open a song but the absolute whirlwind of threats that follows makes it feel warranted. "Fuck hip-hop, rip pockets, snatch jewels" is sooo good. I don't even care about this song I am just straight up robbing you. The absolute power in the rhythm of the overlapping getemGETEMgetem hitemHITEMhitem part is just so, so strong. It's like a VR experience of being fucking robbed.

Awake (feat. JPEGMAFIA) - Tkay Maidza: It seems like Tkay is finally nailing down her sound and she’s absolutely killing it. She’s been through a few different styles since she started out and now she’s really hit on something that’s very distinctly her with this and her other new song Flexin and I cannot wait for the album.

Big Head - Ms. Jade: Ms Jade had one album in 2002 and then basically disappeared which is a shame because she's got a very interesting approach. The star of the show is as usual, Timbaland. The man is a singular voice somehow making the tabla and a wikiwiki noise his signature sound. I love the drone of the raps interspersed with the vocal spikes and I love the chorus as the gospel vocals surge up from underneath. This whole song is just completely bizzare in its construction in a way that works perfectly and feels strangely.

Titanium 2 Step - Battles: Battles are finally back and I’m fucking bouncing off the walls. They’re a two piece now and it does not seem to have slowed them down at all which is very exciting. I can’t think of any band that has ever continued with only half of their original members and also moved forward radically every time. Everything about this song is great: the super strength drums, the hypercolour guitar and the vocals that are just screaming absolutely whatever you like whenever you like. It feels closest to Ice Cream, and Gloss Drop in general more than La Di Da Di but i’m so excited to see how the new album sounds - and how they adapt their old material live now that there’s only two of them.

Dancing Is The Best Revenge - !!!: I’ve never actively listened to !!! for no good reason, but plenty of times in my life I’ve heard a song playing and been like damn what the FUCK is THIS?! and it always turns out to be !!!. This is yet another example.

Skitzo Dancer (Justice Remix) - Scenario Rock: The first clap in this is one of the best sounds ever. Right after 'so you think you've seen and heard it all' everything drops out of the mix for this one very comedy clap and it makes me smile every time. The rhythm of the Disco!... Disco! Disco! part near the end is one of those things that's just always playing in the back of my mind, which as far as constant reminders go it's not the worst. I've also over the last week or so been a big fan of this 11 year old youtube video I found of some guy covering the bass on this song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0DLAUaV3f8

16:56 - Danger: Danger had a new album this year that I don't think I gave enough attention to because I relistened and it's very good. He spends the majority of it refining his original sound but it's such a distinct and original niche that it works out great. The songs are so densely layered and frankly just sound so beautiful! Which is a strange thing to say about 80s inspired electro but it just does. The strings and timpani in this about halfway through are just a gift as well, I love it.

Also Sprach Zarathustra - Deodato: As part of my ‘thinking about Elvis’ I was looking up a live album of his called Aloha From Hawaii Via Sattelite which has a very good cover which doubles as an illustration of how my proposed international peacekeeping satellite will function, projecting an immense Elvis themed blanket of darkness over ‘troublemaker’ regions to immerse them in an eternal freezing night until they’ve settled down. Anyway his entrance music for this this concert in Hawaii is Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is a very very funny thing to do and I think gives an appropriate measure of his status at the time. When I told my girlfriend about this she directed me to this bonkers jazz funk version of it by Deodato which deservingly won a grammy in 1974 for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.

Hollywood Forever Cemetary Sings - Father John Misty: I’ve resisted listening to Father John Misty for a long time because he just seems like a real asshole. A big brain man genius that saw what Lana Del Rey was doing and thought “what if.. me?”. But I can’t deny this song, it’s absolutely magical and as far as songs about fucking in a cemetery go it’s definitely one of the most singable.

Remember / Medicine Man - Yma Sumac: In reading about the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and who was buried there, I learned about Yma Sumac. Yma Sumac was a Peruvian soprano with one of the most incredible voices I've ever heard who was an absolutely huge deal in the 50s when Americans were clamouring for the exotic, real or imagined. She made extremely good mambo music and claimed to be descended from the last Incan emperor. Her popularity faded after the 50s and then for an unknown reson in 1971, ten years since her last album, she made this rock album. It is insane. It's the best example of 'voice as an instrument' that I've ever heard. She is making every kind of sound possible with a human voice and her range seems completely limitless. She's just as comfortable in a piercingly high whistle register as she is in deep guttural growls. About 2 minutes into Remember she just straight up jumps four octaves in a row just to flex. She also sings in a way in the second verse of Medicine Man that I've never heard before that sounds like she's blowing out her cheeks and then singing with her mouth almost closed. It's absolutey bizzare and I love it so much.

This Thing - King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard: Listening to the other album that King Gizzard put out this year is really making me appreciate how much of 180 Infest The Rats Nest was for them. This album is basically a Black Keys album of groovy fun songs about fishing for fishies with fantastic harmonica work and it makes it look even more like they just snapped when they did the next one.

The Warrior (feat. Patty Smyth) - Scandal: I've been very passively watching GLOW since the second half of season 2 and now I'm very passively watching season 3 and this song was the opening credits theme for the first episode. It fucking rocks I don't know why they don't just make it the theme song all the time. This sort of 80s hard-rock pop is very good when it's good and extremely bad when it's bad and I wonder if we'll ever see any sort of revival of it once 80s nostalgia nostalgia takes hold in 2030. Being a singer named Patty Smyth is very funny also. She's billed as a feature even though she was in the band because she left to try a solo career as soon as it was released, possibly even before. She is also John McEnroe's wife I just found out. What a life.

A Girl Called Johnny - The Waterboys: I found this song because I was googling to see if it's possibly to get a random album from spotify and instead foumd a guy on rateyourmusic who was generating random rym album pages and then listening to whatever came up if it was on spotify - which seems just as good. This was one of the albums he talked about and he seemed to like it so I listened and I did as well. Sometimes the best way to find new music is throw dice on the internet and see what comes up.

New Year's Eve - City Calm Down: The new City Calm Down is one hundred percent great and I have such admiration for them for making a complete left turn with their sound and sounding like a completely different band since their last album but being equally as great in both forms. It's very inspiring and it's also the second song of the month I've heard for the first time while walking around Richmond that's mentioned Richmond. Very spooky.

Cruel Summer - Taylor Swift: It's fucked up how good Lover is when ME! and You Need To Calm Down were so bad. It feels like they changed direction at the last minute and changed the tracklist dramatically because those two songs seem sort of wildly out of place, along with London Boy. It's so uneven it's basically two albums in one but when it's good it's extremely good. This song is fucking powerful. The way she straight up screams "he looks so pretty like a devil"? Amazing. What a crazy thing to shout. If you're interested I also resequenced Lover and took London Boy off it and it's a far better album in my opinion https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3LN1uAhp8BS8Ms4bgmHiVP

Kelly - Van She: I have no idea why but this is in the opening paragraph of Van She's wiki page: "Their label introduced them as a "new band from Sydney fresh on ideas, fresher than Flavor Flav, fresh like coriander, fresher than the Fresh Prince, fresher than fresh eggs."[2] Despite these claims, the band began with a sound very much rooted in the 1980s, heavy on synthesizer." which really makes me laugh. Van She had a very specific mid-2000s indietronica thing going that was really good as this song proves but they also did a bunch of remixes under the name Van She Tech that are very out there and completely different to the main band. Their remix of UFO by Sneaky Sound System I'm sure I've yelled about in these posts before, it's absolutely phenomenal. Anyway I guess what I'm saying is get you a band that can do both.

Shadow - Wild Nothing: Somehow I missed Wild Nothing back when they were a big thing and only listened to them this month. I listened to this whole album while I was doing housework and when it finished I though 'that was nice' and could not remember a single thing about it. That's the beauty of shoegaze! I had to listen to it about five more times for it to stick and now I'm getting more and more out of it every time, I love it.

Heaven's On Fire - The Radio Dept.: Years ago when I was having a major 'depressive episode' for about a fucking year I listened to this album Constantly and as a result for a very long time I couldn't listen to it without inviting megawatts of bad vibes back into my brain. Thankfully through hard work and time passing it appears I've fully healed my assosciations with this album which is fantastic news because it is delightful start to finish and worth getting obsessed with again.

Crystalised - The xx: It's nice to see news articles posted almost every day about which albums are turning ten years old. It makes me feel one million years old and viewing the world from a television in my hermit's cave. It feels hard to overstate just how much quiet influence the xx have had over the music landscape since 2009. Without The xx we don't have Royals and without Royals we don't have You Need To Calm Down, so. Something beautiful of theirs that I think is sad hasn't caught on in the intervening years is the idea of writing romantic duets when duets had been out of fashion for so long. They wrote a whole album of them and continue to! There's a beautiful contextual depth to it, in that it's two queer people singing not exactly to each other but with each other. In an interview they've called it 'singing past each other' which is a very nice way to put it.

Aspirin - Tropical Fuck Storm: I really appreciate the continual development of the guitars in Tropical Fuck Storm where they sound so pencil-necked and reedy in these angular little melodies and then sometimes explode into thick cacophanous howls, but what's especially good is in songs like this when they don't explode and instead just sort of sprout tendrils and crawl around each other. They're really drilling down on a very singular and very unsettling sound and I really love it. It is also a very interesting feeling to be walking around Richmond listening to this album for the first time and having him mention Richmond. Spooky even.

Pasta - Angie McMahon: "My bedroom is a disaster / my dog has got kidney failure" is an all-time great opening lyric for me. I love the way this song kicks up from the doldrums, like forcing yourself to do something just so you've done something today. Angie McMahon is so great and I'm getting more and more out of her album every time.

If I Had A Hammer - Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash: The way this song is performed here is so fucking cool. The guitar tone, June's voice and the general energy of it is just absolutely electric. It feels like Highway 61 Bob Dylan where it's still folk but it's got this massive power in it. The solo fucking rips in that very old fashioned way and when it finishes and that riff comes back in by itself it's just great.

Elvis Presley Blues - Gillian Welch: I was thinking about this song because I too was thinking about Elvis. I thought for a long time that the lyrics to this were ‘didn’t he die?’ and not ‘day that he died’ and I think I prefer mine more. Idly thinking about Elvis like “whatever happened to that guy? Must be old now. Wait, didn't he die? No way to know I suppose.”

Everything Is Free - Sylvan Esso: Rolling Stone had a very good article and interview about how this song about napster has had a resurgence and remained relevant through the streaming era which is a very good read. I love the original and really this version is very similar except for the one key difference where they really dig into the anger and frustration at the heart of it in the 'fucking sing it yourself' line. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/gillian-welch-everything-is-free-courtney-barnett-father-john-misty-725135/

It's Nice To Have A Friend - Taylor Swift: This is the strangest song on Lover and one of the best, I absolutely love it. It's a very old fashioned kind of Taylor Swift Love Story type song but it also has a a fucking trumpet reveille in the middle, so that really spices it up a bit. I also keep accidentally listening to this backwards - there's a few phrases like when she sings 'it's nice to have a friend' where the 'friend' lands on the offbeat but is accented like it should be ON the beat and because of the way the music is in this where it's just the steady pulse it's hard to tell whether the chime is supposed to be on the beat or on the offbeat. It feels like it sort of slides back and forth throughout the song depending on what everything else is doing around it. I don't know if that's intentional or not but it's a very interesting effect. This song is also, in my estimation, about a woman and is detailing a fantasy Taylor Swift is having where she can come out to the world with no fuss and enjoy a simple fairytale love story as a gay woman.

Psalm 42 / Chant For Pentecost - The Trees Community: I have a mental list of albums I google every few months to see if they've been added to streaming and by the grace of god one of them finally has been. Years ago I used to listen to this almost every night to fall asleep and I think it brainwashed me slightly in a delightful way, and now I finally have it back again! This is proper hippie music: a bunch of long haired new york christians who drove around the country in the early 70s in a school bus playing their elaborate and beautiful music for anyone who wanted to hear it. The multilayered, multi-movement construction of these songs is completely entrancing to me. It's not a hollow beauty, but one that brings new meaning to old words in the way they stretch and snap and waver throughout the song, moving past each other and through each other as it moves forward. I absolutey love it. Chant For Pentecost is a good illustration of the other side of them, a short song that starts sweet and turns almost maniacal. There's a wild-eyed feeling to the harmonies and the way this melody sits on a single tone for such long stretches before the frankly scary conclusion.

In My Father's House / Working On The Building - Elvis Presley: The backing vocals in these, and especially the bass vocals are so incredible. The way they work in the second verse of Working On The Building is so great, Elvis is the lead vocal but the middle harmony and somehow it just works perfectly. The harmonies is In My Father's House are amazing. The bass solo is mind blowing and the part about halfway through where Elvis swallows the mic and says "jesus died upon the cross [VRRMER] sorrow" is very funny. It's got it all.

The Greatest - Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell is an absolute masterpiece and this is the best song on it. Lana has always had a knack for this apocalyptic feeling but this is a whole other level. https://www.stereogum.com/2056565/lana-del-rey-norman-fucking-rockwell-review/franchises/premature-evaluation/ The Stereogum writeup for this album was really great, and really nailed my opinion of her whole character thing as well, but he described this song as her version of that video that Ted Turner commissioned for CNN to play at the end of the world and it's really a perfect description. The part at the end where she says 'Kanye West is blonde and gone' is so chilling to me. Like Kanye losing the plot makes sense because he's only a few months ahead of the rest of us. He’s been a thought and culture leader for so long and it only makes sense that he’s spun off into space in these last days before it all wraps up.

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kenyel-kenyel · 4 years

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lacystar · 6 years

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Canonicups - A Taste of Heaven, Ch. 1

So if you haven’t heard about the whole situation with Gerard voring a Reese’s cup, good. Read this and you’ll find out. Also sorry this is formatted weirdly. Tumblr’s post length sucks. :/

Ships: Canonicups (Gerard Canonico x Reese’s Cup)

Warnings: swearing, not smut but oddly steamy undertones

Word count: 2,045

@hey-hamlet-bmc this is for you Elliot. I hope it’s accurate to your experience.

———

Gerard could sense it from a mile away.

He’d been standing backstage. Jennifer Tepper was talking about the show and how successful she thought it would be, and Gerard had been listening very intently.

But then... it just hit him.

Maybe the air conditioning changed direction, directing the irresistible musty peanut scent to his nose.

Or maybe he’d heard the crinkle of the wrapper. That high pitched little squeak. The beg to be let out of the paper prison and into a loving mouth.

Or maybe he’d just sensed it. Just gotten that gut feeling of wanting something so bad it canceled every single one of his other thoughts and made his stomach churn... and rumble.

But however it happened, whether through smell or hearing or feeling, or maybe all three, that single moment, that pang of absolute desire would change Gerard forever.

Jennifer was still talking, but Gerard wasn’t listening anymore.

“I just feel so incredibly honored to be working on it, y’know? Joe has had such a huge impact-“

“We’re going downstairs.”

It wasn’t a question.

Jennifer’s face twisted in confusion, or at least Gerard thought it did. It was hard to tell. Everything was so blurry.

“What?”

He didn’t have time for this. Gerard turned on his heel and began power walking to the stairs. Looking back, he might’ve realized how rude he was being. But he couldn’t care. There was too much at stake to care about anything other than finding it, whatever it was.

The closer he got to the stairs the stronger the feeling became. The dry tightness of his throat. His sandpaper tongue. His heart that felt almost more machine than muscle with its rapid yet steady pulsing.

All of his senses were muted to the world around him, yet dialed to 100 when it came to it.

Whatever this thing was, it was his new air supply. Gerard knew that if he couldn’t get to it, he would die. It sounded ridiculous, but Gerard now associated this emotion, this new adrenaline, as dying.

The closer he got, the more amped it got. The nearer he drew, the desire chocked his heart harder.

It was coming from the bag check.

He knew better than this. He knew better than to just walk around where a group of fans was waiting to see him. But he didn’t care.

He was faintly aware of Jennifer following him. Good. It excited him, the thought of her seeing whatever the hell was about to go down.

One of the bag checkers, a girl, caught his eye and waved to him.

It was coming from her. It wasn’t her, exactly, but it was coming from her.

“Gerard, you look pale,” Jennifer worried, grabbing his shoulder. He shrugged her off.

He beelined for her.

The friendly bag check lady said something. Actually, she’d been talking for a minute now. Yet again, Gerard hadn’t been paying attention.

“Uh, I’m... sorry, I- what? Did you say? What did you say?” God, he couldn’t even talk right.

The lady’s brow furrowed in concern. “I asked if you wanted a Reese’s Cup?”

And all at once the frantic pounding in Gerard’s chest stopped.

It— his soulmate, he now knew— had a name. And it was Reese’s Cup.

Realizing he was gaping like a fish and hadn’t responded, Gerard nodded. He didn’t trust his voice at the moment.

Gerard’s head was pounding now and he felt sick to his stomach. What was happening to him? Was this how Rich felt when he needed Mountain Dew Red, a part of him wondered.

It seemed like a century passed as Bag Check Lady reached into her pocket and closed her fingers around Reese’s Cup’s wrapper. It let out another crinkle, this one of joy and utter relief. Gerard realized that it must be going through the same, lovestruck, near death experience he was going through, and found solace in the fact that he wasn’t alone. Soon it would all be alright.

Bag Check Lady lifted her hand out to him and he lunged. She stumbled back as he tore the candy from her hand.

His eyes finally focused through the blurriness. The orange paper was a beacon in the rest of the world. It was the single tiny barrier separating him from his lover. He loathed and loved it all at once.

A drop of water fell on it.

Wait, no, not water. Spit. Gerard was drooling. Or, less drooling, more foaming at the mouth. He hunched protectively over the treat in his hands, and his whole body convulsed in violent shivers.

He was so hungry that he wanted to throw up.

“Holy shit, Gerard,” Jennifer grabbed him by the shoulders and forcefully turned him to look at her.

Gerard snarled, and let out a noise that sounded like a bark, growl, and yelp conglomerated. His arms snapped to his chest, hands protectively wrapped around Reese’s Cup, who let out a panicked crinkle.

Jennifer’s eyes widened and she let go. “What the fuck Gerard, I- you-“ she shook her head, “I’m getting you help.”

Before he could grab her, Jennifer was running away. Shit, Gerard thought. Now she couldn’t see him reconcile with his lover.

He turned back to Bag Check Lady, but she’d already turned her back to him to continue searching bags.

Gerard carefully unfurled his arms from his chest and looked back down at Reese’s Cup. He took one more second to admire the curly calligraphy that was his lover’s name, and then carefully tore the orange prison cell open, careful not to rip into Reese’s Cup on accident.

He reached into the packaging and carefully felt for the candy, the packaging crinkling in anticipation. His pointer finger brushed it and a jolt of electricity raced down his spine. Gerard gingerly pinched it between said pointer finger and his thumb, and pulled it out.

It was beautiful.

The crimped paper packaging was gorgeous compliment to its dark, coco skin, like an expensive dress. Its flesh seemed so smooth, and he found his finger gliding along it to further prove his point.

“Hi,” he whispered breathlessly.

It didn’t speak, but he smiled nonetheless, tears gathering in his eyes as he felt the love radiating off of it. He’d never felt so wanted.

For a beat, everything was perfect.

His stomach growled violently, and he snapped back into his carnivorous state, all kindness gone.

Gerard began to raise the treat to his mouth, when he remembered Jennifer. He’d wanted her to come along so she could see this moment, but she wasn’t here anymore.

For an unexplainable reason, he just couldn’t do this without anyone watching. He needed someone to witness this moment. Someone had to share this with him so that someday, when someone wrote a biography about him, they could retell this crucial moment in his life.

He needed someone to share the miracle of love with.

His eyes rose and scanned the small crowd of fans waiting to get in. He caught the eyes of a boy who was trying to indiscreetly look at him. They locked eyes.

Perfect.

With his target acquired, he brought the treat up and took a little whiff. The peanut chocolate concoction smelled delectable, and he couldn’t wait any longer. He used both hands and brought it to his mouth.

It felt so intimate to be doing in public, and with someone purposely watching no less, but god it felt right. His brain was pleasantly foggy with desire, and he couldn’t comprehend how odd and somewhat disgusting this whole scenario was. He had just never been more hungry.

As the growling in his stomach reached a cacophony, Gerard thrust his lower lip forward, digging it into the treat. He scooped and inhaled the treat into his mouth, never once breaking eye contact with the boy across the room. He’d never stared at anyone so intensely. It didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered. He bit down.

It was the best thing he’d ever put in his mouth.

Warmth flooded him. The ratio of peanut butter to chocolate was perfect, the mix of hard outer shell and soft inside healing his headache, his queasiness. He stopped shaking and continued to chew. He didn’t want to swallow yet. This was too special.

Despite the fact that he already felt better, the intensity was still there. He continued staring at the boy across the room, whose eyes were as wide as saucers and whose mouth lay agape in confusion. This didn’t register to Gerard at first.

But slowly, as he began to walk towards the stairs leading to the lobby, the events of the last five minutes began to catch up to him. A whirlpool of emotions slowly flooded him, mainly made up of confusion. Because, he thought as he stuffed the wrapper in his pocket, what the actual fuck had just happened?

It was as if he hadn’t been in control of his own body. And he realized, as he walked, that he didn’t really remember what had just occurred.

He could recount it, sure. He could tell someone what had happened. But he couldn’t remember the feelings or the drive.

He stepped up a couple steps when the gravity of the situation fully fell on him. He finally swallowed Reese’s Cup, dread filling his stomach along with the candy.

Did he just... get sexually attracted to a Reese’s Cup? And then... vore it... in front of-

He dared to look back over his shoulder. The boy he’d stared at while doing the deed was still looking at him in incredulous horror.

Oh fuck.

Embarrassment and terror jolted through Gerard. What the fuck. How was he supposed to make this better? Did he go back to the guy and apologize for an occurrence he didn’t even fully understand himself?

He stuttered out and “uh,” to nobody in particular, and then, holding eye contact with the boy for only a second longer, turned and sprinted up the stairs.

Gerard dashed through the lobby, panting. Running was definitely the best way to resolve this situation, he decided.

Jennifer almost collided with him as he skirted backstage.

“Oh Jesus-“ she sighed, grabbing him by the shoulders, “I called Troy to fill in for you. You’re free to go home and... figure yourself out.” She looked him up and down, “Do you need a ride to the doctor or-“

“No!” Gerard shook himself out of his stupor, “I... I’m fine,” he lied, “and Troy doesn’t have to come in. I can do it.” Because really, he had a job to do and no smoking hot candy bar was gonna distract him from that.

She looked doubtful, but Gerard continued to try and persuade her and eventually she agreed to let him do the show.

So he left without another word to her and stumbled to his dressing room. George and Will were in there, unsurprisingly, as they often just hung around in there whenever they felt like it.

Gerard collapsed onto a chair, and took a good minute to stare at himself in the makeup mirror. He almost didn’t recognize the face he saw.

“Wow, not even a hello?” Will joked.

No response.

An awkward heavy silence filled the room. Gerard managed to break eye contact with the monster in the mirror, and dug his palms into his eyes.

Will spoke again, more tentatively “... Are you ok?”

“I don’t know.” George opened his mouth to talk, “don’t ask me about it,” Gerard cut him off. George closed his mouth.

Eventually, Gerard forced himself up out of the chair, stuffing the events of the night into the back of his mind as he got into costume. Will and George continued talking as if all were normal, but they didn’t engage with him. Every now and then, Gerard could feel their questioning stares baring into him.

If Jennifer told anyone else what had happened, they didn’t approach Gerard.

The performance went fine, but Gerard’s heart wasn’t in it.

He didn’t stagedoor. He couldn’t bear the thought of having to see that boy who he’d probably scarred for life when the incident went down.

Besides, he had to get home and rest. He had a lot to think about.

To be continued...

#bmc #bmc fanfiction #bmc fandom #bmc nyc #bmc new york #be more chill #be more chill musical #be more chill fanfic #gerard canonico #rich goranski #bmc rich #be more chill rich #reeses cups #canonicups #why the fuck did i write this #lacydoesherbest

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mrsabbington-blog · 6 years

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Farewell, my dear Watson: Amanda Abbington on Sherlock and her break-up with Martin Freeman

The actress’s career was going from strength to strength when her relationship with her co-star imploded. She tells Bryan Appleyard how she contained the fallout

Amanda Abbington — who, as Mary Morstan, took a bullet for Sherlock Holmes — has a new man whom she won’t name. “He’s lovely, we’re keeping it very much on the low down. We don’t want lots of people to know. We’ve been together for about a year now. He’s an actor and he’s delightful. He’s very mindful of my situation and I’m very mindful of his.”

She was with Holmes’s sidekick, Dr Watson — aka Martin Freeman — for 16 years. They have two children, Grace and Joe. They broke up in 2016 while they were both starring in Sherlock.

“We still get on really well, we still really both admire each other as actors … he’s a great guy, but we just couldn’t live with each other any more.”

Given that Sherlock was an international hit, and that Freeman achieved global superstardom as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, this was a high-profile break-up. She was papped, looking supposedly “disconsolate” while out shopping.

Trying to keep the new man a mystery is understandable. But it won’t be easy. Tabloids have recently been reporting that she and Northern Irish actor Jonjo O’Neill are an item. She is neither confirming nor denying this. The paps would have been after her anyway, because she is the star of Safe, a new Netflix series by the crime author Harlan Coben. The first strange thing about this show is her co-star Michael C Hall, who played the Miami serial killer Dexter and the gay undertaker David Fisher in Six Feet Under. Here, he is a dodgy English husband in a wealthy suburban enclave (in fact Manchester, but you’re not supposed to know that). The strange thing is his English accent, which is near perfect.

“He was really worried about that. English accents are hard for Americans to do. I don’t think he had a voice coach.”

Her voice has a slight southeastern working-class flavour. She talks quickly, eagerly and laughs a lot and, for some reason, she seems much prettier in the flesh than on TV. I am sure, however, there is something wrong with her tastebuds. We’re both having tuna salad at a studio in north London. The fish is perfectly inedible, but she eats it all.

To get back to Hall — he will always be Dexter to me, so I’m pretty sure he’s guilty of something other than the affair he’s having with Sophie, the detective sergeant played by Abbington, which is revealed in the first episode. Also revealed is the fact that Sophie’s ex-husband is living in a caravan in her front garden.

This is the second time she’s played a detective sergeant. The first was Jo Moffatt in the series Cuffs in 2015. The BBC cancelled that after one series. She was also Detective Chief Inspector Louise Munroe in Case Histories, another BBC series. Female police officers, we agree, have a long and distinguished screen history. “Prime Suspect,” I suggest. “Helen Mirren!”

“The Gentle Touch!” she replies. “Cagney and Lacey! Angie Dickinson! I loved Police Woman. I wanted to be Angie Dickinson when I was growing up.”

There’s a good reason she fantasised about being a strong woman with a gun. For three years at primary school she was badly bullied — her lunches were stolen and she was called ugly, stupid and smelly. Nobody would play with her.

“There was a group of girls who made my life miserable. I am now very, very aware of it when it happens anywhere. If it happens to my kids or on the street or on the internet I’ll wade in.”

She’s certainly an active and sweary anti-bullying and anti-general-nastiness campaigner on Twitter — she is @CHIMPSINSOCKS.

“I’ve never understood the c**** who abuse and hurt animals,” was her latest tweet as I was writing this. “Wonderful. Just wonderful. Let’s make older women feel even more f****** invisible and unattractive,” she tweeted about a story saying men preferred younger women.

She was brought up in Hertfordshire, her father was a taxi driver and her mother was tough: she finally found out about the bullies and went round to the house of one of them. “If your child does anything like that to my daughter again,” she said, “I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

Her mother’s fierceness and her grandmother’s advice seem to have prepared her for the perils of show business. When I ask her the inevitable Harvey Weinstein question, she says she’s never had a problem. “I always go on a film set as a mate of everybody. I set my stall out. I’m just going to be like the funny mate who hangs out with the sparks and the prop boys, and I make sure I am not someone you can take the piss out of or take advantage of. I learnt that from my nana — be strong, make them laugh and don’t take shit from anybody.”

Anyway, there she is in Hertfordshire worshipping Angie Dickinson and wanting to be on stage. Somehow this leads her into dancing. She studied dance from the age of five. Eventually she got auditions for Cats and Starlight Express, but she knew she wasn’t good enough. In any case, the decision was made for her when, aged 18, she did the splits and ripped the muscles in her groin.

“That ended my dancing career, but I would never have been a good dancer. Then a drama teacher told me that he thought my talent lay in acting and he was absolutely right. I’d always performed, always made up stories and done funny voices. I went to a tiny drama school in Hitchin and I felt like I’d come home.”

She picked up small parts — The Bill, Wycliffe, Casualty and so on. But there was no real breakthrough. Well, there was one: the Maltesers TV ads she made with Katherine Parkinson. Unlike almost every TV ad ever made anywhere, they are still worth watching.

At one point she went 18 months without any work, changing her agent half a dozen times in desperation. The first stirrings of a change in her fortunes came with ITV’s Mr Selfridge — she was Josie Mardle — which ran for four series between 2013 and 2016.

“My character was an amalgamation of quite a few women who worked within the top echelons of Selfridges. There was so much going on in those years — the suffragettes, the Titanic. It was a dream job.”

It was a success, but not huge and a bit middle-aged — it was not for geeks, millennials or snowflakes, so it could not really go, as we must say, viral. All that changed when the actor and screenwriter Mark Gatiss invited her and Freeman to sit in on a discussion on the third series of Sherlock. They wanted to bring in a new character from the books, Mary Morstan, who first appears in The Sign of Four. Abbington had a couple of ideas. “I said Nicola Walker, she would be amazing in it. Or Olivia Colman.”

It was a set-up, they were going to offer it to her all along. She burst into tears. Sherlock was the big TV show of the moment.

“People started to say hello to me in the street when Sherlock started. Mr Selfridge wasn’t iconic. Sherlock hit the ground running and everyone went mad about it.”

She did seven episodes in two series, then she saved the life of Holmes and sacrificed her own by taking the bullet; it’s an invented incident, Mary dies in the books, but the cause is unknown. I ask her why a mouthy, Estuary-accented working-class girl like her would take a bullet for a toff — Holmes being played by the old Harrovian Benedict Cumberbatch.

“I know! Why would she do that? I wouldn’t, I’d run the other way.”

Did being killed off upset her?

“No, it made sense. And, anyway, you never really leave Sherlock, there are always flashbacks. So if they ever do another one I’m hoping they’ll have me back.”

The strange thing about her role in Sherlock was not simply that it made her famous. Out there on the easily offended, lost-its-grip-on-reality internet it made her notorious as the scheming woman who came between the previously happy and — in the imaginations of some fans — gay relationship between Holmes and Watson.

“I made the mistake of talking about the fan art very early on. They used to do some beautiful work about Watson and Sherlock being together as a couple, and I made an off-the-cuff remark that I wasn’t entirely happy with this because my kids might see it. The fallout was terrible and I felt really bad. I wasn’t being disparaging about their work. It got out of hand and I managed to make a lot of enemies. I had to do a lot of damage limitation. It’s because they’re fiercely protective of the show and that’s brilliant! But it means you have to treat it with a lot of respect.”

Meanwhile, Freeman had to be away for years in New Zealand shooting The Hobbit. While away she had the children to look after and had a cancer scare — a lump in her breast that turned out to be harmless. She also landed herself in trouble with the taxman. She was declared bankrupt because of an unpaid £120,000 tax bill. “I didn’t pay enough over a period of years and it accumulated, but for the record I paid it all back with a huge amount of interest,” she says. “Because I’m an idiot and I didn’t put enough away. It was my biggest regret and now I make sure everything is in place where it can never happen again.”

On top of that, their relationship was in trouble and, in the midst of the Sherlock episodes that put them on screen together, they broke up. They kept it as quiet as they could. “When we broke up nobody knew, we didn’t tell anybody except for a few key people because they had to know, because of the logistics of hotels and stuff. It took six months for it to get out and a lot of that was while we were working on Sherlock.

“We were not children, we weren’t going to start throwing crap at each other. We were professional and we were going to get on and make a show and be civil to each other. That’s far more important than being angry and being sad.”

Safe could have her up there again. The first episode I saw looked very promising and Coben does seem to be associated with hits. We’ll see.

Abbington, meanwhile, is back in her home village of Little Heath, Hertfordshire, with her parents living down the road. She’s an only child, they’re close. She loved being an only child because it made it easier to get on with adults and she never had to put up with rows like those between her children.

“Please, Mummy, can I get an agent,” says Grace, who is nine. She wants to be an actor. Abbington thinks she has the talent and presence to succeed. But she’s cautious. Parts like Mary Morstan and Josie Mardle don’t grow on trees.

Safe launches on Netflix on May 10

#Amanda Abbington #Sherlock #Mary Watson #Mary Morstan #Netflix Safe #Martin Freeman #interview

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punkscowardschampions · 5 years

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Ali & Tess

A nice pre-Christmas argument

Tess joined the chat 2 hours ago Ali: Mamacita! How's tricks? Did you manage to get the gum out of Rocky's hair in the end or is he rocking a no.1 rn? Tess: It's hat season he'll be fine. It's your da you need to worry about if he doesn't get those bloody Christmas decs out Ali: At least you'll be saved the toxic fumes of the nit shampoo, like. I'll make him some earmuffs, ears like that, he'll get frostbite. Ali: Aww, leave off, he's got a bad back, like 😜 Ali: Caleb can come help with the heavy shit, he's like an ox, I'll be creative director, obvs, I've got the eye, he's got the body Ali: 😉 Tess: I hope you've got plenty of wool 'cause the dog got to ours and its a bloody state. He'll have a bad head to go with it in a minute. Nah you're alright bab Tommy's offered and Drew might as well make himself useful now he's sniffing round again. Ali: Well, there goes your classic jumper presents! Have to brave dem crowds, fight a bitch for the last...idk, what do kids even want these days? Last I heard from Rock mutant turtles and power rangers were back in vogue but they're probably out again, its been a week or so 😏 Contrary fuckers, eh? I was NEVER that bad, was I? Bet you wish you could relieve those easy years raising me, the dream child 😇 Ali: Alright then, though I wouldn't recommend confining Tommo and Drew to a space as small as the loft, T is gunning for him Ali: aren't we all? but hey 🤷 see if those muscles are just for show ay Tess: He's still on about that slime bollocks. Supposedly this stuff blows bubbles and expands or whatever. All I'm bothered about is that it says it ain't sticky. Better sodding not be. Ha! If you weren't being a little demon you were trying to raise them. Easy ain't the word love! Tess: I'll put Drew at the bottom of the ladder. Maybe some of the boxes'll land on his head. Knock some sense into the lad. Ro too seeing as she's never far. Ali: That shit is such a rip-off though, I could make him some dead cheap, tell him he can have it whatever colour, whatever random shit he wants in it, and no one else will have the same at School Ali: Save your money for the feast 💃'cos I won't be absolutely stuffed from my first xmas dinner, like, nah Ali: and demons need love too, ma, just ask Ro Ali: will he be joining us for meal numero dos? cos i don't think i can stomach 2 helpings of him in one day tbh Tess: Tell him yourself. I tried to make some with him in the summer and the ungrateful little sod wouldn't even come sit up the table. His loss. They loved it at work. Tess: Don't. That girl'll do me in one of these days . I'm surviving on spite by now 'cause he'll be eating with us over my dead body. Caleb's lot are welcome to keep him. Ali: I'm tellin ya get the kid some prescription speed, it'll do him wonders 😂 Well, that's another idea fucked...tis the season! Ali: I know, it ain't even funny at this point. Ali: You know she's gonna wanna go see him, yeah? You'll never get her to sit through games and shit telly once she's picked at her veg Ali: Its like kid swap up in here Tess: If I can get some what's on her plate into her instead of just the dog I'll be laughing. Fuck's sake. Kids who'd celebrate 'em? Grandkids on the other hand. Mary'd have been proper buzzing for that. Ali: Oi, woman! I'm right here Ali: and the giver of majority grandkids, so, think on, love Tess: You're even stevens kiddo. Keep it that way 'til you're done with uni yeah? Call that the xmas gift that keeps giving. Ali: yeah but a twofer ain't the same, is it? 😜 don't make promises i can't keep, ma Ali: engineering students are so fit, how will i resist? Tess: Tell that to Bea. I'm sure she'd have plenty to say back. Ali Mckenna don't test me there's plenty of room in the car when we go for Tommo's new specs I can get you in too. Ali: Yeah, yeah, she can lord it over me with her efficient vagina, getting it done in one, I'll be many bucks fizzes deep by then, give a shizzle Ali: Gurl, my vision is 20/20, in my third eye too, ooOOoOoOOOo Ali: Maybe Beatrice will prove again why she's your favourite daughter by distracting Ro so much with this London visit she won't have time to pine over Drew at all, happy days Tess: That's the spirit. Save your dad's back. He still thinks he's a brawler. Tess: Shh I don't have favorites I'm not one of your teachers. Tess: I'm sure Drew'll stay one text away throughout. Never off her phone now is she. Ali: Ahh, old man could still take him, Drew's a pussy Ali: I'll get Marlene round again lmao Ali: Suuuuuuuuuuuure ya don't 😏 Ali: We can only assume texting is a medium in which he really shines, 'cos seeing them IRL, doesn't make sense, so... Tess: Now that girl is a fave, thinking 'bout it. Yeah I like her. Tess: He must know his selfie angles or some shit. Tess: You tell me I'll never see the appeal. Ali: oh, sweet mama, if only you'd voiced your preference sooner, maybe i'd of married her and had lots of gaybies instead Ali: alas 🤣 Ali: you sound 100, do you feel it? 😉 Ali: he's a vessel for her hopes and dreams, init, but he ain't, he just needs to man up and move the fuck on so she can too Tess: Like you've ever listened to your ma. Double it and you ain't close, bab. I'm in those vampiric numbers here. Tess: Yeah. Maybe try telling her that. Ali: You wish you were a vampire. Which, tbh, is telling of how old you is. Ain't nothing cool about being a basement dwelling weirdo who can't sample the wonder and joy of garlic bread. Ali: Why don't you? Oh wait, cos it ain't for either of us to say it so we'll just sit here like bitter old lemons Ali: You're a bad influence, lady Tess: If that's what you think about vampire lore then I ain't gonna even waste my breath young'un. Tess: I have, cheers. I ain't sitting on my arse doing fuck all for you lot even if that's what you reckon. Tess: Exactly. Learn a lesson. Ali: Mhmm, go tell it to the lost boys 'cos I don't give a damn, I'm getting doughballs baby Ali: Pshhh, well fat lot of good its done, why you setting me up to fail then?! Ali: I know when to bow out gracefully Tess: I don't need to 'cause we'll all be snacking. If you'd watched that movie when I offered you'd know garlic don't work in that verse. Tess: There's nothing graceful about tapping out with a fight left to finish. I thought you'd been set up to go 'til the final bell but do what you've gotta do. Or don't. Tess: There's plenty of other shit stuck to the fridge singing your praises like Ali: No thank you, there's watching some lame for jokes, then there's forcing yourself to endure kiefer sutherland and co Ali: That's sadism. Ali: Well, there's nothing graceful about kicking a girl when she's down Ali: going blow for blow ain't always the right approach, is it? not with someone like Ro so don't start alright Tess: Lame? And you wonder why you ain't my fave. Tess: Helping your sister up is always the right approach if you don't want her to stay down. Tess: I'm not starting anything. I've said my piece. End of. Ali: C'mon, I know even Joe couldn't pretend to like it, like Ali: That's my point, she ain't fell yet, she's on a Drew-related high so pardon me from not trying take the rug from up under her Ali: not that I could if I tried, like I said, what good has you 'saying your piece' done? Ali: sometimes all you can do is be there to pick up the pieces after, that's just facts Tess: You all take after your da is why. No taste none of ya. Tess: It's done me a lot of good being able to get it on the record each time, cheers. Tess: sometimes that's a cop out 'cause you want a easy life Tess: Fact is there's plenty that could have been done before he did his reappearing act. Ali: Oh, yeah? Like what? Changing her entire worldview in time for tea? Ali: If it was that easy, you would've managed it by now Ali: Don't be so hard on yourself, your not doing her, or any of us, a favour with this shit Tess: He's a dealer it is that easy. It ain't my job to manage it though. You all wanna be treated like adults and have me wipe your arses for you at the same time I think not. Do yourself and her, a favor and use that big brain of yours. Ali: You think she doesn't know? Now who's being thick Ali: She doesn't care, so unless you're planning to cop shop him that means sweet fuck all doesn't it Tess: It ain't about what she knows. Last I checked he's not the only dealer in Dublin. There's still some honor among scumbags and more than one way to get caught out. Ali: Aww, such a softie at heart, ain't ya? Tess: Takes one to know one. Ali: That is one small step above 'I know you are but what am I?' Ali: No one wants Drew to get kneecapped or Ro to be collateral but he wants to be treated like an adult, so we can't wipe his arse, can we? Tess: Speak for yourself I'd spend my reddies to see that. However bad he thinks he is there's always someone worse and the sooner he learns it the better for all of us having to watch him play silly beggars Tess: Ro's worth a million of him maybe when she's grown up she'll know it. Ali: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're such a hard bitch. Maybe if he'd got proper help from people like you he woulda turned out better when he was grown too. Ali: It ain't too late for either of them. Tess: I'm what I've had to be. I can't save 'em all. Not even close. You'd be well to stay away from him if you've still got the sense you were born with. Ali: Yeah but you still try, don't you? Read back your previous wisdom for your answer there. Ali: Bit hard when we live in the same gaff isn't it but I can assure you I'm not going out of my way to be his bestie, mother Tess: I ain't about to flog a dead dog. He ain't a stupid kid anymore and what happened when he was a little 'un ain't an excuse either Tess: Nobody's got it easy. Tess: It's up to him to work out if his turning point's come and gone or if he even reckons he needs one. Ali: You don't have to but you can see the pretense Ro is working under, yeah? She doesn't think she's doing anything wrong and, arguably, she ain't. But sometimes all you get for your efforts is a kick in the teeth. Ali: Nobody's got it easy. Ali: It's up to HER to call time, not us. Tess: Who says? I've been there. Thinkin I had it all and knew even more about my future with my dream boy. Nobody came to clue me in but even now I wish they fucking had done. Ali: Like you'd have listened. Tess: If I had someone who gave a shit maybe Tess: She'd listen to you. Ali: Say you had, would you have done anything differently? Even if you knew how it'd go, if you didn't have Ronnie, you might still be with Josh now Ali: It changes everything about you Ali: I don't think she would. There's no reasoning because there is no reason, or rhyme for that matter Tess: Of course I would. I'd do everything differently. I'm not trying to romanticise who I was. Or am. Tess: Change ain't no bad thing when it comes to this. Or me Tess: Because you don't wanna think that she would and deal with all the shit that comes with her doing that. I don't blame ya but that don't make it right Tess: it's still a cop out. Ali: Well, I hope it soothes YOUR soul villainizing yourself because as someone who's half you, it's not something that is helpful, at all. Ali: Who's been there for her after every break-up? Who has to listen to every fucking detail? It ain't been you. And I can assure you I didn't spend those times when he was out of the picture singing his fucking praises. I HAVE told her. Everyone has. It just pisses you off that you can't fix this, or her. Tess: You're all you. Your own person. End of. Tess: And it should help you to know the truth. I was a bad person Ali and I ain't exactly sainted now. I do my best that's all any of us've got. Deal with it. Tess: I'm sorry you want a gold star or pat on the head for doing what you're supposed to for who you love. You're not getting it from me. Try your luck with your da maybe. Tess: And yeah it does piss me off so what? Ali: That isn't close to being true. There's no such thing as an individual, sorry to burst your bubble. Ali: And no one is one or the other. Christ, you're so fucking old testament. Ali: If your going in for all that shite, you should look at how revered a knocked-up teenage girl is whilst you're at it Ali: No one gives a shit about your war stories, they don't help anyone but you so you keep all that anger and hold it tight 'cos none of us are here for it any more Ali: Good luck trying to get Rocky to sit still so you can tell him all about damnation to scare him straight, good fucking luck Tess: You're not gonna change my mind. If you were anything close to being half of me we wouldn't be having this conversation. Tess: Life's black and white for me. That's what happens when you don't have choices. Call it what you like. Tess: And there's nothing to be preached to me about being a knocked up teen by you or anyone else. I ain't trying to either you just think it's that onesided 'cause you never listen Tess: There you go again speaking for everyone else when you mean yourself. But whatever. Tess: Get your own stories and leave mine out of it. Tess: Grow up, Ali. Ali: Now there's a copout if I ever heard one. Ali: Listen to what? What are you spouting but hot air? Ali: Oh, yeah? What one of your sainted children has benefitted? Ronnie hates you, Joe's a junkie, me and Fraze did exactly what you did. Ali: Tommy is passable but he's unhappy as fuck so, well done there. You've only got one left. Ali: What's the point? No one can ever match up to your infinite wisdom, I'd rather stay young so I knew what the hell I was talking about instead of making myself look like an old fool

#fabby fun

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littlepuddingsugg · 7 years

Text

Snow Lodge Skinny Dip**

Request

SMUT WARNING**

This trip was supposed to be a fun trip with you and your girlfriends but when you accidentally mentioned your plans to Joe, he suggested that he and the boys should come along too.

The lodge that you and your friends had picked rented out for the week was perched high up in the Swiss Alps and wasn't near any ski villages as none of you were big skiers or snowboarders. You hoped that this would turn the boys off from coming but it only made them want to go even more and ‘be one with nature’. You sighed at the fact that your girls week away was being intruded by your best friend and his mate but nonetheless the trip still commenced.

It was the last night of your stay and everyone decided that tonight should be a night of drinking responsibly as a group in the lodge, but unfortunately, things got pretty out of hand quickly which left 2 of your friend absolutely wasted so everyone ended up calling it a night pretty quick.

You on the other hand weren't ready to call in a night and decided to take advantage of the piece and quiet and go for a last nightly swim in the pool.

You walked out side and watched as the steam lifted off the heated pool as goosebumps formed on your arm from the icy cold air. You didn't want to wake your sleeping friend who you were sharing a room with so you opted out of grabbing your swim suit, plus, it was dark and everyone was asleep.

You threw your towel on the chair and stripped down before entering the warm pool. You felt your muscles relax as the water warmed your frozen body. You swam to the edge of the pool that looked over the side of the mountain you were on. It was dark so the only thing you could see were the outline of the trees and the stars.

You loved to look at the stars. Ever since you were a kid, you and your mom would lay out for hours and hours and look up at the sky as she pointed out the constellations to you.

“Enjoy the view?” A voice spoke behind you causing you to whip around, your body quickly sinking into the water to hide your bare chest.

“What the hell are you doing, I thought you were asleep?!?” You spoke watching Joe as he leaned agains the door frame.

“Could say the same to you love” You shook your head that the annoying teasing tone in his voice that you were oh so familiar with.

“I wanted one last swim.”

“Naked?” He said looking down at the pile of clothes next to the pool.

“I didn’t want to wake anyone by grabbing my suit because everyone was suppose to be sleeping” You said narrowing your eyes at him.

“Well love, what if I also wanted one last swim?” Joe said as he came and sat done at the edge of the pool, letting hims legs fall into the water. “Its still a nice temp. I think I’ll join you if you don't mind”

“You’re annoying Sugg you know that”

“What? Me, annoying? Don’t know what your on about love.” He said standing before ripping his shirt off followed by his swim shorts.

“What are you doing?” you said adverting your eyes as he stripped down in front of you.

“You’re not the only one who can have all the fun Y/N” he spoke before there was a loud splash and a wave of water hitting you in the face.

“So annoying” you mumbled as you moved back to the ledge and continued to name the stars in your head.

“Joe.” You warned after a finger brushed up against your back. “What?” He said moving his hand lower down your back. Goosebumps surfaced on your arms but it wasn't from the cold.

“Everyone’s asleep Y/N” His other hand went for your cheek, turning your face towards him as he licked his bottom lip.

The atmosphere between you and Joe had always been flirty with a whole lot of teasing. You two had a very similar sense of humor, mix that with the fact that you both were pretty sarcastic in your day to day lives and you’re left with two very sexually frustrated best friends.

You had often thought about what it would be like sexually with Joe in the past years that you have known him and there was no doubt in your mind that he didn’t do that same.

Deciding that you were tired of dreaming, you quickly closed the gap in between the two of you with a forceful kiss that was quickly reciprocated. You moved your arms around Joe’s neck as you pulled him closer, wanted to deepen the already lust-filled kiss.

Joe’s hand moved down your back to your bum where he gave it a little squeeze before moving it to your clit where he waisted no time in rubbing harsh circles around it. You left out a shaky breath once you felt a finger slip into you.

Joe worked his finger in and out of you for a while longer before he added another. Your head found a comfortable spot on his shoulder as you bit your lip trying to conceal your moans. One of your hands traveled down his torso and took a hold of him hardened length, your thumb running over the tip.

“Fuck Joe” you breathed out as his fingers worked themselves deeper inside you bringing you closer to your high.

Joe removed his fingers from your and picked you up by your waist, something that was more easily done in the water, and positioned you just above his cock. You brought you hands up to cup Joe’s face, smashing your lips together with his once again as he guided you down onto him.

The two of you moaned out as you sat down farther on his cock. You pulled away from the kiss, placing your forehead against his as you gripped his shoulders. Joe started to thrust up into you at a pace you were able to match as you also came down on top of him.

“God Y/N” Joe said between thrusts. “Never thought Switzerland would be where we finally do this”

You let out a staggered pant, your attempt at a laugh, before letting out another moan. “Didn’t...didn’t think this would ever actually h-happen.” you struggled to get out as Joe lifted your thighs higher and picked up the pace. “Shit Joe”

You let your head fall backwards, the ends of your hair dangling in the water as the waves you two were creating splashed over the sides of the pool.

You clenched around Joe as you felt your orgasm built more and more up. You heard Joe moan out your name, something that he only did in your dreams, as you felt him start to twitch inside of you. Joe thrusted into you a few more time before the both of you released together, a sea of moans escaping your lips and drifting off into the quite nature around you.

Joe’s lips found yours again as you tried to control your breathing, your arms now going slack over his shoulders.

“Holy shit” He said pulling away and puling himself out of you. His hands still wrapped around you as you weren’t sure if you were able to keep yourself a float.

“That was better than I ever imagined.” You said once finally calming your breathing.

“You imagined us having sex before?” Joe said with a smirk.

“Shut up. Clearly you have too or that wouldn’t have just happened.” You said giving him a look.

“Now what? We can’t exactly go back to being friends, unless you’re fine with this just being a one time thing.”

“I most definitely don’t what that, but can we make it work between us? I don’t want us to end up ruining out friendship.”

“I’m willing to try if you are” Joe said with a smile you knew all too well.

“You’re annoying” you said swimming back to the lodge.

“So is that a yes?” He said following you.

“I’ll have to sleep on it, goodnight Joe.” You said getting out of the pool and wrapping your toweling around your body and quickly running inside before your wet hair froze.

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