#my heart is full of love for all who've read my work

[impishlavenderthrone]

My debut fic has 620 hits last I checked and I think I'm going to cry. I can't even think of something I've read/played/watched a hundred times! I haven't even read my fic back myself more than thrice since posting!

I'm just... My heart is full 🥺

If any of you seeing this post have read my fic, genuinely thank you from the bottom of my heart. You have no idea how much this means to me. I hope you have a fantastic day, you beautiful motherfucker you 💜

#Impy has a mushy moment #Impy has feels #Impy has thoughts #my heart is full of love for all who've read my work #i appreciate you #💜💜💜 #ao3 #ao3 fanfic #ao3 writer #fanfic #fanfiction writer

[lovebugism]

i am so sorry but reader talking about robin right before making out with eddie is like absolutely the best thing i’ve ever read i’m obsessed i genuinely can’t wait for anything else in that universe that you do

THE CUSTOMER'S ALWAYS RIGHT | god help the girl

summary: in which you come to terms with the fact that you're hopelessly in love with eddie munson. pairing: virgin!eddie munson x reader word count: 13k warning: phone sex, more discussions of shitty boyfriends, j*son c*rver name drop, talks of unhealthy eating practices, smut 18+ mdni! a/n: this ask has been sitting in my inbox for ages now, but i wanted to save it until robin made an appearance in the series! thank you, anon, for being so sweet! and for the few of you who've been waiting on me to finally post <3 hope you enjoy! xoxo

( PREVIOUSLY ) | ( SERIES MASTERLIST ) | ( NEXT )

They only met once, but it changed their lives forever. 

That’s what the movie cover reads at least, but the words have long blurred into a jumbled mess at your tunnel vision. John Bender stares you in the face, but all you see is Eddie — boyish and brazen and scowling because he thinks it makes him look intimidating, but nowhere near as cruel as he seems. 

He’s certainly got the hair for it, much longer and curls far wilder than Judd Nelson’s measly set of brushed-back locks. He’s got the terribly animated personality down pat, too; the one that either makes you laugh uncontrollably or squirm in discomfort when it’s pointed your way. And the style’s a pretty fine match also, though you’d argue that no one sports a leather jacket quite like Eddie Munson does.

Wallowing in your boredom at the empty Family Video store on Main Street — where your best friends slave over mundane work with aching backs and a lingering sense of gratefulness that no customer has been in in well over an hour — you find yourself analyzing each character pictured on the front cover of The Breakfast Club.

Robin would surely be Allison, you conclude rather quickly, because their deadpanned glowers are eerily identical. They’ve also got this sort of atypical aura to them, too, like a dark storm cloud or the promise of a long night. But strangely it sparkles — strikes of lightning or a sky full of stars. It draws everyone’s attention to them; even when they’re desperately trying to hide in the very back of a room.

And Steve would be Andrew, not particularly because of his affections for this Allison-Reynolds-Robin-Buckley hybrid you’ve concocted, but because "popular guy with daddy issues" is a trope that fits him far too well. He’s way more likely to get detention for trying to look cool in front of his assholes friends than for anything actually malicious of heart. But that would’ve been years ago now. He’s not that kind of guy anymore. 

He’s soft and sweet — a Brian Johnson sort of soft and sweet, if you will. If Brian wasn’t the brains, but the sweetest dumbass anyone’s ever met.

You realize then, that Jim Hopper would make a mean Richard Vernon. He’s impatient to a fault, almost too stern at times, but never enough to make you genuinely fearful of him. You’ve found that it’s virtually impossible for you to take him seriously when he’s so cartoonishly angry. It’s a match made in heaven, you find, though Jim might take offense to the comparison.

And if Eddie is Bender, then that’d make you the Claire Standish of the bunch.

She’s dreadfully stylish, a bit stuck-up at times, and perhaps a little bit more spoiled than the average person; but it’s not like she ever claimed to be perfect. And you wouldn’t either.

You’ll take more pride in your wardrobe filled with pretty pleated skirts and flouncy dresses than your somewhat glacial disposition. And you might not be drowning in daddy’s money, but you’re certainly spoiled in other ways — if only in the employee discount at Enzo’s that got you wine for cheap and your connections at Family Video that meant free movie nights whenever you wanted.

The bad boy and the princess was a tale as old as time itself. It’s a fairytale you wouldn’t mind living in if it ended how it did in the movies — with a kiss on the cheek and an exchanged diamond earring in the calloused palm of another. A soft pink smile and a celebratory fist in the air.

But you’ve met your fair share of John Bender’s and none of them had been particularly kind to you, let alone had fallen in love with you. 

Maybe that’s because you were no Claire Standish. Never pretty enough, never mousy enough, never pure enough.  You try and dissect why you’ve never been successfully loved, and all the signs point to you, you, you.

You hope Eddie’s different. You need Eddie to be different.

“Something’s wrong with me,” you blurt out of nowhere.

Well, it’s not totally out of the blue for you. You’d been stewing over that thought since you got there — since you left the woods with damp underwear and the scent of you on Eddie’s fingers.

But to Steve and Robin, who’d stayed relatively silent and locked eyes only once after they noticed how abnormally hushed you’d gone, it catches them quite off guard.

Steve lifts his heavy head from where he mans the counter. His tired eyes leave the computerized catalog for the first time in forty minutes, and he has to rub at them with the bottom of his palms to see you properly. Meanwhile, Robin crouches at your side, taking returned tapes from the bin sitting next to her and placing them back upon the shelf you lean against. 

She blinks up at you, deep ocean eyes swimming with apprehension, like she can sense the spiral you’ve just about twisted yourself into.

“What do you mean?” she wonders, ever the supportive best friend, as she plucks Heather’s, Pretty in Pink, and Weird Science from the bin and sets them onto their assigned rows in the Teen Drama section.

“Eddie won’t fuck me.”

Neither of them is particularly stunned by the unabashed nature of your admission.

Not only have they both fucked you at one point or another, but they’re your best friends — no one’s ever going to know you quite the way they do. It leaves little left unsaid between the three of you, with secrets you’ve all sworn to take to your graves. Steve once stuck a finger in his ass to see if he liked it (he did) and Robin sometimes gets off on her childhood teddy bear (rather ironically named Mr. Snuggles). 

So this? This was nothing. Especially in comparison to all the other shit you’ve confessed to them because god knows the whore of Hawkins has a plethora of stories to tell.

Steve is more shocked by the name that leaves your mouth than anything else. “Eddie Munson?” he repeats with furrowed brows, like he had to have heard you wrong.

You bring your chin to your right shoulder to look at him, then nod.

“Eddie… The Freak… Munson?”

You nod again, slower for him this time.

“You wanna fuck… Eddie Munson?” Steve reiterates once more, as though the idea was too appalling to be true. “Eddie Munson — The Freak?”

“Yes, Steve,” you huff in irritation.

His face contorts into a puppy-like confusion. A frown settles between his bushy brows and he cocks his head to the side, nose scrunching and his lip quirking slightly. He couldn’t look more disgusted if he tried.

“…Why?”

You groan and tilt your head back dramatically. “That’s not what’s important here, Steve. The better question is why won’t he fuck me?”

The boy’s lack of any actual assistance doesn’t surprise Robin in the slightest — his dumbfounded gaze and innate confusion are actually pretty on brand. It just puts all the burden on her, to help you wriggle out of the mess you’d tangled yourself into. 

It’s not like she isn’t used to it, though, nor does she mind doing it for you. She walks you through your emotions like a professional, squashing out all the burning orange embers for you before they have the chance to burst into flames.

“Well, what do you mean he won’t fuck you? Like… did he actually say that or does he just wanna, you know, take things slow?”

The latter would’ve been way too easy. Eddie’s always been nice enough to you. It’d make sense for him to want to stay unhurried and gentle with you, but those words weren’t exactly in your vocabulary. 

The first time you were alone with him, you were getting yourself off on his thigh after making him come in his jeans. The next time you saw him, after four days of him clinging to your consciousness, there wasn’t as much small talk so much as there were two of his fingers stuffed knuckle-deep inside of you.

You don’t know Eddie’s birthday, but you know how he likes to be touched — squeezed and not rubbed. You don’t know his middle name or how he likes his eggs in the morning or what his relationship with his mother is like, but he’s already made you come. Twice.

You are completely, utterly, and totally incapable of taking things slow. So it wasn’t that. It couldn’t be. So it had to be the other thing. The very scary, terrifying, boogeyman of a thing.

“I mean, I offered to give him a blowjob and he completely turned me down,” you lament in reply.

Robin and Steve wince. Like, physically wince. Their faces scrunch and their heads flinch from something invisible. Audible ooh’s fall from their mouths without them even realizing it, because you don’t get rejected. Ever. Especially not after offering to pleasure someone without much of anything in return.

They don’t mean to react the way they do. The visible shock that coats their features is involuntary more than it is anything, and it only adds to your fears.

“Exactly!” you exclaim.

“I hate to say it, but I think hell might be freezing over as we speak,” Steve half-jokes.

“Well, he was working, right?” Robin asks with raised brows. “Maybe he was just busy.”

“Sorry, Rob, but no guy’s too busy for a blowjob.”

“Real charming, Stevie.”

“Maybe he just has a small dick,” the boy concludes with a shrug.

“I felt his dick,” you shake your head almost immediately. The feeling of Eddie’s hard cock through his denim jeans, all rough and warm against your palm, hasn’t yet left you. “It’s not small.”

“Well, maybe he can’t get it up—”

“Yeah, that’s not a problem either.”

Eddie was rock hard when you left him, throbbing and aching and obviously needing some kind of relief. That’s partly why you’d been so ardent to return the favor, though the other half of it was purely selfish — you haven’t seen a more beautiful sight than Eddie Munson getting off. To deprive yourself of that masterpiece made you feel like you were starving.

You have a hard time imagining the raging hard-on just… dissipating after you’d left him. That means he probably jerked off in the back of his van and you missed it. And if he came, right after he promised everything was okay, that means he just didn’t want you to do it… right?

Steve seems to be caught in the same inner turmoil you’re currently stuck in; and for good reason. In all the years he’s known you, he can count on one hand how many times he’s had to turn you down. And every time, it was because he’d gotten back together with Nancy. It was never because of you. Not once. And sometimes he felt like it hurt him as much as it did you. 

As far as Steve’s concerned, you’re so out of Eddie Munson’s league that you’re not even in his fucking orbit — so the freak show, turning you down, doesn’t make whole lot of sense to him.

“Huh…”

“It’s me. It’s definitely me,” you conclude with the shake of your head. A bitter, almost hysterical laugh spills from your lips. “He thinks I’m fucking ugly or disgusting or something. It’s totally fucking me—”  

Robin completely abandons her basket of tapes then. She rises to stand in front of you, looking timid as she does so. Her raised brows form wrinkles on her freckled forehead and her blue eyes widen to reveal more of the whites of them. She looks like she’s approaching a wild animal. A bomb that’s about to explode.

“Okay… You’re starting to spiral, alright? So let’s just try and take a few deep breaths—”

You don’t listen to her. 

Actually, you do quite the opposite, as you begin to blurt every fleeting thought that crosses your mind.

“I’ve made out with nearly everyone in this stupid town— I’m pretty sure I’ve fucked almost half— and you’d think Eddie would wanna take advantage of that, the way everyone makes him out to be some sort of freak, right? But he hasn’t and at this rate, he won’t, and I just don’t understand why,” you ramble without taking in a single breath. “Usually being a slut is a huge turn-on for guys, you know? But what if Eddie thinks it’s gross? I mean, it is gross— I’m gross—”

You only stop for air when Robin takes your shoulders in both hands. She looks less apprehensive and more stern, as she forces you to look at her.

“Look. I love you, but you need to get a hold of yourself, alright? I know you’re not used to being told no, and I know how much it sucks, but shit happens. I’m willing to bet all the money I’ve ever seen that whatever is going on with Eddie has nothing to do with you, okay? And if it’s making you this upset, maybe you should just talk to him.”

“But I don’t wanna seem like I’m too eager, that’s gross—”

“Then find someone else to fuck,” she offers with her signature Robin Buckley half-smile. “I’m sure it would take you less than five minutes to find a willing participant.”

“Yeah, right here,” Steve jokes from the counter with the pathetic wave of his hand and a dumb grin on his lips. 

You don’t hear him over the voices in your head — half calling you crazy for letting a boy drive you this mad over nothing, and the other half bitterly affirming each of your deep-rooted insecurities.

Your face screws up, like the thought of being with anyone other than Eddie upsets you — it does upset you.

“I don’t want anyone else.”

“Then what do you want?” Robin yells in your face, shaking you by your shoulders.

“I want Eddie!” you shout back without thinking. The words seem to spill out of nowhere. It takes you of all people by surprise. No one in this rat trap town would ever expect the whore of Hawkins to want to settle down, least of all the harlot herself. It’s strange; it’s riveting; it’s really fucking scary. “…Fuck.”

The brunette smirks, proud of herself. “Well. There’s your answer.”

“I hate when you’re right,” you mumble to yourself, pouting as she crouches back down again.

“I know.”

It was a terrifying thought, to know that you were head over heels for someone else. You try to come to terms with what that means. 

Sometimes you think you fall in love with a new person every day. A cute guy holds the door open for you, a pretty girl compliments your outfit — they never think about you again, but they’re on your mind for days. It was so easy to develop such meaningless infatuations, especially when you were bored.

But Eddie was different.

He was a nice guy. A nice guy that was sweet to you just for the sake of being sweet to you; not because he secretly wanted something in return. That made you fall for him at first, but then you just… kept on falling. Eddie Munson was an infinite void you couldn’t crawl your way out of even if you wanted to, even if you tried.

And that’s what frightened you the most.

Because if you really thought about it, you’ve only truly been in love a handful of times. And, sure, it didn’t work out — that was normal — but some of them fucking ruined you. 

You’re still trying to figure out who you are without all of the people that have broken your heart. You’re still fighting like hell every day to recognize the person you see in the mirror, while Billy Hargrove fucks off with a new girl every other week like he didn’t totally destroy you.

But, even still, Eddie was completely different. No one’s ever made you feel the way he makes you feel. And it’s more than the stupid heavy petting — it’s more than anything. It’s never been like this before; not even with the blonde mulleted asshole who ripped your heart to shreds. 

And you’re scared that if you get hurt again, you’ll never be able to come back from it.

“Steve, do you have another copy of Fast Times in the back?” you suddenly ask the boy, tossing him a look over your shoulder.

It’s your last ditch effort to rid yourself of the ponderous, gray doom and gloom surrounding you like some storm cloud. Your comfort movie solves all of your problems — or, at the very least, Phoebe Cates does — but it seems everyone else in town has developed a similar fondness for minute fifty-three of the film and got all the tapes off the shelf before you could get your hands on one.

“You know I keep on in stock for you,” he answers quietly.

He reaches below the counter to pull out a spare copy for you, and your heart swells with the rays of a thousand rising suns and the songs of every morning bird.

Steve told you some time ago that he could change. And back then, all it did was piss you off, because he didn’t want to change for the town slut — for the girl he put through the goddamn ringer. He wanted to change for Nancy. The princess bruised his brittle ego a little, and then he realized what an asshole he’d been to everyone, to you.

But as angry as it made you, you never believed him. “Once the King of Hawkins High, always the King of Hawkins High,” you remarked bitterly.

You wouldn’t say it to his face, for the sake of keeping his ego from inflating all over again, but you could tell he was really changing.

He was kinder, he was softer. He stopped caring about what everyone thought about him, about what not caring would do to his reputation, and started giving a fuck about the people worth giving a fuck about. 

Apparently, you were one of them.

“…Really?”

He nods with a subtle shrug. Like it was no big deal. Like it wasn’t one of the sweetest things he’d ever done for you — keeping your favorite movie on hand so you’ll always have a spare, knowing that it’s the only thing that gets you out of a deep, dark funk sometimes.

“Stevie… You’re gonna make me blush,” you lilt with a grin as you saunter over to him, hands innocently laced behind your back. “You need to be careful, Harrington. I’m gonna start to think you actually like me.”

He scoffs. “I do like you.”

“Yeah, when it’s convenient.”

It’s obvious your joke hits him where it hurts. It serves as a bitter reminder of the asshole he used to be, the douchebag he’s trying like hell to grow out of. He looks up at you with a sheepish, honey-tinted gaze before ducking away again.

A year or more ago it would’ve made you feel good, to know that you hurt him just a fraction of the way he hurt you. But you know that that isn’t the same man standing in front of you now, that he’d rather die than make hurt your feelings, and it makes you feel like shit for saying it in the first place. 

“Sorry,” you apologize with a scrunched nose. The palms of your hands dig into the edges of the counter as you lean against it. Your shrug. “It just kinda came out…”

The barcode scanner in his hand beeps as he passes the thing over the back of the tape — never charging you, just getting the movie out of the database.

“So, uh…” he starts before clearing his throat. He focuses his gaze on the computer and types on the bulky keyboard with the tip of his pointer finger. “You really like this Eddie guy, huh?”

“Maybe. I think so.”

“And he’s not, like… a total freak or anything?”

You can’t tell if he’s trying to look out for you or if he just wants intel on what it’s like trying (and failing) to bang the local weirdo. Either way, it makes a smile tug slow at your lips as you joke: “Not in the way everyone thinks.”

“Jesus,” he winces at the obscenity of your words.

“Sorry,” you apologize again, though the laugh that bubbles from your lips after cancels out any hint of actual sincerity. “You don’t need to give me the talk or anything, Steve. I can take care of myself.”

“…Can you?” he half-jokes.

It makes you falter. “Well… With you and Robin and Hopper constantly on my ass, then yeah.”

“Just don’t want you to get hurt,” Steve finally admits, soft and suddenly shy as he hands the VHS over to you.

“That’s rich coming from you—”

He jerks back the tape before you can take it from him, leaving your hand reaching for thin air. His cinnamon eyes glimmer with a foreign seriousness, not completely unkind, but lacking their usual blithe. “That’s why I’m saying it. I just… I want you to be okay.”

Steve is one of the rare ones, you conclude right then in there — in the liminal emptiness of Family Video, beneath fluorescent lights that cast sharp shadows upon his already chiseled features. He was a mythical creature of a man, one who breaks your heart and does everything in his power to mend it again.

He hasn’t forgotten about what he did to you, not like Billy did, and he won’t. Not ever. He saw what he did to you and he never moved on from it, just matured enough to make sure it never happened again. And he won’t let another unworthy douchebag hurt you like he did. Not if he can help it, at least.

And he did try to warn you about Hargrove, to be fair. You were just the dumbass that didn’t listen.

“Well, me and my Phoebe Cates wet dream are golden, Pony Boy,” you promise. He hands you the tape again and lets you snatch it from his grip this time. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, Stevie.”

Steve Harrington was right. 

The fleeting thought flashes across your mind for half a second, and you quickly realize that those words have never been uttered in the same sentence before now. But he wasn’t wrong in what he’d said about you, just before you left — you were completely, totally, absolutely, and implicitly unable to take care of yourself.

You nearly passed out in the bathroom after taking the hottest shower of your life, feeling too woozy to slap on anything other than moisturizer because you failed to remember to actually eat something that day. It wasn’t totally your fault, though; if anything, it was because of Eddie and all the butterflies he’d given you that made food the very last thing on your mind.

You half-heartedly dry yourself off, keeping your hair in a towel, while you slip on a cotton set of underwear you’ve had for way longer than what's likely acceptable. Damp and half-naked, you prance into the kitchen to fix Bowie her bowl of dinner before you feed yourself.

You fork a can of wet food onto a flower-shaped plate and let her eat on the counter — because you’re an adult now, and you can do that sort of thing.

The calico purrs while she feasts, but your stomach thunders with negligence. You peek into your mostly bare refrigerator and make a mental note to go grocery shopping when you get paid next week. 

With a lack of food and an even lesser will to cook something, you settle for the half-eaten chocolate bar you keep stashed in the very back of the fridge; kept only for the most special of occasions — when you’re reveling in your loneliness and trying to convince yourself that you can make it on your own.

It was practically the size of your forearm when you first bought the thing at some too expensive candy store in the city. Now it’s no bigger than your hand.

You eat the thing in bed, even though you know you’ll get crumbs everywhere and that it’ll make sleep agonizing for you — if you get any, that is. You’re bound to feel like a total zombie by the time the sun rises and the late-night sweet will likely make its appearance on your skin by then, in a red and raging blemish of a consequence.

You’ll feel empty and starved and surly, a snapping grouch instead of an actual person, until you get some actual food in your system.

And you’re more than aware of all of these things, but you don’t do a single damn thing about them.

You’re nothing but a sulking lump upon an unmade bed, lying in a pitch-black darkness that’s evaded only by the static-y television across your room, trying your best to pretend like you aren’t waiting for Eddie’s phone call. It’s hard to remember to forget him, though, when the movie you’re watching is practically a feature film of him and all the ways he makes you feel.

Spicoli and his terribly inebriated friends slur as they chorus “No shoes, no shirt, no diiiice” and you swear you can feel Eddie’s shoulder bump softly against yours as he laughs, hear every sound of his melodic chuckle in your ear that made you giggle right along with him. The low bass of Moving in Stereo plays in the otherwise empty silence of your bedroom, and every beat feels like the rhythm of your thrusts against his thigh.

Eddie Munson is all-consuming.

Even the thought of him feels physical.

Phoebe Cates all but undresses herself in front of you, but you’re stuck thinking about some guy who lives in a trailer park across town, deals drugs for a living, and can’t graduate high school. You’re a total fucking goner.

Your eyes flutter shut, and instead of the backs of your eyelids, you see Eddie’s trailer. Your lips start to tingle as they kiss his for the first time — hungry, yearning, needing. His thigh is pressed snugly into your cunt, denim jeans rough against your soft cotton panties, and you have to bite back a moan when he tenses every time you squeeze his hard, covered cock.

You can feel it, all of him, like he were here with you now. 

You wish that he were.

His fingers would feel far better, leave far more sparks of electricity in your belly, than the ones as you sneak through the hem of your underwear.

You try and take things slow with yourself, to be as gentle as he had been with you earlier in the woods, but it feels strange to treat yourself with so much tenderness. To touch your pussy like it’s the first time it’s ever been touched. Like it’s a beautiful thing you need to be sweet to.

Maybe you find it so foreign to be careful with yourself because no one has ever been careful with you.

No one, except for Eddie.

Your touch doesn’t rival his. It doesn’t even come close.

No matter how tightly you squeeze your eyes shut or how hard you try to pretend that they’re his fingers inside of you, you can’t make yourself feel as good as he did.

Your fingers aren’t as rough as his guitar-string-scarred ones and they don’t caress your clit with the same methodical care. They don’t fill you quite the same either, nowhere near as satisfying as his much thicker ones.

And you’re no stranger to masturbation, not by any means. Sometimes it’s the only way you can guarantee an orgasm for yourself when you’ve got a partner who cares so little about your own pleasure. But Eddie was different. Eddie cared — so much so, that he’s gotten more orgasms out of you than you’ve gotten from him, which is something you’ve never said about anyone else you’ve been with.

It’s rare and unfamiliar, a bouquet of all things refreshing and terrifying and strange, tied together with a pretty little ribbon.

You know that you can make yourself come. It’ll just take way too long to actually be worthwhile and won’t be nearly as mind-blowing as you need it to be. You won’t be left with trembling thighs and nearly numb legs — just a pitiful excuse for an orgasm that you could get from any one of your exes with half as much work.

What you need is Eddie. 

And you hate that. You hate how much you need him and you’re terrified of what that means.

As far as precedent goes, right when you start needing someone is usually when they start to leave. It’s like fucking clockwork most of the time — like everyone knows that you’re a ticking time bomb and eventually it gets too risky to stand too close to you. 

You’ll just have to keep Eddie at arm's distance. So he won’t see the grenade that you are.

You pull your fingers out of your wanting cunt, still slick and throbbing with a need that you can’t give it, when the phone rings.

The high-pitched shrill in the quiet makes you tense like it’s the first time you’ve ever heard the damn thing. Your breath catches in your throat, first out of fright and then at the inclination of who waits for you on the other line.

Suddenly, you’re scrambling to collect yourself. As though there was any possibility that Eddie might be able to see you through the phone line.

You wipe your wet fingers haphazardly on the cotton of your underwear and sit up straighter from your ungracefully lazed position. Then you count to five — one mississippi… two mississippi… three — so Eddie won’t think you’re some kind of crazy person who doesn’t have anything better to do than wait for his call. 

So he won’t know that’s exactly what you are.

You lift the ruby red rotary from its hook at your bedside table and stretch the corkscrew cord to press it to your ear. “…Hello?”

“Yeah, hi. I’d like to order a pizza. Half pepperoni, half hawaiian.”

You roll your eyes at his dumb joke, even though the familiarity of his voice makes you smile. It warms you like a home-cooked meal, like you were high-pitched and starving before and now you’re on the soothing comedown of finally being satiated.

“Yeah, sorry, we’re closed.”

“Then why’d you pick up the phone, huh?” he teases back. You swear you can hear the grin in his voice. You didn’t know a smile could be so audible. It makes you wonder if he can hear yours — if you’re doing a real shit job at pretending. You anxiously twirl the cord with the pointer finger of your free hand.

“Because I’ve been waiting for you to call me all night, dummy.” 

Your answer is more honest than either of you were expecting. 

Eddie’s sigh crackles through the shoddy reception. “Yeah. Sorry ‘bout that, sweetheart. I’ve been working all night. I only got home, like, five minutes ago.”

You can hear the heavy exhaustion in his voice. “Rough day?”

“Kinda,” he answers with a shrug. You can hear the grating squeak of his mattress as he plops down onto his bed. “I dealt to one of Jason’s goons today… They always give me a hard time.”

“I’m sorry,” is all you can think to answer. 

Eddie’s been the brunt of every joke since seventh grade — people made fun of too big clothes, his too wild hair, his too loud music. But he took it all in stride, laughing with everyone else before volleying a harsher joke back in response. You almost started to think that he liked it. That, somewhere deep down, he was fond of all the attention he got from people who supposedly couldn’t stand him.

But it hurts to know that it hurts him.

“Don’t apologize. It’s not like you did anything,” he assures with a soft laugh. He makes the bold decision to be honest then, too. “You, uh… You made my day a whole lot better, actually.”

You don’t know if he’s talking about the brief fling in the woods or the phone call you’re sharing now or if you particularly care either way. Your heart flutters like it’s been kissed by the wings of a butterfly.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean… I don’t know— I couldn’t stop thinking about you, you know. And, knowing that I was gonna get to talk to you again kinda got me through the day, I guess… And, yes, I am fully aware of how lame that sounds, but—”

You don’t get to hear the rest of his excuse, of why what he just told you totally isn’t lame, because you’re covering the receiver with your palm and turning to squeal into your pillow. A far more pathetic sight, in your humble opinion.

There hasn’t been a more fulfilling feeling than this one, to know that he’s been feeling the same way you’ve been feeling about him this whole time. It’s better than all the orgasms he could give you combined, to be loved so wholly.

“…You okay?” you hear his muffled voice ask after you’ve gone suddenly AWOL.

You press the phone back to your ear and nod like he can see you. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. The phone… fell— you said you just got home?”

“Uh, yeah. I met with Hellfire for a bit at school. We’re almost at the end of the Cult of Vecna, so they’re kinda on my ass about it. The little shits are obsessed.”

“Well, they should be. It’s a really good campaign, Eds.”

“Thanks to you,” he mutters. You can almost picture the glimmer in his button eyes and the shaky half-smirk he always looks at you with when he gets all shy.

“That was all you, Eddie Spaghetti,” you retort. “I still have no idea how you did it.”

“Did what?” he wonders, chuckling a bit at the nickname.

“Make something so beautiful out of thin air.”

Lying in the depths of his bedroom, blanketed by the darkness and bathing in streams of moonlight, Eddie feels his breath catch in his throat. 

For the first time in his life, he doesn’t have a joke to spew out on the spot. He’s speechless, just for a moment, a quick blink of a second, with nothing to say. Because, if he really thinks about it, that’s sort of what happened with you.

You were just his customer and he was just your dealer.

You were a loyal client and then a girl way out of his league that he developed a too big a crush on. Then you made him come in his underwear and washed the sticky stains out of the denim for him. Now you’re on the phone with him. You let him tell you all about his shitty day and apologize like you weren’t the only good thing about it — like you aren’t the only good thing, period.

It’s not the most cliche love story, nor is it the most beautiful, but it has his cynical little heart beating like the wings of a hummingbird.

Then, when all the mushy mess fades like fog, he finally thinks of something to say.

“It’s the witchcraft, sweetheart,” he shrugs to himself. “Didn’t you hear? I’m a devil-worshipping freak.”

“You know that’s not it, Eds,” you retort with the roll of your eyes.

You know that it’s hard, to be a metalhead from the wrong side of the tracks in the eighties — at the height of the Satanic Panic and all the delusional craze. That shit’s followed him since freshman year. Even still, it nips at his ankles like rabid dogs.

Maybe you were never naive or bored enough to believe all the rumors, but Eddie Munson was always more than that to you.

“No?”

“You can blame it on being a freak show all you want, but I know it’s because you’re one of the funniest, smartest, most creative guys I’ve ever met—”

“You must not know a ton of guys then, sweetheart,” he interjects playfully, like he couldn’t stand to hear you compliment him any longer. You’d give anything to see his blushing cheeks just now.

“…You’re kidding right?” you giggle in response.

“Sorry— that’s— I didn’t mean it like— It was— I was joking,” he stammers, frightened that he might’ve offended you in some way. 

It only makes you laugh harder. Both of you know you lost count of all the guys you ‘know’ a long, long time ago. You do imagine it’s somewhere near ‘a ton’, though.

“I know, Eds,” you assure with a contented sigh. “I was just teasing.”

“Oh.”

“The slut and the freak… Who would’ve thought?” you wonder all dreamily, like it’s a fairytale as old as time itself. That’s what it feels like, sometimes.

Eddie isn’t sure what you mean — who would’ve thought you’d be friends? Two people caught in that in-between stage of platonic and romance that’s complete agony and total, total bliss? A couple of kids falling in love—

“It’s sort of kismet, huh?” he answers.

“I think so.”

“So, uh… What are you up to?” Eddie wonders then, equal parts curious and eager to keep the discussion going. He’s frightened any lapse in conversation is going to lead to saying goodbye. 

He wants to stay on for hours, until both of you are fighting to stay awake, and then listen to the sound of your heavy breathing when you inevitably lose — like that isn’t the creepiest thing anyone’s ever wanted. He’ll fight Wayne about the bill if it comes to that, he doesn’t care, he just never wants to stop being this close to you.

“Do you want the real answer or the fake one?”

“Uh… Both?”

“Well, I’d say I was doing something super productive with my night, you know, catching up on all the boring adult shit, but then I’d be lying. And I don’t wanna lie to you, Eds,” you tell him with a teasing lilt playing at the edge of your voice.

Eddie swallows thickly, fearing he’d somehow been caught in his own lie — or rather, his half-truth. He moves on quickly, though not exactly full of grace. “Right. Yeah. Totally.”

“Honest answer is, that the only productive thing I’ve done tonight is shower, and now I’m in bed watching Fast Times and eating all the chocolate in my house, because I can’t cook for shit and I have nothing else better to do with my night,” you admit to him, picking at the thread of your comforter.

“Oh, don’t tell me I missed the ‘Moving in Stereo’ bit,” he agonizes.

“Just.”

“Well, correct me if I’m wrong, sweetheart, but it sounds like you’re having loads of fun tonight.”

“I’m having a lot more fun now,” you assure him.

“Glad I can be around to make you laugh,” he retorts like he’s not all too happy to do it.

“You’re a total comedian, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“If I’m the jester, you’re the queen, sweetheart,” he promises, a grin evident in his voice.

Your breath catches in your throat something fierce; you’re almost worried that he’s heard it. His words pierce your heart, a stroke of lightning or a blade of steel. He’s joking, but it’s so strangely profound, the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to you and it’s dripping in sarcasm. 

It’s sort of Eddie’s love language, you’ve come to understand, to say something so sweet but coated in venom to make it sour again. It makes you feel special, loved, almost.

A fire builds behind your rib cage, sharp and distant and all-consuming.

“Are you alone, Eds?” you ask him suddenly.

The sudden curve ball in the conversation takes him by surprise. “Uh, yeah, Wayne’s at work right now… Why?”

“Because I want you to talk to me…”

“Oh?” is all he can say because isn’t that what he’s been doing this whole time?

“And I want you to say things that… maybe other people shouldn’t hear,” you explain slowly to him.

“…Oh.”

He’s heard about this only once before, the whole phone sex thing. 

It was from Andy in the back of Ms. O’Donnell’s class a year or more ago, though Eddie never called him by that name. Andy, in all actuality, was Jason Carver’s right-hand man, and he meant that in every sense of the phrase. Eddie was more than convinced that the guy was so obsessed with the blonde haired, blue eyed douchebag that he was giving him handjobs on the regular.

But it seemed the dick brigade couldn’t function properly without their leader and Eddie had the misfortune of hearing all the mindless bullshit they were spewing behind him — basketball, parties, girls; in true white bread fashion.

His friends gathered around him like he was telling some sort of secret, though it was loud enough for anyone in a three foot radius to hear. Eddie, caught directly in the line of fire, heard all about Chrissy’s older sister, Wendy, who was two years older and off at college. 

He’d gotten her number from some party he’d crashed. At least that’s how he told it, right before telling everyone that she swore like a sailor when she came and that she told him all the dirty things she wanted to do to him while she did.

“It was like her hand was on my dick, dude, I’m serious. That shit was crazy, bro,” he’d laughed after retelling the whole conversation in excruciating detail.

Eddie rolled his eyes to himself then, inwardly jealous that he’d never get to meet Wendy — or any other girl that would be willing to have phone sex with him, for that matter. His phone only ever rang for telemarketers or a rogue Dustin Henderson calling to annoy him.

But, here you are now, the most wanted girl in Hawkins, offering it to him on a silver platter. He wonders if you’ve done this before, surely you have — oh god, he thinks to himself, what if you’ve done this with Andy?

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” you assure him after his unusually long silence. “I know you’re probably busy and tired and everything—”

“No! No, yeah, I— I want to. I totally want to.”

“Okay,” you nod. Petals of a flower begin to bloom in your chest as you lie back in bed, settling further into the mattress. The movie, already long forgotten, serves only as light and background noise. “So… What are you wearing, Eds?”

“I feel like I should be asking you that,” he laughs. 

On the other side of Hawkins, in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, Eddie rises from where he’d originally flopped back onto his bed with the notion that it was going to be a semi-normal night. He props himself against his headboard. His fingers twitch at his thigh.

“Beat ya to it, Munson.”

“Well, I’ll have you know that it is very sexy, sweetheart. I’m wearing the same Hellfire shirt you saw me in, I don’t know, five hours ago — except now it’s got a rip in it because I totally ate ass on the way back to the van.”

He tells you this to make you laugh — it works — but he prays you don’t ask any questions. Because he got it while hurrying back to his van mere minutes after you’d left him, so hard he thought he was going to burst, with no more than seven minutes until his next client arrived.

 Thankfully, he only needed three.

“I love that shirt,” you respond in place of saying what you really want to — ‘I love how that shirt looks on you’ — how it clings to his lean torso and reveals his midriff whenever he stretches his arms over his head.

“She’s a lit-tle worse for wear now, sweetheart,” he lilts.

“I’ll stitch it up for you.”

“And I’ve got on a pair of boxers that are so old they’re practically see through because I’m pretty sure they used to be Wayne’s back in… I don’t know… the eighteen-hundreds.”

Eddie was right. It was sexy, though, for the exact reason they weren’t supposed to be. 

There was something so domestic about it all. You can picture him lying in his bed, in the most comfortable clothes he owns, in the one place he can feel at peace. Like a renaissance painting, something familiar and comforting and beautiful — fuck, you’d give anything to be next to him.

“…I think that means it’s your turn now, sweetheart,” he teases.

“Is it?” you mock in return.

“C’mon. Don’t leave me hangin’ over here.”

“It’s nothing, special,” you assure. Your eye flits down to peer at your own body — nothing special, indeed, you think to yourself. The lilac cotton set came from the grocery store downtown on the clearance rack you so often frequent. “I just have my underwear on. It’s very boring, I’m afraid.”

It’s not boring. Not to Eddie — the boy who prides himself on his insanely active imagination. He might not be able to pass english with his brain, but he can certainly create worlds with it, and it’s too easy for him to picture you. He imagines you, freshly showered, and smelling of the warm lavender-vanilla scent you always smell like, mostly bare and lazing upon a fluffy comforter.

He swallows thickly. “Oh, that’s— that’s really, uh— that’s really sexy.”

His thankful that you don’t seem to mind his poor excuse for dirty talk.

“It’s only because I was too lazy to get into actual pajamas.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Yeah?” you press, smiling to yourself and caging your bottom lip between your teeth.

“Yeah.”

“Can I tell you a secret, Eds?” you wonder, made brave enough by his own admission.

“‘Course you can.”

“Before you called…”

“…Uh-huh?” he eggs on, intrigued at the way you trailed off, sounding suddenly shy.

“I was…” The thought of telling him what you were doing mere seconds before he called makes you nervous. It wasn’t like you were ashamed of touching yourself or anything, nor is the art of dirty talking lost on you, but something about Eddie makes you timid.

“You were… what, sweetheart?” he wonders gently, with a too audible grin.

“I was touching myself.”

That’s all you tell him. The words linger and hang in the air of your separate bedrooms and you cling to the silence — almost mortified and anticipating his reply. Eddie, meanwhile, feels like his tongue has swelled in his mouth and all the air has been punched out of his lungs.

“Oh...” he tries to respond without the breath to accurately do so. “…Yeah?”

“You know what Phoebe Cates does to me,” you try to joke.

His laughter crackles through the receiver. “Yeah. I kinda have her to thank for the other night, don’t I?”

“Give yourself some credit, Eds. The hottest guy in Hawkins was sitting right next to me, what was I supposed to do?”

“No way you think I’m the hottest guy in town,” he scoffs. “Everyone knows you’ve got a thing for pretty boys.”

“Pretty boys?” you echo with a giggle.

“Uh-huh. The Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington type, you know?”

“Well, I think you’re a hundred times prettier than he is.”

“Really?” he scoffs cynically, obviously not believing you.

“He wasn’t the one I was thinking about with my hand shoved down my panties,” you admit, immediately quelling his self-doubt. “That’s gotta count for something, right?”

Eddie clears his throat and then stammers, “I— I guess so— yeah.”

“Are you hard, Eds?” you ask in a breathy whisper.

And he just nods to himself at first, too stupid to answer audibly. He can feel himself stiffening in his boxers, only halfway hard now, but getting firmer by the second. Soon, he’ll be aching. 

“Yeah…”

“Can you touch yourself for me?”

Eddie would rather take a bullet to the chest than say no to you — at least, he figures that’d probably hurt less — so he slips his fidgeting fingers through the band of his boxers and takes his warm, stiffening cock in his hand. He squeezes himself just enough to make his stomach tighten.

“Want you to touch yourself, too,” he admits, neither asking or demanding it, just telling you.

“Yeah?” you tease.

“Well, I think it’s only fair, sweetheart.”

You can’t help but notice how breathy he’s gotten — how it shakes on the inhale and hitches on the out. He’s got his hand shoved down his underwear and you’re jealous of the fingers that get to wrap themselves around his cock. You wish they were yours. Both of you will have to settle, it seems.

“Whatever you want, Eds,” you answer playfully. 

You obediently slide your hand back into the warmth of your panties. Your fingers slot between your lips and collect the slick that had gathered there since before you’d even answered the phone. You bring it up to your clit, circling the pads of your fingers there until you twitch, then dragging them down to press into your opening. They slip in with ease. 

Both of you have turned into lovesick idiots, separated by so many miles, and missing the other most ardently. Lying in the depths of your bedrooms, basking in a velvet loneliness, building with a mutual pleasure with nothing but yearning hands and longing sighs.

Eddie’s eyes flutter shut at the sounds of your low moans and fragile whimpers that crackle through the static — beautiful still, but certainly no match to the ones you were breathing in his ear just hours ago. 

His lashes dance across his cheeks as he tries to remember how you’d felt against his fingers, soft like velvet and delicate like silk, weeping and pulsating with need. 

He drags his hand from his boxers and lets the band snap against his pelvis. He spits into his palm and wets his cock with it, sighing as he tugs at himself without much friction.

“Are you wet, sweetheart?” he asks, though the words threaten to get stuck in his throat.

“Yeah,” you whisper back like it’s some kind of secret. 

You work yourself open with your middle finger and slip your pointer in next to it without much trouble. Your walls flutter around them while you fight to find the spot the makes you keen. You’re only able to tease it, fingers not quite long enough to caress it completely. Your thumb keeps working at your clit, though, to make up for the lost pleasure. 

“I’ve been wet since I left you,” you admit through labored breaths. “Haven’t been able to… to stop thinking about you, Eds.”

“Glad I’m not the only one whipped over here, sweetheart,” he manages a laugh.

“No one’s ever made me come that hard before. Not just with their fingers,” you tell him mindlessly, dumb on pleasure, as you feel yourself climbing that peak.

“Really?”

“Never,” you promise, then whine. “Doesn’t even feel as good now… Can’t get as deep as you can—”

Eddie hangs on your every word as he works his palm up and down his stiff cock, squeezing at the base and swiping his thumb over the head with an expert hand. His face scrunches as his stomach starts to tighten, he’s close to coming — too close for his liking. He doesn’t want this to be over so quickly.

“You’ve ruined every other guy for me, Eddie Munson,” you confess, more than pleased to hear how it makes him whine. It sounds like it comes from the depths of his chest, the way it crackles low and needy through the receiver.

“Good,” he grumbles through his pants after he’s gathered himself all over again. “Don’t want anyone else to have you, sweetheart.”

This time you’re the one letting out the most pathetic of whines. It makes a smile flicker at the corners of his lips.

“You like that?”

It sounds so dirty, but you can tell by the sincerity of his tone that it’s genuine. So you answer with a longing truthfulness, a delicate “yes”entwined with a yearning moan.

“You just wanna belong to me, don’t ya?” 

Now, this is dirty talk. The teasing lilt of his tone — it’s almost degrading —  and makes you clench around your fingers. “Yes, please,” you whine, all but pleading for him now.

Eddie’s close, so dreadfully close, with a pleasure so tangible he could taste it. Your words make his cock twitch in his hold as the fire builds in his belly. 

Through your whole-hearted promises and wanting moans, he can hear the sound of your slick through the receiver. The static reception doesn’t do it justice, but the wet click of your fingers working you open was unmistakable.

A moan grumbles in his throat as he digs the crown of his head back into his pillow. “Holy fuck— I can hear you, baby.”

“I’m so wet for you, Eds,” you tell him through fragile slurs, like it wasn’t inherently obvious. 

You were wrong before, about wanting to hide from him. You couldn’t conceal your need for Eddie if you tried. The honey you drip, all sweet and just for him, wouldn’t let you keep it a secret.

“I know, baby, I know,” he nearly coos. “Are you— fuck, please tell me you’re close?”

“Yes,” you promise in a whine. Your thumb presses harder into your clit. It makes your thighs tense until they’re shaking.

“You rubbing your clit for me, sweetheart?” he asks like he knows. “I know that’s what you like.”

You whimper, working at the spongy spot within you as your hips buck off the bed. “Yeah.”

“Keep rubbing yourself like that for me, okay? Want you to keep going until you come for me.”

If he keeps talking to you like that, it’ll come a lot quicker than he’s prepared for. 

It’s too soft to be much of a demand, but you listen obediently anyway, rubbing at yourself though your sensitivity keeps building. It grows like a morning tide, rising and flowing like white waves on an ocean, stirring something fierce in the depths of your stomach.

“Eddie,” you sigh out his name, broken through staggered pants.

You hear his stuttering breaths, too. “Y—Yeah?”

“I’m about to come,” you promise through a whine when the familiar crescendo sends a shock through your body.

“O… Okay,” he responds, pathetically, then whines, even more so.

“Want you to come with me… Please…”

“Fuck— okay. Shit, sweetheart, I’m almost there.”

“What are you thinking about?” you ask him.

“Your pussy,” he answers without thinking — he’s not doing a whole lot of that anymore. “Wish I’d gotten to taste you earlier. Wanna feel you… fuck… Wanna feel you come on my tongue.”

“Holy shit, Eds,” you moan at his words, at the vivid picture they paint in your head.

“And you get so… God, you get so fucking wet. Just want you to drench me, baby.”

It feels good, to be complimented for something boys used to make fun of you for, to realize for the first time that’s it’s sexy — that you’re sexy — and that Eddie is more than happy to drown in you. The feeling almost rivals the impending orgasm that’s bound to hit you like a tidal wave.

“I’m thinking about how I coulda took you on that bench… Just, fucking, get on my knees for you. Shove my head between your legs. Hold your— shit, baby— hold your thighs open, keep you exactly where I want you,” he rambles but then cuts himself off to moan at his own words. “Goddamn, sweetheart. Wanna taste you so fucking bad.”

The moan you let out is pitiful. It leaves your mouth in the most delicate cry. 

No picture has ever been clearer than the one of Eddie between your thighs, your hands knotted in his hair to move him to exactly where you need him most and forcing him there. You can feel his fingers digging into your hips, his rings pressed against your burning skin, and the way your legs tremble on either side of his head.

“Yeah. Keep— Keep doing that. Keep moaning for me,” Eddie tells you. “I’m about to… holy fuck, I’m about to come.”

“Wanna feel your tongue in me so bad, Eds,” you whimper, egged on by the moan he lets out. “Want your cock even more.”

That’s what does him in, the assurance — the promise — that you want him just as bad as he wants you. 

He tightens his fist around his cock, achingly hard and raging a crimson at the tip, trying to imitate the way you’d feel around him. It’s not all that close, not nearly as wet as the honey you’d be dripping for him, but his imagination does the rest of the work for him. 

All at once, you’re on top of him, riding him for all he’s worth, your pussy threatening to swallow him whole. You’ve drenched him, just like he’d begged for, and that wet schlick noise still echoing from the receiver is the evidence of each of your assured thrusts over top of him. 

You’re still pleading for him anyway — for more, for his tongue, for his cock — and he wants so desperately to give everything to you.

“Oh god, baby—” he sputters. He grips the phone in a white-knuckled, fist trembling. “Oh, fuck, I’m coming, baby.”

“Please, Eddie. Please come for me,” you plead over the low sounds of the forgotten film playing across the room and all the dirty wet sounds your pussy makes against your fingers. You sound like you need it, like you want his orgasm more than your own.

“Want you to come with me… Can you— Can you do that for me, sweetheart? Please?” It’s not dirty talk anymore. He’s actually fucking begging you and doesn’t feel the least bit ashamed to do so. 

He wants to hear all the pretty noises you make when you come — that initial cry that stems from the depths of your soul, the high-pitched whimpers that come when the sensitivity builds, and the whines that leave you when it ebbs.

He wants to hear it over and over and over again, like a worn cassette, and play it until the tape spins out.

“Yes…” you promise through a set of stuttering breaths.

There’s no talking when either of you come. Eddie’s long forgotten to talk you through it, but you would barely hear him if he had. The phone slips out of your hand when your grip slackens and it falls to the pillow beside your head.

You chase your orgasm full throttle, working through the crescendo and the strikes of lightning, focusing only on his muffled moaning and the pretty sounds he makes as he comes. 

The breath of your name whimpered through a tight throat is what does it for you. Your body has hardly any time to warn you before you’re gushing all over your fingers, twitching every time the pad of your thumb rubs over clit.

That cry, the one you always let out as you come — all wet and full of need — makes Eddie orgasm right alongside you. 

He swipes his thumb over his head again, collecting the pearls of precum gathering there and sliding them down the base to squeeze himself there like he’d been doing this whole time. He clutches harder this time, imagines it's your cunt locking him in a vice-like grip, and whines in his throat when he comes.

Several loads of it spill onto his cotton boxers, most of it gathering along the side of his hand and dripping down his knuckles. His breath staggers as he works himself through his high, praising you through the phone like you’re the one who brought him to it. 

“Fuck, baby… You’re so good… So fucking good.”

You’ve long settled from your own orgasm, still tingly and numb in some places, but not as gone as you had been just moments before. You still float on a cloud, getting lost as you stare through your window at the half-hidden stars sprinkling the night sky and feeling as though you could reach out and touch them.

You can feel the satin moonlight bathing you, and the jittery static of the neon of the television screen. You can feel everything and somehow nothing at all. 

“I don’t know how you do it, Eds,” you confess, hardly thinking about the words spilling from your mouth when you lazily bring the phone to your ear again.

“Do what, sweetheart?”

“I don’t know… You always make me feel good. Even when you’re not here… Even when we’re not getting each other off.”

“I feel the same way,” he promises you, all mushy, even though he feels like a slob for wiping his hand off on his discarded jeans on his bed. “Just… wish you were here.”

“I wish I was there, too… Wish I could clean you up.”

Eddie’s eyes shut tight as his head tilts back to his pillow at the thought. “Fuck… You’re gonna make me hard again, sweetheart.”

You perk up suddenly as an idea sprouts like a flower in your head. A smile blooms on your lips, and you rise up onto your elbows, glowing with an unanticipated excitement. “How long would it take you to get ready?”

“…Get ready?” he echoes.

“Yeah,” is all you say.

“I mean, I— I don’t know. I figure if I put on some new underwear and a fresh pair of pants, I’ll be good as new... Why?”

“You wanna do something?” 

“Yeah. Sure. Anything,” he answers clumsily in place of saying, ‘Anything to not have to be without you.’

“I wanna go to Skull Rock.”

“Skull Rock?” he repeats. 

Legend has it, you and Steve made that place a local landmark. People have always said that Hopper caught the both of you one too many times up at Lover’s Lake and the Quarry, that you needed a more hidden place to fuck. So you’d stumbled around in the middle of the woods until you found a place the chief wouldn’t think to look for you.

You’d certainly found it. Then every other horny high schooler did too.

It’s the place you go to fuck, the most private place in all of Hawkins — hell, maybe even Indiana entirely for teenagers who can’t get the house to themselves. And as appealing as it sounds, to take you beneath a sky of twinkling stars, Eddie doesn’t want his first time with you to be on dirt or in the middle of the woods. That’s how all the horror movies start, don’t they?

So, needless to say, your answer takes him by surprise.

“Yeah! You can see all the stars really good from there. It’s too hard to see them so close to town.”

Eddie’s heart swells all at once at how sweet you are, like sugar poured directly onto his tongue. You’re not eager to be without him either, it seems, and that thought is as gratifying as it is thrilling. 

You’re an adventure he’s about to go on, without a map or a way out, a journey he’s happy to go into blind as long as you’re holding his hand the entire way through it.

It breaks his heart to hang up the phone. He practically begs you to do it for him, and it makes you laugh — a kind giggle entwined with a tease ‘you’re such a baby.’ It rings in his ears long after the receiver clicks.

Most of all, he hates all the stoplights that separate your place from his. He hadn’t known where you lived before now, not until you uttered it over the phone. He makes a mental note to figure out a quicker way, somewhere through the winding back roads that his old van can speed through to make the distance less daunting.

He pulls into your apartment complex, a quaint two-story thing on the quieter side of town, where the woods are plentiful and the street lamps far fewer. He turns his radio down out of respect for all your neighbors that he’s sure he’ll never meet and spies you through the neon orange porch lights. You shut and lock your door in quick succession, then scurry across the way to meet him.

Eddie leans over to unlock the passenger side door for you, already beaming, and finds you’re smiling too when you climb in next to him. The grin you shoot his way outshines the night sky and makes a bright yellow sun of the girl sitting in his passenger seat.

“Hi,” you’d greeted him, all shy like you didn’t just make him come all over his hand thirty minutes ago.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he volleys back like he always does, with that big ol’ smirk and teasing lilt as he cock his head to the side — using his playfulness to cover up the bashful mess you so easily reduce him too.

Neither of you had gotten particularly dressed up to see each other. All he did was put on fresh under and pajama pants. You succumbed to a smilier laziness it seems, haphazardly brushing through your half-damp hair, throwing on a too big t-shirt, and calling it a day. 

The cotton hangs low at your chest, stretched out and obviously well-loved. It falls well past your thigh, though you spend much of the drive anxiously tugging it down. 

It makes him wonder what you’re wearing beneath it. If you’ve tugged on a pair of shorts or if you’re in the bra and (undoubtedly wet) underwear you’d told him you were wearing over the phone. 

Eddie winds himself up all over again while you sift through the flimsy case of endless cassettes he keeps tucked in the glove compartment that never quite shuts all the way.

“How do you now have any ABBA tapes?” you wonder like it’s baffling, with an Iron Maiden tape in one hand and Cinderella in the other. Metallica plays lowly, nearly inaudibly, from the stereo.

Eddie laughs and darts his eyes from the darkened back roads to look at you, all smiley and bathed in moonlight, before turning back to the road again. “Uh, because I’m not a thirty-year-old woman. That’s the shit moms listen to.”

“Moms and hot girls,” you retort jokingly.

“Right, moms and hot girls listen to ABBA — of which, I am neither, sweetheart. Sorry to be the one to break it to you… Besides, it’s not like you walk around listening to, fucking, I don’t know— Van Halen or whatever.”

“Hey. I listen to Van Halen,” you shoot back.

He scoffs. “Yeah, right.”

“It’s got what it takes!” you sing suddenly, not quite catching the rhythm of the song, but smiling anyway as you reach for his forearm resting on the center console. “So tell me why can’t this be love!”

“Oh, my god— that’s literally their worst song,” Eddie chuckles through the widest grin you’ve ever seen from him. 

It makes you smile big too, looking like an idiot who’s totally head over heels for the boy next to her. And of that, you’re happily guilty of.

“Not true,” you shake your head defiantly. “I love that song.”

“So that means it has to be good, right?” he retorts playfully, shooting you a teasing look, though his beam is more than sincere.

“Obviously,” you answer with a scoff that makes Eddie roll his eyes.

He knows he’s going to start to love it, though, if only because it’s the only Van Halen song you halfway know.

He’s going to hear that song on the radio and he’s going to want to turn it, but he’s going to remember this moment now — the one with you reaching for him while you sing the lyrics to a song he can’t stand, sitting pretty in his passenger seat, while the moonlight blanches your smile and the bare skin of your thighs.

Eddie Munson is going to love that goddamn song for the rest of his life.

He parks as close as he can to Skull Rock, knowing his van can’t work its way that far into the woods. The two of you are forced to walk the rest of the way, not exactly minding it, though Eddie’s incessantly worried you’re going to get cold. 

He’s already forced his jacket upon you, which you took with little fight. It warmed you almost immediately — with his cozy heat and musky cologne.

You make mindless conversation the entire way there, about music and then about his band and then what animal you’d want to be in your band if that were the least bit possible. Eddie chooses a sheep without any hesitation, though you’re confident that a penguin would be far cooler. 

You keep a careful distance between you, at first, like both of you are too scared to initiate the first move. That is, until you trip over a raised branch and nearly eat ass on the forest floor. Then Eddie’s holding your hand the entire way, keeping you close.

“If you wanted me to hold your hand, you coulda just said so, you know?” he jokes. “Didn’t have to go through all the dramatics, sweetheart.”

You try and yank your hand out of his grip in protest then, but he doesn’t let you. In fact, he pulls you closer and twirls you into a bear hug that you happily relax into.

He feels your sigh fan against his collarbone as you rest your head at the nape of his neck, his arms wrap around your shoulders as yours settle at his waist. He rocks you back in forth, in a moment that’s too almost sweet to make fun of.

Eddie finds a way, of course, “See?” he singsongs. “I’ll hug you like this all the time, if you want. You don’t have to almost kill yourself to get my attention, babe.”

“All I did was trip,” you laugh at his theatrics.

“Death by tree root… What a gnarly way to go.”

He holds your hand the entire way to Skull Rock. 

He doesn’t let you go once, not until you’re ascending the large boulders to plant yourselves at the very peak of them. He’s grabbing you again once you settle, though, and the two of you just sit there, for several long moments, just gaping at the stars that dance with life above you. They sprinkle an infinite void with enough light that manages to touch you, trillions of miles away.

There’s a subtle beauty in that Eddie never would’ve appreciated before now.

“Shit, babe,” he breathes through a whimsical existential dread. “You were right. The stars are really fucking pretty out here.” 

You love how much he loves this, to come to Skull Rock with you and count the stars. Any other guy would’ve had their tongue down your throat by now, stuffing your hand down their unbuttoned jeans.

But not Eddie.

He just holds your hand because he likes the feeling of his fingers entwined with yours, grasping tightly onto you while he gazes at an infinite universe — like you might float off right along with it.

His neck is stretched to gape at the night sky. You catch his adam’s apple bobbing every time he swallows. You want so desperately to kiss his milky white skin and sprinkle blotchy red bruises there.

His curly locks fall over his shoulders. He shakes his head to get his bangs out of his eyes while the chocolate buttons of them dart around the endless void.

He’s more beautiful than every star in the sky combined. You can’t be sure of how many that is, of course, but it’s a whole bunch if you had to guess. It makes sense, though, for the prettiest boy in the whole damn galaxy.

“Told ya,” you answer with a smile, leaning over to nudge his shoulder with yours. “You come out here often?”

You’re asking if he takes girls here and he knows it, but it’s not like you’re being inconspicuous about the whole thing. Eddie gauges it almost immediately, the subtle jealousy hinting at your tone — something no one else would’ve caught — and he squeezes your hand in reassurance.

He shakes his head. “No… Never.”

“Never?” you press with raised brows, like his answer shocks you.

“Ever. It’s not really my scene, I guess… But what about you, sweetheart? Never seen you around these parts before.”

You knock his shoulder again, harder this time.  “Shut up. You already know the answer to that.”

“Yeah…” he nods to himself, eyes darting back and forth as he reminisces on something. “You and Harrington, you and Hargrove. Hell, I think I heard about you and Jason one time—”

“That was a long time ago,” you argue. “Before I even knew you, okay?”

“I’m just saying,” he shrugs in defense. “You totally have a thing for pretty boys, sweetheart.”

“I never said I didn’t, Eds. Just that you were pretty, too.”

“Whatever,” he scoffs and rolls his eyes like he isn’t glowing red beneath the moonlight.

“You’re better than all three of them, Eds,” you confess with a sudden softness that catches his attention almost immediately. He turns his attention from the sky to look at you properly again. His breath catches at you sad you look — all beautiful and coated in shades of blue.

“…Yeah?”

You nod and drag his hand into your lap to fidget with his fingers. You trace the skeleton heart on his middle finger, subverting all your attention there because it’s easier than having to look at him now. “Better than all of them combined— not even just them, you know? Out of everyone. No one’s ever been this nice to be before.”

“Me neither, sweetheart,” he confesses with a morose grin. “The freak of Hawkins High attracts a lot of assholes, believe it or not.”

“Is it bad?” you wonder cautiously, like you’re scared to hear the answer. In some ways, you are. 

You hadn’t known him in high school, not really. For obvious reasons, you ran in very different circles. You never even had classes together. There was never any excuse to be close to each other before now, never a reason to become friends. So you didn’t.

You grew to know him as a freak, and he knew you as the town slut. Then somewhere down the line, he became your dealer and now… here you were. 

But you’ve graduated now and he’s still army crawling towards a diploma. You couldn’t save him from the hell of Hawkins High even if you wanted to.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” he shrugs. “Jason and the dick brigade just wanna make my life hell, that’s all.”

“I hope they aren’t,” you respond shyly.

Eddie scoffs then shoots you a smile. “Oh, of course not. Look at me. I’m at Skull Rock with the most wanted girl in Hawkins. I’m living the dream, sweetheart.”

“So you don’t care?” you wonder, peering at him through your lashes, as you twist the silver cross around his finger.

“Care about what?” 

“That I’m a slut,” you laugh like it’s obvious.

Eddie doesn’t think it’s all that funny. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s not like it isn’t true, Eds,” you retort with a trembling smile. “I mean, that’s literally what people call me — most people don’t even care to call me by my real name anymore.”

“I don’t care,” Eddie shakes his head. “I don’t care about that. I don’t give a shit about what people say about you. If everyone cared about what everyone said about everyone, neither of us would be here right now… Because you’d think I was some devil-worshipping freak and I’d think you were too busy getting it on with Chief Hopper.”

You screw your face up immediately at the thought. The mere idea was repulsive. The asshole was practically your father these days. Jim Hopper was in that small bunch of available people you would never fuck, and happily so. 

“I’d never stoop that low,” you joke.

“I like you, how you are, right now,” Eddie promises. “Don’t want you to change a damn thing.” 

His brown eyes twinkle with a sincerity that rivals the stars above you. All of a sudden, you don’t care about a bunch of heavenly bodies light years away from you — you care about this man, the one sitting beside you now, holding your hand even though your palms have gone all sweaty.

It’s too good to be true — the way you looks at you, the way he talks to you, the way he treats you. You’re scared that it’s a dream, that you’ll wake up and find that none of this was ever real. Or worse, that he was, and that he just didn’t care about you the way you cared about him.

It’s almost irrational. Almost. 

But it’s happened before. 

And it’s left you a scarred and mangled mess.

You shake your head to yourself and scrunch your face as you turn to look him. “Have you ever done this before, Eddie?”

“Don’t what?” he wonders with furrowed brows.

“I don’t know…” you shrug. “Any of this? With anyone else?”

He’s grateful he doesn’t have to lie. Or tell some clumsy half-truth for the sake of saving his own skin. He realizes tonight is perhaps the most honest he’s ever been with you, baring his pale soul beneath a silver moonlight. 

“Never,” he answers, unwavering, with a firm shake of his head.

“Really?”

“Really,” he nods, then swallows thickly at a gut-wrenching realization. “I’ve never felt his way about anyone else before.’

“Me neither,” you promise. 

It’s a tad more meaningful coming from you than from a boy who’s never had someone to love and to love him back.

You’re experienced, you’ve found what you like and what you don’t like. You’ve been with guys who have given you the world and guys that have ended yours altogether. And out of all of them — all of the assholes in Hawkins you could’ve picked — you’ve chosen the freak. 

You want him. 

You want Eddie.

The revelation makes him grin. “Promise?”

“Cross my heart, Eddie Spaghetti.”

#published by bug #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson smut #stranger things x reader #stranger things imagine #eddie munson imagine #virgin!eddie munson x reader #virgin!eddie munson

[amagicbeyond]

okay confession time: I watched Good Omens when it first came out, and had a perfectly lovely time. It was fun and David and Michael are spectacular to watch and they were clearly having the time of their lives playing these characters together. I saw the love there and like, fully supported the ship in theory but could not for the life of me fathom how these two, who'd been dancing around each other for six thousand years or more, could possibly ever move out of the subtext and the dancing into something more explicitly romantic. I couldn't conceive of it, it didn't seem feasible. They seemed, to me, perfectly content to continue on as they always had, as the single most important person in each other's lives and the person each most enjoyed spending their time with, perhaps just a little more ready to stop pretending that wasn't the case. I didn't buy the holding-hands-on-the-bus thing. I couldn't read fic about them, no matter how brilliant or well-written! None of it seemed plausible to me. I couldn't see the pathway, the journey they still needed to take to get there. Not without another couple of thousand years to do it.

(I want you to know that I write this with full respect and admiration for those who've actively shipped it from the start - I'm just working through my own experiences as a viewer who wanted to ship it whole-heartedly but just couldn't manage it, and could never quite put my finger on why.)

When the heart shaped started popping up on all the promo materials for season 2, I thought oh no. He's gonna do it. How on earth is he gonna make me buy in?

Well.

I get it now. This is the angel and the demon who love humanity the most, who have made Earth their home, who have learned to revel in Earthly pleasures like food and drink and music and books and cars, not all at once but over time. It makes perfect sense for them, with the evident changes in their relationship in the years since we've last seen them, to finally endeavor into human touch, and to explore it together. Dancing. Human expressions of comfort, and love. Reaching out, a simple touch on the shoulder, or chest. A kiss, all wrong, for all the wrong reasons. A kiss, eventually, all right, made even more exquisite by the knowledge of the wrong one, and the journey they took to get there. Maybe someday more.

I know none of this is groundbreaking or new and everyone else saw it a long time ago. But I get it! I see the vision! I understand.

What was the point? The point is the best of humanity. They get to have it too, and to express it and wonder at it and learn it together. The point is love.

And I am fully on board.

#good omens #good omens 2 #good omens spoilers #good omens 2 spoilers #ineffable husbands #just some thinky thoughts I wanted to get out of my brain so I can avoid thinking about the way Crowley said #and i want to spend... #😭😭😭 #it's all so deliciously awful and they fully deserve the most softest and also the biggest most dramatic movie reunion kiss ever #😭

[the-24-7-lawlu-library]

Hi! Just read this fic (https://archiveofourown.org/works/33748141) and the post that inspired it (https://ladycrimsonandblack.tumblr.com/post/658164849325604866/brawltogethernow-brawltogethernow-tama-gives), and was wondering if you knew any other fics where Luffy is a Fae or a Changeling or just not really human? Thanks!

Hello ! Sorry this took us a while, as it seems there are very few fics that fall under that category, but here's what we've got for you:

The closest that comes to mind is :

Wild Wind At Dressrosa by khepiari (M)

[Mod notes: I am personally recommending this one as it is set in a world of magical realism. Luffy is not explicitly a magical creature, but there is certainly a certain magic and mystery surrounding him, which gives this story a whole air of surrealness and fairy tales.]

Doflamingo has troubles- to govern Dressrosa, collect taxes for the King, a womanizing Secretary, a stupid Brother, an angry Wife and a Rebelling Son who is romancing the Biggest Troublemaker- a Wayfaring Godless Curio-Shopkeeper, who is storming the calm streets of Dressrosa. Law's heart is hell-bent to unite with the Wild Wind called Monkey D Luffy- a tale of food, books, friendship and love.

The Moonwitch And His Dumb Werewolf (also) by khepiari (T)

A.U., Fantasy. Happy Ending. Three Part. LawLu (Switch Couple) When his village gets burned down and family captured by the bounty hunters, a young werewolf pup, Luffy, finds himself in the protection of a witch boy named Law and his father Corazon. As the war ravages, the magical creatures must unite to fight their biggest enemies; humans.

Perfect Completion by quackquackcey (E)

Water sprite Luffy curiously happens upon a gathering of vampires and falls at first sight for a certain golden-eyed vampire…but will his feelings be returned?~

A Crown of Flowers by @hyperbolicreverie (M)

The Wild is a mirror, a magic realm of possibility parallel to the mundane one, and people like Luffy, changelings who've made a devil's bargain for power, walk the line between worlds daily. When Luffy makes a mad dash to rescue his brother from certain death, he sets off a chain of events that makes the very foundations of that realm shudder. Soon, he's got several other people along for the ride, and the situation quickly spirals out of control. There's something the people in power aren't saying, and it might be the key to all the strange events that keep happening around them. Luffy just wants adventure and fun and freedom. Law just wants to be left alone to live his life. Kid wants to never be beholden to someone else again. And Ace just wants some goddamn agency for once. But there are other entities in the Wild with agendas of their own, and they don't care about what others want at all.

How To Snare A Life by xairylle (E)

Accidentally ensnaring a parasitic sexual demon and being his host wasn't exactly how Law wanted to end his night or his life for that matter. LawLu/LuLaw.

A Fleeting Moment (When the Sun Can Kiss the Moon) by purplehairedwonder (T)

Once upon a time, the Sun fell in love with the Moon.

[We also recommend checking the #Sun God Luffy tag for godly Luffy material.

And finally, not Fae Luffy, but we'd like to recommend Fae Law]

To Give You My Name by cosmicatta (M)

Trafalgar Law, last of the faes, had committed a fatal mistake 15 years ago: he had given Doflamingo his full name. Now, even after having escaped, the looming threat of his ownership still follows Law everyhwere he goes. He can only try to survive as a runaway, hoping to, someday, find a way to cut the invisible string tying him to his former captor. Until he meets Luffy. He’s just a regular human. But maybe that’s all Law needs.

And, ofc, the one you recommended:

waters of the wild by ladycrimsonandblack (T)

Even to his nakama, Luffy sometimes appears just a little bit too odd. (Or: Five times a Straw Hat notices something strange about Luffy, and the one time someone knows what's going on.)

We're also happy to tell you that your ask prompted some of our writers to give Fae Luffy a shot, so expect some new fics under that tag soon enough.

-Mod Gigi

#Fantasy AU #explicitly lawlu #vampire AU #werewolf AU #sun god luffy #sun & moon #lawlu #lulaw #lawlu fanfic #lawluffy #monkey d luffy #trafalgar law

[girlwiththepapatattoo]

The Unlikely Similarities Between Kittens and Vampires, Chapter 10

Warnings: Astarion being himself, fingering, vaginal sex

Summary: A very good way to wake up.

Notes: *chants to myself* I will not dwell on how vampire anatomy works, I will not dwell on how vampire anatomy works, I will not...

Anyway, I hope you enjoy! Thanks to all you lovelies who've commented, each one makes my day. <3

Read on Ao3 here!

Previous chapter | First chapter

When Astarion had lain down to sleep after getting his new lover off for her first time, he’d forgotten that she’s a druid. 

And they’re in the middle of a druid grove. 

In the middle of nowhere.

So when he wakes from a rare full sleep, he’s surprised to feel something small, warm, and incredibly soft curled up right on his cheek. 

He doesn’t jump, of course not. But he would admit to a brief, tiny moment of surprise upon waking to find Sable isn’t the only thing sleeping on him. His left eye opens and he sees something tiny laying on his face, covered in brown fur. 

“Don’t move,” Sable whispers, and his open eye look at her. The morning sun lights up her features, makes her practically glow…though the absolute delight in her expression helps that along immensely. 

So instead of pushing the whatever-it-is off of him like he’d normally do, he instead does his best to whisper without moving his cheek. “What’s on my face?” 

Sable does her best to ignore the goosebumps running down her arms as she realizes that she really likes to hear Astarion whisper. “A baby bunny,” she replies, and she looks down. 

Astarion follows her gaze. Tucked on top of and around them are a small family of bunnies, an adult female with five small babies, all of which are still asleep. 

He blinks. “...there’s a baby bunny sleeping on my face.” 

“Yep,” is her reply, and he can all but hear the giggle in her voice.

He has to resist the urge to sigh. “This is going to happen a lot with you as my bedfellow, isn’t it?” 

“Yep.” She has to bite her lip to keep from laughing. One of the bunnies twitches a leg. “Think of it as extra warmth.” 

“I’m thinking of all the potential animal hair on my clothes, actually,” he replies, but Sable doesn’t hear any real ire in his voice. 

“Like I said, extra warmth.” But she gently reaches down and rubs a hand over the mother rabbit, who comes awake instantly. She says something to the small creature, who gets up and makes a short chirping sort of noise. The babies all wake quickly, the one on Astarion’s cheek giving a stretch, its tiny feet on one of his nostrils. His eyebrow twitches at how disgustingly cute it is. 

The bunnies hop off, and Sable, to his surprise, leans over and presses a quick kiss to his chin. “Thank you.” 

“For what?” he asks in confusion, trying to ignore how warm his chest feels from her kiss. 

“For not scaring them off. You looked so precious, sleeping with a bunny on your cheek,” she says, and her smile is so fond that it makes his heart ache. 

He clears his throat and props his head up on his hand. “Yes, well…” His voice goes low and suggestive. “I had been hoping for an altogether different way of waking up.” He pauses for a moment, as if thinking about what could have been. “But you’re welcome,” he finally says, smiling very faintly. 

As he hopes, she blushes, heat flooding her face at his words. “I-I um…w-we can still…if you want.” The events of last night run through her head, and she gasps, her eyes going wide in horror. “Astarion, oh gods I’m so sorry!” 

His brow furrows in confusion. “What could you possibly have to apologize for?” 

“After you…” She drops her gaze and her volume. “After you…used your mouth on me. I just fell asleep! You never got…well, anything!” 

He laughs, snuggling her up close. “My precious kitten, that’s where you’re very much wrong. I might not have gotten to spend myself inside your luscious body, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t avail myself of your other splendors.” He sighs, the sound half a moan. “Your taste…your scent…the way your insides felt, squeezing my finger as you came apart on my tongue…those sweet little noises of yours as I sent you to heaven…” He hums, the look on his face like he’d found nirvana. “Yes…oh, I was more than satisfied with what happened between us, darling.” 

She stares up at him, dumbstruck. His words, his tone, leave her frozen in desire. She wants to say something, anything, but the only thing that gets squeezed out of her throat is a very articulate, “Hng.” 

His lips tug in a slow, languid smirk, and he shifts. His movements unhurried, like a predator assured of a kill, he slings one leg over her, straddling her hips. His eyes don’t leave hers as he pulls up the opening flap of his tent and ties it shut. 

Her hands press across his thighs, his form lithe, but she can feel the corded muscle under her touch. He leans down, his hands pressing to either side of her head, and she watches as his tongue curls out, pressing to her collarbone. She shudders, remembering exactly what that tongue is capable of. 

He traces a pattern down, down, until he reaches the ties to the laces of her shirt. He takes one between his teeth and draws back, the loose knots he’d left last night coming undone easily. His hands cup around her hips and push up, and as they go they take the shirt with it, slowly baring her to his gaze. Her heart pounds, her hands squeeze unconsciously around his legs. 

He pulls her shirt off and tosses it somewhere behind them. He says nothing, but his touch is reverent as his fingers trace over her sides and hips. He leans down further, nuzzling into her soft belly, leaving a line of cool kisses up her stomach and into the valley between her breasts. She whimpers softly, her fingers sliding into his curls, before she very gently pushes at his head. “A-Astarion…I want to…w-well, it’s your turn. Switch with me.” 

He clicks his tongue. “You’re really going to make me give up my fun?” he pouts, before nipping playfully at the side of her breast. 

Her breathy gasp makes him groan softly, his hips grinding down on her. “Ahhhhstarion, please, I-I want to touch you like you’re touching me,” she gasps, and starts tugging on his own shirt. “Please, let me, please!” 

“Well, when you beg so nicely, how could I say no?” he purrs. He leans down and kisses her, a passionate meeting of lips and tongue that takes her breath away, before he tosses his shirt off and lays down. 

Eagerly, much less gracefully, she straddles his hips this time. The sun illuminating the crimson fabric of his tent paints everything in soft shades of red, the color flattering on his skin. She bites her lip, looking at him as if he were almost too beautiful to stare at for long. Her hands press softly to his stomach, the lines of his abdominals softened after being at rest all night. She traces over his skin, nonsense patterns that slowly move up and over his chest. 

His eyes half lidded, he watches her enjoy his body, an awed look on her face. It’s a look he’s seen hundreds, thousands of times, but right here, right now…this isn’t to bring his master back a meal. This is for him, with someone he’s starting to care very much for, who cares about him in return. 

A sudden surge of emotion has his hands clamping around her hips, and he grinds up into her core. A soft cry leaves her lips before she could smother it, but she quickly claps a hand over her mouth. 

“I’m sorry, my kitten, my lover,” he all but pants, sitting up against her. “I don’t think I can wait any longer.” He curls his arm around her waist and flips their positions easily, smothering the beginnings of her protest with a deep, devouring kiss. His fingertips slide down her belly, relishing in the sounds she’s releasing into his mouth, and tug at the laces to her pants, pushing them down over her hips until she can kick them off. 

He swallows her cry as his hand cups her, those clever fingers stroking, dipping, swirling until she’s a writhing mess of heat under him. He’s got her so thoroughly distracted that she’s not even sure when he takes his own pants off, only that suddenly he’s kneeling between her legs, her calf brushing up against his bare thigh. 

“Are you ready, my kitten?” he purrs into her ear, tonguing at the shell, his free hand cupping over her mouth so that anyone walking by the tent would be none the wiser. “Are you ready…to be mine?” 

“Yes,” she gasps into his palm, her warm breath puffing gently against his cool skin. 

He smiles and pulls his fingers from her, where he’d be building her up, spreading her open gently and slowly. He spreads her legs wide, wrapping a hand around the base of his own cock and guiding himself to slide against her slick folds. The feel of his velvety head rubbing against her clit has her shuddering, her nails digging gently into the flesh of his shoulders. 

He groans at how warm and wet she is, before he guides himself to her entrance. So aroused is she, so ready for him, that there isn’t an ounce of tension when he starts to push in. “That’s it, my sweet, my darling, just like that,” he moans, spreading his hand just above her mound as he works himself into her inch by inch. 

Astarion has a nearly perfect cock. Not comically big, but not small by any means, he’s got just enough girth to be a wonderful stretch, with a lovely branching vein running just right of center and an upward curve. The only odd thing about it is, like the rest of him, it’s cool when he slides in at first. But he warms to her body temperature quickly, and then they’re both holding still and quivering. 

“Gods, Sable,” he gasps, his body tense to not drive into her from the get-go. “You’re so tight, you feel so perfect around me…” 

“‘S-Starion, f-fuck you feel…you feel so good, y-you…p-please move, please!” 

He groans and kisses her again before moving his hips. He rolls against her, dragging his cock almost all the way out before pushing back in, the motion he uses and the size of him letting him hit every sensitive spot almost at once. She moans brokenly into his mouth as he loves her, as he traps her into this abyss of pleasure. She’s surprised her skin isn’t on fire, how warm she feels, how desperate she is for him. 

He shifts, pulling her legs up and over his shoulders, and if she thought he was deep before…He hits a spot inside her now that makes her squeal, and he growls at the sound and speeds up, pushing and pressing into that spot over and over until she’s sobbing in pleasure. 

He breaks the kiss as he snakes one hand between them, and all but snarls into her ear. “You’re going to come,” he rasps, his fingers finding her clit and beginning to trace quick circles over the engorged bud. “You’re going to come, and milk my cock, and I’m going to bite you and drink your pleasure.” 

“Yes!” she cries, muffled into his shoulder, feeling that tightening in her lower belly already. “Yes, please, Astarion, oh gods oh shit I, y-you, I-I–!” 

Her orgasm shatters her. He catches her scream into his left palm, his right still rapidly rubbing her clit, and he pulls her head to the side and bites down on her neck. His hips stutter as his own orgasm hits him with the force of the nautoloid crash, heightened by her blood bubbling up into his mouth. She tastes even better now, her flavor bright and thick with heady pleasure, and the cry he utters is nearly broken. 

Neither of them know how long they writhe together, how long they stay high, soaring the bright skies of endless rapture hand in hand and bodies intertwined. When Sable comes back to herself, she finds Astarion nuzzling into the bite marks on her neck, every so often licking at them to get a lingering taste of her pleasure-addled blood. “‘S-Starion…” she all but slurs, sweaty and blissfully sore. 

“Sable,” he purrs, shifting his focus to pepper kisses where her jaw and neck meet. “That was perfect. You’re perfect. Gods, what you do to me…” 

They aren’t sure how long they lay together, basking in the afterglow, the vampire’s cock slowly softening and slipping out of her channel. They both hiss at the motion, before he presses one more gentle, fond kiss to the column of her throat and shifts off her. 

He chuckles softly at her wine of protest. “Now now, darling, I’m just getting a rag to clean you up with. I don’t want you leaking all over my bedroll.” 

She turns crimson and hides her face. “A-Astarion!” 

“What?” He laughs softly, gently wiping her clean. “No reason to be embarrassed, darling. Spread your legs a little wider, there’s my good girl.” He hears her heart skip a beat when he calls her that, and his playful grin darkens to something slightly more…calculating. “Well now…won’t that be fun to play with one of these days,” he purrs. 

But she doesn’t get the chance to say anything, because Shadowheart suddenly speaks from next to the tent. “Are you two lovebirds going to stay in bed all day? We have things to do, you know.” 

“Ugh.” Astarion scowls at the woman’s silhouette. “How long have you been lurking there, Shadowheart? If you were hoping to hear something, you’ve missed the show.” Sable squeaks and immediately shapeshifts into her cat form, wriggling out underneath the tent wall and running away. “Now look what you’ve done!” 

“Don’t blame this on me, Astarion,” she says calmly, already turning to leave. “You’re the one who said something perverted.” 

There’s a rustle as he pulls his clothes on and unties the tent, and by the time he comes out the cleric has already walked off. He frowns in the direction he thinks she went, then looks around for signs of Sable. Nowhere to be found, and there’s too much going on in this place to track her by scent. 

He sighs. “I’ll let her have some time alone,” he murmurs to himself. “Later on, I’ll make sure she’s all right. Honestly…this is why I hate fucking in camp.” 

He grabs his sewing kit and heads off to find the group, and if his thoughts stray constantly to his skittish new lover…well. As long as no one uses the tadpoles to pry into his mind, who’s to stop him from fantasizing?

#baldur's gate 3 #astarion #astarion x tav #bg3 #my writing

[dark-frosted-heart]

Memories of the Beasts - Clavis & Sariel (Epilogue)

One day after finishing her work, Emma heads to Sariel's office to report in. Seeing Clavis there as well, she asks them about the time when they were teacher and student. Both ask, at the same time, where she heard this from. She tells them that Jin told her.

Emma wonders if this is a subject she shouldn't have brought up. Clavis tells her that he was formerly Sariel's apprentice. Sariel agrees, formerly. But it wasn't that long ago.

Clavis: I was too brilliant.

Sariel: Indeed, in some ways. You've been making all sorts of troublesome inventions since you were a child.

Emma's horrified at that fact.

Clavis: So did you want to know about Sariel's top 10 goofs?

Sariel: There's no such thing. Are you sure you aren't thinking about your top 12 blunders, Prince Clavis?

Clavis: Using oddly specific numbers to increase credibility's a bad personality trait, you know?

Emma's a bit disappointed to learn that they were both lies. She explains to them that she's recently been reading stories about buddies and teacher-student relationships so she wanted to ask people who've had that sort of relationship some questions. First, did they ever fight back to back while on a mission? Sariel replies that unfortunately, Clavis was only a child back then. He would've reached her waist. Not exactly strong enough to support each other back to back.

Emma then asks about passing skills to his student and Clavis answers that he would be using a whip now instead of a sword if they had that sort of training.

Then what about the teacher taking on multiple opponents to save his student? Sariels asks Emma if she's heard about the old saying, "a lion pushes its cub into a ravine"* Clavis calls a trial without love harassment.

Nothing's matching up with what Emma's read in her stories. But despite their harsh responses, Sariel and Clavis appear to be in sync with each other. She then asks if they have any particularly memorable moments from their time together. Sariel says his first mission with Clavis. Clavis says his third mission. That was also a memorable one for Sariel. It was the first time they've encountered such a huge maze. But he thought their fourth mission together was Clavis' favorite. Clavis found the investigation interesting, but the truth was too obvious.

The two's back and forth warms Emma's heart. Sariel asks her if something's the matter since she's been staring at them. She replies that she's impressed with how well they remember each mission. Like every moment was memorable. The two look at her in surprise before Sariel agrees with her. It was all new to him. For Clavis, he had learned quite a bit.

Emma: That means it's possible for the teacher-student relationship to be revived-

Sariel and Clavis: It's not

Emma was shot down so quick and all she can do is shrug. But it's rare for them to agree on something. Though she didn't learn much about their relationship back then, she's glad she's able to catch a glimpse of their memories.

Clavis: If I ever want to revive a teacher-student relationship, I'd want it to be with you rather than Sariel.

Emma: Huh, me?

Clavis: As my apprentice, I can teach you how to design traps, cook colorful food, and all other matters of evil. How about becoming the second Clavis?

Sariel: I won't allow it.

Emma: I'm sorry but I don't have a reason or the courage to carry the name "Clavis".

Though Emma is curious about how he gets his food to be so colorful, she thinks to herself.

Sariel: I would rather have her be my apprentice than yours.

Why is Sariel going along with this?

Sariel: As my apprentice, I can teach you more practical things such as how to be more efficient with paperwork, facilitate meetings, and how to punish troublesome behavior. Being a full-fledged bureaucrat would be financially stable.

Clavis: You wouldn't want a master that dangles money in front of you, would you?

The air is once again tense despite the two smiling at each other. In a way, the two do get along. Like Jin had told her, they used to be friends. But it's difficult to describe their current relationship.

Clavis asks Emma who she'd prefer. Finding herself in a troubling position, she tries to escape. But it looks like Clavis is one step ahead of her. He's suddenly right in front of her and suggests a trial run if she can't decide. She'd be able to do things she'd never be able to do normally like training in combat. Sariel, also suddenly close to her, agrees with Clavis. And the sight of her wielding a whip would be amusing. Emma's good; she doesn't need this experience. But she's interested in stories about buddies and teacher-student relationships, isn't she, Sariel asks. Clavis adds that this hands-on experience from people who were formerly master and apprentice would be more exciting than any of her stories.

Maybe it's better if the two don't get along well, Emma thinks. The two should not be allowed to work together.

The look of amusement in their eyes as the two slowly approach her makes Emma give up on the idea escaping.

*Meaning to put the child through hardships so that they can learn and grow from them. I'm struggling so hard to think of an English equivalent lol

#ikemen prince #ikepri #ikepri jp #ikepri summary #god i wish that were me

[helianskies]

Top 3 fics of yours that you wish everyone would read—GO! Then remember to pass this on to at least 5 other people ❤️

:0 but i have so many to pick from . . . :00

okay well it would be remiss of me to not mention by bigger word bbies because they are a large part of moi, so as honourable mentions, i'll simply have to include:

Alter Ego - [ explicit; various ships ] - an obvious one for those who've been around for a while with me, but this was my first big project and a work of crime fiction that i am still proud of to this day

For Me? - [ explicit; engspa, frain... ] - ongoing, but it's looking to be my biggest work yet. it's nearly 2 years old if you can believe...

Out At Sea - [ teen+; various ] - a collection of ficlets for all sorts of pairings and aus, all in bitesize pieces!

but if i have to pick three fics for people to check out then it would have to be these fellas:

Pearlescence - [ mature; engspa ] - it's big and it's fun. i think i blacked out writing a lot of this fic. but i do so love a mermaid au!

Excuses, Excuses - [ teen+; turkgrespa ] - this au still makes me feel things and i want to explore it a lot more. it's domestic goodness, and a plate full of food!

Encounter - [ explicit; engport ] - i haven't written a lot of engport in my time but this fic holds a special place in my heart. if you know, you know!

thanks for the ask cake <3

#helia answers #ask game #helia writes #i went digging down into my fics on ao3 to pick out some faves #and may or may not have gotten lost rereading some of my own work oops #hehehehehe

[nothoughts-onlywomen]

Hi! I just read the new chapter and it is magnificent like the entire story. I just wanted to say thank you for this story and continue with it because it's really so good that it's in my top 3 fanfics of all time. I appreciate that there's this story about lumax bc i love them and there's scarce fic content about them sadly. So again thank you sm and I really appreciate your work and how you write the story, especially how you present lumax's characters bc I imagine them exactly like that. This story makes me really happy that i've waited for your updates for nearly 2 years and I'll wait for it as long as it takes. Have a good day! ♡

me reading this message:

I can't tell you how much of a godsend your message is. To be honest, I was starting to get bummed out about the lack of response to the chapter so far. Between-season lulls usually result in the fandom becoming somewhat dormant, and being an elder Tumblr user (age 30), I have been a part of many fandoms where this has happened. The difference is, I'm still giving my entire heart to this story, and so it can be hard to recognize that the fandom's stimulation has died down somewhat. Especially as the chapters have gotten longer and deeper. This last one is my longest yet - 41 pages in my Word document.

That being said, the fact that I still have readers, the fact that I've been told things like "one of my favorite fanfics" and "the Duffers could never" and just had such a showering of praise...it's all a bit surreal for me. I've been writing since I was twelve, and I never imagined I would get to write a story like this, much less a story that was so well-received. You always read your own writing and wince, to be certain, but this is one of the first stories that I've been truly proud of.

I started writing this story for the very reason you describe - there is a shocking scarcity of Lumax-centric fics out there. Most of them are embedded in Steddie or Byler fics, and you're forced to wring out whatever drops of Lumax you can find. After season 4 concluded and I was so completely on board the Lumax ship, I was frustrated I couldn't find any fanfics. So, I decided to write one myself.

I'm honored - I'm floored - that you've followed this story from the beginning. I'm so thankful to you, and to my other readers who've stuck around for so long.

It's messages like these that let me know people still care to read this fic, especially on days when I'm not sure anyone still reads it at all. And I can't express how full of gratitude I am.

Thank you. Truly.

#lumax #stranger things #max mayfield #lucas sinclair #max x lucas #lucas x max #lumax fic #stranger things fic #lumax fanfiction #stranger things fanfiction #st fanfic #st fanfiction #steadfast sightless

[voltstone]

A YELLOW DRESS FORGOTTEN | TWDG Retelling Ep.1 | BLOOD-STAINED

Walkers. Muertos. Deadheads. Lurkers... The dead which roamed, they wore many names. Monster was yet another one. Though, Clementine knew most monsters didn't decay. Their hearts still throbbed. Their eyes, still with color. The monsters, still with words to asphyxiate.  Because she was one herself: a monster with fire in her breath, and eyes that burned her own Hell. She drank for her life. She drank to forget.

A thank-you to Telltale, a love-letter to Clementine as a character, and a passion project writing out my Clementine's story. Made by my blood, sweat, tears, and probably also mucous from the tears, but it's sanitized, I promise.

— — — Fic Layout:

Ep1 | Between S2 & S3. Ep2-5 | S3. Ep1.5 (Interlude) | S1, Between S1 & S2, Between S2 & S3. Ep6 | Between S3 & S4. Ep7 | Between S3 & S4, S4. Ep8-15 | S4.

— — —

Hello! I got sucked back into writing this fic that I've been working on since 2020. Will probably ping-pong back and forth between two fics (this and LYCOS), and make for damn sure these are both finished by the end of the year.

We'll see.

Regardless, this is my retelling of the TWDG games, with my Clementine. And the biggest catch is…she's an alcoholic. So. Yeah. :D

Full transparency, this isn't truthfully a new update. For one, this fic is the remastered of another. Two, I also already posted this chapter before a couple years ago now on the remastered.

But I have rewritten it, and this is a new Tumblr account, and and, I'm assuming some (very few) new people to TWDG have leaked into the fandom.

For those who've read this before (especially the first chapter), I do change some context(s) around. The basic plotline is the same, but there's different implications that help both a) better hone the horror and realities of an apocalypse, and b) symbolism, narrative stuff, blah.(Or, I've made the last scene significantly more violent.)

Anyway, this fic is on several sites (all of which I've linked to), and there is also a master post that goes more in-depth regarding the overall content, and it'll be the one I'll link more updates to in the future.

There's also a snippet of the first chapter (it's the first scene), so if you're interested, there's that.

Hope you enjoy.

:)

Master Post

AO3 | FFnet | Wattpad | Quotev | RoyalRoad

My story of Clementine, after the events of Season Two…

(Where Clementine alone moves on from Howe's Hardware, guilt-ridden, without sleep, only to find a flask.) 4/25/2022 | Last Edit: 3/05/2024 | [14,803]

“L-Lee…? Did you have to kill those men?”

Snow was Hell’s biting plague.

To her skin, such snowfall sank like glass the more it ravaged the horizon. Her shoes scuffed across that biting plague; she felt it gnaw at her, teethe into her heels. Then there was the gore dressed down her body. The smell of blood was rabid off her. It stained her clothes, leeched onto her flesh. The gore did little to warm her, but it was enough of a cloak.

Amidst her fogged mind, a white static, there was little to truly damn the girl. 

Or little to forsake her, at least, beyond what she was.

His eyes were shot by remorse, she remembered—unequivocally strewn by fear. The world seemed to have held its breath for his sake.

Like the dead who roamed the world alongside her, there was nothing that could. Her mind swayed. Her body swung to another rhythm. There were aches. Her feet throbbed for sleep. She was weighed down by the lone pistol secured at her waist—a grave remnant of days past. There was her shoulder too, and her mouth. One scorched to the muse of ice. As for the other…

Her mouth recalled where the barrel had kissed her its intended farewell. A charge haunted her. One not yet ignited.

She remembered, too, how slow his words had been. Thoughtful as always, spoken with care. But, to the world’s held breath, his strummed vowels sunk deeper than he could’ve ever fathomed. They burrowed the weight of the world down her shoulders. Wormed in place to the shell of her ears. And, as the days grew old and weary, and the world fell around them, and its held breath suffocated itself, those words would fade.

Because they were the wise words of a dead man. Because she was still alive, and he was not.

Her shoes abraded across a stride, down a frigid patch of asphalt. Did so to memory’s fleeting tune.

There was only so much she could cling to. Recollection was nothing but a humble tote bag, after all. So, only the better, sweeter memories were kept safe…

The ones at a motel, mainly, where they were stitched together by candlelight, and woven soundly by sheets and embedded cigarette ash.

Those sweeter memories went rotten long ago. All there was left, within that snow, were his wise, dead words. Shards which clipped her strides. Fallen parasites they were just as well, the more snow stole her complexion away.

“Did you have to kill those men?”

Those shards—the parasites—festered to the muse of ice. Her shoulder was an agony, and she didn’t know what was worse, the fact that it was a rifleman’s puncture, or the fact that…the bullet was hardly the Devil of it. The shards ate through the gore, ignored the jacket. They desolated. They dulled her mind’s eye to slow, rattled drawls of conscious thought. All the girl knew, barely, was the road she was on, and the ways she lagged behind herself.

A phantom amongst the dead, roaming wherever her intuition would wrench her.

…of course, there was the life she kept safe in her arms, deep against her chest. He was safe. Secure.

And as warm as she could manage.

There was that, at least. It wasn’t as though the life was enough to soothe her mind, however. So she roamed. The most she could grasp were the whispers of her fractured mentality.

“Did you have to kill those men?”

Over and over and over again.

A ghost of herself. Perhaps. This sounded like a girl not far younger than what she had grown to, anyway. She couldn’t quite recognize her.

“Did you have to kill those men?”

Her recollection… It was waning. Those sour memories revolted her mind’s eye.

“Did you have to kill those men?”

Over and over. And every time, Lee backed away. One step, then two, then three. Four. Further into the shadows. Away from her.

The world was suffocating.

“Did you have to kill…?”

Because he was a dead man. She was alive, he was not.

A sick mantra that hewn his wise words with ease, as it were.

He was a dead man. She was alive. There was dead. Then alive. Dead. Alive. Human. And then not…

“Did you…?”

She was alive. It had been days since that smoking gun was pocketed. Her hands were flecked by his blood. Her face as well.

Did you, Clementine?

The girl tripped. She lurched over the break in asphalt, staggered for balance, before the life in her arms fidgeted.

Her eyes snapped to him where he was, in his blanket. His own peered at her. She saw a vivacity. Those dark eyes of his, they were truly bright. The white static ebbed away. There was no ignoring her maternal instinct.

The world sharpened. There was clarity, and with that clarity came an agonizing harmony:

Her feet ached. Her mouth burned.

Her shoulder writhed of frostbite.

Clementine managed a pained, cracked smile. It didn’t reach her eyes. It barely crossed her cheeks. She choked on a feeble kind of sob, before her cold lips melted onto his warm crown.

“We’ll be okay…” she whispered, ingrained within another mantra, a somber one, that she’d yet to crawl out of. “A.J…, w-we’ll be okay…”

His dark, truly bright, brilliant eyes held her still for a moment. Consoled her. Had Clementine forget.

For that moment, though. A mere lapse in time.

Because snowfall was Hell’s plague. It slashed down her cheeks to remind her of everything again. So she walked.

Did you have to?

The hellscape around her was a vast, dead acreage. Trees were looming. The cars were decaying. And across the horizon, a great shadow. It spurned a dreadful hope.

So Clementine meandered through. Stepped over the bodies, around the abandoned cars. 

The snow upon this land was scarcely white. There were more reds, and darks, and everything between. Some rotted above the surface. Most were a decomposing reality just beneath, and wore snow as twining, raw layers. As raw flesh, marred by the truth of survival:

You don’t. 

There’s fumbling for that last knock into the dead’s jaw. There’s the scrounge whenever a last bullet is lost. The bleating wail in the one hope that somebody, anybody, would just fall from the clouds and be their savior.

It only ever ends one way. Called it survival’s fallacy.

Across that acreage, there were black pillars erected. In the blur, their arms were wide; they did not shed their light for her. They reached far into the winter, above her head. At the base of one, a truck had lunged itself into its pole. The driver’s body was sagged in the chair. The airbag was wilted across.

She snagged her reflection in its broken windshield.

“My baby, my doll. You have the sun in your eyes. Who wouldn’t want to play with you?”

Clementine found not the dead walking, but a ghost roaming. Her ballcap was a fog in color. There was barely the blue she cherished. Her black hair beneath was strewn with ice. Her face, gaunt in hunger and insomnia’s union, and twinged by hypothermia. 

Then…, her eyes.

There wasn’t a trace of life. Dull instead. Winter had stolen its yellow. Left her with a… A bleak hazel.

“You’re the life of everyone’s day!”

A lie. It had been a lie gifted to her from… Who had said that? An uncle, was it? Her father?

…Lee?

She didn’t know. Couldn’t, the longer she rummaged for his face.

Clementine tore herself away. She kept A.J close to her heart, away from her shoulder. The snow, the ice, still festered. Threatened to spread. Down her arm, for her spine, it threatened to claim her whole.

And she thought of the little girl—the one that asked Lee why? Asked how could you? 

It was the little girl who asked the same of Clementine in that hour.

Did you have to kill him? Did you?

Her weary bones ached, and her wounds begged to be licked clean. So, she slowed in her stride. Meandered to a nearby lamppost. The baby struggled in her arms; a last drone of wind clipped them both. Clementine sagged against the pole, only to flinch away from its scalding frost.

She urged her weary bones for a few more strides, before another dozen. They complied. It was agony…

Winter’s haze cleared as she encroached. The bill to her ballcap followed her eyes. Death and its frigid rot swept for the girl’s nose.

HOWES HARDWARE

Clementine never could decide what that sign meant for her. It may have been a blessing, or the Devil in sheep’s clothing.

It was a place where the world held its breath, anyway. Just as it would wherever she wandered.

To the point of suffocation, for Clementine never wanted to answer the little girl.

AO3 | FFnet | Wattpad | Quotev | RoyalRoad

#volt's library #aydf fic #twdg #twdg fanfiction #twdg retelling #twdg clementine #twdg aj #twdg 2 #fanfiction #ao3 #wattpad #canon divergence #but also kinda not #kinda #also psst: wattpad and royalroad gets updated more frequently #because the chapters are broken up into parts #(royalroad has a word limit and wattpad is fucking stupid)

[musette22]

good morning my darling Minnie! new Seb interview dropped and here's a summary in case someone wants it:

- Lily had an interview prior him and said she and Sebastian became really good friends and spoke about how generous and brave Seb is as an actor ❤️

- Sebastian said he was filming a scene of adm when the nominations were announced and he said the first one to congratulate him was the director Aaron Schimberg, he gave him the news and then they just kept on filming 😂

- he was asked if he's still getting excited about working with great people, the interviewer mentioned Nicole Kidman and you know what this sunshine said? 🥺 he said he almost had a breakdown the other day while filming his current movie. no "big" names yet he's still so excited to work with Renate, Adam and everyone involved. his heart ❤️

- He spoke a lot with Jessica Chastain before/during p&t and she recommended him to wear an ear piece to listen to Tommy's voice all the time, he listened to music instead 😂

- he said he tried to eat once a day to lose weight but then he'd feel without energy

- he is literally so grateful for everything he's achieved and the people who've helped him in the way ❤️

- he said this could be the only time he ever gets an Emmy nomination and the interviewer said "no way" and Seb proceed to say that as an eastern European he was raised to no have expectations ever and his mother taught him to always look behind his back 💔

- he said for him it was really difficult the first years in America because he didn't speak English, he had an accent and couldn't communicate correctly with other people

- he said before this interview he was followed by paparazzis for an hour and a half and he was just circling around to basically not get home because he was scared to being followed 🙁 he then proceed to say he often tells to himself "Sebastian suck it up, you choose this profession" and the interviewer told him he's very generous because he shouldn't have to 😩 this man is way too kind i swear, incredible.

- he said that even though he went to college and he got his degree, hes never stopped studying. This guy has been constantly studying his whole life - and we can notice it, i hope he knows that!!

- he told again about how he was asked to get Chris to voice the penis in p&t and he said there was no way he was telling Chris about it because if he said yes "it would be too much for Chris and himself 👀"

- she asked about the penis scene and Seb said the show proves a point because that's the question he's been asked the most during the press of p&t

https://variety.com/2022/tv/awards/pam-tommy-lily-james-sebastian-stan-1235327825/

Good morning my love! Aaahhh THANK YOU for this summary, that's fantastic seeing as I probably won't have time to listen to the full thing (though I'll skip through it for sure and read the interview!) but I do very much want to know all the interesting things that were no doubt said!

Oh god, everything he said about his past, and the fact that he's still so unbelievably humble, and how hard working and dedicated he is, like we knew all this but he proves it time and time again and it's incredible 😭 But GOD, the thing about the paparazzis is so sad ugh, I can't believe it. That breaks my heart. Yeah, he did choose this profession, but he chose acting, not being hounded by photographers, wtf. I hate that, he deserves so much better :(( But he really is too kind and generous, such a good person, ugh.

And then the whole P&T Penis thing with Chris, it's just hilarious and cute and amazing, I love it so much. I was a little worried at first what he was going to say because I was like 'too much..?' but then I listened and it was like 'ooohhh, too much, I see...😏' This cutie!!! Sebastian honey, your crush is showing <33

Thank you so much again for this rundown, lovely! I really appreciate it, big kiss for you! 😘😘

#sebastian stan #minnie answers

[nocompromise-noregrets]

I posted 16,488 times in 2022

321 posts created (2%)

16,167 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@his-name-is-ed

@verecunda

@arofili

@lordoftherazzles

I tagged 16,412 of my posts in 2022

#lotr - 10,244 posts

#<33333333 - 8,488 posts

#oh this is lovely - 6,418 posts

#<3333333 - 5,862 posts

#ofmd - 2,573 posts

#sandman - 705 posts

#my heart - 526 posts

#brb crying forever - 512 posts

#can't bear it - 498 posts

#too pretty - 498 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#that person generalising up there about how all smut authors are writing for that purpose and want to hear about its effect is entirely wro

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Chapters: 115/115 Fandom: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Bard the Bowman/Thranduil, Bard the Bowman & Bard's Children, Bard the Bowman & Bard's Children & Tauriel, Tauriel (Hobbit Movies) & Thranduil (Tolkien), Bard's Children & Thranduil, Thranduil (Tolkien) & Tilda (Hobbit Movies), Sigrid (Hobbit Movies) & Thranduil (Tolkien), Bain of Dale & Thranduil, Bain of Dale & Bard the Bowman & Sigrid & Tilda, Bard's Children & Tauriel Characters: Bard the Bowman, Thranduil (Tolkien), Sigrid (Hobbit Movies), Tilda (Hobbit Movies), Bain of Dale, Tauriel (Hobbit Movies) Additional Tags: Post-Battle of Five Armies, Getting Together, Falling In Love, Fluff, Light Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, Romance, Feelings, opposite of slow burn, Pining, Mutual Pining, Long-Distance Relationship, Family Feels, Family Fluff, King Bard the Bowman, Negotiations, rebuilding of dale Series: Part 1 of My Heart Is An Empty Vessel Summary:

Bard can't stop looking at the Elvenking. Thranduil can't stop looking at the Bowman. After the battle, Thranduil is exhausted and vulnerable and Bard is feeling overwhelmed, and they find themselves leaning on each other for support. Everything moves very quickly after that.

Chapter 115 (the epilogue) now posted! In which, ten years later, the day of Sigrid's coronation has arrived; but first, there is something that Bard and Thranduil must do.

Well, here we are. This is the epilogue to the most unexpected, bewildering, enjoyable writing experience I think I've ever had. Posted on the second anniversary of posting the prologue, because I do like it when things come full-circle. Thank you so much to all of you who've commented, kudos'd, encouraged, prompted, asked and inspired, especially to my invaluable beta @lemurious, without whom this story would never have got beyond the first few chapters.

The story is not over, by any stretch of the imagination; there are pushing 40 other works in this series already, and most of my other stuff is also set in this 'verse (one of these days I'll collect everything in this 'verse in chronological order...). The actual sequel Break You But You'll Mend is still in progress (and developing plotlines faster than I can handle), and there will be a story focussing on the relationship between Sigrid and Tauriel which will show more of the events of the last few chapters than I was able to do from Bard and Thranduil's perspectives and will also cover the ten years between chapter 114 and the epilogue of this story and Sigrid's reign as Queen of Dale; for a Sigrid's-eye-view of the moment of her coronation, there's A Moment On The Edge, and for Bard and Thranduil's arrival in the Woodland Realm after the coronation, there's Deep In The Greenwood. And there'll be one final one-shot treat set just after that one for the final day of Writers' Month 2022, coming tomorrow, 31 August. Oh yeah, and for a little more on the Bain-and-Lotta situation, there's Second-in-Command. :D :D :D

28 notes - Posted August 30, 2022

#4

Oh I'd love to read your thoughts on modern thranduil, legolas, any character you like

Hi, anon! I couldn't see myself writing a modern AU, originally (I'm not very good at AUs) so I didn't have many thoughts about modern versions of the characters, but then the idea for a daft Christmas movie AU came to me, and then All I Want Is You-'verse happened. In which:

Thranduil is Lord Greenwood, widowed, isolated, very lonely when his kids are away at boarding school, and he's rattling around in his enormous stately home with only Galion the butler for company. He owns, if not quite 'half the county' as Sigrid off-handedly puts it early on, a large country estate, which he runs as carefully, ethically and environmentally-responsibly as he can; he is painfully aware of the ridiculous privilege he's inherited through an accident of birth, and he tries his best to do good things with it all, support local community organisations and so on. He is rather reserved and, I think, actually quite shy (that's the British aristocracy for you...) which can come off as stand-offish and forbidding.

Legolas is eighteen years old, in his last year at boarding school, outgoing and friendly, into things like athletics and archery and history, and the member of the family most likely to be getting into trouble at protest marches, seed-bombing patches of wasteland, and probably superglueing himself to railings/diggers/bridges etc, given half a chance.

Tauriel is seventeen, very quiet and reserved, was adopted by Thranduil and his late wife when she was small after her parents died in a house fire - her dad was the woodsman on Thranduil's estate and Tauriel and Legolas had been best friends since they were tiny so it made all the sense. She likes horseriding, and she often goes and sits on the roof of Greenwood Hall to think. She also likes Sigrid, very much.

Bard is an exhausted, widowed single dad who was made redundant from his job as a museum curator (specialism: medieval weaponry) a few years ago and has been barely making ends meet as a delivery driver ever since. He'd like nothing more than to get another museum job, but there's nothing on the horizon. His one priority in life is making sure his kids are okay.

Sigrid is sixteen, also likes horseriding (and Tauriel, very much), and books and spends most of her time studying, working at the riding school at weekends in exchange for lessons, and looking after her siblings. (Her Da hates that she's had to take on so much responsibility)

Bain is fourteen, likes football and computer games, and if he were any more laid-back he'd be horizontal. He's quick-witted and more interested in his schoolwork, especially history, than he likes to let on. He's the artist of the family, too.

Tilda is ten, massively outgoing, given to asking awkward questions, thinks Legolas is the cat's pyjamas, and is probably going to be going to demonstrations with him just as soon as Covid's over. Weapons-grade cuteness which frequently requires warnings in chapter notes.

Thranduil has been noticing the very handsome delivery driver who's been bringing his wine orders (and may possibly have been making more orders as a consequence) but hasn't quite managed to actually speak to him...until he does, and then they bump into each other, quite literally, in town a couple of weeks before Christmas. At which point the kids take matters into their own hands. And then three months later the first lockdown happens and things rather accelerate from there. :D

I actually work, part-time, in a stately home, so I've ended up channelling all sorts of things into this story from personal experience, and I've been having a whale of a time with it, although I'm rather stalled on it at the moment (then again, I'm stalled on pretty much everything at the moment...)

I did write another modern AU for Tolkien Secret Santa, in which Bard and Thranduil were friends as teenagers and never quite got round to doing anything about (or indeed understanding) what they felt about each other before they went off to uni and lost touch, and then run into each other 25-odd years later; in that one Thranduil is a very repressed (and probably demisexual/grey-ace) top-flight QC (Queen's Counsel, a top lawyer) and Bard is assistant distribution manager for a brewery in their home town, and the kids are more or less as above - I had to put my foot down with that one at 14k words or it would have turned into another massive series and I haven't the time or the mental energy for it at the moment XD

I do tend to take the movie portrayal of Thranduil as inspiration rather than the book one, which is probably why my versions of him are all rather more reserved than many others. Which is why fandom is so awesome - there's room for everyone! :D

Thank you very much for asking! <333333 I've never really sat down and thought about my headcanons before, much less actually written a post for them. I am wondering whether perhaps I should do something like this for Empty Vessel-'verse (my enormous sprawling Middle-Earth-set series)...it's certainly big enough, and I do have a large number of headcanons for it at this point...

38 notes - Posted March 3, 2022

#3

I commissioned this art of Bard and Bofur from The Ace of Spades having a nice quiet summertime pint in the beer garden of the Golden Dragon from the always-awesome @geetimesthree and it is DELIGHTFUL! Look at their smitten lovestruck faces! <33333333 THANK YOU! :D :D :D

45 notes - Posted July 6, 2022

#2

I can't help but think that Tumblr is sleeping on The Boat that Rocked/Pirate Radio, given that it features two of the current sopping wet pathetic Tumblr sexymen boyfriends and by the end of the movie they're both literally sopping wet. I'd post a screenshot but the internet is also sleeping on this fantastically silly movie and I can't find any of the pertinent moments. Fans of Rhys Darby and Tom Sturridge being pathetic and wet, get ye thence! (and then come back to me and talk about why I'm right in thinking that Midnight Mark and Felicity are unlikely odd-couple best friends :D :D :D )

64 notes - Posted September 20, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Rules: tag 9 people you want to get to know better or catch up with (or tag whomever)

Tagged by the equally fabulous @mihrsuri, @palmviolet and @coopsgirl - thank you all! <33333

Favourite Colour: Purple, especially the blue-toned shades

Last Song: *checks spotify for what was playing in the car when I got home* Let Forever Be by the Chemical Brothers, although I wasn't really listening to it - I was cycling through a '90s indie' playlist.

Currently Reading: Nothing in particular - I haven't read a book in ages, being entirely without the mental energy and concentration, but I just received the English version of Ari Väntänen's biography of Hanoi Rocks' drummer Razzle and I am hoping to find the wherewithal to read it this weekend.

Last Movie: Good question, I can't remember. Hmmm. We've mostly been binge-watching Father Brown just lately.

Sweet, Savory or Spicy: All three, but not necessarily at the same time (although sweet chilli...hmm...)

Currently working on: Working up the wherewithal to try and make some progress on one or other of Empty Vessel, Break You But You'll Mend or All I Want Is You. Also the fourth unit of my Open University German course, since my third assignment was due in today and I submitted it on Tuesday.

Tagging: without any pressure, @writerman, @lonelyheartsmotel, @goldscythe, @spiced-wine-fic and anyone else who fancies doing this!

82 notes - Posted January 27, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #that number one post is only there because someone reblogged it to add their answers #and then everyone they tagged reblogged it to add *their* answers #and so on and so forth #XDDDDDD #anyway this is what i mean when i grouse about people complaining that their art and fic 'only' gets 300 notes :D #i never did read that razzle biography #need to do that sometime... #i need to check my tag bundles and even out the number of 3s in my hearts XDDDD

[sparatus]

heyy

💋(or suitable turian alternative)🍦💖💞 (I think I know who but feel free to babble about them I'm all ears)

hell yeah thank u 💍

Fanfic Emoji Asks

💋 First kiss fics. Love em or hate em?

LOVE LOVE LOVE god i need to write more im so weak, especially for when it's two characters who've been friends a long time but haven't been able to bring themselves to admit their feelings until at some point everything comes to a head in an emotional moment and AUGH YES

🍦 What's the sweetest fic you've created so far?

i already answered this one here but let's be honest i've got a lot of soft sweet shit under my belt, lol. Where the Wind Rests definitely gets a shout-out, part of a series and has spoilers for the end of broken mirror but god tender reunions and marriage proposals my beloveds. i went looking through my desabrudas stuff to pick one out but honestly any of the stuff i wrote about them post-shanxi with kids is just pure cavity fodder, i need to write them more everything is oLD

💖 What made you start writing?

i used to be a semi-famous rper in the facebook rp community (back in. 2012. yes it was a thing fb used to be an easy haven for rp) for a. certain anime community i'm not going to mention you must be at least a level 3 friend to learn this fact. but that started it, and then i had a couple friends from that community who helped foster that and got me writing - i have an old twilight spitefic still up on ao3 (do not read it. cannot emphasize enough it's very old and i was mimicking smeyer's writing style and the characters have evolved since then) that was inspired by one of those friends!!

i got started writing mass effect specifically because my partner @lightspeedpowerpunk was writing a fic about our ocs, which eventually grew into Rise & Reign (we're rewriting it soon i prommy plans are in the works i miss my dumb stupid boys) and around chapter. idk, 10?? 12 or so?? i started contributing to writing it myself, and that just kinda kickstarted everything. everybody say thank you to the ogs axilus and thie'haasn for my [checks notes] jesus christ 84 mass effect works on ao3

💞 Who's your comfort character?

m. many,,,,, definitely cnclr sparatus, obviously, and also my oc for his wife, aediteia. the way i've written sparky has taken nearly the full 8 years i've been in this fandom to slowly build, and he's very near and dear to my heart. conversely, teia has also grown along with him, and their narratives both personal and together touch on a lot of things that are somewhat personal to me and my own growth as a person.

in the same vein, the arterius brothers also count - i can look back and see how the way i've written saren has changed over the years as i myself have grown. i write him less depressed now, he has a support system, in yes-reapers yes he's still having a Bad Time because sovereign is fucking him up and the reapers are tied to his brother's death but it's less. idk. gloom and doom emo sadboi 24/7, he's allowed to have moments of peace now. desolas in particular i've kinda realized is also reflecting a lot about myself, ESPECIALLY in no-reapers. his arc in my no-reapers au, and in fact a major theme of the entire series, is all about recovery from trauma and how our choices make us who we are; no-reapers desolas has been through a lot of shit, so much, 89 years of it, from his parents being killed to having to help his baby brother through his own trauma to his career to 314 and everything in-between, and he's been in a really bad place and learned really bad habits and attitudes, but after shanxi he makes the active choice to grow and move on, at first just because valis needs him but with therapy also comes to do it just for himself because he's tired of being sad and hurt and angry. and that's a very personal story for me, even tho i certainly didn't set out intending des of all assholes to be the one carrying most of my weight, lol.

nihlus and (valis) abrudas are also in the same boat, characters who've been through a lot of shit and got mad about it and have their own ways of dealing with it. something that's going to become apparent to shepard in itlog is that saren was nihlus's morality chain, not the other way around - saren played a large part in nihlus learning to heal from his father's death and move on as a person, and now that he's been hurt in this whole thing nihlus is starting to slide back into old habits. valis, on the other hand, is the lone sane man in the whole clan, trying to keep her head on straight and above water while her friends and loved ones are drowning, and i've had to be that friend myself and boy i really do appreciate that kind of character, especially for somebody like desolas who's been drowning so long he's forgotten what the surface looks like.

god i have so many emotions and thoughts about sparkyteia and the desabrudas/kryterius group (i like to call des + valis + saren the evolution trio, personally, as they're all in it, but nihlus makes a proper group name hard :lmfao:) they're all my comfort characters i come back to them every time when i get stuck in my head and start Thinking About Stuff i probably have others but this is already rEALLY LONG,

#press conference #callista-curations

[ultraericthered]

Anime Update V3 10

From Me To You - Things are now taking their time, with random fluff and incidents such as Sawako, as her one good deed of the day, sheltering a hilariously ungrateful and angry puppy from the rain, and the dog later gets adopted by Kazehaya. Then there's the start of the new school term where seatings have to be changed via drawing numbers, with almost no one wanting to sit next to, behind, in front of, or across from Sawako. Kazehaya ends up going "fuck it, I'm going to take some initiative here!" and physically moves his table and seat next to Sawako's. Yano, Yoshida, and this guy named Ryuu also sit in that end of the classroom, so I guess this is our main cast. My main takeaway is how our two leads are sort of inversions of one another - Sawako is introverted yet easily lets her emotions show, while Kazehaya is extroverted yet is good at being hard to read.

Hunter x Hunter - The Hunters' assault on the royal palace finally begins and with a great big bang. Netero and Zeno did this huge, shiny strike from the sky and Netero let out a display of his full power that hits Neferpitou, who is miraculously able to survive this. Most of the episode was filled with narration and there's even a glimpse into Netero's backstory for how he attained the strength he has now.

SHUFFLE! - Well on one hand, I've warmed up to Primula enough to give a damn when it's revealed what she really is and the focus gets put on her falling ill and needing to be taken back to the demon world and possibly out of the main casts' lives forever. On the other hand, I'm not sure I welcome this sudden swerve into drama. I'm pretty sure I was expecting it at some point given similar works like CLANNAD, but I was enjoying the fun, breezy and laid-back feel the show had going, and now even the opening card, mid-episode eyecatches, and next episode previews aren't the same as they were before! I'm going to be hopeful that this goes somewhere to make this trade worth it and that the charm doesn't completely fade away.

The Case Files of Lord El-Melloi II - Had a real locked room mystery this time, one set at an estate that holds a magical workshop in the midst of a storm and had to be covered in two episodes rather than one! To make the case stranger, the client has some special eyes that allow him to see and visually communicate with a human-sized fairy that seems to be haunting the place. I loved that Reines actually got to come along in person for this one, as we got to see some good reactive comedy from her and some precious interaction between her and Gray, showing she's got more range to her than simply an evil girlboss. Also got to meet Ms. Hishiri Adashino, who Waver can barely stand, and Kairi Shishigou, a burly, shades and jacket wearing, gun-toting necromacer. Gray is confirmed to have a connection to Saber as she becomes instrumental in the fight against these terrifying black dogs. I think the one part that was iffy for me is that it repeated the "the father is the posthumous mastermind!" twist from Episode 3, only this time there was no actual ghost in the works. But it did lead to us learning of Rail Zeppelin, an underworld group that sells mystic eyes, paving the way for an unfolding story arc.

KonoSuba - The OVA episode was all kinds of priceless, if not a little bit aggrivating at points due to the characters' stupidity. Got to meet Megumin's self-proclaimed rival Yunyun, though the relationship seems to actually be one of a bully and her victim who've become friends/rivals/secret lovers. Her presence at Wiz's shop leads to Kazuma putting on a cursed choker that will drain him of his life unless his heart's wish from when it was first put on is granted. Since Kazuma is the fucking worst, he milks this situation and gets the girls to do whatever he wants them to do, hoping they'll pleasure him enough for it to be considered wish fulfillment. It doesn't pan out, so he has to confess all his sins before he goes, and long story short, he does end up dying again but it's not the choker that does him in.

Symphogear XV - With the main Symphogear girls at the lunar ruins and Shem-Ha planning on using the Curse of Balal to activate Yggdrasil so that she can distort all life on Earth, repopulate it with her own monstrous spawn, and become a true goddess, the final season is at its climax. Tsubasa and Maria work together and put up a great fight against Noble Red, but are too late to stop Shem-Ha from activating Yggdrasil, which is forming towers all over the planet!

Eureka Seven - Aside from some character growth moments for Talho and Holland, and the reassertion of Gecko State's goal, not much happened here! Basically just prepping for the fight ahead.

Gintama - OK, calling this arc "Yakuza VS Aliens" is either the most misleading thing the series could've done or it's secretly genius. The first of the three episodes sees a freak alien parasite running amuck in Edo City and famed alien hunter Umibozu arriving to exterminate it, and in the process talk his daughter Kagura into returning with him to their homeworld. Yeah, he's Kagura's father and there's a more complicated history behind Kagura's clan and why Kagura wanted to break away from it to live a normal, fun life on Earth, Kagura gets more seriously angered than we've seen her get to this point and has a fight against her old man that's settled by Gintoki making a save and....telling Kagura she should leave Earth with her father. He just gives Kagura up and walks away. What in the blazing HELL, Gin?!?

#Anime Update V3 #Anime Update

[egoludes]

Your writing is incredibly addictive. I don't know how to describe how it hits and sweeps me up in the emotions you evoke in your fics. What is your writing process like and do you have authors who inspired you?

anon ugh my heart is so full, i love you so so much for this encouragement and kindness <3

my process is very chaotic honestly - i don't really outline, i typically get struck by an idea (or if it's a request, start to think on an idea), jot ideas down if a particular scene later in the story immediately jumps out at mine, then start to write. i've found that the more i outline, the more insecure i get, haha - i start to overthink parts of the story TOO much and getting it perfect in the outline, and it's just easier to flesh out the ideas i have to gain some momentum and THEN outline to fill in blanks than the other way around. not to mention the fact that more often than not, when i start to outline, i start just writing paragraphs anyway, so it's easier to just start with the fic. the only exception might be multi-series fics though - it's hard to pace something with more than one part without some kind of outline, so i'm more deliberate about that!

as for authors who've inspired me, if we're talking famous folks, i really love pablo neruda (poetry, i know, but it counts) - the way he describes emotion is just breathtaking. also have really enjoyed anything i've read of murakami, margaret atwood, and madeline miller. i will admit that i don't read fiction as much as non-fiction these days, so this is a short list based on what's coming right to mind! as for writers on here, that list can go on forever between all the fandoms i'm involved in! we just have some rly talented people around whose work has made me excited --- it's hard not to want to write once i read something they've done, so i definitely suggest following if that helps you too! again this is just a short list and first people that come to mind based on things i recently re-read or read, so creep my rec tags for more!

@avintagekiss24 @heli0s-writes @cherienymphe @darkficsyouneveraskedfor @honeydulcewrites @musingsinmoonlight @hrina @needleandhammer@stargazingfangirl18 @whistlingwillows @jtargaryen18 @ozarkthedog @dirtychocolatechai

#asks.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

#film noir #neo-noir #criterion channel

[bloodymolly]

I'm having a rough day mentally. Seems like the odds are stacked against me, I can't get a break, and as soon as I tackle one problem within myself or my life another 3 take its place. I feel as though I'm a failure to my species, my family name, to the world.. But I try to remember where I've been. If you looked back... 2 years ago at 19, I was a loser. I had no job (1950s lifestyle sub at the time but was constantly used as leverage to keep me compliant), in an abusive relationship, toxic family members and friends instigating and debilitating my ability to think for myself, mental illness rampant, untreated, and ignored because I couldn't deal with how broken I was, binge eating to the point of gaining 5 pounds in one week, and drinking heavily to cope with everything because it was "better" than physically hurting myself. I thought love was violence so violence equalled love. I forgot I had a choice to consent. I forgot I had willpower and a voice. A voice that I never gave myself credit for being strong until I made a room full of people cry after telling a story about patriotism nonetheless.

I was not a good person at that time. But that doesn't mean I'm not a good person period. I have flaws, as we all do. I get defensive and ready to fight over little things like putting something in the wrong place sometimes. I know why I do it, and I do my best to control it. I see things in black and white when I need to learn that gray is a beautiful color and more often than not the actual color of the world.

I have flaws and downfalls and bad days. I've said and done enough things I regret that maybe I should never be forgiven or seen as a good person by anyone. But self reflection.. self acceptance... Means I can be a good person, even on the bad days. I can accept that I've done bad things and will do them eventually. But I can work to identify what is actually causing me to want to lash out or walk out or say the wrong thing. I can remind myself that just because someone is angry with me doesn't mean I'm going to be hurt. It doesn't make them my enemy. They aren't telling me things to influence me negatively. To manipulate or control me. They have my best interest at heart.

I live and yearn to help others. Selfish at times, of course. I have to take myself into account and not over exert myself or try to do things I know I can't handle. But at the end of the day... I just want to help make the world a little happier, a little more comforted.

I see where I was at 19...

Maybe the sickness and the anger and helplessness isn't visible to others... But my God... I barely recognize myself in that photo. Its a shell of a human. Its someone who's forgotten their soul is there.

To me, and to those who've been in my life since then, I'm healthier. I look like I belong in this body, I smile more, I'm trying harder to be who I know I am, not just who I want to be. I have people who love and care about me for one of the first times in my life. I'm shown what it's like to truly be cared about, what real tough love is not just abuse masquerading as tough love. I sleep better, I LIVE.

I get no one will read this, I don't have a popular blog. But at least I can look back, and find this when I have a day that I remember I have overcome so much in so little time, and I have an entire future of possibilities to explore. Whether or not I've got other's by my side. I will make it through this, and be the person I know I can be.