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banannabethchase · 5 months

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A Few Little Love Affairs - also on A03

Mox is overwhelmed: he's the best man in Seth and Roman's wedding with a chaotic toddler. He's due to blow off some steam.

In honor of the anniversary of my first posted wrestling fic, here have a HangMox! It's an outtake from the Mamma Mia AU of something that happened with Mox when Wheeler was a tiny munchkin. It also fills my second to last bingo square, O2! Title from Lay All Your Love On Me by Abba, of course.

Mox is getting ready to check on Seth after a frantic text when he hears the patter of familiar feet running down the hallway of the little apartment he’s rented with Eddie since he was pregnant with Wheeler.

“Daddy, where’s Uncle Seffie?”

Mox turns to see Wheeler peering up at him, brown eyes giant and curious. Eddie, at the very least, got Wheeler out of his pajamas and into clothes presentable enough for the rehearsal dinner in an hour. “Oh, hey, Potato.” He picks Wheeler up and settles him on his hip. “What are you doing out here?”

“Uncle Eddie says he’s having a…” Wheeler pauses and frowns. Mox kisses him on the cheek. “Daddy, what’s a hissy fit?”

Mox rolls his eyes. “Don’t listen to anything Uncle Eddie says,” he tells Wheeler and kisses him on the nose. “And, uh. Well, everything Uncle Sethy does is a hissy fit, basically.”

“It’s being big mad?” Wheeler asks. He snuggles his face into Mox’s shoulder.

“Yeah, exactly,” Mox says, pulling Wheeler in close. He’s glad he’s been working arms lately – the kid is tall for a three year old. “It’s being big mad and extra annoying about it.”

Wheeler sighs, wiggling so Mox is forced to hold him in front of himself.

“Tater tot, I need to go take care of some stuff for Uncle Sethy before dinner,” he says. “You wanna come with or hang out with Eddie?”

“With you,” Wheeler says.

“Please take him with you,” Eddie yells. “I gotta get my ass in a shower.”

Wheeler swings himself to the side. “I go with Daddy,” he says firmly, sounding surprisingly confident for a child who is upside down.

“I can’t carry you like this,” Mox says, laughing. “You want up on my shoulders?”

“Yes, peas!”

“Please,” Mox says. “Add that l in there, kiddo. It’s part of your name.”

“Different l,” Wheeler says as Mox swings him around to sit on his shoulders. “Wheeler l stays, peas l not for Wheelers.”

“I – okay.” Mox chuckles. “Toddler logic is weird.”

“You’re weird.”

“I hate that Eddie taught you that response, but okay.”

They make their way to the elevator, Mox adjusting Wheeler so he doesn’t manage to hit his head on the elevator frame and Wheeler giggles as he points to Mox’s face in the metal reflection, putting his hands over Mox’s eyes and moving them.

“You playing peek-a-boo with yourself?” Mox asks.

“No, Daddy. I playing with you, duh.”

Mox frowns. “Saying ‘duh’ isn’t very nice, Wheels.”

Wheeler goes all big eyed and cute, then drops his head down and hugs Mox’s head, meeting his eyes in the reflection. “Sorry, Dad.”

Mox’s heart does a weird little twist – Wheeler’s called him Dad a few times, and every time it feels more grown up, more adult. “No problem, little man,” he says.

He swings Wheeler down for a moment as they walk through the elevator and toward the door. Wheeler starts playing the drums on his legs as Mox tries to get him into his seatbelt.

“Calm down, Tater,” Mox says. “I don’t want to pinch you.”

Wheeler pauses, his hands in the air. “Daddy, you’re killing my beat.”

Mox snorts. “Eddie teach you to say that?”

Wheeler shakes his head. “Uncle Seth.”

“Course he did.”

When they make their way to the venue, after ten minutes of Wheeler playing the drums to every song that pops up on the radio, and Wheeler decides he wants to be on Mox’s shoulders to walk into the venue. It’s a beautiful farm, with trees lining the area, a barn for the receptions, a small office building and a building that has to be for ceremonies.

“Your Daddy’s never getting married, Tater tot,” Mox says, patting Wheeler’s leg. “Too much work.”

“Okay,” Wheeler says, completing missing the conversation. “Look! Cows!”

When they walk into the barn and through to get to the outside part where the ceremony will be held, Seth is pacing frantically.

“Oh, thank – um.” He pauses, frowning. “Wheeler?”

“He wanted to come with,” Mox says. He reaches up and swings Wheeler down. “Apparently Eddie wasn’t able to keep him under control and take a shower at the same time.”

Wheeler takes that moment to swing upside down and grab Mox’s leg, biting.

“Ow!” Mox says. “Stop that!”

Wheeler giggles and swings back up like it’s nothing.

“You’re still biting, sweet potato?” Seth asks, poking Wheeler in the ribs until he giggles. “I thought you promised you’d stop.”

Wheeler presses his smile into Mox’s chest. “Wasn’t a real bite,” he mutters. “A funny bite! No teeth.”

“Felt like teeth,” Mox mutters. “Anyway. What do you need?”

Seth’s smile immediately drops. “Um.”

“Cold feet?” Mox asks, swinging Wheeler around to his back. “Your mom acting weird? Ro’s mom acting weird?”

“No,” Seth says, pacing. “Yes. I don’t know.” He looks up at Mox. “I should have eloped.”

“Yeah,” Mox says. Wheeler’s begun to climb around him like a little gymnast, and he’s doing his best to stay on his feet without wobbling. “But you want to show off how much you and Roman love each other, right?”

Seth nods. “I do.”

“And,” Mox says, grabbing Wheeler around the waist and holding him up so Seth can see his face, “if you eloped, this tiny maniac wouldn’t be your ring bearer.”

“That’s me!” Wheeler says.

Seth relaxes, beaming and reaching out for Wheeler, letting him snuggle into his shoulder. His hair’s done in a half up bun with the curls perfectly draped down his back, but the rest of him isn’t dressed yet for the rehearsal dinner, so Mox decides it’s safe to let Wheeler hang for a minute.

“You’ll help Uncle Seth if he needs it, right little man?” Seth says, kissing Wheeler’s temple.

“Yeah,” Wheeler says. “Snuggle time? Movie?”

Mox snorts. “Uncle Seth’s a little busy right now, baby.” Wheeler levels him with a giant pout. “Don’t give me that. I’m not saying no because I’m mean, I’m saying no because Seth’s gotta get ready for his special rehearsal dinner.”

Wheeler sighs. “Okay. I guess.” He slides down Seth and then stands on Mox’s feet, dropping his head against Mox’s thigh.

“Are all kids weird or is it just mine?” Mox mutters.

“Oh!” Seth says. “Speaking of weird, the owner of the venue wants you to meet the day of coordinator, Anna,” Seth says. “He’ll be here all night, obviously, but he wants you and Anna to meet before things get started to make sure you know who to talk to.”

Mox fights the urge to make a face. Wheeler grabs at his arm and crawls up his body, clinging to his back.

“Aw, don’t look like that, buddy.” Seth smacks him on the arm. “You and Adam can stay civil for my wedding, or I’ll kill both of you. Simple as that.”

Mox groans. “The fact that you decided to get married in our hometown, on his farm, will never stop being annoying.”

Seth walks Mox from the outdoor reception area to the small office building in the front.

“Hey, Seth, is everything –” Adam’s voice cuts off when he sees Mox. “Oh. Damn.”

“Hi!” Wheeler says, grinning. “I’m Wheeler.”

“Hey, little man,” Adam says, immediately warming. “Are you our ring bearer?”

Wheeler nods and scrambles down Mox’s body. He takes his little legs and walks over to Adam. “I’m Wheeler.”

Adam smiles. “You said that.” He kneels in front of Wheeler and looks up at Mox. “I didn’t know you had a kid.”

Mox shrugs. “You don’t know a lot.”

“You’re lucky your kid is here so I can’t say what I want to say.” He stands, and is about as shocked as Mox is when Wheeler takes his hand. “Rehearsal’s not until another hour. Everything okay?” He looks at Seth. “I didn’t know you were bringing more people here. I would have prepared.”

“I asked him here to help,” Seth says. “I was – nervous.”

“Oh!” Adam says. “Oh, certainly. You let me know what I can do to help.”

Thus begins the longest three hours of Mox’s life. He’s wrangling Wheeler. He’s wrangling Seth. He’s trying not to kill Adam Page, who seems to be giving him death glares at any opportunity. He’s running interference between Seth and his mother, who seems to be insistent on making the wedding her day.

By the time the rehearsal and the dinner is over, Mox is exhausted and Wheeler is whiny and tantruming in his arms.

“I’m sorry, guys,” he says to Roman and Seth. “But we really gotta get back to the house. Wheels is about to go nuclear.”

“This isn’t nuclear?” Seth asks.

“Nuclear is that time we went to the zoo and you dropped his ice cream,” Mox says. Wheeler is weeping into his shoulder. “Be lucky that he didn’t r-u-n off this time.”

Seth winces. “Okay. Fair.” He steps a little closer. “Want a hug?”

“No!” Wheeler yells, tiny fists rubbing at his eyes. Then he bursts into tears again, flailing backward so hard he almost flies out of Mox’s arms.

“And we’re nuclear,” Mox sighs. “Later, guys,” and he takes Wheeler back to the house in the car. Wheeler sobs the whole ten minute ride, incomprehensible but still insistent.

“Please help your nephew calm down,” Mox begs as Wheeler wails his fists on Mox shoulders and pleads for…something. Mox can’t even figure out what he’s asking for at this point.

Eddie stands. “Get over here, tiny man. Stop beating up your father.”

Wheeler stops crying and levels Eddie with a glare. Mox chuckles.

“No,” Wheeler says through a face full of tears, voice shaky. “Want cake.”

“That’s what you’ve been saying!” Mox says. “Oh, my god. Okay. Give me, like, two minutes.” Mox digs through his bags and pulls out the mini cake he’d carefully wrapped when Wheeler had said he didn’t want it at the dinner. “This one, Tater?”

Wheeler’s entire expression changes. “Cake?”

Mox nods. “If you want your cake, you can have it now. And then we’re going to bed.”

Wheeler takes the cake suspiciously, eyeing Mox until he takes a bite. “My cake,” he says.

“Correct,” Eddie says. “Mox, you go to bed. I’ll put the little hellion to bed.”

“Hell a bad word,” Wheeler says through a mouthful of cake. “That’s what Miss Kris says at school.”

Mox sighs. “Well, yes, but hellion means – whatever. Love you, little man.” Mox leans down and kisses Wheeler on the forehead and nose, like every night. “Goodnight. I love you this much.” He reaches his arms out as far and wide as he can.

Wheeler shoves the rest of the cake in his mouth. “I love you this much!” He reaches his arms out as far and wide as he can.

He dives in and hugs Mox, and Mox hugs back.

“Dad’s gotta shower, Potato,” Mox says, kissing the top of Wheeler’s head. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Mox moves through the next morning in a whirl, getting himself and Wheeler ready while Eddie throws whatever bits and bobs he’s forgotten at them.

“Did you check if he’s wearing socks?” Eddie asks, before Mox heads out the door. “Your kid smells like corn chips if you don’t shove socks on those feet.”

“You are such a douche about the kid you threatened to kill an aunt of mine over,” Mox muses. “Ah. Shit.”

“Bad word, Daddy,” Wheeler says, shaking his head. “No socks. Need socks.”

“Yeah, you do.” Before he can ask Eddie to grab some, he’s pelted in the head. “Thanks, dude.”

“Thanks, Uncle Eddie!”

Eddie comes over and kisses Wheeler all over the face while Mox gets socks and shoes back on tiny feet.

“Alright,” Mox says, pedaling Wheeler’s legs a little. “You ready, short stack?”

Wheeler nods. “Ready, Daddy.”

“I can’t believe you’re putting me on toddler duty for the whole wedding,” Eddie says, taking Wheeler and scooping him into his arms. “Feels unfair since I’m not technically his father.”

“Yeah, well, I’m on Seth duty,” Mox replies, checking his pockets and bags for everything he and Wheeler could possibly need. “I don’t know who’s bound to do more crying.”

They get to the venue around 1pm, but it already feels late. They have a good four hours before things get started, but there’s so much to do that it goes by in seconds. The venue has a small room set aside for the typical bride, but Seth and Roman had arranged it to be storage with a small cot-like thing for Wheeler to take a nap in at 2:00. Like always.

“Thanks for that, man,” Mox says, clapping Seth on the shoulder. He’s watching Wheeler sleep, bunny in his arms and thumb in his mouth. “I – I’m really…” He trails off, the words catching in his mouth. If he lets them out, then the tears will join them.

“Mox,” Seth says gently. “Hey.” He pulls him into a hug, cushy white groom’s robe feeling like a blanket. “You good?”

“Yeah,” Mox says. “Just – long day. The fact that you thought of my little guy in the midst of your own crazy.” He exhales slowly. “Never thought I’d have people like you to take care of me.”

Seth presses his forehead to Mox’s. “Always.”

It’s gone unsaid but known for years that Seth and Roman put off their wedding date, unofficial but discussed, when Mox found out he was pregnant with Wheeler nearly four years before. Mox never knew how to tell them how much it means that they were willing to share that day with him and his kid, let alone put it off to make it work for him.

“Always,” Mox says. “Alright. Don’t make me cry, you douche. I’m not supposed to do that until the actual wedding starts.”

With the human chaos machine napping in the quietest part of the venue, things are easier.

“Hey,” Mox says, running into Adam. “You got any extra blankets? Flower girl found out my kid’s napping and wants some rest time too.”

“Course I do,” Adam says, and he ducks into a little room and comes out with a pair of sleeping bags. “She a Power Puff Girls or Hot Wheels kind of gal?”

“Hot Wheels,” Mox decides, grabbing it. He stares. “This shit clean?”

Adam, to his credit, looks offended. “I wash them after every use. Obviously. What kind of business do you think I’m running here.”

“Just checking,” Mox says, stepping back with his free hand raised. “I don’t know what kind of shit goes down in here.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “And y’all think Seth’s downpayment was ten thousand for bad service?”

Mox trips over a box and falls flat on his ass. “Sorry, what?”

Adam comes over and hauls Mox up with arms that are unfairly strong. “I run a good venue, Moxley,” he says, and his hand is still in Mox’s. “I don’t come cheap.”

He – the fucker winks and walks away. “I gotta take care of some place setting fuck ups, but I’ll be around. Find me if you need…anything.”

Mox nods, and dazedly brings the sleeping bag to the flower girl’s mother.

They’re all getting ready – Wheeler’s hair is a disaster after a nap, always, but it’s even harder to get slicked down in the little way that Seth was hoping for all the wedding party with short hair to have – when someone calls, “Half an hour!”

“Fuck,” Mox grumbles. “Come here, Tater. We’ll see if Uncle Seth’s got some of that hair gel in his pocket or something.”

The floorboards, while beautiful, are in a farmhouse built in the late 1800’s, and he’s not used to the rough terrain. He trips on a rogue board and things start to move in slow motion as he plans how to turn to keep Wheeler safe. And then he feels somebody’s hand around his waist, pulling him back to standing before he and Wheeler can fall. Then the hand dips low enough to pull off a graze of his ass. Mox turns.

Adam Page is standing there, grinning. “Sorry, man,” he says, and god, he looks good in that fucking suit. “Couldn’t let the best man and ring bearer fall on their asses.

Mox licks his lips before he can stop himself. “Yeah. Uh. Thanks.”

“I heard you were having some issues with the hair,” Adam says, and he pulls something out of his pocket. “Hair spray. Can I try?”

“Uh.”

“I actually was asking Wheeler, first,” Adam says. Wheeler giggles as Adam zooms the canister around like an airplane. “Are you okay with me fixing your hair?”

“Yeah,” Wheeler says, nodding. “Daddy, yes?”

“Sure,” Mox says. He’s used to his kid being weirdly easy around people, but not going into their arms and letting them mess with his hair without a second thought. Adam works quickly and efficiently, and suddenly Wheeler’s hair looks exactly like the photo Seth sent.

“And back to your dad,” Adam says, shifting Wheeler back into Mox’s arms like he weighed nothing.

“Wow,” Mox says. “Looks great, dude.”

“Yeah, it’s almost like I’m in the wedding industry.” Adam winks, and brushes Mox’s ass again as he leaves behind him.

“Just trying to get by,” he singsongs as he leaves.

Mox wonders if he feels up all the customers, or only the ones who clearly like it.

It’s not the only time it happens.

Mox and Wheeler, when they’re getting ready to walk down the aisle before Roman and Seth make their way down together, are in the middle of a discussion about goldfish for god knows what reason, when Mox realizes the pillow with the fake ring on it is gone.

“Wheels,” he says carefully. “Where’s the – ”

He feels a hand graze his lower back, then from behind him comes the pillow.

“Thought you might be looking for this.”

Adam. Fucking. Page.

The ceremony goes well. Wheeler is cute as hell as he toddles next to Mox down the aisle and the vows are beautiful, but, to be fair, he misses a lot the first few hours. Wheeler’s demanding Mox take him around to meet all the people in the venue, and it’s wearing on him. By the start of the reception, he’s burnt out.

“Eddie,” he says, somewhere around 7:30, “I’m so tired.”

“You ready to call it a night?” He yawns, stretching.

Mox shakes his head. “Dadding,” he says. “Like, I would do anything to keep Wheels, but everybody else is fucking around and having fun and, well.” He looks down, where Wheeler had just barreled into his shins after the brief respite of him playing with the flower girl and her sisters as they danced to some pop song. “Hey, buddy!”

Wheeler yawns, huge, the frosting stain on his tiny suit jacket almost hidden when he reaches his arms up into the air. “Home, Dad.” He slams his head into Mox’s thighs. “Book.”

“What if I take him?” Eddie asks. “Uncle Eddie and Potato Head time, yeah?”

“Really?” Mox asks. “You – that’s cool?”

“Mox, you haven’t had a night to fu-mess around since one of the nights this little monster popped into our life.” He kneels down and swings Wheeler on his back. “I’ll take your car and you can take mine back.”

“You sure?” Mox asks. He feels guilty, somehow.

“Have fun,” Eddie says, clapping Mox on the shoulder. “Spend time with your friends. Wheels and I will be there when you get home.”

It’s an internal fight, briefly, but then Mox nods. “Yeah. Yeah, Wheels, buddy, you’re gonna head out with Uncle Eddie, okay?”

“Eddie Day!” Wheeler says. He throws himself down to Mox, who curses himself a little bit for how much wrestling and daredevil genes must be in this tiny lunatic of a child. Mox kisses his forehead and nose.

“Love you, little man,” he says, grinning as Wheeler pulls back.

“Love you, Daddy!”

Mox puts his keys into Eddie’s hand and then Eddie’s into his pocket. “Love you, man.”

“Yeah, stop being sappy.” Eddie yanks him in and kisses his forehead. “Love you, too.”

He relaxes, finally, for the first time in nearly four years. He has a lingering cloud of worrying about Wheeler, but that’s par for the course these days.

Things, shift, just a little, when he catches Adam on the phone, looking frustrated, right as the music cue gets messed up. Mox knows for damned sure he was supposed to tell the DJ to shift to Seth’s high school throwbacks at 9:30, but he’s definitely hearing Pour Some Sugar On Me. He goes to speak to the DJ himself, then stalks over to Adam.

“Why are you on the phone during the wedding?” Mox asks over the music. “Aren’t you supposed to be making sure the DJ hits his cues or something?”

“I’m – don’t worry about it,” Adam yells back at him. “It’s fine.”

They’ve been dancing around each other all night, sometimes quite literally, but Mox had always had a toddler at his ankles. He needs to know what the hell this guy is doing – Mox knows he’s with Matt Jackson, has been since they were all in high school together. And if Adam Page is a cheater, Mox is going to tattle.

“Like hell it is,” Mox says. “Was that your boyfriend?”

Adam frowns. “What?”

Mox rolls his eyes. “Whatever.”

“I need to go take care of – something,” Adam says, frown deepening. He walks past, but, rather blatantly, he touches Mox’s waist, just a little bit, as he passes.

“Oh, hell no.” Mox grabs Adam by the lapels of his stupid navy blue suit and throws him into the first room. It’s the kitchen, but it’s empty.

“Dude, what the fuck?” Adam asks, spinning on Mox as he glares.

“What was that?” Mox hisses.

“I – what was what?” Adam asks. But he’s pink in the cheeks. Mox knows he knows what he did.

“You grabbed me around the waist,” Mox says. He walks Adam backward so Adam’s backed against the countertop, so he’s got a leg between Adam’s. “The fuck was that about?”

Adam’s eyes flicker down to Mox’s lips, for just a moment. “Get out.”

“Oh,” Mox says, stepping back. “Oh, I get it. This a thing you do? Cheat on your little boyfriend with groomsmen?”

“We broke up,” Adam says. Mox freezes. “Yeah, hope that feels good. Matt and I haven’t been together for a few months.” He glares at Mox, fire in his eyes. “I was texting his brother to make sure Matt wasn’t off getting himself killed while he fucks his way through half the country.”

Mox pauses. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Adam says. “I – sorry. I shouldn’t have touched you.”

Mox is notorious for impulsive decisions. One of his favorite runs of impulsive decisions gave him his son, which is, quite possibly, the best part of his life.

“Why?”

Adam tilts his head to the side, reminding Mox of the golden retriever puppy at the petting zoo he took Wheeler to for his birthday. “Why what?”

“Why are you sorry you touched me?” Mox slides his hands on Adam’s waist, grins at the way Adam’s breathing hitches. “You wanna blow off some steam?”

Adam licks his lips then looks up to meet Mox’s eyes. “Fuck it.” He leans in and crushes his lips to Mox’s, tongue insistent, and Mox grins.

“Knew it,” Mox says. “You handsy little shit. Bet you wish you’d done this back on Debate team.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Adam growls. He presses his lips back, shoving down the sleeves of Mox’s dress shirt. He pauses to grip at Mox’s biceps. “I fucking hate how big your arms are. Fuck you.”

“Yeah?” Mox says. He flexes and Adam rolls his eyes. “Bulked up since high school.”

“I can see that,” Adam says, and he reaches behind to get two handfuls of Mox’s ass. “Like it. Looks good on you.” He leans in and bites at Mox’s neck.

“Course you’re a fucking biter,” Mox snipes. “Jesus.” He shoves at the front of Adam’s jacket, debating ripping it open, but he figures that would be a bit obvious to everybody at the party.

“You can unbutton it,” Adam says.

“Yeah,” Mox says. He works as quickly as his excited and shaky hands can move. He hadn’t hooked up with anybody since – well, since Bryan. After that it was all too complicated.

This, though, as he reaches down to grab Adam’s cock through his dress pants. This feels perfectly simple.

Adam chuckles, shoving Mox against the counter again and gets a leg between Mox’s.

“Uh,” Mox says. “About that. I mean, in case you forgot.”

“That your trans?” Adam asks. “No, I know that. That’s no, like, issue.”

“Rad,” Mox says. “You ever eaten pussy before?” He grins. “I know you’ve been gay since day one.”

“No,” Adam chuckles, “but there’s a first time for everything, right?” He winks.

“Prick,” Mox says, grinning. Adam unbuttons his dress pants with the expertise of a man often donning formal clothing.

“Actually,” Adam says, mouthing along the waistband of Mox’s boxers. “I’ve never fucked anybody but Matt.”

“First time for everything,” Mox echoes, but he quickly loses the ability to speak when Adam drops to his knees and pulls his boxers down.

“What do you like?” Adam asks, looking up at him from the floor. Mox has to force himself to breathe to keep from losing his balance.

“Anything that won’t get me pregnant,” he jokes. “But, uh. Go nuts, newbie. I’ll tell you when you’re fucking up.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “You issuing a challenge or something?”

Mox shrugs. “You could call it that.”

Enthusiastic, is Mox’s word for it. Adam’s inexperience is obvious, but he’s clearly willing to learn. His tongue does most of the work, circling and sucking Mox’s clit with impressive speed. Probably from the fact that the dude never shuts up, he’d guess.

“You can add fingers, you know,” Mox says, gripping the counter with white knuckles. “Like – in – god damn, exactly.”

Adam pulls away for a second with a self-satisfied grin. “The fingers part I’m pretty good at.”

It takes longer than it has in the past, probably because Mox’s experiences lately have been with more mechanical dates, but he feels it building in his belly soon enough.

“Jesus,” Mox mumbles, rolling his hips a little against Adam’s face. “I – okay, it’s different than with dicks, because if you stop doing that I won’t – shit, fuck.”

It slams into him, insistent and stark white and so fucking good it’s almost annoying. He has to shove at Adam with his knee to get him to stop, because he’s oversensitive as fuck and Adam doesn’t seem to know when to quit.

“Good?” Adam asks. He grabs at a clean towel hanging on one of the stoves and wipes his face. “Seemed like it was.”

“Yeah,” Mox says. “Gimme a sec I – it’s been a while and I forgot…” He trails off. “Look, I’m gonna blow you. I just need a second.”

“Hell yeah,” Adam says. He leans back on the stove and yelps. “Fuck! How long’s that been on?” He shakes out his hand.

Mox grabs his hand and sucks a finger into his mouth. He can taste himself on Adam’s fingers, and he drops to his knees before a second thought.

“Before you act like a bitch about anything,” he says, hands undoing Adam’s pants, “it’s been, like, four years since I’ve sucked a dick, so cut me some slack.”

Adam laughs and looks down at him with burning eyes. “It’s been months for me, dude. It’ll be hard to get me to complain.”

Mox snickers. “Yeah. Looks pretty hard to me.”

Sucking a dick, Mox discovers, is like riding a bike. If the bike was built like a brick shithouse and had fingers that grabbed at his jaw and a slightly southern twang from a childhood in Virginia that spews enough filth that Mox feels himself getting wet again.

“Fuckin’ hell, knew that mouth was better for more than just arguing,” Adam grunts. “Should’a done this earlier. Maybe would’a stopped being such assholes to each other.”

Mox looks up at Adam and pulls off his dick enough to flip him off and say, “Nah, pretty sure I’d still think you’re a dick.” And he sinks his mouth back around Adam’s cock and sucks, paying attention to the head.

He likes blow jobs. He’d forgotten he likes this part of it, drawing words and swears out of his partner until they’ve lost the ability to do much but moan.

“Dude,” Adam says, patting at Mox’s neck. “I’m gonna – ”

Mox pulls off. “What, you think you’re gonna come on my face or something? We’re at a wedding, dude. Come in my mouth. God. Have some class.”

Adam laughs when Mox takes him back into his mouth and comes with a shudder that Mox can feel in Adam’s thighs where his fingertips have dug in. To get him back he keeps sucking at Adam’s cock, a little longer than he might if he were being nice, until Adam gets him by the scruff of the neck and pulls him off.

“Wait,” Adam says, panting. Mox is still on his knees.

“You already regretting it?”

“No!” Adam yells. “Just – I think I can do better.” He pulls his pants back up and turns them, shoving Mox against the counter. “We’re even. I can out fuck you.”

“What? How is that you out fucking me?”

Adam grins. “Sit on the counter. I’m getting you off at least one more time so you don’t rank me last on your list of one night stands.”

Mox wouldn’t have said it, but that is where Adam stands right now. Probably, if he ranks it, Bryan, then Regal, then Chuck, Suzuki because he left that giant bite mark on his arm, and then Adam. “Alright. Go for it.”

The enthusiasm, he notes, is key. He’s never fucked anybody bored about it, per se, but he’s fucked people hesitant and people who relied more on their dick than other parts, people so focused on getting in him that he got himself off.

Adam, though. He must have learned how to hold his breath in the past, because there’s no coming up for air. The first time he was hesitant, almost cute about it, but this time he’s insistent and greedy. He slides two fingers into Mox and pumps them with the pace his mouth and lips work, like he’s determined to draw an orgasm from Mox if it kills him.

“Fucking Christ,” Mox pants, gripping the first thing he can grab. His best guess is the water faucet. “Where was this energy last time?”

Adam responds by his mouth moving faster, stronger, and then it hits. Before Mox can do anything, he’s shouting and clenching around Adam’s fingers, bucking against Adam’s face.

“Holy shit,” he says, shivering as he notices Adam’s beard wet and shining. “That was different than the other – holy shit.”

Adam grins. “I ain’t done yet, Moxley.”

He loses count. Mox loses fucking count how many times Adam makes him come, his mouth and hand working together so effectively that Mox is straight up shaking at one point.

“Okay, I’m tapping,” Mox pants, slamming his hand on the counter. “I – nope. I can’t do anymore.”

“Shit,” Adam says, laughing. “Alright, if you’re telling me enough.”

Mox nods. “I literally don’t think I can come anymore,” he gasps. “I think I’m all fucked out.”

“Good.” Adam washes his hands casually. “Messier than with dicks, but more fun, I think.”

Mox laughs. “Yeah?” He exhales and hops off the counter, pulling his boxers and pants back up. They’ll have to bleach the area. “You had a fuckin’ blast, man. Different than the first round.”

With a paper towel he wipes up his beard. He grins as he continues wiping his mouth. “What can I say? I have a steep learning curve. And I like men with pretty eyes and bitchy attitudes.”

“I’m not bitchy,” Mox says, folding his arms across his chest. “Also, fuck you for saying that right after you gave me, like, a thousand orgasms in a row so you know I don’t have a good comeback.”

Adam licks his lips. “There’s a come jokes I could make, but I think we’ve exhausted that line of thought.” He winks. “And you were bitchy. You yelled at me a couple hours ago because the tables were a few inches in the wrong direction.”

“That was on behalf of the groom,” Mox says.

“You still said it like a bitch.”

Mox rolls his eyes as he grabs a paper towel and soap and wipes down the counter. “Well, the groom’s a bitch, so I earned it. Also, you weren’t this confident in high school. Or this…in charge. What happened to you?”

Adam scoffs as he goes to the fridge and pulls out a pitcher of water. Mox takes another towel and dries the counter. “Fuck. Matt Jackson happened to me.” Mox watches as Adam chugs. It should be weird that Adam can look sexy drinking water, but here Mox is. “Was gonna propose to him, you know? Was thinking of making his hotel and my barn a thing, but no.” He shakes his head, a grim little smile on his lips.

“I figured something was wrong in paradise,” Mox says, hopping back up onto the counter. He takes a glass offered by Adam and drinks. “This like senior year?”

Adam rolls his eyes. “No, he hasn’t been that dramatic.” He takes another sip and leans against the stove, avoiding the burner knobs this time. “He’s scared he doesn’t have an identity outside our relationship.” Adam shrugs and meets Mox’s eyes. “I’ve told him if he needs to figure himself out to go and do it, but I’m gonna do the same.” He raises the glass to Mox and sips.

“Oh, that’s what this was?” Mox asks, grinning. “You catch up with one of your high school rivals, fuck him, and use that to decide if you and pretty boy are meant to be?”

“Or I’ve thought you were hot since we were fifteen and you cut your hair and started with that ‘fuck everybody’ attitude,” Adam says.

Mox blinks. “You’re that gay that you could tell I was a dude before I even came out?”

Adam shrugs. “Had a minor sexuality crisis before you told everybody you’re a guy, which John and Alex had to help me out with, but yeah. Once you came out, it made sense. I think I knew…” He offers a smile. “You know?”

“We queers find each other, don’t we,” Mox chuckles, kicking his ankles against the cabinets.

“Yeah, and then you tackled me in gym class later that year because you were mad I beat you at that practice debate and knocked me out.” Adam flicks water in Mox’s face. “If it wasn’t for that, I don’t think Matt would have asked me out.” He wiggles his eyebrows. “So, really, it’s your fault we got together in the first place.”

Mox sits in that for a minute. “Yeah,” he says. “Maybe I can be the reason you two idiots finally suck it up and get married.”

“Hope so,” Adam says quietly. “You’re weirdly chill about this being a one time thing, by the way.”

Mox shrugs. “I’ve had more than one one night stand in my life. At least this one won’t give me a kid.”

Adam laughs, and he’s really pretty when he does. “Yeah. Your kid’s cute, by the way. He at home?"

Mox nods. “I had Eddie pick him up. He was starting to get tired and when he gets tired he gets a little screamy.”

He doesn’t know how much time passes while they catch up. They were never friends in high school – being rivals for the best on the debate team will keep that from happening – but they tolerated each other, and, as adults, Mox is realizing they don’t hate each other as much as he thought they would.

“Shit,” Adam says, pulling out his phone. “That’s the 15 minute alarm.” He nods to the door. “I gotta go let Seth and Roman know they need to start winding down.” He frowns. “I left everybody out there with Anna. Fuck.”

Mox chuckles. “Yeah, she’s a personality. She told Seth’s mom to go fuck herself when she tried to change the ceremony chair arrangements.” Mox sighs. “I think I’m a little in love with her, actually. She single?”

“Yeah, but she’s only into women.” Adam makes his way to the door. “You should see the way she hits on bridesmaids.”

Mox is slammed with some chaotic pop song he’s heard a thousand times but still doesn’t know the name of, and looks around for Seth and Roman.

“They’re over there,” he says, and he points with a hand on Adam’s waist.

“Smooth,” Adam laughs in his face. “Thanks, though.”

Mox watches Adam walk away, eyes locked on his ass in the excessively well-tailored suit pants, and goes to the bar to get a Coke. He sips slowly.

“Hey,” says Anna, coming over to him. “Where have you been?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the best man, right?” She plants her hands on her hips. “You were supposed to give me an assist with the shitty family members. Seth’s mom started getting bitchy and I couldn’t find Adam, so I went looking for –” She cuts off, eyes narrowing. “Oh, you absolutely didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?” Mox asks, trying to feign ignorance. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you dare hurt him,” Anna says, waggling a finger in his face. “You hear me? He’s a nice man who deserves kindness. Don’t be a douchebag.”

Mox holds his hands up in front of him. “Jesus, you’re scary. I promise, I’ll let him take the lead.” He smiles at her. “Also, please don’t tell anyone.”

She sighs. “Deal. If you fuck with him, though, I will tell everyone.” She whips out her phone. “Remember I have the email of everyone in this building.”

Mox exhales slowly. She’s his type of woman, but alas. Plus, he’d already gotten laid twice that night, sort of, and doesn’t think he could handle it even if the option were on the table. It’d been since before Wheeler was born than he’d gotten any action at all, and he’s starting to feel the good kind of sore about it.

“I know,” he says. “We’re good.”

He’s in the middle of a conversation with Becky, Seth’s maid of honor, when the grooms stomp over to him. Well, Seth stomps. Roman casually strides.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Seth hisses.

“Did something go wrong?” Mox asks, looking around. “What happened?”

“Roman started dancing,” Seth whines. “Becky told him to go out there and shake his ass and he did.”

Mox shrugs. “It’s his wedding, too. He can dance if he wants to. He can leave his –”

Seth rolls his eyes. “I hate how often you quote that song. God. Fine.”

Mox dances with his friends as the final songs of the night play. Songs from his and Seth’s high school years, from the past year, and ending with the song that he and Seth screamed at the barricade when they saw the band live together, on the evening of Mox’s 22nd birthday.

He’d had no idea what that year would bring him. He’d had no idea that that year would give him the best gift of his life.

Missing Wheeler isn’t something he’s unfamiliar with, but it’s more intense right now than it’s been for a while.

When the lights turn on, he runs at Seth and Roman and grabs them in a hug.

“Holy shit,” he laughs. He steps back. “You two are married.”

Seth beams, wiggling his hand. The engagement and wedding rings gleam. “Hell yeah we are.”

“Someone has forgotten they got into a screaming fight with their mother six hours ago.”

Seth shrugs and smiles and Roman pulls him in and kisses his forehead. “And? It’s my wedding. I can bitch if I want to or however the song goes.”

Mox snorts. “Alright, send me on best man duties. What do I gotta do?”

“You,” Roman says, resting a big hand on Mox’s shoulder, “have done more than enough. Go home and hang with your little dude.” His smile quirks. “Maybe on your wedding day we’ll take him home for you.”

Mox scoffs. “I’m never getting married.”

“Sure you won’t,” Seth says. “Go home. We’ll take it from here.”

Mox steps outside where it’s quieter, out the back door where the other guests couldn’t go, and breathes. The chilly fall air mists around him.

“Hey.”

He turns to see Adam Page at the door to what must be the kitchen. “Hey.”

Adam smiles a little. “Live well, man, okay?” He sighs. “And make it easy.” He rolls his phone in his hand. “You deserve some easy.”

Mox’s first impulse is to shoot back that Adam was easy enough for him, but he settles. “Thanks, man. I hope you and Matt figure out what you need from each other.”

Adam nods.

Mox gets into the car, and thinks he may keep this one to himself.

“Potato!”

“Shh!” Eddie hisses, hand on Wheeler’s back. “Wheels is asleep. Don’t wake him up.”

“Gonna,” Mox says. “Hey, baby.”

Wheeler blinks his eyes open. “Daddy?” he murmurs. “Daddy hi!”

Mox picks him up and holds him close as Wheeler wraps skinny little arms around his neck and immediately begins snoring again.

“See?” Mox says in a hushed tone to Eddie. “He always falls back asleep once he sees me.”

“That says you’ve ever been away from him for more than a couple’a hours,” Eddie says, but he pats the couch next to him. “Come on. Let’s watch the game.”

They keep the volume low, just in case Wheeler’s snuggled up sleep is more fragile than Mox knows it is, until Eddie shuffles.

“Thirsty,” he says. “Gonna grab a Coke. Want anything?”

“Water,” Mox says.

Eddie pats his thigh, then pauses. “Mox,” he says. “Mox, did you fuck somebody tonight?”

“What?” Mox is frozen. “What? No. Wait, screw denial. How the fuck did you figure that out?”

“Your pockets are all crumpled inside your pants,” Eddie says. “Only way you’d let that happen is if you’d had to pull ‘em up quick.” He stares at Mox. “Who was it?”

“Oh, my god. Leave me alone, Mom.”

“I ain’t your mother,” Eddie says. “I’m much worse. Who’d you fuck?”

“Nobody!” Mox hisses. “And would you please stop saying fuck when my son is literally right here?”

“He’s heard worse,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. “He’s your kid. Who was it?”

Mox groans and drops his head back against the couch. “Eddie…”

“Did you use protection?” Eddie asks. “Because T ain’t birth control and you know that.”

“Fuckin’ Christ, Eddie,” Mox mutters. “Hold on. If you’re gonna force me to have this conversation, I’m putting Wheeler to bed.”

Wheels wiggles and fusses a little as he’s lowered into his little toddler bed, but he settles when Mox puts his favorite stuffed bunny in his arms. Mox watches for a minute and sees Wheeler’s whole life flash before his eyes, landing on this perfect moment.

“Every mistake,” Mox murmurs, “brought me you, Tater Tot. I’d do it all again.”

Before he can reminisce further, though, there’s a hand on the collar of his suit jacket and he’s being yanked backwards.

“Jesus fucking – Eddie!” Mox says, barely catching himself before he fell over. “Let me have a moment with my kid!”

“Do I need to go get you plan B?” Eddie says. He’s running his hand over his head, eyes panicked. “Fuck, how’s that even work with T? Is that gonna with your top surgery? I gotta do some research –”

“Eddie,” Mox says, putting his hands on Eddie’s shoulder. “We didn’t – he went down on me and I blew him. I don’t think it’s possible for me to get pregnant.” He fights a smile. “I mean, unless coming in my mouth’ll knock me up.”

Eddie slaps him away, looking disgusted. “Jesus Christ, Moxie. I asked if you were gonna need medication, not if you were gonna need a tooth brush.” He frowns. “You’re disgusting.”

“Yeah, and you still love me.”

Eddie sighs and scrubs his hands over his face. “Yeah. Why the fuck do I do that, by the way?”

Mox shrugs and pulls off his shirt, making his way to the bedroom he shares with Wheeler, chucking the shirt in the laundry. “Because you know, deep down, we’re platonic soulmates.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself.” But Eddie smiles at him, and Mox feels warm. He curls up in bed, reaching out a hand to rest on Wheeler’s leg, and falls asleep with a smile.

#HangMox #madly in love with leather daddy jon moxley #anxious millennial dreamboat #wtf i like wrestling now???#in which sara writes #Mamma Mia AU #Look at me posting a HangMox - I miss these two idiots

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msfcatlover · 1 year

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I am insane for your tma x dc headcanons! I have to ask, do you think any of the other dc characters are entity aligned? Heres a few hcs i had:

The Scarecrow: honestly might be an avatar touched by all the fears like Jonathan Sims. Probably like Sims, he started researching the fears and Scarecrow became obsessed w them. If i had to go with a single entity, i would say he is Dark/Corruption/Eye alligned

The Riddler: Eye or Spiral alligned

The Joker: slaughter or corruption (the angst if Jason shared an entity w his murderer!)

Poison Ivy: Extinction?

Harley Quinn: hunt or stranger aligned? She was hunting down the cure for Jokers issues, but he wasnt who she thought he was and she became the prey

Killer Croc: Flesh babey!

Two face: maybe another slaughter?

The penguin: Web

I dont know enough about non-batman characters to do others tbh

Okay, so in my opinion plenty of characters have been touched by various Entities or even marked by them in ways that can motivate them without fully being Avatars or aligning themselves with those Entities. Like, Scarecrow just screams to me of someone who was touched by the Spiral (and is probably in real danger of becoming an Avatar,) but he’s holding on to his own sense of rationality as hard as he can and trying to make Fear make scientific sense. Someone who would walk out of an impossible corridor, and spend weeks measuring the outside of the building trying to find where the hell that corridor was supposed to fit, before sending someone else in to see if they experienced the same thing, only to become fixated on the differences… Not saying that’s what happened, but Jonathan Crane had some kind of experience with the embodiment of Unreality itself, and he definitely feeds it regularly.

(Harley, likewise, seems more like a victim of the Spiral, Corruption, or Stranger than anything else. Oh, she’s still a supervillain/anti-hero depending on the day, but her origin story is of her mind being broken by the Joker’s abuse. That is either depressingly mundane, or being chewed up & spat out by one of those three Entities.)

I hadn’t thought much about most of the villains, but I am 100% with you on Ivy being an Avatar of the Extinction, and I can definitely see Croc as an Avatar of the Flesh. I’d throw in Hugo Strange as probably being at least aligned with the Spiral, and Pyg has definitely at the very least been marked by either the Spiral or Flesh (though I don’t know him well enough to say if he’s a full-blown Avatar or not.) If you only saw my first post, I also decided Talia & Ra’s are both aligned with the Web, though Talia values her own freedom enough I don’t think she’s a full Avatar. They’re the ones who helped Bruce find the Mother’s embrace. Damian was supposed to be a Web Avatar as well, but he’s just a little too desperate for love when nobody’s looking; his swarm is silk worms & moths, and he does manage to fake it for a while. If Joker’s an Avatar, it would either be the Stranger, Spiral or Slaughter, in my opinion, but I always like when experts of every kind take time to study Joker and are like, “Yeah, IDK WTF is going on with that guy, but I hate it.”

(Jason is an Avatar of the Desolation in my version, because the Slaughter is about the violence on as large a scale as possible while the Desolation is about the very personal aftermath. The Slaughter is War, where the Desolation is something taking out your entire life in one single night and leaving you behind to deal with it. Jason absolutely wants his targets to be scared of what will happen, what he’ll do to them, but in a “destroy everything you’ve ever worked for & drive away everyone you ever cared about” sort of way; not a “blow up an entire city block for no reason” sort of way. And given how much Jason cares about protecting innocents, he’s actually partially starving himself by not following through on complete Desolation the way people like Jude Perry do. Imagine if The Archivist (around s3) tore out the last page of a statement & threw it away without glancing at it before he started reading. That’s basically what Jason’s doing to himself.)

Some people in the DC universe, though, are just Like That(TM). Sure, it can be hard to tell supernatural trauma apart from genuine mental illness, but it’s still a superhero setting and some people are just little freaks (affectionate.)

Like, Oliver Queen? Just a little freak with a bow. Just a weirdo. Black Canary? Superpowers, but not of the Fear Entity induced kind. She’s just Like That(TM).

Speedsters? Oh honey, you better believe they’re all just Like That(TM). Anti-Avatars, if anything; those bastards basically became one with a potential aspect of the Vast and went “But what if I was just. Like. Nice about it? Or only mean in extremely specific, petty, personal ways? What if that?”

My main “outside of Gotham” thought is that Amazons are aware of the Entities. Primarily, they have to be very careful & monitor eachother for signs of potential influence of the Hunt, but they’re aware of others beyond it (though they might define the Entities along different lines thanks to cultural differences & all that; I don’t have any specifics, I just really like that headcanon that while certain fears are nearly universal, the way different cultures group & view them are going to be different. Like, if spiders are viewed as purely benevolent & good luck by the culture you were raised in, it’s very unlikely any capital-f Fear is going to have a spider motif. Smirke separated the Buried from the Vast, but aren’t they both primarily about being overwhelmed, about Too Much? At the bottom of the ocean, is there any difference? Why should other cultures draw that same line?) This created some tension with Batman at the start of the Justice League, as Diana knew even if he wasn’t lying when he swore to have the best intentions, Batman was still walking a razor’s edge; he could become a monster so very easily. On the other hand, it was a huge relief for Dick (who, again if you’ve only seen my first post, I’ve changed my mind on and decided he’s a Hunt Avatar) when he first met the other Titans and they all went over their powers, to have Donna realize what he was talking about and promise to stop him if he ever lost control. A promise she has actually had to follow through on a few times, when a villain got into their heads and pushed Dick too far; he sleeps better at night knowing Donna is both willing & able to wrestle him to the ground and keep him from hurting anyone, even when Dick’s gone full-feral.

(The tag for this AU on my blog is "tma crossover," if you wanna check out the... everything I have for it.)

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not24opposumsinatrenchcoat · 17 days

Text

I will claw my way out

Yellowjackets x TLOU ~ Ellie and reader

Uhhh this is just a teaser really, I haven’t finished the rest of the first full chapter but consider this kind of a prologue.

So basically this is just YJ but with TLOU characters as the team. Nothing super heavy in this chapter but if you have seen YJ you know what happens. This is a year before the plane, so Junior year for Ellie and the reader. Uhhh so yeah, idk how to post on here I don’t really know the etiquette but I’m trying to figure it out so plz be patient 🙏. Also the uploading schedule will be very very unscheduled bc of class work and work and family stuff so please have patience with me.

Small tw: smoking, alcoholism

BEFORE YOUR READ PLEASE GO TO THE LINKS IN THIS POST AND SUPPORT PALESTINE IN ANY WAY YOU CAN!-> 🍉

｡･: *:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ ｡･:*: ｡･

1995, junior year

Me and Ellie had decided to come over to my house and smoke, not an uncommon occurrence. We were always in one another’s day to day life, whether it be meeting in the halls between classes, or playing on the field, or hanging out for lunch or after school… It was like you couldn’t walk into a room where one was without the other.

My dad (whom was more like a demanding roommate) was far too busy drunk and passed out with whatever channel his hazed fingers had slipped onto and chosen in a blissful urgency, to notice us slipping inside.

I cracked the door open, it was about 8pm so he sound be asleep by now. Sure enough, he laid on the couch with a couple beer cans and a bottle of whiskey next to him on the floor.

I lived in a small house with 2 bedrooms, a single bathroom, and 1 tv. It was always cluttered, my dog I had begged my dad for on hands and knees left hair everywhere. Nowadays he was just an old beagle who slept on the floor. If a burglar were to break in Buckley would most likely roll over and beg for food to feed his bulging gut.

The house was creaky, always with the whir of the swamp cooler, or wind creaking the old wood, or the beep of some broken electronic. Or maybe it was yelling from my dad, or the dog barking, or the tv blasting. In all the noise Ellie was a fresh dose of calm, even if she was the opposite, she offered a breath of fresh air and a sense of safety.

Our tennis shoes creaked on the scuffed wooden floors. I carefully went to my room and shut the door. Ellie sighed with relief and set her bag down as I set a chair in front of my door in case my dad picked the lock again. I slung my heavy bag from my shoulders and set it next to Ellie’s.

“Did you bring your pipe?”

I asked as I walked over to a pile of stuffed animals and grabbed my old stuffed cow from when I was a baby, it had a small hole in it and I pulled a tiny baggie of weed out of the stuffing.

I turned around and Ellie was already pulling out a little glass pipe she’d stolen from Jordan last year.

“Sweet.” I say as she gently holds the cold glass in her hands and I drop a couple small buds into it.

“Is this skunk?” She asked and sniffed the plant and her ski slope nose scrunched up. I zipped the baggie up and stuffed it back into the stuffed animal.

“I got it from Jordan so… who fuckin knows.” I joke and sit down on my rickety old bed.

Ellie pulled out her lighter and flicked it on, she lit the green flower that had saved me from oh so many bad nights when my dad was screaming on the phone with my mother. She had moved away when I was still too young to remember any of it.

Ellie inhaled and blew a very poor smoke ring into the air.

“Mm.. 6/10.” I say as she passes my the light and the pipe.

“What? That was easily an 8.”

I shake my head and take a long drag, my lungs ached with the familiar taste on my tongue. My heart ached with them, whether that was from Ellie or the weed I would never know.

I blow a large smoke ring out and it bumps and breaks against Ellie’s freckled face.

She waves her hand and rolls her eyes.

“No, that was an 8.” I correct and giggle as I hand her back the pipe and light.

“Show off.”

She says and sits next to me and the bed creaked under her weight.

My room was decorated with a few posters I’d gotten from Sarah as hand-me-downs, a couple pictures of my dog as a puppy, and far too many doodles and drawings Ellie had done tacked up or framed next to my bed. She had always been my favorite artist.

“Says you! I saw you steal the ball form Abby like 10 times today.” I retorted and watch her cough and cover her mouth with her arm and try to muffle her wheezing.

“Well she deserves it! She totally tripped Dina on purpose last week.” Ellie said and cleared her throat while passing me the pipe.

The team was always at some internal war it seemed. We played well for sophomores and Juniors, but our coaches constantly scolded everyone for bickering too much. Always fighting or yelling or cheating for the sake of simply annoying each other.

“Well, Dina did call her a dumb blonde.” I say.

I never picked sides, or tried not to. Everyone had a side to things, I knew that. Patience and understanding was something I had to learn, Ellie never seemed to. I learned it from sitting through hours of boring lectures at church, I learned it from waiting until my dad was too drunk to notice me slipping out the window, I learned it from waiting to be held and not feel invaded. I waited for a lot of things, Ellie seemed to dive head first whether or not it was a good idea.

“She only said that as a joke. Abby’s called everyone something.. remember when she called you a ball slapper in front of Brody?”

I rolled my eyes. Ellie kept trying to pick some guy for me she assumed I liked, Brody seemed to be her choice of the month.

“I don’t care about Brody, first off. Second off, that was funny. And Abby isn’t as mean as you make her out to be.” I say as I hand Ellie the pipe and watch her take a small hit off of it.

I felt bad for ever asking Ellie to smoke, Joel had been like the dad I never really got, and the thought I was letting his daughter do something he would surely yell and ground her for, made guilt ache in my chest.. but the weed helped.

“Did Brody do something?” She asked and laid back on my bed, grabbing my blue pillow and stuffing it behind her head.

“…Well, I mean, he’s just a dick. And wasn’t he one of the guys who beat that girl up for stealing a beer from his friend or something?” I say and leaned back against the wall next to Ellie and relit the pipe.

“Fair point.. I dunno, I was at Leah’s party-“

“I thought you hated Leah?”

“Yeah but she has really good booze.”

Ellie said and shrugged as she looked up at me, her eyes already a little pink.

“Anyways I heard Nora said that Jesse was with Brody when he was drunk and Brody said he thought ‘that number 7 girl with the hair is nice’ so I think that’s you.”

I rolled my eyes and passed Ellie the pipe with an annoyed sigh. High school drama made 0 sense to me.

“So… you heard from a girl who heard from a guy who heard from another drunk guy that he liked me..? And Brody didn’t even say my name?”

I ask and fiddle with the strings of my hoodie with one hands and cradled the pipe in the other.

“…Yeah okay when you put it like that it sounds dumb but-“

“It is dumb! Brody is dumb.”

I sigh and stand up to go grab some soda, setting the pipe down and Ellie quickly scooped it up and nursed another hit. I pulled out the stashed soda from under my bed and cracked one open.

“I mean I swear he is actually the most ignorant, annoying asshat I’ve ever had the misfortune of smelling.”

“You smelled him?” Ellie asked with a small smirk and I toss a can of sprite on her chest and she grunts and sits up to open it.

“Everyone can.”

We both sip our sprites for a moment as smoke wafts through the air, I sit down on the small chair across from my bed.

“I just… I feel bad that you’re not dating anyone.”

Ellie says after a moment.

“You aren’t either?” I raise my eyebrow and slouch in my chair.

“Well…”

Ellie trails off and we sit in uncomfortable silence.

I had dated 1 or 2 boys freshmen and sophomore year but quickly learned I didn’t like dating. I assumed it was just because I was too young and made the excuse that being Christian prohibited me from dating which drove most boys away.. not that really anyone cared to pay attention to me besides on the field. Besides I wasn’t even Christian, my dad was. I just slapped the label on to make him happy and use it as an excuse.

But Ellie hadn’t dated either, she never even glanced at a boy. A few times in middle school I’d set her up and she’d played along, then said they just weren’t her type and I assumed she didn’t want to date either.

Neither of us really… knew why. But we never talked much about it until recently, when Ellie had been on some sort of mission to set me up with every other guy who mentioned my name.

I set my sprite down and leaned over her to grab the pipe and lighter off the bed. I glanced at her and noticed she was staring at me with curious, pink eyes.

I looked back at her for a few moments, leaning over her with my arm above her to grab the pipe. I pulled away the second I felt my heart ache in my chest and walked over to my window to crack it open and took a long hit.

I could hear Ellie sit up on my bed and watch me as I blew the smoke out the window.

“I thought we were hotboxing?”

She said as I waved the smoke out of the window and coughed a little.

“Can’t, I don’t have a candle.” I mumbled and sit down to take another long hit. I blew the smoke out and set the pipe on the desk next to me. I sipped my sprite and sighed as I glanced back at Ellie. I saw her picking at a scab on her knee nervously.

“Is that from practice the other day?”

I ask and walk over to bend down and look at it.

“Yeah, when I tripped?”

Ellie said and moved her hand so I could look at it. It was kinda big, it looked painful at least but nothing we hadn’t both had our fair share of.

“Mm.. want me to bandage that up?”

I ask and before like could answer I was already up and grabbing my little kit from my desk and sitting on the floor in front of the bed.

“You don’t gotta do that.” Ellie said and sipped her sprite to sooth the already forming cotton mouth.

“I know.” I say and rip open a little alcohol wipe to the wound, Ellie winced and I smirked and looked up at her.

“Don’t be such a puss.” I tease and wipe away the dried blood and gunk from her wound.

“I’m not, you’re just pressing really hard.” Ellie retorted and her hands gripped the bed.

“Sure sure… want me to kiss it better?” I joke as I grab a bandaid and rip it open, gently sticking the little Spider-Man design onto the scrape.

“Yeah.”

Ellie says and chuckles. I shrug, I’m high, we’re best friends. I lean down and press a little kiss over the bandage and pull away to put my med kit back on the desk.

Ellie‘s face gets a little red a she looked down at you, kissing her leg so gently after patchig her up.

She clears her throat and looks away as she sips her sprite.

｡･: *:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ ｡･:*: ｡･

(Can you tell I have a homoerotic relationship with my childhood best friend or am I crazy)

This is kinda ass but I hope it didn’t suck super bad bc I have so many ideas for the rest of this series just PLEASE hear me out guys.

Uhhhh besides that plz lmk if anyone wants to keep reading this I’m always open to suggestions or ideas, I don’t plan on entirely sticking to the OG YJ script to like a tee, I’ll probably switch things around and maybe change things up a bit to better fit these characters. But there will be yearning, angst, obsession, and lesbians so… yay🧍‍♀️

#ellie williams #yellowjackets #free 🍉#amateur writer #tlou fanfiction #wlw yearning #i love combining hyperfixations that have nothing to do with each other

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red-in-every-sense-of-the-word · 7 months

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Ive tagged this post to high heaven so if you somehow get spoilered because of this idk what to tell you. I've played through storymode, good chunk of invasions, and had a crack at the endings towers. Ngl Mortal Kombat 1 is a massive fucking fail and I'm so mad I didn't listen and cancelled my preorder.

After the first half or slightly under of the storymode it took a massive nose dive into complete mess, like not even mess as in the choices we're ill-advised, but mess as in you barely know wtf is going on and neither does the actual plot, they forget half the characters exist (they dropped Bi-Han's traitor plot completely after the Scorpion chapter and forgot about Smoke and Kuai Liang, Kung Lao may as well be a background character, Ashrah and Reptile fucking disappear after entering Earthrealm etc),

They ripped off other games ideas while also forgetting plot points from previous games they're going off of (the blatant Armageddon ending/MK9 opening final act ripoff that would've been better if it wasn't flooded with those stupid mutant champions and random copies no one asked for, forgetting the whole Shinnok's Amulet harms the user who uses it thing with Shao and forgetting the madness it causes, ripping off MK11's final battle with all the realms against the time keeper battle all over again etc.)

Essentially, this game has some good ideas and a very good first half up until Shinnoks Amulet randomly got dropped into the mix. I liked the twist of both MK11 endings being canon, I didn't like the fact that the writers decided to make a fucking avengers endgame ripoff out of the idea only for everything to magically snap back to normal reality after its all over. What the actual fuck.

They have such good ideas but never explain a single fucking thing about it in-game. Does Cris divorce Johnny instead of Sonya and Johnny divorcing then getting back together to spare them that pain in Liu Kangs design? Do Ashrah and Sareena know each other since they both worked under Quan Chi? Wtf is Rain's motivation for betraying his Edenian family? How about what happened to Hanzo Hasashi or Bi Han and Kuai Liang's father? Does Kenshi end up restoring his family's glory? Where do Ashrah and Reptile end up? How about Sareena? What the fuck is going on with Jerrodmac? Is Sonya ever gonna be apart of the damned story considering how important she is/was to Earthrealm getting a better timeline? Where the fuck does Kung Lao fit into the story now he's been sidelined AGAIN despite MK11 implying he'd finally get a shot at being the chosen one? Where is Raiden's personality for 95% of the game until timekeeper old Raiden shows up?

They leave all of this unanswered and instead just. Blow everything up and make it all substanceless epic emptiness. Like literally nothing meaningful happens in the last act on that pyramid. At all. The first section of Johnny's chapter where he's basically Indiana Jones had more substance to it then the whole last half of the game did! Oh yeah btw I love Megan Fox (Transformers Movie Fan) but God her Nitara voice acting blows so hard. MK11 Sonya wasn't bad at all yall give her too much shit and then they get bigger names to do roles in this shit and its just worse. Nitara was another character they did not explain at all. So was Khameleon and Darrius and Sareena. They were just There.

It sucks because there were some really cool concepts like Johnny and the gang in the Wu Shi instead of just the usual monks, the Johnny and Kenshi mini storyline was very good and sweet (honestly I see zero romantic chemistry there idk where yall are getting this from but their friendship here is so fucking good and builds off of their friendship in MKX very well and I'm glad it's still there and flourishing. There's not many well-written and healthy male friendships in media that I've seen and I'm glad this turned out to be a perfect example of one). I loved the way they portrayed Bi Han's descent into ambition driven betrayel and it would've been perfect if we were given more explanation. Especially when he gave Kuai Liang his infamous scar. That was sick as hell.

I know not many people were happy that he was being made a villain again but honestly if they tried making him a good guy I doubt they'd be able to pull off anything better than a bitchier version of Kuai Liang and we've already got one good Sub-Zero, it's more interesting to see the worser side of Bi-Han and if they explore him with Sareena again it could make their relationship more interesting when she joins the side of good eventually without him.

Essentially it comes down to a lot of wasted potential, the interface of the game and the towers and some of the rendering in invasions mode and the end of fight standing over you cutscene in story mode is so bad. I don't even think they properly rendered dark Raiden in one cutscene at all. It feels sloppy and rushed. The gear setup is worse and shittier then MK11, there's no variations. The Palette setup is an improvement from the rehash of a skin in 40 odd colours but there's only one gear option instead of three. The actual outfits in the game are very hit or miss mostly miss with such dull colours and clothing/accessories just not sitting right like Kung Laos hat and the odd choice of colours for Sindel (beige) and others.

As for the Kameo system, it's useless. I literally barely use it and when I do it's exactly like using the Konsumables in MK11 except they've changed the damned enhance button to the trigger to make room for a feature absolutely no one wanted ☠️

It's just disappointing. And I probably have more to say about it but rn I'm on almost 24 hours of not sleeping and have to make it another 4 hours before I'm allowed to crash so I'll leave it here for now.

Oh yeah and the Kombat Kids geting slaughtered. Only giving Cassie her "lesbian cut" on her MK11 model specifically now and massacring Jin's design only to kill them all. Didn't like that. I genuinely almost cried because seeing Cassie I almost got my hopes up for a possible playable future for her and then I saw Jin and I've never been more devastated in my life. He looks like Kabal for fucks sake.

Good evening and I'm never preordering a Mortal Kombat game again

#Milady Talks #mortal kombat #mk #Mortal Kombat 1 #Mortal Kombat 12 #Mortal Kombat 1 (2023)#MK1 #MK1 (2023)#MK12 #Mortal Kombat 1 Spoilers #MK1 Spoilers #MK12 Spoilers #Mortal Kombat 12 Spoilers #Mortal Kombat 1 Review #Mortal Kombat 1 (2023) Spoilers #MK1 (2023) Spoilers #MK1 Review #MK12 Review #Mortal Kombat Spoilers #MK Spoilers #MK Review #Mortal Kombat Review #The extra skins all suck too #Couldve put that 90 towards a ps5 or silent hill 2 remake but here we are.#absolute dogshit #Not a fan of Johnshi for the record I just dont get why people aren't satisfied with a good and healthy male relationship when theres barely #any of them out there to enjoy!! Two people can be friends without it being romantic guys I mean this regardless of all identities 😭😭#thats only a miniscule part of the shitshow here btw yall had me prepared to have my CageBlade canon heart destroyed but I was just faced #instead by two dudes who just had a really sweet comradeship going on with zero romantic shit whatsoever. Was dead confused #Anyways enjoy this shitty review it made me want to start smoking 👍

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brothersapart · 1 year

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So, hey, nightmares06!

I came from Brothers Unexpected on AO3, and was wondering if there were tidbits on any future stories. I saw that you could apparently "submit story ideas" here, and decided to plant my own twisted, rotten piece of "idea dandelions" right here!

Brothers Unexpected: Meeting of Brothers

What if there was a third or fourth or whatever number part of the story, where Sam, Jacob, and his family get caught up in a situation with a monster. Maybe a demon, spirit or something "simple" like that. By this point, Jacob is about as old as he is in all other iterations of him, around his teens, a bit older. Sam knows a bit about the topic; not that much, but enough to know that they are screwed up. He's panicking, they're all panicking, everything's terrible peachy-keen.

Then Dean shows up not after, since he's working on another, completely irrelevant case (that is totally not related) and manages to find them and save them from getting torn to shreds impending doom. Oscar, by this point, has also become a hunter. Having lived with Dean and John up to this point, he's lost most of his... soft-ness. He's overcome a lot of fears and is as resourceful as it gets. But he still retains at least a bit of the fuzzy personality that makes Oscar, well, Oscar!

So, anyways, queue the conversation about monsters, the discovery of Sam/Oscar, the reveal, and the reunion. All the standard stuff that we all love to read. (I swear it's almost addicting.)

I would love to see how Jacob's parents are going to deal with this. Like:

"Woah, there are tiny people that aren't cursed humans, and, not coincidentally, our (basically) adoptive son's biological brother, who we have sort of been searching for for entire years, also has adopted a tiny non-human. Oh yeah, and they hunt the supernatural, which we may or may not have been putting aside, since it's almost borderline inconceivable."

Man, I spend way too much time fantasizing with this stuff.

Anyways, this time, Sam is the more scared, unsure character. He's lived with a "normal" human family for most of his life now. He can use his knife, he has the basic skills, and he's a proficient learner, but he's severely outmatched by Oscar, who has been hardened by both John and Dean's training, as well as just pure experience.

Now Dean has to connect with Sam, someway, somehow. Will it be with "hunter-ifying" him? Or will it be by slowly easing himself back into a slower-paced, not-a-hunter brother, just for Sam? And when that happens, how will Oscar feel? Like an intruder, or a replacement? How will Jacob feel? Will he be like in Brothers Adopted, and feel like an outsider? WILL JACOB AND OSCAR FORM THE ULTIMATE ALLIANCE?

I have no clue.

But, hey, this was an interesting thought just sitting in my head; I had to blow the seeds somewhere, and I chose here!

Dandelions are pretty. (◉⁠‿⁠◉)

Have a great holiday, and happy late Christmas! (whether you celebrate it, or not.)

Best Regards,

Dev235

(PeepoJuice123)

Oh, every bit of this is amazing to read and imagine, I love it!

We certainly do have a plan for when these two crews intersect at last, and I definitely hope we get far enough into the story for all the !!FUN!! to commence! You certainly got a few bits of it right ;) and they will DEFINITELY run into each other down the line. Where would the fun be if they didn't?!

Any time you feel like throwing around story seeds, we're all here to listen! My readers are just as rabid as we are for finding new ideas and plot bunnies to imagine.

If you want to see how the Brothers Unexpected crew is doing in the far future, after their rediscovery and encounters, we did do a short story with them (They were just too perfect a crew to throw a halloween for):

Just Another Halloween

(Other posts on Brothers Unexpected)

#brothers unexpected #plot bunnies #story ideas #dev235 #PeepoJuice123

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tyforthevnm · 1 year

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My Chemical Romance - Frank Iero (May 19, 2005)

Bobby Gorman Posted 19th May 2005, Rexall Place - Edmonton, Alberta Link to interview: x

As My Chemical Romance passed through Edmonton as the sole opener for the Green Day North American tour, Frank Iero was nice enough to sit down with me and answer a few questions. He was really cool and gave some intelligent answers and made for a great interview. My friend Jacey helped with some questions and pops in a few times during the interview. Thanks a lot to Frank for doing the interview and to Laura for setting it up. Enjoy!

Please Note: All pictures were taken, without permission, from the band’s site.

Bobby: Starting with the simple questions, you guys have been touring with Green Day for quite a while now. How has that been going?

Frank: Oh man, it’s been amazing. I can’t believe tomorrows our last day. It’s one of those things that you get the phone call, and since you were thirteen you wanted to tour with Green Day, at least play a show or see them or something; and when they ask you to tour with them, it kind of blows your mind. You don’t think that they are asking the right band. But this tour has been amazing. We’ve go to hang out with our heroes who treat us like peers. And we get to watch Green Day every night, so that’s pretty cool.

Bobby: Has there been any really memorable moments from it so far?

Frank: Ah man, there’s so many. I mean, the shows are just insane. The shows are unlike any shows we’ve ever played. The kids are great. In fact, it shows that we’ve been playing really well because it takes a while to get used to an arena, you know? But there’s also other memorable stuff that we’ve done outside of the show on the tour. Just hanging out. Like we all went to go see Star Wars together, the other day we went to a Water Park in town. You know what I’m talking about? That was ridiculous.

Bobby/Jacey: Yeah. The one in the mall?

Frank: Yeah, that one. They take us on dates and stuff, it’s really cool.

Bobby: How did you end up getting the opening spot? Like did they just call you, or what?

Frank: Basically, that’s how it happened. The way things work is that a tour will be planned for a headlining band. And then support bands will submit for the tour and say “Hey, we’d love to go out with you”, you know, “consider us.” So I guess we submitted for it, and they picked us. It was ridiculous too because there’s only two bands and that’s really unheard of these days. Usually it’s like a three band bill, four band bill. And for us just to be us and Green Day… It’s not like they picked us because they needed us to sell tickets or something, like they didn’t need us at all. They just liked our band, and that was really flattering.

Bobby: You guys also recently ended the Taste of Chaos tour with The Used. How was that?

Frank: That was fun. That tour was really different because it was a lot of bands that we had toured with back in the day. Bands like Underoath, Senses Fail, and A Static Lullaby we tour with… I guess two years ago and we were doing hundred person rooms, three hundred person rooms. And The Used we toured with a bunch. So it was like all our friends getting together. And when all our friends got together, we could play arenas; and that was really weird. We’d all kind of look at each other and say “Is this real?” But I guess that’s the beauty of it.

Bobby: On the tour, for your encore you guys and The Used did a cover of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” and now you are selling it on iTunes. Why did you decide to do that song?

Frank: Well, it was one of those things that Bert brought up and said “I really want to cover this song; I think it would be awesome if both our bands did it.” And we were like “O yeah, that’s rad!” We love Queen. We love David Bowie. But a lot of things in the industry happen where it’s like “Let’s do this!” and then it never happens. So I guess fortunately, and unfortunately… Unfortunately the tragedy happened and fortunately the song came into fruition because we wanted to do something for the disaster. So I think that kind of sparked it. We recorded our parts in L.A. right before we did the “Helena” video; and the Used did, I think, some of it in L.A. and I think Bert recorded his vocals in England. So it was weird, we were never in the same room or anything like that when we did the song. So the first time we ever did it live was a test. We did it once or twice, and they were gonna film a DVD for the tour and were like “O, it would be great if you guys both did it because you’re both here, it would be really cool.” And we’re like “Alright, we’ll try it.” We were excited to play anyway and then it was just one of those things where it was just fun to do every night, so we just did it.

Bobby: Did they film a DVD for the tour?

Frank: I believe so.

Bobby: Do you know when it will come out?

Frank: Nope, I have no clue.

Bobby: With the release of “Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge”, you guys have skyrocketed up the popularity chain, especially here in Canada. You guys went from playing for 100 kids at Warped Tour to selling out arenas at the Taste Of Chaos and opening for Green Day. Why do you think that is?

Frank: It’s one of those things where you start out, you form a band and you write some songs in your basement and you put out a demo or a record on an indie label and you just tour because you love to do what you do. Then you run into kids on the road and they say that they enjoy your art and say that you’ve changed their life in a certain way and that’s the best compliment you can get. It makes you feel like you’re really doing something, like you’re actually changing the world. We haven’t stopped working since those days, so to take a step back be like “O wow, we’ve come this far” – that really doesn’t happen. All I know is that more kids are coming out. I have two plaques in my room, I don’t know, but I don’t see them – I’m never home. Why did that happen? I’d like to think that people heard it and knew that we were a real band and that we had something to say and enjoyed that and took that to heart. I hope that’s the reason. We’ve worked really hard. Maybe that’s it. Maybe God likes us, I don’t know.

Bobby: Do you guys think that that humongous leap in popularity could ever turn into a bad thing?

Frank: I think that anytime a large number of people hear your music and enjoy your music, that’s a good thing. I’m not stupid; I know that a lot of those people could be fair-weather fans. There’s definitely a lot more “Gerard, you’re so cute” rather then “play this song”. That’s a shame. Hopefully the kids who bought the record now and bought it because they think Gerard’s really cute will listen to the record and learn about the band and grow into it and realize why they really like it. If they don’t, that’s fine. If they’re not there tomorrow, we’ll still be doing this and we’ll still be doing this for the people that do get it.

Bobby: How did you get in contact with Reprise Records to release the album?

Frank: Well, here’s the thing. Do you remember Thursday? When they were huge – well, they are on hiatus right now, but like when they got signed, there was a signing frenzy, you know what I mean? Labels were just salivating to sign any band form New Jersey. Kids that had black hair. Kids that wrote about New Brunswick or anything. Anyone from New Jersey was getting signed and you could see that a lot because anybody that was in a band from New Jersey got signed. We were a band for maybe, maybe, two months; and major labels were calling the practice studio that we were practicing in, and that was really weird. We were just like “This is kind of bull shit. You don’t want to sign us; you just want to sign the next Thursday. We’re not going to do this.” We signed to Eyeball, put out an indie record and toured for a while because that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to make something on our own and it’s a lot better when you work for something. And then we felt it was time to make a jump, or take the next step. Eyeball couldn’t reach the amount of people that we really wanted to reach. We toured a lot without the record being really anywhere. And we were like “you know what; we’re not going to sign to another label unless we find something that really gets us and it feels like a family.” And one day we were contacted by Reprise. Reprise, Warner, same thing. And we signed for the company. Everybody that works with our band gets us. They wanted us to be My Chemical Romance, they didn’t want us to be The Used, they didn’t want us to be Thursday or whatever. And that was amazing for us. There was no stipulations, its was just go out, be a band and write songs that you love to write. So we were like “alright!” and we did. I really don’t think they thought they were going to get a really good record, and I think we wrote a really good record so we’ve never regretted that decision.

Bobby: What’s it like switching from a small independent like Eyeball to a major like Warner Music?

Frank: You feel like people are behind you, you know what I mean? It’s weird; I always thought that it would feel less like you have people behind you because it’s such a big company with so many bands. But a lot of people have our backs. A lot of people are pushing for this band to do well and for us to reach our goals. We really just have a lot of help and that’s a great thing and there’s people at the label that really believe in you and their job is to, basically, make sure you get what you want. If we wanted to, let’s say, do another David Bowie cover, they would make that happen; and that’s awesome you know. That’s really the only difference, and your record is everywhere.

Bobby: Yeah, because it’s hard to find your first one. All my friends are looking for it and can’t find it.

Frank: For that, we just say go on the internet and find it.

Bobby: I gotta ask this because I love your videos, like we were watching them at my house last night. “Helena” and “I’m Not Okay”, where did you come up with all the concepts of the video?

Frank: Because we’re just nerds. That’s how it is. We sit in our van or our bus, bus now, and just talk about stupid stuff. Read comic books and watch movies. And then the label’s like “We want to do a video” and we’re like “Okay, this is what we want to do.” Then we found a director, his name is Mark Webb. He did both our videos and he’s directing our new video that we are doing in… actually three days. And he’s like “alright, I think we should do this” and we wanted to do this, so we just kind of mixed it all together. Same thing with “Helena,” although “Helena” was a little bit easier only because I left it up to Gerard. It was about his grandmother, him and Mikey. It was their homage to her. It was creepy, because I was at the actual funeral and it resembled the funeral almost to a T. It was really weird. And some of that you wanted, and some of that just happened. But with the dancing and everything like that, well we always try to have an uplifting theme. I think our music is very ironic in that we’ll have a dark theme with heavy music and a darker theme with an uplifting message.

Bobby: You just said you’re shooting a video in three days, for what song?

Frank: “The Ghost Of You.”

Bobby: Do you have any ideas as to what the concept is going to be?

Frank: Yes. But I can’t tell you. Sorry. It’s going to be huge. I promise you this, it’s going to be more like a movie then any other video we’ve done and it’s going to be enormous. Yeah, we’ve thought this out a lot. It could really, really suck, but we hope it doesn’t.

Bobby: Now I’m looking forward to seeing this video. How do you guys pick what songs you want to be singles?

Frank: Well, it’s one of those things where when we wrote the record we had ideas for what songs we wanted to hear on the radio, but we didn’t really decide any. It was kind of like “we like all our songs, you’re the label, and you decide which ones to put out.” And they were like “okay, put this one out. Put this one out. Put this one out.” If, after this one, they do another, I hope it’s “Prison.”

Bobby: On the “I’m Not Okay” video, Gerard says “I don’t wanna make it, I just wanna…” and then it cuts to the music. Can you finish that sentence for us? “I don’t wanna make it, I just wanna…”

Frank: See, the original line was… well, it summed up the entire cheesiness of the teen movie type thing. It was “I just wanna rock!” And it was just too much. We wrote a million other things, “I just wanna be myself”… ah, what were the other ones… there were so many. But we just left it open because I think you get a lot more out of it if you just leave it open and put whatever you want to put in there. In that scene, Gerard is like every kid. He’s me, he’s you, he’s everyone. It’s like, you know what, a lot of people are told they aren’t going to make it, but just do what you do best and live your life. Live it for yourself, and really just fuck everybody else.

Bobby: A lot of punk “elitists” are starting to complain about the whole “emo” trend. Guys wearing makeup, and wearing girls pants. Mark Adkins from Guttermouth went on a huge rant about it all on their site and even went to the limit of calling Gerard a “fat pink raccoon.” What’s your opinion on all of that?

Frank: I think, he’s a racist, he’s a sexist, he’s homophobic, he’s a hateful person, and it’s just wrong. We could all sit here and call people names and hate people for the way they dress or the music they like or just the things that they think are cool. But that doesn’t make us any better. It’s an awful thing where you have such a soap box, like you have a lot of fans that are into your band, and you use that to spew hate. I guess that’s his opinion.

Bobby: You guys are also heavily involved in the Shirts For A Cure project and have a total of four t-shirts on there now. Why are you guys so involved in that?

Frank: Because it’s a good cause. Definitely, maybe this sounds dumb or naive, but when I started playing music and when I started growing up, all I ever wanted to do was to change the world in some way. Make a foot print. I think the worst thing you could possibly do is to live your life and have the world be the same way it was before you were here as it is after. I think that we’re here for a reason and if we don’t do something to make the world a better place, then we just wasted everyone’s time. And if we can do something as small as put t-shirts on website and raise money for a cure, then we’re going to do that.

Bobby: Okay, if you guys could pick one person or band, dead or alive, to tour with, who would you pick to tour with and why?

Frank: Oh man… Definitely the original Misfits line up because they are just amazing. The Clash would be amazing. The bands that I grew listening to, like Black Flag. Man, if I could tour with Black Flag with Keith Morris singing, like the original line up, that would be amazing. Yeah, bands like that.

Bobby: Okay, now onto to more unusual questions that I like to ask at all interviews. First off all, if you guys were stranded on a desert island, with no food and nothing to eat, which one of the band members would you eat to survive?

Frank: Wow. O man. It definitely wouldn’t be Mikey, because he’s got nothing. I don’t know. I wouldn’t eat Gerard or Bob because they are just great company, and I wouldn’t eat Toro because he’d probably be the one to figure out a way off the island. So I’d probably have to eat my own leg.

Bobby: If you were the member of the opposite sex for a day, or a week, or whoever long you wanted, what would you do and why?

Frank: Man, what would I do…? I’d probably get lower car insurance. I don’t know, what would I do… that’s a good question, I’ve never really thought about it.

Bobby: Yeah, not many people do.

Frank: Yeah, I don’t know. Nothing is ringing a bell. Sorry. I’d probably just sit home and eat chocolate cake, that’s all I would do.

Bobby: Okay, here’s a question from my friend Tyson, he’s wanted me to ask this at an interview for so long now. Rosie O’Donnell or Whoopi Goldberg. Who would you do?

Frank: Wow… Christ… Man, there’s no like secret C choice?

Jacey: No happy medium.

Frank: Man. Could I at least give Whoopi Goldberg eyebrows?

Bobby: Yeah.

Frank: Okay, Whoopi Goldberg with eyebrows.

Bobby: Could you tell us something about the band or one of its members that not many people know about? Like a little quirk or something that do on the road.

Frank: Umm, okay, let’s see. I’m trying to think of things that won’t embarrass anybody. One thing, just one?

Bobby: Well, how ever many you want to tell us.

Frank: I’ll give you one about everybody. Ray’s never around. Ray will constantly be on his phone, playing a video game or playing guitar in the back lounge with earphones on. Like you will not see him, you do not see him at all. That kid is dedicated to technology completely. Bob is addicted to “24” – the television show. Mikey will be broke at the age of thirty, but have every DVD, comic book, and video game known to man. Gerard, this is probably widely known, but I will assure you, Gerard is as close to genius as you could possibly get.

Bobby: Okay, I guess that’s about it. Do you have any final thoughts you want to add?

Frank: Whatever you do, don’t ever be full of shit.

Bobby: Alright, thanks a lot for doing the interview.

Frank: I appreciate it man.

#interview #the punk site #frank iero #may 19 2005 #may 2005 #2005 #revenge era #stranded on a desert island #one thing about each member #rica.archive #guttermouth mention

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edoro · 2 years

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You mentioned Wylan Six of Crows offhand in a post like a week ago and I've been curious about your particular read on him since then so☕️ Wylan Sixofcrows

you know what, i think the Grishaverse is in my top five "shitty media that i really love" list. i could go on for oh such a long time about the many many structural and craft problems in these books.

however i do love Wylan. i like how he has an actual last name but he's Wylan 6oC now and forever.

under a cut because it's long and also a very brief reference to implied csa

okay so... i like Wylan. privileged little rich boy runs off to the slums and then it turns out, oops, his home life was a fucking nightmare and that's why? i eat that up. i enjoy people who blow shit up. no, "i know how to make bombs because i had an upper class education" doesn't make any fucking sense. also kinda questioning how well someone could actually do at chemistry if they can't read tbh? but i don't care, i love every single thing about this archetype.

i love when he gets to have his little baby bitch moments... i just like it when boys are sweet but also rude. he is SO soft and while i enjoy the whole grimy criminess of 6oC i actually also love the fact that he decides to go hang out with his mom and sugar his boyfriend up instead of doing all that shit. boy has morals and he sticks to them.

now it's been a couple of years i think since i was actively looking at 6oC fanfic but like... i found a lot of it irritating lmao. people woobify him to no end but they don't even get the correct balance of "soft, naive, sheltered" to "snarky little bitch boy with firm opinions about things."

i mean, this kid was willing to Say Shit to Kaz right after he tortured and murdered a guy in front of him. Wylan has big fat red Cadillac balls, actually, he's not a simpering baby who bursts into tears at the slightest provocation.

additionally and relatedly tbh a lot of the Jesper/Wylan fic was like... mildly to extremely racist. making Wylan a soft little baby is definitely part of it, and then Jesper becomes his like, nanny and caretaker and tough guy bodyguard but also he needs Wylan to take care of him and run his life because he's just too uncivilized to do it himself and also he has a HUGE dick - and yeah. so. was not super impressed with the fic offerings on display or the character dynamics therein.

also, Wylan has Huge Molested Energy. that whole bit early on in the book where they're speculating on why he left his father's house and Inej is like "well i heard a rumor he got caught fucking one of his tutors"? no one ever addresses that again and there's like, 2 fics about it lmao, and of course it WAS just a rumor but if it was a rumor based in any kind of truth then like... well that would certainly be some kind of a power dynamic going on there, right?

the whole 'disguise him as Kuwei' bit was so stupid and pointless, also? like you can't even defend "have a character racefake for an entire book" with it having been necessary for the plot because it was hands down the most dipshit way to solve that problem.

like, what was Kaz's plan if van Eck didn't betray them? or if he did the vaguely intelligent thing and did the exchange and handed over a bunch of fake money while he went off with - as far as he knew - the real Kuwei? or handed over a bunch of - real OR fake - money and then just quietly had someone burn the Slat down a week later?

like, they're fucking gang kids. no one cares! literally no one is going to care what happens to them and there is no possible way they could seek any kind of legal recourse from the man. he's untouchable.

Kaz's entire plan here rests on van Eck betraying them then and there, because otherwise what happens is that he just handed Wylan over to his evil dad, which i don't think Kaz would care about, but van Eck would figure out he doesn't have the real Kuwei pretty quickly and again, the balance of power here is entirely in his favor and like, He Knows Where Kaz Lives.

it's just stupid and relies on the character knowing exactly how the plot is going to turn out. and then it's just pointless for the next book. we get Wylan Learning About Racism but if she wanted to show how the Shu are treated in Ketterdam then she could have just had Kuwei pov? and honestly including Kuwei pov would have been better i think, and definitely done a lot more for the brief little Kuwei/Jesper/Wylan love triangle.

#wylan 6oc #asks #6oc

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frikinnerd · 6 days

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Hello!

All questions ending in the number eight?!?!?!

Jfc okay here we go (/nm /lh)

8. What are your current goals? I'm stuck in Texas for a while paying off my car, so my current goals are to get a better job (one that I don't have to drive 80-90 minutes round-trip for), pay off my debts, and get better at my musicianship and other media-related skills. That way I can actually go do something I love doing, after I pay off my car.

18. Can you drive? Depends on who you ask lmao (I'm licensed but I'm a very impatient driver)

28. What was your last lie? "No yeah I'm fine, just tired." This is a standard response for me since I'm depressed, but this time I actually said it to a guy who caused hella fuckin drama for my roommate. I don't like him now lmao

38. Is there someone you want to punch in the face right now? The most recent target for those desires is a "friend" (using the term loosely) of my roommate's. He's really fucking annoying (train kid from Polar Express annoying) and there's really no good reason for my roommate to still be friends with him, but he's still around for some reason.

48. Something you want to do until the end of this year? Play gigs! For money! I love playing bass and I love getting paid for it!

58. What was the last thing you cried for? Probably the last thing to make me cry was some old Undertale fandom videos. There's a lot about my life that's tied to Undertale and the parts of the fandom I was into back in the day.

68. What are you living for? That's really fucking tough tbh. I'm living for the hope that one day I can "fully" transition and be a "real" woman. I'm living for my roommate whose quality of life is much better with the living arrangement we have rn. I'm living to spite Trump and Abbott. I'm living for the chance to help some trans kids out, be a big sister to them, yk? I'm living for the day I find someone to share a good physical relationship with. I'm living for music. Hm. I didn't think this section would be this long. Damn.

78. Are you religious? Does God exist? That was kinda the topic of my Sunday School class this morning lmao. Yes I identify as a Christian, mostly culturally, because frankly in my mind and my life it's the easiest thing for me to go with. My basis for believing in a God is "there's been moments and days that SHOULD NOT HAVE GONE AS WELL AS THEY HAVE, so there's no fucking way there isn't some higher power out there" lmao.

88. What are you scared of? Heights. Pain. Doing something that I think is benign and harmless--or actively beneficial, even--and having it blow up in my face because it was actually really fucking toxic and hurtful and get pulled into a fucking groupchat just to be told "you're a fucking creep" out of the blue with no prior context leaving me a shaking sobbing mess all because I just wanted to try to make people's days a little brighter. The sun.

(Vent warning for the next question, but it's also the last one)

98. Have you ever made your mom cry? What happened? OH BOY. I came out to my parents. And later she read one of my Facebook posts about Michael Knowles and "eradicating transgenderism from the public" which HAPPENED to briefly MENTION Roe v Wade, and she saw it as explicitly pro-choice. Which she decided to respond to with PHYSICAL ASSAULT. SHE TRIED TO BEAT ME UP BECAUSE I POINTED OUT THAT PEOPLE WERE PISSED ABOUT ROE V WADE BEING OVERTURNED, AND SHE THOUGHT IT WAS EXPLICITLY PRO-CHOICE. WHICH I AM, BUT THAT WASN'T WHAT THE FUCKING POST WAS ABOUT. GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELF AND LEARN THE SKILL YOU BITCHED AT ME ABOUT ALL MY FUCKING LIFE YOU DUMB CHEATING WHORE.

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theinsanecrayonbox · 1 year

Text

X-Force #38

Conclusion of the Xeno stuff! Huzzah!

Apparently this was all about Dom, cause she’s got internal narration throughout. Whatever, that’s fine.

So we pick up where we left off with our merry trio going to Moreau island and finding skinless monkey minions…I’m sorry, it’s Attack on Titans not monkeys

See, that totally Attack on Titan

Deadpool cuts his way out of the giant. It dies. The other two land their plane. This stupid happens

I’m on board with the vampire analogy, and yes I gave in with a cannibal joke, but cmon guys! Arkady doesn’t lick up random viscera. (Now if he’d actually licked Wade here maybe it’d be fun then but cmon)

Peacock man turns on his little telepath. The gang gets into the lab.

Look it Arkady being a good and helpful boi

The “omnimutant” attacks, and it does not look nearly as silly as the version on the cover; it looks mostly like a composite Beast/Wolverine but has Arkady’s coils for some reason. Anywhos, it’s a tough fight

See he’s a good boi and wants to help his team mates, while Beast just cares about the download. He unplugs at 98% to help

Oh that’s kind of a neat effect, wonder what psychic power that is-

WTH??? The death spores haven’t been shown to MELT people before. And one would think you’d be immune to your own power like this one, wouldn’t you?? Is Arkady dead now??? Also, how’d you get his genetic material to use Mr Peacock; I could buy you got the classic X-Force gang’s cause they’ve apparently fought you already? But Arkady hadn’t. And why are you interested in keeping and testing out Wade as if you didn’t already have him; we saw you had clones of him already.

Ah yes, Beast being horrible and terrible. But also (sorry this was before the memo but my caps got mixed up)

Xeno’s plan is literally SoS; is the X-stable just rehashing their own CURRENT ideas now?? Because Xeno’s “augment humans with mutant biotech/powers” is exactly what Graydon has Orchis doing over in Sabretooth/Exiles.

Anyways, kiddo controls omnimutant, they defeat Peacock. Domino goes to kill him, sees his scarred face then decides not to…but totally leaves his monsters to kill him. She goes outside to rejoin Deadpool who’s entertaining the kid…Arkady is lying on the ground by the plane maybe dead? Deadpool carries him into the plane in another panel…

Right Dom, because no one else has never ever EVER stolen you’re genetic makeup to make a super powered entity. Nope. Weapon H is not real. Never ever.

My last snarky comment aside, that’s it. They blow up the lab on Genosha and head home I guess. Why was Colossus on the opening cast page if he was Sir Not-Appearing? I know he and Laura are joining next issue, but what?

Overall…eh, I’ve said it in other posts; this was billed as a finale for several books/storylines that I guess centered on Domino. But as someone who jumped in late to this series and didn’t read the others from the beginning either, it was lacking substance, not helped by the lack of footnote caption boxes to remind readers where to find plot points from the back issues. Is that on me for being late, well not the missing caption boxes, but yeah I give you it is a bit. But again, as a finale for several long things, it wasn’t really good.

And Beast still has to answer for his war crimes more so than just getting the cold shoulder from ‘his friends’ at the lunch table. Arkady was a good boi though (cannibalism aside) and made a new best friend in Deadpool, so that’s nice. It’ll be interesting to see what Colossus and Wolverine can bring to the team (and hopefully no more Logan since we get Laura??)

#kp reads comics #kp rants about comics

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bugtransport · 1 year

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Kamen Rider V3 Finished: January 14, 2023

warning: this is over 3700 words and has pictures so buckle up. you cannot and will not get me to proofread this any more than i already have

Kamen Rider V3 is the show of all time. In case you didn’t know I’ve just decided that I’m going to watch all Showa Kamen Rider in order because when I started watching Kamen Rider I made some kind of joke like “oh, wouldn’t it be funny if I just went back and started from the very beginning?” except I have also never made a joke in my life so had to then proceed to do that and then by the time I finished KR 1971 I was so violently in love with Hongo and entirely charmed by the cheesy 70s kids tv of it all that I just had to keep going. That’s where I’m at mentally. That’s what was in my mind going into the show. A lot happened and a lot changed through the run so I think honestly we’ve gotta be true to the series and talk about it in 3 sections.

PART 1: V3 is invincible! This is the part where all the time we spent with 1971 Rider pays off.

Pictured: a guy about to get his shit rocked

God, what a way to start off. Bringing back the two guys from the previous season and then blowing them up with a nuke in the 2nd episode. It was so special and so charming to have them build the new protagonist themselves? I spent a good 2 months running through 1971 and I was really sad at the thought of having to say goodbye to the boys… but I didn’t have to because they lived on through V3. They also lived on somewhere else. They were fine post-nuke. Good for them!

I had no idea what this show was going to be like going into it. 1971 was so episodic that when they introduced the whole two monsters, two episodes, 26 secrets over the course of 52 episodes hook I was like oh hell yeah, it’s gonna be like the last one but even cooler. They ended up only sticking with that format for the first part but you know what? I liked what I saw while it was happening. I genuinely wouldn’t have been mad if they had just kept going with it. I’m glad they didn’t, but it was a cute little premise. I liked thinking about what special features Hongo and Hayato thought fit to put in him and what could have possibly prompted them to come up with them – because they had to have thought about this before borging Kazami, right? There’s no way they came up with that all on the fly. Not necessarily that they were planning on changing someone else (Hayato may have thought about it in passing, Hongo would be so staunchly opposed that imagining it would probably send him doomspiraling again) but… they could have been planning on making upgrades to themselves. They’re already borged. They’ve gotten themselves into situations before where they did get out of it, but they could have come out of it thinking “wow, this would have been a lot easier if I could, for instance, overclock my body, even at the expense of not being able to transform for 3 hours following,” and then gone and given that power to Kazami when they had the opportunity to. It’s an incredibly sweet concept; it’s like hearing the meaning behind the names parents give their kids, the good traits that they want to pass down to them. It gets me right in the heart. I love thinking about it. I love that V3 is so cute and squishy. I love imagining that Hayato was the one to take the lead on that (he’s a photographer, he’s artistic) while Hongo handled all the more technical stuff. He has both the powers and the dreams of Kamen Riders 1 and 2. It makes me mushy… I had such a good time with ‘71 Rider.

Pictured: proper surgical procedures

Pictured: two guys who had no idea how the shit that ended up working out either

For as cute as V3 is both as a suit and as a concept Kazami is fucking nuts from the get go. He got borged, popped right up off the operating table, pinned a guy to the wall by his throat, and basically went “yeah, I have no idea how strong I am right now, wanna find out together?” He almost let a dude drown. The guy convinced Tachibana to beat him up with a wrecking ball for training purposes. He’s just unhinged in a really fun way especially coming straight off of Hongo, who has maybe the world’s worst case of anxiety. Kazami has really none of that and despite having his family killed in front of him he’s shockingly… well adjusted? Maybe he’s just stuck in the first stage of grief. We’ll touch on this later.

Pictured: your weird uncle who's just down for anything

This section of the show was pure fun. High adrenaline explosions and fights and new abilities and goofy monsters and explosions and Kazami hanging off the side of his motorcycle speeding through the streets while being shot at and uh did I mention explosions? It’s so fucking good. ‘71 Rider was them trying to figure out how to do this show (which was relentlessly charming – I loved seeing them try new things and new effects and get into the groove with the pacing and characterizations and feel of everything going on and by the end of the show you can tell that everyone working on it felt much more confident than they did in the beginning) and the time that they spent getting into that groove made carrying on in a similar fashion pretty seamless. The jank is charming. Tachibana whips as usual. Shigeru was cute; all the kids were, they’re kids and they all seemed to be having a blast being in Kamen Rider. It warms my heart every time I see them. Junko was… there. They did try and introduce what I think was supposed to be a Taki-type character in the Interpol guy (whose name I can’t even remember, sorry king, you were such a non-player in this show) but Kazami is just such a force of nature that he mainly ended up seeming scared and confused and really ended up just in the background kinda standing there awkwardly when anything was going on.

Pictured: world's worst first dates

That’s I think the biggest difference between 1971 and V3 here: because Hongo and Hayato had each other and Taki all as sort of equals and balancers in 1971, when you did get your monster-of-the-week type character building they have each other to bounce off of (i.e. Taki trying to lick poison and Hongo stopping him, the scene when Hongo and Hayato are splitting up after a Double Riders episode on the boat and they both have internal monologues about where they’re at emotionally being borgs) but Kazami doesn’t have anyone to bounce off of and contrast him. He does pretty much everything alone. All the decisions he makes, no matter how off the fucking wall, are his sole responsibility. This begins to compound as time goes on and leads us to…

PART 2: DSM-5 speedrun This is the part where things start to sink in.

Hongo and Hayato come back for a couple episodes! This rules. This is so fun. We get some Double Rider action (I’ve missed this so much; Kazami rules but it’s so fun to see people fighting side by side as equals and it not just being like, Tachibana clubbing a few goons on the nog while Kazami wrecks a monster) and the two boys get to see how Kazami’s doing in action to both check up on him and their handiwork. Kazami seems really happy to have them back fighting with him! Hongo looks phenomenal as usual. Hayato has heels on which is very important to note, thank you. We get a little game of psychic marco polo when Hayato and Hongo get kidnapped and it’s up to Hayato to come find them and rescue them, just like in the last episode of 1971 Rider. It’s so fun. They kick Destron ass together and they laugh and Hongo gets to reconnect with Tachibana and the new rider kids a little. Then they leave, as we always knew they would. And Kazami is left alone again.

Pictured: they are fucking standing

Hongo and Hayato reappearing and leaving again also marks where the cracks in Kazami really start to show.

I mean yeah alright he’s always been a little nuts but at one point I stopped around two thirds of the way through one of the episodes with Hongo and Hayato in them and decided to catalog everything that Kazami had done so far that day. He:

Got exploded in a car crash

Impersonated a man

Got exploded in a car crash again

Transformed upside down

Somehow called his bike down into the Destron surgery chamber

Decided to do donuts in said surgery chamber, terrorizing all the scientists in there (side note: do you think that a certain scientist was in there too?)

This is now a normal day for Kazami. I love this interpretation of why the shift happened but personally I like to think of the tipping point as being when Kazami realized that he was having way more fun fighting alongside two people who were like him now that he was acclimated to being a cyborg – much different than the fighting he did at the start of the series with Hongo and Hayato where he was basically a newborn and just learning the ropes – and so, when they left again, he felt their absence much more acutely than he did the first time, and maybe because the wound has been opened again when he’s not bowled-over-busy figuring out his new borg life, he at this point actually starts grieving his family. Like I mentioned before: Tachibana is maybe the closest thing Kazami has through the series to having someone to fight with, and he’s just some fucking guy. Which is nuts! Kamen Rider is at its peak when it’s about two boys. I stand by that. When we have two boys they can share the trauma of what’s going on around them and support each other. When we only have one boy, that boy has to carry the weight of the whole world alone. Tachibana can try all he can but at the end of the day he’s still just a guy. He can only try and understand all these tortured boys he takes under his wing from the outside.

Pictured: he's trying his best to understand kids these days

Pretty much every single episode post Hongo Hayato return involves at least one kid with no family. Kazami obviously begins to see himself in them - this becomes so heavy handed by the end of the series that he sees a parentless kid playing a harmonica, takes the harmonica from the kid, plays a song of his own, and reminisces about playing the same song for his sister back when she was alive. It’s in no way subtle. That’s not at all a bad thing! If you’re complaining about something being a bit too heavy handed in what is after all a kids show I don’t really know what to tell you. Also, what can I say, I’m a documented slut for repetition as a narrative device. I think it whips. I love time loops. I love callbacks to things earlier in the series. I don’t know if half this shit is intentional but I’m having fun with it. With how hard they hit the Dead Family Connection between Kazami and these kids I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say yeah? Sure, why not. For this example specifically I think it really serves to show just how often this is now on Kazami’s mind. It’s something he can’t really get away from in the same way he was at the beginning of the series. I think that’s also why I didn’t at all mind the episodes that were kinda early-Hongo 1971 rehashes before the Riderman eps… Kazami wanted to be borged in the beginning and didn’t really have issues regarding his new life until around this point. It was in my opinion a nice little way to bring his newfound borg issues into play. I personally just like the early Hongo episodes too so I’m biased, and aware of that fact.

Pictured: the world's most emotional harmonica solo

Back to Kazami though: if you want a really good example of how he’s coping, here’s a video of him kidnapping a Destron goon and threatening to torture them for information. He’s really not doing well. He’s beginning to get a little black and white in his ways of thinking while the narrative is trying to bring in some gray areas by bringing in a couple one-off characters who start to shed a little light on Destron’s recruitment tactics and why, theoretically, someone might join up with them, which is something I thought really interesting and something that I wanted to see more of after the Ambassador Hell waffling in 1971 Rider. I’m glad that we did get to see that! Kazami again gets to have his shit rocked a little when someone that he thought he knew gets sucked into working for Destron. I honestly don’t think that Tachibana is any help here at all, the man comes across as kind of old school and again, pretty black and white thinking. But actually wait… I mentioned Riderman earlier, right? I think to further think about Kazami and what’s going on with him we gotta take this fucking post to…

PART 3: Riderman… what, do you ride men or something? This is the part where I talk about the ending of the show.

Pictured: two boys, twice

Kamen Rider is a show that works best when it’s about two boys. Yuki Joji is a Destron scientist (incorrectly) accused of being a traitor which leads to him losing his arm in a vat of acid and getting rescued by several other Destron scientists who end up attaching a borg arm to Yuki to save him, which turns him into Riderman. Now. This on its own is a departure from how Kamen Rider has treated Shocker/Destron scientists that you’re supposed to be sympathetic to in the past. Before we’ve really only gotten the whole “oh yeah, these dudes were kidnapped and forced to borg people against their will” song and dance which, sure, that’s fine, I think there’s a lot more to unpack about the morality of science than we care to get into in this show (thinking about you, guy in 1971 Rider who made a ray that just turned people into skeletons (??) like why the hell were you doing that. How were you planning on spinning that as being a good and moral thing to do in the first place. How on earth were you at all surprised when Shocker was like “oh actually we could totally use that for evil.”) but you know I’ll take this for what it is. Now you’re coming out of the gate swinging with a guy being saved by people who are clearly more loyal to him than they are to Destron but – all of them still work for Destron, that’s not a question. They all seem to see this as some kind of weird mistake, but not indicative of the organization as a whole. They still believe in the mission that they’re doing there. While Yuki is out for revenge on the people directly responsible for taking his arm and forcing him to get borged, he’s still openly fine with Destron. He doesn’t want to work with Kamen Rider. Kazami, who has gotten through the whole series pretty much through sheer hardheadedness alone, is finally matched with someone just as willful as he is, and oh my fucking god does he enjoy this.

Pictured: yeah you're one to talk

Yuki is stuck in the middle of a bunch of stuff. He’s neither really allied with Destron nor with Kamen Rider. He’s neither fully cyborg nor fully human. His little helmet – it only half covers his face. He’s helping his enemy to save kids. He’s getting pulled in every single direction all at once. Kazami, maybe thinking about all the stuff he’s heard about Hongo and Hayato and their time fighting together (because he has to have heard this, right, he’s got to know their stories) is relentless in pursuing him (“I thought you were different from other Destron members!”). And it works – Yuki realizes that Destron is evil and that Kamen Rider is in fact his (actual quote) angelic savior but it doesn’t even stop there, because he throws himself in front of V3 at one point (sort of similar to Kazami throwing himself in front of Hongo and Hayato in the first ep, come to think of it) to take a blow for the Destron leader because it’s at this point it’s revealed that he was raised and essentially groomed into their organization and while he’s trying his best to unlearn all the stuff he was raised believing, it’s still hard and that tears him apart internally even more because at this point he has joined V3 and is helping him and has renounced Destron but even if you are starting to unlearn things that you have seen firsthand proof of being incorrect… what about those guys that saved him from the acid vat. What about small little happy moments he might have had growing up that kept him going this long even when he was apparently suicidal (yes that is in the show) that weren’t directly Destron things but involved people around him there. What about the accomplishments he made while working for them. These are all tied up in something horrific and the recontextualization of all of these memories that he’s had over the years has got to be incredibly rough to go through. It’s rough to go through on a smaller scale! It is insane to look at the fact that this arc started on episode 43 of a 52 episode show. The burn is instant; the boys go up like a pack of matches, they are from the start so intertwined, such challenges to each other physically and mentally that it doesn’t seem rushed because of course they would be drawn to each other this way.

Pictured: what, do you ride men or someth

I feel like sometimes characters who take this role can be written in a way that comes across as a little too angsty and I don’t always connect with that but I don’t get that from Yuki. All of his reactions really come across as understandable for being in the situation that he’s in. He’s been hurt by something that he trusted and after stepping back from that learned some really terrible things about them. Of course he’s gonna be conflicted. He’s a stuffy little nerd. I really, really like the way they played him. I’m not going to bring my personal experiences in here, but believe me when I say: I get it! And I’m so incredibly impossibly proud of him for changing.

Pictured: things are starting to add up

They go even harder into the Destron/borg issues now – we have episode 49 where literally everything that could possibly happen happens: Kazami gets hacked and loses the ability to control his borg strength, there’s a girl who gets tricked into working for Destron without realizing that they’re bad, Yuki has to take the two of them and break back into his old Destron lab stomping grounds to be able to fix Kazami up… it’s nuts! How fucking fun is this?! Boys with so many issues but like, they have each other, you know? I’m breaking through the walls. I’m tearing them down. I’m renovating. Yuki’s all in now, that I think was maybe one of the most loyal things he could have possibly done for Kazami. Revisiting this place that brought you so much pain and using your skills to fix someone up and do good for them.

For as much as I’ve been talking up until now I don’t really know how to talk about the last two episodes. Kazami and Yuki get split up and have to infiltrate a Destron base separately because they’re on a pretty strict time limit and can’t really waste time meeting back up with each other. Yuki overhears a conversation where the Destron leader calls him a coward – after everything that he’s done, and he decides to go take control of the rocket that’s about to blast off and fly into Tokyo and detonate it elsewhere with himself inside it. In the second to last episode.

Pictured: a guy about to get his shit rocked

Now. Remember when I told you about how I love how repetition is used as a narrative device? Kazami’s story is bookended with people blowing themselves up to both save humanity and also to help him out. To contrast Hongo and Hayato though, Yuki’s… mostly human. I think Kazami makes a fair enough assumption at this point. Same one as you or I would probably make if our boyfriend blew up in front of us. This shit hits nuts for me. What a weird way to wrap back around and bring this thing full circle, giving us a man who has now once more lost someone who was very, very important to him, really one of the very few people who he has who can understand certain things about him, who was willing to give his life to help Kazami accomplish what was originally meant to be revenge for the family he lost at the start. This isn’t a happy ending to the show, this isn’t Taki flying back to the US with an emotional goodbye at the airport, this is Kazami just up and leaving and riding off into the distance. Not checking in with Tachibana or anyone, just going. You can’t really fault him. After everything that’s happened I’d need a moment of quiet and a little bit of time to think too.

From the beginning Kazami was warned about becoming a cyborg and wanted to do it anyway and got himself into a situation where he had to become one. Honestly I’m inclined to believe that he did expect being borged to be the end result of essentially sacrificing himself or at least for Hongo to be more sympathetic to his desire after he helped them out of that jam they found themselves in, but who’s to say… regardless, it’s a really fun show about a compounding tragedy and loss and challenging your views and a guy working through one hell of a lot.

Pictured: say the gender line, king

YEAH FUCK YEAH I RECOMMEND THIS ONE but maybe watch 1971 rider first i think you’ll get more out of it that way lol

BONUS CAPS FOR EVERYONE WHO MADE IT THIS FAR:

incredible special effects

they're doing it standing up

you know exactly what i'm getting at with these two

this one's just real good

>:|

okay that's all for real. BYE

#jumpscare warning for me writing with proper capitalization #official bugtransport 2023 media recap #i will not be reading any replies to this post thank you i'm ignoring it #get at me directly if you want to talk about it #rider roundup #kamen rider v3

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thora-jane · 2 years

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Wine Drunk pt iv (Matt Murdock x Femme Reader Angst)

(a/n) A promise is a promise! The second story posted today! I have a little bit better of an idea as to where this is going than I did when I posted the last chapter. Nevertheless, I hope you all enjoy this <3

Wordcount: 1093

Warnings: Drinking, Puking, Foggy snorts beer out his nose.

Summary: You go back on what you told Matt and decide to go to Josie's

You sat at Josie's with Foggy and Karen, focusing on the way your forearm would peel back from the smudged counter every time you raised your glass to take a drink.

You weren’t exactly lying to Matt. You really had no intention of going to Josie's with the others that evening. But after telling Karen what had happened, Foggy was unable to hold Karen back from pounding on your door and dragging you to Josie’s by the scruff of your neck.

“This is gonna be hell in the morning,” you whispered before finishing off your drink.

“Y’know sitting alone in your apartment crying would hurt more,” Karen insisted, pounding her palm on the counter before declaring with a smile, “I’m going to get you another beer and make you forget him.”

You only sighed, pretending to chuckle as Foggy punched you on the shoulder, “C’mon, (y/n), you’re a bad beyatch! You can’t be sad about some man.”

Smirking, you swirled the non-existent contents in your glass, “He’s also our best friend, Foggy.”

“Did I stutter? I said fuck ‘em! We can unpack complications later. But for now? We drink away our sorrows and pretend we’re all still at the height of our youth again,” He reached out and took a bottle from Karen, who had returned with another round of beers. Shit-eating grin plastered to his face, he raised his bottle above his head and made a toast, “To (y/n), the baddest bitch in town.”

You raised an eyebrow, barely lifting the cool green glass in your hand off the counter before Foggy forced his drink against yours. As you raised the rim to your lips, your only-semi-drunk state allowed for a few words to slip past, “God I wonder if he remembered that one time we almost hooked up.”

This sent beer rocketing out of Foggy’s nose, and Karen began a coughing fit that took nearly a minute to subdue.

“I’m sorry, what?!” Foggy slammed his glass down on the table, reaching for a forgotten napkin and blowing his nose.

You shrugged, “The night after your L and Z intern interview. Remember how we all went out for drinks? It was dark, and Matt offered to walk me home and-”

“Oh god…” Foggy gagged. Karen only smacked his shoulder before turning back to you, eyes wide.

“I mean, we were both a little tipsy and he asked if he could get a congratulations and I…” You paused, covering your face with your hands at the memory, “was feeling incredibly bold and told him to take one himself,” You peeked at your friends through your fingers, “Then he pulled me in and we kissed.”

“And you just kissed, right? That’s everything. Matt played the good Catholic Boy card and left then and there, right?” Foggy’s lips flattened to a thin line before he planted his fist against his lips and under his nose.

“He has a faint scar just between his left shoulder blade and left shoulder. Shockingly more fit than one would expect and really enjoys when you play with his hair,” The last bit came out of your mouth as more of a mumble. But even without hearing it it was enough to make Foggy lose his mind again. Karen shook him by his shoulders and groaned a `you're fine.’

“Please tell me it ended there.” Foggy pleaded, his face pressed to the counter.

“Elektra showed up the next day and spent the weekend in town, so yes,” You took a swig from your bottle, “But yeah. It didn’t matter anyway since we didn’t really go far. We kissed. We made out. Our jackets came off. His shirt came off. My shirt was about to come off before he pointed out that we may have had a few too many. I told him I was fine with it and he insisted that he not accidentally do anything to me that I’d regret.”

“Ever the gentleman,” Foggy said with a solemn and almost relieved nod.

“Speak of the Devil,” Karen whispered.

“What? Devil? Where?” Foggy’s head shot up from the counter. Your heart froze.

There was no way. He said he wasn’t going out.

But then again you said the same thing.

It didn’t help that she had her arms around him either.

Or that she was waving over at the three of you.

She had to have known. There was no way she didn’t know the way you felt for Matt. If Matt was so close with her he must have been telling her everything. You did your best to finish what you could of your beer, which still wasn’t much, and with barely swallowing the last sip you snatched your jacket from the back of your seat, “We’re leaving. Now.”

Foggy tried to stop you, but Karen followed close behind and grabbed him by the shoulder. She stood tall between you and where you’d have to pass Elektra and Matt, shoving Foggy in front of you so you were as blocked as you could be with only two people, “(y/n) start putting your jacket on and keep your head down,” she whispered, placing her hand on the small of your back as she stood taller than before. Her heels clicked on the grimey counter with every step, and you could see how maybe Matt would like her if Elektra weren’t around. You watched as she grinned from ear to ear and nodded at Elektra as the three of you sped past, you kept your head down and pretended to struggle with your zipper.

Before too long, you all stood in the cool night sky of Hell’s Kitchen. The alcohol coursed through your bloodstream, beer and wine mixing together leaving you extra dizzy. You stumbled to the side of the sidewalk as the world seemed to spin and began emptying out whatever sloshed in your stomach.

You stood there, heaving out, foul acidity burning your throat. A strong hand gently ran from the crown of your head to the base of your neck and shoulders, holding back any amount of your hair that would stay in place. After a minute of retching and agony, a napkin was offered towards your face, and you spat out the residue left on the back of your teeth and wiped your lips.

You expected to see Foggy, maybe even Karen. But instead, as you stood up again, still wobbly on your legs, you were greeted by Matt.

“Here,” he handed you a tissue from his pocket, “I should probably get you home.”

(a/n) And scene! Hopefully, I'll have the next chapter sometime next week. I am having a little bit more fun with this than I thought I would, and I hope YOU"RE all having fun remembering to TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND DRINK WATER because I love you and you have so much value on this planet <3

#matt murdock #daredevil #matt murdock x reader #matt murdock x y/n #daredevil x female reader #daredevil x y/n #daredevil x reader #netflix daredevil #daredevil x you #matt murdock x you

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belphies-wife · 3 years

Text

What Naps Are Like With Them (Everyone)

In celebration of my first post kinda blowing up, I wrote a little something for all the characters, including Luke! (platonically for him, of course)

Again, thank you guys for all the love on my Satan Reacting to Montero fic <3 I’ll be working on requests after this.

Also, no beta we die like Lilith.

»»————-　♔　————-««

Lucifer

➼ Never sleeps, e v e r

➼ His brothers would destroy the House of Lamentation in his sleep

➼Took a while to convince him to take a nap with you because of this

➼ His brothers listen to you more than they listen to their older brother, so you begged them to behave for a few hours so that their older brother can rest for once

➼ You will use your pact if you have to, just please let this man sleep

➼ You made sure to pick a day where you know Lucifer hadn’t slept the night before due to his workload

➼ Seriously, you had to talk to Diavolo about that

➼ You both got into your comfiest pajamas and played some soft classical music for ultimate relaxation

➼ You thought about taking a picture of hm while he slept

➼ He saw it coming and had you sleep facing away from him with his arms wrapped around you so you couldn’t turn around

➼ Smart bastard

➼ If you complain about it he’ll laugh at you

➼ Hey, at least you get cuddles

➼ Luci here looks so calm and peaceful while he sleeps, it’s adorable

➼ No wonder everyone tries to take a picture of him sleeping

➼ He’s a heavy sleeper, so you end up having to wake him up after a few hours

➼ He thanks you

➼ He’s well-rested and in a good mood for the rest of the day

➼ His brothers obviously take advantage of that

»»————-　♔　————-««

Mammon

➼ Unlike most of his brothers, he actually has a decent sleep schedule (most of the time)

➼ However, if you wanted to take a nap with him, he wouldn’t say no

➼ Well, he’d say no, but then say yes immediately after

➼ “Whaddya mean you wanna take a nap with me? Do I look like Belphie!?”

➼ Blushing like crazy while complaining, as usual

➼ “Fine, I’ll go nap with him, then.”

➼ “Oi! Come back here! I changed my mind, I wanna take a nap!”

➼ Tsundere baby

➼ Obviously, you tease him about it

➼ “Jealous, huh? I thought that was Levi’s thing.”

“Shut up! Are we gonna cuddle or not?”

“I said nap, not cuddle.”

➼ Cue the pout

➼ The definition of the 🥺 face

➼ Please love this child

➼ “I’m kidding, of course we’re gonna cuddle.”

➼ Usually a little spoon

➼ Unless he’s in a jealous mood

➼ If he is, he will hold on to you like his life depends on it.

➼ More teasing, obviously

➼ If you think about it, Greed and Envy are very similar

➼ Poor baby wants love

➼ New drinking game: take a shot every time I call Mammon a baby

➼ I shot of water, I know you’re dehydrated

➼ Anyways, naps with Mammon = cuddles

➼ Either you’re holding him to you or he’s holding you to him

➼ f o r e h e a d k i s s e s

➼ Mammon gets nightmares about what happened with Belphie sometimes, so lots of comfort cuddles

»»————-　♔　————-««

Leviathan

➼ “Levi, did you sleep at all last night?”

➼ Obviously not

➼ He was up all night binge watching the latest season of “The Magical Ruri Hanai: Demo Girl”’s spin-off series

➼ Why would you even ask?

➼ “Levi, did you stay up all night?”

➼ He looked away, a little embarrassed. “Uh, yeah.”

➼ “Levi, honey. You need to sleep. It’s not good for your health to be staying up so late.”

➼ Leviathan.exe has stopped working

➼ You’re worrying about him?????

➼ And you’re calling him honey?????

➼ Are you trying to kill him?????

➼ “You must be exhausted. Wanna take a nap?”

“Oh, uh. Yeah. I guess I could use a nap.”

“Alright. We should go to my room, since there’s more room on my bed than in your tub.”

➼ Wait you meant a nap together????

➼ You’re really trying to kill him.

➼ Usually, he’d make fun of you and call you a normie.

➼ But he was currently too busy dying.

➼ If somehow you managed to resurrect him and get him to your room to nap, then you’d know this shy boi is a little spoon.

➼ Does this really come as a surprise to anyone? It shouldn’t.

➼ He’s blushing like crazy the whole time.

➼ “Levi, if you can't sleep with me here, I can leave.”

“No!”

➼ He does sleep eventually.

➼ Sweet baby cuddles you in his sleep.

➼ Wholesome af

»»————-　♔　————-««

Satan

➼ As the most responsible one in the family, he has a pretty good sleep schedule, so he doesn’t normally take naps.

➼ However, if you ask him to, he’ll agree.

➼ If it makes you happy he’ll do it <3

➼ He’s not really touchy-feely and won’t initiate any cuddling.

➼ Dude that you asked to nap because you were tired and wanted to sleep.

➼ Nah bro, you just want cuddles.

➼ While he won’t initiate any cuddles, if you make it more obvious that you want some, he’ll give them to you.

➼ Big spoon

➼ If you want him to be the small spoon, he will, but he’ll be flustered af.

»»————-　♔　————-««

Asmodeus

➼ “Asmo, wanna sleep together?”

➼ Could you have made a poorer word choice?

➼ No, you could not.

➼ This boy literally made the lenny face.

➼ “Asmo, I meant a nap.”

“Well, I suppose that’ll satisfy me for now.”

➼ You then proceeded to smack him with a pillow.

“Hey! Don’t mess up my hair!”

➼ You had to wait for him to take off his makeup and change his clothes and stuff.

➼ It’s a process.

➼ Cuddle’s tf out of you.

➼ He’ll be the big spoon or the little spoon. It doesn’t matter to him, so you can decide.

»»————-　♔　————-««

Beelzebub

➼ Takes naps with Belphie a lot and thought it was cute that you also wanted to nap.

➼ Pre-nap snack first, though.

➼ Then he’s ready.

➼ Sweet boi will enjoy the nap whether he’s a big spoon or little spoon.

➼ If you’re happy, he’s happy <3

➼ You kiss his face a lot.

➼ He thinks you’re the cutest little human ever when you do that.

➼ I’d say soft Beel, but when is he ever not soft?

➼ Not counting the custard incident

➼ He Likes to kiss the top of your head while you sleep.

➼ He definitely snores.

➼ It takes some getting used to, but you’re not gonna let keep you from cuddling your big boi.

➼ It honestly feels really safe and comforting to just be wrapped up in his arms.

➼ Equally comforting to have his head resting against you.

➼ Overall just really soft.

»»————-　♔　————-««

Belphegor

➼ You don’t even need to ask. He’s the king of naps.

➼ Being around Belphie for an extended period of time makes you sleepy.

➼ You’re not sure if it’s because he’s sleep or if it’s because he has some sort of sleep-power.

➼ Any time you cuddle you end up taking a nap.

➼ Do I even have to say it?

➼ S m a l l s p o o n

➼ The smallest spoon.

➼ As the youngest, he’s the most spoiled, so he’s really really clingy and just expects you to drop whatever you’re doing at any given time to nap with him.

➼ I mean, you’d probably do it even if he didn’t expect you to.

➼ He does this adorable thing when he’s sleepy and he sees you nearby where he’ll go up to you and wrap his arms around you and rest his head against your shoulder and just say “Sleep, please.”

➼ You will stop whatever you’re doing no matter what and go up to the attic to nap with him.

➼ Not an exaggeration. It’s happened while Lucifer was talking to you before he he was p i s s e d.

➼ It was obviously intentional

➼ But how can you say no to his cute face?

➼ He seems to be able to keep you from having nightmares and you sleep 100x better with him than on your own

➼ Softest boi

»»————-　♔　————-««

Simeon

➼ While he may dress like a stripper, this man is an angel and is pure™

➼ Anything you want, you’ll get. How can he ever deny you a thing?

➼ He can’t.

➼ You want naps? You get naps.

➼ You want cuddles? You get cuddles.

➼ You want sleepy kisses? You get sleepy kisses.

➼ Hotel? Trivago.

➼ But seriously, sleepy kisses are definitely a thing.

➼ Especially forehead kisses.

➼ Big spoon. He likes to hold you.

➼ Sweet boy loves you so much 🥺

»»————-　♔　————-««

Luke (Platonically)

➼ Purgatory Hall has weekly movie nights, and they invite you over a lot to join them.

➼ You and Solomon have a very long list of human world movies you want Simeon to watch, but the poor man can’t figure out how Devilflix works for the life of him, so group movie nights are the only way.

➼ Not that any of you mind, of course.

➼ Luke begged Simeon to let him join you guys (he has a pretty strict bedtime)

➼ Simeon lets him occasionally if the movie is appropriate.

➼ Luke insisted on sitting next to you and sharing any treats he made that day.

➼ Poor baby ended up falling asleep not even halfway through the movie.

➼ Solomon obviously made fun of him.

➼ “Looks like it’s naptime for the little chihuahua.”

“Don’t tease him!” You say, defending Luke.

➼ At some point, Luke shifts so that he’s leaning against you in his sleep.

➼ You coo at how cute the ‘lil cherub looks.

➼ Aaaand then you proceed to fall asleep as well.

➼ You woke up the next day still on the couch. You were pretty confused since Simeon usually carries anyone who falls asleep to their bed (or the guest room, in your case).

➼ Then you realize Luke still asleep and wrapped around you.

➼ HE IS THE MOST PRECIOUS BABY EVER

➼ You assumed Simeon didn’t want to attempt moving one of you and risk waking the other so he just left you too

➼ Whatever it was, you went back to sleep with the little cherub snuggling you

»»————-　♔　————-««

Solomon

➼ Purgatory Hall sleepover!

➼ Everyone had already fallen asleep, so you asked Solomon if he’d be alright with you two sleeping together.

➼ Not a good idea.

➼ You’re both settled in his bed and you’re about to drift off to sleep when this silly little sorcerer decided to tickle you.

➼ You s h r e i k

➼ “Solomon!”

➼ “Keep your voice down, dear. You wouldn’t want Simeon hearing and getting the wrong idea, now. Would you?”

➼ The s m a c c you gave him though-

➼ “Can I sleep now, or are you gonna keep bothering me?”

“You know you love me.” He grinned.

“Well, duh. But I also love sleep.”

➼ He does let you sleep after that.

➼ You fall asleep first, and one look at your sleeping face and he falls in love with you all over again.

➼ You’re so p r e c i o u s.

➼ He held you close to him as you slept, pressing soft, featherlight kisses against our forehead and nose, careful not to wake you.

➼ He’s a bitch until you fall asleep, pretty much.

»»————-　♔　————-««

Diavolo

➼ It wasn’t intentional for you to fall asleep, really.

➼ You’d had a long day, and you had been sitting with the demon prince at his palace as he told you about his day over a cup of tea.

➼ It wasn’t like what he was saying was boring.

➼ No, it’s just that you were so tired, and the sofa you were sitting on was so comfy, and Diavolo was talking so much.

➼ It didn’t help that the tea that Barbatos had prepared was especially soothing.

➼ You couldn’t help yourself. You dozed off.

➼ Diavolo continued talking, and probably would’ve gone on for a long while without even noticing if Barbatos hadn’t cleared his throat and gestured towards your sleeping form.

➼ If it had been anyone else, he would have deemed it disrespectful.

➼ But it was you, and he had realized a long time ago that he was incapable of being upset with you.

➼ “It seems they’ve had a tiring day, my Lord. I suggest you let them rest.” Said Barbatos.

“Of course. I wouldn’t dream of disturbing them.” Carefully, he made his way over to you and pried the teacup from our hands so that you didn’t move and break it in your sleep.

➼ Then, he removed his suit jacket and draped it over you like a blanket.

➼ Not gonna lie, even Barbatos was a bit shooketh.

➼ He didn’t say anything, though.

➼ Diavolo kissed your forehead lightly and had Barbatos bring him the last of his paperwork for the day, which he finished quickly while remaining by your side.

➼ After that he picked up our still sleeping form and brought you to his room where he tucked you in.

➼ He sent Lucifer a text saying that you would be staying the night at the palace then went to sleep after answering a few emails.

➼ He snores loudly, but you somehow managed to sleep through it.

»»————-　♔　————-««

Barbatos

➼ Diavolo set up another palace retreat (because I said so)

➼ You had been assigned a room with Luke and Beelzebub that time.

➼ It went good at first, and everyone was sent off to sleep at around 10 p.m.

➼ At some point in the middle of the night, you awoke from a particularly nasty nightmare.

➼ You were more scared than usual when you woke up, since the room you were in was not your room at the House of Lamentation.

➼ It took a while for you to realize where you were and calm down, but even then you were to afraid to sleep.

➼ Slowly, you exited the room, careful not to disturb Luke and Beel.

➼ You made your way to Barbatos’ room and knocked softly.

➼ Briefly, you wondered if he was asleep, but then he opened the door.

➼ You silently panicked when you realized your hair was a mess and your clothing was rumpled from sleep, but your disheveled appearance didn’t seem to faze him.

➼ “Hello. I was just about to prepare for bed. Is something the matter?”

➼ Suddenly, you felt very, very silly to come to such an ancient, powerful being for help with a little nightmare.

➼ “Sorry, it’s nothing. I apologize for bothering you. I’ll leave.” You said, your cheeks flushing with embarrassment.

“You never bother me, my dear. Would you like to come in?” He asked, opening the door wider and stepping aside.

“Yes. I would like that.”

“Is something bothering you?”

You blushed. “I had a nightmare. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that. I know, it’s silly.”

“Of course it isn’t.”

“Can I... Can I stay here with you tonight?”

“If it would make you feel better, you may.”

➼ Barbatos tucked you in then sat next to you, gently running his hands through your hair. He began singing an old song in some ancient, forgotten language. His voice was soft and soothing as he sang, and you found yourself unable to stay awake even if you tried.

➼ “Goodnight, my dear.” He whispered, pressing a kiss to the top of your head.

»»————-　♔　————-««

Thank you so much for reading!

Request a Fic/Headcanon || Obey Me Masterlist

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makeste · 3 years

Text

BnHA Chapter 328: Pandora’s Box of Discourse

Previously on BnHA: DEKU TOOK A BATH.

Today on BnHA:

youtube

Also Naomasa grew a beard. Goddamn.

please let this be a cool chapter that plays nice with my ADHD lol

(ETA: lol I feel guilty because a lot of people hated this chapter, but I’m just happy there was a lot of stuff to make fun of, and also that I have another week to work on my backlog of meta posts since the kids were MIA.)

around one month ago?? ah, okay, so we’re gonna find out what was in that Tartarus security file huh

I love that they just randomly set the place on fire

was it necessary to do this in order to escape? no. was it a good idea to set the island they were occupying on fire while they were in the midst of still occupying it? uh. was it cinematic as fuck? fuck yeah

wow it’s a pervert!!

that’s so great that the villains set loose this fine fellow who I’m sure is definitely not a serial rapist. truly the LoV is so noble and misunderstood. they’re just trying to free society from its chains people

oh my god??!

SHANKED!!! oh my god I cheered for Stain before I realized what I was doing. time to have an identity crisis I guess

so he’s all “hey what’s going on.” which, while a respectable question, is something I personally would have waited to ask until I had put a bit of distance between myself and the fiery murder island. but that’s just my personal preference

Stain you really are tenacious I’ll give you that

“what’s the point of escaping prison if you’re not gonna be smart about it” well shit. anyways yeah you’re dead right, society is in the process of collapsing and the outside world is in total chaos, good call there

oh shit

I mean it’s not like we really expecting anything otherwise, but still. fucking brutal. I feel like these guys’ fates were decided the minute that one guy called AFO “scum” back in chapter 94. AFO is unmatched at getting long-term revenge

ahh, was it the security footage??

fdsdfk he’s still alive??

and he’s immediately launching into an inappropriately theatrical monologue even as the darkness closes in on him fdlfksjdlk. you know, was it ever confirmed that the other guy back in chapter 297 was Seiji’s dad? I’m just saying

very impressed that he’s still coherent enough to weigh the pros and cons before making the decision to gamble on giving this info to Stain, who at the very least has his own moral code and isn’t allied with AFO. it was definitely still a risk, but as we now know it was also the right call

what a weird alliance. so Stain tells him that he’ll give it to a just person, and the guy is all,

okay for real though I’m gonna need someone to run a DNA test on this guy. maybe it was some kind of cuckold situation?? the other guy had the family resemblance, but this guy absolutely 100% raised Shishikura Seiji and you are not going to convince me otherwise

anyway, so Stain is all,

PRISON GUARD: “???? ??????? what the hell. what the fuck does that fucking mean. I’m dying here, jesus christ, whatever man fuck you”

(ETA: I kind of feel like this might have been Stain’s last appearance in the manga, given all the fanfare. there’s not really much else he can do for the story at this point, and he seems to have gotten all the character development Horikoshi was planning on giving him. so if this really is it, hasta la vista and good riddance I guess.)

DWLFDKSLDK MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE

(ETA: I feel like this is meant to be evocative of that Sermon on the Mount painting, but in a really fucked up way lol.)

if it were me stumbling upon this scene I would just shake my head and walk right back into the flaming building. not getting involved in that mess. sorry not sorry. I’ll take my chances with the fire, especially given that it’s half-assed neutered BnHA fire lol

blah blah blah and so he decided to pass the info on to All Might -- HOT DAMN, HOLY SHIT

NAOMASA HOLY SHIT. THE APOCALYPSE LOOKS GOOD ON YOU, BOY

“I really like that facial scruff thing Aizawa’s got going on, I think I’m gonna get in on that” yes sir. “also thinking of ditching the tie in favor of the bulletproof vest look. also thinking of getting totally fucking jacked.” good lord. except I’m pretty sure that’s just body armor, but also I don’t care. anyway I should probably stop staring and actually read the fucking speech bubbles here lol

“All Might first handed this information over to Nao, and then went to see Deku, and then came back to Nao” thanks for that tidy little summary Horikoshi. we are capable of piecing events together in sequential order, I just want you to know that. but thank you

“so has Deku finally gotten a bath? also, sucks that Stain saved the day, but what are you gonna do” Nao I missed you so fucking much and didn’t even realize. how am I just now realizing that you are the perfect man

for a second I was gonna ask why Tartarus’s security systems would be cut off from the outside world, and then I remembered that’s a basic security control, and then I actually got impressed by how sensible that is. like, it’s been a while since I could genuinely say that the good guys (excluding class 1-A) did something smart. not that it helped them much in the end, but still

anyway so they’re talking about how AFO was able to coordinate the attack by communicating between his horcrux self on the outside and his ugly peanut-faced self on the inside

huh

okay you have my attention. I am taking notes here lol please continue

ah okay so he says that prior to Jakku, the transfer of information between him and his Vestige self was only one-way. but post-Jakku when Deku was in the hospital, he was able to tell what was happening inside the OFA Radical Lisa Frank Dead People Book Club Realm when he touched him. I feel like we established that before, actually. but he didn’t talk about how it actually felt, though

boy we already know this lol. yes AFO can talk with his horcrux self. and he can also communicate with his little bro in OFA too, let’s talk about that sometime why don’t we. what exactly does that imply, based on the rules we’ve established here

my god I cannot get over Naomasa and his fucking facial hair

no wonder All Might was in such a hurry to leave Deku and get back here

like I have no idea what this radio waves nonsense is but my god, people

that jawline. also so it’s a quirk, I see. except last I checked Deku didn’t have a radio waves quirk, so that doesn’t really explain his connection to AFO. but whatever, hopefully we’re at least getting closer to some kind of reveal here

(ETA: since I sometimes forget that other people’s lives don’t revolve around my theory posts, here are the two relevant links if you by chance want to know my thoughts about this.

Hagakure is still The U.A. Traitor™ regardless of whether Deku is passing information on to AFO through his psychic link, which he almost certainly is.

speaking of said psychic link, Deku is a horcrux.

just posting these now, because whenever trippy OFA stuff happens I tend to get an influx of theory asks. so hopefully this will be a bit of a time saver lol.)

-- wait, what

THAT’S what the recording was??!? holy SHIT. I genuinely was not expecting that. y’all wiretapped his fucking telepathy. fucking quirks, man. wild

AND THEY USED THAT POWER TO DETERMINE WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW, HUZZAH. GOOD SHOW

-- oh shit wait lol, except I forgot we’re not talking about 38 days from the present, we’re talking about 38 days from the date the conversation was recorded. heh. um

yeah that’s the face I would make too if All Fucking Might just casually told me we had eight days left until the end times

oh, pardon me. three fucking days

r.i.p. anyone who thought we were going to have another band arc sob. I sure hope Deku is enjoying that nap

(ETA: I realize people were hoping for a longer rest period here, but given that the man warned us all the way back in chapter 306 that we were entering the final act, you can’t really blame him too much when that turns out to be true. anyway but I do recognize that we’ve reached the point in the story where this kind of discourse is going to become a weekly occurrence, simply because there’s no possible way for Horikoshi’s actual endgame to line up perfectly with the variable headcanons of millions of fans, all of whom have wildly differing and in many cases contradictory expectations which can’t possibly all be fulfilled. anyway, so I’m already bracing myself for that lol. this coming year is going to be a wild ride.)

damn, U.A. out here looking like the motherfucking United Nations

-- is this U.A.?? I actually just realized, U.A. is four interconnected buildings, not two. wait holy shit is this Shiketsu?

wait holy SHIT

based on the overwhelmingly powerful vibes of bureaucratic incompetence, I’m thinking this really is the (future) U.N., or whatever organization it is that deals with international hero stuff

“just let them handle it themselves I’m sure they’ll be fine” yeah okay, thanks guys. appreciate it

wait oh shit did he say that it’s not just Japan?

soooo, what you’re telling me is that AFO is this close to bringing about the end of not just Japan, but the entire world, and you guys don’t think it’s a good idea to help the Japanese heroes stop him? so, genuine follow-up question: are you guys already planning your rich people exodus into space a la Wall-E, and that’s why you don’t give a fuck?? like, what??

omg international heroes

these guys are from World Hoodie Mission, right? is this Horikoshi’s way of reminding me to buy tickets

(ETA: and it worked too lol.)

WHO??? WHAT???

don’t tell me you’re introducing yet another badass new female character for me to fall in love with only to watch as you dismember them and/or blow them up, Horikoshi. I’m getting tired of playing this game my dude. don’t lie and tell me this time will be different. we’re not doing this again goddammit

noooooooooooooooooooo

god fucking dammit lmao. [sighs and rips the previous paragraph into shreds]

on behalf of Americans I apologize for our superheroes always being Like This

I also apologize because I love her already and I’m gonna be shameless about it. so fucking shameless you guys

is her fucking hair red white and blue. it is, isn’t it

this is the volume cliffhanger, 100% lol. it will take every ounce of Horikoshi’s willpower not to put her on the volume cover. he’ll have to settle for the spine or the inner cover this time because Deku VS his class 1-a superpals takes precedence. but it will be a close thing let me tell you

tbh it’s that smile that does it for me. she’s definitely All Might’s protege. get out there and show them how it’s done girl. and maybe call Salaam and BRD and see if you can’t convince them to play hooky from their governments as well. why not. world’s ending in three days you guys. “sorry, I’m busy this weekend” ain’t gonna cut it lol

so while I am not fully caught up with Vigilantes, I have read far enough to know that there’s an American hero named Captain Celebrity whose superpower from what I recall is being a humongous douchebag. and while I haven’t read far enough to know what happens to this guy, I can’t say I’m very disappointed to learn that he’s no longer the number one hero in the U.S. (actually, didn’t they kick him out and that’s why he moved to Japan to begin with?). anyway, so my thanks to Horikoshi for having a marginally higher opinion of Americans than Furuhashi, even though we have definitely not done anything to warrant said opinion lately, and you may have inadvertently opened the door to a pandora’s box of discourse lmao

(ETA: lol I went into the tags and they don’t disappoint. “why is she dressed like a flag” because she’s an homage to Captain America and Major Victory and literally every other character on this list. again, I apologize for fictional American superheroes being Like This. “oh boy another thicc waifu to make the fanboys happy” look, tumblr fandom never seems to have a problem thirsting over Dabi or Tomura or Aizawa or Nao, lol, I’m just saying. “where is Captain Celebrity” idk, probably murdered by the exploding bee cartel, let’s just be grateful for our good fortune and try not to Beetlejuice the man.)

anyway, so let’s see if Horikoshi’s recent character development with regards to making Mineta not terrible anymore will apply to other aspects of his writing as well. I know I was making light of discourse just now, but I do think the complaints about him introducing yet another new character at the 11th hour to be cannon fodder in the final battle are absolutely valid. and again, it wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t keep maiming/killing off his female characters one by one instead of developing them and letting them kick ass long-term. but that said, I will never complain about Horikoshi adding another female character to the series, regardless of how clumsy the attempt may be. go ahead and pander away, just give us more girl power lol

anyway so we’ll see how it goes, but I think I’m gonna be optimistic and let myself hope once again, even though I’m probably gonna regret it lol. it is what it is. she is standing on an airplane just chilling for fuck’s sake. I’m only human. anyway fingers crossed

#bnha 328 #stain (bnha)#tsukauchi naomasa #all might #stars and stripes (bnha)#all for one #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha #eta: how did I forget to type 'bnha' in the title sob

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snelbz · 3 years

Text

Tempting the Fates {Chapter 3}

Summary: It’s the final semester of Aelin Galathynius’ collegiate career and she is so beyond ready to be done. Her schedule is packed full of nursing classes and labs designed to test her knowledge and hone her skills for the real world and her “big girl” job. However, she needs one last elective to graduate, so she decides to study a subject she’s always been fascinated by: Mythology. Who would have thought that a class about gods and goddesses living complicated lives would end up complicating her own in such an unexpected way?

Word Count: 2807

Chapters will be posted every Wednesday.

Tempting the Fates Masterlist

Shelby’s Masterlist

Tara’s Masterlist

Poseidon

– God of the seas, earthquakes, horses and tidal waves

Aelin had moved past hurt.

Now, she was just pissed.

It was nearly ten o'clock after her second day of classes and she sat cross legged on the couch with Lysandra in her apartment.

Her roommate had been a worthy rant partner thus far. She’d kicked Aedion out and supplied Aelin with an endless supply of alcohol.

“It’s official. I’m sitting in your Thursday class.”

Aelin groaned, taking a long drink from her wine glass. “Don't remind me that I have to go back there, please. The thought of sitting through an entire semester with him as my teacher… Oh, gods.”

Lysandra refilled Aelin’s glass.

“You’ve done the hookup thing before,” Lysandra said, shrugging as she took a drink from her own glass. “Just pretend this is one of those situations and he meant absolutely nothing.”

“That’s impossible, for two reasons,” Aelin said, adjusting the pillow she had squished between her legs. She held up a finger. “One, it’s not like the regular hookup situation where I might see him across campus or in a bar and we can pretend we don’t know each other. This is my professor we’re talking about.” She took a very large drink of her wine and held up another finger. “Secondly, it was supposed to be a hookup, but then he turned out to be perfect and I just…” She let her head fall back against the cushions. “Do you think I just want him because I can’t have him?”

“Maybe,” Lysandra admitted, but she hadn’t ever been in a situation like this. She and Aedion had been inseparable since high school. “What does your gut say?”

“I don’t know, they’re still in knots from where he rearranged them with his huge dick,” Aelin replied, draining her wine glass.

Lysandra nearly sprayed her wine across the couch, but she knew Aelin was well and truly drunk if she was talking like that.

“So, he still means something to you, then?” Lysandra asked. “Even after you found out he’s your professor, and also a little bit of a dick, apparently.”

Aelin shot her a look. “No, I’m drunk off my ass because he means nothing to me. Have you not been listening?”

Lysandra rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’ve been listening. But, after two hours things just start to blur together and not make sense.”

Aelin hit her roommate with her pillow.

Lysandra only laughed. “Maybe sit and think on it for a few days, yeah? Maybe it’s new and exciting and he’s hot as hell, but all that will fade if it meant nothing.”

Aelin nodded, slowly, fiddling with the stem of her wine glass. “And if it doesn’t fade? If it actually meant something?”

“If it actually meant something, then he won’t be forgetting about you any time soon, either,” Lysandra said, sipping from her glass.

She was still on glass #1.

Aelin had lost count of how many glasses she had drained so far.

“Doesn’t make it any easier now,” Aelin said, that hurt creeping its way back in. “You should’ve seen him, Lys. This morning, at his apartment, it was just…perfect. Then when he saw me in class, he was a completely different person.”

“Have you tried to see this from his perspective, Ace?” Lysandra asked, standing and heading into the kitchen. She handed Aelin a cold water bottle when she returned, falling back onto the couch next to her.

“Of course,” she snapped, opening the lid. “And I get it, it’s a big deal, but it’s not like I’m underage. I’m twenty-one, not sixteen. It’s not like he broke the law.”

“No, but I’m sure there’s a bylaw somewhere in his contract that says Don’t fuck your students,” Lysandra drawled, tucking her legs between her.

Aelin mumbled, “I bet it doesn’t say exactly that.”

“No, I’m sure it’s more along the line of inappropriate misconduct, but if we’re getting specific, it wouldn’t be hard for me to find an example,” she replied, leveling Aelin with a stare.

“Calm your pre-law ass down, I get it,” Aelin sighed, drinking from the water bottle. “His aunt is the president of the university. I wouldn’t want him to get into any trouble with her.”

Lysandra’s eyes softened. “He probably just got scared. I hear he’s a new professor. This must be his first year here. Hell, if he’s as young as you say, this must be his first year anywhere.”

Luck. He’d gotten the job purely out of luck, out of his connections to the university, and here Aelin was, jeopardizing his career as soon as it began.

“I’m being a bitch, aren’t I?” She asked, quietly, before draining her glass.

“You have the right to be hurt,” Lysandra said. “I’m not saying you don’t have that right, because I’d be hurt, too. But, I definitely think that this is complicated as hell.”

Aelin nodded, and took a drink of water before pouring the last of the wine into her glass. “We’re going to need another bottle of this, Lys.”

“I would just take you to the bar,” Lysandra said, “but I wouldn’t want to risk you fucking any of the other faculty.”

Aelin’s eyes snapped to hers.

Lysandra sucked in her lips to stop her grin. “Too soon?”

Aelin nudged her best friend, unable to stop her sputtering laughter. “Bitch.”

Lysandra caught her before she leaned back across the couch and held onto her shoulders, hugging her tightly. “I know this sucks, Ace, and I know you liked him. But just give it time. Either you’ll move on, which I can always help with, or something will happen. It’s not like you won’t be seeing him every other day.”

She sighed, resting her head on Lysandra's shoulder. “I know… I know.”

Lysandra reached for the remote, turning the television on. “What would make you feel better? Sappy love story, trashy reality tv, or a horror flick?”

“Trashy tv,” she decided, if for no other reason than it would be easy for her to block out while she still wallowed in her own misery.

Lysandra did as she was told, refilling Aelin’s glass again, and she thanked her best friend.

All the while, Aelin wondered how pissed Rowan was, or if he was feeling the same way she was.

A knock on Rowan’s door around nine-thirty had him closing his laptop and throwing it open. He groaned when he found Lorcan on the other side, walking back inside and leaving his best friend to let himself in.

“Alright, fill me in on Little Miss Perfect you took out last night. She was all you could talk about this morning, and then boom.” He sat down on the couch next to Rowan, noticing the half empty bottle of bourbon and looked at him. “Radio silence for the rest of the day.”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” he muttered. “Shouldn’t you be going home to your girlfriend?”

“She’s out with Manon,” Lorcan said, blowing off the question. “I’m bored, so talk.”

Rowan sighed, pushing himself up to go into his kitchen. He came back a moment later, two glasses in hand. He supposed he couldn’t continue to drink out of the bottle with company.

After handing Lorcan a half-filled glass, Rowan said, “It’s just not going to work.”

“You decided that quickly,” Lorcan muttered, his eyes remaining locked on Rowan. “Did you google her after she left? Find something cringeworthy?”

Rowan sipped from his glass. “She’s just not who I thought she was, that’s all.”

Lorcan scoffed. “You’re being vague.”

Rowan shrugged. That seemed to be the only answer he was going to give him.

“So what?” Lorcan asked, crossing an ankle over his knee and swirling the contents of his glass. “She lied and you caught her?”

“No, she didn’t lie,” Rowan said, dragging a hand down his face. “But it can’t happen. So it won’t.”

Lorcan raised one dark eyebrow. “First you say won’t, now you say can’t.”

Rowan emptied his glass. “What about it?”

“Well, which one is it?” He asked, leaning back. “Those two have very different meanings.”

“It can’t and it won’t,” he replied, giving Lorcan a pointed look.

Lorcan snorted, but took a drink from his own glass. “You act like she’s one of your students.”

Rowan didn’t say a word. He only stared at his closed laptop.

It took Lorcan a few seconds to understand Rowan’s silence. And a few more before he figured out how to make his mouth work.

And when he did, he started laughing.

“Are you kidding me, Whitethorn?” He asked, clutching his stomach. “You fucked your student?”

“Fuck off,” Rowan muttered, refilling his glass.

Lorcan was hardly able to breathe. “It was your first day at your first big boy job, and you already found yourself in bed-.” His words faded away as his laughter consumed him.

“It’s not like she’s some freshman,” Rowan snapped. “She’s about to graduate. Twenty-one. I just…” Rowan groaned as his face fell into his hands. “Someone had recommended the bar to me and told me the faculty hung out there a lot. I just assumed she was one of them, since she was the one to suggest the place.”

“Hate to break it to you,” Lorcan continued, still laughing. “But, people in their twenties don’t often land jobs at renowned universities. You’re the exception.”

Rowan continued to drink.

“Alright, alright,” Lorcan continued, taking a deep breath. “You’re five years older than her, so what? I’m four years older than Elide. Once you both hit twenty, age is just a number.”

Rowan shot him a look. “She’s a student, Lor. Maeve will fire me in a heartbeat over any sort of misconduct. This…” He just shook his head. “This position is a once in a lifetime opportunity that I probably shouldn’t even have. I can’t ruin it.”

Lorcan knew full well how harsh Rowan’s aunt could be. Before she’d become president of a prestigious university, she’d been the dean at the boarding school he and Rowan had spent their adolescence at. “So either move on or be careful and don’t let her find out.”

Rowan blinked at his friend. He was being so casual about this, when Rowan was freaking out both inside and out, which had required a two hour gym session earlier to calm his nerves.

Lorcan sighed and set his glass down. “Look, I really don’t see the issue here. She isn’t using you to pass the class, right?”

The thought hadn’t even occurred to Rowan, but he remembered the look of pure and utter shock on her face when they’d seen each other in the classroom. “No, it’s a basic gen ed. Plus I really don’t think she’d ever do that.”

Lorcan nodded. “Right. There are much tougher classes she could try and sleep her way through.” At Rowan’s simmering look at his choice of words, Lorcan held up his hands in placation. “I’m just saying, make sure she’s actually doing her homework and studying for her and don’t let Maeve find out.”

Rowan hesitated, but when his lips opened, nothing came out.

He liked Aelin. He really, really liked Aelin. And, yeah, it had been much more than a hookup. When he’d woken up that morning next to her in bed, he felt a sense of peace and satisfaction that he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

Then again, the way he’d snapped at her that morning, knowing that she had only said what she had out of anger - even if she had been correct - would be difficult to come back from.

Rowan had completely shattered her. He saw it in her eyes before she left.

“I don’t know,” Rowan said, at last.

Lorcan groaned before pounding back his drink and pouring himself another. “You’re always going to be the one to stand in the way of your own happiness, Whitethorn.”

He refrained from saying anything. Lorcan had always been the one to hop from girl to girl, while he had always been the one in a committed relationship. After his last relationship had…ended, he hadn’t wanted anyone for a while.

Aelin was the first spark he’d felt since.

“You’re into her,” Lorcan said, staring up at the ceiling to avoid any sort of eye contact while he said something nice. “I can tell. And, if you don’t go for it, you’re going to regret it.”

Rowan knew he was right.

Of course, he was right.

And yet, this job was the first job he had been granted in his field since graduating three years prior with his degree in mythology. Yeah, he may have gotten it because of Maeve, but that didn’t make it any less important to him.

He had the chance to get students excited about something he loved, something he was passionate about.

“Go home to your woman or shut up and turn on the TV,” Rowan muttered, downing the contents in his glass.

Lorcan only snorted and grabbed the remote, fulfilling Rowan’s wishes.

Aelin awoke the next morning with a slight headache and the same dull ache in her chest.

Knowing she needed to move, workout the bad vibes, she tossed up her hair and put on her workout wear before jogging to the gym.

She was still regretting signing up for even one eight am classes, and was thankful her Friday’s were free. She was looking forward to some much needed sleep, which was a lost cause right now.

When she was packing her gym bag, she decided to go straight to class after a quick shower, so she tossed it into a locker after she arrived, locked it up, and put her ear buds in.

The gym was still pretty empty this early, since it wasn’t even eight yet, and most people were too focused on their own workouts to pay attention to those surrounding them. Aelin was grateful for the distraction the gym would provide, and for the physical outlet, as well.

She was just finishing up a mile run on the treadmills when she felt eyes on her. She could tell she was being watched, but didn’t want to look around. Whether it was someone ogling her from across the room or someone from one of her classes, she wasn’t in the mood to make small talk and made her way over to the machines, starting on her legs first. She cranked her music up and kept an eye on the time on her watch.

When there was about forty-five minutes before her first class, she put the free weights she’d been using back in their home and turned to head to the locker room for a much needed shower.

And found who had been watching her during her workout.

Green eyes bored into her own and Aelin felt a blush rising in her cheeks that had nothing to do with the amount of energy she’d exerted this early in the morning.

Ignoring the voice inside of her head, Aelin stopped in front of Rowan, and nodded. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. His t-shirt clung to him, and it was a fact that Aelin could not ignore.

“I was just going to get ready for class,” she said. “Excuse me.”

She swept past him, but his voice pulled her up short. “Aelin.”

She stilled, and slowly turned around to meet his gaze.

“About yesterday,” he began, rubbing the back of his neck. Aelin found the gesture somewhat charming, although she wouldn’t admit it. “I’m sorry. I…didn’t handle the situation right. It all took me by surprise and I reacted poorly. I’m sorry.”

“S’okay,” she said, looking away from him, down at her feet. “I said some things I didn’t mean. I’m…not proud of it.”

He shook his head. “Let’s just…pretend all of it didn’t happen, yeah?”

She swallowed roughly. “All of it?”

Rowan sighed. “Just because we apologized doesn’t change anything, Aelin. You’re still my student.”

She nodded, not looking at him. “Right. No. I get it. I have to get ready for class.”

Making to slip around him, she got two steps away before his hand wrapped around her wrist. “Aelin, I’m… I’m sorry. I wish it wasn’t— I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

Daring to take a chance by looking back at him, it nearly destroyed what was left of her when she saw the sincerity in his eyes. “But wishing doesn’t change anything, does it?” Aelin pulled her wrist free. “I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

Rowan said nothing, but she saw that her shot landed in his eyes.

She shook it off, though, hurrying away, toward the showers.

Aelin knew one thing was for certain: no matter how much she cared for Rowan Whitethorn, there would never be anything between them.

Even if she wanted there to be.

#snacmc ttf #tempting the fates #rowaelin ttf #snacmc collab #throne of glass #rowan whitethorn #aelin galythinius

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stellocchia · 3 years

Text

So, I once made a post about c!Tommy and c!Dream’s relationship throughout season 1 (which you can find here), but today I was thinking, why not do the same for the Exile Arc?

There are some people that still don’t seem to have a comprehensive idea of what actually went down during that time (either because they joined the fandom afterwards or haven’t watched it at the time) so I’ll try to do that here. I’ll cover the first 2 streams here, and then continue in the next part because this is gonna be way too damn long otherwise...

As always I’ll be talking only about the characters and the roleplay from here on out and also I’ll be touching on some very heavy topics under the cut (such as gaslighting and abuse). Also this is gonna be another one of my Overly Long Analysis, so... you know... be warned of that.

I’ll be going through this vod by vod, so It will be so long... God why do I always do this to myself?

Let’s start with TommyInnit Is Exiled From The Dream SMP... which is the vod when Tommy actually get’s exiled.

So, the exile scene per se has been covered a 100 times over, but, right after Tubbo asking Dream to “please detain and excort Tommy out of my country” Dream yeets Tommy off the walls and then he immediately establishes the general idea of how it’ll be in exile: “I don’t think you wanna die Tommy. You need to- to listen to me”.

Also it is to be noted that in this “exile” time and time again Dream establishes arbitrary rules that were most certanly not meant in the initial sentence (which is why it’s much more of a kidnapping then an actual exile). Starting from before they even leave L’Manburg completely. In fact when they are still in the vc with the others and still just down from the obsidian walls, Tommy and Dream have this exchange:

“Do I have any time to speak words? What can...” “NO. NO. NO. NO!” “what the...”

And then right after (just after leaving the vc):

“Do you have food?” “Yeah...” “Good, we’ll be going a long while still” “Am I not allowed- well surely- surely I’m only exiled from L’Manburg-” “Oh, no no no. You’re exiled from everywhere that’s been touched”

The sentence was only for him to be exiled from L’Manburg. Dream theoretically only had authority over the Greater Dream smp in any case, so how come immediately Tommy’s “sentence” becomes being exiled from “everywhere that has been touched”? What authority did Dream have to exile him from the Badlands? Or the Holy Grounds (considering those are widely considered neutral)?

This is from right after Ghostbur joins them:

“Well, I don’t- I don’t have to come with you” “Well, I mean, I’ll kill you” (...) "I don’t have to follow you! I don’t-” “Tommy! Then I’ll just kill you. What happens if I kill you?” “I die...”

Again, technically Tubbo only asked Dream to escort Tommy out of his country, not all the way to his place of exile. Tommy here is right, he is exiled, he is not supposed to have a jailor going with him, he is not supposed to be imprisoned. All he supposedly had to do was get off the lands he wasn’t allowed into and then he’d be good. Of course Dream’s plans were different there.

Also the trend of constantly undermining anything Tommy is feeling at any given moment sure doesn’t stop with the Exile Arc!

“No, no! I don’t want to head anywhere! I wanna to go back! I wanna go back!” “Fine fine, we’ll head this way then. It’s fine, this is fine” “I don’t wanna go!” “Tommy come on...”

Honorable mention to Dream talking about the first time he exiled Tommy:

“Do you remember- this is actually funny! Do you remember the first time you ever joined the server? And uhm... you got exiled? By me?” “Yeah?” “It’s kinda like that, except now if you don’t listen you die”

And the conditioning begins all the way here, with Dream trying to decide Tommy’s emotions for him:

“Oh... I hate you” “*laughs* Okay Tommy, you don’t hate me” “No, no I definitely do” “Noooo, you don’t hate me”

Cue Dream just blowing up Tommy’s second Summer Home after he explained that it was supposed to be a safe haven for him and Tubbo. Also note that Dream is already getting rid of any mob attacking Tommy even if at this point he still had armour and weapons to defend himself. I talked about this before, but Dream does seem to want Tommy to be as dependent on him as he is on Tommy, which is why during exile he made him dependent on him for protection/safety and company and in prison for food. Also Ghostbur going: “I don’t think this man is very nice...”, thank you Ghostbur, I wish you could remember that, but you’re trying your best and I appreciate it...

“How long is- how long am I exiled for? When can I just go back?” “You can’t (...) if you go back you die”

Again, not Dream’s decision to make. Tubbo was the one exiling Tommy meaning that, if Tubbo actually had the decision power in that istance, Tubbo was the one who should have decided when he could come back. Also, again reiterating the point from before:

“I thought I was only banished from L’Manburg, that was the deal, not the entirety of the smp-” “Oh no. No you’re banished far enough where they don’t see you”

Also, a little look into Tommy’s mentality here:

“Tubbo said he wasn’t thinking with emotion, but with reason, but: what the fuck is the point if there isn’t any- any emotion?!”

This is honestly why he is Dream’s exact opposite and probably why he finds him fun, while Tubbo is irrelevant to him. Tommy thinks emotions should always be taken into account when making decisions and he values sentimentality over everything. Dream is the opposite, to him emotions are irrelevant and sentimentality is a weakness. Tubbo is a bit of both, which makes his clash of ideologies with Dream a lot less evident.

Anyway, they get to the island and Dream builds Tommy a dirt shack for him to set his spawn into. And then there is the first istance of Dream taking all of Tommy’s stuff (building blocks and food included) and blowing it up. Which, again, is in no way an actual exile condition. Tommy is in jail basically. He got kidnapped and now he is in jail. Also right after that Dream gives them food and obsidian (of course acting like he is doing them a big favour, when he actually just created that need), which Tommy bromptly refuses, later burning the obsidian.

Also Dream’s parting words here are: “I’ll see you never”. Which couldn’t be less true! There is quite a bit more after that, of Tommy and Ghostbur settling in, finding a ruined portal with some armour and the village nearby and Techno visiting, but this is about c!Dream and c!Tommy and it’s already incredibly long as is, so maybe I’ll talk about everything else another time...

Onto the next one: Tommy Is Alone in Exile with Dream...

This stream starts off with Bad visiting Tommy to give him a few presents (which consist of Chirp, 2 diamonds, an enderchest, and almost dead diamond pick with silk touch, some coocked chicken some bones and a few stacks of oak wood logs). Also Tommy sees Logsteshire for the first time. Then Dream arrives and he is not happy about the present (something something, having other people giving Tommy useful stuff would make him less reliant on Dream). Also Bad seems to be slightly scared of Dream since he immediately tells Tommy that he should not say that any of the stuff he gave him was from him. Anyway, Dream destroys everything, but Tommy, with Bad’s help, manages to save Chirp. Here’s their exchange in this scene of course:

“Tommy?” “Yes! Yes?!” “Do you have uh... something you wanna put on the floor here?” “Yes *throws in 3 red concrete blocks*” “Anything else Tommy?” “No! You’re evil by the way, you’re an evil man-” “Come on... I know there is something else you wanna drop down here...” “No there-... *gives disk to Bad* I don’t reckon there is!” “Okay are you sure...?” “Yes!” “Alright... how about uh- how about your armour Tommy?” “No this is- I actually earned this myself” “I know you did! Just drop it in the hole Tommy” “No, no! You can’t just come and demand things from me! I’ve been exiled, I’ve done your shit! What- what do you mean-” “Tommy~” “What?” *Dream hits Tommy with an enchanted netherite axe* “Drop them down~” “Hooooo okay okay okay!”

So, in case anyone was wondering, physical abuse is there as well. And this is fully depicted as physical abuse. Like, normally, with this being Minecraft, it is implied that violence is generally inconsequential, here though c!Tommy reacts to it clearly in pain and shock. There is no doubt there.

Sapnap arrives at this point as well. After that Dream makes it a point that Tommy cannot have the enderchast that Bad gave him because you can never have enough random arbitrary rules when kidnapping someone apparently!

“Why are you here? Why are you here? What- what could you- what could you possibly want more from me? You’ve tortured me-” “I’m just! I’m just... keeping an eye on you Tommy”

I’ve highlighted this because, considering the last time Dream was there he said he would never see Tommy again, Tommy’s confusion here is more then understandable. But of course Dream acts like it’s obvious that he would be there and that it’s necessary to make sure that Tommy is not “up to no good”. Also, another extremely important exchange:

“You’ve exiled me you stupid manipulative green bastard!” “Yeah I know! I know! And you know why I did that” “Yes? Yes?” “No, you know why” “Why?” “Because you don’t listen to me ever. You’re the only person who doesn’t ever listen to me (...) listen, you are like a little annoying bug in my room and it pisses me off so I take you and I put you outside and that’s what I did. And now I’m just making sure that you stay outside”

So... the bullshit about this being about George’s house is out of the window by the first proper exile stream. Also Dream goes in the ever increasing list of villains who, if annoyed enough, will reveal all their evil plans to the protagonist. Like Tommy screaches enough and Dream will immediately go in evil monologuing mode...

“So what do you actually want from me then?” “Well nothing, I’m just here to talk to you. Tommy, we’re still friends ok? Just because I exiled you doesn’t mean we’re not friends-” “Just because I killed your friends and family doesn’t mean we can’t be bros...” “Well, it’s true!”

Ok so, it’s confirmed that Dream would still go on with this “friendship” facade even if he killed Tubbo or Wilbur then. Also:

*Tommy sees a creeper* then in the most monotone tone ever: “Help me” Dream sprinting from the other side of the cave: “TOMMY!”. I love this scene and I love this two dumbasses (and I mean the cc’s here). Also, to go back to the serious stuff: once again Dream is the one killing every single mob around Tommy because he blew up all his means for defence. Also Bad and Sapnap are still there as well, but Dream is always the on interveening (mostly because he is the one following Tommy around more closely). I’ll have a few of the more interesting quotes here afterwards until the next interesting scene:

“If I had 8 legs I would fuck you all up” “Oooh, no you wouldn’t” (Dream de-valuing Tommy’s anger once again)

“Stop following me” “NO” “Well okay then...” (honestly this was just funny...)

“Can I call you Wilbur? Or is it Ghostbur...?” “You can call me whatever you like” (for those saying that Ghostbur not correcting Tommy was weird)

“Alright Wilbur, what do you need an enderchest for? I might make an exception but-” “We- we need it so that we can access our stuff from the old world, the old world” “But not to go back” “How would we be able to go back with an enderchest?” “Well I don’t know maybe there is stuff in there that’s... better” “Tommy do you have anything that could get you to go back? In the enderchest?” “A boat? What’d you mean?” “Yeah to be honest we just need wood to get back, it’s not really-”

Here we have Ghostbur poking holes in one of the new rules that Dream added that day. As a matter of fact, why would an enderchest be dangerous? Tommy mostly keeps sentimental stuff in there and a bit of iron. Still that’s the whole point: Dream is trying to get Tommy under his control so he needs to bring him to a point where he’ll listen to his orders even when they don’t make any actual sense. Also, btw, Dream doesn’t actually give them an enderchest after this exchange.

“Do you want to come with me Tommy? Do you want to come with me and visit the old library?” “No no no” “Yes! Yes please!” “No he wants to stay here with me” “I don’t. I definitely don’t” “He does! He’s just trying to be nice to you Wilbur. He’s trying to be nice to you” “I’m not Wilbur, I want to come with you” (way to gaslight an amnesiac ghost...)

“So how long is Tommy supposed to be here?” “Like a week?” “Oh, a week is not bad!” “*laughing* No he’s here forever” (Like goddamn, imagine if every minor griefing was punished with permanent exile!)

“M-maybe like- does Tommy gets like visitations? Like once every month he get’s to go to L’Manburg-” “No! No no no” “No visitation, huh?” “No visitation” (well, let’s thank Sapnap for trying...)

So, after this Tommy gets his plan to go through the Nether and find a quick way to and from L’Manburg to, perhaps, sneak in unnoticed at some points. Dream “allows” him here to go to the Nether (even though technically there is no reason why the exile would extend to there as well), so they get to work on fixing a ruined portal. “Did you know, I apparently blew up a nation and killed everyone” (thank God we have Ghostbur, he makes everything better). One thing I want to note though: at this point Tommy still kills the mobs attacking him when Dream is not stalking him and doing it for him, which is kind of nice. We are still at the first exile stream though...

“Can I go back for like an hour and see all my friends?” “No, they can come here though. I-I mean Tommy, I think- I think that someone could come here and visit you, but you can’t ever go back. Like I-I don’t have anything against people coming here and visiting you if they want to. They don’t HAVE to, but they can if they really want to” “Tommy think of it this way: whenever you’re in prison you can’t just go and visit your friends, but they can come and visit you” “They can come and visit you, yeah, that’s actually a very- that’s a perfect analogy”

I wonder why the best analogy for Tommy’s situation is not a f*cking exile analogy, but actual prison. Maybe because he is confined to one place, not allowed to keep any personal items and never allowed to go back? Also they actually get to Nether hub at this point and there is the famous scene with Tommy looking at the lava:

A curious thing about this scene (aside from being a clear indication of the beginning of Tommy’s depressive spiral) is both that Dream didn’t seem to particularly care about Tommy dying up until now (and in the future as well) as long as he is the one to kill him. Meaning that he seemed fine with it as long as he had control over it. And yet at the end there he agrees with Tommy’s statement of “it’s never my time to die” which kinda makes me think that Dream by this point was already entirely set on his idea of Tommy needing to be alive for Dream to control the whole server. Tommy and Dream head back to Logstedshire after this scene.

*Tommy looks at the lava while standing very close to the edge* “I’ll go back through just to... check and see” *Dream hits Tommy away from the edge* “Come on” *Tommy goes back to the edge and Dream pushes him away again, this time covering the hole* “It’s not your time to die yet Tommy” “It’s never my time to die” “That’s true”

“Home sweet home...” “Home sweet home. I think it’ll be good! People might visit you all the time, I mean, I can visit you! It’s- it’s actually fun to come here! It’s a little bit- it’s a change of scenery, you know?” “It’s not fun to be stuck here” “Well... you’re not ’stuck’ it’s your vacation home!” “Can I go back? I’m ready...” “No but you can leave this area, you can go somewhere else. This is just- like, I took you far away, you can go further if you want”

So, if anyone is wondering, this is not, in fact, Dream giving Tommy more freedom. Especially considering that when Tommy does leave Logstedshire later on Dream literally hunts him down, so no, that was never an option. What Dream is doing here is make himself sound benevolent by comparison by telling Tommy that the only other options he has are worse since they are even further away.

“I’m here for a good time, not for a long time” (more hints towards Tommy’s depressive spiral)

“Guys how do you know when it’s too much?” (and again)

“Can I go and see the tree?” “Tommy, you can’t go and see the tree” “Dream why don’t you let him just- it’s not in L’Manburg! Why don’t you let him just see the tree and then escort him back?”

Ghostbur my beloved, pointing out holes in Dream’s rules all the time. Something tells me that’s the reason why Dream tried to kill him later on...

Anyway! This concludes this first post because it’s... Oh fuck this is REALLY long.... welp! I’ll make the others in the next few days!

#dreamwastaken #tommyinnit #ghostbur #dream smp #exile arc #tw abuse #tw manipulation #c!dream critical #character analysis #relationship analysis #this was supposed to be just all the quotes of c!dream being an asshole during the exile arc #then I went 'how about I write a couple of my thoughts in as well?'#and mistakes were made...#long post #my post

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