#the only way to follow up my real time fucking odyssey with this show

[pulsingvoid]

not negating anybody's experience i know black sails is outstanding regardless of how or when or how quickly you watch it. but also, as a gay person who watched it in real time, you really had to be there. they introduce anne bonny and you know your pirate history so you KNOW she's a girlliker. she has a moment with max but youre not sure where it's gonna go. because it's 2014. you wait over a year for 2x01 and she and max fucking obliterate you with the sword drop kiss scene. all anybody is talking about in the tags is vaneeleanor. a few weeks later 2.05 drops and flint is not only textually gay and kissing a man but he is waging war on england, on all of civilization for taking away his male lover. you find this out after investing fourteen hours on this show that have spanned over a year and a half in your real life. not to mention the miranda stuff and silver's arc and mr scott and madi and the death march that seasons 3 and 4 feel like when you have no inkling of how it's gonna end. but you stick with it regardless because it's good and besides it's 2014-2017 and the only genre show with gay people in it is fucking... the 100? lol anyway. more gay people flock to black sails between seasons and the tag becomes more about the gay shit than vaneeleanor, thank fucking god, finally. you all dread the last season. you brace yourselves for the worst. you thank the stars this show airs weekly because watching even just two episodes together is too overwhelming. 4.08 airs. you cry. 4.09 airs. you cry. 4.10 airs. your life will never be the same. you cry so hard you catch a fever and have to stay in bed all week to recuperate. you know this was a once in a lifetime experience never to be repeated again but you can't help but hold every other show to this impossible standard.

#black sails #i cherish this experience so much #i never rewatched. i had seen each episode exactly once shortly after it aired and never revisited it because it was so dense #and unique and overwhelming #i never rewatched‚ that is‚ until i showed it to my girlfriend #and not to be a wifeguy but it was such a special experience rivaled only by the winter she sat me down and showed me all of twin peaks #watching with someone you Love that Gets storytelling the exact same way you do comes with its own warmth and excitement #the only way to follow up my real time fucking odyssey with this show #i moved CONTINENTS between seasons.

[offsidekineticist]

And now we take a breath, because Giliys needs to figure out how to get Theo home, and even he needs a break from angsting every now and then. Here's part 4 of the (Completely Platonic!) Breakup arc.

Interlude

The Temple of Aroden in Rego Cader is a fucking wreck, but in comparison to the rest of the district it's prime real estate. The place has been abandoned for decades–maybe even since the death of Aroden–so there's a thick layer of grime on everything. The altar is gone, probably stolen, and the pews are rotting. The glass has been taken from the stained glass windows, and the gaping holes that remain in their place have been boarded up with wooden planks that are also half-rotted. The sacking of the temple is so complete that you can only tell whose temple it was because Aroden's holy symbol was chiseled into the floor–it was probably leafed with gold once upon a time. The gold is long gone, of course, along with the tiles that probably used to cover the rest of the floor, but they couldn't steal chisel marks. Not yet, anyhow.

"Where have you been? What part of 'emergency' was unclear?!" Qweck hisses at you when you finally arrive, and you scowl at her. 

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to travel with this fuckin Reclamation bullshit going on?" you demand. "Fuckin altar boys have the ports locked up, and every city in the plains is locked down. I had to detour to fuckin Absalom to find smugglers who would take me anywhere near here, and that meant stopping in every Garundi port between here and Absalom, and then I had to figure out a way to get into this horror show of a district–"

"Alright, yes, you are very brave and strong, Giliys, thank you for enduring this odyssey for us," she interrupts. "Now please come over here and look at our plans."

"Plans for what?" you ask as you follow her through the sanctuary. "And who's 'us?' You still haven't told me what the fuck I'm doing here."

"Theoven Derenge," she says, "the children's librarian at the Brastlewark Public Library, has been arrested by the Order of the Rack. They're holding him in Citadel Rivad."

Your brain seems to freeze for a moment. And then it goes into overdrive. They got Thay. You don't understand how–you were the only connection he had with any resistance cells. He did what he could to support your work with the Bellflower Network, but that was as direct as he was willing to get. "I've had a hand in raising so many of Brastlewark's children that I shudder to think what would happen if the powers that be ever felt they had to purge my influence from the city," he explained once. Not even Qweck had known he was involved in resisting Thrune in any capacity–hell, she didn't even know you and Theo had met. You were the only one who knew, and you certainly didn't tell anyone, so–

Does he know that?

You feel the blood drain from your face and your stomach turn over. You were the only one who knew. You know you didn't betray him–but does he? Is he sitting in Rivad, cursing your name because he thinks you're the one who sold him out? He must be–what else could he think? In his eyes you're devil-worshiping scum. He wouldn't be surprised to find out paladins can smite you. Betrayal isn't much of a stretch from there–you did it to every one of your victims after all, why not him?

"Giliys? Giliys!" Qweck's voice startles you out of your thoughts. She's glaring at you, her arms crossed and hip canted. "Could you at least pretend to care that the fate of an innocent man is at stake?"

"Well, excuse me for being confused about why the fuck the Rack would drag a children's librarian halfway across the country for interrogation."

"He had banned books."

In other words, his paranoid insistence of keeping his very illegal collection on his person at all times finally bit him in the ass. Shit, this means the Rack is probably keeping his mom's bag, too, doesn't it? He'll be heartbroken over that if you can't get it back for him.

"Hold up–doesn't your king have a deal with dear old Abby that keeps the Rack out?" You ask, the thought occurring to you suddenly. She shrugs, just as lost as you are.

"It didn't apply here I guess? They were looking for someone specific. I assume Thornfiddle let them in as a show of good will and just didn't expect that they'd arrest someone quite so beloved."

Looking for someone specific, and left when they grabbed Thay. It certainly sounds like someone tipped them off about his books. Yeah, Thay probably thinks you sold him out. Hell, you'd think you'd sold him out if it wasn't for you…uh…being you.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

"So you can probably guess where this is going," Qweck continues, oblivious to your thoughts. "There are three of us already willing to do something about this, but none of us have ever done anything like this before, and…we…need your help."

It almost sounds like it was physically painful for her to say that. You put a hand to your ear. "Sorry, I didn't catch that–I'm middle aged, now, you know–could you say that again?"

She closes her eyes and sighs, and you can tell she's praying or reciting mantras or whatever shit she does when she's worried she might crap out the stick up her ass. "I need your help," she repeats, and your eyes widen on their own. She really is desperate.

Of course she's fucking desperate! Someone she loves is in Citadel Rivad, you fucking asshole.

You drop your hand from your ear. "Well, I guess if you really need me, I can lend a hand." You cross your arms. "You said there were three of you?"

Five minutes later you're struggling not to gape at this crew made of, apparently, three of Thay's favorite students, because, gods, Thay likes the weird ones. The first, obviously, is Qweck–the gnomish devotee of a god obsessed with self-control and discipline even though she was literally born bleaching. But you already knew about Qweck. You did not know about Kob or Vrakka.

Vrakka is a half-orc–her mother is an orc, her father is a human, and both parents still live in Brastlewark. You get the feeling that growing up in Brastlewark was a pretty shitty experience for her, partly because she's more than six feet tall and feels even bigger, partly because when she came of age she wandered into the woods and never came back. Apparently she did it on Thay's advice, which feels weirdly irresponsible of him.

"Mr. Theo knew what I was capable of," she says with a laugh at the sight of your face when she tells you this. "It was he who took me for my first walks through the wilderness around Brastlewark. He used to say the bleaching took the color of the First World from him so that he could be more sensitive to the color of this world. Not that he's done anything to hone that skill, mind you."

"So you came back cuz you heard he was arrested?" You clarify.

"Yes. The birds brought Tidings of his ordeal."

You're not sure if she's a druid or crazy. She might be both. You should clarify that point before you set out to infiltrate one of the most secure facilities in Cheliax.

Kob, on the other hand, is definitely crazy. "BEHOLD, LESSER CREATURE: THE MIGHT AND POWER OF A TRUE DRAGON!" he says in the most self-aggrandizing manner you've ever seen.

He is not a dragon. He is a gnome. He is covered in black scales, with black wings on his back (which, during his introduction, he flared out to great dramatic effect) and long claws, but he is a gnome covered in black scales, with black wings and long claws.

"Uh…huh…" you say, eying Qweck and Vrakka. Play along, Qweck mouths to you while Vrakka rolls her eyes and shrugs. "And, uh, why would a creature so Great and Powerful as you want to help us 'lesser creatures?'"

Kob scowls. "I OWE A GREAT DEBT TO THE ONE CALLED 'MISTER THEO.' FOR, LOATHE AS I AM TO ADMIT IT, I WAS NOT BORN A MEMBER OF MY NOBLE RACE, BUT AS A LOWLY GNOME. THE ONE CALLED 'MISTER THEO' GUIDED ME IN MY QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE, AND IT WAS UNDER HIS TUTELAGE THAT I FIRST HEARD THE NAME OF THE ANCIENT DRAGON WHO WOULD SEE MY POTENTIAL AND TRAIN ME TO ASCEND TO THE HIGHEST HEIGHTS OF DRAGONKIND: LATHIMAS."

From what you can gather, Kob's lifelong hyperfixation (most gnomes have at least one) was that he wanted to be a dragon. You vaguely recall Thay telling story about his first couple of years as a librarian involving a little boy the town had nicknamed Kobold because he wanted to be a dragon when he grew up, and how the kid tracked gold glitter all over the library after he seemingly bathed in the stuff trying to turn himself into a gold dragon.

Apparently little Kobold grew up to study dragons and magic and travel the world in search of a way to chase his dream. Eventually he met the ancient black dragon Lathimas and submitted to his tutelage, and in time he became worthy of ascending to dragonhood. Because he is definitely a dragon now, and certainly not a gnome whose mind has shattered under the weight of a careless infusion of draconic magic. (You decide that if this Lathimas guy exists, he's a dick)

That said, Kob can fly, he's stupidly strong, and apparently Vrakka did see him turn into an actual dragon for a couple of minutes once (though he refers to it as "BEARING THE ASPECT OF DAHAK," which isn't concerning in the slightest). And that, combined with Vrakka's reassurance that she is, in fact, a druid, piques something in your mind. Something that begins to spin itself into a plan.

"Ok," you finally say. "I have an idea."

#Oc: giliys #Oc: Qweck #Oc: vrakka #Oc: kob #pwotr pals #pathfinder wotr #The (Completely Platonic!) Breakup Arc #Part 4

[malxshrine-a]

          𝐒𝐔𝐊𝐔𝐍𝐀❟ 𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐔𝐊𝐔𝐍𝐀 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐍𝐒 :

Sukuna has very many redeeming qualities mired in shades of confidence, pride, and violence. You realize that he’s silly, that he takes himself seriously and doesn’t at the same time. The same mouth that claimed someone can’t do a thing to him, praises that same person in the next breath. The weak show him what they are made of and he sees; his mouth opens to give them the truth. always the truth.

Telling someone the truth of their ability, tenacity, and power does not diminish his own nor does it harm his pride ANY.

Sukuna has very many redeeming qualities to the point that someone is endeared to him, and then, you see him unhinge his jaw to swallow a fucking mother ... and her child later on. do not think desirable qualities are synonymous with the good aligned. or that heroes cannot be truly terrible people. They can, and often are.

Hercules is the best fit for this analogy. both the gods and humans hated Hercules to the point that the gods begged Zeus to punish him severely. every last one of them. and that is not often expanded upon much, because how could someone do good deeds and be a trashcan person at the same damn time? very easily.

Sukuna is like this in reverse and it’s supposed to be this way. It is good that he is this way. Why? because one-dimensional characters begat one-dimensional feelings along with them. He’s cartoonishly evil almost, it’s true. the more we’re privy to the more it makes sense why he’s so dramatic and more than makes sense why the sound of this dramatic bitch’s name is enough to make people LOSE THEIR SHIT — enough so that people make the STUPIDEST decisions in concern to him.

We see him get folded by Go-joe so easily to show how drastic one finger is to having just ONE more to boost his power. I’ve seen quite a few people take this to mean he should be wrote off completely. I can GUARENTEE you this was on purpose. Sukuna passively gains cursed energy. he BREATHES and the next moment gains more strength. and these comparisons people make to his fingers ( even Gege himself out of a need to misdirect people ) and another character’s strength are to the Sukuna from a thousand years ago. I BET YOU. it’s hard for a character that is in pieces to be measured accurately, especially one that grows stronger without even needing to do much. hence why this odyssey to get his fingers to make it an actual effort; growth.

when I took Sukuna I said to myself, violence for the sake of it is empty fun. anyone can roleplay someone without a heart, because people wish they could leave theirs at the door and be terrible. but villains who are more decent than some of the heroes and do deplorable things are top tier. It’s my jam. My entire love.

You’ll never see me excuse Sukuna, but you can bet he’ll do something so sweet in one moment, be sassy the next, and follow it up by suplexing jesus on the cross while small children are barbequed because he is morally wrong. and he is only wrong, because he does whatever he wants. he destroys whatever he feels like. he eats people.

and yet, I endeavor to keep Sukuna reachable. he is uniquely able to be weak and strong at the same time. it does not diminish his character to be silly, to have him fail, to watch him get folded. He is someone that loves to fight, first and foremost. he will never take a loss seriously as he is because he is not HIMSELF right now. it is prime real estate to just be somewhere between absolute domination and ‘ i’d fight GODS, and even if I lost, bitch, i’m not afraid and do it againn cause i can ’. 

#✦ [ 😈 ] 𝖬 𝖤 𝖳 𝖠 ‚ #i have many thoughts #too many thoughts #and they all go against the fandoms uwu and diminishing of sukuna #swerve me with that #i truly love him for all he's got #while also loving his trash qualities with the good ones #listen to me scream to the heavens pls #thank you #don't get me started

[juneviews]

top 10 bl couples?

btw, your gifs are really beautiful, i love the blue tones in some of them💙

awwwww, thank you so much it means a lot 💙 so this changes a lot, not necessarily the ships themselves but more the order of them if you will. let's go:

1) seanwhite (not me)

these two just... kicked it out of the park for me. not only are they incredible & still super interesting separately, but when brought together they just WORK like frankly no other ship has ever worked in my opinion. their intimacy, emotional scenes, the way their relationships builds up carefully and has many setbacks, yet... you can’t imagine these two with anyone else. they were truly built up as soulmates & that’s what they are, absolutely lovely & I can’t get enough of them.

2) untwo (theory of love)

of COURSE, for anyone who has followed me for more than a month, y’all know these two were my number one favorite ship for almost 3 years. it’s honestly the first time I fell so hard for a secondary ship, and I loved the potential that these two had. they have a very touching story and are both deeply relatable, insecure and loving characters. they just WORKED, and for a secondary ship they really managed to steal the show for me. they’ll be forever special to me, and I will forever be the self-proclaimed untwo queen <3

3) danyok (not me)

another side ship, pretty ironic for someone who doesn’t really love most side ships usually :’))) contrarily to untwo, who were amazing DESPITE their small development, danyok are amazing BECAUSE they frankly got as much love from the writers as the main ship. and gosh are these two equally as amazing! not only is their story genuinely super interesting on its own, the chemistry was there, the compelling characters were there, the emotional scenes were there... what is there not to love?

4) khaithird (theory of love)

of course, THE ship that made me fall for offgun. these two are so flawed, and that’s what makes them great, because their love story is one that almost wasn’t. they went through so many obstacles together, so much so that their story almost feels like an odyssey of its own, and I love them for it. they’re truly a sort of ying & yang that shouldn’t work together but DOES, and these two will forever be in my heart.

5) phunnoh (love sick)

so, I often mention that love sick has grown on me over the years, and yup, it’s mostly thanks to this ship. I also often call phunnoh the healthiest bl ship ever, and I truly believe that. despite being deeply immature, closeted, and cheating with their girlfriends together, phunnoh still managed to have the most mature relationship I’ve ever witnessed, always talking through their problems, desires and insecurities. they were truly there for each other and loved each other unconditionally. and because the show is so long & we get to spend a LOT of time with them as characters, it only makes them more endearing and special in my heart.

6) saifahzon (why r u)

truly the only thing I loved in why r u, despite the fact that their storyline got cut and rushed, is saifahzon. what I love about these two is that while they have more cringey fanservice moments, firstly bc they’re such fun characters it just works, and secondly it gets balanced out by the incredible job they did in more emotional / tense scenes. by ep 8, you can SEE how much they care and trust each other, and mii2 just nailed every single moment they had in my opinion. they’re just such a soft, fun ship, and I truly love them SO MUCH.

7) tehoh-aew (I told sunset about you)

y’all know I consider itsay a perfect show, and while ipytm has knocked the tehoh-aew ship down a few notches, I still love them so much & choose to entirely ignore the sequel lol. these two are so immature, and dramatic, and they hurt each other so much... but they also feel so fucking real. every single one of their actions, even the more cruel ones, make sense, and these two are built so insanely beautifully I still can’t believe it. in terms of chemistry, acting, emotions... everything is there, and they’re such an amazing ship who is also, like seanwhite & danyok, built up like literal soulmates so... I’d say iconic!

8) morktee (my tee)

so I often say that I dislike my tee as a show but I adore morktee, and it’s really true, they’ve managed to become one of my favorite ships over the years. not only are they messy, and relatable, and fun to follow, but there is an authenticity comparable to the one phunnoh has that comes from them. they truly feel like a first high school love, and while the show’s writing is its biggest flaw, morktee as characters and as a ship are just really wonderful & will always have a piece of my heart :)

9) zihao (crossing the line)

so you might not know but crossing the line was my number one bl show for a long time, until itsay actually. it’s a show that has such a special place in my heart, and it’s definitely because of its main ship who is just... incredible. once again, I just LIVE for these “first high school love” kind of stories, they’re just too pure in my eyes, and this ship really had it all, like all of the ships present in this list, they have the softness, they have the angst, they have the pining... it’s just such an effective story bc these two characters are so different but complete each other so well, and these two simply KILLED the more emotional moments. the ending kiss scene??? literally makes me sob every goddamn time.

10) popoat (what the duck)

listen, I hesitated between these two & kurodachi bc I honestly love both ships equally, but decided to go with the one I’ve loved the longest. here we have the only ship with a sad ending alongside kido & kijima in mood indigo, another ship I love lol. but I fell in love with these two way before knowing they’d end badly, and frankly I cried for hours when the sequel ruined them lolololololol (: ANYWAYS, I love them bc they’re both this very silly, ridiculous & over the top ship, and also this very angsty ship as well. oat’s love & devotion to pop has always just fucking RIPPED my heart in two, and even though what the duck is a fucking shitty ass show & I hate literally everything else about it, these two just stole the show for me. and even now, 4 years later, after they ended badly one day before my birthday, I still fucking love them. just like phunnoh, I think that since the first season had 20 episodes & was very much slow-paced, it really allowed me to fall in love with the characters more.

honorable mentions: kurodachi (cherry magic), tangmolove (great men academy), jackzi (trapped), aepete (love by chance), phuphatian (1000 stars), kidokijima (mood indigo), sunsky (golden blood), markkit (gen y), mingkit (the original 2moons), morktawan (my ride)

xxx

#answers #nice anons are nice #seanwhite #not me #not me the series #untwo #theory of love #theory of love the series #danyok #khaithird #phunnoh #love sick #love sick the series #saifahzon #why r u #why r u the series #teh x oh-aew #I told sunset about you #morktee #teemork #my tee #cause you're my boy #kurodachi #cherry magic #popoat #what the duck #what the duck the series

[thatsgay-writes]

Day 16

PREVIOUS

"Here they are, the brave young women whose tale of struggle and survival has gripped the nation." The host says as she sends the camera a smile. "The unsinkable nine, as we have come to know them. Ladies, you must have dreamed of coming home for so long. Now that you're here, what do you wanna do most?" She questions as she turns towards you and your friends. "Honestly, smoke about a hundred cigs, you know? Like, really rip through a carton or two." Dot starts as she leans forwards on the couch. The host gives her a slightly awkward smile, "Okay. How about the rest of you?"

"I don't know; Maybe hit up the OG for a never-ending pasta bowl and just... I don't know... Get back to our real lives." Toni says next followed by Nora. "I'd like to read the Odyssey again, rather than, like, live it." She jokes awkwardly, causing some of the girls to laugh in response. "Leah, what about you?" "Oh, um, I just wanna reconnect with certain people... People who may have been worried and-or felt like we had unfinished business. And if that person is watching right now, I just wanna say that I did not not miss you every day." You cringe at Leah's little monologue, still not feeling 100% about her after her fight with Shelby.

"My turn, Brooke, and I've got a nice, straight answer for you. I'm going to fuck the rowdiest guy with the biggest dick as soon as I fucking can." Fatin says, causing everyone to pause the fantasy you all shared and look at Fatin. Fatin turned to look at you, since you were at the end of the couch, and you couldn't contain your laugh. "Holy shit!" You belt out as you roll onto your side, "I don't think you can say that." You tell her after you finally catch your breathe. Fatin rolls her eyes, "Okay, make it more media-friendly. I am going to fornicate with the healthiest penis I can find ASAP." You let out a laugh at her newly formed answer.

After that, Dot changed her answer and Fatin got on Leah for her "emo shit show" answer and how Romeo's would be in everyone's DM's, before they finally started cheering over the fact that there was a chance to return home. "We're going home, bitches!" Martha yells as she holds up the bottle of vodka, causing all the other girls to cheer. You go to celebrate with them but notice how Shelby stays silent and slowly pulls away from the group. You watch her go, debating if you should follow her, as Toni helps you stand. Her face holds a large smile that slowly falls as she notices how distracted you are and that Shelby was walking away.

Ever since kissing Shelby, Toni had been confused on her feelings between the both of you. She had loved you for years but Shelby just had something so attracting about her. Unknown to her, you were having the same thoughts. "I'll, um... I'll be right back." You say as you pat Toni's hands that were still holding your own after helping you up. Toni just nods her head as you hop away after Shelby.

---

"You don't seem very excited..." You try and joke as you hop around the rock Shelby was sitting on, closing your mouth as soon as you see how sad she looks. You fidget nervously for a few seconds as Shelby doesn't respond to your presence. You let out a deep breathe before sitting down next to Shelby on the rock. "Are you okay?" You ask as you slowly reach out your hand to grabs hers. You move slowly so she has enough time to pull away but she doesn't. When you tangle your fingers with Shelby's, she finally reacts some and turns her head to look at you. She opens and closes her mouth a few times wanting to say something, but ultimately ends up closing it and shaking her head. You let out a sigh but nod your head. You lean forwards and cup one of her cheeks, giving her a quick kiss on the other one. Your face gains a small smile as you notice Shelby blush, "I'll leave you to your thoughts... If you ever need someone to vent to or a shoulder to lean on I'll be here." You tell her as you slowly stand up and start hopping back towards to other girls, missing how Shelby stared after you longingly.

---

As you get closer to the other girls, you smile as you hear them all laughing and joking around. "Oh, Martha, you're gonna be trippin motherfucking balls dude." You hear Fatin say as you finally reach the group and collapse next to Toni. Hopping around was not fun and you were going to need to find a walking stick or something soon. "And she won't be alone." Rachel says as she holds her hand out towards Fatin. Taking what looks to be a bag of gummy bears? You nudge Toni with your shoulder and send her a questioning look. "Martha ate edibles." She whispered to you before turning back to the group and reaching for the bag. You covered your mouth in shock and laughed at the fact that Martha, sweet and innocent Martha, ate edibles. "You want one y/n?" Toni asks as she holds one out towards you. You think about it for a second. Your doctors back at home would probably advise you not to get high but you had been feeling fine the past few days. "Why not." You answer as you take the gummy bear from Toni and pop it into your mouth.

---

"Marcus!?" You hear Martha yell out for the 5th time as almost everyone laid on the beach, high out of their minds. The only ones not laying down were Fatin, who looked like she was meditating, Shelby, who still hadn't returned from the rock, and you, who had taken a seat on Toni's back and kept tracing out random letters and shapes on her back. "I'm so fucking blissed out. Not even from the gummies, just from the thought that in 48 hours I can have an orgasm." Was the first thing Fatin had said in an hour, causing you to giggle and almost fall off of Toni's back. Unlike Toni, who always got more relaxed when she was high, you got more giggly, enthusiastic, and talkative. You being high rivaled Shelby's whole "Who wants to play an ice breaker?" persona.

"Wait? You haven't like self-induced?" Leah asks, seriously but still with a playful tone. "No, I can't do it with my hands actually. I have this weird cello-vibrato PTSD. It's a whole thing." Fatin responds, breezing over the subject. "So your electric toothbrush hasn't seen any action?" Dot asks causing you to laugh more and add on, "I mean we all kind of assumed." You send a wink Fatin's way before turning your attention back to Toni's back, effectively spacing out on the conversation.

When you do focus back onto everyone, it's from Toni tapping your thigh to get you to get up. "Huh?" "C'mon we're gonna go play in the water." Instead of standing up and hopping your way towards the ocean, you just roll of Toni's back and lay on your back in the sand. "I'm good... I think I'm just gonna lie here." Toni gives you a questioning look but you just push her thigh towards the water. "I'll be fineeeee, go have funnnnn." Toni rolls her eyes as you purposefully draw out words and follows the rest of the girls into the water.

You could hear the girls from where you laid, all of them letting out screams and laughs of joy. You would have joined but hopping around on one leg isn't fun and tired you out pretty quickly. You rolled onto your side once the sun felt too hot on your face and you noticed that Shelby hadn't joined in on the fun either. You contemplated going up to her and trying to talk to her or give her more space, but went with the first choice. If she had rejoined the group than maybe she would want some company now.

---

"Not a fan of the water?" You ask as you let yourself collapse next to Shelby, taking note how she now had the bottle of vodka and it had a less in it than it did before. "I... Um..." Shelby stuttered out as she purposefully did not make eye contact with you. "It's fine." You say with a shrug and lay on your side. "No need to talk, just relax." You say as you suddenly get hype fixated on making shapes and letters on her back. Missing the way she tensed up before finally relaxing. You spaced out again from what was going on, a common thing that happened when you were high.

---

The rest of the day blew by as everyone did their own thing. Nora and Rachel went off talked somewhere, you noticed that Toni and Shelby got into a argument, and you just chilled around with Fatin, Dot, and Leah, while Martha decided to adventure into the woods. "Guys! Guys! Guess what I just saw!?" Martha yells as she runs over the hill and back towards the group. "I just saw Marcus and he's alive!" She yells out, out of breath, causing everyone to laugh at how ridiculous she sounded. "No, guys, I'm being serious!" Martha defends and grabs the nearest person to her, Dot, and starts dragging her along. "C'mon, he's in the woods." Dot turns to give the group and exasperated look but you all decide to follow along.

You had your arm wrapped around Toni as you all journeyed through the woods. You had tried to get out of going, but Martha wanted everyone to go with her. "You're just saying that he, like, fucking pinocchio'd?" Dot asks, having not stopped laughing or joking about the situation since you all headed into the woods. "Yes. That is exactly what I am saying." Martha says in relief, missing that fact that Dot was still making fun of her. "He turned into a real boy." She finishes as you and Toni see Marcus... Who is still as fake as he was the day he was found. "I don't know, he kinda looks the same to me." Toni says as you release her arm so she can pick up Marcus. "Hey! My leg!" You say excitedly as you notice it laying under Marcus. When Fatin goes to kiss Marcus, you kiss your leg. It was all fun and games until Leah had to mention the fact that Marcus and your leg had been swept away but suddenly ended up in the middle of the forest. You had thought the same thing but hoped to just ignore that fact. "Leah. We're mellow. We're leaving."

---

"Oh Shelby, you love America so much. USA! USA!" Martha cheers, trying to get Shelby to join her but the other girl is completely zoned out. "Is she okay?" You and Toni ask at the same time. Both of you sharing an awkward look with each other, neither of you had told the other about your own kiss with Shelby. Luckily, Fatin isn't stuck in an unknown love triangle and walks over to Shelby. You all watch as Shelby starts to brush her hair, it seems to stay tangled no matter what she does. Until the brush gets stuck in her hair. Fatin attempts to help her but Shelby goes into full freak out mode. "It's all ruined." She says as she grabs the scissors out of Fatin's bag. Fatin attempts to stop her but Shelby was inconsolable.

"I don't' fucking want it! I don't want it!"

NEXT

#the wilds #the wilds x reader #shoni #shoni x reader #toni x reader #shelby x reader #toni shalifoe x shelby goodkind #toni x shelby #toni shalifoe x reader #shelby goodkind x reader

[ifuckinglovestvincent]

THE FORTY-FIVE: ST. VINCENT

Sleazy, gritty, grimy – these are the words used to describe the latest iteration of St. Vincent, Annie Clark’s alter ego. As she teases the release of her upcoming new album, ‘Daddy’s Home’, Eve Barlow finds out who’s wearing the trousers now.

Photos: Zackery Michael

Yellow may be the colour of gold, the hue of a perfect blonde or the shade of the sun, but when it’s too garish, yellow denotes the stain of sickness and the luridness of sleaze. On ‘Pay Your Way In Pain’ – the first single from St. Vincent’s forthcoming sixth album ‘Daddy’s Home’ – Annie Clark basks in the palette of cheap 1970s yellows; a dirty, salacious yellow that even the most prudish of individuals find difficult to avert their gaze from. It’s a yellow that recalls the smell of cigarettes on fingers, the tape across tomorrow’s crime scene or the dull ache of bad penetration.

The video for the single, which dropped last Thursday, features Clark in a blonde wig and suit, channeling a John Cassavetes anti-heroine (think Gena Rowlands in Gloria) and ‘Fame’-era Bowie. She twists in front of too-bright disco lights. She roughs up her voice. She sings about the price we pay for searching for acceptance while being outcast from society. “So I went to the park just to watch the little children/ The mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn’t welcome,” she coos, and you immediately recognise the scene of a free woman threatening the post-nuclear families aspiring to innocence. Clark is here to pervert them.

She laughs. “That’s how I feel!” From her studio in Los Angeles, she begins quoting lyrics from Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House’. “It’s a blues song for 2021.” LA is a city Clark reluctantly only half calls home, and one that is opposed to her vastly preferred New York. “I don’t feel any romantic attachment to Los Angeles,” she says of the place she coined the song ‘Los Ageless’ about on 2017’s ‘Masseduction’ (“The Los Ageless hang out by the bar/ Burn the pages of unwritten memoirs”).“The best that could be said of LA is, ‘Yeah it’s nice.’ And it is! LA is easy and pleasant. But if you were a person the last thing you’d want someone to say about you is: ‘She’s nice!’”

On ‘Daddy’s Home’, Clark writes about a past derelict New York; a place Los Angeles would suffocate in. “The idea of New York, the art that came out of it, and my living there,” she says. “I’ve not given up my card. I don’t feel in any way ready to renounce my New York citizenship. I bought an apartment so I didn’t have to.” Her down-and-out New York is one a true masochist would love, and it’s sleazy in excess. Sleaze is usually the thing men flaunt at a woman’s expense. In 2021, the proverbial Daddy in the title is Clark. But there’s also a literal Daddy. He came home in the winter of 2019.

On the title track, Clark sings about “inmate 502”: her father. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his involvement in a $43m stock fraud scheme. He went away in May 2010. Clark reacted by writing her third breakthrough album ‘Strange Mercy’ in 2011; inspired not just by her father’s imprisonment but the effects it had on her life.“I mean it was rough stuff,” she says. “It was a fuck show. Absolutely terrible. Gut-wrenching. Like so many times in life, music saved me from all kinds of personal peril. I was angry. I was devastated. There’s a sort of dullness to incarceration where you don’t have any control. It’s like a thud at the basement of your being. So I wrote all about it,” she says.

Back then, she was aloof about meaning. In an interview we did that year, she called from a hotel rooftop in Phoenix and was fried from analytical questions. She excused her lack of desire to talk about ‘Strange Mercy’ as a means of protecting fans who could interpret it at will. Really she was protecting an audience closer to home. It’s clear now that the title track is about her father’s imprisonment (“Our father in exile/ For God only knows how many years”). Clark’s parents divorced when she was a child, and they have eight children in their mixed family, some of whom were very young when ‘Strange Mercy’ came out. She explains this discretion now as her method of sheltering them.

“I am protective of my family,” she says. “It didn’t feel safe to me. I disliked the fact that it was taken as malicious obfuscations. No.” Clark wanted to deal with the family drama in art but not in press. She managed to remain tight-lipped until she became the subject of a different intrusion. As St. Vincent’s star continued to rocket, Clark found herself in a relationship with British model Cara Delevingne from 2014 to 2016, and attracted celebrity tabloid attention. Details of her family’s past were exposed. The Daily Mail came knocking on her sister’s door in Texas, where Clark is from.

“Luckily I’m super tight with my family and the Daily Mail didn’t find anybody who was gonna sell me out,” she says. “They were looking for it. Clark girls are a fucking impenetrable force. We will cut a bitch.”

Four years later, Clark gets to own the narrative herself in the medium that’s most apt: music. “The story has evolved. I’ve evolved. People have grown up. I would rather be the one to tell my story,” she says, ruminating on the misfortune that this was robbed from her: a story that writes itself. “My father’s release from prison is a great starting point, right?” Between tours and whenever she could manage, Clark would go and visit him in prison and would be signing autographs in the visitation room for the inmates, who all followed her success with every album release, press clipping and late night TV spot. She joked to her sisters that she’d become the belle of the ball there. “I don’t have to make that up,” she says.

There’s an ease to Clark’s interview manner that hasn’t existed before. She seems ready not just to discuss her father’s story, but to own certain elements of herself. “Hell where can you run when the outlaw’s inside you,” she sings on the title track, alluding to her common traits with her father. “I’ve always had a relationship with my dad and a good one. We’re very similar,” she says. “The movies we like, the books, he liked fashion. He’s really funny, he’s a good time.” Her father’s release gave Clark and her brothers and sisters permission to joke. “The title, ‘Daddy’s Home’ makes me laugh. It sounds fucking pervy as hell. But it’s about a real father ten years later. I’m Daddy now!”

The question of who’s fathering who is a serious one, but it’s also not serious. Clark wears the idea of Daddy as a costume. She likes to play. She joins today’s Zoom in a pair of sunglasses wider than her face and a silk scarf framing her head. The sunglasses come off, and the scarf is a tool for distraction. She ties it above her forehead, attempts a neckerchief, eventually tosses it aside. Clark can only be earnest for so long before she seeks some mischief. She doesn’t like to stay in reality for extensive periods. “I like to create a world and then I get to live in it and be somebody new every two or three years,” she says. “Who wants to be themselves all the time?”

‘Daddy’s Home‘ began in New York at Electric Lady studios before COVID hit and was finished in her studio in LA. She worked on it with “my friend Jack” [Jack Antonoff, producer for Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Taylor Swift]. Antonoff and Clark worked on ‘Masseduction’ and found a winning formula, pushing Clark’s guitar-orientated electronic universe to its poppiest maximum, without compromising her idiosyncrasies. “We’re simpatico. He’s a dream,” she says. “He played the hell outta instruments on this record. He’s crushing it on drums, crushing it on Wurlitzer.” The pair let loose. They began with ‘The Holiday Party’, one of the warmest tracks Clark’s ever written. It’s as inviting as a winter fireplace, stoked by soulful horns, acoustic guitar and backing singers. “Every time they sang something I’d say, ‘Yeah but can you do it sleazier? Make your voice sound like you’ve been up for three days.” Clark speaks of an unspoken understanding with Antonoff as regards the vibe: “Familiar sounds. The opposite of my hands coming out of the speaker to choke you till you like it. This is not submission. Just inviting. I can tell a story in a different way.”

The entire record is familiar, giving the listener the satisfaction that they’ve heard the songs before but can’t quite place them. It’s a satisfying accompaniment to a pandemic that encouraged nostalgic listening. Clark was nostalgic too. She reverted to records she enjoyed with her father: Stevie Wonder’s catalogue from the 1970s (‘Songs In The Key Of Life’, ‘Innervisions’, ‘Talking Book’) and Steely Dan. “Not to be the dude at the record store but it’s specifically post-flower child idealism of the ’60s,” she explains. “It’s when it flipped into nihilism, which I much prefer. Pre disco, pre punk. That music is in me in a deep way. It’s in my ears.”

On ‘The Melting Of The Sun’ she has a delicious time creating a psychedelic Pink Floyd odyssey while exploring the path tread by her heroes Marilyn Monroe, Joni Mitchell, Joan Didion and Nina Simone. It’s a series of beautiful vignettes of brilliant women who were met with a hostile environment. Clark considers what they did to overcome that. “I’m thanking all these women for making it easier for me to do it. I hope I didn’t totally let them down.” Clark is often the only woman sharing a stage with rock luminaries such as Dave Grohl, Damon Albarn and David Byrne, and has appeared to have shattered a male-centric glass ceiling. She’s unsure she’s doing enough to redress the imbalance. “There are little things I can do and control,” she says of hiring women on her team. “God! Now I feel like I should do more. What should I do? It’s a big question. You know what I have seen a lot more from when I started to now? Girls playing guitar.”

If one woman reinvented the guitar in the past decade, it’s Clark. Behind her is a rack of them. The pandemic has taken her out of the wild in which she’s accustomed to tantalising audiences at night with her displays of riffing and heel-balancing. Instead, she’s chained to her desk. Her obsession with heels in the lyrics of ‘Daddy’s Home’ she reckons may be a reflection of her nights performing ‘Masseduction’ in thigh highs. “I made sure that nothing I wore was comfortable,” she recalls. “Everything was about stricture and structure and latex. I had to train all the time to make sure I could handle it.” Is she taking the heels off when live shows return? “Absofuckinglutely not.”

Clark is interested in the new generation. She’s recently tweeted about Arlo Parks and has become a big fan of Russian singer-songwriter Kate NV. “I’m obsessed with Russia,” she says. In a recent LA Times profile, she professed to a pandemic intellectual fixation on Stalin. “Yeah! I mean right now my computer is propped up on stuff. You are sitting on The Gulag Archipelago, The Best Short Stories Of Dostoyevsky andThe Plays Of Chekhov. I’m kinda in it.” The pop world interests Clark, too. She was credited with a co-write on Swift’s 2019 album ‘Lover’. At last year’s Grammys she performed a duet with Dua Lipa. It was one of the queerest performances the Grammys has ever aired. Clark interrupts.

“What about it seemed queer?!”

You know… The lip bite, for one!

“Wait. Did she bite her lip?”

No, you bit your lip.

“I did?!”

Everyone was talking about it. Come on, Annie.

“Serious? I…”

You both waltzed around each other with matching hairdos, making eyes…

“I have no memory of it.”

Frustrating as it may be in a world of too much information, Clark’s lack of willingness to overanalyse every creative decision she makes or participates in is something to treasure. “I want to be a writer who can write great songs,” she says. “I’m so glad I can play guitar and fuck around in the studio to my heart’s desire but it’s about what you can say. What’s a great song? What lyric is gonna rip your guts open. Just make great shit! That’s where I was with this record. That’s all I wanna do with my life.”

More than a decade into St. Vincent, Clark doesn’t reflect. She looks strictly forward. “I’m like a horse with blinders,” she says. She did make an exception to take stock lately when the phone rang. “I saw a +44 and that gets me excited,” she says. “Who could this be?” Well, who was it? “Paul McCartney,” she says, in disbelief. “Anything I’ve done, any mistake I’ve made, somehow it’s forgiven, assuaged. I did something right in my life if a fucking Beatle called me.”

Now there’s a get out of jail free card if ever she needed one.

Daddy’s Home by St. Vincent is out May 14, 2021.

#‘I HAVE NO MEMORY OF IT’ #LOOOOOL #WHY ARE U LIKE THIS #st vincent #full of shit #annie clark #Annie Clark on beds #yellow is the color for dull ache of bad penetration?

[frankiefellinlove]

THE STEVIE FILES PROUDLY PRESENTS - THE AMAZING ROCK & ROLL ODYSSEY OF STEVEN VAN ZANDT

From The Source to Soulfire via Springsteen and Sam & Dave

Recorded, transcribed, edited, written, produced, mixed and mastered by MIKE SAUNDERS

SIDE TWO (1975-1983)

Track 6: Miami Steve, The Asbury Jukes, Tenth Avenue and Hammersmith

In early 1975, Steven returned to New Jersey from Florida, inappropriately dressed for the winter weather. “I came back with the flowered shirts and the Sam Snead hat and continued wearing them in the snow.” For the next seven years, he was known as Miami Steve. He joined Southside in the Blackberry Booze Band and within weeks they’d altered and expanded its line-up (adding keyboard player Kevin Kavanaugh from Middletown and bass player Alan Berger from The Dovells’ backing band), transformed its musical direction, changed its name to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes (referencing their mutual hero Little Walter’s band and first single release) and established a successful three-nights-a-week, five-sets-a-night residency at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park.

“Just before that, me, Southside, Bruce and Garry went to see Sam & Dave. A life-changing moment. So me and Southside basically decided we were gonna be the white Sam & Dave, with rock guitar. So the horns came in and although we didn’t know it, we would change the entire concept of what a bar band sounded like and the respect a bar band would get by making it creative, soul meets rock. ‘Bar band’ was an insult. ‘You’re a bar band,’ which means you can’t make it in the real music world. After the Jukes, they started using ‘bar band’ in reviews and they meant it as a compliment, with Graham Parker and Elvis Costello and Mink DeVille. We changed the way people thought about these things.”

The Miami Horns were a vital component of the new band. Steven composed the horn arrangements, but although he’s always possessed a natural ability to imagine horn parts, he doesn’t read or write music (“never have”) and has always required a little help from his friends to transcribe them. “I have people write ‘em down, to this day. I like that actually. You have to do a lotta things yourself so any excuse I find to collaborate I do it. I find other people will bring something to the party usually. That’s why [I’ve] used Eddie Manion for I don’t know how many years. He knows how I like to voice things. Once I think of something and create the parts, I get bored if I have to voice every part, exactly right. If I hear a voicing I don’t like, I will change it, but I get bored by the mechanics of everything.”

While the Jukes were building their reputation and growing their audience, Bruce invited Steven to hang out at the Born To Run sessions in New York, where he was working on “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” David Sanborn and The Brecker Brothers had been hired to play the horn parts, but Steven created a spontaneous new arrangement. He’s told this anecdote countless times, but I ask him to repeat it because it provides perfect examples of his innate musical talents in action (“I can hear the parts, who knows why?”), the nature of his friendship with Bruce (“I still am the only human being not afraid of him”), and his no-bullshit attitude (“I didn’t know anything about diplomacy”).

“So he says, ‘Whaddya think?’ I said, ‘It sucks, that’s what I think!’ I didn’t know how uptight everybody was. I didn’t give a fuck either. The managers and producers were all afraid of him already. He asked me a question, I’m gonna be honest. I’m trying to help my friend here, not make points with some fucking record company guy. Moment of silence. ‘He just said it sucks, which means we all suck.’ Bruce [says] ‘Alright then, go in and fucking fix it.’ So I did. I went in and sang the [new] parts. I didn’t know they were the most famous [session] guys in New York. It wasn’t insulting them, the chart was ridiculous. That was my thing, just from the Jukes being around maybe six months.”

“I wasn’t really feeling the pressure that Bruce was at the time. I didn’t realise his life depended on this album. His first two records hadn’t done very well. They wanted to drop him. I don’t know how aware I was of any of that. He invited me into the session and I’m laying on the floor. All I can think is, we’ve been hoping to get into recording our whole lives, I’m listening to this and it sounds fucking terrible. Not just the horn charts, everything. It was the worst period of recording in history. Virtually every record from the 50s and 60s sounded great, virtually every record from the early 70s sounded terrible. Because engineers took over, started close miking, padding the walls. Separation, separation, separation, all the things that make rock ‘n’ roll suck. The idea was, you isolate everything and make it sound exciting in the mix. Which they managed to do, miraculously, with the Born To Run album. Because it was pieced together in a bizarre way. Bruce made that record 100% out of willpower, he willed that into existence!”

Soon after making his instinctive artistic contribution (and singing backing vocals on “Thunder Road”), Steven was invited to join the E Street Band. It was a chance to complete the circle, play with his old friend again and settle any unfinished business from three summers earlier, when he’d been sent packing at the Greetings sessions. He made his live debut on the opening night of the Born To Run tour, which ran until New Year’s Eve. His input and influence over the next decade, onstage and off, would prove invaluable. (Bruce even began playing The Dovells’ “You Can’t Sit Down” as an occasional encore). In the fall, the tour took everyone to Europe for the first time, where the culture shock was off the charts. “There was no hamburgers, no peanut butter. The only place you could get a hamburger in the whole of Europe was the newly-opened first Hard Rock Café. There was a line around the block even then.”

Culinary deficiencies aside, Bruce also had to endure the overblown hype surrounding his first UK gigs at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, where Columbia had displayed the legend “Finally London Is Ready For Bruce Springsteen” on every available surface prior to his arrival. “[It was] completely obnoxious,” says Steven. “[Bruce] spent half the time ripping down posters. It was an embarrassing time for him, between that and Time and Newsweek. He didn’t like that stuff. You wanna be in charge of your life, that’s why we get into rock ‘n’ roll. Suddenly it was slipping out of his control. We made the mistake of playing a place with seats. It just made the show that much harder. But by the end, we got ‘em outta the seats. We went to Amsterdam, Stockholm, and back to London. The second one was a bit easier.” The experience had a prolonged effect on Bruce. “He was uptight in those days and would remain so through Darkness into The River, until he asked me to produce the record and we found a way to have some fun.”

Track 7: Epic Records, Steve Popovich and The Stone Pony

Back on the shore, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes continued the Stone Pony residency throughout 1975, gradually consolidating their line-up. For the next three years, between Springsteen commitments, Steven worked as their producer, arranger, manager, part-time guitarist and principal songwriter. In early 1976, after circulating a demo tape, they signed a recording deal with Epic, with assistance from Steve Popovich, the label’s Vice-President of A&R. “I Don’t Want To Go Home,” the song that Steven had kept in his back pocket since his days on the oldies circuit, became the title track of their debut album and their first single. Ben E King’s loss was Southside’s gain.

“I produced [the song] in a way which was appropriate for the Jukes. They didn’t have a big background vocal thing going on,” explains Steven. “I was very conscious of being able to try and do most of it live, although I put strings on it, on my very first production! There was no synthesiser in those days that could play strings. That’s why I re-cut it [on Soulfire] the original way I pictured it, with the singer and background vocals answering. That idea of writing for someone else is extremely important, critical and essential. It changes the way you write completely, from when you think of writing for yourself, which is extraordinarily complicated and confusing. It’s not easy, but easier, to write for someone else. There’s their identity in your mind at least. I’m writing them a song. That’s a wonderful exercise for songwriters.” I Don’t Want To Go Home was released in the summer of 1976 (“I’ve never received one penny of royalties, but whatever!”). The Jukes later began their first national tour and made their European debut in 1977.

Recommended by Bruce, Steve Popovich was one of a kind. “The last of the real music guys in the business. The only other person I can compare him to would be Lance Freed on the publishing side, who’s unique. He’s actually into music and songwriting and the things you’re supposed to be into when you have a job description like that. And Frank Barsalona, the only agent who really did his job and would set the standard for everybody to follow. Those three guys, really quite historic. [It was] Popovich’s idea to launch the record with a broadcast from the Stone Pony. Never been done before. Popovich loved the local scene idea and he largely made it happen. It never would have been recognised nationally, I don’t think, if it hadn’t been for Popovich, who had the vision to say it’s cool if you’re not from New York. Rather than being embarrassed if you’re not from New York, LA or Nashville, it’s actually cool.”

Track 8: Production Credits and Political Awakening

Steven developed his talents as a producer and songwriter with the Jukes in the late 70s, following I Don’t Want To Go Home with This Time It’s For Real and Hearts Of Stone. Successive releases featured greater quantities of his original material, which included “I Played The Fool,” “This Time Baby’s Gone For Good,” “Take It Inside” and “Some Things Just Don’t Change,” apparently written for another of his heroes, David Ruffin of The Temptations. During this period, he also produced the “Say Goodbye To Hollywood” single for Ronnie Spector and the E Street Band and provided production assistance on Darkness On The Edge Of Town. His relationship with the Jukes ended when they left Epic for Mercury in 1979 and he went on to co-produce The River and two comeback albums for Gary US Bonds, Dedication and On The Line. It was an impressive fast-track apprenticeship. Steven had no production experience when he began. He acquired the skills and learned from his mistakes in the studio. “That’s why all three Jukes albums are different,” he says. “By the time we did The River, I knew what I wanted to do. I got it all down by then. That’s how I tend to do things. I can picture what I want. Jump in, do it, let’s see what happens.”

Steven also kept his promise to himself to bring his musical heroes out of obscurity, initially as guests on the first two Jukes albums. “I did what I could, but I wanted to do so much more,” he admits. “First time I get in a studio, got Lee Dorsey out from under a car, where he’s a mechanic. Got Ronnie Spector out of retirement. Second album, we reunited The Coasters, Drifters and Five Satins. Me and Bruce worked with Gary Bonds. We got Ben E King and Chuck Jackson on that record. Those artists had a talent level noticeably above everybody that followed. I wish I’d been insistent on doing more of them. In those [early] days, you actually had to have talent to make records. You had to be able to sing a song, beginning to end, perfectly in tune, perfectly the right melody, and if you fuck up one word, you gotta do the whole thing again. Couldn’t do enough for those people, they were so much fun to produce.”

In addition to his studio accomplishments, Steven played more than 300 shows with Bruce and the E Street Band between 1976 and 1981, primarily on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town and River tours. The majority took place in North America, but the River tour included a European leg that took the band away from home and out of their comfort zone for nine weeks. Much longer than their previous visit in 1975, it was their first significant experience of foreign countries, languages, cultures and political perspectives. They received rave reviews wherever they played, but Steven gradually became aware that not all Europeans viewed the United States in a favourable light.

One particular encounter was pivotal in dramatically reshaping Steven’s worldview. “A kid asked me, ‘Why are you putting missiles in my country?’ I said, ‘I’m not, I’m a guitar player.’ I realised, for the first time in my life, at the age of 30 I’m embarrassed to say, that I’m an American. What the fuck does that mean? I managed to grow up in the middle of civil rights, the Vietnam War, demonstrations about every fucking thing and had no interest in any of it. Amazing when you think about it. Redefining tunnel vision. Suddenly, the tunnel is gone. We’re now successful. Who would have ever figured that would happen, right? Now it’s like, uh-oh, what did I miss, the last 20 years?”

Track 9: Men Without Women, Motown and Mixing In Mono

This revelation accelerated Steven’s growing political awareness, one of two important developments in 1981 that would change the course of his life forever. The second came when he returned from Europe and was approached by EMI America about making a solo album. Having spent six years producing and writing for others, he welcomed the opportunity to have his own creative outlet, which soon expanded into a separate career. In the fall, he enlisted musicians from the E Street Band and the Asbury Jukes to record most of the material for his debut album, Men Without Women, using his established rock-meets-soul sonic blueprint. Including “Lyin’ In A Bed Of Fire,” “Princess Of Little Italy,” “Angel Eyes” and “Until The Good Is Gone,” it remains an undisputed career highlight for Van Zandt devotees, but Steven feels that an outside producer might have helped him make a more commercial record.

“Conventional wisdom is you never should produce yourself and I have to say that’s correct. The only exception I can think of in the history of the business was Prince, who was an extraordinary genius, but other than him, I don’t know anybody who successfully produces themselves.” Describing himself as “extremely schizophrenic, I’m twelve different people, never mind two,” Steven explains how his inner producer failed to control the whims of his inner artist. “Without knowing it, the artist takes over. I was into this extreme naturalism, no logical reason why. I did the whole album live in one day. Came back the second day, did it again, beginning to end. Couple overdubs, that was it. There’s one guitar. The horns aren’t doubled. Nothing’s doubled. Bruce did all the harmony on that record but we couldn’t use his name. We [did] a similar thing with Born In The USA, where we just recorded live in the studio.”

“I made Bob Clearmountain mix ‘Forever’ in mono, to try and achieve the perfect Motown record. It’s never gonna be exact and it shouldn’t be exact, why should it be, but I wanted to capture a Smokey Robinson Motown record. The only way I could do that in my mind was to make it completely mono. He was so good in those days. I mean Bob’s still the best, but in those days he was beyond the best. He was something else when it came down to that Neve board that wasn’t automated, and he’s feelin’ those faders. I made him do something he’d never done before, which requires a whole different way of thinking. You’re now thinking depth-wise and vertically, not horizontally.”

“That’s where my head was at. Can I achieve the emotional communication that my heroes had provided me? My heroes being Motown in general, 10 acts there. Or my heroes at Chess, another 10 acts. Sam Phillips did ‘Rocket 88’ for Ike Turner (Jackie Brenston) and ‘How Many More Years’ for Howlin’ Wolf, three years before Elvis Presley. Unbelievable genius. [I’m] trying to achieve that level of quality in my own world, in my own little bubble, which has these ridiculously high standards. I’m absorbing the 50s and 60s and then trying to integrate them in my head and reproduce them in my own way, not the least bit interested in what’s going on in the 70s or 80s certainly, because it was shit to me, comparatively. An interesting moment here and there. Punk was certainly interesting. But mostly it’s all coming from what I call the renaissance period, ‘51 to ‘71, where it all was created. And that’s true to this day. That’s all I was interested in and that was enough for 10 lifetimes. I didn’t need another bit of input after 1972.”

Track 10: Little Steven, Little Richard and Bob Dylan

In 1982, after recording with Bruce and Gary US Bonds, Steven completed his album, formed the Disciples of Soul (which included Dino Danelli from The Rascals on drums, Jean Beauvoir on bass and Eddie Manion, Mark Pender, Stan Harrison and La Bamba on horns) and played a debut concert at New York’s Peppermint Lounge. Released in October, a month after Nebraska, Men Without Women preceded his first national tour and was credited to his new professional name of Little Steven, which would be used for all future solo activities. “I just wanted separation [from] being the sideman,” he explains. “Each of my personalities required a different name, in order to keep it straight in people’s heads and my own head.” The name referenced his early heroes Little Walter, Little Anthony and Little Richard. In his role as an ordained minister, the latter officiated at Steven’s wedding to Maureen Santoro in New York on New Year’s Eve. Percy Sledge sang “When A Man Loves A Woman” as they walked down the aisle and the reception included performances from Gary US Bonds, Little Milton, The Chambers Brothers and the wedding band from The Godfather. “Little Anthony was doing a cruise at the time or he would have been there.”

“All I can think is, we’ve been hoping to get into recording our whole lives, I’m listening to this and it sounds fucking terrible. Not just the horn charts, everything. It was the worst period of recording in history. Virtually every record from the 50s and 60s sounded great, virtually every record from the early 70s sounded terrible. Because engineers took over, started close miking, padding the walls. Separation, separation, separation, all the things that make rock ‘n’ roll suck. The idea was, you isolate everything and make it sound exciting in the mix. Which they managed to do, miraculously, with the Born To Run album. Because it was pieced together in a bizarre way. Bruce made that record 100% out of willpower, he willed that into existence!”

Steven toured internationally in 1983, then dropped the horns, adopted a more contemporary rock sound and made his second album, Voice Of America. It was an explicitly political record that featured “Solidarity,” “I Am A Patriot,” “Out Of The Darkness,” “Los Desaparecidos” and “Undefeated.” Triggered by his River tour experiences in Europe, this radical transformation was completed with a long period of self-education. “I read every book about post World War Two [US] foreign policy. [It was] shocking how often we were on the wrong side. All of these bad things were happening behind the scenes and nobody was talking about them. No political consciousness whatsoever in the country. I decided I have an obligation to say something about this stuff that we’re all paying for with our taxes.”

“Being conscious of the fact that everybody needs their own identity, I figured who the hell needs another love song from a fucking sideman? I’ll be the political guy. Nobody else is doing it. There were people demonstrating of course. Jackson Browne, John Hall, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, those guys. The Grateful Dead were doing a benefit every week, but rarely did it end up in the work. In general, people weren’t putting much politics into the lyrics of their songs.” For artists with commercial aspirations, he concedes, that’s a smart move. “Jefferson Airplane being an exception with ‘Volunteers.’ Big exception, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with Neil Young’s ‘Ohio.’”

Steven contends that Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” introduced the idea of political consciousness in rock ‘n’ roll. “His first electric song. It’s not given enough credit. The first sentence from Bob Dylan’s electric period, ‘Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.’ What? You’re doing what? You’re thinking about the government? Excuse me? Who does that? Whoever did that before, in a song, no less? There in that one sentence, Bob Dylan communicated what his entire career was gonna be about, which was having fun with language, with inference, symbolism, metaphor and nonsense lyrics that rhymed. ‘Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine,’ what does that mean? It means whatever you want it to mean, right? Then ‘I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.’ Holy shit! You mean we’re supposed to figure out the government? That, to me, is the most important sentence in all the history of rock ‘n’ roll, right there.”

All photos below by Mike Saunders

[ye-bloodeh-liar]

I just finished AC Valhalla – A résumé.

I finished the "main story" of Assassin's Creed Valhalla. These are some thoughts of mine. (This was saved in my drafts for two weeks or so. But my stance hasn't altered. Actually, I'm even angrier now.)

Disclaimer: This obviously contains some spoilers here and there. You've been warned, but tbh, who even cares about the story at this point. Also, I know I don't have many followers, and I suspect none of the few that will come across this post will actually be interested in it. That said, if you like reading people's rants about things, regardless of your interest in video games, this might be something for you. I just needed to get this out of my system somewhere. This is a rant (well, vent? I'm venting, I guess) written as it came to my mind. There's no real structure, I think. Sorry for that in advance.

After Origins, which I thoroughly enjoyed and actually played again between Odyssey and Valhalla, and Odyssey, which's name was perfectly fitting since it felt like a fucking odyssey to grind through, I hoped, actually, I was convinced, Valhalla would right Odyssey's wrongs. You see, Odyssey had one big problem for me: It did none of the things that made and still make me love Origins. In short: The world was massive, but felt copied and pasted, uninteresting to explore and lifeless. Basically, it was a lot of green sprinkled with some olive branches. A lot of the times the only way to know roughly where I am was pulling up the map because based on my surroundings, I could've been anywhere. Compared to the intriguing world of Origins, where you always knew in which area of the map you currently were, this was a shitshow. I mean, just walking through the desert in Origins had more atmosphere than the whole city of Athens (the main fucking city) could ever muster up. (Oh, remember the times of AC Brotherhood, where Rome actually felt like a city even though it wasn't actually humongous like the new games are? Or how atmospheric the whole of AC II was? I mean, Venice? Hello? M a s t e r p i e c e) But I can overlook that. The combat didn't feel heavy, or to put it better, "impactful" like it did in Origins, but more like poking the enemies to their deaths with something that made sword-y sounds. But I can overlook that. The loot system improved a bit, in the sense of giving the option to modify your loot and being able to combine different armor pieces, however, Origins outfit-system was more up my alley. But I can overlook that. Funnily enough, compared to its predecessor, Odyssey looked worse. In Origins the fabric of your outfit look like actual fabric and, I can't stress this enough, waved in the wind. In Odyssey everything felt more static and somehow "fake". But I can overlook that. To me, Origins' story was masterfully done. Personally, I'd say, that this is the closest we've ever gotten to the Ezio-Trilogy. The voice acting was top notch. Bayek was a great character, and the side characters like Aya/Amunet were equally intriguing. I still remember the first time I saw the first confession cutscene after killing Medunamun. It gave me shivers and goosebumps and got me excited for what was about to come. What I want to say with this, is that Origins made me care; care about its characters, care about their backstory and motives, care about the world, etc. After I had finished the DLC The Hidden Ones I felt like I had actually witnessed the igniting spark of something epic, namely the Assassin Brotherhood, in such a chilling way, even though they basically were just chillin' in a cave. Because that's what character building gives you: payoffs. Well, Odyssey did none of that. All it did made me care about was to get all the loot, because that's what my mind always goes for in any game (I'm that kind of stupid ape). I didn't care about what would happen in the end – I just wanted to get there. I wanted to know how the story would end, but in whichever way it would, I knew I wouldn't care for it in the sense of being disappointed or yearning for a different outcome for the character I was so invested in, because, as I said, nothing got me invested in the character(s) in the first place. That's what bugged me the most about Odyssey. Not the flimsy feeling combat, not the husk of a world I found myself in, not the downgrade in design and animation, etc., but the lack of care it invoked.

Now, when Valhalla was originally announced, I was excited as I could be for a video game. Ubisoft was clearly aware of their mistakes with Odyssey and tried to show that they're willing to listen to their fanbase. A world where every area has its own identity? Sounds great. Heavy combat? Hell yeah. Gear and loot that actually matters and is special (unlike in Odyssey where after a few hours of playing you find yourself carrying the same fucking bow 25 times)? Oh my. Choices not for the sake of choices, but story? Yes please. I mean, if you have to implement choices. Even though choices don't really make sense in Assassin's Creed, but that's another topic.

Well, did it deliver (for me)? No. And to be completely honest, I prefer Odyssey, even as the grindfest that it is, over Valhalla, and me replaying Odyssey seems a lot more likely to me, than going through all of Valhalla again. I'm not going to list all of the points mentioned above again in full detail: The world is a bit more intriguing than Greece, but a shadow of what Egypt was. The combat feels heavy, yet every weapon looks too big (????) and it still feels a bit off. My biggest grudge of the minor points is actually the look/the graphics: How on earth does Valhalla manage to look less real than Origins? The fur and pelts on the armor, every piece of cloth, i mean just e v e r y t h i n g looks somewhat plasticy (at loss for a better word here; just compare Origins' outfits in motion to Valhalla's) Anyway, let's get to the real problem here, because all boils down to the point I've mentioned before: Invoking care.

This became very apparent to me after forging the fourth (?; was it the fourth? They all blur together. That's how e n t i c i n g they are. Great.) alliance or so. I didn't give a single fuck about the characters in those arcs. It was very clear that they'd be soon replaced by other characters in the next alliance's arc, which I probably wouldn't care for either, especially, since they all felt somewhat the same: empty. Alliances felt like checklists to do. Even Wincestre, which had an interesting beginning, somehow managed to loose all of its "darkness" after the first two quests. But I could overlook the dreary sidequest-like alliance arcs, if they served the main storyline in some way or form. Now you might ask, what main storyline? E x a c t l y. Looking back, there is none. At least not really. And there where a lot of times playing the game where I found myself wondering, if this alliance-arc-thing I was currently dragging myself through was in fact meant to be the actual story. But it shouldn't be. Was it? I have no fucking clue. My conclusion on what Valhalla's main overarching story is, is what follows:

Eivor's parents got killed when he was a child (never seen before lol), got adopted, and is now part of the Raven clan with his "brother" Sigurd//Sigurd comes home from some raid with the Assassins Basim and Hytham//(Eivor gets the Hidden Blade; I mean, this is an Assassin's Creed game. Big moment. Done in 2 seconds.)//Sigurd and Eivor aren't happy with the new King of Norway.//Sigurd and Eivor fuck off to England (with Basim and Hytham) to set camp there.//Eivor starts to forge alliances throughout England to make his clan's hold on England stronger.// Sigurd and Basim do their own thing.//Eivor meets Sigurd and Basim two or three times throughout his alliance forging.//Basim seems a bit off.//Sigurd says that he was told (by Basim?) that he is a descendant of the gods.// Sigurd wants to "pursue his destiny"// (sidenote: the last few things are all within one (!) short cutscene in a small house. d e v e l o p m e n t.)//Sigurd gets captured and tortured and loses his hand.//Eivor rescues Sigurd.// Sigurd is back in the settlement.//Sigurd distrusts Eivor because Eivor doesn't believe Sigurd and Sigurd thinks Eivor wants to take his title as the jarl (jarls are the bosses of settlements).// And then the end sequence hits. This is where I want to go into somewhat detail again. We go from Sigurd distrusts Eivor to "Eivor, I don't wanna be the boss of the town, so I don't hold a grudge anymore, let's go back to Norway and I'll show you I was right all along" like it's nothing. It's literally just that: You walk up to Sigurd, he says this (more or less) and you sail away. Again: development is taken very seriously in this game. Honestly, at this point I didn't even know that this was going to trigger the ending. My genuine thoughts were "Oh my, finally, after all this grinding, the story is going to start." when in reality of course, ironically, it was going to end. Absolute belter. So you sail to Norway with Sigurd, which takes fucking forever, because OF COURSE you have to sail (for everyone who didn't play the game, yes, sail, that means looking at a viking longship while occasionally moving the stick slightly to change its directions slightly) to your original settlement in Norway, for what feels like far too long, only to say Hi to your dad. Fucking lost it. I thought we were going to assassinate the King? Nah bruv let's just have some quick family talk instead. Some action? Nah. Just get back to the longship. A N D S T A R T S A I L I N G A G A I N. Where? Just around the curve of our settlement in Norway. Yes, they pulled the old trick of the ending is literally just right around the corner of your starting position hehe. Absolute belter. Is this to make it seem like something is about to happen? The calm before the storm? It doesn't work like that. Well, then you actually sail through a storm (lol), which doesn't matter, because Sigurd just says "Let's keep going" and, well, you keep going. Also, to this point the weather conditions have never affected neither Eivors health, nor the ship in any way whatsoever, so why should I be impacted by a storm now? Like, it's a nice thing for atmosphere, but at least make the ship harder to steer or something. Then you walk up a mountain. Funnily enough Sigurd walks in manner that shows that the walk against the storm isn't easy, whereas you, hah, you can just yeet yourself up that mountain like nothing. I could sprint up there. Fucking sprint. Anyway, Eivor and Sigurd enter the Isu temple, because of course, we had to throw an Isu temple in there, I mean, i t ' s A s s a s s i n ' s C r e e d. Was it hinted at before in the story? Not really. Were we chasing or searchig for it? Nah, better get that next alliance going. It just suddenly was. Again: development. So we walk to the main platform of the temple and activate the machine and bam we're in Valhalla (because at some point Ubisoft realised that maybe they should include what is literally in the name of the game). Again, were we looking for Valhalla? Like not in the sense that every viking was, but more in the sense

of was it the main objective of the game? Did Eivor look for a way to Valhalla? Was there anything that led us here other than Sigurd having had a few dreams (that only got mentioned, like, twice?) and being influenced into thinking he was a demigod or something? Nope, Eivor was looking for that next alliance to forge. So, Eivor realises that his experience of Valhalla is fake and he wants to get out. But fake-Odin doesn't want to let him go. In a really weird cutscene (jump to 6:30), Eivor eventually escapes Odin and enters a door with his settlement-family (look, I'm all here for metaphors, but this, this is just utter rubbish. It just doesn't make sense, and there is no payoff whatsoever). Odin actually had a build-up of some sort. In every assassination sequence he's there and talks with Eivor. I actually thought there would be some cool payoff/ending/reveal here. But nah, this ain't it chief. Yet somehow, until here, I had hope. I thought maybe now, building on all this confusion, there's gonna be a relatively good ending. Something enticing. Something that made everything somewhat worthwile. And Ubisoft went: Lol nah. So, you're out of the Isu machine again (for all the non-AC-peoples here: basically like the matrix. Eivor gets hooked up to the machine and experiences alternate reality: Valhalla), and Basim is there. What a twist. The guy that showed up like three times and went from friendly in the first time to super suspicious (like glaring-in-your-face-suspicious) in the two-or-so other major cutscenes he was in, has now been revealed as the enemy. Congrats to that. What a twist. The thing is, and this bothers me a lot actually, it could have been anyone there. It didn't need to be Basim. It wouldn't have felt out of place if it wasn't him. Why? Because Ubisoft failed terribly at making you connect to any character and at building any actual story (or character). It could have been Gunnar, the friendly black-smith in our settlement, and it would have been as fitting as Basim. Then Basim says that this is "for his son". Ah yes, the lost son of Basim, which was mentioned once. Right. Eivor defeats Basim by hooking him up on the Isu machine and gets back to the settlement with Sigurd (in my ending at least. There seems to be a possible ending in which Sigurd doesn't come back.) Cut to the modern day, where Layla now knows the coordinates of the Isu temple, goes there, hooks herself up to the machine, becomes the overseer of time with the other overseer of time which already was hanging out there (I mean yeah, great idea, terrible execution. Build it up, then you can have a payoff. This was just straight outta nowhere, and who cared about Layla anyway.) Anyway, meanwhile Basim, who was still hanging on that machine a fuck ton of years later, pops off, and is now living in the modern day. The idea here is, that we lost the hero (Layla) which caused the (just established) vilain (Basim) to do his fuckery in the modern day. But why should I care? Basim was basically nonexistent in the basically nonexistent story and suddendly I should feel sad or shocked, because he's in the modern day? Is this supposed to be intriguing? And yeah, Layla is "gone". Layla, who had no character building over three fucking games. Why should i be bothered? Why should I care about anything that just happened? Remember when a side character (Lucy) died in AC Brotherhood? That was intriguing. Why? Because they built her as a character we (Desmond) trusted, even though it was in the modern day (which no one really cares about in AC). And this is why Valhalla broke me and Odyssey didn't. Valhalla failed to make me care on a much deeper level. It's just a lot of nothingness. Empty characters in a nonexistent story. And by nonexistent, I mean non-built at all. When I play the game now, I have no actual reason, and throughout the game never actually had any actual reason, to continue. It was a chore. I didn't bother if after three hours of grind I would eventually get a mini-snippet of a husk of a story, and neither do I care now. Everything in

this game is so devoid of sparking curiosity and screams of lacklusterness to the point where I don't even know what I have actually expierenced. For fuck's sake Ubisoft, make me care again. At least once in 40 hours.

May I sum up Valhalla's "story" and content in the glorious words of Catherine Tate: Am I bovvered? The answer, sadly, is a holistic no.

#assassins creed #ac valhalla #sorry for the rant #this is my longest post yet #am i bovvered #sidenote: this is actually the first time that i'm genuinely pissed at ubisoft #i wasn't even this mad with odyssey #and that thing got a lot of hate #maybe i'm gonna delete this again

[tobiasbotte]

Okay, I've got a weird itch, and I'm wondering if my dear netizens can help me scratch it. This is a fic rec request post. Also kind of a praise post? Skip to the end to see the request, because I go off on a bit of a tangent.

I've been…really getting into The Untamed/Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfics lately? Like, seriously, been doing a deep dive every since I finished the live action drama because holy shit that was something beautiful. And I gotta say, my favorite kinds of fics right now in this fandom are the full blown, novel length, ensemble cast ones. You know, the ones where all the right ones live, or even our favorite bad guys get redemption arcs, and almost everyone is paired off by the end. I'm a sucker for that shit. It's beautiful.

This does not negate the fact that the show (I'm working up the courage to read the actual novel that started this all - I've started, now I just need to take the plunge) is beautiful in its own right. I adore that WWX and LWJ got their happy ending. I also adore these fics.

I digress.

When I first dove into the fandom, I loved LWJ/WWX & LSZ interactions as a family. Then I fell down the WWX & JC reconciliation hell hole and I have not climbed back out, nor do I wish to! It’s amazing. But now, I've noticed that the fics that have Meng Yao|Gin Guangyao as the fulcrum are the most fascinating. Everything revolves around him, most of the time, and while I adore WWX as my favorite tortured soul and his epic pining romance with LWJ and his family dynamic with LSZ and JC, these giant fics with JGY at the center are like. Epic odysseys. It's amazing. 

And, you know, off topic of this post - which is supposed to be a cry for recs, please help - it really makes me want to write one, but first off, I know next to nothing about wuxia/xianxia style stories (though with the amount of media I've been consuming, and the cultural rabbit holes I've fallen down in on Google this past month alone, I daresay I could definitely make a good run at it), and second, just the whole psychological aspect of it for all of those characters - I pride myself on being able to read a room, especially with what I do for a living, but holy shit do these fics do a deep dive.

By the way, I speak of two specific fic authors who write the most epic JGY-fulcrum fics that I've seen so far: @mercyandmagic and @hamliet. If either of you guys see this, my respect to you as writers is through the roof. Seriously, it's mind boggling. The dissection of JGY's character, his desire for acceptance, his desperate will to live no matter what - it's beautiful. Not to mention the viewpoints of literally every other character in their fics?! And the head-hopping is amazing - not something I usually see. (Apparently this is common in Chinese fic writing, or so I’ve read somewhere? But it’s not disconcerting at all, at least not how these two do it. I kind of want to try that style...)

Lord, I don't even remember where I'm going with this. If any of my readers follow me on here, you know I'm mostly a Yu Yu Hakusho writer (let's forget the other secret account I had back in high school; I burned that, I believe). I write novella length stuff at best (of fan fiction. My original works are…massive, to say the least, which I'm proud of.). But I've never been in a fandom (and I'm in a lot of fandoms; my bookmark count on AO3 can attest to that holy shit I have a problem) that has produced such epic works that it has moved me to sway from my usual fic writing habits of safety, of topics that I'm familiar with. Seriously, I "know" wuxia/xianxia stuff now (I've been going back to my nerd roots lately and tearing through K- and C-dramas - with my mother, no less! - and absorbing a lot of cool shit. It's so fun.), but I don't know it, you know what I mean? I can explain to my mother the significance of joss sticks, paper money being burned for the dead, wedding red and mourning white, the wedding games people have to play to retrieve their spouses, cultivation culture, etc., but I'd never try to write about it because - let's face it! I'm scared. Which is funny. I'm not Japanese (I’m black/Filipino/white), but I actually grew up being fascinated by the culture thanks to my dad - our family's original weeb - and so I'm not too terrified to write fics about animes because, you know, I'm kind of familiar with it.

Chinese-based fics though? Alien to me. And it's not that I'm scared of offending anyone - I'm glad that the majority of fan culture that I have personally interacted with is nice. It's a shame that a lot of the nasty stuff gets the spotlight, gives fandom culture a bad rep, but I know that most of you guys - I'm speak of you readers/writers - are chill people who wanna vibe with the fandoms in peace.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just making excuses to not write MDZS fics by claiming that I don't want to contribute because I don't want to do the genre its in any injustice. The real reason I don't want to write it is because I don't think I'd be able to have a good grasp on the mental aspect of any of the characters! Weird. Writing fanfiction has never scared me before. I know it's because I'm comparing myself to these other awesome writers, not just the two I've listed, but all the writers of the amazing MDZS fics I've been reading, but who doesn’t compare themselves to someone else? It’s destructive. At least I’m aware of what I’m doing-

Holy shit this post is long I need to stop what was the point.

The point...

The point was - a request! So far, those are the only two writers I've come across who do those epic ensemble/fulcrum/happy ending for all/everyone is paired off fics in this fandom. Obviously I've barely made a dent in all the material that's out there, but I figured I'd save myself some time and ask if anyone in the MDZS fandom could recommend any other fics that do this.

Bonus points if it includes Qin Su/Wen Ning or Su She/Jin Zixun (like, seriously, I would have never in a million years expected to have liked the latter pairing, but when I've seen it logically laid out on how to rectify them, it fucking works?!). If not that, then my second favorite type of fics are the WWX & JC brotherly reconciliation fics with lots of gross sobbing. I adore the relationship between these two and I just want them to be a family again, please. There's a lot more of these works than the former, and I'm slowly working my way through them, but if you find some that I should absolutely read right now, lemme know.

#the untamed #mo dao zu shi #mdzs #jin guangyao #wei wuxian #lan wangji #jiang cheng #lan sizhui #family dynamics #ensemble cast #fan fiction #fanfics #writing #fandom #wuxia #xianxia #this post is one colossal cluster of ramblings please forgive me #i just want more amazing content to read #i've already gone through all the mdzs works of the mentioned writers #need more #gimme #help meeee #seriously though it's all so beautiful #this whole fandom is beautiful #you guys #all of you #are amazing

[bobdylanrevisited]

Infidels

Released: 27 October 1983

Rating: 8/10

With his reputation as a songwriter and forward thinker in the gutter following years of derision for his Christian albums, Bob released this short record to a collective shrug from critics and audiences alike, however I do think this album is criminally overlooked. Whilst his voice almost sounds like a Dylan parody at times, his songwriting is returning to politics and poetry, and his sound now has a strange Caribbean feel to it. This album is the work of a man both jaded and hopeful, possibly at odds with his own life, and his standing in a zeitgeist that had written him off as a has been. Though religion still features prominently on the album, the edgier songs are a welcome return to form for a man who writes about bitterness and feeling out of place better than anyone else. It is, however, impossible to talk about the songs on this release, without also focussing on what was bafflingly left off it.

1) Jokerman - The opening reggae drum beat is a shock, as is the almost mumbled singing from Dylan to begin with. For years I dismissed this track for some reason, unaware that it is one of his best ever songs. There’s a reason Leonard Cohen said it was his favourite Dylan track, it’s truly breathtaking. It’s filled to the brim with religious and historical reference, spilling over from his previous albums, but it is also beautifully poetic with a stellar chorus. The album version is a brilliantly laid back Caribbean number, but when he played it on David Letterman’s show back by The Plugz, it morphed into a roaring punk song. It’s a timeless classic that proved Bob could still unleash wordy odyssey’s and was still the greatest songwriter around.

2) Sweetheart Like You - This is just a nice love song. I like the way Bob sounds on the track, I like way song builds then relaxes, there wouldn’t be much else to discuss here other than one certain lyric: ‘A woman like you should be at home, that’s where you belong’. Obviously, this line isn’t great. In the context of the song it does stick out in the worst possible way, I understand Bob probably didn’t mean it as a horrendously sexist statement, but regardless it does bring the song down in my eyes. It’s a shame as the song is a sweeter side of Bob, but that line really should have been cut.

3) Neighbourhood Bully - This is a fast paced rock song in defence of Israel, a sore subject given today’s political climate (free Palestine). To judge the song on its own merit, it’s well written, almost sarcastic and humorous about the country’s history. Not the best song on the album and it certainly hasn’t aged well, but it’s a decent enough track and a return to Dylan’s take on political events.

4) License To Kill - I like this track a lot, it talks about political and environmental concerns, with Bob attacking society for taking the world for granted. However, it does also have huge religious connotations and a weird distrust of space travel, likely due to religious fears at the time, but it is still a brilliantly structured song. Bob sounds more relaxed and understated here, and the tune is quite mellow, despite a rather out of place drum beat.

5) Man Of Peace - Another fast rock number, this is easily the most Christian song on the record, which talks about Satan and temptation being everywhere. Despite this, it’s a fun and enjoyable song with the best backing instrumentation on the album, although Bob’s voice does slip back into the nasal whine we previously heard throughout the religious years.

6) Union Sundown - This is a scathing attack on American capitalism, it’s just a shame it’s hidden in a very average song. Bob lists everyday items and the countries in which they are made, backed by a weird country guitar riff, and also mentions America’s greed for wanting to keep costs down and not pay workers a proper wage. He then sings a basic chorus with a distracting back up singer who clashes with Bob’s voice. I like the message, and it’s nice to hear Bob take a stance on a geopolitical issue that is still a problem today, but I’m not a huge fan of this track as a whole.

7) I And I - A much darker song, that talks about loneliness. Bob seems to almost view himself as another person, unable to feel at one with his public persona and his real feelings, and this culminates in a pained sounding chorus which is punctuated by a simple but effectively stark guitar backing and those island drums. The ‘Real Live’ version from 1984 is my favourite rendition of the song, Bob’s in great voice and the band gels together to deliver a brilliant performance.

8) Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight - Much like track 2, the album closes with another sweet love song, that features some great harmonica and guitar, and Bob actually sounding romantic. It might not be the most memorable song on the record, but it’s a nice, uplifting note to end on.

Bonus: Blind Willie McTell - Bob Dylan is his own worst editor. I’m sure I’ll talk about this masterpiece at length once I get to the Bootleg Series, but I can’t review this album without also mentioning this outtake. I just think if I’d written and recorded one of the greatest songs of all time during the sessions for the album, a song with perfect vocals and Mark Knopfler on guitar, I’d have probably added it to the track list. I definitely wouldn’t have left it on the cutting room floor and only released it commercially 8 years later. In a decade when people were saying he isn’t as good as he used to be, he chose to leave this song behind. Bob is terrible for leaving great songs off his releases, but to deny listeners this unbelievable tune truly annoys me.

Verdict: This is just a solid album. It’s certainly not his best work, but it is pretty great with a collection of brilliant songs. There’s not much else to say about it, other than I’d urge everyone to find all the outtakes from the recording sessions, as they’re all enjoyable. But especially go and and listen to ‘Blind Willie McTell’ if you haven’t, it’s his best song from this period and it’s not even on the fucking album, if it were I imagine this one would be a 9/10. Following the release, Bob would embark on a fantastic tour throughout 1984 before getting back into the studio, and I’m afraid to say it all goes downhill for the next few years. Music was changing, and a middle aged Bob was struggling to keep afloat in an increasingly young persons industry.

#infidels #bob dylan

[tysondabs]

Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)

trigger warnings and contents: death/parental death, a cemetery visit, L.A. traffic, expensive whiskey. 

************

If he was a smart person, Tyson would have known he could just google his father’s details and find out where he was interred from there. One simple google would have done it, but not being an internet-first person, he resorted to texting Angela instead. She was more than happy to give him the details, and mention in so many follow-up texts how happy she was he had decided to go see him. The knots in his stomach started then, something inside twisting at the way she said she was happy, proud, and that Johnny would be happy to have him visit, he was sure. There was a succession of emojis, hearts, flowers. The sailor knots twisted themselves tighter.

He set off the next day, somewhere between 2 and 3 on the drive. Had taken another day off at work, more sour faces from Lisa and threatening that he’d all but used up all his vacation days this year, but fuck her; he let any thought of her pass not to ruin the day, started his beat up, paint-chipped Honda civic and hit the road. Stone cold sober, nothing in his system but the black coffee he’d slammed back minutes earlier.

Cruising down Silverlake Boulevard, some familiar scenes until he left the familiar scenes for unfamiliar road, then merged onto the freeway. It was fine until he hit bumper to bumper traffic. Now? Midday? Fucking hell.

He hated driving in L.A. on the best of days, but now, without music, and the heat, and stopping every two minutes as the cars crawled up the drive, he was starting to get stir crazy minutes into the journey. At the next stop he pulled out his phone, checking notifications; a thought occurred to him, or rather, a desire. Maybe he could text Sasha. But he couldn’t picture a way to word ‘going to see my dad’ to her without it sounding fucking weird or stupid, so he tossed his phone to the passenger seat and continued driving (only to pull it back up again a moment later because he forgot he had the GPS going).

At some point, he got too engrossed in his thoughts, and missed the turn into Cahuenga Boulevard. Fucking hell, part two. Maps rerouted though, and after a very long roundabout, he was finally at a stoplight, opposite some weird building-slash-cottage. ‘Valhalla Entertainment’, the banner said, and that rang a bell (wasn’t that Jude’s kid’s name?). 14 years in this city, and he had absolutely no clue which part this was. Somewhere between the Hills, before or past the Hollywood Bowl, he rarely came here unless it was a party. The distractions had him nearly missing his turn into Barham, but he pulled it just as the light turned green, the odyssey getting longer by the minute and it would be a miracle, he felt, if he made it at all. At this point, there was an itch to just Fucking Get There, wherever ‘there’ was. He drove past a flower shop, contemplated stopping but decided against it. What good were flowers anyway, he had something better with him — a bottle of Four Roses bourbon, sitting passenger seat beside him. Johnny liked that one. Or so he thought. At any rate, there was a photo of him holding a bottle of it somewhere on the internet, one he looked psychotically happy in, that was burned into Tyson’s retinas. 

He drove past a sign for Universal City, and then a building loomed large, the New York Film Academy building (that made no sense to Tyson, why would the New York film academy be here? In L.A.? It made no damn sense). This entire city was Hollywood, it ate the city up and swallowed it whole, chewed and then spit it back out. That’s what it did to people, at least the ones who came seeking something in the realm of fame, anyway. Everyone else in the city was stuck under its heel, suffering and poor. The rich elite and the hoods; night and day contrasts. He knew which part he belonged to, and would prefer it over anything fancy that this town had to offer because it was all a farce, all an illusion. Though he wouldn’t begrudge any of his friends chasing fame money and success. He had plenty of those, and he hoped they could navigate the labyrinths in this concrete maze better than many did. Better than his dad sure had.  

Forest Lawn Drive creeped up on him as buildings thinned out and disappeared, he was close now, he could feel it. Before long, there was a large white building beside a brick church, and he was here. He stopped at Information, gave the coordinates he was looking for and they directed him. Straight up that road and it was somewhere in the middle, coordinates marked. The knots got tighter now as the boom barrier lifted and he drove into the cemetery. Thoughts narrow, throat dry. He pulled up to the right space, or what he thought was the right space. A piece of trivia fell into his head, remembering that Lemmy was buried here too. Maybe he’d snap a photo for Emma, if he could find it, if he could even remember. He followed the numbers as he slowed his car, looking out at names, gravestones marked in the ground in even rows. He stopped the car at the assumed right spot, parked it by the curb and killed the engine.

Now the hard part. In his stomach sat a lead pretzel. His breaths dug deeper and he thought of a girl with fair hair to try and bring himself out of it. It sure would’ve been nice if she was here, maybe he’d even be cracking jokes right now. He tended to do that in her presence, even when he was peak anxious and scared; like when they were boarding that plane. But there’s no one here, just him and his multiple personalities, the angry ones and the sad ones this time mostly. It was quiet up here, and he saw someone walking amongst the graves, and a caretaker not too far from that person. The church stood behind him down the slight incline of the hill, and everything else fell flat, in neat green rows. He thought of another girl, one from many years ago. She knew his deal, knew how he would get on this day, he’d told her as much. And when that day came around one time, she surprised him with a trip. They drove out of town to some peak overlooking the city, she’d packed a picnic, and made sure they had a day of it. That had been real nice of her to do.

He couldn’t sit here and rehash memories endlessly to avoid what he came for though, and Tyson got out the car, grabbing his trusty tin and the bottle of whiskey he’d brought with. The lead pretzel undid itself and became a slithering snake. Walking amongst the rows, he looked at names, family lots. Looking out for the right one. None of them were the right one. Angela had sent directions, but they were haphazard and not exact. Some five minutes passed this way, Tyson beginning to wonder whether he was in the right section at all, passing name after name, some sounding famous, some not. Some with fancy words the grave, or markings, and flowers left by them. He passed one with a shitton of flowers; either a recent or old Hollywood star. He came down one side and down the next row, starting to wonder if he should give up here and move on to the section directly below this one, maybe it was there she’d meant — when it caught his eye, the gravestone in the corner of an enclave, sitting flush with the earth.

John Robert ‘Johnny’ Dobbs. Beloved husband and father.   8/15/1964 - 4/27/2001 And when the winds carry you home, Remember who it was that sang your song.

There were bunches of flowers shrivelled up beside the grave, two sets of them. His throat felt heavy, scratchy as he stopped and kneeled before it, wondering who’d left them. It was hard to swallow now, impossible.

There was nobody around, but even had there been, Tyson didn’t think he’d let that stop him from doing what he did. He tried talking quiet at first, but maybe Johnny couldn’t hear him that way. Who knows how this thing worked. He took a tentative seat on the ground and crossed his legs, sighing. Looking up and squinting to the sky that still had a sun up high in it, still far from sunset, nowhere near it. A sheen of sweat showed on his brow between the parts obscured by his backwards cap. He frowned, and spoke to some space between the grass and the corner of the memorial stone.

“Well… I made it. I’m here.” Now that he thought about it, he probably should have come on his birthday instead. Because this…this was fucking depressing. The 20th anniversary. Twenty years it had been since he died in that hotel room all alone, and not since the actual funeral had he ever thought to come here. “I know I don’t…come here at all…ever…but I just wanted you to know I think about you…think of how you are…don’t even know if I believe in that heaven or hell shit, who knows…”

He tore out strips of grass that were beside him, and arranged them in a little, methodical pile. “Maybe this reincarnation shit is real and you’re out there somewhere…maybe on another planet. That would be cool. You were too good for this one anyway.” Rip, rip, more pieces of green to join the little pile he was making. “I wanted to…wanted to, uh, say something, actually.” He sniffled, not sure when his nose had started running, but it had now.

“I’m sorry.” He couldn’t finish the rest out loud but he thought it. I’m sorry for ever being mad at you, for throwing tantrums, for being a shit son. I’m sorry for pushing you away when you would come back because I thought you had left us. I know it wasn’t like that now. It wasn’t like that at all.

The tears rolled freely now, another unexpected surprise from the day. “Wish I could…I wish I could find the…” he shook his head, over and over, anger mixing into the rest of the feelings churning inside him, so much frustration, rage. That things even turned out this way. Had it not been for that, his dad could have been here, alive. Disappointing Tyson in the flesh and Tyson in turn disappointing him, but alive at least. “Fuckin’... kill them all…every last one…” He’d do it, too, no one could stop him. Not even the thought of a life in prison. “I know why you were the way you were, is all I wanted to say. Shit, I’m like that too. Maybe it runs in our genes.” He looked up like he was talking to someone, like there was a physical body here receiving his words, looking back at him. “Wish I could listen to your stuff too, because it’s good stuff. But I can’t…sorry.” There were people out there though, who listened, and still loved him, and had not forgotten him. He remembered the messages from fans he would get. That counted for something, at least. Maybe they could all listen in his place, since he could not. He knew Angela didn’t listen to his stuff either, and there was something to be said about that. At least he wasn’t alone feeling like this. 

He picked up the bottle of bourbon he’d brought with him and twisted open the cap. Tipping it back, he took a big drink, quenching his thirst, feeling the burn as the liquor travelled down his system. Gasping for breath as he pulled back, he poured the rest over all the grass. Here, all for you, he thought, some dark amusement to that. Probably haven’t had a drink in a long ass time, huh? He stopped when he’d all but created a puddle of whiskey before him that was getting too large. One more sip stolen of his own, and he placed the bottle right side up next to his gravestone. “That’s for you.” Surprisingly, the knot was easing up, or maybe it was put on hold. Maybe this wasn’t too bad. Maybe he could do it again next year, or in the summer when it came time for Johnny’s birthday. Twice a year.

Tyson let out a long breath he had been seemingly holding in, cheeks puffing out, chest heaving. He started to feel sickish now, queasy. Maybe he needed a smoke. Yeah. His tin came out, the usual stash of two prerolls in it. He hesitated, then pulled the spare one out, placing it next to the whiskey bottle. “I know you never liked this shit dad, but give it a try yeah?” he said, like he was persuading Johnny to change his mind on Tyson’s drug of choice. At the same time, lighting the other one he’d brought with him.  “Don’t know what kinda shit you had back in the eighties, but this is good stuff. Promise.” God, he was going crazy, fully lost it out here, smoking a joint and talking to a gravestone. A fucking joke. But nah, it wasn’t him, it was the world that was a joke, and he was just fine.

He stayed some time longer, until he’d smoke down the joint to the end, the buzz it offered providing some sort of calm to his frayed nerves, definitely making everything better. In a weird twist of events he felt hesitant to leave now, but eventually he did, getting up, dusting himself off. Crossing eyes with a woman across the lot as he did, somewhere in a not-so-far off distance. He wondered if she was visiting someone, but her husband joined her, photo camera in hand and it became quickly apparent they were tourists. He felt some kind of bile about that, the temptation to cuss them out as he walked past high, but he resisted. 

Fucking tourists.

Back in his now-overheated sat-in-the-sun-too-long car, he rolled the window down all the way, and breathed a long, relieved exhale again. His head went to the steering wheel as he tried to collect himself, pick himself up from what just happened. He was in a state but coming out of it, slowly, gradually. That hadn’t been too bad. He forgot half the things he’d wanted to say, but maybe he would think of them again on the drive back, write them down somewhere and then say them when he was back here again. If there was anything he wished for after all, it would be more time with Johnny. And Angela. He’d make a point to go back to Texas if it meant driving for two days. Alone. It was the tradeoff for spending time with his family, what he had left of it anyway, because in the end, that’s all you had, wasn’t it? 

Talking himself through and down some weird freakout episode wasn’t easy, but gradually, in this hot ass car that wasn’t getting any cooler, he somehow cooled down himself. Then he pulled out his phone and dialled a number. 

#self para #ft. johnny dobbs #death tw #parental death tw #grieving tw

[cacti-are-like-flamingos]

The Golden Hand

° Assassin's Creed Odyssey Imagine °

Chapter 2

Fem! Reader

Central Masterlist | The Golden Hand

“Let me see if I understand this...You are not from my time?” Alexios asked, his words slow as he tried to wrap his mind around your whole situation. His brown eyes gazing up at you, trying to see if you were, in any way, trying to make a fool out of him. Yet, you gave nothing of those sorts. Instead, he found that your desperateness was, in fact, sincere. Genuine. You nodded quickly, hoping with every inch of your being that he would believe you. Because if he didn’t---you knew for a fact surviving in this new world would be near impossible. Alexios continued, “You- What time are you from again?” 

“I'm from the 21st century. A thousand years into...um...your future?” The man stared at you.

“A thousand years into my future...what did you do to end up here? Did you anger a god?” You looked at him, eyes looking more dead than ever.

“Fuckin’ must-have.” The Spartan had to hold back an amused snort.

You neglected to inform him about how in your world he was a mere videogame character, thinking that if you told him the truth his reaction wouldn’t have been at all accepting. It was like the equivalence of telling someone their lives and everything they’ve ever accomplished, never mattered, to begin with, because they just weren’t...real. Shit’s complicated.

“And you want me to take you back home as a way to pay my debt?“ “As a way to pay your debt, yes.” You anticipated his next wors. Did he believe you or would he just sign you off as some lunatic? Seconds turned into minutes, and before you knew it, 5 minutes had passed by. Those very 5 minutes felt like hours, the drumming of your heart becoming too much to bear within them.

The sudden sound of him humming lowly broke you out of your anxiety, your heart stilling upon seeing him lean back into the wall of the room, his eyes never leaving your figure. Opening his mouth, you stopped breathing, “ I believe you.”

It was as if someone had lifted off the world from the Atlas’s shoulder, the weight of your fears, doubts, and anxieties evaporating into seemingly nothing. You let out a heavy sigh, hands trembling slightly. You regained your composure a minute later, having developed enough confidence to look back up to him, your eyes locking with one another. 

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” He arched a brow, “Why do you thank me?” Licking your lips you replied, “I feared that you’d like write me off as some crazy person. Come on, would you really believe if someone told you a crazy ass story of how they’re from thousands of years into the future and somehow ended up here?” He gave you a look.

“I just did.” You paused.

“Touché.” Alexios furrowed his brows, unfamiliar with the word you had just uttered. 

“Tou-what?” Your confusion equaled his.

“Touché. You know, when ---oh. Oh.” You realized your mistake. “Its, uh, when like you make a clever point type of thing. Uhh, I don’t know how to explain it. I've never had to explain it before, everyone just knew what it meant.” You muttered the last sentence quietly under your breath. This was going to be a struggle, that was for sure.

 Simply nodding, Alexios figured there would be some extreme cultural differences between the two fo you. After all, you are from the far future, your people are bound to be different than his. Ignoring the look of struggle on your face, he let his eyes trail down your body, acknowledging your clothing--- the lack of it more so. He couldn’t help but grimaced at the sight of your pants, reminding him of the Persians. (Okay, when I was doing my research I came across an article that spoke about how Ancient Greeks associated pants with savagery and Spartans associated it with the Persians, their enemy. So like idk. Correct me if I’m wrong or something.)

“If I am to aid you in your journey home, we must do something about that.” He gestures over to your garments. You understood his point, nodding in agreement.

“Yeah, I know.” 

“But for now, let’s rest. The sun has fallen, traveling at night is not safe. Follow me." He said as he stood up from the wooden stool, gesturing for you to follow him to the room next door. Doing so, hurried over to him, following him all the way down the hall. There were no actual doors, just log pieces of fabrics acting as one; two rooms stared across from each other. Alexios turned to you, "This is my room. " He pointed to the right," And that's your room." He lifted the delicate fabric with his index finger, revealing a simple room from what you could see; not much of furniture aside from a chest, a bed, and a nightstand beside it. A candle on a candle holder already lit.

Nodding, you thanked him, earning a small smile from him.

"Tomorrow we- I. I shall go to the agora and buy you some clothes to wear. You stay inside, don't answer to anyone but me, understood?" His expression was serious, it was new. Nodding once more in understanding, he held the fabric up as you slipped into the room, his eyes eyeing your back.

Shaking his head, the misthios muttered 'goodnight', heading off into his room with a flurry of creaking steps. Repeating his farewell, you paused to look around your new surroundings, scrutinizing every detail of the room. The walls were bare, not a single ounce of color beside the greyness of the stone material they were built from.

A single window adorned the room, providing a view to all of outside. There was no metal screen attached to it, meaning mosquito and whatever other critters could enter freely, especially hostile individuals. The thought of an intruder wight next to you, scared you out of your wits, however, knowing that a trained assassin was your host helped quell that fear.

Stepping over to the bed, you sat on it, its plushness dipping at the sudden appearance of your weight. A pair of fuzzy blankets folded on top of each other laid on the end of it; grabbing one, you examined its material. It was rough to the touch, hued into a deep burgundy with little designs on it. 

Kicking off your shoes, you slipped into the bed, pulling the scratchy blanket over you. Exhaustion overcoming you in an instant as your world slipped into darkness.

...

In your darkness came a light, piercing through your eyelids. Groaning in annoyance, you turned around in the bed, another groan escaping at the sudden feeling of a cold breeze against the skin of your feet.

"Oh for fuck's sake..." You muttered, shifting so that the blanket folded over them, blocking the wind.

"You've got quite the foul mouth, my friend." Snapping your eyes open, you yelped at the brightness of your surroundings. Struggling to regain your vision, you squinted your eyes to the entrance of the room, a familiar figure leaning on the stone frame. You made a face.

"And you've got a foul scent, my friend." Alexios's eyes widened in pure amusement at your witty insult, a smirk playing on his scarred lips.

It was then that you realized what you had just said, mouth already forming words of apologies.

"Sorry, sorry. Force of habit..." The man couldn't help but laugh at the pathetic sight of you trying to fake being sorry for your little statement.

“You really are one to talk back.” He stated as he laughed, the corners of his eyes wrinkling faintly. An embarrassed heat spreading to the apples of your cheeks, nodding your head slightly.

“Yeah, well,  this silver tongue of mine has gotten me into plenty of trouble.” There was a glint in his eyes.

“Wonder what else it does.” 

BIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHH!

A smirk came to paint your lips, your canines just barely poking out. “I mean I could show you but then again, I barely know you.” Not a single quiver in your voice. You spoke with confidence, mischief in your stare. You knew what you were doing without realizing it. 

He was almost taken aback by your words, however, he found them rather endearing in away. Pushing himself off the doorway, the tall male approached your figure still seated on the bed. Having sat up in the bed, you had had your legs danging off to the side, arms holding your body from falling back and hitting the stone wall behind you. The scratchy blankets covering your bare skin. The look in his brown eyes excited you, not in a sexual way, no. But more in a game of....well, you still couldn’t figure out which game, you just knew it was some game.

“So if we got to know one another...?” He trailed off, a playful smile on his scarred lips. His figure coming to stand right in front of you, his torso bent down so that he could meet your height. Grinning, you leaned in close to his face, your breath dusting the skin of his lips.

“Hmmm... in your dreams.” You patted his right cheek before quickly getting out of the bed, stretching your body after doing so. Not noticing the shocked expression that the Spartan held only for it to shift into a look of intrigue.

Hard to get, huh.

Chuckling under his breath, he shook his head. Straightening back up, Alexios spoke, “ I brought you something from the agora.” Glancing over your shoulder, you watched as he took out a small woven bag from his back. Reaching his hand inside, he pulled out multitudes of pearly white wool fabric followed by a sky blue one and a golden sash. 

“What’s that?” You asked, coming over to stand in front of him, your hands already feeling the fabric with wonder. He smiled softly.

“Clothing. You can’t exactly wear that to go out.” he gestured to your modern outfit, a disgruntled look on his face. You hummed.

“No, I cannot. Thanks.” Nodding, he placed the bag on the bed; there seemed to be more things in it.

Heading out the door he spoke, “I’ll let you get dressed now.” You nodded despite the fact that he wasn’t facing you. Hearing the soft whoosh of the fabric hanging by the doorframe, signaling that Alexios had left you alone.

Laying the fabric on the bed, you stared in disbelief at what it revealed.

...

Alexios couldn’t quite figure out just how exactly he was supposed to take you back home. At first, he had thought of the Gods, perhaps a prayer could help, however, the only god he knew of capable of moving back and forth in time was Kronos and that was a big no-no. 

That was one issue. The other was the war.

Just how was he going to help you while a war brews not far from Kephallonia. He was just recently hired to kill the Wolf of Sparta, meaning that if he wanted to get paid he would have to take her with and in all honesty, that was not a good idea. The chances of you getting harmed were ever-increasing. And just the thought of innocent blood getting spilled angered him greatly. But still.

He owed you.

And he always paid back his debts.

“umm...” Alexios snapped his attention to the entrance of your room, your head shyly popping out from it. The sight of your bashful expression almost causing him to laugh out loud. 

“What is the matter (Y/N)?” You smiled shyly, taking brief glances to the inside of the room.

“I’ve just never worn something like---well actually maybe for Halloween...?” He gave you a weird look.

“Hallo....win?” “Ween.” “Ween. Halloween...What is that?” “A holiday where people dress up and go around the community getting pieces of candies.” “Candies?” “Sweets.” You deadpanned. “Ah...Well...uh..let me see you.”

He watched as you disappeared back into your room before you gathered enough courage to come out. But when you did, his breath was taken away. Your looks rivaled even those of the Goddess of Beauty herself. Two golden pins held the fabric together, right on your shoulders, leaving your arms free of any obstacle. A golden sash wrapped tightly around your waist, emphasizing the width of your hips. The baby blue fabric that he had bought was fashioned around your figure, looping from the left shoulder to the right of your hip and back to its place of origin. Gold armbands adorned your left arms with two large golden bracelets adorning either forearm.  He had bought the accessories after seeing them being sold much cheaper than the usual, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to purchase so he did. 

“So?” You peered up at him, eyes glimmering with embarrassment. He hadn’t realized he was staring.

“Panemorfi.” 

“What?”

“You look beautiful. Your beauty rivals that of Aphrodite herself.” You narrowed your eyes at him.

“If I’m beautiful, you drop-dead gorgeous.” He blinked in surprise, not fully sure he heard right.

“What did you just say?” A ‘are-you-serious- look adorned yoru features, lips pursed together.

“Babyboy, you gotta get your ears checked.” You said as you walked towards the main room behind him.  The ends of your chiton dragging behind your soft steps. “Ooo, food!”. He had still to recover from your little statement, ever confused and everso offended by your word choice.

With squinted eyes, he loudly yelled,” Babyboy? I am no boy nor babe! And what does go-tta even mean!”

...

(A/N): Sorry for the long wait, the shortness of the chpater, and also if i got some facts wrong. My research isn’t yet complete.

Hope you enjoyed!

#alexios x reader #alexios x fem!reader #the golden hand #alexios x reader imagine #alexios imagine #assassins creed x reader imagine #assassins creed x reader #assassins creed x fem!reader #ac x reader #ac imagine #fanfic #fanfiction #reader #reader insert #fem!reader #assassins creed #assassins creed imagine #romance #assassin's creed odyssey #alexios #ancient greece

[sergeanttpoliteness]

➹one love confession, please➹(peter b. parker x reader)

The sad and divorced man who’s become a regular for the past year is constantly spilling his emotions to you, his favorite bartender. This wasn’t something new; you can’t count with both of your hands the times you’ve heard someone recount the odyssey of their life. But these flutters in your stomach were definitely something you didn’t experience with your customers, and you definitely did not end up making out with them at the end of the night. Maybe Peter B. was your only exception, though.

(PART I)

word count: 12.3k (oof)

warnings: cursing, alcohol, and mentions of sex (let me know if i missed something!)

a/n: it’s five am where i live and this is already awfully long so i’m gonna make it as brief as i can. first, i’m sorry it took eight months, but at last, it’s here, and i’m so happy and proud of it ! thank you a million times for the amazing support this story got, seriously. second, this was also for @connorshero 1.6k followers writing challenge, and i can’t express enough how ashamed i am that it took so long lmao, i’m a clown. it’s here, tho, and i hope i hear your thoughts and that y’all enjoy it (:

taglist: @fanbase-jumper

Never in a million years would you have deemed possible a human could undergo through such a crushing feeling of dread, yet, sadly, you found yourself to be wrong, for there you were, a pressure smothering your lungs and an iciness washing over you. You never would have imagined yourself hiding in the bathroom from a certain Peter B. Parker, either; but then again, contrary to your previous thinking, there you sat on the closed toilet seat, your eyes squeezed shut, breathing heavily as a frostbite in your heart eclipsed any other thoughts in your head.

For the last few days, you had tried to repress a memory which physically pained you as you worked at the bar, almost as if it were nothing more than a bizarre dream you had one night, or a movie you watched as a little kid and couldn’t figure out as a grown-up whether it was real or not. It didn’t take long before in your restless little brain, that date did not exist in the calendar. So… strange, how all of sudden you couldn't remember anything from that night. Yeah, nothing happened. There’s no reason or possible explanation as to why you nearly dropped dead to the ground every time the entrance opened, or why your lower stomach erupted like a geyser refusing to rest whenever you caught a glimpse in the mirror of the bruises on your neck and, just maybe, somewhere in the back of your head, recalled how they came to be in the first place; how the small vessels burst, why they’re there. Your self-induced amnesia surprisingly worked. Yeah, like a charm. Until you looked up for the billionth time and it wasn’t another false alarm. The fortress of protection you constructed collapsed as if it took no effort to build it, because there he was— there stood Peter, just a few feet away from you.

Of course, you panicked; hysterically searched your surroundings for an excuse to leave, but no one wanted to bother you when you most needed it. Terrible luck, indeed. You only had two choices (although, really, you most likely had more): you could be, you know, smart and face your problems, or, Peter, to be more concise, or you could run away to hide and wait it out in the bathroom. So, after analyzing it thoroughly for approximately two seconds, what did you do?

Get the fuck out of there, obviously; you threw your towel, sped out of the bar, and instantly headed to have the meltdown of the century in the bathroom.

You screamed into your hands as you relived everything in your head, stomping your foot on the floor tiles. Remorse didn’t suffice anymore to explain the sharp pain in your stomach. You’d sabotaged yourself— you got a nip that night, a morsel of something greater, a catalyst for ‘what if’s and a total loss of self-control, because once the temporary high didn’t satiate you any longer, you’d seek it again. Regardless of your constant imbecility, you weren’t oblivious: it was nothing more than a distraction for Peter’s troubles and conflicting emotions over a woman he’d married, and it would never mean anything to him. It never would, despite how much it meant to you.

Suddenly, your phone vibrated in your pocket. You pulled it out, narrowed eyes reading the recent message while your heart went ballistic.

‘You can’t stay there forever, he’s starting to get suspicious.’

You breathed out, partially relieved. It was your friend. You texted him earlier as you lost it in the bathroom stall, as one does. You were close to getting on your knees and start praying to any superior entity that he was simply imagining stuff like most of the time, attempting to read in between the lines when, in reality, all Peter did was drink his whiskey served over ice, totally unconcerned. Yes, perhaps, you running away didn’t signify ‘subtle’, and the fact that you two hadn’t shared a word or texted ever since you fled his apartment a week prior didn’t brighten the situation at all. Why should it matter if you chose to continue escaping your issues? You could stay there forever, and it was no one’s business. The bar’s urine-scented bathroom could be your new home.

Your phone rang again. ‘Dude, c’mon.’

Goddammit.

Your friend shouldn’t have the power to knock some sense into you with just two messages, but he did anyway. You required an abundance of courage you did not carry to hesitantly walk out of the stall, and then the bathroom. You were sure your heart could hop out of your chest, as gruesome as it may have been, at any moment as Peter’s figure came closer and closer to you with each dreadful step you took. It wasn’t as dramatic in real life, most likely (most definitely). But as if you finally understood your situation, the charisma awakened from its sleep and, in an instant, you let out a disappointed ‘aw!’, replacing your terrified features with an exaggerated pout. “Oh, man! Somebody else already took your order? Unbelievable.”

He reacted as though he overheard the most unbelievable noise— a call from God itself or extraterrestrial life, because he could’ve gotten some whiplash by the way in which his head jerked up.

Peter cleared his throat, unsure of what to do with his hands as he showed you a tight-lipped smile. “Uh, hey! Hey…” He exclaimed and you winked at him. “I thought you weren’t here, or something.”

You thought for a moment. For real this time. You couldn’t say ‘I was just having a breakdown in the bathroom’. “Nah, my boss just needed my help… with stuff,” You waved your hand, aware that your boss had left an hour ago. He hummed and nodded, downing his shot. Wait. Your eyes returned to his glass when you fully took it in. It wasn’t whiskey served over ice.

You pointed at the empty drink in his grasp. “What’s that?” 

He glanced down at it, raising a brow. “What, you’ve never seen a shot of vodka?”

“No, no, I mean— yeah, but what the hell happened to your whiskey?”

Peter pressed his lips together, shrugging one shoulder. “I dunno, guess I just… got tired of it?”

The corner of your lips tugged down momentarily. “Ah, I see…” You distracted yourself with a glass, cleaning it despite its already pristine look. You just needed anything to focus on other than Peter. “This is so tragic, your whiskey days have come to an end.” You joked, laughing quietly and disguising the aching in your chest.

He tilted his head, quirking an eyebrow and grinning a confused smile. “What’s wrong with vodka?”

“It’s just… so boring.”

An incredulous grin stretched across his face. “More boring than whiskey?”

Your smile faded, a frown taking its place. “I… I’m guessing I had just grown used to it— I don’t know.”

For the first time in a whole year of weekly meetings and ongoing chatter, an uncomfortable silence sat amongst you two. And for the first time, too, you did not know what to say. “Y/N?” You looked up at him attentively, although you did not want to hear what he had to say at all.

Peter avoided your gaze, instead focusing on his lap, and opened his mouth, closing it when you couldn’t think up any words. “I think, uh… we gotta talk, right? About… y’know.” Your face heated up as red as a field of roses.

You laughed nervously, your hands on the bar as you slanted forward. “...About what?”

“Just, about what happened, and that thing you said the morning after—”

“Did I say anything the morning after?” You cut him off, wishing you’d stuck with your plan of moving into the bathroom.

To your horror, your biggest fear unfolded as Peter let out air through his nose, chuckling without humor.

“Are you gonna try to convince me it was a dream again?” You nearly passed out as Peter cited the words you so vividly remembered uttering. “‘You’re just dreaming?’” It all came back to you, everything— your forced memory loss received a fatal blow as memories bombarded your brain: Peter’s face twisted with puzzlement and sleep after you blurted out your utter nonsense and— how could you forget, oh God, how could you— the cherry on top, your uncomfortably intense five-second staring contest as you headed for the door and dashed out of his apartment.

“‘Wake up?’” He continued and you merely blinked back at him. He didn’t need to fucking quote you and remind you what a joke you were— who does that? But also, who tells the guy you just hooked up with that he’s dreaming after he caught you in the midst of trying to sneak out? B-B-Bingo! Of course, of course it had to be you out of all people.

You stood frozen, like you did that embarrassing morning, begging your head to stop it with the callbacks and breathing out. “What if it was a dream? You never know.” You said, unwilling to give up your idiocy. Peter stared at you, his lack of amusement terrifying you further.

“A dream.”

“Yeah.”

He rubbed his face. “Jesus Christ, Y/N—”

“What?”

“Stop acting like an idiot, please.”

“Peter, you literally could’ve brought up anything else other than this.” You hissed, exasperated. “Any other fucking thing.”

“I can’t not bring this up.”

“Well, why not? I surely can.”

“‘Cause it was weird.”

You grimaced and covered your face with your hands, muffling your words, “Oh my God, I know, I fucking know. What did you want me to do—”

“I don’t know, maybe just talk, you know!” He suggested with raised hands, the harsh sarcasm in his voice deepening your pained expression. “Wh-why did you even say that?! Like—”

“I didn’t want to be there! I just wanted to leave, okay?!” You admitted loudly, uncaring of your blatancy. When you didn’t hear him, your shaking hands slowly unveiled your face. A man two seats away eyed you two as he drank, while Peter stared at the counter with knitted brows, digesting what you said.

“Do you wish it had been a dream?” He asked quietly. You began to tap your finger, your lips shaping the words you wanted to speak, but didn’t exactly know how to.

“No. That’s not it, I…” You croaked out. You couldn’t continue when you noticed what you thought was a flourishing desire in his eyes which you saw that same night back at his place. Just say it. Your fingertips thudded the wood faster, your feet shifting, voice stuttering. Say you’d do it again.

“It was just a one-time thing, right?” You whispered. Then, you doubted if that lust had simply been a delusion your brain fabricated. That, perhaps, you yearned for something bigger so badly you’d projected your own silly cravings onto the man, for all trace of that weakening glimmer was now nothing more than the familiar amity the always held.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Right.” You breathed out.

“It was just a one-time thing.” He repeated as if it were obvious.

“Yes.” You both nodded, unable to look at each other straight in the eye without squirming. As soon as some clients called for you, you shared a last glance before you left. When you returned, all you found were some crumpled dollar bills and no sign of Peter.

You didn’t buy him a gift. And neither did he, but he did send you a message saying, ‘Merry Christmas!’, and there exists a possibility that you broke down crying whilst drunk because of the smiley face he wrote along with it, but that’s something you wouldn’t ever disclose— even if it happened one more time during New Year’s Eve as your head pounded with the people around you religiously blowing their party horns. That was it, though. You didn’t see him at the bar, which a part of you could only be thankful for, but the remaining kicked itself for not fixing things when you had the chance to. For not being honest when you could have.

Your friend yet again with his wisdom from the gods told you to stop wasting time and move on with your life, albeit not as kindly, as if saying it in such a way wasn’t hurtful enough. However, after being too sensitive for two seconds, you sucked it up and knew that he was right. 

You managed to keep Peter out of your thoughts most of the time, focusing on your job and getting additional money with your paintings to treat yourself. You could go out more with your friends, buy a new TV, maybe save for the vacation you’d been dreaming of for the past years. For some time, as there was no Peter in your head nor at the bar, it was just like before the man nearing his forties and with a really, really nice nose sat down in front of you.

You could only maintain him out of your orbit for so long, though.

You sat at another bar two blocks down your place, hunched over and your eyes glued on your cell phone’s screen, anticipation pulling imaginary strings connected to your fingers which fidgeted, tossed the device from hand to hand. Your friend was the fourth person you texted in the last thirty minutes, an act born from desperation, perhaps; created upon an urgency for an anchor, a quick fix that would momentarily patch up the heaviness in your chest that made an unwanted visit too many times to your liking and dissipate all the thoughts in your head. You needed something, a distraction, anything— hell, you’d even texted your boss, a known shopaholic, asking if she wanted to go shopping. But everyone appeared to be doing something that night, too engaged in their own affairs to remember you. It was selfish, you understood, to think that way; they had lives, after all. Nevertheless, that selfishness was a blemish you couldn’t vanish as the three dots emerged, followed by the exact same message you dreaded: ‘Can’t tonight, I’m with dad. What about tomorrow?’ There was no tomorrow, though. No, you ached for it right now, in that instant, something.

Peter.

No. You couldn’t. Another decline was a final blow you couldn’t withstand, anyway, especially from him. However, you weren’t the one making the decisions anymore. Your heart manipulated your limbs, and in a blur, you’d searched his contact. Too soon to your liking, you heard that tedious beeping, your heartbeat then the sole noise in your ears once it halted. All of a sudden, you couldn’t talk, your words lodged in your throat, because it was strange to hear that voice again and it was too much for you right now.

“Y/N? Are you there?” Peter said after you didn’t make the slightest sound, hesitance evident in his tone, for he wondered whether it’d been an accidental butt dial. You took in a big breath and pressed your phone closer to your ear, your elbows aching from the hard counter they rested upon.

“...Hi.” You scrunched up your nose, shaking your head at yourself.

“What… what’s up?” It was odd, you both knew, because when did you ever call each other, and when was the last time you two talked? But turning a blind eye to your friend’s advice, you itched to fulfill your own cravings that night— it didn’t really matter what kind, but just a friend was all you needed, just someone.

You stuttered for a while, internally grateful he remained silent and waited for you to clear your mind. “Nothing. That’s why I’m calling, I guess. Just wanted to talk.”

“To talk?” You could hear the engines of driving vehicles in the background and you frowned, scratching the back of your head.

“Sorry, are you busy? I didn’t mean to bother you. I can call another time—”

“No, no!” He stopped you, your heart growing wings, fluttering and capable of flying out of your chest with how gentle he sounded. “I just got done with something and I’m going back home, you don’t have to hang up.”

You hit the tip of your shoes against the bar, tense brows still not relaxing. “Oh, okay…”

“Are you at work?

“No, my shift ends at a normal time on Friday’s, thankfully.”

He chuckled. “Oh, I see— so you’re home alone and bored?”

You observed the place around you, focusing on the bartender and then on your drink. “Eh, not exactly.” You closed your hand into a fist, struggling to not dissect the skin around your nails like an animal in a biology class. “I know this is unusual, we never really talk outside of the bar and we haven’t seen each other in a while, but…”

“It’s kinda our first phone call, isn’t it?”

You smiled, your lip trembling. “Y-Yeah. Our first phone call.” You almost cursed when your voice wavered.

“Hey, you alright?” 

You sighed, scratching your head. “Not gonna lie, I’ve been better.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

“It’s stupid, I don’t know.  It’s a Friday night— everyone’s out having a good time, and I’m just… here, in a bar and on my own.” You shrugged, your nails carving the timber.

“It’s not stupid.” He murmured and you snorted, unconvinced. “If it makes you feel any less alone, I’m not exactly out partying and having a good time, either.”

“Do you even still party, grandpa?”

“Just ‘cause I’m old, it doesn’t mean I still haven’t got the moves.”

“It definitely sounds like you don’t.”

“Don’t sound so sure, you haven’t seen me at my best.” Seeing him wasn’t necessary, you could easily imagine his teasing grin.

“Hm, yeah, I’d immediately take off my clothes if you pretended to lasso me at the club.” You both giggled and you hugged yourself, glancing at the empty stool beside you, biting the inside of your cheek. “Do you maybe want to come and have a drink with me?” You shot your shot, to your thumping heart’s dismay. Guessing by the click you distinguished, he probably just got back home.

“...Have a drink with you?”

“J-Just to hangout, you know.” You quickly explained. “Chat for a while. I can pay, if you want.”

You waited for a response, a rejection. But it didn’t come.

It was quite embarrassing, to say the least, that after he agreed and you hung up, you almost dropped your phone with how the fright weakened your arms as you tried to send him the bar’s address. You eagerly waited, too, like a damn puppy anticipating its owner’s return at the end of the day. Using your phone’s selfie camera, you checked your appearance, tidying up all just to make yourself look way more put together than you actually were, even if you were in a bar, alone, and, well, drinking. Despite your awaiting, though, you were taken off guard when a man chose to settle down beside you and cleared his throat.

“I gotta say, it’s weird to see you on the other side of the bar,” Peter smiled as a greeting. Your eyes scanned him, taking in his presence, struggling to process it as if he were a ghost. In your defense, it did feel as if he hadn’t been part of your world for the last two months.

You chuckled, shyly moving your view to your beverage. “Sorry, I won’t be playing bartender tonight.”

“Too bad, I like it when you give me free drinks.”

“Technically, you still are getting free drinks from me tonight.”

He huffed, a crooked smile lingering on his face. You called for the bartender and side-glanced at Peter, quietly asking what he wanted and biting back a disappointed grunt when it wasn’t whiskey served over ice. Whatever. It was just a drink. You two didn’t share a look after that small interaction, though, your face flustered, redder than the bartender’s awful and painful-to-look-at-from-how-bright-it-was shirt. You preferred to believe it was the alcohol, regardless of the truth that you hadn’t drunk that much yet. But your skin burned since he was there, and suddenly, the last disastrous meeting you two experienced replayed way too loudly in your head, the scorching sensation only spreading further and gaining more vigor with the possibility that it did the same in his, too. The unspoken and evident discomfort was enough to make you assume that it definitely was on his mind. 

You made the effort to spark up a conversation with the dreaded small talk. ‘How have you been?’, ‘Anything new?’, ‘The weather’s been pretty cold lately, huh?’— blah, blah, blah. Nonetheless, neither of you had more to say other than short, boring responses. It became so unbearable, you knew the only way you could get through this night— seeing as you couldn’t leave after he’d just gotten there— depended on your current and whoever many you could afford future drinks. Quite an alcoholic mindset, perhaps, but there was no way you were the only one or that Peter didn’t have the same wish as you.

Holding your third drink, tispy thoughts pressed you to climb out of the hell you were in. You turned your body to face him, nudging his leg with your foot. He’d been paying attention to a wildlife documentary and an animal hiding from its predator before he lifted an eyebrow and nodded at you. “What?”

“Where have you been?”

A crease formed between his brows as he found it hard to differentiate this question from the one you asked earlier. “I told you, I haven’t really been up to much—”

You shook your head. “That’s not what I asked. Where have you been?” Peter pursed his lips, contemplating.

“New York.”

You hummed, bringing your drink up to your lips. “Okay. So if you were here, how come I haven’t seen you since, uh—” You pretended to count in your head, tongue poking out of your mouth as you summed with your fingers. “—December?”

“I was busy.” You narrowed your eyes.

“I thought you hadn’t been up to much?”

“I… haven’t,” Peter said slowly, too far in to escape the contradiction. You bit your lip before finishing your half-empty drink all in one go, head spinning, the weight in your stomach drawing you down to the Earth’s core.

It’s difficult to perceive the line between overthinking and legitimacy. It’s so fine and faint, like a message written with chalk in the middle of the neighborhood’s road that can only be deciphered if you stare at it long and closely enough after the days have passed by and the rain showered upon it. On one side, the message was nothing more than scrawls and nonsensical letters, an unnecessary distraction on the road disrupting you from reaching your destination on time. But then, there was the other side: the truth. A truth that, funnily enough, you reached by overthinking in the first place. Which was what occurred when you suspected the reasoning behind the lack of Peter in your life could be pinpointed to the man purposefully avoiding you; and, right now, grasped that, after all, it wasn’t just another case of irrational overanalyzing. 

“Do you hate me?” You blurted out, your eyes going round with the disappearance of your filter. Confusion overflowed Peter’s head and spilled into his expression, adorning his face.

“Huh?”

“Do you hate me—”

“Yeah, I heard you the first time. Where the hell did that come from, though?”

“You’ve been ignoring me.” You stated the obvious, visibly hurt. Peter denied with his head the misconception, sighing.

“It wasn’t intentional.” He assured you not just with his words but his gaze, too. You pressed your lips together, not fully convinced.

“Was it not?” You asked with a small quirk of your mouth. He stared at you, embarrassment crawling across his skin.

“Alright, maybe it was.” He admitted sheepishly. You let out air through your nose, turning on your seat.

“So you do hate me.”

“Y/N,” Peter called for your attention, although he knew it was half-joke. You returned your attention to him. “If I hated you, would I be here, sitting next to you?” He questioned, motioning around him. You shrugged one shoulder, a grin growing on your face.

“I don’t know, maybe you’re just being nice.” You said and he groaned jokingly, sporting his very own lopsided grin.

“I’m being nice because I like you.”

Your smile fell for an instant, but you put the expression back up, reminding yourself that, once more, it didn’t go further than platonic. “Good. But you were mad, then.”

“No, not exactly.”

“You left without saying goodbye last time.”

Peter frowned, rubbing the nape of his neck. “I did. Sorry.” He apologized, the sincerity interlaced in his voice worsening your state. You wanted to place your hand on your chest, as you diagnosed with your zero quantity of medical knowledge that you had a high chance of having a heart attack before the night came to an end.

“I’m sorry, too.”

“Why?”

“Well,” You placed your chin on the palm of your hand, moving your eyes elsewhere. “First, for being a dumbass back when we hoo—”

“You know what? You’re fine.” He interrupted you. “Save yourself some time.”

Your brows snapped together. “But—”

“You were right. Let’s just not talk about it and move on, alright?” He waved his hand, grabbing his drink. “If you do talk about it, I think I’m actually gonna get up and leave.”

You laughed, nodding. “Ah, I see. So that’s why you’ve been ignoring me, then?”

His actions halted in the midst of taking a sip. “Maybe.” He answered vaguely.

You rolled your eyes. “You can’t just run away from your problems, Peter.” You pointed out like the hypocrite you were, particularly after that was exactly what you were doing not too long ago. Peter, unaware of this, however, had to admit you spoke the truth as he rubbed his nose with his knuckles, grumbling.

“You see, you say that, but I’m still gonna continue doing it.”

“No, you’re not, because we’re going to discuss this like adults—”

“As an adult, I’m telling you that all is good and I’m over it.” He finished with a warning tone you couldn’t take seriously and you giggled. “Next topic.” 

“Okay, grandpa. Sure thing. All is good.” You grinned, the ice in your heart melting off as he copied your countenance.

“For real this time.”

“Yeah. For real this time. Can I be honest with you, though?” Peter waited for you to go on, paying close attention, his gaze soft. You stared at him for a moment too long ‘till your eyes moved to your hand now feebly holding your empty drink. “I missed you. Kind of. Is that dumb?” You mumbled, your voice small.

You couldn’t properly see him, but through your peripheral vision, you didn’t catch any movement. That’s when you prepared to scream ‘sike!’ to his face— a real-life undo button to delete the emotions you couldn’t take back and shove down your system anymore. However, it felt… good. For once, it wasn’t spilling your guts out and regretting everything as you attempted to cram your organs back into you; you had plucked out a thorn that’d been hanging inside the palm of your hand for far too long. It was liberating. And you peered up at him, expecting that relief to be temporary, but his tender features didn’t let that happen.

“...No. I missed you, too.”

You both smiled.

The conversation began to flow. Words started to spill, and although you weren’t at the bar, you enjoyed that exact same security and blissful buzz. You realized then— a revelation that did not help your case— the location didn’t play an important role, and perhaps it never did; bar or not, if Peter was there, you’d still feel stupidly and overly content. Your worries faded away as you two caught up with no drop of MJ’s name, but some lingered anyway, because change was inevitable, looming over you. Laughter left your lips, his hand rested close to yours on the counter. You noticed, but couldn’t bring yourself to pull away, to walk away from the euphoria tainting your body. More liquor entered his, over time you stared at his mouth one, two, three, four seconds too long as you became intoxicated along with him, and so did he with yours.

“C’mon, tell me.” You pouted for an instant, interchanging it for a drunk smile. “Your secret dies with me.”

Peter slammed his fifth drink down, cheeks tinted pink. It was wrong, indeed, to take advantage of his condition and try to get out of him something you’d wanted to know for the longest time, and that he kept to himself as if it were government classified information. In your drunken brain, it did not seem too far off. Perhaps he went on outrageous underground missions. You laughed at yourself. Peter didn’t seem like a spy-type of guy. Unless…

“Do you, like, work for the government?” Peter screwed up his face at your absurdity.

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

Peter opened his mouth, a giggle escaping. “I can’t.” You dragged your stool closer to him, as you weren’t close enough already. Actually, when did you get so close? It didn’t matter. You analyzed his face, hoping that somehow, if you looked at him long enough, you’d gain the ability to read minds and crack into his. Peter drew his lower lip between his teeth, studying you like you were the most interesting being. You didn’t know why, but you felt tempted to move that strand of hair that always hung in front of his forehead away from his face. As any rational person wouldn’t, you did, your thumb brushing against the barely visible scratch that started the conversation in the first place.

“What are you thinking?” You questioned, brimming with interest. He went crossed-eyed as he tried to follow your hand.

“About stuff. Whatcha thinkin’?” He asked back, his view traveling down to your lips. You bit your lip.

The closeness, your full-blown pupils, the actuality that you could lean closer to him and you’d meet his lips. It all seemed too familiar. And so you wondered, if you did move and kiss him, if you stopped resisting and glanced down at his lips, too, what would happen?

“I don’t know. What does it look like I’m thinking?” You asked, lowering your voice. The stench of alcohol should have been enough to stop you both from advancing any further, but Peter licked his lips, smirking.

“It seems to me like you wanna fuck me.”

You gasped, hiccuping. “Oh, my! I didn’t know this part of yours, Peter B. Parker. Is it just the alcohol speaking?”

“Maybe. But is it true?”

“What?”

“What I said.”

Your upper body swayed closer to him, tired, dizzy, and wishing to lie down. You gripped his shoulder and helped yourself add some distance, your other hand landing on his knee. “Maybe.” You simply said. Your eyes remained interlocked into one another, your hand running up his shoulder to his neck, and then all the way up to the back of his head, sensing his goosebumps. “Maybe…” You repeated as your touch on his knee traveled up his thigh. Peter took in a sharp breath, his hand unconsciously wrapping around your wrist.

You couldn’t help it anymore. You leaned in and captured his mouth in a rough kiss, wrapping your arms around his neck. Pull away, a voice said in your head as you felt his tongue momentarily slide against your bottom lip. Pull away, the nagging voice went on and you did, shaking your head.

“I told myself I wouldn’t let this happen again.” You whispered, yet your mouth came back into a messy kiss, even messier hands craving touch. Breaking glass startled you two apart and you looked down, sighing when you saw your drink’s contents all over the ground. “You owe me a drink.” You panted, your lips swollen.

Peter scoffed, his half-smile blurring your vision as he tilted his head towards your ear. “Nothing has to happen if you don’t want it to.” He said, mouth ghosting near your cheek despite his words, yearning to continue. You pecked his jaw, lips resting against his hot skin, careless about the other customers in the bar.

“I do want something to happen, though.”

You both ignored the conversation your sober selves had. ‘It was just a one-time thing, right?’. Peter slammed your apartment’s door closed whilst your lips were still connected, your hands clumsily coming down to try to unbuckle his belt. ‘Yeah’. His own hands aided yours, the clinking of his belt buckle speeding up your heartbeat as if it weren’t already dangerously fast. ‘It was just a one-time thing’. Peter groaned into your mouth, tasting like liquor, like something you’d both regret the next morning but did not care about the consequences, even if it was a lesson you’d already learned. Not at the moment.

But nothing happened.

You couldn’t recall much the next morning. The first proof that it didn’t go further from a make-out session was that you woke up in your bed, alone, and wearing the same clothes as the previous night. The second evidence you gathered when you barged into your living room and there slept Peter on your couch, his appearance also identical to the one in your hazy memories. He didn’t remember anything. As you struggled to cease your trembling legs, he simply laughed and asked if he got so wasted he had to crash at your place. You shrugged and smiled, still capable of tasting his lips and vividly feel his hot breath.

From then on, you avoided drinking or being too exhausted to have any common sense when you were around Peter. One day he invited you to go out and have a few drinks again, to ‘repay’ you, and to which you responded as calmly as you could that you had other ‘plans’; other plans that, truthfully, were faker than the disappointed expression of yours that followed. Then, as if you couldn’t ever reach a state of peace, he asked again a month later, and you had no other choice than to invent a faulty reason for why you didn’t feel like drinking that night, the next night, or the one after, even if, according to all the drunk stories you’d recounted to him in the past, you never really turned down a drink or the opportunity to get inebriated. Guilt poisoned you when he never brought up the idea after that, fingers crossed that he didn’t get the impression you didn’t want to meet him in other circumstances other than the bar; regardless that that’s exactly what was going on. Every other night after he helped you with closing the bar, you’d also nod goodbye at him and stand in the middle of the sidewalk, waiting until he turned around the corner so your feet could dreadfully carry you to the subway station, your now-unfixable car present in your head like an aggravating piece of gum that stuck to your shoe.

Nothing could be more vexing than this, though.

Eventually, you began to wonder. Perhaps, yet again, you were as weary as that time you slept with Peter, seeing as you couldn’t think straight, almost as if you’d suffered from a concussion and all your neurons died, to your utmost dismay. But there was a dissimilarity: the unfortunate detail that, unlike physical fatigue, mental exhaustion wouldn’t pack its bags and wave farewell after a night-long sleep. Not when immediately after you woke up, the same worries still found their home within your head. So your imagination took it as an initiative to force feelings and schemes onto you, ones which involved the stomach-churning plausibility that maybe, just maybe, Peter liked you back and you could happily come clean. You had to laugh. But then you really started to wonder.

You needed at least six reasons to follow through with it. First. He was the one who made a move months ago. Second. He wasn’t drunk. Third, you listed in your head, you kissed. Again. And, fourth, this time he might have been drunk, but if he did it both as a sober man and a drunk one, it had to mean something, right?

You were struggling to distinguish the line between overthinking and legitimacy again.

You went to work that day, decided, the fifth reason simply being that you couldn’t get him out of your head, but the sixth reason missing. A truck landing on you would probably do the job, you thought. You didn’t mean it whole-heartedly, of course. But, apparently, the universe didn’t know about sarcasm and how it worked since, an hour after the thought passed through your head, it sent you a nice little gift and Spider-Man just so happened to get in a fight near the bar and an actual truck broke through the walls of the pub.

“I can’t fucking believe a truck landed right here. This is why I hate living in this city so much,” You scoffed, holding a towel wrapped around ice up to your bruised forehead as you observed the gigantic hole where the truck happily invited itself into. Peter barely reacted to your comment, too focused on disinfecting the wound in your arm. You pulled the makeshift ice bag away from your head, screwing your eyes shut. “I’m starting to get a headache from how cold this is, can I—”

Peter grabbed your hand and forced it back up to your forehead, shaking his head and focusing again on your arm. “No, trust me, it will reduce the swelling.”

“Should I be worried that you know so much about injuries?”

“I’m just trying to help.”

You chewed on your bottom lip, looking down at your lap. “I know. Thanks.” You smiled, recalling the urgency in his voice after he called you, saying he’d seen what’d happened on the news. He moved on to the gauze and began to bandage your arm, making sure his movements were delicate lest he hurt you more. “I met Spider-Man, though. I think I can finally die in peace.” You caught the way the corner of his mouth lifted upward.

“Really? Did he apologize for almost killing you?” Peter grumbled, accepting the scissors you offered him to cut the cotton fabric. You released a huff of air, admittedly offended and immediately going to defend the masked superhero.

“He didn’t almost kill me, it was the other guy. Bad guys, you know? They’re everywhere.” He huffed. “He checked up on me and offered to take me to the hospital, though. Pretty cool guy.”

“And why didn’t you say yes?”

You contemplated his question. “Stranger danger.” You shrugged. Peter laughed softly, muttering ‘fair enough’. “It also wasn’t necessary. I didn’t want to interfere with his, uh… superhero duties…”

Peter’s eyebrows furrowed. “Isn’t making sure you’re okay part of his duties?”

“I guess, but I’m fine, it’s no biggie.”

“Y/N, you could have died.”

“But look at me,” You patted your torso, then holding your arms wide open. “I didn’t. You’re making it sound much worse than it actually was.” Peter ran his hand through his hair, exhaling tiredly.

“Whatever,” He said, hesitance showing through his eyes. “I just think the guy should be more careful. His job is to protect the people, not to… hurt them.”

You scowled playfully, kicking him lightly. “Dude, fuck off, don’t talk shit about him like that. He’s Spider-Man. Give the poor guy a break.” He didn’t say anything, though, stirring your concern as you realized he seemed off since he first arrived. “Are you okay?” You inquired, frowning.

Peter glanced up at you before rubbing his face. “Yeah. It’s just been a long day.”

“Every day is a long day when it comes to you, isn’t it?” You joked lightly, nudging him a second time. “You helped me, now let me help you. What’s up?”

He moved his head from one side to another. “You’re always helping me.” He said almost as an apology, smiling sadly. You smirked back, standing up from your seat next to him to jump over the bar. You grasped an empty shot glass, checking no small debris had made its way into for the sake of Peter’s health (now, that’d be a hell of a lawsuit) before you slid it towards him.

“It’s my job as your bartender.”

He peered down at the glass and then up at you. Chuckling defeatedly, he took ahold of it, and you read it as ‘ah, the hell with it’ as you reached for the bottle of vodka. “I fucked up.” He whispered while you poured the liquid.

You screwed the cap closed, your eyebrows lifting high. “How come?”

Peter placed his head in his hands, nose crinkling. “I, um… talked to MJ?” And just like that, your mood took a fall as well, an inaudible ‘oh’ fleeting past your lips. “It’s the first time we talked in a long time.”

“...And?” You asked anxiously, folding your arms across your chest. Peter clutched onto the shot of vodka, watching the liquid dangerously reach for the edge of the glass after he slowly tipped it.

“Well, she’s trying to move on.” Surprise crossed your face. “And I was so distraught by it for the rest of the day that I really fucked up at work.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“That maybe I should move on, too.”

Your arms fell down to your sides. Maybe you really did hit your head too harshly, you thought, as your body started to feel heavy and you had to support yourself on the bar, for all this information you were hearing at once was colliding against you more vigorously than the pieces of wood which fled towards you earlier. Swallowing to bring moisture to your throat, you continued with the million-dollar question pestering you.

“What’s stopping you?”

You regretted uttering the words, something you seemed to be doing too much to suit your taste as of lately. However, Peter, although the question troubled him the same way it did you, clasped his hands together and you studied him whilst he went through every thought in his head and through every feeling, seeking an explanation he himself needed to know as well. 

“I’m not sure if I want to. But I know that I have to.” He finally breathed out. You leaned forward, not satisfied, needing to hear more and more even if it’d hurt, because nothing was more vexing than this feeling. 

“But you love her,” You said matter-of-factly. Silence. Your heart pounded rapidly enough you could sense it in your head. “Right?” You asked, embarrassed by the apparent desperation in your tone.

“Huh?” Peter snapped out his thoughts, blinking up at you.

“You love Mary Jane?”

He bit his lip as he went back inside the isolated room of his brain after only just sneaking his head out, evidently growing stressed. “It’s okay,” You brought him back out, sacrificing your curiosity as you gently smiled at him. “You don’t have to answer.”

Peter exhaled thankfully, downing his shot. “What’d you wanna tell me earlier, anyway?” He asked expectantly, his voice scratchy from the liquor. Oh. Yeah, right. Plans might have changed an hour ago, yet for some reason, you still wanted to come clean to Peter. However, right now, after hearing about Mary Jane, you forgot about the sixth reason and remembered why you never did in the first place after all this time.

“Do you… want to go get a drink?” You cursed your imagination for not working when it was necessary. Peter’s forehead creased with astonishment as if he never thought he’d hear that sentence again (in his defense, though, it’s exactly what you were planning to do).

“You finally wanna go and get a drink?”

“Hey, just be glad I’m feeling like it.”

It was an understatement to express you were feeling like it.

You continued searching for that sixth reason for the next weeks, even if the entire world knew that after you found it, you’d keep your lips sealed. Your friend put your friendship at risk when, during your September lunch with your boss, he couldn’t resist but telling her about your ‘secret crush’, saying he simply did it for a third opinion, but neither of you gained no new eye-opening advice for your boss dragged on about how Peter could be ‘the one’, which honestly worked in scaring you away from the topic. One day after, as you couldn’t fall asleep, you deliberated the reasons why you should forget about Peter.

One. He’s your friend. Your really good friend. You liked him being your friend. He’s funny, a nerd, and you could talk to him forever, even if it was merely absolute nonsense. Two. He’s a lot older than you. Not that eight years mattered that much, but it could. You were just entering your thirties whilst he was nearing his forties. Even if he’d made it clear kids weren’t his cup of tea, he could change his mind. You weren’t ready to settle down yet, despite most people reminding you the clock was ticking and you should start considering it. 

Three. The iconic Mary Jane Watson. Peter’s ex-wife whom he loved dearly. He might have not talked about her since he mentioned the idea of moving on, but you knew it was easier said than done. If you opened up, he could shut you down and reveal he’s still in love with MJ. Or worse, if you two did wind up dating, he could decide to leave you for her. Four. Your friend helped you with the fourth one. He had yet to tell you about why he’s bruised most of the time. It admittedly awakened the cynicism in you, for it could be something which had the potential of putting you at risk, or get you killed. Plus, if he did not want to give you an explanation, it meant he didn’t trust you enough. 

Five. You couldn’t lose him. You already almost did. Your absurd crush could be the last straw and get rid of him for good. If that was the case, then you’d do anything to muffle your heart singing its love songs when he crossed your mind or simply stood in front of you. You’d do it, even if it’d hurt.

Again, you couldn’t come up with a sixth reason. You established, then, that whichever reason you uncovered first, would be the final word. Your friend knew both a sixth reason for why you shouldn’t forget about Peter and why you should that, trying not to influence you any further, he kept to himself; it being clear in his head which one he hoped you’d find first.

It was another Friday night. You’d just returned home after wasting your money on some restaurant that definitely was not worth the price (goddamn New York) when your phone blared its ringtone in your pocket. Your heart clenched as you read the name and were about to answer immediately, until you stopped yourself. Counting eight seconds in your head, your thumb slid across the screen after you got to the last number and picked up the call. “Peter?” You were audibly and justifiably perplexed— why has he calling you at… you checked the time— ten P.M,? It may have not been the first one anymore, but phone calls were still a rare occurrence between you two.

“Hey! Are you busy?” His breathing was heavy, which made you wonder what he possibly could’ve been up to before he called you.

You opened your apartment’s door and blindly searched for the light switch. “No, I just got back home, actually.” You muttered, and then voiced a victorious exclamation when the room lit up in front of your eyes. “Why?”

He inhaled profoundly. “Cool. Great. Yeah.”

You guessed the barely distinguishable quiver in his voice could be defined as uneasiness as you sat down on your couch’s armrest, squinting.

“Is everything okay?”

“...Yeah. Yeah!” He repeated, firstly too quietly but now with faux confidence. “I needed to talk to you.”

Ah, hell. You had one important question and one only: when would you get a break from confrontation and those words? The last time you and Peter ‘needed to talk’ didn’t exactly go as smoothly. That in mind, your organs plummeted down into an expanding black hole in your stomach as you brought your fingers up to your lips. “I’m all ears, as always.” No, not really, but you didn’t exactly have any other choice.

“Okay, okay. Um, I, uh… what am I doing?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

“I wanna say sorry in advance.”

You tilted your head. “Why?”

You could solely hear what sounded like wind. “You’re not gonna believe me, so just, just look outside your window.”

The black hole having devoured the contents in your system, you raised to your feet and sped to the window, not capable of painting in your head a single picture of what in the heavens the man could be planning. You unlatched the lock and glided the window upward, your head gradually peering out. Your eyes went as big and round as the full moon glowing above you when you saw it.

You stared dumbfounded, close to pinching yourself to do a reality check. It had to be a dream. A strange dream. There was just no way. No fucking way, it was absolutely impossible. It was beyond the innumerable existing possibilities that Spider-Man looked back at you, stuck against the wall. Similar to someone’s lack of subtlety, it couldn’t have been any more evident. You didn’t even need a big brain or to think, to analyze deeply as if it were a riddle in a newspaper. Because it was just right there in front of you, plainly obvious and transforming your blood into ice: the phone he held up to his face.

“Hi…” Said the masked hero. And so did Peter through the phone call.

Your phone slipped from your grasp, yet you didn’t glance down at it. You continued to gawk at the man as he flicked his wrist and saved not only your phone, but simultaneously also your bank account from having to spend hundreds of dollars on a new one. You did not mutter a thanks, let out no relieved sigh when he gave it back to you. You just stared.

“I know I’m pretty cool to look at, but can you please say something?” He laughed nervously. Ignoring him, you took a step back and retreated your head, eyes close to falling out of their sockets. The phone in your shaky hands rang a second time and you answered without needing to look at the contact.

“H-Hello?”

“Hi.”

“Peter, what the fuck.”

“I’ve done this so many times but I still don’t know what to say.” He groaned to himself. You put your hand on top of your head, disbelieving.

“Get in.” You abruptly ended the call and plopped down on your couch, clutching your stomach, blinking furiously after black dots uncontrollably twirled in your vision. You heard a thump, the floor shaking slightly; however, you didn’t turn around to look at your guest, instead focusing on the wall in front of you. It wasn’t until the cushion beside you sank with the man’s weight that you blew up. “Holy shit.” You cupped your face with your hands, laughing out of pure shock. “Holy shit… holy shit!”

“Don’t freak out.”

“How am I not supposed to freak out?!”

Peter— Spider-Man shrugged, his white lenses wide. “I don’t… I don’t know.” He admitted.

You scanned his mask, the mask you’d become familiar with after seeing it so many times on TV and pictures. Somehow, however, regardless if you knew that mask and the person behind it, you couldn’t believe its authenticity. “Take off the mask.” He didn’t move or respond. “Please.” You begged.

You first saw the stubble. Then his lips. Then his crooked nose, and soon, those eyes. The whiskey eyes. Peter’s whiskey eyes. Your hands wound up on his broad shoulders, and for some reason you yourself couldn’t work out, it just dawned upon you how muscular they were. Your eyes came back to his face. Yeah, that’s Peter. That’s Peter B. Parker. Peter Parker was Spider-Man. All the revelations crashed against you quick, glass shattering in your head, everything suddenly making sense. The bruises. His constant fatigue. Everything.

“Peter… oh my God.”

“I know I-I kept this from you for a really long time, and I know it’s hard to fully digest it, but I did promise I was gonna tell you one day.” He said, the corner of his lips twitching. But you weren’t smiling— all the terrible fights you’d watched on the news throughout the years flashed in your head, going all the way back in time to when you first discovered Queens’ brand-new superhero as a seven-year-old.

You gasped, covering your mouth. “You’re telling me you’ve been at this since you were a fucking kid?”

Peter let his mask drop to the carpeted ground, his back sliding down the sofa’s backrest. “Since I was fifteen, yeah.”

“Peter…”

He grimaced at your concern. “I know it sounds sad, but it’s not… it’s not that bad.” He promised you, but you couldn’t take him seriously. You picked up your legs, sitting cross-legged and playing with your fingers as you continued to go through your racing questions.

“I used to look up to you when I was little.” You revealed quietly. Peter scoffed, grinning playfully. 

“What, you don’t anymore?”

You shook your head vigorously. “I do. Shit, I still do. I never thought I’d meet my childhood hero the way I did, though.”

“Sorry I’m just a sad, old man.”

You rolled your eyes, prodding him with your elbow. “You’re so much more than that.” All humor fled his expression and he shut his eyes, throwing his head back. 

“Am I? I constantly feel like I’m letting everyone down.” He huffed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he spoke. There it was, of course; he couldn’t talk about Spider-Man in a non-degrading way.

“You’re fucking Spider-Man!” You exclaimed, not accepting his utter bullshit, but he was willing to accept it as he peeked one eye open to look at you.

“I know, you always say that.”

You gave up in trying to change his mind and shifted closer to him, copying his position, unable to focus on your view of the boring, mundane ceiling; so you turned your head to see Peter getting lost in the white square. “You really didn’t have to tell me. This is a big secret.”

“It’s alright. I trust you.” You were glad he kept staring up as you felt the blood rush to your face.

“You do?” You asked, your chest warm, illuminated with glee. Peter glanced at you, nodding nonchalantly.

“I mean, yeah. I really do.”

You turned your face away from him, your muscles close to tearing from how big and proudly you grinned. “Spider-Man trusts me.” You hushed to yourself.

Peter breathed out, exasperated, his eyes fluttering closed again. “Stop.” He pleaded, laughing himself nonetheless. You bit your smile back, moving to sit straight in what your friend liked to call your ‘parent worried about their kid’ sitting position. 

“I guess I was right for worrying, huh?” You smiled sadly, taking in the severity of the situation. He poked his cheek with his tongue, shaking his head.

“I don’t want you to worry.” He sighed. You snorted.

“That’s dumb. You’re saying you’re always putting your life on the line? Of course I’m gonna worry.”

“Well, I worry about you, too.”

“How come?”

“If you’re close to me, then you’re putting your life on the line as well.”

You frowned, squeezing his arm to comfort him. “No, don’t say that.”

“Y/N, it’s the truth, though.” He fully sat up to turn toward you, his eyebrows furrowed. “It’s the worst thing about this. How many times have the people I care about gotten hurt? All ‘cause of me?”

You remained speechless. Moments later, he placed his hands flat against the sofa, preparing to stand up. “Y’know, I get it if you want to keep your distance from now on. I actually think it’d be a good—”

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.” You warned him, expression stern. “It’s stupid.”

“I almost got you killed that other time—”

“You didn’t almost get me fucking killed, for Christ’s sake!” 

Peter’s jaw tightened and he ran his hands through his hair, that strand of hair falling back in front of his forehead. “Whatever. You can’t be so sure, anyway.”

You pressed your lips together, knowing that he was right. You nervously placed your hand on top of his. “Can I hug you?” You asked like a child, giving him a half-smile. Peter looked down at your hand before his eyes moved to you.

“Sure. Y-Yeah.” 

You wrapped your arms around him, hugging him hard, your eyes squeezing shut. You felt him slowly embrace your waist, scared of  underestimating his strength. “I’m glad you told me. It must have been really hard.” You murmured against his chest. He chuckled humorlessly, his cheek on top of your head.

“You have no idea.”

“I’m gonna be here for you no matter what, okay? Whether it’s to vent or for some weird spider shit. I…” Love you. “You’re my friend, dude.”

After he left that night, you’d never been more conflicted about your feelings. It was a conundrum; a whole headache-inducing brain-teaser. You’d striked out the fourth reason why you should forget about Peter, the original five down to only four, but you still searched for that sixth— now fifth reason. As if it didn’t scramble your brain enough that it left you dazed and your thoughts impossible untangle, Peter unknowingly joined the game with the objective of rattling you up more. 

You noticed he didn’t disappear without notice ever again, and if he did, he didn’t leave you hanging, rather he sent you a text the day after with an entire clarification. Then, you caught onto the increasing meter of his touchiness: new and unexpected hugs, holding your damn hand— although that only happened twice, but still. Your overdramatic friend didn’t even need to point it out. 

One Saturday, he sat down in front of you, and before you could greet him, he surprised you. “One whiskey served over ice, please.” He smirked. You gaped at him, laughing, face astonished.

“What’s up with that?” He shrugged, grin never disappearing.

“I dunno, I guess I missed it.”

You never thought you’d continue hearing ‘one whiskey served over ice, please’ ever again. But you did.

This year, you did give him a present for Hanukkah and Christmas. A painting of one of your favorite photos of his that he showed you one day; a day you so vividly recalled, for he asked you to come with him to take pictures of an exhibition at a museum, and you accidentally broke a statue after you leaned against it in the attempt of doing an extravagant pose. To your surprise, he gave you one, too: a photo album with pictures from that day, and a message that read, ‘Merry Christmas!’, accompanied by a smiley face. In the blink of an eye, it was New Year’s Eve again, except that this time, you and Peter were talking.

You came out of the party’s bathroom, unable to tear your gaze away for the fourth time from Peter’s New Year’s Eve message, until you bumped into someone and had to force yourself to pocket your phone. You lazily swayed to the music, your vision blurring out, turning it harder to find your friend amidst the people. While your body was there, all your five senses working perfectly, feeling the heat from the enclosed space, the music vibrating in your chest, the smell of alcohol and smoke fixed in your nostrils, your mind lived in December 20th. December 20th being last Monday: a date that continued to echo in your head, the entirety of the day playing from the beginning until the pitch-black hour of midnight. It played, played, played relentlessly, exhaustingly. December 20th, it continued, a stupid date that your drunk self could not let go of.

You distinguished your friend in the crowd, comfort kissing your body and your tired legs guiding you to him, until you moved a person aside and saw the full view of his lower body grinding against a girl all over him. “Ah, fucking gross,” You groaned, pushing the unlucky same guy as you took a turn and headed for the glass door leading out to the balcony.

You firstly bumped into the door thinking it was open, but successfully slid it open and made it out into the winter weather, the city more awake than ever twenty minutes before the New Year. But you weren’t focusing on the future. No, you held onto last Monday, gripping it so tightly it hurt, hanging onto it as if you’d be nothing once it left. You stumbled towards the bench to your left, falling defeated on it. December 20th. You turned on your phone, squinting down at the screen, eyes struggling to focus through the brightness. Last week. You opened your contacts and without hesitation called a number, bringing your phone up to your ear, humming along to the beeping whilst you awaited for the person to pick up.

“Hello?” Peter said. You hung up, eyes wide. What the fuck were you doing? You didn’t answer your own question, though; you pressed the button to call again. 

“...Hi?” 

You ended the call a second time, growing frustrated with yourself. Having finally made up your mind, you called him one last time, jumping when he answered in what appeared a worldwide record-time. “Y/N, what the fuck—”

“Peter! You answered.”

There was a short silence. “I did.” He agreed, undeniably puzzled. You slumped against the wall, muffling your dopey laughter with the palm of your hand. You could hear… ah, wait. You could see, not hear, his face in your head with no problem: his furrowed brows and narrowed eyes.

“How are you?” You wanted to hear about his day. What had he eaten that day? What had crossed his mind? Hopefully you’d made an appearance at least once. That’d be nice.

“I’m good, thanks for asking.”  You hummed happily. “How drunk are you?” 

You shook your head, failing at rubbing the haziness out of your eyes. “Just a bit tipsy, maybe.”

“How much exactly is ‘a bit tipsy’ for you?”

“How many phone calls have we had?”

A question out of the blue, you knew, and you were expecting yet again the quietness as he processed your sudden need to quiz him about such insignificant rubbish. Well… did he think it was insignificant? So many questions bouncing off your skull all at once, worsening that awful migraine you could already feel coming… or was it the booze? No, who cares. All you cared about at the moment was his response, because knowing how many fucking phone calls you’ve had wasn’t that hard unless you didn’t care.

“What?” Really? He was going to make you repeat yourself? You dug the heel of the palm into your closed eye, white fireworks blowing up in the darkness behind your eyelids.

“Like, for these past two years. How many phone calls?”

“I… don’t know, maybe like three?”

Your face fell ever so slightly. “It’s six, actually.” You heard an unenthusiastic gasp.

“Wow, that’s great.”

“Do you remember the sixth one?”

“Isn’t this the sixth one?”

“This is the seventh one.”

“Okay, and why are you giving me a class about how many phone calls we’ve had?”

“Because you don’t remember the sixth one. I’m sure you don’t even remember the fifth one that well.”

He remained quiet for a moment. “It’s a blur.” Peter murmured.

“You were drunk…” You shut both eyes now, trying to dig through the fog to recall. “It was after you came to the bar…” Peter’s embarrassed stutters, similar to his inebriated ones, helped to uncover the memory further. 

“I-I was drunk, yeah,” He admitted, “just like you are right now.”

“And what did you say?”

He laughed uncomfortably. “I think you remember better than I do.”

You grinned. “You’re embarrassed.”

“Of course I’m embarrassed, Y/N.”

“Well, what about the sixth time you called me?”

“I seriously can’t remember a sixth time.”

“It wasn’t a failed booty call.”

He breathed in harshly. “Ah, I’m glad, I guess.”

A frown took over your features. “You really can’t remember?” You needed him to. He had to. Or else...  or else…

“I swear on my aunt.”

Your heart shattered, the sharp pieces prodding and hurting your chest. “So… so I guess you didn’t mean what you said?” You mumbled to yourself, realization sobering you more than you wanted it to.

Peter couldn’t help but begin to panic a bit at the mention of expressing something without his knowledge, or at least without his not drunk self’s knowledge. You immediately grew conscious of it for this time, the silence was different. “...What did I say?” He questioned, somewhat afraid. You didn’t speak. “Y/N? What did I say?” He pushed more urgently.

“It doesn’t matter,” You changed your mind. Calling was just another bad idea. You took your phone away from your ear for a second, jumping off from your seat, but your foot accidentally knocked over your drink. You stared down at the growing pool of alcohol staining the floor, seeping underneath your shoe. Blinking, you looked at your phone, at Peter’s name, and the numbers of the counter below it rising, marking each of your thumping heartbeat. 

The sixth reason. You needed it to stop you right now; an instruction to back out, the reassurance that it was still an option and it didn’t stop being one long ago. But as your finger came down to end the call for the better, your head screamed, freezing you.

Sixth. You were in love with Peter Parker.

You dropped back down on the bench, eyes glazed over. That was it. The sixth reason. Peter. The man nearing his forties and with the loveliest messed up nose. The customer you met last year and that continued to come to bar you worked at just to talk to you, his bartender. The guy you laughed with, sang with, slept with, became too close with, fell in love with. You put the phone back up to its right place, anxiously licking your lips. “Look, I’m gonna regret this. I know I am. But that hasn’t stopped me in the past, so why should it now, right?” You chuckled, your eyes wide. 

“I’m really concerned about that phone call, though.”

“Peter,” You glanced up at the sky, gulping. “I’m so glad I met you. I really am.”

“I-I’m glad I met you, too.”

You smiled momentarily. “Good. Working at the bar had become such a pain in the ass, and it still kinda is, but then you came that first time, and you called me ‘kid’ which annoyed me, but I was still hoping that maybe you’d stay, you know?”

“Why?”

“Because…” Your free hand came up to aid the other which trembled too much, grasping it tightly. “I don’t know, it was weird, I just couldn’t… I-I really wanted to get to know you. And it took some time but eventually we did talk— you said that stupid pick-up line and somehow it worked. I really need to higher my standards.”

“Hey, it was a great pick-up line.”

“It really wasn’t.”

“You gave me your number, didn’t you?”

The corner of your mouth twitched upward, and you laughed softly at yourself. “I did, I did. And I’m glad I did, even if you were just trying to get your mind off of MJ.” The truth stung as it glided out of your mouth.

Peter thought for a moment before continuing, “Maybe I just wanted a friend.” But it lacked sincerity, and you both could recognize that.

“But, Pete,” You bit your lip, looking down at the mess you’d left on the ground, the sole of your shoe now sticky. “Am I really just a friend?”

More silence. You breathed in, your chest moving up. “Be honest with me, please.” You begged, your voice hushed.

“Okay.”

Your stomach began to cramp up. “That time we hooked up,” You paused, the eerie shortage of noise on the other side of the line pushing you to go on. “Did it mean anything to you? Was it anything more than just a distraction?”

“I…” 

“Or what about that other time at my place? Why did nothing happen?”

“We were too wasted. It was wrong.”

“So you do remember.”

“I do.”

You placed your hand on top of the other, beginning to pace around. “Are you lying about that phone call, too?”

“What is it with this phone call you say? What happened?” He repeated, desperate and with a hint of irritation. You approached the railing, placing your elbows on the metal.

“Just… be honest with me.”

“I am, Y/N.”

You kneaded your forehead with your knuckles, shaking your head. “I can’t take it anymore. It’s been too long, and it’s so confusing. You’re so confusing. Or maybe I’m stupid, I don’t know. There’s… there’s this thing, I know you can feel it as well, and sometimes it’s as if there’s a chance that you might feel the same way I do, but then the next minute it’s as if not, a-and it’s so confusing.”

“Feel the same way you do? What do you mean?” He clearly knew what you meant. Your eyes traveled around the city, the cold and strong breeze nearly knocking your body backward. If he knew, why couldn’t he simply outright admit it? Why, all of a sudden, was it taking him so long?

“The phone call…”

He groaned. “Y/N, just please tell me why you’re so hung up on that phone call?”

“It was last week. You said you liked me.”

You said it. He heard it. He finally heard it, and you waited for anything like an idiot, yet it never came. You checked if you had accidentally hung up the call, but when you saw that it was still going, you sighed and decided to end it for once and for all. “We can be anything. Anything, okay? I can just be your bartender, you can be my client, we can be friends, w-we can be more. If it’s not supposed to be, then just as long as you’re there, I really won’t mind. Just, please… I’m begging you…” You whispered, not capable of discerning whether your body quivered from the winter or the fear brutally gnawing on you.

“Be honest.” 

Peter held his breath. “Y/N…” You waited, shoulders shaking, the stupid fucking silence clutching you by the neck as you waited. Just say it. Just say it—

“I’m still in love with MJ. I’m sorry.”

Oh.

“Oh.” You said aloud, voice cracking. “Wow.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No. Pete, no, I’m…Thank you. It’s just kinda hard to take it in, but I...” You tightened your jaw, your throat aching, swallowing back your pity. “I will. Thank you for being honest, though.”

“I really hope this doesn’t ruin things,” You could barely hear him: your brain too loud compared to his voice. You shook your head frantically, scrunching up your nose to hold back a sniffle.

“Never. I love you.” It wasn’t the way you wanted to say it. “You’re my friend. And I’m not going anywhere because you said I was stuck with you, remember?”

He laughed, a beam of light that almost mended your fractured heart. “Yeah, I haven’t forgotten about that.” You smiled brightly, wiping the tears you’d tried so hard to stop from running down your cheeks. You stood straight, but it was only for a mere second, for your arms plopped back down onto the railing from the lightheadedness which threatened to bring you down. 

“Okay,” You slurred, the bile rising up and burning your throat. “I’m gonna leave you. My friend will hate me if I miss the countdown…”

“Sure. Happy new year… be safe.”

You giggled, waving your hand at no one, really. “Don’t worry about me grandpa, I do this every year.” You doubted the idea that popped in your head, but voiced it anyway, “And if you need any help with MJ, I’m here. I can give you a discount at the bar for a date night!” The excitement you forced onto yourself was salt on the wound.

“I’m not sure if that’s a romantic idea, but thanks, I’ll think about it.” You both hesitated, waiting for something once again. But when you realized that it’d never arrive no matter how much time passed, you nodded quietly and unwrapped your arms from yourself, preparing to let go of that feeling you’d clutched onto for the longest time as well.

“I’ll see you around.” You finally said and hung up. You stared at your phone, grief by your side, holding your hand. Yet, to your surprise, a weak smile started to creep on you, relief slowly sewing your heart together. You told yourself that the heaviness in your heart didn’t matter, because at least you had Peter. At least he would still be there, at the bar, with his whiskey served over ice.

As you stumbled to your feet, ready to join your friend and drink away your bittersweet ache, your phone began to vibrate. Your brows twisted together and you looked down, sliding your thumb across the screen.

“Peter?”

#peter b parker x reader #peter b parker x you #peter b parker x y/n #sm:itsv #spider man into the spider verse #peter b parker one shot #peter b parker imagine #one make out session #fem!reader #male!reader #gender neutral #sadies1.6kwc

[dynamics-of-prejudice]

Fashion Breaking Toxic Masculinity One Runway at a Time.

This past year at the 2020 Oscars, Timothée Chalamet was spotted embracing the more feminine aspects of his style, he was wearing a striking Prada Jumpsuit. He was later quoted saying “You can be whatever you want to be. There isn’t [anything] specific…that you have to take part in to be masculine” this coming from a 24 year old white male, and one can assume he is straight due to his relationship with Lilly Depp although he has never publicly commented on his sexuality. Chalmets choices on the red carpet when it comes to his fashion is a symbol for how the norms that have dominated Hollywood for decades are coming to an end. He is proving through his fashion and his actions that these types of expressions of masculinity are unnecessary for the development of healthy males. As Timothy Beneke states in Proving Manhood when discussing assumptions made that tie the idea of compulsive masculinity and sexism together and show how they go hand and hand with one another “real men are superior to women and superior to men who do not live up to models of masculinity” (270) This assumption would be totally crushed by outfit worn by Chalmet at the 2020 Oscars, and this is why this ensemble is so much more than a pair of overalls.  

In the documentary The Mask You Live In directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, William Pollack a well know psychologist states “The way boys are brought up makes them hide all of their natural, vulnerable, and empathetic feeling behind a mask of masculinity”. Young men like Chalamat that can express themselves so freely without the fear of crossing boundaries is a privilege in itself but it also is the source of strength for young people who are struggling with their own identity and how they should express it. This gives them the impression that it is okay to step outside of these gender norms and essentially move away from sexist behavior. As Timothy Beneke stated in Proving Manhood “I find it impossible to imagine compulsive masculinity without sexism”(270) The whole idea of compulsive masculinity is rooted in the idea that the man must achieve things and be able to endure things that the women cannot not. So, by putting yourself in the women’s shoes (pun intended) such as Chalamet, or Tyler the Creator has done does, puts the whole sexist nature on top of its head and breaks this idea that men are supposed to be one way in order to express themselves dissolves and the mask they keep up can come down.

Another Icon when it comes to breaking masculinity norms would be Tyler the Creator, in 2016 during his first ever runway show he describes how he “just wanted to show people, you don’t have to follow any fucking rules, you can literally do whatever you want.” Speaking to how masculinity is a construct that was designed to keep people inside of a box, when speaking about the black community he also mentioned how there is an expectation of being “tough” and that speaks volumes to the privilege white males experience. They are not persuaded one way or the other on either being tough or soft, whereas in the black community males are supposed to be tough and hard and not act soft at all. To have a role model such as Tyler who has come from the same upbringing as most of those born before 2000 for the black community is crucial in breaking down these stereotypes of what it means to be masculine, and who must be masculine, and why it is stigmatized on certain groups and why certain groups are judged based on how masculine they are, and vice versa.

Johnny Depp one if the first actors to ever blur the lines of masculinity and redefined what the male stereotype was. From his role in Edward Scissorhands to Jack Sparrow, Glenn Lantz there is a certain feminine aspect that Depp has achieved in these characters through the years. In a time where Terminator, and Point Break were hitting the scene, Depp was starring as a misunderstood young man that was different, so he was shunned as we have seen throughout history inside the LGBTQ community. Men like Tyler the Creator and Timothée Chalamet are able to express themselves in these ways due to the steps of those who came before such as Depp. Obviously, there are many more who have broken these lines but not too many more well known then Depp. He himself has been quoted saying “Don’t you know all of my characters are gay” in jest, however this is a direct example of how he does not abide by the normal standards of compulsive masculinity.

This freedom of being able to express yourself while working as these above entertainers have, does not cross over to all professions. It is quite the contrary, in most professions there is a dress code that employees must follow and if they do not follow then they will be reprimanded. Thus, being another extension of masculinity that has groomed our society to think that a suite, clean shaved face and a clean haircut is what a successful person looks like. Not only is this putting all male professionalism into a white, straight, middle-class masculine norm, but it is also influencing the females in the workplace as well.

In conclusion, it is amazing to see people like Timothée Chalamet breaking barriers of toxic masculinity, and continuing a legacy started by those like Johnny Depp. Tyler the Creator also being such a influential force inside the black community especially for young black males who understand that being tough is not cool. To see actors like Chalamet getting lead roles in Hollywood is a great indication that as a society we are seeking more depth inside of our male existence and this is exciting. Although this privilege does not extend to the overwhelming majority of the country, it is still a symbol for those who do have to follow a dress code that at least society is accepting of people who have a similar mindset, and believe in similar ideals, that this idea of toxic masculinity is out of fashion as a whole. Emotional and the ability to communicate feelings is the new age stoic, strong and silent type of the past.

Works Cited. 

Beneke, Timothy. Proving Manhood. The Meaning of Difference American Constructions of Race and Ethnicity, Sex and Gender, Social Class, Sexuality and Disability. Seventh Edition. Edited by Karen E. Rosenblum and toni-Michelle C. Travis. McGraw-Hill Education, 2016, pp. 267-270.

Newsom, Jennifer Siebel, director. The Mask We Live In. Jennifer Siebel. 2015. 

Raiss, Liz. Tyler, the Creator Breaks Down How His First Ever Runway Show Came Together. The Fader. https://www.thefader.com/2016/06/15/tyler-the-creator-interview-golf-wang-made-la. Date accessed 5/2/2021

Shorey, Eric. How These Celebrities Are Stylishly Breaking Gender Norms. The Manual. https://www.themanual.com/fashion/celebrity-style-icons-masculinity/ Date accessed: 5/1/2021

Greenwood, Douglas. How Timothée Chalamet is ushering in a new era for masculinity. Vouge. https://www.vogue.com.au/culture/features/how-timothe-chalamet-is-ushering-in-a-new-era-for-masculinity/image-gallery/279f743b36c62f3203306451458111e8. Date accessed: 5/2/2021

 Harris II, Varno. Edward Scissorhands Is a Deep Reflection On Social Norms, Innocence, And Explotation. Odyssey. https://www.theodysseyonline.com/edward-scissorhands-social-norms. Date accessed. 5/2/2021.

 Ben, Barry. What happens When Men Don’t Conform to Masculine Clothing norms at Work? Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/08/what-happens-when-men-dont-conform-to-masculine-clothing-norms-at-work. Date accessed: 5/2/2021.

 Hollywood Insider. The Rise of Teen Idols Timothée Chalamet & Harry Styles: Destroying Toxic Masculinity. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHS3ssNScQo&t=79s. Date Accessed: 5/1/2021. 

[crypticalwitch]

Dr. Hide, The Mechanisms, and a New friend.

The story of Dr. Marie Hide, Her small crew, and how they all met. The Story of my Mechsona crew.

Warnings-death, Poison, ask to tag.

Dr. Marie Hide was raised on stories of the Mechanisms. She would sit and listen to her great grandmother telling tales of a Man of copper singing tales of the past, tales of a man with a heart of metal being passed a baby and panicking, of Women with Wings or Minds of metal. 

She fell in love with the tales from the stars,and no matter how many times she was told to stay planetside for her own safely, she would look to the stars, the old warped disks her Great Grandma left her playing. The singers voice haunting as they told their one man audience the tales of Gunpowder Tim and Ashes O’Reilly. 

So, it wasn't much a surprise to herself or her family when she became an Engineer, and a Doctor, and a Pilot. and She headed off to the stars, gathering her own tales to be told. 

And then she found it. A very old file, something that took months upon months to update and break through all the passwords and safeguards to get at whatever was hiding in the file. and boy was it something.

A very old file, full of things written and made by the Mechanisms, Not the ones who her Great Grandma told her about, the ones whose voices filled Dr. Hide’s speakers when she was alone in the engine room, but the real ones. The immortals from all over the stars who played deadly pranks and who held a mini war over something called an Octo Kitten. Whatever the hell that was. All written by Dr. Carmilla and Raphaella La Cognizi.

But the most exciting thing, was the blueprints and instructions for Mechanization, Immortality developed by the Doctor.

It wasn't a hard decision for Her to make. She already couldn't walk, what was the worst thing that could happen. But first, she would need someone to do the procedure, since she really didn't want to be conceness for her legs to be cut off and guts scooped out.

So she built Jekyll. It was programed with hundreds of medical procedures, as well as what they’d need to do the whole mechanization process, if lacking in preprogrammed personality. 

So waking up with the ability to walk was interesting, and the first thing she got to do with her new skill was clumsy run and steal a ship with her unemoting companion.

The pair wandered, gathering more stories of their own, both ones they were involved in, and not always in their little junker ship, nicknamed “Borealis”.

Borealis tended to break down, stutter and never quiet be as safe as it should, but for a new immortal and her Robot companion, whose personality was only just starting to develop. It was home, if barely big enough.

When they landed on Pistil, Dr. Hide had only planned to make a fuel stop, until she heard from one of the local merchants that a warlord was making quick work of the planet, maybe she had extended her stay for a few....years, much to jekyll’s chagrin.

and She really wasn't expecting to find someone with her legs injured beyond belief. She was face down in the dirt, long grey-blue hair splayed out in long loose curls, her legs down to bone and blood.  

so Hide brought her back to the makeshift lab. Patching up the mysterious woman was easy enough, however, waiting for her to return to the waking world was a nightmare.

When she did, she cried, scared and alone. Now, the good Doctor is not really savvy with emotions, so having a panicking, sobbing, stranger on her table, was not her ideal situation. To make everything so much better, Jekyll had just walked in, and stood staring with its lack of eyes.

“Jek, now is not a good time.” She had hissed, rubbing the back of the woman.

“The Police are here.” It had said.

“fucking hell.” Dr. Hide had shoo’d the police away, who simply wanted to know who lived at the house. When she had returned, the woman had calmed down, and was wiping her tears away with a cloth given to her by jekyll.

She had introduced herself as Carcei Wisteria, the teamaid of Emperor Ivalace. Dr. Hide didn’t quite know what that meant, but was happy enough to support her.

Carcie was on her way to get a very specific flower to make tea with. something that would be VERY HARD WITHOUT HER FEET. So Hide offered her help, Pulling out her old wheelchair and offering her help carrying the flowers and seeds back to her home.

Carcie had (Reluctantly) accepted her offer, and the pair took a three month journey to find these flowers, a gorgeous plant nicknamed “Selene's Prayer”.  

For months after meeting and befriending the woman, someone Hide quickly grew to admire for her silver tongue and for her sharp mind, Hide would not know why Carcie wanted Selene’s Prayer, until one night, late in Pistil’s seasonal cycle, when plants dried and what chill that constituted Pistil’s winters was just beginning to set in, gathered over warm tea and surrounded by the smell of drying earth and burning silverwood, Carcie wove her tale.

Carcie Wisteria had been born Carcie Forsythia, and had trained under a noble of Dandil, the once name of the kingdom before it became territory of Peat. She had quickly became a gift to the Empress, Magnola, and even quicker became her High Teamaid, a position of high honour and status.

Magnola was apparently fond of Carcie, and often took her to peace talks and trade negotiations. Which is how she met them, a otherworldly seeming person who chose their name as Odyssey Velium.

Odyssey was tall, dark, freckled, with short dark red hair and smoky violet eyes that shone like a sunset. They was a similarly high ranked dressmaid to the former Emperor of Peat, a kindly older man by the name of Prairifire and one of Dandil’s strongest Allies. Carcie fell in love near instantly, and apparently Odyssey felt the same way, and the pair began a whirlwind relationship over letters. 

The years went on, the pair only seeing each other in person when Empress Magnola and Emperor Prairifire met up for tea, their love affair remained a secret. until one of the more Enterprising Teamaids discovered Carcie’s letters from Odyssey, and outed her relationship to both rulers. 

The pair believed themselves to only had a few hours together before their verdict handed out and they would be separated. 

and they were given their rulers blessings to be wed.

Odyssey was gifted to Magnola as a dressmaid, and they were engaged, choosing their family name to be Wisteria.

A few months passed, the kingdoms Alliship stronger than ever, before Emperor Prairifire died,and his War mongering son took the throne, and a new treaty needed to be written up.

Carcie just happen to be late to the Congress, her maids having made a near unrecoverable mistake with the petals, and she arrived just in time to see her Queen, her court, and her never to be partner slaughtered.

As was customary, she was taken as a prize, and made to serve her loves killer the same tea she would to her queen, as he took over the land she loved.

The petals of Selene’s Prayer, it turns out, were a horrific paralysis agent, as well as a hallucinogen. and a strong one. When mixed with the right Poisons, it would lead to a painful and terrifying death. One Carcie intended to give to the entire court as she watched.

Hide had only one thing to say after that.

“after the revenge, what will you do?“

“Probably be put to death, why?”

“wanna join my semi-immortal band of space pirates exploring the galaxy?” When Carcie said nothing, Hide continued, “i could just replace your feet with a mechanism like my lower body and Bam! Unkillable!”

“your kidding.”

“nope!” To demonstrate, Hide put a knife through her hand, and then showed the skin kniting itself back together.

“holy shit your not kidding?” Carcie puffed up “WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THAT WHEN WE FIRST MET!”

“DO YOU WANT BE STUCK LIVING WITH SOMEONE WHO DIDN'T ASK TO BE IMMORTAL AND IS ANGRY WITH YOU FOR ETERNITY? I'D FEEL SO GUILTY! plus it kinda hurts for a few weeks after”

the pair laughed.

“Mari,” Carcie said, 

“Oh wow, using my first name! this is serious.”

“Mari.” Carice narrowed her eyes, “I want you to promise me something if i go through with this.”

“ok?”

“Promise me we’ll steal a bigger ship than Borealis after my revenge.”

“HELL YES!” Hide laughed, “so when is this going down?”

“Tomorrow.” Carice said,carefulling sipping her tea as Hide suddenly choked,

“TOMORROW SHIT I GOTTA GET A GOOD SEAT!” Hide threw a hug around Carcies shoulders, “Can't wait to see your magnum opus of vengeance, if Jekyll asks i'm following my family's footsteps!”  

“see ya Hide!”

 Sunrise came, and Carcie got to work. She dismissed her Teamaids for the day (”you’ve all worked so hard lately, and you deserve a break!”), and set to work brewing her poison. 

When the court downed the tea, the poison took quick. The paralysis only took hold of a few but the hallucinations were strong and maddening and within hours, the branches of the meeting hall were covered in madness and gore and horror. And standing in the middle, survivors would later say, stood Carcie, her mourning veil cloaking hazel eyes that had long hardened to earth and moss.

and dropping from an over head branch, was Hide, casting impressed eyes over her work.

“Were grabbing more of those seeds right?”

“mhm.”

“were taking all of your seeds aren't we?” 

“and the dry flowers.”

“sounds good!”

----------

WOO! That was fun! 

If you have any questions about my Crew, please ask! My ask box is open and Id love to gush or expand on the universe. also ask me to tag

#mechsona #My writing #Carcie Wisteria #Dr Marie Hide #mechsona backstory #ask to tag please

[mrneighbourlove]

Scarlet Contract: Final Part

Scarlet gave the old snake a nod and headed inside. On her left were four prison cells with iron bars. The first and third cells were empty. In the second cell was a Moblin who leaned against the bars, sniffing the air around Scarlet. It spoke something at her in a language she didn't understand. When it saw she wasn't a meal ticket, it retreated further into its cell. Arriving at the third cell it was a glass wall with tiny air holes cut at the top. Torch and candle flames were the only source of light source down this deep underground, so it took a moment for Scarlet to see through the dimmed light. "Adda?"

Sitting on a table, a Gerudo with long hair that needed to be cut years ago lifted her head slowly up from a book she was reading. Turning, Scarlet into the eye of her old Captain. Adda wore rags, her hair covering her missing eye. An eye that the royals of Hyrule never replaced. Her nails were long, and her face was filled with wrinkles. Despite this, she was in good shape. Scarlet choked it up keeping in shape when she had little else to do. It was Adda's voice that surprised Scarlet the most. It was low, and sounded like someone who was weary and succumbed to pain. "...Scarlet? Is that you Redd?"

"Yes Adda. It's me."

Adda stood up from her chair, trading her book for a candle as she walked closer to the cell wall. Her golden eye was tired as she looked at Scarlet. "I never thought I'd see you again."

Scarlet looked around, and up and down Adda. "You look terrible. This is the condition they keep you in?"

"Public enemy number one, only alive due to a King wanting to pick my brain. They wanted me dead. Well, they can't. So, for over a decade, they put me in conditions were I sometimes wish for it."

"I... gods."

"You know, the past few years I've gotten so used to this that I've been desensitized to going outside for those twelve hours a year they grant me. What's the point? They'd never give me a cell with fresh air or a view anyways."

Scarlet closed her eyes. Others would tell her that Adda deserved this. But did anyone? "Adda. I'm sorry they put you away to be forgotten."

"And who's fault is that." Adda had a hint of malice, before letting out a deep sigh. "No. No no no no no. Certainty not yours. You had the freedom to leave. I supported you on that. Then you wanted to support your family in rescuing Seer. Of course you couldn't trust me when I wanted to help Bakura. Of course your family would do this to me." Adda tilted her head, and although she smiled, her eye was with sadness. "We were family once too you know."

"Sisters."

"Not anymore..." Adda looked around into the darkness surrounding Scarlet. "Why are you here Scarlet? I've never had visitors before. I don't have illusions you're here to break me out."

"We both know I could never do that. I'm here because of a deal I made."

"The snake?" When Adda saw Scarlet flinch, she smiled. "Yeah. Monster that crawls in the dark, having his hidden away criminal empire. All that money to fuel Queen's armies. He loves to talk about making promises. I see them as servitude myself. You have a debt he's cashing in on you Scarlet?"

Scarlet's mouth hung open for a moment, before she found herself clenching her fist to regain composure. "Something along the lines of that. Cashing in from saving your life."

Adda's brow furled together as she tried to recall. "You'll have to be more specific Redd. After all, you were rather zealous in my protection in the good days."

"When you were sick and we were shipwrecked on Omisha."

"Ah." Adda slowly nodded. "Shame."

"How so?"

"Shame that I'm alive."

"Not at all. It’s more of a shame that I couldn't save you in a way that mattered."

Adda looked to the side, her main of hair facing Scarlet. It hid her emotion perfectly. "Well. I was the only one who could have saved myself. Bad hand is all." Turning back, she tapped the glass, her thoughts lingering on Scarlet's deal. "What is it he wants you to do?"

Scarlet didn't think it'd be a big deal talking about it. "He want's me to replace King Malik as the de facto leader of the Gerudo. Make me a Queen to serve Hyrule's Queen."

Adda's golden eye practically burned to life, and for the first time since visiting Scarlet saw some animation in her body. "Really? You? Dethrone..." Adda grasped her face, an uncontrollable giggle turning into a laugh.

Scarlet couldn’t hide the small amount of fear and hurt that was growing on her. “I didn’t think you saw so little of me.”

"Oh Scarlet. I'm not laughing at you. Just the thought of that King using me for years only to be thrown off his chair by MY second in command? That. Is. Priceless. And quite honestly, something I'd love to see."

Scarlet wiped her brow to get rid of the sweet. "I don't see myself being a Queen."

"Queen? No. You'd never make a good Queen." Adda rested her arm above her head as she leaned against the glass. "But a leader? You have that in you."

That was honestly shocking for Scarlet to hear. "What?"

"I said you have what it takes to be a leader Redd. Queen, that was my title. But you'd make an excellent chief."

Scarlet narrowed her eyes as she turned her head slightly to the side. "Why are you telling me this? You never let me be a captain under your fleet."

Adda backed away from the glass, shaking her head at something funny to her. "All my time in here has given me time to reflect on the odyssey that is my life Scarlet. I've had hammers, fists, crime lords, scum on the high seas and living weapons that have served me faithfully... for one lousy exception. But you? There was no replacing you. My number two. The only person I trusted to lead in my absence if need be. I need you at my side because what I valued most about you was that you were the one person I could call my friend. I respected you. Respected you so much that when you wanted to leave the life, I let you go. I shouldn't have. But I did. I think that's were my first downfall happened. Caring at all for you. For the girls... for some blind old junky. And for Bakura...." Adda turned away from Scarlet. "Loving was never a healthy option for me."

"Adda. How can you say that?"

"Simple. About five years, maybe six? Fuck. It's so hard to tell time down here. Seven years ago, for all I care there was a moment, a moment I broke down and repented. I wanted to see my girls and you. I wanted to admit how much I destroyed everything. But you never came. I know for a fact that Corsaire would never send off any letters I made." Adda looked up at the roof of her prison cell, with balled fists. The void above her was a horrifying image at first, but now it was numbing. It was all she knew down here. Maybe all she'd ever see. She let her fists drop as her shoulders sunk. "But I realized it didn't matter. That loving has only hurt me. Never loved properly so maybe I couldn't love others properly. Good leader, but a lousy parent... Ok, look. There's no changing my past. No changing... no changing me. They want to keep me locked away like some animal? Go ahead... Can't do much worse to me. Those spineless nobles don't have the guts."

Scarlet let Adda ramble, an immense sense of pity for the woman churning in her. Why didn't they just put her out of her misery. "Adda..."

Before she could continue, Adda turned to Scarlet with the spin of a heel. "Now, my point to all this? Your worries are no longer my own. And we should both move on from each other for good. That's the real reason why you came here, haven't you? Don't you realize Scarlet? You're braver than you think. You have the courage to do what my own daughters won't even do. They couldn't kill me, and they can't give me a final goodbye. But you can. And what it's worth? I think you should kick Malik's ass to the curb. You have the power deep within you. Unleash it. Do something special for your life that isn't centered around me." With a smirk, Adda returned to her seat. "I'm sure they don't want you staying long. Say the rest of your peace, then leave. Stay longer and I'll take it as you wanting to mock my imprisonment."

Scarlet pressed her head against the glass, letting all her feeling build up for Adda in one last moment. "I'll ask about them giving you more humane conditions. After that, you're on your own. Goodbye Adda. I loved you. I really, really did."

When Scarlet looked up, Adda was right there with her. "I loved you too Redd. Sayōnara."

Adda returned to her seat, and Scarlet walked away, leaving the old pirate to her solitude alone.

Scarlet fumbled around in the dark with a torch. “I’d like to go back up now.”

"He will show you the way." Bonegrinder slithered in the correct direction, allowing Scarlet ot follow him. "Did you obtain your sense of closure?"

“Best I could achieve. I don’t think she should be treated this way though.”

"Many would argue with you, little lady." Bonegrinder reminded Scarlet. "There are many who want her dead. Imagine what conditions they'd put her in. This is... as humane as it gets."

“She doesn’t get any sunlight. What are we if we treat our enemies this way?”

"Our enemies would not show us the mercy of allowing a capture to live, Scarlet." Bonegrinder reminded the woman. "The enemy we are going to fight will spare no one. No innocents, no criminals, no one."

Scarlet said nothing. Returning to the surface, she felt her stomach grumble. “Maybe some food before leaving.”

"He is sure the palace chef will be more than happy to fix you a meal." Bonegrinder smacked his lips, rolling that serpentine tongue. "He recommends the strawberry creme puffs by Chef Sophie. She's an old lady now, but still can cook with the best of them."

~

At the table, Scarlet was doing her best to have her full. At the table, Revy was giving the orphans and Seija there first Hylian experience. “This here is called a chocolate strawberry. Its dunked in molten chocolate.” Scarlet chuckled. Sometimes it was easy to forget Hyrule was a second home to Revy. She barely left Uskar anymore, but a nostalgia glint could be found in her voice. “Any of you kids want to see Princess Orana’s zoo of wonders in the countryside?”

The kids were eager to see the animals and begged to go right then. Yet, it was dinner time and soon enough, bed time. Tomorrow would be the better choice. Rat dazzled them with promises of seeing Orana's Molagani tigers. Ever since Corsaire rescued her first tiger, Mahaan, from the unsavory market, she had kept a few in captivity to try to replenish the numbers, releasing a few into the wild after intense training. He recalled how happy she was when Corsaire brought Mahaan to her with a little blue bow wrapped around his neck. The first mate also remembered how brokenhearted Orana was when Mahaan finally passed away due to old age. He lived to be almost 23 years old. Sighing, Rat excused himself from the table to get a bit of fresh air on the balcony. He could sense it. Something was changing.

Scarlet joined him, patting his back. “You ok?”

"Aye, me's just thinking." Rat admitted to his lover, stargazing at the night sky. "Just remembering old times. I don't suppose you think me daft for missing those days when Cap'n, the crew, and me-self would go diving for treasure?"

“Course not. But I’d have never got to be with you.”

"Aye, dats true." Rat nodded his head. Then said, suddenly, "Me's old now, Scarlet. Thinking back on things I wish I could a-change. Thinking about time lost. If it would have gone different if I had a-changed me-self."

“Tell me what you’d want to change.”

"Wish me'd just knocked you out and dragged you along to Uskar with me for one." Rat chuckled. "Ice woulda been in the way." He then said, "Wish I could have taken Revy more to see the world when she was younger. Get that self-sacrifice nonsense out of her head. Had forgiven you earlier, that's a big one, but Borgie definitely helped with that. That's for us, but for me-self, I..." He sighed heavily. "More than anything, I wished I could have saved Bomba."

Scarlet looked away, still guilty by that all these years. Everyone played scenarios in there head over and over on how they’d saved him; done things differently. “I’d have accepted a fantastic friendship with ya if I still had the little man at my side.”

"Ya know, Bomba always talked about having a family one day and settling down since he was an orphan." Rat chuckled and told Scarlet with a grin. "He'd brag about how he was going to hook the hottest pair of legs on the town, romance her something fierce with flowers and sea jaunties, and then buy her the fattest ring he could find. Then he said they'd have a dozen kids and a boat with a white picket fence around the mast." The ex-pirate rolled his eyes. "Silly one, that kid. Still can't believe he blew off only two of his fingers while he messed with that dangerous powder. Annoying sometimes, but had a heart of gold."

Scarlet leaned over the balcony railing, sighing as she clapped her hands together. “Feel like it’s my fault at times you know. I was the one who showed Adda details on the Wind Waker. I’m the one who thought we should have controlled that dragon and the other pirates instead of just sinking them into the sea. Thought it was mercy.... I saw Adda again today Rat.”

"... can't say I'm pleased with you a-going to see her." Rat had mixed feelings about Scarlet going to see Adda. Perhaps she needed closure. Maybe she needed to ask why. He was not sure, but either way, he was fearful of Scarlet being hurt. "Regardless of what you did, your intention was not to get Bomba killed."

“No. But me leaving Adda left her alone to the worst people. Should have taken her captive when we first found you in Uskar. Let her live in better conditions than she is now. Let her learn that she could have been a good mother. I left her at the worst time. Only made things worse on all sides.”

"Now you're being silly." Rat turned to look at Scarlet. "You can't blame yourself for her actions, Scarlet. You didn't force her to make those choices. You's ain't her keeper."

“She replaced me with Seer. Look how that turned out. She looked to me to back up and challenge her choices. Because I didn’t have a backbone, I left her to a bunch of yes men.”

"Seer didn't want to be used as a replacement. He wanted to stay in Uskar with his girls. And you are not responsible for Adda." Rat gently pulled Scarlet into a hug. "I know you want to see the good in her, but you're not her guardian, her mother, or the one that's in charge of her actions. That's all on her. Don't think anymore of it. I don't want you to feel guilty over it."

Scarlet hugged Rat tight. He could feel something burning in her to get out. When she saw Corsaire and Prince Ralnor holding casual conversation, she patted Rat and marched up to them. “Hello there gentlemen. Hope I’m not interrupting anything. I had a request on my mind.”

"I'm telling you, if we put in a bigger engine the weight wouldn't be---" Corsaire stopped mid-sentence when Scarlet approached.

"What might it be, Scarlet?" Ralnor was getting rather tired of the captain's constant refusal to try to build a larger engine. Advancements had to be made.

“I know you’ll never give Adda better conditions for imprisonment. I want you to execute her.”

"...?!?!?!"

Both men looked equally stunned by Scarlet's request. "Well... that..." Corsaire took a moment to regain his composure. "I'm not against it. She has done some serious crimes."

"Might I ask why the sudden request when we tried to have this happen years ago and a select few were against it?" Ralnor quirked an eyebrow.

“Because I didn’t know she’d be treated like some slimy Like-Like locked away in an underground, lightless box. It’s inhumane. Just let her die so everyone can move on.” Scarlet crossed her arms, using some ‘logic’ she heard the prince enjoyed. “You want me to replace King Malik right? I don’t know who he is, but if I do that, he has no reason to keep Adda alive anyways right?”

"That is a valid point." Ralnor did appreciate her logic. Malik had not had questions for Adda in a couple of years. Perhaps it was the end of her usefulness. "Very well then. I will set a date for her execution."

"...? It's that easy?"

"No one knows she's alive besides us anyhow."

"Ah... well, I suppose that is true."

“Ok. So... tomorrow morning I, what, march up to his door?”

"..? You?" Ralnor looked puzzled. He misheard being so focused on Adda’s upcoming death. "You want to kill her?"

“What?! No!” Scarlet turned pale, suddenly losing her guts. In her haste to get on with her life, she had confused the prince. “I meant Malik. No. Not kill him. Dethrone. Uh-“

"Oh. Do not worry, the snake and I will handle that." Ralnor assured Scarlet.

“But. I’m the one taking charge. I should go there to transfer the peace and title.” She looked to Rat and Corsaire. “I doubt Rat and the crew would listen to some random Captain if Corsaire was suddenly replaced with no explanation. That’s a mutiny in the making. Even Adda knew this.”

"If you wish to accompany me, then by all means you are welcome." Ralnor then gave her a fair warning. "However, I doubt Malik will step down... willingly. But that shall not be a problem. We all know that the snake has the right playing cards."

“What.” Scarlet crossed her arms. “Blackmail?”

"Let's just say the snake and Malik have an interesting past together." Ralnor told Scarlet. "The less said the better."

Scarlet felt something really off about how the prince said that. Looking to Corsaire, she felt conflicted. “Corsaire. Is this Malik a bad guy? Like Adda?”

"... he was once known as 'Klinge'." Corsaire almost shuddered. "An undead commander who once guarded the queen with such ferocity."

"Until said queen was able to use her magic to reverse his curse." Ralnor told Scarlet. "Even though she is reagent, Zarazu is still powerful."

“Klinge? The Blade of the Gerudo? Revy saw him as a legend growing up.” Scarlet frowned, tapping her foot. “That’s who you want me to go ask to step down?”

"Yes." Ralnor had no qualms about the process. "My father was ignorant enough to pass the Tri-Force piece of Power to him. You and I both know that there's a high chance he could risk going down the pathway of darkness. A risk we cannot take."

Scarlet turned to whisper in Corsaire’s ear. “He sounds like Adda. That’s scaring me.”

Corsaire tried to get her to hush, but it was too late.

"You know, I have quite keen hearing and if I scare you more than the snake, then you are a child that he has picked to lead the Gerudo." Ralnor remarked with a glare. "Remember this, Scarlet, I am the hand that keeps the peace in the kingdom. No matter who or what gets in my way, it will be... removed. Permanently." The second born prince was definitely as cold as ice just as the rumors said. And scary to boot. "I am not the one who conned this plan. The snake did. I am simply trying to follow his instructions to keep my niece safe. Prophecy or not, Luimaya's wellness and my family's safety are tantamount to other objectives. If you are thinking I am like Adda who will sacrifice those dear to me to get what I want, then you are gravely mistaken." He took a sip of his wine. "If I am not preferable for you, then be my guest. Let the snake lead you there."

“No. I’m sorry. I apologize Prince Ralnor.” Scarlet bowed her head, embarrassed at her actions.

"That's what I thought." Ralnor set down his empty glass. "Whether or not you believe Malik to be a legend, a hero, or even a damn saint, he will give up his throne if it means saving those he cares about. If not, then he will be in for a hard lesson from the snake." He then told Scarlet. "While I have my lines that I draw, Bonegrinder does not. He will willingly devour anyone in his path to see that the Mother Goddess inherits Luimaya as her host to battle Chaos for this world. If you cannot convince Malik, if I cannot, then he will be in danger... and his family." The prince then clasped his hands together, walking back inside. "It is late, Scarlet. Get some rest. Tomorrow will be a long day."

"..." Corsaire stood there beside Scarlet for a moment before advising her. "Lassie. Look. Me and you don't have the best of track records, but I say this because I mean it," He took a breath and then said, "If anyone can convince that bastard... it's you."

“Malik. Or Bonegrinder? I don’t like the idea of us hurting some man’s family.”

"Malik... and perhaps convince the snake to view a little light in the world."

________________________________________________________________

Crossover with @ridersoftheapocalypse

Previous Part:

#Crossover #Conversation done by myself between Scarlet and Adda. Last civil one they will have #Scarlet #Captain Adda #Bonegrinder