#edit: i think it's actually fabric of fate so i changed it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

violetseaslug · 4 months ago

Note

hey so, may I request part two to your last fic?😁 the one with rockstar Semi and girly fem reader. maybe part 2 could be reader asking Minsu ways to get back at Semi and actually succeed for once? i just want Semi to be the flustered one this time around💓

" thats how it feels, when shes on me "

₊˚⊹ ⤷ pairing: se-mi x fem!reader // wc: 2k

₊˚⊹ ⤷ my masterlist !!

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brief a/n: i was infact up all night writing this bc i was so excited and i cracked my phone bc i got frustrated editing the layout w long nails </3

synopsis: the reader gets back at se-mi and starts flirting/teasing her the same way se-mi did. AND THEY KISS (*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)

cw/tw: a lot of teasing and flirting, dialogue heavy. part 1 is here!

──────

You smooth out your outfit for the third time, staring at yourself in the dressing room mirror.

Your heart pounds in anticipation. It’s not like you’re nervous—okay, maybe a little—but mostly, you’re just hyping yourself up. Se-mi had teased you relentlessly before, always smirking, always knowing exactly what to say to make you blush.

But tonight? tonight, you are going to be the one in control. Not by being obvious, no—that would be too easy. Instead, you’ll be subtle. Just enough to make her question things, just enough to make her chase.

A knock on the door pulls you from your thoughts. Min-su, a talented bandmember, leans against the frame with a knowing smirk. "You look like someone plotting world domination."

You laugh. "Maybe just a little."

"This about Se-mi?" he teases, crossing his arms. "You finally gonna get her back?"

You roll your eyes but smirk. "pfft, hopefully."

Your friend claps you on the back. "don’t stress, you’ll grow greys so young."

You nod, exhaling slowly.

──────────────────────

You weren’t planning to run into Se-mi so soon, but fate has other ideas.

You’re backstage, wandering toward catering, when you take a wrong turn and open the door to what you think is the crew lounge. Instead, you find Se-mi mid-outfit change, one arm stuck in a too-tight sleeve, struggling to pull it down properly.

She freezes. You freeze.

For a split second, you just stare at each other. Then, with perfect composure, you lean against the doorframe. "Well, this is unexpected."

Se-mi huffs, finally yanking the fabric down and tossing her hair back, trying to play it cool. "Enjoying the view?"

You hum thoughtfully, stepping inside with slow, deliberate steps. "Should I be?"

She narrows her eyes at you, but there's a flicker of amusement there. ""Bold of you to test me like this," she muses, her voice dripping with amusement.

You grin, reaching out and hooking a finger through her belt buckle, tugging her just a little closer. "Oh? Should I be scared?"

Se-mi's breath hitches for just a second before she regains her composure, tilting her chin up. "Depends. Were you expecting something?"

You smirk, throwing her own words back at her. "I should be asking you that."

Her lips part slightly, but she doesn’t move away. Instead, her gaze drops—just for a split second—to where your fingers still rest against her belt. When her eyes snap back up to yours, they’re darker, more intense. "keep this up, I dare you."

You chuckle, brushing your fingers over the leather one last time before finally releasing her and stepping back. "dare accepted."

And just like that, you walk out, leaving her standing there.

──────────────────────

The after-show energy is still buzzing when you find yourself in Se-mi’s dressing room, surrounded by a few crew members. You’re perched on the edge of the couch, chatting idly, when Se-mi walks in, running a hand through her hair.

The moment she sits down, you don’t hesitate. With an easy, natural motion, you shift and settle yourself right onto her lap, acting like it’s the most casual thing in the world.

Se-mi stiffens for half a second before letting out a breathy laugh. "And here I thought I was the shameless one."

You rest a hand on her shoulder, your other tracing idle patterns on her knee. "I figured it was my turn to take the lead."

Her fingers twitch slightly against your waist, as if she’s debating whether or not to move you. Instead, she schools her expression, tilting her head.

"Oh? And what exactly are you leading?"

You lean in just a little, close enough that your lips almost brush the shell of her ear. "Wouldn’t you like to know?"

Her grip on your waist tightens slightly, but she still plays it cool. "You think this is gonna work on me?"

You hum, shifting just enough to make her suck in a breath. "I don’t know, se-mi. You tell me."

For a moment, she doesn’t say anything. You can practically feel her trying to keep her composure. But you’re not done yet.

You trail a single finger down her arm, light as a whisper. "You’re so tense," you murmur, tilting your head as if examining her. "Could it be that I’m actually getting to you?"

She exhales slowly through her nose. "You wish."

You shift again, letting your weight settle just a little more into her lap, fingers dancing up to the back of her neck where you toy with the strands of her hair. "I don’t know, semi. Your body language says otherwise."

She swallows, her hands now gripping your waist firmly, as if trying to steady herself. "You're really testing your luck, you know that?"

You chuckle, fingers grazing just under the hem of her shirt before pulling back, like a promise left unfinished. "Is that what I’m doing?"

Her jaw clenches, her breath coming just a little uneven now. "you’re pushing it."

You lean in closer, lips barely ghosting over her ear. "yet you're not pushing me away".

Her grip tightens, and for a second, you think she might actually do something about it. But instead, she stays frozen, trapped in the tension you’ve wound around her like a web.

With a victorious smirk, you finally slide off her lap, but not before pressing a feather-light kiss to her jawline, the barest touch that leaves her breathless.

se-mi stays still, her expression unreadable as she watches you go. But you know exactly what’s going through her head.

You wanted to play like that

The post-show adrenaline is still buzzing in the air, crew members moving around in a well-rehearsed dance of packing up and resetting. You, however, are focused on one thing—and one thing only. Se-mi standing near her dressing area, fingers lazily working to unclasp the delicate chain around her neck.

It’s almost too easy.

Without a word, you step forward, slipping in behind her before she can protest. "Let me," you murmur, voice low and smooth.

She stiffens for just a second before scoffing. "I can handle it."

"Mmm," you hum, but your fingers are already brushing against the nape of her neck, ghosting over soft skin as you reach for the clasp yourself.

Her breath hitches, so quiet you almost miss it. Almost.

The chain slides away with ease, but you don’t step back just yet. Instead, you let your fingers linger, dragging lightly along the column of her throat as you take your time lowering the jewelry into her waiting hand.

"There. Wasn’t so hard, was it?"

She exhales through her nose, a little sharper than usual. "You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?"

You step around her, making sure your fingers graze her wrist as you pass. "What makes you think that?"

She doesn’t answer right away, just watches you, as if trying to pick apart your next move. But you’re already onto the next one.

You grab a water bottle from the table beside you, unscrewing the cap slowly. You’re aware of her gaze flicking to you as you tilt your head back and take a slow, deliberate sip.

Then, you lower the bottle and hold it out toward her. "want some?"

She eyes the bottle, then you. There’s something challenging in the way she looks at you, but she takes it anyway, mirroring your earlier movement as she tilts her head back to drink. She should leave it at that. She should.

But she doesn’t.

The moment she lowers the bottle, you reach out, thumb swiping across the corner of her mouth before she even registers what you’re doing. "You had something there," you say, voice soft, but teasing.

She freezes.

Then, instead of reacting, she slowly raises a brow. "Oh? That so?"

You nod, feigning innocence. "Mmhm. Just helping."

For a moment, it’s quiet—just the low hum of crew members talking in the background, the faint echoes of the empty stadium. Then, with a slow, deliberate movement, she lifts the water bottle back to her lips.

And drinks from the exact same spot you did.

Your smirk falters for just a second—just enough for her to notice.

She lowers the bottle, stepping in just enough to close the distance. "That flustered look on your face says otherwise," she muses, voice as smooth as silk.

You swallow, then grin, recovering quickly. "Flustered? Please. You’ll have to try harder than that."

Her eyes flicker to your lips—brief, almost unnoticeable. Then, she shakes her head with a quiet chuckle, brushing past you. "Noted."

──────────────────────

The venue is nearly empty now, save for a few exhausted crew members packing up equipment. Se-mi is backstage, strumming absentmindedly on her guitar, lost in the quiet hum of the near-deserted space.

You lean against one of the amps, watching her. The sharp, teasing edge you wielded earlier has softened into something slower, heavier. It’s late. The energy from the show has settled, leaving only the two of you in its lingering afterglow.

She strums her guitar lazily, half-focused on a melody, but her eyes keep drifting toward you, as if waiting for something.

You push off the speaker, walking towards the couch se-mi was on. "You’re really putting in overtime, huh?"

She smirks, fingers never stopping. "Someone’s gotta keep the show perfect."

You hum, stepping closer until you’re right in front of her. "And here I thought you were just stalling."

Se-mi raises a brow. "Stalling for what?"

Instead of answering, you take a seat—right on her lap, just as effortlessly as you had back in her dressing room. She tenses, just slightly, but doesn’t push you away.

"You really have a habit of making yourself comfortable," she murmurs, amusement lacing her voice.

You rest a hand on her shoulder, leaning in so your lips hover just above her ear. "And you have a habit of letting me."

Her breath catches for just a second, fingers stilling on the guitar. "You’re insufferable."

You pull back just enough to meet her gaze, and this time, there’s no teasing, no playful smirks. Just tension—heavy, lingering between you both.

She exhales, something flickering in her eyes. "I hate you."

You smirk, stepping back just enough to be out of her reach. "Sure you do."

Se-mi finally looks at you, and in this dim lighting, you catch something flickering in her expression—something torn between amusement and thinly veiled exasperation. "You really love testing your luck, huh?"

You step in close, slow enough to give her time to stop you, but she doesn’t move away. Instead, she watches you carefully, her fingers tightening slightly around the neck of her guitar.

"I like testing you," you correct, lowering your voice just a fraction. "And I like winning."

She scoffs, but it’s weaker this time. "You didn’t win anything."

“believe me, teasing you was fun, but im getting impatient.”

Before se-mi could respond, you finally made your move.

Your hand slides to her jaw, tilting her face up just slightly before you lean in, pressing your lips against hers. The moment they meet, she freezes, just for a second—then she melts into it, hands gripping your waist as she pulls you closer, deepening the kiss like she’s been waiting for this just as much as you have.

The guitar slips from her lap, forgotten. The stadium is empty, but in that moment, nothing else exists but the two of you.

When you finally pull back, she exhales, dazed. "Took you long enough."

You smirk, running a thumb along her jaw. "Oh? That so?"

She rolls her eyes but doesn’t let go. "Shut up and kiss me again."

You don’t hesitate.

#won jian #won ji an #squid game s2 #player 380 x reader #player 380 #se mi #se mi x reader fluff #se mi fluff #se mi x reader squid game #se mi squid game #se mi x reader #semi squid game #squid game fanfiction

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marsbarsfrommars · 11 months ago

Text

alone with you (the only heaven I'll be sent to)

summary

She nods and simply says the only thing she has to, “I understand.”

“I knew you would,” he responds with a certainty that makes Avar's heart seize.

or, in a quiet moment post-chapter 53, avar finds out about elzar almost dying on grizal

read

under the cut or on ao3 for better formatting

notes

first of all, this is dedicated to the person who headcannoned that elzar has burn scars on his hands from crashing his vector on grizal. I've tried, but I can't find their post, so if anyone knows whose post I'm talking about, please comment so I can tag them here.

edit: it's the lovely @ledalausnows and you should definitely check out her posts bc she's super cool!!

also, a huge shout out to the thr fans on tumblr: if it wasn't for you I probably wouldn't have finished this. thank you for all your support and I hope you enjoy this <3

this is the first time in at least six years that I've actually finished one of my wips, so while I'm a little proud of this, the quality might be questionable. my perfectionism made me proof read this so many times I could probably recite it from memory so I hope this is readable and I fixed all major mistakes. anyways, I hope you enjoy this

also, english isn't my first language, so please just ignore any grammar/spelling mistakes

content warning for mentions of scars, injuries, near-death experiences and past major character death. none of this is in any way graphic but I wanted to mention it anyways

The overhead lights in Avar’s quarters are turned down to a dim glow, and it's quiet apart from the gentle hum of the ship's engines. The night cycle must have started a while ago, but neither of them had noticed; both of them were too wrapped up in each other. Now, though, they're resting. Elzar on his back in her bunk, one arm gently wrapped around her with his hand lazily caressing her waist, and Avar on her stomach, half resting on his chest, the fabric of his shirt soft under her wandering hands.

It's nice like this—peaceful. For a moment, Avar allows herself to forget about their upcoming task, about the possible danger the future holds, and just exist in this moment with Elzar. She feels more at peace than she has in months, possibly years. She slowly runs her hand down Elzar’s arm and intertwines her fingers with his, her thumb softly brushing over the back of his hand. The motion is familiar; they've held hands more times than she can count in those weeks since she escaped the Occlusion Zone, but there's something that makes her pause. It only takes her a moment to realise that tonight is the first time since that fateful night in the garden on Starlight Beacon that they've held hands without the barrier of Elzar’s gloves between them. Elzar wearing gloves is in itself nothing out of the ordinary for a Jedi; most of them routinely wear them as part of their robes, which explains why she hasn't noticed it before. Now that she really thinks about it though, it does strike her as odd that she can't remember seeing him without gloves even once since their reunion.

She slowly brushes her thumb over the back of Elzar’s hand again. The skin feels rougher in some spots. Avar knows the feeling of scars, enough of them are covering her own body, but she can't recall Elzar ever suffering an injury to his hands that would cause scarring this significant. She raises their intertwined hands to his chest, and sure enough, a thin web of healed fine-line and burn scars covers the back of his hand and wrist. An uneasy feeling settles in her stomach. What happened to Elzar to leave his hands scarred like this, and why wouldn't he tell me?

Elzar, sensing the subtle change in her demeanour, chooses precisely this moment to open his eyes and look up at her. And for a moment, as silly as it may sound, she feels overwhelmed by the sheer force of her feelings for him. She had missed him for years, and sometimes, even though it's been months since their reunion, she still can't believe she doesn't have to anymore. Avar is certain he already knows what she wants to ask about, but he doesn't say anything, waiting for her to take the first step, so she does.

“These aren't recent.” It's a remark, not a question. She knows Elzar will tell her everything without her having to ask. There are no secrets between them; nothing is left unspoken. Not anymore. The thought makes a familiar warmth bloom in her chest.

“No.” Elzar’s voice is soft, reserved for the quiet of quarters and whispered secrets after dark. “I got them on Grizal when my Vector crashed. The healers at the Temple did their best and apparently Bacta also helped a lot, but they couldn't prevent the scars.”

Avar furrows her brow. “I didn't know you were injured on Grizal.” She feels Elzar's body tense ever so slightly underneath her, anyone else wouldn't have noticed, but him and her—and Stellan, of course—have always shared an unusually deep connection, and now they're as attuned to each other as they haven't been in years, perhaps ever.

“It was at the end of the battle. We thought we were winning, but we didn't know there were Nameless on Grizal. I don't remember this part at all, and most of what came after is pretty blurry in my head, but Stellan later told me that he saw my Vector go straight down. I don't understand why, but I must have passed out when the Nameless appeared. My Vector caught fire when it crashed, and the cockpit bubble shattered. I wasn't wearing gloves that day, that's why the damage to my skin there was so severe. Ty pulled me out, saved my life. I don't remember anything after, but I know Stellan was with me.”

Avar takes a moment to process all of this. When she finally speaks, her tone isn't accusatory, there may be a tinge of hurt to it though. “Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't Stellan?” she asks. Before Elzar can answer, a terrible thought takes shape in her mind. “It's not that you thought I wouldn't care, is it?”

No matter what happened, she had never and would never stop caring about Elzar and Stellan. She knows without a doubt that it's the same for them, but she and Elzar hadn't spoken for a year at that point, and her relationship with Stellan had already been strained, so what if they had started to doubt her? Avar lowers her head. She's not sure she can look him in the eyes when he answers, the possibility of what she'll see there—of what he'll see in her—too overwhelming.

Elzar draws his hand away from her waist to gently cup her face and tilt her head up until her eyes meet his again. His gaze is earnest and there's an urgency in it—he needs her to believe what he says next. She already knows she will before he can utter a single word because she trusts him implicitly, and she knows that trust is mutual.

“No, I never thought that, I promise.” He pauses for a second and takes a deep breath, “And I know that Stellan didn't either.”

Avar lets out a shuddering breath and tries to quell her bubbling emotions, which threaten to spill over at his words. Even so, her voice sounds a little shaky when she asks, “Are you sure?”

Elzar nods sincerely. “I am. Stellan wanted to comm you, but I told him not to. We argued about it, and he relented in the end.”

The sheer relief she feels at his reassurance is dampened by one burning question, but she doesn't have to ask for him to tell her.

“I wanted you to know, I really did, but you were halfway across the galaxy fighting the Drengir and I didn't want you to be distracted.” He briefly averts his eyes, as if he's unsure about his next sentence, before he says, “I thought if you found out, you'd want to come see me, but we both know you couldn't have, and I didn't want to make it harder on you.”

Part of her wants to argue, wants to protest that she would have come if only she had known. But Elzar is right; she couldn't have. Still, she wishes someone had told her. But of course he wouldn't want that, she should have known. Elzar tends to view himself as selfish, but she has always known him to put the wellbeing of others, particularly hers and Stellans, above his own.

“And later?” she prompts gently. It's certainly not a conversation either of them had expected to have tonight, and she never wants to push him, but they've spent so much time keeping things to themselves in fear of crossing a line that hardly existed in the first place, and what good did it do them?

“As bizarre as it sounds, almost dying wasn't the worst experience I had that week.” Now it's his voice that sounds shaky. The experience has clearly affected him more than he's currently letting on, understandably so, and Avar sends a burst of warmth through the Force.

“When I was fully healed, everything was still so chaotic after Valo and Grizal, and there was so much going on that it just didn't seem that important.” Avar hates that he thinks that way but doesn't interrupt him; there will be time for reassurance later. “I got used to the scars fairly quickly, and even though they should be a constant reminder, I hardly think about it now. And I don't wish to. I've made my peace with everything that happened and everything I did then, I truly did, but I still don't like to remember it.”

Avar understands, of course she does. Enough bad things have happened to her in these last few years that she's made peace with, as is the Jedi way, but still doesn't like to think of. They're the same in that way. She nods and simply says the only thing she has to, “I understand.”

“I knew you would,” he responds with a certainty that makes Avar's heart seize.

There's a pause in their conversation then, both of them processing and coming to terms with what was and what hasn't yet been said. Avar is the one to break it when she says, “Please never do that again.”

Elzar quirks an eyebrow, the tension caused by their conversation slowly melting away. It seems he has decided that the heavy part of their conversation is over, which Avar truly doesn't mind. “Which part? Almost dying or not telling you about it?”

“Oh, do shut up,” Avar says, but there's no heat to it, just affectionate warmth.

Elzar laughs softly and pulls her down for a gentle kiss. Far too soon, Avar pulls away again and cups his face with her free hand, her thumb gently stroking his cheek. This time it's her who needs him to believe her next words. Her voice is soft yet insistent when she says, “I care about you, El. I don't want you to get hurt. And if you do, I want to be by your side if it's in any way possible. And even if I can't be, I want to at least know, please.”

Elzar nods, every trace of playfulness gone from his face and replaced by sincerity. “I know, and I promise you, the next time anything of the sort happens to me, I will tell you.”

Avar nods as well. “Good.”

A slow smile spreads across his face at that and the tenderness in his eyes is almost overwhelming. Avar thinks if she had a mirror, she'd surely see it reflected in her own eyes.

Elzar turns his head and presses a gentle kiss to the inside of her wrist, and she feels the familiar warmth spread in her chest once again, chasing away the last remnants of distress.

She leans down to press her lips to his once again, their connection in the Force glowing with love and understanding, making her feel almost giddy.

The kiss turns heated when Avar slides the hand still cupping Elzar’s check back into his hair, her fingers tangling in the soft strands, pressing her lips to his with more urgency. Elzar responds in kind by wrapping his arm around her waist once again and pulling her as close as their current position allows. She feels butterflies in her stomach at that, like when she was seventeen and kissed him for the first time. It amazes her that time and distance haven't dulled the effect he's always had on her in the slightest, but then again, how could they? He's Elzar, after all, her Elzar.

They don't belong to each other, of course not; there's no possessiveness to their love. But they belong with each other; side by side always. They both know it and the Force rings true with it.

They break apart, eyes closed and foreheads still pressed together. The kiss has left both of them breathless, as kisses like this often do. Once they've recovered enough to open their eyes and ever so slightly pull away from each other, and Avar really gets to look at him again, she is hit with the realisation of just how beautiful Elzar is like this. She doesn't think there has ever been a moment where she hasn't thought of him as beautiful, but seeing him like this is something else entirely. The dim glow of the overhead lights is reflected in his dark eyes, his hair disheveled from where she ran her hands through it earlier, a soft smile gracing his lips. A sight that's reserved just for her.

Avar's musings are interrupted when Elzar starts to speak again, his voice still sounding a little breathless. “Avar, I…,” he begins but then trails off, unable to finish his sentence. It doesn't bother Avar. She knows.

She pulls their still-intertwined hands up to press a gentle kiss to his knuckles, then the back of his hand, then his wrist. She feels his sharp intake of breath more than hears it, and when she meets his eyes, he's gazing at her with a look in his dark eyes Avar can't quite place. Later, she will come to recognise it as pure, unfiltered devotion.

“Stars, Avar,” he murmurs.

Elzar seems to know exactly what she's thinking—or maybe he just shares the sentiment—because he kisses her again, his hand slipping under her shirt to gently caress the bare skin of her waist. It's an exquisite kiss, and for the moment Avar allows herself to get lost in it, in this, until the only thoughts in her head are how lovely it is to feel so at peace, and Elzar. Always, always Elzar.

“What is it?” she asks. For a split-second, she's scared she's overstepped, but Elzar just shakes his head and leans up to brush his lips against hers in a tender kiss that ends far too quickly for her liking. If it were up to her, he'd never stop kissing her, she thinks, only slightly bothered by the fact that she sounds like a character in one of those stereotypical Jedi romance novels Kantam and her used to read to each other for fun in their Padawan days.

#avar kriss #elzar mann #avar kriss x elzar mann #elvar #the high republic #star wars #fanfiction

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stardustprompts · 4 years ago

Text

the poppy war - r.f kuang sentence starters change tenses/pronouns as needed !! some lines have been edited for clarity / length / ease of roleplaying tw : drugs , death , murder , nsfw , prostitution mention , language

‘take off your clothes.’

‘why would anyone drug themselves before a test?’

‘you’re about to be a very lucky girl, sweet.’

‘wow that’s great. really great. Terrific.’

‘your folks are assholes.’

‘well fuck the heavenly order of things.’

‘don’t you have actual responsibilities?’

‘I don’t want to get on _____ ‘s bad side.’

‘you would make a terrible prostitute. no charm.’

‘what is so wrong with getting married?’

‘do you want to die?’

‘everything is spilling out of my head as quickly as I put it in.’

‘please do not commit spousal homicide.’

‘give me a way out of this shithole.’

‘hello, I’m praying.’

‘I seduced him with my nubile young body. you caught me.’

‘you can’t scare me into a confession, because I’m telling the truth.’

‘and that means you’re shit at your job.’

‘if you cross them—- if they even think you’ve looked at them funny—- they can and will hurt you.’

‘it’s easy to lose a language when you never speak it.’

‘you’re offending them with your very presence.’

‘they’ll make you an outsider, because you’re not like them.’

‘no matter what they say, you deserve to be here.’

‘I’ll kill you. I will fucking kill you.’

‘I went out in the sun once. you should try it sometime.’

‘oh, you’re the one ____ hates.’

‘you’d be a prick too if your family was both rich and attractive.’

‘honestly? I think he just comes in here to get high.’

‘I think you’re flattering yourself.’

‘unless you’ve got a weapon, don’t aim for the face. the neck’s a better target.’

‘we aren’t here to be sophisticated. we’re here to fuck people up.’

‘this is the only kick you’ll ever need, really. a kick to bring down the most powerful warriors.’

‘power dictates acceptability.’

‘he hasn’t done anything to earn my respect. all he’s done is act high and mighty.’

‘you’re nothing. you shouldn’t even be here.’

‘consider me bullied and intimidated, just let me sleep.’

‘he’s playing with her. he’ll end it soon.’

‘they’re good at fighting, but not much else.’

‘spend a lot of time looking at ____’s eyes do you?’

‘a betrayal of that sort would not have been out of character.’

‘come on, you belong here too.’

‘they’re not going to get rid of me like this. not this easily.’

‘I’m calm! I’m extremely calm!’

‘you’d rather kill your own people than let the opponent’s army walk away?’

‘you don’t let an enemy walk away if they’ll certainly be a threat to you later.’

‘he can’t stop raving about you.’

‘oh, don’t pretend to be bashful. you love it.’

‘you’re a walking disaster.’

‘anyone this obstinate deserves some attention, if only to make sure you don’t become a walking hazard to everyone around you.’

‘I heard he got drunk on rice wine last week and pissed into ____’s window. he sounds awesome.’

‘it’s me, your favorite person in the whole wide world.’

‘I do not have a problem. you are making up this problem for reasons unbeknownst to me.’

‘you’re killing the mood.’

‘they were weak as shit. scrawnier than you, even.’

‘you’re a real asshole. you know that right?’

‘your state of mind is just as important as the state of your body.’

‘sometimes you must loose the string to let the arrow fly.’

‘because I want to break his stupid face.’

‘he’s the most dangerous when he’s desperate.’

‘from this point on you’re just going to be a danger to yourself and everyone around you.’

‘you’re too reckless. you hold grudges, you cultivate your rage and let it explode, and you’re careless about what you’re taught.’

‘I knew I was the only one that could help him.’

‘they honed his rage like a weapon, instead of teaching him to control it.’

‘one urinating statue for my easily entertained friend.’

‘I don’t believe in gods. but I believe in power.’

‘one might say you’ve been obsessed with ____.’

‘don’t look to your left. pretend you’re taking to me.’ / ‘I am talking to you.’

‘we’re studying very weird things.’

‘I don’t actually know what I’m getting into.’

‘here is what happened: you called a god, and the god answered.’

‘you know that if you don’t get answers now, the hunger will consume you and your mind will crack.’

‘you’ve glimpsed the other side and you can’t rest until you fill in the blanks.’

‘supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world.’

‘I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?’

‘I’m not a god. I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.’

‘are we getting high? oh, wow. we’re getting high.’

‘ah. the law. so inconvenient. so irrelevant.’

‘we are not madmen. but how can we convince anyone of this, when the rest of the world believes it so?’

‘the price of power is pain.’

‘I understand the truth of things. I know what it means to exist.’

‘prey do not question the motives of the predator. the dead do not question the living. mortals do not challenge the gods.’

‘I killed for you. I would have done anything for you.’

‘I have seen the end of things. the shape of the world has changed.’

‘war doesn’t determine who’s right. war determines who remains.’

‘it’s alright. I know what you are.’

‘I thought I was the only one left.’

‘we have developed the power to rewrite the fabric of this world. if we don’t use it, then what’s the point?’

‘I don’t mess with that shit. it screws you up.’

‘I understand the appeal, I really do, but I like having my mind to myself.’

‘he’s a charmer. like a new puppy. you think he’s adorable until he pisses on the furniture.’

‘there’s no routine. no discipline. nothing you’re used to. am I right?’

‘so you’re the last of your kind. that’s sad.’

‘If you hold the fate of the country in your hands, if you have accepted your obligation to your people, then your life ceases to be your own.’

‘____ feared, and so he held you back.’

‘great danger is always associated with great power. the difference between the great and the mediocre is that the great are willing to take that risk.’

‘don’t ever let go on that anger. rage gives you power. caution does not.’

‘don’t give in... you’ve been so brave... but it takes more bravery to resist the power.’

‘the nature of this god is to destroy. the nature of this god is to be greedy, to never be satisfied with what he has consumed.’

‘so. screaming at rocks. is that, like, normal behavior here?’

‘fix this. prove your worth. do your fucking job or get out.’

‘I saved your life. doesn’t that make us at least a little square?!’

‘I was scared of you. and I lashed out.’

‘I thought I was better than you, and I’m not. I’m sorry.’

‘when I killed it, it felt like murder.’

‘look, I’m happy to discuss this, really, but I’m currently leaking life out three different wounds and I think I may pass out. would you give me a moment?’

‘well maybe ____ should get his head out of his ass.’

‘ ____ is more fragile than you think.’

‘look, asshole, I don’t need you to tell me what to do.’

‘they say he can read the future. shatter minds.’

‘you misunderstand the nature of our relationship. I am not your friend.’

‘he’s not human. he—- I don’t know what he is.’

‘but ___ was never allowed to be human.’

‘do you trust me?’ / ‘no. but that’s irrelevant.’

‘you don’t know what true suffering is.’

‘I have seen more than my fair share of suffering.’

‘that boy is beyond redemption. that boy is broken like the rest.’

‘I don’t want to be saved! I want power!’

‘that power will destroy everything you’ve ever loved. you will defeat your enemy, and the victory will turn to ashes in your mouth.’

‘we’ve missed something. something’s been laid out for us, but we can’t see it.’

‘fretting won’t make the dead come back to life.’

‘there was nothing human in those eyes.’

‘It was a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up.’

‘I don’t need your pity. I need you to kill them for me.’

‘whatever it takes. swear it on your life. swear it for me.’

‘I won’t judge him. I don’t dare, because I don’t have the right. and neither do you.’

‘you asked me why I wouldn’t stop him. now you understand. you can’t stop an avenger. you can’t reason with a madman.’

‘I am afraid of what he might do in his quest for vengeance. and I am afraid that he is right.’

‘I am about to do something terrible. and you will have a choice.’

‘they give nothing to the universe, and the universe owes them nothing in return.’

‘you cannot survive my death.’

‘you’re trying to deceive me. you don’t get to deceive me.’

‘this is not the way. this path leads only to darkness.’

‘when are you going to stop being such a damn coward? what are you running from?’

‘you will turn the world to ash, and only demons will live in the rubble.’

‘you dress up your crusade with moral arguments, when in truth you would let millions die if it means you get your so-called justice.’

‘you have not cared about anything for a very long time. you are broken.’

‘I am terrified. but only because I’m starting to remember who I once was. don’t go down that path.’

‘your country is ash. you can’t bring it back with blood.’

‘I’m so sorry. I tried to warn you.’

‘you know the worst part? we’re so close to home.’

‘did you miss me? did you miss this?’

‘I just gave him some of his favorite medicine.’

‘resistance here means suffering. there is no escape. no future.’

‘you have nothing to fight for anymore’

‘what are you defending? you owe ____ nothing.’

‘we were disposable. we were tools. tell me that doesn’t make you furious.’

‘I am sick with fury.’

‘I will die on my feet. I will not die a coward. and neither will you.’

‘we could stay here. we could stay here forever. we wouldn’t have to go back.’

‘you’ll have to live with the consequences. but you’re brave ... you’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.’

‘I have lost everything I care about. I don’t want peace, I want revenge.’

‘I don’t need to sleep. I need to feel nothing.’

‘do you want forgiveness? I can’t give you that.’

‘we avenged him. he’s gone, but avenged.’

‘you have to believe that it was necessary. that it stopped something worse. and even if it wasn’t, it’s the lie we’ll tell ourselves, starting today and every day afterward.’

‘aren’t you supposed to be a seer? do you ever see anything useful?’

‘we have an enemy whom we love.’

‘I’m going to find and kill everyone responsible. you cannot stop me.’

‘oh I’m not going to stop you.’

#rp prompts #literature prompts #literature sentence starters #sentence starters #rp meme #rp sentence starters #the poppy war sentence starters #the poppy war prompt #the poppy war meme

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glitter-garbage · 4 years ago

Text

12. — thread

Shadowgast, ~1600 words, gen, red thread of destiny, soulmate au (spoilers for the eiselcross arc)

Sent by @quinn-of-aebradore 💜 ...ps: this is not edited at all (one word writing prompts: send me one and a pairing if you like. I might fill them some day!) ---

When Bren learned he had magic, he also learned that he could see things that not everyone did. It wasn’t natural, he had to focus, and later on, he even found out there was an actual spell for it. Still, on more than one occasion growing up, Bren would see the delicate red threads that connected people around him.

“Those mean whoever is connected to you is your soulmate,” his mother explained, “Can you see mine?”

And, sure enough, his mother had a little thread connecting her ankle to Leofric’s. He longed for his own thread to appear, though his mother explained that not everyone had one.

Bren didn’t have to worry, though. He was only fifteen when not one, but two threads connected his ankle to his best friends of all people. By that time, he had already been whisked away to the Academy along with them and the experiences they shared, the successes, the pain, the power, all of that just cemented their connection in his mind.

Until he broke, that is.

After the fire came the Sanatorium, and for eleven years Bren, now Caleb, did not think about that again. Only when he got out did he notice that his ankle was free. Nothing connected him to anyone anymore. It was okay, he was a garbage person. He didn’t deserve love like that anyway.

---

Nott had a red thread. It vanished out to the horizon, and Caleb never saw the thread move in a way that indicated that her soulmate was closer. He wondered if she knew, for a while. Then, he learned the truth. Veth’s soulmate, her husband, kidnapped, imprisoned. He was happy she had met him though, and confident they'd free him. She deserved happiness, he would help her in any way he could.

Two couples in his little group had threads connecting them to each other from the start. Fate worked in mysterious ways, Caleb thought. Beau and Yasha did not seem that close, though Beau’s attraction was obvious, and cringe-worthy at times, but Caleb was sure things would go well for them in the future. Jester and Fjord’s thread almost made his heart break- he had allowed himself to get way too attached to the two, but neither of them were for him, obviously. Destiny had other plans.

Molly did not have any threads, like him. After learning about his past, Caleb wondered if he had gone through something similar to Caleb, the snapping of a thread after a traumatic event. He allowed himself to grow closer to the tiefling tentatively, allowed feelings to bloom slowly. Molly was warm to him, and he thought perhaps it was another form of destiny that would tie them together.

That had been a mistake.

The last one to join their family was Caduceus. He had no thread too, and Caleb had no curiosity about it anymore. His interest in destiny had all but faded.

He loved his friends. He had friends. That was enough, for someone like him.

---

“The Luxon is the basis of how we've been able to free ourselves from the binds of the lineage the Betrayer Gods left for us and to carve our own fates, choose our own paths and sidestep these destinies placed upon us nonchalantly by gods that use us as playthings.”

The Shadowhand was interesting. Dangerous, powerful, enticing. Caleb considered what he said about freedom from destiny, the ability to find your own way. He had certainly strayed from his path, but perhaps that was not the worst thing.

Essek Thelyss, too, had no thread attached to him.

Perhaps because Caleb was no longer obsessing over what destiny had in store for him, perhaps because he was beginning to accept that his own imperfect path was better than the one that had been set for him, Caleb felt empathy towards the drow even after he had betrayed them.

They were so much alike, and Caleb kept his heart more closely guarded now. He did not feel his heart breaking when they learned of Essek's schemes, and that too helped. In any case, he did not see Essek again for a long time. Did not think much about him. There was too much on his plate for that.

---

Astrid smiled at him from across a dinner table and his stomach dropped. Caleb felt the wheels of time turning, felt again like Bren, determined and ambitious and blind to the truth. Eadwulf looked at him with a raised chin, a smirk on his face. He too remained handsome, impossibly so.

When they walked out of Ikithon’s tower, Caleb could make out the thin red thread that still connected their ankles. He thought he was stronger, that perhaps he was ready for this.

“Race you to the top,” said Astrid with a childish smile, before turning back to the tower.

It hurt. He could feel the emptiness of what could have been, what would never be again in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time.

---

Imagine his surprise when arriving at the Vurmas outpost in Eiselcross, the powerful figure of the Shadowhand could not meet his eyes. Imagine his surprise, when he saw his eyes lighting up when they chose him instead of his old teacher to go down into the ruins. Imagine his surprise when he saw Essek battling, using gravity itself as a weapon, and felt only fondness and admiration for the man. When he showed off his tower and saw the same in the drow’s eyes. And attraction, of course. That went without saying.

It all came to a head when, together, they worked to cast a spell that would shorten time itself and give the Nein their much-needed rest.

Thought it might have felt like seconds to their friends, Caleb watched for long moments, holding magic in his palms to assist, as Essek opened a gash through the fabric of space and time. Real fabric, made of threads of all colors that together seemed to make up what he saw as the world around him. Time seemed to stop around them as Essek carefully worked around the fibers.

“This… Have you been able to see this the whole time?” he asked.

Essek’s jaw was clenched and there was sweat running down his forehead, but he nodded, “Not really. It takes a lot of effort to see this. A lot of energy.”

Caleb hesitated but gave in once Essek’s questioning gaze found his for a moment, “I have always seen the red threads. I- I had my own, for a while.”

“Annoying little things,” muttered the drow, focusing again at the slow-going task of weaving time with his bare hands, “There was a time when I hated them more than anything.”

“You used to have yours, too?”

“Hm? No,” said the drow distractedly, “I hated them because I had none, and I thought I should. The Dynasty looks like a tangled web if you watch for them since so many entanglements are made complicated by consecution. But I never had one, and even though I looked for… someone that could perhaps make it appear, it never did.”

He moved his wrist to the side, and the universe seemed to shift with it. Caleb felt a little dizzy.

“But I had never heard of someone who lost theirs. I thought they were supposed to be, ah, perfect,” Essek smirked, “Unless you did what we are doing right now to yours. That is, changing it fundamentally. Somehow, I do not think that is what happened.”

“Nein,” Caleb chuckled wryly and then held himself straighter, keeping the spell steady as Essek continued his labor. “I… strayed from the path, I think. I did something that was not meant to be.”

Essek looked at him like he was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen, even though the elf himself had the building blocks of reality in his hands at the moment. Caleb flushed.

“I think Caduceus would say that you did exactly what you had to do.”

“Maybe so. But isn’t it hard to know that others will have this… this gift, this sure thing while we will not?”

Essek looped a bright white strand against a colorful, prismatic one while he hummed, thinking.

“I felt the same way for decades. But whatever we will have or not, in that sense, will be of our own making. And isn’t that a gift on its own?”

---

The moonlight shone down on the beach, turning the sea a glittering mass of waves. Other than the full moon, magical globes and luminescent beetles illuminated the space around them. Their friends gathered around smiling tearfully in perfect dissonance. Caleb himself felt his heart beating so fast he thought it might leave his ribcage and seek quietude somewhere far away from his anxiety-ridden body. He stood beside Caduceus, who hummed a sweet song under his breath as they waited.

Finally, the glittering door at the end of the path opened, and Essek slipped out, bare feet delicately touching the sand. Jester came from behind him, and once their arms were locked, they walked on slowly, passing their friends and family on the way to Caleb and Caduceus.

He looked stunning in delicate iridescent robes, and Caleb tried to swallow down his anxiety. Violet eyes framed by silver lines, mouth poised in a gentle smile, cheeks flushed, Essek walked slowly until he was face to face with his intended.

Essek reached for his hand, and they stood silently, gazes locked while Caduceus conducted the ceremony. When it was time, Caleb drew a small spool of red thread from his pocket. Gently, he took Essek’s hand in his and tied a knot around his little finger. He offered the spool, and Essek repeated the gesture, biting his lips nervously. Caduceus cut the remaining thread, leaving their hands connected.

“You are now joined together, not by destiny, but by your own choice. I think that’s very nice,” Caduceus smiled placidly until Veth cleared her throat, “Oh yeah. You guys can kiss now.”

Caleb smiled at the phrasing. He lifted his hand, pulling Essek’s forward until the drow was close enough for him to count his freckles. Their hands tingled as he came impossibly closer. Essek’s mouth was warm against his.

For the first time in Caleb's life, he felt destiny favored him.

---

#critical role fanfiction #critical role #shadowgast #soulmate au #writing prompt #cute

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fragileizywriting · 3 years ago

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alright this one is gonna take me a while to type out so stick with me. i would put a wip / six sentences banner but given that i’m writing this on my phone, i don’t actually know where it is. actually, hold on, i might as well

(this is going to be a bitch to clean up and edit afterwards, i’m already dreading this)

tikki demands her lover back from hell

(also sorry for the weird past/present tense shifts throughout this, mobile is ALWAYS trying to change verbs into past tense, it’s so stupid)

after a game of cat and mouse, with plagg hiding behind columns and bannisters and railings, holding onto the desecrating stone like a lifeline, tikki finally snatches his ankle with a vine. he freezes when he falls onto his butt after a harsh tug, his tail doing poor work of supporting him when he looks up to her, a woman who fumes in her spot with her hands out to raise vibes from out the ground. she’s furious.

“hello,” he tries.

no matter how many attempts and how many reasons he gives, these phantoms follow. most of them are always a little bit too off— making her too tall, too high pitched, too skinny, trying to ‘perfect’ her as if he wasn’t in love with everything that she was. like the fates and whispers down here want to convince him that he didn’t truly love her, just the idea of her.

but fates, how much he loves her. he thinks of the curve of her smile and how it’s not perfectly symmetrical. he thinks of her arms, weathered and strong, and how she’d been able to lift that tree off of him— he thinks about that every night, thinking about how this short, plump woman had made that tree look like a twig. he thinks about the curls that framed her rounded face, curls that made its gentle way down a large bosom and larger hips. he thinks about her, all of her, and how he wishes he could kiss her delicate finger tips until he couldn’t breathe any more.

“how do you do?” he tries again, when her frown deepens. he doesn’t remember that line between her brows when she did it, but perhaps this whisper is just filling in the gaps of his feigning memory.

“i thought you’d be happy to see me.” her face is crinkled and frowning, poppy seeds on her face making such pretty constellations. every whisper has a different pattern, never quite the same. “instead i see you running away? have i done something wrong?”

“you’re a well-made one,” he laughs. her vines recede back into the beaten, dirt floor underneath them.

“what?”

“i almost feel as if you’re real.”

“what are you talking about, my lord?”

“your cloak almost looks real.” he’s nowhere close to comfortable to touching her. long vignettes about life up above are embroidered into her shoulders and down beautiful panels of an orange-brown fabric. it glistens gold, just as much as the goddess herself does. beautiful and lovely.

“that’s because it is real,” she snorts. “are you out of it, plagg?”

he knows better than to entertain the whispers. he starts to turn, ambling towards some direction he’s unclear of so long as it gets away from her. her, her, her. “it is nice to see you. please enjoy your time here.”

another vine creeps up against his leg and pulls, forbidding him from leaving. “is that all you have to say to me? i came down here as fast as i could after five hundred years and this is—”

“—five hundred?” he whispers. “now i know you’re not real. it’s been longer than five hundred since i’ve last seen you.”

“of course i’m real. don’t you feel my vines on your skin? i cant be an illusion if i’m touching the vines on your skin… but what does that even matter? you’re treating me like you don’t care,” she huffs. completely ignorant to how he sags.

“eight hundred and seventy two years. five months, twenty six days.”

“oh.”

“fifteen hours… twenty minutes and fifty seconds.” his ears flatten against his head. “that’s how long it’s been without you, my goddess.”

“you’ve been counting?”

“the one joy that i had in my life— the only god i cared about— has been away from me for that long. life has no real meaning without you. i’m so barren and empty that i don’t know what to do.”

“but— why are you acting so coldly?”

“you can’t be here. and you aren’t. you’re a figment of my imagination, the way that all others were, trying to keep me company and sane in this broken castle. but you aren’t here. the real goddess is above. away from me, and away from what my father did to her.” how long has he been crying for? how long has his cheeks and eyes wet the cloak on this whisper’s form, even while she holds him tight, close enough for him to scent the wild flowers she tries to cultivate? how long has it been since he’d been in these arms, breathing, trying to keep everything inside him and not breaking down?

“i am here,” she whispers into his shoulder as they hug. “the fates let me through the gate. i’ll show you.”

#speakizys #fire lily petals #this is like a proof of concept for now #i’m sleepy and tired but i love these two so much

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blackvahana · 2 months ago

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More chewing.

A balance between order and flow needs to be struck, obviously. Of course. But to talk on order for a second... It seems breaking the spell down into needles and supports - I guess establishing the matrix and then pushing it in - is important. Establish exactly how it's going to done, and what compromises you're willing to make

For example: looking at the web, what are you going to manipulate in the Records? I would say -

---

Got distracted. Hours later now

The main thing to do now is what I'm going to call triangulation. Effectively... with triangles as the most stable shape on this plane, supposedly, triangulation is part about utilising the most stable shapes and partly about mapping old data and enforcing new data through the stable shapes.

It's inefficient to enforce a large amount of changes in the web; it's weak to enforce a small amount. Instead, the biggest changes should be enacted along effective leylines... Sort of. I'm sort of overthinking and over-math-ing this a little bit. I think it needs, or want to approach it as, a balance of force and give, which leaves me in a position where -

---

You'll never guess who got bored halfway through a sentence again with this topic.

There's a lot I'll say, and I'm mostly taking a break til tomorrow. The topic on my mind now however is a relatively simple one that likely has a - well. it either has an even simpler answer or a nearly unworkably complex one.

How does one translate my own influence outside this plane to influence on this plane? Is that feasible in this working? Is that a good thing to weave into it?

Part of my justification, and the world's justification, for whatever is happening - whether it's related to this or not, well, it's related to this - is that I already have some amount of reach. I'm not so much reaching into the Astral for power as I am incarnating here to form a pocket so I can get things done here. I've been relatively open about that, and will partly continue to be here.

There's a lot of ways to do this. The first that comes to mind is a sort of stamping, to take the web that I already have of influence and justification and reinforcement and use it to stamp the outline on reality here to act as a mould for the time web weaving. This is not straightforward, the influence I have is not money, it's social. There's mechanisms of translation on every plane, so it naturally would tend towards translating to a different form, but I actually think either reworking it or trimming it to then use as a mould might be useful.

Reworking it has the downside of... the further away from its natural state I make it, the more fictitious it becomes until I get to the point I may was well just fabricate the entire damn time web. Actually, noted that time web as a term was more specific to chronomantic activities, I'm now using it more generally to mean the fate-related webbing of justifications and reinforcements and enforcements and whatever of the working that exist outside me, editing Records and such so that they reflect what I want. Trimming it has the downside of loose ends, either in the way that it wakes the Gatekeeper to issues with justifications not adding up (easily solved by the fact I am the Gatekeeper in the way I am the Sky, it is one of my aspects, I can hall pass my own self as a hall monitor if I can move it such that I'm the conscious Gatekeeper that gets the ping - or I drown out all others that don't. Side note, I guess that's why this working is the Birth of the Inevitable epithet of mine), or... leaves it open to fate and her wobbly creativity to write what she wants in the gaps.

I realise I am very hungry, and a car outside screams its horn. Maybe another time for a break, but this time I will post these thoughts.

Notes on current research into lottery spells

Ive been spending the past, we'll say, 36 hours or so in the Astral on and off researching lottery spells, specifically mostly past attempts to win lotteries and other fate-based things, and working out lines of... whatever. Im not here to give all my details, but I felt like rambling a while to equalise bodies a little on my thought processes.

Thoughts from research:

There's a variety of accounts and so on here about everything from raffles to people being picked to fill certain roles, to other “luck” manipulation, it's not technically all "lottery" "spell" records im browsing.

With that said, treating it all for a moment like it's the same thing, there's different accounts on what seems to be the underlying methodology, which is good for several reasons: First, it means there's fluidity here and flexibility so mistakes don't automatically snap the working, second, it can be tailored to one's specific ideas of workings and personal paradigms and skills/affinities, and third, the actual working has an immense amount of wriggle room in general so one doesn't have to focus on intense replication of ideas.

The underlying theme is flexibility, really, or at least one of the themes is flexibility. The working can be many things, but it also needs to be vague enough to handle the fluctuation of fate itself. That's to say that if you're working with the unsettled, your working needs to be, to a relatively high degree, unsettled.

There are ways to do it with certainty a la, say, buying a ticket and anchoring exact numbers to exact things and forcing open a gateway, but that comes with downsides. First, the nature of the element being manipulated ("fate" for lack of a better more exact term) will attempt to contradict you, fate is water and stability is rock, rock's stability and foundations only last until water penetrates far enough in. Second, an immense hard push in the soft fate will absolutely bring the eyes of every being and god that keeps their eyes on/is fate. This is not what the average person would want, eyes on a push for power especially when you're pushing for power by using an opposing elemental force (in this case stability) on a specific part of nature is going to be more detrimental than useful.

In the cases I've now studied, another theme is "fire", or what translates to the symbol of fire. There's specific elements of feeding something in order to fuel fluidity, where you give what you can handle like giving slack or threading twine into a loom, and work with the machine to arrange a result. That… is admittedly not as efficient as I would like it to be.

My approach to try this out is going to work off, theoretically, I may change it, passive and active control as I usually go for. However… This art is asking me for a third type of thing I rarely use. Generally my approach is control the input and control the mechanism, which is to say with this fire metaphor I would feed the fire and also programme the fire. This seems to require the aforementioned third thing, which is that which is out of control. Controlling through not controlling, and through not controlling the uncontrollable. It's a trancestate-related art, but even trancestates are not quite the same as they are uncontrolling the controlled, I need to, or likely will aim to, uncontrol the uncontrolled.

This is another specific thing I need to study, except I don't. To be clear, study in this case is about gathering thoughts and acting as a sort of set of pillars upon which to lean a house of my own custom built methodology… Research in this manner is being treated as semi-divination, but that's a topic for somewhere else.

The research reveals patterns, two types of interest. Patterns of things such as behaviours, thoughts, including the strange draw most seem to have to doing this (fate-play goes both ways, one plays with fate plays with one), etc, and patterns of non-things. There's entire gaps where this element of uncontrolled uncontrol is very plain and visibl…y invisible. Like the orgasm, there's a moment of loss of control where control is partly or completely taken. There have been a few records where control seems to have been held, where people have, say, declared it so, done the spell, and dragged outcome to pair magnetically with exact will. But even that displays the invisible: the invisible is the gap between the magnets in the first place. A glass with no drink in it is empty until you realise it's actually full of air, you may be "filling" it with water but you have not filled it.

The invisible unnamed thing here is an element that cannot be controlled or programmed, it's a gap in such, but it can have a gateway implanted into it. It is Voidic by nature, and the Crossroads are the Void.

This leads me on to the theorised first draft of a spell working.

Elements of the spell:

Element one is certainty, whatever you do has to be done with some element of “I am, I speak, therefore you are, you speak”.

Element two is substance, the elements and energies to be fed and programmed and such. The Somethings.

Element three is the matrix, the support frames, the connections, etc. This only supports up until the Nothing, the uncontrollable uncontrolled but from now I'll shorten it to the Nothing, and so must be worked with carefully.

Element four is the gateway, the thing implanted into the Nothing.

Compounds of the spell:

The time web:

This is the lines of justification to guide the Nothing. Past events are strung to future events, the Records are altered and rearranged to support a new reality. Its use can be explained thusly: A spell can be made to simply align numbers to be spat out, but there are so many variables working against that. A time web establishes an extensive amount of variables - and makes them all support each other as a web - enforcing and reinforcing the spell working. If one reprogrammed the “past”(referential to the moment of the lottery being won) to support the win with something that translates to “the spellcaster felt an overwhelming draw to these numbers, they formed a matrix in themselves of strange code that could unlock something greater”… well. the coding of the is a better example (though it generally must be supported by the past), for example one can programme the future like “and xyz person gained enough to change their life because the spellcaster won the lottery a few months prior, xyz going on to create charity work that influenced the lives of many others”, and so on.

Tying the microfates of many to macrofates of a few, this spreads the pressure of intense reworkings of fate into littler and littler sections so that the push to change things that do not want to be pushed becomes so spread out and naturalised that theyre less likely to disrupt balance. Take it like, instead of releasing a new species into a foreign ecosystem, you also release their predators and their prey and predators for the predators and prey for the prey, thus you still get the same end result - you get your wanted species in this area - without the same detrimental invasive effect - your introduced species is less responsible for negatively affecting what already was there.

Time webs influence the Records in a way that the influenced/rewritten Records all reinforce and support each other, making the rest of the Records move more willingly to correct their own “mistakes”. Like one person may not convince a judge he was really present, but a hundred witnesses saying he was likely will change the judge's mind even against contradicting facts. The Records are the informational side to the pairing of information-fate, both sides magnetically moving each other; fate will be more willing to move to change what exactly is most likely going to happen to what you want to happen the more the information side supports it, and it moving will influence its partner of fate to move too. If you can justify your win and write into the Records how much relies on it, you can anchor it as more and more ”likely” - if not necessary - to happen.

The general coding:

When the time web is established albeit not necessarily actually in place, as in one has established what they want to reprogramme as enforcing one's will but hasn't necessarily begun altering the Records proper, the pins anchoring specific events can be considered. These would be the actual elements a spell will cover, such as exact numbers being what's called out, or money coming through the day of, or… Whatever.

The programming should be to some extent stern and exact, but not too much that it pushes a stable force too far into the unstable Nothing, causing issues. Or, if one does want to… I guess it's a “rules are made to be broken” thing, but it seems it's best to push needles not pillars in. Exact numbers rolling out of a machine can be done covertly where enforcing an explicit win of millions can't really, and not doing this covertly can cause immense return of conflict as any push for great power will. However, programming exact numbers to come out is a series of extremely precise outcomes that are hard to produce in fate workings which is, again, more fluid than exact, and enforcing a win in general is easier with fate because its asking something way less precise of the naturally imprecise - but that still doesnt counteract the fact that forcing a win is dangerous.

Therefore, with that said and addressed... Programming small pins that anchor the time web seems to be the best angle, and a fine balance should be struck between pressure and force. Instead of attempting to programme a string of exact luck-based outcomes through fate, the spellworking equivalent of trying to ask a fish to handwrite a letter, and instead of trying to force a win, the equivalent of walking into a palace and demanding the monarch off his throne and everyone to bow to you... a series of small and gently/considerately fate-friendly "wins" such as, taking the previous time web examples, weaving spellwork to give you these magical numbers while also leaving them magic - something about them draws fate to them - and to solidify the relations in the future where someone, given money by your future rich self, is now pulled to do what they will do with the money... these workings balance the heavy weight of want across many pressure points, loosening the pressure felt by fate's soft body, and also give fate room to bring what you want in her own way with her own touch.

The gateway:

A gateway in this context is a moment where the impossible can happen in the silent absence of the Nothing. A complete illogical change in fate and the Records, something that comes from nothing and that will not just be automatically forgiven by the Records but… bend them and their logic to create new logic that is referenced. When something came from nothing, logic was birthed to enforce it, logic was birthed when things were birthed. This is partly the birth of a new thing, something that was not in relation to what already was.

The gateway forms several things. First, a pact with Consciousness, second, a programming of the unprogrammable, and third, a meeting with the nothingness of pre-creation and a true compromise where both sides get exactly and all they want by getting absolutely nothing.

---

Each of these compound elements are obviously going to be made up of their own subsections. In order to make a time web one needs what they intend to do, which needs probably pen and paper, and a means to alter the Records, and so on and so forth. That's the third step I'll be embarking on tomorrow, this is staying vague

A key observation is that this is both incredibly easy and incredibly difficult. The key really is that it's incredibly easy if fate is already supporting you, and it's incredibly difficult to get fate on your side. I've been having visions since before I was born of this life of mine and its power, hence why I am looking into this as a curiosity and exploration of fate-bending - hence why I am meandering on a journey through the idea of programming monumental moments where something comes from nothing and power changes hand… in accordance with fate. That's part of why I was drawn to the records and books I've been reading over, there's a continuous singing of the Nothing I can hear through all of them. All of them approached this in different ways, some declared they were worthy and so what came to them was what they were going to get anyway, some crawled on hands and knees to try and save themselves and reality bent to them with tears, but all of them… were marked either loudly or silently by fate and were drawn to their future. It was both because of their actions and outside their control it happened, even in the case of those who thought and still think it was purely by their own will alone they made it.

This is the nature of the Nothing. This is the Inevitable. There is a moment-space in existence where free will/self-determination meets absolute predetermined existence, well, that moment-space exists everywhere in reality, but there's a place where compromise happens in a specific way that transcends… doesn't matter what it transcends, actually. It interests me

#~abyssal murmurs #~deus #~astral magic #~magic #~lottery magic

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eunoiaflow3r · 5 years ago

Text

when worlds collide - h.p. x gn!avenger!reader

a/n: bahahahahaha no one reads harry x reader lmaoo you don’t have to tell me - i know. but still, i thought this was a cute idea and i went with it. hope you enjoy :)

not edited.

also: timelines don’t match up bc i don’t want to do the math so harry is like 20 - 21 and your like 19 - 20 in 2020. Civil War and everything on didn’t happen. Fred didn’t die.

gn = gender neutral

warning(s): “language!” - captain america.

word count: 3.1k

request(ed): no.

summary: stephen sends y/n to a strange new place with...wizards?

————————————-&—————————————

Never doubt Stephen Strange. That's something that pretty much everyone has accepted. Never second guess the wizard man. Usually you'd agree. Usually you'd just let the man babble about whatever he needed to and then go about your day.

Not now.

The fuckery.

Now you were here (wherever here was) after some flashes of orange and a "be careful." Did he even do the spell right? Is this really where you were supposed to be?

It was dark, and dirty and you just wanted to go home and not talk to anyone so you turned yourself invisible.

You were born with your powers - you think. You were adopted so you wouldn't know where your powers came from. All you know is that one day your parents couldn't find you, even though you were right there. Instead of thinking you were some kind of alien and throwing you out to labs, they helped you control it the best you could.

It was difficult at first, all things considered, but you got through. You discovered you had another power as well. Force fields. Those came in handy during the battles. (You helped where you could), and Tony Stark took you in afterwards as his own. He helped you create your suit, and your name, and discover more about your powers, he was basically a dad to you.

Your parents were a little hesitant letting you join the Avengers, but once they realized this is what you were meant to do, and you had people just like you protecting you, they couldn't keep you from that. They just couldn't.

So here you were, invisible, in some dark and creepy alley. There were doors either side of you, so you got out of the way considering they could open and smack you in the face at any given moment. You heard loud voices and laughing and cheering from both ends of the alley so you walked towards the one in front of you.

The voices were so loud and echoey that you really couldn't focus on anything else. Maybe that's why you didn't hear a boy behind you trip and fall into you from behind.

"I'm so sorry." he said helping you up.

You turned around to help him, he got awfully dirty, and searched for his glasses that fell off his face.

Once standing, he took out a stick, waved it over him, and all of a sudden the dirt and gravel was gone.

"How did you do that?" You were no stranger to magic, but this was something you've never seen before. And why would he do it in front of you? For all he knew, you were an unknowing human.

"What?" He asked eyebrows furrowed together, accent strong.

"With the stick."

He chuckled shoving the stick back in his cloak.

"The stick." He smiled and looked you up and down. "It's a wand. You must not be from around here."

"Yeah, what tipped you off?" You noticed the lightning bolt scar on his head. You wondered how he got it.

"The accent, the clothes, the inability to recognize a simple wand, the ability to be here, not recognizing me, and wait - where is your cloak?"

"Cloak?"

"You were just invisible a moment earlier but I don't see your cloak anywhere."

"I don't have one. I can make myself invisible without a piece of fabric or your fancy stick." You say sarcastically. Were you flirting?

"Handy." He grins. "The name's Harry Potter."

He holds his hand out for you to shake. "Y/N L/N."

He asks you if you want to talk somewhere besides a dark dirty alley. You agreed. It took some convincing though to let him use his stick to clean the clothes you had on, but to change your outfit to something less, standout-ish.

When you felt the witch hat on your head you immediately snatched it off your head and glared at him.

He just laughed.

Once out of the alley, you breathed in the now clean air, and was mesmerized. People were bustling in and out of small shops, animals were flying and chirping around their owners, children were running around with their friends and siblings, and people were waving sticks, or wands, just like Harry used.

"C'mon, this way." He smiled at your awestruck face. It reminded him of when he first arrived with Hagrid all those years ago.

He brought you inside a coffee shop, and sat you at a booth near the window knowing you'd probably want to still look outside at the new scenes.

After ordering, and a few moments of silence as you looked around, you decided to ask some questions.

"Where am I?"

"We're in Diagon Alley. It's like an outside mall."

"I mean like, planet? I guess?"

"Earth."

"Earth?"

"Well, more specifically London. Diagon Alley."

"London?! I'm in London?!"

"You've never been? To Earth? Or London?"

You rolled your eyes silently cursing Strange. "I'm from Earth. The United States, actually. I just wish he'd put me on a fucking plane or something instead of making it seem like I was going to Mars."

"He?" Harry was very curious.

You looked into his green eyes, your mind wandering. The guy in front of you was very attractive. His dark hair complimented his eyes, and his glasses made him even more attractive.

"You guys are wizards right?"

"Really? What gave you that impression?" He asks sarcastically. "The sticks, the pointy hats, or the big bowl with green liquid sitting outside?”

You rolled your eyes. "Very funny. It's not my fault you live into the stereotype of brewing potions in your cauldrons -"

"Oh well I can only assume you're one of those Avengers from the States, yeah?" He grins. "You guys are all over the news."

"Yes, sure -"

"And don't one of you wear capes and another shoot lasers or lightning or whatnot? Sounds very stereotypical to me."

You laugh as the waitress brings over your drinks and muffins. You thank her. "No, well yes, that's Strange and Thor, but that's besides the point -"

"Well of course it's strange." He grins and winks and you over his mug. He was purposely annoying you and found great joy in it.

"Anyway," you sigh getting back to the point. "Do you guys have a Wizard here, like a powerful, trusting, all-knowing kind of guy?"

His eyes dropped slowly and his smile dimmed for a moment before slowly widening once again.

"Had. His name was Dumbledore."

"Our guy is Stephen Strange. Or Dr. Strange. He sent me here, and I'm not sure why."

"Hmmm." He hums setting down his mug. "Are the states in danger? Were you sent here on a secret quest that would put you through tough trials that would risk your life but would ultimately save everyone you've ever loved so you just have to do it?"

You were in a silent shock. "Uhm. No, not that I'm aware of, no."

"Well then perhaps your Wizard Strange is playing matchmaker."

"Matchmaker?"

"Well you were sent here weren't you?" You nod. "Arrived outside the exact place where I was and I just happened to bump into you? Sounds like a set-up to me."

"Or a coincidence."

"I'd like to think it was fate that I bump into the most attractive person I've ever seen and they don't know who I am and won't judge me 'cause of my past." He took a bite of his muffin.

"Should I be worried?"

"I guess you'll have to figure that out yourself." He winks.

You decide to eat your muffin as well. It was a comfortable silence until you looked out of the window and noticed a guy crouching down behind a cauldron...with a camera.

"Harry?"

"Hm?"

"Why is there a man outside taking pictures of you?"

His eyes widened. "Oh shit." He whispered. "Here." He took out a baseball cap and put it over your head, hiding your face from the camera.

He gets out of his seat quickly pulling you along with him to the back of the shop but before you could say anything he had his wand pulled out.

Next thing you saw was a couch and living room.

"Wow." You panted. "What a way to bring a girl home."

"I apologise Y/N, I block them out so much I forget they're even there and now they've seen you, and have a story and -"

"Wait, wait, wait, are you wanted for murder or something?"

Harry walks over to his bookshelf and pulls out a rather large book. After opening up on the table, he waved his wand over it and beckons you over to read it.

'Boy who lived.'

'Golden boy defeats Voldemort'

'winner of Triwizard tournament'

And there was so much more… 'Harry Potter' in bold just strewn across the pages. His whole life story.

Your eyes widen at everything. "So both and neither. War hero. How come I've never heard of you? Or any of this?"

He smiles at the pages fondly, running his fingers across the letters and reminiscing on his times at Hogwarts.

"Unlike you Avengers, we like to keep our business private and quiet. We don't like prying eyes."

You scoff. "Not our fault we have alien invasions every year."

Harry agreed and for the rest of the night you sat on his couch talking and sometimes arguing, over every little thing. It felt like you two had known each other forever.

You're not sure when, but you fell asleep there and woke with your head on his chest and his arm wrapped around your waist. You're not sure how the two of you ended up this way, and you realized you were practically strangers, but you didn't want to move. You just wanted to tangle your fingers through his dark hair.

But you didn't. Instead you stared at his closed eyes, and focused on his long, dark, eyelashes that fluttered a little from time to time. You thought about how you could get used to this. Waking up with his arm wrapped around you.

You told him last night that if he was actually a serial killer, and wanted to kill you that you had a whole team of people who would rip him limb from limb. He had no doubts and looked actually scared of your threat.

You thought about what it'd be like to live here among people like you.

Stomach grumbling, you decided to get up and see if he had anything you could make for him. It's the least you could do. His face turned when you left his arms, but you quickly pulled the blanket over him so he would be able to sleep a little longer.

You found his bathroom, and washed your face. In your backpack was a toothbrush and some toothpaste so you brushed your teeth, fixed your hair, and got dressed.

By the time you got out of the bathroom, you noticed Harry was still sleeping so you went into the kitchen and tried to find anything remotely close to breakfast foods. By the look of his inventory, you could tell he was very good at cooking but hadn’t been to the store in a while. He did have some eggs and toast though so you decided to make that.

In the middle of it, you got a phone call from Strange.

“Strange?”

“Harry Potter.” he says.

“What?” you were so confused as to how Stephen knew ANYTHING.

“You’re in his place, we've been tracking you.”

“So I guess we should probably have a talk about privacy? I don’t know, it just seems like something we should discuss you know? Cause usually people can respect that - especially people who just DUMP you here in the first place -“

“Calm down that’s what the mission was. While you were sleeping, we searched the place with a camera we put on you and he’s not who we thought he was. You completed the mission L/N. Great job.”

“Is he a danger?”

“Not necessarily. Just making sure your fine is all.”

“What -?”

He hung up.

Why wouldn’t Strange tell you his intentions? Why would he let you stay here if he thought Harry might have been a bad guy? Why would he risk that?

Right as you hung up Harry Potter walked into the kitchen with his lenses in between his shirt - he was cleaning his glasses.

His dark hair hung over his eyes but his eyebrows were raised.

“You made breakfast?”

“It was the least I could do. I didn’t mean to fall asleep but thank you for letting me stay.”

He smiled and put his glasses back on. In doing so his gray shirt lifted and you could see his abs. You turned away a blushed.

“It was no big deal. Thank you for making breakfast, love. You didn’t have to.”

You didn’t say anything and instead placed both of your finished plates on the dining room table. He followed you and sat down immediately digging in.

“These are the best eggs i’ve ever eaten Y/N thank you.”

You smiled in response but then frowned remembering your conversation with Strange. You should probably tell Harry.

“So,” you cleared your throat. “You were wrong.”

He gave you a look that meant “about?”

“Dr. Strange - the wizard I work with - he likes to check out potential threats and make sure that ya’know - the earth stays safe and everything. Je can kind of see the future and its propabilities. He did the same thing with Thor and his brother Loki.”

“Okay, go on.”

You cringed. “And so he called me and told me that he sent me here so he could see you? I don’t know I guess he saw you as a threat and wanted to make sure you weren’t.”

You looked at Harry but his face was clear of any and every emotion. He just continued to eat his eggs. It was silent.

You ate a bit at your eggs too until he spoke up which made you look up.

“I can’t say I’m very surprised honestly. With everything you guys manage to fuck up there I’d wanna know if someone else was about to create shit problems too.”

You sighed with relief. He wasn’t mad.

“I’m sorry really Harry, I didn’t even know.”

“No yeah it’s fine. I get it. I still think he sent you specifically for a reason though. There’s just no way we aren’t soul mates or something.”

“Oh shut up Potter.”

He smiled. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Gee your head must hurt.”

He squints at you jokingly. “You should let me take you out. I can show you around today. Y’know, so you can see what wizards are like.”

“Is this a date?”

His face flushes red and he looks down at his plate. “Yeah, yeah it’s a date.”

And a date it was.

“What the fuck is wrong with you Harry! Again?!” You practically screamed. Harry called it aparation but you call it hell. You let it go the first time but damn. He barely even warned you, just took your hand, held it tight, pulled you close, and waved his wand.

It was teleportation. Something you’ve never ever done before.

“Fucking hell Potter I’m going to murder you.”

“And Strange was worried about your safety? This is like your 4th time threatening to end my life and besides, it wasn’t even that bad.”

You rolled your eyes.

Throughout the day Harry showed you all sorts of things you’d never ever seen before. This consisted of every flavor jelly beans (and by every flavor they really meant every flavor), a chocolate frog, and never ending bubble gum. And that was just on the candy side.

He took you inside this joke shop ran by two of his friends from his old school he called hogwarts. They were twins that went by the names of Fred and George. The only twins you had ever met was Wanda and Pietro but telling the story of Pietro’s death seemed to sour Harry’s mood but excite the twins. The fact that he sacrificed himself for a little boy made him a hero in their eyes. They begged you to tell them more stories.

By the end of the day you went back to Harry’s place and you were exhausted. You can’t believe all that you’ve seen and eaten. How was this stuff even possible? How was it all hidden? You were amazed.

Harry was glad to see you had a good day and glad that he had met you. When you got back, he told you that you could stay another night...and perhaps in the bed instead of the couch. He hadn’t meant it in a dirty way but that didn’t stop you from laughing until tears came out of your eyes. He was so awkward at times. Once he had to ask if it was okay to take your hand while you were in the street and it was so cute how he couldn’t really find the words even for something as simple as hand holding.

“Harry?”

“Hm?”

You both were laying in his bed facing the other.

“I had a lot of fun today. I feel like i’ve known you forever.”

He grinned from ear to ear and was glad that you couldn’t see him. He would have been beyond embarrassed if you’d seen how unmistakably happy that made him.

“I had fun with you Y/N. You’re great company.”

You were silent for a moment.

And another.

“Harry?”

“Yes?”

“Can I kiss you?”

You were scared of his response and your heart was practically beating out of your chest. What if he was just being friendly? What if he just wanted to be friends? You would have made a huge fool of yourself. You were going to turn away embarrassed until his hand came up to your face and slipped onto your cheek. He was so warm. His lips pressed against yours for a moment and then he pulled away.

After a moment he reconnected and moved his lips against yours slowly. Your hand went to the back of his neck and toyed with his hair. He groaned into your mouth. You smiled and scooted even closer to him. All you could hear was the sound of your breathing and kissing. You didn’t want to pull away but you had to.

“Harry.” you said practically breathless.

“Yeah.” he was breathless too.

“I want to show you my world. You should come see New York.”

“Yeah? You wanna show me those alien invasions and robot attacks?”

You laughed and snuggled into Harry. He wrapped his arm around you and kissed your neck.

“Mhmm.”

“I’d love to see it.”

Tags:

@romance-geek @gooseyhouse

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wouldpollyapprove · 5 years ago

Text

You Love Me?

Summary: After Tommy accuses her of trying to take Grace’s place as Charlie’s mother, Y/n leaves the house, trying to forget the words he said to her. Running from her problems, Y/n decided to drink the night away and face her problems in the morning.

Request: 13 angst and 2 humor for Tommy as well please? I like your writing a lot!

Requested by @jenepleurepasbaby

Thomas Shelby x Reader

Word Count: 2k

Warnings: language, alcohol, drugs

A/N: This is probabaly trash and after editing it, I could have done so much more with it but I’m lazy. And I know that I said I was taking a break this week, but I spent all day working on a lab write up and needed to write something I actually enjoy, so this is it. It sucks, but I don’t care. Oh, requests are open and I will be editing my fandoms list so, yeah.

Masterlist

“I think you need to take a break, Tommy.” Y/n stood behind him, looking over at the papers he was hunched over. She ran her hands over his tense shoulders and decided to rub out the knots. “You’ve been at this for hours, how about you come join Charlie and I on our walk?”

A grumble was all she got in response before he through her hands off him.

“Tommy, please. You deserve a break.” She was met with silence. Y/n huffed and walked in front of his desk. “If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for Charlie. He misses you. You spend all your time in your fucking office and none with him. He needs his father.” Her words finally caused the man to look up, but there was nothing but anger in his eyes.

“It’s a real shame nobody asked for your opinion,” Tommy stated. Leaning back in his chair, daggers for eyes stared back at Y/n. “How would you know what my boy needs, hm? Your not his mother, now are you?”

The questions stung, causing cracks in her heart. Y/n never tried to be Charlie’s mother. All she ever wanted to be was someone the boy could come to in a time of need. Someone to support him and love him, but never his mother. She could never do that.

“All you are is my fucking whore! Nothing more, nothing less! Now fuck off, will ya?”

He didn’t have to ask her twice as Y/n ran out of the room, tears pooling in her eyes. She wanted to blame it all on stress from work, but how could she believe that when the words cut her so deeply. She had always thought of herself as more than just his whore, accepting the fact that he wasn’t quite ready for marriage.

But he loved her.

Tommy loved her, that’s what she once knew. Now, dodging furniture and maids, with tears in her eyes, she was uncertain. Finally, upon the room she shared with Tommy, she quickly opened the door and shut it behind her. Sliding down the door, once she hit the floor, tears spilled out like a raging river. Sobs echoes through the room as she pulled her knees to her chest.

Was she no more than a whore to him? Was she wasting her life on a man who would never want her? Questions as such ran wild through her brain, no answer in sight. How was she to know Tommy’s intentions when he never gave away much.

“It’s alright,” Y/n whispered to herself, her head resting against her knee. Her eyes roamed the room, trying to grasp onto something, anything that could distract her. Then, out of the corner of her eye, the sun hit glittering fabric from the wardrobe. Wiping her tears, she pushed herself off the door and trudged over to the wardrobe. The door creaked as she pulled out the fabric, a glittering blue dress that Tommy had bought her. It was beautiful in the light, sparkling like a crystal ball, tragic that it had never been worn.

Upon seeing the dress, an idea popped into her head. She wouldn’t spend all day crying over a fucking man, she would having more fun than that.

*~~*~~*

A smile broke out across her face as the band played a new song. “I fucking love this color,” Y/n ran her finger over the bar.

Her friend, Beth, giggled a reaction from one too many cocktails. “Yeah,” she drawled. “It’s… lovely.”

Y/n let out a sigh and leaned her head on the counter. She was unclear what time it was, vision hazy from the alcohol, but it was getting late, the sun setting outside. “We should go dancing!” she declared, raising her head up a little to fast.

Beth nodded, “We should. We…” Her sentence dropped off as a pair of men walked through the door. A nudge from Y/n brought her attention back to what she was saying. “We haven’t done that… in ages.”

Y/n slide off the barstool after chugging the last of her drink. She then grabbed her friend by the elbow and dragged her out of the pub. They were in the wealthy part of Birmingham, the part that wasn’t covered in dirt and death. People from this part of town didn’t die falling into machinery or from soot coating their lungs. These people usually died from consuming too much alcohol or drugs or in their sleep at the age of 85. Being in that part of town also meant that Y/n could do whatever the fuck she wanted.

No longer in Small Heath, she needn’t worry about the rage of Thomas Shelby. There weren’t Peaky Blinders or members of the Shelby family around every corner. There was no one to tell her to go home or to bite back the tears and leave Tommy alone. She was finally free. Free from the filth, from the looks, from the whispers that came from being with a dangerous man.

For the first time in what felt like ages, Y/n like the person she used to be.

The pair ented a club, one Y/n knew would give them the high they were seeking. Drugs were strewn on tables like leftovers and alcohol was soaking everything from the walls to the tables. If you wanted to forget something, it seemed, this was the place to go.

Dodging people too drunk to stand, Y/n made her way to the dance floor, Beth right behind her. Once in the middle of the floor, she couldn’t help but start dancing, grabbing a random person to dance with her. “I fucking love this!”

“Me too!” her friend shouted above the music.

The danced for a long while, opting to dance with each other rather than the men around them. It was more fun that away, being able to express themselves with no other intentions but enjoying themselves. Both women were tired of being chased after by men to only become sex toys in their eyes.

“I dumped Jack!” Beth yelled, throwing her arms in the air to the beat of the music.

Y/n laughed, “About fuckin’ time! You should’ve dumped him ages ago!” The music picked up, much faster than it was before, causing her to let out a squeal as she started jumping around. “I love Tommy!”

Beth stopped dancing and grabbed Y/n’s arm, pulling her close. “You what?” Her friend said something, but even with their proximity to each other, Beth was unable to hear her. She pulled the two over to the edge of the dance floor until she spotted a table for them to sit at. “You what?” she repeated.

A little out of breath, Y/n rested her elbows against the table. “I love him, Beth. I love Tommy.” A waitress came over a collected their orders before she could continue. Once the woman was out of earshot, she said, “But I don’t think… I don’t know if he loves me.”

Beth huffed and leaned back in her chair. “Men are arseholes.”

“Yeah, yeah, they are.”

After a few drinks later and many tears, the two stumbled out of the club. Y/n didn’t want to go home and face Tommy, who she knew would be angry, instead, Beth insisted she stay with her. So, the two stumbled and giggled the whole way to her apartment, going on and on about how the needed to go back to that club.

“I want a ham sandwich,” Beth muttered from where she laid on the couch.

“Me too,” Y/n agreed, lying on the floor, before falling asleep.

*~~*~~*

The next morning, Beth and Y/n woke up, heads pounding, and made ham sandwiches before Y/n decided to leave. She didn’t want to impose and found it best to figure out her next moves on her own.

On the streets of Birmingham, she walked all the way to Small Heath, watching the large shops and fancy restaurants change into dirty brick houses and factories. The closer she was to the Small Heath, the less she knew. All she knew was that her head felt like it had been smashed in and her feet ached from the long walk and all the dancing she had done the night before. There was no way she was ready to face her problems.

Before she could compose herself, Y/n saw Polly walking down the street. The woman had yet to see her and Y/n wanted to keep it that way. With her head to the ground, she quickened her pace and prayed she wouldn’t be seen. God obviously wasn’t listening as Polly called over to her.

“Y/n.” The woman walked over to her. With a smile, Y/n lifted her eyes from the pavement, ashamed that she had to be seen with makeup running down her face, unruly hair, and yesterday’s clothes. “What happened to you?”

Where was she to start? “Um, it’s a long story…”

“Does this have something to do with Tommy?” A nod confirmed her suspicions causing her to swear under her breath. Her nephews only knew two things: how to run women off and how to chose the wrong ones. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” her voice was gentle as she led Y/n to her house.

Y/n did nothing as Polly helped her clean up, wiping the makeup off her cheeks and comb the rats out of her hair. She sat there, blank face, and let her thoughts run wild. All her worries from the day before had vanished, no longer holding the weight they once did. She was at the point where she believed that what happened, happened. Whether fate was real or not was not up for debate, it didn’t matter. Life played out in odd ways and if things got better than they got better. If they didn’t then she would deal with it when that happened.

“Polly, why weren’t you at the meeting?” Tommy’s voice boomed through the house.

“Fuck,” Polly muttered, having forgotten the meeting as soon as she’d seen Y/n. “I was busy,” she replied from the kitchen, where she sat next to Y/n at the table.

“What could be-” His sentence faltered when he entered the kitchen and saw Y/n. She was cleaned up, but it wasn’t hard for him to see she was exhausted. “You’re here.”

“I was going to go back home, but then I remembered that you lived there too,” she said, eyes trained on the cup of tea that sat in front of her.

A sigh escaped his lips, he knew he fucked up. Even before Y/n had left his office the day before, he knew. The harsh words that left his lips weren’t meant to meet the air. He was stressed and angry with work and should’ve never taken his frustrations out on Y/n.

Polly excused herself upon seeing the tension between the room but didn’t leave until she made it clear that Tommy had to fix what he’d done. Y/n was one of the only good things in his life and she’d be damned if he messed that up.

“I’m sorry for what I said.”

Y/n snorted. “Then why’d you say it?”

Closing the distance, Tommy strode over to the table, taking a seat next to her. He grasped her hand, relieved when she didn’t pull it away. “I should have listened to you, love. You and Charlie deserve better. And I know you do your best to respect Grace and I shouldn’t have said otherwise. You love Charlie like he’s your own and you don’t have to. You don’t even have to fucking like him, but you love my boy. And you love me even after knowing what I’ve done.”

Y/n gave him a small smile. “You love me?”

He rolled his eyes, “Is that all you got from that?”

“No.” She grabbed him by the collar, pulling him closer. “That’s just my favorite part.” She pulled him into a kiss.

*~~*~~*

@amirahiddleston @haphazardhufflepuff @woahitslucyylu @mzcrazy2 @lovemissyhoneybee @multi-fandom-iimagines @tarafaithe @jenepleurepasbaby @fernweh-fangirl @the-anxious-youth @theshelbyclan @wtfdanness @chloeforde @futuristicslimemongerbanana @lucillethings @captivatedbycillianmurphy

#the peaky blinders #peaky blinder imagine #peaky blinders imagines #peaky blinder fanfic #thomas shelby #thomas shelby imagine #thomas shelby imagines #thomas shelby x reader #tommy shelby imagine #tommy shleby imagines #tommy shelby #tommy shelby x reader

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hoe-doroki · 5 years ago

Text

We’ll See

Happy birthday, to my sweet boy, Kiri. Glad I managed to just barely get this out in time for you.

pairing: Kirishima x demisexual!fem!reader

genre: gen, light romance, light fluff, light comfort

word count: 6.3k

summary: After a fateful meeting where he saves you from a villain attack, you and Kirishima keep running into each other. And although he’s so nice, you only feel fear around the fact that he might be interested in you. Even though all you want is, for once, to let yourself be happy and maybe fall in love, you can’t seem to be able to. You just can’t.

a/n: I’ve been trying to think about what a comfort fic might look like for a demi reader because romance stories never match my lived experience and sometimes make me feel worse. I think I’ve finally managed something here. I hope this provides comfort to anyone who has difficult romantically/sexually for any reason, especially those of us who are acespec. My ask box is always open for acespec or similar requests as well. <3

edit: I no longer write x reader but here’s my old masterlist - mobile | desktop

For a moment, you thought it was hail. Little flecks of white—not quite white, really—falling from the sky at a more precipitous pace than snow, and bigger, more irregular. More dangerous.

Then, when you looked up, you didn’t know how you’d missed it.

You were always attentive when walking in the city, even in your Sisyphean commute to work: home, walk, train, walk, work, day after day. You held your bag close on your shoulder, had your pepper spray at the ready, and didn’t bother changing into heels until you got to the office. You always had your eyes on the surroundings, so, just before it happened, you could have told the cops that it had been a lovely spring day, white and pink flowers just beginning to bloom, but still jacket weather—not at all a day for hail. The streets had been congested with people just like you, all headed to work or school. The woman in front of you had been wearing a brightly striped sweater, standing out against the sea of black suits.

Then, concrete had begun raining down.

You looked up in time to see a slab from one of the old concrete buildings give way, suddenly casting shade right where you were standing. And the next thing you knew, you were on your back, and there was a man on top of you. Your first thought was that he must have been a dragon. Hard scales, sharp teeth, all jagged edges sharp enough to scratch grooves into the pavement below. He could kill you in an instant.

His arms were caged around you covered in fabric. But upon closer look at his exposed neck, you saw he didn’t have scales; his skin was like rock. Rocks that hadn’t yet been touched by the erosion of wind or water. They were new ones that were unbroken.

It took a moment of stillness, a moment of him trembling under the weight of the concrete wall for you to realize he wasn’t here to brutalize you—he was saving you. And when you realized that, your brain snapped into focus. There was chaos around you—you could hear the screams. Maybe they were civilians who were worried that you’d just been flattened to a pancake, but maybe they had greater fears than that. There was probably a villain on the loose, and this hero was wasting his time on you—just one person.

“Go!” you shouted, making eye contact with him for the first time. Red eyes like uncut rubies encased in cracked ivory. “I’ll be fine!”

For a moment, he struggled to lift the broken remnant of the building off of you both, but then you honed your focus. You stared at the concrete and it lifted off of the hero’s back, watched as his shoulders settled in relief. He looked at you in confusion for a second, taking in your furrowed brow and tense mouth, frozen body. Then, he took you in his arms and carried you to safety before you gasped, and the concrete fell with a smash.

He left you gasping on the sidewalk and ran into the fray, where it looked like a villain with a power-up quirk had crashed through the office building onto the sidewalk, where they were now wreaking havoc.

Someone offered a hand to help you up and you took it. Telekinesis always took a lot out of you, especially when an object was as heavy as, oh, say, a side of a building, but you shook it off as best you could, just focusing on getting your breathing under you.

More pro heroes were turning up, either drawn by the noise or the masses of pedestrians fleeing the area. The latter of which was exactly what you should have been doing.

But you couldn’t.

You’d never desired to be a pro hero. Yeah, you admired them, but as a job it sounded, well, awful? Seeking out trouble, always in danger of major corporeal damage, a constant target on your back—you’d never be able to handle the stress. You desired consistency in your life and, even if it wasn’t saving the world, an office job gave you that. Still, you’d always told yourself that if you even found yourself in a situation where you could help, where your quirk would be useful and it would be a net gain for you to stay instead of run, you would help. It was your duty.

Awfully hard to live up to when the situation actually came, though.

“Get out of here!” you said to the guy who’d helped you up as you staggered forward, hands on your knees. You were fine, you were standing. You didn’t have to fight—you absolutely shouldn’t fight—but if there was anyone who needed your help, you’d provide it.

As you pushed yourself up straight, the guy threw you one last look and then joined the crowd running from the scene while you stood, planted in it.

The fight was moving away from the building as multiple heroes took on the one huge villain, whose club-like arms were able to send them flying back before anyone could restrain him. But that was perfect. The building was still crumbling and you could check if anyone was stuck.

As you got closer, it looked as though you’d been the one hit by the biggest piece of debris—which, frankly, was a miracle. You were likely the one person in the crowd with any chance of surviving that, and the red-eyed hero had been there to save you anyway. But there was a lamppost that had been knocked over, thankfully pulled out of the ground so you could hold your breath and levitate it, vision just turning black around the edges as you dropped it harmlessly back to the ground. The victim likely had a broken leg, but some others managed to haul them out of the fray and hopefully to a hospital. One person saved.

The move left you capsized, back on your knees as you blinked color back into your vision. Fortunately, there wasn’t too much rubble—not yet, anyway—so all else there was to do was find a couple of the people who’d been knocked down or injured and send them out of the line of fire to where someone else could take care of them. You could use your quirk to keep back, not have to get too dangerously close to the fray in order to help these people. So you did your best to stay in the shadows of the punched-out building where there’d be no attention on you. Each time left you strained, but not broken. You just needed a little rest, and then you could keep moving.

You’d fallen to hands and knees after the last person, wheezing greedy gulps of dusty air. It felt like there were hands around your chest, squeezing palms against your heart and thick fingers against your throat. You weren’t practiced enough with your quirk to move this many heavy things successively, but you’d also never overused your quirk before. Never had to. You didn’t know where the line was, but so long as you were conscious, you’d keep moving.

But you felt lightheaded. The weight was suddenly off of your knees and wrists and you wondered if you were about to faint. Suddenly, the you felt a new compression around your waist as you were flipped upright, and you opened your eyes, looking down to see gray, damp skin pressed against your middle, and your feet dangling off the ground.

Oh, shit.

This was why civilians weren’t supposed to get involved when villains were around. You could become a liability for the heroes. Now they wouldn’t be able to fight all out against the villain, because you were effectively a meat shield. A hostage.

This wasn’t a net gain. Sure, you’d saved a handful of people, but now the villain couldn’t be caught. They had more power than just their quirk—they had leverage.

You thought quickly. You weren’t going to be the reason these heroes’ mission failed. You needed to take control of the situation so that no one else would get hurt. You needed to get the net gain back on your side.

You closed your eyes and took a couple breaths. After one last big one, you sent the villain up in the air, and you with it. As your ears began to ring, the last thing you heard were worried cries rumbling out from the chest you were pressed against. You felt the air as you both rose up in the sky, and then their arms loosened around you.

And then, you began to fall.

The next thing you heard was beeping. Gentle, even beeping to the rhythm of your gentle, even breaths. You weren’t heaving, weren’t gasping anymore. You must have been feeling better.

You took a breath and tried to push yourself up, instantly regretting it as your ears began to ring. Again. Suddenly, you remembered where you’d just been, what you’d just done.

Ugh, you were an idiot.

“Woah, you okay?”

You cracked your eyes open and saw a man in front of you. Definitely not a doctor, if his total lack of a shirt was anything to go by. You could feel your heartbeat in both ears, pulsing like a rock concert and waking up a headache you hadn’t realized you had. You closed your eyes and relaxed back down again.

“I’m okay,” you tried, but your voice came out all raspy. You wondered if dust had come out with it, expelling like smoke from your dry lungs.

“Here, let me get you some water.”

You blinked your eyes open and saw a straw being held up to your lips. You craned your neck up enough to purse your lips around it and took a small sip. Better.

The man in front of you had strange cuffs on his shoulders and something almost like a cape around his waist. But when you saw the wire piece around his face, you were finally able to place him.

“You’re the rock dragon,” you said.

The man laughed and you saw how young he was. When he’d been in his rocky form he could have been any age. No wrinkles or actual hair to go by. But now it was obvious that he was likely in his early twenties, just like you. Impressive for him to be a hero.

“Rock dragon?” he echoed. “I’ll take that.”

“Did you guys get the villain?”

That’s all you wanted to know. It didn’t really matter what had happened to you—evidently you were in one piece, so it was all but irrelevant.

The hero nodded. “They’re locked up, not too many major injuries on the scene. Thanks to you.”

“Urgh,” you groaned. “I’m so sorry. Usually I don’t do stuff like that.”

“Stuff like what?” he asked. “Save the day?”

“No, just…” You were glowing under his praise, but you didn’t want to. What you’d done had been idiotic and so easily could have gone sideways. More so than it seemed like it had. “I’m not usually so impulsive.”

“Must be good to know that you have good impulses then,” he said. “Although, I gotta ask, what was your plan there at the end?”

Plan? There hadn’t been any plan, and judging by his cheeky smile, bumping one cheekbone up against his wire mask, he realized that.

“I figured if I levitated that villain, then they wouldn’t be able to do any damage to anyone except me,” you said. “Of course, then there were a million questions about what could happen after, but the worst case scenario was that only both of us got hurt.”

“Very self-sacrificing,” he said. “You should be a hero. Although, we usually have to get the self-sacrificing impulses beat out of us a bit. But still, you’ve got the quirk for it. I have a friend who’s got a similar one. The world would love you.”

“No,” you said, shaking your head and feeling your brain slap against each side of your skull. “I think this was my first and last foray.”

He clutched his heart jokingly. “Oof, really one to break hearts, aren’t you?”

You froze. Suddenly the pulse that had been between your ears and behind your eyes moved back to your chest and was squeezing uncomfortably. Had he been saying that flirtatiously? Was it a joke you were just taking too seriously? Did this guy just use his hero costume to lay a bunch of girls and you should be kicking him out before he got any ideas?

“I’m really not,” you mumbled, reaching for the water glass again and drinking from it yourself. You felt the tug of an IV hooked up to your arm and you were only part way through the drip. You were stuck, unable to go anywhere until it was done. The good news was, your limbs felt generally fine. Just a little stiff and achy. The only real pain was in your head—the aftermath of using a psychic quirk.

“No,” Kirishima agreed. “You seem too nice for that. And, hero or not, the world was really lucky to have you today. So I just wanted to thank you for helping and, you know, make sure you were okay.”

“I think I’m okay,” you said.

“That’s what the doctor said,” he confirmed. “I’m just glad I caught you.”

So that’s what had happened. You weren’t sure if you’d passed out before or after the villain had landed, but you remembered focusing on trying to lower them to the ground slowly before everything had gone black. But you couldn’t use your telekinesis on yourself, so you’d resigned yourself to plunging to the ground. Not that you’d had much time to make peace with it.

“Sorry you had to save me twice,” you mumbled.

“I’ll save you as many times as I need to.”

Okay, that definitely felt like flirting. His smile was so open and genuine—he didn’t look like a fuckboy, but it didn’t matter. You didn’t want him interested in you, even if he was a hero. Even if he was attractive. Even if he was nice. You couldn’t deal with it. So you put the water back and pursed your lips awkwardly, unsure what to say.

“Oh, I’m Red Riot, by the way,” he said, extending a hand towards you.

You took it, feeling how callused his hand was. It wasn’t hard, like it had looked back when he’d been made of rock and gemstone, but had the feel of a fighter. Yours were soft as a baby’s. “Y/N,” you said.

“I know,” Red Riot said with a grin—his teeth were sharp even when he wasn’t transformed. “We found your ID in your wallet when you were being admitted. So you’re not a Jane Doe.”

“Oh.”

You supposed that was comforting. If you had fallen and broken every bone in your body, at least your family would have found out.

Your attention was diverted when someone walked into your room—a woman in a white coat and definitely wearing a shirt. This must be the doctor.

“Red Riot, you were supposed to press the button when she woke up,” the doctor chastised, though her voice was light.

“Sorry, doc, I was just seeing if she was lucid,” he said with a grin. “She remembers her name and everything that happened.”

“Right,” the doctor said, not looking especially amused. Still, there was a friendly energy between the two of them, and you wondered if heroes had close relationships with hospital staff. They probably found themselves in hospitals often enough—it would make sense. “That will be all, Red Riot.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, standing up from the folding chair he’d been planted in and pushing it against the wall. Then he turned back to you. “I really can’t thank you enough for what you did today. You’re a really good person.”

“Oh, uh, thanks,” you said, not sure what to do with the praise.

“Anytime.”

He waved and gave you one last smile before heading back, returning to duty. And as you were able to breathe easy again, answering the doctor’s routine questions and making sure that you actually were okay, it felt like Red Riot’s lingering smile never left.

The first thing you learned afterwards was that most ‘life-changing’ events weren’t actually life changing. They confirmed what they confirmed in your worldview, but, largely, life went on as normal. Like, now you knew for sure that you were the kind of person who could act in a crisis. But that was the story you’d been telling yourself before too, so what was the difference? After your day of heroics—and a day of rest, necessitated by the doctor—you went back to work and life became about staring at numbers on a screen once again.

Some of your coworkers asked about what the rescue had been like—apparently bits and pieces had reached the news, and there’d been footage of Red Riot and the others, but thankfully nothing official about you. They were suddenly very interested in your quirk—your quirk had never been a bad one, but you’d never made a habit of talking about it. And they wanted to know about the heroes.

Apparently, Red Riot was a name that some people knew. You didn’t tend to watch news about heroes and villains—you didn’t figure you needed to know much more than a bit of politics and the weather in your day to day—but those who did knew who Red Riot was. He was a rising star in the hero rankings and had graduated a few years ago from an apparently notorious class at U.A.

Even you knew what U.A. was.

You told everyone he was very nice but that you didn’t know much else. You hadn’t talked to any of the other heroes and if wasn’t like you were besties with Red Riot now. You didn’t even know his real name. Or you hadn’t, until some of your more eager coworkers informed you it was Kirishima Eijirou.

But…you didn’t like the questions. You didn’t like people asking you about how attractive or fit he was, people talking about how in love with him they were, as if you should be drooling and agreeing. Because, nice as the boy was, you didn’t feel that way. A pretty face was a pretty face and a kind soul was a kind soul. But you didn’t have a crush because, well, you almost never had crushes.

And the reminder of that, how different you were from your fantasy-having, simpering peers made you remember just how alone you were. How without those feelings, playful though they were, you felt like you would always be alone. Destined to shy away whenever a sweet boy flirted with you, to say no whenever one asked you out, to cry in your too-large bed on the days where you couldn’t convince yourself that just because you’d always been single, didn’t mean you always would be.

The second thing you learned was that, in actuality, life was always changing. Down to a simple train ride.

Public transit was one of your favorite things about living in the city. Sure, waiting for trains was irritating when you were running late, but you loved that on your morning commute you could read a book or do work instead of staring at a license plate in front of you, trying not to shout into gridlocked traffic.

You always made a habit of pausing your reading the stop before yours, just so that you could double check that your bag was tucked close, still zipped, and that all of your belongings were still on your person. You didn’t like fumbling with a bookmark and your purse just as the doors were opening and stumbling out, hoping you hadn’t left something on the seat—on the days that you were lucky enough to get a seat, that was. This time you’d been stuck, pressed against the window at the back of the car, but, when the stop before yours came, you put your book away and began pushing toward the door.

When the doors pinged open, you were one of the first ones out, flooding onto the platform as a crowd eagerly waited to take your spot, the train destined to stay full until sundown. You’d almost made it out of the station when you heard your name shouted above the din of the train pulling away.

You turned back abruptly, forcing the people behind you to split around you as you wondered if you’d made it up, heard a phantom voice without a source. But then you saw someone pushing through the crowd toward you, sharp grin present on his face.

His torso was hidden under a graphic tee, appropriate for how much warmer the weather had gotten in the past few weeks, but you’d recognize him anywhere. Really, even if you hadn’t had the reminders of people shoving phones with his picture in your face, he was unmistakable from his hair to his eyes to his teeth.

“Red Riot?” you said with surprise, noticing that he was getting a few stares from passersby.

“Ah, you can call me Kirishima,” he said, rubbing the back of his head. “Red Riot’s just the guy in the uniform.”

“What are you doing here?” you asked, wondering if this man, Kirishima, was going to be imprinting himself on all ends of your commute by the end of the year.

“Day off with my friends.”

Kirishima gestured behind him at a few other people, visible now that the station was thinning out. There was a scowling blond who looked vaguely familiar—probably another hero—two other boys and a pink girl with horns.

“You’re coming home from work?”

You looked down. You were one of the youngest people in the office, so you always tried hard to look the part by dressing as professionally as possible in a button-down and slacks. It definitely stood out against his friends’ casual wear. “Guess it’s pretty obvious, huh?”

Kirishima nodded and you wondered if this was your cue to leave. Cool to see you again, bro, but I’ve got a hot date with Netflix and some leftovers, so why don’t you and your friends enjoy a real Friday night while I begin my descent into my final crotchety cat lady persona?

“Kiri’s told us all about your awesome quirk,” the pink girl said, dark eyes sparkling. “He said you were really brave.”

“And he told us how pretty you were, but man, he didn’t do you justice,” one of the boys—the blond who wasn’t frowning—said.

You bit your lip. The praise was flattering but…uncomfortable. The boy’s brows were raised in what could be interpreted as a suggestive manner, and you wondered what Kirishima had said. Something like She was really brave, cool quirk, kinda cute too or Next time I see her I wanna tap that ass.

Honestly, they made you about equally uncomfortable.

“Cut it out, Kaminari,” Kirishima said, having the decency to flush a little bit. “Listen, we were just going to go to the park and hang out if you wanted to come along?”

“Oh, I…”

You glanced at his friends. All of them—except the one—were smiling and looked like friendly, genuine people. And you usually did like hanging out with people when you actually got up the gumption to do so.

But…your mind was always ready to supply you with a lot of ‘buts.’

But, you’d just gotten off work, looked like an idiot in your slacks and needed to get changed.

But, it was uncomfortable to be in a group where everyone knew each other but you.

But, what if any of these boys were interested in you and tried to get with you?

The last thought always felt so stupid—who did you think you were to assume that any man who looked at you might be thinking about you in that way? Not that you honestly assumed they did, but you feared it. And that didn’t feel much less stupid, to be honest.

“That’s really nice of you,” you said, putting extra cheer and enthusiasm in your voice so it didn’t sound so much like a rejection. “But I haven’t had dinner and work was rough, so I don’t think I’d make a very good impression.”

“Oh, no worries!” Kirishima said, his voice holding the same false merriment as yours. Or maybe you were projecting and he was being totally genuine. “Maybe next time.”

“Yeah,” you agreed, managing a laugh. “If you manage to catch me on another part of my commute—and there’s no villain involved—I’ll make sure to say hey.”

“All right, Y/N,” Kirishima said as he and his friends began to walk on. “I’m counting on it.”

And the third thing you learned was something you’d actually known for a long time. When things changed, usually they changed slowly.

You’d only said what you’d said to Kirishima last time because you figured there was no way in hell you’d be seeing him again. After all, it was a big city with hundreds of thousands of residents, and it wasn’t exactly like accountants and pro heroes ran in the same spheres.

But it seemed life was getting a kick out of keeping you to your word these days.

It was a weekend and you’d actually managed to leave your apartment to hang out with friends. As predicted, you actually did have a good time, though that didn’t keep you from dipping out early—mostly because you were never excited about heading home alone at night. So, purse clutched close to your side, you walked through the streets, reassuringly lit by friendly lampposts and the many bars that were still open.

When you saw the shocking head of red hair, you thought your brain was making up. Because why would he be here, walking the streets on your route home again?

Judging by his shirtless state, it was because he was on patrol. Which, you know, made sense.

It didn’t take him long to spot you. Because while you were attentive—and especially alert, since it was after dark—he was a hero. Trained not to miss a thing.

His face brightened at the sight of you and he jogged over.

“Y/N!” he said. “I thought you were gonna say hello next time you saw me.”

“I said on my commute,” you quipped, feeling the burn of awkwardness that he’d caught you looking at him. “I thought heroes needed to be detail-oriented.”

“Touché,” he said. “Well, it seems you’re spared again. Can’t hang out while I’m working.”

“But you can do this?” you asked, gesturing between the two of you.

Kirishima grinned. “Of course! This is just me building a relationship with the citizens!”

You didn’t know if that was a thing or not, but it sounded legit enough for you. At the very least, it you were in no place to accuse Kirishima of not being good at his job.

“So, I know why I’m here,” Kirishima continued. “What are you up to?”

“Oh, I was just hanging out with friends,” you said. “Heading home now.”

“But that stop that we got off at a few weeks back,” he said. “That’s the stop for your house, right? That’s still pretty far from here.”

Ah, so he was attentive. You had to give him points for that, even if the fact that he’d paid so much attention made you feel…squirmy. Your flight reflexes were humming under your skin, waiting for the moment he said something that made you think too close, too far, too soon.

“I feel safer walking,” you said, subconsciously gripping onto your purse’s strap.

Some people felt safer taking the train home in the evening, but even if it doubled, tripled the length of the trip, you preferred being in a space where you could run away if necessary. And in the city, there were always potential witnesses outside, if you were ever to need them.

Kirishima’s brows furrowed a bit. “Do you want me to walk you? I can go with you at least to the end of my beat.”

The humming increased. His offer was gentlemanly, chivalrous. It reminded you of old-timey courting—and you were being crazy. You didn’t want to walk home alone and a hero was offering to accompany you part way. You ignored your nerves “That would be really sweet, thank you.”

So you walked and talked. He had more to say about your quirk and you told him that you’d never had much interest in them. Rather, you were an accountant who worked nine to five and quite happy living a quiet life with modest success. You didn’t need a lot—certainly not fame or recognition—and you were mostly content. You didn’t mention the chronic loneliness or bouts of fear around dying alone, but that was how you got by. Loneliness was something you were always trying to outrun, and most days you managed to. Letting it catch up and thinking about it never made you feel better and talking about it rarely did either. It was something you felt powerless to change, so the best thing you could do was try to be happy with the rest of your life and hope for the best.

“I’ll admit, the fame is pretty different in real life from what you think it’ll be as a teenager,” Kirishima said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” you said. “I thought about famous bands and stuff and even when I was a kid I didn’t want the kind of notoriety that they have.”

“I’m not sure I ever wanted that either,” Kirishima said. “I just wanted people to look up to me the way I looked up to Crimson Riot. And now that I’m starting to have that, I like that people can rely on me, even if they don’t know me personally.”

You smiled. “That’s a pretty nice way to look at it.”

“You think?”

“I do.” You nodded. “I can see you on the street and feel safer for your being there.”

Kirishima’s shark teeth showed through his smile. “That’s exactly why I’m allowed to talk to you during my patrol.”

“I see,” you said, beginning to think that there was a lot more to heroes than you’d thought.

“Speaking of which,” he said. “I’d love to take you all the way home, but I can’t abandon my post. And this is kind of the end of it.”

You looked at where you were, about to cross a major intersection. You wondered if there was a hero on the other side who would be happy to walk you to the edge of their patrol too.

“No, thank you so much for walking with me this far,” you said. “You didn’t have to do that and it was really sweet.”

“I was happy to do it!” he insisted. You moved to keep going, about to wave your hand in goodbye when he said, “Wait!”

You stopped, heart beating loudly. Flight, flight, flight.

“I was wondering if you’d like to hang out sometime?” he said, a hint of nervousness and hope on his face. Too much hope. “On purpose, you know?”

“Oh,” you said, wishing you could go back in time. Wishing you could have left faster or maybe not even walked with him, even though the walk had been pleasant and comforting. Wishing you were a different person entirely. “I, um, can’t.”

“Oh, do you have a boyfriend?” he asked, the nerves eclipsing the hope. “If so, I’m really sorry if it seemed like I was assu—”

“No, no, I don’t have a boyfriend,” the words almost pulling a wry laugh out of you. A sardonic choke. “I just…I don’t really date.”

“Oh,” Kirishima said again, short brows scrunching in confusion. “Um, sorry, and you don’t have to answer but…what do you mean?”

“I’m on the asexuality spectrum?” you began, hating how apologetic the words sounded. Hating that you couldn’t seem to find a way to be proud of your sexuality, that you could only wear it as a burden. “I’m demisexual. Which means that I can’t feel attracted to people that I barely know. So dating is just…really hard.”

Kirishima’s brows raised. “So…you need to get to know people really well before you’d even be interested?” he asked slowly, clarifying.

“Yeah,” you said. “Very…slow burn.”

“So you’re saying,” he continued, his face becoming warm with a smile again, “that I’d have to see you more often before seeing you officially.”

“Oh, yeah, uh, not that simple,” you said, nervous and confused that he hadn’t let it go yet. “I don’t casual date either. Like, I wouldn’t want someone showing interest in me and then dating other people while they wait to see if I come around. Which I know isn’t fair. Basically, seeing me would be a lot of risk for potentially no reward, because even if we do spend time together, I might never like you. So, yeah, you understand the dilemma.”

The concern was back on his face, and, somehow, your entire urge to flee went away. You’d scared him off, and there was some comfort in that. Sure, maybe it was running away from your problems, but you were able to trick yourself into thinking it was the mature thing to do because you were telling the truth. You were being honest about what the situation was.

“So this really is hard for you.” There was compassion in his voice that took you aback. That wasn’t him running. That wasn’t him being scared off.

“Um, yeah, it kinda sucks,” you said.

“I’m really sorry about that,” Kirishima said, and you thought, hoped that would be the end of it. But he kept going. “But, honestly, spending more time with you sounds like a really nice thing, even without any expectations or anything on it.”

Some boys had made this offer in the past. And it sounded nice on paper, but no matter what you did, you couldn’t remove the expectations in your mind. The fact that you knew why they’d looked at you in the first place, what they were looking for, and that you were still in a position to lead them on. You always made it so hard for yourself, even though you just wanted with everything in your heart for it to be easy.

“And, just so you know,” Kirishima said, glancing down shyly, “I don’t date a lot either. I’m not sure what kind of impression I’ve given off, but really, I don’t have that much time because of this career, and the time that I do I try to spend with my friends. So, it would make more sense to, you know, try and do that anyway. I just…as a hero, I often see the worst of people and so I want to spend all my other time with good ones. And you seem like a really good person.”

“I…” You had one last shot. One last thing to show the worst of yourself and see if he’d turn around on you. “When I’ve tried dating before, I’m not the best version of myself. I get really uncomfortable, so I treat people in a way that’s less than they deserve. I don’t think you’d like that version of me.”

“It’s a good thing we wouldn’t be dating then,” Kirishima said. “Just…two friends trying to become better people.”

You were at war with yourself. He was saying all the right things but you were still so scared. Of someone liking you when you couldn’t like them. Of you falling for them after they’d put you in the friend zone. Of falling in love and it not working out. Of falling in love and getting everything.

“How about this,” Kirishima said. “I’ll be here tomorrow—my shift starts at six. And if we happen to bump into each other by accident, well, that seems to be our pattern, so how bad could it be?”

You smiled, having a quick response for that one. “I could be held hostage by a villain, pass out, and need you to take me to the hospital.”

“Well, at least we know we can get out of that one.”

“I suppose so,” you said. It was casual. It was literally the lowest stakes invitation you’d ever heard in your life. If you couldn’t say yes to this, then what were you doing? “I…okay. I might see you tomorrow.”

He grinned at you and you became immediately convinced that his cheer was totally genuine. He was just a happy guy, and maybe nothing he said had any innuendo or hidden meaning to it. It probably never had. “Is it okay if I give you my number? I just want to know that you get home safe.”

In the bright lights of the busy street, you’d almost forgotten that it was quickly becoming the middle of the night, and that you’d had such unease when you’d first stepped out into it. You’d felt totally safe for a minute, even in this strange world you lived in.

“Okay,” you said. “If I’m not home in twenty minutes, you have permission to get worried.”

“I’ll send a search party,” he said. “I know a guy.”

You laughed. “Sounds good. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise…”

“Tomorrow.”

“We’ll see.”

He nodded. “We’ll see.”

It was half a promise, the start of a maybe friendship. It was probably nothing at all, you had to remind yourself for the whole walk home, otherwise you might go crazy with nerves.

But, also, it might be good.

Time would only tell.

#kirishima x reader #bnha x reader #acespec #acespec fiction #acespec fic #demisexual fiction #demisexual fic #bnha lgbt #kirishima imagine #kirishima imagines #eijirou kirishima x reader #bnha imagine #bnha imagines #mha imagine #mha imagines

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thepeakyfckingblinders · 6 years ago

Text

The Whore || John Shelby x reader

⤠ MASTERLIST⤟

Anon requested: “11&19 with John boy? cause I miss him “ (I miss him too, my poor heart aches)

Summary: n.11 & 19 from prompt list: “Please, please, please” + “I’ll burn this fucking place down” Warnings: swearing, a lot of angst, prostitution, nudity, violence, mentions of abuse, mentions of rape, misogynistic talk, graphic description of signs of physical abuse

Author’s notes:

Behind each one of these works there are sleepless nights and something really close to multiple mental breakdowns, so, please, take a minute to send me a message about it, I need actual feedbacks to understand how to improve my skills and grow ♡

So, this request’s been in my mind for ages, and even though I’m not happy with its final part ‘cause it sucks, I’m literally obsessed with this idea, I love it so much that I’ll probably write a long fic about it, right after Contagio, but it will depend on you babes, because, first and froemost, I need to know what you think about this piece. ⤟ IMPORTANT

Please, if you’re a victim of any kind of abuse, talk to someone who can help you, nobody should go through something like that alone.⤟ IMPORTANT

I edited the gif and added the text, it’s not an actual scene from the show, but I thought it could be a good idea, a small detail that could be added to my works. What do you think about it? Pls, let me hear your opinions babeees ⤟

I’m sorry for being this late, but I’ve been really busy in the past days and writing is never just easy, it demands concentration and effort, plus I don’t want you to be disappointed, so I’m always extra accurate while working. I hope this is worth the wait!

If you want to be added to my tag list, please, directly message me

I’m Italian, English isn’t my first language, so I apologize for every possible mistake I made. Also, please, help me improve my writing by telling me if there’s something wrong

ENJOY!

Birmingham was somehow silent that night, John noticed the unusually empty streets around him, as his feisty pace easily led him towards a well-known destination, his confident steps resounding in between the damp walls of those sordid blocks made of innumerable overcrowded flats. The unmistakable stench of stagnant urine viciously permeated his nostrils, soon causing a disgusted expression to taint his angelic face, while he avidly took the umpteenth drag of smoke from his Cuban cigar and finally stopped his unceasing walk in front of the most renowned brothel in the entire city. For about three years by then, day after day, his life had been perilously circling the drain: things had got totally out of hand, fate had pitilessly thrown him into profound despair, giving life to an apparently endless spiral of darkness and desolation, which was gradually corroding his fragile self, brutally strangling him, rapaciously plundering each of his already strained vital breaths. And, nevertheless, it was beyond hard to blame him for such catastrophic outcomes, after all, he’d scarcely survived the battlefield, only to find himself with a handful of nothing, left alone to deal with a dead wife and four children to raise on his own, while his guts crawled with excruciating grief and ravenous acrimony for the whole world, having him develop a tendency to self-destruction that was just as concerning as it was well concealed. As a matter of fact, in spite of his private hell, he still remained a Shelby, and a Shelby wasn’t meant to be soft, nor weak, none of them could afford to succumb to their affliction, never, not for a moment. They had to be invulnerable.

Or, at least, they had to look invulnerable, for truth was that John was scared, utterly frightened by all those unmerciful changes. Deep inside he felt like a hopeless, undefended child, forsaken by God and discarded to wander that grim world without any destination other than death and misery, thus his blood boiled with virulence and venom, having his heart clench with blind wrath and his devastated young soul desperately long for sort of any distorted kind of unattached affection. That was basically the main reason why his bed was incessantly warm, or more accurately, warmer than it had always been before, because, needless to say, John Shelby had actually been an authentic ladies’ man since his first cry. His stunning beauty constantly teemed on everyone’s lips in Birmingham, there was not a single woman in the whole town who hadn’t dreamt of sleeping with him at least once in her life. Therefore, John was more than happy to please them all, literally, welcoming them with wide open arms, even during his past marriage; and, on those rare times when no girl went to knock on his door, he had now grown accustomed to seek relief into whorehouses, rather than sleep alone and become an easy prey for his ferocious demons.

So he eventually ended up dropping his smouldering cigar on the uneven asphalt of the most rundown place in Small Heath, “Le Belle Donne”, an Italian house of tolerance, quite dilapidated and about to fall to pieces, but which often happened to have his favourite prostitutes. Indeed, ever since the Peaky Blinders had defeated and subjugated Sabini’s clan, they’d occupied a prominent position among the country, to the point that several other Italian gangs on their territory, including the Changrettas who owned that brothel in particular, had finally given in to the Shelbys. As a direct consequence, to put it simply, John and all his brothers had, in a very real sense, earned the full right to abuse of whatever business the wops held.

“Hey, man!” Johnny resonantly barked as he entered the hall, maintaining a pretty intimidating attitude and a menacing look on purpose, in order to strike even greater fear in his newest flunky. “C’mon, show me what you got” That rough order cunningly glided onto his lower lip, immediately followed by his hot tongue, while his famished gaze travelled around the room, examining the face of each harlot standing there with meticulous attention, without however finding something that could come anywhere close to seriously rapture him. Robert Turrini, the whoremaster, was a bizarre bloke, for his physical appearance could be probably described as both disturbing and amusing: his revortingly corpulent stomach wobbled and his short legs dangerously stumbled, when he made haste to stand up and accommodate his toughest client. “Mr. Shelby, what an honour and a pleasure to have you back!” Those sycophant words fled his moist and malodorous mouth, and nonetheless, his stubby fingers inexorably betrayed his true thoughts, since they were either nervously torturing each other or, as only alternative, convulsively running through his greasy, mangy bangs. “Please, sir, follow me, these are for yokels and boozers, nothing to do with gentlemen like yourself” Once again, Turrini’s shrill fawning tone relentlessly grated his ears, making clear reference to the bunch of second-rate whores who could be found at the entrance; thus the lame pimp quickly moved, his hand anxiously beckoning John to tread upon his heels, then headed towards an eerily narrow corridor, so scanty that it was almost impossible to cross, if not walking on the bias. The secret lounge was illuminated only in part by a squalid red light creating a gruesome atmosphere, a dull silence tyrannically reigned into that small space, although you were not alone, but practically glued to another girl; both sitting on a minuscle sofa, your elbows touching, still none of you dared emit a single sound. Everything felt like lead upon your papier-mâché ribcage, that horrible sensation forcing your traumatized brain to involuntarily keep counting the seconds until that heinous burden would’ve potentially staved in your sternum, definitively annihilating your splintered heart. As a result, when the ramshackle door opened and a high-pitched squeak scraped your skin, you really thought to be about to die. Your torturer made his entrance, and right after him, another man came in, yet you couldn’t spot his face, since the peak of his cap designedly casted a mysterious shadow on it. “These two right here, they're real young, real fresh” Robert flaunted his goods along with a nefarious grin, rubbing his soiled paws with evident greed. “Behold the finest offering of flesh and bone on the market” A sadistic snicker repugnantly accompanied his speech, instantly causing John to frown, visibly disgruntled with the way that man deliberately talked about human beings. Luckily, it was a known fact that the middle Shelby was used to treating his women with all due respect: whether he paid them or not, he always made sure they were comfortable with him and never shrank from giving them some good time as well; therefore, a vexed glare was shot in the direction of his gross interlocutor, before his crystalline eyes briefly fluttered around the place, then bumping into your elegant figure almost at once.

Your bloodstream seemed to benumb on the spot as the stranger’s confident stare entangled yours, his rawboned features being now fully displayed, for he had lifted his chin a little in order to properly look at you, and you only, despite Clarissa’s desperate and petulant attempts to get his attention with malicious smiles and ridiculous pet names. Even though your dazed mind had just been ruthlessly brutalized by the sudden, ablaze assault of his glacial irises, a few moments were enough for you to realize how profoundly different he was from all the low-down rats who usually came through that horrible place.

Each sharp, still somehow delicate, trait of his face was brimming with delicious youthfulness, a less keen eye might have even confounded his freshness with actual naivety, but not yours; you were far too clever to make such a coarse mistake. Furthermore, the midnight-blue posh fabric of the classy suit, remarkably folding his majestic body, left gaunt doubt that he was, in all likelihood, a considerably rich man, which was beyond disorientating you, since the price to pay for some tawdry delight in that brothel was outrageously derisory, to say the least. And ultimately, as much as it killed you to conceive it, he was without question one of the most enchanting men you had ever seen, to the point that you found yourself subconsciously wondering the possible reason why a heavenly creature of his kind would’ve needed to buy a miserable hour of dissembled love.

“There she is” That malleable murmur, filled with longing and gratification, furtively sidled past John’s roseate mouth, as its corners seductively bent upwards and his gaze persevered in its praiseworthy commitment to scrupulously linger your finest shape in sheer adoration. Lace and organdy sublimely merged on the light crimson negligee you were wearing, your immaculate form appeared as a beguiling paradox into his dilated pupils, being your long legs lecherously left exposed, while every inch of your porcelain skin, from your lean neck to your groin, was painstakingly disguised by that unholy material, dark and inscrutable, albeit thin enough to allow him to glimpse the inviting turgidity of your nipples. His breath shuddered in awe when he went back to contemplate your aphrodisiac facial features, flushed cheeks and plump lips having him ache with desire, and then your doe eyes flooded by melancholy, strangling his soul with no mercy, entrenching into his brains the treacherous conviction that, at the end of the day, he would’ve gladly dilapidated his fortune, if only to venerate you from afar. “Oi, sweetheart!” His low voice finally rumbled within the walls of that small space, overwhelmingly vibrating into your abdomen, while you forced yourself to swallow the painful lump obstructing your throat and stand up, promptly responding to his command, aware as you had become that rebelling against your pitiable destiny would’ve served no purpose at all. Holding your client’s hand behind your back, but keeping your head down during the whole route, you silently guided him up the spiral staircase to the best room in the house, like you had previously been instructed by your pimp. His jacket and hat were quickly hung on the apposite coat-rack, leaving his muscular top covered with just his white shirt and blue vest, an alluring grin was flashed in your direction and you detected a libidinous sparkle in his irises, as he healed the rift between you at a slow pace. “What should I call you, sweetheart?” He knowingly used the same flattering pet name once more, whispering that barely audible question into your ear, for he was now behind you: his large hands laid around your waist, gently making your back and his vigorous chest fit together, while his skilled mouth brushed forthwith against your nape, drawing an ardent contrail of ephemeral pecks up until your jaw. “Just y/n” You gasped in response, the marked contrast between his warmth and your bitter cold body, along with crippling dread eating you alive, caused your scrambled stomach to squirm and your eyelids to distressingly shut into a frown. “Well, that’s a pretty good one, I’m John, by the way” A lovely, yet hinted giggle fleetingly filled your ears together with that little compliment; there was no record of mockery in his tone, though, it simply sounded like he wanted to be nice to you, without any aspiration of personal gain, and you almost blushed, caught off guard and no longer used to any form of kindness. Nevertheless, it was a matter of instants before another wet, long kiss was pressed on your jawline, making you startle with evident apprehension and, at a later time, definitively back away from him, as soon as you sensed his touch abandoning your hips only to climb your sides, till he reached for your nightgown’s collar and his fingers began to fiddle with its round buttons. “No, I’ll do it!” You curtly gave notice, as you temporarily lost control of both your speech and actions, placing your hands above his in order to shrug them off, then turning to face him with short breath, your open palms shielding you. “I got it” A noticeably softer voice supplanted your preceding rudeness once you gradually metabolised how much damage your incautious reaction could’ve done.

“Aye, aye, darling, as you wish” But John just chuckled, tenderly humouring you, while his forearms jokingly lift in surrender to your commands, although, truth be told, your strange behaviour had left him a bit bewildered, well-nigh confused. Carefully moving backwards, he cockily made himself comfortable on the edge of the double bed, sitting right in front of you with splayed legs, his yearning stare never deflecting from you, and started to unbutton his waistcoat along with his shirt and undershirt, until his statuesque torso was completely nude, in all its glory, as the moon transpired through the curtains and shed its faint rays on his every contour, superbly enhancing all of his muscles.

Without reprieve, he ogled up at you in pure adoration, devastatingly astonished afresh by your dazzling beauty, eager to feel your afire flesh around his, literally hanging on your every word or move, while a provocative smirk steadily rippled his lips. Still, he kept questioning why a seraphic vision like you was slowly withering away in that authentic hell on heart, adamantly squandering your blush of youth amidst that rabble of unrestrained putridity. It made absolutely no sense, and he couldn’t get rid of that pernicious thought haunting his mind ever since he had first seen you: you looked nervous, extremely defensive, almost paralyzed with fear; you seemed so different from all the whores he’d had before, hence his instincts, however obfuscated with cupidity, were screaming that something was wrong. And when he watched you turn your back on him again, so to avoid his penetrating gaze as you reluctantly got undressed, it was enough for him to understand that his execrable hunch was right. Nevertheless, by the time his head managed to eventually reconnect to his mouth, it was already too late, the soft textile of your nightdress ineluctably fell to your feet, leaving you naked under his starving leer.

John choked on his own breath; for the very first time, he felt like a fledgling kid at his earliest experience, no matter if nothing could be further form the truth, in some turbid, cryptic way, you were able to make him vulnerable. His craw went hellishly dry while he continued to gape at you in awe, the sinuous curves of your flawless glutes, the meandering line of your superlatively arched back covered in part by your soft hair, your tensed shoulders and your refined legs, everything about you caused his mind to go entirely black, words stifling in his throat. Yet, as soon as you moved to face him and his sight was blessed with the full view of your voluptuous figure, something altered the light in his cerulean eyes, suddenly making it dark and gloomy. His jaw slightly dropped under the weight of that violent dismay: in conjunction, an obnoxious sense of nausea cruelly shot him in the gut and blind anger virulently assailed him, for your front bust was completely martyrized.

“What the hell...” That unmeant babble died in the gelid air, his shocked orbs demarcating the strokes of your damaged silhouette: your neck and collarbone were horridly plastered with several violet fingerprints, as if someone had mercilessly strangled you over and over, greenish bruises with the shape of full palms circled both your arms, there were conspicuous signs of ligature around your tiny wrists. Worse still, his eyelids had to squeeze a little in order to bring into focus the multiple oxblood dots stigmatizing your soft breasts, until he noticed in horror how those round specks were effectively cigarettes burns; all of the oxygen bluntly withdrew from his lungs, when he dwelled on the multiple blue and black marks barbarically desecrating the protuberances of your ribs. But what irremediably drove him over the edge were the two ghastly scars digging stretched grooves in your lower stomach, in parallel with your bulging pelvic bones and down almost to your livid groin.

Prey of that deleterious humiliation, you observed raw disgust contaminating his features and, with no apparent reason, the dormant hatred you had for yourself began to ferment inside your belly. “I-I’m sorry” you forced yourself to swallow your imminent tears, unexpectedly, the awareness of not being able to please him somehow inflicted more suffering on your mangled soul “If I’m not to your taste, y-you can...” The young man quickly stood up and, before you had the chance to finish your nonsensical sentence, he readily grabbed his shirt, approaching you with dispatch, his cold irises burning with an implausible mixture of fury and concern. “I don’t fucking care right now” His voice was unsteady, rolling down his tongue in fatigued panting, as his hands hastened to wrap his shirt around your shoulders, his trembling fingers struggling to put the buttons through the eyelets “Who did this to you?” In truth, he was talking to himself rather than with you, noticeable impatience worsening his mad tone, yet you persistently steered clear of his inquiring look, more than determined to keep your mouth shut, forasmuch as your dizzy head was already helplessly spinning, along with your heart rabidly hammering against your sore ribcage. You were having a hard time figuring out what was going on, everything around you was so confused, you didn’t even know whether to trust him or not, you only wanted to close your eyes and forget about that lucid nightmare. “I’m not asking you, for fuck’s sake! Tell me who it was!” That searing order tersely brought you back to reality and cleared how easily his rash temper could reemerge; indeed, all of a sudden, no trace was left of that kind, cheerful boy who earlier that night had succeeded in making you genuinely blush, on the contrary, when he cupped your cheeks and vehemently shook you, in a desperate effort to get your attention, his rough, authoritative command unbendingly hit you, and the sweet child within him ended up being thoroughly smothered by the scary, ruthless gangster that he truly was. That unforeseen contact had your feet automatically stagger backwards, your eyes fell to your tiptoes and your teeth started skewering your lower lip, while your exhausted brain resorted to its last ounce of strength, thereby obligating you to spit out a bit of your sorrow. “Three months ago, the man I once called father sold me to settle one of his debts with the Italians” Your thorax seemed to shrink to the point of absurdity once you became aware that it was essentially the first time you allowed yourself to say it all out loud. However, the presence of that compassionate stranger still represented for you a substantial barrier to surmount, leading your unquiet glance to franticly move from the grime on the floor, to the broken window on your left, anywhere, but never daring to meet his. “ I tried to run away, I swear I did, but they always caught me and-”

A large knot callously plugged the bottom of your palate, causing you to hesitate for a minute, gently rubbing your own arms, in attempt to comfort yourself . “Robert has a short fuse, he g-gets pretty brutal when you don’t cooperate” Those disenchanted considerations carried an involuntary grin, it was nothing more than a spasm, but hid the unmistakable sign of an imminent cry, and John’s attentive irises certainly did not let it go unnoticed, yet he chose to stay quiet, because the last thing he would’ve wanted in that crucial moment was to scare you even more. “He beat me to death, each time harder than the time before, and then he let those men-... He-e kept me tied to that bed for days to teach me a lesson” Copious tears were now unremittingly streaming down your flushed face, your heart aching with raw affliction, preventing you from breathing properly, one of your palms instinctively went to cover the space between your breasts, in a vain whirl to ease that excruciating grief. “Oh, God” John simply sighed, he was precariously theetering on the verge of tears as well, thick veins untamedly pumped in the proximity of his temples, till his solid shape ruinously keeled over the longest side of the bed, his elbows piercing his own thighs, as he hid behind his clenched fists and finally permitted himself to indulge a couple of muffled sobs. Innumerable atrocities had clouded his eyes and soul during his brief life, he himself was capable of unspeakable acts of cruelty, still, that was absolutely intolerable, hearing your story was taking a terrible toll on him. Try as he might, he couldn’t conceive how somebody could have been so hopelessly evil, to abuse in such a heinous way a defenseless creature as pure as you were. That thought was irretrievably disturbing him, rancorously eroding his bowels, almost depriving him of his sanity.

“U-until I stopped fighting them” Your last, indescribably anguished whisper struck the fatal blow, it unrelentingly plunged into his chest, sending an unbearable jolt of pain through his poisoned veins. For a brief instant, his expression, together with yours, harshly turned into a mask made of neat despair, as if your synapsis had been ravelled and both of you were enduring the exact same ache, at the exact same moment.

“I’ll fucking kill him!” Then, all at once, something apopletic inside him violently detonated, he berserkly stood up, roughly tripping over the beside table and everything placed on it. “Fucking kill that filthy bastard with my own two hands, bloody hell!” His hoarse yells made your bruised skin cringe and his furious steps covered the whole length of the room in the space of a scant minute; he was literally seething with murderous fits of rage, teeth grinding with irrepressible choler. “No!” your desperate voice erupted afresh and you hurried to reach for him, your hands unconsciously enveloping his cheekbones “Please, please, John, please, stop!” For the first time, his name slipped out of your aching throat in between those pathetic pleads, your wrists forced him to look at you, in attempt to dissuade him from his homicidal purposes; the mere thought of the potential disastrous consequences to his calamitous ire totally asphyxiated you, rampant panic assaulted your frail mind and, soon after, you found yourself hyperventilating and simultaneously rambling a bunch of incoherent words, your fingers gradually tightening their grip on him. “He’s gonna get so angry at me, he’s gonna- he-he’s...” “I’m a fucking Shelby, he does not draw a damn breath unless I say so” He firmly grabbed your chin with just two of his fingers, guiding your depleted pupils to entirely focus on his confident stare, and he growled that undisputable fact a span away from your nose. Petrified by that new awareness, you fell utterly silent, only gawking in his direction, while he put his undershirt back on with ease and rapidly grasped his cap. “Just stay here, do you hear me? Don’t move until I come back” An incandescent kiss was impulsively pressed to your forehead, no other words were spent, before he disappeared behind the door of your private hell. When your persecutor saw his special guest unyieldingly storming towards his desk with a truculent expression exuding fervent disappointment, he jumped on his feet, ready to find a solution to whatever problem had possibly arisen; one thing was sure, he never would’ve guessed what was about to happen. “Mr. Shelby, what’s wron-” John’s fist savagely collided with his jaw, nipping his cloying speech in the bud, without giving Turrini a second to process what was going on, another punch pitilessly smote him, and then another one, and then another, until hot, plenteous blood gushed from his multiple wounds. “You son of a bitch” Animalistic groans left his rabid maws, sheer hate rushing through his brains, as he violently tossed him to the ground, immediately beginning to kick his torso with all of his brute force. “Mercy! I beg of you, sir, have mercy!” His victim’s prayers and harrowing screams barely titillated his ears, everything he could think about was your tragically marred body, hence an unbridled desire to give him a taste of his own medicine completely took over. “Where was your mercy when you were torturing her?” Expertely holding his hat in the most efficient way, in a fury, John went down on his sacrificial lamb, promptly disfiguring just one side of his face, in order to take a quite theatrical pause from his wicked work.

“When she was imploring you to stop?” Robert was now crying out loud, overwhelmed by that merciless agony, reduced to just invoke the glacial scynt of death, since nothing in his entire miserable existence had ever caused him more intense pain, than the coarse perception of a finely sharpened razorblade brutishly lacerating his flesh once more, inch by inch.

“Now bend your ear to this” despite his wrenching laments, John rudely lift him up by seizing the blood stained collar of his jacket “if anyone else but me goes near her fucking room again, I’ll burn this fucking place down!” And with that first, deadly threat the pimp’s head was brutally slammed into the wall, an umpteenth whine of contrition escaping his mouth filled with blood, nevertheless, no time was left for redemption.

“You lay a finger on her again” his skull was doggedly crashed into the bricks once again, a crimson spatter smeared the pale plaster covering them “I will break your neck” John’s knuckles clasped, having his red right hand effectively strenghten its hold on his neck, nearly killing him on the spot. However, fortunately for the whoremaster, Johnny would’ve not put an end to his sufferings, nor he could've simply taken you away, deep inside, he knew he needed to discuss it with his family, first and foremost, with Thomas, for the unstable equilibrium reached by the Peaky Blinder was far too fragile to start a new war against the Italians. Thus, with great difficulty, he forced himself to keep his mind clear and put a lid on his beastly instinct. “From now on, no one of you dirty swines is allowed to even look at her” Throwing him to the floor, the middle Shelby delivered one last kick straight to his fat abdomen, and disrespectfully spit on him, marking with his salt slaver the end of his brutalized prey’s calvary. “By order of the Peaky Blinders” As soon as the crackling door snapped open, your heart seemed to explode, your eyelids bolted with pure fear, whilst you pulled your knees closer to your clavicles, an ancient prayer lingering your lips together with heavy breaths, as you prepared for the worst. But the worst never came. “Y/n, hey, calm down. It’s all right” John’s husky voice echoed in your ears, and, you could’ve sworn it, that was, without the slightest doubt, the most beautiful sound you had ever heard. Your head abruptly tilted in his direction, an oxymoric mixture of fear and hope twinkling into your watery irises, deep pants still rocking your tiny self. “It’s me, it’s just me” Keeping his arms up to indicate his innocuous purpose, he carefully approached you. Almost immediately, you noticed the several scarlet handprints staining his pale top, eloquent sign that he had tried to wipe his palms on that ivory material as best as he could. Yet, you were so profoundly relieved to see his friendly face, that, to be honest, the sight of fresh blood didn’t upset you at all. It was like you had fallen into a fugue state, every single thing around you was so distant, your numb senses were only able to concentrate on John’s lean silhouette kneeling in front of you. “ No one will hurt you anymore, darling” his hands gently went to caress your thighs, while his worried gaze tirelessly sought yours and he spoke those soft, reassuring words “You need to trust me”. And you did want to put all of your faith in that young man. His delicate flair easily awakened you from that ostensible slumber, building a rousing fire inside your belly; without a thought about your unforeseen actions, you threw your arms around his strong neck, your knees producing a dry sound as they collided with the wooden pavement, still you didn’t care and you held him tight, letting out loud cries and drowning into his muscular chest, finally revelling in the feeling of that warm embrace. Soon, he entangled his callous fingers with your velvety locks, subconsciously narrowing his solid shoulders, as to shield your frangible figure from the outside world. “I'll get you out of here soon, I promise”

tag list: @spidey-pal, @shadow-of-wonder, @stassaurus, @peachlle, @livvtheangel, @myjbphase, @namelesslosers, @crazyonesarethebest, @vxxn128, @keithseabrook27, @spaghettirogers, @writingstudent, @hp-hogwartsexpress

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snowdice · 5 years ago

Text

Folds in Paper (Chapter 2: Green Light)[Folds in Time Universe]

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Relationships: Janus/Patton, Remus & Roman, eventual Logan/Virgil (maybe more)

Characters:

Main: Janus, Patton, Remus

Appear: Remy, Emile, Virgil, Logan, Roman

Summary: Janus, a disillusioned senior agent working for the Time Preservation Initiative, struggles to find meaning in a world where time travel could change everything about your life’s history in less than a moment. When time distortions start popping up, threatening the timeline and the fabric of reality as he knows it, it becomes a race against the clock to fix the damage before everything unravels. And the problem with time travel… you never how long you have before the clock strikes 12 and your time is up.

With a partner who has more mysteries in his past than Janus had anticipated and an enigmatic free agent time traveler mucking about time always with a clever pun or a time appropriate pet name on his lips, Janus will need to figure out what went wrong with time, and more importantly, how to fix it.

Notes: Time travel AU, mystery, enemies to lovers, alcohol

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – to-morrow we will run farther, stretch out our arms farther…” (F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gastby)

This is a fic I’ve been writing on study breaks that you have probably all already seen at this point. I’ve slightly edited it for wording and grammar, but not for content from my previous posts. Feel free to send in asks to direct it because I’m not 100% sure where this is going and you can help decide if you feel so inclined! You can see the process I went through to build this at this link.

Part 1

The morning was just as torturous as Janus had expected it would be. He chewed through another pop-tart, this time bothering to actually check and see that it was a cinnamon-sugar one and drank three cups of caffeinated orange juice. Then, he waved his hand through the air and selected the first saved location on his device. He popped up directly behind his desk where he’d been standing the night morning before.

Someone, probably Remus, had shut his integrator down. He swiped a finger across the power button, and it flickered back on, scrolling through its morning start up routine.

The machine scanned through all of the data in the three main system it was connected to and sorted all information into things that concerned him, could concern him, and did not before then sorting the first two categories into order of importance. As it did, he set up his screen reader so he would hopefully not start the day with more of a migraine than he already had. It took about 3 seconds for everything to turn on and settle.

Sitting down in his desk, he dismissed the notification that Remus had finished and submitted the report from their mission the day before, before looking through the next things on his list. A mission had been scheduled for him today, and the details were in his inbox. A piece of time travel technology had been accidently dropped by an archology student in the 1890s during a trip. It was an earlier model of emergency time travel given to time travelers that would dump them back into the Registration Office in the year they originated. It wasn’t extremely dangerous, but could pose some problems, especially if someone who didn’t know what it was activated it.

Surveillance agents had tracked it down and found that it had been picked up by a local and sold. Though no one from that time had known what it was, they had identified that it was made out of a precious metal and it had been crafted into an expensive necklace. Janus and Remus were supposed to retrieve it today. It had been pinpointed that the most opportune time for the extraction was 1923 during a masquerade ball held by those who had bought the necklace. It was a fairly low stakes mission.

He wasn’t set to leave for another couple of hours, so he clicked through the rest of the important notifications and then set off to meet his missions coordinator, Rhi, in her office.

Rhi and Janus got along fairly well. She was a well put together woman who took her job incredibly seriously. It was fair as her job was to organize all information and materials from every other department and make sure the agents she was assigned to got and understood all of it. A mistake from her could lead to an agent’s death or something far worse.

This, of course, made her relationship with Remus… interesting to say the least. Janus could never place whether they were nemesis, frenemies, or mortal enemies, and he doubted he would ever know.

“Okay, but it’s the 1920s America,” Remus was already in her office arguing when Janus arrived. “There were so many gangsters! I could be a gangster. I would make a fantastic gangster! Just give me a gun, a snazzy suit with a white hat, and a buttload of alcohol. I will be running Chicago with Al Capone in five minutes.”

“Al Capone didn’t become a crime boss until 1925 and you are going to 1923,” Rhi said, sounding bored, “you aren’t going to Chicago, and as I have already stated, your cover is already decided.”

“But-”

“It is nonnegotiable, Agent Clockson,” she said firmly. Remus pouted, but seemingly accepted his fate.

“May I come in?” Janus asked.

“Please do,” Rhi said. “You have been to the 1920s before, correct?” she asked Janus.

“Yes ma’am.”

She tapped the screen on her desk in response. “In the last two years?”

“About two months ago,” he responded. She tapped something else.

“Any blacks, reds, or yellows?” she asked.

“All green.”

“Great. Do you need a refresher course on basic cultural or linguistic procedures?”

“No.”

She pushed one more thing and then swiped the check-in document over to him. He glanced at the report stating he’d had no incidents of any level the last time he visited the 1920s and had opted out of the optional refresher course, and then pressed his finger against the screen to sign it with his fingerprint.

The document returned to her side of the desk automatically. “Okay,” she said swiping another document from her left over to be in front of her. She twisted her wrist to copy it and slid copies to Janus and Remus. “Here are exact details on the time, place, and event you are going to, as well as details about your cover.” Janus scrolled through his quickly. It wasn’t as detailed as some he’d had considering this was a brief in-and-out mission, but he still took care to memorize everything on the page.

As he and Remus read through their things, Rhi got to her feet and turned to the storage compartments behind her desk.

She grabbed out two packages and when they’d both signed that they’d read and understood the paperwork, she slid them across the desk to them. “These have everything you need,” she said. “Clothes, money, and an invitation to the party you’re off to attend. You are to get changed now, have a last check in with costuming to make sure everything is in order, and then report to decontamination in 23 minutes. You’re set to leave in 38 minutes. Any questions?”

“How much-?” Remus started.

“None, agent,” Rhi said.

“But-”

“No alcohol,” Rhi said. “It is the prohibition era in the United States anyway.”

“Like there’s not going to be alcohol at the rich people party,” Remus said sullenly.

She pressed her lips together. “It is an in-and-out mission,” she said to both of them, and then turned to glare at Remus. “Do not get arrested.”

“I don’t know,” Remus said joyfully. “I think I still have room for a 1920s mug shot on my wall.”

“Behave,” she said, “or I’ll report you for the cat you smuggled in from the 1800s.”

“You’d never,” Remus said. “You enjoy the cute pictures of Diesel Fuel I send you every day too much, and you know it!”

“Just… don’t get arrested.” She turned to Janus. “Don’t let him get arrested.”

“I’ll do my best,” Janus promised, standing. “Now come on, Remus, we need to get changed.”

“You just want to see me naked,” Remus replied with a wink, but he did stand.

“If I see you naked one more time in my life Remus, my eyeballs will fall out of their sockets,” Janus said, waving to Rhi as he pulled Remus out of the door.

“Kinky.”

Janus’s eyeballs almost did fall out right then and there with how hard he rolled them.

They got changed quickly, Remus complaining and saying if he couldn’t dress like a gangster, he should at least be allowed to wear a flapper dress. Janus had long ago learned to ignore his ramblings. He did seem enthused about the included mask for the masquerade. It was a silver fox shaped mask with green accents that reminded Janus of the Egyptian God Anubis.

Janus’s own mask, on the other hand, was only designed to take up the left half of his face. It was mostly golden with a black swirled design. Attached to the side, there was a plume of golden tipped white feathers. He had to give it to the costuming department, they did have good taste.

Once they were both dressed, they were poked and prodded by one of the costumers to make sure everything was accurate, fit right, and had been put on correctly.

After that, they went to the decontamination area to have themselves and everything they were taking with them sterilized so they didn’t accidently take any pathogens to the 1920s. They also received an oral vaccination to be sure they didn’t pick up anything from the 1920s and bring it back.

Then they were ready to go. The correct time-space coordinates had already been sent to their timepieces. With a push of a button, they were off.

Want to read more? Click below!

AO3 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

#sanders sides #janus sanders #patton sanders #remus sanders #moceit #analogical #(eventually)#virgil sanders #roman sanders #logan sanders #remy sanders #emile sanders #folds in paper #folds in time universe #adriana writes

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stringergames · 4 years ago

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Downtime Roleplay 4 - Checking Out

Post Session 5 - Misty Eyed

Ireena and Magpie spend some one on one time in the Kolyana Library, as the rest of the party continue to exasperate Ismark downstairs.

Words spoken in Elvish are denoted in italics. Spoiler warning: contains spoilers for episode 5 of Edge of Night

Content warning: grief, implied dead parents, alcohol consumption

"So, Mr Magpie, do you like poetry?" Ireena smiles at him as they climb the stairs.

"I do, it can be very beautiful. I prefer such things set to music, but that's a personal taste."

Magpie casts a slightly wary eye over the opulent staircase, taking in the disrepair and lack of upkeep. He takes another sip of wine and makes no comment.

"I enjoy the simplicity of poetry, so much can be said with so few words." Ireena is caught up in her own enthusiasm and does not notice Magpie's appraisal of the house. "Novels are good for escaping entirely to another realm, and you already know of my enjoyment of learning through books." This is said in Elvish, with a smile, before switching back to Common. "But poetry will remain my favourite, I think. If only for its love of pain that cannot be spoken in other ways."

Ireena opens a door on the landing that leads to a damp room piled with books, in the centre of which is a chair. The dust marks on the floor indicate that a desk once also stood there, but judging by the fate of other furnishings in the house, this was probably pilfered to become barricade materials a while ago.

Magpie replies in Elvish, quietly pleased to be able to use his native tongue. "Songs are my favourite, I believe. The dual storytelling between lyrics and tune is wonderfully versatile, but poetry definitely has a beauty of it's own, I can see why it calls to you so." He takes an almost hesitant step into the room, and checks back that she's joining him.

Ireena follows him into the study and responds in Elvish, clearly excited to be able to do so. "I wish I had a better understanding of music. It is a rare thing to hear music in Barovia that isn't a funeral march. Unless you encounter the Vistani whose performances are... livelier." Ireena smirks, and gestures to the room. "This is my library!"

Magpie quirks an amused grin at her Elvish, and takes a slow look around the room. "We heard Vistani musicians at the party. They played very well, Sierra was there among them actually. You'll have to see if she'll play the violin for you, it's truly beautiful."

"I would like that." Ireena pauses, wondering how far she can push her luck. "Maybe you would dance with me."

Magpie crouches in front of a bookshelf, scanning the titles distractedly, not so much as reaching a hand out to touch any of them. "I'm not sure you'd enjoy that, I was... never in a position to be taught any of the proper dances, and quite besides, I've been reliably told I have two left feet."

Ireena crouches next to him. "Then I shall simply have to teach you."

Her smile is soft and her tone no longer teasing. The tension in her shoulders is heavy, but not directed at this conversation or her present company. It is tension she's clearly been carrying for a long time.

"I like this one." She selects a book from the shelf. "It's long, but it tells the most wonderful story of a hero who journeys to find his way home after a long battle away from those he loves." She strokes the cover wistfully.

Magpie looks over at the book, admiring the cover.

"Sounds like a compelling tale." He casts his eyes to the floor briefly, and takes another drink of wine before focusing back up on Ireena and the book. "You have so many books, it must be lovely to be able to come here and escape with them."

"Father loved to read. And there weren't exactly many other ways for me to spread my wings beyond this village." She sighs darkly and gestures at the window. "Even before..."

Aware that her façade has slipped again, Ireena straightens her shoulders and attempts another smile.

"But yes, I am lucky. There are a few tomes in here that predate the beginning of the Von Zarovich reign in Barovia."

"Really? How old does that make them?" Magpie looks very interested at the promise of old books, a shadow that had fallen over his face lifting a little.

"Well over a century! Father rarely let anyone handle them, they're very delicate, but I always loved the way old books smell."

“Incredible. I shan’t ask to look at them, but what are they about? I often find some of the most fascinating stuff is in the oldest books.”

"There's a first edition of some very dramatic plays, and a couple of these epic poems too. If I'm being entirely honest, I am not completely sure I know what is in all of the oldest books Father had. But please, if you would like, feel free to select any volumes that take your fancy to take with you. It is wonderful to finally have a fellow bibliophile to share these with. My brother is not opposed to literature, but he's mostly been too busy with more important things to indulge me in expounding the joys of fiction."

Magpie looks gently surprised. "You'd let me bring some? Just like that?"

"I doubt Ismark will miss them, I will certainly be bringing some with me, and Father hardly has a use for them any more. Of course you may take some, as many as you would like." She laughs a little. "Or as many as you think you can carry, at any rate!"

Magpie laughs a little in return, a hesitant set to his face still. "It won't be many then. Most of us ended up here without a bag. You're sure I can borrow some?"

"Borrow, have, whatever you would like. And while we can't promise armour or weapons, I feel confident my brother can provide satchels or something to carry possessions in." Ireena puts a hand on his arm gently. "I mean it, really."

Magpie flinches at the touch, and pulls his arm away gently. "Satchels would be a great help, I don't think Fox's bag will survive anything else being put in it."

Ireena retracts her hand, but does not seem offended. "I did notice that sewing does not appear to be among Lord Ripley's particular skills."

Magpie laughs properly this time. “Apparently not, though I’m not sure I can say much after the gods awful job I did on those replacement gloves. It turns out not having something proper to cut the fabric with is a significant hindrance.”

"I hadn't liked to mention it, but they were somewhat unorthodox." Ireena giggles. "I wondered if it was some new trend from where you're from!"

“Decidedly not, just shoddy and hurried craftsmanship on my part.” He gives her a lopsided grin. “If you’re certain I can take a couple of books with me, do you have sections you’d rather I chose from? Or perhaps any recommendations?”

"You must feel free to choose whatever you'd like, although I suggest you take something less likely to fall apart when you touch it! But if you are open to suggestions, then I could show you some of my personal favourites?"

“I’d welcome that gladly, I find myself decidedly in a position of rather too much choice, and while I’d often like nothing more than to stay up all night browsing, I fear after the day we’ve had I need the rest.”

Ireena starts pulling books from shelves and various piles. They're all well-thumbed volumes, but don't seem in danger of falling apart completely. They span a wide range of genres: a poetry anthology by a Lord Byron, the classic epic poem she'd picked out earlier, a trilogy of long form fantasy, a collection of old Elvish plays, a couple of shorter looking novels (one historical fiction and one murder mystery), and a nonfiction biography of ancient rulers of Barovia. She sets them down in a pile in front of Magpie.

"This should narrow down the selection somewhat, I wasn't sure what you preferred, so I have chosen my favourites of many genres." She looks between Magpie and the pile a little nervously. "I hope there's something to your liking here?"

Magpie looks at the pile in astonishment, and brushes a gloved hand delicately across the covers.

"All of it, I'd wager; I'll struggle to pick those that I can carry from such a fascinating collection." He looks up and catches her eye. "Thank you. Truly."

Ireena shows him a flash of the smile she must've had before the recent events of her life, and it lights up her whole face for a moment.

"You are more than welcome, Magpie. I am aware that the journey ahead of us will be difficult, but I will not regret the opportunity to spend more time with you." She pauses and then adds almost as an afterthought, "With all of you. It will be nice to be able to say I have friends."

"It would be lovely indeed." Magpie looks back at the books, carefully thumbing through a couple of pages and starting to sort them into two neat piles. "After such a kind gesture, the least I could do is help you with your Elvish, if you still want to learn."

"Very much so, if it isn't too much trouble!" Ireena suddenly looks like she might cry and turns towards the door. "We should be getting back to the others, it is intolerably cruel of me to leave them solely in the company of my brother for too long." She turns back, and if her voice cracks, she doesn't acknowledge it. "Besides, as you said, you've all had a very long day. I imagine you will be wanting to rest soon."

Magpie blinks a couple of times at the abrupt change in mood, but makes no comment on it. He drains the last of his wine and sets the glass down, carefully picking up a stack of five books he'd set aside, the biography of rulers of Barovia, Elvish plays, and trilogy of fantasy, balancing them carefully in his arm before picking his glass back up.

"Are these alright? Is it too many?"

"No, no of course not! That's fine! Would you like some help carrying them?"

"That's very kind of you, but I have a good hold on them, and there's no risk of me spilling my wine." He gives her a cheeky grin. "Well, shall we go and save the others from the company of your brother then?"

Ireena smiles back, small and shaky, but perhaps more real than some of her smiles up to this point. "An excellent idea, Mr Magpie."

She leads the way back out of the study. She pauses on the landing and points at another door. "I believe that is to be your room for the night, if you'd prefer to drop the books off there, although I have no objections to you bringing them downstairs to share your finds with the others, if you wish."

"I –" Magpie looks torn, and a flicker of something passes over his face. "Perhaps, I'll drop most of them off. Bring just one down. To flick through."

"Great, I can wait here, or just meet you downstairs if you'd rather?"

"I'll be just a second." Magpie smiles at her briefly, and dips into the room to gently place the books down, keeping hold of the Elvish plays, and returning to her quickly.

"Shall we?" Ireena gestures at the staircase.

Magpie nods, and walks alongside her downwards, gently clutching the gifted book to his chest.

Written by Francesca Forrest & Nick Drew

Edited by Rowan E. Madden

Edge of Night is a dnd 5e actual play podcast, brought to you by Stringer Games. It is available on iTunes, Spotify & all good podcast providers.

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darlinvandijk · 6 years ago

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Thrift Shop

Concept: request where “Ruel cleaning out his closet and accidentally giving his favorite hoodie (some limited edition shit) to a local thrift shop. Then one day he sees you in *that* hoodie and politely asks you if he could have it back. you have no idea who he is, but after some time, you get to know him better, and catch some feelings.” Dm me and whatnot for requests and I’ll be happy to comply! (This is really fucking long lol) I hope you enjoy :)

I slowly walk through the rows of clothing in my absolute favorite thrift shop, letting my fingers graze against the clothes, feeling all of the different textures and fabrics. I came here to buy a suede skirt for my mother’s annual Holiday party, but so far I have about 5 pieces of clothing and a hat, a hat that I’ll probably never wear. I’m strolling through the men’s section, trying to make my way across the store to dresses, when my eyes catch a muted reddish brown crewneck. I pull out the sweater, eyeing the “Holy Spirit” black writing across the front of it, before ultimately deciding its going to be added to my ever growing pile of clothes. I finally get everything I need, go up to the register, and pull out my card to pay for everything I impulsively bought. The cashier, who’s gotten to know me and become one of my best friends over the last few months of me always being here, looks at my stuff and sends me a small smile, before looking at the sweater and grinning.

“We actually just got this one in today, you should have seen the guy that donated it” he muses, folding everything up and placing it into a bag for me. I raise an eyebrow at him, intrigued by what he found so interesting about the mystery donor. He watches my expression and lets out a chuckle.

“Jake you have to tell me now, what was so great about him?” I question curiously, wanting to know why my friend had such a mischievous smile on his face. He passes me the bag and receipt before dramatically leaning on the counter and letting out a sigh, throwing his head back for effect.

“Sweets he was the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, like he could take me anywhere and anytime, and honestly definitely your type” Jake draws out, causing me to choke on air before laughing. I let him fan himself dramatically for a couple more seconds before rolling my eyes and laughing at my dramatic but great friend.

“Okay jake if you’re done losing your shit, I shall be on my way. Don’t forget this weekend though, you and Ali are supposed to bring the snacks since I’m hosting movie night” I remind him, about the deal our friend group made for our weekly movie night, completely ignoring his fascination over the unknown guy. He nods his head and waves bye as I make my way out of the store and back to my apartment, thinking about how I can put all my new clothes to use. ———

It’s been a few days since I went thrifting and today I decided to finally head out to the shops, wearing my new favorite sweater. I paired the Holy Spirit sweater with a pair of shorts and some black vans, before deciding the outfit was decent enough to be out in public in.

I make it to the shops and stroll around, looking at the setups in the windows, the different cafes and pastry shops, and all the various stores just begging me to spend my money there. I decide to make a quick stop at a cute little pastry place, sitting outside with my drink and chocolate croissant. As I sit outside at one of the tables enjoying the nice weather and hearing the chatter of the families strolling around, I feel someone tap my shoulder. I turn around in my seat, coming face to face with someone’s stomach, before having to completely tilt my head back in order to make eye contact with the random but extremely tall stranger. I freeze a little upon making eye contact with the gorgeous green eyed male, before throwing him a confused look since he obviously had something to say.

“Hey I hope I’m not bothering you, but uh this might be weird, like really weird actually, but uhm can I ask you a question? Did you thrift that sweater?” He asks with a crooked nervous smile, looking me over, spending a little bit longer on my sweater before looking back into my eyes. I slightly blush at his unwavering gaze at me, from not only being put on the spot, but from being flustered by the attention of such an attractive guy. I then take in the question he asked, becoming perpelxed that he came all the way up to me to ask about the very worn out sweater.

“Yeah? Why?” I question, throwing him a small smile, not wanting to come off too awkward or blunt to him. He gives me a boyish one back before taking another long look at my sweater, nervously wringing his hands in front of him, and slightly shifiting from foot to foot. I catch on to his anxious behavior and motion to the seat in front of me, blushing at the smile he throws me before taking the seat. He takes a deep breath before looking me in the eyes with an apprehensive expression.

“Can I have that sweater?” He blurts out completely catching me off guard, while also catching himself off guard by the apparent blush that rises to his cheeks. I stare at him with my mouth partially opened, unsure on what to say to his abrupt question. Like I barely know the guy, he might be attractive but I’m not going to strip right here for him to have this sweater. I slightly tilt my head to the side as I watch him let out a groan and cover his face with his hands.

“So I don’t know you and honestly have no clue what to say. Like well no, because I don’t have another shirt to wear, and also no because I bought it and don’t usually give my clothes to random people? Like I’m not about to strip here for a random guy?” I slowly speak, trying to figure out how to reply to him, still confused by this whole situation. He takes a deep breath at my answer before running a hand through his hair, causing my breathing to stutter for a second. He looks up at me and throws me a smirk, catching on to my reaction, making my face instantly heat up.

“That wasn’t the way I was going to ask, it just came out, but like please I’ll do anything to get that sweater back, I’ll even go buy you a new shirt right now ” the boy pleads, with big round eyes and a slightly pouted bottom lip. He pulls out a wallet and sets it on the table, giving me a look of pure desperation. I honestly have no clue what this guys deal is with this sweater, like did he say he wanted it back when I never took it from him in the first place?

“You want it back? But like I don’t know you so there’s no way I took it from you” I explain watching him bounce his leg anxiously, biting at his bottom lip. He starts to turn pink, seeming almost embarrassed to explain his situation with my sweater.

“Here’s the thing, I donated a lot to the thrift store, but I had no clue that my favorite sweater got put into the pile. Like that sweater is really valuable and also has a lot of sentimental value to me. I’ll pay you for it if that’s what it takes” he rushes out, eyes locked on the sweater, before looking at me with a nervous look. I look at the sweater, then to his wallet, then back to him, before deciding what my final decision is.

“I don’t know you at all, like I don’t even know your name, so I feel weird on giving you something I just bought, but I also don’t want to take your money. Why don’t we get to like know each other and then I can decide on if i believe the story and if I’ll give you the sweater” I reason, watching a grin blossom across his face at my words, before nodding his head vigorously, making me throw my head back and laugh at his excitement.

“Deal, how about we start with something simple. My names Ruel, what’s yours?” He asks, with a sincere look of genuine interest as he waits for my reply, I smile before holding my hand out, ready to finally introduce myself to the beautiful guy in front of me. ———

“You’re kidding me? There’s no way that’s true” I snort out, watching Ruel give me an incredulous look from his spot on my couch. He scoffs as he looks at me, throwing me a betrayed glare, trying his hardest to not smile. It’s been two months since I met him on that fateful sunny day, two months of inside jokes and shared stories, and I couldn’t be more grateful to have him in my life.

“For you information it IS true, I met Tyler and literally ran away from him after introducing myself, I was too nervous” he explains, laughing at the look I give him, before seating myself next to him, handing him his takeout container, both of us getting ready to binge on some Netflix movies, like we usually do on each other’s free days. He sends me a small smile and grabs a blanket, pulling it over the both of us, saying it’s protection from the cold and possible falling noodles if we drop any. We enjoy each other’s company in silence, with comments every now and then, our food finished with only the empty cartons on the coffee table, when he makes a move leaving me completely flustered.

He shifts a little, his left side completely pressed against my right side now, before setting an arm on the back of the couch, slowly moving it down until it rests upon my shoulders. I look up at him to see him already watching me, his green doe eyes and rosy cheeks waiting for my reaction, before I softly smile and turn to rest my back against his chest. He lets out a quiet chuckle, moving his arm down to wrap around my waist, holding me as we watch the rest of Spider-Man. This is the first time he’s made a move on me like this, like yeah we’ve had our moments of flirting and being a little touchy, but he’s never genuinely made a move. I smile as I think about how he might like me, the way I’ve grown to like him, shocked that he wasn’t just being friendly during all those fleeting touches we’ve shared. Shocked that maybe the feelings were mutual.

As the movie comes to an end, I notice the way our position has changed throughout it, at some point we must’ve shifted because I’m currently resting on his chest as he lays down across the couch. His hands rest on my back, one resting on my bare skin underneath my sweater, the sweater that actually made this whole friendship possible. He shifts once the final credits start to roll, sitting up and pulling me with him. I make a move to get off his lap, but he places his hands on my hips and holds me in place. He gives me a nervous grin, much like the one he gave when we first met, and reaches up to move some of my hair behind my ear. He lets his hand linger against my cheek for a second, before putting it back onto my hip.

“So I don’t know how to say this.. because I truly value our friendship and would hate to fuck it up.” He spits out, breaking the silence with his anxious statement. I give him a small smile, lifting a hand timidly to smooth out the wrinkles forming between his eyebrows. He stops furrowing them and just watches as I lay my hand against his cheek, feeling it heat up instantly.

“I don’t think anything you say can ruin our friendship, just go ahead and say it” I softly tell him, hoping to ease up any of the nervousness he feels, starting to get anxious myself on what has him so shy all of a sudden. He nods his head and take a deep breath, before looking up into my eyes and giving me the cute boyish grin I’ve come to love. I start to blush under his gaze, not being able to read the emotion that’s filling his eyes.

“I really like you, like I mean really fucking like you. I get it if it’s not reciprocated, we can just pretend this never happened, but I just needed to tell you. I’m really falling for you” Ruel whispers out, looking away from my eyes, too scared to see the look on my face. I can feel his hands shaking as they hold my hips, filled with fear of rejection. I stop breathing for a second, not being able to comprehend that he actually likes me in a way as more than friends. I let out a quiet laugh watching his eyes snap to mine in confusion, before I throw my arms around his neck, and hold him as tight as I can.

“I’m falling for you too” I softly whisper out, my face still pressed into the crook of his neck. I feel his body shake as he lets out a laugh of pure happiness, completely elated that he not only didn’t ruin a friendship, but that his feelings were wholeheartedly shared. We sit in silence for a little bit, just enjoying the peace and happiness filling the air around us. He pulls back so he can see my face, glancing down at my lips and the back to my eyes, slowly leaning in before connecting our lips in a soft yet sweet kiss. He pulls away and rests his forehead against mine, leaning in to place a few chaste kisses, causing me to let out a laugh. I watch his eyes light up in awe upon hearing the gleeful laugh leave my mouth, happy that he’s the one making me so happy.

“Sooo does this make you my girlfriend?” He asks slowly, not too sure where to go next after making the main move. I give him a smirk, laughing at the way he instantly becomes weary at my expression.

“Hmmm no” I sarcastically reply, watching his eyes widen before they form into a glare, catching on to my underlying sarcasm. He scoffs and instantly tackles me into the couch, landing on top of me and pressing kisses all over my face, making me shriek out at the sudden attack. He pulls away a little so that his face hovers above mine, giving me the softest smile before leaning down and pressing his lips to the tip of my nose. We smile at each other, both of us mentally agreeing that this is the start of our relationship. ———

“Hey baby, can I ask you something?” Ruel asks anxiously from my kitchen, where he’s currently on the search for the Cheetos he left here. I glance up from my place on the couch, waiting for him to go on with whatever his question is, before finally coming to the conclusion that I’ll need to verbally reply before he can finally spit out his question.

“Yeah?” I question, throwing him a small smile, not wanting to make my poor boyfriend even more nervous than he already was. He gives me a boyish one back before taking another long look at my sweater, nervously wringing his hands in front of him, and slightly shifiting from foot to foot. I catch on to his anxious behavior and motion to the seat next to me, blushing at the beautiful smile he throws me before taking the seat. He takes a deep breath before looking me in the eyes with an apprehensive expression. As I look at him I feel a strange sense of deja vu, almost like this had happened before.

“Can I have that sweater?” He blurts out completely catching me off guard, while also catching himself of guard by the apparent blush that rises to his cheeks. I stare at him with my mouth partially opened, unsure on what to say to my idiot of a boyfriend. Like he might be attractive but I’m not going to strip right now just for him to have this sweater back. I slightly tilt my head to the side as I watch him let out a groan and cover his face with his hands.

“Sorry I don’t give clothes to random people” I jokingly reply, watching the look of realization cross his face. He walks over to the couch and lifts me up, placing me on top of his lap with a sly grin. I wearily watch him, completely unsure on what his next move will be, he’s literally so unpredictable. He leans forward and gives me a kiss, sliding his hands under my sweater, and letting them roam across my skin. As the kiss becomes heated, I notice the way his hands seem to be less touchy and more focused on the sweater. I instantly pull away from Ruel and send him a glare, catching on to his sneaky little plan.

“Ruel you asshole, did you only kiss me right now to try and get the sweater off me?” I snap out, watching the guilty grin that spreads across his face. He laughs as I continue to glare at him, placing his hands on my waist and rubbing soft circles into my skin, enveloping me in warmth with his touch. I continue to glare at him, not wanting to let him off the hook so fast, even though I can already feel my stubbornness melting away.

“You had told me that you wouldn’t strip for a random guy, but I’m not random anymore baby. You’re looking at your boyfriend who is kindly pleading with you to give it back, I’ll even give you a different sweater of mine or even take you to buy a new sweater” He pleads, watching the look of mischief cross over my face at his words. He lets out a groan, realizing he just practically made a deal with the devil himself. I excitedly flash him a grin, feeling my cheeks heat up in pure excitement for what’s to come.

“Time to go to the Thrift Shop” I screech out in glee, causing Ruel to instantly press his face against my chest in defeat. I mean it’s his fault really, maybe he should double check piles before donating.

#ruelvincentvandijk #ruel van dijk #one ruel #ruel #ruel one shot #ruel imagines #ruel imagine #imagine #imagines #one shot #x reader #free time ep #ruel fanfic

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angrylizardjacket · 5 years ago

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Yaaasss!!! Jelous Ben was si cuteee and we love a supportive mother, her mom is fantastic and a savage. I hace a question, how did you come up with reader's character in x-men?? I legit googled it as I thought it was a real character, so welk done.

i love her mum so fuckin much, dude, she’s supportive but can still be embarrassing at times. i wrote her, not like my actual mum, but like my dad now that i think about it. dude literally told me over the phone that he’d physically fight people for shittalking me (not just in general, there’s more context, but the point still stands). idk i think it’s disingenuous to not let parental characters have certain flaws, like they’re allowed to be overprotective and spiteful, as well as caring and supportive. i love her too.

oH SHIT DUDE LEMME TALK ABT MY GIRL CASSIDY TEMPLE I LOVE HER SO FUCKING MUCH AND I”VE PUT SO MUCH THOUGHT INTO HER THAT THIS WILL HAVE A READ MORE

so cassidy’s powers are actually based off of an xmen oc i’ve already written 70k about, Aoibheal Cassidy, younger sister of Banshee, Sean Cassidy, and Cassidy Temple’s name is a reference to her, since originally I was going to essentially have Y/N playing Aoibheal (because it’s my fic and i can include an homage to my xmen oc as a treat). the powers themselves are based loosely on Multiple Man from X-Men: The Last Stand, except Cassidy’s clones can’t live a life of their own like his can. In the xmen fic, aoibheal starts off with having unlimited clones, and they can explode because i thought it was neat tbh.

From the original fic, Molotov Heart, chapter 3, rubatosis:

[Context; humans experimenting on mutants between X-Men First Class and X-Men Days Of Future Past have caught Sean and Aoibheal and they experiment on them even though Aoibheal’s powers have not manifested (she is approximately 13) and they kill her brother in front of her]:

Stunned into silence, she can feel something white-hot building inside of her, all the rage and fear and pain becoming almost tangible.

She mutates.

Copies of Aoibheal, clones, appear around them, filling up the space between the now screaming and bewildered 'doctors'. Aoibheal herself doesn't seem to notice the clones, bawling her eyes out, an action the clones themselves are mirroring, and she thinks of nothing but freedom and escape, focusing on the white-hot feeling inside of her until it overwhelmed her. With the force of a bunker-buster bomb, the clones began to combust, began to explode, first a few, and then all at once. Killing the human personel who had kept her hostage, the blast reduced the warehouse to mere cinders, freed Aoibheal and left her clothing in tatters, but she was alive damn it.

The reason Cassidy has a limited number is because i needed a way to have her powered up as a horseman, like a distinct power up, rather than just something unseen like heightened reflexes and strength.

I would like to point out also, that it’s not stated, but Cassidy’s explosions (NOT AOIBHEAL’s) are never to do with heat, they’re always about force. the explosions themselves are never hot, never have anything to do with fire or anything like that, she builds up force inside of the clones, and lets it tear her apart from the inside out as a wave that destroys the things it comes into contact with.

The scream was originally hereditary, like Banshee, it developed as her secondary mutation.

From the Marvel Wiki:

The Secondary Mutation (or "Second Mutation") is a phenomenon in which an existing mutant undergoes another mutation, gaining additional powers, such as healing, or a change in appearance.

Secondary mutation is noted as the appearance of new powers, or an increase in existing powers.

It was stated by Beast that the secondary mutations usually occurred in the twenties of the subjects, and generally appeared in time of great stress.

From the original fic, chapter 8, nodus tollens:

The appearance of the secondary mutation:

The world falls apart in a blur of movement. The gun goes off just after Raven jumps and makes a break for the window, the bullet curves as she crashes through the glass, following her on the way down. Tackling Erik earns Hank a mean right hook to the jaw, but Aoibheal’s there, looking at Trask like a dear in the headlights, memories whipping through her head like a hurricane - the sick fuck looks pleased to see her – her mouth falls open and she screams. She and the clone scream in tandem, their voices supersonic as the surrounding people clutched their ears for dear life; struggling to keep a hold of the feeling in her chest that caused her to explode, the clone detonates like a firework, scorching the wallpaper while Trask is stumbling to the door. There’s blood leaking from his ears but Aoibheal can’t move, can only scream and relive the memory of her brother’s murder over and over again.

Hank discussing it:

"I've never seen a secondary mutation so vastly different!" No longer blue or furry, [Hank’s] smile is excited as he looks over at her. Sharing the cockpit feels almost familiar by now, with Aoibheal curled up in the passenger seat nursing a glass of water. "It makes sense though, your original mutation – the explosions – would be an extension of your temperature immunity, but your secondary mutation is hereditary."

Cassidy’s scream, however, unlike Banshee’s, only effects things with ears, not inanimate objects like glass. Of course she could learn the right pitch to get glass to shatter like an opera singer, but generally speaking, her scream only effects things that can hear.

OKAY LETS TALK ABT THE STUFF I FABRICATED FOR THE FIC

oh GOD I WANT TO TALK ABOUT HER RELATIONSHIP WITH MAGNETO

not as in romantic, as in he is literally her character’s main inspiration in the films. i’m literally making a fake trailer right now that’s intercut with moments from his DOFP speech that was broadcast to the whole of america.

i love dofp (possibly to my detriment) but i always thought it was weird that no-one was ever like.... magneto has a point. BECAUSE HE HAS A POINT. he’s speaking directly to disenfranchised and SCARED mutants across the nation, and yet everyone’s heralding Mystique as the new face of mutant kind. YES she made a point, but like.... did no-one vibe with magneto when he promised the destruction of mankind? i would. anyways.

so i thought it would be interesting for this character, Cassidy, to have this hero-worship of Magneto, taking his words to heart like scripture, ultimately making her a foil for Phoenix, Xavier’s protege.

it’s why i specifically included this:

“You should be,” you hissed, putting your all into the words as you spoke them, and you hear Ben inhale sharply beside you, “we shall inherit the Earth.”

“What follows is a struggle as Cassidy and the figure – revealed to be her clone – proceed to kill the man. When they’re finished, and the man’s dead on the ground, Cassidy straightens her outfit, and we hear –“ as the director reads, Michael begins to slowly clap, “a slow clap, and it’s revealed that Apocalypse, as well as Storm, Angel, and Magneto, had all witnessed the event.”

“We are the future, we are the ones who shall inherit the Earth,” Michael reads as he stops clapping.

“Magneto,” you breathe reverentially, and when you look to him, you and Michael share a sharp smile.

which is a direct quote from magneto’s speech in Days of Future Past:

You built these weapons to destroy us. Why? Because you are afraid of our gifts. Because we are different. Humanity has always feared that which is different. Well, I'm here to tell you, to tell the world, you're right to fear us. We are the future. We are the ones who will inherit this earth, and anyone who stands in our way will suffer the same fate as these men you see before you. Today was meant to be a display of your power. Instead I give you a glimpse of the devastation my race can unleash upon yours. Let this be a warning to the world. And to my mutant brothers and sisters out there, I say this; no more hiding, no more suffering. You have lived in the shadows in shame and fear for too long. Come out, join me. Fight together in the brotherhood of our kind. A new tomorrow, that starts today.

which ALSO is what turns her into the next big villain for the franchise, because she sees Magneto, the man she kind of thinks of like a god, turn on and help kill Apocalypse, the man who claimed to be an actual god, and side with the people who, ultimately, don’t want to destroy the human race like she does, and also killed the man she loved. she takes Magneto’s ideologies and turns them up to 11. he fucks off to create a mutant paradise away from prying eyes and is happy, she won’t be happy until all humans are punished.

it’s why, in the beginning, she and raven can’t still work together, because raven wants to rescue mutants, but not at the expense of unnecessary human lives, and cassidy sees all humans as complicit in the torture, and therefore deserving of punishment.

she has deemed herself judge, jury, and executioner of human kind, and they have all been found guilty.

i’m so excited to see if i get around to writing some of the next film because i really want to explore the dichotomy of Xavier’s ‘no-one is ever really gone/there’s always hope’ and magneto’s ‘you were right to be afraid of us, we are the ones who shall inherit the earth’. Everyone has given up on Cassidy in one way or another, whether it be by betrayal or death, and so when she finds this symbiote who literally becomes a part of her, makes her stronger, and is happy to kill people with little regard for who they are, she’ll take it.

EDIT: here’s the first 26 seconds of the fake trailer (Y/N here is played by Jurnee Smollett, aka Black Canary from Birds of Prey)

youtube

ANGEL & RIOT

i wanted y/n to kiss ben hardy that’s literally it.

actually no that’s not it 100%, i think it’s super amusing in a kind of bleak way that he got fridged for her, like his death, both in the “””comics””” (as in the comic universe for the fics) and in the film, causes her to seek out a force that would help bring him back to life. in the “””comics””” she originally seeks out a mutant, but when the mutant who can bring people back refuses to help her, she’s told of experiments at The Life Foundation, who are working on engineering the next step in human evolution, and she’s thinking that they’re experimenting on mutants again, like trask, and goes in guns blazing, but instead finds symbiotes. she bonds with a symbiote, thus becoming Riot Control, and the symbiote initially promises her all these things, including being able to find a way to ressurect angel, but eventually (in the “””comics”””) the power he gives her overtakes her need to ressurect her love, and riot ends up using her to try and build a ship to bring more symbiotes to take over earth.

IN THE FILM

okay OKAY okay OKAY so she’s looking for a way to ressurect angel at first, but riot’s in her ear while he’s seeing all her memories, and is convincing her to get revenge on the people who are responsible for his death (nightcrawler, jean, and Magneto specifically) so its not that the xmen are just in the plot by happenstance there’s like actual beef, love it.

I also love that Cassidy’s powers are handicapped when she’s got Riot, since her scream would injure or even possibly kill him. Yes i specifically paired her with a symbiote for that reason, which is also the reason why her clone explosions aren’t heat based.

but anyway, can i spoil the ending? i wanna spoil the ending;

so there’s this big showdown between riot control and the xmen, and jean confronts cassidy, trying to talk her down like ‘what would angel think if he saw you? What you’ve become?’ and Cassidy’s furious, thinking that jean’s trying to guilt her, like, angel would be so ashamed

“Keep his name out of your fucking mouth, you have no idea what he’d think-”

“He’d be terrified of you.” And it’s so fucking like, cruel and cold coming from Jean.

“Shut up.”

“You have become a monster; you have maimed your idol-” [we cut to a shot of magneto looking all fucked up and bloody, watching with anger in his eyes] “and you have left Angel for dead. If you’d really cared about him, you would have already gotten him back. Instead, you come for revenge against the people who could have helped you -”

or something like that, and riot control has a whole breakdown, lashing out, snarling that no-one could help her, and when they tried, they ended up dead (angel, apocalypse) and she starts losing control, and her voice starts to distort in and out of riot’s, making it clear he’s taking control of her completely.

there’s this big, final fight, which culminates with jean grabbing cassidy’s face and trying to burn riot out of her.

“No-one is beyond help.” And Jean’s like, got tears in her eyes, desperate to save this girl who’s caused so much pain, but who sees herself as so wretched and beyond help, and we see the symbiote burning away and screaming, but also the physical signs of cassidy’s mutation as like, peeling away in embers, like the black scales around her eyes, and the way her whole eyes are seen as black is now clearing away, and she takes both of Jean’s hands and forces her to keep holding on, to keep looking in her natural fucking eyes for the first and last time as she burns out too.

“You can’t save everyone.” and then Cassidy’s just ash in the wind.

also this ending, in a meta-sense, makes sense, because after this Disney buys Fox and there’s no more this-universe X-Men films, so they had to do a self-contained story, there couldn’t be things left super unresolved.

OR maybe she’s fine, maybe she gets saved and riot burns out of her (spoilers, he fucks off and doesn’t die, hence, Venom (2018); it takes him about 20 years to recuperate) i haven’t decided.

#the angry lizard speaks #hyniels #dreashappyworld

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isslibrary · 4 years ago

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NEW LIBRARY MATERIAL September 2020 - February 2021

Bibliography

Sorted by Call Number / Author.

011.7 F

Fadiman, Clifton, 1904-1999. The new lifetime reading plan / : the classical guide to world literature, Revised and expanded. 4th ed. New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 1999, c1997.

155.2 G

Gladwell, Malcolm, 1963-. David and Goliath : underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants. First edition. Goliath : "Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?" -- The Advantages of Disadvantages (and the Disadvantages of Advantages). Vivek Ranadiv©♭: "It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before." ; Teresa DeBrito: "My largest class was twenty-nine kids. Oh, it was fun." ; Caroline Sacks: "If I'd gone to the University of Maryland, I'd still be in science. -- The Theory of Desirable Difficulty. David Boies: You wouldn't wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you? ; Emil "Jay" Freireich: "How Jay did it, I don't know." ; Wyatt Walker: "De rabbit is de slickest o' all de animals de Lawd ever made." -- The Limits of Power. Rosemary Lawlor: "I wasn't born that way. This was forced upon me." ; Wilma Derksen: "We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to." ; Andr©♭ Trocm©♭: "We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews.". This book uncovers the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty and the powerful and the dispossessed. In it the author challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks. He begins with the real story of what happened between the giant and the shepherd boy (David and Goliath) those many years ago. From there, the book examines Northern Ireland's Troubles, the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, murder and the high costs of revenge, and the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms, all to demonstrate how much of what is beautiful and important in the world arises from what looks like suffering and adversity. -- From book jacket.

170 H

Haidt, Jonathan, author. The happiness hypothesis : finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. Paperback edition. "The Happiness Hypothesis is a book about ten Great Ideas. Each chapter is an attempt to savor one idea that has been discovered by several of the world's civilizations--to question it in light of what we now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that still apply to our modern lives and illuminate the causes of human flourishing. Award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt shows how a deeper understanding of the world's philosophical wisdom and its enduring maxims--like "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," or "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"--can enrich and even transform our lives."--Back cover.

171 K

Kohn, Alfie. The brighter side of human nature : altruism and empathy in everyday life. New York : Basic Books, c1990.

305.5 W

Wilkerson, Isabel, author. Caste : the origins of our discontents. First edition. The man in the crowd -- Toxins in the permafrost and heat rising all around -- The arbitrary construction of human divisions -- The eight pillars of caste -- The tentacles of caste -- The consequences of caste -- Backlash -- Awakening -- Epilogue: A world without caste. "In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of America life today."--.

305.8 W

Williamson, Joel. A rage for order : Black/White relations in the American South since emancipation. New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 1968. Full ed.: published as The crucible of race. 1984. Traces the history of race relations, examines changing public attitudes, and tells the stories of those involved in Civil Rights movement.

305.9 P

Pipher, Mary Bray. The middle of everywhere : the world's refugees come to our town. First edition. Cultural collisions on the Great Plains -- The beautiful laughing sisters-an arrival story -- Into the heart of the heartland -- All that glitters ... -- Children of hope, children of tears -- Teenagers--Mohammed meets Madonna -- Young adults--"Is there a marriage broker in Lincoln?"-- Family--"A bundle of sticks cannot be broken" -- African stories -- Healing in all times and places -- Home-a global positioning system for identity -- Building a village of kindness. Offers the tales of refugees who have escaped countries riddled by conflict and ripped apart by war to realize their dream of starting a new life in America, detailing their triumph over adversity.

306.4 P

Pollan, Michael. The botany of desire : a plant's-eye view of the world. Random House trade pbk. ed. New York : Random House, 2002. Desire : sweetness, plant : the apple (Malus domestica) -- Desire : beauty, plant : the tulip (Tulipa) -- Desire : intoxication, plant : marijuana (Cannabis sativa x indica) -- Desire : control, plant : the potato (Solanum tuberosum). Focusing on the human relationship with plants, the author of Second nature uses botany to explore four basic human desires, sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control, through portraits of four plants that embody them, the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato. Every school child learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers; the bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The botany of desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. In telling the stories of four familiar species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind's most basic yearnings. And just as we've benefited from these plants, the plants have done well by us. So who is really domesticating whom?.

307.1 I

Immerwahr, Daniel, 1980-. Thinking small : the United States and the lure of community development. First Harvard University Press paperback edition 2018. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2015. Preface: Modernization, development, and community -- Introduction: Actually existing localism -- When small was big -- Development without modernization -- Peasantville -- Grassroots empire -- Urban villages -- Epilogue: What is dead and what is undead in community development?.

323.60973 I

In the hands of the people : Thomas Jefferson on equality, faith, freedom, compromise, and the art of citizenship. First edition. New York, NY : Random House, 2020. "Thomas Jefferson believed in the covenant between a government and its citizens, in both the government's responsibilities to its people and also the people's responsibility to the republic. In this illuminating collection, a project of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham has gathered Jefferson's most powerful and provocative reflections on the subject, drawn from public speeches and documents as well as his private correspondence. Still relevant centuries later, Jefferson's words provide a manual for U.S. citizenship in the twenty-first century. His thoughts will re-shape and revitalize the way readers relate to concepts including Freedom: "Divided we stand, united we fall." The importance of a free press:"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Public education: "Enlighten the public generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body & mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." Participation in government: A citizen should be "a participator in the government of affairs not merely at an election, one day in the year, but every day.""-- Provided by publisher.

324.6 P

Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. African American women in the struggle for the vote, 1850-1920. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1998. Revisiting the question of race in the woman suffrage movement -- African American women in the first generation of woman suffragists : 1850-1869 -- African American woman suffragists finding their own voices : 1870s and 1880s -- Suffrage strategies and ideas : African American women leaders respond during "the nadir" -- Mobilizing to win the vote : African American women's organizations -- Anti-black woman suffrage tactics and African American women's responses -- African American women as voters and candidates -- The nineteenth amendment and its meaning for African American women. This study of African American women's roles in the suffrage movement breaks new ground. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn draws from many original documents to take a comprehensive look at the African American women who sought the right to vote. She discovers numerous Black suffragists previously unknown. Analyzing the women's own stories, she examines why they joined the woman suffrage movement in the United States and how they participated in it - with white women, Black men, as members of African American women's organizations, or simultaneously in all three. Terborg-Penn further discusses their various levels of interaction and types of feminist philosophy. Noting that not all African American woman suffragists were from elite circles, Terborg-Penn finds representation from working-class and professional women as well.They came from all parts of the nation. Some employed radical, others conservative means to gain the right to vote. Black women, however, were unified in working to use the ballot to improve not only their own status, but the lives of Black people in their communities. Drawing from innumerable sources, Terborg-Penn argues that sexism and racism prevented African American women from voting and from full participation in the national suffrage movement. Following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, state governments in the South, enacted policies which disfranchised African American women, with many white suffragists closing their eyes to the discriminatory acts. Despite efforts to keep Black women politically powerless, Terborg-Penn contends that the Black suffrage was a source of empowerment. Every political and racial effort to keep African American women disfranchised met with their active resistance until Black women achieved full citizenship.

326.80922 B

Brands, H. W., author. The zealot and the emancipator : John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the struggle for American freedom. First Edition. Pottawatomie -- Springfield -- Harpers Ferry -- The telegraph office. "What do moral people do when democracy countenances evil? The question, implicit in the idea that people can govern themselves, came to a head in America at the middle of the nineteenth century, in the struggle over slavery. John Brown's answer was violence--violence of a sort some in later generations would call terrorism. Brown was a deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to do whatever was necessary to destroy slavery. When Congress opened Kansas territory to slavery, the eerily charismatic Brown raised a band of followers to wage war against the evil institution. One dark night his men tore several proslavery settlers from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords, as a bloody warning to others. Three years later Brown and his men assaulted the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the goal of furnishing slaves with weapons to murder their masters in a race war that would cleanse the nation of slavery once and for all. Abraham Lincoln's answer was politics. Lincoln was an ambitious lawyer and former office-holder who read the Bible not for moral guidance but as a writer's primer. He disliked slavery yet didn't consider it worth shedding blood over. He distanced himself from John Brown and joined the moderate wing of the new, antislavery Republican party. He spoke cautiously and dreamed big, plotting his path to Washington and perhaps the White House. Yet Lincoln's caution couldn't preserve him from the vortex of violence Brown set in motion. Arrested and sentenced to death, Brown comported himself with such conviction and dignity on the way to the gallows that he was canonized in the North as a martyr to liberty. Southerners responded in anger and horror that a terrorist was made into a saint. Lincoln shrewdly threaded the needle of the fracturing country and won election as president, still preaching moderation. But the time for moderation had passed. Slaveholders lumped Lincoln with Brown as an enemy of the Southern way of life; seven Southern states left the Union. Lincoln resisted secession, and the Civil War followed. At first a war for the Union, it became the war against slavery Brown had attempted to start. Before it was over, slavery had been destroyed, but so had Lincoln's faith that democracy can resolve its moral crises peacefully"--.

328.73 M

Meacham, Jon, author. His truth is marching on : John Lewis and the power of hope. First edition. Overture: the last march -- A hard life, a serious life -- The spirit of history -- Soul force -- In the image of God and democracy -- We are going to make you wish you was dead -- I'm going to die here -- This country don't run on love -- Epilogue: against the rulers of the darkness. "John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is a visionary and a man of faith. Using intimate interviews with Lewis and his family and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how the activist and leader was inspired by the Bible, his mother's unbreakable spirit, his sharecropper father's tireless ambition, and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr. A believer in hope above all else, Lewis learned from a young age that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a preacher, practiced by preaching to the chickens he took care of. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it--his first act of non-violent protest. Integral to Lewis's commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God, and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis "as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the nation-state in the eighteenth century. He did what he did--risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful--not in spite of America, but because of America, and not in spite of religion, but because of religion"--.

333.95 W

Wilson, Edward O. A window on eternity : a biologist's walk through Gorongosa National Park. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. Prologue: The Search for Eternity -- The Sacred Mountain of Mozambique -- Once There Were Giants -- War and Redemption -- Dung and Blood -- The Twenty-Foot Crocodile -- The Elephant Whisperer -- The House of Spiders -- The Clash of Insect Civilizations -- The Log of an Entomological Expedition -- The Struggle for Existence -- The Conservation of Eternity. "E.O. Wilson, one of the most celebrated scientists in the United States, shows why biodiversity is vital to the future of Earth and to our own species through the story of an African national park that may be the most diverse place on earth, in a gorgeously illustrated book"--. "The remarkable story of how one of the most biologically diverse habitats in the world was destroyed, restored, and continues to evolve--with stunning, full-color photographs by two of the world's best wildlife photographers. In 1976, Gorongosa National Park was the premier park in Mozambique, boasting one of the densest wildlife populations in all of Africa. Across 1,500 square miles of lush green floodplains, thick palm forests, swampy lakes, and vast plains roamed creatures great and small, from herds of wildebeest and elephant to countless bird species and insects yet to be classified. Then came the civil war of 1978-1992, when much of the ecosystem was destroyed, reducing some large animal populations by 90 percent or more. Due to a remarkable conservation effort sponsored by an American entrepreneur, the park was restored in the 1990s and is now evolving back to its former state. This is the story of that incredible transformation and why such biological diversity is so important. In A Window on Eternity, world-renowned biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward O. Wilson shows why biodiversity is vital to the future of the Earth, including our human population. It is in places like Gorongosa in Africa, explains Wilson, that our own species evolved. Wilson takes readers to the forested groves of the park's watershed on sacred Mount Gorongosa, then far away to deep gorges along the edge of the Rift Valley, places previously unexplored by biologists, with the aim of discovering new species and assessing their ancient origins. He treats readers to a war between termites and raider ants, describes 'conversations' with elephant herds, and explains the importance of a one-day 'bioblitz.' Praised as 'one of the finest scientists writing today' (Los Angeles Times), Wilson uses the story of Gorongosa to show the significance of biodiversity to humankind"--.

340.092 S

Sligh, Clarissa T., artist. Transforming hate : an artist's book. First edition. "This book evolved from a project for which I folded origami cranes from pages of white supremacist books for the exhibition, Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate ... I was trying to look at what it was like for me to turn hateful words into a beautiful art object. What actually evolved from that exploration helped me understand more fully the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of race, gender, class and sexual orientation." --inside front cover.

343.730 I

Internet law. Amenia, New York : Grey House Publishing, 2020.

345.73 C

Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro : a tragedy of the American South. Rev. ed. Fourth printing. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

349.41 H

Honor©♭, Tony, 1921-2019. About law : an introduction. Reprint: 2013. Law -- History -- Government -- Property -- Contracts and treaties -- Crimes -- Torts -- Forms and procedures -- Interpretation -- Justice -- Does law matter? -- Glossary.

363.73 P

Pollution. New York, NY : Grey House Publishing, 2020.

371.102 A

Agarwal, Pooja K., author. Powerful teaching : unleash the science of learning. First edition. Introduction -- Discover the power behind power tools -- Build a foundation with retrieval practice -- Empower teaching with retrieval practice strategies -- Energize learning with spacing and interleaving -- Engage students with feedback-driven metacognition -- Combine power tools and harness your toolbox -- Keeping it real: use power tools to tackle challenges, not add to them -- Foster a supportive environment: use power tools to reduce anxiety and strengthen community -- Spark conversations with students about the science of learning -- Spark conversations with parents about the science of learning -- Powerful professional development for teachers and leaders -- Do-it-yourself retrieval guide -- Conclusion: unleash the science of learning.

512 G

Algebra. 2004. New York : Springer Science+Business Media, 2004.

575.1 A

Arney, Kat, author. How to code a human. Meet your genome -- Our genetic journey -- How do genes work? -- Under attack! -- Who do you think your are? -- People are not peas -- Genetic superheroes -- Turn me on -- Sticky notes -- The RNA world -- Building a baby -- Wiring the brain -- Compatibility genes -- X and Y -- The viruses that made us human -- When things go wrong -- Human 2.0. "How to Code a Human takes you on a mind-bending journey through the world of the double helix, revealing how our DNA encodes our genes and makes us unique. Covering all aspects of modern genetics from the evolution of our species to inherited diseases, "junk" DNA, genetic engineering and the intricacies of the molecular processes inside our cells, this is an astonishing and insightful guide to the code of life"--Back cover.

598 S

Sibley, David, 1961- author, illustrator. What it's like to be a bird : from flying to nesting, eating to singing -- what birds are doing, and why. How to use this book -- Introduction -- Portfolio of birds -- Birds in this book -- What to do if... -- Becoming a birder. Explore more than two hundred species, and more than 330 new illustrations by the author, in this special, large-format volume, where many of the primary illustrations are reproduced life-sized. While its focus is on familiar backyard birds -- blue jays, nuthatches, chickadees -- What It's Like to Be a Bird also examines certain species that can be fairly easily observed, such as the seashore-dwelling Atlantic Puffin. David Sibley's exacting artwork and wide-ranging expertise bring observed behaviors vividly to life. And while the text is aimed at adults -- including fascinating new scientific research on the myriad ways birds have adapted to environmental changes -- it is nontechnical, making it the perfect occasion for parents and grandparents to share their love of birds with young children, who will delight in the big, full-color illustrations of birds in action. -- back cover.

613.6 C

Bushcraft Illustrated: a visual guide. New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, Inc. (Adams Media: imprint of Simon & Schuster), 2019.

638.1 B

Michael Bush. The Practical beekeeper. Nehawka, Nebraska : X-Star Publishing Company, 2004-2011. V. 1 - The Practical Beekeeing Naturally; V.2 - Intermediate Beekeeping Naturally.

660.6 D

Druker, Steven M., author. Altered genes, twisted truth : how the venture to genetically engineer our food has subverted science, corrupted government, and systematically deceived the public.

709.2 A

Atalay, B©ơlent. Math and the Mona Lisa: : the art and science of Leonardo da Vinci. New York, NY : Smithsonian Books in association with HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. Leonardo was one of history's true geniuses, equally brilliant as an artist, scientist, and mathematician. Following Leonardo's own model, Atalay searches for the internal dynamics of art and science. He provides an overview of the development of science from the dawn of civilization to today's quantum mechanics. From this base, Atalay offers a view into Leonardo's restless intellect and modus operandi, allowing us to see the source of his ideas and to appreciate his art from a new perspective.

741.5 G

Greenberg, Isabel. The encyclopedia of early earth : a graphic novel. First American edition. Love in a very cold climate -- Part 1. The land of Nord. The three sisters of Summer Island ; Beyond the frozen sea ; The gods ; The odyssey begins -- Part 2. Britanitarka. Summer and winter ; Creation ; Medicine man ; The storytellers ; Creation ; Dag and Hal ; The old lady and the giant ; The time of the giants ; The children of the mountain ; The long night ; Dead towns & ghost men -- Part. 3. Migdal Bavel. Migdal Bavel ; The mapmaker of Migdal Bavel ; The bible of Birdman: Genesis ; Bible of Birdman, book of Kiddo: The great flood ; The tower of Migdal Bavel ; The palace of whispers ; The gods #2 -- Part 4. The South Pole. The gods #3 -- Appendices. A brief history of time ; The Nords ; Hunting and fishing ; The 1001 varieties of snow ; The invisible hunter ; Britanitarka ; Birds & beast from early Earth ; The moonstone ; The plucked firebird of Hoo. "Chronicles the explorations of a young man as he paddles from his home in the North Pole to the South Pole. There, he meets his true love, but their romance is ill-fated. Early Earth's unusual and finicky polarity means the lovers can never touch"--Publisher's website.

808.1 G

How poetry can change your heart. San Francisco, CA : Chronicle Books, 2019.

808.5 E

Franklin, Sharon. Essentials of speech communication. Evanston, Ill. : McDougal Littell, 2001.

808.53 H

Hanson, Jim. NTC's dictionary of debate. Lincolnwood, Ill., USA : National Textbook Co., c1990.

808.53 W

Strategic debate. Textbook. Columbus, OH : Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2006.

810.8 B

Lepucki, Edan, author. The best American nonrequired reading 2019. This anthology presents a selection of short works from mainstream and alternative American periodicals published in 2019, including nonfiction, screenplays, television writing, fiction, and alternative comics.

815 R

Representative American speeches, 2019-2020. Amenia, New York : Grey House, Publishing, 2020. "Selected from a diverse field of speakers and venues, this volume offers some of the most engaging American speeches of the year. Distinguished by its diversity, covering areas in politics, education, popular culture, as well as trending topics in the news, these speeches provide an interesting format to explore some of the year's most important stories."-Publisher.

909.09 D

Davis, Jack E., 1956- author. The Gulf : the making of an American sea. First edition. Prologue : history, nature, and a forgotten sea -- Introduction : birth -- Part one. Estuaries, and the lie of the land and sea : aborigines and colonizing Europeans. Mounds -- El golfo de M©♭xico -- Unnecessary death -- A most important river, and a "magnificent" bay -- Part two. Sea and sky : American debuts in the nineteenth century. Manifest destiny -- A fishy sea -- The wild fish that tamed the coast -- Birds of a feather, shot together -- Part three. Preludes to the future. From bayside to beachside -- Oil and the Texas toe dip -- Oil and the Louisiana plunge -- Islands, shifting sands of time -- Wind and water -- Part four. Saturation and loss : post-1945. The growth coast -- Florida worry, Texas slurry -- Rivers of stuff -- Runoff, and runaway -- Sand in the hourglass -- Losing the edge -- Epilogue : a success story amid so much else. Significant beyond tragic oil spills and hurricanes, the Gulf has historically been one of the world's most bounteous marine environments, supporting human life for millennia. Based on the premise that nature lies at the center of human existence, Davis takes readers on a compelling and, at times, wrenching journey from the Florida Keys to the Texas Rio Grande, along marshy shorelines and majestic estuarine bays, both beautiful and life-giving, though fated to exploitation by esurient oil men and real-estate developers. Davis shares previously untold stories, parading a vast array of historical characters past our view: sports-fishermen, presidents, Hollywood executives, New England fishers, the Tabasco king, a Texas shrimper, and a New York architect who caught the "big one". Sensitive to the imminent effects of climate change, and to the difficult task of rectifying the assaults of recent centuries, this book suggests how a penetrating examination of a single region's history can inform the country's path ahead. --.

910.92 I

Inskeep, Steve, author. Imperfect union : how Jessie and John Fr©♭mont mapped the West, invented celebrity, and helped cause the Civil War. Aid me with your influence -- The equal merits of differing peoples -- The current of important events -- Miseries that attend a separation -- I determined to make there a home -- The manifest purpose of providence -- A taste for danger and bold daring adventure -- The Spaniards were somewhat rude and inhospitable -- I am not going to let you write anything but your name -- Do not suppose I lightly interfere in a matter belonging to men -- We pressed onward with fatal resolution -- Jessie Benton Fr©♭mont was the better man of the two -- We thought money might come in handy -- All the stupid laurels that ever grew -- Decidedly, this ought to be struck out -- He throws away his heart. "Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Fr©♭mont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple John Fr©♭mont grew up amid family tragedy and shame. Born out of wedlock in 1813, he went to work at age thirteen to help support his family in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a nobody. Yet, by the 1840s, he rose to become one of the most acclaimed people of the age -- known as a wilderness explorer, bestselling writer, gallant army officer, and latter-day conquistador, who in 1846 began the United States' takeover of California from Mexico. He was a celebrity who personified the country's westward expansion. Mountains, towns, ships, and streets were named after him. How did he climb so far? A vital factor was his wife, Jessie Benton Fr©♭mont, the daughter of a powerful United States senator. Jessie wanted to play roles in politics and exploration, which were then reserved for men. Frustrated, she threw her skill and passion into promoting her husband. Ordered by the US Army to map the Oregon Trail, John traveled thousands of miles on horseback, indifferent to his safety and that of the other members of his expeditions. When he returned home, Jessie helped him to shape dramatic reports of his adventures, which were reprinted in newspapers and bound as popular books. Jessie became his political adviser, and a power player in her own right. In 1856, the famous couple strategized as John became the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican Party. The party had been founded in opposition to slavery, and though both Fr©♭monts were Southerners they became symbols of the cause. With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Americans linked the Fr©♭monts with not one but three great social movements of the time -- westward settlement, women's rights, and opposition to slavery. Theirs is a surprisingly modern story of ambition and fame; they lived in a time of globalization, technological disruption, and divisive politics that foreshadowed our own. The Fr©♭monts' adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul"--.

940.54 S

Sledge, E. B. (Eugene Bondurant), 1923-. China marine. Oxford University Paperback, 2003. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, c2002. China Marine 1 -- Epilogue: I Am Not the Man I Would Have Been 149.

940.54 T

Terkel, Studs, 1912-2008. "The good war" : an oral history of World War Two. New York : New Press, [1997.

943.36 H

Hunt, Irmgard A. (Irmgard Albine), 1934-. On Hitler's mountain : overcoming the legacy of a Nazi childhood. First Harper Perennial edition. 2006. On writing a childhood memoir -- pt. 1. 1906-1934 : the P©œhlmanns. Roots of discontent ; In search of a future -- pt. 2. 1934-1939 : Hitler's willing followers. The rituals of life ; "Heil Hitler" ; Ominous undercurrents ; Meeting Hitler ; Gathering clouds -- pt. 3. 1939-1945 : war and surrender. Early sacrifice ; Learning to hate school ; Lessons from a wartime friendship ; A weary interlude in Selb ; Hardship and disintegration ; War comes to Berchtesgaden ; The end at last -- pt. 4. 1945-1948 : Bitter justice, or, Will justice be done? Survival under the Star-spangled Banner ; The curse of the past ; Escape from darkness. The author provides an account of her life growing up in Berchtesgaden, a Bavarian village at the foot of Hitler's mountain retreat, discussing a childhood encounter with the Nazi leader, and shedding light on why ordinary Germans, including her parents, tolerated and even supported the Nazis.

951.04 M

Mitter, Rana, 1969- author. Forgotten ally : China's World War II, 1937-1945. First U.S. Edition. The path to war: As close as lips and teeth : China's fall, Japan's rise ; A new revolution ; The path to confrontation -- Disaster: Thirty-seven days in summer : the outbreak of war ; The battle for Shanghai ; Refugees and resistance ; Massacre at Nanjing ; The battle of Taierzhuang ; The deadly river -- Resisting alone: "A sort of wartime normal" ; Flight into the unknown ; The road to Pearl Harbor -- The poisoned alliance ; Destination Burma ; Hunger in Henan ; States of terror ; Conference at Cairo ; One war, two fronts ; Showdown with Stilwell ; Unexpected victory ; Epilogue: The enduring war. "For decades, a major piece of World War II history has gone virtually unwritten. China was the fourth great ally, partner to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, yet its drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue remains little known in the West. In this emotionally gripping book, made possible through access to newly unsealed Chinese archives, Rana Mitter unfurls the story of China's World War II as never before and rewrites the larger history of the war in the process. He focuses his narrative on three towering leaders -- Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and the lesser-known collaborator Wang Jingwei -- and extends the timeline of the war back to 1937, when Japanese and Chinese troops began to clash, fully two years before Hitler invaded Poland. Unparalleled in its research and scope, Forgotten Ally is a sweeping, character-driven history that will be essential reading not only for anyone with an interest in World War II, but also for those seeking to understand today's China, where, as Mitter reveals, the echoes of the war still reverberate"--.

952 J

Takada, Noriko. The Japanese way : aspects of behavior, attitudes, and customs of the Japanese. 2nd ed. Chicago : McGraw-Hill, c2011 . Abbreviations and contractions -- Addresses and street names -- Arts and crafts -- Asking directions -- Bathing and bathhouses -- Body language and gestures -- Borrowed words and acronyms -- Bowing -- Brand names and brand-name goods (burando-hin) -- Business cards (meish) -- Calendar -- Cherry blossoms and flower viewing -- Compliments -- Conversation -- Crime and safety -- Dating and marriage -- Death, funerals, and mourning -- Dialects -- Dining out -- Dinner invitations -- Directness -- Discussion and consensus -- Dress -- Drinking -- Driving -- Earthquakes -- Education -- English-language study -- Family -- The Jag and the national anthem -- Flowers and plants -- Food and eating -- Footwear -- Foreigners -- Gender roles -- Geography -- Gifts -- Government -- Hellos and good-byes -- Holidays and festivals -- Honorific speech (keigo) -- Hotels and inns -- Housing and furnishings -- Humor -- The Imperial family -- Individuals and couples -- Introductions and networking -- Karaoke -- Leisure (rgli) -- Letters, greeting cards, and postal services -- Love and affection -- Lucky and unlucky numbers -- Male/female speech -- Money -- Mt. Fuji -- Music and dance -- Myths, legends, and folklore -- Names, titles, and forms of address -- Numbers and counting -- Oriental medicine -- Pinball (pachinko) -- Politeness and rudeness -- Population -- Privacy -- Reading material -- Religion -- The seasons -- Shopping -- Shrines and temples -- Signatures and seals -- Social structure -- Sports -- Table etiquette -- Telephones -- Television/radio/movies -- Thank-yous and regrets -- Theater -- Time and punctuality -- Tipping and service charges -- Toilets -- Travel within Japan -- Vending machines -- Visiting private homes -- Weights, measures, and sizes -- Working hours -- The written language -- "Yes" and "no" -- "You first" -- Zoological calendar.

972.81 P

Proskouriakoff, Tatiana, 1909-1985. Maya history. First edition. Foreword / Gordon R. Wills -- Tatiana Proskouriakoff, 1909-1985 / Ian Graham -- Introduction / Rosemary A. Joyce -- 1. The Earliest Records: (A.D. 288-337) -- 2. The Arrival of Strangers: (A.D. 337-386) -- 3. The Maya Regain Tikal: (A.D. 386-435) -- 4. Some Ragged Pages: (A.D. 435-485) -- 5. Expansion of the Maya Tradition: (A.D. 485-534) -- 6. A Time of Troubles: (A.D. 534-583) -- 7. Recovery on the Frontiers: (A.D. 583-633) -- 8. Growth and Expansion: (A.D. 633-682) -- 9. Toward a Peak of Prosperity: (A.D. 682-736) -- 10. On the Crest of the Wave: (A.D. 731-780) -- 11. Prelude to Disaster: (A.D. 780-830) -- 12. The Final Years: (A.D. 831-909) -- 13. The Last Survivals: (A.D. 909-938). The ruins of Maya city-states occur throughout the Yucatan peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, and in parts of Honduras and El Salvador. But the people who built these sites remain imperfectly known. Though they covered standing monuments (stelae) and public buildings with hieroglyphic records of their deeds, no Rosetta Stone has yet turned up in Central America to help experts determine the exact meaning of these glyphs. Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a preeminent student of the Maya, made many breakthroughs in deciphering Maya writing, particularly in demonstrating that the glyphs record the deeds of actual human beings. This discovery opened the way for a history of the Maya, a monumental task that Proskouriakoff was engaged in before her death in 1985. Her work, Maya History, has been made ready for press by the able editorship of Rosemary Joyce. Maya History reconstructs the Classic Maya period (roughly A.D. 250-900) from the glyphic record on stelae at numerous sites, including Altar de Sacrificios, Copan, Dos Pilas, Naranjo, Piedras Negras, Quirigua, Tikal, and Yaxchilan. Proskouriakoff traces the spread of governmental institutions from the central Peten, especially from Tikal, to other city-states by conquest and intermarriage. And she also shows how the gradual introduction of foreign elements into Maya art mirrors the entry of outsiders who helped provoke the eventual collapse of the Classic Maya. Fourteen line drawings of monuments and over three hundred original drawings of glyphs amplify the text. Maya History has been long awaited by scholars in the field. It is sure to provoke lively debate and greater understanding of this important area in Mesoamerican studies.

973.04 A

Asian Americans : the movement and the moment. A wide-ranging collection of essays and material which documents the rich, little-known history of Asian American social activism during the years 1965-2001. This book examines the period not only through personal accounts and historical analysis, but through the visual record--utilizing historical prictorial materials developed at UCLA's Asian American Studies Center on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese Americans. Included are many reproductions of photos of the period, movement comics, demonstration flyers, newsletters, posters and much more.

973.0496 D

W.E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk. BIGFONTBOOKS.COM.

973.7 B

Barney, William L. Battleground for the Union : the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1848-1877. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall, c1990.

973.9 I

Imani, Blair, author. Making our way home : the Great Migration and the Black American dream. First edition. Separate but equal: Reconstruction-1919 -- Beautiful -- and ugly, too: 1920-1929 -- I, too, am America: 1930-1939 -- Liberty and justice for all: 1940-1949 -- Trouble ahead: 1950-1959 -- The time is in the street, you know: 1960-1969 -- All poer to all the people: 1970-1979. "A powerful illustrated history of the Great Migration and its sweeping impact on Black and American culture, from Reconstruction to the rise of hip hop. Over the course of six decades, an unprecedented wave of Black Americans left the South and spread across the nation in search of a better life--a migration that sparked stunning demographic and cultural changes in twentieth-century America. Through gripping and accessible historical narrative paired with illustrations, author and activist Blair Imani examines the largely overlooked impact of The Great Migration and how it affected--and continues to affect--Black identity and America as a whole. Making Our Way Home explores issues like voting rights, domestic terrorism, discrimination, and segregation alongside the flourishing of arts and culture, activism, and civil rights. Imani shows how these influences shaped America's workforce and wealth distribution by featuring the stories of notable people and events, relevant data, and family histories. The experiences of prominent figures such as James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, and others are woven into the larger historical and cultural narratives of the Great Migration to create a truly singular record of this powerful journey"--.

973.9 L

Longley, Kyle, author. LBJ's 1968 : power, politics, and the presidency in America's year of upheaval. A nation on the brink: the State of the Union Address, January 1968 -- Those dirty bastards, are they trying to embarrass us? The Pueblo Incident, January-December 1968 -- Tet: a very near thing, January-March 1968 -- As a result, I will not seek re-election: the March 31, 1968 speech -- The days the earth stood still: the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1968 -- He hated him, but loved him: the assassination of Robert Kennedy, June 1968 -- The big stumble: the Fortas Affair, June-October 1968 -- The tanks are rolling: Czechoslovakia crushed, August 1968 -- The perfect disaster: the Democratic National Convention, August 1968 -- Is this treason?: the October surprise that wasn't, October-December 1968 -- The last dance, January 1969 -- Conclusion.

974.7 F

Feldman, Deborah, 1986-. Unorthodox : the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots. 1st Simon & Schuster trade pbk. ed. 2020. New York : Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012. Traces the author's upbringing in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, describing the strict rules that governed her life, arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, and the birth of her son, which led to her plan to leave and forge her own path in life.

975.7 B

Ball, Edward, 1959-. Slaves in the family. Paperback edition. Journalist Ball confronts the legacy of his family's slave-owning past, uncovering the story of the people, both black and white, who lived and worked on the Balls' South Carolina plantations. It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the painful legacy of slavery continues to endure in America's collective memory and experience. Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors owned 25 plantations, worked by nearly 4,000 slaves. Through meticulous research and by interviewing scattered relatives, Ball contacted some 100,000 African-Americans who are all descendants of Ball slaves. In intimate conversations with them, he garnered information, hard words, and devastating family stories of precisely what it means to be enslaved. He found that the family plantation owners were far from benevolent patriarchs; instead there is a dark history of exploitation, interbreeding, and extreme violence.--From publisher description.

975.7 B

Ball, Edward, 1959-. The sweet hell inside : a family history. First edition. Preface -- Part 1-The Master and His Orphans-Part 2-High Yellow-Porch 3 -Eyes Sadder Then the Grave-Part 4-Nigger Rich-Part 5-The Orphans Dancers-Part 6-A Trunk in the Grass-Notes-Permission and Photography Credits-Acknowledgments-Index. If. Recounts the lives of the Harleston family of South Carolina, the progeny of a Southern gentleman and his slave who cast off their blemished roots and achieved affluence in part through a surprisingly successful funeral parlor business. Their wealth afforded the Harlestons the comfort of chauffeurs, tailored clothes, and servants whose skin was darker than theirs. It also launched the family into a generation of glory as painters, performers, and photographers in the "high yellow" society of America's colored upper class. The Harlestons' remarkable 100-year journey spans the waning days of Reconstruction, the precious art world of the early 1900s, the back alleys of the Jazz Age, and the dawn of the civil rights movement.--From publisher description.

DVD Gre

The Great debaters. 2-disc collector's edition; Widescreen [ed.]. [New York] : Weinstein Company, c2008. Denzel Washington, Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett, Denzel Whitaker, Jermaine Williams, Forest Whitaker, Gina Ravera, John Heard, Kimberly Elise, Devyn Tyler, Trenton McClain Boyd. Melvin B. Tolson is a professor at Wiley College in Texas. Wiley is a small African-American college. In 1935, Tolson inspired students to form the school's first debate team. Tolson turns a group of underdog students into a historically elite debate team which goes on to challenge Harvard in the national championship. Inspired by a true story.

F Alb

Albertalli, Becky, author. What if it's us. Told in two voices, when Arthur, a summer intern from Georgia, and Ben, a native New Yorker, meet it seems like fate, but after three attempts at dating fail they wonder if the universe is pushing them together or apart.

F Arc

Astral Traveler's Daughter. First Simon & Schuster Trade Paperback edition, April 2019. New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2019. "Last year, Teddy Cannon discovered she was psychic. This year, her skills will be put to the test as she investigates a secretive case that will take her far from home--and deep into the past in the thrilling follow-up to School for Psychics"-- Provided by publisher.

F Chi

Chiaverini, Jennifer, author. Enchantress of numbers : a novel of Ada Lovelace. "The only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the most brilliant, revered, and scandalous of the Romantic poets, Ada was destined for fame long before her birth. Estranged from Ada's father, who was infamously "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," Ada's mathematician mother is determined to save her only child from her perilous Byron heritage. Banishing fairy tales and make-believe from the nursery, Ada's mother provides her daughter with a rigorous education grounded in mathematics and science. Any troubling spark of imagination--or worse yet, passion or poetry--is promptly extinguished. Or so her mother believes. When Ada is introduced into London society as a highly eligible young heiress, she at last discovers the intellectual and social circles she has craved all her life. Little does she realize that her delightful new friendship with inventor Charles Babbage--brilliant, charming, and occasionally curmudgeonly--will shape her destiny ..."--Jacket.

F Chr

Christie, Michael, 1976- author. Greenwood : a novel. First U.S. edition. "It's 2038 and Jake Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, fallen from a ladder and sprawled on his broken back, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and violent timber empire. It's 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple syrup camp squat when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: thrumming a steady, silent pulse beneath Christie's effortless sentences and working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood and blood--and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light"--.

F Cle

Memoirs of Fanny Hill. Published by arrangement with Edito-Service S. A., Geneva, Switzerland. New York, NY : Peebles Press International Inc, 1973.

F Col

Andre's Reboot. Birmingham, AL : Stephen B. Coleman, Publisher, 2019.

F Def

Moll Flanders. Reprint. 2020. Columbia, SC, : August 12, 2020.

F Def

Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731. The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders ... A new edition.

F Fit

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940, author. The great Gatsby. Foreword to the seventy-fifth anniversary edition: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, and the House of Scribner ; Preface / by Matthew J. Bruccoli -- THE GREAT GATSBY -- The text of The Great Gatsby / by Matthew J. Bruccoli -- Publisher's afterword / Charles Scribner III -- FSF : life and career / James L.W. West III. Overview: The mysterious Jay Gatsby embodies the American notion that it is possible to redefine oneself and persuade the world to accept that definition. Gatsby's youthful neighbor, Nick Carraway, fascinated with the display of enormous wealth in which Gatsby revels, finds himself swept up in the lavish lifestyle of Long Island society during the Jazz Age. Considered Fitzgerald's best work, The Great Gatsby is a mystical, timeless story of integrity and cruelty, vision and despair. The timeless story of Jay Gatsby and his love for Daisy Buchanan is widely acknowledged to be the closest thing to the Great American Novel ever written.

F Jam

The Turn of the Screw, the Aspern Papers, and Two Stories. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003; Intro. and notes by David L. Sweet. New York, NY : Barnes & Noble, 2003.

F Ora

Orange, Tommy, 1982- author. There there. First Vintage books edition. Here is a story of several people, each of whom has private reasons for travelling to the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honour his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and unspeakable loss.

F Pat

Patchett, Ann, author. The Dutch house : a novel. First edition. "Ann Patchett, the New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth and State of Wonder, returns with her most powerful novel to date: a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go"--.

F Rob

Roberts, Nora, author. The awakening. First edition. "#1 New York Times bestselling author of the epic Chronicles of The One trilogy returns with the first in a brand new series where parallel worlds clash over the struggle between good and evil"--.

F Row

Rowling, J. K. Harrius Potter et philosophi lapis. Cover illustration first pub. 2015. London : Bloomsbury, 2003, ℗♭1997. Latin translation, Peter Needham, 2003. Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle, a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry.

F Rus

Russell, Karen, 1981-. Swamplandia! 1st ed (Borzoi Book). New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Twelve year old Ava must travel into the Underworld part of the swamp in order to save her family's dynasty of Bigtree alligator wresting. This novel takes us to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine. The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator wrestling theme park, formerly no. 1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava's father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety eight gators as well as her own grief. Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, the author has written a novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking.

F Sha

Shaw, Irwin, 1913-1984. The young lions. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2000.

F Tol

The Hobbit. 75th Anniversary. The text of this edition is based on edition published by HarperCollins Publishers in 1995. Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.

F Tow

Towles, Amor. Rules of civility. A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow.

F Wat

Watson, Ren©♭e, author. Piecing me together. Tired of being singled out at her mostly-white private school as someone who needs support, high school junior Jade would rather participate in the school's amazing Study Abroad program than join Women to Women, a mentorship program for at-risk girls. "Acclaimed author Renee Watson offers a powerful story about a girl striving for success in a world that too often seems like it's trying to break her. Jade believes she must get out of her poor neighborhood if she's ever going to succeed. Her mother tells her to take advantage of every opportunity that comes her way. And Jade has: every day she rides the bus away from her friends and to the private school where she feels like an outsider, but where she has plenty of opportunities. But some opportunities she doesn't really welcome, like an invitation to join Women to Women, a mentorship program for "at-risk" girls. Just because her mentor is black and graduated from the same high school doesn't mean she understands where Jade is coming from. She's tired of being singled out as someone who needs help, someone people want to fix. Jade wants to speak, to create, to express her joys and sorrows, her pain and her hope. Maybe there are some things she could show other women about understanding the world and finding ways to be real, to make a difference.".

F Wil

Williams, Katie, 1978- author. Tell the machine goodnight. Pearl's job is to make people happy. Every day, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett--but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job--not as happiness technician, and not as mother, either.-Amazon.

SC D

The Daniel Defoe Collection : The Life and strange surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner; The farther adventures of Robinson Crusoe; A journal of the plague year; Moll Flanders. South Carolina, USA, : August 2020.

SC L

Link, Kelly, author. Get in trouble : stories. Random House trade paperback edition. The summer people -- I can see right through you -- Secret identity -- Valley of the girls -- Origin story -- The lesson -- The new boyfriend -- Two houses -- Light. A collection of short stories features tales of a young girl who plays caretaker to mysterious guests at the cottage behind her house and a former teen idol who becomes involved in a bizarre reality show.

SC P

Packer, ZZ. Drinking coffee elsewhere. 1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed. New York : Riverhead Books, 2004, ℗♭2003. Brownies -- Every tongue shall confess -- Our Lady of Peace -- The ant of the self -- Drinking coffee elsewhere -- Speaking in tongues -- Geese -- Doris is coming. Discovered by The New Yorker, Packer "forms a constellation of young black experience"* whether she's writing from the perspective of a church-going black woman who has a crisis in faith, a young college student at Yale, or a young black man unwillingly accompanying his father to the Million Man March. This universally appealing collection of short fiction has already established ZZ Packer as "a writer to watch.".

SC S

Sedaris, David, author. Calypso. First edition. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, David Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself. Sedaris sets his powers of observation toward middle age and mortality, that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.

SC S

Sedaris, David, author. Let's explore diabetes with owls. First Back Bay paperback edition, June 2014. From the perils of French dentistry to the eating habits of the Australian kookaburra, from the squat-style toilets of Beijing to the particular wilderness of a North Carolina Costco, we learn about the absurdity and delight of a curious traveler's experiences. Whether railing against the habits of litterers in the English countryside or marveling over a disembodied human arm in a taxidermist's shop, Sedaris takes us on side-splitting adventures that are not to be forgotten.

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