#that michael cap clip...man

[seb-boo]

On Sebastian Vettel's rise to Red Bull including karting and his first race with BMW.

[oceantornadoo]

idiots doctors in love

dr. michael robinavitch x resident f!reader

smut. oblivious reader. down bad robby. jazz obssessions.

based on the vibe of the music robby was listening to in ep1 and 15, i headcanon he's a jazz man. SORRY NOT SORRY.

"what do you mean you can't go?"

you frown at dr. mohan, your pain-in-the-ass best R3 friend who's currently breaking your heart. "you're telling me you'd rather stay here than go out?" you gesture to the ER, workers fluttering around as day shift turns to night. out of the corner of your eye you catch a head of almost-silver hair and smirk. "so that's why you want to stay?" she finds the man in your line of sight and immediately shakes her head. samira unclips her clip, shakes her head, and reclips it -- something she never does in the ER. it's a sure sign of her crush on dr. abbot, even if she won't admit it.

"it's not even a crazy club, samira." you hook your arm through hers and drag her away from the board that she was scanning with a single-minded ferocity. "it's r&b night at this new jazz club. we can sit and still have fun! you don't even need to wear heels." she's already dragging you back to the board and shaking her head. "i came in late today. i need to finish my 12 hours." by late, she means the two hours she spent throwing up from food poisoning. even robby told her she could go home and here she is, staying. "fine. but you better text me, i expect you to leave here by 9pm sharp. no more than what you were supposed to work." you squeeze her arm and only let go when she smiles at you. what a liar. you know she'll work way into the night. "sure thing, mom. i'll text you what i eat and when i go to bed, too." she shoots back, smiling. you nudge her side before locating your water bottle and gathering yourself, mentally, to leave the chart board. "i expect nothing less. see you sunday!"

when you turn, your water bottle smacks into your attending.

"shit, i'm sorry." you look up and there he is, crow's feet crinkling as he smiles. rounded black eyeglasses compliment the black ipad he holds, likely updating someone's chart before you whacked his hand with your sturdy bottle. "what's that thing made of?" he lowers his head like he's examining the pink steel of your bottle, and it's hard not to feel giddy under his full attention. stupid, stupid crush.

"confidential weapon materials. it's indestructible." you grin as he shakes his head, clearly done with your antics. "get out of here, doctor. there's only room for so many dad jokes." you roll your eyes, untwisting the cap of your water bottle and drinking just so you can have a few more seconds with him before you really have to go. today was one of those days where you still feel human when you leave work -- no soul-crushing experiences. you're sure one will come on your sunday shift, but the rest of friday night and all of saturday scream freedom to you. a drop of water escapes your mouth and trails down from the corner of your lips to your chin. a lapse in control, something you usually have in spades, but never around robby. how embarrassing, not being able to drink water with more etiquette than a child-

a warm finger brushes the skin of your chin, wiping away the droplet.

you lock eyes. his are brown and a little out of it, his nose flaring and immediately condensing when he retracts his hand. he tucks it in his cargo pants and it's like you've imagined the whole thing.

must be ER-induced delirium.

"any weekend plans, robby?" absolute insane, to ask that question after you just displayed your lack-of-drinking skills. fortunately, all robby does is shake his head. his veiny hand swipes his glasses off his face and tucks them in the front chest pocket of his scrubs. unfortunately, the fluidity of it does a lot for you. must be the competency? "don't call me old, but the record store i like is having a sale on all their duke ellington records tomorrow. might stop by, pretend i have a life." he laughs in that self-deprecating way of his, like he's embarrassed to admit he's human and not just an attending.

your heart melts.

"i love jazz." you murmur, a little self-consciously, as you set your eyes on his stethoscope instead of his face. "i know." you pick your head up immediately, brows furrowed. when did you tell him that? "i mean, i heard you talking to dr. mohan." he clarifies. you nod, a kernel of hope growing when you realize he was eavesdropping. maybe this obsession is more than one-sided. maybe.

"you goin' to that thing you mentioned?" he asks, rolling his shoulders and looking away before looking back at you. "maybe. samira, i mean, dr. mohan can't go, so i might see if my roommate wants to go. she's really into rock though, like die-hard metal fan, so i'm not too sure if she'll want to..." you trail off, a bit saddened. you do want to go, and if it was daytime you would, it's just being alone at night in the city can still be scary. especially after a long shift, even if you're sober. your senses are dulled, worn out from all-day usage. the idea of a long bath and playing a favorite playlist sounds equally appealing and way less work.

"i'm free."

you gape at him, then quickly recover before he can notice how wide open your mouth is. "really?" he looks shocked at himself for even offering, so all he does at first is nod. robby looks off-kilter, far from the confident attending you've spent your last two years with. "you don't have anyone- i mean, any plans tonight? i don't want to take up too much of your time, it starts at 8:30 and it'll probably be at least an hour, maybe two." he barks out a laugh, swiping a hand down his face before answering. "no one's waiting on me. plus, i'm not that old, doctor. my bedtime is 12 anyway." he winks, recovered from whatever shock he was experiencing. you laugh, covering it with your hand before it becomes a full-force giggle. he's not even that funny, but he's just so endearing with those soulful brown eyes and terrible humor and warmth. on hour 12 of your shift, you simply can't take it.

"let me talk to dr. abbot and then i can walk out with you. it's kind of a speakesy so there's this password and this back door and," you realize you're waving your hands around, priming him for another water bottle attack, and quickly fix them to your sides, "and, i'll be right back. don't take another case or i'll go without you." his eyebrows crinkle a little at your mention of dr. abbot but you write it off as tiredness. he nods his affirmation and you bolt through the ER, desperate to finally get out of here.

"dr. abbot!" thankfully he's charting and not gut-deep in a poor patient. he looks up and nods you over, clearly expecting an interesting case. "i need you to do me a favor. dr. mohan is abandoning our jazz club plans to work her full shift and i need you to promise me she leaves here by 9pm. she already had food poisoning this morning, she does not need to work longer than necessary." he's smiling by the end of your demand, clearly amused than angry you're making demands. "you'll make a perfect chief resident, doctor. she won't be here past 9 or i'll walk her out myself." that's what you're hoping for, but you don't mention that. "sorry about your plans." he adds. you shrug, rocking back on your feet as you try not to give away your excitement. "it's okay. robby's coming, of all people."

an odd thing happens to the attending you thought was unflappable. he looks past your shoulder, clearly searching for robby, before quickly pulling back to look you up and down. his mouth opens slightly, then closes shut immediately. "fucking finally." he mutters under his breath, underestimating how good your hearing is. "sorry?" you ask, a little off guard. he shakes his head, resetting. "nothing. have a good night, doctor. have fun." when has he ever told you to have fun? you nod, extremely confused with whatever oddness has affected the Pitt attendings. you wish him a goodnight and beeline back to Robby, who's trying not to involve himself in two GSW's that just burst through the doors.

it's intimate, walking out with him. he holds the door for you but with his hand up high, making you almost duck under it to exit. you talk all the way to the parking lot, only realizing he doesn't even drive when you arrive at your car. you explain how to get into the club, the password being "April 29th" for the NYC Duke Ellington Day in 2009. he takes all of it in stride, nodding precisely at the right points like he's actually listening. "you need a ride home?" you offer, hoping he says no. this past hour has been too much of a whirlwind and you need a moment to contemplate, but the people pleaser in you demands hospitality. thankfully, he shakes his head. "i like walking home. not too far and clears the head." you nod, completely understanding. usually when you drive home, you keep the windows down and the music low to decompress. unsurprisingly, it's jazz or more modern r&b that clears your head.

"i'll see you there, then. text me if something comes up or you'll be late." you tack on, trying not to seem desperate. not to seem like this is a date, of course, which it is not. he's just being friendly, eavesdropping on your personal conversations and connecting over hobbies and offering his time outside of work when he could be, for one, sleeping. "i'll see you at 8:30, doctor."

-

you splurge for a cab, figuring the moment allows for it. plus, your feet ache from hours on your feet and the kitten heels you're wearing don't exactly help. after paying the fee, you step out onto the sidewalk and smooth out the creases in the dress you chose. it's the original outfit you were going to wear: a little black dress that hits above the knee paired with black heels that have bows on them, a small purse around your shoulder. except, you did your makeup instead of going bare face like you originally would've. it's armor to face multiple hours with the man you've been crushing on for months. sure, you've shared beer in parks and much-needed coffee on the roof, but nothing outside of the confines of work. nothing like how he looks now, waving at you awkwardly as he walks down the street in dark pants and a button-down paired with a jacket to stave off the chill. it shocks you for a second -- the first time you've seen him out of his scrubs. he comes to stand in front of you and beams a little, his cheeks pulling up. he's more relaxed without the weight of the ER on him and you yearn to see him like this a thousand times more.

"hi."

"hi."

you stare for a second before reminding yourself that you are not a teenager and can have adult conversations. except this is your boss, a fact you keep forgetting. "i honestly imagined you showing up in scrubs." you tease, gesturing at him to follow as you make your way to the entrance. he chuckles, a low tone that hits like a shower after a long shift, needed and soothing. "i like your dress, too, doctor." he replies. your skin heats at his compliment, glad you're not facing his direction. you wander through the side hallway that accompanies the front of the restaurant, pausing a little before the secret door. before you approach, you turn to him. "you don't have to call me doctor, robby." you remind him, tilting your head a little. he takes the moment to scan the length of your dress, the sheer tights that feed into your heels, before landing back on your face and saying your name. your first name.

it's the first time he's said it, you think. like a shock of epi to the veins, waking you up. his eyes darken and it must be a trick of the light, but you see his pupils expand. you grin shyly before turning and approaching the door. a gold-embossed slit in the door slides open and a pair of blue eyes blink at you. "password?" there's a sudden presence behind you as robby hovers, a touch away from your back. not the closest he's ever stood but you feel practically naked without your scrubs, like he's seeing your bare skin. "april 29th." you supply, clearing your throat as you remind yourself he's just being courteous.

the door swings open and you stifle a gasp. it's all mahagony wood and low lights, candles on every table with velvet-covered chairs and clinking bar glasses. an acoustic version of a leon bridges song plays as you make your way inside, robby only a step behind you. "isn't it pretty?" you turn your face up and there he is, staring down at you. "very pretty." he refers to the room, but his eyes stay on you, warm pools of chocolate in the lamplight. you find a table far enough away from the band where you can talk, even though your tongue is currently tied. robby murmurs something about getting drinks and you sit gladly, your feet straining from being put through even more walking. you set your purse on the table and close your eyes, letting your body finally relax as you take in the music. your head sways a little, the rhythm soothing you after another long-but-worth-it day in medicine.

"i wasn't sure what you wanted, so i got the specialty drink they were serving." he sets down what looks like a fancy dirty shirley with edible gold glitter swirling around. it catches the light and reminds you of the gold flecks in robby's eyes, illuminated by the candles. he sits down in the chair next to you, the table small enough for your knees to brush as you both face the stage. neither of you pulls away.

"they must have upcharged an extra $10 for the glitter." you take a sip and close your eyes, loving the fruitiness. a look left reveals his own drink, dark liquid in a glass tumbler. "part of the experience." he shrugs, nudging you with his knee. "plus, i know mohan wouldn't comp your drinks like i will." you giggle at that, keeping it at a low volume as the band continues. you take another sip for courage before putting the glass back down. "thank you, robby. for the drink and for coming." he takes a sip of his drink and sets it down. the table must be too small or his eyes really that bad, because he sets it so close to you that your knuckles brush. these accidental touches keep sending ill-advised sparks to your core, making you shift in your spot and press your thighs together.

when you gather the courage to look in his eyes, they seem to be on your thighs. a trick of the light, as they flick up and catch yours, no apology on his lips. "i wanted to-"

"hello everyone!" the saxophone player has the mic, greeting everyone with a bright smile. "thank you for coming to our little gathering tonight. it'll be a mix of jazz, r&b, and anything that sits right in the soul. we've got our singer coming on in about an hour but for now, enjoy the music." the bassist plucks a few strings and they start, launching into a louis armstrong song.

it's something close to peace that you feel. taking in the music silently, robby closes his eyes and leans back in his chair. you make small talk occasionally, learning more about him than you ever knew. how he used to live in chicago, how he's the older sibling of a much younger brother and sister off doing Great Things. you tell him about your favorite bagel spot that you stop by when you have the time and how sometimes, you think your roommate might hate you and not actually tolerate your late-night taco cravings. it's addicting, every smile he gives you, each one more endearing than the one before it. you like that he barely drinks, only sipping after a long conversation. you want to remember this, so you let your drink slowly lessen but don't ask for a second.

his knee stays against yours the whole time, a tender anchor to the moment.

after an hour, the singer graces the stage. her voice is raspy and low, perfect for the songs she picks. "these next few are perfect slow songs, in my opinion. and would you look at that, we've got some empty room on the dance floor." she launches into an etta james song about sundays and you can't help but gather your courage. "dance with me? if your feet aren't too tired, of course." you add, suddenly worried you overstepped. he shakes his head, stepping out of his seat and gesturing you forward. when you look back, you watch robby tuck your purse under his coat and your heart aches. just a little.

at first, you feel like a kid at her first dance. there's too much space between you, his hand so high on your back that it almost reaches your neck. it's hard to move together this far apart, so you take a deep breath and step closer. "this okay?" you whisper, face inches from his. he nods a little sharply, but steps closer until your cheek is flush to his chest. "it's perfect." you smile to yourself and lose yourself to the music.

as more people join the dance floor, robby pulls you snug to his chest. "having fun?" he asks, lips grazing your ear. his hand slides lower, still on the small of your back. it's the most you've ever touched him, felt the woodsy scent of his cologne and the hardness of his torso. "yeah." you mumble, drunk on the music and his presence. he seems to understand, tucking your head under his chin as you sway, his other hand tightening in yours as you grip his shoulder lightly. the singer croons about love and loss and you feel it, right under you.

after a few more songs, the band takes a break. when you pull back from robby, something has changed. he has to have felt this pull in your chest, the one tethered to your heart strings. "take a break with me?" you nod to the quiet hallway that leads to the bathrooms, perfect for a break from the crowd. he follows you loyally, hand hovering at your back as you walk down the hall. voices fall away until it's just you two in some alcove between the bar and the bathroom.

he puts his hands in his pockets and leans against the wall. you take a deep breath and one step forward.

"robby."

his eyes squint when you don't follow with a question and widen when he realizes what you're asking, or not asking.

robby swipes a hand down his face before it falls to his side, tapping the top of his thigh. "we can't." he reasons. your toes touch his shoes, shiny ones you didn't even imagine him owning. "says who?" you murmur, standing your ground. both of his hands are at his sides now, flexing and unflexing. if he wasn't wearing long-sleeves, you'd be tracing the veins. "the pittsburg medical board. gloria." he answers, not doing anything to move from where you stand. this time, it's him who straightens, bringing him closer to your heaving chest.

"i'm not going to tell them." you murmur. there's an instant sense of a mistake as he leans back into the wall. "it's not like that for me. it's- i'm not a casual person." the confession is more than you were hoping for, a long-forgotten dream that lay buried in your heart. "it's not like that for me either, robby. i really liked tonight. i want to do it again."

strong, capable hands cup your face. his thumbs swipe under your eyes, probably ruining your makeup, as he tilts you into his eyesight. "you have no fucking idea how long i've waited for this." he confirms, the tips of his fingers brushing your jaw. "really?" you plead, off-kilter from his sudden admission. "since you found me on that roof, still soaked in blood from two child GSW's." a year and a half ago. your heart pounds and you smile.

"can't deny you anything when you look like that." you're not entirely sure what he means -- when you're covered in blood or when you're in this dress? doesn't matter.

"won't you kiss me, then?"

and he does.

robby kisses like a man possessed. his hands on your face stay there, keeping you open even as you gasp into his mouth. it's not sloppy but toes the line as he keeps himself restrained, only allowing his tongue to peek out when you moan in delight. robby leaves little bites and licks with every sound you make, letting you melt into his arms with your arms around his shoulders.

"i don't want our first time to be tonight. i want to do it right." he demands into the wet heat of your mouth, covering the burn of his words with a solid kiss. you agree but still hitch your leg up around his waist as far as your dress will allow. "these fucking tights." he nips your jaw and you giggle, melding yourself further into him. "c'mere."

you lead him to a one room bathroom, locking the door behind you. instead of the perfectly good countertop, he corners you against the wall, hands sliding up and under your dress. "this okay?" he asks and you whine, pushing your hips further into his grasp. your dress gathers at your waist as he finds the band of your tights digging into your skin. "you gonna let me taste?" you nod, practically begging.

he yanks down your tights and you ignore the sure sound of them ripping, glad they were a sale purchase. "i'll buy you new ones." he promises your inner thighs, kissing gently upwards. with your demolished tights, you're able to swing one leg over his shoulder as he lowers himself onto his knees. you've been wet all night from his touches and it doesn't surprise you when he has to peel your lace underwear off, slick clinging in strings as he works them to the side.

"so wet for me. i know, baby, i know." he hums as you whine impatiently, moving forward until his words land on your empty cunt. he works you like an expert, splitting your folds open as he licks a stripe up and down. almost all the way down.

robby isn't like the college boys who treated this like a task. he lavishes you with kisses, small sucks to your clit that end when you start bucking. the tip of his tongue teases your hole but doesn't go in, seemlingly leaving it for another time. his nose, that strong nose you always catch yourself admiring, presses against your clit and you jolt from the pleasure of it. you fuck yourself a bit on it, encouraged by his moan that pulses through your core. the friction switches between his nose and his tongue and you can't get enough, that tell-tale pressure building in your lower stomach.

"robby, i'm close." you admit, gasping when he sucks your clit even harder. waves build and tense in your core as you chase the feeling, moving your hips without thought. "c'mon, honey. come." he mumbles, muffled by your thighs. like you do everyday in the ER, you follow his command, moaning as you tense and flutter around him. he guides you through it with sloppy licks until you're pushing him away, overstimulation creeping over your shoulders.

his beard is sopping with your slick, something he doesn't seem to care about as he emerges after fixing your underwear. deft fingers guide your feet out and into your heels as he fully frees you of the ripped tights, little brushes to your ankle bone going straight to your heart. it's only after he throws away your tights does he stand, eyes glittering.

you look down at his cock clearly straining against his trousers. when you reach for it, his hand stops you, stroking the soft skin of your wrist. "tonight's not about me." one part of you is disappointed but the other is dreadfully tired, needing rest after all of this excitement. "thank you, robby." you say, unsure of how to feel the silence. his hands grip your waist and he kisses your forehead before he pulls back, thumb swiping over your bitten lips. "call me michael, honey. you want to stay or you done for the night?" you shake your head instantly, exhaustion deep in your bones. "take me home, michael."

-

when you wake in the late morning, he's still in your bed. if he hadn't been, you would have thought last night was a jazz-induced dream. instead, he's murmuring to someone on the phone sternly. your eyes trace his bare chest down to his boxers, the same chest you fell asleep against last night. you lay a hand on his chest and he covers it with his own, seemingly done with his phone call. "who was that?" you ask, too curious to hold back. "HR." he grins. "haven't even asked me out properly and you're already calling HR." you grumble, inching closer until he gathers you in his arms, kissing the top of your nose.

"will you go out with me, doctor?"

-

writing this was a fever dream.

if you haven't seen noah wyle dressed up, i highly encourage you to.

[mrs-stans]

Sebastian Stan’s Crash Course in Becoming Trump

After a long tour of duty in the Marvel universe, the Romanian-born actor is conquering the festival circuit, with starring roles in “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man.”

Illustration by João Fazenda

By Alex Barasch

The actor Sebastian Stan glanced approvingly at the neon signage and old-school menus at the Pearl Diner, in the financial district, the other day. He’s lived in and near New York since he was twelve—around the time Donald Trump swapped his first wife, Ivana, for Marla Maples—and has watched the city evolve. “It’s funny. It’s changed, but it’s also the same buildings,” he said. “And then you’re, like, ‘The buildings are there, but you are not the same.’ ”

Stan took off a white ball cap and ordered coffee with cream; he was jet-lagged, fresh from the Deauville American Film Festival, where he’d received the Hollywood Rising-Star Award. “Rising” is a stretch for the forty-two-year-old, who’s appeared in a dozen Marvel projects, but Stan has lately reached a different echelon. In May, he went to Cannes for “The Apprentice,” in which he plays seventies-era Trump. In Berlin, he’d won the Silver Bear, an award whose previous recipients include Denzel Washington and Paul Newman. “Everyone was, like, ‘Oh, the Silver Bear!’ ” Stan said. “Then you go back and you’re, like, ‘Do we know what the Silver Bear is in America?’ ”

The prize was for his role in “A Different Man,” Aaron Schimberg’s surreal black comedy, which nods to “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Stan stars as a man whose lifelong disfigurement is miraculously reversed; the shoot included a grisly three-and-a-half-hour session spent peeling off chunks of his face.

“The Apprentice” demanded a transformation of a different sort. At the diner, Stan pulled out his phone and swiped through an album labelled “DT physicality”—a hundred and thirty videos of Trump, which capture his tiniest gestures and his over-all mien. Marinating in Trump content was, Stan said cheerfully, “a psychotic experience.” He watched the clips so many times that when the director, Ali Abbasi, asked him to improvise in a scene about marketing Trump Tower, he could rattle off the stats: sixty-eight stories of marble in a peachy hue chosen by Ivana, because, as the real Trump put it in a promo, “people feel they look better in the pink.” (It turned out that he’d also memorized Trump’s lie: the tower is actually fifty-eight floors.)

Growing up in Communist Romania, Stan had just an hour of TV news each night; New Year’s Eve was an event because it meant twelve hours of programming. His instinct for mimicry—he had a habit of imitating family members and neighbors—was the earliest tell that he might be an actor. After he and his mother fled to Vienna, in 1989, Stan got his first credit, in a Michael Haneke film—an experience that nearly put him off show business. “I stood in line with, like, a thousand kids, for I don’t know how many hours—which I hated,” he said. “If I could fucking meet Haneke now, it would be amazing!”

When the family moved again, to America, he experienced pop-culture shock. He binged every movie he’d missed—from “Back to the Future” to “Ace Ventura”—in a pal’s basement. Another friend roped him into the school play. “My high school was really, really small, so I didn’t have a lot of competition,” Stan said. “They were, like, ‘Please be in the play!’ ” Soon he was playing Cyrano himself.

After stints on Broadway, and on “Gossip Girl,” Stan was scooped up by Marvel. “I’ve been lucky to play a character for fifteen years,” he said. The blockbuster paychecks freed him up to explore edgier material. “I, Tonya,” in which he played the ice-skater Tonya Harding’s dirtbag husband, was a turning point. “It allowed me to see that a good director will bring out more in you than you can,” Stan said. It was also his first time portraying a real person—a feat that he repeated in “Pam & Tommy,” as the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, and now in “The Apprentice.”

“It’s like learning a piece of music,” Stan said, of nailing an impression. “You’ve got to start out slow—it requires practice. Suddenly, you’re getting it more. You’re still making mistakes—but you’re playing the music. You’re playing the music every day until you can do it in your sleep. That’s when the fun starts.” He sliced the air for emphasis, then caught himself and grinned. “And sometimes it’s months later at a diner, and you’re, like, ‘Why am I doing that with my hands?’ ”

[beevean]

I finally unboxed the Sega Genesis Mini I’ve had for a while, and had the chance to try out Sonic the Hedgehog! It turns out there’s also Mega Man: The Wily Wars, which is essentially a compilation remake of Mega Man 1, 2, and 3, so I’ll try that out later, along with Castlevania: Bloodlines.

Also, the Genesis controller is beefier than I anticipated. It’s not bad, though! It’s nice to hold, and pressing the buttons feels nice. The d-pad is also very sensitive, and if I ever get around to playing any of the fighting games, I imagine the round shape will help with fighting games!

So far, Sonic the Hedgehog, along with what I’ve played of Mega Man and the Classicvanias, strikes me as a platformer that requires lots of precision. Except unlike Mega Man and Castlevania, you’re going at super fast speeds, so obstacles can be hard to anticipate if you don’t know the lay of the land. (I can only imagine how much tougher the Game Gear version is, what with the screen crunch I’ve heard about.)

The alternate pathways are really nice, though! It helps vary the gameplay experience, I imagine!

Also, why is Sonic 3 not on there? There’s a plastic Sonic and Knuckles cartridge, but Sonic 3 isn’t even there? That would have been cool. Oh well. That’s what hacking is for.

That's great!

I never held a real Genesis controller, but they look pretty solid lol.

The Classic games are not quite the other platformers of the time, especially not MM and CV. They are more momentum-based, most noticeably Sonic 1, which didn't have things like the Spin Dash yet so you had to earn all of your speed. The games are generally easier to beat, but you're encouraged to experiment with the level design to find shortcuts. But yes, the Genesis games were criticized for centering the camera on Sonic, causing some visibility issues. If you've played Sonic 2 and got to Chemical Plant, you must have experienced Sonic outrunning the camera :P (as for the Game Gear games, yes they can get very bad :') but they're ports of the games for Master System, so very different games! They're simpler and cute)

As for Sonic 3... oh boy. Let me carry you through a fascinating rabbit hole.

It's widely believed that S3&K could not be re-released for the longest time because of its music. Now, it was re-released in the 2000s, I personally played it on Sonic Mega Collection Plus for PS2, but in the 2010s it was no longer included. But let me explain with one example.

This is the theme of Ice Cap Zone in the Genesis version:

In 1997, the game was ported on PC under the name of Sonic & Knuckles Collection. It used MIDI music, but most importantly, some tracks were replaced. These are Ice Cap's themes in the Collection:

Pretty different, huh?

Since 1997, it was believed that the new tunes were hastly composed replacements either because the PCs of the time could not handle the vocal clips of certain tracks, or because, turns out, Michael Jackson and Brad Buxer composed some of the tracks. No, really.

This is Hard Times, composed by The Jetzons, of which Brad Buxer was a member of:

I hear a couple of similarities with Ice Cap :) but yeah, this song became popular in the Sonic fandom... 7 years ago, I'd say? Not too long ago. It pretty much confirmed that some of the tracks in S3 were not composed by people at SEGA, and this is why they lost their copyrights on it.

Another shocking discovery was made in 2019. A beta of Sonic 3 was unearthed, one dated 4 months before the release of the game. It was still very rough, but again, what matters here is that it too had different tracks...

The S&K Collection tracks were the originals??????

So... they composed these tracks... then they hired Michael Jackson and Brad Buxer to replace them... then they covered their involvement? Now, tbf, if you remember what scandals Jackson was involved in 1994 you can understand SEGA's decision to cut contacts with him, but still, what a loop.

(side note, Carnival Night Act 1 Beta is one of my favorite tracks in general lol. The official one can't compare)

During the 2010s, mobile ports of Sonic 1, 2 and CD were made by Christian Whitehead, the man who would eventually become the head of the team that made Sonic Mania. But even though he was more than ready to give the same treatment to 3&K, SEGA never gave the okay... until 2022.

That year, Sonic Origins was released, a compilation that is meant to be the definitive way to play the Classic games. In reality, they're mostly ports of the mobile ports. And guess which tracks they put in the shiny new remaster of S3&K.

Fans were not happy, to say the least.

And this is the story of how Michael Jackson made porting S3&K nearly impossible without resorting to controversial beta themes :'D

[criticalbennifer]

Sympathy For The Daredevil  By Christine Spines

February 2003

Will a blind lawyer who’s also a crime-fighting vigilante be the next big comic-book movie hero? Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner slip into some tight leather and angsty attitudes to find out.

Grrrrruunt! Snort. Snort. Snort. Snarling and quivering his way into a state of primal rage, Colin Farrell has taken several giant leaps backward along the evolutionary scale in a matter of minutes. His darting eyes and clipped breath give him the air of a fierce animal just let out of its cage as he waits for a chance to unleash a lethal dose of Bullseye, the manic assassin-for-hire he plays in Daredevil, the latest Marvel comic to spring to the screen. Having worked only about 11 days in three months of shooting, Farrell is happy to have been cut loose onto this set built to look like a cathedral of, well, biblical proportions.

Farrell takes a toke on an imaginary joint, and a few beefy grips laugh cautiously as they ready the set. In this scene, Bullseye shatters a stained-glass window with his boot, grabbing the falling shards and hurling them at his arch-nemesis, Daredevil, the titular blind superhero played by Ben Affleck. When director Mark Steven Johnson (Simon Birch) finally calls action, the 26-year-old actor smashes the window, lands with a thus, and begins frantically grabbing fistfuls of air (the shards will be added digitally), which he hurls with all his might at… nobody. Johnson calls cut. Farrell is exasperated. “What am I doing?” the actor says in his native thick Irish brogue. “Fuckin’ break-dancin’?” He twirls around and slaps his knees and heels like a Thriller-era Michael Jackson. It can’t be a good sign when an actor invokes the deposed King of Pop to describe his performance.

Welcome to the all-guts-no-glory world of comic-book action movies, where the actors playing superheroes and supervillains work themselves into a lather to wage war not with each other but with their inner demons – and the far more fearsome prospect of looking downright silly. But stepping into a costumed action-adventure, especially one as full of nuance and ambiguous morality as Daredevil (blind lawyer Matt Murdock by day, crime-fighting vigilante by night), presents a maddening dilemma for the serious actor. It’s hard to resist the temptation to suit up as an icon of popculture mythology in a world in which Spider-Man has become the fifth-highest-grossing movie ever. How else would a lesser-known comic like Daredevilscore such of-the-moment players as Sexiest Man Alive Affleck, Minority Report’s Farrell, and Alias It Girl Jennifer Garner, who plays Elektra, the woman warrior whose designs on Daredevil are nothing short of love or death? On the other hand, there is that pesky business of the job itself, which, for the serious actor, doesn’t feel very serious at all.

While Farrell pretends to throw glass at an imaginary Affleck, the actual star is being primped and primed for his first shot of the day, on a set several hundred yards away. Extra-careful attention is being paid to his nose, which will be responsible for performing his next scene. Daredevil doesn’t really have superpowers, but, because he’s blind, his other senses are turbo-charged. In this case, of course, he smells danger. Affleck’s top half is in character, clad in a skintight red leather jacket complete with built-in ripples and lather headgear that looks like a low-hanging swim cap with devil horns. His bottom half, in baggy gray sweats, is enjoying some time off in this close-up.

Affleck can’t see a thing through his blind-guy mask and passes the time between takes reeling off one-liners to anyone within earshot. This is the gallows humor of the battle-weary or battle-bored. “How’s this for a look!” the 30-year-old actor says, his nostrils flaring the slightest bit. “I know, I know: You’re a fucking gorgeous bastard!” When the cameras roll, Affleck’s mouth and nose twitch wildly for a maximum of 30 seconds. And then his work is done. Affleck slips off his mask and brushes a hand through his matted hair. “We can use that shot for so many things,” he shouts to Johnson. “Just call it, ‘utility sniffer.’” But without much work to do, Affleck, too, looks both exasperated and exhausted. “This stuff is fun, but it’s hard to go for days without any lines. I think we’re doing a good job here but it’s truly hard to walk around day-in, day-out in the costume and keep the shame at bay,” he jokes wearily, heading back to his trailer. “At this point, that’s what I’m shooting for – the moments when the sky parts and the shame is not longer there.”

There may be no character outside of Hamlet or a Morrissey ballad better suited to capture and capitalize on such storms of actorly angst than Daredevil. From his conception in 1964 by Marvel comics mastermind Stan Lee (The Amazing Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four), Daredevil’s defining characteristic was not his superhuman abilities but rather his disability. “I had done a lot of different characters and they all had problems,” Lee says. “Spider-Man had romantic and financial problems. The Hulk turned into a monster. So it occurred to me that the biggest problem of all would be a superhero who is blind. He’s not invincible, so he’s very easy to empathize with, and that’s important in a hero or in any character you want to become a franchise.”

Daredevil has always been the comic book world’s equivalent of Tommy Lee Jones or Samuel L. Jackson. He has dedicated fans, an enduring shelf life, and a reputation for quality work in a pop medium not always given to such thoughtfulness. But he’s not a superstar. Still, he has always attracted the genre’s most celebrated writers, notably Frank Miller, who took over the title in the early ‘80s and infused it with an operatic sense of tragedy and romance that hooked a generation of teenagers, including Johnson, Affleck, and filmmaker Kevin Smith (who wrote his own run of the comic in the late ‘90s). Miller created Elektra, a liberated woman warrior for Daredevil to grapple with emotionally and physically, and then he broke the cardinal rule of comics: He killed her. “That really screwed me up as a kid,” says Johnson. “You think that can’t happen. You would never see Lois Lane get gutted by Lex Luthor. But when that does happen, you’ve got to pay attention. You go, ‘Wow, I gotta care about this guy because bullets aren’t going to bounce off his chest.’ You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Much the same could be said for the commercial fate of Daredevil the movie. As the first comics-based movie to be released since Spider-Man became a phenomenon, Daredevil is left to scale audiences’ steep expectations without a universally recognized character or a feel-good, coming-of-age story line. What the filmmakers are gambling on is the inherent appeal of a superhero with no real powers beyond his heightened sense of moral responsibility, one who reflect the post-September 11 fascination with self-sacrifice and everyday bravery. “Spider-Man raised the bar of what people expect, but this is such a different movie,” says Johnson. “Spider-Man, to me, is always swooping down and catching purse snatchers, saying ‘Here’s your purse, ma’am.’ Superman’s saving the world. This was never about that. This is about a guy trying to keep crime out of his area and do the right thing, and his head’s getting all messed up because of it. He’s supposed to be upholding the law as a lawyer, and then here he is out at night as a vigilante. That’s why it resonates with me. We all find ourselves caught between what’s right and what’s wrong.”

The entire production of Daredevil has also been caught between its own conflicting agendas, determining the right and wrong ways to craft a successful comic-book adaptation. With the exception of the Batman movies, actors of Ben Affleck’s level of stardom are rarely cat as superheroes. From the studio’s point of view, it’s hard to accept that the ever-afflicted Daredevil could be embodied by a six-feet-two movie star with a love for livin’ large and a marriage date with J.Lo. Factor in the rush to bear next summer’s Hulk and the X-Men sequel, X2, into theaters, and one begins to get a sense of the mounting pressures placed on Johnson’s dark-horse superhero. “if this thing works with the soul and depth [inherent to the comic], it’s a great thing for this genre and franchise movies in general,” says producer Gary Foster (Sleepless in Seattle). “That means you can do a movie that’s not just standing tall on its genre but deals with complexity and character and stills appeals [to wide audiences]. If we play our cards right, there’s three or four of these. If [this] one doesn’t do it, we’ve blown an opportunity.”

This auspicious moment, for the 36-year-old Johnson, is the consummation of a lifelong infatuation with a comic-book hero whose cinematic future seemed destined to fall into the hands of a more powerful director. “This is the movie I’ve wanted to make since I was a little kid,” he says. “I used to wait outside of the drugstore in Hastings, Minnesota, for these comics to show up on the truck. I’d be there at 6 A.M. when they’re get there and just obsess over them. [But] I never thought I would get a chance to make this movie. I’m not the obvious choice.”

When Johnson first pitched himself for Daredevil, he had just finished shooting Simon Birch, his adaptation of John Irving’s novel A Prayer For Owen Meany, about a physically challenged kid who enchants a small New England town with his preternatural wit and wisdom. “Simon Birch was my film school,” John says, almost apologetically. “Birch was [training me] to make this movie. But they’re both about handicapped heroes, which is kind of interesting.”

That connection wasn’t all that seductive to the gauntlet of Marvel executives, studio heads, and actors Johnson faced during his six-year crusade to make this movie. His first and in some ways biggest hurdle was Marvel. At the time, the venerable comic company was on the brink of bankruptcy due to bad management and an unwillingness to capitalize on the screen-readiness of their universe of 4,700 characters. Daredevil, as it turned out, had a devoted following among filmmakers, and Chris Columbus (the Harry Potter films) had already optioned the project and written a screenplay for Carlo Carlei (Flight of the Innocent) to direct for Fox. Having heard that Columbus’ script needed serious work, Johnson continued to badger Avi Arad, the president and CEO of Marvel Studios, to let him take a crack.

”They were driving me crazy,” recall Arad, who took the project to Columbia after Columbus’s option expired. “Lucky for mark, I fell in love with him. He was so passionate, and he’s a great writer, and he’s soulful.” No sooner had Johnson got the job than the Columbia deal fell apart over Internet rights. So Arad went back to Fox, and Johnson was once again forced to sell himself as the guy whose passion belied his credits. He scored the writing gig, but directing looked out of reach for him. X-Men had just hit pay dirt, and the studio had its sights set on wooing an A-lister. “The attitude was, we can go get Ridley Scott or Jim Cameron,” recalls Foster. Johnson was so infuriated that he rode his motorcycle over to the studio and sat outside the office of the executive in charge of the production for four hours. “They said, ‘He’s in meetings,’ and I said, ‘I ain’t leaving’,’” recalls Johnson, who had already paid an artist $7,000 of his own money for storyboards. “When I got in, I went off on him for quite a while bout why nobody else was right, and this is my movie and needs to be one vision. And in hindsight, that’s what it took. I think he was terrified.”

”He’d been living and breathing this thing for so many years that it just poured out of him,” recalls the executive in question, Sanford Panitch, president of production at Regency Enterprises, which cofinanced the movie with Fox. “You got excited about Daredevil from him. He just loves it so much. He’d do anything to make a great movie.”

Initially, the concept was to make an emotionally driven action movie – more like a film noir with costumes and martial artistry – for a modest budget of around $50 million. “We were going to do it for cheap,” Johnson says. “And as the cast began to grow…” The first major spurt came when Affleck expressed interest in the title role after being offered the part of Bullseye, the flashy villain role traditionally played by bigger stars (think Jack Nicholson or Jim Carrey in the Batman series). Though Johnson and Foster were aware that Affleck was a Daredevil fan, they had focused on actors who kept lower profiles and price tags. “We had a long conversation with Edward Norton. He knew every detail about this characters,” recalls Foster, who says they also looked at Guy Pearce. “but then Edward calls me up and goes, ‘I just don’t know if I want to wear the suit.’”

Although there was still concern about springing for a movie-star salary, Johnson fought for the actor, whose teenage response to Daredevil had been as intense as his own. “I got into it as an early adolescent and Daredevil mirrored my sense of the world as this operatic place full of weighted decisions and doomed romances and endless combat,” Affleck says. “Doomed romances were something I was thinking about because I didn’t have any. Or when I did, they would be like a week long, and then I’d get a note that said, ‘I break up with you.’ So this was what I thought being a sexy teenager was like.” Still, Affleck was aware that the role might not be anyone’s idea of what a sexy grown man is like. “There was a potential for it to be ridiculous,” says the star (who ended up taking home $12.5 million for the movie and contracting for possible sequels). “Because if it doesn’t work, not only are you in a regular bad movie, but you’re in a bad movie with red trousers on. But if it does work, then it’s my little childhood fantasy comic-book movie, and I get to be that guy.”

For the other primary cast members, the decision to sign on to what could turn out to be a men-in-tights fiasco was largely treated as if it were a kind of summer job where they could collect a paycheck and learn some kung-fu party tricks while they were at it. “I only have about three minutes of screen time,” says Farrell, jokingly underestimating his character’s contribution, “so I thought it would be cool to do a small job. You can’t exactly do research around the streets of Los Angeles killing people with paper clips. I just wanted the physical experience and to have fun with something.” And the Oscar-nominated Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile), who plays the mob boss known as the Kingpin, simply liked the idea of playing a 330-pound character who’s also a “martial artist and really quick for his size.”

Surprisingly, despite the physical demands of her day job on Alias, the 30-year-old Garner was drawn to this role as an opportunity to add to her bag of kicks. “I wanted the training,” she says. “It was like when you learn something new and you’re kind of obsessed with it. And it’s also a much darker role than the one I play all the time. [Alias’s] Sydney is much more normal, like myself. Elektra is an assassin for hire. Her body’s for hire. She’s a… whore. She’s not a girl from West Virginia, that’s for sure.” The only sticking point for Garner had to do with donning the thonglike ensemble Elektra wears in the comic. “I just couldn’t. I’m pretty good about [scary costumes] once I’m there and just forgetting about it. I don’t know how we could have made the things Elektra does in the movie] work with what she does – or doesn’t – wear in the comic.”

Although what Garner ends up wearing – a naval bearing, black leather bustier with matching pants and boots – is negligibly less negligible, comic-book fans don’t take kindly to taking even the slightest liberty. “I hate the Elektra costume [in the movie],” says John Dacey, the genial manager of the Hi De Ho Comics in Santa Monica. “I think she basically looks like a garden-variety D&D dominatrix. Very disappointing, considering what a hottie Jennifer Garner is.”

Early into production Johnson faced off with the studio over sartorial issues. “hey were very nervous about the [Daredevil] costume,” says Johnson. “They weren’t sure they wanted one.” As absurd as it sounds to dress a superhero in civilian threads, these discussions came about before Spider-Man proved that spandex still has snap. The industry was also fixating on the X Games aesthetic of Vin Diesel’s streetwise, testosterone-pumped XXX hero. “We all wanted something cool; it was just a matter of finding it,” Johnson says. “Ultimately it was just like, ‘Look, this is Daredevil. It’s about a guy who dresses up in horns and jumps around Hell’s Kitchen in this outfit. That’s who he is. If you take that away from him, he’s something else. He’s XXX.’”

Johnson ultimately prevailed and hired designers Jams Atcheson and Lisa Tomczeszyn, fresh off Spider-Man, to create the character’s signature duds. “Daredevil’s a much darker story, and I think there was a desire to make the costumes more street and – I hate to use this term – hip,” Tomczeszyn says. “They wanted the costume to feel like it lived in the world of Generation X sportswear. There was a committee who felt there was nothing hopper than a guy in a leather jacket. ‘The guy in the leather jacket always gets the girl’ was a comment that was going around at the time.” Johnson struck a compromise hat put Daredevil in a leather jacket, pants, and boots. “We ended up with this sculpted leather bodysuit, which looks great when it’s well lit,” Johnson says. “And when it’s not, it looks like the gimp in Pulp Fiction.”

Beyond a passing concern that the leather mask would look too Halloween-like, Affleck tolerated the end result, which came complete with a built-in barrel chest, with only occasional cringing even amid ribbing from his costars. “The funniest moment was when I saw him in that leather outfit,” says the 45-year-old Duncan, who wore king-size power suits throughout the shoot. “I said, ‘You need a butt pad. Come on, what is that? I can write on that thing you got back there!’” But it was Garner who could have used some extra padding. “I was very jealous of Ben and Colin’s clothes hat covered everything,” she laughs. “They didn’t have to suck anything in. If I had a bad day, I had trouble zipping into my little suit. I had to be pretty serious.”

Garner is a master of many skills, not the last of which is the highly appealing but all-too-seldom employed art of genial humility. Sure, she can topple men three times her size with a roundhouse kick applied with a sharpshooter’s precision. Sure, she can best squads of international terrorist goons armed with nothing more than a strappy dress and stilettos. But what is far trickier is the ability to talk, over breakfast, about her fluctuating weight (what, in grams?) or the travails of dressing for Daredevil’s glammed-out ballroom scene without sounding like she’s been programmed by mission control. “It took six hours of hair and makeup, and at the end I was like, what does this say about me?” she says. “It takes that long to make Helena Bonham Carter look like a monkey. So am I starting out like a monkey?”

Garner had the cast and crew of Daredevil wondering the same thing, but for a very different reason, when she pulled off the dazzling acrobatics and wire stunts choreographed by Chinese master Yuen Cheung-yan. “Jennifer is a legitimately tough girl,” Affleck says. “And further embarrassing to me, she was so much better at [the action] than I am. She constantly had the moves down first, modestly going, ‘Well, you know, I was a dancer.’” Of course, Garner will cop to no such thing. Her favorite Daredevil story casts Affleck solidly as the hero who saved her early on in the production when she was doing a stunt that required her to run up a wall, pull out a sword (a sai, her character’s trademark three-pronged Asian weapon), land, and stab somebody. “As I’m running up the wall, I start to flip and flail, and I was going with such velocity there was no way I was not going to break my nose on the wall,” she says. “And he swooped in and grabbed me from underneath with both arms and just said, ‘I gotcha!’ It was like he was Superman!”

Uh, make that Daredevil. Perception, or lack thereof, is truly everything in the making and marketing of a comic-book event movie. And Daredevil is still struggling to distinguish itself among the superstars of the genre. While Wesley Snipes’s turn as the futuristic vampire hunter in Blade proved that it’s possible to turn a movie about an unknown superhero into a sleeper hit, Daredevil has the added pressure of entering theaters at a time when audiences expect a great deal more from the genre.

Stars from the Marvel universe gained considerable clout in Hollywood after X-Menpulled in $157 million at the box office without any marquee names. But it is the looming shadow of Spider-Man’s audacious swing to the apex of success that radically altered Daredevil’s course of action. When Spider-Man was released on May 3, 2002, the production was already up and running, and the action sequences were planned to incorporate various Asian fighting techniques with street combat and some rooftop stunts. But it was promptly decided that the movie needed more “wow” moments after the world got a peek at the webslinger’s spectacular set pieces. “There has definitely been a pre-Spider-Man, post-Spider-Man [mind-set],” Foster says. “We saw what they were able to achieve with a certain amount of money. We didn’t have near that, but we realized we had to deliver a certain level of action and visual effects. Otherwise it would be a poor man’s Spider-Man.”

With that in mind, the studio ponied up more money for Daredevil’s action and special effects, bringing the budget up to “under $100 million,” Foster says. The filmmakers then figured they could get the biggest wow for their buck by hiring the Chinese wire-work team responsible for the Hong Kong-style how’d-they-do-that acrobatics in Charlie’s Angels and the upcoming Matrix sequels. Because Yuen and his crew were brought in relatively late in preproduction, they focused solely on two of the film’s action sequences – one sparing/courtship ritual with Affleck and Garner on a playground, and the climactic showdown between Affleck and Farrell in the cathedral. Yuen felt right at home choreographing action for Daredevil, whose melodramatic story line and beleaguered antihero mirrored the underdog heroes who are a staple of Chinese action. “If you watch Hong Kong movies, the bad guy is in over his head and working very hard and he wins,” he says, via his translator. “It’s about perseverance.”

Performing the action sequences, however, was more about endurance. “Jackie Chan I am not,” Affleck says. “It was really hard because Daredevil has no superpowers, so you had to physically approximate as best you could what a superhero is built like. It was an excuse to really get in shape. But in terms of acrobatics and kung fu, flexibility is the big thing, and you can only progress so much.” The playground scene, in which Garner and Affleck perform wire-assisted flips front and back while balancing on tandem seesaws, involved a month of rehearsals and rigorous training while they were doing night shoots of other scenes. “We were fighting all night every night from sundown to sunup,” Garner says. “Before we would do something painful and terrifying, the Chinese guy would say ‘Yat! Wee! Sum!’ And that would be the go. And as soon as we would finish, they would say, ‘Tuleachee,’ which means ‘Again.’ We worked on this one sequence that’s going to last a half second for at least 20 hours. That’s not an exaggeration. I don’t know how Keanu Reeves does it.”

Each day, the actors were rigged up in a harness strapped around their thighs and hips and attached to a wire that ostensibly helped them fly through the air with the greatest of ease. But after being cinched and squeezed in the crotch area for days on end, the novelty wore off. “It gets really boring once you get past the initial thrill of, ‘Hey, I’m kicking someone in the face!’” Affleck says. “Then the actor part of you goes, ‘What am I doing?’ You feel like an actual meat puppet on a string. I felt like a big red piñata.”

Garner’s breaking point came in a scene in which she hurls herself off a tower and has her fall broken by the wire. But in each take, her harness kept cutting into her abdomen, producing a gag reflex. “Every time you think you’re going to be sick,” she recalls. “I was livid and shaking and close to tears. And the reason was, I was thinking, ‘I have just spent this whole summer hurting myself, and then I am going back to Alias, where I will hurt myself for nine more months.’ I had a moment and I had to go back to my trailer while they changed my clothes for the next thing. And they said, ‘We’re ready for you,’ and I was like, ‘Sniff, sniff, okay.’ And I was fine.

But isn’t this exactly the type of thing stunt doubles were made for? Of course it is. But on a movie like this one, which lies and dies on the authenticity of it stunts, audiences have come to expect a celebrity thrill factor for their nine dollars. “People used to use stunt doubles for everything,” Garner says. “Now one of the first questions anyone asks me is, ‘Do you do your own stunts?’” In this case, it almost seems as if the filmmakers planned the playground interlude in anticipation of that very question. Nearly every person interviewed for this story made a point of mentioning that Affleck and Garner “did all their own stunts in the playground scene.” What that means about the rest of the action is hard to tell.

Sometimes the truth is in what people don’t say. “Ben was a real trouper when I had him,” says stunt coordinator Jeff Imada, who hired four stunt doubles for Affleck’s character, each with a specialty like tumbling, wire work, fighting, and weaponry. “Jennifer was rarin’ to go and do a lot of stuff because of Alias and just her physical abilities. She picked up on stuff quite quickly. And Colin Farrell was the same way – a natural athlete. When I first met with him, I said, ‘This guy is as good as a stunt guy.’”

Farrell approaches his stunt work and his dramatic scenes with remarkable ferocity. Garner found herself on the receiving end of the Irishman’s full-immersion technique one night when they were shooting a fight scene and he suggested that he attack her by biting her lip. “I’m hanging from a wire, of course, and it’s the butt middle of the night,” Garner recalls, her voice rising with amused disbelief. “Then he starts off by taking a little nibble. And then take after take he’s pulling my lip like six inches away from my face…” Garner stops to demonstrate, stretching her lower lip out like Silly Putty. “He’s just gnawing on it for a few minutes before he lets go. And Mark said, ‘It would be great if your eyes would fill with tears,’ And I was like, ‘No problem!’”

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Farrell seized a rare opportunity to chew the scenery. Back on the set, several hours after his primal glass-grabbing scene, he looks like a portrait of the understimulated actor, splayed out in nap position on his trailer sofa, chain-smoking and flipping through a tabloid. “He is actually doing a dramatic reading (emphasis on the outrage) of an item accusing him of Johnny Depp-like hotel room shenanigans at the Mayflower in New York. “I don’t know where they Mayflower hotel is,” he insists, lighting a Camel off his last, determined to exonerate himself. “I saw Ben Affleck’s name in here as well, and I went and asked him if he sent a fuckin’ like-sized Scooby-Doo to Matt Damon after The Bourne Identity came out number two to Scooby-Doo, and he says, ‘Fuck no.’ And I was like ‘Hah!’”

That discussion about the tabloid was probably longer than any scene Affleck and Farrell have shot together as the protagonist and villain of a movie that has, at this point, been in production for more than three months. “I haven’t worked with Ben,” Farrell says. “He’s worked with my stunt double, and I’ve worked with his. It’s really weird. But the reality is that he’s in a red fuckin’ suit, his eyes are fuckin’ concealed. It’s not like sitting with someone having a dialogue and being open. It’s a guy with two red horns coming out of his head, and you can’t see his eyes so you pick a point and go for it.”

Affleck had his own challenges playing a handicapped superhero. “He can see, in a way, better than most people because he has this three-dimensional radar,” he says. “It was a tricky thing to play, and I didn’t want to be using my eyes, no matter what, so I had these milky blue contacts in the whole time which actually render you blind.”

To prepare for the role, Affleck spent time with a blind actor named Tom Sullivan, who keyed him into the ephemera of life as a sightless person, like walking with a cane and using the other senses to get around. “Eventually, I just got used to not seeing all day, which wasn’t too bad. People kind of left me alone.” Says Affleck, who also watched a documentary about how bats use their radar sense to navigate. “Although there’s only so much looking off into the middle distance you can do. After a while you do want to say something.”

Affleck is not the first guy one associates with the strong, silent type. “You watch him over the years, and he tens to rely on dialogue, and we didn’t give him a lot [to say],” Foster says. “So there had to be a physical manifestation of what the character is, and he had to sell that daily.” According to Kevin Smith, who has directed Affleck in five films (including the upcoming Jersey Girl) and who visited the set often (he has a cameo in Daredevil), his old friend was virtually unrecognizable. “The really interesting thing about his performance is that he doesn’t get to rely on the ‘Afflecktions,’ as we call them,” says Smith. “He doesn’t get to be that slick, oily, charming Ben Affleck. I was really blown away by his manner. It’s weird because it is a comic-book movie, but he had to give a true performance. It is a completely netless performance because he has to be completely straight.”

”Kevin would visit the set and make asinine remarks like, ‘I can’t believe it! No Affleck!’” Affleck recalls, his hackles up. “I get an unfair rap, but that aside, playing the character was something different for me. For some reason, there is this archetype of the hero who is tortured by his own goodness and always has to suffer while all the actors who have been playing these unredeemable characters have the best time.”

Apparently no Method actor, off-camera Affleck assumed his usual position as class clown. On a long, physically demanding shoot like this one, the tension release between takes can be both a necessary tonic and a dangerous distraction. “There is one moment that has haunted me, where I thought, ‘I don’t like what I did,’” Garner says of a scene near the end of the movie in which her character has been stabbed. “Ben was making me laugh between takes, and I should have been more disciplined. There was an element of this being my summer job. I worked really hard all year and I knew I could relax a little bit – otherwise I think I would have had a nervous breakdown. I probably should have taken it a little more seriously. I was not scooping ice cream. I was making a big movie.”

”That is typical Jennifer Garner modesty,” Affleck counters. “In fact, the only new footage we’re shooting is a love scene of me and Jennifer in bed, which is a testament to the fact that someone was thinking, ‘We have this incredibly beautiful woman and we should have some sexy moments. Give the people what they paid for: the Alias chick panties!’” Garner is actually looking forward to taking another crack at the emotion. In addition to the new love scene, they’re reshooting the climactic moment Garner feels she flubbed. “Sometimes you’re not your best,” she says, “and thank God they’re letting me go back and fix one of those moments.”

Since principal photography wrapped last August, Johnson and his stars have reconciled themselves with the risks (and potential shame) involved in a project like this one. “If the movie doesn’t make its money back, someone out there will blame me,” says Affleck, who ventured to his first comic-book convention so he could talk to Daredevil fans and hopefully prove his fan-boy credentials. “I think that group is particularly suspicious of anyone they think of as a conventional leading man. But by going down there and talking, I think it made a difference. If it were me, it would have made a difference.”

The filmmakers acknowledge that a faithful representation of Daredevil’s sex, violence, and hazy morality would surely result in an R rating. But Johnson understand that his beloved superhero now inhabits a world in which all comic-book adaptations are expected to fall into the fun-for-the-whole-family category, even if it takes a crowbar to squeeze it into a PG-13. Still, a week away from shooting the love scene, Johnson delights at the ideas of smuggling in another layer of darkness and devastation, giving Daredevil even more reason to brood shamelessly into the sequel. “It’s like somebody like him gets a shot at a happy ending with the girl. Now what do you do? Make it even more depressing!” he says with a cackle. “But that’s the real life of a superhero – you can’t have any relationships, nobody can get too close, you’re 30 years old, your body’s falling apart.” Johnson’s voice soars with the wondrous disbelief of a guy who finally got to kiss the girl he’d pined for all his life. “I just think, wow, that’s a hero… Then everybody dies.”

[collectingtruths]

Part 5: Expect The Unexpected

“The unexpected always happens.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

[She didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t to go fifteen days without hearing from Dom. This wasn’t like him. After the first week, she was a little worried, but she didn’t want to break his balls. He was a damn good cop, an incredible detective and he always found a way to make things work. Still, it was unusual that he hadn’t stopped by to give her a smart ass remark or try and steal her food.

When the Eagles won, she expected to hear his mouth from the moment the elevator dinged on Monday morning, but all she heard was the rest of the crew talking about the antics that happened in the city. And if she had been a little worried on day seven, she was a lot worried on day fifteen.

Leaning back in her seat, she let her head tilt back as she looked at the ceiling. She was trying to remember the last conversation they had that night. He said he trusted the person he was sending in with his life and she hadn’t thought about it at the time, but now…her eyes widened as she sat up. Locking her computer, she grabbed her office keys and shoved them into her pocket after she locked her door on her way out. She had taken the elevator up two floors and then made her way for the cubicles that filled the larger space.

She went straight toward the one that had Falcone’s name hung up on the exterior wall. She half expected to see him reclined in his seat, playing with one of those metal binder clips and chewing on the chain that held his St. Michael’s medal, but the chair was empty, the trash had been taken out, nothing scattered across his desk. Her brow furrowed when she heard the sound of voices coming from a few cubicles over. She walked over and when they all smiled and looked at her, she shoved her thumb in the direction of Dom’s desk. Anyone know where Falcone is? Is he trying to milk that Eagles win or what? [She heard the chuckles and she was given direction to go see the Cap, that he hadn’t been in for a few weeks, but they thought he had put in vacation. “I think he was supposed to go down to Mexico with his ex.” They all started laughing. “Think he’ll come back married?” Another round of laughter. “Shit, I hope not. His ex was fucking crazy.” She shook her head and then smiled.] Thanks, I appreciate it. [She turned and walked away. She knew she likely wouldn’t get too far with their Captain so she just wasn’t going to bother. Stepping back into the elevator, she jumped a bit when the large hand came up between the doors just in time to stop them from closing. She didn’t know him, didn’t recognize him. “Looking for Dom?” She looked over at the man and her brow began to furrow again. He looked like he was a few bags short of an OD, but then it registered who he was.] Gaines? [He chuckled and nodded his head. “Gotcha.” She nodded as the doors finally closed again.] Yeah, you did. [He smiled at her. I figured. I’ve been undercover for awhile. Just closed my gig and came back in to see what else was going on and that’s when I saw our boy got himself an assignment.” She stopped talking when the doors opened and someone else got on. She knew it. She fucking knew he did it. He trusted himself and that was what he meant by that. When the person got off, she rode right by her floor as they headed for the ground level so he could go out through the garage.] He wasn’t supposed to do that. [Gaines looked over at her and his brow arched. “If you asked him to do it, well…then we both know why he went.” She started to shake her head, but the door was opening and he was stepping out.] I never asked him. I never asked him to do anything. He said he was going to get someone he trusted. [Gaines chuckled and threw up his hands as he walked backward. “Ain’t nobody better to trust than yourself, kid. You know that. Take care, Vance. He’ll be just fine. He’s one of the best.” She shook her head.] Be safe, Bobby. [She hit the button for her floor and waited as the doors closed again. The silence seemed to hurt her ears as she replayed what he said…if you asked him to…but she didn’t. She never wanted him to take on this task, but Gaines was right. Dom had been undercover for years. He’d get what he needed and get out. He wasn’t supposed to do that. [Gaines looked over at her and his brow arched. “If you asked him to do it, well…then we both know why he went.” She started to shake her head, but the door was opening and he was stepping out.] I never asked him. I never asked him to do anything. He said he was going to get someone he trusted. [Gaines chuckled and threw up his hands as he walked backward. “Ain’t nobody better to trust than yourself, kid. You know that. Take care, Vance. He’ll be just fine. He’s one of the best.” She shook her head.] Be safe, Bobby.

[She hit the button for her floor and waited as the doors closed again. The silence seemed to hurt her ears as she replayed what he said…if you asked him to…but she didn’t. She never wanted him to take on this task, but Gaines was right. Dom had been undercover for years. He’d get what he needed and get out. Once she was back in her office with the door closed, she picked up her phone and dialed down to the Detective Sergeant and asked to be put in contact with the handlers, she let them know she had information pertinent to a case a UC had been working on. After a few minutes of being on hold, she assumed the handler who was overseeing Dom had answered. She gave him a few pieces of information and number for a personal line and asked that Dom text her whenever he was secured to do so. With the call over, there wasn’t much more she could do short of going down into Killadelphia looking to score, but that wouldn’t end well for her and she knew it. Hours had passed and it was now the end of her shift. She had closed up the files she was working on and when everything was secure she left the office and her day behind. It wasn’t until she left the parking lot that she heard the soft ding come from her purse. While watching the road and reaching into her bag, she pulled it out. Stopping at the stoplight, she was quick to read the message. “Hey, baby. I ain’t coming over tonight, I’ve got some shit to do. I’ll hit you up later.” She blew out a breath and didn’t care about the horn that honked behind her. He was letting her know that he couldn’t get out right now because he was onto something and that he’d reach out when he could. She rolled her window down and shoved her middle finger out of it. The horn blowing got a little more impatient but then she pulled away and made the turn. She was just glad that she had heard back from Dom, she would sleep a hell of a lot easier tonight knowing he had it handled and maybe, just maybe no one else would die at the hands of their trafficker any time soon. At least not by contract.]

#TDATD #Mortal

[soundtrack-scribe]

Nights in the OR

A/N: This is called “I watch too much Grey’s Anatomy” so if you’re a fellow Grey’s fan in addition to a fellow Ashton ho, hi!

Word Count: 1.9k

And away, and away we go!

__

Nights on the peds floor we’re, in a word, uneventful. Low hums and beeps from machines doing their jobs while kids and parents alike snoozed between nurses prodding them awake to do their routine checks. You went through the charts of your patients, delegating a duo of an intern and older resident to each case with strict orders to page you only if something was seriously wrong, and a bright “Keep the tiny humans alive,” before making your way to the emergency room.

The trauma team usually ran the emergency room, a sea of green scrubs moving effectively and efficiently, assessing situations before paging the right departments, or diving headfirst into the work themselves. You caught sight of one of the doctors, a tall man in a shade of green scrubs darker than the rest in the room, and rolled your eyes. Attending trauma surgeon Ashton Irwin was about as arrogant as he was skilled, with an annoying habit of assessing quickly, albeit correctly, and working even faster on patients before shipping them off to the correct departments to deal with the fallout. You weren’t sure if that man had ever spent more than an hour, two tops, with a patient from start to finish. True to his arrogance and almost zero tolerance for sloppy mistakes, he was talking in hushed tones to a second year, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, jaw set, as the resident nodded frantically before running off.

Dr. Irwin took a moment to compose himself, giving the slightest shake of his head and relaxing his jaw, before turning to wherever he was needed next. His hazel eyes scanned the room, and even from where you were you could tell that they were more on the green side tonight as they met yours. He offered forth the smallest of nods and smiles in your direction, dimples indenting both sides of the smile.

You returned the gesture, before twirling your index finger about the room. Extra attending on hand.

He waved his hand. No need. Got it covered, thanks.

You smiled your best, I don’t give a damn smile, striding across the room to take a seat behind a computer, crossing your hands behind your head. And with little else to do on your part, you settled in for a long night of researching the pros and cons of artificial bones versus prosthetics in cases for patients with osteosarcoma, a joint effort you were working on with the orthopedic surgeon.

Around 2 in the morning, you took a break from your research to grab a cup of coffee and a small bite to eat. On your way back, you spotted the orthopedic surgeon with a patient. “Oh! Dr. Hood,” you said as you approached. “Come find me when you’re done. I have some ideas.”

The man swiveled on his chair to glance up at you, eyebrows pulled together in confusion. “You’re not in OR 2 with Ash?”

“Nnnnoooo…” you said slowly, taking a sip from your coffee. “Why?” you followed up in a clipped tone. What had Dr. Arrogant done now?

Dr. Hood smiled politely at his patient, and got the attention of his resident. “Ma’am, we’re going to take you up for X-rays now, and then we’ll see about setting your arm for you, okay?”

The woman nodded, clearly shaken up. Then, “What about my husband and son?”

“I’ll get word, and update you as soon as I can,” he promised, before the resident escorted the patient up to X-rays. Finally he turned his attention to you. “Car accident just came in. Parents are a little banged up. Mike and Luke are working up the dad. You know how Luke gets about stitches.”

The both of you shared a chuckle. Luke Hemmings, the plastic surgeon, had very high standards for even the most basic of stitches, and if he was on hand and free, it was an easy bet he’d do the work himself. “So, what’s Mike doing with him then, if it’s just stitches?” you asked, referring to the general surgeon.

He shrugged. “General work up and clearance, I suppose. But the mom and the son’s side took the impact the hardest. Specifically the son. Ash didn’t page you?”

You scoffed. “Why on Earth would Ash page me, Cal? It’s trauma,” you raised your hands and voice in a mocking manner.

“Uh, probably cuz the kid is like seven.”

You growled low in your throat, hands going to tie up your hair. “OR 2, you said? How long ago?”

“Not too long. They gotta still be prepping. So if you hurry…”

“Thanks, Cal,” you patted the man on the shoulder before taking off at a run towards the OR rooms, briefly mourning your discarded coffee and potato chips in the process.

When you shouldered your way into the room, Ashton was in the process of scrubbing in, while nurses finished prep. “What the hell are you doing?” you demanded, arms crossing instinctively over your chest as you made your presence known.

Ashton shut off the water with his elbow, turning slightly to face you. “My job,” was the reply in a tone that questioned your intelligence.

“Bullshit,” you spat. “That,” you pointed out the window towards the child on the table, “is a peds case, and you know it.”

“It will be once it stops being a trauma case, yes.”

“Why didn’t you page me?”

“Because I don’t need you. It’s a trauma case. I’m a trauma surgeon. Now, you want to stop asking inane questions, and let me do my job, or you wanna stand here and fight with me all night?”

“It’s a peds trauma case, and in case you forgot, I’m the peds attending who happens to be trauma certified. And I’ll be damned if you do some hacksaw job on my patient that I have to fix later when I can scrub in and do the correct job now. So, are you going to ask me to scrub in, or do you wanna stand here questioning my credentials all night when you know I’m right? Do not make me go above your head to the Chief, Ash, because you know I will.”

His jaw ticked underneath his mask, his eyes hard as he thought over your threat. “Well?” he snapped after a beat of silence. “Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to scrub in?”

~~~

It was a grueling surgery, working in tandem with Ashton. For all the shit the two of you gave each other outside of the OR, inside you were one of the best teams, each of you knowing each other’s moves before you made them, and knowing what the other was thinking in the subtlest of changes. Even with both of your focuses solely on the patient in front of you, you were both vigilant in sending Ashton’s intern out every hour on the hour with updates, in which you two were also informed of the parents’ recovery.

Just before the four hour mark, Ashton let out a small hum of approval and you nodded. “Close and get him a room on the peds floor,” you told the intern.

“You don’t want me to update the family?”

“No,” Ashton cut in, already discarding his gloves, mask, and removing his scrub cap, shocks of curly brown hair falling forward and plastering to his sweaty forehead. “I will. Give Dr. Y/L/N any trouble and you won’t see the inside of an OR for a month.”

The intern gulped, knowing their boss meant what he said and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Y/N, I’ll meet you after I update the family to make sure we’re on the same page for how to proceed from here?”

“If you can remember how to page me, that is,” you smiled sweetly.

Ashton chuckled as he left the OR, while you stayed to oversee the intern closing, providing probably much gentler instruction than they were used to.

~~~

You rubbed at your eyes and stifled a yawn as you made your way to the cafeteria, still waiting for Ashton to page you. As you walked in, you realized why Ashton still hadn’t paged, spotting the man chatting with a few other attendings.

“Heard Y/N chewed your ear off,” Michael snickered.

“Yeah, she was pissed. Thanks for that, Cal,” Ashton said with a small giggle before changing his voice to do his best impersonation of you, “ ‘It’s a peds trauma case, and in case you forgot, I’m the peds attending who also happens to be trauma certified. Do not make me go over your head.’ Like yes, darling, I know. I’m the one who gave you your trauma certification.”

As the men started to laugh, you set your tray down in an empty seat at their table. “Morning, gentlemen!”

There was a cough as they tried to stifle their laughter, each of them getting out a choked, “Morning.”

“What were we talking about?” you asked innocently.

“Uh… just how Luke needs to learn to loosen up on the stitches,” Michael thought quickly. “Turns a five minute procedure into a half hour ordeal, it’s insane.”

“Sorry that I care how my patients look after a trauma,” Luke said with an eye roll.

“I’m sure, psych would call that mentality projection,” Calum teased.

“Paging Dr. Pretty Boy!” Ashton cackled.

“Hey! Rather be Dr. Pretty Boy than Dr. Arrogant,” Luke rounded on Ashton playfully.

“Who calls me that?”

“Uh… everybody. Y/N’s pretty accurate with her nicknaming,” Calum grinned.

Ashton let out a breath of disbelief as you smiled sheepishly at him, shrugging your shoulders. “Have you considered being less arrogant?”

“I am not arrogant!”

“Yeah, you are,” you all chorused, while Ashton crossed his arms and pouted. “Oh, whatever, the best surgeons usually are” you continued, turning your attention to Calum. “Before I got stuck in surgery, I meant to talk to you about artificial bones. Found some promising stuff.”

Calum paused in his sip of coffee. “Mmm, shit, awesome. Uh…” he checked his watch, “I got a half hour before rounds. You got time now?”

You checked your own watch. “Yeah, I got t-”

“Actually,” Ashton interrupted. “Y/N, I was wondering if we could talk real quick first. About the kid.”

“Oh! Yeah. We should probably do that. Cal, I’m off after rounds, if you’re free then.”

“Sounds good,” he nodded as he went back to his coffee while you and Ashton rose from the table, bidding the other three goodbye.

“So, his chart’s all up to date. I have one of my fourth years monitoring the situation, but I’m not expecting any complications to arise. Should be good to discharge probably later today or early tomorrow at the latest,” you brought him up to speed as you walked.

“Yeah, that’s great,” Ashton rushed, eyes darting around as he pushed open an on-call room and locked the door behind the two of you. “How long we got til rounds?”

“A little under a half hour, why?”

Ashton smirked as his hands landed hot on your waist, his lips finding yours. “Wanna boss me around some more?” he murmured against your lips, before he was trailing kisses down the column of your neck, before sucking into the sweet spot just before your collarbone, his hands jerking you to be flush against him. “Or, do you want my sincerest apology for being Dr. Arrogant, and forgetting to page you earlier?”

“Mmmm,” you moaned softly, tilting your head back, eyes shutting. “Little bit of both?”

“Yes ma’am,” he winked before scrubs went flying and your back hit the mattress.

__

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[calmsweetcreature]

Making Out (BLURB 4/4)

A/N: These are little preference type things where someone sends me a prompt or title and I do a little blurb for each guy💙 send me ideas my lovelies! And let me know what you think! 

Warnings: Mainly fluff, might be a lil’ something smutty here or there.

Luke

I feel like with Luke it would start with you both cuddling Petunia on a warm sunny afternoon. 

***

You had been lounging on the couch for most of the day, listening to chill music and enjoying each other’s company. Luke had been staring at his two girls for a long time now, watching you nuzzle your nose against the top of Piggy’s head and kiss her ears.

“I’m starting to feel neglected over here.” Luke’s voice comes out husky from lack of talking, the two of you enjoying the silence and peace of the lazy summer afternoon.

“Awh poor baby,” you tease, grinning cheekily at your boyfriend as you leave Petunia’s side to crawl across the couch to lay across Luke’s lap.

“Damn right,” He smiles sweetly at you, stroking his fingers across your cheek. You lean into his hand, sighing contently as you both stare into each others eyes. Your eyes sparkle with a bright and happy love in them as you lean up to peck your man on the lips.

Luke instantly deepens the movement of his lips on yours and his fingers slide through your hair to hold your head close. 

Without parting from the kiss you move to straddle his lap, your hands on his shoulders. You both want to be as physically close as you can get, with your bodies pressed up against each others. You both moan against each others mouths as your fingers tangle in his curls to give little tugs while his hands grip your neck and his thumbs rub over your jaw.

It wasn’t so much intense as it was needy, both of you playfully going between shorter pecks and long tongue rolling kisses as you wrapped yourself around each other.

You could feel that Luke was affected by your kisses and you couldn’t help the giggle that spills out of your lips, causing him to pull away and glare at you playfully.

“What are you laughing at there missy? I know it isn’t my amazing kissing skills.” You roll your eyes at his words and tug on his hair hairder making him laugh.

“Not at all bub, I just feel flattered that my superior kissing skills have affected you so much.” To prove your point you wiggle your hips causing Luke to gasp out loud.

“You’ve got me there love. What do ya say we move this to the bedroom?” He wiggles his eyebrows and gives you an exaggerated wink, causing you to laugh out loud and lean forward so your lips are to his ear.

“Sounds like a plan, but I think that it’s only fair if...” You dip your head lower to leave a long lick along the sensitive part of his neck causing Luke to shiver. “...Last one to the bedroom is a couch potato!” 

You jump off of Luke’s lap and run towards the bedroom, cackling loudly as you hear Luke’s footsteps behind you.

“Hey no fair!” His shout echoes through the halls as he chases after his girl.

Calum

Our loveable soft boi at his finest

***

You had been standing in the doorway for the best part of fifteen minutes, watching Cal’s face intently concentrating on his computer screen. He had been messing around with a new song idea and had recorded bits and pieces to mess around with. He’d listen to the same ten second clip about forty times and was ready to pull his hair out. He takes his headphones off and leaves them around his neck as he adjusts his cap. He rests his head back against the chair and groans softly, his eyes slipping shut.

You sigh softly, walking over to your man and placing your hands on his shoulders. He jumps slightly before relaxing into your gentle touch as you try to soothe his tense muscles.

“Don’t think I didn’t know you were watching me, creeper.” His words are a soft murmur and you gasp, spinning his chair around until he is facing you.

“If you knew then why didn’t you talk to me?” You fake hurt for a second before a smile fills your face and you sit softly in his lap. His arms go around your waist and his hands settle on your thighs, drawing a lazy pattern up and down your legs.

“I’m sorry doll, I was concentrating extra hard. Not that it helped, I’m still not sure what to do with it and my heads fucked.” His eyes look so tired that you can’t help but clutch his face in your hands, peppering kisses all over his cheeks and mouth.

“What do you say we order food in, I run you a hot bath while we wait for it and then we sit outside with a few beers and some music and relax? You can come back to this tomorrow with a fresh mind.” You press your forehead against his and place your hands on his shoulders again, rubbing the tension away.

“You’re too fucking good to me, but you got one thing wrong sweetness.” His words are low and heavy which makes your stomach tighten.

“What’s that?” Your words are hushed as you stare into his eyes, sure he can see the longing in yours.

“You’re going to run us a bath, if I’m going to relax I’m going to need my girl with me.” You smile at his words, nodding your head softly before Calum reaches a hand to the back of your neck and pulls you in for a kiss. His plush lips move against yours softly and you sigh into the kiss. 

After a few seconds you both pull away and you can see a twinkle returning to the eyes of your thoughtful boy. 

“I love you doll.”

“Love you always my music man.”

Your lips meet again and you just enjoy being close, getting drunk on the taste of each other.

Ashton

I miss our cheerful man, so I couldn’t resist this scenario.

***

The music was blaring through the house as you stood at the kitchen counter, shimmying your hips and using the mixing spoon as your microphone, your cake mix starting to look as it should.

“Woah, we’re halfway there woah, livin’ on a prayer!” You spun around, your fuzzy socks sliding across the floor. 

“Take my hand, we’ll make it I swear!” Ashton’s voice makes you jump as his arms wrap around your waist as he spins you around.

“Woah, livin on a prayer, living on a prayer!” You both sing your hearts out, laughing as you fall to the floor in a heap. An egg drops from the counter, heading for the floor when Ashton’s quick reflexes stop it from hitting the ground.

“So I see you’re having a productive day,” Ash’s eyes are teasing but the big smile on his face is infectious and you grin back at him.

“I’m making a cake, half of it is in the oven and I’ve just finished the second half - it’s going to be amazing!” You say proudly.

“I can see that angel, just don’t burn the house down again yeah?” You gasp, hitting him on the chest as you climb on top of him.

“Take that back Irwin! That was one time and I’d hardly call it burning the house down... it was just a little smoke!” You can’t stop the blush rising to your cheeks as Ash laughs, sitting up on the kitchen floor. 

“That cake was delicious if I remember, charcoal was very on trend back then.” He smirks, planting a kiss on your nose as you growl softly at him in annoyance.

“Well let me get back to this one if you don’t want a repeat, I don’t need your distractions today mister!” You go to get up when one of his hands goes to your back to keep you in place.

“Not all distractions are bad ones.” He murmurs, his lips finding yours. You both battle for dominance but Ash eventually wins (duh) and he deepens the kiss, his tongue rolling against yours before he leans back to bite your bottom lip. You get lost in the kiss, your hand sliding under his tee to feel his chest when you hear and feel a crunch against the back of your head before a trail of slime falls down your hair. You pull away in shock.

“Oh. No. You fucking didn’t.” His grin tells all and you look down at his hand to see the remnants of a crushed raw egg in his hands. “You’re about to fucking get it Irwin.”

The two of you pause for a moment before you’re both scrambling to reach for anything and everything you can get your hands on, flinging flour and cake mixture at each other until you yet again slip and land with a crash on the floor, only this time you are both covered in food.

“Damn it Ashton! I have to start again!” You’re words are scolding but the grin on your face can’t be hidden as you stare down the love of your life.

He laughs, pushing cake mix covered hair out of your face and pulling you in for another long drawn out kiss. The oven timer goes off and he stands, switching off the oven to avoid another cake burning disaster.

“Now now my little cupcake. You know the best part about making cakes?” You shake your head, taking the hand he holds out to you and lifting yourself off of the floor. He picks you up by your hips and wraps your legs around his waist, carrying you carefully through the house. “Washing it off each others bodies.”

Michael

Our gamer lad, seemed fitting

***

You had been led in bed for over an hour waiting for Mikey to finish his game. You weren’t annoyed at him by any means but you were beginning to feel neglected and in all honesty, needy.

You come up with a master plan and start walking towards his office, shedding your sweatpants leaving you only in Michael’s hoodie, your undies and the knee high socks you know drive him crazy. You can hear him talking on his headset and you chuckle under your breath as you swing the door open slightly. He looks extra cute today in his stripey sweater and glasses, a beanie sat on his messy hair.

He pauses the game at the sound of the door opening and turns to look at you, choking on his breath when he sees what your wearing.

He lifts the mic away from his mouth, swearing under his breath.

“Uh hey baby, you okay?” He asks, his eyes on your legs as you walk over to him.

“I’m feeling needy M, can I sit with you while you play?” You don’t wait for his answer before you straddle his lap, your legs folded next to his as you bury your face in his neck.

“Of course baby, you don’t need to ask. Are you sure you’re okay?” He strokes your back softly, feeling you nod your head against his neck.

He pecks your shoulder softly before repositioning his headset and continuing his game. You sit quietly for the next ten to fifteen minutes while he plays, nestling against his chest and feeling him shake with laughter or rumble when something goes wrong.

As he really settles into the gameplay you start littering tiny kisses against his neck. You feel him tense slightly before resuming the game, every chance he gets he rubs his hand across your back. You start deepening the kisses, pecking over the stubble and occasionally finding a spot to suck on softly. You feel him lip the mic once again.

“Baby, what are you doing?” He tenses, although he tilts his head slightly to the side so that you can reach more of his neck and you know that your plan is working. 

You lick where his neck and shoulder meet and you feel him shiver which lets you know to initiate the next part of the plan.

You start to circle your hips over his crotch softly and a little moan leaves his lips.

“You’re playing a dangerous game sweetheart.” He murmurs. You giggle softly against his neck and he sighs, gritting his teeth and sucking in a breath as you grind particularly hard down onto the growing bulge in his pants. He quits the game, ripping off his headset and throwing it onto the couch behind him.

He grips your jaw in his hand and roughly pulls your face to his, running his thumb over your bottom lip.

“So when you said you were needy...” His words trail off as he notices the desire in your eyes, your hips fully rocking against him. 

He uses his thumb on your bottom lip to open your mouth wide, slanting his face and leaning in so that he can crash his lips hard against yours. You give in to him straight away, kissing him as hard as you can. Your tongues wrestle back and forth and its a filthy kiss with so much need involved that it sets your bodies on fire.

It’s a few minutes before you’re both pulling away and panting hard, your head resting on his shoulder.

“Do you want to go back to bed or shall we just stay here?” His words are hushed but he hears your whine and knows exactly what you need. “I got you baby.” His fingers curl your hair around his fist and he moves your head so his lips can attach to your neck as other hand trails softly under the hoodie your wearing. Let’s just say he knows exactly what buttons to press, your gamer guy.

[elysiashelby]

In Another World - T.Shelby Imagine Ch. 21

Paring: (Eventual) Thomas Shelby x Aliena Welsh (OC)

Fandom: Peaky Blinders

Word Count: 13,178

WARNINGS: ANGST, Cursing, Fluff, Mentions of Sexual Activity (Semi-Explicit), Smoking, Brief scenes of Arguments/Fights, Mentions of Blood, “Vivid” Murder Scene

Summary: A direct continuation from the previous chapter, Aliena takes Michael to the spot Tommy reserved for her and they talk. Michael is introduced to the family. Ali and Tommy are somewhat strained again, but is that a good or bad thing?

MASTERLIST   CHAPTER 20  CHAPTER 22

A/N: This chapter is crazy long! I was not expecting to have so much to write about in this chapter. It’s kind of filler, but it’s happier than most of my chapters. Anyway, from this chapter to the next, I’m going to be messing with the timeline a little. So, if you’re a real stickler for staying with timelines, this is going to irk you.

Oh! Sorry for this sorry excuse of a GIF. The clip I used for Aliena had a boy next to her and this was the best way to make sure your focus staying on the chapter, if you get what I mean?

I doubled over on my knees as I panted for air. Michael was faring far better than I was. 

“Why. The. Hell. Were we running?” Michael asked.

I held a finger up as a hand flew to cover my mouth. I pivoted my body away from his direction, held my hair back as much I could, and let the contents that filled my stomach escape me. 

Michael muttered. “Christ!” Then, he helped me hold my hair away from my face and rubbed my back. 

I was finished soon enough. I spat out whatever remained in my mouth before laughing while I sniffled. I stood up straight and wiped my mouth. “Um, we were running because I thought it a good idea at the time. Anyway, come on. We’re not too far from it now.” I waved my hand over in that direction before walking ahead.

I kept leaning as I walked, and my body felt like jelly— but I’d rather be doing this, feeling this than be at the house. 

Michael cleared his throat before asking, “Did you ever tell me your name?”

I furrowed my eyebrows as I looked at him, still walking. “Um, ya know what… Oh my god, I don’t think I told you my name. I’m Aliena Welsh, but everyone usually calls me Ali.” I extended my hand for him to take which he did.

“Henry. Uh, wait. Michael, um, Michael Gray.”

I giggled into my free hand. “I know. Remember?”

Michael chuckled sheepishly while he rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s right, you know me.” There was some silence between us before he asked another question. “You said you worked as the family maid, right?”

I nodded.

“Forgive me for assuming, but how come you look-?”

I interrupted him with a cackle. “How come I look as posh as you?”

Even in this dark night, I could see the blush on his face. “Ye-yeah.”

I sighed as I hiked my coat up to cover my shoulders. “I have rich friends. They buy me stuff from time to time, but I have my own money. Your cousin and mum pay me two pound.”

Michael scoffed. “That’s a lot of money.”

I nodded to myself. “I know. Well, I know that now. I grew up in America, but I was born in Liverpool. Basically, I only knew the US currency system when I arrived back. I figured two pound was an appropriate amount of money for being a maid to such a big family, but now I’m not too sure.” I chuckled at the end of my sentence. I looked up at Michael and smiled.

I gasped as the sight of my parents’ gravestones as they came into view. I grabbed Michael’s hand as I said. “Come on. We’re here!” I began running over to their gravestones.

“Wait! Where the hell are we?”

I didn’t answer him until we were standing in front of them. I walked behind the gravestones and leaned down on them. “These are my parents. Just their gravestones, so you don’t have to be creeped out abar it. Tommy, your cousin, bought me them for my birthday. Well, he bought me ma’s on my 17th birthday and me da’s on me 18th. But, yeah. This little area, even that swing, is mine.”

Michael bent down taking off his cap as he did so, and read them. He peered up at me. “Tommy, he’s the one with the car, isn’t he?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” Actually, the whole family had cars of their own. ‘Cept for Ada, she didn’t want one.

Michael dusted off his cap on his thigh before standing up. “Can you tell me more about them? My family.”

I nodded and then jerked my head over to my swing. We walked over to it and I took a seat facing him, while he leaned against the tree. “Let’s see.” I began. I kicked off my shoes and started to swing a little. “Let’s go in order. Your mum, Polly, is company treasurer. She’s also the heart of the family. She’s not afraid to hit you when you’ve done something stupid or to piss her off, but she’s also incredibly kind. She just looks intimidating.”

I took a deep breath and leaned my head back. “Arthur Shelby is your oldest cousin and the most physically dangerous. He fought in the war alongside his brothers and friends. He packs quite the punch, but he’s a sensitive man deep down. So, as long as you're good with him, he’ll be good with you. Might tease ya ‘cause he can, but doesn’t everybody do that?” I looked up at Michael and we both shared a chuckle.

I cleared my throat and the smile on my face disappeared. “Thomas Shelby is the boss of the family and company. What he says is almost always law. Nothing happens in Birmingham without your cousin knowing. The cops here have less power than him.” I grunted as I gained more momentum in my swinging. “His looks are as intimidating as your mother’s, but unlike her— he doesn’t have a soft side. So, do not go fishing for it or expect it. Um, I’m sure there’s more but I can’t think of anything.”

I cleared my throat again. “Ada Shelby is your only female cousin. Ada lives in London now, so you will rarely see her in Birmingham. She has a son named Karl and her husband passed recently. He died in January. Ada is a communist, but we love her anyway. Yeah, she’s sort of strained in the family right now ‘cause she doesn’t approve of the business.”

I stopped swinging and let myself relax. “John is the third eldest of the men of the family. He has five children. He is one of the smarter ones of the family. He takes care of the books and he has a wife named Esme. She is the mother of his youngest child. She did not give birth to John's first four children. John can pack a punch as well. Um, don’t tell him a fucking thing! His lips are as loose as a… Um, a goose? Is that the saying?”

I shrugged my shoulder then sat up straight. “Finn is the last of the Shelby clan. He’s only little, 13. I think. He does little things for the family, but all you need to know is that he’s the youngest.”

Michael nodded and kicked himself off the tree. He took a few steps and then motioned me to join him. I hopped off the swing and jogged to stand next to him. “Tell me about yourself then. How did you get to know them?” He said.

I giggled then yawned. “Alright then. My da’ died in the war. That was the beginning of my problems. My sister and I weren’t really on good terms, so she didn’t help me and my mum. So, we struggled a lot. Eventually, my mum told me we were heading to England, but she wouldn’t tell me what for. She took sickness on the journey and died. I walked aimlessly around England. I didn’t remember a thing from when I was eight. I ended up in Small Heath. I fell asleep behind some barrels using my suitcases as pillows when Jeremiah, the city’s preacher found me. He introduced me to your cousins and they took me in. That was… Three years ago.” I nodded when I was done talking.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that.” Michael said.

I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m okay. I’m sorry for what you had to go through. If you don’t mind me asking, were you ever going to search for Polly? Like, do you even remember what happened? How she looks like?”

Michael cleared his throat and scratched the back of his neck. “Um, it’s alright. I’m not sure. I’m still 17, so I couldn’t really leave the house yet. I was debating trying to find… Polly, but yeah. I did think about it. I remember a little of what happened. That day, but I can’t remember anything before that. I, uh, I don’t really remember how Polly looked like.”

I nodded and hummed. “She’s beautiful, really!”

Michael chuckled. “Really?”

I nodded, enthusiastically. We laughed again. The two of us then circled back to the swing and while I sat on that plank of wood— Michael sat down on the grass in front of me.

“Are you not cold?” He asked.

I shook my head. “No, not really. And I have a lot of alcohol to thank for that. Why are you?”

He shook his head. “No, but you’re wearing less than me. That’s why I was asking.”

“Oh.” I drew out while nodding my head. I yawned and sniffled again.  

 We talked more. We talked so much that I was eventually yawning between every word I was speaking. I grew tired of sitting on the swing and I laid down next to where he sat. I guess Michael didn’t like looking down on me like that as he soon laid beside me.

I yawned. “When we head back to the ‘ouse, you need to stay outside. Polly will eventually come home ‘n you’ll be escorted inside. When we meet inside again, you need to greet me as if we’ve never seen each other. Got it?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Good.”

I managed a couple of more sentences before my eyes did not want to lift anymore. I whispered. “Wake me up at dawn, will you?”

Michael whispered back. “Can’t make any promises.”

We woke up when the sun was up. That’s all that matters at this point. As we were walking back, I groaned under my breath. “My feet hurt!”

Michael laughed at me. I blew raspberries at him. Michael looked over at me before he asked. “Do you think my mum is already there?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I hummed ‘I don’t know.’ We trudged all the way over to the house. As we stood outside the door, I pointed at him and said. “Stay.”

Michael glared at me before smiling and shaking his head. 

I snickered before opening the door to the house. “By the way, you might want to try and get off any grass you may have on your back. See ya later.” I closed the door in his face and headed up to my room. 

I stood in front of Tommy’s door and just tried to listen to see if anyone was in there. When I couldn’t hear anything, I went into my room and began getting ready for the day. 

I was asleep for about three to four hours, and I woke up with a nasty hangover. As I stared at the bed beside me, my body was begging me to lie down. But, I couldn’t. I had to work today. There was no Advil or Ibuprofen until 1961. The only thing we had was morphine or opium. I was never going to take the latter, so I was raw dogging the hangover as always.

I covered my face with my hands and sighed deeply. I threw my head back and groaned softly. I wiped my make-up off and reapplied some foundation and concealer. Foundation for the bruise on my chin and concealer for the dark circles under my eyes. 

I looked at myself in the mirror and felt nothing. 

Last night did not go how I wanted it too. Again, I don’t know what I wanted to happen, but I didn’t think Tommy and I were going to be strained again. Fuck, I can’t believe I caught him in his little escapades again.

If I had to compare the two, this one hurt more. Not only because it was raw, but because I wanted him last night. I wanted something like that for us. But it’s just my useless pinning. God, was I obsessing over him? I hate myself.

I squeezed my eyes shut and cringed. I huffed, angrily, before I yanked off my bra and put a comfier one on. I put on a long skirt and a jumper. I put my hair up messily, not really caring how I looked, before heading downstairs.

Walking straight into the kitchen, I found it empty. I pursed my lips at the sight ‘n shrugged my shoulders. I began my job by getting a kettle of tea on for Polly then I made some eggs and sausage. 

The door opened and I knew who it was. I could hear the excited chirping of Polly before she crossed the threshold of the kitchen. 

“Oh my-, Aliena! Come ‘ere!”

I turned around. Polly and Michael were standing there side-by-side. Polly’s hands hovered over her son’s shoulders, an ecstatic smile on her face. It would seem that the smile was contagious since all three of us were smiling now. 

Polly continued. “Ailena, it’s Michael! My son. Michael, this is Ailena. She’s our maid but we don’t treat her as one. She’s been with us for three years and she’s around your age.”

I walked forward and we shook hands while simultaneously greeting each other. I said. “I’m making eggs and sausage. Would either of you like some?”

Polly looked at Michael expectantly while the latter glanced at her as well. 

He nodded. “Yes, please. I’m starving.”

I nodded and turned back around, but I was stopped by Polly. “Wait, Ali, love. Go on, sit down. I got it.”

“Are you sure?” I leaned closer to her and whispered. “I can take care of this for you and you can talk to ‘em.”

She shook her head. “I want you to sit down with him.” 

I nodded and flashed her a smile. I faced Michael, pulled out a chair for him before taking my own. I let them talk and sat there quietly. Not like I wanted to chime in on the conversation anyhow. My head was pounding and I just wanted to go to sleep.

I wanted silence and serenity more than anything. I pinched the space between my eyes and took a deep breath.

‘Good thoughts only, Aliena. Good thoughts only!’ I tried soothing myself. It works sometimes. 

The plates clattered as they were set down on the table. I opened my eyes and smiled up at Polly. I dug into the scran I made as slowly as I could manage. However, the rubble in my stomach was not going to let me get away with such a slow pace. 

“Aliena, have you had any schooling?” Michael asked.

I picked my head up and covered my mouth as I replied. “I finished secondary school, but obviously— I never went to a uni.” 

He nodded and asked. “What’s your plans, if you don’t mind me asking?”

I shook my head, my gaze fluttering toward Polly for a second. “I don’t. Um, I’m not sure. I wanted to become an author, but I’m not sure if that’s still on the table for me. Right now, I’m content with where I am. You?”

Michael stammered for words. “I’ve taken courses. Excelled in mathematics, but I’m not sure. I’m thinking of getting an accounting job as soon as I can. Maybe even something else in that field. But, yeah.”

I nodded. “Cool.”

Polly came over with the kettle, poured both of us a cup, and asked Michael. “How was it?”

While looking up at her, he replied. “I was starving, so I would have eaten anything. But really it was super.”

Polly and I shared a small chuckled, but she repeated his word. “Super.”

Never hear that ‘round here.

Michael asked Polly. “So, uh, are you a cook?”

“Not a cook. No.” She set down the kettle and got a cup for herself, scrunching her hair as she did so. I knew she was trying to look her best given the circumstances.  

As she took a seat, Michael began talking, “The man who came to the house, he was driving a posh car. He looks rich. What does he do?”

Polly finished pouring her cup as she answered. “He works with horses.”

‘What a blag! Polly, ma’am!’ I thought as I took a sip of tea. My eyes widened and fluttered comically. 

“Really? I love horses. I got a bay mare.”

“No.”

“I ride it all the time.”

Polly waved out her hand as she said. “Then, it’s in the blood.”

I was busy eating my breakfast. I wasn’t going to interrupt their bonding moment any time soon. Even though Michael's eyes kept flickering toward me.

Their eyes locked, and Michael had a smile on his face “I’ve got about a million questions.” He said.

“So do I.” 

“I’ve had different pictures in my head.”

“Well, here I am.” Polly went for a ciggie while Michael stirred his tea a bit more. Polly moved some of her hair away from her face before asking,“It's all right that it's me, isn't it?”

‘Should I? Shouldn't I? Fuck it, I want one.’ I reached over for Polly’s case, and I gave her a look asking for her permission. She nodded at me while she was exhaling. I got one and lit it up.

“I don’t have any choice.” Michael replied. Polly stubbed out her ciggie as Michael continued. “I mean, you are who you are, aren't you? We don't choose. And that's it.”

I took a long pull and exhaled it slowly. 

“Yeah, that’s right. God gave you to me. People took you away.” Polly reached for his hand and grasped onto it. She took a deep breath before placing her other hand onto their grasp. “And it is all right that it's me, isn't it? In a place like this.”

Michael looked around as if he were thinking about it. “I thought it would be worse.”

Polly and I let out a little laugh while Michael just smiled. However, the moment was ruined when Arthur’s booming voice could be heard from outside.

Arthur shouted while bursting through the door with John. “Run for the hills! It's the Digbeth Kid!”  

I covered my mouth as a way to stifle my giggles. 

“Get out of town, kid, or I will shoot your fucking head off!”

“Time’s Up! Pew!”

I was cackling, bad. I doubled over and tried hiding myself with the table. Polly and Michael’s chairs scraped the floor a little as they stood up. 

“You’re dead. Go down. John!”

I wish I could say there was nothing but silence; however, my cackling was filling the room. I held my breath and sat up straight. I moved around in my chair, trying to get comfortable and act right. I looked at John and Arthur and snickered. I muttered under my breath, “I’m fucking dead.” I shook my head as I stifled my laughter while looking down. My body jostled up and down.

As John was putting his gun away, he reached over and tried swatting me. I yelped and tried hitting him back. I cleared my throat as I sat back down. I looked down at my cigarette to see it’s almost finished. 

They finally snickered as Arthur said. “All right then, Polly. Who's this?”

The boys looked at me with a mischievous smile and found one on my own. I reached for Polly’s case and got myself another.

Tom said. “Gentlemen, this is your cousin. Polly's son, Michael.”

The looks on Arthur’s and John’s faces were wiped off and a serious look replaced it. I won’t lie. When Tom spoke, I looked at him. A pain shot through my heart, it confused me. So, I numbed it with a quick drag. 

Michael walked over to Arthur and shook his hand then John’s. “Pleased to meet you.”

“John.”

“I'm Arthur. You've already met me. I used to throw you out of the window, so John could catch you.”

“Yeah. I used to put you in a shoebox and kick you down Watery Lane.”

Everyone was smiling except for the two troublemakers over here admitting their evil deeds. 

Tommy chimed. “I bet you’re glad to be back.”

Michael laughed before saying, “I don't remember any of it. All I remember is the day they took me away.”

I looked over at Polly who looked like she was about to cry from the statement. She walked over to Michael and cupped his face. I averted my eyes.

I knew I was not the only one who looked away as she hugged him. Arthur and John did the same.

When I decided to look back, Tommy began to speak. “Well, you’re here now, son.” Tommy put a hand on Michael’s back. “Welcome to the Shelby family.”

Arthur chimed in. “Later on, we'll show you the ropes.”

While, John added. “Mhmm. Yeah, we'll show you what's what.”

I knew Polly sent Tommy a wary gaze. She didn’t want Michael anywhere near the family business. Poor her.

“Let's leave him be for now, eh? Come on, boys.” As Tom passed by me, he stole my ciggie from my hand. “Ailena.”

“Thomas.” I replied in the same tone as him while arching a brow. 

“Nice suit.” Arthur said to Michael. 

Polly chuckled before looking back at Michael, fixing his bowtie. Michael looks like he’s been starstruck. 

“They seem nice.”

I snickered, looking away immediately after the fact. I looked back at the pair just as Polly began to speak.

“After having a bit more of a talk, how about going with Aliena for a tour of the city? I have a bit of business I need to tidy up and then I’ll be done for the day. What do you both think?”

Michael and I shared a look. I gave a quick smile, nodding. “I’m fine with it.”

“Then, I’m fine with it too.”

“Wonderful,” Polly cheered. “Come now, the both of you.” She took Michael’s arm before walking over to me, and pulled me up to the living room by my arm. 

For a while, it was an A and B conversation where C would pop up from time to time. I had to pretend to be engaged, otherwise, Polly would see my head tipping back and she would drag me into the conversation. 

Eventually, Polly let out a huge sigh and stood up, which made Michael and I follow suit. “Well then. I should head to the office to finish up my business. Ali, show Michael around the city, will you?”

I nodded. “‘Course, Pol. C’mon, Michael.” I walked ahead of him and out the door. Once he closed the door behind him, I dropped my facade and groaned loudly. 

Michael chuckled. “How do you think I did?”

“Someone call a film director and give this man a job.” I giggled. “You did good. I can honestly say I couldn’t lie to your mum for months, but you did it so flawlessly.”

Michael dropped his jaw while scoffing. “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”

I shrugged my shoulders as I began to walk backwards. “Take it as you want it. C’mon, I’ll show you a couple of spots I love.” 

We talked as I showed him Mrs. Davies’ Bakery as well as a few other food joints. I wasn’t going to tell a blag, I’m not an experienced tour guide. So, I’m winging it.

We stopped in front of Arthur’s flat when I sighed. “Alright, I had about enough of this. Did you say you had some lodgings elsewhere?”

Michael struggled to find his words. “Uh… Ye-yeah! I did, why?”

I rushed forward and took his hands into mine. “That’s great! Let’s go.”

“What? You haven’t even finished showing me the city yet.”

“The city will still be there after a nap. I know you’re as desperate as me for some sleep. Now, c’mon before I get anymore grumpy. And you won’t like me when I’m grumpy.” I began walking forward, pulling him behind me.

Michael scoffed. He repositioned our hands, increased his pace, and began pulling me instead. “You don’t even know where I’m staying.” He grumbled.

I chuckled. “That’s true.” 

We walked to where he was staying. Got a look from the lady at the desk, I knew she knew me. Michael unlocked his door and noticeably swallowed. He clutched the cap in his hands tightly while smoothing his hair down. “Um, so this is it.”

I rolled my eyes, pushed him out of the way, and flopped down on his bed. I let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Finally, a damn bed!” I closed my eyes while I situated myself on the bed. “C’mon, Michael. Join me.” I patted on the space beside me.

“I can’t possibly-!”

I opened my eyes and glared at him. “Why not?”

“It’s… We hardly know each other.” His face was beet red.

I rolled my eyes again. “Relax. I’m practically your sister, you know. Your mum says she sees me as her daughter.”

“Yeah, but you’re not.”

I hmphed. “Fine then. Sleep on the floor. Wait for mo’! We slept near each other out in the field. How is this any different?”

“This is a bedroom. My bedroom. I’m still a man, you know.”

I let out a cackle. “Don’t flatter yourself, Michael. I can defend myself, so stop arguing and lay down beside me. If you don’t want to, I’m not gonna force ya. But, just know you can.”

I rolled over and faced the wall. I scrambled under the blankets and closed my eyes. I tried going to sleep, but I couldn’t with Mr. Modest standing over there, fidgeting. I didn’t feel at ease until he took the space beside me. The bed dipped and then I felt his presence next to me.

I smiled and finally went to sleep. I woke up sometime in the middle of my nap. Let me rephrase that, Michael woke me up in the middle of my nap. Without opening my eyes, I croaked. “What do you want?”

“I need to use a telephone. They don’t have a working one here.”

“Nearest one is at the Garrison. Go bug Arthur or Tom. Piss off.”

Through squinted eyes, I could see Michael slip out the door. I rolled back over and fell back asleep.

I grunted as I was slammed against the wall. I met his fervent kisses with the same passion. They were so sloppy to the point where he was about to ruin this for me. I tugged him away by his hair and presented him my neck. 

He didn’t waste any time kissing, sucking, and nipping. I let out a sigh that was cut off by my smile. I couldn’t deny the pleasure he was giving me. The target tugged my face in his direction, capturing my lips again before I felt his hands under my knees. 

I jumped in his arms. He whisked us into his office and closed the door behind us. We threw ourselves in a kiss once we heard the door slam shut. He reached up and pulled out the pin holding my hair in a bun. Well, it was my wig, but same thing, for now. 

I parted from him and shook out my hair. He tugged me back down before slamming me against another wall. I grunted, but I can’t deny the pleasure I felt from the pain he caused me. I scratched his face and neck which spurred a groan from him. 

I squealed as he ripped open my shirt. ‘Fuck, I’m getting carried away.’ I thought, a lapse of sanity taking over, thank god! But it faded as he began to suck on the top of my breasts. I hugged his head closer to my body which made him chuckle. He whisked me around again and I giggled. 

He held me tight to him as he bent us over, and used his arm to wipe away everything on his coffee table. He laid me down on it which made my head fall back. He didn’t waste any time paying attention to my breasts again. 

I craned my head up and looked at him. ‘Fuck, fuck fuck! This feels so good.’ I let out a sigh, a sigh I desperately tried to keep in. I bit my bottom lip and let my head fall back again. 

The target trailed his kisses down from my stomach to my ear. He whispered. “I’m going to make it so you’d never want another man again.” He chuckled into my ear and the spell was broken. He fucking broke it by opening up his mouth.

I smashed our lips together before I reached into his coat, grabbed the gun, and pulled the trigger multiple times into his side. 

He fell to the side, gasping for air. Deadpan, I took my time getting to my feet. I bent down and watched as he struggled to breathe. I was panting a little, my heart still racing from the adrenaline. 

I smiled when he took his final breath, what a malicious smile it was. I stood up and walked over to the mirror he had on his wall. I fixed up my lipstick and tried to fix any other blemish.

“Fuck!” There was fucking blood on me. I walked over to the fireplace, wiped the blood off my stomach, and then tossed the shirt in it. The shirt didn’t burn instantly, but it was a nice sight. I turned around, picked up my hairpin and walked out the door. I got my suit jacket from off the floor and buttoned it all the way up. 

I didn’t stop for anyone as I walked directly into the car that was waiting for me outside. 

“Successful, Ms. Welsh?” Chris, my now permanent driver, asked.

I looked at him through the rear view mirror, sporting a smile. “Of course.”

He smiled back at me before taking off from the company headquarters we were at. 

Who calls for a whore so early in the morning? And to meet up at their job, no less! Jesus christ! It’s too bad, he was quite the looker. 

Finger traced over my swollen lips.

I won’t deny that I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m so sexually frustrated. I touch myself when I can, but I’m 19-years-old! I’m an even older virgin! 

I rested my cheek on my closed fist. 

God, I can’t believe my infatuation with Tommy is so bad that I imagined him while I was doing that. The only reason I could prevent myself from going any further was ‘cause that idiot broke my fantasy. He opened his mouth and I realized he wasn’t Tommy.

I rubbed my forehead and huffed. ‘Now, I’m even more frustrated.’ I reached down on the car floor and pulled the suitcase to my side. “Keep your eyes on the road, Chris.” I ordered before I began unbuttoning my suit jacket.

“As always, Ms. Welsh.”

I smiled before shrugging off my jacket. I tugged my regular work dress over my head and smoothed out any wrinkles. I reached down and tugged my heels off to replace them with some shorter heels. Then, I took off my wig. I placed all my items into the case, and threw it back down. 

“You know what to do with it right.”

“Of course, Miss. I’ll incinerate it right after I drop you off.”

“What happens if you try to betray us and try to turn this in as evidence?”

“That won’t happen, Ms. Welsh. I promise you.”

“Answer the question, Chris. It’s procedure.”

He cleared his throat. “Mr. Johnson will kill me and my entire family.”

“Right.” I hated doing this part. Chris really was a diligent worker, but I get why I have to do it. Some dogs like to bite the hand that feeds them. 

We arrived a few blocks from the main house. I climbed out of the car and walked over to the driver’s side. I smiled at Chris, thanking him for the ride. He tipped his hat before taking off. I jogged over to the shop side of the house, entering it. Men shouting over each other made me sigh. 

I’m just glad I didn’t have to deal with it today. 

I walked into the kitchen and passed by the living room where Polly and Michael were sitting. I plastered an innocent smile on my face as I began to spew bullshit out of my mouth. “Sorry, I’m late. It took a little longer than I thought.”

Polly shook her head. “It’s all right, love. How did he take it?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Turns out he was cheating on me, just like I suspected.”

Polly tsked before rushing from her seat to hug me. She whispered in my ear, “I’m so sorry, love. Maybe next time.”

I hummed and nodded. We parted and gave each other a grin. Polly looked over at Michael and said. “Come now. I want to show you my house.” 

Michael got up from his spot on the couch and walked over to us. I went ahead of them both, opened the door, and then waited for them to exit the house. Then, the three of us walked over to the garage.

“Do you think I could give it a go?” Michael asked as we stood in front of Polly’s car.

I looked over at her to which she met my gaze. She opened her mouth letting out a drawn out, “Uh...”

Michael began pleading his case. “I have experience, promise.”

Polly’s mouth smacked before she spoke. “Oh, all right then. Here you are. Promise to be careful.”

“Of course.” 

We all walked to our respective seats, but as Michael passed me— I obnoxiously signed the cross. 

“Oh, shut it!” He muttered as he bumped my shoulder.

“Knock it off, you two.”

I cackled all the way till I sat in the back. The ride was hectic to say the bloody least. The boy was gassing it and breaking hard. I’m just thankful we made it to Sutton without an accident or whiplash.

He pulled up to the house with a screeching halt. Polly’s hand was clutching the outside of the car door for dear life as was mine. 

“That was great, well done.”

I scoffed. “Don’t lie to him, Pol. We were holding on for dear life.”

She sighed. “Out we get then.”

I laughed as I climbed out. Polly swatted me gently on the stomach with the back of her hand. 

She whispered. “Don’t tease him so much.”

With a shit-eating smile on my face, I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I was only joking anyway.”

Polly flashed me a smile of her own before taking my arm and walking toward the house. Once we were on the pavement, she let go of my arm to lean into Michael and talk to him using her ciggie. 

She used her ciggie to point toward the house in front of us. “This house is mine. I’ve taken on a different maid. Aliena isn’t a maid here. She’s my guest, so make sure to, you know, treat her as you’ve been. Anyhow, I told her to make up the big room for you.”

Michael crossed his arms as Polly flicked her ciggie away on the street. “Come on, let’s have a look.” She said while walking ahead of us.

I bumped purposely into Michael and jogged to meet up with Pol. I looked behind me and he was chasing after me. I screamed a little and ran faster. 

“Oh, enough the both of you! Acting like children!” Polly tried sounding scoldin’ but she was laughing through her words. 

Michael and I ran around the front yard a little before I let him catch me in his arms. He carried to the front door before setting me down. 

“Go on.” I said while tucking away pieces of hair that had blocked my view. “Unlike you, I’ve already seen the place.”

Michael nodded. “Okay, then.” 

I was the last one to walk in, so I closed the door behind me. I could see Michael’s figure disappearing in the living room, so I followed suit. 

I could hear Polly say, “I thought we could spend the week here.” Polly walked to the other side of the coffee table while Michael and I took a seat on the couch. “You know, get to know each other again.”

It got quiet between the three of us, which Polly disrupted. “I've got ham. Do you like ham?”

While nodding, Michael said. “I like ham, yes.”

“I do too.” I chimed in, trying to hide a smile. I felt bad like I was interrupting a moment, but it would be weirder for me not to talk from time to time. 

Polly took a side step, placing her gloves into the bowl on the coffee table. “I’ve got a maid.” Her tone was nervous. Instantly, made me feel for her.

“Yes, you said.”

I tsked and smacked Michael’s arm. He gave me a look and I gave him one back. 

“She’s upstairs. She can give us some tea. Look, I ring this bell. Watch.” Polly took the bell that was resting on the coffee table and rang it.

Under my breath, I grumbled. “I’m bloody well glad I never had a bell to be beckoned with.” Though, I did notice that Polly looked really happy. 

Footsteps echoed behind us and I craned my head to face her. She looked like a young adult. Older than me, at least. Good.

“Yes, madam.” She said.

We all just sort of waited for one of us to say something, or perhaps I was missing a cue. 

Michael looked to the side a little as he said. “I think we'd like some tea.” 

I watched as the maid walked out of our sight. I raised an eyebrow at the sight. I was never like that.

“You get used to it.” Michael added.

I looked back at him, well more like I looked down at him since I was sitting on the couch on my knees. I muttered. “Cheeky bastard.” And I smacked his arm. This caused another fight to break out.

“Will the both of you fucking stop it all ready!”

I don’t know why Michael and I acted so well together. It was like I gained an annoying little brother. Honestly! Talking to him is fun, though, I do get bored from time to time. His list of subjects to talk about is as limited as mine. Makes it quite difficult. 

Oh and play fighting! That’s all me. I take responsibility. I provoked him the first time we ever play fought and it became a trend. It’s improper for the time, I understand, but nevertheless. I’m not from these times, and he’s one of the only males around my age. I’m used to roughhousing with John and Arthur. I think it happened only once with Tommy. I think.

I was walking back to the main house after dropping off Tommy’s laundry at his flat. I had to make dinner for Finn. Polly and Michael were back at the house in Sutton. Arthur elected himself my appointed driver to take me to and from the house. As Polly stated before, she doesn't want me sleeping at the main house by myself. Finn gets to stay with John or Arthur. I mean, Tommy is a choice too— but, is he really?

I was chuckling to myself when I bumped into someone. I gasped and instantly began apologizing. “I’m so sorry! I was lost in thought and I should’ve been-!”

“Ali! Ali, it’s all right. It’s just me.”

I finally looked the man in the eye and sighed in relief when it was just Tom. 

Ah-! Just Tom. Tom, who I have not spoken to privately since The Garrison’s reopening. The Tom, who I heard having a threesome. Tom. Yeah, okay.

“Ugh, in that case, watch where you’re going.” I shook my head, giggling into my hand. Tom let out a little snicker.

“Right, well. I wanted to see if you’d notice that I was walking toward you. You didn’t.”

I spluttered into my hand, embarrassed. “Alright, alright. Did you need something, Tommy?” ‘Yes, yes… Keep this nice and calm, Aliena. You know nothing and yet everything. God, let me just ascend, right now!’ I took a calming breath, which was actually very loud.

Tom averted his gaze, his eyes wide, and his jaw dropped before pursing his lips. “Polly told me yesterday that you went to break up with one of your gentlemen fellows.”

I furrowed my eyebrows and waved my hands in a “stop” gesture. “Wait, wait, wait! Did you refer-? Did you just say “gentlemen fellows?” ” I blinked dramatically as I leaned forward. I snickered while turning my head away.

“All right, calm down, Aliena.”

I turned my head back and nodded. I held my breath and then let out a sharp exhale. I met his gaze and bit my cheek to prevent my anxious laughter. 

‘I don’t remember the name I gave this boyfriend. Please don’t make me say a name!’

Tommy stared at my face, almost inquisitively. I could see his hand inch closer to my face through the corner of my eye. 

Tommy took a step closer to me, cleared his throat, and asked. “Can I check Ali?”

I exhaled quickly through my nose before nodding. 

With his thumb and index finger, he held onto my chin and checked my face for any new bruises. He rubbed away what little foundation I had covering my almost healed bruise and then stared at it for awhile. 

His touch was comforting even if it was just as little as this. His plump lips were so close to mine yet far away given our height difference. He still had a nick on his cheek, not fully healed. It may never and leave a scar behind. I can’t remember fully if it really did leave a scar. God, this man. He makes me want to spew poetry. I swear to all that’s Holy! 

As he dropped his hand from my face, he said. “Well, then. It would seem someone’s eyes were spared today.”

“Ha!” I threw my head back. “What’re you talkin’ about? Are you trying to tell me that you would have hunted this guy down and blinded him all for my sake?” I smiled and shook my head.

Quickly, Tommy held my face and brought my gaze up. “Ali, when have I never not fought for your… honor.”

I blinked as I thought about it for a moment. I held onto Tommy's wrists and chuckled with a smile. “Oh, that’s right!” I let out another set of breathy chuckles.

“We care for you, Ali. I care about you.” Tommy flashed me a grin. Keyword, flashed.

I let go of his wrists and he let go of my face. I nodded, feeling heat overwhelm my face and neck. 

Tommy smacked his mouth before saying, “There’s another thing I wanted to ask you about,.”

I hummed.

“The night of the party, you never came home. Where were you?”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “How would you know if I was or wasn’t home?”

Tommy was deadpan, no room for laughter. I so badly wanted to say something, but I held my tongue. “I slept in my room that night.” He admitted.

I hummed again this time with more judgement. 

‘Crap, crap, crap! Who do I say I was with? I could say I was with John, but then again he’s a bit fucking slow! He or Esme will probably ruin it themselves. And if Finn crashed with him that night, the little bugger will rat me out! Same thing if I say Arthur. He’ll question it before agreeing to it! Or just flat out say no! I can’t even say Polly! Everyone knows she was fucking with that young guy!’

I huffed, hung my head, before looking back up at ‘em. “Right, well. I didn’t spend the night at anyone’s house. I walked all the way to my little space and spent the night swinging.”

“By yourself?”

I nodded. “By myself.”

Tom sighed. “Ali, you know it’s dangerous to be out alone at night. Especially some ways out of the city.”

I tsked, “I know, I know! Things are sensitive right now with the gang entering the London war. Yada, yada, yada! I was drunk, won’t do it again. Promise.” I looked up at him and smiled toothily. I fluttered my eyelashes and asked, cutesy. “Forgive me?”

Tom snickered while shaking his head, his hands in his pockets. “Whatever as long as you know not to do it again.”

I sighed while rocking on the heels of my feet. “Well, anyway. Where you headin’, Tommy?”

Tommy replied. “Charlie’s Yard. Some shipments came in and others need to be exported. Want to pay me Uncle a visit and see them load them. What about you?”

“Oh! I have to head back to the house and make dinner for Finn. Whenever the lad straggles back in. He’s honestly like a stray cat, that one. After that, I’m headed over to Cassie’s. Polly gave me an early weekend.”

Tommy took out a ciggie and held it between his lips as he said. “Ah, Polly! Feeling quite generous right now, isn’t she.”

I replied back with the same tone while cocking my head. “Isn’t she?”

We shared a chuckle.

“Well, then, Tommy. Good luck with your Uncle.”

“Aye. Good luck with dinner.”

We walked our separate ways. That awkwardness that I had when I first began speaking to him vanished into thin air.

I sighed contentedly as I threw myself back onto Cassie’s bed. “Ah, I missed this place.” I crawled over to Cassie, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. “I missed you the most, though.” I rubbed my cheek against her shoulder and huffed. 

Cassie giggled at my antics, a hand reaching behind herself to pet my head. “How have you been?” She asked.

I sighed, resting my cheek on her shoulder. “Hmm. My life has certainly been eventful these past few days or rather weeks.” I took a deep breath before sliding off her shoulder and laid down next to her.

“Polly, my female boss, admitted to me that she thought of me like a daughter. I didn’t know how to feel about it really. I liked it at the time, but now I don’t really care. I just feel like her feelings are really flexible, you know? I don’t know.” I shrugged my shoulders as I let the piece of hair I was holding fall back down. 

“Then, I got into this little argument with Tommy. Hold on, hold on! It wasn’t a serious argument, but there was one, nonetheless. He apologized at this party he threw for the pub’s reopening.” I sprang up from where I laid to my knees. I took her hands and put them onto my lap. “Oh my god! I forgot to tell you. I got all dolled up for the party right. I don’t know what I was expecting to happen, but I wanted Tommy to look at me.”

I inched a bit closer to Cassie, who fixed herself to look at me more clearly. “Well, after he apologized he called me beautiful. So, I had my intended effect for a while. However, I couldn’t get him alone after that since like I was talking to other people. Then, he had a cob on from still being in a fight with Polly, and he sort of took it out on me. He apologized right away and agreed to dance with me. Right! Forgot to tell you, I asked him to dance but he said no and that I should sit down ‘cause I was drunk. I was a little drunk, but the way he said it— I didn’t appreciate it.”

I squinted my eyes and gestured “a little” with my hands. “Anyway, when we were dancing— I noticed his attention was not fully on me, so I wanted a break. I freshened up, right, and when I came back, he was gone. When I went home, he was at the house instead of his fucking flat— fucking two girls in his room!” I nodded my head as Cassie gasped, covering her mouth. 

“Aliena, no way!” She exclaimed while smacking my thigh.

I nodded, tears slightly stinging my eyes. “I dressed up for him, kind of made a move. And he still didn’t choose me.” I gnawed on my lip while shrugging. My gaze was on the floor. 

Cassie sighed and grabbed my shoulders, squeezing them comfortingly. 

I sighed, dabbing away at my eyes. “It’s like I’m scared, Cass. I’ve been smitten with Tommy for so long, right? Practically obsessed with the man at this point.” I scoffed while rolling my eyes. “I can’t even explain why I’m so taken with him. It’s just like my soul and my heart reach out for him.” I shook my head as my tongue prodded the inside of my cheek.

“I just feel that once I confess to Tom, right, and get rejected… I’m going to throw myself into the world. But in a bad, unhealthy way. It’s hard because we are both not getting any younger and I’m tired of pinning over him, yet I don’t want to confess either.” I hugged Cassie and hid my face in the crook of her neck. “Oh, Cassie. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Cassie hummed, stroking my hair away from my chest and toward my back. She rocked us from side-to-side ‘n we stayed like that. 

“Aliena, how did you get that bruise on your chin?” Cassie asked me.

My eyes flew open and they widened in shock. I focused on not tensing my body or changing the pitch of my voice. “The bruise on my chin. Oh, I got it from Arthur. He hit me by accident. He was ‘aving an episode.”

Cassie pulled away from me, violently. Her grip on my shoulders hurt. “Aliena, stop lying to me.”

I scoffed with a smile. I shook my head. “I’m not lying to you-...”

Cassie rose to her feet and shouted. “Stop fucking lying to me! I saw you, okay! I saw you with my dad! Are you-! What are you doing with my dad, Aliena?”

I held Cassie’s gaze for a while before I looked down. I tried racking my brain for a lie, but one wasn’t coming up fast enough. How did I know one didn’t conjure up fast enough? Well, it’s because I was struck across the face.

Cassie slapped me across the face as she sobbed. “Don’t try lying to me, Ali, please. I know you’re trying to think of some kind of story to tell me.” She hissed, “I. Know. You.”

I sighed and looked away. “Cassie, I-!” I swallowed harshly before continuing. “It’s not like I-! Fine, I didn’t want you to know because I don’t want to fucking parade this kind of information around. And it’s not like I could bring it up in easy conversation, okay? I realize I should have told you to avoid a misunderstanding, but again— it’s not fucking dinner or tea time talk.”

I took a breath before I told her everything. “On the morning after I killed the man who raped you, I took a job from your father. It was a contract killing. He paid me £1,500 to kill some lawyer, and I killed him. That’s what I’ve been doing, okay? I’m a contract killer, an assassin, a murderer. Cassie!” I rose to my feet and gripped her forearms. I jerked her around as I yelled. “Huh! Well, say something, Cassie! Say something!”

Inside I was nervous out of my mind, but outside I was cold. How was I supposed to feel? Would I lose my best friend? I know we share similar views, but we’re not the same person. We’re both warped, but we only talked about these violent events in theory alone. Now, I was actually committing the things we’ve talked about.

Cassie sniffled before saying, “HOW-! How-?”

“How what, Cassie? Spit it out!”

“How can you do something like that! How can-? Why are you doing this, Aliena? Is it because of me?” Cassie was a mess. She was practically wailing at this point. 

I shook my head. My emotions were getting the better of me as I felt my throat constrict and my eyes sting yet again. “Cassie… No. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. I’ve always had it in me. That night, it wasn't the first time I had killed someone. I already knew I was capable of it, and-!” I took a shuddering breath as I averted my gaze to the ceiling. “When your dad gave me the chance to make that kind of money he was offering, I had to take it.”

I dropped my gaze back at Cassie and cradled her face. “I’m not with you for your money, Cassie. It’s a job. A job I can do well. Please understand, I would never hurt you. Please. Please. Please.”

 I kept begging her and hid my face in her neck. Cassie took loud inhale from her mouth, it stammered as she did so. My shoulders shook as I cried into her neck. When I felt Cassie’s hand stroke my hair and the other rub my back, I let my sobs become more vocal.

Cassie and I fell to our knees and we hugged each other. Comforted each other.

I wailed into her neck. “I don't know! I don't know why!” 

And I truly didn’t. There’s no real logic as to why I’m assassinating people, not in this situation. I can’t tell her that I’m preparing for a life on my own. I can’t tell her that the money I get from these completed jobs will allow me to live on my own in England or perhaps in America. So, I stuck giving her these stupid nonsensical half-truths. 

“You hate me now, don’t you?” I whispered, a hiccup messing up my words.

Cassie replied no with a sigh. “No, of course not, Ali. What hurt the most was that you didn’t tell me sooner. I almost thought that you were prostituting yourself or you were with my dad...intimately.”

I laughed at that. “Oh, Cassie. While your dad is certainly still attractive, I could never do that to you besides...”

“I’m/You’re totally in love with Tommy/Thomas Shelby.”

We belted out with laughter, our foreheads resting together. 

Cassie leaned back and wiped away the snot that was leaking from her nose. I did the same. She said softly. “Ali, how could you ever think I wouldn’t understand? We’ve murdered a man together, remember? You fucking idiot.”

I chuckled while shrugging my shoulders. “I just didn’t want to ruin anything.”

“You’re a bloody idiot, Aliena.”

I smiled. “At least, I’m rarely an idiot.”

She scoffed. “Yeah, that’s best for everyone.”

Silence fell between us before she asked. “How does it feel? Killing someone for money.”

I hummed while looking away and hugged my right foot closer to my body. “Well, it depends on the person and the method. But I can tell you one thing. When I see their blood, feel it, it’s like a high I can’t describe. My reactions just become so raw and get the better of me sometimes. Like I just want to smile and laugh hysterically, but I got to run so... I can’t allow myself to do it for too long either. Other times, I feel nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Do you regret it? Like are you haunted by it?”

I shook my head while pursing my lips. “No. Not one bit. It’s a little frightening, to be honest. How I’m so at peace with myself, you know? I don’t know how many people I’ve killed, but I can fall asleep easy at night. Their screams and pleas don’t haunt me.”

Cassie nodded. “You are so badass.”

We laughed again and I pulled her into a hug. “I love you, Cassie.”

“I love you too, Ali.”

“I’d do anything for you.”

“Me too.”

We parted from our hug a little and shared a kiss. I stroked her cheek with my thumb and stared into her blue eyes.

I whispered. “I think you’re one of my soulmates, Cassie.” My mouth smacked as I said through gritted teeth. “Please, don’t ever leave me or betray me or break my heart.”

Cassie nodded. “Never. I ask you the same.”

I smiled. “Never.” 

Cassie joined me in my smile and we hid each other’s faces in our necks. 

Thank you, God. Thank you, higher power, for blessing me with my soulmate.

I groaned in discomfort as there was this continuous ringing annoying me. Through squinted eyes, I reached for the phone. 

“Suite 226, Ritz Hotel.”

“It’s Tommy. I’m calling a family meeting, get here quickly.”

I tried to find words, but ultimately I said. “Right, yeah. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Good.”

Then, he hung up. I put the phone back on the receiver and flopped back down with a sigh. I looked to my left where Cassie laid asleep on my arm. 

 “Who was it?” She grumbled.

I was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as I replied. “Tommy. It was Tommy.”

“What’d he want?”

“He’s calling a family meeting. Wants me to be there.” I looked down at her and smiled, sadly. I began to get up, but Cassie wrapped her arms around my stomach preventing me from going any further.

She groaned, exaggeratedly. “Nooo! You’re mine for the weekend. You promised.”

I chuckled as I twisted my body to stroke the top of her head. “Cassie, they probably won’t even need me for that long. I’ll come back.”

“You can’t promise me that.”

I huffed as I roughly rubbed my forehead. “You’re right. I can’t.” There was a silence between us. 

Cassie let go, using her hands to support herself. “Fine, whatever. You better come back.”

I smiled as I rose to my feet. “I will! Okay, I’ll see you later. Go on back to sleep.” I patted the pillow I was laying on before walking over to the sofa that had my clothes. I was wearing nothing but a tank top and panties. 

I looked back at her just in time to see as she pshed me while moving some of her hair away from her face. “Do you even know what time it is? No, I’ma get ready for the day. Same as you.”

I heard her throw off the duvet and stomp away to, perhaps, her drawers. I picked up my bag and tried some appropriate clothing. I wasn’t intending to see them at all till I came back, so I didn’t pack any “modest” clothes. 

Unfortunately, I had to settle with yesterday’s clothes which was, unfortunately, a short, purple floral dress. A very short and modern dress.

As I was tugging on my white, knee-high socks, I asked. “Cassie, could you ring Simmons for me, please?”

“Yeah, alright.”

I rolled my eyes. I really didn’t want her ‘ave a cob on for the rest of the day. 

Cassie tapped my shoulder as I was putting on my shoes. “He’s downstairs. Just hop in the car when you’re ready.”

I nodded. “Thanks.” I sat up straight and patted her arm as she was knelt over the sofa. I stood on my knees and gave her a toothy smile. “Forgive me?”

She hummed. “It’s not your fault, so there’s nothing to forgive. But! If you don’t come back, then you’ll have to beg for forgiveness.”

I nodded, tapping her arm a few times before I kissed her on the cheek, and made my way to the door. I put on my coat, and flicked out my hair. “See you later then, Cass!”

“Bye!”

I made my way down and into the car. Simmons already knew where I was headed, so I didn’t have to say anything but a greeting. 

I can’t remember the exact reason for this family meeting. Only that I have happiness associated with the memory since I have the urge to laugh, all of a sudden. 

I ran a hand through my hair and tried to relax.

I can’t describe how liberating it was to finally tell Cassie. I won’t tell a blag. I was never planning on telling her. I just wasn’t. There was no maliciousness behind it nor guilt from me. I just didn’t see a need for her to know. 

But now that she knew and understood, I can rest easy. Well, easier. 

“We’re here, Ms. Welsh.”

I smiled at Simmons through the rear view mirror and thanked him as I climbed out of the car.

“Do I wait for you, Miss?”

I stammered for an answer. “Uh, um. N-No. I’ll have someone else drive me. Thank you, Simmons.”

He tipped his hat at me and then started up the car. I twirled around, walked toward the door, unlocked, and walked in. I closed the door behind me, took off my coat, hung it up, and began making my way into the shop. 

I barely crossed the threshold when I was taken into someone's arms and spun around. I giggled hysterically, my arms wrapping around John’s neck. 

“Here’s the little songbird! We were just talking about ya, Ali.” John shouted in my face.

My jaw dropped as I let out breathy laughs. “Oh, really? Alright, you had your fun. Now, put me down, ya big oaf!” I smacked his shoulder.

“If you want something, you gotta ask nicely. C’mon, Ali. Even my kids know that.”

Tom cleared his throat which caught both of our attention. He scratched his cheek with his thumb before saying, “John, put her down.”

John made a face. A face that asked why, and I smiled smugly at him for it. 

“You heard the man. Put me down.”

John scoffed. “I don’t ‘ave to listen to him.”

I “ooohed” at the statement. But my smugness was short-lived as John spun me ‘round again. I held onto the man tighter, but my legs were swinging in the air. I hadn’t wrapped my legs around him in fear of showing anything. That’s how short this dress was.

“John!” Tommy yelled. “Stop spinning her ‘round and put ‘er down!” He made a face, one I couldn’t decipher. And neither could John, apparently.

Arthur’s mouth smacked before he pointed at us with his hand. “John, you’re showing her knickers for fuck’s sake!”

John let me go like I burned him ‘n I was glad for it. I tsked, pulled my dress down, and made sure to smack him across the chest a few good times. John snickered as always.

I hissed while still smacking him. “You fucking divvy!”

John shouted. “All right! All right, Ali! I’m sorry.” He caught my wrists and apologized one more time.

He had such a smile on his face that I couldn’t help but mimic it. I pushed his face away from mine as I muttered. “Oh, do one, will you?” We both snickered before finding ourselves a spot to stand. I was leaning against the wall next to John, my legs a little ways out in front of me. My back was arching and I was paying attention to my nails.

Tom cleared his throat again before walking up to me. He whispered. “Ali, how about you head upstairs and change, eh?”

I snickered at him. Looking at him as if that were the most ridiculous thing he’d ever said. I whispered. “I’m alright.”

His jaw clenched. He nodded his head as he looked away. “Alright.” 

I tried thinking of reasons for him telling me that. I wasn’t going to get myself in another situation like the one that just happened. So, what was the big deal? Perhaps, it’s because this dress has a v-neckline as well.

Tom walked away and I never took my eyes off him. I didn’t look away as he looked back at me. It wasn’t a long shared glance since he was the one to break it first.

I sniffled before I bumped my shoulder into John. “Oi, you got a ciggie?”

He shook his head. “Nah, but hold on. Arthur, give one over, yeah?”

Arthur took out his carton, lit one up, and then passed it to John. John passed it to me and I nodded to Arthur.

“Anything for you, songbird.” Arthur chimed.

I chuckled before blowing out the smoke. We had to wait a little more till Polly’s car could be heard pulling up from outside. As Tom told John to get Polly and Michael, I walked over to the table to stub out my ciggie. 

I was walking back over to the wall I was leaning against, when I heard the door open behind me. 

From behind me, Polly said. “This had better be good to interrupt my holiday.”

I took my place as Polly quickly stood in front of the little table that was in front of Tommy. 

“Where’s the boy?” Arthur asked.

As she was setting down her things, she answered. “In the back room. I only brought him because afterwards we're going to the museum.”

John chimed in saying, “He wanted to come in and say hello—”

“Shut up, John. There is nothing of interest to Michael in this room.” 

I knew I wasn’t the only one who was shocked by her statement. My eyes blew wide and I fought off a tight-lipped smile. 

‘Fuck, her eyes settled on me!’

Polly scoffed. “Ali, what in heaven’s name are you wearing?”

“I-!”

She blinked dramatically ‘n jerked her head back as she did so. Polly held up both of her hands before taking a deep breath and faced Tom. “Oh, Tommy, get on with it.”

My jaw dropped a little and I peered up at John, who gave me a similar look of astonishment.

We both turned to Tommy just as he clasped his hands together again. “Last night, one of our men had his throat cut in Winson Green. This morning, I had a telegram saying it was Sabini who ordered it.”

“And it says here that Thomas Shelby's next.” Arthur said as he ripped up the telegram.

Tommy continued. “If our men think we can't look after them in prison, they'll not work for us. Sabini knows that. So we need to get the Green sorted out. Scudboat, you and one of the boys break a couple of windows, get yourselves arrested. I'll have our coppers get you into the Green and you can find the bastards who did it.”

Scudboat asked. “Instead of breaking a window, can we pinch a car?”

Everybody in the room began snickering, except for Polly, Arthur, and Tommy. 

Scudboat continued. “What? Everybody else is getting a bloody car.” It made everyone snicker even harder. “I'm still on a donkey.”

Tommy took back control as he said. “All right, just get yourselves fucking arrested, it doesn't matter how. And before you all laugh, a boy is dead.”

Yes, that’s very sad, but that was too fucking funny. 

I turned away and hid myself in the wall, my hands covering my face. I stumbled as John pulled me into a hug. I couldn’t stop bloody laughing!

“He was just a kid. We'll start a fund for his family, Pol.”

“Agreed. So is that it? Can I go now?”

I turned back around and quietly thanked John for helping me. 

“Well, as company treasurer, I need your permission to spend 1,000 guineas.”

“On what?” 

“On a horse.”

“A thousand guineas on a horse?”

Tommy nodded. “That’s right.”

Polly took a moment, taking a couple of steps back with bewilderment on her face. “When was this decided?”

“You've been busy with Michael.” 

“Oh, my God. So, in the absence of common sense, you boys have had an idea.”

“Polly, there's a thoroughbred, quarter-Arab filly up for auction at the Doncaster Bloodstock.”

“What do we want with a 1,000-guinea horse?” 

“When we make our move on Sabini's racing pitches, any men we get into the betting enclosure will be lifted by Sabini's police. A good racehorse is a passport to the owner's enclosure.”

I knew Arthur was about to chime in and soon after that it would be Loose Lips McGee over here. I began rubbing my lips together harshly as a way to hide my smile.

Arthur said. “We'll be in there with all the toffs. Coppers won't know where to look.”

“Hmm.” John began. “Yeah, the Epsom Derby, Pol. We'll be drinking with the bloody king.”

Polly exclaimed “The Derby?”

Tommy and Arthur both looked at him mean. I snickered and whipped my head away. I used my hair as a shield.

“Did he say the Derby?”

I cleared my throat, faced them again, and held one of my wrists in front of me tightly. I was still rubbing my lips together. A sharp pain erupted on my chest and I groaned softly. I snarled at John and struck him back while hissing, “Watch it! You hit my boob.”

He resorted to snickering.

Tommy sighed, almost defeatedly. “That’s right.” He cleared his throat. “For the last 10 years, Sabini's made it his race. If we're going to take him down, might as well make it there, as a symbol.”

Polly asked. “Did you come up with this idea in a pub by any chance?”

“Pol, good racehorse is an investment, like property. We need to diversify the portfolio.”

‘That’s a load of bullshit!’ I smacked my hand over my mouth and rocked on my heels. 

“So when is this sale?” 

“Tomorrow.” 

Arthur said. “Tommy's had a death threat, so we'll have to go with him for protection.”

Rather irritated, Polly said. “So, you're going to close up the shop, go out on a piss-up and blow 1,000 guineas on a horse that's not even whole Arab.”

Curly’s laughter caught everyone’s attention. “Quarter-Arab is better! Quarter-Arab, it means—”

“Curly, shut up.”

That’s when Michael came ‘round from behind John ‘n stood beside him.

Polly was quick to yell at John. “I thought I told you to lock that door.”

Michael said. “He did. I used the key on the nail. Look, I've been listening. I want to go with them.”

Polly flailed her hands up as she yelled. “You see?” She was looking right at Tommy. Crossed her arms when she was done.

Michael tried pleadin’ his case. “I love horses. I could even help.”

“Over my dead body!” 

“It'll be all right, Mum.”

I couldn’t help but notice how much Polly softened as Michael called her mum.

“I've been to loads of horse auctions before with my uncle. They're very respectable. People bring their butlers.”

With a glass raised near his mouth, Arthur added. “Yeah, and their posh wives!”

“And their mistresses.” John said as he elbowed his cousin, playfully.

Arthur said while takin’ a drink. “Let him come, Polly. We'll go there, buy an 'orse, come back.”

John tried helping his cousin as he said. “I'll drop him back at the house in Sutton before it gets dark.”

Polly began shaking her head, tears barely forming in her eyes. “No. Fucking no.”

I pulled back my lips making an “Eee” kind of face before pursing them and looking away with my eyes closed. I knew all three of them were disappointed like little kids. Like little kids being told they can’t have a sleepover.

I could hear as Michael walked away then papers ruffled, and finally, the slam of the door.

Polly looked at Tommy, who was nodding.

He smacked his mouth before saying, “All right, that's it. Back to work. Come on!”

I headed out, posthaste. I caught up with Arthur and clapped my hands on his shoulders.

“Arthur!” I shouted. “Give me a ride to Cassie’s, will ya?��

“Cassie? Your mate’s?”

I nodded while humming.

“All right, hop in the car.”

After Arthur dropped me off at Cassie’s, we soon got a call from Angie. Said she wanted us to be at some event next morning. It was really fancy and I would have to dress nice. There was to be a dress code as well. All white. So, the next morning, Simmons dropped me off at the house in Sutton. As Michael was getting ready to go to the auction— I got ready for the event.

I wore a real modern dress. I got it made by the same person who Tina had make my birthday dress. It was a white, spaghetti strap, fit-and-flare dress. I had a white, fur-lined coat to go with it. 

I barely styled my hair, just swept it to one side, really. My make-up was done in lighter shades and I added on jewelry. Had on my heart-shaped locket necklace and wore my pearl earrings. 

When I was done slipping on my white heels, I trotted downstairs. I peered into the living room to see Michael showing off his new suit to Polly. I chuckled breathily at the sight before stepping outside.

I waited on the steps for Cassie to come ‘n pick me up. I rummaged through my purse for my lighter and my cigarette case. I put one between my lips and lit it up. I took a long pull and then slowly exhaled. My coat fell from my shoulders and into the crooks of my arms, but I didn’t care to hike it back up.

When I saw that ugly truck pull up, I smiled. I knew it was them ‘cause of the episode. John parked then hopped out of the car. I met him halfway as I ran into his arms.

I squealed as he twirled me around in the air. 

“What’s up with your clothes nowadays, Ali? Looking like a rich girl.”

I cackled, mischievously with my head thrown back.

I was put down for a second before I was whisked up in the air again. 

Arthur boomed. “Isn’t she a sight Tommy?” He set me down then hugged me from behind.

I couldn’t stop laughing. “Oh, let me go! Don’t mess up my hair!” I broke free from Arthur’s hug and pushed him away from good measure. With my free hand, I patted down my hair.

“Eh, where you going lookin’ like that, Aliena?” John asked.

I sighed. “One of my friends invited me to a party-event-thingy! It has a dress code. All white. And it’s posh people only, hence, the extravagance!”

I looked at Tom from the corner of my eye. I couldn’t read his face.

He nodded before asking, “ And who paid for the dress, Ali?”

I furrowed my eyebrows, confused. I took a drag before I said. “I did.”

He clicked his tongue and said “oh,” almost mockingly. 

I walked closer to him and shoved him, playfully. “I’m not telling you a blag. I bought it myself. I had it custom made. Tina referred me to her dressmaker.”

He hummed and nodded.

I prodded my cheek with my tongue. I gave him a shit-eating grin as I said. “You know, the event is for horses. There's going to be a game of polo or something.” 

“Lucky you.”

I scoffed. I didn’t manage to make him smile. Yet. I tiptoed, gaining some leverage by using his shoulder as I whispered into his ear. “You know, Polly’s inside making sandwiches for youse.”

“What?”

I let go, covering my mouth as I nodded. “She’s making sandwiches and put tea in a canteen.”

Tommy ran his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip before smiling while shaking his head.

When there was screeching down the road, our heads whipped around to see who it was. Angie pulled up, roughly.

“Oi, Aliena! Get your arse in this car! I’m about to kill Cassie.” Angie screamed while leaning out the window.

Cassie peaked out her head shouting, “Ali, she’s being mean to me.”

I squeezed my eyes shut looking away from them. I tsked, opening my eyes, and flicking my ciggie away. “Shut up, will youse? You’re fucking embarrassing me!” I shouted at them.

Arthur passed us, saying, “This kid. Fuck it! I’m honking the ‘orn.”

I giggled at the man. I sighed looking back at Tommy. I ran a hand over his arm before I said. “Good luck with your horse, Tommy, and be careful.”

“Yeah, I will. Have a good time.”

While walking backward toward Angie’s car, I replied. “Oh, I will!” I turned around and walked correctly. Just as I hopped inside the car, Arthur began his honking. I giggled again.

The event was fucking boss, la. I never thought I would have so much fun at a posh party. The only reason it was fun was ‘cause my friends made it so. Angie and Horace had so much sexual tension, but Angie-! She was playing the game. Good for her.

I mean the dude has liked her since childhood, but men! “Men go for whoever their dicks point at,” as Polly said. Cassie ended up meeting a man. Oh, he was so handsome!

If I wasn’t so in love with Tommy, I would have wanted to pay this lad some attention. Name was Douglas Clayborne. Anyway, she ended leaving me alone for ‘em. Not that I minded. I wasn’t as anxious as I used to be when I was younger. 

Psh! I was, I would have prevented her from leaving with him. I would have asked to join them, at the very least. But that phobia’s been squashed. I’ve killed more than twenty people in my life. There’s no room to still be anxious about the world. 

I’m the danger people have to worry about now.

Anyway, Horace ended up driving me home. Tina and Angie were incapacitated. When I walked through the door, Polly was there near the entrance of the living room. She was clearly not expecting it to be me, but greeted me, nonetheless. 

I told her all about my day. As I was talking, Michael came home. She asked how it was, smelled his breath, and did all that. I smiled as Michael told her a blag. 

When we both headed upstairs, I congratulated him for being about to lie. He smirked saying he had no clue what I was talking about.

After that I went to get undressed; however, I was pulled back down soon after. John had thrown pebbles at my window. He came to get me to help with Arthur. I sneaked downstairs and hopped into the car. He told me what happened, even though I already knew.

I spent the night tending to Arthur’s knuckles, cleaning off any blood on him, and then getting him into new clothes. That took a while and some persuading. I had to crash on the couch once I got him to sleep.

Fucking, christ! Can’t have one thing to myself. I sighed, exhaustedly. 

TAG LIST: @amirahiddleston @nemesis729​ @salvatoreitmeanssaviour @tlfshelby1 @halepea @lilymurphy03 @marsfireeyes @masumiyetimziyanoldu @i-love-superhero​ @thatweirddaydreamer​ @xxbeckybeexx-blog​ @ilikealotofpeople-younotsomuch​ @well-hydratedpvssy​ @the-jess-life @babaohhhriley

[purplebunniboy]

Retrograde Character Masterlist

I lied, here are all the characters. I’ll do in depth backstories later.

This probably isn't EVERY character but it's damn near close and just some basics about them that are totally subject to be altered or expanded upon later

---

Afton Family

Michael Frederick Afton/ Fritz Smith/ Mike Schmidt:

Thick curly brown hair, hazel green eyes, grey tshirt with rolled sleeves, tucked into jeans// scars along his face, torso, and arms

Born October 7th, 1969 to Sandra Schmidt and William Afton

The oldest of the Afton children

Loved baseball, got his first bat from Henry

Scar across his nose came from a fight, hand scars came from attempting to pry open Fredbear's mouth during the bite, arm scar came from encounter with the Nightmares, torso scar came from getting scooped, various other scars from animatronic encounters

Fox mask bully, Dayshift worker at Freddy Fazbear’s in 1987, Technician at Circus Baby’s Pizza World and Party Rentals, Nightshift Security Guard at Freddy Fazbear’s in 1998

William David Afton:

Shiny dark hair, soft blue eyes that turned grey the first time he “died”, well-groomed and cared about his looks

Father of Michael, Elizabeth, and Cassidy Afton; Spouse of Sandra Afton

Co-owner of Fredbear’s Family Dinner, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, Circus Baby’s Pizza World, Fazbear Robotics and Fazbear Entertainment inc.; Owner of Afton Robotics LLC

Cunning, charming, and extremely persuasive, could find out absolutely anything about anyone and use it against them to get what he wanted

Extremely theatrical and loved going over the top in performances, 

Loved robotics and excelled at crafting learning AI, but could never perfect it how he wanted

Drove himself mad with the idea of immortality and legacy

Absolutely hated being called Billy

Did love his kids, at least originally, he’s only Somewhat a heartless monster, but there’s something still beating in that chest of his

Cassandra “Sandra” Bella Schmidt:

Denim jumpsuit, dyed blonde hair, hazel green eyes

Mother of Michael, Elizabeth, and Cassidy Afton. Spouse of William Afton

Was a Broadway actress but left her career behind to marry William and raise her family

Very soft-spoken, only confident when she was on a stage under the spotlight

Had a beautiful singing voice and would often sing her children to sleep, especially if they woke up from night terrors

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Rose Afton:

Dark strawberry blonde hair curled into tight ringlets and pulled back into two ponytails with red ribbon ties, bright green eyes, often wore a lot bright colors

Born May 12th, 1979. Died February 1986

The youngest of the Afton children

Suspected of being the product of an affair as her looks did not resemble her father’s

Did whatever it took to get her way and was very cunning about how she went about doing that

Liked to sing with her mother and was very musically inclined

Evan “Ev” Afton:

Thick brown curls that often fell in front of bright green eyes, white collared shirt a large black tshirt with two white stripes across the chest

Born October 31st, 1975. Bitten by Fredbear October 31st, 1983. “Died” November 5th, 1983

The middle child of the Afton children

Was never the best at communicating with others, complained a lot, fought with his brother constantly at home

After witnessing Charlie’s unaliving, became traumatized and cried all the time

Had a large collection of stuffed animals but was usually carrying around at least one of the Fazbear Plushies

---

Emily Family

Henry Emily

Shoulder length hair always swept or pulled back out of his face, dirty overalls, hands are never clean

Father of Charlotte and Samuel Emily. Spouse of Donna Emily

Treated all the robots the same way he did his own children

Caring and understanding but had a short temper and lacked patience, especially when under a lot of stress

Extremely talented in robotics, excelling in them from an early age. He could make anything look lifelike and real.

Preferred the comfort of his garage workshop over really showing his face

Donna Fitzgerald:

Big and poofy dark hair, dark eyes, high-waisted acid-wash jeans, pink wool turtleneck

Mother of Charlotte and Samuel Emily. Spouse of Henry Emily.

Strong-willed and very loud about her opinions on things.

Very supportive of Henry’s passion with robotics even if the whole topic gave her headaches when she attempted to wrap her brain around the concept

Charlotte “Charlie” Emily:

Denim overalls decorated with marker drawings of flowers, green striped tshirt, green wrist band, untamable brown hair pulled into two high pigtails

Born June 26th, 1978. Died April 5th, 1983

The younger of the Emily children

Extremely empathetic and caring, always went out of her way to care for children smaller than her, wanting them to feel loved and accepted

She was never afraid to get dirty, she always colored outside of the lines on purpose, she wanted to do the daring and unexpected.

Carried around a porcelain doll that was styled like a black and white jester

Her robotic counterpart was the spitting image of the real one

Robotic Charlie was much more sensitive and much more analytical of the world around her

Samuel “Sammy” Jeremy Emily/ Jeremy Fitzgerald:

Born June 24th, 1970. Bitten by Mangle October 7th, 1987

The older of the Emily children

He was always a very gifted child, excelling in mathematics from a very young age, but hit gifted kid burnout by the time he hit highschool

Never had much of an interest in robotics

Patient and gentle, he preferred to keep to himself and would often seek out quiet places he could be alone

Jennifer “Aunt Jen/Jenny” Emily:

Older sister of Henry Emily

Always had an interest in robotics and passed her skills on to her baby brother

Fiercely loyal to family she would do anything she could to protect them and keep them happy, especially Henry since he was the only family she really had left

She was strong-willed, even in her younger years, and able to hold her own very well

---

Before the Bite

Michelle “Mitchie” Peters:

Spiky short brown hair, green t shirt, blue boy shorts, green sweatbands

Bear mask bully

Older sister to Gabriel Peters

Died July 4th,1985

Michael’s closest childhood friend

A tomboy, closet case, and had a major superiority complex or at least pretended to have one

Called the Mama Bear of the group due to her caring deeply for her friends but aggressiveness towards everyone else

David “Davie” Kennedy:

Wavy black hair, red polo shirt with a popped collar, blue bunny mask

Bigger kid and designated meat shield of the group.

Willing to defend his friends to his dying breath.

Inside, he had a soft core. He was the one who would check on each of them, asking if they were ok and if they needed help. His soft core often got him teased by his friends but it never stopped him from wanting to make sure they were always safe

Bunny mask bully, Technician at Circus Baby’s Pizza World and Party Rentals

Christopher “Chris” Houghton:

Short curly dark hair, long sleeve blue shirt

Chicken mask bully

Never left the arcade, living that sweet gamer life

Liked to run his mouth and always needed to have the last word

Vanessa “Nessa/Ness” Abernathy

Dark hair, rainbow clip extensions, dark eyes

Born December 24th, 1970. 

Knew Michael in school, had a crush on him, he was the first one to ever call her Ness and the only one she ever let call her that

Took a robotics class because of him and also got really into coding

Influenced by William and eventually taken completely under his control. She was his eyes and ears in the outside world. Talks to him through the Spring Bonnie plush when non-possessed

Poses as Mike’s therapist to keep an eye on him for William

Matthew “Matt” Griffiths

Older man though no one was sure how old he actually is or if he can even die, choppy hair, thick rimmed glasses

Phone guy

Dayshift worker/ Training Manager at Fredbear’s Family Diner, General Manager of the first Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria

Loyal to the company but also put his own well being and safety before anyone else’s

Would not stick his neck out for anybody on his own

Blunt and standoffish, sometimes considered rude though he was never rude to customers or kids

One of Afton’s first “puppets”

---

Party of 1985

Susan “Susie” Waylar:

Messy golden blonde curls, blue eyes, pink shirt, bedazzled jeans

Older sister of Samantha Waylar

Best friends with Gabriel Peters

Died June 26th, 1985. Stuffed into Chica

Extremely energetic and always told she should settle and be quieter like her sister

Despite being super messy, constantly having gunk in her hair and under her nails, she had an unnatural ability to always keep her dresses clean

Gabriel “Gabe” Peters:

Straight light brown hair, striped shirt beneath denim overalls, missing front tooth

Younger brother of Mitchie Peters

Died June 26th, 1985. Stuffed into Freddy Fazbear

Stood up for the smaller kids whenever possible

Energetic, never able to settle, and outgoing. Impossible to ever see him not smiling

He was clumsy and always getting hurt accidently.

Best friends with Susie Waylar

Cassidy “Dee-Dee” Richards:

Dark hair always pulled into two uneven pigtails, always wearing yellow

Died June 26th, 1985. Stuffed into Golden Freddy

Pulled a lot of pranks, some lighthearted, some not so much.

Threw tantrums to get what she wanted.

Always wanting to be first, always wanting to come out ahead, always 

Jeremy Velasquez:

Died June 26th, 1985. Stuffed into Bonnie

A generally shy kid who’s loud and energetic around his friends

Started growing out of Freddy’s pretty early on

Susie felt bad for him and invited him to hang out with her and Gabe

Frederick “Fritz” Parker:

Messy auburn hair, pastel pink polo shirt

Died June 26th, 1985. Stuffed into Foxy

Aggressive and rude, rather abrasive and destructive

---

Party of 1987

Pete Dinglewood:

Brown hair, red letterman jacket, backwards baseball cap, prosthetic hand and glass eye after being hit by a car and barely surviving.

Died October 4th, 1987. Stuffed into Foxy

Older brother of Charles “Chuck�� Dinglewood

Always sticking gum under the tables in the party rooms

Alec Wilkins:

Blonde curly rocker mullet, sci-fi movie shirt with cut off sleeves, braces

Died October 4th, 1987. Stuffed into Freddy

Older brother of Hazel Wilkins

Could be rude at times, always got himself into trouble and pinned with the “problem child” title

Toby Billings:

Fluffy brown hair, mullet, reminds Michael of Cass, pullover sweatshirt with an athletic team’s logo on the front, always putting stuff in his mouth

Died October 4th, 1987. Stuffed into Bonnie

Younger brother of Connor Billings

Wanted to have the highest scores in the arcade

Cracks his knuckles when he’s lying or when he’s nervous which most people will loudly say is gross and annoying

Millicent “Millie” Fitzsimmons:

Dyed black hair always teased and pinned on one side, always wears a lot of black and intense black makeup

Died October 4th, 1987, stuffed into Chica

Best friends with Alec

Lives alone with her grandfather, who is sometimes hired by Fazbear’s or Afton Robotics to fix any minor technical malfunctions with the animatronics

Was there during the grand opening event of Circuse Baby’s when Elizabeth was killed in 1986

---

Around Town

Connor Billings:

Brown hair, square face, very hyper and always laughing even if the joke isn’t funny

Phone dude

Older brother of Toby Billings

Became obsessed with the mysteries of the place after looking into the 1987 deaths more

Collected old remnants of the closed down restaurants.

Hired by Henry to find the stuff still haunted to put into Fazbear’s Frights, no questions asked

Lowkey scared of Michael saying, quote, “the guy just gives me bad vibes”

Samantha Waylar:

Older sister of Susie Waylar

Quieter, though who’s to say that equals maturity 

Preferred to keep to herself and her books

She knew how to stand up for herself and was actually better at telling kids off than her sister was

Swear she loved Oliver more

Stanley Martinez:

Technician at Circus Baby’s Pizza World and Party Rentals

Was into tech most of his life.

Known to be a generally kind man, putting others and their well being before himself

He was never one to snoop around and would prefer staying out of other’s business

Clayton “Clay” Burke:

Father of Carlton Burke. Spouse of Betty Burke

Chief of police. Was a detective when the 5 murders happened, worked on the case.

Though he is at times a little air headed, he is very caring of those around him

Carlton Burke:

Ginger hair, dark clothing

Only son of Carlton and Betty Burke

Childhood friends of Charlie, John, and Jessica

Always the kind to crack jokes when the mood was down and laugh in the face of danger.

Art and theatre kid

John Aowyn:

Messy brown hair, white shirt, brown leather jacket

Childhood friend of Charlie, John and Carlton. Had a crush on Charlie

He was a writer and constantly lost in his own fantasy world that sometimes it was hard to pull him out of

Jessica Sinclair:

Shiny light brown hair, brown doe-eyes, always clean cut, fashionable clothing, contagious smile

Childhood friend of Charlie, John and Carlton

Fiercely loyal to her friends, and would do anything to protect them. She hated seeing them sad or hurt and was always there with bandaids and snacks the moment they needed her

Very perceptive and smart, she had a love of forensics and her friends would often put on mystery hunts just for her

Leslie Dunn:

Round face, light hair, police uniform

Police officer/ Detective

A bit blunt at times though not with the intention of being rude

A bit awkward at times

Jack Flores:

Younger man, greasy hair, bright eyes

Nightshift Security Guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria

Overly curious, couldn’t keep his nose out of other’s business

[gins-potter]

One Chicago Promo #2

I had a lot of fun breaking down the first promo we got so I’m going to do this one as well.  This one dropped on the One Chicago twitter account this morning (for me) and is about a minute long (compared to the first one which was only like 20 seconds).

So we open with Dr Charles walking with a crying woman into the ED, and a Boden voice over playing.

Boden voice over: “When this community hurts...”

Cut to black, words “Nov 11″ appear on screen.

Cut to Ruzek reaching out to touch Atwater, looks like they are on scene somewhere (note: this is different to the Ruzwater scene in the first promo which was in a hallway). Also interesting note: it looks like Atwater has blood or something on his face - unknown if this is his or someone else’s.  Both are wearing bullet proof vests.

Boden voice over: “... when it reaches out it’s hand...”

Cut to a screen with words “Wednesday’s Most Watched Dramas”.

Cut to Severide carrying an unconscious woman on a fire scene.

Boden: “... we pull it to it’s feet.”

Cut to Boden sitting in his office, Severide can just be seen in the background.

Cut to word “Return” on screen.

Cut to a scene of 51 responding to a fire.

Boden: “And we respond.”

Cut to Cruz standing on a fire scene, in full gear and mask.  He yells, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

Cut to a brief clip of Voight exiting his car.

Cut to Casey and other firefighters (presumably from 51 but we can’t really see specifically who it is) about to enter a building.

Cut to Mouch opening the door to the building and flames jump out at him.

Cut to a brief shot of a helicopter over Chicago.

Cut to Crockett, Ethan, Capp, and another unidentified doctor running together, presumably on an accident scene because all are in scrubs and turnout gear.

Cut to a three-way split screen, brief clip of Dr Charles, Will, and Natalie (left to right).

Cut to the word “Med” on screen.

Cut to Will, Ethan, and April wheeling a patient out of an ambulance (entrance to ED can be seen in background.

Cut to Ethan walking through the ED in full gown, mask, and cap.

Cut to Ethan and April standing together in the ED (interesting note: both are wearing blue scrubs as opposed to their usual maroon)

Ethan: “-I’m just worried about you.”

April: “They are sick...”

Cut to a shot of a patient in a bed.

April voice over: “... they are frightened...”

Cut back to April and Ethan.

April: “...and they are alone.”

Cut to April standing in a trauma bay in full hazmat gear.  Ethan can be seen watching her from outside the bay.

April, voice over: “I’m not abandoning them.”

Cut to a closer shot of Ethan’s face.

Cut to a three-way split screen, brief clip of Boden, Casey, and Sylvie (left to right).

Cut to word “Fire” on screen.

Cut to Severide in turn out gear with water dripping off his helmet.

Cut to extremely brief clip of a firefighter in the middle of a blaze (I think it’s Stella but it’s very brief).

Cut to a shot of a doorway on fire.

Cut to a firefighter (I believe it’s Severide) on the ground in a hazy, smoke-filled room.  No mask or helmet on.

Stella, voice over: “Severide!”

Cut to Stella crouching down in the middle of a fire.

Cut to shot of a firefighter helping another downed firefighter (presumably Stella helping Severide).

Boden, voice over: “You are the very definition-”

Cut to Stella in the fire surrounded by other firefighters.

Boden, voice over: “- of a leader.”

Cut to Stella standing with Boden in his office.

Boden: “It’s time everyone got to see it.”

Cut to Severide and another unidentified firefighter (he has 51 on his helmet so he could be an extra from Engine) helping a burned victim out of a building.

Cut to Sylvie driving (maybe the ambo - not completely sure as something about it doesn’t like quite like the ambo to me).

Cut to Sylvie and Mackey entering a living room of an unidentified house.  There is a man lying on the couch.

Sylvie: “CFD paramedics!”

Cut to an unidentified man approaching Sylvie and Mackey from behind, and putting a gun to Sylvie’s head.  The click is audible.  Sylvie gasps but stays still, Mackey looks around at him.

Cut to a different angle, Sylvie is looking up at the man with the gun still pointed at her.

Cut to a three-way split screen, brief clip of Burgess, Atwater, and Upton (left to right).

Cut to the word “P.D.” on screen.

Cut to a clip of Atwater, Ruzek, and Burgess standing on scene.

Cut to a clip of Atwater walking alone down a hallway.

Cut to Voight and Micheal Doyle (Tom Doyle’s father) talking in the street.

Doyle: “He snitched on the police. He’s gotta pay the price.”

Cut to Atwater.  He is out of uniform, exiting a car with his hands raised, while a uniformed police officer has a gun pulled on him.

Cut to Voight and Atwater sitting in Voight’s office.

Voight: “Takes a lot of guts to stand up for what you believe in.”

Cut to a shot of Voight standing in the street wearing his bullet proof vest.

Cut to Atwater sitting at a table with an unidentified man.

Atwater: “Just trying to do the right thing.”

Cut to Hailey and Jay walking up an alley together.

Cut to Jay busting down a door.

Cut to the word “Together” on screen.

Cut to a shot of the Med cast, but focused on Will and Nat.

Cut to the words “We Are” on screen.

Cut to a shot of the Fire cast, focused on Boden and Stella.

Cut to the word “Stronger” on screen.

Cut to Atwater walking alone in a parking garage.

Cut to Atwater confronting Doyle outside somewhere.  Doyle is walking away while Atwater follows.

Atwater: “If I’m the one you want then come for me!”

Cut to a different angle.  Doyle has turned around and is facing Atwater again.

Doyle: “I’m gonna keep coming for you until I have your badge.”

Cut to shot from last season of Atwater standing in the streets while the police cars drive off around him.

So there we go, that’s our second One Chicago promo gearing up for the show’s coming back on the 11th.  I don’t think it gives us anything massively new but rather confirms what the main focus of each show is going to be for the upcoming (and rather reduced) seasons.  But like I did with my last post, I’m gonna break down some interesting notes (I’ll put them under the cut because I had more thoughts that I expected and this post is long enough):

So like the last one this one contains some presumably old-ish footage.  It isn’t really a big deal, just moments like Severide carrying the unconscious woman, the shot of Burgess, Ruzek, and Atwater standing together at a scene, patients getting wheeled into the ED.  They look older and a lot of people have speculated that they’re from past seasons and I’m inclined to think so too.  It doesn’t really mean anything or matter just interesting to note.  They were probably put in to pad out the run time of the promo a bit without giving too much away of the new seasons.

We got the same voiceover from Boden from the last promo which really emphasises the idea of community and connecting with community that I think all three shows (but particularly Med and possibly Fire) are going to focus on in s6, 8, and 9.

We get a new shot of Ruzek and Atwater, different to the one we got in the last promo.  Doesn’t really confirm anything of course, but it does make me wonder if we’re going to get some serious Ruzwater friendship moments, which I’m always down for.

And another interesting thing to speculate about is the blood we can kind of see on Kev’s face in that shot.  It’s hard to tell but it looks to me as though he’s been in a fight or an altercation so I wonder if that’s a result of a confrontation with Michael Doyle.

Another short clip that I really found interesting was that short one of Capp, Ethan, and Crockett all running together.  It’s kind of hard to explain without the visual aide of the video but between Capp being there and how it’s set up it definitely looks like a Fire call that maybe they called for extra medical assistance on, hence Ethan and Crockett being there.  Now I’m not 100% sure so if someone can confirm that would be great but this looks new to me.  I don’t remember anything like this from last season.  So it looks like we’re going to get Ethan and Crockett scenes outside of the hospital which makes me wonder what they’re relationship will be like considering how it was left in s5 considering the April of it all.  I’m sure we’ll get something from them at some point during the season, I just wonder if them being away from the hospital and therefor April will have an effect.  Of course if this is them on a mini crossover with Fire then we probably won’t get that in that specific scene, but again this is all very speculative.

So from this promo it definitely seems to me like April and Ethan dealing with the COVID of it all is going to be something that either brings them together or drives them apart for good.  We get that exchange between them, and then we get Ethan watching her with a patient, and idk if it’s just me, but Ethan seemed worried for her.  So I do wonder if going through this, especially because it seems like it’s going to be primarily those two (along with Lanik) that are on the front lines of COVID, is going to be something that mends the relationship between them.  I’m not necessarily against a Sextoi reunion, but I’m also not excited for it if it means more bullshit like s5.  If they’re going to do it, they better do it right.

In that same vein, I don’t know about anyone else but this promo definitely makes me think that Stella’s potential promotion is going to be a big thing this season.  We get Boden telling her she’s a leader, we see her rescuing Severide I believe during a call, we get a shot of her and Boden together later in the promo, but yeah I think this is going to be one of the major multi ep arcs.  Which I love because I’m always there for more Stella Kidd.

And then we have Brett and Mackey getting held at gun point which is just like woah!  I wonder if this is the crazy 10 seconds at the end of 9x01 that Derek warned us about.  I mean, it’s gotta be right?  And as a Brettsey shipper I have to wonder, and would love to see, if Brett and Casey bond over this experience.  Because Casey went through something similar in I want to say season 7? When a gun was pointed at him and it jammed, and basically lead to an existential crisis.  I love me some angst so I would love to see Casey be there for Brett through that.

And just a random interesting side note.  We get a shot of Sylvie driving what I presumed to be the ambo.  But someone noticed on twitter that the dimensions are slightly off, the seats are the wrong colour, and you can’t see the window that shows into the back of the ambo, so she’s possibly driving another car, in her ambo gear?  Wearing gloves?  Don’t really know what’s going on with that one, gonna have to think on it a bit more.

And we been knew but clearly this Atwater/Doyle thing is gonna be a major season 8 storyline.  Well I mean the amount of time devoted to it in the promos suggests it is anyway.  And honestly, it better be.  Atwater deserves to have a major story like this.  I don’t want it wrapped up in the first episode.

I do wonder if the shot of Atwater presumably getting pulled over by a cop is going to be something that was specifically orchestrated by Michael Doyle or if it’s going to be a slightly unconnected storyline that ties into the bigger theme of reform that this season is pushing.

And finally just a comment on Atwater’s line right near the end: “If I’m the one you want then come for me!” which kind of makes me wonder if Doyle tries to hurt Atwater through someone else, either Jordan, or the others in Intelligence, or Vanessa.  There’s lot of speculation that Jordan is going to die, which is a definite possibility.  Or this scene could be related to the uniformed officers not showing up for Intelligence and thereby putting them in danger (which is a plot line I definitely think has been teased for season 8).

So anyway yeah, those are my thoughts.  I hope you liked this break down and found it interesting and helpful since some of the clips are so short that it can be hard to pick up on absolutely everything.  And going through it slowly and transcribing it actually helped me pick up all the little details which was cool.  But anyway yeah, the promo is on the One Chicago twitter account and is probably on the yt account as well, so check it out and let me know what you thought of it :D

[lambourngb]

My brain is still a messed up bowl of depression and anxiety soup. However, I’m trying to get back into writing so I can finish Last Year’s Wishes. And hey, thank you everyone for reblogging my dumb not-fic this morning, that was sweet.

Anyway @tasyfa gave me some suggestions on re-igniting the fires of creativity- like re-reading the story, putting on the right playlist, thinking mindfully about the next step in the story.

I spent the morning re-reading, and it felt a bit weird. Like I know I wrote it, but wow it feels like a million years ago... bits that I love and can’t believe came out of my brain:

From Chapter 8- I loved writing stoned Alex.

The sounds of Michael moving about the cabin, the thunk of discarded boots on the wooden floors, the soft close of a door and the start of the shower all made for a soothing background noise that Alex drifted in peacefully. He shut his eyes for a moment, only to find himself awake to the strong scent of food again.

Michael sat a plate on the coffee table in front of him. Dinner was a pair of hot dogs slathered with relish and mustard, with baked beans spilling around it. He placed a can of soda next to it, sweeping away the now-warm beer bottle from his reach. “You awake enough to eat?”

“Yeah, I'm starved.” Alex rubbed the drug fatigue from his face, and reached toward his hip for the melting bag of ice only to encounter a fresh pack with his fingertips. Michael had thoughtfully changed out the ice and prepared him dinner, all after working a full day at Sanders's. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you do all this after working.”

Michael cracked open a bottle of beer, and settled back in the chair with an amused look. His own plate of food balanced on his thighs. The shower’s effects were present, the damp curls mussed and in intact locks around his face, and his grease-marked clothes exchanged for a simple sweatpants and t-shirt. “You make a terrible wife, Alex, not having a hot meal ready at the end of the day for your hard-working man.”

“Haven’t had a lot of practice.” Alex bit into the hot dog, noting to himself that Michael prepared it just the way he liked it with no ketchup to be seen.

“No? You never played house like this before with a boyfriend? I mean, once you could legally.”

“Can’t play house if you've never had a boyfriend.”

Michael paused, holding his beer to his lips in surprise. “What, never?”

It was flattering that Michael appeared so shocked by the idea. Alex chewed with deliberate consideration. “Depends, are you counting yourself?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Then never.”

***

From Chapter 12:

Michael swallowed hard, twin wet tracks of tears shining on his cheeks. “That family tree, the evil doesn’t branch out much, does it? Direct line to your dad.”

“I’m so sorry-”

“Don’t,” he cut Alex off brutally. “Don’t apologize. You’re not the one who put her in that cage. That was what, your great-grandfather Harlan? And you’re not the one who gave her that fucked up exam, that was just your granddaddy. And you’re not the one who killed her. That was just daddy dearest-” Michael choked harshly, as a sob caught in his throat. “Or me, depending on how you look at it. So don’t apologize, Alex. It wasn’t you.”

“No, just everyone I’m related to,” Alex replied bleakly, taking a seat next to Michael. He reached out to rest a hand on Michael’s leg cautiously. “I'm sorry that you saw that. I was… I was looking for footage of her where she was... where she was just in her cell. Not okay, but not being hurt.”

Michael tipped his head to the side, to meet Alex’s gaze finally. “Did you find any?”

Mutely Alex shook his head, as his own eyes welled up.

“Yeah, didn’t think so.”

His heart breaking at the amount of pain and hopelessness on Michael’s face pushed him to keep going, “It’s early though. I… I've only been able to crack two out of twelve of the drives. That one’s part of one that documents procedures. There might be others that are just surveillance.”

“Mmmm. So I can watch her pace in a glass cage, instead of being sexually assaulted. Cold fucking comfort, Alex.” Michael’s voice broke on the word assaulted, before it turned hard and angry. “When were you going to tell me you had these? When you found some nonexistent footage of her not being tortured?”

“I was going to tell you, I was,” Alex defended weakly. The justification for waiting for the correct time was just as Kyle predicted, feeble and without weight. This was the fruit of his cowardice. “It’s horrible, I know. I was trying to spare you the visuals.”

“I need you to stop doing that. You can’t keep trying to control shit by holding onto information and then saying it’s to protect me. I have a right to make my own damn decisions. She was my mother!” Michael ended his ragged speech with a harsh cry. He wrapped his left hand into a fist, pulling tight on the black wrap on his knuckles.

Immediately Alex tensed, as he wiped at an escaped tear. His brain, formed and shaped by his experiences with his father, went into high alert. Michael, with his own trauma-shaped instincts, caught his flinch instantly and exploded upward from his seat and away from Alex to place several feet between them in the close confines of the bunker.

“For fuck’s sake,” Michael shook his head, wounded as he fisted the curls back from his eyes. “I will never, fucking never, lay on a hand on you.”

More tears spilled from Alex’s eyes, as he took a deep breath to lock down his feelings. He was really messing this up with Michael, not that the reveal was ever going to go smoothly. The progress that they had made in the last few weeks was vanishing right before his eyes, and he felt helpless to stop it.

Trying for calm and conciliatory, he replied lowly, “I know. I know you wouldn't. We've never done that to each other.”

“Right. Never.” Michael kept to the other side of the room.  He dropped his hands flat against his side, keeping them in view. His face was red, struggling to hold back his devastation at Alex’s response, merely compounding the grief triggered by the video. “I'm pissed and I can barely look at you right now because you kept this from me, but that. That’s not me, that’s not us.”

“I know, Michael.” Alex took another deep breath, and wiped at his face with his sleeve. Gradually he felt his pulse starting to slow, with the soft embrace of an upcoming adrenaline crash threatening at the edges.  “Just... tell me what you need?”

“I don’t know. Short of a time machine, where I can rescue my mom, there's nothing. She’s dead. She lived a long, miserable life here. How ...how old was that clip?”

***

From Chapter 14

“Well, it’s like you said, I’m the expert in leaving.” He twisted his lips in a semblance of a smile, “I had just learned you had slept with my best friend and you were working on a way to leave orbit, how else was I supposed to react?”

“I don’t know, I guess I didn’t really think you’d care,” Michael paused, shrugging carelessly, “about either of those things.”

“Now we’re back to the ways in which I’ve fucked up with you.” Alex braved a hand on Michael’s arm. “I care about both of those things. I'm trying to come to terms with you moving on from me and that’s not going great, okay? This limbo we’re in, it hurts, but it’s nothing compared to what you leaving the planet will do to me.”

Michael blinked a few times forcefully as his eyes started to glisten. “Really?”

Alex tightened his grip on Michael’s arm, as he dug down for the words. He knew this was usually the point where he backed off and let things be understood instead of implicitly being said. The second, third, and fourth chances to get this right kept slipping away from him.

It would be stupid to waste another moment.

“It would kill me, Michael. I know I left in the past, with deployments and training rotations, but I was always going to come back. Even after the IED hit, I pulled a belt off my dead friend and killed my right foot just so I could live long enough to come back to you.” Alex swallowed hard, forcing the grief back down his throat. “I was prepared to hack the DMV once my assignment to Roswell was over just to track you down. But I can’t hack a spaceship, so I kept the piece from you. I’m sorry.”

A tear finally streaked down Michael’s face as he let go of the console and turned to put his arms around Alex. “God you’re such a fucking asshole.”

The sentiment was in direct opposition to the tight embrace Michael pulled him into, before he leaned back to meet Alex’s eyes. His hands trailed from Alex’s waist and glided up to cup his jaw, holding his face close, so he tipped his forehead against Alex’s. “Such a fucking asshole,” Michael repeated wetly.

“Does that mean you forgive me?” Alex ventured tentatively, soaking in his touch greedily.

****

From chapter 17:

“Yes, and no,” he admitted quietly, his fingers fidgeted with the discarded beer cap. “I want to talk to my best friend about my boy problems but he’s also your boy problem so that makes it hard.”

“Pretend he isn’t then,” Maria urged softly. “Can you do that? ‘Cause I miss you, Alex. There’s nothing I want more than to talk to my best friend about dumb boys again.”

Alex had had a lot of experience pretending it wasn’t Michael Guerin he was twisted up over and then seeking out the counsel of Maria in return. It wasn’t that much of a stretch when he thought about it. Over ten years of discussions about feeling he wasn’t saying the right thing, or being too scared to act on his impulses, and she had patiently held his hand through it all without once knowing the identity. Steady, supportive, and always with a wicked twist of humor to remind him just what a catch she thought he was.

When he was a teenager trying to fall asleep through the various dull aches that came from disappointing his father, he used to press his bruised face into his pillow and pray for two things. To not be Jesse Manes’s son, or if he had to be that, then at least let him fall in love with Maria Deluca.

God was cruel enough to keep him under Jesse’s roof and to leave his desires unchanged.

While his love for Maria skipped over the romantic track, nonetheless it still flowed strongly over the years. Scattered around the loft were various gifts that Alex had sent to her during his time away from Roswell. A wall tapestry he had picked up in Kabul hung from one wall. A pipe and ashtray set from an Istanbul market sat next to a wooden cigar box where Alex knew Maria kept her weed. A bright blue glazed bowl painted in the geometric designs of peacock feathers rested on a side table. It had been a gift from a thankful Yazidi father after his unit evacuated his daughters to a UN camp safely. He had meticulously packed and padded the bowl to ship to Maria two weeks prior to the IED. With the typical international shipping delays, he had already transferred from Landstuhl to Walter Reed by the time Maria had received it.

He held onto that connection, pushing down the lingering question of where Michael spent the night in the close confines of the loft. Certainly not on this small couch.

“Alright, deal.” Alex licked his lower lip in thought. “So there’s this guy, and we have some pretty heavy history together. We’re trying to be friends and like figure out who we are to each other outside of-” he broke off, glancing toward her bedroom alcove nervously before finishing, “outside of the bedroom.”

Maria followed his glance without comment, before taking another sip from her bottle. “That sounds like a healthy and adult decision, Alex. Can I take the credit for browbeating you over the years or do I have to share it with your therapist?”

“Depends, Maria, do you want to take credit for my complete failure here? ‘Cause for whatever reason I keep fucking it up.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Alex raised his eyebrow skeptically, “Do you?”

“Yeah, you’re right, I forgot what a disaster you are,” Maria teased gently. “I mean you have a good job, you have amazing friends if I do say so myself, you’re the kindest person I know. And your face isn’t half bad either. So you have a few walls to climb, who doesn’t? Alex, you are worth the effort here.”

“He hates my job, and he really hates that I signed a new contract.” Alex tipped his bottle to finish the last swallows. Dully he looked down at the bottle cap pressed tightly between his fingertips, “My walls are pretty high, here. I either hold back on him, or I get scared and push him away, which means I’m either pissing him off or hurting his feelings. It’s no wonder he wants-” He stopped, leaving the rest of the thought unfinished.

“Being afraid of being hurt or rejected is normal. Life has taught you a lot of reasons why you need to protect yourself and if you’d share that with him, I’m sure he would understand.” She reached up to touch her necklace absently, before sighing. “I admit, I wasn’t thrilled when he told me you re-upped.”

“Not you too, Maria.”

“You were so close to being out-”

“I can’t leave until the job is done-”

“Please, that’s the kind of thinking that has kept us in Afghanistan for twenty years.”

A beat passed between them before Alex cracked a disbelieving smile at her sarcastic reply. “Did you just compare me to Donald Rumsfeld?”

Maria covered her mouth, as she started to laugh with him. “I mean, maybe? You have much better hair though, or at least you did. There’s only so much product can do to fix that boring flat top.”

“Thanks,” Alex replied drily, as he reached upward to his hair out of reflex. Maria giggled as he belatedly brought his hand away from his head. “My ego is safe with you around.”

“See? You need me around, you’d be lost without me.” Her smile widened with fondness, the old comfort of teasing each other over having high maintenance hair habits settling in naturally. This time, her words landed awkwardly into the air and her smile slowly dropped away. Her eyes grew bright and glassy in the warm light from the two floor lamps. The atmosphere between them changed again, as the unsaid pressed against them impatiently, nagging for their attention.

Alex dropped his eyes to the floor again. The words in his throat were tangled, as he wished one more time that he didn’t feel like this with Maria. He was caught in the rough current of feeling jealous and angry while being tossed against his ever-present pillars of self-loathing.  

“What are we going to do?” Maria asked forwardly. She was braver than him like usual. “Are we ever going to get past this? I mean, I can pretend some more if you want-”

“God, that’s all I do these days, pretend, so maybe it’s best if we don’t.” He licked his lower lip, registering the dry chapped feeling from his nervous chewing. “I pretend with Michael, I pretend at work, and I don’t want to have to pretend with you, Maria.”

“I don’t think you’re pretending with Michael,” she pointed out, in a no-nonsense tone. Her eyes lost their sharp focus as her face reflected the changeover from friendly observation to a psychic read. “Unless you’re pretending that friendship is going to be enough for you. You love him and you’re not getting over him, and you’re sabotaging yourself with him because you’re afraid. You’re afraid that friendship is enough for him.”

The air in the room felt thin to Alex. He closed his eyes, and placed his hand on his chest to count the rapid beat of his pulse. The black spots in his eyes swam in front of him, and he blinked several times to clear his vision. “I thought he had already made his choice. But then living together, pretending that we never broke up- It’s complicated now. Messy. And I’m afraid if I really ask, he’ll tell me the same thing he did before, that love isn’t enough. That it’s too much baggage to get past and he won’t choose me.”

****

From chapter 19:

Michael closed his eyes, as a tear slipped down his cheek and turned his face into Alex’s touch, as he whispered roughly, “Losing her, my mom like that, I didn’t want to be known by anyone. Not by Max, and not by you.” He lifted his face away, his eyes still wet as his smile wobbled, “That’s why you found me at the Wild Pony.”

“I figured,” Alex replied, his throat tight.

“I know now that I hurt you by doing that. It’s a fucking weak excuse to tell you that I really didn’t think you would care. ‘Cause it doesn’t change the fact you did.”

“Michael.” He started to tell him that it was fine. That he understood. Except on one level, as much as they had laid out the pain and wounds that had been exchanged between them, some targeted, some merely shrapnel from outside forces, there was the unavoidable fact that it wasn’t fine. Discarding the emotions of it, which he was never going to find comfort with, Alex fell into the cold facts of what happened. “I wasn’t what you needed then, or wanted. And that’s okay. You are allowed to make that choice for yourself. You went through something unimaginably terrible, how could I begrudge you for turning to someone who made that a little better for you?”

The hurt miserable laugh that escaped from Michael as he pressed his lips against Alex’s palm in a kiss, sent a chill down Alex’s spine.

“You were exactly what I needed after Caulfield, Alex. You make everything, fucking everything, in my miserable life better. This whole month, every minute of it, you made me feel whole. I can take a full breath because of you. I am okay, and that’s so much more than I deserve to be. And I tried to fight it, especially early on when I was a dick to you, but as it turns out, hurting you so I could make myself miserable isn’t worth it.”

Alex was frozen, his hand still against Michael’s face as he worked to understand just what he had said. The first three thoughts circled back to Michael still being drunk, or perhaps this was delayed gratitude for helping keep them safe from the police investigation. For all that Michael spoke of not feeling like he deserved to feel okay, it was shockingly clear in Alex’s mind he shared that same sentiment. Their broken pieces were shattered on the same fault lines, not necessarily the mirror opposite that would fit together in the same way.

Michael kissed his thumb softly, looking up at him, “I can see by your face you are having a hard time believing me. If you let me do this, open up the bond print, you’ll get it. You’ll see that as nice as Maria is, she doesn’t have nearly the power you do. You’ll feel what I feel. Um, just what I feel, if you’re worried about your privacy. This is a one-way street.”

There was a brief moment of disappointment for Alex hearing that, but the lure of Michael’s offer was too strong to deny. “Okay. Do it.”

“Yeah?” Michael smiled brilliantly as he sat in bed, and gently pressed Alex back on the mattress. He spread his palm flat on Alex’s chest, directly over his heart, its beat strong and quick beneath the touch. Michael’s eyes flickered down at his hand and then to Alex’s tense gaze, his lips quirking with shy pleasure at what was about to happen. “Merry Christmas.”

Michael’s hand didn’t change in temperature, even as a red glow started to build in his palm. It was reminiscent of how his mother had communicated in those last doomed moments at Caulfield. And like that too-short interval from before, there was no pain on Michael’s face, just rapturous joy.

Alex stored that snap shot of Michael’s face, looking so unbelievably happy, away in the place he hoarded his good memories.

It was the last clear thought he had.

Oh. It was a lot.

His therapist had warned him a long time ago that trauma had changed his brain patterns forever. It wasn’t just psych jargon to understand that his electrical pathways of experiencing pleasure and joy were forever altered after his childhood. His doctor had argued to him that comparative MRIs would prove it. The therapeutic homework of practicing pleasure and reacquainting his body to positive feelings had been taken with a dose of skepticism. Michael had always made him feel okay in receiving and giving pleasure, but later Alex realized it wasn’t necessarily the comfort of sex that was the issue, it was happiness.

Michael loved him.

It washed all over his mind, like standing under a waterfall. The torrential press of love, joy, peace beat down on the brittle feelings of shame, of self-hatred, of feeling like Alex had been made wrong in some way right from the start, after all, why didn’t his father love him?

Michael loved him.

Water was the most destructive and most transformative force on earth. It was relentless. It sought out cracks, pouring into the hollows while it filled the caverns. Once inside, if needed, it could freeze and expand, to break down defenses, until the path was clear. It nurtured with the same unstoppable power, feeding the roots, nourishing the parched throats, cleansing the wounds and washing away the filth.

Michael loved him.

It was infinite. It was one thing to know it intellectually, after all, Michael had said it once to him, present tense and all. This connection made Alex feel ashamed, because now he knew he had never really believed it. It wasn’t Michael’s fault though; the core truth was Alex had made it 28 years believing he was the issue, that he was unlovable. Any words that Michael had said, Alex had dismissed as something shallow, or perhaps the result of a trick.

The connection battered at that belief until Alex had to discard it as false.

****

From chapter 21

There was a moment when he thought Michael would break away, he could feel Michael take a deep breath, his chest heaving in effort before he tipped forward into Alex’s body, a mirror of Alex’s earlier collapse. He caught Micheal’s weight easily, and held him securely.

“I really want to scream right now, just so you know,” Michael warned with a low voice in Alex’s ear. “I don’t want to be mad at you, but I’m fuckin’ mad.”

“You can be mad at me,” Alex offered weakly, keeping his arms around Michael.

“I really can’t, Alex,” Michael huffed a humorless laugh, “you tried to pick a fight five minutes ago about Maria, and I saw your face when you got here, you were totally white. You didn’t expect this reveal to go well, did you?”

Alex hummed a little in his throat, acknowledging Michael’s point without argument. He thought about the file that had his father’s request for testing when he was a child and locked down his feelings on it to deal with later. “It’s not all terrible news to report though. If the pod responds to intent, then we should have Liz and I guess Kyle, meet us at the cave so we can see what it might be doing to Max in the meantime. See if there’s any readings we can gather.”

Michael moved his warm hands up to cup Alex’s face, the fabric wrap on his left hand rasping lightly as he gently moved Alex back to meet his eyes. “I’m sure Liz was thinkin’ about saving Max, but he’s not the only one in a pod. What were you thinkin’ when you put your dad in there?”

“Honestly?”

“Uh yeah, of course.”

Alex smiled grimly, “I was thinking how good it felt to choke him out and finally win a fight. I was thinking he got to see my face as darkness took him, the way I used to see his face when I was a kid. And I hoped he was scared. I hoped he felt small and powerless.”

“God, I hope so too. I hope the pod is making him relive that non-stop,” Michael breathed fiercely as he tightened his hold on Alex for a moment, then he leaned in to capture his lips in a deep, hungry kiss. Alex opened under his mouth easily, surrendering to Michael as he backed him against the parked Bronco. He pushed his fingers into Alex’s short hair, pressing against Alex’s body as Alex’s tongue stroked firmly against his.

The warning burn in Alex’s lungs was the only thing that brought the kiss to an end, as he sucked in a gulp of air, the taste of Michael and a hint of beer still on his lips. “As much as I want to continue that, um, you should finish up here so we can make a plan with Liz and Kyle.”

“You’re lucky my trailer is at the cabin, otherwise you and me and a horizontal surface-”

****

Also from chapter 21

The warmth of Michael scooted up against his back as his arms snaked around Alex’s chest. He pressed his lips against Alex’s neck and offered softly in his ear, “Listen, if this is…. If this is something in your head, I can help with that. If you want.”

Anticipation and pleasure lit up briefly through the agony as Alex followed the train of thought to Michael’s offer and remembered Christmas Eve. It was beyond tempting but being back on active duty made that an impossibility. With regret, he shook his head, “No bond print, too risky.”

“Nah, not that, but I could go inside your mind, and um, persuade you that what you’re feeling isn’t real.”

“Oh,” Alex breathed. Michael inside his head, seeing his thoughts, seeing just how messed up Alex was, not that he couldn’t already guess it from the outside. The cramping seemed to intensify as he debated, from what felt like a stabbing feeling from the ball of his foot, to a deep burn into the arch of his instep, traveling up his right leg. “Yeah, okay, do it.”

Michael licked his lips at the acceptance and took a deep breath. He shifted in bed again until Alex faced him. He brought his palm up, to cup Alex’s cheek gently, meeting his eyes. Alex blinked heavily at the touch, tears from the pain slipping down his face as Michael brushed the wetness away with his thumb with love.

Then.

Then it was warm and bright. Michael was the joy of a perfectly played note, the pitch and harmony of Alex’s favorite song, slipping into his mind to curl around him. The percussion of matched heart beats, thundering in time together. The vibration of strings, dancing across two keys, one high and soprano, one low and deep.

That was Michael in Alex’s mind.

Alex though, Alex was a crumpled ball of paper. The painstaking drawing, scratched out in eraser marks and errant ink blots. The brush strokes of a self-portrait imperfectly translated from three dimensions to a flat disappointing two. Discarded and tightly balled up, waiting to be tossed into the trash.

Then.

Teasing at the edges, Michael picked at and pulled at the scrapped drawing, the furrowed shell of Alex. With infinite care, he worked to flatten out the wrinkles and to smooth the creases. This wasn’t a failed attempt; this was a work of art, worthy of being framed. He laid out love, ironing out the perceived imperfections, until the crushed bits, and worn notches were treasured marks of strength and experience. These weren’t deficiencies to reject, or blemishes to trash but well tested symbols of armor worthy of protection.

Then.

Alex blinked again, and swallowed down the sob pressing at the edges of his throat waiting to erupt as the pain was gone. Inside his head, every small scrape and cut was calm and soothed. Michael had wrung the tension from his mind and body, leaving him loose and shapeless.

“Better?” Michael asked, his hand still on Alex’s face.

“Yeah, much.” Alex licked his lower lip, his mouth dry. “Is that, is that really how you see me?”

An enraptured look slipped over Michael’s face as his eyes grew dark, “You are a work of art, Alex. You’re beautifully made, inside and out. I wish you could see yourself the way I do.”

Blushing, he had to look away, unable to meet the intensity in Michael’s gaze. “I think you’re crazy.”

“You’re the crazy one for not seeing it, but I know why you can’t believe me.” Michael’s expression saddened as he turned to catch Alex’s eyes, “He is wrong about you. He was wrong when you were a kid, and he’s wrong now.”

“Ah, you saw it. What my dad wanted to do.” Alex pressed his lips together tightly, and sighed.

“Yeah, I saw it.” Tension grew in Michael’s grip, as he moved his hand down Alex’s shoulder to his chest, pressing his hand against the rising beat of Alex’s heart. “He is a monster, and it’s his loss that he could find anything in you that was deserving of hate, but sweetheart,” Michael’s voice broke briefly, “it breaks my heart that you might agree with him on any level. Your body, the way you love, how you love, it’s all part of what makes you, you.” He paused, before finishing with a thick voice, “And I love you. You should love you too.”

“I’m trying, Michael,” Alex leaned in to kiss his lips gently, “I’m trying really hard to do that.” He let Michael deepen the kiss, sighing at the care Michael used in touching him, like he was that precious work of art he’d glimpsed in Michael’s thoughts.

“Don’t be ashamed of this,” Michael whispered, his mouth hovering over Alex’s.

Alex shook his head, and leaned up to trade another kiss, “I’m not, not anymore. Well, not most days. I’m working on it.”

Michael smiled in response at Alex’s honesty, “Good, anytime you need a reminder, let me know. We can fight those demons together, darlin’. Speaking of, how’s the pain?”

Stretching his right leg out, he rubbed his stump against Michael’s leg, and sighed in relief at the motion. “Gone.”

****

All self-indulgent clips.

[trans-advice]

Actor Michael D. Cohen Has Something to Share: ‘I Transitioned’

Actor Michael D. Cohen in Burbank, Calif. on April 16, 2019.

“We need more sweat!”

On that command, a production assistant takes a spray bottle filled with glycerin and scurries over to actor Michael D. Cohen, making his bald head glisten as a crew stands by at a studio in Burbank, Calif. They’re filming the fifth season of Henry Danger, a farcical superhero saga that is Nickelodeon’s longest running live-action sitcom. In it, Cohen plays a character named Schwoz, a quirky genius who aids the show’s good guys much as Q aids James Bond. In this scene, as a goof, Schwoz is leading some of the show’s younger actors through an aerobic workout. Cameras roll as Cohen, clad in spandex and now suitably sweaty, breaks into action. “Your life begins where your comfort zone ends!” he barks while huffing through the routine.

It’s just a line that Cohen is delivering in his character’s silly accent. But it also expresses an idea that the actor has come to understand intimately, one he is ready to embrace again, whatever it might mean for his future. Spurred in part by the political climate — which in recent years has seen fraught public reckonings around issues related to gender — Cohen wants to publicly disclose a private fact that he has been sharing with colleagues on the set of Henry Danger: Nearly twenty years ago, he transitioned from female to male.

“I was misgendered at birth,” Cohen says. “I identify as male, and I am proud that I have had a transgender experience — a transgender journey.”

Today, there are more actors than ever who are open about having had, as Cohen puts it, a transgender journey. This is in part because there is a proliferation of shows, including Pose and Transparent, that are portraying nuanced transgender characters. But Cohen is rare in that he worked in the entertainment industry for more than two decades before he chose to make this disclosure.

In many ways, the environment is far more welcoming than it was when Cohen first transitioned, back when issues of gender identity were largely relegated to spectacles like The Jerry Springer Show. In Hollywood, figures like Laverne Cox and Asia Kate Dillon have nabbed major roles, helping to shift mindsets among producers and audiences alike. More broadly, there is unprecedented awareness about LGBTQ issues, in courts and legislatures as well as the cultural zeitgeist. Yet that visibility has also spurred backlash from conservatives who cast transgender and gender nonconforming people as a threat to societal norms.

Cohen does not use the word transgender to describe himself, but he does view himself as part of a community that typically embraces that label, and he didn’t feel he could be an outspoken advocate until he made his history known. The actor has grown restless while watching the Trump administration roll back protections for transgender people in schools and the military, as Republicans have fought bills that would protect them from discrimination in public spaces.

“This crazy backlash and oppression of rights is happening right in front of me. I can’t stay silent,” Cohen says. “The level of — let’s be polite — misunderstanding around trans issues is so profound and so destructive. When you disempower one population, you disempower everybody.”

It’s a chilly April evening in L.A., and I’m sitting with Cohen on the otherwise empty patio of a sleek restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. One of the first things you notice about him is the same thing casting directors do: he’s short, just over five feet tall. Tonight, his big eyes are framed under a flat cap and he’s sporting salt-and-pepper stubble that will be shaved before filming starts the next day. As we talk, Cohen has a tendency to fiddle with the cuff of his blue blazer. The Canadian-born actor also has a tendency to crack jokes, displaying the comedic talents that have propelled his career. When asked about how it’s been having the name Michael Cohen lately, for instance, he says that he’s had it: “I’m thinking of changing my name to Paul Manafort.”

Today, a central struggle for openly transgender actors is combatting the expectation that they should play transgender characters. If Cohen has been hemmed in, it’s only by the perception that he’s a character actor — a type of thespian he defines as “not good looking enough to sleep with a leading woman.”

He recalls watching The Carol Burnett Show as a kid in Winnipeg, marveling at the way that television can be unifying for people laughing together on a couch “regardless of whatever else is happening in that family unit.” Though Cohen always wanted to be an actor, there was a time early in his career when he focused on behind-the-scenes work and voice acting instead. “I think I loved acting so much,” he says, “that I didn’t want to do it as a woman.” Eventually, his love of acting won out. Cohen played female roles until he transitioned in 2000, a process that, in his case, involved medical treatment as well as changes in how he presented himself socially.

Some years later, Cohen left the studios of Toronto for Hollywood and started landing roles at a greater clip. In 2014, he began appearing on Henry Danger. Today, more than 750,000 kids tune in to watch the sitcom each week. According to Nickelodeon — which, along with parent company Viacom, shares wholehearted support for Cohen and “diversity in all its forms” — it’s the number one live-action kids’ show on basic cable. Adults may have seen Cohen elsewhere, on sitcoms like Powerless, in films or commercials like a Wendy’s “Biggie Bag” spot that has been airing recently.

Actor Michael D. Cohen on the set of Henry Danger in Burbank, Calif. on April 16, 2019.

Actor Michael D. Cohen on the set of Henry Danger in Burbank, Calif. on April 16, 2019.

Ryan Pfluger for TIME

Another reason Cohen wants to publicly talk about his history now is that he is preparing to put on a new production, a play about his life that has been in the making for the past fifteen years. In the one-man show that he wrote and stars in — called “4 Cubits Make a Man,” a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian specimen — he chronicles how he came to grips with his identity, as well as how he navigated family, romantic relationships and widespread ideas about what makes someone a man.

“It is not random, it is not arbitrary, it is not chosen,” he says of gender identity. “It’s like trying to negotiate with gravity.”

The play, funny enough to get the audience through the raw pain of many scenes, centers on this tension. “In my experience, I was born male. What my body said about it was irrelevant,” Cohen says. “No matter how hard I tried, it was not up for negotiation. Believe me, it would have been so convenient if I was actually a woman.”

People like him are not, as some social conservatives have suggested in fiery debates about LGBTQ rights, the product of “radical ideology” spreading around the Internet or a figment of anyone’s imagination, he says. “My chromosomes do not dictate my gender. I’m a man,” Cohen says. “It’s not that hard.”

In the play, Cohen also explains why he does not describe himself as transgender.

He understands that this word is commonly used by people who identify with a gender other than the sex they were assigned at birth. Many people “feel that does reflect their identity and they’re very comfortable with that, and that’s completely valid,” he says. But, for him, the term feels off, and he does not want to make compromises about how he describes himself at this point in his life. “I have worked so hard to get to the truth and I’ve taken on labels in the past that didn’t feel true for the sake of convenience at that moment,” he says. While the word transgender may describe his past or his transition, he says, he has always felt his “core being” was male, and so that is the language he uses.

Cohen knows that may seem complicated. But that comes with the territory. He believes that animus toward people like him — however they identify — comes in part from the fact that their existence complicates simple maxims about gender. That is part of what has made transgender people a target in political battles over issues like the sports, religious freedom and civil rights. And Cohen wants to stand with them. “These are my people. I belong to this group,” he says of Americans who have been affected by policies like the Trump Administration’s guidance on Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in education.

Though Nickelodeon has been supportive, Cohen knows this is a complicated time to be making this disclosure in Hollywood, too. The entertainment industry continues to grapple with what it means to be inclusive, and while LGBTQ issues are intermingling with kids’ programming more than in the past, sensitivities remain. Cohen is hopeful about the message that his continued presence on the show — which has filmed more than 100 episodes and was recently picked up for 10 more — will send to young viewers who are attuned to issues of gender identity. Yet he is also prepared for backlash from parents.

“People don’t understand. They think this has to do with sexuality and it doesn’t. They think this has to do with pushing an agenda on kids and it doesn’t,” he says. “What it does is send a message to kids that whoever they are, however they identify, that’s celebrated and valued and okay.”

There’s something about Cohen that kids respond to, the producers of Henry Danger say. Maybe it’s his small stature. Maybe it’s his talent for physical comedy. Maybe it’s the feeling that Schwoz is a fantastical bridge between the grownup and kid worlds.

Chris Nowak, the showrunner for Henry Danger, says that colleagues respect what Cohen has told them but continue to see him as they always have: “Just a guy who’s real good at his job.” Jace Norman, a teen heartthrob who plays the show’s protagonist, Henry Hart, says in an email that the news “didn’t change anything about the high level of respect and admiration I have for the guy,” and thinks “it’s in the best interest of the entire world to have every type of person represented on TV.”

On set, Cohen’s news seems to have been processed with little hubbub. Of far more concern is the timing for delivering jokes as he flees, still in his spandex getup, from a frazzled woman who has traveled back from the future to warn everyone that humanity will be enslaved by robots. As she pursues him, Schwoz zips frantically around the show’s secret superhero lair like he’s in a Benny Hill chase scene. In between takes, he jokes that, for this particular episode, he has been drawing inspiration from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

However frivolous it is, when the episode airs, it will reflect a serious reality back to the actor: that the world sees him as he sees himself, a guy who plays another guy on TV. And he hopes that sharing the fuller picture might make the idea of disclosure less uncomfortable for others. “If I tell my truth,” Cohen says, “that gives other people permission to tell theirs too.”

Write to Katy Steinmetz at katy.steinmetz@time.com.

[iwritesometimes]

speaking of west virginia, here's an incredibly niche video that youtube recommended to me last night, which is proof that the dossier Google have been algorithmically building on me over the last few years has become indistinguishable from my actual personality, because i cannot believe how specifically this suggestion was tailored to my trash pile of interests. behold, an incredibly cheaply-produced name-that-tune quiz of 90s contemporary christian pop music in which i disappointingly only recognized one song and it was a rebecca st. james track, of all things, i think it might be the only rebecca st. james song i've ever heard. anyway, the skinny old guy in the ugly ball cap is the first (non-animated) man i ever had a crush on, mr. michael w. smith of kenova, west virginia, though to be fair when i was seven he looked like this and i've had a thing for swooshy hair ever since

his twang is still surprisingly strong and even now, jaded and atheist and deeply scornful of CCM and mws's 938744738937437 dove awards, i still appreciate his shit-eating grin as he guesses his own multimillion-dollar songs in the first two notes

he reminds me of a hundred older middle aged men i knew and shook hands with in a dozen different churches when i was a little girl, benevolently patriarchal with winning smiles and comforting hillbilly voices. seeing him on a youtube video is so surreal. like seeing your papaw on the internet. the first video of him i ever saw - and one of the first videos i ever saw on the internet, period - was about a ten-second clip i painstakingly downloaded at dialup speed, of him performing at a concert, singing at a mic and then stalking over to a keyboard for the piano break, and i remember being starstruck at how cool and talented he was, how amazing a musician. and here he is slapping a little plastic buzzer and grinning his old man grin in a cramped little webseries studio, this foundational pillar of the music industry that raised me, first idol I ever had. wild, man.

also, tobymac is aging like a fine wine, though he's fooling no one with that stupid little hat into thinking he still has a hairline

ETA: in case any of you wanna know what my childhood sounded like, here's a playlist of the songs they had to guess!

Awesome God - Rich Mullins

Place in This World - Michael W. Smith

Baby, Baby - Amy Grant

The Great Adventure - Steven Curtis Chapman

Big House - Audio Adrenaline

Shine - Newsboys

God - Rebecca St. James

Jesus Freak - DC Talk

Testify to Love - Avalon

Consuming Fire - Third Day

[deepbutdazzlingdarkness]

hiiii! i was wondering if u had any recommendations for best caps fics? dirty or not. ALSO LOVE UR BLOG

First of all, THANK YOU FOR ASKING! I loove giving fic recs. Second of all…this is gonna be LONG lmao. I gave some Kuzy and Willy/Latts recs earlier here, so these are gonna be primarily Nicky/Ovi recs, with some smaller pairing ones too, and I’m gonna sort them by pairing that way.

SO, Nicky/Ovi (including some poly recs, which I’ll list the pairings for):

-First of all, literally EVERYTHING by Ferritin4. They were the first Caps author I read after blood pressure, and I’m going to limit myself to linking just three of them, but really, READ EVERYTHING.

King Meby Ferritin4 [E, 12k]

In which there is a small tragedy, a great success, and a lot to learn about someone Sasha thought he knew awfully well.

Dream the Right Dream by Ferritin4 [E, 14k]

They don’t do it like that in Sweden, which Nicklas mans up and valiantly explains to the room after he makes it back from camp. They don’t use humans as tools. All people are people, and Nicklas would never — he couldn’t imagine having a teammate inside him every time he fell into heat, however willing they might be. His body is his own, and they all touch him far more than enough already.

What Will Survive Of Us by Ferritin4 [E, 26k]

It’s going to be a big deal, his mother had told him, and Nicklas had listened.

His mom’s not an idiot.

It’s going to be a big deal, she’d promised, if and when you find them. It’s going to be more than you thought it would, and if and when you know it, you’ll know it for sure.

-Another author you should read everything by is screamlet. They have some non-Nicky/Ovi fic I will rec later, so I’m just gonna post a few of the Nicky/Ovi ones now

the arrival of 290287 backstromby screamlet [M, 18k]

Nicky has an asteroid named after him; that’s just the beginning.

the washington royals by screamlet [M, 45k]

Sasha doesn’t remember the very first time he met Nicky, but Michael Nylander is kind enough to remind them when he arrives to meet the team, carrying an honest to fuck laminated newspaper clipping of the first time Prince Alexander visited Sweden to meet his future husband, Prince Nicklas.*An arranged marriage—or, an arrangement and a marriage.

-One more author to mass rec: angularmomentum! They’re not solely a Nicky/Ovi author so I will be linking them more down below too, but for now:

running from the weather by angularmomentum [E, 21k]

Alex starts playing for Dynamo at sixteen.

kithbyangularmomentum [E, 12k]

Sasha makes prefect in his second to last year. It’s earlier than anyone but him expected, but right on track for his two year plan, which is: be head boy, get a contract to play Quidditch professionally, and beat Bäckström off in the baths.

-For the rest of these, I’m gonna sort them by rating! Lowest to highest (G-E)

Soft Hands by sadhockeytrashbaby (allofthefandoms)[G, 1k]

Alexander Ovechkin walks into the Capitals dressing room with a collar and the entire Washington sports press corps grinds to a stunned stop.

Eight + Eight (+ Nine) bysockitup [G, 2k]

Active players have started waking up in bed with retired players who wore the same number when they need relationship advice. It goes some kind of way.-*-Teemu pulls back and kicks forward at the same time so violently that he knocks both Paul and Ovechkin out of the bed.

street’s an empty stage by grim_lupine [G, 4k]

Over their heads, in this little dream world Nicklas has built, the sun is blazing at it’s peak, searing them where they sit. The light bathes Alex a molten gold. He couldn’t look any other way in Nicklas’s head, of course.

Nicklas is cracked open, exposed.

so play on, play on, play on by carissima [2k, G]

“Gonna give you the cup first,” Alex says, still too close. He’s in Nicke’s space like he always, always is. He’s grinning and Nicke’s grinning because they finally won the goddamn cup but his head is spinning now. “Brooks already had cup. Your turn first.”

raise my hands (paint my spirit gold) by seaqueen [G, 1k]

They break apart with chests heaving for air, and when Nicke looks Alex is burning with it, fierce joy and agonizing victory painted in every line of his body and Nicke loves him so, so much.

pledge my allegiance and bite my tongue by spock [T, 5k]

It’s a given that all droids will develop some form of their own unique idiosyncrasies, but none of them are as decidedly too much as Ovi’s is. He’s got too much style, too much personality; it’s a well known and much maligned fact that he’d nearly been recalled not all that long after his activation, but the test groups had loved him so much that he was granted an exception.

cherish the moonlight by haipollai [T, 6.5k]

“What is wrong, pup?” He asks again, wishing desperately that he could actually get an answer. Instead he settles for holding his hand out, palm up until Nicky takes the hesitant step forward to nuzzle against him.

The Dog Days Are Over by xihale [T, 8k]

In which alternate universe Boston had 4th pick and Washington had 5th pick in the 2006 draft, and in which alternate universe the NHL is kind enough make accommodations for players’ personal circumstances. For instance, to allow Washington to pick Alex Ovechkin’s absolutely true, definitely not fake, 100% not-made-up fiancé to come play for the Caps.

“You what,” Alex says. “Alex Ovechkin’s who?”

—and its aftermath, through the years.

Demons, Ovechkin and other Superhuman Forces by stumblebee [T, 2k]

Sometimes Nicky wonders, usually in moments like these, if there is something to it, if you need Canadians and the horrible things they chose to do to themselves as children to win it all. Maybe Don Cherry is right, at the end of the day, maybe you just can’t win without demonic assistance. Without sacrifice, as that insufferable spray tanned dinosaur always puts it.

something old, something newby bropunzeling [T, 5k]

“You,” Alex says, pointing at him. “Me,” he continues, pointing back at himself. “Married.”

“Oh,” Nicky says. “Oh.”

[It doesn’t go any smoother after that.]

Wait Until Tomorrow (You’ll Be Fine) by sunshinexbomb [T, 8k]          

In which Nicky is an accident-prone Auror and Alex is the Healer that always seems to be coming to his rescue.

Red is the Color (of Your True Love’s Blood) by Saebrin [T, 2k]

What are the odds that all of Jakub’s teammates are serial killers? Like, statistically that has to be impossible, right?

Literally by xabier [T, 4k]

In which Nicklas Backstrom is literally Andre Burakovsky’s father.

to have and to hold by oops_ohdear [T, 6k]

The problem with putting a fake engagement photo, complete with stupid smiles and a bottle of champagne, on Facebook, is that sometimes someone’s mother sees it.

This is not a problem Nicklas ever had before he knew Alex.

This Alone Is The Real Treasure by leyley09 [T, 10k]

A defiant trip to the Olympics gets Alex outed. The solution is obviously to marry Nicky.

Obviously.

Whatever happened to all this season’s losers of the yearby Thorne [T, 9k]

Alex loves his kids, he really does, but he also might kill them. That is, if they don’t put him in a goddamn early grave first.

(Cop bribing, theft of public property, and how to photoshoot your dick properly in order to seduce a teammate: all part of a captain’s responsibilities to his rookies.)

Baby Boom by WeagleRock [M, 7k]

Having babies gives you dad power. Dad power helps put hockey teams on the road to Sir Stanley. Sid sired a herd of little Penguins before Pittsburgh won its Cup. Toews might as well be running a Blackhawks baby factory.

Now it’s Ovi’s turn. If only someone had told him that impregnating your fuckbuddy might make things a little weird.

String Theories by WeagleRock [M, 14.5k]

Nicky knows what’s expected of him: Set up goals, mentor rookies, provide a steadying backbone for a struggling team …  and never, ever look at other men.

Then Ovi surprises him with a kiss, and Nicky doesn’t know anything anymore.

The Brook Horse by WeagleRock [M, 11.5k]

Nicklas Bäckström is a good person. Nicklas Bäckström would never risk Ovi’s life just to stay human.

It’s really too bad he isn’t real.

Holding Onto You by somethingnerdythiswaycomes [M, 6.5k]

“You can’t be picked if you’re married,“ Nicky says, like it’s obvious.

“I’m not married,” Alex replies.

“You’re marrying me,” Nicky says, his jaw set.

“You haven’t proposed.”

the laws of the world never stopped us once by punkassbookjockey[M, 6k]

Sasha points at him with his chopsticks. “Your powers,” he says. “Snowzilla comes, suddenly everyone’s mutants? Something happened there, no other explanation.”

Fault Lies by hoosierbitch [M, 6k]

Alex kneels.

“You’re smarter than me,” Trotz says to Nicky, “but I do know what I’m doing.” Right now, Nicky is fairly sure that he’s wrong on both counts. “Let me be his coach. Let me take care of him.”

no it’s not nirvana but it’s on the wayby ghosthunter [M, 4k]

Sasha does not miss the way Backy looks at him then, sharp and angry, and Sasha knows he deserves it. They sit in awkward silence until the waitress comes to take their drink orders.

A More Fascinating Name by pukeandcry [M, 38k]

Although Sasha had never made the younger Mr. Backstrom’s acquaintance, he was at least familiar enough with his reputation to know that chief amongst his qualities was the quite publicly known fact that Mr. Backstrom was as notoriously uninterested in achieving an advantageous marriage as Sasha himself.

Something, then, must have upset the order of things. What that was he could not say, but Lord Backstrom was now, it would seem, in active search of a husband for his son.

Better Than Heartbreak by the_glow_worm [M, 1.5k]

It’s morning in Vegas, technically, but Nicke and Alex aren’t about to go to sleep anytime soon.

Kärlek Redux by Saebrin [E, 3k]

“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” —Mignon McLaughlin

A.K.A. Four times Nicky (re)fell for Alex.

Perfect For A Person by mlyn [E, 18k]

Alex Ovechkin is near the end of his 30th year and still not married. In the US, that means he’ll either have to find a spouse at a Transformation Hotel before his birthday, or he’ll check out transformed into an animal.

Not if Nicklas Backstrom has anything to say about it.

You and me, Drenched in greenby xihale [E, 18k]

Nicky’s an omega with a heat problem. Ovi volunteers as tribute.

tell me in the morning by haipollai [E, 4k]

Nicky yanks himself back and away, almost hard enough to tip his chair. “You don’t know why I’m scared my very Russian friend and teammate is suddenly asking questions about me dating men?” He snaps.

anchor by pavses [E, 2k]

They’re not going to make up the three-goal deficit, but Alex sure as hell is trying to single-handedly score a hat trick in a minute.

You’re a work of art, baby by sirona [E, 7k]

FBI Agent Alex Ovechkin doesn’t mind working with others. He even likes working with Malkina every so often. What he doesn’t like is being lead by his dick nose. And yet, he can’t stay away from the Gray case.

Wolfborn by waspabi [E, 60k]

A wolfborn on an airplane was either unbearably reckless or a hockey player. Most of the time, both.

if you’re needing something by atrytone [E, 5k]

Nicke hates losing, but he’s grown out of letting it black out everything else in his mind. Alex can’t seem to do the same thing, not when they get on a roll like this, not when nothing he tries seems to make a difference.

Luckily, he has Nicke to help.

touch by itsahockeynight [3k, E]

When Alex does turn up, he walks across the locker room and straight into Nicke’s arms.

Eleven Years by waspabi [E, 2k]

The door inches open. Alex, of course. Bloodshot eyes, rumpled suit. His Conference Champions cap with the sticker still on the brim, the fucking Prince of Wales Trophy still clutched in one big hand.

Nicky/Willie Nylander:

weekender by screamlet [M, 5k]

William couldn’t imagine that Toronto would ever love him the way Washington loved Nicky.

Fingertips Putting On A Show by sunshinexbomb [E, 1.5k]

In which Nicky finds comfort in William during Worlds.

make me wanna hold on (make me wanna be all yours) by Pinkmanite [E, 4.5k]

It’s like Will instantly melts into a well-worn mold, one he’s been in many times before. The switch is flipped and he’s standing up straighter, painting on that pretty smile, the one Nicky loves so much, pentimento on the overworn canvas of his cheeks. He angles his chin so he can look up at Nicky through his lashes, batting them in the way that he knows gets Nicky all worked up.

Nicky/Ovi/Willie Nylander:

the elementary disposal of weighted objects by angularmomentum [T, 14k]

William, at eleven, was primed to tip over the cusp into nascent adolescence. He was big for his age and very competitive, and had no real idea that his obsession with beating Nicke was actually an obsession without caveats, because infatuation was a word he didn’t know.

right there where we stood was holy ground by babygotbackstrom [NR, 4k]

The revamped Tre Kronor line, of Nicky and his soulmates, is mesmerising.

Sasha is jealous again, and it is ugly, even though the team is leading the division.

copenhagen by screamlet [E, 10.5k]

William had already casually texted Nicky a photo of the sunset, a cool little haha bet you don’t have this in GÄVLE, but there was no response. Gävle had Nicky and William didn’t and it was bullshit.

Andre/Nicky and/or Ovi:

say all that you’re feeling by screamlet [T, 43k]

Andre Burakovsky/Alexander Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom/William Nylander

Much had happened in the past year, enough that Andre sat on the hill overlooking the lands he had been naive enough to call home until he pledged himself to Lord Laich and left his friends with barely a note. Now he had returned and—Who would want Andre now?A flash of lightning in the distance illuminated the one house he hadn’t yet considered.After a moment’s thought, Andre rode south.

a hundred dollar bottle of champagne like me by Pinkmanite [E, 6k]

Nicklas Backstrom/Andre Burakovsky, Andre/Various Caps

Nicke’s got a beer in one hand, uses the other to wrap his arm around Andre’s waist, grips his hip and pulls him in close, as close as he can be.

He tucks his face in the crook of Andre’s neck and hugs him tight, exactly like he’d done on the ice just hours before.

“I’m so fucking proud of you,” he murmurs, raw and genuine, just for Andre to hear.

Don’t You Worry Child by Capbuckyang [M, 2k]

Nicky pats his thighs and Andre drops, just like that. It’s not like it was the first time, when the boys all watched in a hushed silence, but it does quiet down a bit.

It isn’t that hard, boy, to like you or love you by Two_for_Slashing [M, 3.5k]

Nicklas couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he had become desirable.

Lop-sided on the Side of the Angels by babygotbackstrom [NR, 2k]

The sun doesn’t make vampires sick anymore but that doesn’t mean Nicklas Backstrom is a morning person.

for the taking by chartreuser, thegraceinyoureyes [E, 4k]

Of course Nicky knows Andre wants him.

Nicky/Ovi/Other:

Sharp Suits and Sly Smiles by SomebodyOwens [T, 5k]

Nicky/Ovi/Holtby

He chased them so hard that they caught him.

A seduction in 5 (+1) parts.

Wayward Mayday by xihale [E, 6k]

Nicky/Ovi/TJ

Nicky and TJ are fucking around, and one of them starts mouthing off about Ovi, how Ovi might join the two of them, how hard he’d hold them down, how hard he’d ride them.

Naturally, Ovi walks in.

intermittent melting by blushingsweet (sunflowered) [E, 3k]

Nicky/Ovi/Tom

“I don’t think he wants to leave,” Nicky says, looking up at him, smug and a little cocky. “Do you want to leave, Tom?”

“No,” Tom says. He’s pressing his hands into his jeans, shifting on the floor. Alex wonders if his knees have started hurting yet; Nicky’s kept him there for a long time.

Andre/Holtby:

-These are all part of a larger Caps ensemble series w/ a variety of pairings, but I’m singling the Andre/Holts parts out, which can fit together w/o reading the whole thing

All We Are Is by somethingnerdythiswaycomes [M, 5k]

Braden notices everything in the dressing room.  He’s seen enough that, sometimes, he can guess what’s brewing before it really erupts in the locker room.  And maybe, because he saw Brooksy and Burky, that’s why he wasn’t able to see himself and Andre.

Just to Please Them [E, 3k]

Andre’s in a tank top and jeans and his neck is tantalizingly bare.  Braden keeps staring at it, and Andre keeps catching him and honestly it’s getting a little embarrassing.

Don’t Think About Why [E, 13k]

Andre Burakovsky/Brooks Laich, Andre/Holtby

“What about Brooksy?” Andre asks quietly.  Nicky’s fingers still on the back of Andre’s head, and then start petting over his curls again a second later.

“He has a reputation,” Nicky says carefully.

Or: Andre tries, and then tries again.

Comfortability [E, 6k]

Andre/Holtby, Andre Burakovsky/Braden Holtby/Nathan Walker, Braden Holtby/Nathan Walker

“How’d you sleep last night?” Braden asks Walks, when they’re all sitting down for breakfast.

“I hope we didn’t keep you up,” Andre says innocently, and Walks chokes on his omelet.

Match Your Weakness With A Name by leyley09 [T, 4k]

In which Braden gets talked into playing spin-the-bottle with his teammates and - surprisingly - doesn’t live to regret it

Words Just Get in the Way by somethingnerdythiswaycomes [T, 8k]

“You’re pretty gone on him, huh?” Mike asks him.  Andre nods.  “And you don’t know anything about him?” Andre nods again, glumly.

“This is the semester,” Mike proclaims with enough conviction that Andre almost believes him. “This semester, you’re getting him.”

 field testby matskreider [M, 1.5k]

When he cracks his eyes open, he sees a rather determined pout coming from Nicklas’ favorite underling, a new guy called Burakovsky. “Sorry, 0070. I was going to offer to debrief you, if you were waiting for Q. He’s, um…going to be busy for a while.”

Andre + Willy and/or Latts:

Kickstart The Fight by MermaidSmiled [T, 9k]

Tom watches as Andre’s knuckles scab over and heal and split again after a hard practice until they’re finally healed, pink and shiny. He watches Andre’s eye blacken where a fist or an elbow caught him and charts the flow of the blood pooling under the skin as the days go by.

It’s something so unfamiliar to Tom, seeing these things he’s used to seeing when he looks down or in the mirror on Andre. He ignores it as best he can.

come under the covers by ghosthunter [M, 4.5k]

Andre meets him at the airport. He has a tan and he looks good. Not that Tom thinks he, himself, does not also have a tan and look good, but he’s not picking himself up at the airport in a foreign country either.

Something So Pleasant About That Place by somethingnerdythiswaycomes [E, 5k]

Tom turns his head to look at Andre, sprawled out on the other bed dicking around on his phone.  “Hey, wanna fuck?”

Andre glances at him, and rolls his eyes.  Tom doesn’t know if he should be offended by how not-surprised Andre is.

Or: Andre and Tom have a ‘List of Cities We’ve Fucked In’

#capsexroomiesby forks[E, 7k]

André doesn’t mind living in his own place now, but sometimes he does miss seeing Mike and Tom being sexy together.  Good thing he has his new camcorder along this time so he’ll be able to watch whenever he wants.

Tale as Old as Time by Kerfluffle [E, 5k]

Andre breaks his hand. Tom provides an assist.

champions by angularmomentum [E, 2k]

Tom had a problem. To be more accurate, Tom had several problems but that was the way of Tom’s life. He often had a few running in tandem. Tonight they included but were not limited to: bruised knuckles (regular problem) forgot his toothbrush (also a regular problem) and a boner for Burky (definitely NOT a regular problem.)

Andre/Other:

conversation superseded by by ghosthunter [T, 1k]

Andre Burakovsky/Christian Djoos

Somewhere along the line, some signals got crossed.

or: andre is dumb

sugar by ghosthunter [M, 4k]

Nicklas Backstrom/André Burakovsky/Marcus Johansson

Nicke’s almost ready to leave, his jacket still off, his tie around his neck. “He’s fucking with you,” Nicke says quietly, coming to stand next to Andre as he ties his own tie. “And you looked at his ass when he walked away.”

So Press Record, I’ll Let You Film Me by Petalpants [E, 3k]

Andre Burakovsky/Brooks Laich

Hey, ur hot! If ur interested in doing sum amateur porn, lmk ;)

Ergo: Homo by R_Gunns [E, 14k]

Andre/Various Caps, Andre/Original Male Characters, Andre/Original Female Characters

In which André no-homos his way through casual sex, bro-snuggles and the discovery of something between his captain and his A, before Braden kindly hits him with a clue bat.

Or: self-discovery is a bitch.

TJ/Carly:

press my nose up to the glass around your heart by nighimpossible [T, 6k]

“I swear to God,” TJ says, covering his face with his hands, “if I get an inkling that a bond is starting to form, I’m truly going to kill you, John Carlson.”

“It’s Carly,” Carlson grins, leaving him behind in the locker room. “And I’d like to see you try.”

toss, turn by alotofthingsdifferent[M, 3k]

John’s neighbor – the one who has a lot of loud, enthusiastic sex – is really, really hot.

John is in so much trouble.

do you even know the miranda rights? by nighimpossible [E, 9k]

Sidney Crosby’s brother swap program is going to be the death of TJ.

Inside My Bones by somethingnerdythiswaycomes [E, 3k]

TJ’s riding the high of winning a Stanley Cup Final Game, before John’s hand comes down hard on his shoulder, gripping him tight through his pads.  He knows what that hold means, what it means when John’s fingers dig into the soft spot just next to his armpit through the gap in his pads.

“You’re lucky we won,” John murmurs in his ear, hot breath fanning over TJ’s neck.

but then you say “please” by Anonymous [E, 2k]

“Quite the charmer,” TJ goads. His feet are a little more under himself now. “Bet you could get anyone you want, kissing them like that.”

“Cut the shit,” John says, but he’s smiling, running a thumb over TJ’s cheek.

TJ/Other:

hold me tight and i’ll sink in by thermocline [NR, 2.5k]

Willy/Latts/Oshie, Oshie/Carly, Oshie/Various Caps

The thing is, it’s happened a few times, during the season and mainly during first round.

TJ’s always been touchy. Not needy. Just better when he’s given touch. He works best when he’s receiving.

i’m a prisoner to my decisions by orphan_account [E, 1.5k]

Oshie/Willy

Lauren makes him forget the things he’s been running from since high school.

Tom makes him remember.

staying put by thegraceinyoureyes[E, 7k]

Nicky/Oshie, Oshie/Various Caps

There are bodies—hands all over him, all around him.

Other:

Covered in the Colors by sunshinexbomb [T, 12k]

Nicklas Backstrom/Mike Green

In which Nicky and Greenie pretend to be soul bonded so they can be road roommates.

Taste of Bavaria by JessamyGriffith[T, 7k]

Philipp Grubauer/Braden Holtby

Philipp Grubauer is a tour guide, resigned to spending yet another day introducing American tourists to the beauty of Bavaria.

Braden Holtby, star goaltender for the Washington Capitals, is looking forward to a nice day seeing the sights of Munich on his vacation.

Happily, neither of them is going to have their day go quite as expected.

drop by savedby [T, 2k]

Devante Smith-Pelly, Ensemble

five times the Washington Capitals welcomed DSP to the team and one time he did it for someone else

Tell The World by sunshinexbomb [M, 10k]

Nicklas Backstrom/Braden Holtby

Three times somebody finds out about Nicky and Braden and one time they decide to tell someone on their own.

feels like summer by Thorne [M, 30k]

The unglamorous fact of the matter is that lifeguarding, particularly at a community swimming pool, is much less about the dramatic rescues and slo-mo dives into the water that Baywatch has tricked people into believing, and much more about janitorial work that’s either tedious or gross, spiked with the occasional scraped knee or elbowed nose or no-holds-barred ice cream vendor death-match in the parking lot.

(Or, Karl’s in love with his best friend, all the local community pools in the Metropolitan county are at prank-war with each other, and also there are ducks.)

Oh, but how were we to know? by orphan_account [NR, 12k]

Tom Wilson/OMC

“How’d it feel skating with Gavin for the first time as teammates?” a reporter asks in the locker room after their first preseason game, played against the New York Islanders. “He cites you as such an integral part of his development into a player. It must be rewarding to see it come full circle.” 

When condemning the whole body by anonissue [E, 6k]

Braden Holtby/Nate Schmidt

There’s more than one way to cure the hiccups, as Braden Holtby has the misfortune to find out.

Wide Open by Ferritin4 [E, 2.5k]

Braden Holtby/Nate Schmidt

Braden opens his mouth again, because he’s glad it’s okay but he didn’t mean no, he just meant give me — give me a minute, give me —

[lindyhunt]

Everything That Upset the Internet This Week

What is the web-o-sphere angry about this week? A pop star who claimed her lyrics will solve racism, the meaning behind the MAGA hat and a Latina actress who’s being called “anti-black.” Here’s everything you need to know.

Ariana Grande Responds to “7 Rings” Backlash With a Fan Comment

THE STORY: Everyone from 2 Chainz to Soulja Boy to Princess Nokia has taken issue with the lyrics, beat and video for “7 Rings,” Ariana Grande’s recently released single about popping Champagne, splurging at Tiffany’s and being unapologetically rich.

“Does that sound familiar to you? ‘Cause that sound really familiar to me. Oh my god!” Princess Nokia said in a since-deleted video. “Ain’t that the lil’ song I made about brown women and their hair? Hmm… sounds about white.”

Grande then (seemingly in response) reposted a fan’s Instagram Story about why the “7 Rings” hair lyric—’You like my hair? Gee, thanks, just bought it…’—was justified: “White women talking about their weaves is how we’re gonna solve racism,” wrote the Instagram user. Grande added that she had “so much love” for the fan, finishing the sentiment with a signature Ari black heart emoji.

  View this post on Instagram

  This #PostAndDelete by #ArianaGrande has fans upset because they feel she’s missing the point of the backlash. Meanwhile, #ScooterBraun says #7Rings has hit a record on #Spotify (See previous posts)

A post shared by The Shade Room (@theshaderoom) on Jan 19, 2019 at 11:32am PST

Grande’s story was quickly taken down—but not before it was screen capped and shared across the web.

THE REACTION:

When black women wear weave it’s ghetto and trash and we’re bald but now miss Ariana says that corny ass line everyone and their mom is hype ab it. I love Ariana but bitch NO. @arianagrande

— oh k . (@xchancelorswife) January 19, 2019

Soo i show up to twitter seeing that Ariana grande said white women talking about weaves will end racism….. pic.twitter.com/5emt6Inrdz

— Amen & Gin (@_HeavensAngel_) January 20, 2019

@ArianaGrande please delete ur story and apologise. it was really insensitive. if it was meant seriously or sarcastically, it doesn’t matter, it was wrong of u to post something like that.

— lola (@styIesdrew) January 19, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: Grande slid into the comments section of The Shade Room’s post, leaving a heartfelt apology. “Hi hi,” she wrote. “I think her intention was to be like… yay a white person disassociating the negative stariotype [sic] that is paired with the word ‘weave’… however I’m so sorry my response was out of pocket or if it came across the wrong way. Thanks for opening the conversation and like… to everyone for talking to me about it. It’s never my intention to offend anybody.”

A quick delete, apology and statement of appreciation for the communal conversation when she missteps—she has this whole backlash response thing down to a formula, doesn’t she? Besides, was there really ever any doubt that Ariana Grande’s hair is real…

Fox News Compares Judging MAGA Hat to Blaming Rape Victims’ Outfits

THE STORY: So you know those MAGA hat-wearing Kentucky teens who taunted an indigenous elder at a Washington protest? Of course you do. They’ve been the centre of the news cycle for the past week: the clip went viral, different narratives were spun on each side of the political spectrum and Nicholas Sandmann, “The MAGA Hat Boy,” was invited to share his non-apology on the Today Show. And then, Fox News’ The Five hopped in on the conversation to state that judging these young boys based on their Trump-affiliated merch is comparable to judging a victim of sexual assault based on their outfit at the time of the crime.

“What kills me is the idea [that], if you’re wearing something, you had it coming. We’ve learned that that’s not what you say to people,” said host Greg Gutfeld.

THE REACTION:

Aren't the Fox viewers and pundits usually the people that would do that anyways?

— Area Man | UTE (@veggiescott) January 24, 2019

#FOXNews used rape victims to defend RACIST #MAGA teens

The MAGA hat is an open embrace of #Trumpism and everything he stands for — which is BIGOTRY, XENOPHOBIA, ETHNIC CLEANSING, CORRUPTION, and HATRED.

LIKE DONNING a SWASTIKA#MOG https://t.co/3Sx79N2cf2

— Michael O'Grady (@mog7546) January 24, 2019

What does a MAGA hat signify? Does a pair of “provocative clothes” scream racism, misogyny, and other bullshit? Just say you’re a rape victim-blamer and go.

— 권치용 | 秋 (@californiaaki) January 24, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: The commentators are right on one thing: you should never judge a woman’s choice of clothing when a violent crime is committed against her. What they’ve done here, however, is set up a false equivalence. The MAGA hat is not a meaningless piece of apparel—and as far as I’ve heard, a mini skirt or tube top isn’t widely perceived to express hateful views towards marginalized people. (A Zara jacket with the words “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” scrawled on the back, however, shares its message loud and clear.)

When people put on that red cap, they know the message they’re sending. It’s really no different than any other baseball hat: when you’re wearing a blue Maple Leaf on your forehead, you’re signalling to those around you that, for whatever reason, you’re a fan of Toronto’s hockey team. Wearing a MAGA hat aligns you with the president’s exclusionist policies and hateful rhetoric, and if you’re putting one on, you should know that—even if you’re a 17-year-old high school student.

Gina Rodriguez Addresses Accusations of Being Anti-Black With Tears

THE STORY: Back in November, Porter‘s “Women in Television” roundtable with actresses Gina Rodriguez, Gabrielle Union, Ellen Pompeo, and Emma Roberts went viral online. Pompeo was praised for calling out the lack of diversity in the room, while Rodriguez caught heat for commenting on the intersectional aspect of the gender pay gap in America.

“White women get paid more than black women, black women get paid more than Asian women, Asian women get paid more than Latina women,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like a very scary space to step into.”

Her statement sparked backlash, with many accusing the Golden Globe-winning Jane the Virgin star of being “anti-black” and pitting POC women against one another. Months later, during an appearance on Sway in the Morning, she broke down into tears as addressed the controversy.

“The backlash was devastating, to say the least,” said Rodriguez. “The black community was the only community I looked towards growing up. We didn’t have many Latino shows and the black community made me feel like I was seen. So to get anti-black is to say I’m anti-family.”

THE REACTION:

Listen @HereIsGina I really wanted to empathize I did but you’re just deflecting instead of being accountable. Instead of rationalizing what you said (re: white & asian community didn’t get offended) look at the moments that the black community DID. pic.twitter.com/nyjXMziuiu

— 🍯 COME GET YOUR HONEY 🍯 (@SUGGADADDY) January 23, 2019

Gina Rodriguez on Black Panther vs Crazy Rich Asians….she really is terrible pic.twitter.com/BYDIJS1bhh

— tk (@foswina) January 23, 2019

gina rodriguez: *is anti black, constantly puts black women down to favor “all women”, probably doesn’t know the difference between race and ethnicity*

gina rodriguez when she gets called out on it: pic.twitter.com/7RhSPp46Gu

— skinty (@KIMPOSSIHOE) January 23, 2019

RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE RAGE: Cancel culture is toxic, and it pushes people to become defensive. But regardless of intention, Rodriguez’s words hurt, and she should have done was listened to that and taken accountability for her comments—rather than making excuses.

“Gina Rodriguez is really really really really ignorant, socially unaware, dismissive with black issues, and entitled,” writes Twitter user @culieatumami, “BUT I don’t think she’s necessarily hateful. I think she needs to talk less and listen more.”