#the only person who can help is a linguist

[thehardkandy]

I'm really glad I decided to finish Exordia this morning because it did lead to just about 7 hours of writing (+lunch break and dog walk) so that I was able to do a short story front to back ~3300 words.

Feels like a bit W because the last short I did was October, which is still much more recent than the one before it had been (though I've had a few abortive attempts at getting past the first 20k of a book in there)

I spent a lot of the winter depressed and struggling to find the joy in doing something for it's own sake, so I've been trying to really push myself toward the parts of writing that have me looking back on my own writing fondly. Because even without plans for publishing stuff there is so much of my writing that I think my life is better for having written

I feel very good about what I wrote today, so hopefully I'll keep doing this small stuff

I'll say an especial shout-out to the Penric novellas, the cemeteries of amalo books, and Exordia for really making me feel that extra fondness for books and writing lately

[dailymanners]

I feel as though in the past few years it's becoming more common for me to be interrupted while I'm speaking, and I can't help but wonder if more people are losing a sense of conversational rhythm due to communicating more and more digitally and less and less in person.

When you communicate digitally you don't have to worry about finding the natural rhythm of the conversation, you're not taking away someone else's ability to finish their thought or make their point if you send a message to them while they're still typing. I'm not here to scare monger about the kids and their phones, but it's important that you don't let your skill of finding a conversational rhythm, if you have that skill, atrophy, lest you speak over someone and take away their ability to complete their thought and make their point.

But I also realize that it's really important to specify what I mean by interrupting someone.

When someone says that interrupting is really normal and not considered rude in their community or culture, what they're actually talking about is what's known in linguistics as "cooperative overlap", that or simultaneous talking. Here's an example of cooperative overlap and/or simultaneous talking that you might see in a culture where this is normal and acceptable:

Person A: So guess where I went today? I went to the -

Person B: Oh let me take a wild guess! You went to the shoe store again didn't you?

Person A: That's right, and I got a -

Person C: Oh come on, don't tell you got another pair!

Person A: You know it baby!

Now let's compare that to a different style of interruption, what I like to call "steamrolling"

Person A: So guess where I went today? I went to the -

Person B: UGH did you guys catch the game last night?

Person C: Yeah the refs sucked!

Now, what differences can you see between the first example, aka "cooperative overlapping" vs the second "steamrolling" example?

For one, in the first example Person A is still allowed to make their point, tell their story, and finish their thought. They're not being silenced or completely derailed, and most importantly their conversation partners still seem interested and engaged in what they have to say. In the second example, Person A is being completely derailed and stripped of their chance to finish their thought and make their point, which is unfair to Person A, which is what makes "steamrolling" disrespectful even in many cultures and communities where "cooperative overlapping" would be acceptable.

Now, conversational overlap isn't for everyone, and that's okay, but it makes it awkward and tricky when someone from a community or culture that uses conversational overlap talks to someone who is from a culture that doesn't. For example:

Person A: So the other day I went to -

Person B: Oh my god did you go to that one store?

Person A: Um, no, I went to the movies, and I saw -

Person B: OH did you see that new creepy movie about the aliens?

Person A: No, can I please just finish my story?

Person B: Oh, uh, sorry

Neither person will probably feel great after this conversation. And I'm not here to condemn either conversational styles. I understand why some people see cooperative overlap as a more engaging and exciting conversational style, but I also understand why some people find it frustrating. My mother's family has a cultural background big on conversational overlap, but my father's side of the family ehhh not so much, so I personally grew up seeing these two conversational styles clash a lot.

If you're person A in the above conversation who doesn't like conversational overlap, that's totally fine, I'm personally not a big fan of it either only because I have a terrible memory, so when someone disrupts my flow I usually end up completely forgetting what I want to say. Just try to recognize the difference between cooperative overlap vs steamrolling. If someone is just trying to cooperatively overlap with you, patiently and politely tell them something along the lines of "sorry I have a terrible memory so if I don't finish I'll forget what I'm trying to say". But it's generally a good idea to be more patient and understanding with conversational overlap than steamrolling.

If you're someone who cooperatively overlaps and you encounter someone who isn't a fan of it, try not to take it personally, maybe like me they have a horrible memory and will forget what they're trying to say if they get side tracked.

But what I meant earlier about conversational rhythm is that too often a lot of interrupting comes from not realizing the other person wasn't finished speaking.

For example, personal A wants to say "so the other day I went hiking, and I saw a fox" some people might not recognize when person A is actually finished speaking, typically they assume as soon as they've heard a complete clause that means the thought is finished, so the conversation goes like

Person A: So the other day I went hiking -

Person B: OH I went hiking a few weeks ago with my girlfriend but it was so slippery out!

Person C: Oh how is your girlfriend doing by the way?

Person B: She's doing great! How's your partner doing?

Do you see how this style of interruption, unlike cooperative overlap, also derails Person A and deprives Person A of a chance to finish what they want to say? It's not quite steamrolling, and often just comes from a lack of rhythm or understanding. As a general rule, if you want to avoid interrupting someone, pause for a few seconds after you think they're finished in case they aren't actually finished. This way you avoid accidentally depriving someone of the chance to finish what they want to say and completing their thought.

We should never be too eager to assume someone has finished making their point because you never know what someone might actually be trying to say, and if you cut someone off before they make their point you can miss important context. For example:

Person A: I don't think I see stray cats here -

Person B: AHA BULL FUCKING SHIT! I totally saw a stray cat the other day!

Person A: I was going to say as much as in other places if you had let me finish?

Or:

Person A: I hate when it's hot out. When I was a kid it was usually around 25 or 30 degrees Celsius in the summers -

Person B: OH come one don't be such a wimpy little baby! 25-30 degrees isn't even that warm! I've totally seen WAY hotter summers than that!

Person A: Uh, that's what I was going to say if you'd let me finish, the summers were pretty mild when I was a kid, but they're a lot hotter now . .

Do you see how in both conversations Person B was too eager to assume Person A had finished making their point and ended up missing important context? If person B had only paused and waited for Person A to finish making their point, they wouldn't have ended up making an ass of themselves to put it frankly. This style of interruption can make you come across as eager to dominate and "one up" other people, which frankly a lot of people find obnoxious and exhausting. This is different than cooperative overlapping because it comes from a place of wanting to correct or one-up your conversation partner, rather than play and/or build into what they're saying, which is why I'd argue it's closer to steamrolling.

Good conversational rhythm ideally means everyone is allowed to finish their thought and make their point, whether or not that includes overlapping or even simultaneous talking. If you're not sure someone has finished their thought, pause a few seconds to make sure they've had the chance to complete their thought, less you miss important context. OR, if you do interject, it should be about building/playing into what they're saying rather than derailing/steamrolling them.

What's important to keep in mind is that it's often a matter of power and respect when someone is or isn't allowed to finish their thought and make their point. If someone is unable to finish their thought or make their point before getting steamrolled, they're going to feel like their input to the conversation isn't valued or important, and that's never a good feeling.

[ayeforscotland]

What is Dataflow? Part 2: Diagrams

This is the second part of a couple of posts about Dataflow, particularly why it's important for the world going forward and relating to the Crowd Strike IT disaster.

Read the first part here.

Before I get into this one today, I wanted to address a couple of things.

Firstly, Dataflow is something that nearly every single person can understand. You do NOT:

Need to have a degree in Computing Science

Need to work in IT

Need to be a data analyst / Spreadsheet master

If any of you see the word 'Data' and feel your eyes glazing over, try and snap out of it because, if you're anything like me, Dataflow is much more approachable as a concept.

Secondly, what do I mean by IT?

Traditionally in most of our media the all-encompassing 'IT department' handles everything to do with technology. But every business works differently and there are many job titles with lots of crossover.

For example, you can be an infrastructure engineer where your focus is on building and maintaining the IT infrastructure that connects your organisation internally and externally. This is a completely different role from an Application Portfolio Manager who is tasked with looking after the Applications used in business processes.

Both are technical people and come under the banner of 'IT' - but their roles are focused in different areas. So just bear that in mind!

Now that's out of the way, let's begin! This one will be a little bit deeper, and questions welcome!

An Intro to Diagrams

You probably do not need a history of why pictures are important to the human race but to cover our bases, ever since we put traced our hands on a cave wall we have been using pictures to communicate.

Jump forward in time and you have engineers like Leonardo Da Vinci drafting engineering schematics.

You get the idea, humans have been creating diagrams (Pictures) for thousands of years. Centuries of refinement and we have much more modern variations.

And there's one main reason why diagrams are important: They are a Common Language.

In this context, a Common Language helps bridge a language gap between disciplines as well as a linguistic gap. A Spanish electrician and a German electrician should be able to refer to the same diagram and understand each other, even if they don't know each other's language.

The reason they can do this is because they're are international standards which govern how electrical diagrams are created.

A Common Language for Digital?

Here's an image I've shown to clients from governments and institutions to global organisations.

Everything around us, from the products we use to the bridges we drive over and the buildings we live, work, enjoy and shop in had diagrams backing them.

You would not build a skyscraper without a structural engineering diagram, you would not build an extension on your house if an architect couldn't produce a blueprint.

Why is there not an equivalent for the Digital World and for Dataflow?

Where is the Digital Common Language?

This is the bit where the lightbulb goes on in a lot of people's heads. Because, as I mentioned in Part 1, the flow of data is the flow of information and knowledge. And the common mistake is that people think of dataflow, and only ever think about the technology.

Dataflow is the flow of information between People, Business Processes *and* Technology Assets.

It is not reserved to Technology specialists. When you look at the flow of data, you need to understand the People (Stakeholders) at the top, the processes that they perform (and the processes which use the data) and the technology assets that support that data.

The reason why this is important is because it puts the entire organisation in context.

It is something that modern businesses fail to do. They might have flow charts and network diagrams, and these are 'alright' in specific contexts, but they fall to pieces when they lack the context of the full organisation.

For example, here is a Network Diagram. It is probably of *some* value to technical personnel who work in infrastructure. Worth bearing in mind, some organisations don't even have something like this.

To be absolutely clear, this diagram will hold some value for some people within the organisation. I'm not saying it's completely useless. But for almost everyone else, it is entirely out of context, especially for any non-technical people.

So it doesn't help non-technical people understand why all of these assets are important, and it doesn't help infrastructure teams articulate the importance of any of these assets.

What happens if one of those switches or routers fails? What's the impact on the organisation? Who is affected? The diagram above does not answer those questions.

On the other side of the business we have process diagrams (aka workflow diagrams) which look like this.

Again we run into the same problem - This is maybe useful for some people working up at the process layer, but even then it doesn't provide context for the stakeholders involved (Are there multiple people/departments involved throughout) and it doesn't provide any context for technical personnel who are responsible for maintaining the technology that supports this process.

In short, nobody has the big picture because there is not a common language between Business & IT.

Conclusion

So what do we do? Well we need to have a Common Language between Business & IT. While we need people with cross-functional knowledge, we also need a common language (or common framework) for both sides of the organisation to actually understand each other.

Otherwise you get massively siloed departments completely winging their disaster recovery strategies when things like Crowd Strike goes down.

Senior Management will be asked questions about what needs to be prioritised and they won't have answers because they aren't thinking in terms of Dataflow.

It's not just 'We need to turn on everything again' - It's a question of priorities.

Thing is, there's a relatively simple way to do it, in a way that looking at any engineering diagram feels simple but actually has had decades/centuries of thought behind it. It almost feels like complete common sense.

I'll save it for Part 3 if you're interested in me continuing and I'll make a diagram of my blog.

The important thing is mapping out all the connections and dependencies, and there's not some magic button you press that does it all.

But rigorous engineering work is exactly that, you can't fudge it with a half-arsed attempt. You need to be proactive, instead of reacting whenever disaster strikes.

[yourplayersaidwhat]

Today’s pathfinder module ran for eight hours. Highlights include:

Aracanist: “Can I linguistics him?”

GM: “What?”

Arcanist: “Y’know, can I, like, say calm down in the soothingest languages I know?”

Orc Fighter: “I’m not sure that’s how it works.”

Arcanist: “I know 84 languages, that’s gotta count for something!”

GM: “Y’know what, sure, roll.”

Arcanist: “That’s an eight, so… thirty-two.”

GM: “… Yeah, he calms down, somehow it works.”

-

Orc Fighter, OOC (about an NPC who bites people): “Clearly, his name is Bitey McBiteface.”

-

Bitey McBiteface: “You must kill me!”

Arcanist: “Uh, quick question about the area, is there a National Suicide Prevention Line?”

-

Orc Fighter: *rolls a nat one on perception*

Orc Fighter, who is 89 years old: “Grandma’s developed cataracts.”

-

Orc Fighter, OOC: “Everyone knows General McGeneralface, formerly known as Bitey McBiteface.”

-

Bitey McBiteface: *snarling and growling as Orc Fighter pins him*

Orc Fighter: “Now that’s just rude, young man.”

-

Orc Fighter: “That’s a nat one but it is a 26 to hit.”

GM: *sigh* “You hit.”

-

Arcanist: “So is it a sword?”

GM, frantically looking through her notes: “It… is… something.”

Orc Fighter: “It’s three goblins in a trenchcoat pretending to be a sword.”

-

Monk: “What is the population of this town?”

GM, off-guard: “Uh…”

Orc Fighter: “Between one and a fuckton.”

-

GM, annoyed with the module: “Aaaaah, why can’t I find the instructions for how to do this peacefully!”

Orc Fighter: “They’re expecting us to be murderhobos.”

Stryx Fighter: “Well…”

Monk: “They’re punishing GM for our peace.”

Arcanist: “Peace in our time, peace in our time.”

-

Arcanist, having used Command Undead on an enemy, tied her up, and forced her to play Tic-Tac-Toe with him: “I command her to place her O in the bottom right so I win.”

GM: “She’s gonna fight that… ten.”

Arcanist: “Twenty-four.”

GM: “She writes it with a shaky, reluctant hand.”

Arcanist: “Rather than win immediately, I am not going to touch the board for the next nine days.”

Orc Fighter: “Civilian NPC is just thinking to himself, ‘Do I want to be indebted to these people?’”

-

On a rather important diplomacy roll, Arcanist spent about five minutes rolling different dice, as he is one of two members of our five-person party to have a positive charisma modifier, only to roll a three, a five, a two, a one, a four, and so on ten times until we got it. The first time, Orc Fighter tried to help him.

Orc Fighter: “I assist… oh my god. GM, look at the chat.”

Spiritualist, laughing: “Oh my god.”

Orc Fighter, laughing: “I have a -1 to diplomacy and I just rolled a nat one.”

[here2bbtstrash]

crybaby (explicit)

genre: all pwp all smut babeyyyyyy

pairing: jungkook x reader

summary: your boyfriend has always mixed his pleasure with pain.

word count: 4.3k

contains: explicit sexual content!!!!!! like that's the whole fic lmao 😵‍💫 established relationship, marathon sex, wrist restraints/bondage, cocky yet eager sub!jungkook 🥵, soft dom!reader but she can be a lil tough, clothed tit play, objectification, she calls him bunny which i think is cute 🥺, spitting, dick riding, unprotected sex, fingers in mouth, humping/grinding, jk has a nipple piercing 🙈, overstimulation/multiple orgasms - for both of them hehe, vibrator use, jungkook (and reader!) pushing himself to his limits bc..... he's jungkook, he cries 🥲, reader finds it hot 👀, a lottttt of sweat & cum lol, cum licking/eating, blowjob, maybe some subspace if you squint, winners never quit 💪, talk of coming dry at the end, jk is kind of a little shit lmaooooo - alright i think that's it 😩

A/N: not me barely managing to get this up before the ticket sales start 😅 happy hunger games to y'all who have codes!!! this fic is a birthday gift to my love, my angel, my cunning linguist @moni-logues 💜 HAPPY (yesterday) BIRTHDAY bb, can't wait to marry you on our first date, it is the joy of my life to build castles in the air with you~

and god bless jk for his lives the past few weeks bc they breathed so much life into this regular degular "sub!jk" fic idea. i'm v obsessed with his personality and the way he always pushes himself "just a little more", whether it's in staying up til 5 am singing karaoke on his couch or giving his absolute all in a workout. just so in love with our bunny tbh, so i hope you enjoy this spicy version of him too!! 🥰

read on AO3!

~*~

You know your boyfriend has always mixed his pleasure with pain.

He stays up late even when he’s exhausted, likes to do his workouts to failure, could spend hours in a tattoo session with the needle pressed to his skin and his bones humming from the buzz. Always holding out for as long as he can, always wanting just a little bit more before he calls it quits, even when it’s hard, even when it hurts. Because he wants to test his limits.

And today, you want to test them, too.

That’s why you text him to meet you in the bedroom, let him find you in nothing but one of his oversized Carhartt shirts, kneeling up on the bed as you affix a pair of purple silk restraints to the headboard.

There’s the soft creak of the mattress from Jungkook’s added weight, and you feel the heat of him as he crowds you from behind, hands dragging up the curve of your hips and taking the hem of your borrowed shirt with it.

“This was the emergency, huh?” The low murmur of his voice is chased by the cool touch of his lip ring as he drags his mouth up the nape of your neck. A blossom of arousal starts to unfurl in your core. “Wanted to use these?”

“Yeah,” you answer, feigning nonchalance as you give the silk a firm tug to test that it holds. Satisfied, you let yourself sink back into Jungkook’s touch, dropping your head against his shoulder and smiling when he leans down to brush his lips over yours. He hums a soft little sound into your mouth.

You cup your hand to the nape of his neck when you pull away to finish the thought. “Thought we could try them on you.”

The words are seemingly all your boyfriend needs to hear; he drops down onto the mattress so hard that he bounces a little. You can’t help but laugh at the way he scrambles to strip out of his sweatshirt, like he’s being timed, then hurriedly centers himself on the pillows, eyes glinting dark with desire.

When you first started talking to Jungkook, everything about him made you expect that he would be the one to call the shots. The good looks, the tattoos and piercings, the muscles— and definitely the motorcycle. But once you’d sat across from him at dinner on your first official date, only to watch him blush and fumble his way through a conversation, you started to suspect that maybe he preferred to follow rather than lead.

That thought was certainly confirmed the next time you saw him out in public: it’d been a full two weeks since your first date, with nothing but radio silence between you since. You were admittedly maybe a little too drunk when you spotted him out with his friends at the same bar you’d been dragged to by yours— drunk enough to have no problem walking right up to him to read him for filth, in front of all of his friends, for ghosting you.

Except he’d just blinked those big brown eyes up at you, mouth dropped open in disbelief, and quietly admitted that he’d been waiting all this time for you to text him.

One of his friends had clapped him on the back, laughing loudly as he corroborated Jungkook’s confession. “He’s been having midnight karaoke pity parties because he never heard from you. Please take this boy out again before his neighbors have him evicted!”

That night told you everything you needed to know about how the dynamics in your relationship would work out. That if you wanted something, there was a very good chance Jungkook wanted it, too.

Which is why it doesn’t surprise you that your boyfriend is already sprawled out half-naked on the bed beneath you, arms folded behind his head in a way that makes his biceps bulge, dangerously attractive.

His mouth pulls into a cocky, flirtatious grin. “Ah, so you wanna use me?”

“I do,” you murmur, straddling your thighs over his torso and leaning up to take the smooth purple silk between your fingers. He offers you one hand before you even have to ask for it, and takes advantage of the other’s last few minutes of freedom to paw at you over your shirt. His tattooed fingers seek out your breast and squeeze, his thumb flicking lazy strokes over your nipple.

You tug the knot of the restraint to tighten it, then look back just as Jungkook closes his lips around the clothed bud of your breast. The rough drag of cotton against your sensitive skin makes you hot all over, your nipple stiffening easily at the rub of his insistent tongue.

“How’s that? Too tight?”

He smirks with your tit still in his mouth, soaking a wet spot into your shirt, teeth scraping gently. “Could be tighter.”

“You are such a show-off,” you huff, more endeared than aggravated as you redo the knot, this time as tight as you can manage. Jungkook pulls against it teasingly, but it does actually seem to hold him in place, and you can feel a dull thud between your legs at the flex of his muscles on full display, the image of him already half-helpless beneath you.

“I’m Jeon Jungkook,” he says, as if in explanation, giving your breast a final playful jiggle before you tug his other hand off to tie it up, too.

“Well, Jeon Jungkook,” you retort with a smirk and a grunt of effort as you lean over him to tug the knot tight. You glance down to find him already using the leverage of his restraints to pull himself up so that he can continue to nuzzle his face into your shirt between your tits, abdominals shaking a little from the effort, undeterred despite the loss of both of his hands.

You take his jaw in your grip and scoot yourself further down his body, dipping in to plant a kiss on his soft lips.

“Are you gonna be a good little toy for me?”

“Uh-huh,” he grunts, and you enjoy the tease of hovering just past where he can reach, watching him strain up toward your mouth to seek another kiss and fall ever so short.

You can feel arousal already dripping from your folds as you slide further down the bed, slipping off from on top of Jungkook to easily rid him of his joggers and briefs. His dick smacks against his stomach, thick and hard; wet, too, at the pretty brown tip. You toss his clothes over the edge of the bed, then strip your own shirt to follow before lowering yourself between his spread legs.

The muscles in Jungkook’s thighs tighten with visible anticipation as you hover above his cock, letting the heat of your breath fan out over him, not unlike the warm afternoon air leaking in through the cracked bedroom window, the first taste of spring. You can hear the wet clicks of Jungkook’s tongue in his mouth.

“Easy, bunny,” you murmur, and then you work up a mouthful of saliva and spit it right onto the head of his dick.

He hisses in a breath at the splatter of it, then gasps a soft little sound when you take him in your hand to slip your fist down the length of him. That’s Jungkook all over; always so eager, always so sensitive.

“What do you think?” you muse, your mouth ticking up as you feel Jungkook’s hips roll into your grasp. “Think it’s ready for me, baby?”

“‘Sready,” he grunts, teeth clenched. “Use it, jagi.”

You waste no time, crawling back up Jungkook’s body to settle your hips over his, flattening your palms against his chest. He’s still squirming, thighs flexing against the bed as he rocks up in a desperate attempt to find the wet heat of your cunt, and you giggle as you work yourself backwards until the head of his dick catches on your entrance.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but you’re wet enough to take it. You bite down on a smug smile as you manage to seat yourself on him hands-free.

“Fuck, love when you do that.” Jungkook’s voice is a low growl, and you slide a hand up the firm definition in his chest and slowly start to rock yourself along his length. His cock fills you up like he was made for it; you can feel every detail of him drag against your ridges, trailing sparks of pleasure as you tilt your hips to drive him right into your sweet spot.

Jungkook’s head kicks back against the pillow as a groan rips through him. There’s a gentle crease in his brow, furrowed in the way that tells you it’s so good: the tight heat of your pussy, the slick stretch of it when you work it on him. You ride him rough, make him take it like a good boy.

Another noise stutters out of Jungkook, chased this time by a huff of breath that it takes you a second to realize is a laugh, the tone caught halfway between shy and horny. You watch the way he squirms, restless against his restraints, like he can’t help himself.

He answers before you can ask. “The way your tits— fuckin’ bounce— fuck, I wanna touch you.”

The feeling sinks in as you watch him writhe beneath you, as you shove your hips back harder to pull more desperate sounds out of him. It’s fun, not letting him have what he wants, makes you drip that much more down the length of him.

“You can’t.”

“I know,” he grunts, wrists tugging uselessly. “It’s hot— that I can’t.”

“It is,” you concede, feigning composure despite the hitch in your breath, the way you’re already close to the edge and pushed that much closer by having Jungkook like this. Tied up, all yours, free to do with as you please.

And still fighting against his fucking restraints.

“Think I could rip these?”

It’s like your body acts faster than your pleasure-driven mind can keep up with: all at once, you’re tracing the pouted curve of Jungkook’s bottom lip, then slipping two fingers past it into the heat of his mouth.

“Shh, bunny,” you murmur. He blinks up at you, glassy-eyed as you pet over his tongue, all lush and wet on your fingertips. “Toys don’t talk.”

You press down more firmly as if for emphasis, enjoying how his soft parts give so easily to your touch, and then Jungkook outright moans around your fingers in his mouth.

The needy little sound makes your pussy pulse hot between your thighs.

“Fuck,” you hiss as you take him to the hilt, changing the stroke of your hips to grind against your toy, used solely to get yourself off now. Humping, really, rubbing your clit over the smooth skin of his abdomen where he’s blooming feverglow, flushed with need. Jungkook’s eyes flicker back in his head at the way your pussy’s taking him, squeezed tight like a vice and gushing wet. Working raw sounds out of him, his jaw gone slack; you can feel the blunt edge of his teeth and his heavy, shaky breath on the palm of your hand.

Your thighs shift to spread wider and the next drag of your clit is at just the right angle that pleasure surges up in you, undeniable, overwhelming. It’s all you can do now to chase your release, to keep rocking yourself into it, Jungkook’s thick cock plugged up inside of you and drool slicking out of his mouth to drip down your wrist.

“Gonna make myself come on my pretty little toy,” you manage to gasp.

Jungkook’s eyes find yours, burning intensity, the way he gets, and then he closes his lips tight around your fingers in his mouth and sucks, as if he’s begging to be used, and it sends you over the edge all at once. Your head tips back as your orgasm kicks through you, white noise pleasure, enough to get lost in.

Hips still rolling, you grind yourself through it, the waves of your climax swelling and receding again, until you finally drop forward against Jungkook’s chest, breathless and buzzing all over.

You let your fingers slip out of his mouth, exhale a laugh as they skip over the defined ridges of his stomach when you wipe your hand dry, taking full advantage of the fact that he’s powerless to stop you.

“Shit, that was hot.”

Jungkook’s voice is hoarse with desire as you shift to find the curve of his neck under your mouth, trailing kisses until your lips brush over the pretty lines of ink just behind his ear. He’s still thick and stiff inside you, with a steady pulse-throb that tells you how badly he needs to come, how worked up he is from being used as your personal hump-toy.

“Yeah,” you echo, paired with a tentative rock of your hips that makes your cunt flutter, overstimulated, tugs a little whine out of Jungkook, too. Your tongue feels thick in your mouth as you breathe against his flushed skin.

“Think I— wanna keep using my toy. Kinda feel like being greedy.”

Jungkook’s cock twitches, shameless, at your admission, again when you flick a thumb over the silver jewelry studded through his nipple. There’s a part of you that wants to keep him like this, his leaking-hard dick filling you up while you purr nasty shit in his ear, just to see if he can come from it.

“Might ride it until I break it.” You scrape your teeth up his neck and he moans. “Gonna take all I can give you, bunny?”

His throat jumps visibly as he swallows, fights to gasp a desperate “uh-huh”. Answers with his body, too, arching up to press himself deeper into you, rubbing the slick, hot tip of his cock into your front wall in just the right way to melt pleasure down your spine. You reward his eager submission with a soft kiss, then lick along the seam of his lips, enjoying the sweet little noises that pour into your mouth when you open him up.

Still intertwined, his tongue stroking over yours, your hand goes fumbling for the nightstand, comes away with the slender cylinder of your vibrator, and switches it on before slipping it down to press between your bodies.

“Oh my god,” Jungkook groans as you nestle the shuddering bullet between your folds and find the bud of your clit. You know he can feel it too from the way his hips jerk beneath you, the steady buzz engulfing his cock as you squeeze your pussy around him, all lush sensitivity from your first orgasm. “Oh fuck, I’m gonna come.”

“You can.” The words are hardly more than a warm exhale from your mouth to his, your lips brushing. “But I’m not gonna stop.”

You don’t give him time to respond or even heave in another gasp of air before your thumb finds the button at the base of your vibrator, clicks it once, then again.

“F— ahh!”

Jungkook’s body jolts like a live wire as he falls apart beneath you. You sit up to take in the whole of him, your free palm slipping to the jut of his hip, fingertips splayed out and pressed heavy to anchor.

Pinned down and helpless, he trembles through the hot rush of his release, dick buried deep and pulsing as it all comes spilling out of him.

“That’s it, baby,” you coo. Your nails scratch lovingly against his skin to coax him out of it— taking such good care of your toy. His breath is punching out of his chest in these ragged, overwhelmed gasps, sweat glittering at his temples while he whimpers through the comedown. So fucking beautiful like this.

The hum of the vibrator rolls through you, strong enough with the change in angle that your eyes drop shut to focus on the feeling.

Jungkook whines when you circle your hips with him still tucked up inside of you— it’s a wrecked little noise, high and sweet, underscored by the thick squelch of his cum starting to leak back down his shaft. Your thighs tense just right from the filthy sound of it, and then it’s all throbbing velvet glow in your core as you clench up and come on his cock again.

“Fuuuuuck, bunny,” you groan up to the ceiling, your head tipped back as it washes over you. “God, yeah.”

You flick the vibrator off when it gets to be too much, let it go rolling down the mattress— the bedroom feels bigger for the silence. Sweat slicks at the back of your knees, warm spring breeze still licking through the window to flutter the sheer-gauze curtains.

You’re fluttering too, all over: the kick of your heartbeat, the breath stuttering out of your lungs. The throb of your cunt, split open and drooling out juice, messy-wet fresh fruit.

The sound of the bedsheets shifting has your lashes flickering open again, and there’s Jungkook. Dark hair fanned out on the pillow, wrists bound, and that look in his eyes. Like he can take a little more. Like he’s waiting for your cue. Like there’s this whole-heart want brimming up inside of him, making his blood run hot.

He’s still hard between your legs.

“Go on then,” you tell him. “Give me another one.”

With a concentrated growl, Jungkook flattens his feet to the bed, grips tighter to his restraints for leverage, and starts to pound up into you. You can feel an overstimulated shudder in the stroke of his hips, how his cockhead twitches, sensitive, as it rubs over your g-spot. But he doesn’t stop; doesn’t even lose his rhythm.

He fucks you like a machine, and it’s all you can do to brace your palms against his chest and tip forward, rocking yourself down to meet him thrust for thrust.

The harsh slap of body on body is almost enough to drown out the rest: your open-mouthed panting, Jungkook’s groan when your nails dig crescent moon slivers into his tan skin, the gravel edge to your words, “Yeah, like that, fuck me just like that.”

It takes you a second to notice, the sound buried beneath it all, but then it floats through— Jungkook’s sucking his breath in through his teeth now, his jaw tight. You can see the jump of a muscle working there.

“Does it hurt, baby?” you gasp, more air than voice.

Jungkook’s head drops back against the pillow, brow pinched from the focus of keeping his pace steady. He’s breathless, too, when he answers: “Feels good.”

“Feels good because it hurts, huh? Is that how you like it?”

A strangled noise tears out of his throat, and he shoves up even harder, like he wants to fuck you into the shape of him. You splay one hand over the column of his throat and watch his pretty brown eyes blink-blink back at you, and then you have to bury your moans in the crook of his neck as you come hard.

The world around you returns a little at a time. First, the tremble of your tired thighs, the dull ache that’s already started to bloom at the bend of your knees. Then, Jungkook’s body curved up against yours, hips still slow-rolling as you exhale in hot, jagged bursts against his skin. There’s the distinct drip of his cum sliding out of you, and all the sticky-wet places where it’s slicked up the swell of your ass.

“Shit,” you laugh when you manage to find the breath for it. “That was crazy.”

Jungkook shifts a little, but doesn’t respond, and then he makes this wet, soft gasp. You realize he’s shaking beneath you.

You sit up so fast the room spins; your tether is Jungkook’s face, cupped lovingly now between your palms.

“Oh, baby.”

A fat teardrop traces a path down his cheek. Another threatens the dark border of his lashes. He can’t wipe them away with his wrists tied up, but you can see him trying to hold back even as a sob shudders through him, his chest heaving.

“You okay, my love?” you murmur, swiping a thumb across his face. He sniffles, nods, hiccups a little. The tip of his nose is flushed pink. “Shoulda told me to stop, if it was too much.”

“It feels good,” he insists, and his voice cracks around the words. “It’s just a lot. But ‘m not— don’t wanna stop.”

“No? You sure?”

Jungkook sucks his lip ring into his mouth as he nods again, sniffs again. That sends a bolt of something through you.

“You’ve been so good to me,” you praise, and you tip your ass back until his softening cock slips out, smeared glossy-white with your shared release. Jungkook’s still wound-up, pulled so tight inside himself that he flinches when you slip a hand down to ease his legs apart, sliding lower on the bed to slot yourself between them.

“Can I take care of you, bun?” The question’s posed sweetly, chased with a flutter of your lashes and kisses dropped down on the flat plane of his abdomen. “I’ll be gentle.”

He whimpers— answers in the way his hips lift up to meet your mouth.

Your hands press flat to Jungkook’s broad thighs, and you can feel the overwhelmed static-shiver beneath your palms, little tremors that jolt through his muscles. Head dipped low, you drag your tongue up his length and it punches a thick sob out of him, hips stirring like he’s trying to crawl up the bed. But you just keep going, pin him down and make him take it, working broad flat stripes over the whole of his shaft, root to tip. Tasting him, salt and slick and your own heady flavor; you lick him clean.

Jungkook comes quietly this time, feet flexing restless on the bed as you tongue it all out of him. You swipe two fingers through the mess on his stomach and suck that up, too.

Humming around the digits in your mouth, you surface from between Jungkook’s legs to take him in: eyes closed, face wet with tears. You can see the rise and fall of his chest as he gasps for air, shaky, coming down from it.

“Alright baby,” you soothe, shifting up to straddle his chest, knees sinking into the sheets. “All done now, just breathe. Gonna untie you.”

Reaching up, you gently tug open the knot on one restraint, then the other, easing Jungkook’s limp arms to the mattress. Your thumbs find his wrists to massage soft love-circles in case he’s gone numb there, gently coaxing him back to earth.

“Did so good for me, bunny.”

There’s a whimper, and then Jungkook’s surging up to kiss you, forceful enough that you give a little hum of surprise against his lips.

His hands are all over you, all at once, tugging at your legs to drag them forward until you’re flat on your back on the mattress. Your sore thighs shake when he shoves them up and apart, and then a sharp buzz rolls right over the bud of your clit and you keen. Fuck, when did he even grab the vibrator?

“Wanna make you come again,” he pants, and you smile even as your spine arches off the bed. Of course. You should’ve known.

It’s Jungkook all over, you think, hyper-focused on your pleasure even when he’s out of commission, and then you feel the head of his cock push inside and you both gasp. Your cunt aches, so swollen that it’s like he’s stretching you out all over again when you take him to the hilt.

“Oh my god,” you breathe. Jungkook’s hips snap, punctuated by a strangled grunt of effort, but he keeps going, making soft little sweet-pain whines with every thrust, brow scrunched as he brute-forces his way well past overstimulation.

He’s still crying, you realize.

Tears roll down his face and drip onto your collarbone, and everything’s somehow hotter for it. His length is slick, painted in the stored-up remnants of his cum, and you can hear the squish of your folds at the base of his cock each time he fucks it all back into you, so dirty it makes your head spin.

“J-just like that, baby,” you groan, overwhelmed; you can barely get the words out. “Oh fuck, I’m gonna come.”

Jungkook buries his face in the crook of your neck, and you can feel him shaking, dripping, still rabbiting his hips into you, and then the hum of pleasure reverberating through your body explodes. Your clit throbs with an orgasm that feels endless, dizzying, divine. Jungkook outright sobs as your walls pulse pulse pulse around him, begging for every last drop.

When it’s all too much, you swat at his hand, mumbling shapes that aren’t words until the vibrator’s switched off and tossed away. He pulls out with a thick wet sound and the hiss of his breath between his teeth.

Together, you come down slow. Exhaling staccato, limbs tangled, bodies flushed and sweat-sticking.

Jungkook moves first: flops onto the mattress next to you, entirely exhausted, the way you’ve seen him get after a particularly rough workout. Scrubs at his face with one hand, this shy laugh fluttering out of him. “Can’t believe I cried. Ah, so embarrassing.”

You turn onto your side, tugging his hand away so you can press a kiss to his open palm. “Don’t ask me why but… in the moment? Very hot, actually.” A flush colors his cheeks and you giggle. “My perfect little crybaby.”

He flashes you his signature cocky grin, eyes squeezing shut as it morphs into something nearer to a wince. “Fuck, I’m so sweaty.” A breathless gasp, again. “And my dick hurts. I think I came dry that last time.”

“Poor baby,” you coo, not quite sincere. “You really could’ve stopped at… what, three?”

Eyes closed and still smirking, he shakes his head, damp hair falling in his face. “No I couldn’t have— I’m Jeon Jungkook.”

“You certainly are.”

[lexirosewrites]

I've been in a funk ADHD wise so I haven't had the same inspiration I usually do🥺 let's give this a try

Steve & Robin r platonic soulmates & they're both omegas & they're gross twins with little to zero boundaries

They share the same piece of gum till it runs out of flavor, they've helped eachother build up a storage of tasteful nudes on their respective phones, when Robin had constipation Steve not only got the laxatives he held her hand in the bathroom, when Steve got food poisoning Robin not only helped him out of bed she helped him aim for the toilet or trash can, their heats r synced up in a way tht allows them to take care of eachother in turns, yes Steve taught Robin how to kiss, yes Robin taught Steve to use a knotting dildo

When Steve eventually gets kicked out of his house bc his parents want to sell it he just goes to the Buckley's with a couple of suitcases & one box bc so much of his stuff was already at their place anyway, robins parents barely blink when stobin tells them tht Steve is moving in, they all cry when Steve says he'll b changing his last name to Buckley tho

Robin graduates high school & then they're setting off for the big city so she can study linguistics & Steve can study cosmetology

When they get their degrees they decide "why the hell not?" & go to live in California bc neither of them have seen the Pacific ocean before. They end up in LA even tho the plan was San Francisco, and they both find semi fulfilling jobs. Robin works as an interpreter with various state government offices, helping individuals whose first language isn't English, taking some of the pressure off of the children in the situation

Steve finds work at a small hole in the wall salon that's been in business longer than the many fancy salons all around LA. He's doted on by the regulars, surrounding shop owners, and his coworkers. There's a small hole in the wall barber shop a few shop fronts down the street tht the salon has a friendly relationship with. On the corner is a teeny tiny burger spot that's been around since the 1920s with no changes to the menu except for price & it has the best burgers Steve & Robin have EVER had.

It's a good life, the only thing they want tht they cant give eachother is a romantic connection, but they've tried every app & no one seems to actually want a relationship or they get weird abt how close they are

Well one day a chipper female alpha wanders into the salon looking for a last minute shampoo & trim to keep her strawberry blonde waves healthy. The only person available is Steve & he does so well tht the alpha introduces herself as Chrissy & books an appointment with him for a couple of months later when she knows she'll need another trim.

Except Steve & Robin don't rlly engage with social media, they rarely watch recent shows or movies, and their taste skews between horror or romance there's no in-between. So neither is aware tht the nice female alpha Chrissy is THE Chrissy Munson, an up & coming movie star, adopted sister to Eddie Munson the lead guitar of world famous metal/rock band Corroded Coffin, and someone very fussy abt her hair.

Chrissy comes back for her next appointment & at the end she point blank asks him if he'd like to be the only person doing her hair for the next 8 months, he asks her why & she realizes he genuinely has no idea who she is, so she explains & tht she has a production filming soon & she wants him to handle hair at the end of the day to wash out all of the gunk that gets into it for filming

Steve says yes only after the salon owner & regulars tell him to say yes & tht there will b a job waiting for him when he's done

Blah blah blah

Steddie meet & fall in love then buckingham meet & fall in love

scarily close stobin is my favorite flavor! and of course all steddie needs a side helping of buckingham🥰💕💕

[captainlexapro]

hang on. I just need to talk about quinn's autograph for a minute because i have so much appreciation for the effort and intention he puts into it. (also i love linguistics/language/writing and how people sign their name is actually very interesting to me)

Been thinking about this (x) article from 2021 (and also very much demko saying "thoughtful" for his one word to describe huggy at the nhl awards this year. demmer u don't understand the implications of what you just said).

teammates chirping quinn for being a slow at signing because it's not a scribble or an unintelligible flourish...but he straight up doesn't give a fuck what they think because HE wants HIS signature to be easily distinguishable for FANS. like the awareness of how special that stuff can be for people. 💙 antoine agreeing that "you should always be able to tell the name without the number." YES!!! YOU GET IT!! (don't get me wrong, there can be iconic autographs that aren't legible whatsoever but idk. to me it's something about how it's a name and i'd like to be able to read it. it's so personal and a scribble doesn't feel personal).

i wanted to see how his signature has changed/progressed over the years, so i dug around a bit to see where he's landed at this point. let's back up to the beginning!

2018 (screenshot from this vid) -

huggy's first official nhl signature!!

his draft day signature shows he's still fully spelling out his first name. it also looks just very. teenage boy who can't do cursive.

BUT the elements are already there - heavy on the Qu, the Hu, (new nickname Q-hoo? like yoohoo? no? fine.) and the s. starting to stylize the gh.

*side notes: Qu is such a rough first letters pairing rip... it's a distinct shape. printing Q doesn't flow easily into the u while cursive Q is ugly (in my opinion) and idk if a lot of people actually know what a true cursive Q looks like (hint: it looks like a 2). also, "quinn" is hard just because it's SEVEN vertical elements back to back. i honestly think doing it in cursive requires more focus than printing. hughes is fun because it has the high and low elements right next to each other, which he emphasizes.*

2019 (nhl debut) -

oh boy. sill very choppy. still have those main elements of emphasis happening.

i feel like he probably hadn't started worrying about his signature yet (this was his first game, to be fair).

not a lot of connectivity (especially in Hughes)

the n has hints of what it will become later, though, which is cool to see!

2021 (from article)-

only writing Quinn now (only one dot for an i). maybe to speed it up, maybe just bc that's the nickname he goes by, maybe both.

seeing the connecting line/stroke between the g and h more prominently

s is looking more stylized as well

i think he's picking up the pen a fair amount still (maybe up to 8 or 9 strokes in this one?). so yeah, i'm sure it took a while compared to others...

2022 (from this silly vid)-

this is kind of not a 'true' signature to me bc 1) given the nature of the video i kind of doubt he would have put 100% effort into it (complete lack of stylized s) and 2) you can tell the surface/pen combo isn't great - see the jaggedness on the gh?

this is the most ~scribbly~ version i saw. like i said, idk if i really count this one but i don't want to dig around forever to find a confirmed 2022 signature

regardless, he seems to have sped it up and is better at the cursiveness aspect. Most of it is connected - i'd guess 5 total strokes for that version.

2023 (from wallpapers on the canucks' insta)-

definitely more committed to a "look"

Qu is kind of aggressive lol and the gh stroke isn't super smooth either. HOWEVER it is 100% a stylistic element he focuses on. also it's fast to connect them, so it probably feels pretty natural. just needed more practice on keeping that stroke aligned.

officially no dotting of the i anymore - just swooping up high (again, probably helps with speed)

we have the fully stylized s! i'm actually very fond of that part because lots of people will let the last letters fall to the wayside and basically just draw a line. he's kinda doing that a smidge with the n. but there's intention on the s and it looks very nice!

2023/2024 (from canucks' wallpapers & inhousemade insta)-

here we have our latest iteration

I reallyyy like the finishing on the n - it matches well with how he does the s, which is so pretty. such a fun letter to write lol

i think the gh line has been fully mastered at this point. and it's a good way to keep his signature legible but still give it a unique flair. not everyone's signature/name has that type of line so ppl can pick his name out rather easy i would guess.

i think huggy's probably settled on autograph style/look at this point. but i will still keep an eye out to see if he decides to try a new element!

thanks for reading and hopefully you found this mildly interesting ☺️

[room-surprise]

what part of SA does kabru seem like he's from? i thought maybe nepal or India but idk

(To clarify for readers I think by SA they mean "South Asia." Also this post is an excerpt/remix of the information in my essay about the real world linguistic and cultural references that exist in Dungeon Meshi. You can read Kabru's section of that essay here. You can also read a tumblr version of Kabru's section here.) Kabru is the name of a mountain on the border between Nepal and India, so I agree with you, and I think he's from somewhere similar to both of those places! I don't believe any location in Dungeon Meshi is an exact copy of a place in the real world (Except Wa being Japan) so there's probably some other cultural elements mixed in there too.

I talk about this in detail in the Kabru section of my essay, in the chapter on Miscellaneous tall-men. I'll give an abridged version here, with some pictures, since this is tumblr, and I love nothing more than talking about Kabru lmao

Utaya (ウタヤ) is the name of the village that Kabru lived in until his mother’s death. It’s located in the southeastern part of the Western Continent, in an area that seems to be made up of arid mountains and cliffs, based on images in the manga, anime, and world guide.

(Utaya circled in red. As you can see it's around a mountain chain.)

Obviously the terrain information is anime-only, as Kui's map doesn't include this information... HOWEVER, Kui does give us POPULATION maps.

This is the combined population map my spouse made in 2023 to help us understand where the different races live. How does this help us?

In the real world, geographic barriers like rivers and mountains are usually what create the boundaries between different cultural groups. The person who made the anime map obviously knows this (or Kui told them) and they placed mountains and rivers based on where there are divisions between the races on Kui's map.

There's an ethnic enclave of gnomes and dwarves in the bottom east corner of the Western continent. There is most likely a serious mountain range between that population and the rest of the continent, since the World Guide says the Western Continent is dominated by elves, not dwarves or gnomes.

So, there probably ARE mountains around Utaya, in the manga, even though Kui hasn't explicitly told us so. So it's probably a region like the Himalayas, like Nepal, since those are some of the tallest mountains on earth.

These red cliffs Kabru is standing around in the first anime opening are likely meant to represent Utaya, since there is no place on the island or in the dungeon that looks like this. It's where Kabru comes from and what happened there is both vitally important to his character, and the Dungeon Meshi story as a whole, so it makes sense to foreshadow its existance in the OP.

Utaya (pronounced “uthaaya”) could be Hindi (उठाया) or Urdu (اٹھایا), but it’s also the name of a Yakut/Sakha village in Siberia (Утайа). So the village's name is either Hindi or Urdu (both Indian languages which are mutually intelligible) or Turkic. I think it's most likely the former.

The appearance of Utaya, especially the red cliffs that the anime has shown us, looks a lot like a remote part of Nepal called the Mustang District.

Mustang (मुस्ताङ) District straddles the Himalayas and extends northward onto the Tibetan Plateau. The district is one of the remotest areas in Nepal and is second in terms of the sparsity of population.

Geographically, Mustang is a cold, high-altitude steppe that is a part of the Tibetan highlands.

Upper Mustang (the northern part of the district) was once part of the Kingdom of Lo-Manthang, isolated from the rest of the world by some of the tallest peaks on earth. From the 15th to the 17th century, its strategic location granted the Kingdom of Lo-Manthang control over trade between the Himalayas and India.

We know that dungeons only grow large and dangerous if a lot of humans visit them, and dungeons that don’t have a lot of traffic tend to wither away. If Utaya was a trade hub that saw a lot of people and goods moving through it (lots of desire) like Lo-Manthang, it would make sense for a man-made dungeon to grow out of control there.

Being major trade hubs might even be something that Utaya and Merini have in common, since Merini was once the major port of entry to the Eastern Continent from the West. That may be part of why both of them grew such catastrophically dangerous dungeons.

Now obviously these houses are drawn REALLY roughly and without a lot of detail... But Kui generally doesn't seem to enjoy drawing houses so I'm not surprised. Nepal has both steepled and flat-roofed houses though, and villages that are built on the side of a steep incline aren't uncommon.

Additional reasoning:

In the Daydream Hour book, there is a comic about various characters presenting sweets from their home regions. Kabru attempts to share a dessert from Utaya that looks like white oblong balls on a plate.

These are probably an Indian sweet called rasgulla (literally "syrup filled ball"). Rasgulla are a dessert popular in the eastern part of South Asia (an area that includes the Himalayas), made from ball-shaped dumplings of chhena dough, cooked in light sugar syrup. Rasgulla are also popular in Nepal, where they are called rasbari.

The Nepal sky caves have a passing resemblance to parts of the Ancient cities that Kui shows us towards the end of the manga, where there are homes that look like they are built directly into cliff walls. Since Utaya had a man-made dungeon beneath it, there was probably an Ancient city located there... Just like these ancient ruins in Nepal.

The Ancient cities even more closely resemble Phuktal Monastery, a Buddhist monastery located in the Lungnak Valley in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in Northern India. Phuktal is in a region very similar to Upper Mustang, on the border between North India and Tibet.

And finally, I think there's story significance to Kabru coming from a place like Nepal.

The way Kui describes dungeons and the villages that grow up around them are similar to real world gold-rush or boom towns. The ability for people to make a lot of money in a hurry, with very little initial investment, attracts poor and desperate people who use the dungeon as a way to lift themselves out of poverty. This transforms the local areas from whatever their normal lifestyle was into a service economy that is completely dependent on the unstable dungeon.

In the real world, a huge amount of Nepal’s economy depends on tourism in the Himalayan mountain range. Nepal is a very poor country, and working as a porter at Mt. Everest, a Nepali can make nearly double the nation's average wage.

The Himalayas are an extremely popular tourist destination, and the amount of people who want to visit and attempt to climb the mountains far outpaces the local ability to support it. This makes me think of the dungeon of Utaya, and the dungeon of Merini, and how people have overcrowded it in their desire to conquer and exploit it for economic gain and glory.

Dungeons as an unsustainable way for locals to make a living, that leads to the destruction of their homes when the dungeon inevitably collapses, is a major plot point in Dungeon Meshi, so I think the parallel is likely intentional. Characters often talk about someone “conquering” the dungeon, and “conquer” is also the terminology commonly used for climbing a mountain.

This phrasing obviously has a hostile, imperialist subtext in the real world, since it’s most commonly used by outsiders talking about proving their strength by climbing a mountain in some exotic, foreign place. I think it has the same subtext in Dungeon Meshi. People want to assert themselves by proving they are stronger than the dungeon.

[dr3amfyr-e]

modern!jace thoughts ( wc. 600-ish )

i have a jace parasite living in my brain <3 i’m cooking up a part two ( i cooked it up )

jacaerys who studies literature and linguistics at university — on the pre-law track. he’s such a diligent student, a frequenter of libraries and study rooms. ( but he doesn’t really have to try that hard, it comes easy, it’s aggravating )

he lives in the nicest dorm on campus, probably private housing.

jacaerys who wears glasses :3 but only when he must, makes an effort to put contacts in every day. but some days are just glasses days. ( they’re the sliver squoval wire framed ones )

jacaerys who prioritizes hygiene, he’s so clean. (i’m a jon girl at heart, i can acknowledge that he is not squeaky clean. jace is squeaky clean) jace has a skincare routine and a haircare routine. he’s using olaplex and cerave and that super expensive moisturizer. he knows how to defuse and gel cast his curls, he’ll happily do yours too! i firmly believe he uses an electric toothbrush AND HE TAKES CARE OF HIS NAILS

jacaerys who attended a private school until university, and started playing competitive football ( ⚽️ ) at age 10. he plays in college too, but he’s not as serious about it.

lucerys attends the same private school and plays for the same team, so jace practices with him ( it usually ends with a physical altercation, think the sword fight scene ‘what. was. THAT?’ )

jacaerys who likes animals, and LOVES his dog. vermax lives at home while he is off at school, but when jace gets a place of his own the dog will come with. he walks him every morning and evening and takes him for runs most days over the summer. vermax sleeps in jace’s bed, and he takes up a good portion.

jacaerys who is SO oldest daughter coded. he’s driving his siblings around. taking joffrey to pediatrician appointments and picking him up from school. going to all of luke’s football games and rhaena’s violin concerts.

chronic over achiever, he has to be his mothers favorite daughter- what, who said that?

mama’s boy jacaerys who looks up to her more than anyone. he’s bragging her up to anyone who will listen: in his gender and women’s studies class like, “my mom is a ceo! 🙋” “my mom is married to a woman! 🙋”

he would defend his mother’s name with his life. he’s getting into fist fights at social events, ryan atwood style. ( no he’s not, but he really wants to )

jacaerys who can be mean. he doesn’t mean to be, he doesn’t want to be — he hates it. but the world he grew up in was exclusive, and cliquey, and competitive.

he’s good at controlling it, thinking before he speaks. because he’s not a mean person. he’s good, and kind, and gentle. but, it comes to the surface when he goes into defense mode.

he made luke cry once, and started journaling to channel his emotions.

english/history person jacaerys. he’s hopeless at helping his brothers with their math homework.

when his mother married his late grandfather’s former wife he started reading lesbian theory to cope. and he liked it! he borrows baela’s feminist theory books, they bookclub.

jacaerys who, unfortunately, does participate in performative reading. omg nooo don’t come talk to me while i’m reading didion and wearing pearls and mewing 🧏

jacaerys who has a really expensive digital camera and also a really expensive film camera. he likes to post his pictures on his instagram ( no one cares )

all of his social media accounts are private because he doesn’t want to be the internet’s next eligible bachelor.

jacaerys who cries when he’s frustrated.

jacaerys who tolerates his step-brothers, but not very well or with much enjoyment. he has way more in common with alicent than he’d like to admit ( quintessential horrifying step-child experience of being mistaken for your step-parents biological child ) he likes helaena, though! they’re kind of bestie

he separates puzzle pieces by colour for her and looks at all of her art and knows all of her favorite bugs. ( he’s always wanted a sister )

jacaerys who is a fantastic boyfriend ( i’ll get into this later ) (( i got into this ))

[vidavalor]

Stars Crashing Down

For @tickety-bippity-boo and @thavron, who wanted thoughts on why the same musical cues play when Death spreads its wings as during the Jesus scene and the 2.06 kiss.

The questions posed to me were: What's the deal with Crowley and Death? Is Crowley Death? and the answer is... well, um... kinda... just read it and you'll see what I mean. 😉

You have sought The Black Knight, foolish one, but you have found...

...your death.

So, you do not have to read it first but, over here, I talked about the connections between why the same musical cues are playing in the 2.06 kiss scene and the Jesus scene. What we're going to do here is expand those thoughts out to include Death spreading its wings having the same musical cues and talk about why that might be.

The 2.06 kiss/Golgotha scene meta talks about how the show is using different meanings of the word passion and how Golgotha is contrasting romantic passion with the suffering and death of Christ, aka The Passion of the Christ. This isn't the only instance of a comparison between destruction and death and passion in the series. Looking at more of them will probably help clear up what's going on with the parallels between Death and Crowley (and Aziraphale) in the series, so, that's what I'll be doing here and you can let me know what you think, yeah?

Passion is, by far, not the only word that has such wildly, contrasting definitions, but it's one of the strongest examples of it because of how its definitions illustrate how people make comparisons between the experience of erotic love with the agony of suffering and death. The word is an example of something we could call a destructive sexual metaphor or sex and death.

Throughout history, humans have sought words to explain the experience of sex and many different common metaphors have arisen from this. Crowley and Aziraphale, for instance, also have a whole thing about one of the other most common ones in the arts, which is the sea. Linguistically-speaking, though, the most common ones have always been death and destruction. Why?

Well, some people see an orgasm as a rebirth of sorts and the closest thing a person experiences to death while still remaining alive. Both sex and death come with a sense of a lack of control. They are on the opposite ends of a spectrum when it comes to experience, with one being an example of intense pleasure while the other being possibly painful and an ending from which you do not return. This draws contrasts between them. Similarly, something being destroyed-- like a crumbling building, say-- is seen as metaphoric for the feeling of coming apart that can accompany an orgasm.

As a result, across many languages, there is a metric fuckton of linguistic overlap between words related to death, destruction and violence and words related to love and sex. The French phrase that means an orgasm, for instance, is la petite mort which, when literally translated means the little death. When Hozier sings the song that is on Crowley's playlist and offers his life in exchange for "that deathless death," the "deathless death" in question is an orgasm. He is using death as a metaphor for the sexual pleasure about which he is singing, which is currently one of the most well-known examples of sex and death/destructive sexual metaphor in modern music, if nowhere near the only one.

If you start thinking about slang words for sex, I'd wager quite a few of them are going to fall into the category of a destructive sexual metaphor because they're also words related to a sense of destruction. Bang. Smash. Wrecked. Nailed... Would you sleep with him? Yeah, I'd hit that... Even puppy love is destructive sexual metaphor, as it's a pash (short for passion) or a crush. The word that we use to say we have a little thing for someone-- a crush-- is the same word we use to say someone was killed within the rubble of a bombed building. Both a little disturbing and quite interesting, right?

If you've ever written or read erotica that was at least purporting to be a little literary 😉, you know that there's usually a lot of writhing and thrashing involved-- words that are originally rooted in flailing around in pain that are being used to describe how the body moves in the midst of sexual pleasure. These words, too, are a form of destructive sexual metaphor.

As anyone who has gotten back from seeing Deadpool and Wolverine improve the sales of Hondas for the foreseeable future can tell you, using violence and destruction as a metaphor for sex is not going anywhere. It's not new-- it's actually very, very, very old. How old, you say?

Well, how's this for homoeroticism: the word weapon comes from the Old English waepen, which was a word meaning penis, you guys. Dudes literally invented swords and the like to kill each other and then went 'this is just like my dick' to a point that they just called them the same fucking word. 😂

It's a truth universally acknowledged that nearly all Good Omens fans have seen Our Flag Means Death-- a tv show whose title is an example of sex and death happening, let alone the rest of the show. This also means you've all seen the most blatant example of destructive sexual metaphor on screen maybe ever and, if you have seen OFMD, you already know exactly what scene I'm going to say... 😂

It does not take much to infer that, perhaps, Stede's sword was standing in here-- so, was metaphorical for-- his cock and what Ed really desired here was to get done into the following Tuesday. The sword is a very overt metaphor for penetrative sex. This is what very blatant, destructive sexual metaphor looks like. More subtle ones exist-- it would be hard for them not to, by comparison lol-- but this is it a nutshell.

Ok, I can hear you saying: alright, I love the sadly departed queer pirate show, Vida, but what does this have to do with Good Omens?

As we'll see, Crowley and Aziraphale are fucking obsessed with death and destruction as a sexual metaphor, that's what, and sex-and-death is a theme of Good Omens.

Crowley and Aziraphale are supposed to be hereditary enemies. For thousands of years, when they've been in a place where someone could overhear them, they've had to sound like they dislike one another. To sound like a good angel and a bad demon, there needs to be talk of being on opposite sides of what is ultimately supposed to be a large-scale military conflict. Heaven and Hell are places of violence and destruction that are full of talk of war and Armageddon, right?

As we'll look at, you can use those words of death, violence and destruction to mean sexually euphemistic or, depending on the word, even romantic things... which is what Crowley and Aziraphale do.

Crowley and Aziraphale's language exists to mask their speech in public but the way they use it is to take those words of aggression and use them as flirtation. They're wonderful dorks who get off on seeing how cleverly they can wordplay each other into bed. Their little birdsong mating dance-- whether in public or private-- involves a ton of sex and death and destructive sexual metaphors. I've picked out a few of what I think are great examples but this is in no way all of them.

Receipts time. 😉

In 1.01, a drunk Crowley and Aziraphale are, on a surface level, talking about the destructive devastation that will happen to Earth when Armageddon happens. In reality, Armageddon here is a metaphor for a top notch time in bed. It's the end of the world so it's an irresistible metaphor for a really, really, good end, if ya get me.

Crowley flirts with Aziraphale with a bit of destructive sexual metaphor that is actually made even funnier retrospectively by 2.01's Before the Beginning scene and that's this bit here: "Stars crashing down!"

Making someone "see stars" is an example of destructive sexual metaphor in language because if a boxer takes a punch and starts to wobble, someone might say "oh, he's seeing stars"-- meaning, he's probably a bit concussed or, at least, disoriented from the punch-- but you can also want to make someone "see stars" in bed, which is descriptive for giving them pleasure. It comes from how many people see flecks of light when they orgasm. Crowley is taking this one step further by referring to them as the stars, which is made funnier by the fact that they set the stars in the sky and the first things he ever showed Aziraphale were literal fucking stars 😂.

And what are these stars doing? They're crashing down.

Crowley is comparing the stars falling out of the sky in the final destruction of Armageddon-- so, the destruction of the universe-- as metaphorical for the two of them in bed later on. Aziraphale gonna be so gone, he'll be like what are they putting in bananas these days? (The bananas are another post. Do not distract me while I'm on a roll here lol.)

Aziraphale comes back not long later when he's gotten enough drunken synapses to fire and he's got a destructive sexual metaphor for Crowley that wins at life by their standards because it also encompasses the sea which, as we looked at in the Fish meta (I'll link it later on in the post), they've been using to talk about sex seemingly ever since they first started having some literal and metaphorical oysters back in ancient Rome.

Aziraphale's metaphor? The Kraken.

The Kraken is a mythological sea monster that was often seen as something of a sea serpent, even if historians believe that it was based on giant squid and octopi before those were more well understood. Hmm, I wonder what long-limbed sea serpent could be The Kraken in Aziraphale's metaphor here? 😉

And what's supposed to happen to "The Kraken" that is Crowley during Armageddon?

Oh, it's supposed to come up from the sea to the surface "in the end, when the sea boils." When it all gets too hot because the sea in the mother of all boils here and "the end" is in sight, The Kraken is going to come to the surface.

This is Aziraphale using Armageddon as destructive sexual metaphor. He's comparing sea creatures trying to escape the boiling waters of Armageddon and dying trying to Crowley's near-future orgasm.

They managed these drunk so imagine how filthy they are sober! 😂

We don't have to, actually, as there are lots more...

When Crowley and Aziraphale crossed paths in The Kingdom of Wessex, how did Crowley flirtatiously greet Aziraphale?

"...you have found (dramatic beat while he poses) your death."

Crowley is amusing them both by using the words he has to say to sound threatening while posing as the seemingly violent Black Knight to actually refer to the fact that he's not Aziraphale's literal death-- he would never harm him-- but he is very much Aziraphale's metaphorical death, in that he is Aziraphale's lover.

It's a play on death and destruction as sexual metaphor, in that Aziraphale arrived expecting an encounter with violence, potentially, and, instead, he's found "death"-- pleasure.

For a pretty basic example, there is Aziraphale's "sitting on it" joke and that smirk 😂 to Crowley...

...this is a pretty surface-level but still very funny joke equating the sword with a cock and illustrating that Aziraphale is making the comment innuendo intentionally for the amusement of his partner, who more than gets the joke. Hell, his partner originated the damn joke...

Destructive sexual metaphor is also why Aziraphale references The Titanic when promising a great time at The Meeting Ball and why the theme song to the 1997 movie is on his playlist in S2.

The Titanic is the greatest nautical disaster that has ever occured. By Crowley and Aziraphale standards, that makes it metaphorical for best of the best sex. (Unfortunately, Aziraphale accidentally manifested an actual disaster instead lol.)

One could also say that positively destroying some barbecue is destructive sexual metaphor, especially when one looks one's partner dead in the eye in the middle of it and uses it as euphemistic for other things onto which one might like to go down.

Whew. Good thing Crowley has the constitution of an ox...

Now, you might say... but what do these two care about death and destruction? They're immortal! Except... they're not. Not entirely.

Their relationship is dangerous as all fuck and if they got caught, they could be killed. They do fear actual destruction and Aziraphale uses the word destroy to refer to that with Crowley in earnest more than once when expressing his fear over it.

The spectres of holy water and hellfire looms over them because they could be killed if they are caught. How they end up surviving that risk at the end of S1-- swapping bodies-- is a sexual metaphor in and of itself. The point is that there is risk to them so they understand the human comparisons between sex, destruction and death.

This is really why Aziraphale is so excited about The Bullet Catch in S2. There is nary a more frequent example of a weapon used in destructive sexual metaphor than a gun and, as I looked at a bit in the Fish meta, The Bullet Catch is a metaphor for the history of their sexual relationship and Rome, in particular.

In 1941, The Bullet Catch was Aziraphale's answer to the destructive sexual metaphor Crowley had made when redirecting the bombs in the church by finding an equally sex-and-death magic trick that they could perform together. They both were well-aware of the metaphor.

Understanding this and destructive sexual metaphor in general helps to make clear what it is that Aziraphale actually mouths at Crowley:

When Crowley is struggling to actually fire the gun because he's anxious and, ya know, doesn't want to kill Aziraphale (kinda understandable lol), what Aziraphale mouths at Crowley helps him focus and fire the literal gun that they could not possibly be using more euphemistically if they tried (and they are trying lol.)

If you look at the above gif, you will see that "trust me" are not the actual words that Aziraphale was saying, as those words do not match the movements of his mouth. What he says means "trust me" to Crowley, as Crowley later states, but those are not the words that Aziraphale actually soundlessly said to Crowley on the stage.

Instead, it's pretty evident that what Aziraphale actually mouths is "come for me." He got Crowley to fire the literal gun with some words that do it for Crowley in the situation for which the literal gun is a metaphor. Aziraphale having a gun to his head and using language he'd use in bed is the most sex and death thing that has ever sex and deathed.

This is referenced in the Chateauneuf-de-Pape scene afterwards, when they're still talking about The Bullet Catch as if it was sex, both well-aware of why they spent their date night using a gun-firing performance as foreplay.

Aziraphale referring to what it was he actually mouthed:

Finally, if The Bullet Catch is the king of destructive sexual metaphor scenes between them, then the queen is The Seeds of Destruction.

On the way to Tadfield in S1, we have this scene in which Crowley was giving Aziraphale a few more details about when he dropped off the baby eleven years earlier and started to feel down about how the whole thing is a mess and Armageddon is days away. Aziraphale then starts in on this little monologue using a religious teaching to talk about the nature of evil that gets quite a response out of Crowley.

A lot of people already see the end of the scene for what it is, as it's fairly overt:

You don't have to be looking at wordplay too heavily to see that Crowley's saying that what Aziraphale just said has him hard and that is emphasized by the shot we hold on of Aziraphale to end the scene being that he is clearly checking out the fruits of his labors. So, what, exactly, about what Aziraphale says in this scene is so hot that Crowley is trying to be cool but is very glad in this moment that the car can drive itself?

What Aziraphale is doing here when they're obviously alone is using the slightly pompous angel voice he uses when they banter in their speak in public and he is paraphrasing a religious teaching-- one that Aziraphale doesn't believe in or else he wouldn't be here in this car in this moment-- as the basis for wordplay. What is he doing with that wordplay? He is dirty-talking Crowley in blasphemous destructive sexual metaphor.

Aziraphale sounds like he's talking about the religious teaching that states that evil will always falter, no matter what, simply because it is evil, which means that it is doomed to always cave to good. He is actually using that teaching as a metaphor for how he will "win out" over Crowley the next time they have sex. To do that, he adds destructive sexual metaphor to the very hot blasphemy of using religious language to talk about sex because raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens and all that but if you mash up etymology, blasphemy, destructive sexual metaphor and the pompous angel voice, these are a few of Crowley's favorite things.

How does he use destructive sexual metaphor here?

Aziraphale is talking about how Crowley keeps the seeds of his destruction-- the impetus for what turns him on-- quiet and doesn't let people close to him and to know him is to know just what he likes and oh Aziraphale knows what he likes (like word flirting while he's driving lol)... and also that one of the things that Crowley likes to contain are the other way the "seeds of destruction" can be taken, which is the literal seeds of his destruction (yes, this is scene #543 to make an orgasm denial reference) but doing that, Aziraphale is saying? It's going to be no use, Crowley...

Among the wordplay in here is that Aziraphale is saying that Crowley might think he's going to last but he's wrong because, eventually, Aziraphale is going to have him metaphorically crashing on the rocks in a shipwreck ("founder on the rocks") and "vanishing"-- a word that means to suddenly disappear. A vanishing, in and of itself, is destructive sexual metaphor but the verb 'to come' is also the root of the words appear and disappear, making to 'vanish' doubly-euphemistic for a sudden, dramatic, ah... "disappearance."

Aziraphale is literally sitting there in the passenger seat chatting away in religious speak, wordplay-happy euphemisms, and with those he is saying, among other things: I know you and what you like and what you need and I'm going to have you dying for it and no matter how much you might try not to give in, eventually, you're going to give yourself up to me and I'm going to make you come so hard.

It's a little more detailed and more clever if you go word-by-word but, basically, that is, in summary, why Crowley is trying not to drive off the road at the end of this scene-- and it's destructive sexual metaphor to a point that there's a vanishing and a shipwreck-- plus, the word destruction literally in it.

Finally, the extent to which they use destruction and death as sexual metaphor is actually best summed up by a moment in which Crowley used it-- but not just as a flirtation.

In 1827, as Aziraphale debated healing Wee Morag, he thought he had more time than he actually did. Crowley, who could sense Wee Morag dying, tried to interrupt him to tell him:

Aziraphale continued for a second in which he says: "I will brook no argument"-- a phrase that implied through its use of a word that also means a type of body of water that he thought he had enough time to flirt with Crowley for a moment before doing anything. The whole exchange is only a few seconds long and Crowley knew that it was over before Aziraphale had even proposed healing Morag and that there was really nothing Aziraphale could have done.

He turns Aziraphale and they witness Wee Morag die. This is the first scene we've seen where the two of them see death happen before them, even though we know they've obviously seen it happen on Earth before. Both of them are understandably upset by Morag's death.

As Aziraphale then speaks to Elspeth, he starts to stammer, emotional over Morag's death and feeling guilty that he didn't save her. Crowley steps up to comfort him before moving to help Elspeth. Crowley wants Aziraphale to know it wasn't his fault and to not feel guilty for flirting while the young woman was dying, as there wasn't a way to save her. He does so by combining the comforting tone and pat of Aziraphale's chest with further flirtation, picking up where Aziraphale left off to show him he doesn't think badly of him.

The comforting flirtation? Is some sex in the face of death.

Crowley says something about grief to Aziraphale that also sounds an awful lot like something someone might say to a lover. The result of the scene is that it has the effect of sounding like Crowley is referencing something once said between them and that was likely something Aziraphale once said to Crowley after a very different sort of "death"-- likely, the first time they performed the The Bullet Catch together.

"It's a bit different when it's someone you know, isn't it?"

So, why does the same music play when Death spreads his wings and when Jesus is nailed to the cross as plays when Crowley and Aziraphale kiss in 2.06? Sex and death. Crowley is death in the sense that he's Aziraphale's death-- and Aziraphale is his.

These two are supposed to be thrilled to bits to one day defeat one another in glorious battle in the final war of Armageddon but they're really in love. They have no desire to hurt one another and every desire to give each other all the pleasure they can. They've developed and enjoy a mutual kink for figuring out increasingly clever and inventive, word-nerdy ways to say they want to fuck each other senseless by way of using words of God, violence, destruction and death to do so, underscoring a theme of sex and death in the Armageddon show.

After all, this is how Crowley once faux-told Aziraphale he wanted to commit murder, so... is it really a stretch? 😉

I'm pretty sure that is about neither goats nor kids, aren't you?

[hayatheauthor]

Crafting Character Voices And Distinct Dialogue

A well-crafted character voice can breathe life into your narrative, making readers feel as if they're eavesdropping on real people. Each character's dialogue should be as distinctive as their fingerprints, reflecting their personality, background, and motivations. 

Creating distinctive character voices is one of the first things I learned in my creative writing lessons. Whether you're a seasoned writer or just starting, understanding how to create authentic and unique character voices is a crucial skill. So, here’s my guide on how to personalise your dialogue. 

Understanding Your Characters

To craft dialogue that resonates, you must first get to know your characters inside and out. Dive deep into their psyche, exploring their backgrounds, beliefs, values, and desires. What drives them? What keeps them up at night? Understanding these intricacies is the foundation upon which you'll build their unique voices.

Additionally, consider their primary language or dialect. A character from Italy, for example, might have a different vocabulary and speech patterns than someone from India. For instance, an Italian character may use phrases or expressions unique to their culture, adding depth and authenticity to their voice. This not only provides cultural richness but also enhances the character's individuality.

Creating Distinctive Speech Patterns

Once you've delved into your characters' backgrounds and cultural influences, it's time to work on their speech patterns. Think of this as giving each character their own linguistic fingerprint. Here are some key elements to consider:

Unique Vocabulary: Each character should have a vocabulary that reflects their education, interests, and experiences. A well-read character might use more complex words, while a simpler character may prefer everyday language.

Sentence Structures: Pay attention to how characters structure their sentences. Some may favor long, flowing sentences, while others opt for brevity. This reflects their thought processes and personality.

Idioms and Colloquialisms: Characters from specific regions or backgrounds might use regional idioms or colloquial expressions. For example, a Texan character might say, "fixin' to" instead of "intending to."

Influences from Native Language: If your character speaks more than one language, consider how their native language influences their speech in another language. They might occasionally switch to their native language for emphasis or use idiomatic expressions from that language.

Accents and Pronunciation: If your character has a distinct accent, consider how this affects their pronunciation of words. You can subtly convey accents through dialogue without overdoing it, using phonetic spelling sparingly.

Tone Tags: Incorporating tone tags (e.g., nervously, confidently, sarcastically) can convey the character's emotions and attitudes during a conversation. These tags help readers understand the subtext of the dialogue.

Imagine a character named Maria, who hails from Mexico. She might use Spanish phrases when speaking English to emphasize her cultural background. Her speech could be peppered with warmth and expressions of hospitality, reflecting her upbringing.

Dialogue Tags and Character Expressions

Dialogue tags and character expressions are invaluable tools for conveying the nuances of character voices. They add layers to your characters' speech, giving readers insight into their emotions, intentions, and personalities.

While "said" is often your best friend because it's unobtrusive, don't hesitate to mix in other tags to convey mood and tone. For instance, instead of always using "said," consider alternatives like "whispered," "shouted," "murmured," or "replied." Choose tags that align with the character's demeanor and the context of the conversation.

Character expressions and actions:

Non-Verbal Communication

Beyond dialogue tags, describe how characters express themselves physically while speaking. Actions, gestures, and facial expressions can reveal a lot about a character's emotional state or their intentions. If a character nervously tugs at their collar while speaking, it conveys anxiety. If another character smirks while delivering a line, it hints at their amusement or mischief.

Using tone tags:

Incorporate tone tags like "nervously," "confidently," "sarcastically," or "gently" to clarify the character's tone of voice. These adverbs provide crucial context to the dialogue, helping readers understand the character's emotional state.

Social Influence

Remember that a character's social background can significantly influence their speech. For instance, a character from a wealthy background might use more formal language and have a refined way of speaking. They might avoid slang or contractions. In contrast, a character from a less privileged background might use colloquialisms, contractions, and have a more relaxed speech style.

Balancing character expressions and tags can breathe life into your dialogues, making them engaging and memorable for readers. Use them strategically to punctuate and emphasize key moments in your characters' conversations.

Balancing Consistency and Evolution

As you craft your characters' dialogue, it's crucial to strike a balance between consistency and evolution. Characters should maintain their unique voices throughout the story, but they can also grow and change. 

Consistency is key to character integrity. Readers should be able to recognize a character's voice from the beginning to the end of your story.

To achieve this create a character profile that includes detailed notes on their speech patterns, vocabulary, and idiosyncrasies. Refer back to your character profile whenever writing dialogue to ensure you stay true to their voice.

However, characters, like real people, can evolve and change over time. Events, experiences, and personal growth can influence how they speak. To reflect this evolution gradually introduce changes in their speech as they undergo character development. You can also use dialogue to convey their changing perspectives, priorities, or emotions.

For example, a shy character might start using more assertive language as they gain confidence throughout the story. Their evolution should feel natural and in line with their character arc.

By maintaining consistency while allowing for evolution, you can create dynamic and believable character voices that resonate with your readers.

Dialogue Exercises and Practice

First things first, get to know your characters like you're catching up with an old friend. Dive into their quirks, fears, what makes them tick, and what ticks them off. Once you've got a handle on that, it's time to let them speak their minds. Ever heard of character monologues? It's like giving your characters a stage to shine. Let them ramble, vent, or reminisce—it's like therapy for both you and your character.

Now, let's talk duets. Imagine pairing up two characters from different walks of life for a conversation. It's like a linguistic showdown, and you're the ringmaster. See how they bounce off each other, and you'll bring out their unique voices like a pro.

Last but not least, voice journals. Think of it as a diary for your characters. Let them jot down their innermost thoughts and feelings. It's like having a backstage pass to their minds.

Remember, mastering character dialogue is a journey, not a sprint. Your characters will evolve, and so will your knack for making their voices stand out.

Avoiding Stereotypes and Clichés

When creating character voices it's important to avoid those clichéd, overused character stereotypes. We've all seen them: the tough-as-nails detective with a whiskey habit, or the ditzy cheerleader who cares more about lipstick than world affairs.

As writers, our mission is to create characters that feel fresh, real, and relatable. So, let's steer clear of the tired old tropes and explore the vast spectrum of humanity.

Instead of falling into the trap of predictable character traits, dig deeper. Ask yourself: What makes your character tick? What are their quirks and passions? Sure, your character might be a brilliant scientist, but what sets them apart from every other lab coat-wearing genius out there?

Diversity is your friend here. Embrace the rich tapestry of human experiences and backgrounds. Give your characters unique voices that reflect their individuality, and you'll create characters that resonate with readers on a whole new level.

I hope this blog on Crafting Character Voices will help you in your writing journey. Be sure to comment any tips of your own to help your fellow authors prosper, and follow my blog for new blog updates every Monday and Thursday.  

Looking For More Writing Tips And Tricks? 

Are you an author looking for writing tips and tricks to better your manuscript? Or do you want to learn about how to get a literary agent, get published and properly market your book? Consider checking out the rest of Haya’s book blog where I post writing and publishing tips for authors every Monday and Thursday! And don’t forget to head over to my TikTok and Instagram profiles @hayatheauthor to learn more about my WIP and writing journey! 

[dream-a-little-bigger-x]

I Think He Knows | Spencer Reid

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Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Summary: JJ invites her best friend, a linguistics professor, to help out on a couple of cases. When she and Spencer work together, something sparks between them.

Warnings: Your usual Criminal Minds murders and gore, inappropriate thoughts and conversations about coworkers, making out, plot holes (read author's note),

Author's note: I know Season 4, Episode 12 is without JJ, but let's pretend JJ is there anyway and Jordan has never been there, okay? Okay. Thank yew.

Words: 4.3K

“I think he knows.” 

JJ’s brows furrowed as she looked at her best friend, back pressed against the shut door of her office. It took her one look at the wide-eyed, worry-filled girl to know just what the hell she was even talking about. 

Everything had started when JJ introduced her to the team. 

JJ and y/n had been childhood best friends and kept in contact, even when both of them moved away from Pennsylvania. While JJ moved to Washington DC to join the FBI, y/n was making her career as a linguistics professor in New York City. So, when they needed a linguistic expert, y/n was the first one JJ called for her expertise. 

“Thank you so much for coming,” JJ said as she embraced her oldest friend. 

A smile resided on her face. “Of course, Jayj. Anything for you.”

“Come, meet the team!” 

JJ grabbed y/n’s hand and dragged her towards the bullpen. Everyone seemed to be gathered around one particular desk, hunched over a case file. 

“Guys, I want you to meet y/n, she’s gonna help us with linguistics,” JJ said, capturing everyone’s attention. “y/n/n, these are Derek Morgan, Emily Prentiss, Aaron Hotchner, David Rossi, Penelope Garcia and Spencer Reid.” She introduced them, pointing at each member of the team as their name was called. 

Y/N simply offered all of them an awkward wave, suddenly self-conscious about the attention she was getting. “Luckily, I’m good with names,” she chuckled, which made the others laugh too. 

The eight of them filed into the briefing room where JJ explained the case to everyone. Luckily – if you could use that word in this field – it was a local case, meaning y/n could stay with JJ for the time being. The two women were actually quite excited about that. 

This one seemed to be a pretty open-and-shut case. An abduction of a politician's daughter with a ransom note that led the team straight to the Unsub. Spencer and y/n worked on the note together, both of them quickly noticing some outstanding quirks of the guy’s personality. 

“First and foremost, I can tell you that the guy you’re looking for is actually a guy,” y/n started explaining to the team when they had regrouped. “He uses a lot of articles, prepositions and big words. So, we are looking in the right direction.” 

Spencer nodded his head in agreement. “He’s also very precise in his choice of words, so he’s most likely an introvert. He tells us exactly where to be and at what time, something an extrovert wouldn’t do.” 

“He’s also using ‘I’ and ‘mine’, which further proves the introverted side of this UnSub. Normally, higher rates of ‘I’ words correspond with feelings of insecurity, threat and defensiveness. Closer inspection of his ‘I’ use in context tends to confirm this,” y/n continued, seamlessly flowing with Spencer in their debrief. 

“Not only that, but the number of words such as ‘except’, ‘but’, and ‘however’ changed. These are all ways to encourage dialogue or thinking and indicate higher cognitive processes. They also signify a willingness to tell the truth,” said Spencer. 

The two of them glanced at each other and offered a smile before turning to the rest of the team, who were looking at them as though they had just witnessed a talking dog. 

“It’s like they’re copy-pasted,” Emily muttered. 

Y/N felt her cheeks heat up and when she looked over at her partner-in-solving-linguistics-psyche, his cheeks had a dust of rouge. Before either of them could add anything else, Hotch nodded his head before scraping his chair back. 

“We’re ready to give a profile. Let’s head down to the Metropolitan Police Department,” he ordered and everyone quickly followed. Even y/n. With the research she and Spencer had done, they were their best options to go over the profile with the detectives. 

It felt great to be doing such important work, especially when her analysis helped catch the guy in the end. Even better when JJ had asked her to come back on another case, needing her language expertise again. 

Every time, she and Spencer worked closely together to try and analyze any sort of text that had been brought up during the case. Whether it was newspaper ads, ransom notes or blog posts. Nothing was too hard for the duo. 

The fifth time they asked her, it was a bit more of a difficult case. 

When she had walked into the BAU that morning of the fifth case, her breath had hitched in her throat. She couldn’t deny that she found the young doctor very attractive, but there was something about him that morning with his hair slicked back and the patterned button-down and his perpetually crooked tie. 

“Morning,” Spencer greeted with a beautiful smile that had her knees buckle. 

She grimaced, trying to keep herself composed, but it was proving to be a lot more difficult that day. “Good morning,” she greeted back. Her brain decided she needed him to feel the same way she did. “You look good this morning, Doc.” 

When the resident genius blushed furiously, she knew she had succeeded. He awkwardly coughed whilst his lips quirked up into a shy smile. “Th-thank you, y/n. So–so do you.” 

“Thanks.” Her eyes stayed glued on his, something unspoken passing between the two when the rest of the team entered the bullpen. 

JJ, being y/n’s best friend, immediately caught onto what was happening between the two. But, with the task at hand, she decided not to say anything. Yet.

Though y/n knew that she knew.

JJ always knew. 

For this case, the team flew to Sarasota in Florida and y/n was allowed to come along. Once everyone was briefed about the case, they all piled onto the jet where y/n took her trusty spot next to JJ. While she was reading over the case file again, she couldn’t help but sneak glances at Spencer, who was sitting on the other side of the plane. 

Sometimes, their gazes would meet and they’d turn away quickly, like two teenagers who were crushing on one another. 

“Okay, what’s going on between you two?” JJ asked softly, not wanting the coworker in question to hear her. 

Y/N furrowed her brows, barely taking her eyes off the file, even though they involuntarily flitted back towards the youngest on the team. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jayj.” 

“You and Spence. You can’t lie to me, y/n/n. You’re acting the exact same way  you did when you had that crush on Landon during our senior year.” 

A soft gasp left y/n’s mouth. “I forgot about Landon,” she whispered, giggling at the memory of her constant gushing over the boy. It took her a good four months of swooning over him before he finally asked her out. 

JJ’s eyebrows rose in question, impatiently so. 

“Okay, I’m not gonna lie that I find him attractive,” y/n admitted, but it wasn’t enough for her best friend. “Fine,” she grumbled, then sighed, admitting defeat. “I–” but before she got go off on a tirade, Penelope appeared on the laptop screen, wanting to let them know what she had found. 

“This is not over,” JJ warned as the team descended the jet afterwards. 

The Sarasota Police Department had a suspect in custody, but not enough evidence to keep him for more than forty-eight hours, so they were on a clock. The team worked tirelessly, trying to piece together the evidence. While the others went to the crime scenes, the suspect’s house or the ME, Garcia had found a blog post on the guy’s computer, which Spencer and y/n were now decoding together.

“Look,” y/n said, pointing to a paragraph on the printed copy of the blog post. “He switches between the words ‘soda’ and ‘pop’.” 

His shoulder brushed against hers as he leaned over to look at the paper she was pointing at. The feeling of his body being so close to hers caused her to heat up from the inside out. Her bodily reaction told her she wanted more of him. She wanted him to be this close at all times. 

“This is not just one person,” he mumbled, then pointed to another paragraph. “Not one person ever uses dashes and ellipses in the same text, right?” 

Y/N nodded. “Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “Ellipses and dashes are not interchangeable, but the misuse of either and both is common. A dash is a highlighter. An ellipsis takes the place of missing words. Not one person ever uses both in texts.” 

“Hey, lovebirds,” Morgan’s voice interrupted them, even startling y/n a little. 

She had been too wrapped up in her own world, she hadn’t even noticed Morgan and Rossi walking in with the Sheriff by their side. 

“You found anything?” asked Rossi, unable to hide the smirk underneath his mustache. 

Spencer nodded his head before taking a step back from y/n. “Garcia’s been digging through William’s computer. She found an encrypted link to a web page.” 

“Where’d it take you?” Derek questioned. 

Y/N put the lid back on her red Sharpie before sticking it in her ponytail, wedging it between the hairband and the crown of her head. “An unsearchable, untraceable blog with tons of journal entries. It’s like some sort of diary.” 

“You find anything incriminating?” Rossi asked. 

“We were able to differentiate between two distinct voices. Two authors,” Spencer started explaining and y/n couldn’t but gawk at him, intrigued by what he was saying even though she already knew. “We found various idiosyncratic words, phrases, punctuation and orthography within the blog entries, consistent with each separate person.”

“Words like “soda” and “pop”,” y/n added. 

Nodding, Spencer added with a smile, “One guy uses dashes while the other uses ellipses.” The giggle at the end of his sentence made y/n’s stomach flutter. 

Spencer being so interested in the English language had to have been the cutest thing she had ever seen. It made her heart skip a beat and her spine tingle all the way to her toes. “That was hot,” she muttered, her eyes widening upon realizing the words didn’t stay in her mind. 

Luckily, Spencer had already returned to the board and Rossi was too busy talking to the Sheriff to have heard it. The only person, much to y/n’s dismay, that did hear it, was Derek Morgan. With that devilish smirk of his plastered on his face he was looking down at her. 

She coughed and turned back to the rest of the team. “One side of the discourse made reference to the “devil’s strip”,” she explained before Derek could start his relentless teasing. 

“What the hell’s that?” asked the Sheriff. 

At that moment, Spencer turned around again, not realizing y/n had moved and nearly bumped into her. Instead of stepping back, though, he remained in his spot with his chest pressed against her back. It sent yet another shiver down her spine, which required y/n to breathe in deep before she lost control and jumped his bones then and there. 

“It’s a small patch of grass that separates the sidewalk from the street. Now, that term is only used in central Ohio. William lived in Atlanta for twenty years, but he grew up in Columbus,” Spencer explained. 

In agreement, y/n hummed. “The other guy uses words like “turnpike” and “filling the gas tank”, both specific regionalisms for Florida,” she continued just as one of the deputies passed by with William in handcuffs. 

Derek looked back at the suspect before turning to the linguistics duo. “Kid, you sure about this?” he asked Spencer, which merely earned him a slight tilt of the head and a deadpanned glare that said ‘seriously?’.

Of course Spencer and y/n were sure about this and Derek knew better than to doubt that. 

While Morgan and Rossi went to question William about what they found, Spencer and y/n continued working on the blog. After a good hour, y/n decided to go and get them both some coffee, needing the pick-me-up to keep herself going. 

“Here,” she muttered, handing the cup to him. “With three spoonfuls of sugar.” She then pouted, “They didn’t have almond milk.” 

Spencer chuckled before reaching in his satchel and handing her a carton of almond milk. Surprised, y/n added a cloud of the milk into her coffee, ignoring how her heart was soaring. 

She smiled a thankful smile and took a sip of the hot beverage as the two of them turned back to the splayed out blog posts on the board in front of them.

“Wait,” he then mumbled with his brows furrowed. “Where’s the–” he stopped in his tracks when his eyes fell on the item he was looking for. 

Gazing up at him, y/n’s heart quickened when he reached for her head and fished the red Sharpie out of her hair. “Right, sorry,” she whispered, nearly swooning at the soft smile on his face. 

She watched as Spencer started adding lines and annotating a paragraph of the blog post. As she followed what he was doing, her brain started to form theories and analytics. “Faith should never be broken,” she read aloud, then wiggled her nose in thought. “The longer they got away with it, the stronger their relationship,” she pointed out. 

Within the next few hours, Derek came to check on the two of them, wanting to know if they had gotten any further into finding out who William’s partner was. Then, later, the whole team had gathered again to brief one another on their findings. 

“Connie Mayers described an Anger Excitation Rapist, just like William,” Emily told them. 

“So, we’re looking at two dominant personalities?” asked Derek. 

 Y/N nodded her head as the words registered in her brain. “That makes sense,” she said. “They have a similar discourse.” Spencer nodded his head as well, agreeingly. 

“They’re equally well-written,” he added. 

“That’s a big deal?” the Sheriff wanted to know. 

Spencer’s eyes skidded from the Sheriff to y/n and back as he said, “It’s rare in criminal partnerships.” 

“If their personalities are the same, their lives probably mirror one another’s as well,” Emily clarified. 

As the Sheriff spoke, y/n went to sit on the desk in front of Spencer, needing to give her feet a rest. “Harris goes to church, on the board of the PTA, coaches his daughter’s soccer team, rarely drinks.” 

“Sounds like a saint,” JJ commented with a roll of her eyes. 

“With a dark side,” Hotch offered. “It’s what he connected to in the partner.” He then nodded to Emily. “Prentiss and I will go talk to the family, see if they know who it might be.” Hotch and Emily exited the precinct, leaving the rest of the team to their own projects. 

Derek sighed as he moved closer towards the board. “Two alpha males won’t be easy to break,” he pointed out. 

“The partner is definitely following the investigation,” JJ added with a determined nod. 

“Let’s do the talking for them,” Rossi suggested. 

“You want me to put this out in the public?” asked the blonde. 

Rossi held up the bundle of papers that contained the blog posts. “We’ve got something better.” 

“Why would he read it?” the Sheriff wanted to know. “He knows William won’t be writing.” 

“These men are addicted to each other,” Derek argued. “Right now, he needs a fix, and the words they’ve shared are all he has to cling to.” 

Y/N climbed off the desk again as an idea popped into her head. “His partner wrote “Faith should never be broken”. A betrayal could devastate him.” 

“All we have to say is that William’s cooperating, and then hope he takes the bait,” Derek said. 

Nodding their heads in agreement, Spencer and y/n gathered in front of the laptop. “You should do the typing,” he said. “You’re probably our best shot at tricking him.” 

With a smile, y/n took a seat. “Why, thank you, gentleman,” she cooed, earning those flustered rosy cheeks from him. Together, the two of them came up with a pretty convincing blog post that would get the UnSub to reach out. 

“What do we got so far?” Derek asked. 

“We were surprised that you injected yourself into the investigation. You risked a lot in order to help William.” Y/N and Spencer read it aloud at the same time, their voices mixing together smoothly like a perfect harmony in a song. 

Deciding not to comment on how blatantly obvious the two had been, Derek turned back to the task at hand. “And killing Missy tells us how close you really are.” Y/N quickly typed it up into the computer. “It must be devastating to learn that William is here with us.” 

“He’s not gonna like that, it sounds like William is cooperating,” Spencer mumbled as he placed one hand on the desk, the other on the back of y/n’s chair to lean in closer to read the words on screen. 

Y/N’s breath hitched in her throat as she felt his breath fan against her cheek. “Well,” she coughed to try and keep her composure. “That’s exactly what we want him to believe, so he’ll doubt their alliance.” 

Once the blog post was sent, all the team could do was wait for the partner’s response. While they did that, Morgan, Spencer and y/n continued working to try and find something else, just in case their first plan fell through. 

It took them a while. A lot of back and forth between Morgan and William, a lot of trying to decipher the blog posts. But in the end, the entire team managed to find William’s partner and save Andrea from her neighbor’s claws. Once they had both of them arrested, the BAU could finally breathe again. 

Spencer and y/n were cleaning up the mess they had made with analyzing the blog entries. The both of them kept to themselves in silence, trying to calm their overheated brains. Out of the five cases she assisted on, this one had to have been the hardest. 

As y/n absentmindedly reached for a pile of paper, Spencer did the same, causing their hands to bump. “Oh,” y/n giggled, a chuckle rolling off Spencer's lips as well. “Sorry,” they both apologized before he retracted his hand, allowing her to grab the pile. 

“I, uh, I enjoyed working with you – a-again,” he stammered nervously. 

A smile curved her lips. “As did I with you, Spence.” 

The smile he gave her made her knees buckle. Anything this man did would make her weak. She had all these feelings bubbling up inside her the second she merely looked at him and it was driving her absolutely nuts. 

But there was nothing she could do about it. After this case, she’d be going back to New York City without even knowing when she’d be seeing the Behavioral Analysis Unit again. For all she knew, she was never going to see Dr. Spencer Reid again. 

“Penelope?” y/n knocked on the tech’s door when she was back at Quantico. There was a file she needed to grab to complete her after-action report Hotch made her write. She was part of the team for that case after all. 

“Come in, girly pop!” Penelope exclaimed as she opened the door, her ever-chirpy attitude beaming off the walls as soon as she appeared in front of her. “I’ve got the file right here…” she trailed off whilst walking over to her desk to retrieve said file. When y/n reached for the manila folder, the blonde held it just out of reach. 

“Pen–”

“First, you gotta tell me what’s going on between you and Reid,” she almost sounded threatening. As soon as y/n opened her mouth to lie, Penelope cut her off. “And don’t lie to me!” 

She could feel her heart overflowing, needing to spill her deepest, darkest thoughts she had been locking inside. With a sigh, y/n plopped down on Garcia’s chair. Sensing the upcoming spilling-of-beans, Penelope perked herself on the corner of her desk. 

“He’s got my heart… skipping down sixteenth Avenue,” she started, earning a gasp from the blonde. “H-he’s got that…” she moaned out a sound that had to resemble how she was feeling, “I mean… I just wanna see what’s under all that intelligence, you know?” 

“Y/N! You dirty dog!” Penelope giggled, hitting the girl in front of her with the manila folder. 

Y/N couldn’t help but laugh too, but then sighed. “But there’s nothing going to happen there. I’ll be off to New York later tonight and then who knows when I’ll see all of you again. It’s better that nothing happened.” She shrugged and got up from the chair, grabbing the file from Penelope’s hands. 

As Penelope protested, y/n turned around towards the door, only halting with widening eyes when she saw who was standing in the doorway. Her mind raised, trying to think of what he could’ve heard and debating whether or not he had heard it. Before she could embarrass herself even more, she quickly bid her goodbyes and sneaked past him, rushing towards JJ’s office. 

She hid inside, shutting the door behind her before leaning her back against it. Her eyes were still widened as they landed on JJ in a panic. “I think he knows,” she told her best friend. 

“What do you mean?” JJ asked, chuckling, dropping the file she was working on. 

Y/N took a seat in one of the chairs in front of JJ’s desk. “I was talking to Penelope about how–” she sighed. “About how I wanted to see what was under that intelligence…” 

“Y/N!” JJ scolded, though her lips curled up in a bemused smirk. 

“Worst of all is, when I got up to leave, he was standing in the doorway…” 

JJ’s jaw dropped. “Do you think he heard?” 

“I don’t know! I was too embarrassed to stay and ask, I just left!” Her voice came out squeaky from embarrassment alone. She didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She was hoping her best friend would know what to do. 

“I think you should go talk to him,” JJ suggested the one thing she didn’t want to do. 

Shaking her head, y/n protested. “Nuh-uh, Jayj, I’m leaving for New York tonight. Who knows if I’ll ever see him again!” 

“I do,” JJ told her. “You’re my best friend, I might hope you come and visit me often,” she joked and y/n did laugh, but it was a half-hearted one. The dilemma seemed to be eating her alive. “Go talk to him.” The order was so sweet, yet stern enough that y/n obeyed and exited the office. 

In the breakroom, she found the one she was looking for. He was making himself a cup of tea to keep him awake enough to finish his report. As he blew on the hot beverage, he glanced over the mug towards y/n, shooting a bolt of lightning through her heart with the intensity of his gaze. 

“Hi,” she greeted awkwardly. 

Spencer offered her a smile. “Hi.” 

“You, uh…” Her brain almost short-circuited, not knowing what to say. “You wanna get out of here? Go for a walk to clear our heads before continuing on our reports?” She needed the fresh air. Maybe that would clear the fog that clouded her judgment. 

“Sure,” he agreed and set his mug down before following after her. 

As soon as they stepped outside, Spencer turned to y/n. “I heard you, by the way–” Her eyes shut tight. “I-I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, I just needed to ask Penelope about something and then I heard you and–” 

“It’s fine, Spence. I-I shouldn’t have–” She cut herself short, noticing the look on Spencer’s face. His eyes sparkled in the dim streetlight, his smile almost lyrical. “What?” 

He shook his head with a giggle. “I’ve had a crush on you ever since we were going back-and-forth about that first ransom note.” 

Y/N’s heart was nearly beating out of her chest at his confession. This had to be a dream. 

“And when I noticed how flustered you were when Emily insisted we were copy-pasted, I was a goner. It sounds so weird, but I’ve never met someone who met my level of intelligence.”

“Barely,” y/n scoffed, but Spencer either ignored her quip or he didn’t hear it. 

“I love how your eyes light up whenever you deduct how someone’s been using ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ or when the intent of the sentence dawns on you. I love how you stick your pens in your ponytail when you don’t have your hands free and how you wiggle your nose when you’re thinking. I love how you know my coffee order and how you’d get upset when no one has almond milk for yours.” 

She was absolutely soaring. Her heart was skipping, her eyes nearly tearing up at the sweetest of words rolling off his lips.

Before he could add anything that would send her into hysterical sobbing, she leaned in and kissed his lips sweetly. It was a quick kiss, more like a peck. Just to gauge his reaction. When his hands came up to cup her face, a soft smile landed on her lips before he kissed it away. 

This time around, it was deep and passionate; like he had been waiting to do this for the past five weeks, the same way she had been waiting to do this. She reeled at the feeling of his warm tongue slipping past her tingling lips. 

All of it reminded her of being seventeen again, no one understanding what she was feeling. 

But he understood. 

He knew. 

Everything taglist: @calamitykaty @littlemissaddict @n0wornever @wanniiieeee @unnowhatthisistbh

Criminal Minds Taglist: 

@boimlers-gonna-boim @samsbirks @tinaasthings @dysphoricsanity @love4lando @elenamoncada-ibarra @r-3dlips @magstheslayer @astess 

[phantoms-world-and-more]

I've seen many posts where Jason dates Jazz and realizes there's something wrong with Danny, but what if it's the other way around?

Danny has been ghosting for a while longer, so he knows better how to hide the effects, Jazz who only recently realized he's liminal doesn't do so well.

Then Jason arrives, he met this cute and nice guy who is totally sarcastic but also always willing to help him with a problem, then he meets his sister, who has something strange about her, sometimes her smiles are too big or her shadow moves unnaturally, makes bad love decisions and wants to be a psychologist, cue Jason thinking that Jazz is the second coming of Harley Quinn but more Eldritch

This is amazing!!!

This is kind of an old one because i was away for a while, but thanks for the ask

.

.

.

Jason had made a new friend (boyfriend if he's lucky)

They met when red hood was on patrol and was going to stop a SA in progress when this lanky bruce adoptee to be stepped in and handed the scumbag his ass on a silver platter

After the kid took care of the girl, called the police and sent them on their way he stayed, turned to where he was perched, smiled and said

"What? Couldn't just do nothing."

Turned and left, leaving jason dumbfounded that this kid could see him, beating up an unexperienced scumbag was one thing finding a highly trained vigilante was something else, looks like this kid is interesting.

.

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Turns out the kids name is danny and he is awesome!

He's 19, just moved to gothem from some no where town and was studying aerospace engineering, linguistics and chemistry in gothem university.

His mother was a blackbelt and tought him how to put the fear of God in people 6 ways to sunday, he also has a sister whos an arkam asylum phyciatritrist intern

Danny is cool, knowes how to take a joke and can dish it right back out, was goofy and playful compared to the usual seriousness of of the bats, AND HE WAS SASSY

The colourful way he broke down the batfams characters had him cry laughing

When he met Danny in red hood persona he was mostly the same, though jason nearly had a heart attack when danny called him jason in red hood gear, but dannys cool and easy to talk to, they spent the rest of patrol together

Batman showed up wondering why red hood wasn't responding and red hood thought he had to defend danny from the interrogation that was to come...NOPE

The first words out of danny's mouth was

"I've never met a furrie in person, is it difficult to breath wearing the suit"

By the end of the 'conversation' Red hood couldn't move he was laughing so hard oh he couldn't wait to meet his fanily

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.

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Nevermind somethings wrong with jazz

When he met her nothing was wrong per'se but...

she seems nice but her smiles are too wide, too pointy, she moves too stiff and theres something just...off

She made the pit squirm in...not fear or discomfort, more like, she made the pit more agitated, annoyed, angry...thats...never happened before

Then he found out she was having love problems...the last guy she dated ended up in a cutl and was trying to get her to join, and the way she talk about phycology was too...disconnected

Somethings wrong with her

About 2 hours later jason came speeding into the batcave screaming about the next generation of Harley Quin

[zepskies]

Hey loved your Sam having a crush on Dean's gf! I was wondering if I could request the flipped version where Dean has a crush on Sam's gf 😏😏

Oh my God, hun! 🫢

The way I didn't even contemplate this!! But it's so delicious...

(And thank you for reading that Dean imagine! It was angsty, but oh so fun. 😘)

See this imagine for context: You are Dean's one exception.

Word Count: 1,300

Imagine: Dean gives you an impossible choice.

Dean hates this. He hates it more than anything.

He hates the look of you, all soft curves and smiles that brighten your eyes. Your hair looks even softer.

(He wants to tangle his fingers in it, tight, until your voice echoes in his ear.)

He hates that you bake cookies on Saturdays. (He also hates that you're learning how to make pies, just because he mentioned off-handedly that you should try. If your snickerdoodles are this good, he can only imagine what you could do with some cherry filling.)

He hates that you greet him, every morning, without fail, with a hand on his shoulder and asking how he's slept. (Even better if you'd joined me, he thinks.)

And then his mind gets truly creative, imagining all the ways he could make you lose sleep. All the ways his hands and tongue could get creative, tracing the contours of your body.

He hates all of that too.

But what he hates most of all?

That you're Sammy's girl.

Sam's known you longer, since college. The two of you reconnected after the second apocalypse diverted. Or was it the third one? Dean's lost count at this point.

So you're smart. Sam studied Latin, but you studied Greek and Spanish, and even symbology. You consider yourself a linguist -- a fact that had Dean grinning from the moment he met you...

But as many times as he made you blush and smile with his charm and a well-placed joke, it was Sam who hooked you with one of his dimpled smiles and asking you for help on a case.

You'd agreed, for him. The two of you bonded over your nerddom, with heads bowed over ancient texts and shared personal history, and Dean tried not to feel like an outsider.

And yet, even when you fell for his brother. Even when you moved into the bunker, taking up his counter space with your ridiculous baking appliances. Even when you doted and touched and kissed and promised Sam more with your eyes, Dean couldn't shake the feeling that he'd missed his chance.

So Dean backed off. He made excuses not to be around you and Sam when it got too much for him. Had to ignore the way his stomach churned (and maybe his heart clenched too).

...Until his chance comes. He sees it.

He's also a bit drunk.

"Aw, Dean. You okay?" you ask, picking up a large, empty bottle of whiskey by his hand, which still holds a fifth of a glass.

"Oh, I'm good," he replies, raising his brows with a smile. "I'm real good."

You snort with a laugh. He smirks at the sound; he would never admit it, but a small part inside him always swells with warmth when he makes you laugh.

You bring him a glass of water with just a few cubes of ice. You know he doesn't like it packed to the top. "Drink this."

"What's the magic word?" Dean teases, even as you take the glass tumbler out of his hand.

You then sit next to him at the kitchen table and offer him a wry smile, resting your chin in your hand while your elbow rests on the table. "Please, will you hydrate yourself?"

"Already did," Dean remarks.

"Dean," you say, more seriously gesturing to the water. "Please."

He hesitates. But seeing your face, he finally rolls his eyes and dutifully sips at the tall glass of water.

You reach out for his shoulder. His inebriated gaze is drawn to your hand, the smooth skin of your arm, and back to your face that shows soft concern.

"You don't drink like this unless something's on your mind," you say.

Dean falters. When did you get to know him so well?

"What, a man can't drink alone anymore?" he says wryly.

"He can, but he's gonna have to spill his guts sooner or later," you smirk. Dean grimaces at the image. Suddenly the Jameson sloshing around in his gut doesn't feel all that nice. But the longer he looks at you, the worse he feels.

"Trust me, you don't wanna know," he says. He gestures, with the hand that holds his glass, up at his head. "'S not for newcomers."

"Yeah, but I'm not a newcomer, am I?" you quip.

Dean can't help it. He stares at your face. Your damn perfect face. Perfect for him.

His heart clenches with the pain of guilt. With thoughts he shouldn't have. How he'd rather slit his own wrists than hurt his little brother. Not like this, for fuck's sake.

But Dean's got a problem. It's eating him down to the bone.

He wants you. He really wants you. More than he's wanted anything in so long...

"You really wanna know?" Dean asks. His voice is both a rumble and a coarse whisper. His green-eyed gaze falls to your lips.

For your part, you suck in a subtle breath. Your eyes widen, and your body's frozen, suspended in time.

You stare back at Dean's handsome face, overgrown with stubble, like he’s forgotten to shave. And you finally know what he's been hiding for the past few months. Why he sometimes ducks out when it's supposed to be the three of you, hanging out, watching a movie, sharing a pizza, being friends and family all at once.

You sometimes thought Dean had something against you, no matter how many times Sam has said, "That's not it." With one of those pensive looks on his face.

Like he knows something you don't, and just doesn't want to speak it into existence.

But then, Sam would distract you with his hand stroking your cheek. A kiss to your lips, sweet, but with urgency. You like that about Sam. You even love that about him -- how he can be both kind and considerate, but passionate in his affections.

But now, you stare at the eldest Winchester's face. You don't even know what you're thinking.

Dean sees you fidget, and has a feeling that you’re blushing.

He leans in, slowly. He’s mere inches away from finding out how sweet you really are.

He hears your shallow breath. His eyes flick up to yours, briefly capturing you again. You smell whiskey on him, but it doesn't completely drown out his cologne. His Deanness.

You can feel your face heating up further, down to your neck. What the fuck is happening right now?

"Tell me no," Dean says. Tell me to stop, or I swear to God...

"Dean, what..." you whisper. But that's not a no.

Still, he can't. He just can't do it. Not to Sam.

Dean just reaches out with a hand to soothe a gentle thumb across your cheek. He realizes then that he loves you. He loves you enough to let you go, if he has to.

"It comes down to this," Dean says. His voice is deep, full of grit and desire. You can see it in his eyes. He sees the conflict in yours.

He swallows. His heart is pounding against his ribcage, but he uses every ounce of self-restraint he has left, forcing his hand to fall away from your cheek.

"You've got two choices, sweetheart," he says. And he pulls away, leaving you there at the table.

Dean doesn't know it, but your heart is about to burst just like his. What the hell! How could he do that? Why...

But you realize then, holding a hand to your wildly beating, guilt-ridden, confused heart.

You never told him no.

AN: I love Sam, don't get me wrong. But because I'm unequivocally a Dean girl, I had to leave it a bit ambiguous. 😏

Read the Sequel!

Here's the requested sequel to this, in which you have to make a choice (contains both Sam and Dean endings):

Imagine: Choosing him.

Dean Winchester Imagines

Dean Winchester Masterlist

Main Masterlist

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[sonicasura]

Transformers: Analog Horror Style

I've been talking about this on a non fandom related Discord and decided to bring it here. There are various analog horrors that utilize non horror series such as Splatoon 3 or Jurassic Park. It felt only right to add something like Transformers to the mix.

Extraterrestrial mechanical beings who can disguise themselves as various machinery, grainy footage and videotapes that only hold clues??? Perfect material for a horror. Here's some ideas that came to mind.

Decepticons

Nowhere is safe and one wrong move can potentially be your last. The Internet is a stalking ground so post or search with caution. Lest you wind up on Soundwave's radar. This Decepticon will be happy to light up his targets for one reason: an insidious hunt for the spy master's cassettes to enjoy.

Ever seen a beautiful sports car parked by the side with a sleek blood red paint job? DO NOT TOUCH. Unless you want to meet the same fate as all the others who run afoul with Knockout.

A terror in the skies that signals disaster wherever he appears. Pray the lone jet doesn't reveal it's true form. Don't look and hope he hadn't spotted you if a glimpse occurs. Survivors of Starscream are miniscule.

Results are all that matter. Morals? Worthless. Lives? Another opportunity to experiment. Emotions? Not needed. Shockwave only serves for the cause with lethal efficiency.

It is useless to hide. This will only excite him. Run as it chips away at his boredom. Fight and he'll be merry to slaughter the lamb caught in his gaze. All Hail Megatron as humanity is nothing but a plaything.

The only way this information can get through is by the way of analog. Find these tapes at your own risk. There is no turning back the moment the video starts. Decepticons don't lose their prey easily.

Autobots

It's nearly impossible to tell if they have good intentions unlike their more violent counterparts. The Internet is a double edged sword that needs to be regarded with caution. Autobots are at a greater disadvantage than you think. What little information about them is scarce.

Communication and knowledge is minimal. Some can speak but how comprehensible they are varies. The most understandable share only broken sentences that rarely blur into inhuman language. A few offer a 'soup' of linguistics which share little to no connection. Some play by the ear but don't understand what every word means. The remainder are mute, either speaking in their language or have no voice box to respond through.

Most don't understand how humans function. A situation that has led to people being slaughtered by Decepticons, accidental harm to the innocent, or danger by their fellow man who believe they gone insane. This has led to a decision from their leader, Optimus Prime.

Human help is REQUIRED. They need a liaison if the Autobots hope to even catch up to the Decepticons. Government related officials won't do as these humans are too volatile and always under Soundwave's surveillance.

What they need is a teacher. Someone who can offer such knowledge and not marked as a person of interest to their enemies. A bystander will do.

Pay attention to the car that appears outside your driveway. Look closer at the one following behind on the road. Did another join each car? Flee foolishly and they will give chase.

If the lights behind you disappear, DON'T RELAX. The Peterbilt is coming. Avoid him as he will trap you. Stop and the chance of escape dwindles. Turning off the engine was a bad mistake. DO NOT RUN. Optimus Prime will catch you and escape is impossible.

Welcome to the war. You can't escape until one side wins. The Autobots are guardians but also prison wards to their chosen liaison. You will be protected yet caution is still advised. Welcome to this new dangerous life.

That's it for now! Until next time folks, I'll see you later. Transform and Roll Out!

[silverflqmes]

໒⦂ 𝐒𝐓𝐔𝐏𝐈𝐃 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒.

synopsis. in which you go from utterly despising what you’ve dubbed as your ‘rival’, with every fiber of your being, to loving his stupid ass self.

academic rivals to lovers ( alhaitham’s version )

for @reiqings <3

tw. mildly suggestive, mentions / consumption of alcohol.

alhaitham x gn!reader.

“look at him, sitting all smug with that stupid little book of his.” you grumbled to your best friend, layla, taking a bite out of your pita pocket. “i bet he’s reading smut, i can just feel it.”

“smut?” the female repeated, nestling her head in her arms. “alhaitham-san is super serious about his reading and reputation.. doubt he’s reading that.. sort of content..” she trailed off into a snore and you nearly face palmed. there goes your friend again.

unlike him, sadly layla didn’t share the same major as you, as she was into astrology, rather than languages and writing. so it was only around lunch hour that you could hang out.. although it was more like nap time for her while you sat in silence.

with a huff, not wanting to be shown up, you finished the last of your meal before grabbing the book you’d been reading as of late. if alhaitham could read without it being for an assignment, so could you!

except he didn’t care.

his eyes barely lifted from his novel as he flipped to another page, deeply immersed in the story.. which in turn, frustrated you each time you peeked at him.

what could you do? there had to be something.

and like a metaphoric light bulb flashing, an idea came to mind.

opening your school bag, you reached for your linguistics notebook, recalling the newly assigned homework.

silly alhaitham was busying himself with his dumb little book, blissfully unaware of the homework you had just received. only a good noodle would make it the day it’s assigned — and that.. would be you!

as you buried your nose in your text book and notes, writing the necessary notes for the homework, you failed to notice groan of the chair few tables away.

until the culprit was standing across from you, overshadowing your work with their stature. it didn’t take any guesses to know who it was, but you were a petty shit.

“can i help you, dear alumni?” you asked without lifting your head, words like knives covered in honey. if you had your way, they’d be covered in bees, too. “your breasts are blocking the natural sunlight.”

“are they now? i hadn’t noticed.” the person in question answered, his tone low, yet there was a hint of amusement. “does that mean you were eyeing them each time you glared over at me?” he inquired, and you scoffed.

“me? eyeing your rack? that is preposterous. i would never do something so absurd. you flatter yourself too much, alhaitham-san.” who was he to think so smugly of himself? like you would be staring at that terrifyingly gorgeous physique of his.

but the silver haired male wasn’t buying it, not one bit. “hm, perhaps i do when flattery is in order. maybe next time you should try being more stealthy if you wish to stare.” he advised, turning on his heel with a faint smirk on his lips, knowing precisely how to rile you up.

and it worked like a charm, as your jaw nearly dropped. “flattery is NOT in order and never in a million lifetimes would i be caught red handed staring there of all places!” you blurted, slamming your books shut before dashing past him to your next class.

alhaitham only rolled his eyes, knowing damn well you would tire your legs before even reaching half way. like the turtle and the rabbit, he would come in like the wise turtle to beat the naive little rabbit.

from the lunch table, layla stirred at the sound of the bell, looking around tiredly before blinking. “y/n-chan?”

and alhaitham was correct, once again, for you did tire yourself before even reaching the doorway to your next class.

he passed you wordlessly, an innocent smile on his lips as he took his seat, watching as you dragged yourself into the seat next to him — the only one that remained. how touching.

“not a word.” you hissed to him, fixing your hair up as best as you could before taking out your materials.

the male ignored your comment, shrugging with indifference as he took out his own things.. along with that book of his. just what in the world was he reading that was so much more important than today’s lesson??

as your eyes darted to the book, you noticed it was unguarded while alhaitham reached into his bad for pencils. an opportunity.

with a wicked grin, you reached out for the book, nearly snatching it from alhaitham’s desk.. had it not been for the hand that encased your wrist. foiled again.

“i believe you should ask before taking one’s belongings, wouldn’t you agree, y/n-san?” the dendro user spoke, his words like a chill breeze. it made you shiver as you looked up at him before trailing your eyes to his hand. yeah, yours was going nowhere.

“quick, think of an excuse!” you warned yourself, clearing your throat as you did so. “you think so illy of me, alhaitham-san. i wouldn’t dare take that abstruse book of yours.” you huffed out, snatching your wrist back. “i was waving a fly away like a good classmate of yours! i should have known my actions would always go by unappreciated with you.” you pouted further, turning away from the gray haired swordsman, who only rolled his eyes, as he knew.

“sure, we’ll go with that.” he retorted in his usual monotone, missing the irritation on your visage as he refocused his gaze on the lecturer.

the twin tailed female below averted her gaze from the bickering pair, clearing her throat. “perfect, now that we’re all listening, allow me to commence today’s lecture with returning your test papers to you.” the teacher — faruzan spoke, smiling while half the students groaned. “i will be going over the all the answers, so should there be any mistakes in my corrections, do approach me after i finish.” the anemo user finished, grabbing the stack of sheets off her desk before handing each out.

as she reached where you and alhaitham sat, she sent your a proud grin. “amazing job on last week’s test, y/n-chan! your story was lovely to read!” the professor praised as you took your sheet from her hands, blinking in surprise. a perfect score!

curious, you looked over at alhaitham’s paper, wanting to shove your grade in his face.. only to find he had also gotten a perfect score.. with a bonus point.

you nearly wanted to smack yourself.

“you’re staring again, y/n-san.” the taller mocked, a smug look on his annoyingly attractive face. who made brains and good looks legal, and why did it have to be him?!

you puffed your cheeks out, tearing your eyes away from his paper. “i’m not staring, you’re imagining it with how inflated your ego must be!” you retaliated, folding your arms over your chest as you sank back into your seat.

stupid alhaitham and his stupid games. it’s like he wanted you to taste the bitterness of defeat while he soaked in the sweetness of victory. what an ass.

his only response to your outburst was a hum, and if that didn’t throw you over the edge, you weren’t sure what did.

“him being right, probably.” you answered in your head before muttering a curse under your breath.

just who does he think he is?

“alhaitham-kun, w-would you go out with me??” a female squeaked, holding out an envelope to the haravatat student as she bowed her head.

a confession a second after the bell rang.

you nearly gagged at the sight, wondering to yourself who in their right mind would want to date the likes of him. he was despicable! annoying, and egotistic! there was absolutely nothing attractive about him other than those horrifyingly gorgeous features of his.

and yet.. there was this strange bitterness you felt, as your gaze lingered on the pair longer. you weren’t sure why, but there was this nervous feeling of what he might answer with.

“sorry, but i’ll have to decline. i have my eyes set elsewhere, hope you can understand.” he responded curtly, rising from his seat beside you as he passed the girl to take the stairs.

the poor maiden barely got a word in after his answer as she watched his retreating figure disappear through the doorway, letter still in hand. “he.. didn’t even take it..” she muttered to herself, frozen in place. all eyes were on her, including your own.

somehow you felt this sense of relief, hearing alhaitham say no. and yet.. you couldn’t help but feel for the scholar as you placed a hand on her shoulder. whether to comfort or wake her from her trance, you weren’t sure. but the female lowered her hands, keeping her head down as she descended the stairs before taking off at the doorway.

it stirred something in you other than that strange relief but rightful pity. fear, was it? you weren’t sure why.

though something else boggled your mind impossibly more.. that being alhaitham’s response to her confession.

i have my eyes set elsewhere.

and just where on teyvat was that?

“your rival sounds awful, y/n! breaking the poor heart of a girl..” the blond across from you sighed out, draining his glass of wine. “reminds me of someone i know..”

you nodded vigorously, lowering your glass in front of you. “see what i mean, kaveh gets me! i can’t stand being around that man,” you hissed out, wiping your maroon stained lips. “he’s always reading his dumb book half the time — i don’t get how he scores higher than i do?!” you groaned out, clenching the column of your glass. “it makes no sense!”

“perhaps if i meet this fellow, i can rob him clean of his tcg deck as revenge.” the albino haired male across from you spoke, twirling a card between his middle and index fingers, which drew a low exhale from the male beside him.

“tcg isn’t to be used as gambling material, cyno.”

the male question sunk back in his seat, grumbling. “who put the sigh in cy-no.”

silence.

“moving on..” you cleared your throat before looking down at your watch. “when is this roommate of yours is supposed to arrive, kaveh? he’s awfully late and we’re already on our second glasses..”

“wow, i didn’t picture you as the alcoholic type. perhaps that’s why you stare so often where you’re not supposed to.”

it couldn’t be.

almost instantaneously, you whipped your head around to look up at the newly arrived figure, widening your eyes. “a-alhaitham?!” you blurted before turning to the blond beside you. “you live with him?!”

kaveh sank back in shame, draping a hand over his forehead. “unfortunately.” he muttered back, sending you a glance after a short pause. “you know him?”

“i wish i didn’t.” you grumbled back when alhaitham sat between you both without warning. it irked you greatly as you looked up at him, brows furrowed together. “do. you. mind?! i was in the middle of a conversation!”

alhaitham only glanced down at you, raising a brow. “did you say something?” he asked, lowering his hand from his ear.

“can he not hear?!” you asked yourself, nearly shattering the glass between your hands. “forget i even asked, you’d probably just annoy me more than you have already today!” you fired back, turning away from your classmate.

already?

that piqued kaveh’s interest as he shared a knowing glance with cyno and tighnari before smiling innocently at you. “say, y/n.. you never did tell us who that guy was.”

the color drained from your face almost instantly as that guy.. was right next to you.

“maybe you could de-scribe him to us?” the spantamad major added and his fennec eared friend groaned.

“can we do without the puns for once..”

a wicked snicker. “well that’s no pun.”

“you guys!” kaveh hissed out before turning to you once more. “so who is it, y/n? you can tell us.” he encouraged, grinning brightly.. for someone who held a similar distaste for the male in question.

it left you in a panic, not wanting alhaitham to know you had been blabbering about him in particular. you’d never hear the end of it if he found out!

“i-i need a drink!” you babbled, nearly jumping out of your seat as you rushed over to the tavern bar, face flushed, and not just from your last two glasses of wine.

when the bartender approached, your ordered another glass of wine and water, smiling awkwardly. you probably sounded like a complete mess as your words jumbled out from your nerves. why was alhaitham making you feel so on edge — so.. flustered. was that the word?

“having too much to drink is no good, you know.” speak of the devil.

startled by his presence, you nearly slapped the boy as you tensed beside him. why was he there??

“sneaking up on people is pretty weird, you know.” you retorted, huffing quietly. “this is the third time today.”

alhaitham hummed in amusement. “and you counted each time?”

“i hope kaveh destroys that book of yours..”

“jealous of the attention i give it over you?” he asked and you nearly choked on your breath.

you? jealous of a book? as if!

“and why would i be jealous of an inanimate object, least of all one belonging to yourself.” you countered, scoffing at his words. “that’s completely ridiculously, even more so when it’s coming out of your mouth.”

“then what was that look on your face, earlier today.” he inquired, side eying you. “when that girl confessed.”

look?

you hesitated for a moment, thrown off by the sudden question, but you didn’t back down. “disgust, perhaps. a normal person would be appalled to see someone confess to you of all people. it’s idiotic when you’re more likely to be committed to a library than a significant other.”

the silver haired male hummed again, which annoyed you, but he wasn’t finished. “funny, it looked like envy to me.” he mused, finally turning to face you. “and repose when you heard me reject her.”

archons, his eyes were so striking — so alluring. was this why he never looked you dead on? or paid you any mind, other than some side glances?

it made the beat of your heart quicken with fear, maybe even excitement. wait.. what were you saying? this was alhaitham — your class rival! he was just trying to throw you off your game!

and yet.. why was he suddenly so close to you? so entrancing? was it the alcohol? no.. the alcohol was bringing it out more — the truth, that which you’d been hiding.

“am i making you nervous? or was i correct with my conclusions?” he asked after a period of silence and you gulped. how long had you spaced out for?! speak!

“a-and why should i tell you anything?” you finally voiced, a puny comeback. “thought you had your eyes set elsewhere.” you elaborated, mustering up whatever confidence remained in you.

alhaitham leaned in closer, a prideful smile on his lips. “correct, i’m looking right at them.”

you blinked once and then twice.

there wasn’t anywhere else or anyone else he was looking at.. except for you.

“that..” you stumbled, feeling your face warm up up. “that can’t be right — you’re joking, you have to be.. did kaveh send you over purposefully? i swear to-mmph!”

and just like that, your disbelief was silenced with a surprisingly soft pair of lips as you felt a hand cup your cheek.

“still think i’m joking?”

notes. this was longer than i expected and oml istg it went everywhere.. ANYWAY here you go rei i hope you liked it BAHAHAHA half of this was me clowning around with an old idea i drafted soooooo yeah.. but i hope i did the boobman justice and fulfilled your request<3

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