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impulsivefanwriter · 3 years

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A Tiny Spark Leads to a Roaring Flame (But Flames Can Always be Doused by Water)

Heeyyyyy so y’all know the Reverse Thanos Snap AU for SPBNR? Basically everyone but Smith/S!Kai gets sent to the M!verse. Everyone. The entire population of S!verse Ninjago City & a few surrounding areas. Except poor Smith. Essentially it happens because S!Garmadon tries to send Smith to a place where he can't mess with his plans, and ends up sending everyone away from Smith to take him out of the equation.

The second part to this AU is that the S!Ninja end up searching for Kai in the chaos and grab the Red Ninja before jetting out of there with the Bounty. Except... they didn’t grab Smith (who’s still home), but rather Red (M!Kai).

Red thinks the S!Ninja are babysitter clones created by Garmadon after he somehow turned Lloyd younger without his memories & is trying to raise him to be his new General #1. With this in mind, he pretends to be S!Kai, and waits for the moment he can rescue Lloyd.

What would happen in the S!Ninja discovered his deception/their mistake of grabbing a wrong Kai and mistake Red for a recreated Aki (aka Bizarro Evil Clone Kai) before he could enact his plan?

Well, this is that idea. (Title inspired by how a crack AU spiralled into a beautiful angst-fest)

Enjoy. :3

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Red was going to get Lloyd out of here tonight.

Away from these Not-Friends made by Garmadon to emulate the Ninjaforce. Away from this flying ship built to emulate Master Wu's ship, so familiar and yet so off. Away from this false reality and back to the real everything where they could hopefully get his memories back and his age back and everything back to the way it was before the city descended into chaos.

He just had to... bide his time. Be patient.

FSM, he was bad at being patient.

His hands itched to grab Lloyd and run now, but he was horribly outnumbered and without his mech. No matter how badly he wanted to, he couldn't rush this. If he did, he would make everything worse. Like he always did.

But fate- or rather, Lloyd- had other plans.

The little version of his younger brother- yes, they were roughly the same age normally, shut up, Lloyd was still his younger brother- had been... eying him weird all morning. Not like Not-Jay and Not-Cole and Not-Zane, but like Not-Nya. Like he actually knew instead of suspected. These babysitter clones seemed to think he was the Not-Kai, and if that was the opportunity the universe was going to give him, then by the flames of the departed world was he going to skip this chance to save Lloyd.

Currently he stood on the deck of the ship as they parked in the sky a few meters above the docks on the outskirts of the city. It wasn't the docks with the Bounty warehouse, curse his luck, but it wasn't the endless sky or the empty ocean (though it was still too close to that murky, haunting water for his liking. Water was his sister's domain for a reason). At least he could sneak Lloyd off in the cover of night, maybe find someone in the city who wouldn't recognize the Son of Garmadon this way and would be willing to help them hide until they could make it back to the real ninja.

"Kai," Not-Zane spoke suddenly next to him.

Red would never get used to the way his voice... lacked the same effect the real Zane's had. The effect that Kai and the rest of his team had assured their friend over and over was unique, special, but in a good way. To embrace it. That it wasn't noticeable, but when it was, that it was so Zane that his friends didn't care that it was different.

This 'Zane' sounded much too different than his own. He hadn't recognized Kai's tested line of 'road work ahead' when they passed one of the many construction signs littering the city (even more so since the chaos happened a week ago), and instead had responded with 'a great deal of work to fix in the city'.

Seriously, Garmadon, do better research on your clones.

Not-Zane was also much too... calm. Too 'wise' compared to the wild teen that was Zane. And he walked without heelies or whatever Zane used to slide around like a boss, though he was still silent. And that meant, like now, he snuck up on Red fairly often- and Red was training to be a Ninja, so that took serious talent.

"Kai," Not-Zane said again, and Red finally broke his gaze from where he'd been staring over the railing, planning tonight's escape route. "Lunch has been made for over an hour. Are you alright?"

Red forced his brightest smile. "Course I'm alright! Just trying to figure out what happened, as usual."

Why Lloyd was suddenly like, 8, and without his memories. Why the Not-Friends were on this Not-Ship and had mistaken him for Not-Kai. Why the city was in a state of disarray and chaos.

Not-Zane studied him, then turned to give the city a sad look. "I'm not sure myself. My scanners can't seem to figure out what is happening. It is as if... blocked by some force."

Red winced, then expertly disguised the move by leaning against the rail. Zane never would use 'my scanners', despite how often Red and the others assured him it was okay. Yet another reason why this wasn't his friend.

"You know Ninjago City," Red said with a weak laugh. "Always one crisis or another. Always those annoying Garmadon Attacks"

This seemed to satisfy Not-Zane, who nodded thoughtfully. "This event definitely seems to have Garmadon's hand in the mess."

He patted Red on the back. "Well, don't worry yourself ragged, Kai. Come in for lunch soon, alright? We have training for Lloyd later."

Ah, right. Training. AKA what Red assumed was how Garmadon was planning to shape this impressionable version of his friend into his new General #1.

"I'm ready for training now, Zane!"

Speaking of Lloyd-

The little gremlin came up from the hull with the rest of the Not-Ninja. Red hated when the entire group was together; it was way more difficult to act as Not-Kai around them, especially around Not-Nya.

For starters, Not-Jay had a notch in his eyebrow that the real Jay never had. He was missing the iconic freckles, and the scarf, and the fluffy hair, though you could always say it was just a wardrobe change. What you couldn't change was the personality differences. This couldn’t be Jay. Jay was anxious and quiet, his jokes (while plentiful) said more timidly and his newest ideas shared with hesitance that only shrank after years of encouragement. He would never be this loud, ever.

Not-Cole was the leader, probably because Lloyd was so young. But even then, in Red's team, Nya would probably take second-command. Cole was their sturdy support, yes, but he was chill, laid-back. Ready to follow and support his friends to the ends of the earth with his tunes and occasional sarcastic wit, but not lead. Not like Not-Cole, who was more serious and commanding and didn't. listen. to. music. Red hadn't spotted a single record or boombox in the room in the hull. That was a tragic oversight on Garmadon's part. The members of his research team should be Fired.

And then there was Not-Nya. Who wore a dress with confidence that his sister would love but never publicly wear. Who had short hair- Nya had tried that style once, and decided it itched around her neck too much- and jewelry, and a giant flying Samurai mech suit. His sister had the Water Strider Mech, and Not-Nya had a flying combat suit. Sure. Close enough. Personality-wise they were similar.

Similar at first glance. Nya was fluid and adaptable to whatever role she needed filling. She was spunky, and as fiery as him when it came to tempers, though she knew how to keep hers in check (she had to, right? No one called her hot-headed and impulsive and reckless and blamed her temper for mistakes or damage or whatever the news comments liked to say about the Fire Mech). Not-Nya was also adaptable and independent-minded, but she seemed more rigid. More doing her own thing.

Point was, everyone wasn't actually his friends, despite how much they tried to prove they were. And they kept acting like he was this Not-Kai, who was just as hot-headed but apparently more mature and training-oriented and basically the better, cooler (or hotter, perhaps, for the fire theme of the red ninja) him, since his acting never seemed to fully convince them. Trying to impersonate a standard he couldn't seem to reach, some legendary hero he wasn't- er, wasn't yet! Yeah! He just needed to prove himself, be better, and he'd be fine. Just... fine. Yeah.

Mini-Lloyd (Red was tempted to call him L'ilyod in his head, but that felt wrong somehow, like he was infringing on some kind of copyright law) stared at him like a goddamn falcon, and he wasn't talking about the bird that circled the ship. He had this bowl-cut Red would tease him about endlessly after all this was over- seriously, how had Mr. Fabulous Hair started with this mess? Garmadon probably didn't even have hair, so there was no way the guy knew how to style it, and it was very evident based on Mini-Lloyd's hairdo.

Red noticed that all of them were staring, actually. Despite his relaxed rest against the rails, his fingers behind his back clutched the cool bar with a dull shake. He didn't notice how the metal seemed to glow red under his touch.

"Training, right, we should get onto that," Red tried. "What do you want to start with, Lloyd?"

"How about a little game?" Lloyd asked with complete innocence. "What we were playing last week before we got interrupted."

Oh sh!t.

"I-I don't know, shouldn't we start with stretches? Or how about some sparring, that's always more fun than a game!"

"But I wanted to continue our game..." Mini Lloyd said, and FSM's sake, he couldn't deal with that pouting look.

Okay. Okay, don't panic. Think logically. What kind of game would an 8-year-old Lloyd like to play with him? Something physical, so no board games- he liked to test his mettle against Zane on those, and sometimes he would almost not-lose. Logic puzzles also fell more on Jay's area. Trivia, especially music trivia, was a bubble between the anxious motormouth and Cole. Video games fell on team building, and wouldn't classify as a training warmup.

"Well," Red said, taking a hopeful stab in the dark. "There's not too much space on the deck for... tag..."

Lloyd nodded, looking satisfied. The Not-Ninja looked- well, their expressions were hard to read because of how different it was compared to his friends. But Red was a master of deception (well, fire, but eh, technicalities), and he had them fooled, and he just had to keep it up until nightfall so he could rescue Lloyd and explain in a safe location-

"HE'S NOT KAI!"

Orrrrr improvise. Okay, yep, he could improvise.

Red lunged forward and grabbed Mini Lloyd's wrist from where he had his hand extended in an accusatory point. He ducked under Not-Jay's attempts to grab him- fast, but not as fast as his Jay, his Jay who could disappear from an awkward social interaction in the span of a flickering lightbulb- and dragged his younger brother with him as he vaulted over the railing. Not-Zane almost managed to yank him back onto the Not-ship, but his icy grip caught only empty air as Red pulled Lloyd into a tight hold and ducked.

He hit the dock below with a stumble, rolling back onto his feet and taking off with a very stubborn green ninja in tow. It took all his strength to drag Lloyd (kicking and screaming like he was being kidnapped or something when Red was just trying to rescue him, for FSM's sake. Lloyd didn't know that, but he could still try to be at least a little more considerate.)

The wooden docks creaked and shuddered underfoot and Red grimaced; whoever rebuilt them after the latest Garmadon attack had shredded them like newspaper clearly hadn't wasted any unnecessary change. It certainly didn't help that Lloyd packed quite the punch for someone so small. Red definitely would come out of this with bruised shins and arms from where Mini Lloyd tried to push him away, but it would be worth it to keep his teammate, his younger brother, safe.

Then green filled his vision and broke his hold on Lloyd's wrist, sending him skidding across the dock planks as he was sent flying. When he finally rolled to a stop, neck and shoulder stinging from where the blast had caught him (no burns, just jitters like he'd been shocked), he had to take a few seconds to re-orient himself. Did the Not-Ship have cannons or something? What hit him from behind, so close it could have hit Lloyd?

Lloyd. Was Lloyd okay?

Red pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the bleeding scrapes on his hands and legs from where he'd gotten banged up by the splintered docks. His gaze, sharp and frantic, searched for signs of green. The warning of more blasts, the flash of the fabric of a gi, anything.

He spotted his brother in the arms of Not-Cole. No, no, no-

And suddenly Not-Nya was there, given a boost by Not-Jay. Her grip was as if she were wearing the robotic mech suit, harsh and powerful and near in-human. She threw Red back to the dock floor as her face twisted with the fury of a storming ocean. A resounding crack rang out over the harbour.

Red couldn't tell if it came from the planks under him or his own shoulder.

She pinned him to the wood, barking accusations and threats in his face faster than Not-Jay could talk. Red blinked through a haze of pain, trying to focus on her face and words. She was missing the beauty mark on her face, he noticed. Yet another tell she wasn't his sister.

"-scar on the wrong side-" And it was hard to hear again over the ringing in his ears. He tried to throw her off, get back to Lloyd, anything, but he was-

Useless.

Her hands suddenly got in his face, slamming his left cheek to the wood. She was close- close to his face, close to his eye, close to his scar- pushing and prying as she tried to do something. Red picked up in his struggling, his attempts to free himself turning to desperate shoves and wild clawing like a trapped animal. He wouldn't let this creation of Garmadon's finish the job that teen had started all those years ago.

"Or better yet, he needs to shut his damn mouth."

The flash of a knife. His vision half-blurry. Blood- so much blood- and a lasting scar.

"-contacts-" "-red-" "-struggling-" "-we know what he- it- is already-" "-not the real Kai-" "-wish-" "-Garmadon-"

He had to get away. Get Lloyd away from them now.

In one surge of strength- and yep, his shoulder definitely wasn't okay after that move, as if he'd ripped it not just from its socket but from its very attachment to his body- he knocked Not-Nya aside. If he could’ve seen through the red haze, he might have noticed red embers dancing around his fingertips as his desperation and fear tapped into something deep in his soul.

He tried to shoot to his feet, tried to run for Lloyd (held so tight in Not-Cole's grip, surely they were hurting him, he couldn't let that happen-). He roared, "LEAVE MY BROTHER ALONE!", but before he could take another step through Not-Jay and Not-Zane in his path, the docks gave one last ominous shudder before deciding it had finally had enough.

The planks crumbled underfoot like charred firewood in a crackling campfire, and Red was sent tumbling into the frigid ocean water below.

#spbnr #reverse Thanos snap au #reverse thanos snap #ninjago #lego ninjago #same People but not really #kai ninjago

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seraphdarlimg · 4 years

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wish I were (pt2)

harry acts like everything is good and dandy but reader sees Heather wearing the sweater

part 1 here

‘heather’ by conan gray WARNINGS - ANGST WORD COUNT - 1,892

A/N: hehe because it was december 3rd, I just had to get this chapter done to post even if it might be a little late but here ya go

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My guitar rested on my thigh as i brought my head down to lay on the fret, staring at the blank piece of lined paper in front of me. I sighed, turning my head away and just bathed in the silence of the separate room from the main studio. The weight on my chest might of suggested the frustration out of my creative block, unable to produce words or lyrics for the past weeks. Or that I was progressively losing the will to even pick up an instrument, as strumming the strings took a lot of energy for me to do.

The oversized hoodie I brought kept me warm, but i knew that wasn't satisfying enough. However the idea of wearing one of his hoodies I've place in a closed box in the corner of my apartment hurt too much and that now I'm back in the studio after weeks of trying to avoid coming here at all costs. After the New Year's party, I've done nothing but wallow up in my apartment alone, trying to come up with songs as quickly as possible just so I could get this project done and over with. That proved to be difficult however, especially with Harry trying to call on a normal basis.

"Helllooo bubs, why haven't you been showing up at the studio eh?" "You said at the beginning of this project that I could work at home whenever I want. I'm just taking you up on that offer." "Of course, you'd remember me sayin' that. How've you been love, haven't seen you in a while though." "Fine, just been doing my job." "Well yeah, can't write all these lovely songs without your talent, can I? You gonna come in tomorrow then?"

I hesitated for a second, biting my tongue when I felt my eyes pool up again. "I'll just send a pdf of lyrics to you Harry." "O-oh. Well that would conventionally work... yes but you have to come in tomorrow though." "Why? Just text me what you like and don't like about the verses and I'll fix them." "Bubs you know how I feel about in person collaboration. Plus the deadlines are coming up and it'll be easier and faster to have you in the studio." "Okay." He hesitates this time and I could see his brows furrowed together as well as having a hand on his hip. Most likely wearing lose sweats and the knitted cardigan he's been falling in love with over the months. His hair a bit longer than it was last time I saw him and his pink lips quirked to the side in thought. Maybe the bags under his eyes are gone, has been looking more happier lately. More happier than I could of made him to be over the months. "Are you okay?" "I have to go Harry, I'll see you tomorrow." "Oh see yo-"

He was the first one to greet me when I arrived, and I wanted nothing more than to burst out sobbing when I see his smile. It took everything not to do so, giving him a tight lip smile and quick side hug before sitting down farthest away from him. For the first hour and a half of discussion, I didn't say much and zoned off a lot, tuning in and out of the conversation Harry leaded about a song he had written recently. I felt his glances on me when I turned away, probably sensing my unwillingness to comment so he was considerate enough to not put me under the spotlight in the discussion. In the middle of it, Harry's phone started ringing and he didn't waste a second to excuse himself to answer it. "Hello? Oh hey darling, you almost here?" I froze when he grows a cheesy smile on his face as he walks further to the other side of the studio before telling us to continue without him. I took a deep breathe, not mentally prepared to be in the same room as her. Has she always been coming to the studio or did I just choose to worse day to finally come in? I try to focus doodling in my little notebook, but it grew harder and harder to focus on anything else but the way he crosses his arms and laughs while on the phone with her. From the corner of my eye, it was definite he's completely captivated just hearing her voice and I could just picture the angelic tone of it. I didn't realize I was tapping my pencil till I hear Sarah calling out my name, breaking me out of my thoughts. "Are you okay, haven't seen you in a while." I nodded, putting on a smile. "Yeah sorry, been getting a lot of work opportunities and just a bunch of family stuff that's exhausted me." Sarah gives me a look that resembles one of a mother who knows their child isn't telling the full truth, but she nods and pats my hand. "Completely understandable. But that's exciting, new artists been reaching out to you n' all that?" "Ha surprisingly, considering saying yes to all of them." my smile was growing genuine a little, thinking about how content I was with my career. Being a lyricist and songwriter was a definite risky path to take in terms of stability, but it made me happier knowing I was able to to do. "Oh of course, you can totally do it. Probably wanted to see what all the hype was about when Harry couldn't stop talking about you at every social gathering he's been at." Sarah chuckles, rolling her eyes playfully. "Yeah?" I quickly looked down, feeling my eyes water as the pang in my chest came back. "Mhmm, acts like Thomas and Mitch don't even exist." I laugh lightly at that, fiddling with my fingers as I focused down on my notebook. I found myself in an awkward situation, not knowing how to continue the conversation but knowing I didn't want to try. I love Sarah, but I was close to break down right there if I tried and it was not the place to do so. Not when everyone is trying to meet deadlines and Harry was about to walk in with Heather at any moment. "Hey, I actually have a lot of emails to respond to so I'm gonna be in the other room." I stood up, taking a guitar and my notebook. "Might actually be better for me to focus in." "Sure, we'll let Harry know." I gave her a grateful smile, walking out into the hallway to a different room. I let out another shaky breath, feeling overwhelmed once I was finally alone. But before I could close the door, I hear her. I peak out to see both her and Harry standing at the entrance of the building, huddled close together. "Sorry I forget it gets this cold in LA sometimes." She says, looking up at him while he rubs the sleeves of his sweater that was wrapped perfectly around her. It was a simple orange stripped sweater. A vintage that Harry bought in Vienna and became one of his favorites. It was just a simple polyester sweater, but it became my favorite too. So it was hard to give it back after wearing it that night we kissed, but fuck was it harder to see her wearing it. Now as I sit alone with no sense of motivation to do anything else but wallow in my own pity I thought about a lot of things. I should be angry, be fuming and cursing at Harry for how he's been acting. I should confront him, make him feel as hurt as he made me for choosing her. Or maybe I should hate Heather, despise her for taking the chance I had with him. But deep down I know I couldn't hate Heather. She's such an angel, it wasn't her fault he's still hung up on her. And as much as the image of his arm wrapped around her kills me, I couldn't hate him either for the same reason. She looked prettier in his sweater than I did. "You okay in here bubs?" As if the tears welling up in my eyes and heavy weight on my chest wasn't enough, the sound of knuckles against the door and his voice calling out my name made me almost sob. "Yeah, I'm good. Door's open." I quickly try to compose myself when he enters the room, giving me that warming smile of his. "Just wanted to check up on ya, been quiet since you got here." Harry looks at me with concerning eyes as he places a hand on my shoulder before crossing his arms and leaning against the wall in front of me. Keep your hand on my shoulder, the second it was there all the nerves went away. I wanted to say but instead I fake a smile again, waving it off and shrugging. "Oh no, just have a lot on my plate don't worry." He nods, feeling his eyes on me while I try to avoid his by opening my laptop and skimming through my inbox. "Sarah told me about different singers reaching out to you." He points at my laptop before taking a seat on the chair to the side. I nodded, humming while I typed out quick responses. "Yup, thanks by the way but now I gotta sort out a whole schedule for this year." I took a glance up to see him focused on my song journal on the table in front of us.

“So...you and Heather huh?” The sheepish smile he has tugs my heart strings but I tried to keep from fumbling with my fingers.

“Yeah uhh...” He scratches the back of his neck, keeping his eyes on his hands and looking like a young kid with a crush. “Started talking again and catching up, been working out stuff between us since the party.”

I tilt my head to the side, motioning him to continue. “She’s gorgeous...”

“She’s amazing.”

I finally looked away from him and onto my screen, letting out a little chuckle.

“So you guys are back together?”

“No no, we’re just sort of figuring things out at the moment.” Though it was an answer I was hoping for, the look in his face was none the less comforting.

“Well, hope everything goes great. You guys look perfect together.” I managed to say, going back to typing while he only responds with a nod and hum.

There was silence. Does he not feel it too? Uncomfortable silence was never a thing between us but it was prevalent here. "Not gonna leave early are you though?" He says out of no where and I stopped typing for a sec to give my attention to him. "Not going to ditch me for someone else of course." He says it with a laugh, playing it off like an obvious joke... but the way he looked at me. Part of me wanted to scream at how oblivious and selfish that statement sounded coming from him, as if he has no idea the drastic shift our relationship has taken. But I see the vulnerability in his eyes, sensing the subtext in his question that is practically asking me to stay. Stick by his side and help finish this passion project he's dedicated to put out, not only for his fans but for himself. Be with him to figure out what to do next, even if I would be in a different county or continent and working with someone else. Keep in touch throughout because I've become an important person in his life. Even if that person who used to fill that spot came back, he's still here and asking me to stay with him in a similar sense. It wasn't the kind of love I wanted, but never the less, it was still love from Harry. Did the smile I wear at that moment reach my eyes? When I placed my hand on top of his in reassurance, was the hesitance obvious? Maybe he did notice the little signs, but he took my hand in his anyways and placed it against his heart.

"Of course, 'm always gonna here Harry."

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part 3

A/N: guys my heart hurts writing this lol. There’s gonna be one or two more parts of this series, but thank you for reading! feedback is appreciated :)

#Harry Styles #harry styles angst #harry styles imagine #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles one shot #harry styles fluff #harry styles x reader #one direction #harry styles blurb #heather

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shima-draws · 4 years

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At last, here she is...best girl Olivia!

As usual, all of her info is under the cut c:

Olivia

Age: 18

Hair color: White (with pink/purple streaks)

Eye color: Green

Element: Fire

After a lot of debating I decided that Olivia is actually Jasper and Mouna’s daughter--if you don’t know them they’re two older OCs that I’ve had for a while! (I figured I might as well give her parents already existing within the ATS-verse anyway, and I planned on Jasper and Mouna getting together and having a child somewhere down the line so it fits.)

When she was born, Olivia was very weak, and most healers feared that she would not make it—similar to how weak and frail Jasper was when he was born. Because of this, Jasper and Mouna are both fiercely overprotective of her (Jasper more intensely) so she was sort of suffocated by their attention. She grew up within the Spinelrose Guild and was treated more delicately by the rest of the guild members, especially because of how slow her development was and how often she was ill as a child. She originally had a difficult time making friends because Jasper was so afraid she’d get into trouble and get hurt, and the other kids didn’t want to accidentally put her in danger. Olivia was pretty isolated from her peers as a kid, and that frustrated her, because she didn’t want to be treated differently from everybody else just because of her fragility. Unfortunately she was never really strong enough to make her point, and just ended up being coddled by the guild as a result.

As she developed into a teenager, Olivia eventually outgrew her sickly physique and started to become stronger, both mentally and physically. She started to speak up about her parents’ treatment of her more—she knows that they just want to keep her safe, but she feels smothered by their hovering tendencies. Mouna eventually realizes how important this is to her and starts to back off, realizing how strong her daughter has become. Jasper, however...it’s harder for him to let go lol because she’s his only child and he knows how difficult it was to grow up as the weak link, the one who got ostracized because of their general health and well-being. It doesn’t help that Olivia is very clumsy and gets into little accidents all the time, which just makes his stress skyrocket.

Even worse, Olivia is a fire elemental, which is considered to be one of the most dangerous simply because of how destructive it is without proper control. When Olivia was a kid Jasper forbade her from practicing any of her magic, too worried that she’d end up hurting herself. Of course, Olivia has a bit of a rebellious streak, so she tried it once by herself and inevitably ended up burning the side of her face with her magic. (By now the scar is almost faded, but you can still see it.) Both of her parents flipped their lids, and Olivia was so terrified that she decided to never use her magic again, viewing it as a curse. Mouna tries to tell her that her magic is a blessing, something that encompasses life, and that she just wasn’t ready to use it so freely without any training. But Olivia is insistent—scarred both in the literal and metaphorical sense, she refuses to use her magic, scared that she’s going to hurt herself again, or worse, somebody else.

As the years pass Olivia starts to feel more and more unsatisfied with her current life—she likes the guild, likes her friends and her family, but she feels as if there’s more she could be doing with her life. Since she’s refrained from using her magic all these years, and because of how much of a klutz she is normally, she’s not really a strong fighter, and is pretty useless on guild missions. Seeing the rest of her guildmates put their all into what they do, and being able to succeed in it, drives her to eventually seek escape and try to start off with a clean slate. When she turns 14, Olivia decides that she’s going to leave the guild and travel to someplace new in an attempt to be more independent and maybe find a purpose for herself.

Of course she realizes that if she tells her parents this they’ll probably refuse her, so she corners her uncle Terrence instead. Seeing her drive, Terrence decides he’s going to escort her to make sure she arrives safely. Olivia initially refuses because this is something she wants to do on her own, but Terrence warns her that the world is a dangerous place, and since she doesn’t know how to fight or use her magic the trip would be near suicidal if she went on her own. Terrence tells her the best option is going to stay with Spinelrose’s sister guild, Amethystus, and receive proper training in order to hone her magic and her fighting skills. That way she’d still have a direct line with Spinelrose in case something goes wrong, but she’d be far enough away to be independent.

Olivia prepares to sneak out in the middle of the night, but she gets caught by both Jasper and Mouna (because Terrence is a good uncle and he told them lmao). Fearing that they’re going to stop her, Olivia stands up for herself and makes it clear that this is something she needs to do. Much to her shock, Jasper and Mouna encourage her to follow her dreams and come home a new woman. It’s a very soft moment when they all hug each other goodbye, and there’s lots of tears :’) Olivia leaves home knowing that her parents are worried, but they’ll support her decisions because they love her.

After their crazy trip (where Olivia second guesses herself a million times and wonders if she can really survive out in a world this chaotic), they finally arrive at the Amethystus Guild! Olivia literally bumps into Ginni and from there, they form an instant close friendship. Ginni respects Olivia’s desire to be independent and is somewhat envious she made the decision to leave her guild in order to become stronger. Olivia admires Ginni’s confident personality and her fearlessness. Together they get into LOTS of trouble lol, mostly led by Ginni who is a notorious troublemaker within the guild, with Olivia just along for the ride.

During all this, Olivia meets the guild’s official blacksmith and, upon seeing the incredible things he can create by using fire magic, starts to rethink her opinions about her own “cursed” fire magic. The blacksmith, normally a very closed off, grumpy, and rude person, notices Olivia’s conflict about fire, and decides he’s going to train her in order to help her overcome her fear. Through a lot of practice and very intense sessions, Olivia is finally able to confront her trauma and move past it—leading to her discovery that she’s a talented natural at using elemental magic, finding that it comes very easy to her and is something she can control without thinking too much. This is a rare skill, for normally it takes an elemental years of practice and training to have perfect control over their magic. On top of that, her fire is very pretty and beautiful to look at, a reflection of her soul. Her master berates her from hiding something so beautiful and pure for so long lol

Olivia finds passion in blacksmithing, and trains under her master in order to create beautiful and powerful weapons. She does get burned a few more times during this, leading to some relapses, but her master tells her it’s part of the job and something that every elemental will come across: they aren’t always the perfect masters of their magic, and sometimes can hurt themselves without meaning to. But being able to understand what went wrong and how to fix it will make her stronger. Within a couple years Olivia flourishes and evolves into one of the guild’s most fiercest fighters, with an excellent handle on her abilities!

Olivia and Ginni grow up together in Amethystus, and are pretty much inseparable. When Ginni gets kidnapped by the Forces and is missing for several weeks, Olivia is beside herself with worry. After Ginni returns with Kaz in tow, Olivia is one of the first people to accept him and trust him fully, because she believes in Ginni more than anybody else. (Kaz develops a soft spot towards Olivia because of this, and is forever grateful for her support.) Over time Olivia starts to realize just how awful Kaz’s life at the Forces was, and grows very sympathetic towards his situation. She understands wanting to start over somewhere new with a clean slate, though Kaz’s circumstances are much worse than hers, because she still has a loving family and home to return to someday. Olivia becomes determined to make Amethystus a home like that for Kaz, as well as Hiro, who they discuss recruiting to their side from the Forces. As Kaz continues to reveal more of his past, as well as Hiro’s, Olivia and Ginni both get very gung ho about going to fetch Hiro LOL because they both want him to be safe (though Kaz assures them Hiro isn’t in any sort of danger, being the colonel, as well as too intelligent to put himself in trouble).

Kaz meets with Hiro, who was actually sent out on a mission to fetch him, and they negotiate Hiro acting as a double agent for Amethystus to spy on the Forces. Hiro had already been planning on leaving the Forces at some point, so he sees this as a perfect opportunity to get back at them for years of mistreatment. Over the course of the next several months, Hiro routinely reports back to Amethystus of the Forces’ plans, their current hideouts, and everything he knows about the higher ups. During all this he and Olivia meet, and at this point Olivia has started to refer to the colonel as ‘Hiro’ in her head, because it’s too confusing for her to call him the colonel, and she reasons that since Ginni gave Kaz his name she might as well give Hiro his. (Also because she believes that he’s a true ‘hero’ for enduring all of that suffering for so long, so it fits ;D) She calls him Hiro by sheer accident, but luckily he takes to the name well haha and they start to grow closer >:’) Hiro comments on how close Kaz and Ginni have become and the two start betting on when they’ll get together lol

Eventually Hiro’s position as a double agent is discovered by Mallary and so he finally breaks away from the Forces (and Mallary’s manipulation) and starts living permanently at the guild. Olivia’s pretty happy about this. She can’t explain why but she feels very safe and at ease around him, and she’s the person he’s the gentlest and softest around—unbeknownst to her, this is because he’s fallen in love with her, but she’s completely oblivious to his feelings. She’s pretty dense when it comes to romantic stuff like this whoops. Olivia finds Hiro’s intelligence incredible and likes that he’s such a skilled fighter despite not being that strong physically. Hiro likes watching her do her blacksmithing duties and always has expert things to say on her craftsmanship. They get along very well! Olivia’s never felt more at home than with Ginni, Kaz, and Hiro, and likes the tight knit little group they’ve formed. She becomes very fond and protective of them and, upon realizing how important they are to her and how much she’s changed because of them and because of her decision to join Amethystus, she decides to cut her hair as another sign of her growth as a person, and as a sign of change! She finally discovers what she wants to do: become a master blacksmith, and work alongside her friends to protect everything they can, including taking down the Forces to set free all of the people forced to work for them, and bring peace to the land.

When the time comes to finally take down the Forces, Olivia starts to develop feelings for Hiro as well, though it takes her a while to figure out because she’s never really been in love before, and mistakes a lot of her attraction for simple admiration. As Hiro continues to put his life on the line for their group and do anything he can to protect them, Olivia starts to discover that maybe she wouldn’t mind spending the rest of her life with him. There’s a point where Hiro gets injured so badly in battle he’s certainly going to bleed out, so he pleads for her to use her fire magic to cauterize his wound. Olivia’s trauma comes crashing back in and her worst fears are confirmed: her magic will end up hurting the people most important to her. Hiro tells her that by doing this, she’s going to save him, that her magic is life itself. Encouraged by his words, Olivia burns Hiro to save him, though it’s an extremely painful thing for her to do :’( But it’s at this moment she realizes that she definitely is in love with him, and would sacrifice anything for him.

Not long after that, Mallary attacks, enraged, and accuses Olivia of stealing everything important away from her. It’s a really emotional battle;; Mallary basically vents out about being the one left behind, the only one who couldn’t find a happy ending, and who had the only people she cared about taken. She says some really nasty things to Olivia about Hiro lol and this really makes Olivia mad, so they basically duke it out over Mallary’s twisted feelings for Kaz and her perceived ownership of Hiro. And Olivia’s just like. Bitch you don’t own him!! He’s not an object or a toy for you to play with!! Yeah. It’s nuts

After the grand battle with the Forces comes to an end and everything is resolved, Olivia decides to confess her feelings to Hiro, but it doesn’t...really go as planned. Hiro gently rejects her, but Olivia takes it the wrong way, still not realizing how head over heels for her he is. Shortly after this, Hiro and Kaz part ways with the guild, deciding to go on their own personal journeys of self discovery. During the year they’re gone, Olivia laments over her feelings for Hiro, miserable that she didn’t realize how she felt until it was too late, and miserable because she might never see him again. Eventually she tries to move on from that, but Ginni repeatedly tells her that Hiro is literally holding a torch for her lmao and that she shouldn’t let it go so quickly. Olivia protests constantly and strives to work harder to become a better blacksmith and stronger guild member, trying to put her feelings aside and ignore them.

Of course, when she and Ginni eventually reunite with Kaz and Hiro, Olivia realizes that shit I’m still in love with him and my feelings haven’t gone away, they’ve just grown stronger during the year we were apart;; luckily for her Hiro’s gone through a lot of self reflection and feels ready to be in a relationship with her, so, after a rocky road of awkward confessions and pouring out their feelings, they FINALLY get together.

The four of them go on a journey together! There’s some problems when Hiro runs into his childhood friend and first love, Lorelai, but in the end he shows he’s pretty damn dedicated to Olivia and it’s super soft. I just. I just love them so m u c h //shakes fists

AND THAT IS ALL FOLKS!! Most of it anyway lol

Extra personality traits:

-Very compassionate and caring about others—she’s a very motherly type. She’s able to get people to open up to her easily because of how friendly she is. She also settles disputes within the guild often, being the mediator between arguments

-A social butterfly. Probably the most social one out of the group, and the one most used to conversing with other people

-She’s got a lot of self-esteem issues because of her upbringing (and really, I promise Jasper is not a bad parent!! He’s just concerned), but she’s learned how to handle it better. She’s definitely way more confident than she was before!

-Tends to be very indecisive when it comes to big decisions, and is hesitant about fighting—though she will put her all into it if the stakes are high. She CAN whoop your ass

-Super passionate about blacksmithing! It’s her true calling, and something she throws herself into fully. She’s very artful with her work and makes gorgeous pieces, and tends to ramble on about the specifics even when nobody understands lol

-A bit oblivious and airheaded sometimes. She’s completely unaware of several of the guild members’ feelings for her, including Hiro’s.

-VERY affectionate. Because she was isolated from other kids as a child, she’s very touchy feely and loves expressing her affection through casual touches. And lots of hugs!

-Since she’s the sweetest and nicest person in the group, she is terrifying when she’s angry. She’s super protective of her friends and won’t hesitate to leap into action to keep them safe, often getting very fierce when she does so

-She hates being alone. Being raised in an atmosphere with so many people around, she isn’t used to being by herself, and her instant source of comfort is being near others

-Isn’t afraid to tease her friends or state her opinion when it really counts

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perditus-a · 2 years

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new muse : adaline beaulieu (info below along with verses)

name - adaline beaulieu age - 26 pronouns - she/her sexuality - lesbian languages - spanish / japanese / broken english ( a work in progress if you will ) ethnicity - spaniard disclaimer - yes her design belongs to me. it isn’t a faceclaim so please don’t steal thank you!

personality ;;

she’s just a little bit of an airhead and academics aren’t really her forte...but she has some incredible control and critical thinking skills. patience is one of her strong suits but mostly because of her interest in being a doctor when she’s older. depending on the verse this role does tend to change slightly, but it’s always some form of healer/support role. adaline is also incredibly empathetic and will go out of her way to try to understand a situation, but can become a little pushy and hard-headed because of this strong desire to help. sometimes she makes the situation about her by mistake, but usually catches herself early on. usually. outside of that, she’s a super sweet girl and really level-headed. she doesn’t get mad too often, but sometimes a little annoyed. she’s a bit nosy and sometimes a little hyperactive, but usually fairly mellow and calm. adaline prefers to try and stay as happy as long as possible and doesn’t like to cry or look sad around others. it’s one of the few things she’s super reserved about really! she’s been taught as a child that it isn’t polite to impose on others, so she goes out of her way to avoid doing so.

verses ;;

my hero academic - she’s a freelance sidekick that works for several agencies through limited contracts due to the more supportive nature of her quirk. originally she was born for her quirk, as her mother was severely ill and they knew that healing quirks were in their bloodline. they wanted a child that could extend her mother’s life...and it took them roughly ten tries before she was born as the 11th. however, her mother made a difficult choice and chose to send her child away to the school she wanted to rather than keep her locked away at home. so, adaline ended up in japan and attended u.a. for a few years before becoming a sidekick for a small hero agency. she eventually decided that being stuck in one place was a waste of her healing abilities, so she chose to become a freelancer and travel around instead. adaline can usually be found where natural disasters have occurred.

----> quirk - (POCKET HEALER) - adaline’s quirk allows her to shrink her body to roughly palm-sized, converting whatever mass ‘lost’ during the transformation in to a healing mist. she can manipulate the mist to roughly ten feet around up and down as well, but the more spread out the less efficient it is. it applies a regenerative healing type to those within the mist, but cannot restore things like lost limbs or remove illness/disease. at best she can slow the damage, but cannot reverse it. the more concentrated, the stronger it is however ! she can sense people in the mist but not distinguish between them. when not actively using her quirk, her tails gives off a very minor regenerative ‘sparkle’ dust that can heal small cuts. jujutsu kaisen (no tail/ears) - adaline is a grade three sorcerer as her innate technique and skills in general are suited for healing rather than anything offensive. she can convert her own cursed energy in to reversed cursed energy and expel it out of her body like a mist, allowing her to apply a regenerative healing boost to a 10 foot radius. the more spread out it is the weaker the regeneration ; in contrast the more concentrated the stronger/faster. all of her skills and talents are trained to support other sorcerer’s, so she doesn’t really do much field work unless she’s with others. she is however fairly fast and can perform basic, non-technique restricted attacks if needed. naruto (no tail/ears) - she’s a chunin medic-nin from konoha with training for field work, though a lot of her time is spent at the hospital instead. adaline originally failed her genin exam and opted to join the genin corps until she found an apprenticeship with a jounin-ranked medic-nin that allowed her to progress beyond genin. adaline was briefly assigned to a genin team to take the chunin exams. she has water affinity in regards to her chakra and knows a few low ranked water ninjutsu, but most of her skills are medic-centric.

#|| ✦ || MUSE: ADALINE BEAULIEU #|| ✦ || HEADCANONS #i love my girl so much she's a total sweetheart cries

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shroomcult · 3 years

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Hey folks!

Here’s my Day 1 post for Soma Week 2021. Tooth-rotting fluff towards the end - please enjoy. ^-^

@soulxmakaweek

Maka awoke with an audible groan, first registering the lack of her weapon’s familiar soul wavelength in the room before anything else. Whether she was disappointed or grateful of his absence was difficult to determine in her hazy mindstate.

Soul had been fussing over her for the past day, and while his concern for her comfort was endearing - his mother hen routine got old fast.

His over-attentive behavior was at least understandable. He had little to do cooped up in their hotel room, and ended up alternating between watching cooking shows at a considerately low volume, pacing around what little square footage they had, and laying in his bed beside hers tapping out the rhythm to whatever was blaring from his headphones. He was sure to pester her about how she was feeling at least every 20 minutes and his restlessness had been grinding on her last nerve before she fell into a fitful sleep.

If she had to hear “you okay?” or “need anything?” one more time, she was liable to snap and throw the closest object to her directly at his dumb, fluffy head. Not that he actually deserved it.

If she were being honest with herself, she was mostly frustrated with the situation itself - not Soul.

Well, maybe she was a little frustrated with Soul.

He may have been outwardly kind towards her in her predicament, but she could feel something else beneath the surface of that. She was well-versed in the subtle language of Soul’s facial expressions after all.

He was dying to tease her, and while she commended him for keeping his mouth blessedly shut about the humor in her suffering - she knew it amused him at least a little bit.

Because despite the fact that they had been sent to the bustling beach-side city of Recife, Brazil to take down a particularly cunning and repulsive kishin - she was not stuck in bed over any kind of work-related injury inflicted during their battle with the corrupted beast.

There was no glory or dignity that could be gained from the current state of her weakness. She had not received her injuries from a tense and thrilling battle, but instead from being negligent in her application of sunscreen before falling asleep splayed out on a beach towel under the unforgiving afternoon sun.

Soul had even recommended that she apply sunscreen a second time for her “hella pasty” skin and she responded to his comment in kind by throwing the sunscreen bottle at him with impressive accuracy and force.

Now she was bedridden with what was likely sun poisoning and had a complexion comparable to a hot dog.

Perhaps she should have taken Soul’s advice after all.

She also may have reached her last straw with Soul’s smothering behavior earlier and said something along the lines of “please get the hell out of here and give me at least an hour of peace,” before taking her rather unsatisfying nap.

That certainly explained his absence.

She let out a heavy sigh before deciding she would deal with the pain of moving so that she could re-apply aloe vera for the twentieth time that day. Only this was the first time she would be doing it without Soul’s assistance.

It was difficult to reach most areas of her back without him. She was certainly flexible enough to do it on her own, but the pain that came with stretching her arms was something she would prefer to avoid experiencing if possible.

She started on lathering her arms and chest area first, grounding herself in the way it stung yet soothed at the same time.

She only got through a small portion of her back before the combination of fatigue, nausea, and pain convinced her to give it a rest.

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to just figure out where Soul was. She didn’t need him or anything. She was just checking in - making sure he didn’t get himself into any trouble while she was asleep.

She made an awkward hobble across the room to retrieve her phone, careful to avoid bending her scorched appendages on the way there.

It only took a ring and a half for Soul to pick up her call, and she cursed herself for the way her entire body relaxed a little at the sound of his voice.

“Hey. Everything alright?”

He had that pleasant gravelly quality to his voice that usually indicated he either just woke up or he had a few drinks.

“I’m fine, Soul. I just woke up, actually. What have you been up to?” she’d tried to sound casual, but the hitch in her voice when she tried to lower herself back on to the bed betrayed her. The soft cotton sheets felt like they may as well have been a brillo pad against her sensitive flesh.

“Just givin’ you space like you asked. Found a neat little place to drink just down the road from us. To be honest with you, I think it might be a swinger bar or somethin’ - everyone here is middle aged and horny as hell.”

Maka felt a twinge of irritation at that last comment. Was he really off flirting with a bunch of Brazillian cougars while she was stuck in bed?

“S’not like I’m interested, but they keep buyin’ me drinks anyway. I don’t speak very good Portuguese and they seem to think that’s pretty sexy of me,” he added with a throaty chuckle that raised goosebumps across her skin.

“Why don’t you just stay there all night then! I could care less what you do!!”

She felt a bit childish for her outburst, but blamed it on Soul’s innate ability to push every last button she has in very few words.

“If you don’t care, then why’d ya call me in the first place?” She could just tell that his lip was curling into a smirk by his voice alone. Oh, he is so lucky he’s not in book-throwing distance.

“Just wanted to make sure you weren’t dead in a ditch somewhere,” she murmured with only a little bit of edge left in her.

“Oh yeah? That all?”

“.... Also, I guess you can come back to the hotel room.”

“Sorry? Can you speak up a little?”

“I said you can come back to the hotel room! Don’t make me say it again or you can sleep on the streets!”

He responded with an amused snort, “Oh, that’s very gracious of you. What a loving and benevolent meister I have.”

“Yeah, whatever. Don’t fall in a ditch on your way here.”

“Love ya too, Maka. Be there in a few.”

With that the phone call cut off, and she was left staring at the ceiling and feeling an overwhelming warmth in her face.

She decided to blame that on the sunburn rather than her weapon’s comment.

It only took about 20 minutes before she heard the click of the hotel door as it swung open, her partner poking his head in first and flashing her a shark-toothed smile before he kicked the door open the rest of the way. He was carrying an entire pack of drinks under his arm and a plastic CVS bag in the other.

“Stopped by CVS round the corner. Dunno if you’ll like ‘em, but I got these weird electrolyte drinks. S’posed to help hydrate you better or something,” he said as he plopped down at the end of the bed, emptying the contents of the plastic bag.

“Also got you some ibuprofen, more aloe, and a couple snack things. I know you said you weren’t hungry, but you should really try and eat at least a little bit.”

Maka only nodded, slightly overwhelmed by how caring he was being despite her recently sour attitude.

He tilted his head to the side for a moment, regarding her with gentle eyes before he got up and sat closer to her on the bed, being especially careful not to let his legs touch hers.

He slowly placed the back of his hand against her forehead muttering something about a fever, but she was too focused on his close proximity to her to even register what he was saying. He smelled of beer and limes and sunscreen.

His skin was a perfect bronze color, and he was showing off a lot more of it than he usually did. He was clad only in swim trunks, slider sandals, and a loose-hanging tank top that the top of his scar peeked out of.

He had been out in the sun just as long as she had, napping right beside her even, and yet his skin only tanned; never burned. The lucky bastard.

He used the same hand he’d checked her forehead with to brush back a few stray hairs from her face. “Sleep okay?” he asked in a hushed tone, as if he were worried his voice would bother her.

“I slept okay, I guess. Not much else I can do right now anyways.”

He nodded and gave a sympathetic click of his tongue, running his hand through her hair a few times before reaching for the aloe on the nightstand.

“Need me to get your back?”

She ignored his question, opting to rub the short-cropped silver whiskers covering his jaw with her palm.

“You need to shave.”

He rolled his eyes and let out an exasperated huff, squeezing the tube of aloe into his palms and rubbing them together.

“I’ll just take that as a yes and pretend you think I’m roguishly handsome.”

That earned him a laugh from her that clipped short when he placed his hands softly on her back. It only hurt for the first brief moment of contact, but she soon hummed her approval as the stinging sensation in her back felt dulled and soothed wherever his hands caressed her.

He was talented with his hands - knew just the right amount of pressure to give and take at each moment. She really had needed this. Trying to reach that spot between her shoulder blades on her own had been a nightmare.

Minutes passed with only the sounds of their breath and Soul’s practiced hands over her skin. It should have been awkward, but it wasn’t. Everything was just easy with him.

“Hey, Soul?”

He acknowledged her with a noncommittal grunt.

“Thank you. I know I haven’t exactly been pleasant lately, but I really do appreciate all of your help.”

She wanted to say more, it felt as though she hadn’t really expressed to him how much he means to her, but Soul wasn’t one for flowery words and declarations of love. She knew that was enough of a thanks for him.

“You don’t gotta thank me for all that, Maka. We’re partners, this is what we do for each other.”

“Right,” she whispered, a faint smile gracing her lips.

“All done,” he announced, “you gonna hang tight and read for a bit?”

“No - I’d like to, but I just feel too tired and nauseous to focus on anything like that right now. Maybe I’ll just try to take another nap.”

Without a word, he sauntered over to the book she had brought - a period-piece romance novel that he would make fun of at the first given opportunity. After it was in his grasp, he collapsed on his back right next to her. He really did kind of reek of beer, but she didn’t have the heart to push him away.

Once he found her bookmarked spot, he started from the top of the page with a hardy clear of his throat, reading the lead male love interest’s lines in the most posh and ridiculous accent she could have imagined.

She immediately burst into an uncontrollable fit of giggles and snorts, which only encouraged him to continue, smiling from ear to ear as he did.

She nearly ran out of breath when he began reading the female heroine’s dialogue in a shrill voice that sounded more like an old British nanny than a pretty young woman.

He continued this entertainment for an admirable hour and a half before he had to admit that his vocal cords were defeated from the strain of ‘fancy British lady voice.’

By the time he had put the book aside, she had a hand curled around his bicep and her face was buried in his neck.

He’d said he was watching TV, but he fell asleep within 10 minutes of setting her book down much like an old man.

Her skin felt dry and tight, a feeling she was easily able to ignore while Soul was reading for her. She was aware that she’d need to get up soon to re-apply aloe, or she’d regret it later. Yet, it was so difficult to move away from him.

He was breathing deeply, and he smelled less like a bar and more like a beach the closer she was to him. He always looked so peaceful when he slept too. He looked young, like he didn’t carry the exhaustion that he usually does.

Despite the calm, collected demeanor he always tried to hold around others - he carried a lot of weight on his shoulders from pretending to be the person that other people need him to be. From taking the load off other people’s backs, he only strained himself and she felt this tiredness from it all that seeped into the very cracks of his soul.

She wished he didn’t have to try so hard all the time. She wished he could let himself be taken care of for once.

“I know you told me before that I don’t need to thank you. That the things you do for me are what I should expect from a partner, but you really are more than that to me, Soul,” she’d only whispered this into the crook of his neck, but she lifted her head up just to check that he was still unconscious.

He appeared serene, his breathing steady and not a crinkle in his face to indicate her words had disturbed him from his slumber.

“You can always depend on me too. I’d love to take care of you the way you take care of me. You deserve that - you know that, right?”

Not even a twitch.

She sighed, not expecting him to respond in the first place, but a little disappointed she hadn’t had the courage to tell him this while he was awake. She assumed it safe that he was in a deep sleep and began threading her fingers through his thick tufts of hair sticking up from his forehead.

“I know that when you say you love me, you’re talking about as a partner, as a friend. Well, I love you too. I love you a lot, Soul. I’m always afraid to say it back ... because it would carry a different weight when I say it. It’s like I’m afraid you’d just know.”

His breath hitched for a moment and her heart nearly jumped into her throat.

He only readjusted slightly, pressing his cheek against the top of her head and making a small sound akin to a whimper before his breathing evened out again.

She let out the shaky breath she had been holding and turned her head ever so slightly to press a soft kiss to his throat, where she could feel the warmth of his pulse.

“I hope we stay partners for a really long time.”

#SoMaWeek2021 #SoulxMakaweek #soul evans #maka albarn #soul eater

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valkyriesryde · 4 years

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Shut Up

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Platonic!?Reader

Summary: Exams at the SHIELD academy are coming up and with that members of the Avengers have come to observe the next potential heroes. Some are more promising than others.

Requested by @idk123906

Word Count: 2k

A/N: it should be known my life is basically just uni and My Hero Academia at the moment so writing about someone with powers I was like finally my time has come even though I literally write for Marvel but yea i don’t know what happened here but enjoy

What should I have for dinner?

I need to work on my left hook.

This is pointless, I know all of this already.

I shouldn’t be here, I should be up in the big leagues already.

Why the fuck is she staring at me?

God she’s so annoying.

Her combat skills are awful. She’s going to lose.

You stood at the edge of the mat, your fists by your side and your knees bent ready to leap forward if need be.

I’m going to destroy her.

Your opponent stared back at you from the otherside of the mat. He smirked, almost as if he was looking forward to the fight even though it was nearing the end of the training, this had to be at least his fifth sparring match, it was your sixth and final one.

“You’re going down,” he growled.

This will be a short one.

Your shoulders laxed for a moment at the voice. Not because it relaxed you, but because it was the nail in the coffin. Having the voice of the Black Widow in your head telling you she knows you’ll lose is never very motivating.

It was the second to last week of training at the new SHIELD academy and there was so much tension in the air that it could be cut with a knife. Exams were the end of next week and nobody knew what the practical was going to be like.

There were no friends left, sure the cliques still moved in groups together, but once they stepped onto the mats it was you vs them no matter who you versed.

The final week also meant that sessions were being supervised by the best of the best. Natasha Romanoff a.k.a Black Widow had been present every day so far, today Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson were all present along with her.

They’d be here all day, watching, observing, even taking notes every now and then. And you had to spend the entire day listening to what they really thought about your fellow classmates as well as yourself. All thanks to your own powers of telepathy. You blocked it out mainly, or tried to at least, wearing headphones or focusing your mind on specific sounds and voices. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to ignore and sometimes it was tactical to hear what people were thinking around you.

Right hook

You dodged the attack as your feet moved swiftly to the side and you ducked under his swing. He always planned his moves in his head.

What the fuck?! Playing hard to get huh bet she can’t do it twice.

You couldn’t, he swung his leg and kicked you square in the back as you tried to regain your footing.

She needs to work on her spacial awareness.

A new voice, one you had heard plenty of today. Your gaze peered to the Avengers standing to the side as you turned to your opponent. Natasha was shaking her head as she typed on her tablet. Bucky looked like he’d taken the hit himself as he cringed “rookie mistake”. Sam appeared unfazed. Steve Rogers, his stare was directly on you and it was obvious it was you he was thinking about. So you decided to take his advice.

Looking at the space around you you noticed that even though your opponent had the brute force and his combat far outclassed yours he’d made a mistake. In charging towards you he’d put himself at the edge of the ring. You had space all around you to move and dodge, if you kept him against the outer rim you may have a shot.

So you moved, you stepped around and he followed your movement to try and read your attack. You kept him at the outer rim.

But he lunged again and then you were scuffling on the ground trying to get him off of you. He out-skilled you, he was stronger and bigger and you didn’t have a chance.

How’d she get into this program?

You huffed and continued to try and kick him off as you heard Steve’s voice again. A scream and a punch but he’d already swung you out of the ring. You lost. Again.

She’s not going to make it. - Steve

She’ll never survive. - Bucky

Disappointing really, with that power. - Sam

I wouldn’t want her on my team. - Natasha

You pulled yourself up from the floor, your blood boiling as you cursed yourself and stormed towards your bag, your sessions were done you didn’t exactly feel like sticking around for the last of them to be done.

“Hey!” The deep voice called after you and your steps stopped as the Steve Rogers came to stand before you in all his glory. “I just wanted to tell you good try out there, you’re not always going to win them but you can learn from them. If you wanted I have some pointers that might help you?”

You need it.

“Thank you, I appreciate it but I think I’ve got this, I’m fine really,” you answered and tried to step around him but he was just so massive it was hard to avoid hitting his shoulder on the way past.

Won’t even take help when she obviously needs it

There was three hours until the final exam now. You’d trained every day, into the early hours in the morning in the gym to late night runs around the facility. None of it felt enough when you couldn’t even get out the voices of your peers and teachers saying how you were never going to make it; that you weren’t good enough. Captain America had made an appearance at every session since the first day and his voice was the loudest.

She needs to work on her agility

So you trained your agility that night to prove him wrong.

Her hits are weak

So you went through three punching bags over one night to perfect them.

Your body was exhausted, your mind was empty after the written exam the day before. The final exam was before you and finally it had been revealed what you would be doing, a fight, one fight, one sparring session, verses the Avengers best hand to hand combat members.

Clint Barton. Natasha Romanoff. Steve Rogers. Sam Wilson. Bucky Barnes. Three students to each and you were peered with none other than Steve. Even worse, you were his last one.

Because Steve and Bucky were enhanced they would be wearing restraints that lessened their strength against their opponents. There was a pattern for who they were paired with. Clint was peered with those that were highest in agility skills. Natasha worked with the top three students. Bucky was with the ones who had explosive or dangerous mutated powers. Sam was with the ones who preferred the long tactical fights. Steve was classed with the ones who had strength mutated powers...except you, you should have been with Clint or Sam but you were peered with Steve and you had no idea why.

You’d avoided all of the heroes for the past week, the closer they got the louder their voice was and you couldn’t deal with the hit to your mental state or motivation at a time like this. There as no avoiding them now though.

Saving the easiest for last, he’s getting lazy. - Bucky

I can’t believe I have to stick around for this, it’ll be over by the time I reach the door. - Sam

I wonder if she uses it during combat? - Steve

You tilted your head at him but shook it off. It was well known what all of your powers were. It was also known how difficult it was to use telepathic powers in combat, you weren’t like Scarlett Witch, you couldn’t get inside someone’s head you could only hear their voices and even then if their guard was up sometimes it was hard.

Shake hands. Step back. The bell rings and Steve doesn’t attack.

I haven’t seen her hit first.

He wants you to?

Don’t drag this out for the fun of it you idiot. - Natasha.

That was it. Your blood boiled and your anger took over. You charged for Steve but he dodged you easily until you were leaping onto his bent leg to hoist yourself over his shoulders and to his other side, an elbow between his shoulder blades to send him away from you.

Why doesn’t she do that in training?

“Because no one here has the same stance as you do.” You bite back at him and he loses his focus for a second, just enough for you to send a kick his way but not long enough for him not to catch your leg afterwards.

“So you do use your power during combat then,” he smiled. God just get it over with, if you didn’t want this job so fucking bad you’d let him beat you immediately but you had to prove yourself. You had to prove your worth to him, to the rest of the Avengers and to all your classmates that actually you did deserve to be here. You had every right to be here just like everyone else.

The two of you went back and forth for what felt like hours but was only a couple minutes, even with the restraints Steve still hit hard. He didn’t give you an opening, not one that you could find, he was too quick, at this point you were just running out the clock...too bad there’s no timer.

Can you communicate back?

You shook your head, to answer his question and it gave you time to try and catch your breath.

You really want this? You’ve improved a lot this past week.

Your scowl was ever prominent on your face as his comment reminded you of every fucking, you landed a punch, comment, then a kick to his left side that was left open, that came from him and his friends.

Do you only hear your opponents thoughts?

“No.” Steve stood straight, he was sweating, you were both covered in it, your breathing heaving and your voice ice cold towards him.

What the fuck is going on? - Bucky

They didn’t know what you were saying but you kept talking to him and he wasn’t saying a word, they must have guessed you were using your power but this was an exam for christ’s sake you’re meant to be fighting.

“I hear them all, I don’t often have a choice in it,” you told him, you were so close to being done, you didn’t think your body could take it much longer, one more hit and you would be down for the count.

I’m sorry. I’ve been underestimating you this entire time.

Your eyes blurred. You used to look up to the Captain, you used to want to work alongside him, to follow in his footsteps but you weren’t so sure anymore. He and his friends took one look at you and decided you weren’t cut out for it. You let out a laugh as you and Steve went back to throwing attacks and attempting to dodge one another. This is how villains are made, this is why they say never meet their heroes.

You can’t go much longer.

You gritted your teeth. FUCK OFF you wanted to yell at him. You were the one with telepathic powers but he was the one reading you.

You’ve already passed you know.

“It’s not about passing anymore though.” He quirked an eyebrow as you leaped behind him and caught him in an arm bar. “I deserve to be here.” He didn’t answer you, somehow through pushing and pulling he got out and in the process you were thrown out of bounds. You punched at the ground and groaned, as long as you walk out of this room on your own accord that was okay, then you can go straight to the nurse and pass the fuck out.

“You do. But you’re not ready to be out there yet.”

Part Two: Vigilante

thank you for reading I hope you enjoyed it!

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#steve rogers #steve rogers x reader #steve rogers angst #steve rogers fluff #steve rogers fanfic

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fedonciadale · 3 years

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What do you think about JKR's writing ?

Hi there!

That is a difficult question:

On the one hand I have some very happy memories connected to HP: How I waited for new books to come out, how much fun we had later when I read them to my children, how I was hooked and wanted to know how it ends.

On the other hand there were even then some arcs I found dissatisfying. When I had finished the last book I laid it aside and thought “Well, what about the elves? That can’t be it!” -

And then there is my absolute disappointment with the author. The way she tried to cover plot holes in Pottermore, how every addition to canon is somehow worse than the last, how she made Nagini a cursed human in a half-assed attempt of representation (and therefore suddenly turned Neville Longbottom, one of the nicest persons in the HP verse into a murderer) and lately her transphobe tweets. In her case I decided that ‘death of the author’ is the only way for me. The HP verse is by now in fandom hands and I try to ignore JKR. And she won’t get any more money from me.

And then there is the fact that I now read some of the arcs in a completely different way. I used to like Dumbledore for example and now I think that he might have had good intentions but that he really still stuck to the idea that “the greater good” allows for many sacrifices and shady dealings. That the end justifies the means. I mean he fought for a Voldemort-free world and that was obviously good, but he exploited his friends (if he had any), the people who looked up to him and prepared Harry like a pig to the slaughter....

So, I still think that some of JKR’s ideas are really good and I still love them. I think the idea of horcruxes is creepy and compelling at the same time. I really like the Snape arc because he works for the light and his background story is interesting, and yet he does not suddenly become a good person. The only character in the books JKR actually allows to be grey.

I think that Voldemort ultimately kills himself is brilliantly done and an absolutely satisfying ending for a villain. I love that at the end of TDH Harry just wants a sandwich (that would have been such a great end).

I also happen to think that JKR (although probably unintentionally) has actually a wide range of characters that are not flawless, but that usually feel rounded and as if they have backstory that is there but never told. I also think that she covers the hard choices people face in a tyranny: the Malfoys, Percy Weasley, Seamus and Neville at Hogwarts, Snape, Aberforth Dumbledore, Xenophilus Lovegood. There are many layers and it could have been a very good study of a society under a tyrant and how people cope with that - and then she does nothing with it. The heroes are good, others are bad is her solution to every moral dilemma.

And then there are also all the lose ends and plots that are hinted at (again maybe unintentionally) and that never get tied up in any satisfying way (the elves....).

So, to sum up: So much potential that’s just wasted. It makes for very good fodder for fic ideas though, because you can always come up with this way or that to fix canon. I wrote a whole novel length fic (The Phoenix Potion) that started with two premises: What if the elves were actually important? and What if Severus Snape came up with a Plan B to destroy Voldemort?

Slytherdor and Dramione trash that I am it was also a Dramione fic....

Thanks for the ask!

#anon ask #Anti JKR #My HP experience #Dramione #my writing #flaws in HP #Phoenix Potion

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narcissasdaffodil · 3 years

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20 for Lottie x Marisol, cuz i loved their oneshot! 💕💕💕

Thank you so much for the prompt! Recently sad stuff comes more naturally to me, so enjoy this one. This is the same verse as my oneshot.

So casually cruel in the name of being honest.

Marisol started to make her way upstairs to the roof terrace. She wanted desperately to have some time to herself, to sit with only herself for company.

She heard voices as she passed the bedroom, and ducked into the dressing room. The voices are coming from the roof terrace, and they float downstairs. The dressing room was the perfect vantage point to listen in on conversations from the roof.

“It isn’t worth it! Trying with Marisol that is. I should just focus on Gary, she’s just treating me like a puppet on a string, pulling me along and expecting me to follow her every word. You’re lucky to have Lucas, he’s honest and clear about his feelings for you. I wish Henrik stayed, maybe then I’d have another option.” Lottie snapped, her voice clear as a bell and obviously pissed off. But she’s the one who’s new to a relationship with a girl. Not you, you’ve done this before. Your only proper relationship with a girl was Olivia, and that ruined you, losing a friendship and a girlfriend all at once. How can she be so definite, and not scared of starting something new? You struggle with commitment, Olivia burnt you badly.

“You need to be more patient, Lottie. She isn’t like Lucas, and probably has a reason for struggling so much. Have you even thought of asking her? Of trying to understand her side. Love isn’t supposed to be easy, and when you decided to go down this route, I thought you realised that. If you wanted easy, you’d go for Gary.” Livia explained, trying to placate her a little bit. Lottie on a rampage was something difficult to solve, only Livia ever had any luck with her like this. Maybe you did make a mistake. Maybe being stuck pining for Livia would be far better than whatever this is.

“Oh please. She’s so fickle. And you keep making excuses for her, despite the fact she’s hopped from guy to guy like she’s collecting them or something. Nothing’s worked out at all, maybe because they can’t stand having her psychoanalyse them. I mean, she even tried for Lucas, but he turned her down, politer than she deserved. And you forgave her for that. I don’t get you sometimes.” Marisol could hear the sound of heels from the roof, likely Lottie pacing about. Fickle? It’s not your fault nothing has worked out for you. And you’re stuck in yet another friendship couple, with Bobby. The same person who tried to get Livia interested in him by getting her involved in Operation Nope, and pretended to be offended when she was offended by it. He even tried to get you involved. Maybe he’s also sick of you, you wouldn’t be surprised. The only person you really have is Livia, and she has Lottie for a best friend so you’re only second rate to her too.

Marisol took in a deep breath and fiddled with a loose curl of hair. She could feel tears pricking behind her eyes, what Lottie was saying hurt.

“You’re being too harsh. What if she heard you talking like this about her? I know I’d be considerably pissed. Also I forgave her for Rocco, and the Lucas thing, I wouldn’t take either back also. Both her and Lucas apologised to me about that, Lucas didn’t need to, it wasn’t his fault she liked him. The fact both of them were open and honest about it made me respect them more. It takes guts to be honest about something.” Livia sighed audibly. You chose to put all your love on the wrong person it appears. Maybe you don’t know for sure if Livia would have reciprocated it, but asking her even if she turned you down in the way Lucas did would have worked out well compared to this mess with Lottie. The way she’s treating you is completely wrong, she still keeps coming for you, and everyone else lets her do it. There’s only two people who keep defending you, Livia and Lucas and you don’t understand why Lucas is doing it.

“She’s not the type to eavesdrop. Besides, I don’t really care as I regret wasting my time on her. I know she even voted Henrik out too, after the little bait and switch you had to do to keep Lucas. I don’t blame you for it, but part of me thinks I’d have been better with Henrik. She wouldn’t even have needed to tell you if she hadn’t stabbed you in the back. Not even Priya, after her stunt with Noah, wastes her time with Marisol, and Hope stays clear too. That does say something in my eyes. She’s alone for a reason, not even Bobby likes her and he likes everyone. That’s something you need to realise, how she’s completely bad news.” Lottie laughed, the sound harsh and scratching at Marisol’s ears. Wasting her time on you? That’s not the first time someone has said that, but even Olivia wasn’t so obvious when she gave up on you. Or quite as quick. You did vote Henrik out, but that was in a desperate attempt to keep Rocco, even if your decision might fuck Livia over. Thankfully she saw that coming, and actually understood your reasoning. There’s a reason you prefer your own company, you can’t betray yourself. You must deserve to be alone, it’s far safer that way. Apart from Livia, who likely only pities you.

“Wow. You’ve changed your tune. You’ve gone back to the same you were when Roccogate happened, I did hope you’d grown as a person since then. She hasn’t even hurt you, or done anything to you.” Livia appeared frustrated by her tone alone. Marisol wanted so desperately to just leave the room, but as she tried to get up from her seat at the dressing table, her knees buckled under her weight, which caused her to sit down hard on the chair. Her vision blurred with tears and she removed her glasses, watching the mascara tears drip down her cheeks in the mirror. Lottie’s broke your heart in the blink of an eye, you don’t matter to her one bit.

“Whatever. I’m not going to go over old ground with you yet again. I’ve got over it, so why haven’t you? These shoes are killing me, so I’m going to change them then find Lucas. Don’t follow me.” Livia made her way to the door, the sounds of her heels echoing against the roof.

“But!” Lottie protested.

“But nothing. You tell me that you’re not a bad person, but you turn on people so quickly. You lash out at everyone, apart from me. It appears I haven’t earned a place on your bad list so far. You’re a cruel person, Lottie. Especially in the way you talk about Marisol. I bet you wouldn’t like it if Mari was talking about you that way, yet you easily do it to her.” Livia replied while making her way downstairs. Lottie doesn’t respond to that comment, and the dressing room is silent apart from the sound of heels, and Marisol’s sobs. She is cruel. You can’t love someone like that, who’s casually cruel in the name of being honest. She has it out for you specifically too. It really hurts.

Marisol heard the click of the door, and looked over to see Livia making her way inside.

“Marisol? I didn’t know you were in here. Are you okay?” Livia’s eyes widen at the sight of her, and Marisol feels like she must be quite a mess for Livia to act that way. She stood on shaky legs and wrapped her arms around Livia, unable to speak. She hid her face in the taller girl’s shoulder, and let go her emotions entirely. Her throat has a persistent lump in it, and she can’t speak past it. Livia stroked her hair gently and the simple motion is enough to ground her, to make her feel less awful. She stayed in the same position until she calmed down enough to look at Livia.

“I...I heard both of you talking. I heard it all, I guess I fell for the wrong person, huh? I can’t be with someone who gossips about others like that. I’m absolutely awful though, I get that much. I get why I’ve gone through so many guys here, I’d be sick of me too. I’m no one’s first choice, not even Lottie’s. You’re so lucky to have Lucas, I’m glad you’re happy at least, if I’m not destined for it.” She spoke past the lump in her throat and stared down at her feet. Meeting Livia’s eyes was hard, she didn’t want to be pitied.

Livia caught hold of her chin, turning Marisol’s face to face hers, and making direct eye contact with her, her emerald green eyes piercing into Marisol’s coffee coloured ones. “No. I’m sorry, but that’s a serious load of bullshit. You’re not awful, and I’m not sick of you. Don’t ever let anyone make you doubt your worth. You’re a wonderful person in your own right, you’re gorgeous. You’re also honest, which means I value your opinions. I definitely want you to find someone, you do deserve a genuine relationship. Someone will come along who puts you first, mark my words. And you’ll know when you know. Like me and Lucas.”

“But, how are you sure? Part of me wishes it was you I fell for, that would make a little more sense. And I wasn’t asked on a date, when Lurik came in. So of course I didn’t feel any major liking to either of them. I was the only one too, then adding the Bobby thing and OP Nope, it feels like I’m cursed.”

“Uh, uh. You’re not cursed. I have a feeling you have a reason for your walls being so high, so I’m not going to treat you like Lottie. Not kidding here, if she puts up with her nonsense, then I’m dropping her friendship. Easily too, I’d much prefer to have you for a best friend. This might not help, but if it wasn’t for Lucas, I’d like you too. I understand not having any dates did sting, I get that. But if they don’t see how awesome you are, that’s their problem.” Livia taps her on the nose playfully, causing Marisol to look up at her with wide eyes.

“R...really? You mean that? You’d drop Lottie for me? I can kind of handle being second to Lucas because it’s you. That does mean a lot. Thank you.”

“Really, really. I don’t say stuff I don’t mean. I don’t like bullies. If Lottie persists, then I don’t want her around me, point blank.” Livia wiped her tears gently with a discarded tissue and focused on cleaning up her face a bit. The pressure was gentle and she focused on the feeling of finger tips on her skin.

Marisol tried for a wobbly smile, and just about managed it. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do this, but the fact you did means a lot.”

“Of course. Mari, what did you expect me to do, just leave you all upset? I wouldn’t do that, and it sucks that you heard all that. Are you going to give her another chance, or is that it?” Livia let go of her chin and retrieved a pair of heeled boots, sliding them onto her bare feet. She put her flip flops back with her other shoes and turned back to Marisol.

“I don’t know. It should be easy to answer, but I don’t know. I want to give her another chance, but I’ve given so many.” Marisol tapped her hand on the dressing table, unexpectedly nervous. Be careful. Lottie could hurt you again.

#marisol x lottie #litg marisol #litg lottie #litg #love island the game #litgs2 #litg fanfic #bubblelaureno #fanfic

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chaoswillfallrpg · 4 years

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RODOLPHUS LESTRANGE is TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD and a DEFENCE BARRISTER in THE DEPARTMENT OF MAGICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT at THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC. He looks remarkably like JACK FALAHEE and considers himself NEUTRAL. He is currently TAKEN.

→ OVERVIEW:

tw: death, murder

Raised to have a strict worldview due to the fanatic attitudes of his parents, Rodolphus Lestrange has never had reason to question the nature of his reality. Rodolphus and his family resided in the beauty of Lestrange Manor in Nottinghamshire, Rodolphus’ childhood family home stood secluded on the outskirts of Nottingham. A gothic chateaux that took inspiration from their family home of the same name near Paris, it was surrounded by fields and trees, far away from muggles and cloaked in magic in the event any came for a walk in the forest. Brought up away from the Muggle world they detested, with only his mother and father for company until his younger RABASTAN was born, Rodolphus was absorbed in the thinking of his parents with very little reason to doubt anything outside of their word. MARIE LESTRANGE loved her children more than she loved herself and showered both Rodolphus and his younger brother in affection. Whilst most Pure-Blood families they associated with had nannies and school masters to aid in the raising of their children, Marie disagreed with handing her children over to someone else and insisted on doing everything herself with only the aid of a single house-elf Posy for help. She taught her children to read and write and ensured they were fluent in French by the time they went off to school and well versed in many authors that had been pre-approved by Marie for them to read.

Rodolphus and his younger brother were raised given almost everything they could ever ask for with a childhood spent taking afternoon tea in the garden and discussing the future she wanted her boys to have. His mother upheld tradition and longed for her children to make respectable Pure-Blood marriages to people who loved them. The relationship his mother and father shared captured the attention of a young Rodolphus, who longed to have a relationship like the one his parents shared and provide for them and the rest of his family. Though the Lestrange family were wealthy, their ancestors had wasted a lot of the Lestrange family fortune throwing balls and having custom couture outfits made to line the walls of their wardrobes. The building of the British Lestrange Manor cost their family a great deal and began the long tradition of the Lestrange family working in government and slowly rebuilt the fortune the rest of the wizarding world had no idea they had slowly lost, beginning with Radolphus Lestrange of who he was named. His father THIEBUAT LESTRANGE worked directly for The Minister as her Senior Undersecretary, a job which he believed was beneath him especially in a traitorous administration and had aspirations of climbing higher. His plan would be to groom Rodolphus to work in government and have him infiltrate The Department of Magical Law Enforcement to keep an eye on the goings on there and report back to him.

Before Rodolphus was sent off to Hogwarts he was given one particular request from his parents and that was to grow close to influential families within the wizarding world, particularly the Pure-Blood families who his father remarked he might need in the future. BELLATRIX BLACK was of particular interest to his parents, with a father who worked in Wizgamot and wealth and beauty that would make a good wife. Rodolphus went to school in the knowledge she’d be someone he’d need to at the very least befriend but was disappointed with the person he found. Bellatrix was incredibly loud and opinionated with a fondness for torturing other children and an inability to follow even the most simplest set of rules as did her friends CASTOR WILKES and EVAN ROSIER. An intelligent young man, Rodolphus had a high opinion of himself which was solidified by the praising of teachers and almost flawless grades which made hanging around Bellatrix and her posse even more difficult for him. He tried to keep them sweet by sitting with them at parties and occasionally handing in a page of homework for them but mostly preferred to seek the company of his roommates LUCIUS MALFOY, ARISTAEUS GREENGRASS who he found far less tiresome despite Lucius’ over inflated ego and Eirik’s constant mood swings. Though he narrowly missed out on being a Prefect due to PROFESSOR SLUGHORN’s clear favoritism of Lucius, Rodolphus did graduate a celebrated member of the Slytherin Quidditch team and Slug Club which greatly pleased both his parents.

Upon graduating from Hogwarts, Rodolphus was quickly swept up into a job at the Ministry and began training under Bellatrix’s father CYGNUS BLACK. Rodolphus wasn’t quite sure if it was his legal knowledge, spotless record from Hogwarts or a polite word from Bellatrix or his father that had made Cygnus agree to be his mentor, but either way he was glad to have such a respected name in the wizarding world teaching him how to practise law. Training to become a barrister was certainly grueling and required Rodolphus to sacrifice the majority of his personal life in order to be taken seriously by Cygnus. When he wasn’t at the office, he spent the majority of his time at the Black family home helping Cygnus prep for his cases and eating dinner with his family who had come to slowly replace Rodolphus’ own due to the amount of time he spent with them. Bellatrix thankfully was hardly ever home, supposedly travelling or working on personal projects her father hoped would be beneficial to their family Rodolphus had chalked up to meaning a polite term for finding some direction beyond sneering at mudbloods and barking at her sisters. The Black family seriously lacked direction from Rodolphus’ point of view, NARCISSA seemed harmless but if you looked at her often enough you’d see the way she looked at men with eyes like a snake, burrowing into the souls of helpless men.

Rodolphus had been suspicious for some time that Narcissa's trained gaze had been on his younger brother, considering he’d notice him acting strangely lately and spending a lot of time at the Black home, which he disliked. Bellatrix was Bellatrix. Then there was ANDROMEDA, the middle daughter who was quiet and studious. She cared not for parties and rolled her eyes at the idea of finding a husband often along with a rude quip that made Rodolphus chuckle to himself. The two exchanged the odd piece of polite conversation, though Rodolphus only fully began speaking to her when he took over her father’s job when he became a judge. Andromeda had graduated from an accomplished witch with a longing to learn and better the world she’d been raised in which he found both admirable and misguided considering she came from wealth and privilege as he did. Nevertheless he agreed to train her using the same methods her father had used on him. The life they had chosen was a lonely one and whilst Andromeda did have friends and a personal life he noticed she spent the majority of her evenings in his apartment in High Gate attempting to find something useful which would help them win their cases and slowly became more than just his mentee. He began to learn things about her that he found interesting, her relationship with her sisters and her theories on blood purity he hadn’t really considered before.

Rodolphus still thought being a Pure-Blood made you better than others, but he did consider those he knew of the same blood as them who were not fit to wipe their shoes. As Andromeda nears the end of her training, Rodolphus has come to regard her as a close friend of his and a much needed warmth in his life he’d been missing in the pursuit of greatness. Though their caseload is often petty crimes such as underage wizards using magic, there have been a few more interesting cases recently that have kept both him and Andromeda busy as Aurors attempt to find the culprit of those kidnapping and killing multiple people across London. Most recently the pair have been defending SILAS CRUMP, an unregistered werewolf frightened he’d be framed for the killing of his daughter. Supposedly found by a witch and wizard he can’t recall the names of, Silas was put under the Imperius Curse and given a false memory both he and Andromeda can’t seem to break through. Curious, the pair have been trying to find other cases of other magical creatures with similar stories, until the case took a turn. The Minister’s son BOOKER BAGNOLD was found dead in the Ministry’s fountain on Halloween with one named attached to the killing. Silas Crump. Confident there is more lurking underneath the case, Rodolphus won’t rest until he has won his case but with his client missing, people closest to him keeping secrets and dark forces at play has no idea what else he may be uncovering in the process.

→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Blood Status → Pure-Blood

Pronouns → He/Him

Identification → Cis Male

Sexuality → Up To Player

Relationship Status → Single

Previous Education → Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Slytherin)

Societies → N/A

Family → Thiebaut Lestrange (father), Marie Lestrange (mother), Rabastan Lestrange (brother), Ilar Travers (uncle), Vivienne Travers (aunt), Isolde Travers (cousin), Evora Travers (cousin)

Connections → Aristaeus Greengrass (best friend), Andromeda Black (close friend/mentee/potential love interest), Lucius Malfoy (close friend), Decius Flint (friend), Bellatrix Black (friend), Castor Wilkes (friend), Isolde Travers (friend), Cygnus Black (ex-mentor), Silas Crump (client), Regulus Black (assistant)

Future Information → Eventual Member of The Death Eaters, Husband of Bellatrix Black

RODOLPHUS LESTRANGE IS A LEVEL 7 WIZARD.

#rodolphus lestrange #jack falahee #connor walsh #how to get away with murder #htgawam #harry potter rp #wizard #neutral #magical law enforcement #wizgamot #magic #lestrange #taken #taken wizard #taken neutral #tw: death #tw: murder

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vegetacide · 4 years

Text

TaG: Bloodlines (Part 8.. )

Veg • notables: Any errors in this are strictly my own

Ty to @gumnut-logic and @scribbles97 for the brainstorming help and the encouragement.

Rating and General warning: Mature content head. If you are not a fan of medical issues of a female nature in relation to pregnancy please proceed with caution.

Characters: Virgil, Kayo, (V/K)

Location: TaG-verse AU | Tracy Island

E N J O Y

8-8-8

Part 8 - Susulan

Lady Penelope being true to her word found a wonderful woman who was well liked and sought after and she was one of several that Doctor Coxley had recommended to their Grandmother.

The tall Haitian by the name of Cecilia had credentials as long as Kayo’s arm and had worked in some of the best kitchens in the world. Several of which had Michelin star ratings due to her amazing contributions and somehow they’d managed to scoop her.

She was a true marvel and the whole family took advantage of her skills.

The boys were in heaven and so well fed that often they found themselves all camped out in the living room or out by the pool in various states of full bellied contended lethargy. Happily stuffed and satiated after a mind blowing meals. Before long it was like Cecilia had always been there and things in the house seemed to settle down back into some form of normalcy.

The two weeks following her arrival just seemed to coast by and as previously arranged the date of Doctor Coxley follow-up had come and gone with barely a hitch..

His trip had been a simple affair, the boys having been out on a call at the time. One of their security operatives had shuttled the doc to the island with little fanfare.

Kayo, though frustrated at being basically bed bound the last few weeks, found herself decidedly nervous. She was eager to know if the improvement of her condition would be enough to appease the doctor. She’d done research herself as she’d had plenty of time on her hands but she was by no means an expert.

Her pressure was down, bleeding tampering off to the odd bout of spotting. Energy levels were increasing daily and her appetite was healthy. She felt better now then she had in a while despite the lingering morning sickness and she was twitching to do something other than staring at the walls all day.

Grandma had been happy with the results as the forced rest seemed to have helped but there was no telling if she was going to be able to return to some form of duty or not.

Upon the Doctor’s arrival Grandma had shown him to their infirmary where Kayo had been waiting as patiently as she could.

After a quick but thorough exam her doctor had snapped off his gloves and tossed them in a bin before making a quick note on his data pad. When he’d turned back, he’d handed Kayo a towel and given her a hand up from the awkward position she’d had to sit in.

The island medical facilities were top notch for basic injuries but for things of this nature, not so much.

“Well, “ He’s begun pushing his glasses up his nose. “Things are looking good. The bleeding has for the most part stopped through you may still experience a bit of spotting. Typical of placenta previa.

“Baby’s heart rate sounds strong and your weight gain is all within acceptable levels for your age and fitness level.”

He’d paused as he’d looked over his note. “I’m pleased to see you’ve taken appropriate measures the last couple of weeks and I do see a marked improvement in your BP but,” he stopped for emphasis. “It’s still higher than I would like to see it.

I know you’ve been eager to get back to some sort of normal activity level but I would have to recommend that for the time being you refrain from anything too strenuous. At this stage of your pregnancy we don’t want to mess around as you still have some twenty odd weeks to go.”

Kayo had been disappointed by the results but she would do whatever needed to be done.

“Additionally,” He added, setting the data pad down to make sure he had her full attention. “Going forward I would like to be able to monitor you personally. Allowing you to come home was the best course of action given the situation at the time but I have my reservation about you not being within east travel distance of a hospital. It’s quite a hike out here even with access to the type transportation you have at your disposal but given the nature of your pregnancy I strongly recommend you relocate to the mainland.”

That certainly hadn’t been what she expected and her hand automatically settled on her middle. “Is there a problem?”

Doctor Coxley gave her knee a pat. “Just call me being overly precautious. I would rather have the necessary staff and equipment and not need it than need it and not have it.”

He’d smiled at her then, turning to gather up the equipment he’d brought with him. “I’ll advise Doctor Tracy of what we’ve discussed so arrangements can be made sooner rather than later. And I would highly recommend you make the move in the very near future as traveling any later could have detrimental effects that we would like to avoid.”

He’d left shortly after with directions to call him if she had any further questions.

It was definitely not what she’d been expecting to hear and her anxiety kicked up a notch.

The island was a secure haven but the outside world was a different story. If the media got wind that she was on the mainland and pregnant there would be no way to stop that shit storm that would follow. Their family privacy would be out the window in an instant and the vultures would start circling like that carrion loving garbage eaters they were.

She’d cursed as she dropped her face into her hands

“So, “ Virgil said, stepping from the bathroom with a towel slung low around his hips. “He wants you to be closer to medical help if need be.”

His wife gave a nod and he leaned a heavy shoulder against the door frame, arms crossing tight over his chest.

It wasn’t idle that was for sure, security wise it was a nightmare and as for call out the logistics were .. well to say it wasn’t the best was putting it lightly.

“We’ll talk to Scott and Dad in the morning. We’ll figure it out somehow.”

Fiddling with the end of her hair, Kayo looked off out the darkened window. “It’s not going to work with both of us being there. Two isn’t something you can just park anywhere without it being noticed. Even on a GDF base eventually it’s going to get noticed. And what about the pods?”

Brows dipping, Virgil pushed off the door frame. “What are you saying?”

She braided and unbraided the end of her hair, eyes distant and when she flicked her gaze up to him he caught on to her train of thought. Shaking his head he walked the short distance over to her and crouched at her feet.

“That is not an option and you know it.”

“Virgil, we don’t have much of a choice here. You’re needed here and we can’t just up and move Two and all her gear to the mainland for the next four months. It’s not logical or safe. It would be easier to set up a secure location for me. I can take a small security detail with me. Logistically its a sound option”

Virgil shook his head, taking her hands in his. “No, that is not a viable option, Tan. It’s too risky. Not with us having no idea where your uncle is or what he’s up to.”

“It’s been months since there’s been any sightings or news on him.. Maybe it’s time we stop hiding..”

Shocked, Virgil blinked at her. Five months earlier she’d thought that not having the baby was a better option than having it because of the Hood and now she was doing a complete about face.

“Kay, stop.” He gave her hands a squeeze running his thumb over the back of her knuckles. ‘What’s really going on here?”

She pulled away and got to her feet to walk across the room. Taking his shirt off the back of a chair she tugged it over her shoulder, her small frame dwarfed by it and Virgil got a flashback of a morning so many months ago.. One he didn’t care to be reminded of when there had been a real possibility of them not being in the position they were in now. Like having to make this sort of decision.

He would take this though over any other option as difficult as things were at the moment the alternative was not something he even wanted to fathom.

Her shoulders shrugged and she turned back to face him. “I’m just trying to not.. I don’t know...” Her shoulders slumped. “It’s just that things are so complicated and having to worry about ‘him’ all the time is exhausting.”

Going to her, he wrapped her in his arms. “We’ll figure it out. Let’s just not do anything rash before we’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

Her slender arms slipped around his waist and she burrowed into his chest. When they were along like this was the only time he ever got to see this side of her. The vulnerable one that she tried hard to hide from the others.

Her confidence was always such a striking thing about her. Standing out and making her bigger than life but in the closed confines of their space the masks peeled away. Her guard came down and he got to see the woman underneath the warrior.

Pulling back, he took her chin in his hand and tipped her head up so he could see her face. Brushing his thumb over her pulse point, he kissed her brow and then each check reverently before skimming his lips over hers.

She sank into him easily, having long ago given up her internal battle against the feelings she’d hidden so well from him.

He caught himself though as her fingers pressed into his back. It was late and he could tell by the shadows under her eyes that Kayo needed sleep desperately. The emotional toil of the day having cost her considerably.

Her breath ghosted across his lips as she sighed, knowing like he did that stopping before things got out of hand was for the best right now.

“Come on, we can discuss this in the morning when we both aren’t dead on our feet.”

Her nod in agreement was singular and concise. A flicker of her confidence with the simple gesture returning behind the verdant green of her eyes.

She stood back, took his hand and tugged him towards the bed.

8-8-8

TBC

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds fanfic #fanfiction #fanfic #TaG Bloodlines #vegetacide #Virgil Tracy #Kayo Kyrano #virgil/kayo #Virgil X Kayo

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chiseler · 3 years

Text

Ginger Rogers: Curse of the Working Class

A natural-born mimic, ham, tease, hard worker, stoic follower and out-of-reach babe, Ginger Rogers has proven one of the most difficult to define of all the 1930s Hollywood stars. At her best she was a synonym for fun and high spirits while also conveying a dignified and skeptical kind of resistance to other people, and these contradictory impulses made her one of the most special and ambiguous performers of her time. Rogers excelled in her first seven musicals with Fred Astaire and in several of her comedy vehicles and even in some of the programmers she churned out in the early 1930s. She was beloved, and rightly so.

In Stage Door (1937), Rogers gives one of the most distinctive, most suggestive, and most perfectly judged performances of the period, molding every one of her bone-dry, wisecracking line readings (and what lines she has in that movie!) into something pleasurable, something unexpected, even something profound, delivering them all with her guarded, in-transit sort of face.

I’ve seen Stage Door probably more times than I’ve seen any other movie, but I always notice something new in it, some new line, some new angle. As a kid, I didn’t really understand the source of Rogers’s misgivings here, which is the same source that animates her outrageously and inventively bitchy yet somehow tender and worldly fights with Linda (Gail Patrick), her high-falutin’ former roommate. Linda is the mistress of Anthony Powell (Adolphe Menjou), a powerful Broadway producer. When Powell sees Rogers’s Jean Maitland rehearsing a dance routine, his little weasel eyes light up with lust. He thinks she’s just playing hard to get when she makes her habitual mordant jokes at him, but she is really just trying to delay the inevitable. She wants no part of sleeping with a man for his money not because she thinks it’s morally wrong, per se, but because she’s basically too tired-out to go through those motions.

Jean is so disenchanted that the disenchantment seems to be leading her to some kind of drastic change. She talks herself into going out with Powell but gets out of sleeping with him by getting, or pretending to get, disruptively yet vaguely drunk. Jean gets drunk the way she does everything else, at some very unusual kind of steady and wary behavioral half-mast. She cracks wise as a matter of course, but she sleeps with a doll and she plays a ukulele. These cute details don’t seem to fit her character, but they do express the divided character of the woman who was playing her.

Jean stumbles home from Powell’s penthouse to her new roommate Terry (Katharine Hepburn), a rich girl with airily la-di-da attitudes about life and the theater. Hepburn had not endeared herself to Rogers with her much-repeated remark about Rogers’s partnership with Astaire: “He gives her class and she gives him sex.” The competitive rivalry between Hepburn’s upper-class pretension and Rogers’s low-burning common sense is the heart of their conflict in Stage Door, and this conflict and mutual dislike reads as pure chemistry on screen, just as it did for Rogers with Astaire.

There is such chemistry between Jean and Terry that Stage Door has always been a kind of closeted lesbian classic just waiting to burst into full-on Sapphic love. Terry has no love interest and shows zero interest in acquiring one, while Jean looks more than ready to give up on poor, unreliable young men and rich, sexually demanding older men like Powell. Jean and Terry, in fact, are perfect for each other and wind up with each other, and in the last scene Rogers reaches a kind of epiphany as she reacts to their friend Judy (Lucille Ball) leaving New York to get married. “At least she’ll have a couple of kids to keep her company in her old age, and what’ll we have?” she asks. “Some broken-down memories and an old scrapbook that nobody’ll look at.”

I first saw Stage Door when I was eight years old. Now that I’m well into adulthood, these last few lines that Rogers tosses off with such face-the-facts casualness have the force of revelation, as if she has finally washed up on the shores of some final philosophy. They predict the real lives of both Hepburn and Rogers (though some people still do want to leaf through those particular scrapbooks) and Terry and Jean, and everybody else for whom the easy way and the conventional way of living will never fit or will never be acceptable.

Rogers was capable of that tough-minded and frank and bleak attitude on screen, but in life and in general she was actually, and alarmingly, one of the most clueless of stars, never quite knowing what it was that people liked about her. Starting as early 1938, the year she made Vivacious Lady and Carefree, something peculiar started to happen to Rogers. After years of the most unlikely and enormous success in her Astaire films, where she was up to any dance challenge he gave her and where her timing in both musical and comic and dramatic scenes was magically sharp, her timing started to go horribly awry. Rogers began to be afflicted by self-consciousness, miscalculation, cutesiness, self-infatuated archness and flashes of deep-rooted mean-mindedness. She slipped back into her best controlled star mode in several films after that year, but she started to deteriorate more and more by the mid-1940s, almost as if someone had put a curse on her.

Rogers was born Virginia McMath in Independence, Missouri in 1911. Her formidable mother Lela Rogers was a writer for silent films and a journalist, and she was seemingly joined at the hip to her daughter. It was Rogers who wanted a career as an actress, and Lela resisted this at first, but when Ginger won a Charleston contest Mama Lela knew which way the wind was blowing. She poured all of her own considerable energy and ambition into making Ginger a star and keeping her one (that first name supposedly came about because a cousin couldn’t pronounce the name Virginia).

At the height of her stardom, when Rogers was sent the script of The Hard Way (1943), she wonderingly said, “This is the story of my life,” and turned it down. In that movie, Ida Lupino works like a demon to get her malleable kid sister (Joan Leslie) into show business, and the comparison is not flattering to Lela, who made a fool of herself testifying before HUAC as an expert on Communist infiltration of Hollywood, citing particularly the time when Rogers had to say Dalton Trumbo’s line, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy” in Tender Comrade (1943). Lela herself actually turns up playing Ginger’s mother in Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor (1942), and she’s a rather low-key presence, but she talks and moves like a woman who has power and feels no need to make any outward show of it.

In that Wilder movie, Rogers spends most of her time pretending to be a twelve-year old, and this uneasy reversion to little-girlhood was one of her most troubling fallback modes. She had made her first successes on stage with “baby talk monologues” written by Lela, and her early style, as seen in films like Young Man of Manhattan (1930) and Honor Among Lovers (1931), was very much a hold-over from the 1920s, a Betty Boop baby vamp persona that was more suited to cameo roles than to leads (Claudette Colbert, the star of Young Man of Manhattan, gently mocks these baby affectations after meeting Rogers’s character).

She churned out lots of low-budget programmers in 1932, and in 1933 she made ten films. In two of those, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Rogers nearly steals the show in fairly small parts. As Anytime Annie, a notoriously obliging chorus girl in 42nd Street, Rogers is first seen wearing a monocle and affecting a grand manner accent, and this was the first sign of her aptitude for two-faced disguise. As Manuel Puig once said of Ann-Margret, Rogers is anything but reassuring.

She’s close to surreal in her gold-coin outfit singing “We’re in the Money” with pig Latin verse in Gold Diggers of 1933, looking directly into the camera and not flinching as it travels all the way up to her face. Rogers gobbled up attention like that, and she had what it took, but she needed something or someone to stabilize her. When she strips down to her slip and stockings and gyrates in Professional Sweetheart (1933), an outraged Norman Foster spanks and then punches her, the first in an increasingly ominous series of punishments that would shadow her later career.

In the very horny Pre-Code musical Flying Down to Rio (1933), her first film with Astaire, Rogers is a hot mama, singing and swaying to “Music Makes Me” in a vagina power dress that even Marilyn Monroe might have rejected as too overt. When they dance “The Carioca,” Astaire starts out holding his head slightly away from Rogers, as if she might be diseased, but by the end their electric chemistry has fully kicked in.

Astaire had spent his youth dancing with his sister Adele and didn’t want to get stuck with another steady partner. Rogers had her eye on dramatic parts, announcing to an incredulous press that she wanted to play Joan of Arc. She was an ambitious and competitive person, and she knew that she was not even close to Astaire’s Olympian league as a dancer. But that’s part of the magic of their series of films, in which Rogers improves as a dancer bit by bit until she is fully capable of following his every step.

Astaire objected that no one would believe Rogers as an English girl in The Gay Divorcee (1934), and surely no one could mistake her for English, but this part gave her the reserve that she intriguingly used and toyed with for her best years as a star. Like most first sexual experiences between two people, their first real romantic dance together in that film, “Night and Day,” is both exciting and a little awkward. In their follow-up Roberta (1935), Rogers looks tense during their slow “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” routine, but she comes wonderfully alive when they casually tap to “Hard to Handle,” their first really great dance together.

She was always at her best in the lively comic numbers, where her wacky energy seems to warm Astaire, but she worked hard at the dramatic routines, so that when they do “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” in Follow the Fleet (1936), Rogers has somehow ascended up to Astaire’s level as a dancer. It must have taken nearly super-human will, but she did it, and audiences saw and felt her progress, and they loved it because it meant that anything was possible if you worked hard enough, even dancing like or with Fred Astaire.

Astaire didn’t like her feather dress for the “Cheek to Cheek” dance in Top Hat (1935), and you can see why he didn’t: it’s a little tacky. Costumer Walter Plunkett said Rogers always wanted to “add a crepe paper orchid or a string of beads or some goddamned feathered thing. She just never could resist little improvements.” But her feather dress in Top Hat does move beautifully when she dances, even if we do see some of the feathers floating away from them, as if she’s molting.

A more characteristic and winning image of her comes in the way she hikes up her skirt in the “Pick Yourself Up” number in Swing Time, which has a deeply charming kind of put-on nonchalance, or in the soldier-like way she executes a series of brutally exacting turns at the end of the “Never Gonna Dance” finale toward the end of that movie (while she shot this scene, her feet started to bleed in her shoes). One of the real pleasures of American moviegoing is watching Rogers as Astaire sings a love song to her: she would listen so intently, with barely any change of expression, but with such sensitive receptivity behind her eyes and in the set of her mouth.

People like to wonder if Astaire and Rogers hated each other. Maybe there were moments when they did, but mainly they just resented being tied together as a team, and those misgivings are part of what give their partnership and their best dances such impact, such crackle. Rogers reported in her autobiography that Astaire had taken her out on dates in New York when they were both working in theater, and at the end of one such date he gave her “a kiss that would never have passed the Hays Office Code!” But when they worked together in films, Astaire was married to a woman he adored, and he was a distant taskmaster in the killer rehearsal sessions for their dance routines. His friends, cultivated when he played on stage in London in the 1920s, were the English gentry. Rogers was not his cup of tea, and he made that known to her in subtle ways. She said either, and he said eye-ther, and they wanted to call the whole thing off, but no one else ever did.

In the many years after their partnership ended, they were still stuck with each other, and they both still resented that. Rogers would sometimes make friendly overtures to Astaire, and he would politely but firmly put her off, and this led to hurt feelings for her, so much so that she didn’t even go to his American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Film scholar Joseph McBride helped to put together that evening, and when I asked him about it, he remembered Astaire saying, “I suppose we’ll have to have Ginger,” in an irritated voice. When she didn’t come to the ceremony, it seemed like sour grapes on her part, but it had been made clear to Rogers that Astaire only wanted the bare minimum to do with her, and so she withdrew. It would do well to remember, of course, just how obnoxious Rogers could be. If you want to feel the full force of that, just look at any number of the films she made from 1944 to 1964 and you’ll see one garishly misplayed, mistimed performance after another, including the last one she did with Astaire, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), where her dramatic aspirations were mocked and then the mockery was unintentionally confirmed when she did a goggle-eyed recreation of Sarah Bernhardt reciting the Marseillaise.

So what happened to Rogers? Why did she lose all of the qualities that had made her a star right after her stardom was confirmed? Many writers have tried to explain it. Analyzing Astaire and Rogers in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972), Arlene Croce says, “She’s an American classic, just as he is: common clay that we prize above exotic marble. The difference between them is that he knew it and she didn’t. Rogers always wanted to be something more. Probably no other major star has so severely tried the loyalty of her public by constantly changing her appearance and her style.” In his book Romantic Comedy (1987), James Harvey writes, “Can there be any other major star who was so variable, even from film to film, as she was?”

Harvey blames George Stevens, who directed maybe the finest Astaire/Rogers film, Swing Time (1936). He sees a softening of her character in the straight scenes in Swing Time, but the rot really sets in with Vivacious Lady, a romantic comedy that has all the elements for success but perversely ruins them with its taffy-pull pacing, its willful lack of coordination, its leaning on jags and cutesiness and bizarre sequences like the fight scene between Rogers and a rival that devolves into a series of unmoving tableaus broken only by a coy laugh from Rogers, as if Stevens wanted to turn her into Frank McHugh. In the same year, in Carefree with Astaire, Rogers exhibits such unpleasant sadism when her character is under hypnosis that it feels like a revelation of some inner nastiness that had always been prudently hidden from view.

The damage was reversed in Bachelor Mother (1939), a working girl comedy that has no right to be as charming as it is, where Rogers added a kind of moony dreaminess to her repertoire of personas. She then made two films for Stage Door director Gregory La Cava, 5th Avenue Girl (1939) and Primrose Path (1940). In her second La Cava film, Rogers is so deadpan that it reads as a lack of basic vitality, a first in her career; it’s as if La Cava is unearthing the suicidal or even homicidal side of Jean Maitland. “People annoy me,” she says in that movie, and boy does she mean it. In Stage Door, when Powell tells Jean he wants to put her name in big electric lights, she says, “Gotta be big enough to keep people away.” La Cava is the director who understood Rogers the most, discerning something anti-social and solitary behind her sunny audience-pleasing looks and manner. In Primrose Path, he cast her as a teenager who breaks away from her family before she joins their prostitution racket, and her work in that movie is stark, clean, unsentimental.

Rogers won an Oscar for Kitty Foyle (1940), and many have dated her decline from that point, even if she is modestly touching in what is a modest working girl soap opera. She was close to unbearable in Tom, Dick and Harry (1941), where director Garson Kanin seems to dote on every moment of her self-indulgent performance as a dumb and narcissistic telephone operator who must choose between three suitors. Something about playing dumb here makes Rogers’s style seem laborious and throws her timing all out of whack, yet the following year, in Roxie Hart (1942), she certainly gets her laughs with her broad playing of a very dumb murderess who lives for publicity and likes to do the Black Bottom for reporters. In her segment in Tales of Manhattan (1942), you want to say to her, “OK, you can have all that hair on the top of your head or you can have all that hair fanning over your back, but you can’t have both, Ginger.”

Leo McCarey’s Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) did her no favors, but most writers agree that the real coup de grâce in her career was Lady in the Dark (1944), a Technicolor movie of the psychoanalytical stage musical that had starred Gertrude Lawrence. Rogers insisted on playing it, and she was at loggerheads with director Mitchell Leisen and Paramount studio chief Buddy DeSylva, who vengefully cut most of the Kurt Weill songs from the film. All in all, the mercifully little-seen Lady in the Dark looks now almost as if it had been made in a spirit of deliberate sabotage. It is has to be the most nastily misogynist of any major studio production of this time, constantly hammering home the idea that Rogers’s Liza Elliott is an unnatural woman unhealthily attached to her work, and her leading man Ray Milland warrants particular scorn here for the gleefulness he brings to the scenes where he humiliates Rogers’s character. In the one extended musical number Rogers has, “The Saga of Jenny,” she doesn’t seem to have been given any choreography or direction and she can barely move in the outfit Leisen designed for her. “After Lady in the Dark there was nothing left of the Rogers character,” wrote Croce. “She died on the analyst’s couch.”

Rogers’s career proceeded only through sheer determination on her part (and on Lela’s part). She floundered in an updated remake of Grand Hotel (1932) called Week-end at the Waldorf (1945), and the next twenty years of her career were a real trial for her fans from the 1930s. Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952) was supposed to be about scientist Cary Grant reverting to childhood when he drinks an elixir of youth, but Rogers insisted that she “wanted to do the kid thing too,” and so she ripped into scene after scene of coarse-grained youthful impersonation, the wise child of her early ‘30s character bearing rotten and poisonously un-watchable fruit. Cast as a hardened gangster’s moll in Phil Karlson’s Tight Spot (1955), Rogers is so heavy-handed and slow and cutesey with her dialogue that the effect is ghastly. If I were to make a simple diagnosis of her problems in the last half of her film career, I’d say that she caught a bad case of George Stevens-itis and never got over it (she had an affair with the married director during Vivacious Lady, which had Lela up in arms).

When she worked with a fine and sensitive director, as she did with Frank Borzage for Magnificent Doll (1946) and with Edmund Goulding for Teenage Rebel (1956), Rogers was still capable of restrained and acceptable if somewhat colorless work. But hateful things kept happening to her. In something like Storm Warning (1951), where she does battle with the Ku Klux Klan while also doing a transposed version of A Streetcar Named Desire, it seemed as if someone behind the scenes wanted to see Rogers punished. When Steve Cochran attacks her in Storm Warning, the scene is so prolonged that finally it is Rogers being humiliated and hurt, not the character she is playing.

Rogers went through five husbands, including the pacifistic and beautiful Lew Ayres, and most of them lasted for a couple of years, but Lela was her real partner for life. The last husband, William Marshall, got her to play a madam in a dire film shot in Jamaica, variously known as The Confession and Quick, Let’s Get Married (1964), and after that low point she made only Harlow (1965), where she was intriguingly cast as Jean Harlow’s mother, before retaining her star status in long-running stage stints in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway and Mame in London. After that came a little TV and nightclub work, where she ended most of her songs with a corny wink to the audience. A Christian Scientist like her beloved or at least inescapable mother, Rogers refused medical treatment after having a stroke, and she was ill for several years before dying in 1995.

The last forty-five or so years of Rogers’s long career basically ran on fumes of good will from her first twelve years in movies, and particularly those Fred Astaire musicals that she preferred to forget. Like many actors, Rogers had no real center or base that was really her, and this lack of center meant that she was able to in effect be something she wasn’t with Astaire, and transcendently so, but it also meant that bad habits and instincts were ready to rush in and overwhelm her when her guard was down.

“May I rescue you?” Astaire asks her in Top Hat, to which she snaps, “No, I prefer being in distress.” The Astaire/Rogers films are so romantic because part of her resistance is that she is suspicious of romance, and maybe she doesn’t believe in it at all. That lack of belief was what made her so sexy beyond her God-given but worked-on perfect figure (“Women weren’t born with silk stockings on, you know,” she says in Follow the Fleet). Look at how cool and unreachable she is when Fred is singing his heart out to her during “Never Gonna Dance” in Swing Time. She preached that God is Love and soda fountains were forever, but in her best work with Astaire and in Stage Door, she let darker and more movingly yearning things cloud her almost cartoonishly pretty brow, and those things are what should define her and what should be remembered.

by Dan Callahan

#Dan Callahan #The Chiseler #Ginger Rogers

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theoriginalladya · 4 years

Note

27 100 ways to say I love you for Caleb x Kaidan

from this list

on AO3 here

Some Caleb and Kaidan set in ME1 prior to their romance, actually. Still, small things lead to bigger ones, right? Set right after Virmire. A bit sad maybe, more bittersweet, but in the long run I think it works well. Under cut due to length.

~~~

After dismissing the others, Caleb can’t exit the comms room fast enough. Between the disastrous outcome of the mission and the lack of sensitivity on the Council’s part, he is absolutely livid. It takes every ounce of willpower within him to keep from cursing up a blue streak and losing his temper – in Irish, just to be safe, but he still can’t count out a well-placed assistant on any of their staffs – but he manages, barely. Logically, he knows returning to the Citadel is the right call, especially if he wants to have backup going after Saren, but it does very little in the way of calming him. And after Virmire, he needs calming.

Heading through the CIC, he descends to the crew deck, but once he reaches the base of the steps, he hesitates. He really should head to his own cabin; his gear needs attention, and God knows he could do with a rest after events on Virmire, but his thoughts are elsewhere for the very same reason, so he doesn’t. Instead, he calls the lift and takes it down to the cargo bay where he spends the next few hours cleaning out Williams’ locker and her work station, packing her personal belongings away in a shipping crate that he carefully secures and labels. He still has a letter to write, one he isn’t looking forward to but has far too much experience with. He’ll add it later, securing it to the crate with her things. When they arrive at the Citadel, he plans to personally see it gets onto an Alliance transport back to her family. Ashley deserved a hell of a lot more in life than she got; he’s going to do what he can to see that she gets it now, even if it’s the last thing he does.

A quick glance at his chronometer when he’s done explains why he finds himself alone in the cargo bay; it’s 01h16. Only third watch is up this late, all sensible crew members are asleep in their beds or pods. With that in mind, he finally gives in and heads to his cabin.

He doesn’t get more than a half step inside the room before he hesitates. He sees her face in his mind’s eye, hears her voice insist he protect Alenko and the bomb instead of coming for her. The weeks and months of chasing Saren suddenly come to a drastic, unexpected halt as a result; a young life cut short far too soon. One hand rises almost of its own accord to rub over his left breast, attempting to ease the ache there. It doesn’t do any good, of course, but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

“Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat,” he mutters then spins on his heel needing to be any place but here …

… and runs straight into Kaidan. Throwing his hands out is automatic, and he catches the lieutenant before either of them can fall. “Sorry.”

“My fault,” Kaidan replies, stepping back out of his way.

A quick assessment is all Caleb needs to see something isn’t right with him, and he steps to the side, gesturing him into the room. “Come on in,” he invites, putting as much warmth into the words as he can just now. Whether he’s successful at that or not, he doesn’t know, but Kaidan is agreeable and moves into the room. “Did you need something?” He doesn’t wait for his answer, but walks on over to one of his storage lockers and retrieves a dark bottle and two glasses.

Kaidan sighs heavily, the sound echoes throughout the small room. “I just … I can’t stop thinking about Ashley,” he admits after a minute or two.

Caleb sets the glasses onto the table and opens the bottle, pouring two-fingers worth of the liquid into each. When he finishes, he caps the bottle then nudges a glass in Kaidan’s direction. The lieutenant seems startled at first, but catches himself after a moment and takes it in hand. Only then does Caleb lift his glass. Instead of his usual toast, he murmurs, “Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.” At Kaidan’s quizzical look, he clarifies, “May she rest in peace.”

Kaidan nods and lifts his glass, clinking it softly against Caleb’s. They drink in silence, each to their own thoughts, own memories. When their glasses are empty, Kaidan sets his on the table. Caleb is about to reach for the current bottle, but a twitch of distaste at his lips. “Not to your liking?”

Kaidan shrugs but says nothing.

Grabbing what he affectionately refers to as the good stuff, he returns it to the storage locker and snags a different bottle. “How about this?” he asks, tilting it so Kaidan can see the label. When Kaidan hesitates, Caleb provides a smile of encouragement. “Try some,” he insists. “I promise, it’s good.”

Kaidan chuckles softly, conceding with a slight nod of his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a commander quite so … well-versed, shall we say, in spirits?”

The smile that follows doesn’t reach his eyes as Caleb pours another two-fingers worth into their glasses. This time, he reverts to his standard toast. “Sláinte.” Their glasses clink lightly and they down the liquid in one gulp. This time as he sets his glass down, Caleb takes a seat.

Kaidan follows. “What was that you said?”

“Hmm?” Rubbing his hands over his face, Caleb tilts his head until he can see the lieutenant. “Sláinte? It means ‘good health.’”

Kaidan shakes his head. “No, before. When we were at the door,” he clarifies.

Caleb frowns and tries to think back. So many things he says, so many in Irish, even, and he does it without really thinking about it at the time. How is he supposed to remember?

“Sounded like something about a … cat?”

From one instant to the next, it’s as if a light turns on in his head. “Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat,” he repeats.

“Yeah, that one.”

Chuckling, Caleb pours himself one last drink. This time, he silently salutes his friend, hoping she is watching down over them and keeping them safe for the rest of this mission. “Loosely translated, it means, May the cat eat you, and may the divil eat the cat.”

Kaidan waits a moment or two before he asks, “What the hell does that mean?”

Sitting back up, Caleb shrugs. “I was wishing Saren and surefire one-way ticket to hell, simply put.” He looks over at Kaidan and tips his chin toward the bottle, but the lieutenant shakes his head. Pushing both the bottle and his glass to the side, Caleb settles his hands on the table as he turns toward his friend. “Look, Kaidan, I –.”

Shaking his head, Kaidan waves off the comment. “I’m sorry I put you into such a position to begin with,” he says quietly. His fingers fiddle with his glass. “I … shouldn’t have, and now? … The shock of losing Ash like that, it just …”

Caleb reaches over and plucks the glass from his hands before covering them with one of his to keep them still. “The whole situation shouldn’t have happened the way it did,” he corrects. “Ashley should be here now, drinking with us; it should never have been you or her. But she isn’t here, and that’s Saren’s fault, not yours, not mine. Understand?”

Kaidan’s closes his eyes for a minute, but he nods.

Pulling back, Caleb asks, “Do you remember that night on Arcturus, when we finally went out for the drink I owed you?”

His eyes open again and focus across the table with the question. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Caleb shrugs. “I made some comment about how things played out on Akuze. And you said …?”

“Situations like that are out of your control. There isn’t anything you could have done to change the outcome,” Kaidan repeats. “Something like that, anyway.”

“I think we both know Ash would agree with that.” Caleb leans back in his seat and sighs. “I hate losing people under my command. But it happens. Will happen again, no matter how I wish it won’t. Virmire … Akuze … the streets of Shannon. Doesn’t matter where or who, it happens. But each time, I try to learn something from it – take something that might just keep it from happening again, or at least will lessen the numbers.”

A thoughtful look crosses Kaidan’s face. “And this time?”

Huffing softly, Caleb admits, “Still working that out.”

After several more moments of quiet, Kaidan pushes to his feet. “Well, thanks for the talk, commander, and the drink. I –.”

Caleb’s eyes narrow to slits. “Alenko, what have I told you?”

“Sir – .”

He folds his arms across his chest, giving his most intimidating stare. Granted, after three quick drinks, it’s probably less than effective. Probably. But he’s got his N7 training behind it, too. That has to count for something.

Kaidan sighs again and grumbles, “Fine, Shepard.”

Intimidation slips easily into amusement. “Was that so difficult? At least I’m not asking you to call me by my given name.”

“The point,” Kaidan continues acting as if he hadn’t been interrupted, though the hint of pink at his cheeks states otherwise, “I was trying to make was, thank you. For taking the time to talk. For the drinks. For …”

He eases up immediately, sensing the completion of that thought. “For remembering Ashley?”

“Yeah.”

“Not likely I’ll forget her.”

“No, I wasn’t suggesting you would. I mean – .”

Rising, Caleb shakes his head. “I remember every single person I’ve lost over the years under my command,” he says quietly. “Ashley won’t ever be forgotten.” And if he has his way about it, the entire family won’t ever be forgotten again.

“Thank you, sir.” Kaidan slides to attention. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

The minute the door shuts behind the lieutenant, Caleb pours one more drink. It isn’t what he’d prefer, but the bottle is right in front of him. Lifting his glass, he stares across the room at the door and lifts the glass and begins to recite, “Ciara, Colin, Sean, Brennan, Nora, Aoife, Killian and Siobhan.” Each name comes easily from his memory, gliding off his tongue with his easy lilt. He continues through the names of his unit on Akuze, of the couple of personnel lost over the years on his N7 missions, then hesitates as he concludes, “welcome her with open arms, if you’d be so kind. Like you, she was the best of us and deserves the homecoming. May good luck be with you Wherever you go, and your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow.”

When he finally tumbles into bed and falls to sleep that night, his dreams are blessedly still and empty for the first night in what feels like forever …

#100 Ways to Say I Love You prompt #ladya writes #Caleb Shepard #mshenko #OTP: Brothers in arms #Kaidan Alenko #mallaidhsomo

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eujazmine · 4 years

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⟨ RYAN DESTINY. CIS FEMALE. SHE/HER. ⟩ though the mist might prevent some from seeing it, JAZMINE HARPER is actually a descendent of H E C A T E. it’s still a question of whether or not the 23 year old BUSINESS MAJOR from HOUSTON, USA has taken after their godly parent completely, but the demigod is still known to be quite PASSIONATE & MISCHIEVOUS.

hi everyone it’s rae #2 again 😔 but allow me to introduce you all to my darling jazmine, who is a revamping of a couple muses i’ve played in the past. as always, like this post and i’ll hit your dms!

History (death tw)

claimed at birth in houston, texas since her father could see through the mist. her father started physically training around the age of three. it wasn’t anything too crazy at first, since she was only a toddler when they began, but her father wanted her to have a head-start athletically. on her 6th birthday, hecate gifted her a spell book and required that she started her magical training.

she started attended camp elektra in california during the summers when she was seven years old. at some point, her father got married and started having more children. when she was twelve, he announced that they would be moving to new york for her new step-mother’s job. that summer, she attended camp half-blood, and leaving for camp was the last time she had seen her texan home.

it was around that time that her and her father’s strong personalities truly began to clash. they had different visions for jazmine’s future, and she started to resent being under his control. it also frustrated her that she couldn’t alter his perception via mist, which led to even more complications whenever she was caught doing so to her step-mother.

she spent nearly two years with her family in new york. after nearly getting expelled from school and having too many issues at home, her father sent her away to year-round camp in greece by the time she was 14.

due to extensive training, she was among the top-ranked during her time at camp athens. she devoted much of her free time, including summer breaks, to questing and rigorous training, and was often recruited through the school for selective quests.

once she graduated, she tried staying with her father in new york again to work and save money, but this only lasted about six months. she went back to europe to travel and she fulfilled quests for money to support this new lifestyle.

at 20, jazmine had another terrible fight with her father. she left and hasn’t seen him since. after this, she started to take questing seriously again. she went on more dangerous and complex quests, knowing there was no one really out there waiting for her safe return.

then came 2019: the zeus incident. she, celeste (daughter of zeus) and adelphie (daughter of apollo) teamed up to retrieve poseidon’s trident from zeus. these three had quested in the past, and were a notoriously powerful trio, but they had never gone against celeste’s own father.

by the time they had defeated the guard monsters and reached the trident, zeus had become aware of what they were up to. he killed adelphie on sight. as jazmine futilely tried to heal adelphie’s lifeless body, celeste used this moment to carry the trident back to the ocean via the wind. soon enough, zeus zapped celeste off the mountain. whether the god of thunder hadn’t seen her hiding in the darkness or he just didn’t care, she’ll never know, but he spared jazmine and left.

after carrying adelphie back down the mountain and presuming that celeste was also dead, she came across rostam, who had prophesied that something would happen at the mountain. he helped her bring her friends back to eonia, where she was allowed to rest and enroll for the following semester.

now, she’s at eonia studying business because 1) she has nowhere else to go and 2) she doesn’t think she wants to fight her whole life anymore.

Personality

being able to manipulate mortals as a child has made her view people more as vessels of entertainment or stimulation, and it shows. her sense of humor primarily revolves around teasing others, such as mocking them or playing tricks on them, and her blunt remarks can often be perceived as quite insensitive. she is very observant and has no problem using this trait for blackmail or manipulation, but she uses this to provide frank judgment or advice when asked. “0 to 100″ is a pretty accurate way to describe jazmine -- meaning for the most part, she has a calm, cool vibe, but her hot-temperedness can quickly get her in trouble. she can be impatient, vengeful, and petty, refusing to be the bigger person or the “loser” when crossed. stubborn and prideful, she could hold a grudge forever until she serves her own sense of justice or receives external mediation.

her bluntness and outbursts might give off the impression of her being mean, which she kinda is sometimes, but she isn’t that mean. she’s a compassionate person, and she’ll often help others if she feels sorry for them, despite trying to brush off their problems as beneath her. this is especially true when it comes to her friends. although she can be particularly harsh with them, her fierceness also comes with extra love and protection.

Powers

her most powerful ability is mystiokinesis, but it didn’t come easily. like other children of hecate, her magic is strongest at nighttime and very limited during the day. she was given a spellbook once claimed and has been perfecting her craft since. her magic gives her a limited grasp of all kinds of abilities, but she is most skilled in the areas of magic that have helped her the most on quests, such as vitakinesis, offensive spells/curses, and magical tracking. she works hard to improve her mystiokinesis through camps and personal training, but she is prone to overdoing it and negatively affecting her own health.

mist control is her secondary ability. it was the first of her powers to develop. as a child, her suggestions seemed to be a little too convincing to mortals. although it wasn’t fool-proof, she found herself manipulating people’s perceptions in her favor, possibly to get herself out of trouble or solely for entertainment purposes. she mostly uses it to her advantage around mortals or on quests. at eonia, and hasn’t found much use for this skill at eonia.

umbrakinesis is definitely her weakest power, but she would love to be more skilled in it. it has been the most difficult for her to develop, so she can only sometimes use the shadows as a shield or as a method of travel during the night. however, she has been able to levitate since she was a kid, which has been pretty convenient ever since she learned how to control it.

Extras

tl;dr: retired adrenaline junkie prone to moodiness

she has been at eonia since summer/fall 2019. you can get some more details about that last quest on celeste’s intro and self-para, if you haven’t already! feel free to assume that your muse had heard something about it.

she’s very hard-working and puts 110% into the things she cares about. the number of hours she has devoted to magic and academics is endless. neither of these areas come super naturally to her, so she has to work extra hard to develop them to reach her standards.

those 2 years she spent traveling europe and questing for cash?? she was living her best life. she used mist control and mystiokinesis a lot during this time to do things like avoid getting arrested, sneak into fancy masquerade balls, crash weddings, and waive any extra fees she couldn’t afford. she’ll bring up a wild memory from time to time if the conversation calls for it, but it’s rare for her to give out too many other details.

character inspo: think michelle jones (1), jessica huang (1, 2), hotaru imai (1, 2), fallon carrington (1, 2, 3), mal (1), daoming si (meteor garden), jennifer pierce (1, 2, 3), sam puckett (1), rosa diaz (1, 2, 3, 4)

works at the dining hall. she doesn’t care about this job and therefore puts no effort into it, so don’t expect a smile or cheery tone from her when you walk in.

involvements: black student union, gamer’s guild, football (soccer)

a skilled fighter, she is well-versed in swordsmanship and hand-to-hand combat, but she prefers using magic since it comes from her godly lineage.

she’s been playing soccer since she was a child, a sport her dad forced encouraged all of her siblings to partake in. although her and her father had many other issues, this actually wasn’t one of them, seeing as they both shared a genuine love for the sport. she’s known for being overly aggressive and instigative on the field, so she's at risk of losing her position if she starts any more fights.

Potential Connections

ex: there was probably never any official title tbh so she might even claim that they weren’t exes. jazmine’s a very private person and finds this kind of stuff too vulnerable, so maybe your muse got tired of being treated like a secret.

quest mates: could’ve been for anything tbh, but if your muse was significantly weaker than jazmine, she would’ve for sure let them know.

tutor: she works hard to maintain her grades, but sometimes she needs the extra help.

people she protects: for whatever reason, jazmine has a soft spot for your muse, so she’ll take care of them when they’re sick, bring them home from a party, put a curse on their ex, you name it.

past hookup: she never called. consider yourself blocked.

friends: self-explanatory! unlikely friends, friends who bond over mutual hatred, frenemies., etc.

enemies: her moral ambiguity and rude remarks probably rub some people the wrong way, so enemies wouldn’t be too surprising.

clients?: i’d imagine that some people have paid her in the past to bring misfortune to their enemies. they probably paid her some money to put a lil curse on them. it’s never anything permanent. if they paid her extra, maybe she did some research and brought them something to blackmail them with.

targets: the people that her clients have paid her to curse. she’s just a third party trying to chase the bag, so no hard feelings, really -- but if your muse somehow found out they got cursed by her, she’d be willing to reverse it for a price.

pawns: maybe she views them as weak. maybe she just finds them funny. either way, she has little respect for your muse and will mess with them for her own entertainment. it’s all in good fun!

people she met while exploring europe: she was up to a lot of shenanigans during those two years, so the possibilities are endless.

#euintro #death tw #violence tw #okay and now i disappear

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enduringsea · 3 years

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( rules: you can usually tell a lot about a person by the kind of music they listen to! put your music on shuffle and list the first 10 songs, then tag 10 people! no skipping! ) / tagged by @yellowcrumpet ╭( ･ㅂ･)و )))

Thanks for the tag! I LOVE these things-- I don’t rlly have a playlist either though, just a mess of music files on a device I haven’t updated so I’ll be checking my YouTube history too lol. There’s a uhhh.... pattern to be found, mainly relating to Code Vein or other OCs.... which isn’t surprising ._. ;; I made it a separate post bc I knew this was going to get long and rambly with lyric snippets and crying about fictional characters, sorry :D

1. Repeat Until Death - Novo Amor don’t go / you’re half of me now / but i’m hardly stood proud / i said it, almost oh i’ve been low / but damn it i bet it don’t show / it was heaven a moment ago oh i can’t seem to let myself leave you / but i can’t breathe anymore This one gives me Loubeth vibes ok, partially bad end route ;-; While Elizabeth is a very strong person, her friends are the most prominent reason she tries to do anything at all & isn’t living day-to-day in a monotonous grind to survive without a solid purpose other than ‘help random ppl bc it’s the right thing to do’. If she loses them, it’d ruin her & hammers into her head how everything she’s ever done has been a failure. She suffered a major betrayal by her boss before the Collapse, she was unable to fully participate in proj. queen despite her incredible test results, she failed to defeat Cruz and take her blood during Operation Queenslayer, and if she fails to protect the people she’s finally found meaning with? She’d break down completely & destroy herself to save them. She’s always had some level of abandonment issues, and without her family around it’s so much worse, even if it isn’t the most obvious because she’s generally seen as very well put together-- I really can’t express how much it would hurt her to lose Louis, Yakumo, and the others. She’s just not one to show just how bad it can truly get for her mentally and emotionally-- she’s resilient as hell, she’s been through hell repeatedly and survived it all, so it’s easy for others to assume she’s fine all things considered. It makes her feel weak and ashamed of herself if she shows any level of vulnerability, so she doesn’t; she swallows it down and is afraid of disappointing those who look up to her as a fighter and friend-- of course, no one at Home Base would blame her for being vulnerable, they all have their moments, Bethy just sets herself to such a high standard it’s difficult for her to talk about her own suffering in spite of how well-versed she is in getting her thoughts and feelings across otherwise. Louis is the one most keen to how deeply she’s hurting, but he doesn’t understand just how deeply until she finally does fall apart. The final swell of the song and its desperate lyrics really relays the pain they both feel-- Louis too would not fare well if something happened to Elizabeth, because he blames himself she was even involved in Operation Queenslayer for a long time, I honestly did so bad in explaining coherently, this song just has so much emotion and hurt behind it adklfjdfdff </3

2. Looking Out For You - Joy Again this is a love song for a girl who will never know it’s about her she's beaming that smile / all the while i’m all tripped up on my own throat i guess there is no hope This song reminds me of Elizabeth & my friend’s character Takashi Fujioka, who gets-- vERY...FRIENDZONED, for lack of a better word, by Elizabeth in his story, it’s really summed up best as tragic (;﹏;) Before the Collapse they were hitting it off, then the Collapse happened, they were separated, he lost his sisters, Mido happened, he was experimented on + became a revenant, etc, etc; years have passed since then & she’s gotten her life together as much as one can in a world like Vein, but for Takashi it’s like no time has passed at all. Elizabeth is subtly older in appearance, she’s been working w Lou & Co. for a long time; Loubeth blatantly have a connection, & rather than bringing up his feelings + making it awkward bc he values their friendships, he just kinda. chokes on them & does his best to help out the team. It doesn’t help he can’t even be jealous bc Louis is a really solid friend to him too, IT’S JUST A MESS OF A SITUATION & the death of what could have been if things were different.

3. Closer - Teagan And Sara ( no lengthy explanation for this one thank goodness, I’ve just been watching BoJack Horseman again and I really like some of the songs they add in, I like listening to this one on loop when mindlessly coloring something )

4. Brutal - Olivia Rodrigo all I did was try my best / this the kind of thanks I get? they say these are the golden years / but I wish I could disappear ego crush is so severe / god, it's brutal out here I have it on a playlist for Elizabeth somewhere, not all of it applies to her but it reflects some of her struggles she has both before & after the collapse. She’s-- always kind of been a mess while under immense pressure + has serious self image issues, this song hits that side of her well. She’s been held to humanly impossible standards by both herself and her family bc frankly? She can reach them, she’s NOT exactly human. She was born into her position as a hunter & intends to keep it for as long as she lives (like revenants, her kind is very much ‘either gets killed or lives 5ever), even if some days she really feels how heavy the burden can be. She didn’t have a normal childhood and she’s fine with it for the most part, but it alienates her from most of her peers-- she never got to date anyone, never had a close group of friends, never went to parties that weren’t formals, etc., while she feels a little childish about it, she does envy ‘normal’ and understands the pressure she’s lived under her entire life has caused damage-- she has been exploited for her abilities, there’s just not much she can do about it but to keep going, rlly.

5. Freaks - Surf Curse don't kill me / just help me run away from everyone i need a place to stay / where i can cover up my face don't cry / i am just a freak / i am just a freak UhhhHHH this song really makes me think of Oliver Collins :D;; thank TikTok for showing it to me. It makes me think of how scared he was, of both the world and the revenants who captured him. The song’s use of the word ‘parasites’ really makes me think of Revenants and the BOR parasites XD I’m hoping when I poke my video editor again, I can record some Oliver footage to make a short video to this song. Oliver deserves so much better, I wish you could save him, but that’s what AUs are for, hahah.... The second half of the lyrics make me think of the AU I have where he lives and has to grapple with the guilt of surviving and the things he did to other revenants to get by too.

6. All Eyes On Me - Bo Burnham you say the ocean’s rising / like i give a shit you say the whole world’s ending / honey it already did you’re not gonna slow it / heaven knows you tried got it? good / now get inside I haven’t seen the Netflix special yet but I’ve had this song on repeat since my move started. The lyrics hit too hard & resonate with my existential dread, covid exhaustion, and extreme burnout in my 20s, but bc I have Damage I can also relate it to CV ._. ‘you’re not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried. got it? good now get inside’ makes me think of--;; the bad end route again, and Elizabeth’s desperation to keep her found family together. It’s not like her to completely stop caring about an issue, but in the moment she realizes what’s being taken from her? She doesn’t want to save all of revenant-kind if it means she’s going to wind up alone all over again, her world is effectively over if she’s forced to be alone again. The MC frenzying means the only immediately identifiable hope she had of saving everyone else is gone, so why not just go home? If they’re all doomed, she wants to at least be together for a little while longer, it’s fine if they use her blood to survive & everyone else in the mist is out of luck, it’s soul-crushing bc I’ve never had her in a situation where she’s been this reckless, despondent/hopeless, and thinking irrationally where it’d impact more than herself-- especially when she’s normally goal-oriented, organized, meticulous, so on so forth: she’s not one to act without thinking something through first, but that last breath of light just got sucker-punched out of her. All she wants is home, comfort, and family, and ultimately in the bad end route she does manage to preserve their lives, maintain the mist, and supply blood beads, but her own condition leaves her on the throne-- it’s a mix of the bad, neutral, and true ending rlly ldkfjdf BUT YEAH enough rambling on that :D;; This song’s really good and touches a lot of different thoughts and ideas both in real life and my ocs, kind of embarrassing--;; thank u bo burnham for ruining me with this beautiful song

7. Yellow - Coldplay look at the stars / look how they shine for you / and everything you do your skin / oh yeah, your skin and bones / turn in to something beautiful do you know / for you I'd bleed myself dry Does this song make me think about JackEva? Yes. Yes it does. Star / night sky symbolism? Bam. Sappy lyrics about love and finding the person you’re with absolutely mesmerizing and worth dying for? BAM. If JackEva were capable of using their own blood to save each other, I can see it-- hJNGn they just care about each other so much, Jack cries for her even though they both knew that eventually one of them would succumb to their duty, and if the roles were reversed I can see Eva doing the same, I adore them beyond human language. On my CV RP blog, my Jack’s not shippable bc-- Eva, my friend even have them looking after his nephew (an oc--) at one point. I should seriously drop some headcanons down eventually....

8. Louder Than Thunder - The Devil Wears Prada are we meant to be empty-handed? / i know i could, i could be better i don't think i deserve it / selflessness, find your way into my heart all stars could be brighter / all hearts could be warmer

LMFAO throwback to my middle school playlist, I’m old-- I’ve applied this song to a lot of things back in the day, but I really connect it to Loubeth now, especially Louis. Lou & Bethy are both functional idiots who are too hard on themselves & have trouble recognizing their worth beyond what they can do for others. They’re trying to be better-- to make up for what they perceived wrongs they’ve done, but it’s hard, they don’t believe they’re worthy of the love and support the other gives, but they still yearn for that sense of security. After Louis’ memories are returned, he finally understands the guilt he’s felt since he became a revenant and it really skews his self-perception; he blames himself for so many things & Elizabeth, who has always been able to kill when necessary, sets it straight-- “It’s not your fault”, and it takes Louis some time to properly absorb that message. He thinks she’s just trying to comfort him, which she is tbh, but she’s not wrong: “It’s not your fault you couldn’t kill someone. It was never your job to kill anyone.” It’s up to people like her to do those sort of things-- Elizabeth may not have been present when Cruz frenzied, but if she had been? It would have been over before it started, that’s something she has regrets over, even if nothing could have been done since she was already on the field. Actually, she’s actually really quite angry that security failed to monitor Cruz properly and has a few select words for the ones there who could have actually done something before it got out of hand-- civilians and doctors are exempt from her shtlist bc they’re not meant to be killers (so don’t worry Artorias, she’s not ready to bite your head off!), but they had to have some kinda security detail rite o-q??? They’re probably hiding from her wrath-- BUT ANYWAY, she insists she’ll never blame Louis for not being able to do something as serious as killing another person. He was a normal human being who cared about his friend, not a failure, and he couldn’t have been expected to do something that shouldn’t have fallen on his shoulders in the first place. As many times as it takes, she’ll reaffirm that it wasn’t his fault, she’s not angry, he’s always done his best and her opinion of him hasn’t changed. He’s a good person and she loves him through all the hurt, though she doesn’t drop the word ‘love’ for a long time. It just-- takes Louis a while to accept she views him as someone worthy of the love and respect she has for him. It’s kind of ironic she’s so adamant on Louis not blaming himself considering she’s the one privately blaming herself for-- wow there’s too much to unpack, she feels guilty she was even born?? im so broken over these two. I love them and yet they SUFFER...

9. What I’ve Done - Linkin Park i'll face myself / to cross out what i’ve become erase myself / and let go of what i’ve done today this ends / i'm forgiving what i’ve done

I have Louis Amamiya brainrot and I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks that this song fits him super well & it needs to become an AMV dsjfkldsfd. I’m a near life-long Linkin Park fan and this fits with Lou so well thematically. As much as I’ve gone on about Louis’ guilt, he does steel himself to keep going forward in spite of it and make things right, for everyone. Maybe it wasn’t really his fault, but at the end of the day his inability to kill Cruz in that moment left a disaster in its wake that got a countless number of people killed-- the MC included with Karen and Aurora. He doesn’t want to run away from the truth, doesn’t want to make excuses, he wants to take responsibility for it and he’ll work himself to death if it means things will be better-- it’s both admirable he’s got a strong resolve and VERY concerning with how willing he is to die for the cause, please don’t overdo it, Lou, you’ll break mine and Bethy’s hearts ._.;; It won’t always be easy, there are moments the grief gnaws at him, but in the end he does overcome it (and uh. as in the bad ending, we know he can actually do it this time). I know we can’t see everything, but I would have loved deeper character interactions, especially with Louis with an emphasis on grieving + forgiving himself properly-- but this song really is nice with the whole ‘I’m going to face my mistakes head on, forgive myself, and keep moving forward’. It’s what Louis deserves: self forgiveness and a damn break ‧º·(˚ ˃̣̣̥⌓˂̣̣̥ )‧º·˚

10. Call of Silence - Hiroyuki Sawano you will know you're reborn tonight / must be rough but i’ll stay by your side even if my body's bleached to the bones / i don't want go through that ever again so cry no more / oh my beloved ngl idk if those are the correct lyrics, buuuuuuut....... im a weenie and am internally weeping abt loubeth after midnight, what else is new lmfao- i’ll at least try to be brief :D I also used to really like Attack on Titan when I was in high school, I dropped the anime years ago because I was waiting for s2 and never got back to it once it started airing again, I thought I’d finish it once the anime was complete since I eventually caught up with the manga, such a good series BUT ANYWAY-- I think it’s a really pretty song and Loubeth fit with the tender lyrics. IT’S LATE, idk what to say about them other than what I’ve said already dsklfjdslf im sorry I really ramble a LOT and I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had the chance to >w>;;

#i do not know how 2 b quiet #long post #personal text #yellowcrumpet

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