#{took me a while to sort things but here we go~~!}

[petew21-blog]

Swap you face part 2

Archie frowned looking a bit paler than before:"So you're saying that doctor Brown is onto us and we gotta flee, is that what I think you're saying?"

"Pretty much"

"How would he prove we stole their bodies? Would he force you to switch clothes in front of everyone or what?"

"Have you performed any surgery recently? No. Neither have I, but these bodies have. So either we run away or we will have Hell of a complicated life. Or if you don't want this, I can go get your body. I'll switch you and your hell ends."

Archie was contemplating for a while watching his manly arms on his wide thighs. He looked up:"I don't want to leave. Please sort this out."

"Ok, so Dr. Brown is in my body. Dr. Kim now has yours. Meaning that I need part of my original clothing to swap myself and Dr. Brown. Then I'll just swap you with Dr. Kim. We already have their clothing. We can't go back to my house for the clothing cause my parents would freak if they saw two adults trying to enter their house for a piece of clothing of their sons. I'll leave for the hospital and get it. Ok?"

"Fine. Thank you. I'm really sorry, but it would be really stressful to just leave. I know you understand."

Don't get it wrong. I really wanted to follow the plan before. I went to get my clothes. But my body was sleeping, strapped to the bed. Then a handsome intern entered the room

"Good afternoon, Dr. Brown. I'm on your service today. We had to restrain the patient, he was showing signs of mental disorder claiming to be you. There is a bypass scheduled in OR 1 and OR 2 is waiting for you. Can I help you with anything sir?"

My mind was coming up with the most devious plan ever. But eventually it would make many people happy. Maybe except Dr. Brown.

"Come with me to the on-call room. I have to speak to you privately."

We entered the room

"Take off your shirt." I ordered him

"Sir, I am sorry, but I am not comftable doing that. Besides, I am in a relationship. You're a very handsome man, but this isn't gonna happen, sir."

"I am your attending. And as your attending I expect you to follow everything I tell you to do!"

He was visibly angry, but he proceeded

"Here you go." He said angrily and handed me the shirt.

I took off my own shirt and threw it at him, while taking his own. "You're about to get a very fast promotion." I put on his shirt. Changing my appearence yet again.

in front off me was the body of Dr. Brown. It seemed from the look of his face, that he understood the situation quite well. He seemed actually happy about it too. Smiling even. I mean it doesn't happen everyday that you become an attending from being an intern in just a few months

I smiled and waved at him:"Goodbye DR. BROWN!"

He just waved without saying a single word and just smiled. The last thing I saw was him unbotting his jeans

"So you're saying you put dr. Brown back in your body but you had to swap with this kid? How does that even happen?"

"First of all i"m an adult and an intern just as your body. Second of all, it happened fast after he wanted to get me for swapping with him. And third of all stop at this motel. We're far enough from them. We should rest."

We got ourselves a room. We decided to relax for a while and the figure out where we were gonna go. We were next to each other on the bed. I was enjoying my new smell of a younger man. Inhaling my armpit. Archie was still nervous. Maybe I shouldn't have swapped him and just continue this journey on my own. He is such a wreck when he is doing something out of his control.

"I'm gonna go to shower. Wanna come with me?" I asked. He said he needs some time to think, so I let him be.

I was so looking forward to this. Enjoying the new body. Now was the time to fully explore. I left the door open for Archie to observe in case he was interested. Taking off the trousers and my shirt, I was left with the view of my new manly, yet younger body than before.

I smiled at myself. "This is gonna be so much fun"

I entered the shower, turning on the hot water. The feeling of water running down over my pectorals and my slightly hairy torso, over to the abs and to my new beautiful cock. Dr. Brown was bigger, but damn, this guys dick is amazing. Looks like from a porno movie.

I started slowly. Picking up the pace. I didn't try to hold in me the moaning, but even that didn't invite Archie to join me. I tried to insert the fingers of my free hand into my anus. Maaan this guy is so tight. I continued until I found his prostate. Let me tell you that this was indeed the best orgasm so far. Even better than in Brown's body. I had to wash the wall of the shower because of how much of cum I released.

This power is so fucking amazing

I went out of the shower to find Archie still on the bed. I laid down on mine too.

"You're still upset?"

"I.... I don't know if I want this. I mean. It's one thing to swap around two doctor's bodies to fuck around. But we stole their life. Our lives are gone. And I mean... It's not too late to go back. Don't you think?"

"We can be anyone you know? We don't have to go back to our lives"

"But I want to be me. I like my life."

"Hmmm... well in that case..." I got up from my bed and showed visibly my frustration.

"Where are you going?"

"Ehm. I am gonna go for a walk now to think how I'm going to swap us back easily and not to screw anything else up."

"I'm sorry. It's just cause I feel so guilty."

"Yeah I know. It's fine. I'll be back in an hour."

Maybe it was horrible from me, but I still think leaving Archie in the motel was the best thing I could have done. He's got a new adult body and he needs to learn how to take care of himself. Yeah you guessed it. I wasn't planning on going back to that motel.

As for me. I wanna thake this body for a ride. I went to this bar a made a decision to hit on anyone who might have a car to get me further away. Maybe even take their lige. But I think I'll keep this guy for a loooong time

A cute nerdy guy approached looking sex starved. Well this should be interesting

Hey guys, I'm slowly working on your stories, but I gotta take care of some stuff in school. I'll try to write in my free time as much as possible to make your swap dreams come true. Byeee

Part 1:

[bisexualiteaa]

How The Boys Met You

Character list: Soap, Price, Gaz, König, and Ghost

AN: This one is a little different than the stuff I’ve been posting lately, sort of a throw back to some of my old content! I will be getting back to the regular stuff as well, just wanted to post some of the things that have been in the works for a while now! Hope y’all enjoy! 🥰

CW: slight OOC task force 141 + König, deviance from the games, fem bodied reader, possibly poor attempt at writing accents, flirting, talk of dating apps, being stood up, mentions of alc0h0l, mentions of w0unds, mostly fluff, slight suggestive themes, cursing, possible grammar and spelling errors

Taglist: @expirednukacola

John “Soap” MacTavish

- He was at his favorite pub, spending the weekend enjoying a few drinks with a couple of the guys.

- Three beers deep, going on about some stupid story that anyone could tell by the guy’s faces that he’d told a million times already, and every time told it as if they hadn’t all been there to witness it just to get to the butt of a joke.

- ✨Then you walked in✨

- He was speechless as you walked up to the bar. Your cute, form fitting dress on, heels that made your legs look absolutely stunning and your make up all done. You looked too damn good to be sitting in a place like this he thought.

- The only thing off about it all? You had a sad look on your face as you sat down, breathing a heavy sigh before the bartender made his way over to you so that you could order a drink.

- It made his heart hurt to see someone so pretty look so sad, not to mention the guys were totally teasing him and daring him to talk to you.

- The “make your move before I do” ™️

- “I’ll have an old fashioned please, extra cherries” you ordered, and he knew right then and there that you were different than the usual crowd this place pulled in.

- “Put it on my tab, I think I’ll have the same” Johnny spoke, making you turn to look at him, intrigued by his Scottish accent and the fact that he had just paid for you.

- You tried telling him he didn’t have to, but he kindly insisted, making you blush before you thanked him.

- “You look beautiful if ya don’t mind me sayin” he said, making you smile at his compliment, the first one you’d gotten all night. “Thank you! It was a new dress I bought for a date tonight but…I got stood up. So I came here instead to take a little of the pain away” you responded, and he understood where the pain in your eyes came from now.

- “Steamin’ Jesus…someone really stood you up? What ‘n idiot. They really missed out. Ya look stunnin’. Anyone would be lucky t’ go out with a gal like you” Johnny said, making you blush again as you smiled.

- Secretly it made your night.

- “How about I give it a try? We have some drinks, I tell you a little about myself, you tell me about your fine self, and we have a good time in the makin’? I’d happily make up for the screw up they made to get t’ know ya and see ya leave with a smile if you’re willin’. And if I’m lucky, hopefully I’ll get t’ leave with your number so we can have a second one” he said, and rather smoothly at that, making you giggle as you took a sip of your drink. “Alright lover boy, seeing as we have drinks, tell me about yourself” you replied with a grin and he lit up with joy at your humor and you accepting his offer.

- Was better than you could have ever expected, certainly better than the stuffy, upscale place you were at originally. You were glad you ended up meeting someone at the pub he soon figured out that you frequented just about as much as he did.

- Even better? You went home with a smile, he went home with your number in his phone, and both of you went home with a plan for a second date. 💖

Captain John Price

- You were a barista at his favorite cafe he’d been going to for years now.

- When he wasn’t gone on deployment, he would come every day at the same time around lunch time, right before the rush, and leave once it was done.

- He ordered the same thing every time. Hot tea no matter the temperature outside, two sugars and a splash of cream and he would sit in the same spot by the window, reading or working on his laptop.

- You learned he was never terribly big on sweets, assuming he got most of his sugar intake with his drink, but every once in a while you’d slip him a bakery item for free.

- He was convinced it was just you being nice and making sure he had food before returning to work because it was a bad habit he was doing his best to break, but anyone else who knew? Was thoroughly convinced it was your own method of flirting with him.

- Sometimes you would take your break and sit and talk with him, try and get to know him more than just his order, the name he would give you to write on the cup and his phone number for the rewards account.

- One day it had been a particularly difficult day before he’d come in, but upon walking in and breathing in the lovely smells, seeing your bright smile, and hearing you sweetly greet him, he already felt ten times better.

- He returned the sentiment as he walked up to the counter, not even opening his mouth before you had put his order in the POS already, wishing to save him the trouble with how stressed and tired he looked. “A delight as always, love” he said, making you smile again. “Rough morning?” You asked as you made it for him, seeing stress written all over his face made you feel for him. “Very” he responded through a sigh as he took out his wallet while talking to you and watching you make it. “Four twenty nine as usual?” He asked, making you smile as you sat it down in front of him. “It’s on the house today. Please, sit and rest, I’ll have it out to you asap!” you said sweetly. “And if it isn’t too classified, I go on break in ten. I’m happy to lend an ear if you wish to confide your burdens or just to talk” you added, making him smile as he took a seat, pulling a chair out for you for when you were clocked out on break.

- You spent a little over time on break talking, having lost track of the time but it wasn’t busy so you knew it was okay.

- As he was about to leave as you were clocking back in, but it was then that he saw you’d left your number on the back of his cup, making him smile before quickly adding you into his contacts.

- Hello love, this is John. I wanted to say it was lovely talking with you today, thank you for the tea and for making the rest of my day go by much better. ❤️ I’d like to take you somewhere that isn’t the cafe sometime if you’d allow me, what do you say? you read on your phone, making a bright smile stretch to your lips as you excitedly responded and planned a proper date with him.

Kyle “Gaz” Garrick

- Poor Kyle had been on just about every dating app he and the boys could to find to get him the perfect girl to settle down with.

- From Tinder, to Hinge, to failed dates set up by finding people in person, he wasn’t sure if his heart would be able to withstand anymore heartbreak.

- This was attempt number eight, with seven dates failed before this. Why was the dating world so difficult now? He did everything he could to be himself and present himself as someone suitable.

- He swore to himself that if this one didn’t work out, that he would give up on it entirely. After all they do say you don’t find the right one when you’re searching for them, they find you.

- Or at least that’s what the married ones say.

- So when his date was running twenty, almost thirty minutes late to their supposed date, he was hurt but sadly wasn’t shocked either.

- He gave a heavy sigh as he checked his watch, then his phone for any communication from her. No text messages, no calls, absolutely nothing to let him know that his date was on their way or even still on for it.

- You were sat at the bar enjoying a few drinks as you normally do on the weekends, when you saw him walk in and grab a table for two.

- He was a handsome young man in your eyes, nicely dressed in a nice dress shirt, slacks, and a nice jacket seeing as it was raining outside.

- You were slightly saddened to find that he was there waiting for a someone else, assuming he was on a date, but when you’d stolen a few glances his way through the night, you noticed he’d been sitting there for a while and the second person had yet to show up.

- Your heart hurt for him, knowing what it was like to be stood up, it was the reason you gave up on dating all together yourself.

- When more time had passed by and his date still hadn’t shown, you decided to take the faithful leap.

- You weren’t sure if it was the alcohol in your system, or just the way that you sympathized with what he was going through, but just as he was getting ready to stand up and walk out, you found yourself walking over to his table.

- “Hey there handsome, I couldn’t help but see you’ve been sitting here for a while. Mind if I join you?” You asked kindly, and he had to admit, it took him back a bit.

- You looked stunning, donned in a nice cocktail dress, your hair and makeup done nicely, he figured you came here often with the way the waiters knew you and your drink order well.

- “Sure, that sounds lovely actually” he replied, his British accent taking you by slight surprise but with a kind smile in return. Maybe this failed date could take a turn for the better after all.

- You two sat and spoke over shared glasses of wine, some food, and got to know each other some.

- You talked of your hobbies, your work, your life goals, your favorite things, over all it had turned out far nicer than he could have imagined it would have been.

- You were both laughing and talking amongst each other when another woman came up to the table, looking dressed for a date and seemingly not very happy to see you sitting in her place.

- “Umm excuse me, I think you have the wrong guy, I’m supposed to be on a date with him” the girl spoke, pointing to him and regarding him as if he were an object of her possession making you turn to her and you fought to stifle a harsh laugh.

- “Oh I’m sorry, were you the one whose seat I’m in? Funny because you’re about two hours late sister. Finders keepers” you replied, trying to wave her off then turn back to Kyle and ignore the woman who clearly stood him up by the hickies all over her neck that were very poorly covered.

- “Excuse me?!” She asked angrily, making you turn back to her once again, only this time more annoyed at her persistence and rudeness. “Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were dense and rude, I said finders keepers. Should keep that in mind next time when you decide to be late to a date because you were too busy having fun with another” you said, gesturing to her hair that was slightly unkempt and the fresh love bites along her neck.

- It took everything in Kyle to not let his jaw hit the table at your response in his defense.

- He liked you even more now.

- “Oh and newsflash sweetie, that concealer really isn’t your shade. If you want to cover up hickies, find one that matches. Now if you excuse us, we’re trying to have a nice dinner here and I’d really like to get back to the very nice man you decided to stand up” you said, making her angrily scoff and look to Kyle for his defense.

- “Ugh, Kevin! C’mon, tell her to leave! This was supposed to be our night!” She said, making you cringe at her whiney tone and the way she didn’t even know his name.

- “My name’s Kyle and no. She was kind enough t’ come up t’ me when you weren’t here and I’m havin’ a rather lovely time with her. I’m sure the date who entertained you before this would happily take you back. I will not be rude and ask the woman who’s so kindly kept me company to leave because you think you’re entitled to crash our date” he replied, and she did NOT like that one bit.

- “DATE?! Ugh, whatever! I knew I shouldn’t have come here” she said angrily before stomping away once it became apparent that you weren’t leaving.

- He couldn’t have been more relieved, then soon enamored by you. First, you come over to him because you didn’t want him to be alone, then you defend him against his date?

- Where have you been all this time?

- “That was your date? If you asked me, I think you dodged a bullet there” you said with a grin, making him chuckle.

- “I couldn’t agree with you more” he replied, enjoying your company far more.

- “Glad to know you’re having a lovely time with me, because the feeling is quite mutual” you said genuinely, making a blush rise to his face before smiling back at you.

- Once the date was over, you both exchanged numbers, keeping in contact and being sure to step up more dates to come.

- Maybe his married buddies were right, all it took was for him to stop searching and there you suddenly were.

König

- He wasn’t exactly proud of it, but he met you through one of the guys who had set you up with him as a one night stand.

- Someone that would just give him some fun and a chance to relax for a night, with the guys claiming he needed to be “less tense”

- He’d had his fair share of sexual encounters before from past girlfriends and the occasional hookup, but something about you felt different.

- You were kind and sweet, a little shy, and of course really attractive.

- Not to mention the sex was unbelievably good.

- He loved that he was so much bigger than you, that you felt so small in his hands as they slid around your waist and to your hips as he kissed you, and how yours trailed his biceps and hard chest.

- Thought it was cute that you have to get up on your tiptoes to kiss him or to loop your arms around his neck.

- What he loved most was how you toyed with him, how you could be obedient and bratty, you could be dominant and submissive.

- You had an almost chaotic, unpredictable air about you.

- You were the wild card he’s been looking for.

- So as you both laid in his bed, his hand running along your back soothingly as you laid on top of him, naked and enjoying the after glow of the activities you’d just taken part in, the words left him without any second thought.

- “Could we…maybe see each other again, liebling?” He asked, and how you swooned at the nickname and his German accent.

- You thought it was so cute that a man of his stature, someone who looked so scary and big could be so shy.

- “Awww, do I have someone hooked?” You asked in a teasing tone with a devious giggle to match, making him blush at your words.

- “It doesn’t have to be like this again i-if you don’t want it to” he stammered, making you giggle as he tripped over his words a little.

- “I wouldn’t half mind if it was…” you said with a half lidded grin, littering kisses against his neck and chest because truth be told, you were a little hooked on him too.

- “Would you let me take you out? Properly get to know you?” He asked, wanting to treat you right, wanting to show that he had better intentions than just a one night stand if you’d let him.

- He’d have started that way had one of his friends not set this up without him knowing.

- “that sounds really nice” you replied sweetly, liking the idea of maybe seeing where it goes.

- It was adorable seeing the excitement that flashed in his eyes when you agreed, making you giggle.

- “Such a gentleman, I like it” you added, feeling butterflies begin to flutter in your stomach at the thought.

- He gave a chuckle as he rolled you both to where he was on top of you, taking you by surprise at first before looking up at him with that half lidded gaze he couldn’t get enough of.

- “I’ll take you out to dinner, get to know you, treat you right, then we can come back here…and I can be far less gentlemanly” he said through kisses he laid against your neck and shoulder, making you giggle.

- “I’d like that” you whispered in reply as your lips found his once more, a smile donning your lips at the prospect of it.

- He could hardly wait, the guilt of knowing your body first and the rest of you later no longer ate at his conscience as you both were swept up in the moment again.

Simon “Ghost” Riley

- He was a frequent flier to medical more so now than he ever was before since meeting you, and you were the nurse he’d always see to help him.

- Hardly was he ever really there for anything super serious, a cut here, a gash there, an infection from something caught out in the field.

- He rarely ever enjoyed anyone fussing over him, in fact if it weren’t for you, he wouldn’t even go to medical for his injuries, more of the type to tough it out with a bottle of whiskey and some pain pills to take the edge off.

- It was your soft touch on his arm as you stitched him up, the way you respected his privacy in not asking him to remove his mask anytime he was there, even the smell of your shampoo as you tended to a cut on his collarbone.

- You would always smile and shake your head, hands on your hip like a mom whose child got back from causing trouble when he would enter.

- “What’s it this time?” You’d ask before he’d show you, then tell you briefly and vaguely about how it happened and groan and complain that it happened at all.

- This time however was far more serious.

- You saw the blood seeping through his shirt, dripping as he walked, his hand clutched to the wound as he saw you, making you all but drop what you were doing.

- “Si? Oh my god, sit, sit! What the hell happened??” You asked, concern evident in your tone, something he’d never really gotten from others before.

- Did he just hear you call him Si? Oh the poor man was hooked without even knowing.

- “Just a bullet sweetheart, had thousands of ‘em fly my way, just unlucky enough this time t’ ‘ave one land” he said nonchalantly but you could tell by its placement that he was in pain.

- “You’ve been shot and you’re just walking in here as if it were nothing? Why didn’t you call me? I’d have come to you! Actually don’t answer that, I know you’re too stubborn and wouldn’t let me” you replied, making him chuckle.

- You had him lay down on his back, slicing open the shirt with a pair of scissors before tearing it so you could get to the wound quickly and with no obstructions.

- And that was the most attractive thing he swore he’d ever seen.

- “An’ here I thought you were suppose t’ take me out on a date before you rip my shirt off” he said dryly, wanting that look of worry and that tense stressed feeling to fall from you, making you laugh.

- “Fuck, well they didn’t teach us that in basics” you replied, making him chuckle as you laughed along with while getting him and your tools prepped.

- “Maybe that was my lucky shirt” he joked once more, making you roll your eyes with a playful grin but you were still worried about him.

- “We can mourn the shirt later, I’m more worried about the bullet inside of you and getting it out first” you added, making him grin beneath his mask as you blushed a little at the sight of him shirtless.

- “Practically skipped dates one through three at this point, seen me down t’ everything above the belt” he said, making you laugh again as you cleaned his wound and prepped your instruments to remove the bullet.

- “Well, maybe if you keep coming back for me to check on you and the progress of your stitches, then in say maybe…four weeks for proper healing, I’ll take you up on a proper date” you proposed, and he couldn’t lie, he liked the sounds of that.

- “Then, maybe if you’re lucky, we’ll skip the shirt and get below the belt finally too” you said, sending a grin and a wink his way, making him chuckle as the clang of the shell casing hit the metal bowl.

- “That means no more getting shot in that time though, or else you’ll have to wait even longer” you teased, making him chuckle again.

- “Fuckin’ torturin’ me luv. Makin’ me wait that long” he replied, making you giggle a little and you figured it was the morphine kicking in that let him be this open with you, not that he hadn’t been before but he was certainly more relaxed now.

- Would mumble compliments under his breath like “smell s’good luvie” “y’ look s’pretty like that” making your cheeks feel as if they were being light on fire and the smile never leaving your lips.

- Little did you know, he secretly would be counting down the days and had more of a reason not to get himself killed out in the field.

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

Miraculous Ladybug Season 5 - An Overview

Well... that certainly was... the fifth season of Miraculous Ladybug.

While I was overall mixed on Season 4 with how much it varied in quality, I think I have a more concrete opinion of Season 5.

Yeah, this season was a real pain to review, but not for the reason you'd think. Most of the episodes were either dull or average, so there wasn't a lot for me to really talk about. Of course, when things were bad, dear lord, were they bad. This analysis is somehow longer than my Season 4 one and the ranking post. Other than real life stuff getting in the way, there's a damn good reason why this took so long to finish. I basically wrote a college thesis on this season.

The Things I Liked About Season 5

Let's get all the good things about this season out of the way first.

For one thing, one of my biggest complaints about Season 4 was sort of rectified, the portrayal of Adrien. While I still have problems with him (which I'll get to in a later section), they're more about his impact on the story. As for his personality and attitude, it's a big step up. There's much less complaining, he's more active in the action, and is far more intelligent. Compared to Season 4, where Cat Noir was affected by an Akuma's powers or taken out of commission in order to raise the stakes eleven times (Lies, Mr. Pigeon 72, Mega Leech, Guiltrip, Optigami, Sentibubbler, Wishmaker, Simpleman, Ephemeral, Penalteam, Risk), here, funnily enough, it only really happened five times in Season 5 (Jubilation, Illusion, Derision, Emotion, The Final Day). It's honestly amazing. There were times where I thought he was going to be taken out or get portrayed as an idiot, but that almost never happened this season. Even some of the weaker episodes this season featured Adrien in a more active role, like “Passion”, “Reunion”, “Elation”, and “Deflagration”.

Also, as much of a problem that I have with Cat Noir trying to Cataclysm his enemies, I'm glad that the show at least tries to acknowledge this by showing his worst nightmare is a world where everyone is dead because of him. It's not handled well, and it's only done just to bench him for the finale, but I'll at least give the writers credit for putting in the effort to give him more nuance. It's a hell of a lot better than what they did with Gabriel, but I'll get to him later. By extension, his relationship with Ladybug is much more tolerable. The two work together well, talk about the conflict with Monarch more often, and for the most part, feel like actual partners. Yeah, that dynamic falls apart towards the end of the season, but again, I'll give the writers an A+ for effort.

Another thing I like is that this season tries to focus more on character pieces, with episodes focusing on characters like Nathalie (Passion), Kagami (Perfection), Luka (Migration), and Zoe (Adoration). They're not handled the best, but I'm glad the show is at least trying to give the supporting characters time in the spotlight, even though they don't have their Miraculous anymore.

Speaking of, I like the idea of the Alliance rings. It's really the only time Gabriel actually takes advantage of his status as one of the most influential people in Paris to push the use of something specifically designed to help give his Akumas more power. Given how prevelant the marketing for Alliance rings is, it's easy to see his plan working in the long term.

We also had a couple decent new Akuma designs, like Safari, Bugfighter, and... uh... Yeah, I got nothing else. This is pretty much the most praise this season is going to get from me. Sure, I'll go into some other aspects I like during later sections, but other than that, this is it. Hell, even the parts I listed earlier are only mentioned for the ideas they present, not the way they're executed.

The Final Season... Of Filler

We've finally made it to Season 5, the climax of the conflict with Monarch. This is going to be epic, with all kinds of compelling stories that can be used for episodes, leading to a final product that will go down as—my God, why is this season so boring?!

Like I said earlier, this season was a lot harder to review than Season 4 was, and this was one of the biggest reasons why. As bad as that season was, I at least had stuff to talk about. Here? Almost nothing. A good chunk of the episodes I reviewed just didn't leave an impact on me. Most of them were either forgettable, mediocre, or just okay. Some of the episodes had decent ideas and a handful of good scenes, but it wasn't really enough to reach the highs of earlier seasons, including Season 4.

It's strange, because at first, it seemed like the show was learning from its mistakes during the first three episodes of this season. “Evolution”, “Multiplication”, and “Destruction” were far from perfect, but you could at least tell the show was trying something different. There was tighter continuity, clever mind games on both sides, a rare instance of nonlinear storytelling, and major changes to the status quo. They explained why Monarch can't just beat up Ladybug and Cat Noir himself, why the Rabbit and Rooster Miraculous can't be used to end the story, and why the Alliance rings were created.

When Ladybug got the Rabbit Miraculous after failing to get the other fourteen back, you would think that this would lead to an arc where Ladybug and Cat Noir gradually reclaimed the Miraculous from Monarch until the final battle, but what did we get instead in terms of plot development?

For what was supposed to be the final season, it felt like almost nothing happened. Sure, as always, the show tried to trick us into thinking stuff was happening, but several plotlines introduced this season were either abandoned or rushed through after a few episodes. The Resistance? Only relevant for five episodes, and even then, they didn't do much (Illusion, Deflagration, Confrontation, Revolution, Representation). Trying to discover how Monarch is giving the Akumas Miraculous powers? Only relevant in a single episode (Illusion). Felix having the Peacock Miraculous and being a total wild card? Only relevant for three episodes (Emotion, Pretension, Representation). The reverse Love Square? Only relevant for four episodes before it petered out (Determination, Passion, Reunion, Elation). Lila manipulating Kagami for some reason? Only relevant for two, maybe three episodes if you count that one scene in “Emotion”, and that was dropped in favor of her learning Monarch's identity offscreen (Perfection, Protection).

You'd think for a season with stakes this high, there would be bigger stories or more character drama, but we got nothing. The only real ongoing story we got was the Love Square finally happening, and trust me, I'll get to that later. There were plenty of ideas for story arcs here, but the writers pretty much ignored all of them.

Retcons! Retcons Everywhere!

This one's shorter, because it's a problem with the show in general, and I'll go into more detail about specific examples of this later on.

Miraculous Ladybug is a show that has always struggled to be consistent with its lore, worldbuilding, characters, story, and... well, a lot of things. I've talked about how often the show retcons things in order to justify whatever story they need to tell, not just for individual episodes, but story arcs too. There were so many episodes with stories that contradicted previous events or changed the motivations of certain characters on a whim.

In case you didn't keep track, here's a little highlight reel of some of the retcons this season.

Evolution: After both him and Ladybug were able to use multiple unifications last season with no problem, Monarch can't use too many of his powers without collapsing in pain. It also goes against what was established in “Kwamibuster”, the idea of using multiple Miraculous being enough to damage your sanity, where here, Monarch's body is damaged.

Multiplication: Adrien's reason for falling for Marinette was due to all the times she helped him, when it was usually the other way around in earlier seasons.

Determination: Adrien reveals he's had feelings for Marinette since the events of “The Puppeteer 2”, even though it never influenced any of their interactions between that episode and this one. It also contrasts the previous episode, where it said that Adrien was just starting to fall for Marinette for different reasons.

Derision: Chloe's bullying of Marinette had severe psychological damage that explains why she acts the way she does around Adrien... but ignores the romantic feelings Marinette has had for Luka and Cat Noir, and didn't act the same way around them, to say nothing about how she acted around Nathaniel when he had a crush on her during “The Evillustrator ”.

Intuition: The Snake Miraculous somehow makes Gabriel's Cataclysm wound worse even though the form of time travel it uses is mental, not physical.

Protection: Gabriel and Tomoe want their children to be in a relationship, yet Adrien and Kagami kept it a secret while they were dating.

Adoration: Zoe suddenly has feelings for Marinette despite showing no signs of it beforehand.

Emotion: Felix reveals he's doing everything for Adrien's safety, even though in his previous few appearances, he's done nothing but screw his cousin over by smearing his public image.

Pretension: Felix is against using a Sentimonster to defend himself and Kagami due to not wanting to force an innocent creature to follow his orders, yet he had no problem using a Sentimonster in the very last episode and in his next appearance.

Revelation: Lila has multiple secret identities she uses while pretending to be the child of several women, which had never come up at all during the last four seasons.

Representation: Kagami apparently learned Marinette was Ladybug right before she was akumatized in “Perfection”, yet Monarch didn't learn this like he did with Luka.

Do you see the problem here? Hell, I didn't even list every single retcon, or else we'd be here all day.

I don't get how a show that wants to be serialized can keep changing details like this. It's not even a case of the show replacing its writers with new ones who don't know as much as the old ones. This is mostly the same writing team for almost four seasons at this point.

Sometimes, the show will retcon stuff in order to justify stories when it doesn't need to. Remember how at the beginning of the season, Marinette was feeling guilty about her failure at the end of Season 4, and that influences her hesitance to accept Adrien's advances? The writers sure didn't, as “Derision” exists to give Marinette a whole new reason to not be comfortable around Adrien. Why the hell would you give Marinette a perfectly valid reason to not want to pursue Adrien, only to write an episode that gives her a different reason to not want to pursue Adrien? There was literally no reason to do this, especially during the last season of your first major story arc!

This season is clearly trying to be the most serialized of the bunch, yet the writers keep changing details about the story like that one Wallace and Gromit meme.

Season 5: The Show's Greatest Hits Album

Something I've noticed about this season is just how repetitive it can be. I know that sounds weird given this is a show that literally gave us the Status Quo-Yo, but please hear me out.

So many major story arcs and focus episodes are just rehashed versions of older things in this show, and not just the reused Akumas. Not only does the first half of Season 5 restate how complicated things are for Marinette's love live and how she can't love Adrien after what she did (something she gets over rather anticlimactically once Adrien confesses). Then there are other times where even plotlines established this season will get reused, and more often than not, it's worse.

In “Perfection”, Kagami is akumatized thanks to Lila's lies, and manages to break free from Monarch's influence thanks to her friends showing that they care for her. And then four episodes later, Kagami is akumatized again thanks to Lila's lies, only this time, she isn't able to break free. What... what was the point of having that emotional scene in “Perfection” if you're just going to treat her like a run of the mill Akuma a few episodes later?

And it's not just that. Big moments that happened in earlier seasons are pretty much redone but with a few changes to make it seem like they're different. Did you like seeing Adrien give up being Cat Noir in “Kuro Neko”? Well how about seeing Adrien and Marinette give up being superheroes in “The Kwamis' Choice”? Did you like seeing Chloe break off her friendship with Adrien in “Queen Banana”? How does seeing Adrien break off his friendship with Chloe in “Derision” sound?

But the worst of this has to be in the last seven episodes of the season. So much of what is essentially the culmination of five seasons' worth of story is just recycled. Let's go over why. In “Confrontation”, Marinette (and by her, I mean Sabrina with help from Marinette) manages to outsmart Chloe and Lila and put an end to their tyranny in the classroom. What are the next two episodes about? Marinette needing to outsmart Chloe and Lila, only now, they have reign over the city. This feels like something that should have been one major story, not something split up into two two-parters. Hell, you can't even say it's original to see Chloe in control, because this is also something that was done back in Season 1's “Rogercop”, only with the titular and the police following his orders for no reason instead of Chloe and her bootleg Daleks.

But hey, if an army of robots capable of using Miraculous powers, at least we can expect something even more creative for Monarch's ultimate plan, right? Yeah, Project “Perfect Alliance” is just a combination of Chloe's murder boxes and the exact same plan in “Heroes' Day”. People are brainwashed like in “Heroes' Day” and they get Miraculous powers like the robots in “Revolution”. Seriously? Nobody took a look at this and thought “Didn't we do this already?”

What's the point of making these two different evil plans when they're essentially the same thing? Why not give Chloe's robots various weapons instead of Miraculous powers if you're going to have an army of villains who have the same Miraculous powers two episodes later? Why not make it so the Miraculized are really the robots designed to help Chloe, only here, they have the ability to turn anyone wearing an Alliance ring into one of them, sort of like the Borg from Star Trek?

It's clear that after four seasons, the writing on this show has gotten incredibly stagnant if the major plotlines are just reused from earlier seasons. At best, it comes across like blatant fanservice, and at worst, it's a symptom of the writers struggling to come up with new ideas for stories. Either way, this is one of many reasons why not a lot of people are looking forward to Season 6. How can you expect interesting stories in the future when the writers keep recycling their old ones?

Felix and the Struggle With Sentimonsters or: This Is Starting to Sound Like a Bad Comic Book Plot!

Before I get into the problems with Felix this season, consider this: With Chloe (who I'll get to later), she was an example of someone who wouldn't get a redemption arc. Felix? This is the writers intentionally trying write a redemption arc. How did that turn out?

The obvious problem with Felix is mostly due to, like a lot of things in this show, poor time management. He only had three focus episodes, and in that time, the writers needed to explain his motivations, establish him as a wild card, have him realize the error of his ways, develop his relationship with Kagami, and help out Marinette. They really wanted to do a lot with Felix, yet with how rushed his arc was, I have to wonder if there was some trouble behind the scenes that prevented him from getting more focus.

It doesn't help that what little we got was confusing as all hell. I've already gone into detail about the problems with Felix's motivations not explaining his actions, but here's a list of all the problems with Felix.

If Felix wanted to get the Peacock Miraculous from the start, why didn't he try stealing that in “Felix”?

If Felix cared about Adrien, why did he spend most of his appearances mocking him and ruining his reputation by impersonating him in “Felix”, “Gabriel Agreste”, “Risk”, “Emotion”, and “Representation”?

If Felix knew who Gabriel was, why did he come up with this elaborate plan to get the Peacock Miraculous in a trade with him instead of going to Ladybug for help in “Strikeback”?

If Felix realized Gabriel was dangerous and capable of wiping him out, why did he decide to give him fifteen Miraculous in exchange for a single Miraculous without doing anything to stop him in “Strikeback”?

If Felix could easily get rid of Gabriel with a single Sentimonster like he did in “Emotion”, why didn't he immediately do that as soon as he got the Peacock Miraculous in “Strikeback”?

If Felix wanted to stop Gabriel, why did he decide to wipe out all of humanity alongside him in “Emotion”?

If Felix cared about innocent lives, why did he decide to wipe out all of humanity without showing any remorse except for when he had to get rid of Red Moon in “Emotion”?

If Felix didn't want to create any Sentimonsters just to end their lives in “Pretention”, why did he do just that in “Representation”?

If Felix knew Marinette was Ladybug, why did he choose to tell her who Gabriel was in an unnecessarily complicated way instead of telling it straight to her face in “Representation”?

If Felix really hated his abusive father, why didn't he show any hatred for Gabriel (who gave Colt the damaged Peacock Miraculous and did nothing to stop the abuse) as well during his little play in “Representation”?

If Felix cared about stopping Gabriel, why did he only decide to go to Ladybug for help when Gabriel was getting in the way of his relationship with Kagami in “Representation”?

If Felix was willing to tell Marinette about Gabriel being Monarch in “Representation”, why didn't he do anything else to help her stop Monarch in “Comformation” and “Re-Creation”?

With how many flaws his plans have, I'm surprised Felix hasn't said anything along the lines of “My pwan is gweat!”

For someone who claims to be doing a lot of things for Adrien, Felix tends to either screw over his cousin as part of his plans or forget him entirely. I don't mean he screws over Cat Noir, as his identity is one of the few things he doesn't know, but rather, how little his plans actually benefit Adrien. Putting aside his previous appearances in Seasons 3 and 4, in the span of a single episode, Felix pretended to be his cousin and smeared his public image, used a Sentimonster to wipe out all of his friends and loved ones while needing to be told by Adrien that doing so wasn't cool, and after that, he pretty much abandoned caring about Adrien.

Yeah, starting with “Pretension”, the writers once again change gears so Felix's primary goal is to help Kagami, not Adrien. It's Kagami that really helps inspire Felix's true turn to good, it's Kagami who he chooses to visit when she and Adrien are taken to London, and it's Kagami that helps him decide to tell Marinette Monarch's identity. Even though he only has three major appearances, the writers still decided to shake up his character arc for some reason. How does a team of paid writers struggle to stay consistent with any story or character arc they've written?

The worst part is that for a redemption arc, Felix shows little to no remorse for his actions. Not once does he apologize to anyone he's personally wronged, like Adrien, Marinette, or Kagami. He doesn't see anything wrong with giving Monarch more power and depriving Ladybug of almost all of her allies, and he had to be told that wiping all of humanity from existence was a bad thing. Felix has done so many terrible things in his quest for freedom, which isn't a bad idea, as it could make for an interesting discussion about whether the ends justify the means, but the show doesn't go that route. Instead, despite doing almost nothing but making things worse for Ladybug and Cat Noir, we're supposed to see Felix as a great person who just wants to have friends. Sure, having good social skills is a big part of being able to manipulate others, but let's just ignore all the people he's tricked and assume he doesn't know how to properly socialize with someone without stalking them.

It doesn't help that of all the characters this season, Felix makes the most progress in stopping Monarch. Puting aside his little genocide attempt in “Emotion”, he actually made an attempt to take Gabriel out of the equation, and later on, passed on intel about his true identity to Marinette. Think about that for a second. Marinette, despite being a hero with the ability to deduce what to do from simple clues given to her, isn't the one to figure out Monarch's identity. Instead, she has to be told who Monarch is, and is able to beat him only because Felix told her what to do. The worst part is that Felix doesn't even take part in the final battle when he has no excuse to not get involved. Remember, he doesn't have to worry about getting snapped away by Gabriel, so even though he cares so much about Adrien and Kagami, he does nothing to save either of them from their glorified solitary confinement.

Felix isn't a character. He's a glorified plot device who only shows up to advance the story instead of letting any character make progress by themselves. While Marinette and Adrien are focusing more on their love lives this season, Felix is the one actually getting things done. Because God forbid the two characters the show is named after actually do anything to stop the villain this season, am I right?

And that's not even getting into the Sentimonster stuff. Yep, to our collective horror, not only is Felix a Sentimonster, but it's also hinted that Adrien and Kagami are Sentimonsters too. I'm not sure why the writers are so hesitant to flat out say the latter two are Sentimonsters after all the obvious hints, especially when this is a show that loves to overly explain every plot detail and character trait. I don't know. Maybe they're just hedging their bets in case things don't go over well with audiences, but I can't possibly see anything bad coming from this. After all, how can you think of any uncomfortable implications stemming from the three major victims of child abuse literally being inhuman monsters who are physically unable to resist their abusers' orders?

With the Sentimonster “reveal”, Adrien and Kagami, two characters who were previously doing their best to be independent from their parents as they could at their age, are now physically incapable of even having a single negative thought about them without being ordered around while showing no resistance. Like I've mentioned before, it's a blatant retcon because it's never explained why Gabriel and Tomoe didn't do this during Seasons 2 and 3. It also gives the writers the opportunity to remove any agency Adrien and Kagami have in the plot, even though one is one of the two main characters, and the other plays a crucial role in helping another character expose the main villain's identity.

We're supposed to see Gabriel and Tomoe as wrong for ignoring their children's protests and forcing them to do things they don't want to do, but it doesn't lead to an arc where Adrien and Kagami rebel against their parents and break free from their influences. As soon as either Gabriel and Tomoe touch their respective rings, Adrien and Kagami are completely helpless, and there's no way for them to resist because of how powerful the link with their Amoks is. There's no hint that they have the potential to break free from their Amoks' influence, and the only time we saw that happen, it was a complete accident that Felix didn't even cause (Representation). Adrien and Kagami are both reduced to damsels in distress thanks to being Sentimonsters, and even though the show is trying to say they're trapped in a terrible situation, there's never a way out.

The most Adrien and Kagami do is express frustration with their situation, but most of the progress made in escaping their bad relationships is done by their respective love interests, Marinette and Felix. Yes, support systems are important, but rather than help Adrien and Kagami earn their freedom, Marinette and Felix do pretty much all of the work to save them during the latter half of this season. Hell, they couldn't even get that completely done by the time of the finale! Gabriel dropped dead and Adrien thinks he's a hero and Kagami's still living with Tomoe, only now she has her Amok ring. We're supposed to see this as a happy ending when they're both still influenced by their abusive parents, even if they don't have any physical control over them. The whole idea behind making Adrien and Kagami Sentimonsters should have been something about them, but with Gabriel and Tomoe, the writers only see them as helpless victims who can't do anything to save themselves. Sure, both of them have fought supervillains before, but we can't have them actually showing agency, can we?

I'm going to get into other ways Adrien and Kagami's characters were butchered this season, but for now, let's get into all the uncomfortable things this plotline implies. Now before I go any further, just remember that I am far from an expert on abuse or child psychology, so please take what I say with a heavy grain of salt. If there is anyone reading this who is a victim of abuse or knows someone who was, please don't be afraid to speak your mind about my analysis or correct me if I get any details wrong.

I get that making Adrien, Kagami, and Felix Sentimonsters was probably done so it'd be a way to explain the concept of child abuse to younger audiences, specifically to show how helpless the situation can be for victims, but the problem is how the allegory is handled. It wants to show how cruel the idea of child abuse is, but it doesn't want to outright vilify abusers like Gabriel or Tomoe. They usually try to sugarcoat it by saying that the two have good reasons for doing what they do, but that's a common problem with abusers. Abusive parents almost always believe that they're doing the right thing while their children think that they're just being punished for their own good, and the season ultimately takes that stance by the end.

The show is clearly trying to use the Sentimonster concept to tell a story about abuse, but I have no idea what exactly it's trying to say about it. “Child abuse is bad”? Okay, then why aren't you going to condemn the abusive parents for being abusive parents? And no, brief mentions of abusive parents who we never actually see onscreen don't count (Derision, Pretension, Representation). “Help out abused children”? Big talk coming from the season that only has two people actually fight to help the victims of child abuse, while treating another victim of child abuse as getting her just desserts (Revolution). “Parents have good reasons to do what they do”? Yeah, that normally applies to stopping your kid from getting a tattoo, not forcing them to whatever they want against their will.

The thing about writing abuse is that you need to acknowledge just how unhealthy it is, and do whatever it takes to take them out of the toxic environment. Here, nobody ever tries to remove Adrien from the toxic environment or tell him that what his father is doing isn't right. Sure, Felix tries to take Kagami away from her abusive mother, but that was only for like an hour at most, and then he just let her go back to her mother. Adrien doesn't even get that luxury. Hell, he isn't even allowed to know just how terrible his father was because he's just a sensitive baby according to the show. Portraying abuse victims as too emotionally fragile to know the truth is a pretty bad idea because, like I mentioned before, a big problem that abuse victims go through is that they're conditioned to see their treatment as normal at best, or see it as their fault at worst.

Like so many other serious topics discussed in this show, the writers clearly want to tell a story about abuse, but they're too afraid to actually take a proper stance on it, so they kept trying to play it safe in an attempt to not get backlash from audiences. Of course, because of that, they ended up portraying victims of child abuse as soulless husks who have almost no free will of their own, while ending the season by having them still under the influence of their abusive parents, even the dead one. Real bang-up job, there, writers. It says a lot when a Spider-Man PSA from almost 35 years ago did a better job tackling child abuse than you did.

And finally, let's talk about how this season's treatment of Sentimonsters indirectly influences our perception of them across the past two seasons. Even though the Sentimonsters created have shown almost no individuality from Seasons 2 to 4, only now are we supposed to see them as sentient beings, with Felix himself even taking offense at the idea at being called a Sentimonster. Never mind the fact that Felix never actually comes up with a proper alternative, so he just comes across as whiny when we're supposed to see him as a champion of the Sentimonsters.

In regards to the narrative the show decided it now wants to tell about Sentimonsters, I have two questions.

First, why should I care about Sentimonsters if the previous two seasons have portrayed them as nothing but soulless killing machines? If you're going to write a plot twist that changes the way we see Sentimonsters, you need to explain why we were wrong to only assume they're dangerous, especially since Argos' first Sentimonster literally wiped out all of humanity. For comparison, Ultraman Z did a similar plotline by having the main character realize that several of the monsters he killed as the titular hero weren't intentionally trying to harm humanity, so it caused him to doubt himself as a hero before he vowed to start finding non-violent ways to stop monsters if he could, while viewing the act of killing monsters that couldn't be reasoned with as a necessary evil. This show has no such arc and just expects us to ignore all the damage the Sentimonsters have caused since the end of Season 2.

Second, what about the Sentimonsters whose lives have been snuffed out by Mayura, Shadowmoth, and even Ladybug? The writers want us to sympathize with Sentimonsters and believe they get a bad rap? That's fine, but even if we did, what about the ones who were already wiped out of existence? Are we just not going to talk about them? Why should we only value the lives of Felix, Adrien, and Kagami and not any of the other Sentimonsters created in previous episodes? What, because they're not main characters, their lives don't matter?

All in all, everything about the Sentimonster was either poorly thought out or too preachy to take seriously, and Felix is emblematic of those problems with how he and the Sentimonsters are written. Oh right, I forgot Felix had a sidekick too, Kimberly—I mean, Kagami.

Kagami Never Hesitates to Be a Complete Idiot

If you read my overview of Season 4, I sang high praises for how Alya was written. Season 4 managed to take a character I had previously disliked and turn her into one of my favorite characters in the show. Now, with that being said, I want you to imagine the opposite of that happening to a different character, and you have my feelings on Kagami this season.

It's weird how, after she had made it through the past three seasons with her character somewhat intact, the writers decided to give her even more prominence by involving her in two separate arcs this season... and only made her nothing more than a damsel in distress who constantly needed to be saved in both of them. I'm not saying that Kagami should be able to beat the crap out of Monarch with her bare hands, but my point is that Kagami just lost so much agency this season.

When she wasn't being manipulated by Lila (Perfection, Protection), she was playing second fiddle to Felix and acting like he didn't hand over almost every Miraculous in Ladybug's possession to Monarch (Pretension, Representation). It's really strange, considering a defining character trait of hers is her hating liars like Marinette does, since it's why she dumped Adrien, yet here, she gets tangled up in the schemes of two different liars, Lila and Felix. I can at least get Lila (as dumb as her episodes are), since she's supposed to be seen as this master manipulator, but she just brushes all of Felix's crimes aside because he “doesn't know how to express himself”. Because even though she's always been loyal to Ladybug, she has no problem working with one of the only two people to betray her trust. But she loves Felix, so that makes it all okay.

What made Alya's arc last season work was that even though she was primarily Marinette's confidant, we also got episodes showing her struggling to balance her own desires with what needed to be done for the greater good (Optigami, Sentibubbler, Hack-San, Rocketear). She had to step up and become more than just one of the many temp heroes Ladybug called on, someone trustworthy enough to temporarily use the Ladybug Miraculous. Yes, she made bad calls, but when things went south because of her bad decisions, she normally took responsibility for her actions and vowed to do better. With Kagami, we don't get any internal conflict like that at all. She just blindly goes along with whatever Lila and Felix say, and even when bad things happen as a result, she never even thinks to call out either of them other than rarely saying something along the lines of “Hey, not cool.” (Protection, Pretension).

Kagami just doesn't get to do anything on her own terms this season. Her entire arc revolves around following Lila and Felix around like a lost puppy. And just remember, we're seriously supposed to act like Kagami is trustworthy enough to see that her defending Felix from Ladybug is enough to prove that he's a good person deep down... when this same season showed her easily falling for Lila's lies and getting akumatized twice as a result. It's like believing Dr. Nick can perform a life-saving kidney transplant after seeing him botch an open-heart surgery.

Even Kagami figuring out Marinette is Ladybug, something that should be a big deal like with Alya and Luka learning last season, is something we learn through a flashback and is, you guessed it, is only relevant to one of Felix's plans. And yeah, reveal your friend's secret to someone who someone who betrayed her. What could possibly go wrong? Again, when Alya screwed up, she was at least able to admit it to Marinette's face. Kagami never tells Marinette that she knows, and never faces consequences for throwing her lot in with Felix. What's her excuse, that she has too much love in her heart for Felix?

Speaking of which, let's talk about the biggest problem I have with Kagami this season, the way her relationship with Felix is handled. Let me make one thing clear: my problem isn't with people who ship the two together. Much like with the Love Square, my problem is how the show handles this romance. The two had almost no episodes together, and from what little we saw of them interacting, Kagami didn't like him, and for obvious reasons. But then “Pretension” came. Not only did Felix develop feelings for Kagami offscreen, all it took for Kagami to fall for Felix was a single conversation where he showed basic human decency. Yeah, Marinette fell for Adrien for similar reasons, but at least she and him took a while to actually get together. These two shared a handful of conversations, and now they're just made for each other.

The problem with this is that the relationship basically reduces Kagami to Felix's girlfriend and sidekick. All of her major appearances post-“Emotion” were in relation to Felix. She only helps him because of their relationship, and their relationship was the whole reason why Kagami convinced Felix to do what he should have done from the start, tell Ladybug who Monarch was... even though Astruc said this kind of relationship was toxic when discussing Lukloe.

You see, the difference between Lukloe and Feligami is (MAKE UP EXPLANATION LATER AND DON'T ACCIDENTALLY LEAVE THIS SPOT BLANK). And that's why we shouldn't see this as blatant hypocrisy on Astruc's part.

While it's par for the course, given how almost every female character in this show is connected to a male character in some way, the way Kagami is written this season is still part of a bigger problem. Kagami is not everyone's favorite character and not one people fiercely discuss as much as Marinette, Adrien, or even Chloe, but it's still baffling that out of all the characters in this season, Kagami would arguably sustain the most damage out of the entire cast. Given that this is the same season as Nino becoming the braindead leader of the Resistance, Chloe's brief stint as a tyrannical mayor, Nathalie choosing to do nothing about Gabriel until she was about to die, the baffling reveal of who Lila supposedly is (again, more on these later), or... really, a lot of things with both Marinette and Adrien, this is actually saying a lot. If you want to look at it at a particular angle, Kagami's actually a direct victim of practically all of the biggest problems in this season and I've had to mention her a lot more in this analysis than I anticipated. Then again, I suppose that's me showing more care to Kagami as a character than the writers did.

The Story of The Resistance (In Name Only)

I've already gone on about how underdeveloped most of the temp heroes are, so you can imagine the season where they try to help Ladybug without superpowers doesn't really change my opinion of them.

Remember how in episodes like Season 1's “Antibug”, Season 2's “The Dark Owl”, and even this season's “Jubilation” made it clear that trying to be a superhero without a Miraculous or proper training was essentially suicide? You know, how it was better to leave things to the actual superheroes? Well the writers sure didn't, as now we get to see a bunch of idiots try to take on supervillains with paintball guns and whatever they can throw at them. I'm pretty sure the writers put more effort into all the codenames themed after condiments than actually coming up with creative ways to fight Akumas. Because we all know how hilarious (citation needed) the flower codename gag from “Gigantitan” was, so let's do something like that, but for multiple episodes this season.

I'm just going to be blunt here when I say the Resistance this season sucked. Putting aside the fact that the writers couldn't come up with a less generic name or a name that wasn't already taken by the Ox Miraculous' power, this subplot was just so pointless. You have a team of former heroes who want to find a way to help Ladybug and Cat Noir stop Monarch, and rather than do things like pass intel along or find ways to stop people from getting akumatized, they decide to try taking them on themselves with their most powerful weapons being paintball guns. Congratulations, you now have all the equipment you need to take on Bart Simpson in a fight. Sure, they try to pass on intel to Ladybug and Cat Noir in their first episode, “Illusion”, but Nino's plan was so stupid, they ended up helping Monarch in the long term by letting his civilian identity into their team. Oh, I'm sorry, did you forget how Gabriel and Lila were inducted into the Resistance at the end of “Illusion”? It's okay, the writers did too.

And the idea of them passing on intel could have worked, as it would give Marinette a support system to help solve problems she can't figure out on her own, following up on her character arc from Season 4 where she learns to put her trust in people, but like a lot of things this season, the writers got bored halfway through and decided to change up this plotline. Now, they're prepared to fight anyone who gets akumatized. How many Akumas did the Resistance manage to stop completely on their own? One, and it was offscreen (Deflagration).

Trying to make the Resistance seem competent and effective comes at the price of making the villains look like idiots who can't handle a few teenagers without superpowers. Monarbug, someone who managed to unify with the Ladybug Miraculous, lost it thanks to the Resistance dogpiling him. Then, later on, they managed to stop Nightormentor, an akumatized Gabriel, by just throwing stuff at him. Do you have any idea how lame this makes Monarch look? It's like that scene from Robocop 3 where that kid somehow managed to make ED-209 as loyal as a puppy in a matter of seconds. It's not cool to see it happen. It diminishes the threat the formerly menacing villain posed.

The show loves to play up the Resistance as this amazing underground organization Nino is so proud of, but it doesn't work because you can count the number of times they've actually helped out on one hand, and even then, that's being that word Chloe doesn't know the meaning of (Deflagration, Revolution, Representation). Even then, they still fall for Lila's lies which, like Kagami, doesn't help establish any of them as trustworthy. The whole Resistance subplot is basically an excuse to make it seem like the former temp heroes aren't just sitting around, which again, isn't a bad idea, but nothing comes of it. We don't get to see any of them worry that they can't do anything without their Miraculous, we don't see where or when Nino got the idea to form the Resistance, and we don't even get any scenes where the worry about the captured Kwamis. The show just has them all operate under the same goal and makes it seem like they're making a difference when they barely do anything. None of them really feel like characters, and it shows this season.

Nino, despite labeling himself as the brave leader of the Resistance, is anything but. He constantly brags about how effective he is, but not only does he let anyone into his top secret organization without even thinking if they can really be trusted, all of his genius plans amount to, you guessed it, throwing stuff at the brainwashed people with superpowers. He's also so confident that he was awesome as Carapace when all he did was occasionally help Ladybug out with his Shelter, and then whines about not being chosen by Tikki and Plagg when Scarabella and Kitty Noire temporarily take over (Illusion, Deflagration). He's also so poor at gathering intel that not only did he fall for Gabriel's ruse and act like he figured out how the Akumas have Miraculous powers, he didn't even know his best friend was going to London until he got on the plane (Representation). I wasn't kidding when I said Nino was such a terrible leader, he makes Zapp Brannigan look competent by comparison.

And remember when Alya was a major character? Neither does the show! Out of the entire season, she was really only relevant to the plot when she became Scarabella for a few days, and even then, she didn't think that maybe she should take off the Alliance ring that monitors her every move if she's going to be a full-time hero again (Transmission, Deflagration). There is absolutely no follow-up to anything that happened to her in Season 4. She doesn't regret blowing her cover, she doesn't worry over not being able to help Ladybug as Rena Rouge, she doesn't worry about the safety of Trixx, she doesn't even consider the fact that she's not used to going back to full-time hero work after half a season of being undercover as Rena Furtive. At best, the whole thing with Alya exposing her cover to Nino last season gets played off for the sake of a cheap joke (Illusion).

Then there's Zoe. Like Season 4, I can definitely say that out of all the supporting characters, she was certainly one of them. They clearly try to give her these big moments in an attempt to endear her to the audience, like her brief stint as Kitty Noire or her coming out to Marinette, but because of how nonexistent her character development has been, these don't feel earned. I can't buy her friendship with Marinette or anyone else because of how little she appears. Hell, she was specifically introduced to act as a good counterpart to Chloe, and she did nothing to really contribute to her ultimate downfall other than sharing a single conversation during “Revolution”. That's how little the writers care about her, they don't even have her interact with the character she was designed to replace. I take back what I said about her being a Mary Sue way back in my “Sole Crusher” review, because at least those types of characters get plenty of focus in the narrative. All I can really say about Zoe after two seasons is that at least she's more interesting than Socqueline, a character so boring, this is the only time I'm going to mention her in this entire analysis.

And that's it for the Resistance. Only three side characters are actually worth talking about this season. That is how pointless of a group they are.

Chloe’s Arc That, in Case You Forgot, Was Totally Planned From the Start

I really don't know what else to say here. Remember, this entire blog was started because of how upset I was by Astruc's response to criticism of the Season 3 finale, specifically how Chloe's “damnation arc” was claimed to have planned out from the start.

For the sake of argument, let's go over this arc and just what happened with this character over the past eight years. In Season 1, Chloe started out as a standard high school mean girl who used her father's influence to get whatever she wanted, but wasn't that much of a threat compared to Hawkmoth and the Akumas. In Season 2, we got to see a different side to her that started a character arc, showing she was capable of changing and becoming a hero in her own right. In Season 3, while it seemed like Chloe was changing for the better, the finale had her betray Ladybug and go back to being the same mean girl she was before. In Season 4, we were introduced to Chloe's never before seen half-sister, Zoe, who only existed to replace Chloe as the user of the Bee Miraculous, and even though the very same episode where Zoe first got the Bee Miraculous hinted that there was still a chance of Chloe changing, the rest of the season acts like she's always been a menace to society with no redeeming qualities. In Season 5, Chloe was portrayed as a heartless monster who is worse than the main villain of the entire show, is simultaneously smart and cunning enough to bully Marinette in a way that would leave lasting mental scars for a year and also too incompetent to take seriously, and even though the season has made a big deal about how terrible child abuse is, her being sent off to live with her verbally abusive mother is seen as a perfectly suitable punishment for her.

I don't know what's worse, the fact that none of the writers had second thoughts about this character's “arc”, or the fact that Astruc probably thinks he made an antagonist as complex as Lady Macbeth. I also love how, despite all this supposed planning, not once do we get any explanation as to just why Chloe hates Marinette so much other than the fact that one's a rich person and the other is the main character in a cartoon.

Chloe's character was already going in a downward spiral in Season 4, but with Season 5, it feels like the writers just abandoned all attempts to be subtle and were determined to stop people from liking her. Like, it's amazing just how much time was spent hammering the point home. She got more focus as a villain than Lila and even Gabriel. We had about eight episodes this season that featured her in a major antagonistic role: “Determination”, “Deflagration”, “Derision”, “Adoration”, “Revelation”, “Confrontation”, “Collusion”, and “Revolution”. Almost a third of this season is dedicated to showing how evil Chloe is, as if she's somehow worse than people like Gabriel or Tomoe. And that's not even counting episodes where she got a line or two to remind the audience of how bad she is, like “Multiplication”, “Passion”, and “Reunion”.

The weird thing is that even though this was supposed to be the season where Chloe was at her worst, it still seemed like the writers couldn't make up their minds on what they wanted to do with her. For example, let's take a look at her relationship with Monarch. In “Multiplication”, she believed that Ladybug and Cat Noir should just give Monarch what he wants, implying she's still on his side. Then, in “Determination”, she blamed not having the Bee Miraculous on why Monarch was able to win, implying she wants to stop Monarch. And then in “Deflagration”, it's hinted that she once again willingly accepted an Akuma out of a desire to get revenge, implying that she's still on good terms with Monarch. Finally, in “Revolution”, she initially wanted to arrest Monarch when he arrived in her office, and had to be convinced to work with him again. Seriously, this is almost two seasons after she started working with Monarch in the first place. How the hell are the writers not sure if she's working with the villain or not?!

Of course, that's the least of my problems with Chloe this season. One such problem that it seems like the writers specifically went out of their way to ruin the few positive relationships Chloe had just so her fans would have less ground to stand on. Her friendship with Adrien? He finally decided to write her off as irredeemable just as he learned just how miserable she made Marinette (and only Marinette) at the end of “Derision”. Her friendship with Sabrina, as one-sided as it is? She doesn't even see Sabrina as a friend anymore, specifically referring to her as an underling starting with “Adoration”, and then Sabrina turns against her after she finds one specific scheme to be going too far. The sympathy Ms. Bustier had for Chloe, even though it wasn't relevant to her character after “Zombizou”? Chloe basically ignores any attempt made to reach out to her, and we're supposed to act like her wanting to help Chloe get a decent education because it's her job as a teacher is the stupidest idea in the world. Chloe's relationship with her own father? This season decided to make Andre out to be a man mentally broken by the bad treatment he gets from his daughter and totally not a corrupt politician, and outright disowns her in favor of adopting someone who isn't even his biological daughter.

It already felt like Season 4 exaggerated Chloe's negative traits, but now, the show doesn't want anyone to like her in-universe, as if showing basic human decency to her in the first place was off the table. Remember, in “Revelation”, Marinette's speech to Adrien was basically copied and pasted from one of Astruc's tweets, as if this was meant to address anyone who still liked the idea of Chloe changing for the better.

And trust me, I'll get to the characters who actually got redeemed later.

For now, let's talk about the main issue I have with her portrayal: The writers want her to be seen as a threat... but they don't want her to actually be a threat. Almost all of Chloe's appearances this season had her acting as a pawn to either Gabriel or Lila. This season also started to use dumb blonde jokes in order to show how incompetent she is, like having her struggle to understand the concept of the word “generous”, making her out as an idiot. The whole point of the “irredeemable villain” archetype is that the character is usually so big of a threat, there is absolutely no way of talking them down, so they need to be stopped through the use of force. Chloe is far from a threat, which is why all this talk about her being a monster falls flat.

At the end of the day, Chloe is easily at the bottom of the hierarchy of the villains on this show. She has no Miraculous like Gabriel, she has no advanced technology like Tomoe, and she's nowhere near as cunning as Lila is. The problem is that the show wants the audience to see Chloe as if she's the worst of them all. Fine, she may have the most obnoxious personality and least amount of redeeming qualities by the writers' standards, but this is a superhero show. You don't just rank villains on how mean they are, but also by how much of a threat they are to the hero. The moments where we're supposed to take Chloe seriously, the show keeps reminding us that she's only getting as far as she has because she's being used by other villains. It makes the moments where the heroes triumph over her ring hollow.

I'm not even joking here when I say that out of the show's entire rogues' gallery, Chloe is literally the only one who actually gets punished. Sabrina was able to wash their hands of her association with the bully, Andre was more than happy to give up his position as mayor and kidnap Zoe, Tomoe was never even exposed, Lila only faced a minor setback when she was exposed, Nathalie was healed by the wish, and even though he died, Gabriel died a martyr who never actually answered to any of his crimes. But Chloe? As fucked up as it was, she was the only one who received some form of punishment for everything she did. Congratulations, Ladybug and Cat Noir! After five seasons, you finally managed to defeat the Ringo Starr of your rogue's gallery, and all it took was unlocking the full power of your Miraculous.

I was initially angry at the show for just throwing away a character arc and mocking anyone who was interested in it, but now, I'm angry at the show for a different reason. Even if we were to assume that everything about Chloe was planned from the start, that she was supposed to be a fallen hero turned enemy, the show did nothing with it. If you're going to make Chloe a full-blown villain, then go nuts with the idea! Have her dedicate her life to beating Ladybug out of hatred, maybe even through a suit of armor like Princess Morbucks. Instead, this is the writing equivalent of intentionally setting your house on fire, but deciding you don't need the insurance money.

I'm actually going to say something that might sound blasphemous, especially coming from someone who has spent a lot of time talking about Chloe's character assassination, but I'm just going to admit it: I think Chloe should have been the next Hawkmoth, not Lila.

Yes, that's probably what you're thinking, but I'm serious. Think about it. Between her and Lila, who has the closer connection to Marinette as an enemy? Who has a more fleshed out reason to hate Marinette? Who got more focus as a villain this season? Who has more resources at her disposal? Essentially, the show put so much effort into making Chloe out to be Marinette's most personal enemy, that it makes no sense for them to not just go all the way and make her the next big bad. The writers already go on and on about how irredeemable she is, so why not make her an actual threat for a change?

But no. Instead, let's just keep her as comic relief who somehow gets more screentime than almost every other villain this season. That's a good way to tell our story, right?

Now You See That Evil Will Always Triumph Because Good Is Dumb... And So Is Evil, Apparently

This section should be relatively easy for me to get through, since not much has really changed with the villains since Season 4. They're all still idiots even though the show wants us to see them as a threat to the equally idiotic heroes.

Let's start with our only newcomer to the show's rogues' gallery, and definitely the weakest, Tomoe. I'll give the show a lot of credit with the foreshadowing for Tomoe here. Unlike other plotlines where the show bashes you over the head with obvious hints like with the Sentimonster stuff, the hints leading to the reveal of Tomoe being in leagues with Gabriel are far more subtle. They spend a lot of time in Seasons 3 and 4 discussing things offscreen (probably about some version of the Alliance rings), and both of Tomoe's akumatizations happen offscreen as well (since their conversation would give away their alliance). It's handled pretty well... which is more than I can say for Tomoe as a villain.

Tomoe is just such a confusing character, both conceptually and the way she was used this season. She's meant to be Gabriel's new confidant after Nathalie decided to stop being a villain while still mooching off him, but she pretty much does the same things Nathalie does, including the constant nagging about how inefficient he is. She even serves the same role Nathalie served in earlier episodes as Gabriel's technical advisor. Tomoe is basically a second Nathalie, with the only differences being that she's blind and that she wants Kagami to be with Adrien. Of course, this makes no sense because, like I mentioned in the retcon section, Adrien and Kagami tried to keep their relationship secret before their breakup. How could Tomoe not notice this? What is she, blind—oh right...

There's also the issue I have with the way Tomoe's nationality and disability is portrayed here, and how it really highlights how terrible this show is with representation (not to be confused with the episode of the same name). Like with my Sentimonster section, if there's anyone reading this who is disabled or a person of color, and you'd like to say anything about this part or how this show's representation is handled, feel free to voice your opinion or correct me if I get anything wrong.

With Tomoe, it feels like the writers slapped on every Japanese stereotype you could think of and called it a day, because we've seen all of these before. She's dressed in very traditional Japanese attire, is named after a famous Japanese warrior, uses a kendo shinai as a cane instead of a walking stick, is a strict parent to her child who expects the best from her, makes references to Japanese culture like samurai (Pretension) and taiko drums (Protection), is a technological genius, forces her child into an arranged marriage, and uses Japanese honorifics while talking with Gabriel even when they're not speaking Japanese. I'm not saying Japanese people can't talk about their culture at all, but when you're writing a character who happens to be a person of color, you need to do more than make references to their heritage.

With Tomoe, almost everything she says is referencing her heritage, which makes it come across like the writers cared more about her being Japanese than anything else. Because somehow, the writers were worried kids wouldn't pick up on the fact that she's Japanese... when she's wearing something that makes her look like she just stepped off the set of an Akira Kurosawa movie.

But hey, at least they say Tomoe is Japanese. I don't think there's a single indication that she's blind. At most, they give her the stereotypical superpower every blind person in superhero media seems to have, enhanced hearing. Of course, while characters like Daredevil and Toph Beifong have in-universe explanations for how they're able to “see” without their eyes (Daredevil's enhanced senses came from the same chemicals that blinded him in the first place, while Toph learned an advanced Earthbending technique that gave her the ability to sense others through vibrations in the earth), Tomoe just has them because the writers thought it would be cool. I know it might seem strange to say this after I talked about how too much focus was given to Tomoe's Japanese heritage, but you'd think more would be done with her being blind, and how it would factor into her motivation to create a better world through technology or her ideology about self-discipline. Instead, she acts like every other character on this show, to the point where all three times she was akumatized, she got her sight back.

The main problem with Tomoe is how other than her heritage and disability, she has almost no personality other than being a strict mother to Kagami (something that is also a negative Asian stereotype) and her vague ideology about suppressing her emotions. She's basically a female Gabriel, and because she's a woman in this show, lacks any depth or redeeming qualities. There just wasn't enough time to really develop Tomoe as a character in the same season she was revealed to be a villain. Sure, they try to hint at her having history with Gabriel, but that never goes anywhere, and we never even learn just why she's working with him in the first place other than some vague desire to make the world more technologically advanced in spite of also being a traditionalist who loves honoring old beliefs. Just remember, Chloe got eight focus episodes as a villain this season, yet Tomoe only got one.

Now for Lila, the most competent of the villains... by comparison. The show clearly wants her to be seen as a master manipulator in the same vein as David Xanatos from Gargoyles, but how they show it is just poorly executed. Sure, sometimes she would get ahead in clever ways during episodes like “Illusion” and “Revelation”, but other than that, a good chunk of her plans rely on contrivances that we're supposed to see as part of her plan when she would have no idea if it would actually happen or not. In fact, let's go over all the things Lila did during her last five episodes of the season and see how her master plan played out.

Step 1: Revelation – Convince Ms. Bustier to hold another election for class representative, lie your ass off to get the position while making it seem like you rejected an Akuma, and win the election.

Step 2: Confrontation – Tamper with confidential school documents while hoping your enemy doesn't plan anything to stop you, and if your plan falls through, abandon your identity entirely and hope nobody ever tries to look for you.

Step 3: Collusion – Convince your pawn to record a conversation between the mayor and the man you somehow know is Monarch and then after the conversation leads to an Akuma forcing him out of office, tell your pawn to accept an offer from Monarch's civilian identity that you somehow knew he'd make, leading to your pawn becoming the new mayor by force who everyone is too stupid to even think of opposing.

Step 4: Revolution – Tell your pawn to take an offer from the same supervillain she's willingly worked with before, watch her go mad with power and assume that Ladybug and Cat Noir will defeat her, and then in the chaos from her defeat, assume that one of Monarch's associates will randomly leave her computer behind for you to use.

Step 5: Re-Creation – Develop an immunity to magical nightmare dust, hack into the heavily-guarded mansion you know where Monarch lives while the city is being swarmed with supersoldiers, hope you don't run into Monarch or any heroes trying to stop him on the way there, take the hole created by a Cataclysm you know would be there, assume that Monarch will lose, and seize his Miraculous from the ruins of his lair that you somehow know how to navigate after surviving all of reality being rebooted.

General Patton, eat your heart out. I think we all know who the real tactical genius is here.

Seriously, how the hell did she even know half of the stuff involving Gabriel and Tomoe would happen? Yeah, she had Tomoe's laptop after the events of “Revolution”, but she didn't see how their final fight would play out. You could also argue that we technically never saw her go into Monarch's lair during the final battle (all we got was a shot of her looking down into the hole Bug Noire created with her Cataclysm), but why didn't she go down if she disguised herself to infiltrate Monarch's lair? Was she just scoping out the area? Was her entire plan just to steal Monarch's Miraculous? There were so many ways this could have blown up in her face, so let's go over all of them, shall we?

What if Ms. Bustier didn't agree to hold a reelection for class representative?

What if Marinette won the reelection anyway?

What if Lila wasn't able to escape during the chaos caused by Monarch's Megakuma targeting Mr. Damocles?

What if the school managed to contact one of Lila's moms and tell her about what her “daughter” did?

What if Chloe wasn't able to record the full conversation between Gabriel and Andre?

What if Andre agreed to use the police robots without any manipulation?

What if Miss Sans-Culotte wasn't able to get Andre to resign?

What if Andre did resign, but managed to appoint a interim mayor until the next election?

What if Chloe didn't accept Gabriel's offer?

What if Chloe didn't accept Monarch's offer?

What if Chloe managed to arrest Monarch with her robots and got all of the Miraculous herself?

What if the French military was sent to stop Chloe's abuse of power?

What if Ladybug and Cat Noir weren't able to stop Chloe and lost their Miraculous to Monarch?

What if Chloe double-crossed both Lila and Monarch and managed to get Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous herself?

What if Tomoe didn't carelessly leave her laptop behind during the final battle with Chloe and her robots?

What if Tomoe realized she lost her laptop and sent someone to track it down?

What if Tomoe installed a kill switch on her laptop to make sure nobody would be able to do anything with it in the event it got stolen

What if Ladybug didn't learn Monarch's identity?

What if Lila fell victim to Nightormentor's nightmare dust?

What if Lila was attacked by some of the Miraculized before she could make it to the Agreste Mansion?

What if Gabriel caught Lila while she was attempting to sneak in?

What if Ladybug caught Lila while she was attempting to sneak in?

What if Nathalie caught Lila while she was attempting to sneak in?

What if the Gorilla caught Lila while she was attempting to sneak in?

What if some of the Miraculized caught Lila while she was attempting to sneak in?

What if Lila got caught in the crossfire during the final battle between Bug Noire and Monarch?

What if Bug Noire didn't Cataclysm the floor and beat Monarch at the entrance of the mansion?

What if Bug Noire wasn't able to defeat Monarch?

What if Ladybug managed to find the Butterfly Miraculous before she did?

What if Ladybug caught her while she was trying to find the Butterfly Miraculous?

Do you see why I only think Lila is the most competent villain by comparison? A good chunk of Lila's “plan” amounted to her waltzing over and reaping the benefits from every coincidence she's around to see. And she's supposed to be this criminal mastermind who thought this all out from the beginning?

Lila's planning makes about as much sense as her motivation. Why does she hate Marinette and Ladybug? They both called her out on her lies back in Season 1 and 3 respectively (Volpina, Chameleon). That's it. This is enough for Lila to want to become a supervillain and terrorize Paris. I get that the idea is to contrast with the more noble goal Gabriel had as a supervillain, but you need to give more of an explanation if you want the audience to care about Lila becoming the next Hawkmoth.

At the very least, if the writers wanted to build intrigue about Lila, have this be the season where she first appears. Build her up as this mysterious new girl who wins over Gabriel's trust, only she has an agenda of her own. By having most of her appearances be this season, it's more obvious that she has a bigger role to play, and would eventually become the next Hawkmoth. Instead, it seems like the writers put a bunch of names on a dartboard, Lila's name was the closest to the first dart they threw, and that's how they decided who Ladybug's next arch-enemy would be. And once again, Lila hasn't even touched a Miraculous in five seasons, yet we're supposed to believe that with the help of that vague glowing light she saw as soon as the first put on the Butterfly Miraculous, she'll be able to take on eighteen superheroes who have plenty of experience fighting Akumas?

Speaking of, let's get into the final main villain, Gabriel. Compared to the others, he had a pretty decent start. He felt a lot smarter than he usually did, like how he used his influence to market the Alliance rings in order to boost his Akumas' powers, or once again trick Ladybug and Cat Noir into thinking he isn't Monarch. He even managed to outsmart Scarabella and Kitty Noire by using the Alliance rings to learn their identities, and almost got their Miraculous as a result. For the most part, Gabriel was a pretty clever villain who capitalized on every screwup the heroes made, and actually came across as a threat... that is, until “Protection”.

Starting with “Protection”, Gabriel decided that even though he has only a few weeks to live at best, he needs to focus more on meddling in his son's love life instead of getting Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous in order to save his wife. It comes across like he cares more about stopping Marinette than he does stopping Ladybug in the latter half of the season. Hell, Gabriel doesn't even set up any plans for what would happen to Adrien if he died despite once again claiming to be doing everything for his family. Also, for some reason, he really wants Adrien and Kagami to stay together and become a couple for reasons that I can only assume is because of some kind of social commentary on the rich. Is Gabriel trying to start a eugenics program? Is this how Khan was born?

The abrupt detour Gabriel's motivations take is connected to one of the bigger problems with this season: How Gabriel's Cataclysm wound is handled. We're supposed to sympathize with Gabriel and how his days are numbered thanks to what happened, all while he's desperate to achieve his goal... when not only did Gabriel Cataclysm himself at the beginning of the season, he almost never brings up his wound until the writers want to add unnecessary drama to the story. At most, he'll either flinch in pain a little because of the wound (Elation, Perfection, Intuition, Protection, Emotion, Confrontation), or show his purple hand to show how serious it's gotten while saying he doesn't have much time left (Passion, Pretension, Revelation, Collusion, Conformation). At least, we're supposed to see it as serious, as the injury never really gets in the way of his plans.

Rather than a painful injury that's slowly killing him, the show treats Gabriel's injury with the seriousness of a sprained ankle. Yeah, it's painful, but nothing serious. Aside from one episode (Intuition), we don't see Gabriel struggle that much with his deteriorating health or how it gets in the way of his plans. Compare this to how Nathalie's condition has been portrayed. As Season 3 progressed, Nathalie got weaker to the point of forcing Gabriel to abort his second outing as Scarletmoth (Ladybug), she became so sick, she had to be benched as Mayura by the end of Season 3, and needed cybernetic crutches just to help her walk during Seasons 4 and 5. While I criticized her sudden wrinkled appearance by the events of “Representation”, the show still made it clear that Nathalie was struggling to go about her everyday life over the course of the last three seasons. As for Gabriel, whose condition is supposedly more serious to the point where not even the Ladybug Miraculous can heal it? At most, it's less something influencing his belief that he has nothing left to lose, and more a mild injury at best.

Another problem I have with Gabriel is the same one I have with Tomoe and Lila: The lack of a proper backstory. Yes, we know the basics of it (his wife is comatose and/or dead, so he became a supervillain to get Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous and save her), but we know nothing about his life before that. Thanks to “Revelation”, the most we get is that before he became a fashion designer who took an interest in discovering the Miraculous, he used to work in fast food like Skeet from Jimmy Neutron. Hell, the two even have similar haircuts.

Whether Gabriel knows the difference between salt and sodium chloride is still up for debate.

The show wants to say that Gabriel used to be different, but we don't get to see that side to him. If you want to say Gabriel used to be nicer, then give us a flashback to show how much Emilie's death affected him. That way, it would also give the scene in the finale where he breaks down have more weight to it, as it would show him letting down his emotional defenses.

Also, why was Gabriel so interested in the Miraculous in the first place if he found the Butterfly and Peacock Miraculous before Emilie got sick? The show establishes that Gabriel went exploring with Emilie and Nathalie, but why? What were they looking for? How did this lead to them getting into fashion? How did Gabriel and Emilie get so rich if Amelie inherited the Graham de Vanily fortune? This was the season that was supposed to wrap up the storyline regarding the Agreste family drama, yet we still know so little about them or how Gabriel and Emilie even met.

Finally, let's get to the Akumas. The season makes a huge deal about how dangerous Gabriel is now that he has almost every other Miraculous at his disposal, how hard the battle against him will become. How do the Akumas reflect that idea? Very poorly. Twelve of the season's Akumas were reused models (Ikari Gozen in “Multiplication”, Darker Owl in “Jubilation”, the Collector in “Illusion”, Glaciator in “Elation”, Sole Destroyer in “Deflagration”, Dark Humor in “Derision”, Riposte Prime in “Protection”, Vanisher in “Adoration”, Matagi Gozen in “Pretension”, Hoaxer in “Revelation”, Reflekta in “Confrontation”, and Nightormentor in “Representation”), and only ten of them were original (Manipula in “Determination”, Safari in Passion, Kikou in “Transmission”, Ryukomori in “Perfection”, Gold Record in “Migration”, Bugfighter in “Intuition”, Miss Sans-Culotte in “Collusion”, Queen Mayor in “Revolution”, King of Plastic in “Action”, and the Miraculized in “The Final Day”). I've also gone over this several times, but despite the main gimmick being that the Akumas have Miraculous powers now, the show never really explains why Monarch can't just give them those kind of powers himself, especially when he could easily recreate Miraculous powers as far back as Season 1 (Copycat, Antibug, Volpina).

Most of the Miraculous powers didn't actually feel like upgrades and just excuses to recycle Akumas on the basis of acting like they have new powers when it's almost always just giving them the same old powers. Either that, or with the new Akumas, they'll just make it so their only powers are related to their Miraculous powers, like Safari getting all of her gear thanks to the Goat Miraculous' Genesis, Kikou and Ryukomori's only abilities being related to their respective Miraculous powers, or Queen Mayor getting the power to control robots with multiple Miraculous powers. There were exceptions like Manipula getting the Ox Miraculous' Resistance as an added precaution, or Vanisher mixing her stealth with the Dog Miraculous' Fetch, but they were few and far between.

Overall, almost every villain this season was just so underwhelming. While the Akumas were once again mostly reused character models, we learned almost nothing about the villains other than the fact that they're idiots. Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot the fact that by the show's logic, almost all of the villains aren't really villains. Let's talk about how the show handles redemption arcs now.

The Redemption Misconception or: The Power of Love Always So Strong?

While younger readers might not understand this, there was once a time on the internet where one of the most debated shows was Steven Universe, and mainly for one reason: How it handled the topic of redemption. Pretty much every major antagonist had changed their ways by the end of the show, including Lapis Lazuli, Peridot, the Cluster, Bismuth, Spinel, Jasper, and even the Diamonds. While the quality of each of these redemption arcs varies from character to character, as is the moral status of each character, there's one thing I can say about how the show got the moral about redemption across: It was consistent. Aside from one or two characters like Eyeball or Aquamarine (who were more ignorant than anything else), there was never a case about someone being physically incapable of changing their ways, which tied into the overall theme of how important compassion is. With the way Miraculous Ladybug handles its redemption arcs, I unfortunately can't say it does it the same way Steven Universe does.

Pretty much every major villain, antagonist, or associate in the show gets a redemption of some kind. This includes Nathalie, Felix, Sabrina, Andre, and even Gabriel, while Chloe, Lila, and Tomoe are all viewed as beyond saving. The problem is rather than actually acknowledge the things any of them did as wrong before they start to change their ways, pretty much every “redemption” in this show amounts to downplaying their crimes. If the writers don't retcon the story so characters like Nathalie, Sabrina, and Andre were forced to help a greater threat instead of being willing accomplices, they'll retcon the story so characters like Felix and Gabriel were perfectly justified in their actions due to having a tragic backstory. Yes, while the point of a redemption arc is to have a former antagonist realize the error of their ways and turn a new leaf, it doesn't mean that the character who goes through this arc was never bad in the first place.

Like a lot of problems with this show, this is obviously contradicted by the way it handles Chloe. Any argument made on why every villain who was redeemed this season was stated to not apply to Chloe for some reason.

“Felix is a victim of child abuse and has a lot of emotional baggage!” Funny, because I remember in “Derision”, Mylene made a point about Chloe having a deadbeat parent not being enough to justify her actions, so by that logic, Felix shouldn't be getting away with anything.

“Sabrina and Andre were being forced to go along with Chloe's evil plans, so it's not their fault!” Chloe was also a pawn in Gabriel and Lila's schemes, yet we're still supposed to see her as evil. “But she still went along with Lila's plan!” By that logic, so did Sabrina and Andre, since they still listened to Chloe for a while instead of distancing themselves from her far earlier than they did.

“Gabriel and Nathalie are doing everything they can to help Adrien while they're both in poor health! Chloe didn't actually care about Adrien!” Sure, it's clear that (according to the retcons in Season 4), Chloe only cared about Adrien as a meal ticket, you can't say Gabriel and Nathalie care about Adrien either, since one is an abusive parent and the other did nothing to actually stop the abuse. Also, why should I feel bad for either of them when they routinely endanger lives and are only on death's door because of their own terrible choices?

I'm not saying that the show doesn't make decent points about why Chloe can't be redeemed. The issue is that these rules are never applied to anyone else who does get redeemed. The show tries to use characters like Chloe and Lila as a cautionary tale about how easy it is for your kindness to be taken advantage of, yet we never get any examples of compassion being a key factor in any major redemption this season.

Pretty much every villain who changes their ways only does so out of self-interest. Nathalie was fed up with Gabriel's constant failures and her own declining health, Felix only cared about doing things that would benefit himself like hooking up with Kagami, Andre was more than happy to resign even though he was forced to do so by an Akuma, Sabrina chose to stop helping Chloe after one particular plan goes too far (without actually apologizing for all the times she still went along with Chloe's schemes, no less), and Gabriel only stopped trying to hurt people once he got exactly what he wanted and died a martyr.

For a show with the lyrics “The power of love always so strong!”, why do we never actually see the power of love in action? And it's not just them. Whenever a character shows some form of compassion for an enemy, it's usually met with a dismissive attitude or fails miserably, and if it's not that, it's all lie to trick someone else.

In “Illusion”, Gabriel's plan to throw off suspicion that he's Monarch involves pretending to let Ladybug and Cat Noir get through to him.

In “Derision”, Rose pointed out Chloe's relationship with her mother as an excuse for why she's so mean, only for Mylene to argue against that despite being in a different boat than Chloe is.

In “Revelation”, Lila kept lying about having a caring attitude and believing that anyone can change, which was obviously meant to mock anyone who had that kind of viewpoint.

In “Collusion”, Ms. Bustier tries to reach out to Chloe after everything she's done, only to lose her job as a result.

In “Re-Creation”, the whole reason Bug Noire manages to beat Monarch was by putting him in a situation that would take advantage of his compassion for his wife, and later on, Gabriel manages to get the upper hand by taking advantage of Marinette's own compassion for him.

For a magical girl show, these writers are really terrible at teaching the lesson about showing kindness to your enemies, because more often than not, it's just violence that solves everything. Just ask the citizens of Paris in “Revolution”.

It doesn't help that the morality in this show isn't a complicated spectrum that weighs every action a character does and allows for other stances besides good or evil. Instead, it's like a light switch with two settings: “So good, you volunteer at the local children's hospital” and “So bad, you voluntarily send children to the hospital”. Characters in this show are either good or bad, and there's no room for in-between. Even when characters supposedly do change their ways, the show goes out of its way to claim that this is what they've always been like, which completely undermines the idea of what a redemption arc sets out to accomplish.

The thing is that I've actually seen examples of “Character X was only doing bad things as part of their plan!” and “Character X was only forced to do bad things for the villain!” done with one character, and it was a very recent example too. In the recently concluded Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger, one of the major villains was a tyrant named Racules, who took advantage of several monster attacks to secure more power for his kingdom, but later on, it's revealed he had a reason to do so. Long story short, Racules was the latest in a long line of rulers who was essentially blackmailed into carrying out a war by an immortal being from space named Dagded. However, Racules had a plan to secretly find a way to kill Dadged, and it involved playing along by pretending to be a heartless tyrant. By playing up his persona of a villain, not only did Racules drive his brother Gira (who was revealed to be an immortal creation of Dadged) to gain the weapons necessary to fight Dadged, Dagded trusted Racules so much, he decided to give him the power to kill an immortal. Guess who Racules chooses to kill as soon as he gets that ability.

While the reveal that Racules was good all along happened very late into the series, it worked far better than any redemption in this entire show for one reason: Racules isn't let off the hook for what he did. Everyone, Racules included, acknowledges that he did terrible things for years, and as soon as the situation is resolved, Racules is imprisoned for his crimes. Racules even admits to going mad with power at one point before he focused on his goal again, and he doesn't complain while he's in prison.

We never get any moments like this with the other redeemed characters. Nobody ever acknowledges that they went too far. They do one or two good things, and therefore, they're perfectly okay in Marinette's eyes.

Like a lot of topics it covers, this show wants to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to redemption. It wants to show characters changing their ways, but it doesn't want to actually hold those characters accountable for their actions. It wants to explain that not everyone can be redeemed, but it doesn't want to explain what causes people to want to redeem themselves. It wants to have an idealistic view of solving problems with compassion, yet it goes out of its way to mock those with that same ideology while claiming that violence is the only answer.

Maybe if Astruc spent less time arguing with people on Twitter over the concept of redemption, he and his team could have put more effort into fleshing out the all of the half-baked redemption arcs this season.

Adrienette Is Finally Canon! The Love Square? What’s That?

Well, it finally happened. After seven years, five months, fourteen days, 115 episodes and three specials since the show originally premiered in France on October 19th, 2015, Marinette and Adrien have finally gotten together for real. No cop-outs, no reset button, no misunderstandings, this is real. Credit where credit is due, the writers could have easily kept stalling and wait until the very end of the season for Marinette and Adrien to get together and called it a day, but they gave us over half a season of them in an actual relationship. Unfortunately, this also meant the writers had to rush the development of the relationship in order for Adrienette to become official in the first place.

Like a lot of stuff in the first half of this season, the writers pretty much speedran through the plotlines building up to Marinette and Adrien getting together. During the course of a mere eight episodes, we got a plotline about Marinette feeling guilty for letting her feelings for Adrien make her screw up, a plotline where Adrien realizes he has feelings for Marinette, a plotline where Marinette falls in love with Cat Noir, a plotline where Adrien stops having feelings for Ladybug, and finally, a plotline where Marinette stops having feelings for Cat Noir. These are all plotlines that we should have gotten over the course of the past four seasons, but instead, the writers are just cramming them all into less than a dozen episodes.

Considering how this was meant to be the final season originally, you can tell the writers realized they actually had to actually resolve the “Will they or won't they?” plotline instead of just padding things out like they normally do. But that's the problem. This was something fans, shippers, and general audiences were told to look forward to for years. Keep in mind, one of the biggest arguments you could make for just why the writers waited until Season 5 for Marinette and Adrien to officially get together was because they had something HUGE planned. This is a big deal for the show, something you can't take too lightly. If Astruc and the other writers were so intent on hyping up Adrienette for over four seasons to the point of showing two alternate timelines where they get together to tide viewers over, they needed to make sure they had a payoff so incredible, so satisfying, that their audiences would see it as more than worth the wait.

Just how was the big moment where Marinette and Adrien officially got together this season after so many years of buildup?

To be perfectly honest with you, I had absolutely no goddamn idea that the end of “Transmission” was meant to signify them finally starting a relationship. It just felt like the writers were doing the same thing about them being friends with a hint of something more on the horizon, but then the opening of “Deflagration” made it clear that here was major progress made in their relationship, though Marinette denied it due to her own anxiety, and by “Perfection”, it's confirmed that the two are dating. I just... really? This is how the two finally get together? It just... happens? No big dramatic confession? No romantic first date building up to this? Not even a kiss? The two talk for a few minutes, watch an Akuma fight, and now they're an item. Are you kidding me? Sure, most of the big moments in their relationship are saved for after they get together, but there's the problem: the writers half-ass the moment where Marinette and Adrien get together! It's more or less an afterthought in a two-parter involving a battle with Monarch where nothing was really accomplished.

You'd think for all the uncertainty Marinette felt over her feelings for Adrien this season, them getting together would be seen as a big moment, but it just doesn't for some reason. While you could argue it's a lesson in your fear of confessing being harder than the act itself, not much attention is given to Marinette growing closer with Adrien, because, for some reason, the writers decided to hold off the love confession and the first kiss for far later in the season (Pretension, Revolution). That's right, even after Marinette and Adrien finally get together, the show still needs to find a way to draw out the development of Adrienette.

I don't get it. Why couldn't the confession and kiss be what cements Adrienette, so more focus could be given to other plots? You can't say the “Will they or won't they?” stuff is the only draw to Adrienette, because there are plenty of plots you could write now that Marinette and Adrien are together. You could have an episode where Marinette invites Adrien over to breakfast with her parents in a follow-up to “Weredad”. You could have an episode where Marinette and Adrien try to go out on a perfect first date, only to struggle to balance their superhero lives getting in the way. You could have an episode where both Marinette and Adrien worry they're not good enough for each other, only for them to realize they love each other for who they really are. You could have an episode where Marinette and Adrien finally get closure on their former relationships with Luka and Kagami respectively. There were plenty of options for stories here, yet rather than do literally anything like that, not only did the writers drag out Marinette and Adrien's first kiss, they had the main villain take a break from trying to get the Miraculous to focus on breaking up the two.

As I mentioned earlier, we get a new arc all about Gabriel trying to break up Marinette and Adrien so Adrien can start dating Kagami again. Now I know what you're probably thinking: “IOTA, wasn't it implied that while Adrien and Kagami were dating, they were keeping their relationship a secret from their parents? Why are their parents suddenly obsessed with them getting together?” Well, you see, the answer to that is... that I have no answer because this makes no sense and is yet another excuse for a story arc that is somehow relevant to the overall plot. It's because of Gabriel's irrational hatred of Adrienette that Adrien is sent to London, and as a result, is absent from the final battle.

The sad thing is that I honestly thought Marinette and Adrien had some cute moments as a couple this season and had some believable chemistry. It's nothing groundbreaking, and there are plenty of flaws that I'll get to later, but for all intents and purposes, they still made a decent couple. It's just too bad that everyone else won't shut up about how amazing they are together. When their friends aren't trying to set up these cinematic scenarios for Marinette and Adrien that keep failing (Perfection, Protection,), they're gushing over how amazing of a couple the two are (Transmission, Deflagration, Revelation). At best, it comes across as the writers saying “How do you do, fellow shippers?”, and at worst, it comes across as the writers taking a victory lap while treating Adrienette as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Adrienette just dominated the latter half of this season, and it really got in the way of the overall story regarding the conflict with Monarch. What's that? You're saying I forgot something, like the other three sides of the Love Square. Ah, good eye, my friend.

SO DID THE FUCKING SHOW.

For the thing that got a lot of people interested in the show in the first place, the rest of the Love Square is criminally underutilized this season. Marinette randomly develops feelings for Cat Noir for a handful of episodes, Cat Noir randomly moves on from Ladybug, and I don't think we even got a single Ladrien scene this season. It really felt like the writers realized this was meant to be the last season, so not only did they have to get Marinette and Adrien together as quickly as they could, they also had to acknowledge the other sides of the Love Square. Of course, they did that without actually doing an identity reveal.

There are theories that the reveal was going to happen this season with how much Marinette and Adrien only talked about each other and not their superhero partners (implying they both knew who the other was), but the writers changed it at the last minute because they got renewed for more seasons. I suppose it makes in a meta sense, but what about the in-universe explanation? What's stopping Ladybug and Cat Noir from learning each other's identities when literally every other hero in Paris can get their Miraculous back, even the ones who had their identities discovered? Were the writers so uncertain if people would still watch the show if there wasn't any mystery in Marinette and Adrien's relationship? What exactly is there left to explore with the Love Square when Adrienette is canon, while Ladynoir, Marichat, and Ladrien are all dead in the water?

Like a lot of things this season, the handling of the Love Square started off strong and gradually petered out to the point where I just don't care anymore. I started this season assuming the reveal would actually happen, but of course, the writers just won't let this subplot die already.

Adrien Who?

While I don't really have a lot of bad things to say about Adrien compared to last season, this is unfortunately part of the bigger problem with how he was handled this season.

Like I said earlier, it seemed like the writers actually learned from their mistakes last seasons with how Adrien was written during the earlier episodes last season. He stopped whining about how he was totally important and started pulling his weight in battle. He was very active in fighting Akumas and actually felt like an equal to Ladybug. Yeah, Ladybug still called the shots, but the two stopped bickering over stupid things and had more conversations about other things. It didn't matter if they were more casual chats about their lives (Perfection) or discussions on the enemy's plans (Intuition, Revolution).

The problem, like a lot of things this season now that I think about it, comes in the second half. Remember how last season made a big deal about how wrong it was to leave Adrien out of the loop with so many secrets? Once again, the writers seemed to have forgotten this major story arc that they wrote themselves. Now, not only does Gabriel crack down on his horrific treatment of Adrien through his ring, not only does Adrien's character regress to being nothing more than Marinette's trophy boyfriend, by the end of the season, Adrien is literally reduced to a damsel in distress who needs to be saved, instead of, you know, A SUPERHERO. And remember, the writers were very proud of how this was planned for almost a decade, all because they got to supposedly subvert fairy tale tropes.

I feel like this whole “Save Adrien” plotline could have worked if Adrien wasn't already a superhero, and was just a civilian Marinette knew. Yeah, it would still be using an overdone trope, but at least if that happened, Adrien would have an excuse to not be able to fight back as opposed to the several he made during the finale. Instead, for the majority of the season's second half, Adrien takes a backseat to a major story arc revolving around his family and isn't even given proper closure by the end.

“But IOTA!” You might say. “The show's called Miraculous Ladybug, not Miraculous Cat Noir! Of course Ladybug has to save the day! She's the main character!” That may be true, voice in my head, but here's the thing: If Adrien wasn't going to be part of the final battle, why wasn't this about Marinette's family? Why not make Monarch Tom or Sabine trying to bring back their spouse? Marinette is the main character, yes, but so much of the backstory in this show is connected to Adrien's family. The show tries to connect Marinette to this through her relationship with Adrien, but with how often she and Gabriel fight over what's best for him, Adrien kind of just sits around, not protesting against his father in the slightest. I'm not saying Adrien should be the main character. I'm saying that Marinette should be tied more into the story if you were going to base a lot of the drama on her perspective during the final battle. It's almost like making it so Adrien physically can't rebel against his father was a stupid way to keep him out of the conflict.

Why the hell couldn't we have gotten a scene where Adrien's connection to Gabriel was broken? There were plenty of options the writers could have used. You could have had Nathalie steal the other ring back from Gabriel to give to Adrien, have Argos use the Peacock Miraculous' powers to override Gabriel's commands, or have Adrien unlock a new form of Cataclysm that severs the bond with his Amok. And that's not even getting into the excuses the show made for why he can't get involved, because God forbid one of the two main characters in the show's title get to take part in the final battle.

In fact, I'm pretty sure this is why Felix was introduced, to do the things Adrien should be doing. Felix is the one who has a vendetta against Gabriel, a deeper connection with Kagami, knowledge that he's a Sentimonster, and an overall influence in the plot. The writers are so obsessed with coddling Adrien that they created an entirely different character to fill in a role for him, and Felix wasn't even in the final battle. And just remember, Adrien was originally created to replace Felix in the story, so Felix taking over Adrien's role as the character who helps advance the plot makes even less sense.

Even if the final battle is meant to be over Adrien, it comes across less like Marinette and Gabriel are fighting over his freedom and more who gets to control him. Gabriel doesn't use his wish to free Adrien from the shackles of the rings. He just gives Marinette the rings and hopes she won't do the same kind of things he did with the rings. Nothing changed over Adrien's treatment except who gets the keys.

It'd be one thing if Adrien at least chose Marinette over his father, but Adrien isn't even allowed to know the full story on anything, not even the Sentimonster stuff. Okay, putting aside the fact that Adrien has lots of friends and family to help him cope with this, maybe I can buy not telling him about Gabriel. Not telling him he's a Sentimonster is something I can't excuse. This is like not wanting to tell someone they have diabetes and hoping they know how to use their own insulin while they're downing Pepsi after Pepsi. It's not just a matter of hurting Adrien's feelings. His fucking life depends on those rings. He should obviously know to keep them safe and not trade them for magic beans or something stupid like that.

But the biggest problem with Adrien this season is how it goes against everything the show has said about him and his relationship with Marinette/Ladybug the last four seasons, and especially Season 4.

For the past four seasons, the show has loved to say that no matter what happens, Ladybug and Cat Noir will always be here for the other, even against the world. Put aside how unlikable Adrien was last season, that was the ultimate lesson, about the two reaffirming their bond. And yet, here we are in the Season 5 finale, when literally the entire world is against Ladybug and Cat Noir, and Cat Noir is nowhere to be seen.

One of the main reasons why Adrien jumped at the chance to be a superhero was the freedom it gave him from his restrictive lifestyle, and how it led to him making more friends at school. And that very same story ends with Adrien admitting it's a good thing for him to stay inside and never acknowledge the fact that his father was kind of a dick. Remember, this was planned in advance for YEARS, and absolutely nobody thought it contradicted one of the most important aspects of Adrien's character: his desire for freedom. Now the same person who would demand to not be kept in the dark about so many things (Lady Wifi, Syren, Lies, Sentibubbler, Rocketear, Risk) is now sitting around like a coward while everyone else saves the world instead.

I still think Adrien was at his worst in Season 4, with how much of an whiny and insufferable idiot he could be, but Adrien in Season 5 is a close second. Yes, I wanted him to stop acting out and demanding that the world cater to his every whim, but I also wanted him to prove he was as valuable as he says. The first half of this season seemed to understand this kind of criticism and reminded the audience that Cat Noir was still useful, but when the actual story kicked in, the writers were so determined to keep the secret identity bullshit going, Adrien somehow got less focus as a hero than the Resistance, a group of temp heroes who actually lost their Miraculous. And consider the fact that this season wrapped up the drama with the Agreste family, so for all we know, Adrien will get even less screentime next season.

If Adrien is supposed to be an invaluable ally to Ladybug, then why doesn't the writing accurately reflect it?

The Problem With the Biggest Idiot of Season 5: Moronette, “Of Course I Know What I’m Doing!” Royal-Pain, AKA, Ladydumb

You know, it's funny. I kept defending Marinette when the writing kept making her out to be a terrible hero last season while Adrien got by without a single criticism, to the point where I considered Adrien to be the worst part of the entire season. Oh, how the tables have turned with dear old Marinette, as the season that chose not to criticize every single action she took is when she's arguably at her worst.

You have to wonder if the writers finally realized how much crap they put Marinette through over the last few seasons by having her always forcing her to learn some contrived lesson and were like, “Oh yeah, she's supposed to be someone the audience is supposed to root for.” Unfortunately, they went way too far in the other direction with how they handled Marinette.

The way Marinette was written this season felt eerily similar to what happened with Adrien last season. Suddenly, her personal drama is of the utmost importance (Determination, Passion, Reunion, Elation, The Kwamis' Choice, Perfection, Migration, Derision, Adoration, Pretension, Representation), she's making incredibly stupid decisions in battle (Evolution, Destruction, Determination, Pretension), she becomes the moral compass of the show who lectures others on what to do (Revelation, Confrontation, Collusion, Revolution), and she's never really called out for her actions by the other characters despite how often she makes things worse.

So much of the first half of this season is the exact same crap over and over again. Marinette complains about how hard things are for her and her conflicting feelings for Adrien. I wouldn't really mind something like this if it wasn't for two things.

First, there's no real arc involved with this. Marinette keeps complaining about her love life, and she never really learns anything from it. She doesn't even get to confess to Adrien and show her growing as a character. Adrien confesses to her, and bam, the two are a couple now. Glad to see all the discussions about Marinette's anxiety was completely pointless since she doesn't get to be the one to really confront her inner demons. Well, there was one time in “Derision”, and we all know how well that turned out, right?

Second, more often than not, it seems like Marinette is prioritizing her personal life over the situation with Monarch. You know, the guy who has access to fourteen different Miraculous? After you only managed to get one back? I'd understand if we got this kind of arc in the earlier seasons, but by doing this, you're undermining the current threat Monarch poses. She's even willing to give up being a superhero if it means being with Adrien. That is how important her love life is to her. She's willing to let Tikki force the responsibility onto someone else if it means she can be happy. Of course, this isn't too surprising, as Astruc once said that the show is supposed to focus primarily on romance, not superhero action.

THIS IS WHAT THOMAS ASTRUC ACTUALLY BELIEVES.

Just like with Adrien last season, the show seems to care more about Marinette's personal issues at the expense of other characters. Do you want to know how many episodes this season focused on Marinette's love life in some way? EIGHTEEN (Multiplication, Jubilation, Determination, Passion, Reunion, Elation, Transmission, Deflagration, Perfection, Derision, Protection, Adoration, Emotion, Pretension, Revolution, Representation, Conformation, Re-Creation). Literally two-thirds of the season includes Love Square drama. Even if you want to be generous and count both two-parters as single episodes, that's still more than half the season. This is yet another problem with waiting until what was originally supposed to be the last season to resolve your plot. You need to force all of this development through almost every episode until people get tired of it.

Because of this, Marinette basically took over the narrative of Season 5. Almost every major conflict revolved around her, even the stuff with Adrien. Rather than make a story about Marinette and Adrien working together to break free from Gabriel's influence, Marinette is the one who has to do the heavy lifting and save Adrien herself. I've already talked about this with Adrien, but it bears repeating, as this is same issue I had with Season 4. Just like how Adrien got more focus during a story arc that should have been about Marinette last season, Marinette is now getting more focus during a story arc that should have been about Adrien, to the point where Marinette gets to use Adrien's Miraculous during the final battle with Monarch.

I'd at least be somewhat forgiving towards the shift in focus if Marinette actually got to do anything to advance the plot herself. Because of how often the show focuses on Marinette's love life, very little time is dedicated to showing Ladybug making an effort to actually stop Monarch. The closest we got was in “Illusion”, and that was a plan spearheaded by Nino. Like I said earlier, Felix does more to advance the plot out of any character, even Marinette, THE ONE THE SHOW IS NAMED AFTER!

We have three separate episodes where Ladybug has Monarch at her mercy, but she decides to talk about how she's totally won and that Monarch can't get away at all, and then Monarch gets away in a matter of seconds. I just... this is “SHOOT THEM WITH THE DEHYDRATION GUN!” levels of stupid here! The only reason Monarch gets as far as he does is because Ladybug can't just grab any the Miraculous he has all over his body.

We're seriously supposed to see Marinette as an amazing hero when she keeps screwing up every opportunity she gets to stop Monarch. In the span of one season, Marinette went along with being forced to retire because she got a chance to date Adrien (The Kwamis' Choice), chose not to form a temporary alliance with an Akuma even if it meant possibly getting the Peacock Miraculous back and stopping a potential threat (Pretension), had absolutely no plan to stop Lila until someone else came forward with information on what she was doing (Confrontation), decided to let another Akuma force the mayor out of office (Collusion), and failed to stop Gabriel because she got tricked again and was completely helpless as the entire universe was recreated before she took credit for defeating Monarch afterwards in the new reality and then decided to honor the insane supervillain's wishes and keep her boyfriend completely in the dark about the truth even though she learned not to keep secrets from others (The Final Day) and MY GOD, I HATE THIS SEASON SO MUCH.

When Marinette isn't making terrible decisions, she's lecturing others on how to act around their enemies, and when I say “how to act”, I mean “refuse to give them even the slightest bit of respect after doing the bare minimum to help them try and change”. Marinette really lets her own personal biases toward Chloe and Lila get to her this season with how the latter half of the season had her tell others not to even consider trusting them because of how easy it is for them to take advantage of kindness. You know, something you'd hear someone like Superman or Spider-Man teach kids about.

In fact, here's a little game any aspiring writer can play when writing superhero characters: If you can't imagine someone as noble as Superman saying something like this...

Marinette: But sometimes, the good we think we see in some people is just a reflection of our own, and we end up being fooled by our own kindness.

Unless your intent is for them to be flawed or in the wrong instead of a complete paragon of virtue, you need to go through your drafts.

And just like Adrien, even though Marinette keeps screwing up, she's never held accountable for her actions. She's never allowed to be wrong, and is almost always the one who gets to lecture people, mainly towards the end of the season. A good example of how poorly written Marinette is this season is when she whines about Ms Bustier not punishing Chloe enough when not only does she fail to understand that Chloe is still being punished, but she did absolutely nothing to bring Chloe's cheating to her teacher's attention when as class representative, it's her job. I don't care how stupid that idea sounds, that's what the show goes with, and it makes Marinette's inaction come across as very irresponsible.

But then again, neglecting her duties at school is nothing compared to acting like Marinette didn't fail to save all of reality while not showing the least bit of remorse for it. I'm just saying, when even Ben 10: Omniverse of all shows does this kind of story better, you know you've screwed up. Again, we're supposed to see it like Marinette won because the universe is in one piece, when, once again, SHE FAILED! Like I said, she failed at pretty much everything she set out to do this season and didn't stop Monarch outside of warding off his Akumas. This is seriously how the show was supposed to end, with Marinette failing to save the universe and the audience just needing to accept it. Well, in case it wasn't obvious on my front, I don't. Hell, forget Ben 10: Omniverse. Even Star vs. the Forces of Evil had the main character save the day, even if it meant potentially screwing over countless lives by destroying all magic in the world. Marinette? “Well, everyone I know and love is technically dead and the madman I spent five seasons trying to stop gets to die a martyr, but everything looks like I saved the day, so that technically means I didsave the day! Man, I'm a great hero. Good thing the other characters basically exist to remind the audience of how amazing I am.”

If there's one thing to take away from everything that's happened, it's that this was the season where Marinette has arguably become one of the biggest examples of a show failing to make the audience like their main character. There was much time dedicated to rationalizing and trying to justify the worst possible decisions she could've made and acting like she's still an amazing hero. Stuff like this only serves to further validate the criticisms people have had for her as a character ever since Season 5. And remember, this is coming from someone who went out of their way to defend Marinette last season. In an attempt to show her at her most heroic and virtuous, Season 5 pretty much cemented Marinette as a terrible main character, a terrible superhero, and a terrible role model for children.

Eight Years for This?

I'm going to be perfectly honest with you guys. This season just broke me, and there was a good reason why this analysis took so long to write.

While there were a number of outside factors that made it hard for me to get the time to write (work, the holidays, family gatherings, etc), there were still times where I either didn't have a lot of material to work with, or I just couldn't find the motivation to work on the reviews. I guess throughout all these years, I figured that after all this buildup between the Love Square and Adrien's relationship with his father, there would at least be something I could find this season that would allow me to say this was worth the wait. Unfortunately, it was just disappointment after disappointment this season, with a universally hated finale to boot.

To me, this was the season that burned away the remaining goodwill I had for the show, because there's just no salvaging it at this point. The writers pretty much butchered every single character in some way, excused the main villain's actions for a sorry excuse for a heroic sacrifice, and literally reset the universe so all of the characters we've come to know for almost a decade technically don't exist anymore. Even the cliffhanger for Season 6 really excites me, because why should I care about a character we still know nothing about becoming the main villain? Why should I care at all when the writers have made it clear they don't care either? They don't care about writing character development, they don't care about writing consistent lore for their world, they don't care about approaching serious subjects with the delicacy they deserve and they certainly don't care about telling a consistent story.

Season 5 of Miraculous Ladybug was a failure in every conceivable definition of the word. It failed to deliver a satisfying conclusion to any of the stories that had been set up for years, and if this was how the main story ended, I don't really have a lot to look forward to when Season 6 premieres.

[tinywitchgoblin]

Good, Bad

Hunter x fem!reader x Crosshair, use of she/her but no use of y/n

Summary: nasty smut with Crosshair and Hunter (plot? who’s she?)

Word count: 3.3k (oops)

Warnings: smut MINORS GTFO, threesome (mmf) NO CLONECEST, unprotected piv sex (wrap it up in real life y’all), mention/use of sex toys and handcuffs, lots of degradation, also lots of praise, honorifics (sir), use of safewords, Tech makes sex toys, edging, face fucking/riding, oral (m and f receiving), spanking, creampies, choking, overstimulation, I think that’s it??

a/n: I rb’d this post ⬇️ with these tags and got an anon ask to write the fic so here we are!!

a/n 2: this is my first time writing explicitly kink stuff, so if I messed anything big up, please let me know. I did some research, but there’s a possibility that I missed something

What you had with Hunter and Crosshair didn’t really have a label. It wasn’t quite friends with benefits, given that you were exclusive, but you weren’t quite dating, either. What wasn’t ambiguous, however, was that the sex was top-tier. The two of them had lots of experience, and they sure put it to good use. They took you individually, together, in the bedroom, in the closet, in the shower, you name it. This dynamic gave new meaning to the concept of “variety is the spice of life,” and tonight, things were gonna get spicy.

So that’s how you found yourself in your room with the guys, Hunter stood behind you rubbing your shoulders to ease the tension there while Crosshair got things prepared. He’d grabbed lube, a couple of toys, a waterproof blanket for the bed, some water bottles, a couple of toys, and some other supplies to use throughout the evening. 

“You sure you’re up for this mesh’la?” Hunter inquired, always intent on making sure you gave consent. One of his favorite things was asking for your consent enough times to the point where you’d beg for him to fuck you- and he loved every bit of it. 

“Yes, I’m ready,” you affirmed. 

“You remember the safeword system?” Crosshair questioned. 

“Yes, I remember,” you reassured. 

“Then say it back to us. We want to make sure everyone is on the same page, and that we keep you safe,” Hunter asserted. You turned around to look him in the eyes before responding, “Green means ‘keep going’, yellow means ‘slow down’ or ‘proceed with caution’, red means ‘pause’, and black means we’re done for the evening,” you recited. “And I’m green right now; all set to go.”

“Well done, mesh’la, I’m so proud of you,” Hunter murmured, nuzzling into your neck. “So good at being good.”

“There’s no way this little slut would forget the system,” Crosshair whispered from behind you, turning your face towards him before continuing, “We couldn’t fuck it out of her even if we tried. Little cockwhore needs to be filled, and she knows she needs the safewords in order to get what she wants.” 

You let out a little whimper- so that’s the chosen dynamic for tonight. Hunter fed your praise kink, while Crosshair took hold of your need to be degraded. You lovingly referred to it as the ‘good cock, bad cock’ routine. “So… what are things looking like for tonight?”

“You see those toys over there?” Hunter indicated over to the dresser where Crosshair’s little ‘assistants’ for the evening were displayed. “Crosshair is gonna use these on you, and you’re gonna follow his directions exactly. When you do, I get to reward you. Deal?” 

“If she’s good,” Crosshair corrected. “Sometimes the little slut can’t help but break the rules. And if that happens… no reward.”

“She’ll be good,” Hunter asserted. Turning to you, he asked, “Isn’t that right, mesh’la?”

“Yes sir, I’ll be good,” you assured. Hunter gave his brother a knowing look, to which Crosshair gave his usual scowl. 

“Get on the bed, little cumslut,” Crosshair demanded, to which you gave a quiet “yes, sir,”

Crosshair led you over to the bed, grabbing a pair of cuffs on the way. They’d been specially made by Tech for these sorts of situations. In fact, all of the toys on display were ones Tech had made. His were better than any you’d been able to find at a store or online, so they showed up pretty regularly during scenes that involved toys. Holding up the cuffs, he asked, “What color?”

“Green,” you replied, holding your wrists to the bed frame where you knew he’d ask you to put them.

“Good girl, knowing exactly what to do,” Hunter praised, laying down next to you and brushing a hand over your cheek. 

“You give her too much credit, she’s doing exactly what I fucking told her to,” Crosshair retorted. “Little bitch knows I expect nothing less. Isn’t that right, naughty girl?”

“Yes sir,” you responded, but that wasn’t enough.

“Yes sir, what?” Crosshair demanded. 

“Yes sir, I did what you told me to,” you repeated. Hunter decided to stay quiet for the moment, letting Crosshair do as he pleased. Crosshair got up and walked back over to the dresser, looking down at his options for how to proceed. He definitely wanted to use the wand at some point; you always looked so pitiful when edged for long enough, plus hearing you beg to be allowed to cum turned him on like nothing else. He also considered using the buttplug, but that wasn’t the highest thing on his list of priorities at the moment. Browsing over the other options, he grabbed the wand and the lube, figuring he could come back and reevaluate later. 

Meanwhile, Hunter had tilted your face towards him, kissing you gently. As he did so, one of his hands went from holding your face to massaging a breast, earning a moan, which he swallowed eagerly. Noticing that Crosshair was ready to continue, he pulled away, but stayed within arm’s reach to give you support. 

“Color?” Crosshair asked. 

“Green,” you gave, a bit more breathless than before. Hunter’s kisses always did that to you. 

“This is what I’m going to do to you. I’m going to use this wand on you, and you’re not allowed to come. If you do, I’m going to use the cane on you, and for each second of your orgasm, you will receive one hit to the ass. Repeat back to me what I said.”

“You’re going to use the wand on me and edge me. If I come, I get one hit to the ass with the cane for each second of my orgasm.”

Without another word, Crosshair settled between your legs, squirting a bit of lube onto his hands and the wand before turning it on. He dragged it up the inside of your left thigh, watching you squirm, desperately trying to get some sort of friction. Putting down the wand and grabbing your legs, Crosshair forced them open even more. “Keep your legs open, little slut. I’ve seen you do it before, don’t be lazy.”

“You can keep those pretty legs of yours open, right, baby?” Hunter chimed in, brushing a stray hair out of your face. 

“Yes, sirs,” you affirmed, focusing on keeping your legs open and ready as Crosshair kept teasing you with the toy. He would bring it closer to your aching cunt before moving it away. You knew he loved teasing you like this; you also knew he could take his sweet time when he wanted to. Thankfully, he was feeling a bit impatient tonight. 

When he moved the toy to where you needed it most, your body jerked, trying to get more. A strong smack to the thigh told you to keep still as he ghosted the wand over your clit. You focused all of your energy on staying still and keeping your legs open, but it was getting increasingly difficult as Crosshair applied more pressure with the wand. The whole time, you could feel Hunter’s presence next to you, and at one point, he brought one of his hands up to hold yours where they were bound to the bed frame. 

As you felt yourself approaching the precipice, Crosshair pulled the toy away and sat there for a moment, watching your cunt spasm around nothing, longing to be filled. But he wasn’t about to let you get what you wanted so easily. 

“That was me going easy on you,” Crosshair divulged. “It only gets more difficult from here, and remember what I told you would happen if you come before I give you permission. No, tell me what happens if you come early.”

“If I come, I get one hit to the ass with the cane for each second of my orgasm,” you remembered. With a single nod, Crosshair redirected his attention to your pussy, reacquainting it with the wand. Tired from your first edge, your control over your body was slipping, and you felt your orgasm nearing once again. This time, Crosshair kept the wand on for longer, and you had to muster all of your energy to keep from coming. 

Finally, he pulled away, and you breathed a sigh of relief. Looking over towards Hunter, you saw he’d started palming himself, patiently waiting for the show to continue. When he saw you looking at him, he asked, “Think you could help me out with this, mesh’la?”

“How can I help?” you asked, glancing up at your still-bound hands. 

“Let me ride that pretty face of yours. Your mouth always feels so good, and it’ll give you something to concentrate on while Cross is edging you,” he clarified, looking over to Crosshair to make sure he was okay with that idea. With a nod, he looked back to you, he asked, “Is that okay with you? What color?”

“Green,” you responded, looking forward to having Hunter’s cock down your throat. 

“What is Hunter about to do to you, cockslut? Say it back to us,” Crosshair demanded. 

“He’s gonna ride my face and fuck my mouth, use me how he wants,” you whispered, looking over as Hunter climbed over your face. 

“Such a good girl,” Hunter moaned, and without another word, he sunk into your awaiting mouth, grabbing onto the bed frame for balance. Crosshair placed the wand back on your clit, and you moaned around Hunter’s cock as he bottomed out. He held still for a moment, getting used to the feeling of your throat, while you tried to focus on breathing through your nose. He was big, and it had taken a while to train you to be able to take all of him. He moved his hands so that they were holding yours, while still maintaining his balance. 

Crosshair kept his attention trained on edging you a third time. Hunter was right- this time, you were able to concentrate on sucking Hunter off, so you had something to focus your attention on instead of just the sensation from the wand between your legs. Hunter pulled out a bit before pushing back in, content with fucking your mouth nice and slow for the moment. 

As you approached your orgasm a third time, Crosshair sped the motions with the wand, forcing you to choke on Hunter, who only fucked your throat faster in response. As you held your orgasm off the best you could, he pushed into you as far as he could and spilled his cum down your throat. Finally, Crosshair relented, pulling the toy away as Hunter pulled out of your mouth. 

“Color?” Hunter checked. 

“Red. I need some water,” you admitted. Crosshair got off the bed and grabbed one of the water bottles as Hunter climbed off of you and whispered, “You did so, so well, mesh’la. I’m so proud of you, and you should be proud of yourself, too,” he whispered, leaning in to kiss you. 

Crosshair brought the water over and you opened your mouth for him to pour some water into. You drank deeply, not realizing how thirsty you actually were. 

“How're you feeling now? What’re you thinking?” Hunter questioned. You took a minute to respond before admitting, “I don’t think I can take any more edges.” You looked over at Crosshair before continuing, “I’m sorry, I wish I could do more.”

“Maybe another night,” Crosshair conceded. “You know your limits, and I won’t cross a boundary. Time to move on?” You nodded in response. Hunter kissed your forehead and added, “You’re doing so well. Your body can only take so much, and you were good for communicating your needs to us. You have nothing to apologize for.” 

“And can we take the cuffs off? My shoulders are starting to hurt,” you clarified. 

“Of course,” Crosshair affirmed, unlocking the cuffs and bringing your arms down slowly so as to not cause any more pain. Hunter massaged your shoulders, alleviating some of the pain that had built up there. You leaned into his touch, enjoying the break in activity when Crosshair came back over to the bed, buttplug in hand. “Think you’re up for this?”

You thought for a moment before responding, “Not tonight.”

“Look at you, setting boundaries. Such a good girl,” Hunter praised. “Is there something that we can do that you want to try? Another toy, a different position?”

“What does our filthy little cockslut want to try next?” Crosshair added, reaching over and tugging on your hair a bit. 

“I wanna come,” you begged. “I need to come so bad, please-”

“Shhh, we’ll take good care of you,” Hunter reassured, taking you in his arms. He sat back against the bed frame, pulling you with him and depositing you on his lap with your legs bracketed outside his own, legs spread wide so that Crosshair could see how wet and swollen your pussy was. 

“Wanna be a good girl and give Crosshair a show?” Hunter murmured in your ear. “Show him how pretty you look when you come on my fingers?”

“Yes sir,” you moaned, desperate to finally get your release. Normally, Hunter would take his time worshiping every inch of your body before even considering going down on you, but he knew how badly you needed to come. He brought his hand down to your aching pussy, circling around your clit a few times before massaging your entrance and slowly pushing a finger in. You gasped, grinding and clenching down on his finger. 

“Such a little whore, so desperate and aching just from one finger,” Crosshair chided, laser focused on where Hunter’s finger disappeared inside you. Hunter pushed a second finger in with the first and began curling them against your g-spot, making you see stars and squirm around in his lap. He wrapped his other arm around your waist, holding you close to him, whispering, “You’re doing so well, letting me finger you like this. Let’s get you that orgasm, yeah?”

All you could do was nod as you felt yourself hurtling forward, getting closer and closer to finishing. Hunter dipped his head down to suck a hickey into your neck as he kept fingering you, feeling you get closer and closer to your orgasm. 

As you felt yourself reaching your peak, you tried to let them know that you were about to come, but given that the only noises you could make were senseless babbles, they figured it out pretty quickly. Once you hit your peak, you felt your entire body clench, losing all control and surrendering to the all-consuming pleasure Hunter was giving you. It felt as if every nerve ending in your body had been set alight, blazing from head to toe, and you could do nothing but take it all in. The whole time, you could vaguely make out Hunter whispering in your ear “that’s it,” “good girl,” “you look so sexy coming all over my fucking fingers.”

Eventually, you came down from your high, trying to regulate your breathing. Crosshair leaned in and captured your lips in a surprisingly gentle kiss before pulling away, looking into your eyes, and muttered, “slut” before giving you a quick kiss to the forehead. 

Once you’d fully regained control of your bodily functions, Crosshair asked, “Color?”

“Green,” you replied, eager to see what was next. 

“I think you’re finally ready for my cock, and I know your slutty pussy agrees with me,” he smirked. He looked to Hunter, who turned you around and put you on your hands and knees, ass in the air, just the way Crosshair likes it. Crosshair maneuvered himself behind you, taking in the view before giving your ass a couple good, hearty slaps that you knew would be visible come morning. Sliding the tip of his cock through your folds a few times, he eased himself into you slowly, giving your body time to adjust to him. He bottomed out for a moment before pulling out and thrusting back in again. Crosshair was known for being rough, and this was no exception. 

With every thrust, your body slid a little bit farther up the bed until your face was buried in the pillows. His grip on your hips was so strong you knew those would leave marks, too. Crosshair absolutely loved marking you up, especially in places most people wouldn’t get to see. As he pounded into you, he grabbed your hair and pulled you against his back, biting your throat and saying, “Little fucking cockslut, just waiting to be filled up and turned into a fucking cum dumpster.”

As Crosshair could feel your walls fluttering around him, he knew you were close, so he slid a hand down to your clit and rubbed precise circles over it. Before you could respond, your orgasm took you by surprise, walls clamping down over Crosshair’s cock. He kept pounding into you, chasing his own high, sending you into overstimulation. All you could do was cry out and claw at whatever parts of his body you could reach. As he reached his high, he pulled out and came on your ass, watching as your cheeks became adorned with white. 

Pulling away, Crosshair laid you back down onto the bed as Hunter approached. “Fuck, you looked so pretty coming all over his cock like that. You got one more in you?”

“Yes, please, let me come on your cock, too,” you begged. 

“Still so desperate to be filled, hmm? You want to be Hunter’s little cum dumpster?” Crosshair teased. 

“Yes, oh fuck yes,” you babbled. Hunter moved you so that you were on your back with your legs over his shoulders, cock poised at your entrance when he asked, “Color?”

“Green,” you breathed. Without another word, he pushed into you, filling you up. Sure, Crosshair was longer, but Hunter was certainly thicker, and you still needed a bit of time to adjust to his size. He leaned down and pressed a chaste kiss to your forehead as if he wasn’t buried balls deep inside you, showing his soft side.

“Fuck, you always take my cock so well,” Hunter moaned as he started to fuck you. You could feel him stretching you out, the breath getting knocked out of you with every thrust. As you lay there being repeatedly impaled on his cock, Hunter couldn’t help but reach out and wrap a hand gently around your neck. Not hard enough to actually restrict airflow, but just enough pressure to assert dominance. You, on the other hand, wanted him to choke you, so you put your hand on top of his and pushed so he would know to add pressure. He groaned and exerted a bit more pressure on your neck, adding that much more pleasure to what you were already experiencing. 

For the final time that night, you reached your high, coming all over Hunter’s cock. You could tell he was getting close, too; his thrusts were harder and more erratic. Before long, you could feel his cum filling you up as he finished inside you. Stilling inside you, Hunter tilted his head and kissed one of your legs as you smiled up at him, pussy still twitching from your orgasm. He slowly pulled out of you, taking your legs and resting them back on the bed. Crosshair came over with a damp cloth to clean you up with, and Hunter grabbed some more water for you, knowing you’d be thirsty again. 

The two of them knew how to take care of you during sex, and they made sure to pamper you afterwards. Even though you didn’t dare say it out loud, you loved the both of them so much; however, what you didn’t know was that they felt the same about you. 

[the-cimmerians]

It's 2024. I have been participating in fandom for 40 years. This is a ramble commemorating some history I've experienced along the way.

In 1984, I attended my first convention, and made a beeline for the one long row of covered tables in the Dealer's Room that was, according to the whispered lore of my friends, 'the one'. "um", I said, very suavely and coherently, except for how it was totally the opposite of those things, "I'm here for the... for the, uh. For-"

"Come around here," the man behind the table said with exhausted ennui, so I went around, and he lifted up the table skirt next to him and pointed to rows and rows of boxes underneath the line of tables. "It's all under here."

It was all under there. Along with about five older ladies with glasses, graying hair, cardigans. Flipping through slash zines and chatting in whispered voices like old friends (which of course they were). I noticed one of them had the good sense to be wearing kneepads. I was still too young and ablebodied to need kneepads when crawling on a carpeted floor, but I immediately found her preparedness skills to be both impressive and hot. "You're new," one of the ladies whispered to me--a bit warily, which made sense. "Are you sure you're in the right place?"

In the faint light (the kneepads lady had also come prepared with a flashlight, additional practicality hotness points for her) I grabbed a comb-bound book with a heavy line art piece on the cover, featuring a musclebound Captain Kirk getting righteously and enthusiastically plowed by a stern-yet-ebullient Spock. "This," I said, pointing helpfully at the cover, like I was trying to make myself understood in a language I had only the vaguest knowledge of. "I'm here for this."

Outside at the convention, most of the attendees were wearing large homemade circular pins that shrieked 'K/S is BS!!!'1. But underneath the table, we reveled in the forbidden.

***

In 1985, I fell very hard for Starsky & Hutch fandom. Which was simply referred to at the time as 'the other fandom', because there were only two. We were upstarts. Many fannish elders predicted that it was just a phase.

***

The 'circulating library' was a massive stack of barely-legible pages that smelled strongly of mimeograph ink. When you were on the list, you would write stories while you waited for your turn, and when the big box was mailed to you, you would read everything (new finds, old favorites), add your own sloppily-typed or hastily-mimeographed stories, and then mail the whole thing to the next person. For me, at the time, it was an extremely expensive indulgence--but my favorite one.

***

By 1990, slash fandom had grown enough that I no longer knew everyone in it, which was both thrilling and a bit daunting. A young woman at a convention waited for me after a panel I was part of (I think it was 'writing impactful smut' or something like that), and said she had a question she didn't want to ask in a group setting. I'd heard that before. I said that's fine, go ahead and ask; and she came out with: "Why do you have to be gay?"

I blinked. "Is... that a problem?"

She looked annoyed. "Yes, because your stories are on all the recommendation lists and in all the top zines, but if you're gay and I read something you wrote and I get hot from it that makes me gay, and I'm not gay."

"Wow." I grinned, I couldn't help it. It probably made me look very predatory-dyke-about-to-score-a-toaster. Whatever, it was enough to make her back away from me fast.

When I thought about it later that night, I wondered what it would be like not to be the only queer person in slash fandom.

***

By 1997, slash started appearing on the internet. Many fannish elders claimed it was the death knell of slash fandom, or dismissed it as 'just a phase'.

***

Anyway, I wrote all this for myself as a commemoration of sorts, but if you took the time to read it--thank you. Love you, fandom. I always will.

1 In those days, m/m fandom was known as 'slash', which grew from the fannish shorthand where 'K&S' meant a story of Kirk and Spock having adventures or tribulations or what have you, and 'K/S' meant a story of Kirk and Spock getting it on (Kirk divided by Spock or Spock into Kirk--it was mathy fannish humor and I was into it then and I still am now). Slash was decidedly unpopular in the fannish world in 1984, and there was a concerted effort to force slash authors, artists, and fans out of 'mainstream' fannish public life. Hence, under the table.

[captainfantasticalright]

In 1985, one of the only persons interested in an interview with a “new” writer called Terry Pratchett, after his publication of the Colour of Magic, was one Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman was writing for Space Voyager at the time. "The Colour of Pratchett" was the name given here:

It ran exactly one page inside the June/July issue of that year. The interview took place in a Chinese restaurant in London.

Here is Neil many years later holding that issue. You can see it here if you want. Warning: extremely emotional video.

Neil arrived wearing a grey homburg hat. “Sort of like the ones Humphrey Bogart wears in movies” he later wrote. (Before saying that in fact he did not look like him, but like someone wearing a grown-up’s hat). Terry Pratchett, photo courtesy of one @neil-gaiman, was in a Lenin-style leather cap and a harlequin-patterned pullover. At this point, Terry was already a hat person, although not that hat.

Terry offered Neil this : "An interview needn't last more than 15 minutes. A good quote for the beginning, a good quote for the end, and the rest you make up back at the office"*. (Terry Pratchett had worked many years in journalism by this point ).

But the meeting went terribly well. The two of them realized they had "the same sort of brains". So well indeed, that in 1985, Neil had shown Terry a file containing 5282 words, exploring a scenario in which Richmal Crompton's William Brown had somehow become the Antichrist. Was a collaboration in the cards as of that moment? Not really. But Terry found in Neil someone to whom he could send disks of work in progress and to whom he could pick up the phone sometimes when he hit a brick in the road of his writing.

Terry loved it and the concept stayed in his mind. A couple of years later, he rang Neil to ask him if he had done any more work on it. Neil had been busy with The Sandman, he had not really given it another thought. Terry said, "Well I know what happens next, so either you sell me the idea or we can write it together". **

And as you know, unless you’ve been living in Alpha Centauri, the rest is history. That was the beginning of what would become William the Antichrist and later would get the name Good Omens:The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. (Title provided by Neil Gaiman and subtitle by Terry Pratchett).

From the introduction to William the Antichrist: “In the summer of 1987 several odd ideas came together: (..)I found myself imagining a book called William the Antichrist, in which a hapless demon was going to be responsible for swapping the wrong baby over, and the son of the US Ambassador would be completely undemonic, while William Brown would grow up to be the Antichrist, and the demon would need to stop him ending the world. The unfortunate demon, whom I called Crawleigh, because Crawley was a nearby town with an unfortunate name, would have to sort it all out as best he could.

It felt like a story with legs.

Terry took the 5,000 words, and rewrote them, calling me to tell me what he was doing and what he was planning to do. The biggest thing he was going to do, he told me, was split the hapless demon into two characters – a would-be-cool demon in dark glasses (which was, I think, Terry’s way of making fun of me, a never-actually- cool journalist in dark glasses) who had renamed himself Crowley, and a rare-book dealer and angel called Aziraphale, who would embody all the English awkwardness that either of us could conceive.”

William the Antichrist being a direct inspiration of the 1976 film The Omen. If the baby swap had just been a little bit messier and the kid had gone off somewhere else he would have grown up as somebody else. “And then there was a beat and I thought, I should write it, it will be called William the Antichrist” says Neil. ***

“The first draft of Good Omens was a William-book. It was absolutely in every way it could be a William book. It had Violet Elizabeth Bott, it had William and the Outlaws, it had Mr. Brown”.

Over time they realized that they would have more creative freedom if they in their own words filed off the serial numbers. William and the Outlaws becoming Adam and the Them.

But the spirit of Just William was never far away.

The joy for Neil was to construct “perfectly William sentences”. The one when Anathema tells Adam that she has lost the Book, and he tells her that he has written a book about a pirate who became a famous detective and it is 8 pages long… that’s “a William sentence”.

Good Omens was also inspired by a particularly antisemitic moment in The Jew of Malta and John le Carre's spy novels. (Neil’s ask)

“When we finished the book we estimated that the words were 60% Terry’s and 40% mine, and the plot, such as it was, was entirely ours.”

(Here are some slides of mine where I go into some other details concerning the origins of Good Omens).

*Quote: from Terry Pratchett A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins, but said by Terry of course.

** All the quotes, facts listed here : see above.

***all other quotes by Neil Gaiman from various interviews and asks I’ll link.

[navybrat817]

Just Like That

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Female Reader Summary: Bucky suggests staying in a hotel together before an undercover mission, which would be fine if you didn't have a massive crush on the super soldier. Word Count: Almost 5k Warnings: Explicit sexual content, unprotected vaginal sex, pining, flirting, slight possessive behavior, talk of undercover mission, "only one bed" trope, slight feels (it's me, okay?), Bucky Barnes (he's a warning, okay?). A/N: A combination of @targaryenvampireslayer's Blind Date Writing Challenge and my Bucky Barnes Smut Menu, courtesy of @ellemj. "Only One Bed" Trope and the dialogue prompt in bold italics. ❤️ Beta read by the lovely @whisperlullaby, but any and all mistakes are my own. Divider by the talented @firefly-graphics. Please follow @navybrat817-sideblog for new fics and notifications. Comments, reblogs, feedback are loved and appreciated!

The engagement ring on your finger suited you. Not large or overly flashy, the single diamond radiated a subtle sparkle. It was beautiful and a perfect fit, a representation of the unifying love of marriage. When you looked at it under the light, it was almost as if you could feel the love that Bucky had for you.

If only that were the case.

“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” You asked, taking a seat at the table across from Bucky.

“So we can practice and make sure we’re a convincing couple,” he replied.

You sighed as you glanced around the hotel room for the umpteenth time. A small sitting area, a dining and kitchen combination, a single bathroom, and a bedroom. When you pointed out that there was only one bed, Bucky reminded you of the expectation that the two of you had to sleep together while on assignment since you were going on a couple's retreat. Which wouldn't be an issue if you didn't have a crush on him, right?

Right.

You were completely enamored with Bucky Barnes, the handsome former assassin turned agent for the revamped SHIELD. Instacrush wasn't something you experienced often, so he took you by surprise. It was pathetic to fall for him so hard and quickly. It had to be some sort of karma or divine intervention that you were with him in a hotel room.

Just the two of you.

“You know,” he began, wetting his lips as he leaned back in his chair. You blinked, only because you didn't want him to call you out on staring. “You don't have to look so miserable to be here. Is my company that terrible?”

“What? No. Bucky, you aren't terrible company,” you promised, slumping a bit in your chair. The last thing you wanted to do was upset him. “Just been a bit since I've been in a relationship and I’m kind of rusty.”

“You're talking to a guy who hasn't been on a real date since the 40s,” he deadpanned.

He had a point. Plus, from what you understood, Bucky wasn't exactly interested in dating anyone. Every time Steve or Natasha suggested he go on a date, he found a way to brush it off or change the subject.

Even if he was interested in dating, did he think of you as anything beyond a colleague?

Taking this assignment may have been a mistake.

“I’m just not sure I’m the right one for this job,” you said.

“You’re perfect for this job. Why would you think otherwise?”

You froze like a deer in headlights, even as his compliment warmed your heart. It meant a lot that he thought you would do the job well. But how were you supposed to answer that question? That you adored him and it would be torture to pretend to be with him for a week just to back to being coworkers after?

“We should practice,” you suggested instead of giving him an answer. The backstory wasn't overly elaborate, but you had to get it right.

He leaned forward, forcing you to meet his gaze. “Did someone say something to make you think you wouldn't be good for this assignment?” He asked in a low voice. “Because I'll straighten them out.”

You bit the inside of your cheek to keep yourself from whimpering. The thought of him putting someone in their place to make you feel better was swoon-worthy. “No, Bucky. No one said anything. You're right. I’m good for this,” you said before you added, “We’re good together.”

You couldn't read the look he gave you and it became more difficult not to squirm under his gaze. “Yeah,” he whispered, leaning back and clearing his throat. “So. We’re engaged. Going to a resort for a much needed vacation. We’ll have to mingle with some of the guests in between investigating the owner. One of the first questions will be how we met.”

With an exhale, you recited, “We met at a coffee shop. We both ordered the same drink.”

“An iced caramel macchiato,” he said.

“And we reached for the drink at the same time,” you smiled, making a show out of reaching for the glass on the table. “Our fingers touched first. Our eyes met second.”

“And I immediately asked you out,” he smiled.

Your heart swelled. He looked like he didn’t have a care in the world when he smiled like that. “You did,” you said, trying to blink the longing from your eyes. “We went to dinner and talked a bit about ourselves. You told me you're a mechanic and I told you I’m a teacher. And once dinner was over, we went back to that same coffee shop and we shared an iced caramel macchiato.”

“Even proposed to you at the same shop,” he said, gesturing to your left hand. “But I actually got the ring after our first date because I knew I wanted you to be my girl,” he said with such conviction that you found it hard to breathe.

The way his eyes softened as he gazed at you, you found yourself believing him for a moment. You had to stay rooted in realism though. The point of the mission besides the actual mission was to act as if you two were crazy about each other.

Not that you had to do any acting on your part.

You cleared your throat and pulled your hand back from the glass. “If only that were true,” you said, absentmindedly twisting the ring around your finger. You weren't cynical about love, but this whole thing was a reminder that you were single and alone.

His brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

Heat crept up your neck. You shouldn't have said anything. “I mean, it just would've been nice if we met at a coffee shop,” you replied to avoid saying you wanted to be his girl.

“What’s wrong with how we met?” He asked, crossing his arms.

The metal arm gleamed under the light. You noticed that he had a tendency to wear long sleeves and gloves whenever he was in the building, but seeing him with his sleeve pushed up and missing glove? You would almost say he was comfortable around you.

Again, he had to play the part right.

You pulled yourself from your thoughts when he said your name, which sounded like it melted on his tongue. It made you press your thighs together. You needed to stay professional. “Do you not remember what happened or are you just being nice?” You asked.

Months ago, the day you met Bucky, Steve informed you that he planned to introduce you to him after he came back from a long assignment. Not only were you excited to meet one of his best friends and a great soldier, but you had wanted to make a good impression on him. What you did was make an ass out of yourself when you turned the corner only to smack right into the former Winter Soldier.

And splattered your beverage on both of you in the process.

Instacrush and a horrible impression on your part.

Bucky’s lips curled in a smile as your eyes widened. “You do remember,” you said, wadding up a nearby napkin and tossing it at his face, which he easily caught. “Oh, my God! That’s why you chose ‘coffee shop' for this, didn't you?”

You concentrated so much on getting the backstory right that it didn't occur to you that he was maybe poking fun at you. He wasn't the kind of guy that liked making others feel bad though. Tease you, sure. Outright make fun of you at the risk of hurting your feelings? He would never.

“Hey, I didn't choose how we met, but I also didn't object,” he said, raising his hands in surrender when you went to throw another napkin at him. “And I wouldn't forget meeting you, doll. You make a lasting impression.”

You wished you had done something to make him remember you besides spilling a drink on him. “I guess making an idiot out of myself is a lasting impression,” you teased.

Something dark flashed in his eyes, making your breath hitch. “That’s not what I meant. You didn't make an idiot out of yourself and I don't like you thinking that or talking down about yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” you said, not used to someone getting so defensive at your self-depreciation. There was something sexy and heartwarming about it. “You were very nice about the whole incident.”

“You were nice, too,” he said, gesturing to his torso. “I mean, you offered to buy me a new shirt.”

“Because I spilled my drink on it! I felt bad,” you said.

“And when I said you didn't have to buy me a new shirt, you said, ‘Are you sure I can't pay for the dry cleaning at least, Sergeant Barnes?’” he said in a falsetto voice.

He chuckled when you rolled your eyes. “I don't sound like that, first of all, and I was being considerate,” you said. You couldn't believe he remembered your exact words. “And you just gave me that half confused smile of yours before I grabbed napkins for both of us to clean up.”

“You mean this?” He asked, his lips stretching in that familiar awkward grin.

“Yeah, that,” you giggled, your heart doing that funny flip that happened far too often around him.

In the beginning, whenever you smiled at him, he gave you that very look in return. Somewhere along the way, the uncomfortable glances on his end became genuine fondness. It didn't mean anything though.

Just an agent being kind to another agent.

Bucky stared at you as you continued to giggle at the memory. “I’m sorry. I just-”

“I love your laugh,” he said, almost making you choke on your own breath. Nothing like forgetting how to be a human and breathe. “And your smile.”

Maybe he had switched back into practice mode. “You do?” You asked, playing along as you smiled directly at him.

He swallowed and nodded. “Yeah, I do,” he replied, his voice thick as he unfolded his arms. “You know, you're one of the people that actually smiles at me. And you look me in the eye when you talk to me.”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“Because some people are still afraid of me,” he whispered.

Your heart sank. He was a good man. A hero wrongly painted as a villain. It wasn't fair what he went through and you had no reason to fear him.

Why couldn't everyone else see the good in him?

“I’m not afraid of you, Bucky,” you promised. And after what he went through, frightening people was the last thing he would do. “Never have been. Never will be.”

“Maybe you should be,” he muttered, some of the light leaving his eyes.

Your eyes narrowed as you tempered the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Seeing this vulnerable side of him also brought out your protective instinct. “Listen to me. You’re amazing and a good man, okay? And if I don't get to call myself an idiot for spilling a drink on you, then you don't get to say I should be scared of you, Sergeant Barnes,” you said with an air of finality.

He gave you an impressed smile. “Just like that? Because those are totally different things you're comparing.”

“Just like that,” you said, putting your hand on the table for him to take if he wished. “Do you trust that I'll have your back on this mission? Because I trust that you'll have mine no matter what.”

He stared at your upturned hand for a moment before he took it. “You're one of the only people I do trust,” he admitted.

His eyes bore into yours as you tried to find the words to respond. He wasn’t feeding you a line to make you feel good about yourself. Bucky Barnes trusted you.

“Then trust me when I say we got this,” you promised. You would look out for him and let him know that he hadn’t misplaced his trust in you.

“Why don't you have a boyfriend?” He asked suddenly.

The switch in topic jarred you, but he didn’t let go of your hand. “That’s. I’m. What? How is that relevant?”

It wasn't smooth, but it was better than blurting out that your hopeless crush on him was one of the major factors.

“I’m curious,” he shrugged.

“Oh. Well. My last boyfriend dumped me for being an agent. Seriously, he didn't like the fact that I could kick his ass if I wanted to,” you told him, squeezing his hand without meaning to. He didn’t object. “Which I wouldn't.”

“You could kick my ass if you wanted to,” he winked. Physically, Bucky was broad and strong. You weren’t sure you could take him in a real fight, but you could take him another way if he ever offered. “And your ex sounds like an asshole if he can’t stand beside and support an amazing woman.”

You smiled humorlessly. “Thanks, Bucky, but I’m not-”

“I swear to fuck if you talk down about yourself again, I will put you over my knee,” he threatened, his eyes darker than they were seconds ago.

You didn’t laugh as he stared at you. Neither did he. Your clothes suddenly felt too heavy, your body too warm. Licking your lips, you couldn’t stop yourself from saying, “Is that a promise?”

Bucky pushed his chair back and pointed at his thigh, his eyes still on you. “Get over here and find out.”

Oh, fuck.

The sound of Bucky’s phone ringing snapped you both out of whatever spell you two were under. “Shit,” he muttered, taking his hand from yours. “It’s Steve. I better-”

“Yeah, you should answer that,” you said, almost knocking the chair over as you stood. “I think I'm going to call it a night.”

“Wait, what?” He asked, answering the phone. “Hold on, punk,” he said, covering the screen as he looked at you. “You’re going to bed now?”

Guilt settled in your stomach at the hurt in his eyes. “Just going to lay down. I may not go to sleep right away. And we can practice more in the morning,” you replied. You just needed to step out of the room and take a breath.

He waited a beat before he nodded, the tension still lingering. “I’ll be there in a few minutes, okay?”

“Okay,” you nodded, leaving him alone so he could talk to Steve.

You splashed a bit of water on your face when you went to the bathroom to change. The assignment hadn’t started and you couldn’t keep your cool. With squinted eyes, you pointed at your reflection and mentally scolded yourself. Yes, you wanted Bucky Barnes and maybe, just maybe, some part of him wanted you. At least, he wanted you enough to put you over his knee.

You couldn't have him though. Could you? Mixing business with pleasure could lead to complications if you crossed that line, but it wasn’t like you’d break some major bylaw by being his girl.

Now wasn’t the time to think about that.

“Get your shit together,” you hissed, rushing through your nighttime routine and changing into your comfortable yet sexy nightgown.

Your eyes went to the bed when you left the bathroom. Just a regular hotel bed. Inviting, but not overly frilly. Large enough for the both of you, but small enough that you might end up in each other’s arms.

“It’s going to be a long night,” you muttered.

Sighing, you left a light on for Bucky to see and crawled into bed, shutting your eyes as he wrapped up his call with Steve. You tried to block out the sound of his footsteps as he made his way to the bathroom. Maybe his nighttime routine would take a bit longer than you thought and you could drift off and wake up to the sight of his beautiful eyes and-

The bed dipped as Bucky curled up behind you, your eyes opening when he placed his arm around your waist and pulled you back against him. You were conscious of every shift in his body, every breath he took. How you could smell his lingering cologne as he pressed himself closer. How he ran warmer than you and you wanted him to heat you up even though you weren’t cold.

And that he wasn’t wearing a fucking shirt.

“I know you aren’t sleeping,” he whispered, his fingers brushing along the fabric that covered your skin. “Your heart’s beating too fast.”

He was right. It was about ready to burst through your chest. “Can’t sleep.”

“Why not?” He asked, helping you roll over so you were on your back. He didn’t remove his hand though. “Did my ‘threat’ make you uncomfortable?”

“No, it didn't,” you assured him, heat pooling between your legs that you couldn't prevent. “I wouldn't have continued with the banter if I was uncomfortable.”

“Just making sure,” he said. “I was only teasing.”

You huffed out a laugh in an effort to cover up the crushing feeling in your chest, your arousal fading to a dull ache. “Of course, you were,” you uttered. Teasing. Nothing more. “Good night, Bucky,” you said, turning your head away.

He brought a hand to your cheek and brought your face back toward him. How did his eyes look so blue in the faint light? “Don’t go to sleep yet, please.”

“Why not?”

“You rushed to bed and now you're shutting down. I clearly said or did something wrong,” he sighed, which made you feel bad. He hadn't done anything wrong in your eyes since it wasn’t his fault you wanted his teasing to mean something. “I need to fix it.”

“There’s nothing to fix because you didn't break anything,” you said, the ring heavy on the finger. “But can I ask for a favor?”

“Of course,” he whispered.

You didn’t dare search out his gaze when you said, “I may need reminders this week that you don't actually have feelings for me.”

A few seconds went by before he asked in a small voice, “What?”

You took a breath to compose yourself. The last thing you needed to do was get upset for no good reason. “We’re going to hold hands and cuddle and share a bed and be a couple, but you may need to give me a reality check now and again that you only see me as an agent. Okay?”

Maybe he’d ask Steve for a new partner in the morning.

“You think I only see you as an agent?” He asked, sighing when you nodded. “I used to be good at this.”

“Good at what?”

“Teasing. Flirting,” he answered, leaning in close. He stopped just before his lips touched yours. “Kissing.”

“Wait. You were flirting with me?” you said, not moving forward or back as you put a hand on his chest. His heart raced as fast as yours. And your brain couldn’t compute that implication that he wanted to kiss you. “You weren’t just practicing for the assignment?”

He huffed out a laugh this time. “You’re killing me, doll,” he whispered, closing the distance.

You imagined Bucky kissing you before, but didn’t think it would ever be so soft. His lips barely brushed against yours, but it felt like the beginning of something more. It tempted you like nothing else ever had. He must’ve felt it, too, since he deepened it. You melted. You surrendered.

You never stood a chance.

“So, you like me?” You asked when he pulled back a little to gaze at you. “I’m sorry. I just need to hear you say it because I really like you and have for months. Fuck, maybe I shouldn’t have said that because we have a whole week together for this assignment and now you know and I don't want it to be weird.”

Your mind almost shut down when he gave you a full-blown smile and said, “Yeah, I like you. I thought it was obvious. I tried dropping little hints, talking about your smile and trusting you.” He chuckled almost shyly as his words sank in. “I took this assignment because of you.”

A moment passed before you giggled, happiness blooming in your chest. Bucky Barnes liked you. Wanted you. “Thank fuck,” you breathed, pulling him back down for another kiss.

He groaned, ravaging your mouth as he moved on top of you. His knee pushed your legs apart so he could settle between them, swallowing down your whimpers when he pressed his growing hardness against your pussy. He ground his hips, your panties soaked as his tongue tangled with yours. The man kissed you like he had something to prove.

Like he wanted to own you.

His muscles rippled as he leaned up and grasped the bottom of your nightie. The vision of him above you like this was now engraved in your mind. “If you want me to stop, I will.”

Sleeping with him was moving fast considering you just confessed your feelings for each other, but you didn't care. “Don't stop,” you whispered, quivering as he tugged the fabric over your head.

Your hands moved up to cover your chest before he gripped your wrists. “Are you trying to hide from me?” He questioned, his smirk playful in comparison to the uncertainty in his gaze.

You didn't want him doubting himself or your want for him for a second.

“Maybe? I mean, look at you and look at…”

You wouldn't knock on your looks since you were generally confident in your appearance, but the super soldier was an entirely different level of gorgeous. He towered over even the largest of agents, with the exception of Steve, and his dark lashes framing his steel eyes were enough to pull you under.

And who were you compared to him? Just another agent. Average.

“Don't,” he whispered, releasing a wrist so he could cup your breast. You arched your back and any uncertainty in his eyes before faded when a moan escaped your lips. “You're so fucking beautiful.”

The praise almost made your eyes water as he brought his head down, losing focus when he swept his tongue across your nipple. Your eyes fluttered shut as he did it again, a wave from a sea of ecstasy crashing over you. Your heart thudded faster, addicted to the feel of his sinful mouth.

“You’re the reason I don't have a boyfriend,” you whined, your fingers twisting in his hair. Why did you say that?

He smirked against your skin before he reached down and tore your panties away. “I haven't gone on a date because of you.”

Your body throbbed with need as you met his gaze. “You're just saying that to get in my pants,” you joked.

His eyes raked down your body, stopping between your trembling thighs as he pushed his pants and underwear down. “If I had my way, I would've taken you out first,” he said, drawing a moan from you when he wrapped a hand around his thick cock. “But all I can think about right now is how loud you’ll say my name when I make you come.”

“Bucky,” you moaned, tempted to reach down and touch yourself to the sight of him.

“Louder than that,” he said smugly, rubbing the tip of his cock along your slick folds. “Fuck, I wanna take my time and explore you. Make you feel like a goddess. Treat you the way you deserve.”

It warmed your heart and sent another wave of desire through you knowing he wanted to take care of you. “I know you'll treat me well,” you smiled, opening your legs wider. “But for now, please, fuck me.”

He didn't ask about birth control, which you were on. You didn't ask about condoms. It didn't matter. You wanted to feel all of him.

You glanced down as he lined himself up, watching as he slowly eased into you. It was overwhelming as you took every inch, your mouth falling open with a moan. You floated in a cloud of lust, the sound of his groan reaching your ears.

“Look at me,” he ordered as he bottomed out.

Your eyes flew to his as he gripped your chin. The feel of him inside you, his eyes staring so intently into yours that he practically touched your soul. It was almost too much. And that was when he began to move, the weight of his body on top of yours as he fucked you in slow and deep thrusts. It was the kind of lovemaking that would make you crave more.

Crave him.

“Knew you'd take me well,” he grunted. You whined, the praise going straight to your core as you tightened around his thick cock. Your walls couldn't stop gripping him as he slid in and out. “Knew your pussy would be greedy for me. Won’t let me go.”

Your head fell back against the pillow, dizzy as he trapped your body under his. As he rolled his hips, you wondered if he’d let you ride him at some point. Maybe he’d fuck up into you as he brought your hips down. Or maybe he’d lay back and cup your breasts, let the weight bounce in his hands as you took all of him.

You’d take whatever he gave you.

The growing pleasure within you was like you were burning from the inside out, each movement from him stoking the flames. His low groans mixed with your whines, his thrusts increasing in speed when he brought his thumb to your clit. Your hand worked its way back into his hair as you cried out his name, your control slipping further and further away as he took over.

“Just like that,” he moaned. “Don’t hold back on me. Wanna hear every pretty sound you make.”

“Bucky, I'm gonna…” you trailed off, your orgasm building fast in your core and ready to burst.

“Come,” he finished for you, a filthy smirk on his face as he laced his fingers with yours.

One more thrust and you were gone, his name falling from your lips as you came. Your mouth stayed open as you spasmed, pleasure rushing from head to toe. You panted and didn't care if you'd ever properly breathe again. That was how good it felt.

“I’m close, doll,” he gritted, resembling a growl as he continued to fuck you and chase his release. “Gonna come inside you. Gonna own you.”

“Come inside me, Bucky,” you begged, watching through half-lidded eyes as his face contorted in ecstasy. It was such an erotic sight. “Please.”

He buried himself deep with a long moan as he filled you in hot, thick spurts, nuzzling his face in your neck when he finished. He said your name as he heavily breathed against your neck and it was the sweetest sound you’ve ever heard. You wrapped your arms around him when he stayed inside you, not at all bothered as your mixed release slowly trickled out.

You didn't want him to let you go.

“Well,” you huffed, a dopey smile on your face as you ran your fingers through his hair. “I don't think we’ll have a problem convincing people we care about each other.”

He chuckled, kissing your warm skin. “And we won't have a problem sharing a bed,” he said, keeping you close as you yawned. “Sleep, doll. I’ve got you.”

“I’ve got you, too,” you said, feeling him smile against you as you drifted off.

The delicious ache between your thighs was the second thing you noticed when you woke up. The first, of course, was Bucky’s arm and leg draped over you: warm, protective, perfect. He was still fast asleep, the blanket pooled around his waist, completely at ease with the world. You could get used to waking up like this.

You hesitated before you touched his cheek, not wanting to wake him as you kissed his forehead. You wished you had time to kiss every scar on his body and worship him the way he said he wanted to worship you. The two of you would have to leave the bed sooner or later. There was work to do.

“Mmm. Morning,” he said, his voice laced with sleep as he cracked an eye open.

“Morning,” you whispered, cuddling closer as he brought your hand to his mouth and kissed over the ring. The motion made you brush against his crotch and you were close enough to hear the hitch in his breath. You did it again, keeping your gaze innocent as he opened his eyes more and groaned.

Yes, there was work to do, but it was still early.

“You’re still horny? Didn’t I fuck you hard enough last night?” He teased.

“Yeah, I’m still horny,” you replied. Waking up next to him would arouse anyone. “Need you to fuck me again.”

“You won’t be able to walk if I fuck you again,” he smirked, rolling on top of you and digging his fingers into your waist.

“Should’ve known you’d be a cocky boyfriend,” you teased back, your heart thundering in your chest as he leaned down and skimmed kisses along your jaw. “Sorry, we didn’t put a label on this and there’s still stuff to figure out and the mission and-”

“Hey. Boyfriend, your man, whatever you want to call me, I’m yours,” he cut you off, his mouth drifting to your neck. “And I still owe you a date, got it? You’re my girl. You’re mine.”

“I'm yours,” you gasped when he nipped your skin hard enough to sting, his tongue soothing it after. You were his and he was yours. “So, we're a couple now? Just like that?” You smiled as he worked his way back to your lips.

Bucky answered you with a kiss. “Just like that.”

I struggled a bit with this one after having to scrap almost 2k and go in another direction, but I ended up falling in love with it. Love and thanks for reading! ❤️

Masterlist ⚓ Bucky Barnes Masterlist ⚓ Ko-Fi

[mossy-rock-in-a-field]

Several weeks ago, my retirement-age mother requested that I play Baldur’s Gate 3 for her because she has trouble with controllers/keyboards and wanted “to see what all the fuss is about with that cute wizard boy.” For context, my mother and I have done this sort of thing in the past with certain RPGs (dragon age, mass effect, etc.), but it’s been a few years since she’s personally requested a game like this. Basically, I control her Tav but let her make all the choices so she can determine how the story plays out without worrying about mechanics. She treats it like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

Anyway, here is a list of some of the things my mother has said and/or chosen to do throughout the course of BG3 in no particular order:

She is (obviously) romancing Gale. She is quite smitten with him and his passion for books and learning; she also thinks he’s polite and qualifies as “relationship material.” She also REALLY likes the things he’s said about his cat so far (my mom is a cat lady), so I know she’s gonna flip shit when we meet Tara in Act III.

She’s playing a normal druid Tav with a generally good alignment. Her favorite spell is Spike Growth because she thinks it’s hilarious whenever enemies walk into the AOE and die. I usually end up having to cast it at least once per battle per her request. Sometimes twice.

Contrary to her alignment, my mother tasks me with robbing every single chest, crate, barrel, and burlap sack we come across; this also includes people and their pockets. The party is always at max carrying capacity. ALWAYS. She doesn’t like selling things because “what if I need them.” The camp stash is in literal shambles. There is no hope of organizing it. She’s got like fifty seven sets of rags and a billion pieces of random silverware.

She MUST talk to every animal and corpse in the game. I think five hours of her total playtime so far (47ish) has been spent speaking to animals as many times as humanly possible. Like, I was thorough in my own playthroughs, but this is on a whole other level.

She did NOT get Volo’s lobotomy, but she did let Auntie Ethel take her eye in hopes of a cure for the tadpole. I did not understand the logic then. I still do not understand it now.

She is far more interested in fashion than equipment stats. Do you have any idea how much gold I’ve had to spend on dyes just to make things match? SO much. Same vibe as that “please someone help me balance my finances my family is starving” tweet but instead of candles it’s thirty thousand fucking bottles of black and furnace red dye.

We broke the prisoners out of Moonrise, but they got on the boat too early and bugged the fight by leaving Astarion and Karlach behind. Wulbren Bongle somehow got stuck in combat mode even after engaging the cutscene on the docks below Last Light; he he kept trying to run ALL THE WAY BACK TO MOONRISE nine fucking meters at a time while I frantically tried to finish the fight with the Warden, otherwise Wulbren would have run straight into the shadow curse. (I would’ve let him go; fuck Wulbren Bongle, all my homies hate Wulbren Bongle. But my mom didn’t know that, and she wanted to keep him safe. So.)

She had me reload a save like eighteen times to save the giant eagles on top of Rosymorn Monastery. Wouldn’t even let me do non-lethal damage just to get past things. I think getting that warhammer for the dawnmaster puzzle took us like an hour and a half alone. (Yes, I know you can use any warhammer, but SHE didn’t.)

She’s started keeping an irl notebook to keep track of her quests between play sessions. She writes down ideas and strategies when she thinks of them during the week, then brings them to her next game session at my house. I think she wrote about three pages on possible approaches to the goblin fortress alone.

She insists that I pet Scratch and the owlbear cub before every single long rest, no exceptions. Sometimes I have to do it multiple times until she is absolutely sure that the animals know exactly how much she loves and cherishes them. She has also commissioned a crocheted owlbear plush from a friend of hers and is very excited.

I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I’m forgetting, but those are some fun things I thought of. She’s enjoying the game and is telling all of her retired friends to get it and play it for themselves. She asked me “what is Discord” yesterday and I think my life flashed before my eyes.

anyway shout out to my mom for being neat

Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4 — Part 5

[nervousimposter]

Eddie started finding notes in his locker his sophomore year. The first couple of them, he just tossed without reading. He didn’t need to read what those asshole bullies wanted to say about him. But curiosity won out after two weeks of constant notes and he finally opened one. It was the single most impactful thing he’d ever read. 

I think you’re the prettiest boy I’ve ever seen. 

He kept that note. And every other note he got from that point on. If anyone were to ask Eddie what he regretted most in his life, it would be those two weeks of notes he tossed without reading. Ten slips of paper with unknown writing that he wishes he could get back. Add them to his ‘mystery boys notes’ box. And he was a mystery, the note writer. Anonymous. Unknown. Impossible to catch. 

Eddie held out for a month. A whole month before he decided to stage a stake out. He watched his locker like a hawk. In between classes, during classes, lunch, after school and even one absolutely horrible day where he came in an hour before school started. But the mystery boy had to be invisible. He never saw anyone approach his locker but his daily note was always there. And Eddie; poor, unfortunate, infatuated Eddie dealt with mystery boys’ notes from ‘82 to ‘85. Four agonizing years of the most heart-warming, loving notes. 

I wish I was as brave as you.

Did you change your shampoo? Your hair looked so soft today.

God, your eyes have to be the biggest fucking eyes I’ve ever seen. So pretty.

I like how long your hair is getting. 

Saw you walking down the hall today and I’ve never wanted to kiss someone more. 

They started cute. Compliments here and there, even a doodle every once in a while. Hearts and smiley faces. But as the months and years went by, the mystery boy got deeper. Confessions and secrets. 

I think if I had a different dad, we would’ve been best friends.

Can you fall in love with someone you’ve never talked to?

I dream about us. 

I’m a boy. I’m sorry.

I want to hold your hand. Those rings are something else. 

I saw you trying to catch me. Adorable.

I wish I could take you on a date. Not give a shit what my dad would say or what people would think. 

I wish I could be brave enough to talk to you. 

You’re still the prettiest boy I’ve ever seen.

I’m graduating this year. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you. I think I’m going to try to figure out a way to keep dropping these off next year. I don’t want you to forget about me.

The notes didn’t continue when the school year started. Eddie was embarrassed to admit he cried that first night. He wasn’t sure how the mystery boy was going to be able to get the notes to him but he fully believed it was going to happen. He went five weeks with no daily note in his locker. And then, it showed up on a Monday. He almost missed it, the tiny slip of paper. 

Sorry this took so long. Had to figure out how I was going to sneak these in here. I don’t think I’ll be able to call you pretty every day of the week this time around but I’m going to try my best! 

And mystery boy was right. The notes were always there on Monday. Just Monday. But Eddie didn’t complain. One note a week after five weeks of nothing almost had his heart bursting from his chest. It also narrowed down his search. Sort of. Mystery boy was either coming in on those Mondays to drop off the note, sneaking in on the weekends when the school was empty OR after school on Fridays. And look, he’s failed to graduate high school two times in a row now but he wasn’t stupid. Did it take him three months after the notes to start again for him to realize who it was? Yes but to be fair, for two of those months it was Eddie wallowing in denial. 

Five weeks into school was when he restarted Hellfire. Three weeks before that was when he brought in those new little freshman sheepies. The same freshman sheepies that got picked up by Steve Harrington. Steve Harrington who graduated last year. Steve Harrington who he catches staring at him from his beemer in the parking lot every Friday night before he takes the kiddies home. Steve who he categorizes as someone who is so far out of his league that it just couldn’t be him. But it’s been three months and there isn’t any other former Hawkins high student running around in or near the school. And now that Eddie’s almost certain Steve has been mystery boy these past few years, he can’t wait. He’s been in love with a figure made out of slips of paper for four years and his nonexistent patience has truly run thin.  

He calls for a break 15 minutes before they normally end their sessions. Tells the boys he needs to run to the bathroom and almost sprints out the door. His locker sits in the hallway just around the corner of the drama room. The door closing shut echos through the empty hallways, alongside the squeaks coming from his shoes as he hustles towards his locker. He freezes as soon as he turns the corner. 

Steve probably only had 30 seconds after hearing the door open and shut to process what he was going to do. He could’ve run or hid, maybe pretend like he just needed the bathroom while he waited. But Eddie watched him pause as they made eye contact instead. Watched as Steve looked him up and down. Watched him relax and lean back against the lockers behind him with a lazy smirk. His arm slowly moved up and Eddie could see a slip of paper held between his fingers. Steve didn’t break eye contact with him at all as he proceeded to shove the paper between the vents of his locker. They stayed like that for what felt like hours. Staring. Broken when Steve pushed himself off the wall and walked towards him. He didn’t stop. Side stepped around Eddie before they could collide. A faint brush of his fingers along the back of his hand as he walked past him. And Eddie just watched him pass. Just like he watched him slip that note in his locker, he watched Steve walk back down the hall and out the front doors.

He waited only five seconds after the doors closed behind Steve before he jogged over to his locker. Grabbed the note and shoved it into his pocket before running back over to the drama room. Told the guys that they stopped at a decent spot and would meet again next Friday. Walked with them to the parking lot to head home. To catch a glimpse of Steve. And there he was, sitting in his beemer, staring again. This time though, Eddie smiled at him. He smiled at him and pulled the note out of his pocket. Opened it right there in the parking lot while he stared back at Steve. It only took him a few seconds to glance down to read. And as soon as he did, he threw his head back and laughed. Cackled really. He looked back at the beemer and saw Steve with the widest grin. Watched him lift his fingers off the steering wheel and wiggle them at him before he started pulling out of the lot. He looked back down at the note in his hand and chuckled again. Who knew Steve Harrington knew DnD well enough to draw a perfect rendition of an eight sided dice?

Wanna go on a d8? - Steve Harrington xxx-xxx-xxxx

[flowersandbigteeth]

Orc boyfriend with what he thinks is a tiny, smol mate who's so smol, so delicate, so sweet... They're actually pretty firmly built for a human, while a bit short, along with being stubborn and sassy and ready to bite heads off for their adorable XL size boyfriend.

I've got so many orc stories going right now, but you know I'm not mad about it ^_^ I love Orcs <3 There are so many different ways to write them. I have another couple of Orc asks I'm working on, as well 🥵

Orc (Cedar) x thick f reader

Word Count: 5K

Tw: sfw orc fluff, some brief descriptions of battle, brief mention of sa, size difference

More monster fluff here

“Put the stick down, sugar. We’re not going to hurt you.” 

You scoffed at the soldiers circling you, their eyes dark with lust. 

“We just want to have some fun,” another said, his eyes drifting over your shapely hips. “Don’t you owe us a debt of gratitude for rescuing you?”  

You squeezed the iron fire poker that you had gripped in your hand. 

“Rescuing me? You didn’t get your rocks off burning down the damn village?” 

“It was a strategic maneuver,” the leader of the armored men said with an oily smile. “We are here to liberate you.” 

“By assaulting me?” you snapped. 

There was not a doubt in your mind that the second you lowered your weapon, they were going to drag you into some dark corner and act out all of the sick thoughts they had echoed on their faces. 

Your King’s soldiers weren’t good guys. When they heard there was an Orc camp nearby, they couldn’t be bothered to attack it directly. Instead, they burned down your village. They said it was to prevent them from resupplying. 

It was true you did business with the Orcs, who were technically your enemy, but they never acted like enemies. While big and quite scary-looking, they paid in gold and were always polite to the women running the shops. You never felt the least bit unsafe alone with one, and occasionally, they’d help you out with things that needed done– fixing roofs and cartwheels. The men of the town had all been conscripted for the war, so it mostly the ladies keeping the village afloat. The soldiers had made a whole lot of children and the elderly homeless. 

“Come on, sweetie, this game is getting tiresome.” 

One of the soldiers dared to approach you, and you didn’t hesitate a second, swinging your poker and smacking him so hard in the head that his helmet crunched. He collapsed on the broken boards that had once been the floor of your little noodle shop. 

“Now that’s a crime!” the leader barked.

He waved to his accomplices. 

“Get in there and restrain her!” Their eyes fell on the collapsed soldier, and they looked between one another, trying to sort out who was next to get a whomping. 

You flexed your wrist, preparing to swing at whoever came at you next, when you heard the heavy steps of an Orc approaching. The soldiers were too inexperienced to know what that sound meant. You’d heard them approach every day at dinner time for several months. It wasn’t until he was shouldering his way through what was left of your door that they took notice. 

“The enemy approaches! Your swords!” 

The Orc you knew as Ash, wrinkled his brow and let out a lilting call to gather his brethren. The ground rumbled as more heavy feet ran towards you. 

Wood splintered, and what remained of the ceiling creaked as they tore the walls away, making more room for a fight. 

Faced with five nine-foot Orc barbarians armed with axes almost as big as their bodies, the soldiers tried to run for it. You screamed as they threatened to trample you, trying to force their way through the back wall, but they never reached you. 

The Orcs didn’t need to draw their weapons, grabbing every soldier and smacking them against the ground until they stopped moving—a gruesome way to die, but practical. 

When the danger was crumpled into a wet gnarl of bones and metal, their eyes turned to you. Ash said something to his friends in their own language before he stomped across the room and plucked you up like a kitten, cradling you in his arm. 

“Hey, What do you think you’re doing?!” 

“Quiet, little one. You’ll give us away.” 

You puckered your lips at him, annoyed, as if the stomping of five tons of muscle was quiet. When you tried to wave your poker at him, he plucked it out of your hand but didn’t drop it, tucking it instead in his belt. He said something else to his friends before turning to split away from them. 

You had no reason to panic. The Orcs had never harmed you, but being taken away from the group put frightening thoughts in your head, and you instinctively started screaming. 

The Orc sighed, sounding tired, when four more soldiers came skidding around a corner, swords in hand. You looked up at him apologetically, smacking your hand over your mouth to stay the scream that didn’t want to stop. 

He set you on the roof of what was left of a building and pat you on the head, a gesture that you read as “stay” before pulling out his axe. You weren’t going anywhere, even if you wanted to. The drop was fifteen feet down, and the stairs were just charcoal at the base of the building. 

“Attack!” the leader of the soldiers shouted, but their moves in their heavy metal armor were slow. Ash swung his arm in a sweeping stroke that sliced four of them in half where they stood. The other one, eyes wide with horror, turned tail and ran. 

Replacing his axe, he picked you up again and headed into the woods. This time, you had enough sense to keep quiet. 

You’d never been to the Orc camp before, but you heard it before you saw it. The brassy sound of a grinder and hammers on metal rang through the trees, blended with the shouts of the Orcs in their language.  There were lots of huge tents and fires spotted here and there. The camp was buzzing with activity. Orcs ran around shouting at one another, some gathering weapons, some sending groups in the direction you came. You recognized many of them as some of your customers. They often came in groups and hauled away vats of the noodle stew you sold. 

A few Orcs waved at Ash but didn’t pay you much mind as he carried you to the nicest-looking tent. It had a banner outside of it with a gold bear embroidered into the fabric. Ash set you on the ground at the door and handed you your poker before patting you on the back, indicating you should go in. 

“What’s in there?” you asked. 

He said something in Orcish that you didn’t understand and walked away. There were too many other giants around to attempt an escape, so you pulled aside the fur covering the door and peeked inside. 

“Hello?” 

Your question was returned with a deep voice, smooth as a glassy pond. 

“Enter, little one.” 

Taking a few steps inside, you were faced with what you could only describe as the most handsome Orc you’d ever seen. His skin was a deep olive, and his hair fell over his shoulder in a long, dark sheet with small braids here and there. His tusks were large, but they seemed only to highlight how well his lips were formed. His features were harsh and defined but not unattractive, with a straight nose and deep-set gold eyes. The only thing you could point out as a flaw was a dark scar from his forehead to the right corner of his jaw. 

You assumed the Orcs were blunt tools, sprinting into battle with no real plan, but this one was sitting at a high table examining maps with a book in his hand. 

“I’m…I’m not sure why I’m here,” you said, brandishing your poker, though you didn’t feel like you were in any particular danger. 

“I asked Ash to fetch you,” he said without looking up. “You’re the noodle shop woman.” 

“My name is (Y/N), not “noodle shop woman,” and I don’t have a shop anymore. The soldiers burned it.” 

He put his book down and turned his gold eyes to you. 

“That’s why you’re here.” 

“I don’t understand.” 

His eyes drifted over you before they settled on the poker you were still holding up. 

“You were feeding most of the camp. If there’s no shop to visit, you can make noodles here.” 

You blinked up at him. 

“Oh…Am I your prisoner?” 

He chuckled. 

“If you’d like to go back to your people, I won’t stop you, but judging how they burned down your village without hesitation, I think you’re safer with us.” 

You had to admit that made some sense, but you still weren’t buying it. 

“I can’t stay here with you!” 

He tipped his head, the corner of his lip twitching up slightly. 

“Why is that, little one?” 

You narrowed your eyes at him. 

“First of all, I’m NOT little, and second, an Orc camp is no place for a lady.” 

A shudder that had nothing to do with fear shot down your spine as his eyes moved over your body. He crossed the room, scooping you up, and setting you on his table. Your feet dangled far from the ground. 

“What- What are you doing?” you snapped, waving your weapon at him. 

“My neck was hurting from looking down at you. You’re very short.”

The sparkle in his eyes told you he was teasing you, which drew heat to your cheeks. 

“Maybe compared to you. You’re unnecessarily large. What are you doing with all of that muscle? Are you going to arm wrestle your books?” you pouted, eyes drifting to the massive bicep peeking out of the fur vest he wore. 

He laughed out loud, gracing you with a wide smile. 

“You’ll fit right in here.” 

You raised your nose at him, trying to look unconvinced. 

“Where will I even sleep? All of your tents are big and drafty.” 

“Since you’ve declared your intention to court me, I wouldn’t mind if you slept here.” 

“Declared my intention to— Where did you get that idea?” 

He flicked a fingertip at your poker. 

“In the old days, Orc females came to their males' tent and threatened them into submission with their favorite weapon.” 

Your cheeks burned like hot irons, and you almost dropped it. 

“Well…I’m not trying to court you. It’s for protection.” 

He snorted at you but nodded his head. 

“If you say so, little one, but it will be much warmer in my tent if it’s drafts you’re worried about.” 

“I don’t even know your name. Ash called you something in your language. I didn’t understand…” 

He examined one of the feet you had dangling over the edge of his table. Compared to his big hand, it was tiny. 

“Cautalin, it means something close to general in your language, but you can call me Cedar. That’s what my mother named me.” 

Your eyes traveled over his barrel chest and thick arms. 

“Seems about right,” you said, finally setting your poker down. 

He picked it up, looked it over, and tested the weight in his hand. 

“Not a bad choice,” he said. “Light but effective.” 

You glanced up at him through your eyelashes, feeling cheeky. 

“Do you feel like submitting?” 

You watched a flicker of heat ignite in his eyes, and he slowly set it down. 

“Come on, let's get you to bed, killer.” 

He picked you up again, walking you over to a large pallet covered in furs. 

“This is your bed.” 

He gave you another smile. 

“We’re in the middle of a battle; I won't be sleeping tonight. It's all yours.” 

Though you weren't quite sure about sleeping in his bed, weariness overtook you at the sight of the comfortable, cozy furs, and you crawled in, wrapping yourself up to your chin in blankets. 

He put your poker next to you and blew out the candle, slipping out the front flap as you dozed. 

— 

You woke to yelling, but not the sound of battle. Crawling out of your furs, you picked up your poker and peeled out of the flap Cedar used as a door. Another Orc you didn't recognize was the one yelling, and Cedar had his arms crossed, looking bored. 

Your eyes drifted to about twenty women, elderly, and children, cowering in the chilly morning air, their faces streaked with soot from the fire.

“They’re our enemies!” the strange Orc barked. 

“Really, Asvoth? Are you really afraid of a handful of children and their mothers?” 

“This is a war camp, not a nursery.” 

“It's my camp, not yours. They stay.” 

“I outrank you. I can take your command.” 

Cedar snorted. 

“Yet the King hasn't trusted you with a unit of your own. You're nothing more than an errand boy with a fancy title. Any of these children could take your job.” 

Asvoth’s face turned a deep forest green from both embarrassment and indignation. He yanked the sword he wore on his back to his hand. Without thinking, you hopped in front of Cedar, waving your poker at the intruder. You had no idea why, a fact you only considered after you’d already put yourself in harm's way. Still, you'd made your move so the only thing to do was follow through. 

“You heard Cedar! We’re not leaving! Get on if you know what's good for you!” 

Asvoth sprung forward, dropping his sword toward your head. Your eyes squeezed shut, preparing for pain, but there was only the clang of metal. Opening one eye, you glanced up to see Cedar’s axe blocking the other Orc’s blow. 

There was a moment when you thought Asvoth might overtake him, but Cedar’s muscles weren't all for show. He shoved the other Orc back, and he toppled over, landing on his butt in the dirt. His sword landed in front of the children with a CLANG. 

“Woah!”  the little ones cheered, circling around it like it was a strange animal. 

A few of them tried to pick it up, but it was far too heavy, making their eyes pop even wider.

Cedar nodded at him, and a pair of Orcs from the camp dragged Asvoth up by the collar of his tunic, pushing him towards the forest.  

“I'm reporting this!” He shouted over his shoulder as he stumbled towards the woods. 

Cedar waved a hand at one of his Orcs, beckoning him closer. 

“You and Orin follow him and make sure the King gets our side of the story, not his.”  

When the situation seemed settled, Cedar looked down at you and patted your head. 

“Thank you for your protection, little suitor,” he said with a smirk. 

Your cheeks blew up in flames, but you puffed your chest and looked at the children watching Ash pick up the abandoned sword. They hopped around him like little bunnies, begging him to teach them to use it. 

“I have no idea what you mean! I’m here to make noodles! Point me in the direction of my kitchen! These little mouths are probably hungry.” 

He chuckled, but guided you with a large hand on your back to a large tent filled with whatever food supplies they had rescued from the village. You wrinkled your nose at the primitive workspace, but there were enough flour and eggs to work with. You were surprised to find someone had stuck in a lower table, perfect for your height. After washing your hands in a water basin, you got to cooking. 

“What are you still doing here?” you asked Cedar, who had plopped down in a chair and was reading a book. 

He smiled. 

“Reading.” 

You blinked at him, putting your floury fists on your hips. “Are you surveilling me? I’m not going to poison you all! I have to eat this too, you know.” 

He tipped his head to the side, his gold eyes sparkling in the makeshift hearth. 

“The sound of cooking is soothing. I liked to study in the kitchen while my mother cooked when I was a boy.” 

You looked him up and down. 

“I can’t imagine you as a child.” 

You thought for a second, tapping your chin. 

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Orc child, actually.” 

He looked back down at his book, shifting in his seat to get comfortable. 

“You will,” he said as he flipped a page. 

Your brow wrinkled at that nebulous statement, but you knew everyone was hungry after the long night, so you got back to work. 

By midmorning, you had a stewpot big enough to feed an army filled with noodles, vegetables, and what little bit of venison the Orcs had been able to hunt between the battle. 

“All done,” you said, clapping your hands and creating a puff of flour in the air. 

Cedar got up and shouted something to his men, and two Orcs appeared to carry the big vat into the central circle so it could be served. You felt a sense of satisfaction when all the bowls were passed out and the children, tired humans, and bloodied Orcs were eating. The mothers spoke quietly between one another, while the children could hardly sit still, their big eyes following the Orcs every movement. 

“Here.” 

You looked up to find Cedar holding a bowl out to you. A grumbling stomach had you accepting it, and he patted the seat next to him for you to sit down. The two of you ate quietly for a moment before you asked him a question. 

“What are you going to do with all of us?” 

“Hmm?” he asked. 

“Well, I mean when the battle is over. We have nowhere to go. Our town is destroyed.” 

He looked at the children who, after scarfing down their bowls, were engaged in some game with Ash. 

“I was hoping you would all return to our capitol city with us. That’s where we live when we’re not fighting.”

Your eyebrows jumped. 

“To the Orc city? We’re humans. Don’t your people hate us?” 

He shrugged. 

“There are some weak minds who reveal their own fragility with their hate, but the rest of us like your kind. This whole war started because we wished to create allies amongst the humans.” 

“What? The soldiers said you attacked!” 

He chuckled. 

“Your king has a very effective propaganda engine. That’s probably the only thing about him that is effective. We sent a delegation party to him to discuss our interest in mingling with you humans. You all are prolific; despite your size, you’re a sturdy bunch. We thought marriages would bolster our numbers and strengthen your stock. Your King attacked, and we were forced to defend ourselves. The force that attacked us was decimated, and he declared war.” 

“You mean…you wish to mate with us?” 

His eyes slid down to you, and he gave you a sharp nod. 

“Is that so surprising?” 

You thought about it for a moment. 

“I don’t know…Maybe a little. You’re so strong. You’re not afraid we’ll diminish you?” 

His thick hand cupped your chin and rubbed some flour away with his thumb. Your heart raced at his touch. 

“Size is not what makes us strong. Our strength lies in our unbreakable bonds. Your King will be defeated, not because his forces are less than ours, but because he orders his men to betray his own people.” 

He nodded towards the children, who were playing chicken fight on Ash and another Orc’s shoulders. 

“They will remember it was men who burned down their village, stole their fathers from them, assaulted their mothers and Orcs who took them in, fed them, and helped them smile again. 

“I suppose you’re right,” you agreed. 

His smile widened. 

“I will remember you took up arms to protect me against an enemy twice your size. You belong among the us.” 

Suddenly the wool dress you wore was much too hot. 

“I should go wash these before the next meal,” you squeaked, grabbing his empty bowl and scurrying away.

Once safe in the kitchen tent, you pressed your hand against your chest, trying to still your heart. Why did Cedar make you feel so fluttery? You’d never felt this way around anyone before. You usually kept to yourself and steered clear of romance. It had to be the battle, you decided. You were still hyped up from the night before. In a day or so, you were sure it would pass. 

Dunking empty bowls in ice-cold river water helped cool your thoughts as you tried to focus on what to make for dinner. The Orcs stocks were pretty hefty, but they and the children ate a lot. You’d noticed many of the parents tipping some of their bowls into their little one’s, making sure they were fed properly in case the next meal didn’t come. 

It saddened you it had to be this way. What horrible person decides to burn down their own citizens' village? Who was the King even protecting you from? Not the Orcs, that’s for sure. 

A loud rabble outside dragged your attention away from the dishes, and you picked up your poker before peeking your head outside. 

A few Orc scouts were speaking in rapid Orcish to Cedar. When they paused, his eyes immediately looked around for the children and frowned before he spoke to you all. 

“The human King has sent reinforcements. They will close on our camp by nightfall.” 

The mothers all gathered their children to their skirts, looking weary. 

“Women and children to the kitchen tent! We will keep you safe, but you must stay hidden!” 

You made way as a small stampede of humans rushed past you, many pushing their children to hide under the table. 

“What’s happening?” You asked Cedar as people and Orcs rushed around. 

He scrubbed his hand over his jaw, looking disturbed. 

“Someone ran back to your King with a story that we’d kidnapped you, not taken you in from starving in a burnt-down village. We will win this fight, but then we will have to make the journey back to the capitol. They will keep attacking if they think you’re within their grasp. Do you think you can explain this to your people? We don’t intend to take anyone by force, but I wouldn’t trust the King’s soldiers.”

“Yes, of course. Whatever you need.”

You hurried back to the kitchen, where the humans were muttering to one another. 

“Should we flee to the forest?” Isla, the former town candlemaker, asked. “Can we depend on the Orcs to protect us?” 

Another woman scoffed. 

“We can’t trust anyone. These Orcs are kind now, but they’ll sell us out at the drop of a hat.” 

Linda, a quiet woman who worked as a weaver, whimpered. 

“But we’ll starve in the forest alone. Word is the King’s men have raized every town for fifty miles!” 

You inserted yourself into the conversation, holding up your hands. 

“No one needs to escape to the woods. The Orcs are going to take us back to their capitol to keep us safe.” 

Linda squeaked in horror. 

“The Orc capitol?! Where they can enslave us?!” 

“They have no plan to enslave you. Don’t you want your children to be safe? We will be safe behind their walls!” 

“Or…when the King takes the city we’ll all be hung as traitors!” 

“Shawna, don’t put that in her head. Linda, we’ll be fine. I trust Cedar.” 

You paused on that thought, realizing not only was it true, it didn’t make any sense. You’d only just met him. Your conversation was interrupted by the shouting of men outside. 

“We’ll talk about this later,” you hissed, “Here, take this.” 

You armed the humans with whatever haphazard weapons you could find, mostly butcher knives and skillets. 

Outside, you could hear the clang of weapons and the squelching sounds of metal piercing flesh. 

“What's happening?” Linda asked, trying to get around you so she could peek out of the tent flap. 

“Stay back!” You barked. “If they see us, we’re in trouble!” 

You could tell she was losing it, hopping from one foot to another, her hands getting slippery on her knife. 

“No, no, no,” she whimpered. “I don’t want to go with the Orcs. Even a human monster is better than them!” 

Before you could grab her, she skipped through the doorway, running wildly into the fray. The other humans gathered around you, their opinions spilling out like loose marbles. 

“What is she thinking?!” 

“Linda, come back!” 

“Let her go, she’s nuts.” 

You clenched your jaw, squeezing your iron poker. 

“She’s scared. I’ll go get her…you all stay put!” 

Before anyone could stop you, you darted after her, trying to catch sight of her red skirt through the mess of armour-clad humans and massive Orcs. The King had sent a much larger force than the one that had burned down your village. The battle around you was brutal. You almost slipped on a puddle of blood, your eyes frantically searching for Linda. 

You found her pointing her knife with shaking hands at a human soldier. 

“What are you doing? I’m a human, too!” 

“The King ordered you all dead!” he snarled, raising his sword at her. “No witnesses! Come on, do your duty to the kingdom, and die quietly!” 

Panicking, you launched yourself at him, whacking him with your poker as you barreled into him. The two of you went down, metal clashing as you fell and dropped your weapons. Both of you scrabbled for purchase in the blood-soaked earth. You could hear Linda screeching beside you as you tried to overpower the soldier. His armor, now slick with mud, made it impossible to get a hold of him, and he triumphantly dragged himself to his sword, clumsily grabbing it by the blade and flinging it in your direction. You saw the metal flash in the firelight before pain exploded between your eyes, and your vision went black. 

—

“Please tell me she’s not dead,” you heard Linda’s voice from far away. 

Isla scoffed. 

“You’d better hope she’s not, Linda. This is all your fault!” 

“I'm sorry!” she simpered, “I made a mistake! I thought the soldiers were here to free us!” 

“Free us from what? A good meal and a safe place to sleep?”

You dragged your eyelids open, vision blurry for a moment before it cleared. 

“What…what happened?” you murmured. 

“She’s awake!” Isla gasped. 

You felt her cool hands against your cheek. 

“Take it slow, here; have some water.” 

She pushed a tin cup into your hands, and you wet your palette with a few sips. Looking around, you were surrounded by the humans, all looking very concerned. 

“Is everyone okay?” you asked. 

Isla smirked, and the other women tittered a bit. 

“Thanks to you, I suppose. That chieftain or warlord or whatever saw you get knocked in the head and went berzerk. He killed most of the soldiers all by himself.” 

Another woman poked her head out of the tent. 

“She’s okay! You guys can untie him!” 

“Untie who? Is the battle over?” 

Isla nodded.

“Yeah, all the soldiers are dead. We’ve all been waiting for you to wake up so we can move the camp before the King sends anymore. Can you believe he ordered them to kill us? I guess so he could claim the Orcs did it and get more support for the war.”

She smirked at you. 

“And as for who's tied up, your Orc friend thought you were dead. The others had to tie him up so he wouldn’t go on a rampage. He was ready to storm the King’s stronghold! You ought to see the ropes they had to use…thick as your waist!” 

You heard the roll of stomping feet, and Cedar burst through the tent flap. His hair was wild, and his tunic was red with blood. He fell to his knees in front of you, holding his hands as if he couldn’t decide if you were safe to touch. 

“Are you okay?” he asked, carefully prodding the bandage you had wrapped around your head. “That monster didn’t do any permanent damage, did he?” 

“She’ll have a scar,” Isla said, “but I think she’s fine.” 

Cedar’s face lightened, pulling you towards him, his big arms wrapping around you. 

“Thank the goddess,” he sighed with a heavy breath. “I thought they’d taken you from me.” 

He cupped your cheeks between his palms when he finally let you go. 

“You are so stupidly brave, little one,” he gasped, eyes wet. “You have more honor than your people deserve.” 

Behind him, Isla waved the women out of the tent, leaving the two of you alone. Not used to so much intimate attention, your cheeks warmed, and you weren’t sure where to look. 

“I just didn’t want Linda to get hurt,” you muttered. 

He gave you an odd smile, scooping you out of the cot you’d woken up in. 

“Once I get you to our home in the capitol, I’m going to have to keep you locked up for your own safety,” he said, patting your head. 

You looked up at him from where you were tucked, leaning on his bicep. 

“Our home?” 

He grinned at you, counting on his fingers. 

“First step to Orc courting: Threaten your desired with your weapon. Done. Step two: Allure them with your cooking skills, cooking or hunting something delicious. Done. And the final step: Display your honor through a grand act of bravery. Done! You’ve effectively and thoroughly seduced me, little one! All that’s left is to take you home!” 

He tipped your chin up with one thick finger and dipped his head to press his lips against yours. Your whole body felt like it was made of butterflies, every nerve flickering with excitement. Despite being covered in blood and mud, his kiss tasted like honey and sage. It felt like a warm cup of tea on a chilly morning. Your eyelashes fluttered shut and you sank into his warmth, despite yourself, happy to be alive and in his arms.

“Oh!” you gasped as he straightened his neck.

Your mouth fell open, unsure what to say. Before you could think of anything, Cedar carried you out of the tent, shouting orders at his men to pack up the camp so you could leave for the capitol.

[sp0o0kylights]

Part One / Part Two (You are Here) / Part Three 

A03

Hopper had undersold Harrington's condition. 

Wayne hadn't expected anything pretty, but the face that turned to them as they walked through the door almost had him freezing in place. 

Black eye, bruised chin, split lip. 

More and more bruises, some faded and some very new, trailing down the kids neck. 

 The rest was hidden by his preppy little polo shirt, but Wayne didn't doubt that there were more.

Harrington tried to stand when they entered the room and the way he moved--entirely unbalanced, clearly in a lot of pain--made Wayne think the only thing the kid really needed was a hospital. 

Because Steve Harrington hadn't just been beaten. 

He'd been tortured--and very recently strangled. 

(Abruptly, Wayne realized that Hopper had implied the boy had been in the mall fire--just as much as he implied the mall fire was anything but. 

He also hadn't stated how Harrington had escaped the Suites trying to break into his house.) 

"Sit down." Hopper commanded, and Wayne expected Harrington to do anything but listen. 

Say something cocky, or act the part of a demanding little shit maybe, despite the condition he was in.

Instead the kid just sighed in relief and dropped like a stone, right back into the chair. 

Hopper came around his desk, talking all the while. "Steve, this is Wayne. Wayne, Steve."

"Hello Sir." Steve croaked politely. His voice was wrecked, no doubt from the necklace of finger shaped bruises around his neck.

"You're going to stay with him for a while, and you're gonna pay him for the privilege." Hopper informed him, as he began digging around his desk. "Money, chores, whatever Wayne wants." 

Wayne held his gaze as Steve turned to appraise him. 

Would Harrington pitch a fit? 

Would he look at Wayne's work clothes, streaked with dirt and sweat, with the name of the warehouse embroidered in the corner and crinkle up his nose, just like his daddy did? 

Hopper didn't lie, but a part of Wayne wanted to see just how different this Harrington was. If the respectful demeanor was an act done for Hopper. 

Or perhaps, Hopper had mentioned Steve's father for a reason, instead of his mother. Did he adopt her ice-like approach to life? 

Micro managing and long-held grudges were Stella Harrington’s game, and she excelled at it. 

Steve however, did nothing of the sort, instead settling with the situation in a way that reminded Wayne far too strongly of the men and women who'd come home from war.

"Okay." The kid said simply, after a long moment of consideration. He turned back to Hopper. "But we need to tell the rest of the Par--" 

Here he cut a look back to Wayne, correcting himself. "the kids. I don't want them showing up at my house trying to find me and freaking out." 

"They wouldn't--" Jim paused, fingers freezing from the rummaging they'd been doing. "they absolutely would, goddammit." He muttered darkly.  

"I'll tell the kids. The only thing I want you doing right now is laying low. I need to get a hold of Owens, but it's gonna take time to do that, and more time to fix this, so as of right now, Harrington? You're on vacation." He pointed sternly, as if Steve might argue.

The kid looked too tired and messed up to bother trying. 

"I mean it. You're out of the country, where is anybody's guess. No one's seen you and no one better be seeing you, got it?" His voice held firm, and Wayne had to blink because the tone here wasn't one of a police chief warning a teenager--but of a father talking to his son.

He knew, because his own voice did that now. Took on a worried tone that masqueraded as something more like annoyance and seriousness. 

"Yes, Sir." Harrington said, remaining weirdly compliant. "Consider me gone." 

A hand came up to briefly press above one eye, and Wayne wondered if the kid had been looked over, or if they had just crammed him into Hopper's office without offering so much as a tissue box. 

How many painkillers did they have back at the house? Wayne usually kept a good bottle around, but Steve was going to need more than that…

He found himself once again cataloging Steve's wounds, this time comparing them to the medicine cabinet he had at home. 

"I expect you to be a damn good house guest, you hear me?" Hopper continued, trying to cut a menacing figure. He finally found what he was looking for; pulling out a large, padded envelope. 

He handed it over to Harrington, who took it without looking, shoving it into the duffle bag he'd had sitting at his feet. 

There was a smudge of red on the handle of said bag, that matched perfectly up to a shittily done wrap on Steve's right hand. 

Wayne mentally added 'buy more bandages' to his list. 

Steve nodded at Hopper again. "Yes, Sir."

Jim’s eyes narrowed. "Quite that, you know I hate that." 

The briefest glimmer of mischief crossed Harrington's face. "Sorry, Sir. Won't happen again, Sir."

'Ahh.' Wayne thought. 'So there's a teenager in there after all.'

Jim rolled his eyes. "Get out of my office."

"Thanks Hop." Harrington said, finally dropping that odd obedience, a hint of a smile on his battered face. 

He stood, and Wayne had to stop himself from offering an arm out as Steve reached for his bag and limped towards him. 

He paused right before he left Hopper's office, hand on the doorframe.

 "You'll check up on Robin too, right?"  He asked, and for the first time his tone took on something more alive--and filled with worry. "And Dustin? Erica?" 

"Dustin and his mom are finally taking me up on my suggestion to see their family in Florida for a while, and the Sinclairs are taking a sabbatical from Hawkins. I'm working on the Buckley's." Hopper drummed his fingers on the desk. "So far, no one else besides you and El have been targeted, and we're going to keep it that way."

Steve let out a breath, and while Wayne could tell the worry hadn't left him, he could almost physically see Steve force himself to put it away.

Another act that was far beyond the kid's years. 

A different officer popped up as they walked down the hall towards the exit, waving his hand madly. "Harrington! Chief says you forgot this!" He barked.

(Or tried to anyway. Callahan wasn’t the most aggressive of officers and frankly, never would be.)

A slim sports bag was held in his hands, and Steve nearly tripped over his own feet when he tried to turn and claim it.

"I'll get it." Wayne said, knowing his tone sounded gruff.

No use for it. He could either sound gruff or sound sad, and Wayne knew better than to start off the relationship with yet another hurt young man by acting sad.

Pity wasn't gonna win him any favors here. 

He took the bag, slinging it over his shoulder, uncaring of the wince on Harrington's face until something sharp poked at his shoulder. 

Several somethings, in fact. 

"What the hell do you got in this thing?" He asked once they hit the parking lot, voice low as he escorted Steve to his truck. 

"Just a baseball bat, sir." Steve said, in the exact same tone Eddie used every time he thought he was bein’ slick. 

Considering the thing in the bag could have passed for a baseball bat if not for the sharp pokey bits, it wasn’t a bad attempt. Steve just hadn’t accounted for the fact that Wayne lived with Eddie. 

An unfair advantage, really. 

‘Least there can’t be any baby racoons in the damn bag.’ Wayne thought idly. 

Went on to gently put the bat in the backseat, watching as the kid struggled to lift himself into the truck.

"You can drop that, I take too being called Sir about as well as Hop does." He said, keeping his tone nice and calm, hoping to ease into calling Steve out on his lie. 

Fussed with a few dials on the stereo, giving Steve an excuse to take his time before starting the engine and taking the long way home.

Wayne wanted to talk a little-- without the chance of Ed’s interrupting. 

"Son,” He started off. “I was born in the morning, but not this morning. I'm hoping to make the next few weeks as easy as I can for both of us, and I can't do that if you're starting off with a lie." 

Steve blinked, turning to face him in a matter that was too fast for his injuries. He didn't bother hiding the hurt it caused him, but his voice stayed even as he spoke.

 "What do you mean Si--Wayne." 

"Nice catch.”  Wayne said. “We’ll get you there yet.” 

It was a trick he'd learned with Eddie--little tidbits of praise went a long way when it came to gaining trust.

Especially with kids who hadn't ever been given much. 

Harrington seemed smart to it, or perhaps was just hesitant to speak in general because he remained quiet, not offering up any info. No further lies, but nothing towards the truth, neither. 

Which was fine. Wayne didn’t think a little pushing would hurt.

"That bat of yours was digging into my shoulder like a bee swarm." Wayne continued, when it became clear Steve wasn't talking. "I'm more a fan of football than baseball, but last I checked they hadn't changed the design of a bat." 

"What teams?" Steve asked, perking up a touch. "Of football. Which ones are yours?"

Wayne could ignore it of course, or demand Steve give him an answer to the question he asked. 

He did neither. "I’m liking the Colts since they got moved here. You?" 

"Green Bay Packers, though I like the Colts too--that trade in 84’ was crazy." Steve said. After a second he proved that answering instead of pushing was the right move because he added; "What did Hopper tell you? About…" He trailed off, making a gesture Wayne didn't bother trying to interpret. 

"He said some things. I've guessed a few others." Wayne admitted. Cut a little look out of the corner of his eye as he came to a stop sign. "I know the feds are real interested in you after Starcourt." 

Steve took that in, hands tightening on the handle. 

"It really is a baseball bat." He said, a little fast and with the tiniest hint of that challenge Wayne had been looking for. "It just also has nails hammered into one end." 

Wayne took that in with one nice, slow blink. 

"A bat with nails in it." He said, and it made a hell of a lot of sense compared to the sensation he'd felt carrying the case. "You use it against anyone?" 

"Some of the feds." Steve admitted, and even with his eyes on the road Wayne could tell he was being stared at.

Judged.

Not in the way one expected a rich kid to judge, but in the way Eddie had, those first few months he'd lived here. The times when  he'd push, just a little, to see what Wayne's reaction would be. 

Eddie hadn't done it in a damn long time, but Wayne recognized the behavior nonetheless. 

"Anybody else?" He asked. 

"Nobody human." Steve replied. 

"Alright." Wayne said, and made a mental note to drop all questions related to that. 

He didn't need to know, definitely didn't want to know, and had a feeling if he did know he'd find himself being watched by the same spooks after Steve.

"I've got a few deck boxes that lock on my porch. Think you'd be agreeable to leaving the bat in one?" 

Steve paused, hand clenching tighter around the strap of his duffel bag. "If you gave me a key so I could get it in an emergency,  I'd be happy to." 

He tried to sound calm, even a little charming in that sort of upper-class businessman sort of way, but the fear bled through. 

The kid wasn't happy separating from the bat, and given it sounded like it might have saved his life recently, Wayne understood the hesitation. 

With an internal apology to Eddie, he promptly threw his nephew under the proverbial bus.  "I've got my nephew at home and he'd be far too interested in it, is all. Blades and weapons and such tend to attract him, and I don't need to be rushing anyone to the ER." 

All of which were very true facts (one Wayne learned the time he'd allowed Eddie to bring a sword  home, only for him to nearly cut his own nose off winging the thing around) but he figured it might make Steve more amenable to separating from it. 

Sure enough, some of the tenseness bled out of Steve's shoulders. "Yeah that's fair." 

The truck hit a few potholes as they finally turned into the trailer park, and the kid hissed, a quiet sound. 

Judging by the uncomfortable wince, and hands clenched into his jeans something painwise was giving him trouble. 

"When was the last time you took a pain pill?" Wayne asked, doing his best to weave around the other holes that dotted the gravel roads.

Steve blinked. "Uh…" 

"You take any today son?" 

Steve his head. 

"Didn't have time to grab it." He said, offering a sad look to his pack. 

Course he hadn't. 

"Let's get you inside then and get you some." Wayne said with a sigh. Thankfully Eddie's van wasn't here--Wayne was fairly certain he had band practice today but knowing him it could be a million other things.

Just meant he had to acclimate Steve as fast as he could, to try and get the poor guy settled before Ed’s came in. 

He just hoped life and lady luck would work with him, for once. 

[twizzie-lairs]

My Darling, My Honey

Alastor X Fem!Reader (Part 12)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 |

Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12

Part 12:

It felt like hours went by, and it looked like your suspicion was correct- as indicated by the deepening red of the skies of Hell, compared to the pale pinkish hue it was when Alastor teleported the two of you up here.

The entire time, Alastor hardly said even a single word- a rare occurrence, knowing his occupation and personal love of hearing himself talk. If anyone ever knew that Alastor just purely listened attentively to you for hours, they'd probably think you're lying.

You told him about how your parents and in-laws treated you like a bargaining chip for their own businesses and social standing to prosper- then for everyone to turn their backs on you as soon as you were married off. You were treated like a circus animal in a cage.

Even after that, he didn't say a word. He just rubbed his thumb across your hands as reassurance before you continued.

When you told him about how your ex-husband used and abused you, but then paraded you around as the trophy wife like nothing was wrong, all Alastor did was tighten his grip on your hands.

As you explain in full detail the emotional and physical distress it all caused you and the impact that meeting Alastor had on your life, which then spurred the meticulously planned murder of your then-husband, you could swear you feel his hands trembling ever so slightly.

Many more tears had fallen from your eyes during this whole process, your throat sore from talking so much at one time.

Then, you looked up at Alastor.

He looked at you with nothing but love and the most gentle smile you had ever seen.

Without saying a word, he stood up and walked over to you, helping you stand up. Then he gave you a warm embrace. You gasped in response. It was very rare for either of you to initiate much physical touch, but it was even less common coming from Alastor.

Not letting this opportunity go by, you wrap your arms around him.

Alastor pulls back from the embrace slowly to gently caress your face and says, "And here I thought I couldn't possibly love you even more, my dear. You're just as perfect to me as the day I first laid eyes on you..."

A chuckle escapes your lips as you lean into his touch.

"My vows still hold true, you know. As I put that ring on your finger that night you left me too early, I said to you...' 'In life and in death, I am forever yours, as you are forever mine. I love you, dear.' with only the moon and stars as my witness."

A huge smile spreads across your face, "Oh Al, honey... Looks like you were right after all, in life and in death, I'm yours". You say as you pull him into a kiss, that he happily obliges to indulge you in.

"My dear, I think we will have to have a proper exchanging of vows soon- one that isn't interrupted by a certain someone- banging on the DOOR!"

You hardly even noticed the muffled yells and banging noises that were present at door that then disappeared with a yelp as Alastor whipped around to unlock and open the door.

"Why Vaggie, to what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from you all the way up here?" He answered the door with a low growl to his voice.

"Alastor! You just up and kidnapped our guest and haven't returned for HOURS! You can't just do that! Especially when you were threatening their life!"

"Ahahaha! Funny thing! Yes, yes I can!"

"Why you... ALAST-"

"Hey, hey! Vaggie, don't worry. I'm okay, we're okay." You quickly shoved yourself between the two of them as you felt the tensions rising.

" (y/n)! What did he do to you?? What's going on here???"

You sheepishly smile as you slink back to Alastor's side and link your arm through his, "Just uh.. reuniting?"

Vaggie took a step back and raised an eyebrow while asking, "Hold on now, what did you just say?"

Alastor clears his throat, "Ahem, why I do believe I owe you and Charlie an apology of sorts! Perhaps a 'thank you' as well for saving the love of my life, my soon-to-be fiancée from when we were still alive!"

"Excuse me- WHAT???"

-> Part 13

Tag List:

@mysticwitchcraftco @lil-bexie @lonely-burger @cherry-cola-100 @angelxx7 @mariaclarade-la-cruz1 @avitute @justhellacesome @mcrtrashfan @spookysisters @galaxywing-has-adhd @ggyalruu @trashbin-nie @fudosl @night-shadowblood-writes2 @memospacexx @yuraaahs @completelyshatteredbrokenmschf @ghostdoodlen @moschinski @cannibalcoyote @missam @reader3 @yourworstgf @justaproudslytherpuff @milkspong3 @xdolls-crownx @1potato2rulethemall @1rxsemary1 @xxcrispxx @zardward @robin-the-enby @mylenapony11 @silvermoondarksky @bootylimpics @amarokofficial @euphoricaphrodite @blueyobsessedgirly @need-a-therapist @knifukiller @huayan @hwrimonsjer @no1sillybilly @kimmikreates @icarus-has-falllen @watchinthestarz @lady-lik3r @yunxi-11085 @luzzbuzz @tsukilover11 @plntmxrss @houmi @demoarah @papas-ghoulette @trashbin-nie @d-darlingyourbleeding @hallothankmas

[houseofceline]

My Pretty Girl - T.N.

Foreign Touches and Breakfast in Bed

Pairing: Ravenclaw and sort of ditzy but talented Reader x Slytherin notorious playboy Theodore Nott

Warnings: Asshole Theo?

Summary: You wish you never woke up.

Author's Note: Hey guys! It's been a while, sorry for the wait but here it is!

< 6

__________________

“How much did you even drink last night?” Cho cringed holding your hair back as another round of vomit spewed out of you and into the toilet. You could feel your head pounding as you sat on the bathroom floor trying to calm yourself down. Waking up to a hangover and your period may be the worst combination known to man, or really women. Thankfully there were no classes today. 

“Too much,” you breathed in and out, making sure there was nothing else coming up. 

“Come on, we need to go to breakfast, you need to eat something.” Cho tried helping you up as you gripped onto the sink for support. 

You were not ready to go out in public like this. Bed hair, snippets of last night makeup look in the form of smothered mascara on your cheek, and a million knives stabbing your uterus. Definitely not a pretty sight. Plus, you did not want to see any of the boys after last night incase of something embarrassing you might’ve done while out of it. 

“I don’t wanna go,” you groaned as you flopped on your bed and curled up into a fetal position. 

“You have to eat something Y/n,” Cho spoke softly as she ran her fingers through your hair, trying to flatten it. 

“I’ll eat later.” You grumbled closing your eyes, menstruation already tiring you out. 

“I’ll be back,” Cho said as she left the room, but you were too tired to say anything as you slipped away to dreamland.

___________________

A foreign touch on his chest causes Theo to stir awake in confusion. 

What the hell.

He blinked a few times, allowing his vision to clear up.

Seeing the fake blonde from last night he groaned. 

“Why are you still here?” He mumbled, swatting her hand away from him as he scooted further away from her. 

“What do you mean baby? We don’t have classes today silly,” Hannah replied as she sat up, still nude from late night activities. 

“Right, so the last thing I want on a free day is to see your face. Get out.” Theo mumbled hoping she’d leave so he could sleep so more.

“Theo baby, don’t be so mean,” she spoke, reaching out for him again causing Theo to sit up in a huff. 

“You know the deal, you were supposed to be out before I even woke up,” he ignored the nasty feeling of her calling him cringey pet names. 

“Theo we don’t have to be like this.”

“My name is Theodore,” he stated as he got up and got dressed. 

He sighed as he picked up her clothing items off the floor and threw them at her. 

“I’m leaving since you won’t. But I advise you to wake up before Malfoy does, you know he doesn’t like you.” Theo said as he walked out, ignoring the gasps of surprise when her bra landed in her face. 

What an annoying girl. 

He walked to the Great Hall, deciding that he might as well grab breakfast since he was awake. 

“Did you fuckers seriously eat all the sausages?” Theo scoffed as he took a seat in front of Mattheo. 

“What the fuck did you want me to eat? Those nasty ass muffins?” Blaise replied as he passed a goblet of orange juice to him. 

“HEY! They’re not nasty,” Lorenzo spoke up with crumbs falling out of his mouth. 

“Buddy you’re getting it all over me,” Mattheo shoved the boy next to him with a scoff before glancing over at Theo. 

“Fun night huh?” Mattheo raised a glass towards the bruise-like mark on Theo’s neck. 

“Fuck are you serious?” Theo groaned as he rubbed the side of his neck. 

“I knew I’d regret it, she’s been so possessive lately,” Theo rolled his eyes as he continued eating breakfast. 

“Well I mean you’re always going back to her, maybe she thinks something will happen between the two of you,” Mattheo responded while Theo laughed in response. 

“She’s a Hufflepuff, you know only Slytherin girls are worth dating.” 

Mattheo frowned as Lorenzo looked up from his breakfast.

The whole table fell silent as Lorenzo finished chewing his muffin, “Y/n’s a Ravenclaw. I don’t think she lacks anything compared to Slytherin girls.” 

“Yeah in fact I think she looked better than any Slytherin girl last night,” Mattheo mumbled, causing Theo to look up in surprise. 

“She was there?” He gaped, suddenly feeling like he was going to throw up. 

Lorenzo rolled his eyes knowing that Theo had no right to even care if she was there or not. Mattheo and him had begun to care for the girl as if she was their baby sister and at first they were rooting for Theo, but now they weren’t so sure anymore. They had thought that she could be the one to make Theo better. After all it was him who had shown interest first, it was him who had begun to change because of her. She was the first girl Theo had ever described without using compliments that didn’t mean anything. Never spoke about how hot her body was instead ranted to the two boys about how angelic her face looked while she studied and how she smelled like flowers and vanilla. Not only cared about what was on the outside but on the inside as well, bragging to the boys about how talented she was and how cool her nail designs were. That is the same boy who had his eyes set on someone else last night, and the thought of it even made Lorenzo want to either cry or punch him. 

“Yeah but don’t worry, she didn’t need your company,” Lorenzo scoffed as he continued to eat his breakfast again. 

Lorenzo isn’t the type of person to show any resentment or hold any grudges, so Theo definitely knew he might’ve messed up. 

But before Theo could say anything, a familiar face approached up behind Mattheo and Lorenzo. 

Following Theo’s gaze the two boys turned around and greeted the girl. 

“Chang! What’s up?” Lorenzo greeted happily, a complete 180 switch in tone. 

“Hey boys, I’m grabbing breakfast for Y/n since she doesn’t feel well and I thought seeing your faces would cheer her up,” Cho explained as she showed them her plate of chocolate chip muffins. 

Theo furrowed his eyebrows, “Is she okay? Is she sick?” 

Cho rolled her eyes at the boy who caused her best friend to come back to the dorms sobbing her eyes out. She didn’t even know Theo that well but as she watched Y/n clutch her heart as she cried in her arms, she felt as if the boy had broken her heart as well. 

“She's fine as if it’s any of your concern,” Cho brushed Theo’s questions away as she avoided any eye contact with him. 

Lorenzo and Mattheo didn’t bother coming to his defense but instead got up and grabbed some juice and fruit before following Cho. 

Theo looked down at his plate and suddenly didn’t feel very hungry anymore. Blaise sighed before patting his mate’s back in comfort while Theo pushed his food around. 

Maybe he deserved that. 

[vaspider]

Last year I wrote about what happened at Pride when a couple of kids didn't understand why us older folx were so bitter about Reagan.

This year, I have something a little softer.

Someone who looked a little older than me came up to the booth wearing a pink t-shirt proclaiming him one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Francisco chapter. As I was ringing him up, I asked if he'd been involved for a while.

"Yes," he said, "for a bit," in that way us middle-aged people do when we're sort of wincing and feeling old.

"Okay, well," I said, sitting at my register in my queer booth full of queer clothes and patches and pins, topless in public for the first time. (I had pasties on for my own comfort bc I was working, but I live in the city of the Naked Bike Ride, and I took full advantage). My baby brother and both of my partners ran around behind me, my brother wearing a loose tank top that makes his scars visible.

"I need to tell you that you all helped keep me alive."

He blinked at me as I continued, "I was a kid in high school in the early 90s. I lived in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, and what you all were doing was so loud and so out there that even I heard about your work. It was one of the things that kept me alive. So thank you, and please thank the rest of the Sisters."

I heard about them through people in my parents' church complaining about them, and then I sought more information through the beginning of the internet, through newspapers, through anything I could find. I found the cover of Newsweek that one of the Sisters was on. I read about their "exorcism" of fundamentalist preachers whose books sat on the shelf in my parents' basement and probably still do. I saw how loud and colorful and unapologetically queer they were.

The knowledge that someone was out there, so full of defiant joy, refusing the shame that people kept trying to put on them? Oh, that kept me alive. I saw them, and I knew I could make it through. I wrapped my hands around that knowledge, and I held on so tight.

It took me a long time - a long, long time - to unwind most of it for myself and get to the point where my fat butch ass was sitting bare-chested in the July breeze, looking up at him as he held out his arms and said "you're actually giving me chills." I answered, "I mean every word. You helped keep me alive. So thank you."

I never know what to say when people come up to me in public and tell me that I helped them or changed their life in some way. I appreciate it, and I genuinely love the people who apologized for "fanpersoning" at me last weekend, I just never know what to say. I'm incredibly grateful that the Sister I spoke to was incredibly gracious, saying "usually we give blessings, but I feel like you blessed me." Another member of the party let me pet their tiny dog, who was not very interested in me, and that's okay. It was an overwhelming day. Then, they moved on.

Me? I'm still sitting with the fact that I looked last weekend into the faces of people who didn't know they were holding my head above water, and that I got to tell them the work they do matters. It's a rare thing to get to tell someone, "You saved me," and I'm treasuring it.

Last weekend, I wore my new battle vest with nothing underneath it, unless it was too hot, and then I just sat in my chair, chatting and ringing ppl out with my skin free to the air. I decided last year that top surgery isn't for me, but that also I'm going to love this body unapologetically, and it's no less a transmasculine body because the soft new dark hair on my belly isn't accompanied by pink scars along my ribs.

I didn't get here on my own. I got here because someone else cut through the undergrowth ahead of me so I could take another step forward. Here I am, decades later, still taking step after step, one at a time, and trying to lay paving stones behind me.

Last weekend was another step along that way, another step through unwinding the fear and shame and sadness that my parents and their church built into me. Another step out of hating myself for hiding parts of myself for so long, for acting out in other ways to distract people from my queerness, for feeling so much guilt when other people tell me I'm brave, because I know how much of myself I hid for how long because I was a coward, because I was afraid.

Another step into expiating stigmatic guilt.

[the-offside-rule]

Max Verstappen (Red Bull Racing) - Explain

Requested: yes

Prompt: 18) "My mum thinks we're dating."

Warnings: Max being dumb asf

Y/n and Victoria had been friends for as long as they could remember. They would visit eachothers houses, carpool to school, go shopping on the weekends; you name it, they did it and they did it together. Now both girls had a set of rules for eachother and Victoria's number one rule was not a surprise at all; her brother was off limits. Y/n didn't have a problem with it because well, Max was older and they rarely talked. Even as children she didn't like him that way, mainly because as a child she thought he looked like a strange lizard of some sort. When Max became a Formula One driver, Y/n found herself with Victoria less and less due to her still having to stay in school, whilst Victoria travelled the world with her brother for a good part of the academic year. But it didn't tarnish their friendship in any way.

In fact, once Y/n graduated from high-school, Victoria managed to get her to a few races that the whole Verstappen family attended. She grew closer with the family as a whole and even became one of the regulars in the paddock after a while. However, Y/n went on to study in Italy and her paddock appearances were significantly lowered to once or twice a year.

The weekend of Monza 2023 was a special one to say the least. Y/n smiled as she walked into the paddock with Victoria, like she did every other time. The cameras took photos, like they did every other year and they walked straight to the hospitality. "I missed this place." Y/n sighed as she looked around the hospitality, holding her godson Luka's hand as he waddled about the place. "I know. They've changed a few things since you've been here last." Victoria smiled as she wheeled the stroller through the paddock. "And where is the golden boy himself?" Y/n asked, obviously referring to Victoria's now two-time world champion brother.  "He's with Mama. They're having their weekly lunch like they usually do." Y/n nodded. "I can't wait to chill in the hospitality. I'd argue it'd my favourite place."

Just as she said she would, Y/n sat in the  hospitality of Red Bull. She got her usual place; a table by the window that overlooked the whole paddock, and close enough to Ferrari so she could get a glimpse of Charles Leclerc walking by. All heads snapped around as the heard large footsteps pounding up the stairs and there appeared a delirious looking Max Verstappen. They locked eyes and Max began walking over to her quite quickly. Did he really miss her that much?

"Hi, Max. How are you-" Max sits down rapidly, making Y/n freeze and look at the dutchman as if he had two heads. "I have a problem. Well, no. We- we have a problem." Max said, stumbling on his words. "You look like you've just seen a ghost." Y/n chuckled as she continued to scroll through her phone. "I- I think I really messed up." Max muttered. Y/n scoffed in reply. "Can't be worse than the time you-" She paused and looked at the familiar face of Max's I fucked up face. "What did you do?" She asked, not putting the phone down. "I- You're going to hate me." Max said. "What have you done?" She asked again. "My mum thinks we're dating." Max blurted out, leaving both of them in stunned silence. "She what?!" She put her phone down and stood up. "I know! It was really dumb!" Max repeated over and over again. "Max! Why did you tell her that!"

"It was an accident!" Max replied defensively. "What exactly did you say?!" Y/n asked. "Well she said we would make a cute couple and I kind of joked that well, what if we were but nobody knew. And then she started smiling like that and asking questions so I just went with it so now-" He paused. "Now she thinks we're together." Max mumbled the last bit. "Max, you need to tell her we aren't!" Y/n said. "But why? She seems so happy-"

"Max! Victoria might actually murder me! I have known her since we were seven!" Y/n whisper shouted. "It'll be fine! She won't know, I am sure of it-"

"Y/n?" Y/n froze as she heard her loving friend Victoria call out her name. Max and Y/n turned to see Victoria walking towards them, almost in the same fashion that Max walked over just a matter of minutes ago. "Victoria, I can explain!"

"Oh I'm so happy for you both! It makes so much sense now! Why you were looking for him this morning, I mean." Vuctoria squealed, engulfing Y/n in a hug. Max stood up chuckling along. "You- you're not mad?" Y/n asked, audibly confused. "Mad? Of course not! Me and Mama have said it many times; that the two of you should be dating. It's about time, to be honest." Y/n smiled and looked between the two Verstappens. "And you! Oh thank goodness you found a nice girlfriend after that last one, she was horrible." Max nodded and shoved his hands into his pockets. "Even Dad is happy about you two!" Max and Y/n didn't know what to say. "And you all want us to...date?"

"Yes! For the longest time. It was so obvious you liked eachother too. So, so obvious." Max looked down at Y/n. The pair's faces turned as red as the Ferrari garage next door. "Well, I'll let you two lovebirds have some alone time. Ill see you both later?" Victoria asked, getting ready to leave. "Yes. Definitely."

"That didn't go how I thought it would." Y/n muttered. "Are we missing something? Do we like eachother but we're just too stupid to tell?" Max asked. "I- I don't know." She whispered. "But, I think we should tell them we aren't together before this gets out of hand." Y/n went to walk, but felt her hand being grabbed. She looked back to see Max. "Or we just play along until it dies down." Max suggested. "That is possibly the most stupid thing you've ever said." Y/n retorted. "Bot really. We both get benefits out of dating. You get recognition for being my girlfriend which comes with brand deals, magazine shoots-"

"I would never date you just for the benefits. I date someone because I love them."

"So so you love me?" Y/n didn't really know how to respond to that. Her mouth opened and closed, searching for the words but she couldn't couldn't a singular sentence. Max's grin widened. "Don't even! I'll see you around." Y/n said storming off, her face red from embarrassment. "Okay. Bye my love!" Max teased. "Shut up!" Did she like him? Did she love him? No! Of course...well....maybe.

[amara-scott]

Imagine Mattheo and Theodore fighting over you constantly.

P.1

Reader x Mattheo Riddle / Reader x Theodore Nott

"The picknick was a good idea, I have to admit." I say, dropping another grape into my mouth, a full mouth turned into a smile. I sneak another one out of the basket Theo is carrying.

I glance over at Theo and he nods, grinning. He winks. "I know, Carina. I always have the best ideas, you should know that by now." I roll my eyes in amusement at his cocky statement.

As if on cue, I see a brown mop of curls rounding the corner, making me sigh. Great. Just great.

"Hey, what a surprise." Mattheo says, not seeming too happy as his eyes land on Theodore beside me. Mattheo shuffles something inside his jacket, flashing white, which I only catch a glimpse of. But I can't even question what it was before these two begin staring each other down.

An undeniably painful pause is the only thing holding me back from just turning around to run away. It's scaring me to even move a muscle. If these two don't sort out whatever is bugging them, I won't hesitate and avoid them both. I really did try to help them befriend each other once more. Their inner rivalry didn't get unnoticed by the rest of our friend group either. What has gotten into them these past few weeks?

"(Y/N), let's get going." Theo's free hand wraps around my wrist, not even glancing at me once while talking. He turns and tries to pull me with him, but not before Mattheo steps up, pushing Theo.

I stumble with him, still being in the grasp of Theo's strong hand. He let go and I take a step back.

"Excuse me?!" I get out before straightening up, rearranging my cloak. My glare hits Mattheo, but he is fixed on the boy in front of him as they now nearly graze noses. If I didn't know these two, I'd say one of them would be a Gryffindor. That would make sense at least. This is worse than Draco and Harry.

"Where do you think you're taking her, huh?" He grits out, and I can't say a word, too stunned I am being dragged into this ongoing fight now.

"Stop it, both of you!" I yell, but neither of them are backing down, making it really hard not to just ask a Professor to break them off. I glance around, only a few students hushing past, not daring to spare a look.

"We are going somewhere that is none of your concern, Riddle."

"Yeah? I don't think so, Nott."

"Why don't you fuck off and shag one of your whores, mind your own damn business!"

I had never seen either of them so worked up, which certainly was scary to look at. I try once more, "boys, come on, this is ridiculous." I gulp as they still don't look at me. My heart starts racing, and I try to find a way out that won't result in broken noses or wands at each other throats. What is going on with these two?!

"Come on, (Y/N)." Theo says again, making me debate what I should do. Pick a side? I don't want to be the reason one is more mad or disappointed by what I do.

"No." I mumble, feeling my eyes sting as I blink. I gulp once more, Theo's eyes finding my form a few feet behind Mattheo. His face relaxes as he looks at me.

"See? She doesn't want you, Nott." I can only make out the corner of Mattheo's lips as they curl up into a grin. Which doesn't help my situation.

"I'm not picking a side here, Matt, you are both acting extremely childish over – over, who knows what!" I turn and storm off, ignoring Matt and Theo yelling my name.

These idiots took it too far now. I won't speak a word – won't spare them another glance. Ugh, boys!

___

"-and he pushed Theo! Like a little kid! What is going on with these two?" I sat across from Pansy, piercing my fork into my piece of chocolate cake over and over again until it went mushy and the appetite left me. I sigh, my fork dropping onto the table, and I bury my face into my hands.

"You know them. They will get over it. Theo probably stole Matt's last fudge fly. They're boys, just like you said." She mumbles and keeps chewing on her dessert, eyes scanning the next page of her Witch Weekly magazine.

"I hope you're right." I mutter under my breath.

"Hey you two-" Draco joins us at the table, sitting down next to Pansy, Enzo settles beside me, I send him a brief smile.

"What's pestering you, (Y/N)? Or should I ask – who's pestering you?" He snickers and earns a stare from Pansy, making him shut up.

"Wait – do you know something, Draco?" I ask him and squint my eyes at him. He obviously does, as he stutters for a word, shaking his head. His cheeks slightly pink.

"Enzo, what is going on? Where are the others?" I turn to him, he sighs but shakes his head, sending me a small and sorry smile.

"I promised not to tell anyone. Especially not you, love." I grow irritated with the lot and push myself up, sending another glare at Draco, he would be easier to break. I take out my wand, holding it by my side and start boring holes into his head. He tries to avoid my deathly stare. But then he makes the mistake of connecting his eyes with mine.

"If you won't tell me right now where they are, I will personally make sure to have you grow a second nose every day, for the rest of the year – you will smell things you wish you didn't –"

"– come on, (Y/N), we promised –"

"– In the library, in the far back corner on the second level –" Draco squeaks, making Enzo glare at him in shock.

"We promised, Draco!"

"I don't care, I know she'll do it. I don't want a nose on my bum one morning! She knows how to get into our dorm." Draco snarls and glares at the table as I hurry off. Pansy only smirking and eating her second dessert in peace.

"Go get them!" She calls out without looking up and I wave her off, pushing past a few people on my way. My heart is racing and I don't know if I want to even meet these idiots. I promised myself to ignore them. Well that didn't take long for me to break.

I round the corner and walk into the library. My racing thoughts made this quiet place unbearable as I heard every damn thought of mine. But just as I take the last couple steps on the stairwell, I am met with hushed shouting.

"– how about you're both idiots? I really am hungry and if you two make me miss dinner, you won't sleep another night –" I hear Blaise taunting. I glance between a few books on the shelf, making out three heads. There they are. Blaise sits by the window, I could see his face clear as day. Theo sat sideways, eyes turned to the table in between them both. Mattheo on the other hand stands, pacing back and forth. He stops, just as my breath.

"Theo simply has to admit that he went behind my back. He took away the only thing that really mattered –"

"The only thing that mattered? The only thing that mattered to you was to simply get laid! Like always – just pick a different girl!" Theo stands up too now, Mattheo stepping up to his figure.

Blaise suddenly steps between them, hands on either chest and looks back and forth. "Hey, boys, you truly think we haven't had these lines already tonight? You're both ridiculous."

So this is about a girl? Is this about –

"Well, (Y/N) would never pick someone like you."

Shit.

"Like me? You're one to talk, Nott – stealing her from me, right after I told you I liked her. I trusted you, you are supposed to be my fucking best mate!" Their hushed voices are not so hushed anymore and I glance down to Miss Pince's desk. She narrows her eyes, scanning the upper level.

Blaise is struggling to hold Mattheo back now, Theo's lips curling into a smirk. I lean closer, my eyes still wide. How do they both like – me? Is this a stupid prank?

WHACK!

I was obviously leaning onto the shelf a bit too much as a book fell to the ground. Their heads turn to me and I could now clearly see all of them through the opening. I give them a weak smile and wave. "Hey –"

"(Y/N)?" Theo asks, stepping forward, around the shelf. I meet him half way, Mattheo’s eyes as hard as stone. My mouth feels dry while I try to think of what to say. I shrug and try to smile. My eyes land on Blaise who seems relieved, sighing as he walks up to me and wraps an arm around my shoulder, glancing between Theo and Matt.

“Maybe you’re the best to talk to them right now.” He pats my shoulder and turns to leave, I turn my head, wanting to tell him to stay, my heart racing. Blaise stops, glancing back at me. “Good luck.” He smirks and skips down the staircase. I really don’t want to turn back around so I take my time, gulping as I focus on both their shoe pairs instead of any eyes. Theo steps up slowly. “Carina, what did you hear?” My eyes shoot up at his question and Matt huffs, falling back into a cushioned arm chair.

“Obviously she heard it all. Otherwise she would be smacking our heads by now.” He mumbles at the end, his head held high as he’s glaring down at his knees, his hands squeezing the soft armrests. His sharp jaw clenching every now and then.

“I- I really-“ I take a deep breath shaking my head. “- don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.” Theo sends me a small encouraging smile. Matt’s head rolls back as he groans out.

“Oh please, stop that stupid emphasizing scheme!” Matt stands back up and joins us, glaring at Theo in disgust. Theo just rolls his eyes, turning to him.

“Just because you’re cold-hearted and only care about yourself doesn’t mean everyone has to-“

“-oh I only care about myself? You’re one to talk, fucking backstabber-“

“-Me? You are-“

“Hey!” I yell out, them both turning to me as they are once again almost choking each other. I ignore a few shushes thrown our way. Mattheo’s eyes soften as I look directly at him. His lips part and in his eyes I see that he’s struggling to hold back from saying what’s on his mind. “Matt-“ I get out, holding back my own emotional rollercoaster.

“I- I can’t-“ He stammers, rushing past me and running down the stairs, leaving. I walk up to the railing, my hands closing around the cold wood while I am looking after him.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” My head snaps around, Theo’s sad eyes glossy. He looks down, stepping closer and stops a foot from me. His eyes wandering back up, like he’s taking one last good look at me. Taking me in.

“It’s always been him.” He continues.

———

For part two choose your ending:

Mattheo (coming soon)

Theodore (coming soon)