#((Feel free to play the character coming in...or the American...or anyone else in the room...make the NPCs do anything you want XD))

[mrjoelgarcia9]

Let's Talk #TheCasagrandes: Final Thoughts

After three seasons and 60 episodes, Nickelodeon's The Casagrandes has come to an end.

For Nickelodeon, it was something rare: An animated series about a multigenerational Mexican-American family.

For my final thoughts on The Casagrandes, feel free to keep reading. There will be spoilers.

When a traditional animated show features the whole family, they limit it to just parents, siblings, and the occasional pet. Additional relatives like aunts, uncles, or grandparents tend to only appear on special occasions or holiday episodes. The Casagrandes had them as part of the main ensemble, allowing for a wider range of stories.

Despite the large number of characters, every single family member and most of their friends got their moment to shine. Like The Loud House, as the show went on, it relied far less on its supposed main protagonist of Ronnie Anne. Several episodes from Season 3 had her either in the background, play a supporting role, or not show up. It helped expand upon the Changs, Ronnie Anne's friends, and her relatives with stories that did not necessarily need her involvement.

The show highlighted Latin American traditions such as Nochebuena, El Raton, and Dia de Los Muertos. For anyone who grew up with these traditions, it was great to see them presented in a very respectful manner without feeling contrived or tacked on.

It also had the rare feat of NOT ending its run on Nicktoons. The last time any Nicktoon accomplished that? Sanjay and Craig, also after three seasons and 60 episodes, in 2016.

With that noted, there were a couple of missed opportunities. The most obvious was the lack of crossovers with The Loud House.

Each season had at least one appearance by both Lori and Lincoln, with them either calling Bobby/Ronnie Anne, visiting Great Lakes, or both. The first season finale, "Cursed!", did feature the Loud family, but only Lisa would later make a second appearance. Clyde also showed up, albeit with Lincoln, in the show's final half-hour episode "Phantom Freakout".

In return, The Loud House cut back on appearances from the spin-off's characters after Season 4. Season 5 was the first to not feature Ronnie Anne at all, while Bobby only appeared whenever Lori showed up (including the live-action A Loud House Christmas). Even in The Loud House Movie, the show's only representation were the two in the Mercado. It would have been great to see more crossovers, but the spinoff likely wanted to avoid relying so much on its predecessor.

The show also avoided bringing up the elephant in the room of Bobby and Ronnie Anne's parents Arturo and Maria being either separated or divorced. The former was brought up in the first episode, while the only affirmation of the latter came from a text blurb about Arturo in the graphic novels.

Considering the seriousness of such a topic, one that has only been explored vaguely on other animated series, it was for the best the show didn't bring it up. The closest was in the episode "Date with Destiny", where the two try to get their parents back together but in the end accept their current situation.

If there is anything else the show could have done, it would have been great to see the whole family travel outside of Great Lakes and more episodes with the Changs.

Unlike most cancellations, this is not exactly the end for the Casagrandes. Some of the family members have begun to appear over on the current sixth season of The Loud House, with possibly more appearances next season.

It remains to be seen how this will continue to work, either by the characters conveniently meeting up, more reunions, or Ronnie Anne moving back to Royal Woods. The latter option seems very unlikely.

If Ronnie Anne were to move back to Royal Woods, what would happen to her extended family and the rest of Great Lakes? Even if the whole family moved, there would be no reason to go back to Great Lakes and subsequently lose a whole set of characters.

The Casagrandes differed from other animated series not only by its protagonist, but also by the multigenerational family aspect and exploration of Latin American traditions. For Nick, it was a rare Latino-centric Nicktoon, the only other notable ones being Dora The Explorer and El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera.

While it may have run for only three seasons, the spin-off did manage to outlast around 30 other Nicktoons, including It's Pony, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Glitch Techs.

The Casagrandes streams on both Pluto TV and Paramount+. The first season is available on DVD, while the complete series is available to own on Digital.

Until next time, thank you for reading!

[marvelandimagine]

I think some people mad about the arm is not necessarily about the fact that Ayo disabling the arm itself, it's more of the fact that it was not necessary and the fact that Bucky had no idea they can do that. If I were to be honest, I think it was not that necessary because Ayo is well capable of taking him down without having to disarm him and she is definitely not threatened by him. I think what some people find upsetting about that scene is the fact that it kinda comes off as Ayo putting Bucky in a position where it would make him feel like he doesn't have full control of his own body after all. The Wakandans, especially Ayo, T'Challa and Shuri had every right to feel betrayed and upset but the point is they should have told Bucky about how the arm can easily be disabled like that, they didn't know Bucky was going to set Zemo free when they gave him the arm and regardless of the things they have done for him and if they were ones who gave him the arm, they should have at least told him about it, because it's connected to him, it's a part of HIS body. It doesn't matter if it was necessary to disarm him or not, the point is they should have told him about it because apart from the fact that it's his body and that it was a bit insensitive given his history, it's also a point of vulnerability, and the fact that she did it in front of Walker (and possibly Zemo) --- people who can easily turn on Bucky, could easily that to their advantage and attempt to disable it themselves. Just my thoughts on it.

Thank you for sharing your perspective, anon!

I’m going to use this long-ass reply to address this stuff with Ayo and also voice some thoughts I’ve had over the past few weeks seeing people paint Bucky into being this complete soft and harmless human that needs 25-7 protection which I don’t jive with — and this is me, a complete Bucky stan.

Many moons ago, I saw a post that compared 1940s Bucky moving with stealth and a loaded gun on the train to the Winter Soldier doing the same thing, essentially discussing the similarities and debating how much of non-brainwashed Bucky was in the Soldier. And I think the fandom forgets or chooses to neglect the following when painting him as this fragile, peace-loving guy:

Bucky was an incredibly skilled sniper in the United States Army. His job is to eliminate threats in the most efficient way possible, and he’s good at it. HYDRA gets their hands on him and + the serum, this gets magnified. It wasn’t like HYDRA turned him into someone with the ability and mental capacity to kill — that was already there. The brainwashing and torture just carved out the rest of him to leave those honed skills and an amplified ruthlessness with no moral issues, no sense of self to contend with. That ruthlessness is part of Bucky, whether people like it or not.

When Bucky is outside of HYDRA for the first time and hiding in Civil War and gets attacked, he’s so brutal in his actions that Steve Rogers, the man who literally was ready to die to save Bucky and free him when no one else believed in the good in him, intervenes because “Buck, you’re going to kill someone.” Bucky responds that he’s not going to kill anyone, but the fact remains: with or without HYDRA control, Bucky has a strong capacity for violence that hovers on brutality — again, what’s the most efficient way to eliminate or neutralize a threat? Like, I don’t want to kill you, but I’ll knock your ass out with cinder blocks to the chest.

Bucky has a good heart, he’s loyal, he’s smart, he’s caring, he’s the longest-standing POW in history and was turned into a slave for decades, put through unimaginable trauma and torture and horror with no escape. Bucky is also a strong and incredibly skilled super soldier who has a bionic arm, is a trained sniper, is unnervingly precise with knives, and self-describes himself as “semi-stable.” Zemo notes in the bar that “it didn’t take Bucky long to get back into form,” and he’s right because the ruthlessness and skill of the Winter Soldier is a part of him and always has been. We see it when he has his hand around Zemo’s neck and tells him he will kill him, when he rips the glass from his hand and throws it across the room.

And I’m sure the Wakandans know all this about Bucky, this light and his ability for hard-to-stop violence, whether from talking to Steve and Bucky or doing their own homework. And they still choose to help him out of the goodness of their hearts because he’s been put through hell and they believe they have the capacity to help him and it’s the right thing to do — they’re betting more on those positive attributes. And they put a failsafe on his arm, a literal weapon, and chose not to tell him. You know why I think that shows how much they did care about him? Because they could’ve blatantly come out and said “Hey, we don’t trust you,” and hurt him outright, but they didn’t because they’re betting on the light in Bucky to outweigh the dark or any future manipulation. That it’s a worst-case scenario function they hope to never have to use — so they’re prepared if shit hits the fan, and if it doesn’t, Bucky doesn’t have to be hurt feeling like he can’t be trusted. I see no issues here, they’re just being cautious.

Now coming to Ayo, my QUEEN Ayo. From that beautiful, beautiful opening scene, we get to see her support, her reassurance, her belief that Bucky will be able to work through this, even when he doesn’t believe it himself. She watches him fight and struggle and cry, and you can feel the hope in her and how moved she is when she gets to tell him it worked, he did it — he’s free. And she says it not once, but twice. And you can hear not just the comfort, but the PRIDE and warmth in her voice directed to him, who I’m sure she’s watched throughout the whole deprogramming process and gotten to know and is happy to see him work through the pain and come out on the other side.

And then she sees that same individual make a decision in freeing Zemo that she perceives as a “fuck you” not just to her country, but to her, someone who was charged with protecting her king. She could’ve just disarmed Bucky the second they met up, but she doesn’t. She takes the time to explain her side and her feelings, her guilt and her shame, and basically implies that she feels betrayed by Bucky because Wakanda helped him and now he’s doing something that’s hurting her country. And still, she doesn’t attack or just go get Zemo. She gives Bucky the benefit of the doubt and a whole 8-hour American workday to do what he has to do because again, she believes in the best of him. And then that time limit runs up, and he chooses to get in her way.

And that’s the final straw. She’s angry, she’s guilty, she’s frustrated, and she feels betrayed hurt by someone I think she did respect and care about, someone whom she worked with and helped and supported when he was his most vulnerable. Did she “need” to disarm the arm to fight Bucky? Probably not. But is she doing it in the heat of battle and adrenaline and a whole bucket ton of emotions, including what she sees as the White Wolf blatantly disrespecting her country and her as a person and even friend and she just says fuck it, I’m done? You hurt us and me, and I’m going to hurt you back? Oh yeah. And Bucky looks shocked, not because he’s a poor fragile baby and “oh no, my arm, how could you?? my TrAumA”, but in the dual realization of “oh shit, how’d you do that?!” and “oh shit, I think I crossed a line here.” And also, I don’t think a single person in that room would be able to recreate the disabling sequence other than Ayo — it’s way too targeted and specific for someone like Walker to pick it up in the whole three seconds it took.

People need to stop reducing characters to these black and white extremes of soft and hard, of good and bad. Doing so completely devalues and ignores the REALITY of the complexity of being human, and Bucky and Ayo are both great examples of that played by stellar actors who portray that range and depth extremely well. End of the day, my thought is that the failsafe in the arm was justified and people need to stop coming for Ayo based on this ridiculous narrative that Bucky is too traumatized and sensitive and too much of a fave to ever be challenged or he’ll explode into dust. Boy deserves a life of freedom and healing and mental health support, but he’s also still a formidable opponent with the capacity for violence and skillset to kill. People are more than one thing.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk!!

[nobodyfamousposts]

Miracle Queen Aftermath

Because there is a disappointing lack of focus or depth for the aftermath of Miracle Queen in canon, I have made my own.

Be warned of: Chloe salt. A lot of it. Chloe faces consequences for things.

Some Bustier salt. Some Adrien being called out on things (but he gets better).

Enjoy!

In the weeks following the Miracle Queen incident, a lot had happened.

Hawk Moth had increased his power, and was now able to summon akumas and amoks at the same time.

Master Fu was gone and now Ladybug found herself the official Guardian of the Miraculous—along with the Miracle Box, kwamis, and duties that entails.

Marinette had resolved to let go of her crush on Adrien, and to support him and Kagami in their new relationship together.

And Chloe had been arrested and would now be going on trial for assisting a terrorist.

It was that last bit of news that had caused the most commotion in Paris and the world at large. What people would have dismissed as simply another akuma attack turned into a much greater matter when accusations started to be made about Chloe helping the super villain intentionally. This was soon backed by multiple eyewitness accounts and further proven by leaked video evidence showing Chloe not only attempting to grab a butterfly for herself after she was de-akumatized but even negotiating with the terrorist before the incident in which she betrayed the heroes of Paris and revealed the identities of most of the team.

To say that the people of Paris were outraged was putting it mildly. People were akumatized over it. Chloe was in a secured facility where she had armed guards around to watch her just as much as they were there to protect her. New legislation was being considered to specifically address willingly aiding supervillains. The backlash was so severe that many were calling the mayor’s own position into question.

After all, if his daughter could do all of that, who was to say that he wasn’t also in Hawk Moth’s pocket?

For Mayor Andre, his hands were tied. While he had covered for his daughter and her selfishness in the past, this was one thing he couldn’t overlook. Not when it brought his position as mayor under scrutiny. And certainly not when it opened a probe into his own dealings.

None of this was helped either by the multitude of witnesses of Chloe‘s past behavior. In particular, her many victims over the years.

And there were a lot.

Now that Chloe was actually being held accountable for something, it seemed to have opened a floodgate of outcries as the many people she tormented finally felt able to air their grievances. They came out on TV, on social media, on radio. Stories littered the air and internet of the horrors of dealing with this single teenage girl.

“She tried to cheat during this designing competition. She apparently stole some other girl’s hat design and tried to pass it off as her own.”

“She was the reason the mayor tried to shut down my ice skating rink! To build another gym! Paris has enough gyms! Why couldn’t she just go to one of those?”

“She had her dad shut down Clara Nightingale’s music video and got her akumatized just because she didn’t get to play Ladybug. We waited in that line for HOURS and didn’t get chosen either, but no one else threw a fit over it.”

“She shoved a giant signed poster of Adrien Agreste professing his love to her in my friend’s face just to make her cry! I found out after the fact that he didn’t even know about it!”

“Our entire school was punished for someone pulling the fire alarm except for her because she threatened our principal. So while the rest of us were having to clean up the school, she spent the entire time insulting and making fun of us.“

“Knowing her, she probably pulled the fire alarm in the first place.”

“She tried to crash a train! I don’t think I can emphasize that enough: she tried to crash a train!“

“Chloe Bourgeois joined up with Hawk Moth? Can’t say it’s a shock.”

“Yeah, given how many akumas she caused, I’d been wondering if she hadn’t been working with him all along.”

It wasn’t that unbelievable to the populous. Nor did anyone feel particularly sympathetic towards her for her current situation. Some might have for lack of knowing her, but Chloe had carved herself a special place in the memories and hearts of nearly every Parisian. There was nobody who didn’t know of her or have some experience with her by this point. So when it came out that she was arrested and facing criminal charges, the response was…rather telling.

Practically everyone was calling loved ones as soon as they heard, resulting in high phone and internet traffic. The Ladyblog crashed after making the announcement. Several people threw parties. People over the internet started coming up with a list of “Things We Will Be Allowed To Do Once Chloe Is In Prison”, with a count that currently rested at 139 and was rising quickly. One guy bought 500 cupcakes and just started passing them out to people on the street singing a jaunty little tune from some late 1930’s cult classic American movie. The school had closed down for a couple of days due to several teachers calling out sick—possibly with hangovers from celebrating a bit too hard. Various Queen-related hashtags and memes were trending with each seeming to fight for the top spot of most used. #let her eat cake was currently in the lead. And Mr. Ramier somehow orchestrated a 21 pigeon salute. On Chloe’s rooftop.

As it was, nobody expressed surprise when it came out that she worked with a supervillain. Many were disappointed, shaking their heads and saying “if only something had been done sooner” or blaming the parents and teachers and other adults in her life. Most were angry, mainly that things had been allowed to get this far and that they hadn’t been acted on earlier—particularly after the train incident.

But no. Nobody was surprised.

Except, perhaps, Marinette herself.

Still reeling from the events of Miracle Queen and the aftermath of…well…everything involved, Marinette had been questioning herself. Constantly. Incessantly. Going over and over in her mind all the things she could have done differently. Blaming herself for all the major blows to their team.

She lost her mentor. Her allies have been compromised. Chloe, one of her former allies, chose to betray them all. Hawk Moth had the grimoire now. Marinette didn’t have a grimoire. Fu had no memories.

And it was all because of her mistakes.

Last time, the prospect of never having to deal with Chloe again had been a relief.

Now…it was background static to her.

She could barely hear the announcements and cheers over the endless cycle of her own thoughts.

I should have tried harder. I should have been more aware. I failed them all. This is because of me.

So while everyone else in Paris was celebrating, de-stressing, or just outright reveling in the news, Marinette was grieving. With the help of the kwamis and Chat Noir, she had been trying to come to terms with what happened and figure out the next plan of action.

Hawk Moth had changed the game, so she needed to step up hers.

The days seemed to have passed in a blur. Between working with the kwamis, trying to recreate and retranslate the grimoire, and simply trying to deal with the remnants of Fu’s life that he had left to her, Marinette had barely even kept up with the current state of things in Paris. Or in particular, Chloe.

Not until the day came when Bustier made an announcement.

Chloe‘s trial date was finally decided. And though she didn’t say as such, it was clear that the case against her was pretty solid. There was video evidence. Eye witness accounts. And Chloe’s own words and actions working against her.

The odds were not in her favor on this. Even if her parents did try to help her, she wasn’t going to get off this time. Aside from getting the best lawyers money by, there really wasn’t much they could do.

Maybe that was why Bustier had tried to step in?

“Now class, I have received word that they are moving to the next step with Chloe’s hearing. Right now, they are looking for character witnesses for Chloe’s defense.” The kind teacher explained, causing Marinette to snap to awareness and realize just what was going on. Partly because of the mention of Chloe and her court case.

But mostly because of the sudden dead silence in the class…

To be fair, she wasn’t sure she could say anything either. Marinette felt her throat go dry and her muscles tense. There was a sudden tightness in her lungs that while she could breathe, it felt like she was suffocating. Why was Bustier bringing this up now?

The teacher smiled, seemingly unaware of the sudden tension and Marinette’s slow drowning. “I know this has been a difficult experience knowing that one of your classmates is facing such a trial. And Chloe will certainly need support. So I thought it would be kind if everyone wrote a letter supporting her for the hearing coming up, so the courts can hear about Chloe and understand more about who she is.”

Silence. Dead silence.

Maybe Bustier herself picked up on the growing tension, as she proceeded to move to passing out papers to the class. “I thought it would make for a nice project, so I will give you all the forms explaining the requirements. Take some time to think over what positive things you want to say about Chloe. If you have any questions, please feel free to come talk to me.”

After that, she quickly left the room, citing the desire to let them have this free time to work on the letters.

The class remained silent for a good minute after she left. Almost as if they were questioning if she would return. Or perhaps if she was listening.

Then—

“‘Think about what positive things we want to say about Chloe?’ Well that’s easy!” Alix spoke blithely, curling the paper she received into a ball. “Nothing!” She shouted and tossed it over her shoulder. “Assignment done!”

Murmurs filled the classroom. Some sounded uncertain, but most seemed to be in agreement. Or at least expressing distaste for the assignment.

“Is she serious?”

“Does she really expect us to?”

“Of all the worst ideas...”

Marinette could hear them, but couldn’t seem to acknowledge anything around her. And furthermore, she couldn’t make herself respond.

Chloe‘s trial was set for a point in the next few weeks, and at this point there was no denying just what type of person she was. If anything, this was probably the first time that anyone was allowed to actually speak their mind about the girl, and they were all reveling in it. Her classmates in particular.

Marinette couldn’t quite bring herself to.

Sure, Chloe has tried to blackmail her more than once.

And damaged her gift to their teacher.

And attempted to frame her a few times.

And stolen her hat design.

And her diary.

And a Miraculous.

And all of the other Miraculous.

But...she had been doing better for a while there, hadn’t she?

Didn’t she only betray them all in the end because Marinette had chosen Kagami over her for her own selfish reasons? Didn’t Hawk Moth only capture Fu because of her own mistake? Hadn’t Chloe only revealed everyone else because she felt betrayed? Couldn’t Marinette have done more to prevent Chloe turning?

Wasn’t a simple letter on Chloe’s virtues the least she could do?

So why...

Why couldn’t she seem to bring herself to?

Kim frowned, looking at his paper in worry. “We’re not going to get graded on this, are we?”

Nathaniel huffed. “I’ll willingly take the failing grade any day.”

“Hear hear!”

“But if it’s a grade…” Max murmured to himself. Out of everyone in the class, he took his grades the most seriously, so this was no doubt a difficult choice for him. He looked at his paper with a rather conflicted expression for a minute before sighing and turning it face-down on the desk. “No. It’s an impossible task in the first place.”

Kim rested a hand on Max’s shoulder in sympathy. It wasn’t that he cared as much about grades as Max did, but it was clear that the fallout of refusing could be more troubling for the genius who took his academic performance so seriously. If Bustier did make it a mandatory assignment with a grade, it’d be horribly unfair of her.

“What was it Chloe said before?” Ivan asked, looking over his page with a glare. “Once a monster, always a monster? I guess she’d know more than anyone.”

Mylene hugged him. “You’re not a monster. You never chose to be.”

“None of us did.” Nino agreed.

“Nobody did except her.” Alix bit out.

Mumbles of agreement came from the rest of the class. It was clear that none of them were on board with having anything to do with Chloe, much less try to help her with her current legal woes.

There was a large part of Marinette that agreed with them. But even so, there was also a large part of her that insisted she had to do the right thing and help.

She knew she should say something. She was supposed to say something here. Because it was her fault, after all. She was Ladybug. She had to be the better person. Shouldn’t she?

“Marinette? Girl, are you okay?” Alya asked, drawing her attention. “You look a bit pale.”

It was too much. It was suffocating.

“I think I need some air. Excuse me.”

She didn’t know if anyone watched her leave the classroom. She hadn’t even noticed if anyone had chosen to follow her.

Not until…

“Marinette, are you all right?”

She spun around in surprise.

“Oh! Adrien! Hey! Hi! Hello!” She blabbered. Why was he here? Did he come out after her? Why? She didn’t need this right now! She struggled enough with him under normal circumstances, she wasn’t sure she could handle being alone with him now. Her stress over everything was bad enough, but having him approach her set her anxiety skyrocketing.

“Hey,” he replied, smiling at her—and oh, what a beautiful smile. On any other day, it would ease her worries and make her want to swoon, but right now, it just made her more nervous.

“Are you all right?” He asked again. “You didn’t look so well in class.”

“Y-yeah. Just…” she sighed. “I just have a lot on my mind. With…you know…everything.”

He nodded in understanding. “I know what you mean.”

She smiled. She could always count on Adrien to be a calming supportive friend. He was always so sweet and reliable. If anyone could understand or relate to the chaotic mix of emotions she was feeling, he could.

He sighed in sympathy. “Poor Chloe.”

She froze.

“Chloe?”

“Well, yeah.” He replied, like it was obvious. “I mean, she did a bad thing, but now she’s going through the worst experience of her life. One that could ruin her future. And people are glad about it!” He shook his head. “It’s just too cruel.”

Marinette just stared.

He wasn’t wrong. But…that was what he was worried about?

She couldn’t fault him of course, because Adrien was always so kind and considerate and of course he’d feel for Chloe but…something about this just…pulled at something inside of her and was choking it.

“Chloe is already suffering enough and it feels like no one wants to help her. You heard them.” He gestured back to the classroom. “We’re being given an opportunity to make a difference for her and they’re all just saying she deserves it. Chloe is alone and hurting and they want her to hurt more.”

She felt a denial on her lips but couldn’t give voice to it.

“Everyone is so great with each other. It’s always just Chloe who is kind of on the outside. I know you’ve seen it.”

She hadn’t, actually. Because it was never Chloe on the outside looking in, it was Chloe looking down on them. Whether it was because she genuinely thought she was better or because it made her feel better to do so.

He hesitated for a moment before looking at her. And there was something in his expression that told her he was about to ask something. A gut feeling told her that it was going to be something she wouldn’t like.

“Do you think you could talk to them?” He asked her, looking so sad and despondent that she just wanted to hug him and agree to anything to make that look go away.

“M-me?”

He wanted her to convince her classmates to help Chloe?

“I know you and Chloe have had your differences, but you’ve been able to see past her front. And you’ve done a lot to help her before.” He smiled. “Like the party you threw for her after she became Queen Bee.”

A traitorous voice asked if giving her a second chance with the Miraculous she had previously stolen wasn’t enough? Why did she have to feel bad for her leaving and throw her a party to make her feel special?

“Chloe really needs the help right now. And you’re always so good about that sort of thing.” He looked to her imploringly. “Do you think you could try to get them to at least give Chloe a hand? I don’t know what impact it’ll have in her hearing, but any little bit helps, right?”

Go back in there? With the tension and the suffocation to try and convince her classmates to help when she was questioning whether to herself?

But she had to, right? After all, couldn’t she have prevented this if she had acted sooner? Couldn’t she have helped sooner instead of being focused on her own petty problems? Isn’t that what Ladybug should do?

“Please, Marinette? They listen to you. If you asked them to, I’m sure they’d be willing to at least try.”

Her vision started to dim, seeming to tunnel in on Adrien and his sad and hopeful expression. Her thoughts crying about CHLOE and poor CHLOE and how hurt CHLOE was and how it was her fault for CHLOE—

“I—”

“Oh no! No, you do NOT.”

Marinette suddenly found herself torn away from Adrien by a sudden grab of her arm and pulling sensation. She felt as if she was pushed out of the way by a fierce gale. Like a raging whirlwind had spun her around and behind it.

That whirlwind’s name was Alya.

“How dare you? How dare you try to make my girl be responsible for this!”

Marinette floundered because she had not expected this and oh no now her best friend looked ready to tear her crush’s head off!

“Alya, we don’t have to do this!” She pleaded, trying to calm the other girl down.

“Oh, we most certainly do.” Came another voice. And sure enough, the rest of the class had stepped out as well. All of them looked in varying ranges of frustrated and that frustration was clearly directed at her and Adrien.

Or rather just Adrien, as Marinette discovered when Rose and Juleka pulled her aside and out of their direct line of sight. They were all looking at Adrien, and those were not nice or understanding expressions.

Oh no! This was a disaster! Now everyone was upset and she should have just agreed or said something sooner!

Completely unaware of Marinette’s inner turmoil, Alya stepped forward and jabbed at Adrien in the chest. “You are not going to make my girl feel bad and try to help someone who has never done a single nice thing for her or anyone.” She spat out, forcing him to back away.

Adrien held his hands up in a placating gesture. “Come on, Chloe is not that bad.“

“Not that bad?” Nino exclaimed, shaking his head in disbelief at his friend’s words. “Adrien, Chloe betrayed us!“

“She took over Paris!”

“She turned us into her servants!“

“Not to mention the other things…”

“Do we really have to name each time?” Alya started to count on her fingers. “Chloe CHOSE to take the Miraculous for herself instead of returning it. She CHOSE to transform in front of everyone and reveal her identity to the world. She CHOSE to try and crash a train, risking the lives of EVERYONE on board just to show off. She CHOSE to run off with it when Ladybug tried to take it back.”

“She also chose to continue being horrible to everyone even after Ladybug gave her a second chance.” Nathaniel added, bitterly. “She didn’t get better after becoming Queen Bee. It just became another thing for her to lord over people.”

Alya nodded. “And when Ladybug made it clear to her that she wasn’t going to be Queen Bee again, she felt ENTITLED to something that was never hers in the first place. And because of that, she made the active, knowing, and willful choice to work with Hawk Moth.”

“And out all of us while she was at it.” Kim added. “Turning us into her personal ‘guard’. Making us fight our heroes against our will.” He shuddered. “I don’t know if you were hit by those things, Adrien, but it was NOT a pleasant experience having your body turned into a puppet.”

Adrien wanted to argue that he understood full well, but that was only as Chat. He couldn’t say that here.

Unaware of his inner turmoil, Alya continued. “So no, we are not going to forgive Chloe. We are not going to try and ‘get along’ with her because her own poor choices have led her to have a ‘rough time’.”

Adrien grew nervous at the way the others drew closer to Alya as she spoke, clearly backing her statements as she continued.

“We are not going to defend her or speak up on her behalf to the entirety of Paris she ALSO betrayed. Whatever consequences Chloe has to face—quite possibly the first ones she will EVER have faced in her LIFE—are nothing less than what she deserves.”

“Yeah!” Came the exclamations from the rest of the crowd.

“She didn’t know what she was doing!” Adrien argued.

“Not know what she was doing?! Adrien, she willingly accepted an akuma! She used it to take control of us and revealed us to Hawk Moth!” Alya exclaimed. “That’s just—how can you even justify that?”

With as angry as Alya was, any lesser or wiser man would have backed off.

Adrien…well, she certainly would never call him unwise, so it had to be because he was more strong-willed than that to be willing to stand his ground here.

“Hawk Moth was the one who manipulated Chloe!” He insisted. “And he’s the one who got away scott free and left Chloe to take the fall.”

“And whose fault was that?” Alya countered. “Chloe HELPED him. He only got as far as he did because of her and he only got away because she helped him!”

“Don’t you think this is cruel?” He argued back. “Yes, Chloe was wrong, but she was already called out for what she did by Ladybug and Chat Noir. The entire city hates her. Isn’t that enough?”

“NO!” Alya shouted. “No, it isn’t! Because Chloe has always gotten away with her antics in the past but you’re actually trying to get us to let Chloe off for a legitimate crime here! If Chloe is going to prison, it’s only because she deserves it!”

Around them, several of the others in the class nodded in agreement.

“How can you say that?” Adrien demanded. “Chloe made a mistake and she’s suffering for it! All this time, she’s felt left out and cut off and this only further emphasizes that for her! She’s been alone all this time and now she’s alone and miserable!”

“Then why should that be OUR problem?” Alya questioned, raising her hands in exasperation. “Why are you trying to MAKE it our problem?!”

Adrien drew back, looking genuinely hurt.

"But treating someone badly never made them become a good person."

"Yeah, because letting Chloe have her way all this time has totally made strides in her path to becoming a good person." Alix called out sarcastically.

"If anything, it's made her worse." Max added. "She's gone from simply causing akumas to intentionally becoming one."

“But—”

Alya cut him off. “But nothing, Adrien! You have to have some gall to be trying to get us to make nice with Chloe after she betrayed us all! And here I thought your little lecture to Marinette to make her feel bad for being relieved that Chloe was leaving Paris was pretty hard to beat.”

Nino blanched at that. “You did what?” He turned on Adrien. “Dude! You know that happened after Chloe tried to crash that train!”

“She was just trying to prove herself.” Adrien weakly argued.

“PEOPLE were on there!” Nino bit out. “They could have DIED because Chloe was showing off! And you got on to MARINETTE? Where was this attitude with Chloe?”

“I’ve called her out!”

“Yeah, one time.” Alya groused. “AFTER the rest of us had spent the better part of the day cleaning up after HER mess. Which she never apologized for or admitted to doing, by the way.”

“And in response, she threw a party.” Juleka muttered.

“It was a nice party, sure.” Rose added quickly.

Alya though shook her head. “But being a good hostess is nowhere near the same thing as being a good person. And before the night was over, you rolled over for her and she went RIGHT back to acting as she always had.”

“She made Mylene cry.” Ivan glared. “She made Mylene cry and you just laughed.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You said it yourself: ‘she’ll never change’. Except you said that like it was a good thing.”

Marinette looked back and forth between the two, everything inside her screaming at her to help. But she was completely lost on which one she was supposed to help. Because Adrien had a point about what Chloe’s going through but Alya was right about what Chloe did and she needed to do the “right thing” and help Chloe but why did everything Alya say resonate so strongly with her and bring such a feeling of vindication—

No. She was getting distracted. She needed to help. And right now, it was Adrien against the rest of the class.

But Alya was worked up. And Adrien was looking past her to Marinette, eyes begging for help and still so hopeful that she would step in. And Chloe was still in prison and Marinette could fix everything if she just tried so why can’t she try?

“Alya,” Marinette tried. “You told me to give Chloe a chance before after the fire alarm incident, remember? You said we were a lot alike.”

“That was to get you to go to a party!” Alya shouted, making Marinette step back in surprise. “I never meant it like this!”

She stepped forward and took Marinette by the shoulders, holding her sternly.

“Marinette, you are nothing like Chloe! Not where it counts! Yeah, you both can be short sighted when it comes to trying for what you want, but you at least notice and CARE how other people feel! And when you make a mistake, you at least TRY to make it right!”

She shook her head.

“Chloe…doesn’t.”

“She doesn’t try to.” Alix cut in. “If Chloe was feeling sad and lonely, that was pretty much her own fault.”

Adrien looked like he wanted to argue, but Alix didn’t even give him a chance.

“It wasn’t like we left her out. We went well out of our way to try and befriend her. We invited her to things. We tried to help her. Hell, you said it yourself—Marinette has tried to help her more than anybody! And each and every time, Chloe only took what we offered like it was something we owed her but that she was also too good for. I mean, I certainly can’t recall a time she ever thanked me. Can you?” She asked, turning to the other classmates.

All around them, there were murmurs of agreement. Maybe a couple hesitated as they tried to recall a time—one single moment of kindness on Chloe’s part only to come up empty.

“Chloe’s had a hard time.” Adrien insisted. “You know how her parents are—”

“Oh yes, her ‘Daddy the Mayor’.” Alix rolled her eyes. “Like we don’t hear enough about him every time it comes to something Chloe wants. She only threatens us or anyone with him every other day.”

Adrien shook his head and tried to explain. “It’s only because her parents aren’t there for her emotionally.”

“Again, not seeing how this is our problem? Or justification for anything she’s done to us? Or how this excuses her willingly helping a supervillain?”

“Because we’re her classmates!” He argued back, gesturing to all of them. “Out of everyone, we’ve all had the most interactions with her.”

“All of which were negative.” Came a cutting remark, followed by grumbling.

“There were good times, too!” Adrien insisted with a frown. His eyes spanned over the assembled classmates before they came to rest on one in particular. “Kim, you have to have seen Chloe’s good side. You liked her before.”

“Before.” Kim replied, emphasizing the word and the timeframe it referred to. “But being humiliated and her sending out that pic to everyone in school kind of crushed that crush.”

“How did she even have our numbers?” Ivan asked.

“But there had to be something that made you like her in the first place.” Adrien encouraged.

The taller boy shrugged, uncertain and uncaring. “Maybe so, but was it something that was really there? Or something I just wanted to see? Because I’m looking back and quite frankly, I don’t know what past me was thinking.”

“Wow, that’s deep, man.” Nathaniel whispered.

“Thanks!”

Seeing Nathaniel gave Adrien an idea. “Wait, Nathaniel! Didn’t Chloe let you put her in your comic?”

“Forced us to, more like.” The artist bit back. “And even when we tried to fit her, we got nothing but complaints from her. It was no wonder we never got past the initial concept art for her character.”

Adrien winced. “It was an attempt, at least?”

Nathaniel wasn’t buying it. “A poor one.”

“She’s been trying to be better.” Adrien was getting increasingly frustrated. This was not how he was expecting this argument to go. “Rose? What about you? You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

After all, Rose was sweet and caring, always willing to see the good in anyone. Surely she would have something nice about Chloe!

Juleka frowned at him over his focus on her girlfriend and moved to stand beside her. “Don’t push her.”

Still he tried.

“Rose?”

“I’m sorry, Adrien.” Rose said, hugging herself. “But Chloe has done nothing but hurt people. And going out of our way to protect her has only ended up biting us.”

That wasn’t true. Not...all the time at least. There had to have been at least one instance where she did the right thing!

Adrien brightened in realization. “Didn’t she catch you when you fell after being deakumatized during Heroes Day?”

The blonde girl frowned. “Well, yes…but she wasn’t very nice about it. Even though I did the same for her before.”

“Rose, come on…”

She shook her head. “I put myself at risk to help Chloe when she was being chased by zombies, and only got turned into one for my efforts. Chloe never appreciated it. She never thanked me. She didn’t even do anything to help when we were trying to keep her safe!”

“We all ended up kissing zombies because of her.” Alix accused, crossing her arms and looking particularly annoyed. “And not just because she caused the akuma in the first place.”

“Why are you pushing this?” Mylene asked. “We’ve been asked. We said no. Isn’t that enough?”

“But—”

“Adrien, you’ve got a good heart.” Ivan started.

“Easy for him when he’s not the one who has to be on the receiving end of Chloe’s tantrums.” Alix cut in, clearly sounding bitter.

“You’ve got a good heart.” Ivan repeated, sending Alix a look that asked her to back off. “But Chloe…doesn’t.”

Adrien shook his head, remaining insistent. “That’s why she needs help.”

“If she needs help,” Mylene spoke, “It should come from her parents. Her teachers. Any of the adults in her life. She has plenty of adults who are fully capable of helping her. It should not be expected to come from the kids she’s spent years tormenting.”

She gestured to herself and the others around her. “And that’s what she’s been doing: tormenting us.”

“To great joy, might I add.” Max droned.

“She hasn’t been cruel to everyone.” Adrien muttered.

That brought out a backlash of outrage.

“She outted my crush!”

“She insulted Mylene’s cooking and made her cry!”

“She got Aurore akumatized and nearly caused Paris to be incinerated in a volcano!”

“She tried to push Mylene out of the lead role of our movie!”

“She locked Juleka in the restroom!”

Wait...

But that hadn’t been Chloe. She had stayed with the class at the time. The one who did do it was...

He glanced around until he saw her—a redhead in the background behind the rest of the class. She looked anxious and uncomfortable, and almost seemed to be trying to edge around the class to get to the stairs.

Adrien did seem aware. Or rather, he was focused on the fact she was there.

“Sabrina? What about you? Chloe was your friend!”

Of course she would help! Because who better than her own best friend to speak on her behalf?

The rest of the class broke into mutters as they realized the same.

But Sabrina...bit her lip and looked away. Refusing to even meet Adrien’s gaze.

“Sabrina?” Marinette tried, concerned about this reaction. Sabrina had been Chloe’s best friend—or at least the closest thing she could have to a friend. “Minion” or “Servant” would be more accurate. “Slave” would be more honest.

The girl had been Chloe’s only real fan and follower, and had assisted Chloe in some of her worst plots.

Marinette had briefly seen another side to her. A girl who was so desperate for friendship that she latched onto even the slightest bit of kindness and went to the greatest of extremes to appease the “friend” so they wouldn’t leave her. It was no wonder she had fallen in with Chloe—someone like that was perfect for the spoiled girl. Compared to her, Marinette’s anxieties and need to please were nothing.

And Chloe had pretty much been her world for years.

What must she be feeling now?

“Should we really be getting her opinion?” Ivan whispered. “You know how she and Chloe were…”

“Well, if anyone would have anything positive to tell the courts about Chloe, it would be her.” Mylene whispered back.

Sabrina took a breath and spoke quickly—almost shouting in her rush.

“I’m sorry but my therapist said I shouldn’t!”

That got a surprise. The rest of the classmates glanced to each other before looking back to the girl. Adrien in particular looked shell-shocked. Marinette couldn’t blame him. She felt the same.

Sabrina for her part seemed to tense up, as if ready to defend herself from the rest of the class.

Marinette stepped forward. “Sabrina? Are…you okay?”

The other girl shook her head, looking close to tears.

“After word got out what Chloe did, the police had to question me about Chloe. They were able to see that I wasn’t involved, but they…didn’t like what I told them about our relationship. Afterwards, my dad decided to have me see a counselor and she…has been telling me things that I hadn’t really considered.” She curled in on herself. “They all think I should stay away from Chloe and anything directly related to her…for my own health.”

Adrien frowned at that. “But don’t you want to help Chloe?”

Sabrina jumped. “Of course, I do!”

“Hold up, Adrien!” Nino stepped in. “She just said police took her in because of Chloe!”

“But they let her go…”

“It still happened!” Mylene argued. “It doesn’t matter how nice they are, how innocent you know you are, or if you’re released in the end, it’s still terrifying when it happens!”

"And it only happened to her because of Chloe." Alya added.

Rose, in her infinite sweetness, reached out to take Sabrina’s hand in support. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

Sabrina sobbed and covered her face. Aside from Rose, no one else really attempted to comfort her. Most of them simply watched her, pitying her current state. But they also remembered how complicit she had been in Chloe’s schemes, so they were conflicted. While they did feel bad for her current situation, there was a part of most of them that noted how she had brought it upon herself by being Chloe‘s lackey for so long, so their sympathy was limited.

Perhaps it was out of awkwardness, or maybe an attempt to give some respect for Sabrina’s privacy that the classmates turned away from her and instead focused on the heart of the argument.

“Man...” Nino tried. “Maybe you should let it go?” Though it was clear from his tone that he knew it wasn’t likely.

Because Adrien had still not given up, it seemed.

He looked around between of the classmates, growing more desperate. But those that remained either looked at him straight on as if daring him to call on them or looked away. A few of them even closed ranks as if to block his view of certain others. It was clear none of them were willing to help him on this.

None of them except…

“Marinette.” He called out, drawing her gaze to him instantly. “You understand, don’t you?”

She bit her lip. “I…”

“Back off, Adrien.” Kim said, giving the other boy an angry frown as he stood in front of her to shield her from his gaze. “It’s not on Marinette to help Chloe.”

“Yeah! She suffered more than any of us!“ Ivan shouted.

“She has been Chloe’s main target for years.” Nathaniel agreed. “She is the last person who is obligated to help Chloe now.“

Adrien winced at the harshness of their words and in their tone. “I just thought that Marinette could help. Like before.”

“Just because she could doesn’t mean she should have had to.” Alya countered. “She’s a teenager. Dealing with Chloe should have been the job of adults. Her parents. Bustier. Damocles. Any one of them should have done something—and if they can’t, the courts will. It’s their job. Not ours.”

“And getting her to help you wouldn’t make a difference anyway even if you had convinced us.” Max said, shifting his glasses. “Chloe helped Hawk Moth. There is nothing we could say that could undo that. And even if we did try, we would either be guilty of committing perjury or aiding in a conspiracy.”

“What?” Adrien jerked in surprise.

“The best we can do is be character witnesses.” Mylene explained. “But this is a court and we can’t claim something that isn’t true! We can’t say anything nice about Chloe when she hasn’t done anything nice!”

Max nodded and shifted his glasses. “Furthermore, our testimonies—even if they were positive—would only serve to create a narrative about Chloe and the type of person she is. They can’t explain away the current evidence against her.”

He rubbed the back of his head. He knew there were issues, but he also knew Chloe. He knew what she could be like. He knew she was a good person deep down. “I know she’s made some mistakes—”

“No.” Alya stated sharply. “Calling them ‘Mistakes’ implies that her actions were unintentional. ‘Mistakes’ implies that people were harmed by accident. ‘Mistakes’ implies that she would have any point learned from them. They weren’t mistakes, Adrien. They were willful acts of cruelty every single time.”

Ivan shook his head, pityingly. “We can’t save Chloe from this. We have nothing to say in her defense. The kindest thing we can do for her is stay silent.”

“She’s better than you think she is. She threw that party once for everyone, remember? You all went.” Adrien reminded them.

“That only proved that she could throw a party and be a good host, not that she could be a good person. There is a difference.” Nathaniel pointed out.

“Not that Chloe could tell.“ Alix sniped.

Adrien ignored the barb. He had given up on getting any of them to listen and now only had eyes for her. His last hope.

“Marinette….come on…please.”

She hesitated.

Everything in her that was Ladybug and her crush on Adrien and her desire to make people happy and take the high road and give second-third-fourth chances wanted nothing more than to give it to him.

Except...

There was a long pause. No one spoke.

The other classmates have had their say. They were letting Marinette have hers. And she knew in that moment that if she spoke up…if she did as Adrien wished and tried to help Chloe…she knew they would go along with her. It may be more out of respect for Marinette than it would be out of any sort of forgiveness for anything Chloe had done, but it would still help Chloe and it would still make Adrien happy.

…and hadn’t Marinette already done that enough?

“Did you know?” Marinette started, not looking at anyone. “I would have been well within my rights to press charges against Chloe?”

Adrien balked at that.

“She’s stolen from me at least three times now.” She shrugged. “I mean, sure, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about my diary since she had Sabrina steal it for her, but she did steal my hat design for a competition and I had proof. I could have pressed charges against Chloe and let her face some consequences…but I didn’t.”

She looked up at Adrien. “I also could have pressed charges for what she did to my gift for Madame Bustier. Since she did break into my locker and vandalize my property while it was still technically mine…but I didn’t.

“Adrien.” She spoke almost in monotone, the only sign of her emotions being how she clenched her fists. “Did you know that after the fashion show, my parents and I took a train to get home?”

He furrowed his brows in confusion. What did that have to do with anything?

“It was the same train Chloe took control of and nearly caused to crash.”

Several gasps resounded around them. Apparently this had not been common knowledge.

“Even if Chloe could have bought her way out of any consequence for the other things, we all could certainly have had her face some major trouble for that one…” Marinette took a shuddering breath. “But we didn’t.”

Adrien frowned. “I…I see that—”

“No, I don’t think you do.” She cut him off. “Because instead of any of that…rather than hold Chloe accountable at any point, I catered to her. I tried to understand Chloe. I tried to make things nicer for Chloe. I tried to excuse Chloe. Time and again. Just like everyone else. Just like you wanted me to. Just like you’re asking me to now. And what did that get us?”

The more she talked, the more words filled out and she was unable to stop the torrent.

“I defended her from Alya after Madame Bustier was akumatized, and Chloe stole a Miraculous and nearly got my family killed. I helped Chloe bond with her Mom—costing myself any chance at a once in a lifetime opportunity in the process—and Chloe tried to get me banished from Paris just for saying she wasn’t a superhero. I threw Chloe a party to show her some appreciation, and she willingly worked with a supervillain to take over Paris. Just to fuel her ego and because she felt she was owed something that wasn’t hers.”

She tilted her head, considering.

“What is that American saying? Three strikes and you’re out?” Her eyes narrowed. “I have given Chloe more than three chances. I have done nothing BUT give her chances. And clean up after her. And just…try to help her. At no point has she been grateful. At no point did she ever apologize. Or show the slightest bit of remorse for anyone she hurt. Or just…try to do better.”

She stepped forward. Past her classmates. Past Alya, who looked ready to tear into Adrien herself.

“So tell me, Adrien. How much more am I supposed to do? What miracle am I supposed to achieve to help Chloe to be a better person that I haven’t already done?”

“You can just try.” Adrien begged. “Chloe’s alone. She has no one in her corner. You’ve given her chances before! Can’t you find it in your heart to give her another chance this time?”

“Why haven’t you?” Alya demanded.

Adrien drew back in surprise at that.

But the girl wasn’t letting him off. “If you’re so certain Chloe is the victim in all this, then why aren’t you stepping up to help her? Why are you pushing Marinette and the rest of us to do it?”

Alya wrapped an arm around Marinette in support. “If you truly believe Chloe has some sort of inner goodness that only needs the right person to bring it out, then it’s pretty clear Marinette is just not that person. She’s tried enough.”

Alix nodded. “I’m pretty sure she could’ve demolished a brick wall with how many time she’s banged her head against it by this point trying to drag a decent person out of Chloe.”

Others in the class also nodded and gave sounds of agreement to that.

Adrien frowned, lowering his head despondently. “I’m just one person. There’s only so much weight my word will have. I just...I just want to give her the best chance.”

“That’s nice for Chloe, I guess.” Kim muttered. “But not much for us.”

Adrien looked up in surprise. “What do you mean?”

Alya stepped forward, releasing Marinette in the process. “Adrien, why should we as Chloe’s victims have to help protect her? That’s the thing we’re not getting here. WE are the ones she hurt. WE are the ones she betrayed to Hawk Moth. So why are WE supposed to try and save her from her own consequences? Why are you wanting us to?”

Adrien hesitated.

“Can you even imagine what it was like? Being frozen in time. Unable to move or speak? Only able to hear her voice in your head? Feeling your body respond as she’s calling you and being unable to stop?” She clutched her arms, as if trying to hug herself. “Do you have any idea how terrified I was knowing what she was doing to us but being completely unable to stop it? How humiliating it was when she had us bowing to her and calling her our Queen? And then…” She took a breath. “She made us fight our heroes. Ladybug and Chat Noir trusted us to help them and we used the Miraculous they entrusted to us to try and kill them.”

“We were just lucky that they were able to turn the tables on us.” Kim muttered. “I don’t even want to know what would have happened if we had won.”

“Luka still has nightmares.” Juleka whispered. “He won’t talk about it, but he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks.”

Marinette winced. She hadn’t even considered that everyone else could be suffering ramifications of Miracle Queen as well.

“We could have killed them.” Max stated. “Given the nature of the Snake Miraculous’s power, we very well could have more than once for all we know.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have killed them?” Rose suggested, trying to be positive. “I mean, Chloe wanted all of the Miraculous, right? She probably wanted them as her servants as well.”

Max glared. “I’m pretty sure I attempted to send Chat Noir into space. Even a Miraculous can’t protect someone from that.”

Adrien tried not to wince at the memory. How he managed to even move enough to activate the Miraculous, he still wasn’t sure.

“We fought against them. We never wanted to, but we did.” Alya bit out. “Not even because of Hawk Moth this time, but because of Chloe. And now you are wanting us to just…overlook the trauma of the whole thing to help Chloe after what she did. For something she hasn’t shown even the slightest remorse for.”

She shook her head.

“I know you’re nice, Adrien. But this level of kindness is a cruelty.”

He winced. And it looked like he wanted to argue. But he just…wilted.

“I just…it feels harsh. What’s happening to her. The amount of hate she’s getting. That her entire life could be over.”

That was true. While they felt her current status was well deserved, it was a harsh sentence for anyone. Especially a teenager.

Nathaniel sighed. “Adrien, it is harsh. Maybe cruel. But fact is that she still brought on herself.”

“Isn’t that just victim-blaming though?” Adrien countered, frustrated now. “I mean, Hawk Moth manipulated her! How was that her fault? He’s the one who did it. She was…” He clenched his fists in anger. “Chloe is a victim.”

“No, we are the victims.” Alya insisted, gesturing to herself and the other revealed former heroes. “We were the ones used to fight our heroes. We were the ones who had our identities revealed to the world against our will. And now we are the ones having to live with the results of Chloe‘s choices, just like we always are.“

Adrien looked ready to argue. And maybe he would have, except...

Nino rested a hand on Adrien’s shoulder.

“Adrien. Dude. Just stop. We have enough to deal with and this…this isn’t helping.”

Adrien frowned at that, concerned by his friend’s attitude. “Nino?”

Nino lowered his head. “I wasn’t going to say anything. Really, I was trying not to think about it. But my parents are currently talking with police about their options. Now that I’ve been exposed as one of the temporary heroes, they’re questioning if it’s not safe for us at home anymore. There is a chance of us having to go into protective custody.”

Alya winced at that, drawing attention to her. “My parents have been talking as well. My mom quit her job. She said she doesn’t want to work for someone who would let their daughter do such a thing and put me in danger. She’s looking at drawing me out of school since it was pretty much Chloe‘s base of operations. And since Chloe is the Mayor’s daughter…and Hawk Moth…and just…everything?” She looked away, clearly anxious.

“There’s a chance we may have to move out of Paris altogether.”

Marinette gasped.

Alya looked to the other girl, sad and guilty all in one. “I’m sorry, girl. I guess I’ve been hoping it wouldn’t be an issue. I’ve been trying to talk them out of it, but it’s hard given everything that happened. Currently, the only reason they’re willing to stay is to see through to the end of the trial. But after that…” She shrugged, shaking her head uncertainly. “Who can say?”

“No…” Adrien whispered in shock.

The others in class came closer around her, trying to offer some comfort and reassurances—what little they could give, at least. This was a situation that was clearly beyond them. Marinette herself hugged Alya tightly for all she was worth, and the other girl held her back just as much, neither wanting to be parted.

Adrien, however, remained on the outside looking in. Watching the people Chloe had tormented even before Miracle Queen and realizing just how badly they’ve been hurt by this. It hit him then—for what was perhaps the first time just how much pain Chloe had caused his friends. And how unfair he had been to expect them to simply deal with it.

He stayed the lone person outside of the circle. By this point, did he really deserve to join in the comfort? To try to be the one to give comfort? After what he had tried to push on them all?

After minutes passed, they were finally able to draw away from each other.

“I’m sorry for not saying anything sooner.” Alya told Marinette. “I guess I was just hoping…y’know…that it wasn’t real. Or that it would go away and things would work out on their own.”

Marinette smiled. “No, I understand.”

And she did. That’s exactly what she herself had been doing for the past few weeks as well. Trying to deal with things without really dealing with them. Working without acknowledging just what it all meant because she was scared she would break down and that would be just one more thing Hawk Moth would have won because of this whole mess.

“I was kind of the same way.” She admitted, and it felt like a slight relief to be able to say aloud to someone. “I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you about it.”

She still couldn’t, unfortunately. Not about Ladybug and the kwamis and the Miracle Box.

But…she could talk about Fu. How she lost him. How she feels. She could help support Alya and her classmates and be there for them in the meantime.

She…hadn’t lost everything.

Not yet.

And that was the scary thing…

Adrien gaped at the group. He had thought the trauma was bad enough, and that at least could be worked through. But this...

“I’m sorry. I...I didn’t even realize...”

“Adrien, what Chloe did put a major target on our backs.” Alya explained. “Nobody knows how we became heroes, or that Ladybug was the one to specifically choose us and give us the miraculous to use. Nobody knows WHY we were chosen. It’s not just Hawk Moth, any regular criminal can come after us now in an attempt to get a hold of that power. And we can’t exactly protect ourselves.”

She shrugged helplessly.

“We kind of have enough to worry about with the fallout of Chloe‘s actions. And now you want us to try and protect Chloe on top of that?“

Seeing it now, in this light...it was cruel. It was cruel and unfair and hurtful, and Marinette felt horrible for considering letting herself be talked into it.

Adrien himself felt horrible for even suggesting it.

“We all have to live with the consequences of Chloe’s choices.” Alya stated. “So why shouldn’t she?”

Silence followed. It practically echoed throughout the entire hallway.

He said nothing in response. What could he possibly say? He’d known that Chloe was…difficult with other people, to say the least. He’d known the type of person she was. But she was his friend and friends forgive and support each other, right?

But they were right as well. It wasn’t fair to expect them to help Chloe after what she did. Especially once he knew of the level of harm she’d caused them. He felt the horror trickle in. The trauma everyone felt. The knowledge of what they’d been forced to do. The fact that…

He suddenly found it harder to breathe.

Nino could leave.

Adrien could lose his best friend because of this.

And who knew how many of the others would be forced to leave as well. Aside from Nino; Kim, Max, Alya, and Luka were other heroes as well. Juleka was Luka’s sister. And how many of the other classmates might be pulled out of this class and school because it’s unsafe? And Kagami—oh god, she was outted as well. He hadn’t heard from her in a while. Her mother is probably furious. She could move back to Japan because of this. And Marinette…she had been lucky to not be caught up in that fight since she was a hero only the one time, but that could have been just one more thing Chloe ruined for her…

…what about himself?

He paled.

He was longtime friends with Chloe. Went to school with Chloe. Was in class with Chloe. Chloe, who was currently getting a lot of heat from all of Paris. How was his Father going to react to that? The man was always focused on the company and appearances…what would he do now that Chloe had fallen from grace in such a way? Would he forbid Adrien from talking to Chloe again? Would he pull Adrien from school?

…would he ban Adrien from leaving the house altogether?

How was he only just now considering the impact? For himself or anyone else? Of course people would be hurt. Of course they would be upset. Of course people would respond. Somehow, he knew that, and yet he had only been focused on Chloe that it hadn’t actually hit home until now…

And in that light…

It had been selfish to ask. Honestly, he’d known that when he first tried to approach Marinette. But he felt he had to try. Honestly, part of him had known better than to ask in the first place. But at the same time…there was a part of him that still believed things could just go back to “normal”.

…how foolish. That was a “normal” that nobody else wanted. And even more, it was one that was now impossible…all because of Chloe herself.

“I just wanted to help.”

He deflated, losing all remaining fight.

“I’m sorry.”

The classmates glanced between each other. There was much they could have said, but really, anything they could have said already had been. And with him seeming resigned, it appeared there was no longer a need to defend themselves.

Marinette—ever the mediator, stepped up and hugged Adrien.

“Adrien, this isn’t something you can help with. None of us can. What happens in the trial is up to the courts. And what happens to Chloe is up to her.”

Slowly, he reached up and hugged her as well. The warmth and comfort brought some limited solace in this situation. He felt lost. Out of control. Like the world was moving around him and he didn’t know where he was standing much less where he was supposed to be.

They weren’t ready to forgive Chloe. And he couldn’t force them to be. Given the circumstances, he couldn’t blame them. And it was really unfair of him to try. Especially…

“I’m sorry, Marinette.” He whispered to her.

He had tried to use her. Looking back, he had a bit of a tendency to rely on Marinette to fix things when she shouldn’t have had to. Especially when it was for Chloe’s sake. He knew plenty of times Chloe had done things…but he always seemed to overlook how hurt Marinette was because of it, simply due to how well she always appeared afterwards. She was strong and confident, but also a good listener and willing to forgive. It was like nothing really brought her down.

It was due to this that Marinette was often the one he turned to whenever things happened. Because she would listen. She would understand. And she would always try to help, regardless of her position.

In this light…he may have over relied on her too much.

“I wasn’t fair to you.” He admitted. “I just saw Chloe hurting and only thought about how to fix things for her. I didn’t consider your feelings.” He hugged her more strongly. “I’m sorry.”

She didn’t speak. But she squeezed him back.

He felt another body press against him. A quick glance showed it to be Nino.

“I’m still super mad with her. And I don’t like how you tried to push us to defend her after what she did. But I get that she’s your friend and you care about her. I’d do the same if it were you in her place.” He gave a small laugh. “Not that I think you ever would, of course.”

Adrien smiled back. “Thanks.”

This…this felt much better.

Things weren’t okay right now. He still wanted to help Chloe. His classmates were still hurt. People were still angry. Hawk Moth was still out there.

But whatever happened...in this moment, he felt they could make it.

[chrisevansluv]

Here is the 2012 Detail Magazine interview with chris evans:

The Avengers' Chris Evans: Just Your Average Beer-Swilling, Babe-Loving Buddhist

The 30-year-old Bud Light-chugging, Beantown-bred star of The Avengers is widely perceived as the ultimate guy's guy. But beneath the bro persona lies a serious student of Buddhism, an unrepentant song-and-dance man, and a guy who talks to his mom about sex. And farts.

By Adam Sachs,

Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

May 2012 Issue

"Should we just kill him and bury his body?" Chris Evans is stage whispering into the impassive blinking light of my digital recorder.

"Chris!" shouts his mother, her tone a familiar-to-anyone-with-a-mother mix of coddling and concern. "Don't say that! What if something happened?"

We're at Evans' apartment, an expansive but not overly tricked-out bachelor-pad-ish loft in a semi-industrial nowheresville part of Boston, hard by Chinatown, near an area sometimes called the Combat Zone. Evans has a fuzzy, floppy, slept-in-his-clothes aspect that'd be nearly unrecognizable if you knew him only by the upright, spit-polished bearing of the onscreen hero. His dog, East, a sweet and slobbery American bulldog, is spread out on a couch in front of the TV. The shelves of his fridge are neatly stacked with much of the world's supply of Bud Light in cans and little else.

On the counter sit a few buckets of muscle-making whey-protein powder that belong to Evans' roommate, Zach Jarvis, an old pal who sometimes tags along on set as a paid "assistant" and a personal trainer who bulked Evans up for his role as the super-ripped patriot in last summer's blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger. A giant clock on the exposed-brick wall says it's early evening, but Evans operates on his own sense of time. Between gigs, his schedule's all his, which usually translates into long stretches of alone time during the day and longer social nights for the 30-year-old.

"I could just make this . . . disappear," says Josh Peck, another old pal and occasional on-set assistant, in a deadpan mumble, poking at the voice recorder I'd left on the table while I was in the bathroom.

Evans' mom, Lisa, now speaks directly into the microphone: "Don't listen to them—I'm trying to get them not to say these things!"

But not saying things isn't in the Evans DNA. They're an infectiously gregarious clan. Irish-Italians, proud Bostoners, close-knit, and innately theatrical. "We all act, we sing," Evans says. "It was like the fucking von Trapps." Mom was a dancer and now runs a children's theater. First-born Carly directed the family puppet shows and studied theater at NYU. Younger brother Scott has parts on One Life to Live and Law & Order under his belt and lives in Los Angeles full-time—something Evans stopped doing several years back. Rounding out the circle are baby sister Shanna and a pair of "strays" the family brought into their Sudbury, Massachusetts, home: Josh, who went from mowing the lawn to moving in when his folks relocated during his senior year in high school; and Demery, who was Evans' roommate until recently.

"Our house was like a hotel," Evans says. "It was a loony-tunes household. If you got arrested in high school, everyone knew: 'Call Mrs. Evans, she'll bail you out.'"

Growing up, they had a special floor put in the basement where all the kids practiced tap-dancing. The party-ready rec room also had a Ping-Pong table and a separate entrance. This was the house kids in the neighborhood wanted to hang at, and this was the kind of family you wanted to be adopted by. Spend an afternoon listening to them dish old dirt and talk over each other and it's easy to see why. Now they're worried they've said too much, laid bare the tender soul of the actor behind the star-spangled superhero outfit, so there's talk of offing the interviewer. I can hear all this from the bathroom, which, of course, is the point of a good stage whisper.

To be sure, no one's said too much, and the more you're brought into the embrace of this boisterous, funny, shit-slinging, demonstrably loving extended family, the more likable and enviable the whole dynamic is.

Sample exchange from today's lunch of baked ziti at a family-style Italian restaurant:

Mom: When he was a kid, he asked me, 'Mom, will I ever think farting isn't funny?'

Chris: You're throwing me under the bus, Ma! Thank you.

Mom: Well, if a dog farts you still find it funny.

Then, back at the apartment, where Mrs. Evans tries to give me good-natured dirt on her son without freaking him out:

Mom: You always tell me when you think a girl is attractive. You'll call me up so excited. Is that okay to say?

Chris: Nothing wrong with that.

Mom: And can I say all the girls you've brought to the house have been very sweet and wonderful? Of course, those are the ones that make it to the house. It's been a long time, hasn't it?

Chris: Looooong time.

Mom: The last one at our house? Was it six years ago?

Chris: No names, Ma!

Mom: But she knocked it out of the park.

Chris: She got drunk and puked at Auntie Pam's house! And she puked on the way home and she puked at our place.

Mom: And that's when I fell in love with her. Because she was real.

We're operating under a no-names rule, so I'm not asking if it's Jessica Biel who made this memorable first impression. She and Evans were serious for a couple of years. But I don't want to picture lovely Jessica Biel getting sick at Auntie Pam's or in the car or, really, anywhere.

East the bulldog ambles over to the table, begging for food.

"That dog is the love of his life," Mrs. Evans says. "Which tells me he'll be an unbelievable parent, but I don't want him to get married right now." She turns to Chris. "The way you are, I just don't think you're ready."

Some other things I learn about Evans from his mom: He hates going to the gym; he was so wound-up as a kid she'd let him stand during dinner, his legs shaking like caged greyhounds; he suffered weekly "Sunday-night meltdowns" over schoolwork and the angst of the sensitive middle-schooler; after she and his father split and he was making money from acting, he bought her the Sudbury family homestead rather than let her leave it.

Eventually his mom and Josh depart, and Evans and I go to work depleting his stash of Bud Light. It feels like we drink Bud Light and talk for days, because we basically do. I arrived early Friday evening; it's Saturday night now and it'll be sunup Sunday before I sleeplessly make my way to catch a train back to New York City. Somewhere in between we slip free of the gravitational pull of the bachelor pad and there's bottle service at a club and a long walk with entourage in tow back to Evans' apartment, where there is some earnest-yet-surreal group singing, piano playing, and chitchat. Evans is fun to talk to, partly because he's an open, self-mocking guy with an explosive laugh and no apparent need to sleep, and partly because when you cut just below the surface, it's clear he's not quite the dude's dude he sometimes plays onscreen and in TV appearances.

From a distance, Chris Evans the movie star seems a predictable, nearly inevitable piece of successful Hollywood packaging come to market. There's his major-release debut as the dorkily unaware jock Jake in the guilty pleasure Not Another Teen Movie (in one memorable scene, Evans has whipped cream on his chest and a banana up his ass). The female-friendly hunk appeal—his character in The Nanny Diaries is named simply Harvard Hottie—is balanced by a kind of casual-Friday, I'm-from-Boston regular-dudeness. Following the siren song of comic-book cash, he was the Human Torch in two Fantastic Four films. As with scrawny Steve Rogers, the Captain America suit beefed up his stature as a formidable screen presence, a bankable leading man, all of which leads us to The Avengers, this season's megabudget, megawatt ensemble in which he stars alongside Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Hemsworth.

It all feels inevitable—and yet it nearly didn't happen. Evans repeatedly turned down the Captain America role, fearing he'd be locked into what was originally a nine-picture deal. He was shooting Puncture, about a drug-addicted lawyer, at the time. Most actors doing small-budget legal dramas would jump at the chance to play the lead in a Marvel franchise, but Evans saw a decade of his life flash before his eyes.

What he remembers thinking is this: "What if the movie comes out and it's a success and I just reject all of this? What if I want to move to the fucking woods?"

By "the woods," he doesn't mean a quiet life away from the spotlight, some general metaphorical life escape route. He means the actual woods. "For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival," he says. "I was convinced that I was going to move to the woods. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by the time I'm 25, I have failed."

Evans has described his hesitation at signing on for Captain America. Usually he talks about the time commitment, the loss of what remained of his relative anonymity. On the junkets for the movie, he was open about needing therapy after the studio reduced the deal to six movies and he took the leap. What he doesn't usually mention is that he was racked with anxiety before the job came up.

"I get very nervous," Evans explains. "I shit the bed if I have to present something on stage or if I'm doing press. Because it's just you." He's been known to walk out of press conferences, to freeze up and go silent during the kind of relaxed-yet-high-stakes meetings an actor of his stature is expected to attend: "Do you know how badly I audition? Fifty percent of the time I have to walk out of the room. I'm naturally very pale, so I turn red and sweat. And I have to literally walk out. Sometimes mid-audition. You start having these conversations in your brain. 'Chris, don't do this. Chris, take it easy. You're just sitting in a room with a person saying some words, this isn't life. And you're letting this affect you? Shame on you.'"

Shades of "Sunday-night meltdowns." Luckily the nerves never follow him to the set. "You do your neuroses beforehand, so when they yell 'Action' you can be present," he says.

Okay, there was one on-set panic attack—while Evans was shooting Puncture. "We were getting ready to do a court scene in front of a bunch of people, and I don't know what happened," he says. "It's just your brain playing games with you. 'Hey, you know how we sometimes freak out? What if we did it right now?'"

One of the people who advised Evans to take the Captain America role was his eventual Avengers costar Robert Downey Jr. "I'd seen him around," Downey says. "We share an agent. I like to spend a lot of my free time talking to my agent about his other clients—I just had a feeling about him."

What he told Evans was: This puppy is going to be big, and when it is you're going to get to make the movies you want to make. "In the marathon obstacle course of a career," Downey says, "it's just good to have all the stats on paper for why you're not only a team player but also why it makes sense to support you in the projects you want to do—because you've made so much damned money for the studio."

There's also the fact that Evans had a chance to sign on for something likely to be a kind of watershed moment in the comic-book fascination of our time. "I do think The Avengers is the crescendo of this superhero phase in entertainment—except of course for Iron Man 3," Downey says. "It'll take a lot of innovation to keep it alive after this."

Captain America is the only person left who was truly close to Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man), which meant that Evans' and Downey's story lines are closely linked, and in the course of doing a lot of scenes together, they got to be pals. Downey diagnoses his friend with what he terms "low-grade red-carpet anxiety disorder."

"He just hates the game-show aspect of doing PR," Downey says. "Obviously there's pressure for anyone in this transition he's in. But he will easily triple that pressure to make sure he's not being lazy. That's why I respect the guy. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in his skin. But his motives are pure. He just needs to drink some red-carpet chamomile."

"The majority of the world is empty space," Chris Evans says, watching me as if my brain might explode on hearing this news—or like he might have to fight me if I try to contradict him. We're back at his apartment after a cigarette run through the Combat Zone.

"Empty space!" he says again, slapping the table and sort of yelling. Then, in a slow, breathy whisper, he repeats: "Empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people, it's all empty space. That's amazing!" He slaps the table again. "You want another beer? Gotta be Bud Light. Get dirty—you're in Boston. Okay, organize your thoughts. I gotta take a piss . . ."

My thoughts are this: That this guy who is hugging his dog and talking to me about space and mortality and the trouble with Boston girls who believe crazy gossip about him—this is not the guy I expected to meet. I figured he'd be a meatball. Though, truthfully, I'd never called anyone a meatball until Evans turned me on to the put-down. As in: "My sister Shanna dates meatballs." And, more to the point: "When I do interviews, I'd rather just be the beer-drinking dude from Boston and not get into the complex shit, because I don't want every meatball saying, 'So hey, whaddyathink about Buddhism?'"

At 17, Evans came across a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and began his spiritual questing. It's a path of study and struggle that, he says, defines his true purpose in life. "I love acting. It's my playground, it lets me explore. But my happiness in this world, my level of peace, is never going to be dictated by acting," he says. "My goal in life is to detach from the egoic mind. Do you know anything about Eastern philosophy?"

I sip some Bud Light and shake my head sheepishly. "They talk about the egoic mind, the part of you that's self-aware, the watcher, the person you think is driving this machine," he says. "And that separation from self and mind is the root of suffering. There are ways of retraining the way you think. This isn't really supported in Western society, which is focused on 'Go get it, earn it, win it, marry it.'"

Scarlett Johansson says that one of the things she appreciates about Evans is how he steers clear of industry chat when they see each other. "Basically every actor," she says, "including myself, when we finish a job we're like, 'Well, that's it for me. Had a good run. Put me out to pasture.' But Chris doesn't strike me as someone who frets about the next job." The two met on the set of The Perfect Score when they were teenagers and have stayed close; The Avengers is their third movie together. "He has this obviously masculine presence—a dude's dude—and we're used to seeing him play heroic characters," Johansson says, "but he's also surprisingly sensitive. He has close female friends, and you can talk to him about anything. Plus there's that secret song-and-dance, jazz-hands side of Chris. I feel like he grew up with the Partridge Family. He'd be just as happy doing Guys and Dolls as he would Captain America 2."

East needs to do his business, so Evans and I take him up to the roof deck. Evans bought this apartment in 2010 when living in L.A. full-time no longer appealed to him. He came back to stay close to his extended family and the intimate circle of Boston pals he's maintained since high school. The move also seems like a pretty clear keep-it-real hedge against the manic ego-stroking distractions of Hollywood.

"I think my daytime person is different than my nighttime person," Evans says. "With my high-school buddies, we drink beer and talk sports and it's great. The kids in my Buddhism class in L.A., they're wildly intelligent, and I love being around them, but they're not talking about the Celtics. And that's part of me. It's a strange dichotomy. I don't mind being a certain way with some people and having this other piece of me that's just for me."

I asked Downey about Evans' outward regular-Joe persona. "It's complete horseshit," Downey says. "There's an inherent street-smart intelligence there. I don't think he tries to hide it. But he's much more evolved and much more culturally aware than he lets on."

Perhaps the meatball and the meditation can coexist. We argue about our egoic brains and the tao of Boston girls. "I love wet hair and sweatpants," he says in their defense. "I like sneakers and ponytails. I like girls who aren't so la-di-da. L.A. is so la-di-da. I like Boston girls who shit on me. Not literally. Girls who give me a hard time, bust my chops a little."

The chief buster of Evans' chops is, of course, Evans himself. "The problem is, the brain I'm using to dissect this world is a brain formed by it," he says. "We're born into confusion, and we get the blessing of letting go of it." Then he adds: "I think this shit by day. And then night comes and it's like, 'Fuck it, let's drink.'"

And so we do. It's getting late. Again. We should have eaten dinner, but Evans sometimes forgets to eat: "If I could just take a pill to make me full forever, I wouldn't think twice."

We talk about his dog and camping with his dog and why he loves being alone more than almost anything except maybe not being alone. "I swear to God, if you saw me when I am by myself in the woods, I'm a lunatic," he says. "I sing, I dance. I do crazy shit."

Evans' unflagging, all-encompassing enthusiasm is impressive, itself a kind of social intelligence. "If you want to have a good conversation with him, don't talk about the fact that he's famous" was the advice I got from Mark Kassen, who codirected Puncture. "He's a blast, a guy who can hang. For quite a long time. Many hours in a row."

I've stopped looking at the clock. We've stopped talking philosophy and moved into more emotional territory. He asks questions about my 9-month-old son, and then Captain America gets teary when I talk about the wonder of his birth. "I weep at everything," he says. "I emote. I love things so much—I just never want to dilute that."

He talks about how close he feels to his family, how open they all are with each other. About everything. All the time. "The first time I had sex," he says, "I raced home and was like, 'Mom, I just had sex! Where's the clit?'"

Wait, I ask—did she ever tell you?

"Still don't know where it is, man," he says, then breaks into a smile composed of equal parts shit-eating grin and inner peace. "I just don't know. Make some movies, you don't have to know…"

Here is the 2012 Detail Magazine interview with chris evans:

The Avengers' Chris Evans: Just Your Average Beer-Swilling, Babe-Loving Buddhist

The 30-year-old Bud Light-chugging, Beantown-bred star of The Avengers is widely perceived as the ultimate guy's guy. But beneath the bro persona lies a serious student of Buddhism, an unrepentant song-and-dance man, and a guy who talks to his mom about sex. And farts.

By Adam Sachs,

Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

May 2012 Issue

"Should we just kill him and bury his body?" Chris Evans is stage whispering into the impassive blinking light of my digital recorder.

"Chris!" shouts his mother, her tone a familiar-to-anyone-with-a-mother mix of coddling and concern. "Don't say that! What if something happened?"

We're at Evans' apartment, an expansive but not overly tricked-out bachelor-pad-ish loft in a semi-industrial nowheresville part of Boston, hard by Chinatown, near an area sometimes called the Combat Zone. Evans has a fuzzy, floppy, slept-in-his-clothes aspect that'd be nearly unrecognizable if you knew him only by the upright, spit-polished bearing of the onscreen hero. His dog, East, a sweet and slobbery American bulldog, is spread out on a couch in front of the TV. The shelves of his fridge are neatly stacked with much of the world's supply of Bud Light in cans and little else.

On the counter sit a few buckets of muscle-making whey-protein powder that belong to Evans' roommate, Zach Jarvis, an old pal who sometimes tags along on set as a paid "assistant" and a personal trainer who bulked Evans up for his role as the super-ripped patriot in last summer's blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger. A giant clock on the exposed-brick wall says it's early evening, but Evans operates on his own sense of time. Between gigs, his schedule's all his, which usually translates into long stretches of alone time during the day and longer social nights for the 30-year-old.

"I could just make this . . . disappear," says Josh Peck, another old pal and occasional on-set assistant, in a deadpan mumble, poking at the voice recorder I'd left on the table while I was in the bathroom.

Evans' mom, Lisa, now speaks directly into the microphone: "Don't listen to them—I'm trying to get them not to say these things!"

But not saying things isn't in the Evans DNA. They're an infectiously gregarious clan. Irish-Italians, proud Bostoners, close-knit, and innately theatrical. "We all act, we sing," Evans says. "It was like the fucking von Trapps." Mom was a dancer and now runs a children's theater. First-born Carly directed the family puppet shows and studied theater at NYU. Younger brother Scott has parts on One Life to Live and Law & Order under his belt and lives in Los Angeles full-time—something Evans stopped doing several years back. Rounding out the circle are baby sister Shanna and a pair of "strays" the family brought into their Sudbury, Massachusetts, home: Josh, who went from mowing the lawn to moving in when his folks relocated during his senior year in high school; and Demery, who was Evans' roommate until recently.

"Our house was like a hotel," Evans says. "It was a loony-tunes household. If you got arrested in high school, everyone knew: 'Call Mrs. Evans, she'll bail you out.'"

Growing up, they had a special floor put in the basement where all the kids practiced tap-dancing. The party-ready rec room also had a Ping-Pong table and a separate entrance. This was the house kids in the neighborhood wanted to hang at, and this was the kind of family you wanted to be adopted by. Spend an afternoon listening to them dish old dirt and talk over each other and it's easy to see why. Now they're worried they've said too much, laid bare the tender soul of the actor behind the star-spangled superhero outfit, so there's talk of offing the interviewer. I can hear all this from the bathroom, which, of course, is the point of a good stage whisper.

To be sure, no one's said too much, and the more you're brought into the embrace of this boisterous, funny, shit-slinging, demonstrably loving extended family, the more likable and enviable the whole dynamic is.

Sample exchange from today's lunch of baked ziti at a family-style Italian restaurant:

Mom: When he was a kid, he asked me, 'Mom, will I ever think farting isn't funny?'

Chris: You're throwing me under the bus, Ma! Thank you.

Mom: Well, if a dog farts you still find it funny.

Then, back at the apartment, where Mrs. Evans tries to give me good-natured dirt on her son without freaking him out:

Mom: You always tell me when you think a girl is attractive. You'll call me up so excited. Is that okay to say?

Chris: Nothing wrong with that.

Mom: And can I say all the girls you've brought to the house have been very sweet and wonderful? Of course, those are the ones that make it to the house. It's been a long time, hasn't it?

Chris: Looooong time.

Mom: The last one at our house? Was it six years ago?

Chris: No names, Ma!

Mom: But she knocked it out of the park.

Chris: She got drunk and puked at Auntie Pam's house! And she puked on the way home and she puked at our place.

Mom: And that's when I fell in love with her. Because she was real.

We're operating under a no-names rule, so I'm not asking if it's Jessica Biel who made this memorable first impression. She and Evans were serious for a couple of years. But I don't want to picture lovely Jessica Biel getting sick at Auntie Pam's or in the car or, really, anywhere.

East the bulldog ambles over to the table, begging for food.

"That dog is the love of his life," Mrs. Evans says. "Which tells me he'll be an unbelievable parent, but I don't want him to get married right now." She turns to Chris. "The way you are, I just don't think you're ready."

Some other things I learn about Evans from his mom: He hates going to the gym; he was so wound-up as a kid she'd let him stand during dinner, his legs shaking like caged greyhounds; he suffered weekly "Sunday-night meltdowns" over schoolwork and the angst of the sensitive middle-schooler; after she and his father split and he was making money from acting, he bought her the Sudbury family homestead rather than let her leave it.

Eventually his mom and Josh depart, and Evans and I go to work depleting his stash of Bud Light. It feels like we drink Bud Light and talk for days, because we basically do. I arrived early Friday evening; it's Saturday night now and it'll be sunup Sunday before I sleeplessly make my way to catch a train back to New York City. Somewhere in between we slip free of the gravitational pull of the bachelor pad and there's bottle service at a club and a long walk with entourage in tow back to Evans' apartment, where there is some earnest-yet-surreal group singing, piano playing, and chitchat. Evans is fun to talk to, partly because he's an open, self-mocking guy with an explosive laugh and no apparent need to sleep, and partly because when you cut just below the surface, it's clear he's not quite the dude's dude he sometimes plays onscreen and in TV appearances.

From a distance, Chris Evans the movie star seems a predictable, nearly inevitable piece of successful Hollywood packaging come to market. There's his major-release debut as the dorkily unaware jock Jake in the guilty pleasure Not Another Teen Movie (in one memorable scene, Evans has whipped cream on his chest and a banana up his ass). The female-friendly hunk appeal—his character in The Nanny Diaries is named simply Harvard Hottie—is balanced by a kind of casual-Friday, I'm-from-Boston regular-dudeness. Following the siren song of comic-book cash, he was the Human Torch in two Fantastic Four films. As with scrawny Steve Rogers, the Captain America suit beefed up his stature as a formidable screen presence, a bankable leading man, all of which leads us to The Avengers, this season's megabudget, megawatt ensemble in which he stars alongside Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Hemsworth.

It all feels inevitable—and yet it nearly didn't happen. Evans repeatedly turned down the Captain America role, fearing he'd be locked into what was originally a nine-picture deal. He was shooting Puncture, about a drug-addicted lawyer, at the time. Most actors doing small-budget legal dramas would jump at the chance to play the lead in a Marvel franchise, but Evans saw a decade of his life flash before his eyes.

What he remembers thinking is this: "What if the movie comes out and it's a success and I just reject all of this? What if I want to move to the fucking woods?"

By "the woods," he doesn't mean a quiet life away from the spotlight, some general metaphorical life escape route. He means the actual woods. "For a long time all I wanted for Christmas were books about outdoor survival," he says. "I was convinced that I was going to move to the woods. I camped a lot, I took classes. At 18, I told myself if I don't live in the woods by the time I'm 25, I have failed."

Evans has described his hesitation at signing on for Captain America. Usually he talks about the time commitment, the loss of what remained of his relative anonymity. On the junkets for the movie, he was open about needing therapy after the studio reduced the deal to six movies and he took the leap. What he doesn't usually mention is that he was racked with anxiety before the job came up.

"I get very nervous," Evans explains. "I shit the bed if I have to present something on stage or if I'm doing press. Because it's just you." He's been known to walk out of press conferences, to freeze up and go silent during the kind of relaxed-yet-high-stakes meetings an actor of his stature is expected to attend: "Do you know how badly I audition? Fifty percent of the time I have to walk out of the room. I'm naturally very pale, so I turn red and sweat. And I have to literally walk out. Sometimes mid-audition. You start having these conversations in your brain. 'Chris, don't do this. Chris, take it easy. You're just sitting in a room with a person saying some words, this isn't life. And you're letting this affect you? Shame on you.'"

Shades of "Sunday-night meltdowns." Luckily the nerves never follow him to the set. "You do your neuroses beforehand, so when they yell 'Action' you can be present," he says.

Okay, there was one on-set panic attack—while Evans was shooting Puncture. "We were getting ready to do a court scene in front of a bunch of people, and I don't know what happened," he says. "It's just your brain playing games with you. 'Hey, you know how we sometimes freak out? What if we did it right now?'"

One of the people who advised Evans to take the Captain America role was his eventual Avengers costar Robert Downey Jr. "I'd seen him around," Downey says. "We share an agent. I like to spend a lot of my free time talking to my agent about his other clients—I just had a feeling about him."

What he told Evans was: This puppy is going to be big, and when it is you're going to get to make the movies you want to make. "In the marathon obstacle course of a career," Downey says, "it's just good to have all the stats on paper for why you're not only a team player but also why it makes sense to support you in the projects you want to do—because you've made so much damned money for the studio."

There's also the fact that Evans had a chance to sign on for something likely to be a kind of watershed moment in the comic-book fascination of our time. "I do think The Avengers is the crescendo of this superhero phase in entertainment—except of course for Iron Man 3," Downey says. "It'll take a lot of innovation to keep it alive after this."

Captain America is the only person left who was truly close to Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man), which meant that Evans' and Downey's story lines are closely linked, and in the course of doing a lot of scenes together, they got to be pals. Downey diagnoses his friend with what he terms "low-grade red-carpet anxiety disorder."

"He just hates the game-show aspect of doing PR," Downey says. "Obviously there's pressure for anyone in this transition he's in. But he will easily triple that pressure to make sure he's not being lazy. That's why I respect the guy. I wouldn't necessarily want to be in his skin. But his motives are pure. He just needs to drink some red-carpet chamomile."

"The majority of the world is empty space," Chris Evans says, watching me as if my brain might explode on hearing this news—or like he might have to fight me if I try to contradict him. We're back at his apartment after a cigarette run through the Combat Zone.

"Empty space!" he says again, slapping the table and sort of yelling. Then, in a slow, breathy whisper, he repeats: "Empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people, it's all empty space. That's amazing!" He slaps the table again. "You want another beer? Gotta be Bud Light. Get dirty—you're in Boston. Okay, organize your thoughts. I gotta take a piss . . ."

My thoughts are this: That this guy who is hugging his dog and talking to me about space and mortality and the trouble with Boston girls who believe crazy gossip about him—this is not the guy I expected to meet. I figured he'd be a meatball. Though, truthfully, I'd never called anyone a meatball until Evans turned me on to the put-down. As in: "My sister Shanna dates meatballs." And, more to the point: "When I do interviews, I'd rather just be the beer-drinking dude from Boston and not get into the complex shit, because I don't want every meatball saying, 'So hey, whaddyathink about Buddhism?'"

At 17, Evans came across a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and began his spiritual questing. It's a path of study and struggle that, he says, defines his true purpose in life. "I love acting. It's my playground, it lets me explore. But my happiness in this world, my level of peace, is never going to be dictated by acting," he says. "My goal in life is to detach from the egoic mind. Do you know anything about Eastern philosophy?"

I sip some Bud Light and shake my head sheepishly. "They talk about the egoic mind, the part of you that's self-aware, the watcher, the person you think is driving this machine," he says. "And that separation from self and mind is the root of suffering. There are ways of retraining the way you think. This isn't really supported in Western society, which is focused on 'Go get it, earn it, win it, marry it.'"

Scarlett Johansson says that one of the things she appreciates about Evans is how he steers clear of industry chat when they see each other. "Basically every actor," she says, "including myself, when we finish a job we're like, 'Well, that's it for me. Had a good run. Put me out to pasture.' But Chris doesn't strike me as someone who frets about the next job." The two met on the set of The Perfect Score when they were teenagers and have stayed close; The Avengers is their third movie together. "He has this obviously masculine presence—a dude's dude—and we're used to seeing him play heroic characters," Johansson says, "but he's also surprisingly sensitive. He has close female friends, and you can talk to him about anything. Plus there's that secret song-and-dance, jazz-hands side of Chris. I feel like he grew up with the Partridge Family. He'd be just as happy doing Guys and Dolls as he would Captain America 2."

East needs to do his business, so Evans and I take him up to the roof deck. Evans bought this apartment in 2010 when living in L.A. full-time no longer appealed to him. He came back to stay close to his extended family and the intimate circle of Boston pals he's maintained since high school. The move also seems like a pretty clear keep-it-real hedge against the manic ego-stroking distractions of Hollywood.

"I think my daytime person is different than my nighttime person," Evans says. "With my high-school buddies, we drink beer and talk sports and it's great. The kids in my Buddhism class in L.A., they're wildly intelligent, and I love being around them, but they're not talking about the Celtics. And that's part of me. It's a strange dichotomy. I don't mind being a certain way with some people and having this other piece of me that's just for me."

I asked Downey about Evans' outward regular-Joe persona. "It's complete horseshit," Downey says. "There's an inherent street-smart intelligence there. I don't think he tries to hide it. But he's much more evolved and much more culturally aware than he lets on."

Perhaps the meatball and the meditation can coexist. We argue about our egoic brains and the tao of Boston girls. "I love wet hair and sweatpants," he says in their defense. "I like sneakers and ponytails. I like girls who aren't so la-di-da. L.A. is so la-di-da. I like Boston girls who shit on me. Not literally. Girls who give me a hard time, bust my chops a little."

The chief buster of Evans' chops is, of course, Evans himself. "The problem is, the brain I'm using to dissect this world is a brain formed by it," he says. "We're born into confusion, and we get the blessing of letting go of it." Then he adds: "I think this shit by day. And then night comes and it's like, 'Fuck it, let's drink.'"

And so we do. It's getting late. Again. We should have eaten dinner, but Evans sometimes forgets to eat: "If I could just take a pill to make me full forever, I wouldn't think twice."

We talk about his dog and camping with his dog and why he loves being alone more than almost anything except maybe not being alone. "I swear to God, if you saw me when I am by myself in the woods, I'm a lunatic," he says. "I sing, I dance. I do crazy shit."

Evans' unflagging, all-encompassing enthusiasm is impressive, itself a kind of social intelligence. "If you want to have a good conversation with him, don't talk about the fact that he's famous" was the advice I got from Mark Kassen, who codirected Puncture. "He's a blast, a guy who can hang. For quite a long time. Many hours in a row."

I've stopped looking at the clock. We've stopped talking philosophy and moved into more emotional territory. He asks questions about my 9-month-old son, and then Captain America gets teary when I talk about the wonder of his birth. "I weep at everything," he says. "I emote. I love things so much—I just never want to dilute that."

He talks about how close he feels to his family, how open they all are with each other. About everything. All the time. "The first time I had sex," he says, "I raced home and was like, 'Mom, I just had sex! Where's the clit?'"

Wait, I ask—did she ever tell you?

"Still don't know where it is, man," he says, then breaks into a smile composed of equal parts shit-eating grin and inner peace. "I just don't know. Make some movies, you don't have to know…"

If someone doesn't want to check the link, the anon sent the full interview!

[glitxhwayventeen]

A Different Kind Of Love…

Wonwoo: Chapter 3 (Save Your Tears)

Characters: Wonwoo x female reader

Genre/Warnings: multi-member au (different scenarios), werewolf au, fantasy, angst, fluff, cheating (again, sort of), FOOD mentions, Mood Swings. Any others will be put as warnings when future chapters are thought up/written.

Author’s Note: Here it is friends! A chapter with almost complete fluff. Who would’ve thunk huh? Anyways I hope you guys like the chapter. I had quite a bit of fun writing it for some reason…

Please remember that all of these chapters and the content within them are a work of fiction! They’re just for fun/entertainment!

Bold= Dialogue Italics= Thoughts

Mostly domestic ☁️ & barely any 🥀

A Different Kind Of Love… Master List

Chapter 3: Save Your Tears

It had been exactly three months since you had been marked by Wonwoo and finally completely integrated yourself into your new pack. You hadn’t seen or heard from Song since that night, but you still felt VERY uneasy about the whole situation. People didn’t just get together the way you and your mate did and get a sweet happy little ending.

Wonwoo and you were doing great personally though. You now slept in the same room, ‘slept’ together, and just all around loved each other. You were starting to have a hard time remembering what life was like before you had gotten attacked by that angry mob now that you were with him. He made time stop and fast forward all at once. Everything seemed to go on forever and yet so quickly when you were with him. And you loved every single second of it. Even if you had a hard time showing him that sometimes.

You were downstairs in the kitchen making breakfast for all the boys, someone had to. They literally could not seem to take care of themselves even if they were grown ass men. So you kind of took on the part of den mother to them, you were the only responsible girl they had around after all. None of the Alphas had mates yet, in fact, no one older than Jihoon had found theirs yet. It was only the younger ones. And while their mates were great, they just very much acted like their wolf counter parts, which meant fun all day everyday without a second thought. So that left you being one of the few, other than Seungcheol and Joshua, who knew when enough shenanigans was enough. You didn’t mind, you liked having a big family again.

Many of the boys reminded you of your brothers. Especially Mingyu, who ate and played just as much and as rough as they did. It caused the both of you to become very close, even to the point where he felt like one of your biological brothers, he reminded you a lot of Mako. And of course, Wonwoo was absolutely delighted that the member he considered his best friend and his mate got along so much. He trusted Mingyu around you more than anyone else, so much so that he refused to even let you leave the house without either Gyu or himself by your side.

You had been having your nightmares again which was relatively normal for you. However, Wonwoo had started having them himself, which as a seer was very much not normal or good in meaning in anyway. He wouldn’t tell you what they were about, he always said you didn’t need to worry or be bothered with them as there was nothing to mention. But the way he clung to you, and the way he forced Mingyu to stay with you when he couldn’t, started having you think that maybe things weren’t as alright as they seemed…

You still just brushed it off, trying your best to just enjoy your little honeymoon bliss with your mate and continued to flip pancakes. Everything would work out. That’s what your voices said, so that’s what you believed. Soon enough, your mate had woken up to an empty bed and marched his way downstairs with a pout adorned on his face.

“(Y/N), why are you downstairs stirring batter instead of upstairs snoring in my arms?” He let out in an annoyed huff as he came to stand beside you, watching your actions with playfully narrowed eyes.

“Because Wonu, 1.) everyone will need breakfast soon and I hate that Seungcheol’s always left to be the one to do it and 2.) you take forever and I hate waiting for you to wake up. And HEY I do NOT snore!” You ranted, smacking his toned chest with your free hand in the process, the other firmly gripped onto your whisk as you made more mix for more pancakes.

You had gotten comfortable with him to the point of joking. Which not only made you proud, but made Wonwoo’s heart soar. He was glad he could coax you out of your shell a bit.

“Yeah yeah sure. And Soonyoung isn’t a little sexual deviant.” He chuckled and kissed the top of your rat’s nest covered head.

“Hey! I heard that!” Soonyoung shouted from his room in the higher portion of the house.

“Yeah I know.” Wonwoo smiled, dipping his finger in the batter you had just added some strawberry syrup to to add more flavor and plopping it directly into his mouth.

“Whatever that weird stuff is is good. But don’t think I’m still not upset that my mate left the bed without me this morning.” He assessed, sitting himself down on the counter next to you while you started pouring batter onto your skillet.

“Well get over it my love. It’s not the first time it’s happened and we both know with the way you sleep, it’s not gonna be the last. And my pancakes are not weird! They are delicious.” You declared, flipping a newly heated pancake over so it’s other side would begin to cook.

That’s something he had come to realize about you: you were always very prideful of being able to do household things well. And certain things like your hair for that matter. You always had high personal standards, though you only seemed to hold yourself to them as you didn’t care if anyone else lived up to them, just you. He chalked it up to your tribe’s old family centered traditions. He thought it was cute, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t tease you a bit about it.

Wonwoo smirked and bit his lip at the gratification you showed in your cooking, “They are. They’re still weird as shit though. Who puts the syrup INTO the batter?”

“I do. It makes them taste better” You insisted before you put the finished pancake with the rest of the cooked stack you had managed to create before your mate came to bother you.

“You know maybe you just don’t know how to cook.” You pointed at him with your spatula in a teasing manner.

“Maybe not” He shrugged, ducking his form down a bit to get closer to you, “But I DO know that when you’re done cooking them, you’re just gonna eat them plain like a freak.”

Just as he finished his sentence, half a dozen wolves made their way into the kitchen. You hadn’t even realized anyone other than Soonyoung was really even up yet do to you focusing all your senses and attention on your mate. That had taken you a lot of practice as, in the wilderness, you had to pay attention to everything and everyone around you.

“Mmm smells good (Y/N), what’s cooking?” Seungkwan questioned as he fought Soonyoung for a seat that was positioned closer to the food.

“Pancakes. I made loads of them” You stated, looking towards the two bickering werewolves before you and turned the stovetop off.

“And it is NOT freaky to eat them without syrup. Lots of people do it. Plus, the extra syrup’s so sugary it’s been making me feel sick lately so I would rather just eat it without to avoid it.” You spoke to Wonwoo, who had finally brought himself down from the counter and sat himself down on a chair to grab food with the other boys.

He just laughed in response to your stubbornness and pulled you to sit on his lap with a kiss to your cheek, “Whatever you say baby. I still think it’s weird to eat a plain pancake.”

It had taken you quite a while to warm up to this kind of PDA. When you first came to them, something like that would have you wiggle your way to sit alone and have to hide your burning cheeks. You’d really come a long way. Well, at least with Wonu

“Oh yeah no that’s suuuuper weird (Y/N). You may be a sociopath.” Jeonghan chuckled as he plopped another large bite of a pancake into his mouth, smiling.

“Yeah that’s weird as shit. Who the hell eats a plain pancake?” Soonyoung snickered, shoveling a whole syrup filled circle into his mouth.

“Look, what do any of you know? Most of you had never even eaten a pancake before I came around because Koreans don’t typically eat them for breakfast. So shut up!” You spit out, your feelings starting to get hurt at the constant teasing of the others.

“Who’s the weirdo eating plain pancakes?” Joshua, the American, asked from the stairs as he slowly made his was down towards the rest of the pack to eat.

“Well the Westerner thinks it’s weird so…” Chan said with a shrug and a shit eating grin.

The boys all busted out laughing, some so hard they had to hold their sides. Wonwoo started to choke a laugh back into your shoulder as you sat there and folded your arms over your chest.

“You guys suck. I try and be NICE to you and I get laughed at for my eating habits. I don’t want to have to sit here for this” You huffed, getting up from your mate’s lap and walking upstairs to your shared bedroom, closing the door a bit louder than you probably should’ve when so many people were still sleeping.

“Damn, what crawled up her ass?” Hansol, who you had stomped past on the way to your room said, finally getting himself situated in the kitchen.

Wonwoo let out a frustrated sigh before he stood up from his place, grabbing a plate of pancakes in the process. He was still trying to figure out when his teasing was too much for you. And he probably would’ve been fine had the others not decided to join in. You liked them, you did, but you weren’t as comfortable around them just yet. Them taunting you probably really upset you and he was just the dumbass who let them continue to do it.

“Me. I’m an idiot. I’ll go talk to her and see if I can get her to come back down.” He said as he begrudgingly made his way to the stairs, slightly kicking himself internally for upsetting you over something so little and stupid.

-

Once he made it to your bedroom door, he tried to turn the handle, only to realize it was locked.

“(Y/N)? Baby? Can you please open the door?” He whined out, not realizing he had upset you to the point of you wanting even HIM to leave you alone.

You always wanted him around you. Even when you first came to the pack, you still would rather be near him. Even when he was with Song, you still liked having him close by. Even when you were angry at him, you’d rather be angry at him with his arms wrapped around you than be angry at him alone somewhere. You never locked the door. His inner wolf groaned at the thought.

“No.” You bluntly spit out, wanting him as far away from you as possible and trying to suppress a stomach growl all in one go.

“I brought pancakes…” Wonwoo all but sung out, having heard your angry stomach and knowing damn well you would give into him if he had food.

After hearing a small groan from the other side of the barrier, he heard a little click of metal before the door swung open. In front of him was a very angry looking you, your cheeks were stained with tears and it caused a small whimper to emit from his chest. He had caused you to cry and it crushed him.

You had your hand out in expectancy as he had promised sustenance in exchange for entry. He dutifully handed you the plate and closed the door behind him. He watched as you scarfed down a full pancake in one go. Damn, you were more hungry than he thought.

“What do you want?” You sniffled at him once you had cleared your airway of food.

You sat the plate down on the nightstand before you stood and turned your attention back to your mate, grabbing another pancake and taking small bites in the process. You were never really this hungry or ate this much, but when you got sad lately, you just felt like eating. Probably not the best habit, but you weren’t that good with your feelings, you always just followed your instincts instead. They always kept you alive, and right now they were telling you to eat, so you ate.

“I wanted to apologize baby. I didn’t mean to upset you. It really was just a joke. I didn’t mean to make you cry. You’re not weird. Plain pancakes are fine. I should’ve just kept my big mouth shut.” He groveled, wrapping his arms around your small frame.

“Yes. Yes, you should’ve.” You agreed, finally swallowing the remains of your food and crossing your arms in annoyance, slightly leaning away from his touch to wipe your tears away.

You wanted him to touch you. God, you wanted him to touch you. But you didn’t want to give in so easily, because once you gave in, you knew he’d get all smug and then you’d want to punch his smug face. You wanted him to genuinely feel bad before you crashed your lips to his and ripped each other clothes off. It was only fair.

Wonwoo could smell the wetness already beginning to form between your legs. He suppressed a smirk threatening to appear on his face for getting you this worked up by literally doing almost nothing, but he knew being cocky wasn’t a good way to get you to stop being mad at him. So he stuck with his original plan: begging for forgiveness.

He easily lifted you up and secured your legs around his waist, holding onto your back so you wouldn’t lose your balance and fall, “I really am sorry. I won’t do it again baby. I promise.” He spoke as he leaned his forehead against yours with his best pout, tugging at your heartstrings.

You closed your eyes for a moment, trying to contain your excitement for what was about to come, but failed miserably and let a happy smile creep up on your lips. You locked your hands behind his head, giggled at him and bit your lip.

“You’re forgiven. This time. BUT you have to make it up to me.” You decided, eyes looking up for a moment in thought to tease him. He slowly started moving towards the bed that was in the center of the room before he spoke up.

“And how would you like me to make it up to you baby?” He said as he began kissing your neck softly, trailing around your mate mark with a grin plastered on his face.

“Well for starters, you can fuck me senseless until I forget what I was even mad at you for to begin with.” You confirmed, tilting your head to the side to give him a bit more access to your exposed neck.

“With pleasure my love.” And with that, he fell to the bed with you in his arms, careful not to crush you in the process before he got to work on his promise.

(Updated 8/23)

[jojoboisimagines]

Snippets Ch.4 : Johnny and Josuke (4) with the Same Crush (3)

Previous Chapter

A set of multiple drabbles/oneshots combining characters (i.e Jojos) from multiple parts and AUs.

.::.

"That guy...do you think--" Josuke started.

"That's their boyfriend? No idea." Johnny quickly answered, trying to play it off as if he didn't care.

It was quite the opposite. He may have cared too much.

To say Johnny was jealous was an understatement. But it seemed like Josuke was feeling some of the heat too, seeing you hanging out with some guy and proceeding to talk about him with Josuke when the two of you went to lunch the other day.

Josuke was still in the dark about Johnny’s own crush on you, which was a relief for the jockey, but it was hell for him, having to be afraid of either guy winning you over first.

He just needed to muster up the courage to talk to you again, but it was a lot more difficult than he thought it’d be. You two always seemed to be busy when the other wasn’t. Of course he still had Gyro (and occasionally Josuke and Hot Pants) to keep him company, but he missed you.

The little spat the cousins had was forgotten for a while. They didn’t exactly apologize to each other, but just starting to talk normally again was enough sign there was no hard feelings. The younger teen was still very confused about Johnny’s intentions that day.

‘ Was he trying to be a good role model or was he just mad I was leaving him at home?’ he thought. It didn’t really matter to him anymore, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t concerned about what Johnny must’ve been thinking, and if he still did feel that way.

They sat at a small table on the far side of the kitchen. Josuke, looking rather bored, held his head on his palm, while Johnny was playing on their shared Switch. Or at least, was pretending to be after Josuke brought up the subject.

“Hey, can I ask you an honest question?” The Japanese teen breaks the icy silence once again.

Johnny merely raises an eyebrow with a low ‘hm’ that was barely audible. His heart silently raced thinking of what the boy sitting across from him had on his mind to ask.

“(y/n)...how long have you known them?” 

A simple enough question to start off with, Josuke thought. Yet Johnny’s lips still pursed.

“Uh...about half a year now. We got really close in that time I’d say.” That last part wasn’t even to get a rise out of Josuke, he just genuinely thought so. He really cared about you, romantically or not.

Meanwhile, Josuke had only known you for the duration of the summer, which was about to end in a couple of weeks. Perhaps if he’d beg Johnny to let him stay he’d have more time to bond with you, but there was also the issue of him feeling homesick from time to time.

God, if he could take you back to Morioh with him..it’d be like a dream come true.

They both had quickly forgotten about whatever guy Josuke was referring to earlier, mixed up in their own thoughts about their relationship with you. Besides, he had only ever seen the guy once, there was no way you’d switch up on him that quickly.

He had no dates or anything planned with you like he usually does, though. Not that he didn’t want to spend time with you, he just felt as if he was coming off as a little...clingy.

Higashikata had been trying to drop hints that he liked you, such as buying you things, having heart-to-heart conversations as he’d walk you home, calling you pet names, and ending his goodnight texts with a little heart emoji. He considered himself a romantic, but when it came to your reactions, you kinda brushed them off platonically. Perhaps you’d never been flirted with before?

His texts were still frequent, making sure you were having a good day and all, but he figured maybe he should start being a little more risky..

“What do you like about (y/n) anyways?” Johnny asked.

There was a pause for a couple of seconds, before Josuke scooted back in his chair and got up from the table, intending to retreat to his room for a couple of hours.

“The same things you do, probably.”

.::.

“Ow! Gyro, what the hell was that for?!”

“Because, idiota, you need to confess already.” He hovers over Johnny like a judgmental parent.

Josuke had left the house to get some groceries, and in that time, the jockey called Gyro over. Not for advice specifically, but that's what it had eventually turned into. Sitting on the floor of Johnny’s room (where it was painfully easy to find porn magazines, Gyro won’t let that go as long as the two of them live).

“Like seriously, this is getting embarrassing to watch, just do it already.” The Italian pointed a finger at his friend. “Sooner or later you’re gonna do the thing where you get the girl drunk and then sleep with her regardless of feelings.”

“Ugh, I’m not like that anymore Gyro!” Johnny folds his arms with a pout his friend knows all too well at this point. “I’ve never committed to anyone before, so of course this is a little more awkward for me than it is for anyone else, you know this!” 

Indeed he did know. It was somehow one of the things they always ended up talking about.

“Listen, I know how this is gonna end. Its gonna end with you in this same room, bunched up in several blankets, listening to Fleetwood Mac on repeat with 3 pizza boxes to make yourself feel better.”

The American scoffs.

Gyro sits upright on his bed. “I’m right. Look, this gal means a lot to you, I know. I’ve seen it. You’ve never stared at someone with such a…not hateful look in your eye.” It was half a joke, half truth. “And I don't wanna see you sad, so you’re just gonna have to pull yourself up, grow some steel balls, and ask them out. For real. For both of our sakes at this point.”

Johnny rolls his eyes. “Wow, Gyro wants me to be with a girl? Pigs must be flying.”

“You are so not funny.” The Italian’s teeth flashes for a moment as he scowls.

“Alright, since you’re such a casanova, why don’t you tell me what to say to them?” At this rate, there was really no other choice for Joestar to take. He could ask Hot Pants, but knew she would give him similar advice.

“Nyo-ho! I’ll show ya! All you gotta do is gimme your phone.”

As soon as the word ‘gimme’ was uttered, the jockey clutched his phone as if it was a baby. The last few times he lended his friend his phone, it didn’t go so well.

Gyro would’ve snorted if he wasn’t serious about this.

“Come onnn! It--”

“Won’t go like the last three times, right? Fat chance.”

“Just hurry and hand it over before I tackle you!”

The larger man did that far too much already, much to Johnny’s dismay. Once Gyro had him in a headlock, there was no getting out of it. He defeatedly raised his phone up to the man for him to take.

“If you ruin anything, I’m doing the same thing to you, AND taking your damn horse.” The Italian waved him off as if he was merely an angry toddler. As he typed, Johnny tried to peer over and see, but his friend was too adamant on turning side to side so he couldn’t. The expressions Gyro was making wasn’t a good sign either. First confused, then mischievous, then looking a little too proud of himself. The jockey’s hands could start sweating at any moment from the sheer anxiety this was giving him.

“Aaaaaand done! There we go, all set!”

Johnny reached for his phone as soon as the words left his mouth, unapologetically in a snatching manner to immediately read the text sent.

::‘Hey This is Johnny darling. Hope your day has been as beautiful as your smile. I was wondering if you’re free tomorrow by 12pm. I have something very important to tell you. See you soon xoxo.’::

Alright, so it wasn’t as bad as he thought itd be (not nearly as bad as the time Gyro dared him to send a ‘send nudes’ text to you) but god, it would look suspiciously out of character for you to see. He can’t even remember the last time he typed ‘darling’ instead of ‘darlin’ and actually bothered to punctuate his texts. And who even used ‘xoxo’ anymore?

His friend looked at him with a big grin, waiting for his reaction. A slightly more pure smile than if he were waiting for Johnny to get a joke.

“Soooo what do you think? You gotta pick some nice clothes out for your date.”

The shorter man sighs.

“Its...passable.”

.::.

 Josuke got home a little later than he expected. He was surprised to see there was still Prince CDs in stock at the store. Thats one of the perks of coming to America, he guessed. He was more than ready to put them into one of Johnny’s old CD players he had found. It was already hard for him to listen to pretty much anything without thinking of you. At least if it was Prince specifically, it would help him feel better and he could jam out to it.

Finally finding the track he wanted, he grinned, letting the music play out loud and hopping on his bed. It was a good few minutes before he had started getting that feeling in his gut again.

..Crap, this wasn’t helping either.

The teen felt that he couldn’t endure this much longer. Love was something he took very seriously and to be so unsure about your relationship just made him feel funny. He had to at least know for sure if the both of you were on the same page. Josuke was sick of being so anxious about it.

Josuke laid down flat on his back, pulling his phone out.

“You know what? I’m gonna ask them out.”

[mrvdocks]

Selcouth

You shouldn’t have come on this stupid trip. Not even if it had opened you up more to him. If anything, you felt this trip had soured the more time had passed. Alex could tell. But you two had to play it safe, play the parts that Karl thought you two assumed from his perspective. You resented that, having to stick to an image that he had formed of you, one that tried to act like you weren’t so in love with him it made your heart ache. 

Or,

You and Alex plan a meet up with Karl for a week trip, only to have your feelings for Karl be put to the test when things don’t pan out how you all planned. (Karl Jacobs/Reader)  

After

“Stop it.” He says, voice serious and no longer joyful or even hinting at friendliness. You’ve heard Karl be serious many times but this time sounded different. This time he sounded like he was scolding a child after being annoyed by them repeatedly. 

“Stop what?” You ask, pretending to be aloof.

“Stop acting like a child!”

“I’m the one acting like a chil - since when was doing something I want, acting like a child?!” 

He makes a hmpf sound. “What is this supposed to be, payback? Is that what you’re playing at?”

“I’m not playing at anything here, Karl. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

He scoffs. “Oh yeah? So you just suddenly developed an interest in Dream overnight, is that it?” 

“Honestly, why do you care so much? My love life isn’t up for debate here.” 

“Oh and mine was?” He retorts.

You knew he would bring it up, you just knew. It was perfect ammo right now. You stutter to find the right words. 

“What - what do you want from me Karl? I don’t need to explain myself to you. Have you considered that maybe I just finally got tired of being alone? That maybe I just needed someone?” 

Karl tries to not let this dig push him over the line but his frustration and jealousy wouldn’t let him stop seeing green. 

“Is this what you do? You like playing with people's feelings? Do you think screwing my friends is going to help you or is this another one of your phases?”

It feels good in the heat of the moment but he knows he’s messed up as soon as he says it. 

Your mouth drops open. Incredible. In-fucking-credible.  

You laugh bitterly, trying to put up a strong front but your voice betrays you by cracking. “That’s low, Karl. That’s - really fucking low.”

Instantly regretting it, he tries to make amends but can’t put words together properly. His mind reels, heart races, palms suddenly feel sweaty and all he can manage is your name. “(Y/N)......I -”

You can’t bear to hear another false apology spill from his lips. If that’s how he felt, then there was no changing his mind. No matter how badly you wanted to. 

“No you’re right. You’re right. You made your choice and so have I. Goodbye Karl.” You conclude and hang up, throwing your phone across the room. You stare at it until your vision becomes blurry with tears. 

Where do you go from here?

Before

You didn’t think that when you first started streaming that you’d end up at the point you were now. You just wanted to have fun with your friends, maybe meet some new people, share your interests along with the loads of games you found amusing. Interestingly enough, your personality and content seemed to resonate with a lot of people. 

Pretty soon you’d become one of the top streamers on Twitch behind the other big talent that once dominated your dashboard. 

You’d made your way into the big leagues with names like GeorgeNotFound, Dream, Quackity, Nihachu, and even Karl Jacobs. Though you’d met the latter two years ago, you’d become quick friends with Quackity, or Alex(is), having bonded over having similar backgrounds and interests. 

He was more like a brother to you than anything, much to the chagrin of many in the chat. You believe it had to do with growing up in a family with mostly girl siblings. 

Your collabs with Alex garnered lots of views, with people tuning into the streams to watch you two yell at each other chaotically while playing odd games or attempting to bake things. 

Of course, while he did your side of content, that meant you had to hold up your end of the bargain. Minecraft wasn’t your strong suit at first, but as time went on and with some help from both Alex and Karl, you became a little more proficient. 

Karl was no stranger to you, not anymore. Alex had introduced you to Karl a little after he started streaming. You’d only really known him from a couple of Jimmy’s videos. 

He seemed kind, goofy, friendly, and all around a pretty fun guy to be around. Which is why when you started to fall just a little bit for him, you were surprised. You came into this Twitch thing with one rule. Don’t fall for people. 

Things could get messy, it was always a given. The fandoms would tear into you or them, people were unpredictable. It was just better to keep everyone at an arm's length when it came to shipping. 

You were thankful nothing had come to fruition from your friendship with Alex. If anything, all you saw were people shipping you platonically. Though you two would often tease each other if one had a crush on someone. 

Your dynamic with Alex meant that you had countless ridiculous and outrageous moments together, often documenting them when he would visit you in LA from Mexico or you going to Mexico to see family and stopping by to visit him.

It was starting to become a thing you two did a few times a year. This year was no different. Even when the pandemic seemed to sour your plans, you both promised to stay safe and healthy and limit the trips. So far, this was going to be the first trip you two would be taking anywhere. 

Your phone buzzed next to you as you scrolled mindlessly through your discord server. You laughed a bit here and there, looking at memes and chatting with people. 

Alex’s text ringtone was him rage quitting during a game where you absolutely obliterated his ass. You either cracked up at the sound of it or jumped in sudden fear when it bounced off the walls of your apartment in the middle of the night. 

A: Hey wiener, are you packed?? I know you take like three business days to get ready. 

You rolled your eyes. He was supposed to be coming to visit you first before you both made the flight out to see Karl in North Carolina. 

Y: Me??? I’ve been packed since last week. I thought you were supposed to be on the flight here already 🙄

A: I may or may not…...already be out. 💀

Your eyes widen. You abandon the chat and hit the FaceTime button. He lets it ring for a good five seconds before he accepts it and greets you with a close up of his face.

“What am I looking at?” You ask, feigning disgust. 

“My beautiful face, what else?” 

“Really? I thought it was a dog’s asshole.” You chuckle. 

He guffaws. “Fuck off! First I get stranded here in LA, then I get some shitty chicken nuggets and now you’re calling me butt ugly! Why does life hate me so much?!”

“Menso! You were supposed to call me when you - wait did you say chicken nuggets?”

“Yeah, I still have the rest but I can’t finish because every time I chew I think of the pink slime.”

“Ugh don’t talk about Supersize Me, I’m still having nightmares about it. Who shows that to little kids??” 

“Yeah well it’s shit, Burger King’s better.” He admits, munching down on the nuggets. He chews obnoxiously near the phone speaker to annoy you so you tap at the screen in retaliation. 

“Hey, I was supposed to record you trying out American McDonald’s! Why are you taking sweet sweet content away from me? Now no one gets to see you lose your McVirginity!”

He sputters through a mouthful of nuggets and does a combination of coughing and laughing. 

“Anyways,” he says, finally nugget free. “You coming or not? I don’t think I wanna sleep on the airport floor.”

“Yeah yeah, I’m coming. I’ll text you when I’m outside.” 

The airport was a forty five minute drive, thirty if you stepped on it and committed several traffic violations. 

Maybe that would make good content. 

You grabbed your keys and rushed out of your home, fully prepared to go fast and furious. You put your windows down, connected your phone to the aux and blasted Tokyo Drift as you merged into the freeway. 

Half an hour later, you’d arrived at a packed airport pick up area and texted Alex to let him know you’d arrived. He replied that he was starting to feel the effect of the chicken nuggets but that he would push through people to get out of the building before he caught anything from anyone.

Once you could make out his figure up ahead in front of the other cars, you got the bright idea to switch your music to something more interesting. You pulled up one of his videos where he was fully invested in a rendition of Hey There Delilah and honked excessively once you got closer to him. He looked around and pulled his beanie down lower to hide his face in embarrassment. 

You and the prerecorded Quackity sang in off key unison with the volume up as much as you could before he threw his luggage and bags into your backseat, hopped into the passenger seat and put the volume down.

“Never do that again.” 

“Hey, that was your welcome salute. I don’t do that for other people, you’re special and I like it.”

“Could you try liking me a little less? I could do without all the cringe covers.” He laughed to himself as he buckled up. 

The ride home consisted of a mix of very poor and impressive impressions of characters that would’ve annoyed nearly anyone else except you. Alex alternated from a gruff impression of Squidward to a raunchy Mickey Mouse that left you doubling over and gripping the steering wheel. You competed with him, doing your worst impression of Cookie Monster and Goofy. 

Your impression competition was interrupted by a phone call, Karl’s photo flashing flipped a panic switch in you as you scrambled to grab your phone. Alex takes your phone and extends his arm far from your reach. 

“Ah, ah, ah! No texting and driving! You want to kill us or something?!”

“I need to answer! What if he thinks I’m ignoring him?”

“I got it, I got it.” He assures, sliding the bar to unlock the phone and meet Karl face to face.

Karl makes a surprised sound, greeting Alex almost immediately. 

“Hey bub!” You chime in, keeping your eyes on the road but getting a glimpse of Karl in his frog outfit. 

“Hi! Sorry, I didn’t know you were driving.”

“No it’s okay! I’m just coming back from picking up this idiot.” 

“Who you calling idiot, dumbass?” Alex suddenly burst into his Mickey Mouse voice from earlier, ending it with the iconic Mickey laugh. 

Karl seemed to eat it up, breaking into laughter. It was infectious enough to make you chuckle. 

“You guys excited for the trip? It’s looking really pretty here this time of year. I can’t wait to show you around.”

“You mean show us your sweater collection?” Alex jabs.

You nudge him roughly to the side as a warning, glaring at him when he glances at you. 

You’d hoped that the change of scenery would do you some good. LA was an endless heap of  heat that you never could seem to escape. Not even with air conditioning. It was October already, which normally would mean Fall, orange leaves, pumpkins everywhere, a complete shift in temperature, right? Nope. 

It was the devil’s asshole all year round, something Alex could attest to. 

“Don’t mind him, I think he was dropped as a kid.”

“How dare you! There is nothing wrong with me, I’m perfect.”

“Ha! Sure. As if you don’t have a lot of things wrong with you.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

You tap at the time on your screen, “We don’t have enough time to get into it.”

You turn your attention back to Karl, very attentive to your bickering, small chuckles here and there. It wasn’t until he made eye contact with you that you felt your hands falter on the wheel. You were lucky enough that it didn’t make you stray away from the road. 

“Um - you know what? We’ll call you later, we’re almost home anyways.” 

“Okay! Be safe! Goodnight. ” Karl bids you both goodbye and poses his phone in front of him in order to hug it from afar, as if to hug both you and Alex. 

You groan to yourself, pretending to bang your head against the steering wheel as soon as you pull up to your complex. Alex laughs at your misery. 

“Oh man, you really are down BAD.”

“Shut up! I regret telling you things sometimes.” 

“No one said you had to! I guess I just have one of those faces.” He Chad swipes at his chin and squints at you.

“Yeah, punch able.” You remark with a quirk of your brow, slipping out of the car and heading to your front door. 

Alex follows, grabbing his things in a hurry before you can get the chance to lock him out and leave him to sleep with the coyotes. 

“Don’t leave me out here! I’m too delicious to die!” He cries.

You’re awoken by the feeling of warm sunlight on the left side of your face. You hesitate to move, feeling tired already even though you’re sure you slept longer than you should’ve. 

You prop yourself up by your elbows, shielding your face from the sun with your hand. You get out of bed groggily, staring at the floor for a second before making your way to the living room and finding Alex sleeping in a weird position. 

Amused, you rush back into your room and grab your phone to document this moment and post it on Twitter. However when you return, he’s gone. You lean over the couch to check if he’s hiding behind it but he’s nowhere to be found. 

You’re about to crouch to check for his feet or any sign of him when you feel fingers dig in your sides. You yelp in fear and surprise, smacking your attacker until he starts to yell in a shrill voice. 

Alex pushes you over the couch making you fall on your ass. 

“WHAT THE HELL?!” You scream. 

“That’s what you get for trying to take pictures of me!”

You try to stand, rubbing at your sore ass. ���Ugh, what are you, a cryptid or something? The people have a right to see!”

“No one gets to see me in the morning! No one! I need my beauty sleep more than you.”

He extends a helping hand for you to take in a moment of truce but you take advantage and pull him down with you to land on his back. He groans when he hits the ground and curses at you in Spanish. 

“Play time’s over, we gotta get ready. The plane leaves in…..one hour????!” 

Your phone says it’s only nine in the morning but you hazily remember the tickets reading ten thirty. 

“No way! I have to take a shower, I have to order food….” He begins, counting on his fingers the various things he suddenly had to do but you stop him by running into your room and getting your bags. 

“No time! Brush your teeth, get dressed, I’ll buy us something at the airport.”

“NOOOO! Airport food is disgusting! Can’t we stop somewhere?” 

“Like I said, no time! We gotta be out of here in thirty minutes.”

He grumbles under his breath. 

“I heard that!” You yell behind you, grabbing a towel and turning on your shower. 

After Alex rummaged through your kitchen, stuffed himself with some snacks and an alarming amount of frozen food, you urged him to shower in the little time span you had left and ordered a ride to take you to the airport. 

You had to basically pull him away from putting on his finishing touches with his beanie, with him complaining that his hair wouldn’t settle under it the way he wanted. You rolled your eyes and shoved him and your stuff into the Uber and kissed California goodbye. 

You two started planning what you’d do in NC as soon as you landed, besides getting food. You could practically hear Alex’s stomach grumbling the whole drive to the airport and even after the Uber gave him some snacks.

There was a sense of urgency that made your stomach twist in knots until you’d arrived at the drop off section. You stuck your tickets in your pocket as you hurried Alex, dragging him and urging him to run faster than he’d ever imagined to catch the plane. 

With only minutes to spare, you didn’t realize you were holding your breath until you panted and tried to regain it once you were at the gate. Alex makes a joke about you being out of breath to the pretty attendant that you make a note of later, just in case he tried to flirt with her. 

Alex followed the attendant like a puppy while you popped your phone out from your pocket and snapped a photo of the plane. You debated sending it to Karl, not sure if wanting your boarding to be a surprise or not. You relented to posting it on Twitter and sending it to Karl. 

Big things coming ;) You tweeted, exiting out of the app as quickly as you’d posted it, knowing you’d be flooded with notifications. 

You switched over to message, sending it to Karl but unsure if he would be awake right now. Maybe it would make his day better. 

On our way! See you soon! :)) 

You ran to catch up with Alex, finding him still talking to the attendant. In the most bitchy voice you could muster, you hugged him from the side and nestled your head into his shoulder. 

“I’m so happy we’re going on vacation babe, thank you!” 

His face fell, the attendant suddenly losing interest and suggesting the two of you find your seats. You intertwine your hands with his and hold it up, making a joke about how you two were inseparable. 

He suppresses the urge to fight you and instead screams internally, whisper yelling to you as you both sit. “You couldn’t let me be a Chad once? Just once!” 

“That’s what you get for slamming me on my ass earlier.”

[avengerscompound]

Running to a Standstill - 16

Running to a Standstill: A Captain America Fanfic

Masterlist PREVIOUS //

Buy me a ☕ Character Pairing:  Bucky Barnes x Steve Rogers x F!Reader

Word Count:  1849

Rating:  E

Warnings: Canon typical violence

Synopsis: While on the run from an unknown organization trying to take your son, you meet two super-soldiers.  While they try to help you get to the bottom of who is hunting you and your son, feelings come out and admissions are made that make your personal life even more tricky.

Chapter 16

By the time you and Bucky got home, Geo was awake again.  Bucky had given him a punnet of blueberries to eat on the elevator ride up. As soon as the three of you arrived at Steve’s apartment, the toddler jumped out of his stroller and carried the rest of the berries to the coffee table where he immediately started playing with his Lego.

“Good.  You’re back,” Steve said, approaching the two of you.  “Honey, I can’t say too much.  But we’ve finally got a solid lead on who has been hunting you.  We have to act quickly and hit hard. We’re leaving Hill, Agent 13, and some agents here.  There’s also some of the Iron Legion.  Stay put.  You’re safe in the building.  Don’t order food to be delivered.  There’s the common room and a cafeteria on four if you don’t feel like cooking.  If Geo gets bored, get FRIDAY to take you up to the party deck or the pool, but do not leave the building for any other reason.”

Bucky was used to Steve in the ‘take-charge, voice of authority’ mode he got into when he had slipped on the Captain America persona.  Bucky had always taken comfort in it.  When Steve was like this, as dumb as he might seem, Bucky trusted he had some kind of plan of attack.  The look in your eye told him that you weren’t as comforted as Bucky was.

You had the wild-eyed look of a cornered animal, not sure whether to lash out or run.  Steve put his hand on your arm and looked in your eyes.  “This is it, sweetheart.  We do this, and you’ll be free from it.  You just have to trust us for a little longer.”

You nodded, and he kissed your forehead.  “You stay safe.”

“You too, Steve,” you said quietly.

Bucky ruffled Geo’s hair and kissed your cheek.  “We’ll see you soon, okay?”  He said, hoping he sounded optimistic and comforting.

“Okay,” you said, obviously not buying it.

He looked back over his shoulder as he left the apartment following after Steve, seeing that you’d gone to sit with Geo.  Something on his face told him you were going to prepare to run.

“You might need to tell Hill that she’s a flight risk,” Bucky said as they both got on the elevator.

“She knows,” Steve said.  His jaw was clenched, and it twitched slightly.  It was hurting him knowing how scared you were and that that fear was potentially a little more potent than the bonds you’d formed with them.

Bucky rubbed Steve’s shoulder.  “We’ll end this.  Tell me what’s going on.”

The doors opened on the armory, and they both strode in and started suiting up.  Clint, Natasha, and Sam were all in there, getting the last of their gear.  It looked like they had already been briefed, and they were just waiting for Bucky to get back.

“The intel came back,” Steve said, as he pulled on his body armor.  “The drugs trace back to the Madripoor government.  Three manufacturing plants control distribution.  It all goes back to their current ruler.  Ophelia Sarkissian, or as she is also known, Viper, the current head of HYDRA.”

“So it was HYDRA?”  Bucky asked, buckling the last few straps on his suit.

“Yes,” Steve said, picking up his shield.  “Though not originally.  IGH was its own thing.  When Jessica Jones broke up their operation, HYDRA swooped in and collected up the scraps.  With the work they gathered using Loki’s scepter, paired with what they found from IGH, they were able to re-create a drug similar to the combat enhancers that IGH were selling to the American Military, but with more erratic side effects.  It looks like they want Geo to see if they can work out how to make a more permanent drug.”

“So, what’s the plan?”  Bucky asked, shouldering the last of his weapons.

Steve indicated to the door and Bucky, and the others followed him back to the elevator.  “We’re going in teams - four in total.  Three will be hitting the manufacturing plants,  the other - Castle Madripoor.  Each team will have additional agents with them.”

The elevator stopped, and they got out onto the landing bay.  One jet was ready for take-off, and the other three were being prepared and waiting in a queue to use the launch pad.  Everyone gathered around Steve.

“Team one is Sam, Wanda, and Clint,” Steve said, speaking to everyone but without breaking his flow with Bucky.  “Two are Rhodey, Natasha, and Bruce.  The third will be Bucky, Vision, and Tony.  Your groups will be the ones hitting the plants.  It’ll be important you not let anyone get out and get as much data as you can.  Carol, Thor - you’re with me.  The full briefs will be given on the jets.  We know HYDRA.  They are good at spreading roots.  We need to rip it all out in one go.  If they have any of this hiding elsewhere, we need to find it.  Any questions?”

When no one spoke up, the teams all split up.  Steve grabbed Bucky’s arm before he went to his Jet.  “Be careful, Buck,” he said.

Bucky smiled and pressed his forehead against Steve’s.  “You too.  We’ll get them.  We stopped them coming for Wanda and me.  We’ll stop them coming for her too.”

Steve closed his eyes and took a deep breath before breaking apart and heading to his jet.  Bucky ran to the plane his team was using. They were already in place and waiting for him.  Tony was in the cockpit with one of the agents Bucky had seen around; he thought her name might be Jacobs.  “Finished making kissy faces with your boyfriend, Barnes?”  Tony said and started flicking switches, preparing to take off.

Bucky put his machine gun into one of the racks and sat down, buckling himself into the jumpseat.   “So, what’s the plan?”  He said.

“Me and Viz are gonna jump out before we get in sight of the island and go ahead.  Viz is going to stealth in, get the data.  I’ll come in after - seal off the place.  You and the rest, land, and circle in and lock everything down,” Tony explained.  “Should be a piece of cake.  The castle is going to be the bitch, but Cap squared should be able to handle it.”

Bucky nodded and sat quietly, letting himself fall into the dark space he always went into when he had to fight.  He was a little worried about going back to you when he was done with this.  It still took about a week to shake off the soldier after a battle like this, and you hadn’t seen him like that.  Overriding that was the concern that you wouldn’t be there at all.  He couldn’t help but worry that he’d get back home, still in the winter soldier headspace, and he’d find you and Geo missing.  He didn’t quite know how he’d survive that.  Or at least the him that had started to heal and feel worthy since you, Steve, and he had started seeing each other.  That soft part of his person that was so fragile and so hopeful would never see the light of day again if that happened.

By the time Tony and Vision had left the jet to hit first, Bucky was buried in the dark zone of the soldier.  Aware of every flicker of movement, every sound made, every color in the room, yet not at all attached to his emotions.  Like he was an empty shell that processed the physical and nothing else.

The jet landed, and Bucky led the team out the cargo bay hatch.  “Branch out, we’re going in on all sides,” he ordered.  The agents followed his instruction, circling the factory. 

The sound of fighting was already loud, making him sink further down into that place inside him that HYDRA had made.  Tony circled overhead, and a series of explosions rocked the nearside of the factory.  Bucky shouldered his machine gun and ran.

Armed guards met him at the now destroyed fence around the facility.  Other workers were running around wildly, but from the looks of it, it didn't take too much to get them to drop to the ground and surrender.

The guards were more difficult.  They had HYDRA tech, and there were a lot of them.  Bucky wasn’t concerned.  He never was when he got into this state.  He had a mission - he would complete it.  Besides, he knew HYDRA better than he knew himself.  He knew how they fought.  He knew their weapons.  He knew how to take them down.

He moved quickly and without hesitation.  He shot two guards before he even reached the factory.  He leaped over the remnants of the fence and took out three more.  He ducked behind a wall and tossed a grenade at a truck that was barreling toward some agents.

A wall exploded nearby, and Bucky ran to the hole, jumping through it.  Some HYDRA goons were inside shoveling pills into their mouth.  Bucky took each of them out and ducked to the side as someone came charging at him.  They lumbered through the wall and out the other side.  “Stark,” Bucky called over the comms. “They’re taking the pills.”

“Shit,” Tony cursed.  “I’ll take care of the supers; you see if you can secure the drugs.”

Bucky moved through the room, taking out anyone that behaved aggressively, putting anyone else in cuffs.  Outside he could hear the battle.  It was already dying out.  While the plant was guarded, it wasn’t a military stronghold.  Bucky moved to an elevated position and watched over the room.  Another guard made a play for the drugs, and he took them out with his sniper rifle before they reached them.  Besides that, the room remained quiet.  The sounds from outside started to die off and then went silent.  A few agents came in and began rounding up the people in cuffs, but Bucky stood and waited.  He had a mission, and he’d stand here until it was done.

Tony flew in and landed next to Bucky.  “Hey, robocop,” he said, his visor sliding back.  “Vision’s still downloading the data.  We’re doing a cleanup.  We kinda need to be quick because this is technically an act of war.  They’re breaking international law, but they’re gonna retaliate.”

Bucky nodded, watching as even more agents came in and began packing up the drugs and equipment.

“You gonna be okay watching this?  I’ll go patrol.  We should be fine given there’s an attack going on on the castle right now,” Tony said.

Bucky nodded again.  “You heard anything?”

Tony clapped him on the shoulder.  “The other factories are ours.  Still working on the castle.  Your boyfriend is fine so far.”

Something relaxed inside Bucky.  He didn’t say anything as Tony took off again, and even as he stood there, keeping watch of the operation, a small smile cracked through the hard exterior as he realized that he did still have that soft part of him, even now.

// NEXT

[chaoticpete]

Our lives is a movie?

Peter Parker x reader...I think, Avengers x reader, Tom Holland x Reader (if ya squint)

Warnings: none

What would it be like if the team found out they were just a movie series in our world?

A/n: This is just an idea I had like last year, will probably end up rewriting it, well at least the end, hope you guys still enjoy it though!

“Oh come on! I was so close to an almost perfect winning streak!” You yell at Bucky. Tossing the controller beside you, you cross your arms and start pouting as your Yoshi finally crosses over the finish line.

“Guess I’m just better.” He replies with a smug smirk. “Is that why I beat you the first three games.” It’s your turn to smirk when he glares at you. An alarm starts going off through the tower. A code red. Someone is inside the tower. You wave your hand and your suit appears on.

“FRIDAY! Where’s the intruder?” Tony asks, running into the room, Nat and Wanda following behind. “They’re trying to get into the plans vault, sir.”

“L/N would you mind pulling up a portal?” You make one leading to the vault. “Why of course Papa Stark!” Tony summons a suit and the rest of you jump through your portal seeing a blue man trying to get past the actual vault.

“Hey, Smurf! Who do you think you are?” You ask, throwing a mini explosive his way. He jumps out of way throwing back a disk towards you guys that set off a bright light.

Then he sent another one.

“Void! Look out!” Peter says pushing you out of the way the same time you made another portal causing it to mix with the blue guy’s device.

Before anyone else in the team could do anything the guy was gone, and so were you and Peter.

You land landing on your face. “Ow...I really don’t get paid enough for this.” You grumble as you get back up and brush off your clothes. You notice a golden disk by you. It’s the one the guy threw.

Picking it up and slipping it into your suit, you begin looking around you, you see lots of people walking around some talking other carrying items. “Where the hell am I?” You say starting to walk around.

When you spotted some familiar brown curls. “Peter!” You say running towards the boy and pulling him into a hug. “Ugh, I have absolutely no idea whe- when you change your clothes?” You ask actually getting a good look at him.

‘Peter’ looks at you confused. “When did I change my clothes? Darling, I think the real question is what are you wearing and who are you?” He says in a British accent.

Before either of you can say anything else ANOTHER Peter runs up to you. “Y/n!” “Peter?!” You say back pulling this one in a hug.

“Are you okay?” “Yeah. But when I came out of that portal this woman automatically started coming at me saying that “I needed to get ready for the next scene” and “I needed a touch up” THEN SHE TRIED TO UNDRESS ME! I ran so fast.”

Quickly remembering the other Peter you step back from that Peter and look between the two. Peter looks over at the next person, who he saw...was him. “Holy shit!” He says jumping closer to you.

“Y/n, what is happening?” “I don’t know but I don’t like it. Do you think this is Loki’s doing?” “No, no.” He's on that time mission, remember.” “She.” “Oh yeah.”

The fake Peter looked just as confused as the both of you. “I feel like I should be calling security, but it’s not every day you meet someone who looks, exactly like you.” He says staring at Peter.

“Whoa, you’re British?!” Peter askes shocked at the accident. “Would it help better if I talked like this?” He asked now in an American accent.

He sounded just like Peter.

Both your and Peter’s eyes open wide. “Noooo.” You both say. “You both already look very much alike. Don’t you guys talk alike also?”

A loud bell rings and you and Peter automatically jump into your fighting stances. “Shit! Break is just about done.” Fake Peter says panicking a bit.

“Uh, okay follow me. You guys can stay in my trailer till I’m done for the day then when you get to the hotel we can figure this out.” He says starting to walk towards the trailers.

He goes to one labeled “Peter Parker” and opens the door. “You guys can wait till I’m done. Please, don’t let anyone in. I have a key so I’ll just lock it. Um, there are some snacks in the cupboard, water in the fridge, and feel free to watch anything on the tele. Even got youtube!” He yelled before closing the door.

“...did you catch any of that?” “Nope.”

Turning on the tv, you see the date. “February 16, 2021. What the hell is Covid-19-“

You get cut off by someone trying to open the door. “Fucking div locked the door again. And left the tele on.” You hear a voice mumble on the other side before walking off.

“N/n look at this,” Peter says flipping through pages of paper.

“What is it?” “It’s a script. For a “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” He says looking at the first page. “It has everyone in here. Aunt May, Mj, Ned even that European trip we went on.” “Wait what?” You ask, looking over his shoulder.

“Dude...where the hell are we.”

Hours passed and before you know it you hear the trailer door unlocking. Sitting up in the bed you see the fake Peter (whose name you learned was Tom) walking in looking tired.

“Hey. Okay, so before I actually bring you guys back home. Who exactly are you?”

“Well, my name is Peter. Peter Parker. Spider-Man. Um, I’m pretty sure you know me.”

“Yeah kinda. I am...you? Technically...in this universe. Well, one of you. I’ll explain better at the hotel. Oh, I’m Tom by the way. Don’t think I’ve actually introduced myself.” He says chuckling. “And you?” He asks turning your attention to you.

“I’m the actual Y/n. Or Void as my hero name.”

“Y/n huh? Yeah, we don’t have you here.” “Wait what? Really? But I’m Peter’s partner in crime. We’re always getting blamed for everything with the team.” You say pouting.

“Is there at least an actor that looks like me?” “No, I don’t think so darling. Sorry.”

Before anything else can be said there’s another knock on the door. “Tom, are you in there mate? We’re going to go get some pizza.”

“Uh, no thanks I’ll just meet you back at the room. Be safe.” “Who was that?” “My brother, Harry.” “Aww, he has a brother.” “Three actually.” “Awww!”

“Okay it should be safe to get you two out of here but first. Here,” Tom says opening up a kit bag and giving Peter some clothes and you an oversized hoodie. “They might think you’re trying to steal the suit.”

“Oh, and you’ll need these.” He says grabbing a box and handing you each a mask after Peter was done changing.

“Yeah what’s with these?” “We’re in a pandemic?” “Like the plague?” “Ehh, sort of. Now let’s find a way to get you two back home.”

**************************************************************

“So here, we’re all just...comic book characters? There are no avengers? No flying robots? Nothing?”

“Nope. No alien villains. Just regular people who wanna bring harm.” “Huh.”

The three of you were now in Tom’s suite.

“So how did you guys even get here.” “Well, my theory is when the guy threw his little disk thingy, it merged with Y/n powers and made a new portal.”

“But how do you know that’s what it was meant to do?” “It’s the only explanation with how he got into the compound and the vault unnoticed.”

“You guys never thought about that?” “Blame Tony.” You say as Peter hisses and moves back from getting shocked.

“You okay?” You say grabbing his hand to inspect the slight burn. “Yeah, just a sting. It’ll heal in an hour or two.”

“Can you get us back home?” “Yeah, but I’ll need a few supplies.” “Well,” Tom speaks up. “I’m off tomorrow so we can go pick up what you need. You can stay here tonight if you like.”

“Thanks, dude,” Peter says and you nod with him.

“You guys hungry? I can ask Harry to bring back some pizza for us.” “Ohh yes please.” You say bouncing on your toes a bit. “I’m absolutely starving.”

“So Tom you’re an actor right?” “Mhmm.” “And you said you play me?” “Yep.” “And they have the rest of the team?” “Besides me apparently,” you say under your breath.

“Maybe they’ll bring you in soon. The company is starting a new phase so,” Tom says shrugging.

“Do you guys wanna see them?” “How many are there?” “23 movies and more coming out. There's also shows.”

“23 MOVIES ABOUT US?!”

Tom can’t help but laugh at your guy’s reaction. “Yeah, Marvel movies are some of the biggest ones these days. Going on for almost 13 years.”

“How much have you acted in?” “Like five, two solo films, and this one we’re currently filming will make it six. Three solos and three with the actual avengers.”

There was a knock on the door. “Must be Harry with the pizza,” Tom says going to the door. “Why didn’t you just use your key?”

“Cause my hands are full ya div. Why did you get so much food any-“ Harry stops when he sees you and Peter sitting on the couch.

Tom quickly grabs the food from his hands before he can even think about letting it go.

Looking between his brother and his duplicate you couldn’t help but start laughing at his expression.

All three turned to look at you like you completely lost his mind (which I’m sure is exactly how Harry was feeling). “I’m just gonna...nice meeting you guys I guess.” He says walking to what you think is his room before looking back at Tom and Peter causing him to almost walk up into a wall.

“Uh...sorry about that. That’s my little brother Harry, he came along as my assistant.” You and Peter nod. “Well guess we can dig in and watch the movies.”

“I- it was not that dramatic when Mr. Stark took the suit.” “Yes, it was. You could barely talk properly when you called me.”

“I can’t believe they included Flash but not me.”

“Okay, but why is the guy who plays Mysterio kinda hot though.” “Y/n I swear.” “Okay, but am I wrong?!” “...no.”

“Tony’s ego is gonna be ruined if he ever knows they killed him off.”

“Sucks we didn’t have enough time to watch all 23 films. I’m sure it would make more sense.”

And that’s how your night went. You just watched the Spider-Man stand-alone ones before everyone started to crash from the long eventful day. Harry even came out and joined you guys.

After figuring out what was needed and put together his own device, it was time for you guys to go home.

“You guys got everything?” Harry asks as Peter puts the finishing touches. “Yeah, thank you, guys. Really, I don’t know what I and Peter would’ve done if we didn’t end up here.”

“Oh! These are for you.” Tom says handing you a bag. “It’s the whole MCU collection. I saw how much you guys loved the Spider-Man ones and it was confusing since they all interact. Plus, I’m sure the others would wanna see them.”

“As if some of them need an ego boost. Especially Tony and Loki. I’m pretty sure if Loki ever found out he was actually worshipped here he would find a way to get here.”

You go and pull Tom into a hug. “Nice meeting you Peter’s British half. I’ve never really cared for them but eh, I guess I have a little soft spot for two of them now.” You say shooting Harry a wink before placing a kiss on Tom’s cheek and then going to give Harry a hug as Peter says his byes.

“Ready N/n?” “I guess. I just hope we actually end up in our world and not a different one.” You say grabbing Peter's hand as he gets ready to throw the disc.

You both look back at the two Holland brothers. “See you again one day boys.” You say as Peter throws the disc and a portal opens and the two of you jump through it.

The two of you crash to the floor. “Ugh, Peter get off me! You’re skinny but really heavy.”

“Kids!” You both look up to see the team rushing to you guys. “Where did you two go?!”

Getting up from the ground, both tackled with hugs.

“YOu'll never believe us. But we do have the next movie night!” “What are those?” “Movies about us. Avengers! To the theater room!”

Tags:: @tommyunderoos @spideyspeaches @frenchfrostpudding @holland-styles @gwenvrse @allegra-writes @petersgroupie @cherry-hyejin @kitkatd7 @buckys-other-punk

[americangirlstar]

american girl contemporary dolls’ animal crossing islands

bc apparently covid is now canon to the agverse you know they all got new horizons

lindsey bergman: the first contemporary doll also has THE most chaotic island. she does what she wants and nobody can stop her. she only accepts the villagers with the wildest designs, made everyone’s catchphrase either uwu speak or smth like “gay rights,” only wears the most hideous outfit combinations, and buys everything from redd no matter how fake it is. one room of her house is filled with haunted artwork, another has nothing but snapping turtles. she’s figured out how to make memes into clothing patterns and now every pathway on her island is the pogchamp face. best friends with flick. honestly she’s an icon 

kailey hopkins: spends 90% of her time swimming or fishing. only 90% because she actually takes her role as island rep seriously and she has worked very hard to get it to five-star. she does abuse her power to make a million rivers and turn her island into basically a waterpark, but that just makes it cooler. died of joy when swimming was enabled and now has two of everything you can collect in the ocean decorating her house, every room of which resembles a beach house. also collects seashells and has very pretty shell arches decorating doorways

marisol luna: she went into the game with a list of who she will and will not allow on her island and is ruthless in kicking out villagers in order to get who she wants to move in. absolute QUEEN at catching tarantulas/scorpions, goes hunting for them on islands with the insane amount of nook miles she collects by doing random quests. loves collecting emotions for her character to do and then making funny videos out it. filled out the fossils in her museum FAST and now just digs up fossils to decorate the lawn with. each room of her house is a different dance studio. 

jess mcconnell: QUEEN of fishing and bug-catching but can’t dive for SHIT. she has about three of every fossil because she can’t stand the idea of selling them. is obsessed with gathering every possible DIY recipe even if she doesn’t plan on making anything with them, she just thinks they’re neat. has a shrine on her island for redd and celeste in attempts to get them to come more often. she’s been on her island religiously every day since she got the game, it’s a little scary. thinks murder should be legal on her island 

nicki fleming: cannot chose a mean dialogue option to save her life. she can barely stand to kick out villagers she dislikes either, only does it if they ask to leave and then prays to the nintendo gods that bunnie will come visit the island. the main room of her house is reflective of her actual room, the rest of it is absolutely gorgeously decorated, stuff made to look like meadows or snowy mountains. winter is her favorite, she makes a snowboy every day no matter how many times she crashes the snowballs. LIVES for cj and flick because she always hated the idea of her fish/bugs dying for a competition. saves all her new stuff for the museum for nighttime because she feels bad waking up blathers 

mia st clair: wants to hack the game so that it’s winter all the time. soon as the winter DIYs dropped she redecorated her entire island and house to be as icy as possible. she’s basically queen elsa at this point. she’s horrible at catching items so her museum is mostly fossils, but even then sometimes she sells fossils before identifying them if she’s short on bells. she visits sable every day in hopes of making her feel happy. she has pretty much every possible clothing wand so that she can carry around one to match each outfit. one time her brothers went on to try and fuck with her island and we don’t speak of what happened following that. fear her 

chrissa maxwell: shares an island with gwen and sonali. she’s the one in charge so she’s working very hard to make it a 5-star island so isabelle will stop bugging her about it. also very into DIY and likes to decorate the island with things she’s built. favorite seasonal event was the wedding anniversary one, she can’t get enough of redesigning and taking photos of those funky lil alpacas. plus, she got a lot of neat stuff out of it. goes to the able sisters every day to see what kinds of new outfits they have, and yet somehow cannot make a good fashion decision to save her life. obsessed with swimming and now leaves all other museum donations to her girlfriends so she can spend all her free time looking for crabs��

gwen thompson: somehow absolutely brutal. will send clashing-colored toilets in the mail to villagers she doesn’t like to fuck with their home design and hit them with butterfly nets. she’s tried to hit them with axes as well. shakes trees constantly in an effort to catch wasps and has not gotten stung once because she’s that quick with a net. her favorite character is celeste and chrissa and sonali have barely any star stuff because whenever celeste is on gwen is hogging the switch. changes her characters’ hairstyle, like, every five minutes. when she sends her friends gifts the letters will say something like “fuck u, love u <3″ it’s so wildly different than how she normally acts in public that it’s a little scary 

sonali matthews: even worse than gwen. has tried to murder villagers she dislikes before. sometimes fucks with parts of the island just to see how people react. would sell her soul to redd just to piss off tom nook. the only thing she takes seriously is gardening, she has a fenced-off area where she breeds flowers and woe befall anyone who messes it up. her house is a hoarder’s nightmare and chrissa and gwen have been begging her to let them redesign it but she refuses. screenshots the worst parts of their island and posts them on twitter with the dreamcode so people can see the graveyard she made to intimidate rodney 

lanie holland: still lives in a tent because she thinks it’s cool, refuses to pay up to nook so she doesn’t have to get a house. somehow has the cutest outfits of everyone. her island design is to die for, half the island is full of flowers arranged in rainbow-order and the other half looks like a faerie forest. has filled out her museum’s bug collection and has half the fossils but keeps forgetting to go fishing. her little sister emily joined her island and keeps trying to get lanie to upgrade to a house or expand other stores but lanie refuses, it’ll mess with the aesthetic. emily basically has a huge mansion in the corner of the island while everything else is practically a glorified campsite. leif is lanie’s favorite and she only collects bells in order to buy things from him 

kanani akina: the most beautiful island design you’ve ever seen. she also takes the best screencaps and posts them just so her friends know what she’s up to but becomes internet famous for how gorgeous everything is. the best designs, very diverse plants, all the houses are arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. kanani’s house is on the beach so she can easily swim, fish and collect shells, but the inside is the best part. five of the six rooms are just as beautiful as you’d expect, with soft pastel aesthetics and quiet music playing. then her basement is referred to as the “special room” which holds nothing but several candles in a summoning circle and a single tarantula figure in the center. there’s a skeleton in the corner. whenever anyone asks about it she pretends she doesn’t know what they’re talking about. it’s the funniest thing 

mckenna brooks: disastrous. horrible at paying nook back and keeps getting angry letters from the happy home academy. her goal is to find any loopholes in the game and exploit them, no matter that the game is super simple and thus “cheats” aren’t very useful. she found out about island star ratings and now is trying in vain to get a five-star but she can’t get above a three. has been stung by wasps about a million times while shaking trees to try and find loose bells. one time she shook a tree and a toilet fell out and it now has a dedicated podium on her island, and whenever anyone asks she simply tells them that the toilet is the god of the island. hasn’t been able to keep a villager for longer than a few weeks, and also somehow got raymond on accident. still having the time of her life

saige copeland: spends far too much time designing customs and far too little removing weeds. wants to have flowers in rainbow order like lanie but keeps accidentally picking them. has absolutely no rush to do anything, lived in a tent for like three months because she forgot she could pay off loans. only accepts peppy or normal villagers so her island is pretty much all-girl and she refers to it as the amazon island; this is, however, because somehow no horses have shown up on her island yet even though she very much wants them to. likes to dream and go to random islands to get inspiration. she has a room in her house full of rainbow eels because she thinks they’re pretty 

isabelle palmer: will not stop buying things from the able sisters. she visits every day, pretty much buys one of everything, and then mixes and matches costumes instead of fixing her island. lives for the days when label visits because she takes her requests very seriously and comes back in outfits that slay™. almost exclusively gives clothing gifts to her villagers so that they have a better fashion sense. has a lot of flowers but can’t figure out how to get them to mix. the bug section of her museum has butterflies and nothing else simply because she only thinks to try and catch butterflies. hits rocks every day to try and find the daily Money Rock™. keeps trying to get raymond but her sister won’t let her pay anyone actual money for him 

grace thomas: when she visits the nook store she will solely speak to tommy. constantly checking the wiki to find out which DIYs sell well, and thus only collects shells in order to make shell arches to turn around and sell back. insanely good with bells and with figuring out how to make her island palatable, got a five-star fast. the main room of her house is decorated like a restaurant, with two different kitchen rooms and the upstairs decorated to look very french. she made everyone’s catchphrases french, too. is the only person in the world upset you can no longer eat the fish. goes swimming every day just so she can find a scallop and talk to pascal, she thinks he’s cool 

lea clark: there are a lot of plants here. just. far too many plants. of every color too! she’s very proud of it. she has a short attention span though so there’s like fifty different unfinished projects. she is best friends with like three villagers and forgets the names of the rest, but one time she accidentally hit a villager with a butterfly net and cried for an hour. only ever dresses in summer clothes and is awful at saving money so she only has like eight bells at a time. seasonal events are her absolute jam though, she can’t get enough of them. would die for leif. almost got blocked by the animal crossing twitter for constantly begging them to give her the froggy chair (thanks @lesbianleaclark!) 

gabriela mcbride: her island is more important than her social life. she is very serious about making it a functioning island, and is obsessed mainly with filling out her museum. every time she catches a sea bass instead of something new she lets out a series of swears not appropriate for a child audience. she is best friends with all of her villagers and cries whenever one of them thinks about leaving. her favorite kk slider song changes by day and she’ll switch the music around everywhere whenever she feels like it. visits other islands in order to gather materials to sell in order to make her house bigger; she’s got a dance room, a poetry corner, a student council room, and the main room looks like the liberty arts center. whenever anyone (who’s not redd) visits her island she cries and tries to figure out how to give them things for free because she loves them so much. whenever redd comes by without genuine art she tries to hack into the game in order to skin him alive

tenney grant: obsessed with getting every kk slider song. every time he shows up to the island she pulls up the list of available songs and picks one she doesn’t have yet to request. she wants to get a different song playing in every area of the island and every room of every house. shares an island with logan, jaya and holliday but she’s in charge, which sucks because holliday is way better at doing island management. she’ll text holliday with what isabelle wants her to do and then go DIY a guitar. she set up a stage area near the beach so they can give concerts for the villagers and honestly it looks gorgeous. she named her island “nashville” but makes no attempt to actually make it look like tennessee. she released her dream code on her twitter and because she’s technically a celebrity people keep coming by and asking her why everything on the island looks good except logan’s house and she’s like “ask logan idk” 

logan everett: speaking of which, yeah, logan’s house is a disaster. he cares naught for decorating his place and fills it with random things he thinks are “cool.” likes to run through flowers until they explode. the best diver on the island, though, and is responsible for that area of the museum, while tenney gets fishing, jaya gets bugs, and holliday gets fossils. they all work together to buy everything from redd whether it’s real or not because they think the art is pretty, they find out whether or not it’s real after taking it to blathers. he will place random toilets in the middle of the island and wait for someone else to find it, they have no idea he’s the one doing it and it’s driving them crazy. it’s also the funniest thing he’s ever done and he’s very proud of it. whenever kk shows up he requests a song tenney doesn’t have yet and leaves it outside her door. she didn’t ask him to do this he’s just like that 

z yang: the god of all things video games. she’s a streamer now and while she mostly streams mario, zelda or sonic games, on holidays she’ll stream her island and take suggestions for what she should do to it. due to this, her island can be a mess at times, but she somehow keeps getting good ratings. every time there’s an update she loads up a report of what’s new so she can be one of the first to try it out. she named her island something like “zworld” and refuses to change it. every room of her house is a different movie set, and she put cameras everywhere on the island “so the villagers don’t get any ideas.” somehow keeps getting rare villagers on the first try and won’t let them leave 

luciana vega: would die for celeste. her island is incredibly space-themed and well cared-for, because this game soothes her anxiety so she’s on it 24/7. her town flag is an incredibly accurate constellation. she fills out her museum specifically cause it’s run by celeste’s brother and she’d do anything for that owl; her parents got her a celeste plush for her birthday and now she won’t let go of it. she schedules her life around animal crossing updates. her favorite thing to do is go swimming at night and just look at the animation on the waves under the stars. also wisp’s best friend. won’t accept a villager unless they look like they could potentially be an alien, which means she has the coolest villager collection of everyone 

blaire wilson: due to her family’s experience running an inn she knows exactly how to run a village. her island’s almost boring in how well it’s designed and run, but she always has something extra to keep interest, like an island in the middle that’s filled with exotic flowers. went to the wedding picture event every day in order to get every piece of furniture she could and now has a “wedding area” of her island that nobody uses but is great for photos. isabelle is her favorite character and she will do anything for her. somehow able to make the funniest animal crossing memes in the world. once caught a coelacanth without expecting it and screamed and dropped her switch 

joss kendrick: the BEST fisher. has never lost a fish once, nobody knows how she does it. best friends with cj and takes his seasports challenges way too seriously. wishes they were able to surf but swimming is good, too, though sometimes she’ll spend upwards of ten minutes chasing a particularly stubborn crab. she is incredibly patient at terraforming and uses this skill for evil, as every time her cheer squad comes to visit her island she has completely changed it around and then has them all play hide-and-seek. nobody knows how to find anything. the only consistent thing is that the beach will be the coolest-looking beach in the whole game. she named her island “lesbos” and accepts villagers that “pass the gay vibe check.” nobody is sure what the gay vibe check is 

kira bailey: is horrible at saving bells or getting a good rating on her island but she doesn’t care because her main focus is DIYing her own decor to make her island look like her aunts’ conservatory. as such, will only accept animals that could potentially live there, such as koalas or kangaroos. she’s bad at figuring out where to put houses and buildings so her island’s a mess to navigate, however she knows the routes like the back of her hand and gets confused when people ask her how the hell she finds anything. for some reason absolutely terrified of wisp and refuses to wander her island at night in case they show up 

[midshipmank]

These Violent Delights Review (contains spoilers)

Where to begin with this book? I finished it almost two weeks ago, but I put off reviewing it because I had a lot of thoughts about it and a lot of ranting to friends to do before I felt calm enough to write an actual review. I personally dislike rant reviews and didn’t want to be the author of one. And it’s not like I hated this book! It had so much potential! I still think the concept was great! But I had so many craft problems with this book that I actually started writing notes and using page flags to keep track of everything that bothered me. I don’t normally do that!

So here we go. TLDR: Brilliant idea, terrible execution.

I split my page flags into 3 categories while reading: language, character, and gang-related (which ended up becoming worldbuilding in general). All of these informed my thoughts on what I found to be the biggest problem with this book in the end, which was the fact that it was a retelling. Or rather, it was supposed to be. This book is marketed as “Romeo and Juliet in 1920s Shanghai,” but it really, really does not want to be Romeo and Juliet. It is fighting that framework with everything it’s got. It makes me think that the idea of retelling Romeo and Juliet, regardless of setting, was probably the original inspiration for the book, but it definitely outgrew the play. The author needed to just let the retelling go and let the story be free.

What really firmly convinced me that this should not have been a R&J retelling was actually the author’s note in the back of the book. Gong talks about how, though there was no blood feud between two gangs at this time, she tried to keep the story as true to history as possible. So she lists all of the groups that were vying for power in 1920s Shanghai, all of whom were featured in the story in some way. And that’s exactly the problem. From a political perspective, Romeo and Juliet is a very simple play. There are only three groups with power: the Montagues, the Capulets, and the Prince. In 1920s Shanghai, there were always at least four (counting all the foreigners as one group) and, with her added blood feud, there’s always at least FIVE. If you have three other powerful groups running around causing problems, it pretty much takes all the intensity of your blood feud out of your blood feud. With everything else that was going on with the Communists, Nationalists, and foreigners, whenever the blood feud between the gangs came up, I was always sort of like, “Why is this here? It feels so pointless. What could it possibly add to the story?” All it really did was slow everything down because the gangs refused to work with each other, and add a layer of ~forbiddenness~ to the main romance. The actual plot of the story, about a British businessman unleashing a madness-inducing insect upon Shanghai, had literally nothing to do with the blood feud.

It would have made more sense to insert Roma and Juliette into two of the existing powers of historical Shanghai, and, indeed, Gong almost did: Roma could have been part of the “foreigners” block, like Paul Dexter. But for some reason the White Flowers were treated as separate from the foreigners for reasons I don’t totally understand. In the author’s note, Gong talks about how the Russian refugees in Shanghai never actually held much power, but that there was a reason she made them equal in power to the Scarlet Gang in this story. She doesn’t ever actually give that reason. Basically, as I read the author’s note, I kept thinking, “Then why didn’t you write about this? Or that? Or that? Why did you add all this stuff, when the actual history is more interesting?”

The other things that made this feel really unlike Romeo and Juliet are all character and gang-related. The thing that makes Romeo and Juliet WORK is that the characters, even when foolish and impulsive, COMMIT to the foolish and impulsive decisions they make. And those decisions have MASSIVE consequences. In a short series of fatal moves, they bind themselves to their fates. But halfway through this book, in the middle of yet another argument about what should be done (if anything) about the madness, I stopped and thought to myself, what has been done? What have these characters actually been doing? I was halfway through the book and it felt like nothing had happened. Sure, people had died and guns had been fired, but what were the consequences? Had anything actually CHANGED? It was at that point that I began to add page flags and take notes. I was tired and frustrated by the endless pages of characters waffling around Shanghai, having the same arguments over and over, and not accomplishing anything. This book was paced like it was written by the seat of Gong’s pants during NaNoWriMo, and then never underwent any significant structural edits. (The meanest my rants about this book ever got was after I finished it and described it to my twin as “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But that’s still what most of it felt like.)

One of the best examples of what I mean is a persistent problem I had with Juliette that was both character- and gang-related. Basically: there’s a point in the book where she thinks that everyone in Shanghai can recognize her on sight (and indeed, this does happen) because she’s the heir to a very powerful gang and she dresses in American clothes. So far so good. But on another occasion, she raids some place in pursuit of the Larkspur with Roma at her side in front of at least a hundred witnesses, and then….nothing. She doesn’t find the Larkspur, and later when talking to one of her cousins, she worries that her cousin might have learned about what she did. But then she thinks, no, it’s not possible that anyone knows I did that with Roma! And she’s right. SHE’S RIGHT. She waved her gun around and shouted in front of at least a hundred people, and was clearly working with Roma while she did it, AND NO ONE FOUND OUT. Things like this happened over and over with Juliette. Normally I’d love an interpretation of Juliet who’s so hot-headed and driven, but she got away with SO MUCH without ever being recognized or experiencing any consequences. In the end, my suspension of disbelief broke. Juliette’s antics, and consequently all the rest of the gang-related drama, became melodrama. It made me roll my eyes. I just couldn’t believe it anymore. This whole thing with Juliette wasn’t the only gang-related thing that frustrated me, but it was the biggest one.

In an effort to give Gong the benefit of the doubt: Romeo and Juliet can be read quite melodramatically. Maybe this is the effect she intended? Maybe she wanted us not to take it seriously?

But that brings me to my next point: at times, this book seemed to take itself TOO seriously. I got this impression mostly from the language. My initial reaction to the prose was, “Wow, this is so beautiful!” Eventually, though, it mostly just seemed purple. I kept wanting to cut sentences in half. It was like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a normal YA book or if it wanted to emulate William Shakespeare. So in the end, it mostly just seemed like an overwritten YA book in which the characters spouted needlessly flowery lines that just sounded silly. Again, it became melodrama. This was actually the first thing I started page-flagging.

The problem with the language wasn’t just silly though; it also had a detrimental effect on the plot and characterization. At times, the book was written in third-person omniscient and at times it was in third-person close. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but with the confusion of the plot I described above, it became difficult to keep track of who knew what. There were two separate times in the book when the characters discovered something about the monster and I thought, “Wait….didn’t everyone already know that?” One of these times was within the last twenty or so pages. I’m trying to stay calm right now, but it was unbelievably frustrating for something that had been obvious since the first page to be realized by one of the main characters at the very end of the book. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw the book across the room. But it is very pretty, so I didn’t.

The detrimental effect the language had on character was mostly that I never felt like I knew any of the characters. They’re fond of reminiscing dramatically on the past, but all we ever get are random details and no actual story. I kept waiting for a flashback that never came. I’m not a huge fan of flashbacks, but this book really, really could have used one. Both Roma and Juliette are very poetic about their shared history, but it all rang hollow because I felt like I had nothing real to grasp onto. They played games by the docks and killed each other’s loved ones? That’s pretty much all I got. By the end of the book, I still had no idea why they even liked each other. It’s mentioned several times that they thought they could end the blood feud, but, given how the blood feud pales in comparison to the actual history of Shanghai, that didn’t seem like much. The blood feud is not Shanghai’s biggest problem historically or in this book! So why should I care?

So we come back to the main problem of this book not feeling like Romeo and Juliet. It doesn’t want to be Romeo and Juliet! It is begging to be something else! The real causes of turmoil in Shanghai at this point in history were the foreign powers and the workers’ strikes. Gong says that herself! She made the foreigners the villain, which I think was a very good choice, but the workers’ strikes and growing Communist party just ended up feeling like set dressing. Background scenery. It added nothing to the plot but a red herring. In the authors’ note, Gong says that if she had followed history more closely, there would have been strikes in every chapter. I can understand why that would seem overwhelming, but if she didn’t wanted to include the workers’ strikes, then maybe….this should have been set….in a different time period….because this time period….has too many political elements….for an R&J retelling to work…. Just a thought! Or maybe she should have tossed R&J, which is the option I prefer, because the actual history is, as I have said before, much more interesting than a fictional blood feud between gangs.

In an effort to not be entirely negative about this book, I do have a mild interest in reading a comparison of this book with The Beetle by Richard Marsh. The Beetle is a Victorian novel and, like many Victorian novels, it’s about Britain’s fear of reverse-colonization, or being infiltrated by one of the countries’ they’ve invaded. In The Beetle, the infiltration comes in the form of a scarab from Egypt that carries some curse. I don’t remember all the details, since I read the book several years ago, but I found it interesting that this book had a similar concept of foreign invasion via insects. I think it would be interesting to compare the two, especially since they have opposite perspectives on British imperialism.

So, in summary: I think the idea of this book was great. I would have loved to read a retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in 1920s Shanghai that worked; unfortunately, for a variety of craft problems related to pacing, worldbuilding, characterization, and language, I don’t think this book worked at all. It wanted to be so much more than a Romeo and Juliet retelling, and the author should have let it.

Am I going to read the second book? Maaayyybe. I might get curious enough about the backstory to see whether she puts it in that book. But if I do read it, I’m getting it from the library.

[cloveroctobers]

GARY RENNELL —

IG info/bio | @/rennellnotreynolds | 300k followers | currently havin a midlife crisis at thee moment so cheers! 🍻🏋🏼‍♂️🤨

23 (24) years old

Born & raised in Chatham, England there’s no other place like it to him. Sure when he went on holiday to the villa, it was quite nice but nothing ever beats home. He genuinely believes that he’s meant to be in this place since it’s all he’s ever known & doesn’t think he’ll live anywhere else

Raised by his nan & is an only child. Was at risk of being placed in foster care until his paternal nan came forth to raise him

His father and nan did not have the best relationship due to the way he chose to live his life and Gary was kept away from his nan until he was about 10 years of age

Does not like to talk about his birth parents due to the trauma, which is why he feels like his nan is his everything. His savior and why she means so much to him

His nan once told him that he favors his mother, Gail. He never had the chance to really know her, but was aware that she was very unhappy with herself &, “chose to be with the stars” just before his 5th birthday

That’s one of the reasons why he finds himself always looking up at the stars, usually when he’s drunk out at the docks by himself, he’ll try to talk to his mom, to know her better

I feel like he’s either a cancer or a Libra?

Update: Cancer sun + libra moon + Taurus rising

Went to uni for a semester and thought about architecture as a profession but ultimately felt like uni was NOT for him and eventually juggled around with jobs until he landed into the crane operator field which he found himself to be great at

For as long as he and his nan can remember, he always loved playing with cars, ships, building Legos, (I’m American idk if this is a thing there too or it’s something different/similar so my apologies lol) and putting things together. He never cared for reading instructions, Gary’s a hands on type of guy/learner and it’s how he best communicates

He likes heights, so this job wasn’t an issue it was just getting through the program for 2-3 years that was a pain in his ass but he was determined + knew this was what he was good at and stuck with it.

It was tiring working 40 sometimes over 40 hrs a week but he’s passionate about his work so he’d never dare change it

Due to this job being a lot physically, he would use muscle cream to help his pain or pay to see a masseuse whenever he could or wasn’t being cheap about it + often buys epsom salt to bathe in 3 or so times a week 

Total penny pincher! I can see him being so, his dad told him all about how to hold onto what he’s got and always look for a bargain but with a gambler for a father, you can only imagine how that worked in his favor

Lives with his nan and doesn’t see an issue with it. His mates definitely tease him about it but know how much the woman means to him but still think it’s a major c*ck block for him but it’s a two for one package deal and anyone who doesn’t understand that doesn’t deserve him

Will probably still live in her house once IF she p*sses

Nan is a big fan of wallpaper and has one room in the flat that has squeaky plastic covering most of her furniture ( she loves furniture shopping) & only takes it off once her lady friends come over with consists of a huge cleaning routine which Gary secretly hates but pushes through it while she plays some old tunes on her jukebox

He finds himself singing those exact songs when he’s getting ready for work and actually enjoys them...but don’t ever tell his mates that!

His nan taught him basic household care & he finds himself scolding his mates for not knowing how to wash their underwear & always taking it to their mum’s or having their girlfriends do it for them

Loves washing clothes on a Sunday in the backyard + hanging them on the clothes line. His nan doesn’t believe in washer machines & makes her own detergent

He’s always down for a rooftop hangout, whether drunk or not. To be up almost as high as the stars is such a feeling or hang out with his mates laughing it up

Occasionally smokes cigarettes when he’s really stressed, he’s not proud of the nasty habit and tries his hardest to hide it from his nan & Lottie but they both know

Is in a on and off again relationship with Lottie. She’s met his nan, they both like each other. And that makes Gary extremely happy

Gary is the laid back one out of the two and Lottie is firey and needs constant reminding from Gary that he wants to be with her whereas Gary feels like that’s something she should already know and he’s told her a couple of times before, he’s sure of it. He doesn’t get why she doesn’t get that

Which results in arguments. Lottie chose to live in England for half of the year and goes back to Australia for the other half. Nan encouraged Lottie to live with the two of them until she decided to get her own place in England, or rather the two of them together. Nan doesn’t believe Gary will leave in fear of her being lonely, which she’s not! By all means, nan keeps busy! But Lottie desperately wants to have her own space with Gary away from nan, even tho she adores the spunky lady.

When they don’t see eye to eye she does what she does best and leaves, which is exhausting to Gary

They’ll go days without speaking until the other cracks. At first it would be Gary but since it’s been a year into their relationship, he’s gotten used to it and let’s her come back to him when she’s ready

He cares for Lottie, he really does. And wants this to work but he just wishes they could be more secure in their relationship.

Was a f*ckboy way back when from 18-20 and rarely there’s his old flings who show up just to cause drama knowing that Gary’s got a new girl in his life that LIVES with him, which Gary dreads that this small town knows his business. He hates confrontation but there’s one thing about Lottie, she’s never going to bite her tongue. So whenever those girls do try it with not only her but Gary she goes off.

Gary is protective too so when those messy girls start shit at the pub, he’s instantly trying to get Lottie away from the issue. Then there’s drinks flying and slap fights happening + hair pulling & they’re getting kicked out of the club/pub or even cops called on them.

“This blows. I thought you said you were trying to be better than this, Lottie.” “Me? What about those slags?! They attack not only me but your character too!” Which adds to a list of the reasons they fight.

Nonetheless they do have their fun moments together, getting drunk by the docks, getting random tattoos, hanging with his friends & their significant others, + going to the theatre

Lottie still thinks this town is very slow-pace, sleepy, cloudy and hardly has sun— which is okay to her some days but other day’s it can be dreadful and much different from her fast-pace life but she finds the little things like spending time with Gary to encourage her to stay

Gary likes playing games when he has his free time, like fortnite, red dead redemption, Final fantasy, & SUPER SMASH BROS & almost always plays with Ibrahim who informs him about new games which makes Lottie want to slam her head against the wall since that can take hours

Keeps in touch with all of the boys in villa and makes sure they have zoom meetings as much as they can because he cares about those boys. Noah tries to schedule them but usually it’s happens at random which annoys him but he gets over it. Gary spent month(s) with them. They’re basically his extended family & that’s saying a lot since he views his home to a high standard and has friends here but they’re nothing like his villa brother’s

Also into woodwork. He didn’t think he’d enjoy it but he likes to do it more when the weather gets crisp and he battles with that over cigarettes to ease his worries in life, then goes and have his daily dose of tea

Finally stopped dying his hair that awful yellow and stuck with it. Marisol was the first to see it, after an accidental FaceTime call which was supposed to be just a regular phone call but whatever? They’d all eventually see it if he EVER decided to post to his IG stories!

She compliments him in Spanish yanking her glasses off leaving him highly confused, “is that good?” “If Lottie doesn’t sit on your— which leaves Gary very wide eyed opposed to his raised brows but Marisol is cut off by Graham clearing his throat

Lottie does indeed like it & shows him how much and later asks his option on what color she should dye her hair next. 3 out of the 13 look the exact same to Gary. But he helps her dye her hair which comes out patchy but there’s no way in hell she’s letting anyone else touch her hair. She’s been doing this all on her own for some time now. Gary’s lucky she even allowed him to help her! So she dyes it back to blonde, all of it, and waits a few weeks to dye it all blue

Gary’s definitely into old boy bands especially LFO & serenades, “girl on tv” to Lottie all the time, likes 98 degrees, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Boys II men, & Dru Hill

As for modern day music, he LOVES to work out to tame impala which never makes sense to his mates but he usually works out the next day after getting shit-faced, he’s also in love with lizzo’s music, laundry day, brockhampton, & rina sawayama

Anthem = mac demarco, “Salad Days”

Celeb crush? Julia Roberts, Salma Hayek, Anne-Marie, Leona Lewis, & Noah Cyrus

[thatdamnokie]

so, as everybody knows, our man, the lovely mark strong, turned 57 this past august 5th

since the kingsman films have had a huge influence on several aspects of my day-to-day life (gee, wonder what group of people i could be referring to...), i decided to sit down and do something i’ve been thinking about since getting my medical card earlier this year: getting high as a kite and watching them back-to-back.

to celebrate mark’s birthday, i decided to do another running commentary post like the one i did for rocknrolla ages ago, under the cut. it’s a pretty similar style, which is to say not necessarily super coherent and might be hard to understand if you’ve never seen the movies. D:

there are some mentions of the roanoke society, but not many.

if even just one person finds this mildly entertaining for four seconds, then i’ll have done my job. there is a lot of cursing and this is NOT spoiler-free.

enjoy~

edited 9.1.20 to correct typos and such, please remember that i was Not Sober while i wrote this lmao

how many times have i watched these movies at this point? i don’t even know.  

i always liked the nifty like—retro arcade marv opening animation

and the thing with the tapes! we love book-ending devices!

kingsman: badass motherfuckers worldwide incorporated

like why was merlin even with them? i understand why lee and james would be there, but merlin, was he not acting quartermaster then?

i have SO MANY FEELINGS about lee unwin

i think it haunts harry and merlin more than anyone thinks, but these are fun spy movies so we just don’t talk about trauma and shit, don’tcha know

don’t look at how merlin tears up and tell me he doesn’t drink about it *HEAVILY* later

it’s such a stark contrast to see the 1990s interior vs. what it’s like when eggsy’s grown :(

michelle baby i’m so sorry. you deserved better than this.

and BABY EGGSY

omg. like this scene is both heartbreaking but is also adorable.

colin firth has gd anime legs, that dude had to straight up unfold himself as he stood up lmao

aaannnnd swooping logo, whooooo, goin’ over some mountains~

and mark hamill, ladies and gentlemen!

this whole thing with james deciding to kinda go rogue makes me wish that we knew more about his backstory as well. like, is this james being james, or was this a weird one-off situation and he was just unlucky?

YES unlucky. nobody could plan for the hurricane of sleek destruction that is gazelle

who has one of my favorite aesthetic designs as a villain (although i guess i’d put her more on maybe henchman level? but idk, it seems like valentine looked at her more as a partner, less like an assistant? and they had a very interesting chemistry together too, like i would’ve added more valentine x gazelle scenes)

i would LOVE to be this chill about just—draping blankies over bodies

blankies over bodies sounds like a cool band name

DIBS you guys can’t have it

i am SO GLAD samuel l. jackson gave valentine a lisp!

valentine, to me, does fit a lot of the usual spy movie villain tropes

but since this movie doesn’t take itself super serious, it’s more fun than annoying

and we never hear about any of the other knights?? like

half of this is just gonna be me whining for additional footage that there just wouldn’t have been room for realistically lmao

michael caine, you are lovely

MARK STRONG, LADIES AND GENTLEMAN

WITH LEGS THAT DON’T QUIT AND AN ACCENT THAT I’D DIE FOR

i’m an embarrassment

like let’s all stop and thank god that mark didn’t have time to learn the welsh accent

not that i would’ve been disappointed, because all accents are good accents on this blog

but at this point i can’t imagine merlin as—not scottish

“try picking a more suitable candidate this time”

arthur you DICK

like were you this cold-blooded when lee died, you fuckin’ reptilian-ass son of a bitch

no wonder you were charlie’s pledge person thing

and enter the fabulous taron egerton, stage left!

DEAN you are DISGUSTING

god, michelle, you need better friends, if you were my bro this entire relationship would’ve never happened

;-; and eggsy’s so sweet with his sister! i know there probably wasn’t “room” for it but i AM glad that there are scenes showing that family is one of eggsy’s kinda “core values”or whatever you want to call it

dude is a hufflepuff through and through imo

can you imagine eggsy as a villain? we would be so fucked. he’s sly, he’s smart, he could’ve made life v e r y difficult for lots of people if he really wanted to

but look at him with the squad!

eggsy’s just like the british version of a good ol’ boy

this car scene is some dukes of hazzard bullshit (ramp-jumping and fun car horn aside)

if butterflies are harry’s main symbolic critter, would foxes be eggsy’s? or would it be a pug instead? i guess that’s like asking if harry would be either a butterfly or a cairn terrier, like mr. pickle. let’s say both.

this fandom is pretty on top of character associations like that

you get symbolic associations! YOU get symbolic associations! EVERYONE gets symbolic associations whether they’re actually in the canon or not! don’t have any? don’t worry, we’ll assign you at least one!

the guy playing the interviewing officer is ALSO the patriarch in the witch which i didn’t realize until—like, a while after

and it was while @circlesofbone​ was visiting, and we were just “oh, okay, guess we can’t escape this cast at all, this is fine”

“your father saved my life.”

harry you’re such a fucking peacock, waiting all posted up and posing so you’ll look cool

you big doofus

i’d kill to be inside his head during this first conversation with eggsy though

like is eggsy like lee? is harry seeing lee the entire time he’s talking to his son, in his mannerisms, how he carries himself, how he speaks?

or is eggsy the opposite? which—i don’t know if that would somehow be sadder?

there’s just a lot going on in the background of this bit that’s left up to interpretation

“although i’m sure it’s well-founded—“

harry’s just so casual about this entire thing, nobody’s that casual without practice

harry you rabble-rouser, what kind of life have you led

“manners. maketh. man.”

our timeless motto, my flowers

kingsman STILL to this DAY has some of the most well-choreographed fight scenes i’ve ever seen??

like yeah the church scene but even just this initial bar fight

harry could’ve been a dancer

in a way i guess he already is

like he moves so fluidly and gracefully, it is BONKERS

colin you did so good! i’m so proud!

the way eggsy’s just O.O

whether or not you ship hartwin, like, you gotta admit, that was hot

and his BODY LANGUAGE, he’s sitting like RAMROD straight, this poor dude lmao

nobody prepares you for a situation like that in public school is all i’m saying

harry, exiting stage left like a suave, smooth motherfucker

remember when iggy azalea was relevant

ugghhhh i hate this part

“I WASN’T WITH NO ONE”

can you imagine being harry hart listening to your dead friend’s son getting the shit beat out of him

like, surely he heard the cleaver, he knows dean was going to fucking gut eggsy right?

listen to how cold and icy his voice gets, oof

yeah, he’s pissed, and dean is lucky

PARKOUR

ugh, i want to go to london ;-; i want to walk in front of the shop and visit harry’s house and kiss cute english boys

i’d like to think harry’s super excited to show eggsy everything but he’s gotta keep it dialed back because “decorum”

the way eggsy pauses though

“come on.”

and he says it so softly.

if i was eggsy, i’d be nervous, too.

but i didn’t realize how quickly harry tries to give off signals like “hey there’s no reason to be scared.”

“like my fair lady?” “well, you’re full of surprises.” <3 one of my favorite sceneeesss.

harry’s voice is so soothing but eggsy is so freaked out by the elevator that he’s just—there’s no room for anything else beyond processing the elevator lmao

“how deep does this fucking thing go?” asking the real questions

aannnddd KINGSMAN BULLET TRAIN

i’d like to think they have like soft jazz or something playing in there

and then they get to the hangar and there are obviously a buuuuunch of people out on the tarmac that we just—never hear about? i just assume they’re all like technical officers or maybe other agents

“your father had the same look on his face. … as did i.”

harry is already rooting for him.

“late again, sir.”

that. brogue.

fuck, i could listen to him talk for hours, scottish accents are my favorite thing

#squadgoals

not a very diverse cast :/

the body bag speeeeech

and of course nobody was in any actual danger, but merlin doesn’t want them to know that so he becomes mr. hard as steel, i am emotionally stoic at all times, do not test me you bunch of rugrats

“classic army technique.”

ROXY

ROXY I WANT TO JUST HOLD YOU IN MY ARMS TT.TT

aannnnddd charlie, also

who we might’ve found sympathy for if we knew aaannyytthiinnggg else about his backstory

like, could he just be Like That, yeah

but most people i know who are assholes like that are that way because their parents were first /shrug/

can hardly fault the dude for turning out like that when poison was all he was given to drink

anyone else a hundred percent positive they would’ve drowned in the first trial

i would absolutely have panicked and bit it

but then again, i’m not kingsman material, i’m roanoke

and if this is the exact same test that merlin and harry went through, does that mean there might be some weird drowning trauma hidden back in there that’s just ANOTHER thing we’re not gonna talk about?

(yes the correct answer is yes)

god that’s such an american response to the problem though

glass can’t cause problems if it’s in a million pieces!

“yeah you can wipe those smirks off your faces…”

i wonder if there was ever a situation where a trainee actually drowned

and i don’t mean like amelia, i mean some poor kid who just failed the test

merlin knows how to put the fear of god in people though!

and mark strong, very handsome, yes, very scary, also yes

he and colin both look like they’re 80 percent leg in every single scene

harry literally had brain matter smatter ALL OVER HIS FACE and still somehow had the mental facilities to be aware of those dudes, leave a bomb and dive out of a window (and then escape said dudes)

billy badass, y’all

“just get it done.” okay, i took back what i said earlier, maybe he does see her as more of an assistant, less than a partner. their relationship is weird.

the puppy scene!

“it’s a bulldog innit?”

YASSSS the golden trio

because of what happened with our other canon charlie has become a weird character for me to watch, like, yeah, i “watch” charlie be himself in tss but the charlie i “see” is like—”our” charlie.

“bollocks!” and then he just runs with jb in his vest, makes me smile

aannddd we see valentine’s super cool factory

harry your hair gets so long <3

“water!” wow, who wants to bet that the fact he was instantly screaming means that maybe he’s gonna have some stuff to talk about in therapy later

roxy baby i’m sorry they made you hold the balloon and have to trust these dumbasses to not shoot you on accident

i would trust roxy to not shoot me

i love, love love valentine’s house

it’s gorgeous

set design is always such a cool way for filmmakers to include details about a character using pure aesthetics and i’m such a slut for it

tilde!

see also: one of the characters done the WORST by these movies imo!

the fact that she not only says no, she says no with enthusiasm and gets blatantly pissed, is one of the best insights we get into tilde’s character and then it just—gets wasted

like it takes three steps and then gets mowed down in the hallway like her guards

i would never be given the opportunity to be asked if i wanted an implant but i draw the line at having stuff put into my neck

awwww harry’s so proud!

that finger point “yeah, see, be more like your uncle”

merlin is SO TALL

“a bit much innit?”

he’s just—tapping a normal clipboard

… nobody wanna talk about how that’s a normal clipboard

anyway

i also love how they show him in professor sweaters for the beginning acts of the movie

definitely a softer aesthetic than one would guess for a dude who apparently did field missions sometime within the past decade or so, but i also have a theory that lee’s death directly contributed to merlin maybe being the man behind the screen as opposed to afield

because trauma is a thing but this is a FUN movie so we’re NOT gonna talk about it

“you’re gonna be all right. you’re top of the class!” this was the scene that made my mom a reggsy shipper

regardless of how you feel about them as a couple, their friendship is one of the best things about this movie, along with their dynamic with charlie, asjdnaskdjna WHY could we not have had a trio movie instead

eggsy you show-off “lemme just throw my arms up and dip outta this plane like it’s not a big deal”

roxy you can do it!

ugh, there goes my baby, off to have a near-death experience under merlin’s immediate supervision lmao

“good girl, rox, glad you made it!”

guys, they’re just kids.

i love this big group scene because it reminds us that these are just young folks, still

“my, my, you’re all very cheerful...”

“rufus, come on!” dude eggsy—and not even just eggsy, charlie and rox too--at least made an attempt at teamwork. you get points for that bro

but man, for all they know, they’re about to beef it in a very permanent way, i’d be freaking out too

merlin getting caught up in the drama

because again, he’s supposed to know that eggsy has a parachute

i think he wasn’t prepared for these two to get that close to not making it and that’s why we see him break face and drop his mug

*WHAM*

i HATE the sound of them landing

it’s not like you can hear bones breaking but it hurts me, guys

and then there were three

plus one daddy long legs quartermaster

“if you have a complaint you come here and you whisper it in my ear.”

yes SIR

“you need to take that chip off your shoulder.”

merlin coming’ in with the tough love portion of the kingsman core squad

there’s no reason for me to think harry’s persona was inspired by cruella de ville somehow but i do anyway

she reveals the mcdonald’s and valentine is just :D

idk if he was expecting a specific reaction or was just excited to see a reaction period

valentine is definitely a fun villain, which, given the tone of the movie, makes sense, it’s all supposed to be fun

one of the reasons i love kingsman is that it’s like, this golden ray of goofy cinematic fuckery in a world of grim!dark remakes and other superhero/spy films who are presented as more serious stories

“and thank you for such a—happy, meal.”

harry got a puppy smile

but see, then, here at his house he’s a lot more relaxed with gazelle! like, patting her butt, etc.

maybe what we see of their relationship is dependent on setting, because valentine himself has it compartmentalized?

perrrrrrhaps

“and i am never, EVER GOING TO AGREE!”

tilde, you deserved better, and i think all the weird hate you get from our ohana is unfair

you don’t twist a runner’s ankle before the race starts and then get mad when they don’t win

your story was mishandled from the beginning

asmr: hanging out with the golden trio watching worrying news in the kingsman trainee bunker room

the way he says “biblical sense” lmao

i have never been able to figure out if the way he says that line is supposed to infer spiritual respect, or lack of it, but i might be looking too into it

“it’s an acquired taste, mate.”

what—what would you even do if you were at a club and three people as hot as taron, ed and sophie all came up and start talking to you at the same time

like i know the target got up and left pretty quick because of the training exercise

but i’d be doing it because i’m ugly and if three hot people are all talking me up at a bar something is Bad and Wrong

which—the CAHONES on both eggsy and roxy

they both literally said “yeah i’m willing to die for this organization that hasn’t even given me a permanent place yet, what of it”

look at harry’s dimples in this scene, he is fighting a huge grin, he’s SO PROUD

i know that charlie’s response is supposed to be just more fodder into the “charlie hesketh is a tool” fire

but given that i’m not unconvinced that his home life wasn’t super shitty, like—

idk, this makes this scene a lot less fun to me. it makes it sad.

like, maybe charlie didn’t even want to be there deep down, maybe this was all for like, arthur, or his dad, or some other person he looked up to

and the way merlin looks when he tells charlie to go home, the way that he’s kinda grimacing? i’m wondering if he’s along the same kind of feeling. he’d know more about charlie’s history

have i also mentioned how much i love harry’s war room?

“YES harry!”

an evil plan is being born!

“true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

eggsy is still in his club clothes, so like—has he slept? y’all let those kids sleep after fucking drugging them, right? … guys?

“—when one is popping ones cherry.”

and eggsy is just CHEESING he is SO EXCITED

am i the only one who wants to learn more about the store clerk guy though?

he’s like the one person around who’s legit just there to run the shop

has no idea about any of the spy stuff happening

his name is donald, he’s married with three children and has two spaniels he loves

“THAT is sick.”

i would KILL for this room.

i don’t need anything in here for any reason but still

foreshadowing, foreshadowing, foreshadowing, more foreshadowing—

harry is such a NERD

“put it back, eggsy.”

the amount of self-control it would take to not have a sudden change in expression in that moment, omg

i wonder how THAT gets trained up in kingsman

“i guarantee it.” ha, get it, it’s a reference to that one commercial

“y’all—talk so funny.”

and this all means that they had a contact at that hat shop and got all that info to them before valentine got there, and somehow made sure he did end up buying a hat that they could also successfully put a bug on, how deep does this goooooo

“jack bauer?”

it says a lot about eggsy that out of all the jb’s it could’ve been, it was jack

uggghhhhhh of course they HAD to do this scene with eggsy with arthur

obviously harry couldn’t do it

i just think most of us would NOT be fans of arthur at this point in the movie, we’re all rooting for eggsy, like, he needs this moment with this other character because we gotta drive home that he’s an asshole

also—would have absolutely failed that test

and i’m not sorry at all

“welcome to kingsman--lancelot.”

i was really happy that it was a female agent who ended up getting the handle

aannddd more echoes of past scenes, man, nobody can say that this crew wasn’t intentional with their cinematography

when eggsy rolls the window down you can see his chest moving up and down, like, he is MAD

dean you asshole

so no wonder he gets so pissed that the car suddenly decides “nope, no, we’re not doing this, c’mon”

this entire conversation at harry’s house is—tense

and you don’t pick up on it the first time, i don’t think, but uh

i’m seeing it now

harry’s not just mad, he’s hurt, and eggsy’s furious but he’s also maybe regretting his actions.

it’s these two men who are rapidly trying to figure out their headspaces and trying to figure out how to navigate this situation with each other

and the way eggsy tries to apologize ;-;

kentucky is a beautiful state, actually

ohhhhhh y’alllll

we’re at the churrrccchhhh

we’re gettin’ closer to the coolest part of the movieeeee

it’s telling that gazelle was trying to make sure that they’d be safe

“… so hail satan, and have a lovely afternoon madame.”

the most metal lines colin firth has ever uttered on camera

the siren noise after it’s switched on bothers me in a way i can’t quite articulate

it might be because i have silent hill-colored trauma, who knows

FREEEEEE

BIIIRRRDDDDDDD

THE GREATEST ACTION TRACKING SHOT IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA

but then eggsy and merlin are reacting aaaanndddd it’s—a lot less fun

because you realize that they’re watching their bro mercilessly slaughter innocent people and not stopping

and still not stopping

and still not stopping

but plot twist, i’m really glad they kept the track going, because if they’d suddenly picked *this* part of the scene to get serious, that would’ve brought the mood down so low that i don’t think there would’ve been any bouncing back

i just

how do people exist who aren’t attracted to harry hart

that man is a machine

and colin worked so hard to be able to do the scene himself, and that work SHOWS, that man cuts a FIGURE

i don’t know how they managed to somber it up just the right amount, either? maybe because they waited for the “fun action sequence” to be over so there wouldn’t need to be noise that had to be masked by a fun rock track?

“… what did you do to me.”

i cannot imagine what harry was feeling in that moment.

the way he spoke it was like he didn’t even have time to be afraid to die

“that tends to happen when you shoot somebody in the head. feels good, right?”

“no, it does not feel good!”

i love that exchange because we normally hear the opposite.

also—whiplash.

mark has this way of expressing grief without showing any—blatant signs.

like merlin’s not especially tearful, or crying, but his eyes look MASSIVE. and SAD. and he has just the tiiiiiniest tremor in his voice.

and eggsy, dude, like, we’ve all had it come on us really quick and suddenly it’s like your chest is pumping like a piston and when did it get so hard to breathe?

ARTHUR you REPULSE me

like look at how egssy’s shoulders sag when he realizes that arthur isn’t on his team

and in a way, this is eggsy’s final test as a kingsman trainee, imo

do you realize how quickly he had to assess what was happening and figure out what to do, all without arthur noticing?

“you are all alone. it is all up to you. remember all you have learned. good luck.”

it’s a very—almost horror-esque situation from that pov

and he passed with flying colors to go on his first true mission, because after he puts on the suit, that’s his visual cue of graduating, if that makes sense

that’s the knight putting on his armor.

“i’d rather be with harry. thanks.”

“so be it.”

*click*

me: *laughing at arthur’s big dumb stupid head*

… man i’d love a replica of that decanter and glasses set though

not to mention that eggsy recognized the flaws in arthur’s character and weaponized them, which is a whole other level of shit that isn’t necessarily easy; he knew that arthur carried the kind of pride that would leave him open

god, he looks so exhausted though when rox has him at gunpoint.

i think he was being pretty serious, about harry

sick helipaaaaaaad

that thing looks vaguely like a rock-‘em sock-‘em robot but in pieces though

more grandpa sweaters <3

man. you can see roxy swallow, you know she’s scared, but then she just sets her jaw and—

roxy baby you are the best i love you

i like the vintage vibe of the mountain lair

i think that’s another visual poke at the aesthetic themes of some of the older, og spy flicks out there

merlin looks SO LANKY walking back to the plane for some reason??

he stays until the last second for roxy. that’s love right there.

“a bespoke suit always fits.”

which can be good spiritual life advice too but that’s a separate conversation

“what the fuck is WRONG with you people?”

and his fuckin’ disco ball

uuggggghhhhh his speech reminds me of so many… “public figures” that i dislike

even though it’s obviously a bad thing that the chips are everywhere, i appreciate that phones and such are being shown in a positive manner (like, michelle talking to someone in the park, people at a ball game taking selfies, people at the beach, etc.) because i get so sick of that anti-tech boomer humor tbh

and the big reveal of eggsy in his suitttt

A KNIGHT IS BORN

“how’s the view?”

“hideous.”

you’re allowed to be crabby baby, you just let it out.

“lookin’ good, eggsy.”

“feelin’ good, merlin.”

merlin is so calm heading into the fortress and i don’t know if it’s because he’s very, very good at compartmentalizing and that’s genuinely how he is at the moment or if he’s that way through extreme self-control and effort

he can rock a pilot’s uniform though

just like eggsy can rock a suit

they’re both so handsome, help

i also wonder how eggsy’s feeling right then

like, i’d imagine that the pressure of having to perform a role to literally save the world would be enough to distract him from the bite of grief

that’s—probably enough to distract everyone, tbh

i a hundred percent believe there are breakdowns we don’t see

i wonder if eggsy told tilde he’d spoken to lindstrum(sp?) after everything was said and done

like, that’d be some kind of weird foreshadowing in hindsight

this scene is anxiety-inducing in a big way so to distract myself i imagine roxy as a mech pilot

dude i’d totally watch sophie in a role like that, like, let her be in a movie like pacific rim, she’d kick ass

and now we have The Chaos

otherwise known as that point when Everything Is Happening All At Once All The Time

also a thing that doesn’t exist in spy movies: hearing damage

because like his voice is right in eggsy’s ear and without it he’d have a LOT harder time surviving

imagine being an agent, merlin trying to talk to you, but something either hits your ear or goes off right next to it and suddenly it’s just silent

SYSTEM FAILURE

YAAASSSSS

WE WIN

GGOOOAAAAALLLLLL

THE AUDIENCE IS DOING THE WAVE

except JUST KIDDING

The Chaos 2 Electric Boogaloo!

merlin with a huge gun: hot, also, very scary

eggsy is just 10000% done

“this is mine. i’ll show you yours.”

i wonder who e man was supposed to be that valentine called.

like is that a reference to a real person that i just did’t catch?

… elon musk? maybe? idk

eggsy slides like a gd anime character

when he uses the rainmaker, it’s just like harry’s protecting him from somewhere else

(oh—wait, technically kentucky, i guess)

“merlin, i’m fucked.” you can hear the anger there. not only did he fail, but he—and everyone else—is about to die

but this? this is the pinnacle of eggsy showing himself as a kingman agent

he was staring death straight in the mouth and STILL

SOMEHOW

REMEMBERED THE IMPLANTS

so i guess if i say that the moment when he puts on the suit is when he becomes a true agent, then maybe this is the moment when he becomes galahad.

*bobs head to pomp & circumstance*

i remember getting a huge kick out of how colorful they made this

because in real life you know a bunch of people literally blowing up would be like—DISGUSTING

viscera everywhere

no fun rainbow mushroom clouds

“i’ve always wanted to kiss a princess.”

ANOTHER knight reference, very clever matthew

mmmmm Do Not Like that noise

aaaannndddd *that* line

which—maybe that’s mr. vaughn’s sense of humor, or what he thinks the sense of humor his core demographic has, idk

but it always kinda rubbed me the wrong way

the mass brawl scenes are edited so like--jarringly compared to the other fight scenes in the movie

that’s probably for a reason

also, a showdown to the tune of something disco: kind of another trope homage

this shot of gazelle is so sick, i love everything about it, she is so cool

this entire fight with eggsy is awesome tbh

we got a little bit of what gazelle can look like in combat earlier with tilde’s guards, but now we get this epic showdown seeing her at her full potential against someone who’s actually a challenge

and the way valentine is shouting for her to kick his ass from upstairs and yelling encouragement lmao that’s how real friends act when there’s a fight

daisy ;-; ugh, that’s the visual gutpunch that makes it juuuuuust serious enough by reminding us of the stakes

which is why it’s fitting that then we see the Slo-Mo K.O.

and that smile with the fun little chimes in the back, lmao

and eggsy, quick on his feet again byyyy being quick on gazelle’s feet—foot—whatever

man, impalement deaths are always fun.

coulda done without the vomiting but that’s also one of valentine’s quirks that makes him different from a cookie cutter villain

aaannddd have a heavy sigh from merlin

that dude needs a full-body massage and a drink

“is this where you say some really bad pun?”

reminder: i love that this movie is self-aware! i could not picture a super serious kingsman movie! i just picture something depressing!

there had to have been a better option besides—this, for this eggsy/tilde ending scene

i’m not saying i’m mad it ended with them fucking, i’m mad that the extent of the joke was anal and that was it.

also the idea of my boss possibly seeing me having sex would have me a little more concerned about the hardware on my face, but okay??

aannddd the tapes.

gah, we love visual throwbacks!

we love being able to see that despite all this growth and change, family remains very important to eggsy—he hasn’t changed into a different person, he has grown more into himself than ever before! THIS! THIS is eggsy unwin!

… GET READY FOR IT

time for tgc! (and to get into my roanoke feels, maybe, this is the nexus where our canons connect)

the BAGPIPES

okay

i did not stop to consider how unpleasant this was going to be to watch stoned but we’re gonna power through it and get through it together

if i cry i cry

the way the music swells into the main theme <3

and the perfect reveal for our boy eggsy!

reflected in gold, looking sharper than broken glass

and SUDDENLY CHARLIE

the pacing in tgc leads me to believe that matthew had huge plans for this movie, and a lot of cool stuff probably ended up on the cutting room floor for time

i also love that they brought charlie back

i love his voice box and his cool robot arm

and i’m not just saying that because it made it super easy to blend him into our canon, either, this is like—charlie’s evil twin in terms of his new aesthetic, the contrast is really cool

YYAASSSS THIS SCENE

WITH PRINCE PLAYING??

*CHEF’S KISS*

like we are IMMEDIATELY thrown back into the gold parts of it all, like how physics is a little broken so we can do cool shit like have a knockdown drag-out fight all within the space of a small cab

i wonder what would’ve hurt charlie worse—being thrown onto his organic side, or having all his weight land on his metal arm if it hadn’t disattached

but then he’s up and standing so i guess we’re fine?

MERLIN! <3

otherwise known as the character entrance that literally changed my life

i try not to think about it too much or i get weirded out

ANYWAY

(and to think i almost never even saw the movie)

Sick Car Chase, Bro

and as an american, like, everything’s on the opposite side to me, it’s stressful to watch a little bit

“i seem to remember in your training you were rather good at holding your breath.”

man, that’s uh—kind of a macabre thing to say, merlin

just a little bit

i’m not even gonna attempt to hold my breath to see if i’d survive this scene just assume i’m dead in that universe

we all live in a kingsman subarmine, a kingsman submarine, a kingsman submarine~~

“not boasting, but i trained him well enough that even he wouldn't mess that up.”

merlin are you okay??

gah, i love that chest-deep laugh though.

is it real love if they won’t crawl through the sewer to get to your house in time

i love that harry’s house looks basically the same

i know they talk about eggsy not wanting to change anything in the novelization but i haven’t read it yet so I’m not a hundred percent sure what all is in there

and we still get to see him hanging with his friends, and his girlfriend, like, this dude is still all about the family

“wwwwOOOOO!”

i love this group so much omg

for as much as he’s galahad, he’s still eggsy

the transition in the weed bag looks super cool

… oh, i guess watching this while high makes the main storyline hit a bit different

welp

i love that poppy is an aesthetic slut and really doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s opinion about how she makes her space

like, “i want a big 50s-style diner with a gourmet kitchen that i can cook people in, soooooo i’m getting one”

it’s also refreshing to see julianne moore in a bad guy role!

not that i’m super familiar with her filmography but i feel like i’ve mostly seen her cast as like a good guy?

i could be wrong

awwwww jet and bennie!

there’s so much to love about this set

cannibalism and the fact that she bulldozed jungle to build all this aside (suspend that belief!)

the breakfast sceeeeeene

it’s so bittersweet, for obvious reasons

and it’s more evidence that he’s not super ready to move on into new territory yet, like making new memories with tilde that ring close to home

“i wish i could have met him.”

and the way he has to turn away, ugh.

eggsy. i’m sorry.

tilde, i’m sorry, too. you had good intentions, but they lost against his pain.

michael gambdon! the new arthur we didn’t know we wanted until we got him.

charlie had a moral glo-down, it’s fine, happens to everybody

FFFFFF his imitation of merlin lmfao

man, poor charlie, like

you wake up, you can’t make a sound, your arm has been blown off and your family’s dead

like his reaction to that entire scenario isn’t entirely unrealistic, i’m just saying

also LOOK AT ROX

omg everyone in this movie can wear the FUCK out of suit, y’all

man, i’ve gotten a few tattoos that were exquisitely painful—i can’t imagine how much it would suck to do it with literal molten metal

dude this means clara laid on her stomach and probably screamed at the floor as she got hers D:

this kinda—riffs off of hannibal, a teeny-tiny bit

like we’re so overloaded with the aesthetics and behavior of a certain character so it’s like, we forget about the much darker parts untillllll there’s a mood change and we’re looking at that dude’s legs, to the burger this other dude puts in his mouth, and thinking “oh, oh dear, ew”

i love eggsy in the orange jacket <3 snaps for the wardrobe crew across this series.

tilde’s face, omg, she was heart-eyeing so bad. and like, that little proud nod at her dad (who was of course being Like That on purpose)

and roxy, coming in in the clutch, you are tonight’s MVP

uggghhhhh i hate this part

because again, it’s just--a bunch of bad shit colliding outside of anyone’s control

(it was also really jarring seeing the war room with blank walls the first time i watched this)

like—granted, you should maybe not touch stuff that’s not yours, but…

like we *just* saw eggsy and brandon in a very casual, intimate scene with each other, how can anyone get angry with brandon?

this is all stress-inducing

i remember being in the theater watching this and feeling like i was watching some awful slow motion car wreck and i couldn’t look away

idk what other story i would’ve wanted to see but i was NOT a fan of Sudden Death For Christmas, especially concerning roxy!

and poppy is such a *bright* villain, not just because of taste but because of her personality, which is another weird thing to have next to the cannibalism

gaaahhhh charlieeee your arm is so cooooool

this shot is gorgeous and incredibly depressing.

what do you do?

gah, and the way merlin comes out of the dark, like

i probably would’ve drawn a gun on him too

“you think *i* would?”

this scene shows 1. how much he trusts eggsy to not shoot him, and/or 2. how good merlin is at compartmentalizing, because this is an even bigger blow than harry’s death, and he’s following the protocol like it’s an art form

i hope that we see some reference to this safe in the next movie, that’d be a cool way to tie the narratives all together

“i suppose that must be upper class humor. … i don’t get it.”

reminder, merlin is working class.

if you’re a ho for this fandom and went and bought this whiskey specifically because of this movie clap your hands *clap clap*

and they proceed to just get HAMMERED

“country rooaaddsss… take me hoooooome…”

another reminder: kentucky is a beautiful state!

i would love to tour a whiskey distillery, that’d be super cool

“shame it’s not scotch”

again, with his weird night vale clipboard.

who would win: two highly-trained kingsman agents vs. one (1) cowboy

channing tatum, ladies and gentlemen!

“y’all look damn sharp!”

i am forever gonna be mad we didn’t get more of tequila in this movie, and not just because of roanoke either, but like, “that dog don’t hunt,” whatever he has in his mouth sealed a leak in a barrel, and it took him all of two minutes to incapacitate both eggsy AND merlin? hello??

i’m glad we’ll get to see more of him in the another movie.

“you know why the measurement of alcohol is called proof?”

just dumping it on their laps, so disrespectful

“—and you can go fuck yourself.”

eggsy fucking just giggling.

these two doofuses

also it’s hot to see merlin be sassy ngl

“HARRY!”

these guys have been fast thinkers in stressful situations but as it turns out, people being unexpectedly not dead can kinda fuck with your day

aaannddd halle berry, everybody! i love ginger ale omg

(and so does merlin, he is instantly enchanted)

;-; this reunion scene

i don’t know how colin manages to be two completely different people at once

like there’s a huge difference between former agent galahad and harry hart the lepidopterist and i can’t explain it

i really, really hope we see at least one little hint at kinsman’s relationship with statesman in the new movie, i just think it’d be really cool

in roanoke canon, there’s an office rumor that the nanobot tech used by statesman was influenced directly by the same technology developed by dr. wernicke in the outlast games. i still think it’s one of my better crossover ideas.

also

god bless whoever decided to get elton john involved with all this?? because i was DELIGHTED

i love poppy’s wardrobe as much as i love her weird 50s-land in the jungle

i also really love the main statesman theme? it reminds me of all those fun epic westerns

jeff bridges! :D

champ vaguely reminds me of my dad

“can you imagine us in the tailor business?”

and he’s super quick with the questions. my headcanons for champ are all over the place but one that i really like is that he was maybe a sheriff or in law enforcement before being recruited by statesman.

aaanndddd pedro pascal, everybody!

otherwise known as *another* character that this movie did dirty, that’ll probably come up in this later

imagine being harry hart, not remember all of yourself, and suddenly your entire room just—fills with water

that had to have been so terrifying, and it was just as hard for merlin to watch (and possibly remember something unpleasant)

and like

that sounds like SUCH bullshit, too, like “yeah we thought if you came close to drowning it would help”

which, is that what merlin meant, no, but is that what harry heard, probably

enter jb the second ;-; <3 sweet baby

tilde’s trying so hard. i see you!

aha, penis jokes.

and all of the unnecessary weird festival stuff, uuggghh

there are so many different things they could have done, like, all of this is just weird from the get-go

first of all, whiskey striking out? hello?? saying no to a man like mr. pascal???

not realistic

the way whiskey takes a shot as he walks away lmao, relatable

and poor clara, like, it’s not like she was asking for any of this D:

hmmmmmmm don’t know how i feel being a stoner watching other stoners get this blue rash thing when i know it kills some of themmmmmmm

i love charlie in his newsboys cap!

poppy has a little bit of a point. like, booze is way more dangerous than pot, as is tobacco. like i would never advocate anyone try meth or heroin, but i think weed and some hallucinogenics get bad wraps.

seeing a dude get torn in half in the reflection of elton john’s sunglasses is the surprising bit of gore we need to remember that oh, yeah, the villain isn’t fun, she’s a murderer

uuggghhhh the TENT SCENE

and, look, i’ll defend tilde forever, but i did NOT like the weird marriage ultimatum. i still think it’s a dick move, like, in that situation either decide to trust your boyfriend or break up with him

the tent interior is super cool-looking

and like, man, he tried, he tried to bounce D:

/sigh/ work hazards, i guess

mmmmmm we don’t need any of what’s happening on screen right now so i’ll just sit patiently and wait for it to be over

and like, there’s nothing funny about merlin and ginger being able to hear everything that’s going on, it’s so grosssss, poor ginger has to have heard some shit before to be so nonchalant about it

everything about this sucks

and then he tries going to the one person who he needs the most and having to deal with him still existing in some state between alive and dead

his body is here

but harry is not

“maggots turn into flies, perhaps you mean larvae!” :D he is SO CUTE

but this entire conversation, with harry still not remembering and eggsy trying so hard to reach him through the fog, is so depressing

like, i’d need a drink too

*and* a joint

i’m seeing my coping mechanisms on screen here folks

the way he comes up with the idea is kinda ingenious though

like, he’s looking at stuff to make himself bummed on purpose, but therein he finds the thing he needs to fix the issue

harry’s smile when eggsy hands him the puppy TT.TT

and then eggsy just becomes a stone cold motherfucker with no emotions

“no one’s sick enough to shoot a puppy!”

hi, flashback!harry

and as SOON as he remembers himself, it’s like his eyes are different, something about him looks like it did before kentucky

“… eggsy.”

one of my favorite movie hugs

and eggsy has to stand on his tiptoes because harry’s so tall

like yeah merlin and harry’s reunion isn’t as overtly emotional, but there’s definitely a sense of joy and relief there.

harry my baby ;-; much better with the sunglasses (and merlin was so close to telling him he looked spectacular)

“now is that any way to welcome a visit from outta town, moonshine?”

he! tried! to! defend! harry!

i hate that jack got a villain story line!

we could’ve had something so much better and infinitely more compelling!

“hurrrr durrrr morgan you just like redemption arcs because you don’t want anybody being a villain permanently” i also like them because sometimes that’s better writing, y’all sit down

“that is NOT what i call a kentucky welcome.”

i love so many things happening in this scene, like

we get to see whiskey kick ass, like yassss gimme those sweet action sequences and give us some character development by showcasing his fighting style

and also NOBODY shits on harry for not being able to handle the situation. both eggsy and merlin were like “dude we’re still celebrating the fact that you’re alive tbh it’s fine if you’re not back up to speed right this second”

you can really tell that this was penned by british people writing american slang because having grown up in the southern half of the u.s. i have never ONCE heard ANYONE say shit like “i feel like a tornado in a trailer park” lmao

and poppy’s fun little death threat infomercial, so great

“what have you done to me you FUCKING BITCH” oof, that’s a mood

!!!!! gonna be honest i kinda forgot that bruce greenwood plays the president

okay but save lives, legalize isn’t an entirely bad idea tbh

hnnnnnnng the scenes about people not being able to get into the hospital hits different in the year of our lord 2020 huh

… y’all i’m being weirded out by all this hospital scenes, this is unpleasant

i, too, wish i could pull a tequila and just be slipped into a chilly coma until shit wasn’t so fucked up

“the fact is, this presidency has won the war on drugs!”

THIS SCENE!

look, y’all can come into my inbox and call me a pothead, or a lazy stoner, or some third insult, but this dude’s VP is bringing up some very, VERY important points when it comes to any kind of discussion about drug use in the u.s.

am i drug-friendly, sure, but i’m more friendly to the notion that we stop demonizing addicts/users

harry looks fucking SCANDALIZED when he sees champ spit into his spittoon thing

i don’t think whiskey even brought up harry not being ready to return to the field in an insulting manner, he literally just saw him get his ass beat in a bar, but eggsy’s faith and loyalty are up there in the category of unstoppable force/immovable object, so here we are

am i the only one curious about the whole charlie x clara thing? because he’s definitely grown up a bit by tgc, and i wanna know how much of that might be because of clara

and he MISSES, e for effort harry

“so sorry about this—“ WHAM

and now that guy can say colin firth busted his face with a fire extinguisher, which is very cool

“*you’re* wu ting feng?” “… yes?”

“you motherFUCKER” ohhhhhh charlie maaaaaad

ginger and merlin though, #couplegoals

the only person more pissed off about the hallucinations than everyone else is harry

imagine remembering that you’re one of the top people in your field and you just keep seeing imaginary butterflies everywhere

like, yeah, i’d be pissed at not being able to do what i knew i was capable of, too

if it wasn’t careening towards a random retirement center, getting stuck in a wildly rotating gondola thing could be fun

nice tuesday afternoon activity

i would loved to have seen more galahad/whiskey field stuff

“you’ve got to be fucking kidding me—“

meanwhile, in the continuing adventures of eggsy and jack: shit goes from bad to worse like a formal spiral only going downward

their expressions as their both just SCREAMING always make me laugh

”that’s the first decent shit i’ve had in three weeks.” <- as does that line, that old dude’s just telling it like it is

eggsy’s comment about the antidote just reminds me of when boromir looks a the ring and says something like “all this for such a tiny thing”

dun dun DUN what are THOSE? hints that whiskey may not be who we think he is??

great. so excited about that. i say, rolling my eyes into the sun

“i’ll fix their wagons.” no one says that matthew!

i. love. this. scene. because now we get cool gun tricks AND the second most metal thing that happens with a lasso in this movie (we’re coming up on the most metal thing)

like please please PLEASE show us more lasso tricks in the statesman movie

“well thank fuckin’ christ i didn’t need any backup.” i wonder if whiskey’s acting angrier than he actually is to throw off the fact that he might’ve caught harry’s glance at him betraying suspicion

RIP jack

imagine the timeline where whiskey was never a bad guy and harry hart just blew a dude away for NO REASON

now THAT would be an interesting movie

because harry and eggsy, for all they went through in the first film, never had a conflict where it was harry in the position of mangling the ropes up

but of course eggsy would never, never tell merlin what happened because he’s still ultimately on harry’s team

damn, charlie, literally blowing up your girlfriend seems kinda extreme

“THIS is vital!”

and here we get to see the biggest difference between merlin and ginger

now, i know there’s extra stuff in the novelization about their relationship and i can’t talk about it because i have no idea what’s in the book

but!

i DO still headcanon as merlin quitting fieldwork after lee’s death

his comment is either what he genuinely believes, or maybe what he fashioned his beliefs into after stepping down from his field role, and ginger is just as sincere in her desire to break into that aspect of working for statesman

it’s like seeing the same character but in two points in time, and it’s really cool

that balance would’ve also been a fun aspect of their romantic relationship to explore but alas! ’twas not to be

colin and mark could both play slenderman

look at those limbs.

gracious.

also this facetime scene with eggsy and tilde T.T

that has to be so terrifying to watch when you know the steps of death and what they look like as they get closer

but it also puts a fire under eggsy though

“i’m leaving with, or without you.”

and of course they’re both gonna go because that’s NOT characteristic eggsy behavior based off of how we know he views family/squad

that’s how they know he’s being for cereal

uugggggGGHHHH and THAT FORESHADOING

stacey pruitt, attorney at lawwwww

hmmmmmmmmm

what does this conversation between poppy and the president remind me of

gonna just sigh into the void

and now we have harry and eggsy on the jet along with the BIGGEST LIE harry hart has ever told in his LIFE

kingsman and statesman aesthetics at least tend to be the same color schemes. lotta golds, yellows. browns.

eggsy, yeah, it’s a bummer your gf dumped you, but this relationship wasn’t very well-developed or written so i’m not as bummed as i could be

“… and in that moment, all i felt was loneliness and regret.”

harry shut the FUCK UP

you felt NOTHING??

you weren’t thinking of, gee, i dunno, EGGSY? or MERLIN?? your MOM???

like these lines from him just seem to come out of left field and i can’t even halfway suspend my belief long enough to come close to believing him

like mr. hart you just gonna be like that in front of jesus and everybody????

so, yeah, of course he’s on board with saving tilde! because he recognizes (apparently just right that second) that “having something to lose is what makes life worth living”

and i don’t know if they felt like there need to be some weird, deeply contrasting reason for harry to swing around to being in support? or something?

like

i’m forever pissed about this characterization and i don’t even know if i’m expressing my anger in a way that makes it easy to understand lmao this is fine, i’m fine, literally not a single person in this fandom ever believed those lines anyway, it’s fine

moving on

... and even if they WERE true then honestly that just makes me more excited about butterfly knife, because that means that harry acknowledged both the bad side of the coin, and also the side with rae on it (which would mean seeing her for who she was and also recognizing his feelings for what THEY were) and drew the ultimately correct conclucision that love! is! always! worth! it! let that shit in like a welcome guest in the home of your heart, and they will stay as long as you let them!

as SOON as he wakes up ginger looks a thousand percent done lmao

and the “process” that they use to wake people up or whatever is—interesting

because all it is, is trauma turned into a tool which is kind of a weird concept to see in a “fun spy movie” imo

and this is one of what i feel were like only what, two? glimpses we get into whiskey’s Tragic Backstory

and the other scene isn’t a glimpse it’s just straight up exposition in his dialogue :/

jack, i’m sorry, you deserved better than this as a character

i’m sure the name “silver pony” is a reference to something but i don’t know what

“lookin’ GOOD merlin!” “feelin’ good, eggsy.”

ladies and gentlemen when i tell you that i lost my pool-noodle mind seeing him put on that suit watching this in a theater, i--

ANYWAY

because now that i have the horrible burden of having seen these movies a million times

i know it’s more symbolic

he stays in sweaters so long, as an agent of the background, because he walked a man to his death

so it figures when he puts the armor back on for the first time in ages

he walks to his own

uuuggghhhh the minesweeper

i hate this

i hate it

i hate everything about the feelings i’m having while this is happening

*beep-beep*

“you move, we die.”

i HATE IT

but like, i don’t know, how preferable is this to the end scene we almost got, which was merlin dragging his newly-legless corpse through a doggy door?

because it’s been literally multiple years and i still have no fucking idea

they’re both horrible in their own terrible, awful ways

damn, matthew, it’s not often someone manages to come up with multiple versions of a thing and have every version be so gut-wrenchingly horrific, i’m truly impressed and completely disgusted

“do as your told!”

god

everyone just going through twenty shades of Bad Feelings in the space of fifteen seconds here in the jungle

and colin and taron do this thing where it’s like—their eyes go dead? like, there was a light here, it’s gone now

it SUCKS

oh

oh no

ALMOST HEAVEN

WEST VIRGINIA

… fuck

LIFE IS OLD THERE

OLDER THAN THE TREES

“… singing?”

this sucks.

this sucks this sucks this sucks

MOUNTAIN MAMAAAAA

TAKE ME HOOOOME

COUNTRY ROOOADDSSSSS

*THUNK*

and he even took off his glasses before he hit him, he had his end coming towards him and he was still a gentleman

TAKE ME HOOOME

COUNTRY RROOOOAAAADDDSSSSS

his EYES AT THE END

FUCK

… okay i had to get up and go for a lil’ walk

anyway

(and again, roanoke canon, fucking fixing’ shit left and right, because we’re the goat)

harry and eggsy look MURDEREROUS

MERLIN SAID KNOCK YOU OUT

it DID make the grand ending fun action scene a lot more satisfying

because like, without merlin there, that means harry and eggsy get to go full feral

poppy you big idiot you just robbed them of all their motivation to show any kind of restraint and now everybody’s gonna get blown up

except for those dudes who get kicked by elton john

which would be an HONOR first of all

(the part where eggsy’s using his gun and shield vaguely reminds me of the specialist, @bloodofthepen​)

and harry and eggsy just—they’re drift compatible! that’s it! the teamwork! the grace! the flow! my god!

eggsy vs. charlie: round like 4 if you count the first movie

it was also satisfying to see charlie’s new arm in action

we love fun robotics and gadgetry in this house

colin firth is really just not afraid to throw himself full force down a bowling lane huh

ugh, seeing charlie slam eggsy over and over again makes my chest hurt

the sound mixing on all these films is top notch which isn’t always a good thing T.T

ROCKETMAN~~~

that shit will never NOT be funny

a wild elton john appeared!

eggsy is indestructible, he can walk off anything

but charlie, charlie i feel really sorry for, imagine being attacked by a superior version of your own limb, i.e. something that you can’t exactly quickly remove from yourself, that would be TERRIFYING

harry + elton = dream teaaaammmm

“darling if you save the world, you can have a backstage pass.”

i love you elton john :(

i would have been the most OBNOXIOUS hype man in the background of the entire kingsman vs. poppy land face-off

“let’s make this fair.” eggsy you’re fuckin’ cheeky

and poor harry, all that lank just getting tossed like noodles

i thought the robot puppers were very cool

“for the record charlie i’m more of a gentleman than you’ll ever be.”

mmmmmm do NOT like this death for charlie

SUPER glad we fixed it

and another scene where i can’t stand the sound mixing T.T it makes me cringe every time

“i don’t consider genocide especially lady-like.”

and are we gonna talk about how merlin knew how to make heroin?

… no?

nobody wanna talk about that?

ugh that houndstooth dress is so PRETTY though

high!poppy is weirdly comedic for all of two seconds and then it stops being funny real fast

whiskey D:<

this is so dumb

this is all so, so dumb

“our agencies were founded to uphold peace, to protect the innocent—“

there’s that nobility again

is what happened to whiskey fucked up, yes

i’m not saying we have to completely remove that from his story

i just

literally anything but this would have been preferable

and then HOT DOG it’s one of my favorite shots in the movie with the whip where harry’s just chucking it away from his face like a bamf, YES

how great is this cover, let’s be honest

like, i’d be lying if i said i didn’t enjoy this scene visually

plus

HARRY GETTING PEGGED RIGHT IN THE FACE WITH A FRYING PAN

gracious

it’s one fluid tracking shot, so kinda in alignmentment with what we’re used to

some people get annoyed with repeated junk but when you can do it THIS WELL you can get away with anything

D:

but then jack

you did NOT desert that

yes, you were in dire need of an attitude adjustment but jesus

“this is for you, merlin.”

/ugly sobbing/

and tilde is all betterrrrrr ;-;

you guys did itttttt

COUNTRY ROOOAAADDSS

TAKE ME HOOOOOOMMEEEE

TO THE PLAAAAAACCCEEEEE

I BELOOOOONNGGGG

and the scene with jamal and liam T.T #wholesomecontent

poor tequila, after i knew that you would have a bigger role in another movie, i was less annoyed by the fact that they iced you so quick into the story

#FOX2020

“… now we’re brothers, working side by side.”

spoiler alert i actually love champ’s toast

“y’all shittin’ in high cotton now” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN???

and ginger becomes the new whiskey like she always wanted T.T

merlin is proud from heaven (or london, depending on which canon)

iiiiiii have mixed feelings about the whole wedding scene, which is probably because i take HUGE issue with the weird proposal ultimatum thing that happened earlier

but the way eggsy says “not a doubt in my mind,” he says it so seriously and i remember that tilde almost died

there was such good intention packed into this couple that was so badly written that i just

augh

“but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

there’s ***merlin! lmao i see you dude, they did you dirty

look

i was pissed off about a lot of things that happened in this thing but i was honestly hype seeing tequila at the very end walking into the tailor shop

like, yeah, i’ll stick around to see what happens in this universe but i’m gonna complain the whole time

GO JACK RABBIT

RUNNING THROUGH THE WOODS

and again, i almost didn’t see this movie.

… i think about that morgan sometimes.

hope she’s doin’ okay.

…

she’s probably not. D:

[velianmagicalgirl]

An Important Anniversary

So today’s Christmas! Merry Christmas everyone, I hope you had a good one. So anyway, I’m going to write something I’ve kinda wanted to write about for a while now but never knew when to do it it or if I even should. I wondered if anyone would care or if it was selfish of me to want anyone to care. But I’m doing it because I know I want to and if I don’t I’ll be mad at myself for that too.  So this is going to be a bit personal (and probably a bit long because I have a tendency to ramble) so if you don’t want to read it, feel free to skip but I would appreciate it if you did read it :) 

So like I said, today is Christmas and I want to talk about something quite important to me that happened on this day last year.  So last year I was in a pretty different place then than I am now (like most of us). I lived in Florida then, and now I live in South Carolina. I had just finished my first semester at my university and I was about to turn 21 (my birthday’s in January). 

So anyway, it came time to open presents, and among other things, my parents got me a record player which I was super excited for (I planned to buy one myself so I was pretty happy I wouldn’t have to spend the money :p) and one of the records my parents had gotten me was *drumroll please* The Joshua Tree by U2!  Now, this wasn’t a complete surprise to me (well it was a surprise that they got it for me, what a coincidence) but I had actually heard of this album and this band before... 

This is the story of how the universe tried to get me to listen to U2 since I was freaking 12 and I’m so dense I kept ignoring all the *signs* until last freaking year. 

Let’s time travel back to 2012 (sometimes I wish I could...) So I’ve done some thinking and this is the first time I can remember ever hearing anything about this band named after a Cold War era spy plane. Now I’m not exactly sure what year this was, it may have been 2011 but 2012 kept popping up in my head while I thought of it.  So at this time I was 12-13 years old (depending what year it was) and I was in 6th grade. Yes hello, I am a child.  So, really the whole memory is my mom talking to me, saying something along the lines of “That’s Bono! You know who Bono is right? Come on, everyone knows who Bono is! You know, the Irish guy?” and I remember being like “oh yeah!” pretending to remember just so she would leave me alone. Either I had a very vague memory of hearing that name before or I really had no idea who she was talking about and just wanted her to leave me alone.  This whole thing would explain why, up until last year, whenever I thought of him, I thought of him in his 360 look. Even now, that’s like his “default look” to me haha.  When I think about it, it feels like this was all in relation to American Idol which would make sense because I was in love with that show at the time and I had a huge crush on one of the contestants that year, a country singer named Scotty McCreery (I think he ended up winning too). I had a huuuuge crush on him, just ask my mom. 

Anyway, that’s my first memory of them. I guess it doesn’t have to do with U2 as a whole but it’s about Bono so... 

So fast forward about two years. I originally wasn’t going to include this but I just thought of it so in it goes. It’s 2014 now, I’m 15, just moved to Florida and I’m about to start high school. I also just missed out on getting a super cool new free album on my phone because my dumb dad (accidentally) broke my iPhone by dropping it in water. Thanks Dad. So in late August-early September (before September 9th obviously) I get a new phone but end up getting an Android. So I literally by just a few days miss out and getting that. Noooooooo. 

So anyway back to our regularly scheduled program of what I was going to write about. So next year, it’s 2015 now, I’m 16 and about to do a bunch of Stupid Things™ that it seems everyone is required to do while they’re in high school *sigh*. But we’re not going to get into that (😅).  This is another vague memory I have. I just remember having some sort of conversation with my mom about music. And somehow, I end up with the knowledge of The Joshua Tree by this band U2. I don’t really remember how specifically it happened, I just now it had something to do with her. I do have this specific memory of sitting in the computer lab during one of my classes and listening to the album.  Except, for some reason, I only ever listened to the first three songs. Seriously. Why? I have no idea. What was wrong with me? And I liked them (especially the first one). I remember not liking the third one very much (hahaha... how that’s changed...) So I liked them, but for some reason they just didn’t catch on in my head (and I didn’t listen to the others... FOR SOME REASON *kicks self*). 

So anyway, time goes on and I mostly forget about those three little songs. Until February-ish 2018. I’m now 19 and about to graduate high school in a few months (scary). Anyway, I pick up this book at the school library one day called The Memory of Things (by Gae Polisner, it’s actually one of my favorite books, if not the favorite. I really recommend it). So basically the main character Kyle is a pretty big U2 fan. That’s not really the plot or anything but that’s a big part of his character. There’s a part where he’s looking online at pictures of the recent Slane Castle concert during the Elevation Tour and he’s like “I wish I was there” (me too). There’s also a part where he gives one of his friends his PopMart shirt. There’s also a chapter called “Achtung Baby” (I was like “what the heck is an achtung”) where one of the things that happens is he talks about how he likes the song Mysterious Ways (can’t argue with you there buddy). 

So a few months later, I find this movie called “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” on Netflix (also a really good movie, highly recommend, I don’t know if it’s on Netflix right now though) and I’m one of those weird people who likes to watch trailers for movies they’ve already seen so I was watching one of the trailers and Streets started playing and I was like “hey I remember this song!” and got me to start listening to it again (not the other three that I’d listened to before, or the other ones FOR SOME REASON *sigh* Also, here is the trailer if you’re at all interested).  

So fast-forwarding again to 2019. Last year. So like I said, I’m about to turn 21 and I open up one of my Christmas gifts to find that my parents got me a Joshua Tree record. I get excited because I’m like “Oh I remember this!” and I remembered I never actually listened to the whole thing before.  So finally AFTER FIVE FREAKING YEARS, I finally listen to the whole thing. And I really liked it. A lot. Why didn’t I do that before?? Like five years ago?? *kicks self*. Honestly, looking back on this, it really seems like the universe was really trying to get me to listen to them like “listen to U2 listen to U2 listen to U2 damnit!” but apparently I’m about as dense as a boy being flirted to so I had to be basically whacked on the head with it before I got it. 

So then a week or two later it’s now 2020 (it feels weird to think this was this year but it was) and my parents are driving me back to my dorm before the semester starts up. And we’re sitting at this light, I would tell you where it was except obviously you wouldn’t know. But there’s one light and then you take a left and maybe a hundred or 200 feet later there’s another light where you take a right and that takes you into the university campus.  So we’re sitting at this light and this cool song comes on. I look to see who it is (the joys of satellite radio) and I see it’s Mysterious Ways and I’m like “oh cool, a U2 song!” and also “hey, it’s that song from that book!” As much as I try to, I can’t seem to remember if I’d actually heard that song before or if I just thought I did because of that book. But I definitely liked it in that moment.  And I’m not kidding when I say this, but the song comes on and lasts the entire drive from that light to my dorm building parking lot. It ends right as we pull into a parking spot. Seriously. Was it meant to be? 😜 So after that, my parents help me bring my stuff back into my room and after they leave, I look up that song on Youtube and listen to it on repeat a few times while I’m unpacking my stuff. 

So now it’s a few days later, it’s my birthday, I’m now 21 and my dad comes to visit me. He takes me out to dinner and then I ask him to take me to Barnes and Noble so I can get some books. While I’m there I realize they have a record section and I think “hey I have a record player now so why don’t I look?” and so of course I end up at the Us because who else would I be thinking of at this point. So I look and notice that there’s an Achtung Baby album there and I think “hey it’s that album from that book!” and “that Mysterious Ways song is on here isn’t it?” so I ask my dad to buy it for me and he does. 

So I go back to my dorm and listen to it. And I guess like a lot of people did when it was actually released, I sat there thinking “what is this?” as the opening notes of Zoo Station played. Again, like everyone when it was actually released, (the same year my mom graduated high school interesting fact) I had been listening to Joshua Tree and had gotten used to that sound. So when I was first listening to it, I was worried that my new love affair with this band would be short lived (which was pretty dumb because they have a lot of albums but I wasn’t thinking of that at the time) but as it went on I liked One, So Cruel, and of course Mysterious Ways. 

So I ended up buying more of their albums, like All That You Can’t Leave Behind. I was excited to hear that one because I remember reading about it in that book as “their newest album” because of when it takes place. (The book is actually pretty new btw, 2016, it just takes place in the past). And geez, I never realized until now just how much that book has influenced me, and it’s not even about U2, the main character just likes them a lot lmao. The main plot is completely unrelated.  And funny story, but when Beautiful Day came on, I was like 🤯🤯🤯, basically my mind was blown because I remember hearing that song as a kid but I didn’t know it was by them lmao. Same thing with Desire. I remember my dad liked to listen to that in the car and sing along so when I was listening to Rattle and Hum and that came on I was like ????? how many more songs???? 

And in December-January, my step dad got a job promotion but it required him to move to South Carolina so in February they did and I flew up to visit them on Spring Break in early March and then the world ended :D :D :D 

So yeah, that’s my story of how I ended up here. I’ve basically been holed up in my room for an entire year obsessing over guys that are way too old for me. Eh, oh well, what can I say? It’s not my fault that one guy I first heard of when I was 12 was (and is) so good looking.  So yes, I’m a real big noob, only been here a year and I haven’t even seen them live because I couldn’t get my act together five years ago (or anytime between then and now) despite the universe’s best efforts to get me to. *sigh* sorry I’m so dense, universe. But I guess better late than never, better now than later, right? 

Anyway, there’s more I want to say but this is already a freaking novel (sorry but I warned you!) Maybe I’ll write everything else in a separate post sometime, but for now, I hope you enjoyed reading this. And to quote Bono on that “A-Z of 2014″ post he made, if you somehow made it to the end of this, you must be on painkillers. 

[morwensteelsheen]

I just have to tell you how much I ADORE “Finger Back.” I keep retreading it! I’ll be starting my masters in the autumn and reading this AU put a huge smile on my face and a warmth in my heart. (If only lecturers looked like Faramir or Aragorn, though. *sighs*) I do have a question that I’m not sure you addressed already: I read your endnotes that say you’re protective of Denethor, and I’m curious as to what your reasons are. Could you flesh that out for us? Cheers!

Thank you so much!!! I’m so glad to hear you dig it — and good luck with your masters!! 

So, yeah, The Denethor Problem. My answer to this is gonna go under a cut because this is gonna be such a long answer lol. 

Some of it is in response to how he’s portrayed in the films, which is I think wholly unfair, but a lot of it is because I think I recognise the real life cultural/social archetype (I think) Denethor fits, very much unintentionally on behalf of JRRT. For context, I’m a historian of modern British history by training, and gendered/political history specifically, so I spend a lot of time dealing with the social implications of WWI/II, if not the actual wars themselves. 

Denethor to me fits the mould of a very specific member of the Lost Generation (yes, I realise this is a largely-American generational identifier, but I think the cultural stereotypes fit well enough for the WWI generation in Britain), which is the sort of man who was, in effect, completely and utterly destroyed by the meat grinder that was WWI. Whatever he may have been had the war not existed doesn’t really matter, because the war was ultimately the end of life for him. A lot of British men of that generation faced what was essentially a systematic unmanning (not in the gendered sense, as in, total depersonalisation/dehumanisation), and were never given the care or community necessary to recover from it. They then went on to live through WW2, the slow and miserable recovery from that, and the repeated crises of the 1970s, which is typically when they died — see JRRT himself. 

These were men for whom the abject violence of war never really went away. Lots of them had severe PTSD, though it was never diagnosed and certainly wasn’t treated adequately, and almost all of them had some form of war-based trauma. They were men who were so scarred by the violence of WWI that things like love and joy and other positive human emotions ultimately ended up requiring too much energy and too much heartache to express, and so they retreated in on themselves. It’s not to say those emotions weren’t there for them, but what they experienced during the war was so traumatising it became hard to ever fully become “human” again. They were weapons of war discarded at the armistice. 

So, socially, I see a lot of Denethor in that, this man who has, effectively become the war. 

But also I think when you read the text there’s a lot to actually recommend Denethor. For starters (and I do intend on elaborating on this more later), we tend to only see Denethor when he’s in direct conflict with Gandalf, and Gandalf is obviously given the privilege of controlling the narrative. It’s this huge elephant in the room with most of the Gondorrim: we never really get more than fleeting glimpses at how unbelievably shitty and miserable life has been for them at the frontline of this war to end all wars. 

Actually I think I’ll run with this Gandalf comparison for a second. 

Gandalf is portrayed as this political and military mastermind, who rides from kingdom to kingdom fixing the problems of the free men of ME. We rarely ever see the aftermath of Gandalf’s time in these kingdoms, which means we never actually see what sort of political effort has to go into enacting Gandalf’s provisos, or covering up for the strange politicking that goes on. What this really comes down to is: Gandalf is a consultant, not a ruler, and in his status as consultant enjoys this moral distance from the practicalities of keeping a country/state afloat. 

Denethor, however, does not. Unlike Gandalf, he doesn’t get to go gallivanting about Middle Earth searching for Elendil’s heir or Isildur’s bane or whatever, because he’s got a kingdom to run. If there’s a plague in Lossarnach, it’s ultimately Denethor who has to take responsibility for that (even if there are multiple layers of vassals below him, the buck ultimately stops with him). When there’s an entire looming cataclysm at Gondor’s (and, in effect, Middle Earth’s) eastern border, Denethor’s the guy who has to coordinate that response. And in that it’s not just Gondor he’s responsible for. If Gondor falls, everywhere else will fall too, but as far as we’re told, Gondor’s running this defence almost entirely by themselves. 

And, importantly, Denethor’s a mortal. He’s a Man. I know that mostly is associated with death in LOTR, and, in the movies, the folly of Men’s pride, but what it really means, I think, is the tangibility of life. Life and time means something to Men, they have to feel and live in each second in a way the others don’t. They are tethered to the world in beautiful but also terrible ways.

The big gripe about Denethor is that he sends his son to hold Osgiliath. Okay, fine, but think about that this way, Denethor sends his son to Osgiliath. For us, the readers, and for Gandalf, the consultant, that could be anyone. But for Denethor, that is his son, flesh and blood, someone he loves dearly, one of the last living connections he has to his dead wife. The war is real and intimate for Denethor in a way it isn’t for other (yes, including Aragorn), and he bears this unbelievably difficult burden of being the ruler of a kingdom without having any of the real political legitimacy to be that leader. 

Which is to say: Denethor is the Ruling Steward, but he is no king. That’s a hugely important distinction, I think, and limits a lot of what I think Denethor has the right to do. He’s essentially managing the decline of a kingdom because he doesn’t have the right to play offence for it. Everything about his life and title is about making him subservient to something else — in his case, something that literally doesn’t exist (as far as he knows). Imagine how soul destroying that is. You have to bear all the horrible psychological and emotional burdens of ruling a kingdom with none of the benefits of getting to shape it in your own image. Horrible. 

We tend to give Théoden a pass for his weakness and (to be frank, even though I do love him) shittiness because he’s brought back to his senses. Denethor has suffered essentially the same problem as Théoden, except worse because he’s getting it direct from Sauron, and he never gets the chance for healing. And why doesn’t he get the chance for healing? Because he’s literally holding back the apocalypse. By the time anybody thinks to come help Denethor out, the world is already ending, and — so far as we’re told — nobody’s actually bothered to help Gondor out until the very end.

A lot of this is, tbh, wrapped up in how angry I get about how Gondor is treated by literally every other kingdom in ME, but I think Denethor-as-Gondor is a salient and important point so I’ll keep it in. 

Oh also, sorry for jumpiness (my ADHD meds are wearing off) but my other gripe with the Osgiliath thing is — okay so Denethor sent his son. But he had to send someone, didn’t he? If they hadn’t held back the army at Osgiliath Minas Tirith would’ve been overrun before anybody had the chance to get there to save them. So they have to do it, somebody has to go, so who does he send? Not his son because we, the readers, have a total crush on sadboi Fara? Okay fine, so then he sends someone else’s son. But that’s still someone else’s son! We just hate Denethor because he has to make the decisions none of us would ever want to make lol

Anyways. Yes. That’s why I’m super defensive of him, I just don’t think he gets a fair shake all things considered and wish he would. He’s not a villain, he’s a man at the edge of the world, and I think we all oughta have a little empathy for that.

Like, I do think he makes the wrong call on a lot of things, and, to put it lightly, I think trying to kill your own son is Not Great, but I think as a character Denethor deserves a more nuanced interpretation than what he gets. I actually spent today writing like a three thousand word Denethor POV on the idea of hope and his kiddos which I might post at some point. But yeah. Yeah. God, sorry, that was such an info dump lol 

[herewegoagainniall]

I’ll Love Her Still: Part 10 (Brian May x Female!Reader)

WELL. It’s certainly been a while, hasn’t it? I know that the whole world has just kinda....ended, but on the bright side, the quarantine has finally made me write more! I’m coming to the last few parts of the fic now, and I honestly can’t believe this journey is going to be over soon. Thank you to everyone who’s supported this story in any way, I’ll never be able to thank you all enough ❤️. 

TAGLIST: @alittlepeoplemagic​; @brianmayplease​; @brianmayscurls​; @chlobo6​; @d-illo​; @delilahmay39​; @kenzie-belle​; @killer-queen-xo​; @kiwithekiwi​; @lizzybeth1986​; @maryfree​; @moreinfinite​; @readinghorn​; @rogerscupboard​; @thelegumemother​ 

TRIGGERS: Guys there is so much angst here. Like seriously, the end of this chapter gets...kind of awful. It’s important for character development! But if fights or name calling triggers you, just sit this part out and wait for the next one. 

“Ladies and germs,” the sound of Freddie’s best flight attendant impression roused you from your slumber, “welcome to sunny California!!”

You rubbed your eyes and looked out the window at the sprawling City of Angels, feeling an excited smile spread across your face. You turned to Brian with bright eyes and held his arm tightly. “Brian!” you said through teeth that were clenched in an uncontrollable smile. “We’re here!”

Brian looked past you and out the window, smiling. “I know!” he mimicked your tone teasingly before pulling back to kiss you on the forehead.

The wheels of the plane touched down (so harshly that you and Brian literally bumped heads, something that the two of you laughed about for the next hour), and the usual production of going to the luggage carousel and declaring your belongings at customs had an added element of enchantment to it. You were finally here- Los Angeles. The American capital of the rock and roll world. Anybody who was anybody made their name out here. And now you were here with Queen; it was almost to surreal to think of.

You didn’t really get to spend much of that day with Brian- he and the boys had to rehearse at the venue and then do press, so you roamed the city with Amber. The dress she picked out for you to wear to the concert and the after party was tasteful, but still clung to your body in just the right ways. It made you feel beautiful. Hell, LA itself made you feel beautiful. Beautiful, happy and… free.

That night, Queen and Mott the Hoople played their absolute hearts out- you could swear that you watched both bands transform into rock gods right before your very eyes. Brian, Freddie, Deacy, Rog… it was a true metamorphosis for the four of them. It was the kind of life-changing performance that you could tell your grandchildren you saw, and say, “I knew them when…”

Still in the clouds after the performance, the Queen entourage made their way to the Continental Hyatt House (lovingly referred to as the “Riot House” by the rock stars you ran with) for the after party. The place was practically swarming with people of all walks of life. Hippies, rockers, groupies, roadies, rock writers, tour promoters- anyone who was anyone was there. It was an overpowering kaleidoscope of long hair and glitter eyeshadow and alcohol. LOTS of alcohol. You’d had the perfect amount- just enough to get you buzzing, not so much that you were going to regret it later. Brian had been by your side for pretty much the whole night, but he also knew that this night was just as much for you as it was for him. This was your chance to reconnect with the scene that you’d left to follow him around the country, and he wanted you to grab it.

You’d seen so many friends already- old friends, the kind you never think about in the day-to-day, and then the minute you see them, it’s as if no time had passed at all. But you were also seeing a lot of familiar faces. Here was the promoter you’d blown for Led Zeppelin tickets, there was the roadie you’d flashed so you could get backstage and catch Roger Daltrey’s eye. They were everywhere, and for the first time in a long time, you felt wholly yourself.

The sunshine glow from your fourth drink was warming you all over, and you felt like you were on top of the world. Then you heard him. “Lily, Lily, Lily. The only woman who was my kind.”

You whirled around and felt your heart soar.

“Joe Walsh, as I live and breathe!!” you laughed and let out a squeal as Joe wrapped his arms around you and spun you in a circle. Out of all the rock stars that you’d been with (before Brian, of course), Joe had been your favorite. He was talented, sweet, and never ever failed to make you laugh. Maybe in another life, something more serious could have happened between the two of you- but now wasn’t the time for that. For now, you were just grinning like a fool, and you felt so happy to see him. “I’ve missed you,” you exhaled.

“I’ve missed you too, sweetheart,” Joe chuckled and set you down. “What are you doing all the way out here?”

“I could ask you the same question! I thought you were in Ohio.”

Joe shrugged and laughed softly. “C’mon, Lily, you know there’s not a whole lot out in Ohio for us. We had to come out here to make it big.” You felt his hands rest softly on your hips, but you didn’t push him away. It felt natural, having him here with you. “What about you?? You finally made it out to LA, like you always wanted.”

“I did,” you grinned. “I’m here with Queen.”

“Aw, shoot, we wanted to see them but we had things to do.”

“Well, you should see them if you can. They’re going to be legends.”

Joe raised his eyebrows. “Legends, huh? Well, Lil, if YOU say it, then it must be so.”

You chuckled softly, finding yourself falling more and more into Joe’s eyes. God, you’d forgotten how captivating he could be. But you didn’t want to take it any further, obviously: you were here with Brian. Where WAS Brian anyway?

“You know,” Joe smirked, “I thought I saw Delphi from Sacramento somewhere here. You maybe wanna grab her and a bottle of José Cuervo and see where the night takes us?”

“Easy there, cowboy,” you laughed, nodding over to the other side of the room, which was the last place you saw Brian, “I’m here with someone else.”

“So he doesn’t let you have fun?” Joe grinned that jackal grin that had always made your heart skip a beat. “I really have missed you,” he added, his voice becoming a little softer.

You tucked Joe’s hair behind his ear and smiled. “Maybe another time, Joe, okay?”

Joe nodded slowly, pressing his lips to the place where your thumb met the rest of your hand. “You must really like this guy, huh?”

A sunny feeling spread across your heart and you nodded. “I do,” you confessed. “He’s different, Joe, he really is.”

Joe was about to say something, but a sing-song voice called, “Jooooooooe” from across the room. The jackal smirk returned to his face again and he sheepishly said, “Guess I’ve gotta go.”

You nodded, understanding. “I’ll see you around, Joe,” you gave him one last smile.

Joe bent down and pressed his lips to your knuckles, a gentlemanly gesture completely at odds with his personality. “Take care of yourself, flower,” he murmured, already halfway to the other voice that demanded his attention.

It was odd- watching Joe leave normally made your heart drop slightly, the feeling of not knowing when you’d see each other again difficult to bear. But it wasn’t there this time. Maybe you were growing. Or maybe you just missed Brian. You decided to go with the latter and try to find him.

Making your way through the maze of glitter and flared jeans, you found yourself in the hallway. After you gave a quick hello to a couple more familiar faces, you saw Brian leaning against the wall, arms crossed. You didn’t pay it any mind- he was probably just tired or cold or something.

“Hey stranger,” you smiled at him.

Brian turned his head slightly and mumbled, “Hello.”

“Where have you been?”

“Around.”

You raised your eyebrows. “You sound like you just walked through the catacombs and the skulls started talking to you.”

Brian smiled unwittingly, lulling you into security. “’M just tired, I guess.”

“Why don’t you go to bed then, granddad?” you teased him slightly. “I’ll come up with you.”

“No.” The harshness of his tone surprised the both of you, and Brian cleared his throat. “I’ll be fine,” he clarified, his voice a bit softer.

His words were falling on deaf ears-  you were already turning around, the pull of an LA party too strong to make you want to leave. “You sure?” you called over your shoulder.

Brian didn’t respond, so you filled in the silence for him. “Okay, then I’ll just-”

“Exactly how much of a slut are you??”

You froze in your tracks. He didn’t… he did not… You turned on your feet slowly. “What did you just say to me?”

“You heard me.” Brian’s eyes were ablaze. “How many people have you fucked before that I’ve met tonight? Hm?”

“Brian, that is… there’s no stretch of the imagination where that could matter in the slightest!”

“How many?” he repeated.

“I-I don’t know, I…” you were sincerely racking your brain, trying to think of who was at this party. “Who’s here?”

Brian scoffed and shook his head, running a hand over his face. “Unbelievable,” he murmured.

“What?” you could feel your mood beginning to sour. “What’s going on with you?”

“‘What’s going on with me??’” Brian laughed humorlessly. “I didn’t realize taking you to L.A. meant I’d be confronted with every guy you’ve ever given the time of day to.”

“I… honey, I didn’t know that there would be so many of them here, okay? I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

“Yeah. Well. It is.”

Your eyebrows furrowed. “Look, Brian, I get that you’re jealous, but that’s no reason t-”

“Jealous?” Brian said mockingly. “What do I have to be jealous about? I’m not some groupie who just goes around letting complete strangers into her bed night after night.”

The confusion in your heart was slowly starting to transform into anger. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Pretty obvious what it’s supposed to mean, isn’t it?” Brian scoffed. “I’ve got no reason to be jealous of someone like you, hopping from one sucker to another, lying about who they are and thinking that everything’s just going to be hunky dory.”

“Brian,” you said in a tone that you hoped conveyed just how pissed off you were becoming, “I don’t know where this is coming from, but it needs to stop. Now can we please just go back to the party?”

Brian’s eyes narrowed. “So you can find my replacement, right?”

You could feel your hands ball into fists. “You knew what you were getting into with me,” you growled. “The first night we met, I asked you if it bothered you that I was a groupie, and you said ‘no’. You haven’t had any complaints at all before tonight, and now all of a sudden, I’m just trash, is that it?”

Brian shook his head. “You don’t get it, Y/N. Or Lily, or whoever the fuck you are.”

“Brian, if you have something to tell me-”

“I LOVE YOU!”

Oh God.

The silence between the two of you was suffocating. It was a horrible, choking silence that completely knocked the wind out of you. “What?” you gasped, terrified to speak in anything above a whisper.

“I… I love you,” Brian repeated, softer but with the same intensity as before.

Words escaped you. It was like a nuclear bomb had gone off, but you and Brian were the only ones at the detonation site. “Brian,” was all you could say. Not even say, whisper. Hell, not even whisper- it came out like a breath.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” Brian’s voice cracked slightly despite his best efforts to seem strong.

You took a shaky breath. “I don’t know what else to say,” you admitted, lamely.

“How about, ‘I love you too?’”

You let the sentence form on your tongue. It rolled around in the back of your throat like a marble. But you couldn’t speak it. It couldn’t fall from your lips.

Brian ran a hand down his face. “I knew it. I fucking knew it,” he grumbled. “What were you playing at?” he spoke clearly again, making sure you felt every jab of his words. “Why did you pick me out of everyone in the band? What, was Roger too easy? Was Freddie too smart?”

“Brian, stop it!” you begged. “How could you even think something like that?”

“What else can I think? You have every fucking part of me, and you’ve given me nothing in return!” The hurt in Brian’s eyes was palpable and shot like a rocket, straight to your heart. “All I want is for you to be mine. To go back home after a long tour and have you by my side. To wake up next to you and go to sleep next to you. Take you out on proper dates. Fight over whose turn it is to cook dinner or do laundry. Have you meet my parents. Show you where I grew up. It’s all I can think about, being with you for real.”  

You could feel blood rushing to your head. Where was all of this coming from? “Then what?” you asked harshly. “Marriage? Babies? Eventually leaving me behind while you go on tour and find another girl in every city, just like you found me? Is that really what you want for us??”

Now it was Brian’s turn to be gob smacked. “Y/N… I wouldn’t. I would never,” he said softly.

“And it’s not even that,” you shook your head. “I don’t know if I even want to get married or have kids. I don’t want to be locked down before I even figure out what I want!”

“You think I’m going to lock you down?” Brian said incredulously. “Would being with me really be so bad?”

“No, Brian, I-”

“So then what’s the problem??”

“Because I don’t know if I want to be with you! I don’t know if I want to be with ANYBODY!” you ran a hand through your hair. “I happen to love my life just as it is, and I don’t see any reason to change it or apologize for my choices. Least of all to you.”

You watched Brian’s expression morph from pain back to anger. “What are you going to do if I leave right now?” he snarled. “What if I walk away and just leave you here?”

“I don’t care what you do, because I’M NOT YOURS, BRIAN!”

That was it. Brian spun on his heels and stalked away from you, seemingly ignoring the, “Fine, walk away, real fucking mature!” that you threw at him.

Red clouded your vision, and the noise from the party shifted into a dull drone. You felt like you couldn’t even stand anymore, and you stumbled over to the wall, leaning against it and letting your head fall into your hands. What the actual fuck just happened?

“Oi oi!” You pushed a hand through your hair and slowly turned to see Roger coming down the hall from the same door that Brian had walked out of. He was certainly enjoying himself. “There she is, our sweet Peaches.”

Goddamn it. It was like the mere sound of the nickname popped the balloon that your anger had become, and the tears started to spill out of your eyes. “Fight with Loverboy?” Roger asked, clearly trying to do the “cheer the sad girl up” thing and failing.

“Don’t,” you spat out. “Please, Rog, just…”

“Okay, hey, hey,” Roger said softly, bringing you into his chest and rubbing your back. “Easy there, lovey.”

You knew he was just trying to help, but you also knew you couldn’t bear to be around anyone right now. Least of all, one of Brian’s best friends. You let out a huff and balled your hands into Roger’s shirt. “Can you walk me to the elevator?” you muttered into his chest.

“Course,” Roger replied, not letting you go for a second. The feeling of his arm around your shoulders was the only thing that was keeping you grounded as you made your way to the elevator. Roger pushed the “down” button and looked at you, eyes filled with concern. “Do you need me to stay with you?”

You shook your head. “No. I can’t… I can’t be around people right now.”

“Lily, if there’s something Brian did-”

“Don’t be mad at him,” you found yourself saying. “It’s something between the two of us. We’ll handle it.” Your voice actually felt like it was disconnected from your body.

With that, the elevator doors opened and you broke free of Roger’s embrace. You entered the elevator and pressed the button that led to your floor and watched as the elevator doors closed on Roger and the party you thought would be the best night of your life.

Welcome to L fucking A.