#-genuinely died while I was all the way across the country

[straytexts]

All my two only friends talk about are their boyfriends.

[bradshawssugarbaby]

God, Your Mama and Me (Jake Seresin x Reader)

A/N: told y'all I listened to country music and it inspired me. Inspired by and quotes God, Your Mama and Me by Florida Georgia Line. I'm not religious but that song gets me all heart-eye emoji every time.

pairing: Jake Seresin x reader (I'm 99% sure I kept reader GN the whole time with no mentions of appearance)

content/warnings: reference to God via the song (the line is "no one's ever gonna love you more than God, your mama and me"), Jake being adorable and trying his best to be romantic but he's more awkward than he wants to be bc he doesn't do PDA, brief references to potential character death (I promise no one dies)

word count: 1.6k

Jake took you by the hand, running playfully through the sand. Coronado Beach was where he’d taken you for your first date. It was where you’d met, where you spent every free weekend, where you’d meet with his friends at The Hard Deck for drinks on Friday nights and where you’d sit and watch the planes taking off from North Island as you waited for him to come home, not knowing what each day would bring but hoping and praying he’d come home to you safe and sound every time. 

For the last three years, Coronado was an integral part of your life. It was where you’d held Jake’s 35th birthday party, a spontaneous beach gathering complete with a cooler of chilled beers and a portable speaker belting out country tunes. Despite the groans from others, the music had a magical effect on the usually reserved Jake, prompting him to join in with spirited, off-key singing every time. 

It was where you and Jake had shared your first kiss, where he’d first told you he loved you - a sentence he admitted he never thought he’d say to anyone, swearing up and down he’d lead the bachelor life until he either died or retired, whichever came first. He’d always claim it was because he just “wasn’t the settlin’ type”, but his friends always saw right through it. 

“He’s just scared,” Bradley had assured you one day over a beer while Jake tossed darts effortless at the board a few feet out of earshot. 

Reading the puzzled look on your face, Natasha hummed playfully as she sipped her drink before raising an eyebrow at you. 

“He doesn’t want to settle down because he’s scared,” She and Bradley nodded in unison. 

“Yeah, doesn’t wanna leave behind a war widow kinda thing,” Bradley shrugs, “You’d think it’d be me who feels that way considering my dad died when I was literally a toddler, but no, apparently it’s Blondie who’s got the commitment issues.”

The first time Jake referred to you as his girl, the usually chatty Bradley had been rendered speechless, mouth agape while Natasha had choked and sputtered on her beer as she looked wide eyed at Bradley and back at Jake. Jake shrugged it off as if it was nothing, but everyone, even you, knew it was uncharacteristic of him. 

The following weekend after stunning his Navy buddies, he’d been called away to the first mission since you’d started dating. You weren’t expecting it, but you got a heartfelt, emotional goodbye from Jake, one that was genuine and raw, a side of him you’d never seen before. He’d hugged you tightly and kissed you slow and sweet, making it last, permanent on your mind in case he didn’t make it back. As he promised you he’d return, you could hear his normally velvety smooth Southern drawl crack as his voice caught in his throat. 

When he came home a few weeks later, you’d greeted him with a warm embrace, and he held you tighter than he ever had before, his first true public display of affection towards you. Bradley and Natasha could be heard whispering, while Bob simply looked on smiling, knowing how in love Jake really was, watching as it mirrored Bob’s own relationship with his girlfriend. 

“Jake, where are you taking me?” 

You laughed as you snapped back to the present, raising an eyebrow at him as he continued to lead you across the sand. His cargo shorts were hugging his hips perfectly, golden-tanned skin from the California sun illuminated in the light of the setting sun. His green eyes were full of a child-like excitement, his signature grin plastered on his face, looking like it couldn’t be wiped off even if you tried.

“Just trust me, ok? You trust me, don’t ya, Sugar?”

“Alright, alright, I trust you.”

“Atta girl, c’mon, almost there.”

You shook your head and shot him a playful eyeroll as he continued to guide you along the shore. Your mind flashed back to when you and Jake had first slept together - instead of the playful arrogance, overwhelming confidence and cocky egotistical attitude he gave off around his friends, he was the opposite when it came to loving you. He was gentle, caring, passionate and considerate. He checked in with you, making sure you were comfortable and enjoying it. He was selfless in the way he loved you - making sure you were taken care of in all aspects before he was, and if for whatever reason, his climax came before yours, he made a point to bring you to yours by whatever means necessary. 

When Jake asked you to move in with him, the look on your face was one of pure shock and disbelief, you were sure you were dreaming it. Your wide-eyed gaze and raised eyebrows were enough to make Jake laugh, shaking his head at you.

“Now that’s not how I thought you’d react, babe.”

“I’m sorry…I just…can you say it again?”

“Ask you again?”

“Yeah, please?”

“Ok, Sugar, you’re losin’ it, but sure, I want you to move in with me, that sound alright to ya? We both complain we don’t see each other enough, and well, I just feel like it’s time we do somethin’ ‘bout it, right?”

You nodded your head and simply threw your arms around him, letting Jake embrace you tightly as he kissed your cheek. He had his friends help you pack and by the end of that week, you were moved in with him, sharing the little house on base together. His Cowboys jersey hanging in the closet next to your Commanders one - your teams were bitter rivals, and Bradley, who had come from Virginia, your home state, was beyond shocked to see Jake allowing you to wear a Commanders jersey to their Sunday night football watch parties. Bradley, forced to wear a jersey for another team, pouted at Jake.

“How come when I wear my Commanders jersey, I get told to fuck off and stay outside?”

“You don’t look cute in Washington’s colours, Bradshaw,” Jake replied matter of factly as he kissed you on the cheek, leaving Bradley to pout once again.

Jake stopped in front of you, turning his body to face you, bringing you back to reality for another moment. His unwavering grin still on his face, smiling at you as if you were the only sight around him for miles. Your heart melted when he looked at you - it always did - the love he had for you was always evident on his face, his gaze full of admiration and affection for you.

Your eyes widened as Jake went down on one knee in front of you. The sounds of the waves crashing against the sandy coast echoing softly around you. The odd passerby gawking as they went for their stroll in the dusky glow of the beach as the sun began to set on Coronado. Jake beamed up at you from where he stood on bended knee, his eyes matching the seafoam that was pooling around you, inching closer and closer to where you stood. 

“Darlin’, remember that date I took ya on, where you made me dance with ya on the beach, after I swore I never would? That song you made me dance to, the one by Florida Georgia Line?”

“I remember,” you said, gazing at him with tear soaked eyes.

“Sugar, you know I’m not good at this kinda stuff - it’s more Bradley’s thing, being all sentimental and shit, but I’m gonna try my damnest, ok? You know how that song goes, “Baby you know my love is never gonna run dry, never gonna come up empty, now until the day I die, unconditionally,”

Jake’s cheeks blushed a soft pink as he tried his best to carry the tune, serenading you by the oceanside, “then it’s like, “You know I’m always gonna be here for ya, no one’s ever gonna love you more than God, your mama and me”? Guess that’s what I’m tryin’ to say here, no one on this earth is gonna be able to love you, or anyone else more than I do. I’m sure of it. I didn’t even think it was possible for me to love you as much as I do, but Baby, do I ever love you.”

“Jake,” you started, feeling yourself becoming breathless with excitement as he spoke.

“Babygirl, will you do me the greatest honor ever, and become Mrs. Seresin? I never thought I’d ever marry anyone, but I’d be a fool to not marry you, darlin’.” 

Speechless, you nodded your head quickly, unable to make any sound other than an excited squeal of delight as he slipped the ring onto your finger. As Jake stood upright, he wrapped his arms around you, enveloping you in a loving embrace, his lips crashing against yours as he kissed you passionately.

From behind you, you could hear familiar voices cheering - you broke the kiss and turned to see Reuben, Javy, Mickey, Bradley, Natasha and Bob standing there, all beaming at you. Bradley wiped a single tear from his eye in his usual dramatic fashion, while Bob gave a proud thumbs up to Jake. A congratulatory smile formed on Natasha’s features, while Javy, Mickey and Reuben all applauded you both. You were overcome with emotion as you shared this moment with Jake and your friends. 

“You all knew?”

“Of course we knew, Jake can’t keep a secret to save his life,” Natasha grinned, shrugging her shoulders.

“I get to be best man, right?” Bradley grinned as he clapped his hand onto Jake’s shoulder in a congratulatory substitute for a hug. 

[watercolorfreckles]

Could you do a story where a guard of a Supermax prison befriends a supervillain, because he treats him like a genuine human being instead of an animal; and later, all the power-dampeners suddenly fail; and all these villains just revolt against the guards; but supervillain makes sure he’s safe since he was always kind to him?

I understand if you don’t want to!!❤️

Hello! This has been sittin in my inbox for many months during my huge writing rut, sorry about that! I know you also gave this prompt to @the-modern-typewriter and she's been making an incredible series with it on patreon! I changed some things around because I don't want to in any way attempt some sad copy of her interpretation, but I was still inspired by the prompt itself, so I've taken some fairly big liberties to avoid any significant similarities! Hope that's okay! Also, please manage your expectations, I do not compare to the magic that is TMT's writing 😆

TW: Brief depictions of body horror. Violence.

The power blew out in sections. The lights dissolved sector by sector with a sickening whine and click–one by one–in approach.

The commotion ripped Eloise from the fictional world she was lost in, aged page corners still pinched beneath her thumb. Her spirited storytelling abruptly died behind her teeth.

Somewhere in the distance, one person shouted. Two.

Her gaze flicked behind them to the door isolating herself and the bound supervillain from the other sectors of the Maximum Security Prison for Powered Individuals or, as everyone called it, The Max. Seeing nothing but black beyond the bullet-proof glass, her attention snapped forward again to the supervillain imprisoned across from her. 

Was this the start of some elaborate escape plan on his part? Why did it have to happen on a day that she was stuck fulfilling her community service hours instead of being something she could safely gawk at in the newspaper from a distance in a few days? Her stomach did a nauseated flip. 

“What are you doing?” she blurted, voice quivering only a little. Her fingers tightened around her book.

The villain made a show of looking pointedly at his restraints. Wrists strung taut and chained to either wall, he shrugged an innocent shoulder at her as if to say “clearly, nothing.” He was perched on the edge of his bed like a bird, tilting his head with a matching sort of probing curiosity. 

For all the chaos outside of the room, Artisan had not a hair out of place. He appeared perfectly unconcerned, though as thoroughly trapped as ever: ankles shackled, arms stretched uselessly apart from each other. The power-dampening collar wrapped around his neck still blipped a faint red light, indicating it was active. 

The prisoners were rioting. Surely they couldn’t get too far? Containing the most dangerous of powered individuals was, after all, the express purpose of the facility…

The lights above them flickered, dipping the room in and out of inky darkness before settling into a dimly lit haze. Eloise’s breath stalled. The imposing dark felt like a threat, as if the lights could keep the monsters at bay. It only made a little sense, in the way that a child feels safe from the monsters under their bed as long as their nightlight is plugged in.

Except that these monsters were real. The most dangerous in the country. And she was currently feet away from the monster that made even other monsters run.

He hadn’t seemed so bad in the time that she’d known him. Quiet, impassive, yet twisting her gut with pity any time she eyed his barbaric restraints. The least she could do–while crossing off her hours–was to read the supervillain a story every few days. She couldn’t change his fate. Couldn’t make him more comfortable. What she could do was rattle off, sheepishly, about fictional worlds and impactful characters in literature and the way that a well-crafted story could transport you somewhere better.

A crash, gunshots, a scream. Tension racketed through Eloise’s shoulders. More shouts chased thundering footsteps.

Things were going very, very, wrong. And she was very much out of her depth.

Eloise jolted as something struck the door, her special-edition copy of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein falling to the ground and skidding away.

Finally, the lights cut out. With it, every noticeable piece of tech died. All of the energy felt sucked out of the room as if vacuumed. The camera’s blinking light disappeared. Alarms that should have been wailing cut silent. Speakers, keypads, and security systems, all dead. The secondary generator hadn’t sprung to life yet. That meant that this was more than a simple power outage. This was a calculated revolt.

 Eloise’s mind raced through a list of everything else that must have been failing. Coms. Sedative gas. Shock collars. Layers and layers of security locks…

Power dampeners.

Panic clamped vice-like and suffocating around her throat. Artisan’s collar was no longer blinking. 

She froze in the eerie silence of the cell, afraid of shattering the fragile calm. Her heart thumped, rabid, against her ribs.

Chains rattled and clinked to the floor.

Eloise bolted blindly for the door, smacking her palm against the DNA scanner while frantically swiping her “Volunteer Staff” badge through the card reader. When neither miraculously came to life, she resorted to banging on the door.

“Let me out, let me out! Guard!”

The door could only be opened by one person inside the cell and one outside simultaneously unlocking the security checkpoints. Even if the power were on, if the guard on the other side was gone…

The emergency floodlights kicked on, bathing the building in startling fluorescence. Eloise flinched, briefly stunned.

Hands grabbed her firmly from behind, yanking her backward.

Eloise yelped. “No, please–!”

The spot that she had been standing in exploded, steel door and concrete chunks collapsing into the room in a barrage of shrapnel. Something–no, someone–landed, bones crunching, at her feet. The guard who had last been standing on the opposite side of the door lay motionless. His blood puddled the floor, staining the soles of her Converse sneakers.

A horrified sound choked in Eloise’s throat.

Another supervillain strode in, eyes alight with hatred and something more–power. His lip curled, waving a mocking hand–engulfed in green energy–at the guard’s corpse. “God. I’ve wanted to do that for far too long. That one always got on my nerves.”

Artisan looked unimpressed. “You’re making a mess in my cell.”

Eloise’s breath caught. Hearing the supervillain’s voice was jarring. Artisan rarely spoke. Not that any of the other staff had ever actually attempted conversation with him… But even in news clips and YouTube videos, he carried himself with the kind of self-assured quiet of someone who had absolutely nothing to prove. His lethal efficiency did more for his reputation than any words could.

The other man was a villain named William Frenzy, a telekinetic with a gleeful taste for violence.

Faced with Artisan’s startling calm, Frenzy… paused. Faltering on a tight rope he had moments before been strolling across. 

“Yes, well. It won’t have to be your cell much longer, will it? They can’t stop all of us.” He smirked at the dead body on the floor. “Some of them can’t even stop one of us.”

Eloise shrank back toward the corner nearest the door, agonizingly slow, willing the ugly shadows from the artificial lighting to swallow her up while the supers focused on each other. She was the kind of person that people tended not to notice; a background character in the perimeter of a story that the protagonist would meet once and never spare a thought again. She wished, then, that invisibility really was her superpower.

Artisan said nothing, his steely gaze fixed upon Frenzy.

Frenzy floundered beneath the scrutiny. The smugness buffered on his face. Finally, he huffed, crossing his arms. “I made you a nice and easy door out. You’re welcome.” He flicked a hand toward the gaping hole in the wall.

Eloise inched further toward it.

Artisan tutted, and while it wasn’t aimed at her, it shot a cold thrill up her spine. She froze, briefly, before continuing her tantalizing escape. She listened to Artisan speak again. 

“I did not need anything from you. I’ll be getting out regardless. You on the other hand…” 

Eloise stared as Frenzy’s skin shrank taut against his bones, the frame of him creaking and groaning like an old tree in the wind. The air choked out of him, fingers grabbing at his jaw as it stretched open too wide. The corners of his lips tore, slitting his mouth into a gaping maw.

The faintest of smiles graced Artisan's lips as he continued, soft as ever. “Say sorry.”

Eloise didn’t wait to see the carnage through, slipping out into the hall and running.

The other sectors were washed in the same sterile glow as Artisan’s cell was, blue-tinged and horrible, like the lights in a dentist's office. She kept to the edge of things as best she could, clinging to the walls and dark corners.

There was brawling in every sector—guards with weapons drawn mowed to the ground by the creatures they had wardened for so long. A villain fell as shots rang out. Another grabbed the guard from behind, cracking his skull against their knee. 

The smell of blood stung Eloise’s nostrils. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe.

She turned to flee down another hall, but two fighting inmates crashed into the doorway in front of her.

Eloise squealed, jerking backward into the belly of the room's chaos.

Don't notice me, don't notice me, don't notice me.

Everyone was so occupied by their chosen prey, maybe she could fade into the background. Maybe she could–

Her heel caught on something and she tumbled, gracelessly, to the floor. It took her several moments to register the lake of blood seeping warm and sticky into her clothing. 

Terror blurred her brain in a white flash bang.

Disappear, disappear, disappear…

“Mm. What do we have here?”

Eloise couldn’t bring herself to lift her head. She clamped her eyes shut, another child’s illusion of protection. 

The villain opposite her chuckled. He ripped her volunteer badge off of its clip against her chest. Her eyes snapped open again. She recognized him as a ringleader among superpowered thieves. They called him Volt.

“Volunteer, eh? A pretty thing like you should know better than to willingly set foot in a prison full of men with nothing left to lose. It’s been a long sentence, darling. I could make excellent use of your volunteer services. Get up.”

Numbly, ears full of static, Eloise shook her head.

Volt frowned, electricity jumping to life in his palms. “No?” He reached for her, hand nearing her throat.

“Keep your hands to yourself or I will remove them.” 

Artisan’s voice was calm. His eyes were not.

The room quieted.

Spatters of red decorated Artisan’s prison uniform. A few drops dotted his face and he brushed them away with his knuckles, smearing the crimson across his cheek. Almost lazily, he popped his neck and stretched his shoulders, no doubt sore from the strain his restraints kept him in.

The villain across from Eloise paused, sparks still dancing across his fingertips. He regarded Artisan with the same wary caution as Frenzy had.

Before he'd been… Before Artisan had…

Eloise swallowed back the nausea climbing her throat.

Finally, Volt’s hand lowered. “She's yours?”

“She's hers. Step away.”

The man hesitated a moment too long. Artisan didn't offer a second warning. 

As if puppeted, the man's fingers raised to gauge at his own eyes. He screamed, the faint evidence of Artisan’s power shimmering over him. He clawed, next, at the skin on his face, peeling it back like wet wallpaper. 

As promised, his wrists crunched and bent, wrenching all on their own at impossible angles.

Eloise covered her ears, unable to bear the screaming. She felt sick.

“Stop,” she whispered finally. “Please.”

It did. The man collapsed into a sobbing, bloodied heap.

When Eloise managed to look at Artisan, she startled to find his attention fixed on her.

They stared at each other for a stretch of silence that itched. She imagined being forced to choke on her own lungs, or her skull constricting in on itself until it squashed her brain into pulp. For being so bold as to run, he might snap her legs and reaffix them the wrong direction, or splinter her bones to poke, grotesque, out of her skin. They always did say that his victims were his personal works of art, bodies twisted into shells of monsters.

He crooked a finger, beckoning her.

The edges of her vision swooped fuzzy and vertiginous. She rose onto wobbly knees and pushed herself to her feet. When she swayed, Artisan caught her elbow, slipping an arm around her waist to lead her forward.

He did not look back at the others, with complete confidence that no one would challenge him.

No one did.

Eloise was barely aware of taking one step after another. When they arrived back in the villain’s cell, the bodies of Frenzy and the dead guard, thankfully, were gone, though the floor was streaked with the drag lines of their blood.

She wrenched her gaze away.

Artisan’s hand moved further down her arm to her wrist, gesturing that she sit on his bed. When she shifted to do so, his grip tightened, tugging her to a stop. She frozen and tried to read his face. 

His dark brows were furrowed, suspicious eyes flicking from hers down to her hand.

He pulled down her sleeve and held her wrist up between them, revealing the power-blocking cuff clamped around it. His head cocked. He waited.

Eloise swallowed. “I’m not a super. I mean- not a super-super. Just a…..no one.”

“A no-one who volunteers at The Max? With a power-dampener?”

“They’re terms of my probation,” she blurted. “A thousand hours of community service here and a power-inhibitor for a year. I think they put me here to threaten me with where I could end up if I continue on like… Um…”

“Me.”

“A villain,” she clarified, as if that was better. 

Her gaze flitted from the fingers wrapped around her wrist and up to the villain’s face again. The harsh lighting haloed him, dimly silhouetting his face. He looked haunting. He looked lovely. A beautiful house, old and creaking, wrapped in ghosts like a bride’s veil and left to rot. 

“What did you do?”

“I…” Eloise felt very small. “I lied about being powered on my documents. So that they wouldn’t put me on the registry. When they found me out, I tried to run away.”

Artisan’s scrutiny burned her cheeks. He let go of her wrist.

“...What can you do?”

“Nothing special,” she said, cradling her wrist–wholly uninjured as it was–in her other hand. “It doesn’t even work most of the time. My power is sort of…blending in. Going unnoticed. When it’s working, I could stand in a the White House and people’s attention would glide over me as if I belonged there. Not quite invisible, but… It just tricks your brain into not thinking twice.”

Artisan’s eyes narrowed.

Eloise flinched back a step, stumbling back over her fallen book onto the bed. She stared at him.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

Some of the tension eased from her shoulders, but she still waited for the catch. “Why aren’t you out there with the rest of them? Trying to escape?”

The villain considered her for a long moment. He sat down beside her, and the hard cot creaked beneath his weight. “Mm. That’s just it. No one inside the prison could have blown the power-dampeners. They require someone with powers to turn them off or on, and the security is impenetrable. My team has tried. Besides, if this was a simple power outage, the inhibitors would still be on. But they’re not. This was premeditated–and no one imprisoned here could have done it. No one on the outside could have done it. So. Process of elimination. Who’s left?”

That was the most Eloise had ever heard Artisan speak, and she could only sit and listen intently–As he had when she’d read him stories. Her brain whirred in a jumbled jigsaw of puzzle pieces. 

“It… It could only be an inside job.” She wet her lips. “The heroes- The higher-ups- They want the prisoners to break out so that they can kill them. A clean massacre. Justified under the law. The world’s most dangerous criminals could never be allowed to escape…”

Artisan smiled and it swirled something in her insides. “A convenient way to get rid of all of the pesky criminals clogging up the system. I’d bet anything that there are 50 snipers surrounding the building, waiting to slaughter anyone who steps foot outside.”

“Oh.”

“Oh,” Artisan agreed, his smile easing into something softer; something with less feral teeth.

“Thank you for helping me,” Eloise whispered. “What do we do now?”

Artisan hummed. He bent down and swept up her book, dropping it into her lap. He laid back against his pillow and crossed his arms behind his head. The bloodspots on his skin and clothes glittered in the lowlight. 

“Keep reading. I want to know how it ends.”

Part 2

[deliciousangelfestival]

I Hate It When You're Drunk - 6

Character: bodyguard!Bucky Barnes x Princess!Reader

Summary: A forbidden love between a princess and her bodyguard. They love each other deeply, but their relationship is threatened by the tyrant king's oppressive rule and their differing social statuses.

I Hate It When You're Drunk Series Masterlist

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Thank you to everyone who has read this chapter. Leave a comment and Reblog, please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. ❤️

The news of the rebellion made headlines, dividing public opinion. Some supported it, despising the tyrant king, while the majority dismissed it as futile, knowing the king's power was insurmountable.

However, the rebellion news quickly died when a new announcement captivated everyone's attention: the princess of Veridian was getting married to her personal guard.

It was a fairytale come to life. The official story painted a romantic picture of childhood friends whose bond blossomed into love as they grew older.

This narrative enchanted the nation and international media, drawing interest from all corners. People saw Bucky as incredibly fortunate—a commoner rising to become a royal consort, a prince. Suddenly, both of you were thrust into the spotlight.

You were accustomed to attention, but this was more intense than ever before. Now recognized by everyone in the country, Bucky found the newfound scrutiny overwhelming.

Since the wedding announcement, you and Bucky had been constantly busy with interviews and photoshoots. The flashing cameras and endless questions left Bucky feeling numb inside, his mind preoccupied with thoughts of his captured comrades.

Flashback Start

You had asked the king to show mercy to the rebels. Bucky vividly remembered the scene. Leonard was in the glasshouse, a place of enchanting beauty that looked like it belonged in a fairy tale. It was a gift for his wife, your mother. The tyrant king had made it as beautiful as a painting.

One of the birds, an eagle, landed gracefully on Leonard’s shoulder—a symbol of wild freedom now tamed into domesticity, much like Bucky’s transformation from an idealistic rebel to a figure constrained by duty.

Leonard, his face a mask of composed authority, offered the bird a snack. “Sure,” he said, his tone icy and detached. “No more bloodshed since your wedding is coming soon.”

The way he said it lacked genuine comfort, but at least he had promised. "Thank you, father," you said, bowing before leaving with Bucky.

Flashback End

His mind replayed Leonard’s smirk as he promised no bloodshed. He clenched his fists, the weight of his comrades' fates heavy on his heart.

“Bucky!”

He snapped out of his daydream, looking around in confusion. “Huh?” He saw you, the royal tailor, and the tailor's assistant staring at him. Bucky had been too immersed in the harsh reality that the tyrant king knew his plot. He still hadn't had the chance to visit his comrades who had been caught.

“Are you tired?” you asked, coming closer and touching his forehead. Perhaps he was tired; since the royal wedding announcement, both of you had non-stop schedules, constantly talking to the media.

Today, Bucky was meeting the royal tailor for the first time to be measured for the wedding.

“Your Highness, we are honored to be part of this occasion,” Sergio, the senior tailor who the royal family always chose to make their clothing, said as he bowed his head. Since King Leonard's reign began, Sergio had only designed for the king and you. Now, there was a new person, and it was for a special occasion.

You nodded. “I’ll leave you three alone.” You took another glance at Bucky, noting his dazed expression.

After the door closed, the tailor started measuring Bucky’s body. “You have a wide shoulder, sir,” Sergio commented, running his measuring tape across Bucky's back.

Bucky didn't know how to respond to the compliment, feeling awkward and out of place.

“It’s fit for someone carrying a big burden,” Sergio added, his voice low.

Bucky flinched. Did the tailor know something?

Sergio continued measuring, his movements precise and professional. “I’ve been here since before the king was born. My only advice is to keep your head down.”

“Democracy is dead,” Bucky muttered, the weight of his words heavy with resignation.

“It died for me the moment we servants had to wipe the blood spatter from the castle walls,” Sergio whispered, his voice barely audible.

Bucky's throat tightened, his tongue feeling like lead. The tailor’s words struck a chord, a stark reminder of the brutal reality he was facing. He clenched his fists, trying to steady himself as Sergio continued his work, the room filled with a tense silence.

The assistant worked quietly, taking notes and handing Sergio various tools. Bucky’s mind raced, thoughts of his captured comrades and the looming threat of Leonard’s wrath gnawing at him.

He forced himself to focus on the present, to endure the moment, knowing that every step he took brought him closer to his goal of freeing you and the country from the king's tyranny.

After Sergio finished measuring, he looked Bucky in the eye. “Remember what I said,” he whispered. “Keep your head down.”

Bucky nodded, his jaw tight. “Thank you,” he managed to say, strained but sincere.

As the tailor and his assistant left, Bucky stood alone in the room, the weight of his situation pressing down on him. He took a deep breath, steeling himself for the upcoming battles.

But it seemed like the battle had come sooner. From the window, Bucky saw you in the garden, walking together with Duke Cassian.

You were wandering around the garden, trying to clear your mind. This was what you wanted, but why didn't you feel butterflies in your stomach? Bucky's attitude made you nervous, filling you with doubts.

Was this what people meant by cold feet before a wedding?

"Having second thoughts?"

You jumped as Cassian's voice broke the silence.

"Why are you still here?" you asked, a bit startled.

He shrugged his shoulders. "I can't leave until my uncle says it's done."

Both of you fell into an uneasy silence until he finally broke it. "I knew from the beginning it wouldn't work. In your eyes, there's only one person."

You scoffed. "It's obvious."

"But I kept my hopes up. If you need me, I'll be wherever you need me," Cassian said softly.

You shook your head, unsure of how to react to his vulnerability. "What exactly made you agree to this, even though you knew from the start it wouldn't work?" you asked, searching his eyes for answers.

"My uncle," he admitted, going quiet before forcing a smile. "You know my situation."

Right. You knew his story. Even though he held a duke title, his uncle, who was the illegitimate son, was the richest in his country. Both of you shared the same fate. The puppet master of your life was your father, and for Cassian, it was his step-uncle.

"If it doesn't work out with you, my uncle will find another princess from another country," Cassian said, resignation in his voice.

You stopped walking, a sense of hopelessness washing over you. "Will we ever get out of this?"

"If my uncle dies," Cassian answered without hesitation. "Can't you see we already share the same suffering? There's a connection between us."

Before you could respond, Bucky appeared between you and Cassian, his presence imposing. "Cassian," Bucky said, his voice steady but cold. "It's time for you to leave."

Cassian nodded, sensing the tension. "Of course. I'll see you later," he said to you, then turned and walked away.

Once Cassian was gone, you turned to Bucky, concern etched on your face. "What did my father say to you?"

Bucky's jaw tightened. "Nothing I can't handle," he replied, trying to sound reassuring but failing to hide the strain in his voice.

You reached out, touching his arm. "You can tell me, Bucky. We're in this together."

He took a deep breath, looking into your eyes. "He just reminded me of my place, that's all."

Your doubts grew stronger with every word. "I don't want this to be a marriage of fear and obligation," you whispered, your voice trembling.

Bucky took your hand, squeezing it gently. "I love you, and I'll do whatever it takes to protect you," he said, his voice filled with determination.

But the look in his eyes told you there was more he wasn't saying. The seeds of doubt had been planted, and you couldn't shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.

As you walked back to the palace together, the weight of the situation pressed down on you. You wanted to believe in Bucky, in your love, but the shadow of your father's tyranny loomed large, casting a dark cloud over your future.

👑👑👑👑👑

On the wedding day, Bucky stood in front of the mirror, his eyes locked on Veridian's royal army uniform. The intricate embroidery, the gleaming medals, the carefully tailored fabric seemed to shimmer with an unspoken weight. His heart pounded, a relentless drumbeat that matched the anxious tremors in his hands.

He was dressed in the very outfit that marked him as a symbol of honor and responsibility, but today, it felt like a shroud, heavy with expectation and fear.

He took a deep breath, trying to steady his racing thoughts. "This is the day we've been waiting for," he murmured to himself, his voice barely more than a whisper. The words were meant to be reassuring but came out hollow, a weak echo of the tumult within him.

Every inch of the uniform felt like a reminder of the stakes at hand—the promise of a new life with you, intertwined with the shadows of deception and conflict that loomed large.

As he adjusted the gold-braided epaulets on his shoulders, something caught his eye. A single envelope lay on the table beside him, its presence an anomaly in the otherwise pristine room. Bucky picked it up, his fingers trembling slightly.

The envelope was plain, but the ominous red strokes that marked it were anything but ordinary. They looked like fresh blood, the stark color vivid against the cream of the envelope.

With a sense of foreboding, Bucky slid his finger under the flap and pulled out a single sheet of paper. The words written on it were clear, but it felt like a dagger to his heart. “TRAITOR.”

The word seemed to pulse with a menacing energy, the red strokes bleeding through the paper as if tainted with a sinister intent. The simple, accusatory message sent a shiver down his spine. His mind raced, trying to piece together the implications. Who had sent this? How did they know? And most importantly, what did it mean for the ceremony about to take place?

His breath hitched as he looked at his reflection, realizing that today was not just a union but a stage for something much darker.

The uniform that had once symbolized his hopes now felt like a prison. The looming threat of betrayal overshadowed the day that was meant to be filled with joy and celebration.

With a clenched jaw and a resolve hardened by the weight of the message, Bucky tucked the letter back into the envelope and straightened his posture.

He knew that whatever lay ahead, he needed to face it head-on. Today was the culmination of years of waiting and planning, but it was also the beginning of a new chapter fraught with danger and uncertainty.

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Author Note: Hey friends,

If you've been enjoying the content, I've set up a Ko-fi account.

Your support through tips would mean the world and help me keep creating.

Only if you feel like it!

Here's the link: Ko-fi

Thanks a bunch for being fabulous followers!

[dnickels]

RE: 5x05. I have no idea how much I'm supposed to read into this, but that has never stopped me before:

It's VE Day. Havers is back in England. The post office, telephone system, communication infrastructure etc all still work. So where is Cap's sense of urgency coming from? He knows the full name and regiment of a serving officer, a letter will get where it needs to go, they're very good about that over there. Yes, Cap's been waiting, but its been six years, he can wait a little longer-- hang out in the bushes until he sees Haver's car drive away and bang on the window, if he insists on being an insane person (<3). Figure out where he's billeted. Japan hasn't surrendered yet, so I suppose there's a chance Havers could get shipped to Burma or something and potentially die there, but he's not going to go straight from the cocktail reception to the troop ship, especially if everyone there is about to get "Hitler defeated"-levels of drunk. ("They're all red tabs, surely decency and decorum--" they are going to roll those old soaks out of there in wheelbarrows)

The urgency isn't because Havers might die. I think Cap knew his time was short.

He's a middle aged man in tolerably good shape, all that ration food aside. He make good time on his morning jogs, and his biggest ailment is 'creaky knees'. "Widowmaker heart attack out of nowhere" isn't an unheard of COD for someone who seems otherwise fine, especially someone who has been under a fair amount of stress (six years of wartime, including the fucking Blitz would do a number on my heart) but his sudden relocation makes me pause. It's only been about a year since he got relocated away from Button House, right? What was all that about? It's presumably still requisitioned, given that they're throwing a swanky victory party there and Heather Button is nowhere to be seen, but has the weapons program been disbanded? Or was there some reason to pull the CO out of a high-stress position and send him to the beach to take potshots at seagulls? (I am being glib here-- the coast was NOT a stress-free place when you can see your enemy just across the Channel). I genuinely forget what he said he was doing in season three-- was he even still in the army at all, or did they send his ass to the Home Guard? Even they got a campaign ribbon.

I think Cap made one last push to get to the front, and while its very clear that this dingus should under no circumstances be on the front line (<3) they humored him with a medical-- and found something really troubling. Or maybe he went in of his own accord, the old flutter, or maybe it was just a routine checkup. Either way he got some very serious news, so sorry old boy, just one of those things, could be any day now-- best make sure your affairs are all in order.

Hence the single-minded desire to meet, once last time. Everyone else clearly drove-- did he walk all the way from the train station, down the country lanes? Did he feel a little short of breath scaling all those walls? Did every set-back and stressor make him more determined-- just give me a little more time, just a little more time...

It could also be that he just got yelled at so hard he died of it, which is almost certainly how I will go, but that was my immediate impression and it has not left me, nor have I known peace. I know there's a few holes in my theory but I haven't talked myself out of it yet. For me the kicker is that he experiences at least ten devastating emotions in the last moments of his life, but "surprise at entering cardiac arrest" does not appear to be one of them. It looks more like grim acceptance. Stoic in the face of death-- a soldier to the end.

[sequencer987]

As a Yank I can’t help but notice that whenever British Monarchists defend the institution of the royal family, they always talk about how it brings in tourism and is respected by people all around the world. Without fail, they’ll always bring up the fact that the monarchy “is” very popular in the United States. They’ll cite that as an example of the monarch’s respect abroad and like…

I genuinely hate to break it to you guys, but we here across the pond view the royals the same way we view mascot characters at Disneyland. Like, there is absolutely zero actual respect. Whenever children in the U.S. learn that the monarchy is still a thing, they are usually confused. Adults then explain the monarchy as “a silly little thing that the Brits do for fun.”

When I was a kid learning about the revolution, I just assumed sight unseen that the British must have had their own revolution at some point and got rid of the king.

When my dad told me that the royal family was an extant institution, I thought it was a joke at first. He liked to kid around, and it just seemed more likely that he was fucking with me. I could not wrap my head around why you would have a queen in the 21st century.

When I first learned how much the UK government gives royal family I was honestly kind of shocked. I had figured that the royal title was so ceremonial as to be completely meaningless in a governmental context. I thought it was like being made a colonel in the state of Kentucky; that being basically just owning a fancy medal that says you are.

And FURTHERMORE, we Yanks (we in a rhetorical sense. Not me lol) were only really crazy about Queen Elizabeth. The moment she died people over here pretty much stopped paying attention to the royal family outside of scandals.

I think people in both countries tend to overestimate the cultural similarities between the United States and the United Kingdom due to our sharing a language. We absolutely do not see the monarchy in the same way its hardline supporters in the U.K. do.

Also while I’m at it, I saw one guy speculating that we loved the Queen because of “Pride at their English heritage” and I also feel I need to clarify that English is pretty much the only heritage in the United States that people are kind of ashamed of. If you only have English heritage here that’s seen as a bad thing. Like, we associate that with like inbred Old Money weirdos and Mormons. Even the Boston Brahmin don’t wanna be seen as having ‘English Heritage.’ I don’t personally feel that way, but that’s sort of the attitude here.

[splatreference]

File Garden Mirror of Splatrefs

hey peeps! I genuinely forget if i've already made this post because i've been meaning to for like 5 months, but the gist of it is that i've been working on a mirror of this blog on File Garden.

This will function as a backup of the blog in case something ever happens to it (e.g. tumblr dies, i get banned, i accidentally delete it and whatever else giant meteor etc.) But it will also serve as an alternative way to access the resources here through another website, as well as easily access all the files themselves rather than having to sift through photo posts.

The pros that come with this:

MUCH easier management and uploading of pictures and even videos (for me). Tumblr has a daily image upload limit and even then the images have to be split across many different posts, which makes it a days-long, sometimes weeks-long process to be able to add pictures. Also don't have to memorize tags. -

Clear organization; folders and subfolders mean that everything can be neatly in one place. Whether you find this easier and/or more convenient to navigate than Tumblr tags is subjective, though. -

Easy downloads! I'm always saying that if you need some references a lot, I recommend saving them for yourself and File Garden makes it pretty easy to my knowledge. I will keep recommending this, by the way. -

In MY experience, load times for images are usually much faster than on Tumblr (which is definitely my main draw for making it in the first place) -

It's not Tumblr, but an actual file hosting site. I know, that's revolutionary

Unfortunately File Garden also isn't perfect, so to be thorough here is also a list of cons:

The site is down ALL the time. I feel like it has constant outages which isn't really unexpected for a smaller site. The good news is that these rarely last very long - the bad news is that you might also run into errors. -

There are no folder icons, which can make it a bit harder than it needs to be to actually find where you want to go, which is annoying given there's no search -

While faster at loading image previews than tumblr by a country mile (especially when reloading the page), loading in the images can be really flashy. As in they literally flash white when loading in sometimes.

Going forward, I'll be uploading everything I upload here also to File Garden. I'm slowly working towards copying every major thing from the blog over to there (it's horrible guys, one copypaste at a time) so it should fill up over time and be usable as an alternate resource!

(Also, for anyone taking a look, please help a guy out in the endless war against admin error. If there's pictures in folders where they shouldn't be or there's thumbnail-sized uploads in some of the folders, shoot an ask here with the location and I'll fix it...)

That's it for this century's status update. I've been procrastinating a fuck ton on actually getting anything uploaded here... hope everyone has a good Sizzle Season and maybe I'll try to catch up at least a little bit.

[olympic-paris]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

August 18

1774 – Meriwether Lewis (d.1809) was an American explorer, soldier, politician, and public administrator, best known for his role as the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, with William Clark.

Their mission was to explore the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, establish trade with, and sovereignty over the natives near the Missouri River, and claim the Pacific Northwest and Oregon Country for the United States before European nations. They also collected scientific data, and information on indigenous nations. President Thomas Jefferson appointed him Governor of Upper Louisiana in 1806. He died of gunshot wounds in what was either a murder or suicide, in 1809.

Lewis had no formal education until he was 13 years of age, but during his time in Georgia he enhanced his skills as a hunter and outdoorsman. He would often venture out in the middle of the night in the dead of winter with only his dog to go hunting. Even at an early age, he was interested in natural history, which would develop into a lifelong passion.

The two-year exploration by Lewis and Clark was the first transcontinental expedition to the Pacific Coast by the United States. When they returned to Washington DC, they had an immense amount of information, plus plant and animal specimens. They demonstrated that it was possible to travel overland to the Pacific Ocean. The success of their journeyed strengthened the American concept of “Manifest destiny”, the idea that the USA was destined to reach all the way across North America from Atlantic to Pacific.

Meriwether Lewis seems to have been stereotypically gay, at least by modern standards. When he worked as Thomas Jefferson‘s secretary, he was a noted dandy who wore the latest fashions and hair style; very metrosexual. He was also kind of ”queenie”: gossipy, edgy, excitable, temperamental.

Lewis was never married or showed any interest in women. He was well-built, handsome, and a genuine American hero, but he preferred the company of men. Something about his personality sent women screaming in the other direction. At 35-years-old, he described himself as a ”musty, fusty, rusty old bachelor”. ”Bachelor” was a code word for gay even in the early 19th century.

Lewis’s letters and journals reveal a man profoundly uncomfortable with women. When writing about Native-American women, Lewis seems positively repulsed, especially by the naked Clatsop women on the Pacific Coast "who exposed their bubbies and battery of Venus for the world to see."

However, Lewis wrote detailed observations of the Nez Perce men, noting that they were"hardy, strong, athletic and active". That’s four glowing adjectives!

In the historical novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (2003), Brian Hall uses the premise that Lewis was gay and had unrequited love for Clark. Lewis’s suicide in 1809 adds to the conjecture. Many queer people have experienced the haunting loneliness that comes with certain social ostracism if their gayness would become known. What better explanation of Lewis’s tragic death?

On September 3, 1809, Lewis set out for Washington, D.C., where he hoped to resolve issues regarding the denied payment of drafts he had drawn against the War Department while serving as governor of the Louisiana Territory, leaving him in ruinous debt. After the expedition, he had started to drink heavily and use opium.

Lewis stopped at an inn on the Natchez Trace about 70 miles from Nashville on October 10, 1809. In the early morning of October 11, the innkeeper’s wife heard gunshots. Servants found Lewis badly injured from multiple gunshot wounds to his head and stomach. He bled out on his buffalo hide robe and died shortly after sunrise.

Lewis may have committed suicide that morning because Clark had recently gotten married. Lewis was already severely depressed after their trip and never fully readjusted to life back in civilization.

There are intriguing hints in his journals that Lewis had a much more intense feeling of comradeship for Clark than Clark did for him.

When Jefferson asked him to lead the expedition, Lewis wrote to Clark:

"Believe me there is no man on earth with whom I should feel equal pleasure in sharing them as with yourself. I should be extremely happy in your company and will furnish you with every aid for your return from any point you might wish it."

1721 – Germany: Catherina Margaretha Linck is executed for female sodomy. She was a Prussian woman who for most of her adult life presented herself as a man named Anastasius Lagrantius Rosenstengel. She married 18-year-old Catharina Margaretha Mühlhahn, and, based on their sexual activity together (court records detail their sexual activities), was convicted of sodomy and executed by order of King Frederick William I. Linck’s execution was the last for lesbian sexual activity in Europe and an anomaly for its time. Linck’s story was the subject of a play, Executed For Sodomy: The Life of Catharina Linck, performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013.

1852 – Guglielmo Plüschow (d.1930), born Wilhelm Plüschow was a German photographer who moved to Italy and became known for his nude photos of local youths, predominantly males (but also young and rather androgynous looking girls).

Plüschow was the cousin of Wilhelm von Gloeden, who, despite taking up nude photography later than Plüschow, soon overshadowed him. Plüschow was several times at odds with the law and charged with corruption of minors. Today, his photography is recognised for its artistic merits, even though it is generally considered somewhat inferior to von Gloeden's on account of his less graceful handling of lighting and the sometimes strangely stilted poses of his models. His photographs are more erotic and less 'artistic' than von Gloeden's.

Not much is known about Plüschow's early life, except that he was born in Wismar as the eldest of seven brothers and sisters. His father Friedrich Carl Eduard Plüschow was an illegitimate child of Friedrich Ludwig von Mecklenburg-Schwerin and the family home was Schloss Plüschow.

In the early 1870s, he moved to Rome and changed his first name from 'Wilhelm' to its Italian equivalent 'Guglielmo'. Initially making a living as a wine merchant, he soon turned to male and female nude photography. Later he also worked in Naples, among others doing contract work like taking pictures of Nino Cesarini, the young lover of Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen at the latter's house Villa Lysis on Capri.

Nino Cesarini

In 1902, Plüschow was charged with 'common procuration' and 'seduction of minors' and had to spend eight months in jail. Another scandal followed in 1907: Plüschow was arrested for his portrayal of a nude minor twelve-year old boy, after which he 'converted' to photographing landscapes. He never stopped producing the erotic images, but learned to be discreet. In 1910 Plüschow left Italy for good and returned to Berlin.

1906 – The master of "poetic realism," Marcel Carné (d.1996) was a prodigy who created some of the defining films of French cinema from 1936 until 1945, including the Dadaist comedy-thriller Drôle de drame (1937; American title: Bizarre Bizarre); the fatalistic melodrama Quai des brumes (1938; American title: Port of Shadows); the intricate, flashback-structured tragedy Le jour se lève (1939), the medieval allegory Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), and his masterpiece, the magnificent theatrical epic Les Enfants du paradis (1945; American title: Children of Paradise).

Working with a powerful team of collaborators (the poet Jacques Prévert as scenarist, the designer Alexandre Trauner, the composers Maurice Jaubert and Joseph Kosma, the editor Henri Rust, and the cinematographer Roger Hubert), Carné provided the French cinema with some of its most emblematic images, including Michele Morgan with trenchcoat and beret walking through the fog in Port of Shadows, Jean Gabin waiting for the police alone in his attic room in Le jour se léve, and the mime sequences, with Jean-Louis Barrault's lovesick Baptiste pining for Arletty's statuesque Garance, in Children of Paradise.

Carné's last feature film, Le Merveilleuse visite (1974), about a beautiful young man who turns out to be an angel visiting Earth, is an allegory in which male beauty is used as an indicator of innocence. A man noted for his generosity and sensitivity, in his private life Carné tended to place personal relationships above political considerations: on the sets of Les Visiteurs du soir and Children of Paradise, there were artists who would later be tried for collaborating with the Nazis, as well as artists who were members of the Underground resistance and Jews in hiding who were given shelter.

During the 1970s, however, Carné issued several statements to the press indicating that he wished the openness of the post-Stonewall era had been available to him earlier in his career. Although he regretted that he had not infused his work with a political consciousness, he believed that his partiality to themes of impossible romance derived from his acute awareness of the societal oppression of homosexuals.

He was an outspoken champion of filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who politicized questions of gender and sexual orientation. Although his career was uneven, Carné will be remembered, above all, for Children of Paradise. The latter, indisputably one of the classics of French cinema, was recently voted one of the greatest films in French history by a poll of French film critics in the year 2000.

1927 – Ricardo J. Brown (d.1999) was an American journalist who wrote one memorable book: The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's: A Gay Life in the 1940s. which was published posthumously.

Brown was born near St. Paul, Minnesota, and was in high school when he realized that he was gay. He moved to Greenwich Village in New York, but was upset by the openly gay culture and joined the U.S. Navy. He was discharged in 1945 after revealing his homosexual orientation to his commanding officer.

Returning to St. Paul, he looked for other people like himself and discovered Kirmser's, a small neighborhood bar owned by a German immigrant couple. Working-class customers frequented the bar during the day, but at night it was the unofficial meeting place of the gay community.

Brown writes of various customers, including queen Bette Boop; his friend Dale, who lost his job when someone told his employer that he was gay; Flaming Youth, a middle-aged man whose nickname of earlier years had stuck; and Dickie Grant, a gentle young man who was imprisoned for writing bad checks and was murdered there.Brown recalls an incident when he intervened as Flaming Youth was being bashed by two bullies. In this pre-Stonewall era, when gays chose not to rally to each other's aid, he was asked by another gay man named Lucky why he had gotten involved. Brown writes that he "was stricken silent by the question. Why? What did he mean, why did I get into it? I didn't know how to reply to such a stupid question. Were we all supposed to sit there while two guys kicked the shit out of an old man like Flaming Youth? Could we call the cops? Not us. We were the criminals."

1950 – Randal MacDonnell (d.2019) was an architectural historian who styled himself Count Randal MacDonnell of the Glens.

MacDonnell was not too bothered by how others saw him. He regarded his only tweed jacket, his permanent choice of apparel, to have been a lifetime investment and he subscribed to the 18th century view that real grandees only took a bath once a year, whether they needed to or not. The olfactory consequences earned him the nickname the Count de Camembert. Moreover, he lived openly as a homosexual in conservative Catholic Ireland.

When asked by a friend how he could possibly survive in Dublin on so little money MacDonnell replied: "Dear boy, when I walk down Grafton Street I do so wearing an imaginary coronet." The coronet in question derived from his claim to the ancient title of The MacDonnell of the Glens, in which he persisted to the great annoyance of the Earls of Antrim and other MacDonnells with legitimate claims to ancient Irish titles.

MacDonnell claimed his comital title had its origins in the Holy Roman Empire and his preferred form of address was "My Lord Count". But those versed in the world of ancient Irish genealogy observed that he had originally arrived in Ireland sporting the title Baron Randal MacDonnell of the Isles, so few took his claims seriously.

Randal MacDonnell was born somewhere in England, though his exact origins remained a mystery due to his habit of obfuscation and invention. His mother Kathleen (nee Dolan) was one of the first women employed as a continuity announcer on radio.

MacDonnell often claimed his father worked on the early episodes of Coronation Street, but in what capacity remains unclear. So too does Randal's education: as the mood took him, he would lay claim to having attended Eton or Stonyhurst. What is certain is that MacDonnell arrived at Trinity College Dublin to read law but, preferring the Buttery Bar to the lecture theatre, he failed to get a degree.

On the rare occasions he turned up for lectures he did so wearing a kilt, and on other days he could be seen cycling into college wearing the mantle of the Knights of Malta, rumoured to have been hired from a theatrical costumiers. On one occasion in the late 1960s he and a group of like-minded students hired a helicopter to attend the College Races, a sporting event attended by guests including the octogenarian President Eamon de Valera. The helicopter hovered over the sports field while MacDonnell slid down a rope. Even the near-blind de Valera could not fail to notice that he was wearing his kilt in the traditional manner as he landed in the presidential box.

He claimed to have been Noel Coward's private secretary, and his capacity for name-dropping could reach Olympian proportions. Sentences regularly began with "as Orson Welles/Noel Coward/ Debo Devonshire/ the King of Greece", or whoever took his fancy, "said to me &hellip"

Despite his claims to past grandeur, his financial situation remained precarious, often requiring the adoption of ingenious strategies to keep a roof over his head.

MacDonnell had a lucky break when he was engaged by his friend, the Guinness heir Garech Browne, to advise on the restoration of his house, Luggala, in Co Wicklow. Things went splendidly until a blistering row broke out between the two friends over the disappearance from the house of items of Georgian silver and other valuable chattels.

In an effort to avoid the scandal surrounding the "silver teapot affair", as it became known, in about 2005 MacDonnell decamped to Prague, where he set up home in a room in a crumbling Baroque palace.Later he moved to Tangier in Morocco, a city which easily accommodated his peculiar type of genius, and where he found a whole new audience for his stories. On one occasion his entertaining conversation caused the distinguished historian Norman Stone to miss a boat departing Tangier for Spain.

MacDonnell died penniless, broken in health and, though he never showed it, in spirit. His last years were spent living in terrible conditions among Tangier's poor in a tiny rented room in the Kasbah.

1965 – Bob Harper is an American personal trainer and author. He appears on the American television series The Biggest Loser.

Harper was born in Nashville, Tennessee. After reading the book Skinny Bitch, Harper became a vegetarian. In 2010, he then became a vegan for a year. That same year, PETA voted him sexiest male vegetarian of the year. Harper stopped following a vegan diet in 2011 and now eats animal products again due to wanting "something more."

Harper has worked as a personal trainer for celebrity clients, including Jennifer Jason Leigh. In 1999, he was cast as an extra in Melissa Etheridge's hit video for the song "Angels Would Fall" from her album Breakdown. He is featured as a trainer on the United States version of The Biggest Loser reality television series. He has been a trainer on the NBC show since 2004.In addition to working on the show, Harper has appeared in several Biggest Loser DVD workouts. Harper also appeared on the first three seasons of the Australian version of the show. In addition to his appearances, speaking dates, and writing duties, Harper still teaches regular classes in Los Angeles and works as a yoga instructor.

Harper publicly came out as gay in the seventh episode of the fifteenth season of The Biggest Loser, while talking to a contestant who was having difficulty telling his parents about his sexuality. Harper revealed he came out to his parents at 17, but that this was his first time ever addressing his sexuality publicly in his career. The episode aired on November 26, 2013.

1983 – Mika, born Michael Holbrook Penniman, Jr, is a British singer-songwriter.

After recording his first extended play, Dodgy Holiday EP, Mika released his first full-length studio album, Life in Cartoon Motion. In 2007. Life in Cartoon Motion sold more than 5.6 million copies worldwide and helped Mika win a Brit Award—winning Best British Breakthrough act, and receive a Grammy Award nomination. In 2006, Mika started up his company, Dodgy Holiday Tours Limited. Two years later Mika released his second extended play, Songs for Sorrow, of which limited edition copies are now sold out worldwide. In 2009 Mika released his second studio album, The Boy Who Knew Too Much. Finishing his worldwide tour, Mika started writing and recording material for his third album, The Origin of Love, stating it will be "more simplistic pop, less layered than the last one". The album will be released on 16 September 2012.

Mika was born in Beirut, the third of five children born to a Lebanese mother and an American father. When he was a year old his family was forced to leave war-torn Lebanon and moved to Paris. At age seven, he wrote his first song, which he describes as an "awful" piano instrumental called "Angry".

The family moved to London when he was nine years old. There, he attended the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, where he experienced severe bullying. He also had problems with dyslexia. In response to these experiences Mika was home-schooled by his mother at the age of 12, for six to eight months. He then attended St Philip's School in Kensington, where he was the head of the Schola Cantorum (the St. Philip's Choir). Later he attended Westminster School and the Royal College of Music, which he left to record his first album at Casablanca Records. He has also slightly altered his given name, Mica, changing the "c" to a "k" because he was frustrated by how often people would mispronounce it.

Mika denied allegations that he is steering clear of sexual taboos in order to appeal to the US market, pointing to the song "Billy Brown", which is about a married man who has an affair with another man. He is quoted as saying, "If I was worried about sexual taboos I certainly wouldn't have made the record I made. It has nothing to do with that. It has more to do with self-respect." In an interview in the US gay magazine Out he stated that "there is a way of discussing sexuality without using labels."

In a September 2009 interview in Gay & Night Mika commented on his sexuality: "I've never ever labelled myself. But having said that; I've never limited my life, I've never limited who I sleep with... Call me whatever you want. Call me bisexual, if you need a term for me..." Later he stated in an interview with This Is London "I consider myself label-less because I could fall in love with anybody - literally - any type, any body. I'm not picky." In an August 2012 interview with the magazine Instinct, the singer confirmed that he is gay.

1988 – The Center for Disease Control announced that syphilis and hepatitis B among gay men decreased dramatically since 1982, but had increased among heterosexuals.

1993 – Sicily: Giuseppe Mandanici, 33, was shot three times but survived the attack. Police believed it to be an act of random violence until they discovered that his father had paid a hit man $1 million lire (approx. $700 US) to kill his son because he could not come to terms with his son’s homosexuality.

[jhlvogue]

if I could rewrite eloise’s story since hers is absolute trash:

ok end of s3, penelope & colin happy & married, penelope truth about being LW comes out to the family and they work through all that ending with the family still accepting penelope. eloise & penelope talk things out and realize they are still meant to be friends however, eloise continues to feel this gnawing sense of lonliness and ‘can i trust you’. she gets closure from theo with finding him moving on with someone new or he travels or like dies off (idk). eloise is heartbroken and returns home to the lonliness and cries herself to sleep

s4: benedict finds his story with sophie. polin is doing newlywed stuff. mama bridgerton is getting her groove back w/ the ton. ELOISE FEELS SUPER ALONE. because of this she journeys outside the realm of high society once again (& more discretly) to find others alike (the radicals). she stumbles upon the writings of a feminist progressive radical who is writing under a pseudonym & inspires eloise to pick up writing. tells mama bridgerton she needs time alone to find her self (aka find her writing voice) and wants to go to the countryside (cloee to where phillip crane is) mama bridgerton says yes and eloise packs up and leaves. the rest of the family doesnt pay much mind but penelope still feeling guilty about the whole theloise situation and feeling as if her & eloise are not 100% cool takes notice especially as eloise dodges her questions. eloise spends time in the country falling in love w/ it and its people and stumbles across sir phillip geeking out on plants. to eloise knowledge, they create an acquaintancship while she is in the countryside but sir phillip starts developing feelings for her despite being in a loveless marriage. phillip is shy and reserved because he doesnt know if eloise is judging him for his interests or is genuinely interested in what he has to say. during their time in the country, eloise grows to love the speration from high society, indulges in radical readings, and writes. this is where she starts the whole penpal thingy. she dreads coming home for christmas but makes her way back to town to celebrate christams and benedicts marriage to sophie.

s5: eloise comes back and has the whole ‘bridgerton glow up’ she starts wearing more earth tone dresses and has her hair more free and flowing to resemble her time in the country. while the family is happy for her return and notice the changes, they continue to ignore her due to their own duties. penelope tries to reconnect w/ eloise and hear what happened in the country side but eloise still reserved doesn’t go into details and colin keeps pulling penelope away. eloise once again feels alone and reminisces of her time away, especially with sir phillip. then word of marina gets around and eloise is like “oh no, phillip!” so she wites him a letter and they continue to go back and forth with him sending her dried flowers and her sending book recs or poems (idk). phillip comes down into town to talk with the fetheringtons about marina and sees eloise. he has this longing look on him as he continues to watch her while in society. unfortunately, penelope takes wind of his longing stares and starts to speculate, but doesn’t bring it up. eloise and phillip reunite in the garden at a ball away from everyone and fall back into natural conversations with each other. he asks her to come up to his house to see the land & she jokes about it being a proposal and he doesnt correct her. eloise finally putting 1+1=2, blushes and says she will think about it. she thinks about it for a day and hauls her ass up to crane & his estate w/o telling anyone.

then the rest of the events of her book can take place but this time phillip crane is a shy & reserved father who has a hard time expressing his feelings but at least TRYS with the kids & witg eloise (think king george in the beginning). he would be like a HOT geeky nerd who stutters and goes off on tangents (this can balance out eloise personality). ALSO eloise while coming to terms with her love for phillip crane, also comes to term with her place in society as a high society woman & needs to have her little woman jo speech about women and how we are more than bedwarmers and have dreams and aspirations (do this for me plsss)

they get married, live in the countryside, she continues to write. the end.

[nightincarnate]

AHSOKA (2023) / FAVORITE SCENE / SABINE WREN & EZRA BRIDGER IN EP 1.6 FAR, FAR AWAY

"Let's not talk about that. Not right now." Sabine climbed to the top of my favorite Star Wars characters ever since the day she was introduced nearly a decade ago. The way Natasha portrayed Sabine's serenity at seeing that Ezra was alive and safe and just as she remembered filled me with more ca tharsis than I knew I needed. Sabine had lost so much more than we knew; first Kanan, then Ezra, but then also Ursa and Alrich and Tristan and the rest of her clan. "I just wanna be happy that I found you. After all this time, can I have that?" My 2023 has been shit. My mom died after a short battle with inoperable pancreatic cancer. My uncle died, my cousin attempted suicide. My dad got diagnosed with dementia. Two of my uncles just straight up decided to never talk to any of us ever again. I've faced childhood traumas that had been buried since the Clinton administration. I've felt levels of loneliness and abandonment I didn't know were possible to feel. I've also felt some of the highest joys of my life. Being able to say goodbye to the 2/6 of the most important people to me exactly the way I wanted to. My last words to my mom being ones of forgiveness and grace for the hurt she caused. Feeling confident in my abilities to take care of my loved ones in their worst moments. My best friend maxing out her credit card just to fly across the country to watch Jedi Survivor walkthroughs with me while I signed my mom's DNR. My dog curled up on my mom's hospital bed as she lapsed into a coma, surrounded by birdsong. Watching my dad reconnect with his brother as *he* struggles with dementia too. Learning what it's like to have genuinely supportive managers at work. Knowing I am strong while still knowing I deserve not to be. The deep sleep that comes with knowing your loved one is no longer suffering. I knew 2023 would be horrible from the start, and I made it my intention to welcome every emotion that arose. I've thought about that intention every time I watch this episode (which is an ungodly amount). I know grief isn't linear. But like Sabine, I know this is a marathon, not a race. I know I have to stop and replenish myself with happiness wherever I can find it.

[sunshineblondiewrites]

The First of Us - Chapter 4

14 vs 54

Joel Miller x f!reader (no use of y/n)

Series summary: you and your father meet Joel and Tommy 6 years after outbreak day. You join their group trying to make it to the Boston QZ not realizing all that joining would entail. You eventually make it to the QZ but not without suffering many losses. Tommy decides to join the Fireflies and you and Joel are left with your smuggling partner, Tess, when years later you meet a teenage girl that will bring you and Joel across the country, and maybe together.

Summary: Years of being in the QZ has worn you out and with Tommy not contacting in weeks Joel is itching to get out as well. Your team's plan in place seems unbreakable until a deal goes bad and a 14 year old girl appears.

Warnings: death, outbreak day, friends to lovers, reader has a sister, minor physical descriptions of reader, grieving, FFM threeway (does not include reader, cannon typical violence, (if I miss any please lmk)

a/n: Hello, hello hello, SO SORRY this took ages!! This has been written for forever I just like to stay one chapter ahead of posting anddd I got very busy very fast, BUT thankfully due to thanksgiving break I've caught up a bit. We're finally in TV show cannon! WOO! As always thank you so much for reading, it genuinely means so much to me and brings me so much joy!

ps: lmk if you spot the very depressing easter egg in the beginning of this chapter, blink and you'll miss it! (hint: involves one of the bodies in a truck)

word count 4.2k

Ch3 Masterlist

Boston QZ, present day, 2023

You readjusted your face covering and wiped sweat from your brow with the peek of exposed skin between your glove and your dark purple linen button up. You had paired it with a black tank top underneath and some worn jeans as always. Today’s task was body burning. FEDRA had taken on more bodies than usual because of the bombings going on and therefore reviving this job in your schedule for the first time in about a month, which was pretty good all things considered. Less bodies equaled less death. There were quite a lot of bodies to burn today, and of course the FEDRA officers watching you all expected the bodies to be burned by the time the work hours ended. It wasn’t a completely unattainable goal, but it did require zero breaks and speed. Typical.

Most of the corpses you could haul into the fire by yourself, but still often needed help with the larger corpses. Joel was here, but since you and Joel were hardly ever on the same service, you had never partnered together before. It was usually you and a woman named Mary. You knew literally nothing about her except for her name and that she had a dead husband and son. You didn’t know how they died, you never asked, and honestly the two of you had had maybe 10 real conversations, but you still considered her a friend.

You grabbed what looked to be the body of a teenage girl out of the back of the truck bed–the last one for this truck. She had a bag over her head but a large braid still stuck through the bottom of it and from the looks of it she’d been bitten. You chucked her body into the fire and was met with the overwhelming stench that was burning flesh, hair, rubber from shoes, and clothes combined with the sickeningly sweet smell of cooking meat. It made you want to gag thinking about how it reminded you of a Kentucky cookout back home.

As you walked over to the next truck you noticed Mary staring at the bodies with Joel walking next to her.

“I can’t,” Mary said. Wordlessly Joel reached into the truck and turned with a small child in his arms. It had been months since a child that small had been in one of these trucks. While you made your way over to the truck you watched him carry the poor kid over to the pit and toss them into the fire. When he turned away from the pit he made eye contact with you and you paused for a second trying to push back the thoughts of how that kid was no bigger than…

“THERE A PROBLEM?” an officer shouted. Of course you stop for less than ten seconds and ta da Officer Matthews over here has a problem with it.

“Nope,” you said to Matthews who had come around to the side of the truck you were at.

“Then get back to work,” he snarled. You grabbed another body and threw it over your shoulder, this one a woman who looked to be only skin and bones, and began your march over to the pit. Joel passed you, locking eyes with you as he went by, silently asking if you were fine. To which you nodded shortly. 

After you’d thrown in all the bodies you had maybe 20 minutes to sift through the ashes and keep the burning pile active and so that you could begin to shovel them away. Eventually the buzzer sounded at 4:00 to end the day and you and Joel met up at the line to receive your cards for the day’s work. 

“You got anything else?” Joel asked.

“Not today. Tomorrow, we got street sweeping, or sewer maintenance” the soldier responded.

“Which one pays more?”

“That would be the one with the shit,” the soldier responded sarcastically. Joel nodded. “Late crew, 4pm start,” he stamped Joel’s paper and Joel moved aside so that you could get your cards.

“I’ll do a double on the street cleaning tomorrow,” you said.

“Ah the pretty lady doesn’t like the shit huh?”

“No, I just know I can get more at other places.” It was true, some men liked to tip you a card or two or more while you “worked the streets” and if you could get a double shift in, it would be even better.

“Early and midday crew, 6am start.” You took the stamped paper from him and left with Joel to the QZ’s town square where an execution was taking place.

“... violation of EMC 342.3, unauthorized exit from a Quarantine Zone, Maria Elisiano, violation of EMC 342.7, unauthorized entry into a Quarantine Zone. Each of you have been tried in a military court of justice and each of you having been found guilty by the court martial panel and with a sentence of death by execution…" You felt Joel’s eye’s leave Boston’s gallows and you followed his gaze to the side wall where Lee, a FEDRA soldier, stood and nodded at him before slipping away.

“I’ll be right back, wait here,” Joel said.

“Yes sir,” you said, saluting unenthusiastically. He shot you a glare before following Lee into the back alleyway. You turned back just as the ground beneath the death rowers disappeared and the collective sound of three snapping necks filled your ears and you grimaced. You couldn’t be more grateful you’d convinced Tommy and Joel to just walk through the front door those 7 years ago or those three may have ended up being you. 

Tommy hadn’t radioed in two weeks. Joel mentioned it casually that he hadn’t responded in a few days last week but now it was really beginning to worry him. You started going with him to the radio station, if you could even call it that, as moral support for your friend or maybe just because you, too, were worried. It wasn’t like Tommy to not respond for so long. 

You looked around the crowd of people and spotted Jake, who you still hadn’t managed to completely cut ties with. You’d been making up excuses for months now of why you couldn’t have sex with him. Headache, you’re on your period, smuggling run, stomach ache, late shift, whatever you could come up with. And besides, you’d noticed him flirting with some chick named Rebecca last week so he’s got a new pretty doll anyway. 

*snap*

Another woman’s neck wringed, who you looked up to see was actually Rebecca, so Jake wasn’t completely off your hands now. You eavesdropped on the whispers of the people beside you and heard that she was a Firefly and was hanged for treason not just violation of whatever law like the officer said. This was FEDRA’s new tactic. Whenever they captured a Firefly they would come up with some violation other than treason to try to show that they weren’t scared of them and that they had no value. So they were being hanged with only their fellow Fireflies knowing. Another senseless FEDRA plan. 

Is this what happened to Tommy in another QZ? You wondered. He was smarter than that, you hoped anyway.

Tess was supposed to be securing your battery today. You were finally taking steps to get out of here and find Tommy. Joel is a lot of things, but when it comes to his family, patient is not one of them. You heard children’s laughter behind you and noticed two boys and a girl chasing each other around, completely oblivious to the fact people are being killed 30 feet in front of them. It was sad the way the world had ended up. You had so much life ahead of you back then, but now, you were a 34 year old with no family, hardly any friends, and honestly, the apocalypse was lonely. 

Now, you were a young, headstrong woman and you’d had your fair share of female teenage fans who looked up to you, but they only met a cold shoulder. You didn’t want them to end up like you, and if that meant FEDRA academy so be it. It was better than what you had. Never having to worry about food or a place to sleep, getting an education. A shitty one you’re sure, but still an education.  It hurt to push them away–you had always loved kids, but it was for their own good.

You couldn’t say that you completely regret going into the QZ. It gave you a sense of security, Tess–despite her obvious love for Joel–had become a mentor for you. You thought back to a night not long after Tommy left you had rolled over to see in the moonlight that Joel was still wide awake, staring at the ceiling with his hands linked across his chest. Maybe it was your sleepy state that made you do it, but you reached out and slipped your hand into his and squeezed. He looked at you quizzically but all you did was give him a soft smile and closed your eyes to go back to sleep. In the morning, your fingers were still interlaced.

 You were startled out of your thoughts and back to reality by Joel. 

“Hey,” he said, grumpy as always.

“Hey, is everything set?”

“Yeah, he said stay off the streets the next couple nights, guys are jumpy.”

“Makes sense, we done?” you asked.

“No,” Joel said gruffly, “one more stop.” He then turned in the direction of the radio station and started walking.

“Joel,” you said slowly and he turned around, “you’ve been there everyday. You can’t keep trading cards and whatnot to get stuff for this guy. He didn’t answer yesterday, or the day before that. It’s almost 5:15, we need to get back.”

“He could answer today,” Joel said and turned to start walking again. You kicked a rock on the ground in his direction and begrudgingly followed after him. 

—

You hated the radio station. Hallways filled with people writing notes to family members, some of them crying softly, some giving looks of panic, all of them just quietly depressed. It was things like this that made you glad you didn’t have family out there to call, but now there was Tommy.

Joel, as usual, walks past everyone in the line to the front. There’s a man in there talking to the Radio man, Greg–something about a new baby. Sometimes you forget people still get pregnant in the apocalypse. You’d been lucky, Jake knew how to pull out and you weren’t dumb and tracked your cycle.

Joel sat down across from Greg and tossed him a few cigarettes. Greg took one and lit it before shaking his head at Joel.

“Nothing?” Joel asks, “Is there any chance it's coming in at night? You're asleep and you miss it?”

“When I'm sleeping, Gabriela listens or my son, the smart one, not the other one, God bless him. If Tommy responded we'd know.” You watched as Joel tried to sort through options in his head.

“And you're talking to the tower?”

“Every day. They gave him your message. They haven't seen or heard from him since and that's it. It hasn't been that long.” Greg was right, as things go at the station it really hadn’t been that long. It wasn’t like before where you could just leave a voicemail and get back to them later when you or they weren’t busy. And if Tommy had to move again then maybe he hadn’t found a station there yet.

“It's been three weeks. It's never taken him more than a day to respond.”

“I'm sure he's okay.” Wrong move Greg, wrong move.

Joel pulls out a map you hadn’t realized he brought to work with him today. “Show me where the tower is,” he said firmly.

“Joel…” you piped in.

“You can't be serious.” Oh he is very fucking serious., “Joel it's in Wyoming. All this open country? You guys are capable people, but there are worse things than infected out there. I hear everything on this. There are raiders, there are slavers…” Wrong move again, Greg.

“But you're 'sure' Tommy is okay?” Joel says sarcastically. And you look at him again and you see a broken man, who just wants to know if after all this his brother is still alive.

“It's... it's the Cody Tower,” he circles a spot on the map, defeated. “Q-Bar 4, but I don't know exactly where…” Joel gets up to leave, and you follow him with your eyes out the door before turning back to Greg. 

“Thanks,” you say quickly.

Greg nods at you with a flick of his cigarette and goes back to his smoking while shouting, “NEXT!”

—

It was a wordless walk back to the apartment. As soon as you entered, Joel made his way to the floorboards where you kept your supplies and then made his way to the table to spread out all his maps to go over routes with his pencil. You grabbed an old bottle of whiskey and two glasses, filling them and giving one to Joel and sitting at the table with him. 

He starts to sip his whiskey and you sit in silence for a bit before speaking up, “So we’re really doing this?” You asked cautiously.

Joel grunted in reply before responding, “We were always doing this.”

“We were always going west, this is fucking Wyoming.”

Joel paused his cartography session to look at you in confusion, “Yeah? Wyoming is west, what the hell did you think it was going to be?” Joel countered defensively.

“We live in fucking Boston, everything is fucking west of here. I was imaging something more like Iowa or Illinois or some shit. Everyone knows how stingy the Chicago QZ is,” you shot back at him. Did he actually think the three of you would be able to make it across the country?

Joel scoffs and pops a few pills and downs the rest of his whiskey, slamming it onto the table. “I’m taking a nap,” he grumbles, “you should too. You didn’t sleep well,” he adds walking away from the table.

As he walks you turn in the chair to look at him, “what makes you think I didn’t sleep well?”

Flopping onto the bed he says, “you were yawning a lot today on shift and I heard you toss and turn all night.”

“I wasn’t yawning,” you argue but he just grunts from the bed. You roll your eyes and start looking at the maps. On paper it doesn’t look that far, but you know how deceiving that is. You finish off the last of your whiskey and get up from the chair to stretch and pop your body. Joel was right, the body of your twenties wasn’t around anymore. You were still a fit and muscular woman, but nothing stops age. Sitting on the couch you grab an old beaten up book from the shelf and try to read it, but succumb to sleep by the second page. At some point in the night Tess comes in and gets in bed with Joel but you don’t look up. It’s dark outside now and sleep is calling you in again.

—

You wake up to Tess making coffee in the kitchen, and apparently so did Joel because you walk into the kitchen at the same time. Joel sits at the table and Tess sits next to him. Since Tess only has two hands, you don’t have a mug of morning drug and you move to the counter to grab one. 

You take your cup to the table when you notice Tess’s face was swollen and bruised with a black eye.

“What the fuck happened to your face?!” you rush towards her and Joel looks up, with a slimmer of worry in his stoic features, reaching for her face to get a closer look.

“I got jumped by a couple guys,” she says indifferently.

“What guys?” you and Joel demand in unison. 

“Just a couple teenagers. Said some shit I probably shouldn’t have.”

Joel stands up quickly, ready to fight, and you begin to grab a fresh towel to clean her up.

Tess grabs his hand and pulls him back to sit down, “no no, I’m fine,” she says, “come on. You know these guys were born after the outbreak. Never learned how to argue. They just start swinging. Fucking 19-year-old pieces of shit.” You ignore her and begin dabbing at her wounds with what was left of the whiskey from the night before. 

“It’s a miracle you’re alive,” Joel huffs.

“It’s a miracle any of us are alive,” she retorts. 

“These aren’t new…” Joel says, annoyed, examining her face.

“No. I was in FEDRA lockup all day,” you and Joel look at each other but before you could say anything, she adds, “Anyway it doesn't matter. I need you both to take a breath.”

“What?” Joel questions.

“Joel…” Tess says slowly.

“What?” you say back to her, this time leaning against the back of Joel’s chair and crossing your arms.

“The guys who jumped me were with Robert. He sold our battery to someone else. Nothing's lost. Shit like this is gonna happen. Now we just shake it off, and we go get our cards back or the battery.”

“That little piece of small dick shit!” you shout.

“I need that battery Tess,” Joel gets up aggressively, almost knocking his chair over.“The truck's no good without one and if I don't get to Tommy soon, he's gonna die out there!”

“Well fuck it, we get our battery and the money back,” Tess suggests, “Joel, listen. Robert is terrified of you. So, you march out of here all Clint Eastwood, especially with Miss Hot Stuff with you, he's going to get wind of it and skip. I need you to take a breath,” Tess stands up in front of him.

“Who’d he sell it to?” Joel asks.

“Don’t know,” Tess says.

“Well where is he?” you ask now.

“Don't know...yet. But we're gonna find out quietly. Understand?” Joel nods curtly, “Now I promised Robert that you wouldn't hurt him. But I would very much like for you to hurt him.”

You laugh from the table and take a swig of the whiskey, “you and me both sister.”

“So let's go hunt that motherfucker down and get our battery and our truck. And then we'll go find Tommy. Alright?” 

You and Joel both nod and grab the supplies out of the floorboards. Your timeline may have been set back, but that wasn’t going to stop you. Guess you won't be making it to your street crew shifts today.

—

Joel stood behind where you and Tess were talking with Dave, one of Robert’s “men.” Dave may be on Robert’s “payroll”, but it isn’t enough to buy his loyalty. Especially when it involved you in a low cut black tank top. 

The conversation didn’t last long. As you and Tess get up from the table and walk towards Joel as another man scurries away from him. You raise your eyebrow at him and he rolls his eyes shortly, nodding towards the white Fireflies symbol being painted over on a wall not too far down.

“Well, I mean, it cost us a couple of cards, but we got him. He’s supposedly taking the battery to a red-tagged building. But get this, the corner of Stillman and Cross,” Tess said.

“The one Miguel used to use?” Joel says confusingly.

“Yeah, I’m thinking so,” Tess agrees.

“I mean, couldn’t we take the subway tunnel under Haymarket and get into the building from below?” you ask.

“Take Robert by surprise…” Tess wonders aloud.

“Pay this fucker back,” Joel agrees.

“Then let's do this.”

—

Joel uses a set of large bolt cutters and snaps the rusting chain keeping the building closed off. You and Tess each have your guns and flashlights out already, wrists crossed.

“Ready?” Tess asks. You and Joel nod. You walk until you come across a door with a U and a dot painted above it. “This is it.”

You walk into an old office looking type room. This must have been some type of office building before the outbreak. Suddenly Tess lets out a yelp,  causing you and Joel to whirl around, guns up. Tess shines her flashlight on the wall revealing a dead infected, glued to the wall by cordyceps, frozen by its own flesh. 

“Shit,” you say under your breath.

“This one’s done,” Joel says, lowering his gun.

“Yeah, I know,” Tess huffs, “just wasn’t expecting it.”

“You never do,” you say slowly, taking in the magnitude of the horrendously beautiful display of nature on the wall. The poor victim forever trapped in a scream. You’d learned over the years how deadly cordyceps was, but you couldn’t help but have a horrified admiration for what it creates. The fungal flowers that sprout from the infected heads are a display of nature’s beauty surrounded by danger and death. 

“Let's keep moving,” Joel says to you, bringing you out of your daze and directing you forward. He, like you, took a last look at the infected and then followed behind you to a ladder Tess had begun climbing.

“It’s like they reframed the whole structure,” Joel starts and you’re already smiling and rolling your eyes, the infectious wall art quickly leaving your mind, “Probably in the ‘80s.. Everyone was cutting down on apartment sizes to sell more condos.”

“Oh,” you laugh, “and this has been…”

“Construction Corner with Joel Miller,” Tess finishes for you. “Construction Corner” had become a running joke between the two of you that Joel just absolutely adored and showed so by completely ignoring you and Tess’s comments.

“How far up are we going,” he says begrudgingly. 

“Uh, this far,” Tess says hopping off the ladder, “this door opens into the hallway and… the fuck? They put a piano in front of this thing?” Tess frustratingly tries to pry the door open.

“You smell that?” Joel asks.

“Gunpowder,” you say looking around until your eyes find something trickling out from the cracks in the door, “guys…”

“Blood,” Tess breathes and brings up her gun. You and Tess push the door open together and a body falls, it’s Robert, along with several other bodies around him. Tess spots the battery and bends down to inspect it.

“Well, the battery’s no good. And he still tried to sell it,” Tess shines her light on Robert’s face, “Twice.”

“That greedy fuck,” you say. You hear groaning around a corner in the hallway and Joel goes around the corner gun in position. He creeps fully around the corner and after a few steps you hear a door fly open and SLAM. 

“Joel?” you hear from a faintly recognizable voice.

“Marlene?” you hear Joel say. Here we fucking go. There’s some more conversation going on between two parties as you and Tess round the corner as well.

“So this is who Robert screwed us over with? The Che Guevara of Boston? I mean, war must be going pretty shitty for you to be buying from scumbags like him.” You could almost kiss Tess. You hated Marlene. For multiple reasons. The obvious one being that she convinced Tommy to leave, and the second being that she and her little rebel gang made everything harder. For smuggling, for working, for fucking existing. Her people were everywhere, bombing, attacking, causing disruptions. It was ridiculous and they could hardly be considered rebels at this point–just nuisances.

“Yeah. It kind of has been. The merch was bad and he obviously didn’t take “fuck off” for an answer,” Marlene responds.

“Give me my knife,” your attention is brought to some kid on the ground. She looks 12. 

“What do you need a car battery for?” Joel says. The girl is wearing a white shirt with burgundy sleeves and worn jeans, with her brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, and looking with big, brown eyes from her knife to Joel and back and forth. She makes a move to grab the knife causing Joel to point his gun at her resulting in a reaction from Marlene and some other woman. Kat? Kit? Kim? Something with a K.

“Don’t,” the woman says, causing you to tear your eyes away from the girl and to the two beaten up women down the hall from you.

“Not at her. Point it at me,” Marlene says. Joel looks back at the kid and raises his eyebrows at her before moving his gun back to Marlene, you and Tess follow suit. It’d be a pretty unbalanced fight, 3 vs 2 injured.

“And to answer your question, I need it for a better reason than you do. No offense, but Tommy’s just one man,” Marlene says, “ It’s our business to know things.”

Joel laughs, “To know things? You’re the cause of it. You turned my own brother against me.”

Suddenly… the assistant? speaks up again, “That was a lot of gunfire. FEDRA’s gonna be on the way.”

“I know,” Marlene says quickly, “We were gonna move Ellie out of the zone tonight. But we won’t make it anywhere like this. Not for a while anyway. So now I’m thinking… you’re gonna do it.”

What the fuck?

tags: @orcasoul @who-has-my-green-banana

thank you for reading and wanting to be tagged :) 🩷

[eclipsecrowned]

Mithandin + HOUSE JAVAYA. (PT 1: history and forebears)

Javaya is not a new name in its native Al*thkar. Founded when the Sunmaker was still busy trying to wipe Az*r off the map, they have always held a speck of land within the Crownlands, minor nobility with good land. The name was known, but knew neither power or fame for much of its long half-life.

This all changed after several centuries of mediocrity, as the War of Unification saw the youngblood head of the House pursue his masters to whatever end. The change in fortunes for the family is built upon the blood of fallen Houses and conquered men, in lands and titles awarded for loyal service pulled from the grasp of dead resistance. Yet that youngblood grew old, long in the teeth, and eventually met his end during the failed plateau run that wiped out significant Kh0lin forces.

His eldest son has now risen to take the title of Highlord, but the family is not able to return to their lands. Living as refugees at the Tower of Ur*thiru, House Javaya is in dire straits as much as the rest of the country. It is perhaps further threatened by the unchecked vitriol its latest leader, as well as the personal machinations of his younger siblings.

The parents:

The late Highlord Abrar Javaya, Mithandin's father a good and amicable man by all accounts, until you realize this is a man who was close to D*linar pre-character development and still campaigns to 'bring back fun Blackth0rn.' This is almost certainly a war criminal who his son only knew as a loving and protective patriarch, ignorant of how horrific the campaigns he took place in really were. Duality of man. Someone give the listener that cut him down a bonus.

He began as a simple Citylord who met the hoard of his Highpr*nce's brother head on, his own volunteer army and household guard in tow, and swore fealty. It wasn't an act of self-preservation as one might expect, but a genuine fervor. In a society that solemnizes warfare as holy, he considered it a sacred duty to serve his master in all valorous pursuits.

Valor, in this case, meant subjugating the rest of the country for personal gain, moving from Citylord to Highlord once all his neighbors were cut down, and then trampling across borders in the intervening decades to destroy adjacent countries in bids for Al*thi supremacy.

Despite this, and most pivotally to Mithandin's journey, it never showed in his personal life. Upright, zealous, and affectionate in a way some considered outrageous for a proper Al*thi man, Abrar set a good example for the children he doted on. He did the best he could for them while still leading them from warcamp to warcamp. He was very clear that all he accomplished in various wars was for nothing if it didn't secure a better future for his sons and daughters.

Dies in the climax of the first book, cut down by the enemy as his son watched. He was the greatest loss House Javaya suffered that day, but not the only one. Part of Mithandin's narrative moving forward is both coping with/overcoming the trauma of that event, as well as acknowledging his family history and accounting for the crimes his father committed in service of recognizing a pattern and becoming a better man by far.

The dowager Highlady Catath, who was deemed 'unsuitable for motherhood' based on her treatment of her children. Has not seen or been seen by any of them since they were old enough that their father could safely wrench them out of her household and onto campaigns with him.

A pretty trophy for the conquering young hero, she was a widow who married up after her first husband was cut down for resisting the unification. She pursues her own aims in the capital, enjoying infrequent visits from a husband she's fond of in spite of it all. I never give specifics on how she behaved as a parent, just that the children old enough to remember her treatment resent her deeply, and the younger have no active memories of her.

Tries to worm her way back to the family once Mithandin ascends, only for her elder two children to pay her to return to the capital. It's an arrangement she takes to happily, so long as her son allows her to continue acting on his authority back at the palace. This will surely not come back to bite Mith in the ass in the future.

The fact Mithandin so favors her, that all his pretty boy features reflect his mother, fucks with him in some kind of way he can't articulate.

Both his parents suck, is what I'm getting at -- as people undoubtedly, but one made an alright parent. The kids give Abrar way more credit than he deserves in terms of being a good person. Their first red flag should have been just how devoted he stayed to a woman that mistreated the children he professes to love, but that's just how it is sometimes. Catath set such a low bar the kids would take whatever their father was selling.

next: the siblings/allies

[sapphic-space-syren]

okay below the cut is a summary of sorts of the ridiculous quasi-relationship I've been in since the end of last year because I need to put this somewhere (links are to my own Tumblr posts, no nsfw images)

no trigger warnings (except maybe infidelity? not sure on that one) but this is a story about sex

at the end of 2022, I moved back with my parents and got a barista job while I waited to see if I'd got into grad school. at said job, there was another barista who was friendly and always told me I was doing a good job (lonely, insecure me appreciated this very much). nice.

after a few weeks, we exchanged numbers and he started sending me... poetry. which became kinda kinky poetry. which became sexting.

which became 'do you wanna get a room'

which became meeting up to spend a night at a hotel on the edge of town. and then when the deed was done and we were waiting for food delivery, he decided to tell me that he's actually a felon who did jail time for [redacted].

might have appreciated knowing that before I drove to the middle of nowhere to fuck you in secret, but alright.

anyway I found out the next day that I was accepted into grad school and would be moving across the ocean within weeks. before I left, he snuck me into his parents' house in the middle of the night for one more ~night of passion~ (this is insane I genuinely can't believe I went along with this) and met me at a tea shop to give me an admittedly lovely set of farewell gifts.

and he told me he loved me. (we're in February now, 2 months after the texting began)

so then I fly away forever and I think good, we'll gradually drift apart and I won't have to deal with the drama of long distance or being with someone who can't even legally travel to my home country because of a criminal record. also he smokes. in general there are a lot of red flags and this is easiest way for it to just... fall apart on its own.

except it doesn't.

the thing is, I've got used to texting him every day and I'm not very good at making new friends within my grad school cohort. I'm still struggling with bipolar symptoms I can't really talk about with anyone but him because there's no-one else in my life who gets it. (he's bipolar too) The fact is everything kinda sucks, school and moving aren't what I thought they would be, and talking to him is the best part of my day. and he calls himself my boyfriend. fuck.

around May-ish, he asks if I'm still planning on visiting my parents soon because he has.... a friend...... a woman.... who he's mentioned in passing but I've certainly never met or spoken to..... but she's seen photos of me and thinks I'm cute.... and she wants to have a threesome.

well, alright then. I'm like... tentatively into it.

except my symptoms are getting worse, a family member died, I'm not handling school very well, so my visit to my parents is postponed a few months. until it's august and I come in bottom of the class, I can barely function, and we decide it's for the best if I take a medical leave of absence.

and fly back to my parents.

so, I'm back! he's so excited! except it takes 3 fucking weeks for him to see me because he keeps ghosting me. or cancelling. or standing me up. so that feels great. and when we do finally meet up he has to go shopping for shampoo for this woman he mentioned earlier. so that's a bit weird.

we spent another night together (his parents were out of town this time, but I still had to dodge their security cameras) and then I don't see him for another month because he keeps. standing. me. up. every other day I drive somewhere only for him to call and cancel while I'm still in the car, or just not appear at all. no explanation.

he does tell me he takes time off work for a hotel night with our alleged threesome partner, though, because (wait for it) she's his GIRLFRIEND and it's their 3 YEAR ANNIVERSARY.

which he NEVER told me. not when he was flirting with me. not when he was sexting me. not when he was fucking me and not when he told me he was in love with me and wanted to be with me.

now I'm not opposed to polyamory, but it would be nice to be aware I'm practicing it.

anyway.

I've seen him... once in the last month. He gave me jewellery and kissed me and promised he would see me soon and apologised because he had to leave early because his (other?) girlfriend (who I still have not met) needed him.

I have not seen him since. He never calls when he promises, sometimes barely texts, and it drove me absolutely nuts for a bit but I've been trying to just... disengage. I've stopped asking when I can see him, stopped texting first. I'm alone in this town with no friends or social support but I'm starting to think his company is just not worth it.

He promised weeks ago that he would see me this weekend. I haven't asked if he remembers. Stay tuned. 🤷🏻‍♀️

[atypicalsenerio]

Mad King’s Shadow (AU Meta)

Under a cut for Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn spoilers. Last art on this blog is inspiring some Daein!Soren thoughts and I gotta let them spill out somewhere.

It gets a bit dark, but I think it makes for an interesting AU. TW mentions of manipulation, nothing really outside the scope of canon events though.

Soren is canonly Ashnard’s son, but once Soren was born and Ashnard saw he’d inherited none of Almedha’s draconic powers and deemed him weak, he disposed of him, passing him off to some stranger to take care of. Almedha lost her brother Rajaion to Ashnard and also had been led to believe that Soren had died.

In an AU where Soren is actually raised as the Prince of Daein, I have some thoughts on how Soren was shaped as a person. Ashnard is cruel and manipulative, valuing strength above all else. Daein does not treat Branded such as Soren kindly, and I thin that Ashnard would curate Soren’s world experience for him in such a way to make Soren think Ashnard’s vision of a world where the strong dominate and/or kill the weak is favorable for him.

Ashnard lets Soren out on diplomatic ventures or in the most prejudiced areas of Daein to have Soren experience some of the judgement firsthand, instances where he may be treated poorly or spoken down to for being Branded, even as a prince. Some of the trips may have to be outside of Daein, where no one knows who Soren is. By comparison, returning home to where his father respects him for his abilities would make Soren more inclined to be loyal to Ashnard.

Ashnard would also keep him rather isolated, banishing his mother Almedha while telling Soren that she abandoned him, and not allowing many people to be near Soren. The idea that no one will have a relationship with Soren except out of some mix of fear and respect for his abilities is reinforced by outsiders’ reactions to him if they perhaps don’t know who he is when he ventures out without a crown.

In canon, Soren began training with an old sage at the age of four and was a prodigy. Ashnard would put him through similarly harsh training that never truly lets up, so Soren becomes a frighteningly powerful mage, tactician, and perhaps gains expertise with physical weapons as well. Ashnard gains someone powerful and held under his control, not drugged like Rajaion, but leading Soren to believe that the only world he can belong in is one where he, someone strong, can earn his place for himself, and his blood, even Ashnard’s blood, matters less than his capabilities.

Soren is a cold person in canon. In this AU, he’d be even worse, still with a glacier in his heart, still deeply pessimistic about the nature of people.

I still like the idea of Ike being the first person to really treat him as a person, but it happens as enemies, as adults across the battlefield during the Mad King’s War, as Soren serves as Ashnard’s tactician and general.

Soren gets captured by the Greil Mercenaries and expects to be executed or tortured, but is surprised to be treated with civility. He tells them all to spare his life as a hostage...

...but he knows full well Ashnard will never take him back, since his failure during battle and getting captured prove his weakness and unworthiness.

So, Soren has time to debate his next move while living with the mercenaries, and bit by bit he sees that his perception of common people and of far away countries weren’t right. Ike in particular surprises him, as Ike stubbornly seems aware of the high walls Soren has up and genuinely just wants to know who’s behind them. Some of what Ashnard said was true about the world, but the more time Soren spends outside of Daein, the less he wants to see it ravaged by Ashnard and himself. Eventually, Soren decides to defect, even though there’s some obvious trust issues from everyone but Ike. He’d used to it.

Soren has no qualms facing off against his father, and once he realizes what had been done to Rajaion/who Rajaion was, feels as though at least he could attempt to atone for what Ashnard had done by bringing him down as Ike’s new tactician. He continues to stay at Ike’s side, realizing there was some hope for the world, but still being unable to thaw around most people. His identity feels lost to him, wondering how much of himself is Ashnard and what he was led to believe, and how much of himself is Soren.

He has plenty of time to find out.

Soren renounces the throne, having played a part in Ashnard’s death and even if it was justified, not wanting Daein to continue to be ruled by someone who gained power by murdering their family members. He also doubts he’s a good person and admittedly has bitterness towards Daein. While it may be selfish, he prefers to be with Ike, to see more of the world.

If he ever finds Almedha and finds out she didn’t abandon him, this Soren would be much more receptive to her affection/want a relationship with someone who actually loved him. Again, his worldview would be turned upside down with the realization of one of Ashnard’s lies and his betrayal by taking Soren from his mother, but there can be time to heal.

This could be a fanfic I write someday or a scenario to RP!

[briefcasejuice]

i'm seeing so much backlash to the sun and the star: a nico di angelo adventure in which people are really upset that the book centered around the romantic relationship between nico and his boyfriend, will solace rather than the sibling relationship between nico and his sister, hazel levesque and while i do understand that it's saddening that we haven't gotten to see more of them since heroes of olympus, i genuinely really do dislike how much nico di angelo fans tether hazel's existence as a character to nico. this happens a lot in fandom (where people tether female characters who aren't canonically as close as fanon would like them to be to male character they think are better suited to be involved in their general existence because of past canon) and it's obviously as a result of misogyny. however, i came across a post just now in which someone referenced a post they made about 'how much they hated tsats' and how they'd found someone to do the art for their 'rewrite of the book' and when i'm going through this person's blog, reading their posts about what they wish the sun and the stat was about (hazel and nico's relationship instead of nico and will's), it's starting to feel like homophobia more than anything else. i highly doubt that they were intentionally being homophobic but christ, as someone who lives in a country where queer relationships are genuine criminalised both socially and in terms of the law, microaggressions and internalised homophobia become really easy to spot.

this kind of fanon mentality is so dangerous to queer literature like this because this person and the people that support them have no doubt been waiting and speculating about this book since it has been announced, but in the time since nico's appearance in heroes of olympus and trials of apollo, i've seen some of the weirdest characters transformations within the fandom to the point where characters are simply no longer recognisable; after tsats was announced, people took these fanon characters and speculated about the story that was going to be presented with these characters, not consulting the source material and not realising that what's important in nico's life right now, as someone who's life has generally lacked or has just been a perpetual process of loosing love, is his love life. his last appearance was with the other main character of tsats: his boyfriend, will solace.

anyway basically i think that the entitlement that a certain part of the older teen riordan fanbase has over nico's character in particular is especially strange and it kind of poisons the way they view his relationships and the characters involved in those relationships. over the years i've seen a kind of weird erasure of characters who don't interact with him much, the demonisation of characters (these characters are children btw) who have made mistakes from which he has, too, suffered and a really strange fandom-wide thought that rick riordan, the creator of these stories and character, has no idea what he's doing with these stories and characters and that he's doing it all wrong. i think it's also extremely funny that with the sun and the star, riordan specifically wrote the book with a queer writer in order to make sure he was doing his character justice; he admitted that he was not the perfect writer for this specific story, for this one specific character of his — he knows his character and he understood that he could not understand an experience he wanted his character to have so he got help about it — and yet people are still dismissing his work as being done wrong because of their own personal (fanon) opinions about the character.

specifically i think it's interesting to mention that this is the first time that we're getting an in-depth look at will's character, as well as an in-depth look at his relationship and chemistry with nico. coming across posts saying 'nico wouldn't do [this]!' or 'nico wouldn't do [that]' is interesting because we don't actually know what he would. we are, however, currently learning what he is doing. to say that will is out of character is even more interesting to me because what previous character are you talking about? the mere glimpses we've been shown throughout dramatically different circumstances over the years? this is a new, incredibly intimate (romantic, even) setting and it's the first we're seeing both will and nico here.

there are is so very little queer literature about 15 year olds, and there are even fewer that have been published by well known authors, guaranteed to be known, to be read and to dismiss it because it simply wasn't what you wanted — mind you, things like characterisation and story are excellent here so it's not like comics where a new writer comes in and fucks up years of character development with a few pages — is so tone deaf, it is simply outrageous. there are so many little boys out there that are going to get to read badass nico di angelo kiss his boyfriend, so many little boys that are going to finally feel understood and you want to dismiss it? rewrite it? for your little fandom validation? there is such a difference between doing that and writing fanfiction. one is significantly less offensive and yet you chose wrongly anyway. i hope your fingers break and you can never type a word again.

[mraprilgf]

theatre production au

chimney is a deputy stage manager. he was interim stage manager once for like 3 days and everyone complains about it but really everything ran smoothly in the end, they all know it's only a matter of time before he becomes stage manager for real (when the current one, eli, moves across the country at the end of next season). used to be an electrical technician, got into theatre production by chance, slowly worked his way up. kevin died bc of a safety hazard, which makes chim triple check everything every time

hen is the playwright and director. she used to be a nurse and the job wore her down completely. found solace in writing, a hobby she took up since a playwright had come to speak to her class one day in middle school. her then partner eva secretly submits one of her works to a writing contest and when she wins it and hears how it moved the judges or something she decides to pursue it for real.

bobby: musical director. was a child prodigy musician, used to play at a virtuoso level. being in that world since little led him into a spiral of drugs. he retired from the scene after a horrible accident where all of his family died. he got sober but was scared to play again for a long time, fearing it was the music that made him an addict. eventually he finds his way back to it and to the peace it brought him, though in the public scene only as a composer and director and only in the theater/cinema scene, preferring to play only in private. has an ongoing playful flirt with the lead actress

athena: lead actress!!!!!! used to study law, switched to theatre halfway through the first year. she had to fight her way through a lot but is now an accomplished and respected actress. she is little known on tv, where she only played small roles, bc her true love is the theater since she was little and her father took her to the local social theater. her favorite director/playwright is hen, they have done 3 plays together so far. she keeps her life very private but she has recently divorced her husband of 20 years with whom she's had 2 kids. the couple seems to have remained in friendly terms. can't help but flirt with musical director

buck: actor. came to it later in life, even though his parents got his older sister and (dead) brother into commercials and tv roles before he was born. no one in his family know about it. he has slept his way through half the female members of the crew causing daily spats and fights, then bobby took him with him to a springsteen concert and he apparently found his way back to the lord as he stopped fooling around. he was also given a very serious ultimatum regarding his employment and had started a very intense long distance relationship with a woman called abby he met on reddit. he has been the understudy of one of the main characters for the entire last season and now that the main actor has moved to another project he feels ready to step up to the challenge and take his place. enter:

eddie: new guy in town. he's been acting for less than 2 years but he's got a real genuine talent for it. is also drop dead gorgeous. used to be a professional boxer, spent all the time traveling bc of tournaments and shit i don't know how boxer works but i wanted him to have a different og job. quit bc of a serious arm injury, became a single dad when shannon left out of the blue and dropped out the radar. christopher is the one who pushed him to try some auditions while he worked as a waiter or something. gets buck's role as main actor, finds himself in the middle of a one sided feud with his understudy

maddie: one of the biggest film/tv actresses around, has only worked in theatre when she was young. married to fellow actor doug, whom she met as a teen on the set of a popular soap opera: fictional love becomes real love, been together for what? 20 years?, #dreamcouple (think brangelina), though recently famously split up (omg love is dead) then got back together then split again then got back together. the details have not been made public, rumor is she cheated on him (truth is: domestic abuse). met athena once for a movie and they got along pretty well, was invited to appear on the show as a sort of cameo, also as a way to boost it, and she accepted happily. she plays a minor role due to her busy schedule, as eddie's character's love interest

ravi: budding actor, understudy of the understudy of eddie's character. buck has taken it as his supreme duty to show him the ropes, to ravi's despair. starts to hang out a lot with chimney to escape buck but is slowly realizing that what chimney does is so cool? like maybe he got it all wrong and maybe what he really loves about theatre isn't being center stage, but backstage?? where the magic happens <3 !! i'm still gonna give him a cancer childhood bc yeah. rn i can't think of anything else

albert, easy peasy, appears on chim's doorsteps one day, is taken in and given a job as a handyman at the theater. decides it's not for him though and is currently looking for what he truly wants to do, changing jobs every few months. lately he's been following nail art classes online just to spite his father, who in an angry call asked him if he wanted to become a nail beautician. he practices on himself and on chimney, who pretends to complain but walks around with jeweled claws beaming with pride