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specterchasing-a · 3 years

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Sucker Punch || Alfie & Eddie

TIMING: The day after I Swear It’s The Truth

LOCATION: Eddie’s apartment, downtown White Crest

PARTIES: @yikesimonfire and @specterchasing

SUMMARY: Nothing will ever be the same for Alfie and Eddie, and now they know why.

CONTENT: Internalized homophobia tw, homophobia tw, emotional abuse tw

(This is an emotionally heavy thread. Let one of us know if you need a summary.)

It wasn’t often that Alfie found himself at Eddie’s apartment. For the most part, the time they spent together was almost exclusively at his place. Even when he dog-sat Bucket, the pomeranian was dropped off at Alfie’s. He never complained. In fact, it was more convenient that way, even when he was decidedly too busy to entertain guests. But things were different now. Bex was in the picture; not as one of Eddie’s friends, but his girlfriend. Not even 24 hours in, Alfie was struggling with the concept. It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. It should have been fine. He should have been happy for him — he wasn’t. The thought made him sick.

He thought about cancelling. Throughout the day, Alfie composed several messages to his friend as a means to get out of their plans, but he couldn’t bring himself to hit send. He couldn’t back out. Not now; not on Eddie. Not when the plans were made before the events of last night. So he persevered. He wanted to be a good friend, no matter how much emotional distress he was in; no matter how many silent tears he shed before finally falling asleep.

Taking a deep breath, Alfie rapped his fist against the door to Eddie’s apartment, the sound causing him to flinch. He didn’t exactly know why he knocked. The front door was unlocked. Alfie knew that. After a moment of hesitation, Alfie managed to still his trembling hands long enough to crack the door open and slip in, mindful enough to not let Bucket bolt out of the door at his arrival.

“Hey,” he called out. “Just me.” Obviously. Who else would it be? Bex, maybe, if the time hadn’t been reserved specifically for Alfie. He didn’t want to think about that.

Until last night, Eddie didn’t know how much change a single kiss could bring about. He felt disoriented, partially because the knots in his stomach kept him from getting any sleep. It didn’t make any sense. He should be happy. He wanted to be happy. Instead, he felt worse than before. Alfie’s reaction to finding out about him and Bex didn’t add up. He sounded distant, disappointed even, as if Eddie having a girlfriend changed something between them. That was a line of thought Eddie decided against pursuing as bile gurgled in his stomach. He didn’t want things to change.

Eddie nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard a knock at the door followed by the sound of Bucket’s paws skittering across the living room floor. He only did that for one person, the man in question, Alfie. Eddie half-expected him to cancel after the way he acted last night. Realizing he assumed wrong, his heart leapt into his throat before plummeting into his stomach to be eroded by the crashing waves of acid. Why didn’t his heart leap like that for Bex? Never mind, he didn’t want to know.

“Hey!” Eddie called out from his office, rising from his chair to meet his visitor. At the sight of Alfie, Eddie’s heart thumped pitifully as it drowned. “Fancy seeing you here.” He tried acting casual. Fake it ‘till you make it. “Everything’s all set up, even brought in an extra chair.” Why did he leave the office in the first place? Alfie knew the layout of his apartment, he would’ve made it there fine without him. Did he really need to see him so badly that a few more seconds of waiting would hurt? So many questions and not a single answer he wanted to acknowledge.

“Warning you now,” he said, walking back to where he’d come from. “It’s boring. All we’ll be doing is staring at my face and deciding what can go.” Eddie plopped into his chair, rolling back a few inches from the force. “You sure you wanna subject yourself to this?” Please say yes.

The sight of Bucket rounding the corner to meet him at the door gave Alfie a momentary rush of relief. A sense of normalcy, although fleeting. He crouched down to stroke behind Bucket’s ears as Eddie came into view. His heart lurched at the sight of him. It shouldn’t have. He wished it didn’t. Yet there Eddie was, beaming at him like everything was fine — or at least, almost. There was a sadness twinkling in his eyes that Alfie couldn’t quite place. It didn’t make sense. Surely, he must have imagined it.

“I could say the same to you. Come here often?” Alfie foolishly flirted. Stupid. He regretted the words as soon as they left his lips. What was happening to him? He wasn’t usually like this. Or, if he was, he wasn’t usually so aware of it. But even now, standing in Eddie’s apartment, chittering off cliche pick-up lines, there was a stark contrast between Alfie’s tone and the look on his face. He tried to smile — to pretend that everything was normal — but his features mirrored the same despondency he could have sworn he saw in Eddie’s.

Without another word, Alfie trailed behind him to the home office, wriggling his fingers and clicking his tongue for Bucket to follow. At least he had Bucket. Even if he was about to subject himself to spending hours staring at Eddie’s face on the computer screen, the pooch served as a welcome distraction.

“I doubt it’s boring,” Alfie retorted. He wanted to say that he didn’t mind staring at his face. To take his words out of context and insist that none of it ‘needed to go’. Not only would that have been uncharacteristic of their friendship, it would have made Alfie seem pathetic. Instead, he eased himself into the spare chair next to Eddie, careful to keep his distance. “Absolutely. I’m eager to see your, uh… process.” Had he said that nearly verbatim last night? Shit.

And there they were, standing face to face in mutual mourning over something that never existed in the first place. Or, did it? Eddie had to wonder. Grief like this didn’t appear out of thin air. He had a girlfriend now, did that come with a hidden cost? If he looked at the fine print, should he expect to see Alfie’s name crossed out? When he kissed Bex, it didn’t occur to him that the average life he wanted so badly might exclude the one person he thought he couldn’t lose. The dejection written on his best friend’s face registered immediately, years of memorizing his expressions and the meanings behind them made it obvious.

“Cute,” Eddie quipped, trying to pair the word with a laugh, but it came out hollow. He didn’t know he could miss someone standing only a few feet away from him. Deep within his chest, he felt something awful clawing its way up. If it managed to reach his throat and break free, he knew regret would quickly follow.

“Mm,” Eddie hummed skeptically as he pushed his hair away from his face, hands shaking as he did. His chair scooted forward, closer to the desk. Even when he wasn’t looking at Alfie, he was imagining his face. He tried removing the sadness from his eyes, but it didn’t work. He struck a key and an application opened. “So,” he started, clearing his throat. “This is Premiere, it’s the, uh,” Eddie trailed off, blinking at the computer screen. It wouldn’t come into focus. “It’s the editing software that I use,” he said with a slight shake of his head. “Adobe, y’know.” What was he saying?

Eddie pushed back from the desk and brought his hands up to his face, letting them slide down a moment later. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He needed a moment to regain control, he couldn’t let Alfie see him like this. “I haven’t taken my meds yet, it’s making it impossible to focus. Give me just a sec,” he explained as he stood up and slipped past Alfie, leaving the office in pursuit of his bedroom.

He closed the door behind himself and pressed his back to it. Eddie stressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and let out a pitiful, but quiet sob. “Why are you so fucking useless?” he berated himself internally. “Get it together, it’s just Alfie. It’s just Alfie.” The words repeated in his head, an endless loop, never successfully convincing him. His hands fell to his sides and he straightened up. If he kept acting like this, the chances of Alfie leaving would skyrocket. He needed to keep him there for as long as he could. Eddie shook out his arms and bounced on the balls of his feet, trying to get his blood pumping. A sharp exhale escaped his nose. He could do this.

Eddie waltzed back into the office and reclaimed his chair. “Okay, where was I?” He gripped the mouse, sounding more invigorated than he had before. “Right, Premiere. It’s expensive, confusing, and constantly crashes, but we love disappointment in this house.” A video opened on-screen, a mirror image of Eddie. He turned his chair to face Alfie, their knees brushing in the process. He tried to ignore it.

“You want the whole editing process, right? Technically, it starts as soon as I have an idea for a video. You always plan a concept with editing in mind,” Eddie explained, his hands falling limply in his lap. “Camera angles, movements, position, all of that should be mostly figured out before filming starts. But, uh, I’ll ease up on the behind the scenes talk and get to the feature presentation. We’re gonna have to watch this about 10 times, so,” Reaching towards the desk, he hit play on the video. His voice played through the speakers, spilling information about fae. “Someone actually warned me against making this one,” he mused. “Something about dire consequences. People are so dramatic.”

This wasn’t right. None of it was right. Clearly, Alfie’s behavior was affecting Eddie. Even last night, he called him out for being quiet. Just tired, Alfie had responded. He tried to cheer up, to act like the news didn’t eat him up inside. But it was easier to hide in a world of pixels and code than it was being next to him. “I’m vaguely familiar with Premier, if that helps,” he said monotonously; a desperate attempt to encourage Eddie to push forward. It didn’t help.

In an instant, Eddie was rattling off an excuse about his medication and removing himself from the office altogether. “Yeah, sure. Take your time,” Alfie murmured, his voice breaking in the process. His eyes — and Bucket — followed Eddie out of the room. Suddenly, he was alone. Even as Bucket strolled back into the office, giving Alfie a confused head-tilt and a pitiful gaze, Alfie was alone.

“What?” Alfie questioned the ginger ball of fluff. Bucket’s tail thumped against the floor, eliciting an exasperated sigh from Alfie. “You have no idea, do you? Not a single clue.” Not one brain cell was firing off behind the dog’s eyes. “You’re lucky,” he added.

Coming here had been a mistake. He could probably still leave — slip out the door while Eddie was gone. But Alfie couldn’t bring himself to budge from the chair. Instead, he sat in silence and watched Bucket watching him.

Before long, Eddie returned. His gaze didn’t meet Alfie’s as he elected to focus on the monitor instead and dive straight back into where he’d left off. Ignoring the fact that Eddie’s meds were not immediately effective, Alfie turned in his seat to give the other man his undivided attention. He had to put on a brave face; he didn’t have any other choice. But then Eddie’s face was on display. He seemed happier in the still shot. There was passion behind his brilliant eyes, and it made Alfie’s heart swoon. He stared longingly at the image on screen, interrupted only by Eddie’s knees brushing his as he turned towards him.

Alfie swallowed the knot in his throat, glancing down at the space between them. Making eye-contact would be a mistake. There was no hiding the vacant gloss of his eyes, no matter how hard he tried. “Just… pretend I’m not here, if that helps,” his voice wavered. Alfie looked back up at the screen when Eddie started the video. Please pretend I’m not here, he thought, catching a mere glimpse of his friend’s face in the screen’s reflection. Two entirely different faces greeted him.

Nervously, Alfie ran his tongue across his bottom lip. His hands clasped tightly together in his lap. “Like that’s ever really stopped you in the past,” he absentmindedly chided. This was going to be absolute torture.

It felt unfair, seeing Alfie in so much pain while working hard to keep his own out of sight. At the same time, it felt familiar, but that only made it worse. Eddie, in a desperate attempt to keep people close, became a stranger to himself. Put on a show, keep them entertained, but don’t let them know what’s lurking beneath the surface; they’ll love you less. And Alfie did love him, he knew that now, which was also unfair.

“Don’t,” Eddie pleaded softly, gazing at the ground for a moment before an unprecedented surge of irritation flooded his mind. “I didn’t know, okay? How could I?” Either Alfie would understand what he was referring to, or he wouldn’t. In a way, he preferred the latter option.

“The first time I came into your apartment through the balcony, it was because you wouldn’t answer the door. And I think that pretty much sums up our entire friendship.” Anguish settled in his eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to fight it. “I turn my music up too loud because I know you’ll message me to complain. I bribe you to spend time with me. I do whatever it takes to get you to notice me.” His chest heaved with every breath. Eddie didn’t like being so honest, so vulnerable, but he didn’t deserve to be cast as the villain in this scenario.

“The past few months have been a little different, I didn’t need to work so hard, and I’ve always thought it was worth the effort, anyway. I know how you are, you’re not loud like me, you need a little convincing. That’s fine, I like that about you sometimes, but if you do this…” Eddie gestured at the way Alfie held himself. “If you make me feel guilty for having something in my life that doesn’t revolve around you, then I…” He trailed off, biting back tears as they formed in his eyes.

“I just wish you’d take a second, one second, to look at me and notice that you’re not the only one who's scared. Alfie, you are so important to me in ways you don’t even realize. Ways that I can’t make sense of without throwing my entire world off its axis, and that’s why I need this to work with Bex. With her, it’s simple—it’s expected. So, just… I can’t ask you to be happy about it but, for my sake, try to understand that I can’t be what you want me to be.”

Don’t. The word shook Alfie to his core. At that moment, he knew he fucked up. His shoulders tensed — his entire body did, actually. He was frozen, still locked onto the computer screen and staring straight past Eddie. Leave it to Eddie to see right through him. He anticipated a lashing of reproach; that Eddie was disappointed in his behavior. That’s exactly what he got, tenfold.

Alfie tore his eyes away from the monitor as he shifted his gaze to finally look at Eddie; a look of pure bewilderment. His thoughts began to run rampant as he processed what was being said. With each line came a blow to his gut and Alfie’s throat constricted, forbidding him to speak. But he didn’t look away. He couldn’t. Not when Eddie very plainly laid his grievances out on the table for Alfie to see. “If you make me feel guilty for having something in my life that doesn’t revolve around you, then I…” Guilty. He made him feel guilty. All because Alfie couldn’t bring himself to pretend for one goddamn second that he was happy for Eddie. Because he was consumed with jealousy over a relationship that was “simple” and “expected”.

After a painstaking lull, it was Alfie’s turn to speak; to say something — anything — that might smooth things over. An apology would have been a good place to start. But “I’m sorry” were not the words that came out.

“You think it’s easy for me?” Alfie scoffed, choking on the knot that threatened to suffocate him and forcing back the tears brimming in his own eyes. “That I haven’t even considered how I’ve made you feel over the years? How horrible I’ve been to you because I couldn’t deal with—” It didn’t matter that Eddie had pieced it together; he still couldn’t bring himself to say the words aloud. “What do you have to be afraid of, anyway? That I’d try to hold your hand? Or, god forbid, kiss you?”

Eddie didn’t deserve the backlash he was receiving from Alfie. Nor did he deserve to be saddled with the responsibility of carrying their entire friendship. But Alfie was terrified to face the reality that they were both now painfully aware of. “I’m sorry, alright? I’m sorry I ever tried to push you away. I’m sorry I’m not happy for you and Bex. I’m sorry, Eddie.” An errant tear ran down Alfie’s cheek and he flicked it away with a terse laugh.

“I didn’t ask for this. I tried so hard to not— to not feel the way I do about you. I’m still trying. But I look at you and I—” Alfie cut himself off by biting his bottom lip. It wouldn’t do any good. Nothing he said was going to change the fact that Eddie would never reciprocate his feelings. He made it evident that he couldn’t be what Alfie wanted him to be — his own words. “I’m sorry,” he reiterated, once again unable to meet Eddie’s gaze. “I’m trying, really. I want you to be happy.”

Over the past few months, Eddie and Alfie reached a new level of closeness. As Alfie became more receptive to him, Eddie realized how thin their boundaries were becoming. It terrified him how much he liked the idea, so much so that his only option was running away. Enter Bex. He thought the answer to all of his problems started with her, but Alfie proved him wrong when he plunged into a comeback diatribe.

At the mention of physical affection, Eddie bolted upright and out of his chair. He needed to put distance between them. His legs carried him to the farthest corner of the room, which still felt too close. Alfie didn’t do well with subtext, he should have known better than to rely on it to get his point across, but the idea of openly admitting to how he felt made his chest tighten.

A barrage of apologies hit him in quick succession as he nervously combed his hair out of his face. Eddie couldn’t let Alfie think he was afraid of him, not even to save himself.

“I’ve never been afraid of what you might do, Alfie.” His voice shook as he gave his confession. “What I’m afraid of is that I’ll like it.” Eddie crossed his arms over his chest, as if bracing himself for whatever came next. “You’re not the monster here, I am.” He wanted this to be easy, but shards of glass lined his throat in the wake of truth.

“Neither of us asked for this.” Eddie found it impossible to look at Alfie. Instead, his gaze remained fixed on a gap in the wood flooring. “But it happened anyway.”

Alfie was certain that he’d hit the nail on the head as soon as Eddie shirked away to the other side of the room at the notion of romantic advancements. Between the two of them, Eddie was always the one to initiate physical contact. It was never intimate; Alfie knew better than to believe it ever could be, and his friend’s present reaction only solidified this theory. If Eddie felt the need to withdraw himself from the situation, he wasn’t going to stop him. He didn’t move in his chair or turn his head to follow his movements. He stayed put, staring at the space the other man previously occupied. In fact, Alfie was so convinced that he was correct in his assumption that Eddie’s next words gave him whiplash.

Afraid that he would like it?

Bewildered, Alfie shifted in his seat to face Eddie. His eyes desperately tried to search a face that couldn’t bear to look at him. It was impossible for Alfie to discern the truth behind these statements without proper facial cues. He was forced to take Eddie’s words at face value.

For a second time in the twenty-four hour period, Alfie’s heart shattered all over again. “Oh,” he breathed, unsure of what to say. Nothing he could say would relieve Eddie of the sheer panic and shame he felt. Eventually, he settled on a single-minded question.

“Do you really believe that? That it— that you’re a monster?”

Alfie didn’t have much to say, only offering up a simple question. A simple question that Eddie choked on. His hand raised to cover his mouth as an influx of contradicting emotions lashed out from within. He nodded wordlessly, closing his eyes tightly to fight back tears. He wanted to beg Alfie to tell him how wrong he was, to dissuade him from believing the lies his parents told him, but the words wouldn’t come out.

His back hit the wall and Eddie slid to the floor. He bit back a sob, trying to stay quiet. His dad lived half-way across town, but he still half-expected him to suddenly appear and tell him to keep it down. According to Jim Carridine, Eddie only cried for attention or to make people feel guilty. It never stemmed from anything real, only girls cried their pain out.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie instinctively apologized as he wiped the tears from his eyes. He noticed his position on the floor and cringed; he wanted to shrink his existence. Eddie did the next best thing and pulled his knees to his chest.

“I don’t know why it hurts so much,” he admitted with a sniffle. “I don’t think less of anyone else because of who they wanna be with, I really don’t, but when it comes to me…” Eddie shook his head sadly. “I’m already so different. People don’t need another excuse to tell me what I’m doing is wrong. And, yeah, it’s just their opinions, but it’s still too heavy. I can’t carry any more.”

He didn’t know what to expect from a question like that. Honestly, Alfie wasn’t even sure why he chose to focus on that part specifically. Maybe it was because he was afraid that Eddie did think he was a monster, but chose to carry the burden himself as a martyr. Or, maybe it was because he knew how fragile Eddie’s sense of self-worth truly was and that suggesting otherwise wouldn’t have accomplished anything.

But then Eddie continued to break, all because he asked him if he actually believed it. Of course he did; Alfie should have known better than to doubt how much hatred his friend harbored for himself.

“Hey, hey— whoa, whoa, whoa,” Alfie sputtered, more or less flinging himself from the chair to join Eddie on the floor. This wasn’t the first time that he caught Eddie in a vulnerable state. He’d seen him emotional, probably even shed a few tears. But moments like that never lasted long. Eddie was an expert at masking his emotions.

This was different.

Not only was Alfie bad at comforting people in general, he was entirely clueless as to what Eddie needed right now. A friend — he could give him that much. Alfie managed to swallow his own pain just enough to drape an arm over Eddie’s shoulder. He wouldn’t blame him if he pushed him away, but he had to try.

“Eddie, listen to me,” he began softly. “That’s not true — none of it. Okay? This sucks. It fucking sucks. But you are so much more than what anyone says you are, alright?” New tears pooled in Alfie’s eyes and he quickly brushed them away with his free hand before extending the gesture to Eddie. “I’m sorry you’re going through this. I’m sorry I was an asshole. I didn’t… I didn’t mean to—”

A deep frown etched onto Alfie’s features and he let out a trembling sigh. If he kept this up, he’d likely make things worse. “You’re my best friend, Eddie. That’s not going to change, alright?” He wasn’t in the position to make promises like that, no matter how much he wanted to believe it. At the end of the day, he still had to go back to his apartment where he’d only be left with his thoughts. “Bex’ll be good for you, right? So… so, okay. Give it a chance. You owe it to yourself to try, right? And you’ll still have me.” He hoped that wasn’t a lie; for both of their sakes.

Turning points, both big and small, happen every day. Intentional or not, change is both constant and inevitable. As Alfie embraced him, Eddie knew nothing would ever be the same between them again. The truth about their feelings stripped away the comfort of denial and ushered them into a new chapter, one that terrified Eddie. As far as he could tell, he had two options. The first involved swallowing the truth and dating Bex. The second was wiping away his tears. It didn’t occur to him that his choice should include his feelings as well as Bex and Alfie’s, Eddie didn’t think in those terms.

When Alfie encouraged him to keep playing house with Bex, claiming nothing needed to change, Eddie sprung forward and wrapped his arms around his best friend. He knew a lie when he heard one. No matter what choice he made, things were irrevocably different now. No amount of pretending would undo the past two days, but he appreciated Alfie’s dedication to the fabricated life he said he wanted.

Eddie breathed in Alfie’s scent, unsure of when he might get another chance. So much begged to be said, additions to his initial confession, but he stayed silent as his grip tightened. In a perfect world, the two of them would stay like this and the rest of the world would leave them alone. But they didn’t live in a perfect world. Alfie would eventually return to his apartment, the change would set in, and their friendship would slowly dissolve. Eddie wondered how much damage a kiss would do. Just one, to know what love felt like pressed against his lips. Too much, probably.

“You changed my life, Alfie,” Eddie whispered with his eyes closed. “No matter what happens, I want you to know that, at least. And I don’t regret any of it.”

Eddie released his hold on Alfie and pulled away enough to look him in the eyes. “One of these days, I’m gonna catch up to where you are. Until then, keep the balcony unlocked for me, okay?”

#c: alfie #sucker punch #wickedswriting #internalized homophobia tw #tw: internalized homophobia #emotional abuse tw

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maddiewritesstucky · 4 years

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Call me maybe (but only during business hours)

A smutty gift for @raynakiasbel, for her endless patience with my infuriatingly slow writing and inability to focus on one thing at a time!

Pairing: Steve/Bucky

Rating: Explicit

Wordcount: 3308

Tags: CEO Steve, College Student Bucky, Poorly-Timed Phone Sex, Anal Fingering, Masturbation, Dirty Talk, Light Daddy Kink, Dom/Sub Undertones

Part 1 of the SugarVerse series on Ao3

Bucky is most definitely not watching the clock.

His eyes have absolutely not been glued to the LED display on the bedside table for what feels like a hundred goddamn years, watching the little white lines form number after number, blinking their way into the formation that will mean he can pick up his phone, and call Steve.

That would be all kinds of pathetic, and Bucky is not that kind of boyfriend.

He’s certainly not the kind of boyfriend who’s already fixing to climb out of his skin on day three (three!) of Steve’s out-of-town business trip. Bucky is one of those autonomous, self-sufficient boyfriends, who is entirely too busy with his own obscenely full schedule to care about the fact that he’s not getting dicked down at his every whim this week.

He has midterms to study for, and hours to log at StarkTech to go towards his internship, and Nat’s surprise birthday party to plan even though she’s literally impossible to surprise…he doesn’t have the mental real estate to spare on thirst right now. He might have become a whole other kind of hoe since being exposed to the many splendors of Steve Rogers’ cock, but twitching for it before they’ve even hit the seventy-two hour mark?

That would be highly problematic, if that was happening.

Which it isn’t.

Bucky is well accustomed to flying solo when Steve’s off in corporate alter-ego mode; he’s done this countless times over the past few months since he moved in with Steve, and he’d made his peace with it long before that. You don’t couple up with the CEO of an internationally renowned architecture firm and expect to see his face at the dinner table every night, and for the most part, Bucky has no complaints about having the stupidly plush bed all to his starfishing self a few nights a month.

It’s just...there’s a method to this, usually. And that method does not involve three entire days of near radio silence.

When Steve goes away, even on his busier trips, he always finds time to call Bucky at least once a day, even if it’s just five minutes as he’s crawling into bed to say goodnight. They’ll text, and Steve will send emails that are endearingly formal because his brain tends to stay in CEO-mode 24/7 when he’s on business trips, and they’ll generally tide one another over with tidbits of cyber-affection until they get back in the same physical space.

But this time? They’ve hardly been in contact at all. And it’s on Bucky, too, at least in part - he’s been swamped with his own workload the past few weeks, struggling to find quality time or head space even in the few days just before Steve left, and all they’ve managed so far is a few sporadic messages in their rare moments of down-time, which have so far been chaotically misaligned.

It’s been a drag, if Bucky’s honest, and he can occupy himself all he wants with his exam prep and his party-plotting, but at the end of the day…

Bucky’s just a boy, laying in front of a clock, asking his dick to hold out just a few more minutes.

Because right now, it’s 10:42pm.

It’s 10:42pm, which means that in exactly three minutes, Steve will be sliding into the crisp white sheets of whatever lavish hotel bed he’s being put up in; buck-ass naked because he’s as stringent on his no-pyjamas policy as he is on his bed time, and in exactly three minutes…

Bucky’s gonna call him, and phone-fuck the soul right out of his offensively perfect body.

He flips onto his back and nestles into the pillows, a dumb grin already fixing to his face in his hormone-fuelled stupor. The lights of the city outside the floor-to-ceiling penthouse windows bathe his naked skin in soft orange-gold, and his hand migrates of its own accord to the semi he’s been rocking ever since it occurred to him that he could just straight up call Steve and spring a jerk-sesh on him.

The whole thing feels deliciously sneaky-skanky. He’s never done this before, just cold-called Steve with an x-rated agenda. They’ve had phone sex before, a great many times in fact, but there’s always a lead-in; a text exchange turned sordid that spirals into a video call straight out of Bucky’s horny teenage fantasies.

But he’s never gone in jizz-first, ask-questions-later, and as certain as he is that Steve will be entirely on board, it feels just risky enough to have Bucky a little high off the adrenaline of it.

Here lies Bucky, Queen of the Sluts! Stretched out bare atop cream colored sheets, lit up by the New York skyline! Dick in hand and filth on the tip of his tongue!

He is power! He is scandal! He is ready for this!

He pulls the lube out from its hiding place under the pillow and slicks himself up, stroking slow as he tries to summon some small measure of nonchalance about the whole thing. He has a vision for how he wants this to go, and it does not involve him losing his cool the second he hears Steve’s voice on the other end of the line.

This is about seduction, about surprising Steve with some old-school nasty, no video or visuals involved - just Bucky’s filthy mouth and vivid imagination, and he’s determined to keep it together long enough to paint Steve a picture he can jack it to.

He pulls up Steve’s contact and waits out the final torturous minute with his heart in his throat, hitting the call button the second it ticks over to go-time. He hits the speakerphone button, dropping the phone onto the pillow next to him, and holds his breath through the four rings it takes for Steve to pick up.

“...James?”

And oh, but that bodes well...Steve uses his real name in two contexts, and two contexts only - when Bucky visits him at work and he’s in business mode, and when he’s got Bucky flat on his back underneath him, letting him have it.

If Steve’s already keyed up tonight? This just got a lot more interesting.

“Mm, there it is,” Bucky heaves a deep sigh, “that’s what I needed, that voice...”

His mind’s eye conjures up visions of Steve spread out across the bed, taut lines of muscle and bare flesh all laid out. He’s probably just had a shower, so his skin would be all warm and pink, smelling like soap and aftershave; his hair all fluffy from that irreverent way he has of rubbing it towel-dry...god, Bucky misses him.

“James? Are you alright?”

He can practically hear Steve’s brows drawing together in that way they do when he’s overworked; a tight-wound tension in his voice that Bucky has every confidence he can allay before the night’s through.

“Mm, be a lot better if it was your hand wrapped around my cock right now,” Bucky drawls, rolling his body for his audience of no one, “but I guess I’ll just have to settle for fucking my fist to the sound of your voice. Can you hear me touching myself, Daddy?”

He breathes a soft groan as he strokes himself slick and languid, and Steve is silent for a long moment that Bucky’s brain is all too happy to color in with pornographic images of how Steve might be listening; where his hands might be wandering, how his cock would be filling at the mental picture Bucky’s painting. Bucky thinks this might just be the best idea he’s ever had, and he doesn’t hold back on letting Steve hear exactly how good he’s feeling about his decision...

...Until Steve clears his throat, and unceremoniously hits him with an ice-cold dousing of you-done-fucked-up.

“I’m in a meeting right now, I have two clients with me.”

There is zero inflection in his tone, and if Bucky thought he had experienced true panic before, he was mistaken. He can physically feel himself paling; his mouth dropping open soundlessly, humiliation warring with plain confusion as to why the hell Steve is still working at this ridiculous hour.

And then it clicks.

Horribly, harrowingly clicks.

Steve isn’t working at stupid o’clock at night.

In the perpetual haze of Bucky’s overworked brain and Steve’s ever-changing schedule, Bucky had forgotten that this trip was taking Steve to Hawaii.

For Steve, it isn’t slutty phone-sex hours. It’s very sensible, 4:45pm strictly-business hours.

“Ohmygod,” Bucky gasps, bolting upright and looking desperately around the room like it might hold the solution to his colossal screw up, “Steve, I completely forgot--”

“Mr Barnes, I can give you exactly two minutes of my time right now because I realize it’s been difficult to touch base recently,” Steve interrupts, his tone cooling abruptly with the air of professional detachment and veiled authority Bucky’s heard him use on work calls a thousand times. “Can you tell me exactly what the issue is with the redesign?”

...Bucky blinks, breath caught in his throat as he scrambles to string together some sense from Steve’s response.

Steve hasn’t mentioned any specific projects lately, is Bucky supposed to know something about a redesign? Was there something he--

Oh.

His brain and his dick catch on at the same time in a borderline painful rush of blood. He hears Steve pull back from the phone to address his clients, placating them with an apology and the assurance that this won’t take long, and Jesus Christ...Steve is actually doing this.

Steve is actually going to let this happen, going to let Bucky have one-sided phone sex with him while he sits there in some boardroom, with actual clients sitting right in front of him.

What the fuck.

Bucky’s breath leaves him in a rush as he drops back against the pillows and wraps a frantic hand around himself. “The issue is you’ve been gone three fucking days and I wanna sit on your face.”

“Mm, I see why that’s problematic,” Steve muses, cool and unaffected, “what exactly do you need from me?”

God, Bucky can just picture it - Steve sitting there looking like a fucking wet dream in one of his distractingly well-fitting suits, with his hair swept perfectly over and his beard trimmed just close enough to show off the sharp cut of his jaw; radiating that air of quiet authority that makes Bucky want to bounce in his lap until he dies...

Bucky knows for a fact that Steve’s face will be betraying precisely none of what’s happening on the other end of the line, and why the hell is that such a turn on?

“Well I was gonna describe in graphic detail all the things I want you to do to me when you get back,” Bucky huffs, breaths coming faster already, “but if I’m on the clock now, guess I’ll have to settle for sayin’ I need you to bring that dick home ASAP...fuckin’ miss it.”

“I see,” Steve sighs, “well I’m not back in New York for a few days yet, how do you plan to manage this in the interim?”

Bucky curses under his breath, tightening his grip on himself. “Just have to fuck myself, imagine it’s you.” He sounds every bit as unconvinced of the efficacy of this plan as they both know he is, and Steve hums thoughtfully in response.

“I’m going to need more detail, paint me a picture here.”

Bucky knows he’s blushing, feels the heat of it all the way down his chest, and fuck this shouldn’t be as hot as it is. Dirty talking at Steve and getting nothing back but clipped responses, void of emotion and the usual undercurrent of affection he’s become accustomed to?

Work-Steve needs to come to the bedroom more often.

“I’ll touch myself, like I’m doing right now,” he twists his grip a little on the upstroke, hissing at the change in sensation, “get my fist all wet and tight around my cock...pretend it’s your mouth.”

How close are Steve’s clients sitting to him? Steve wouldn’t be letting this happen if there was any way they could hear...but what if one of them has some kind of medical condition that gives them enhanced hearing? What if one of them can read minds and is hearing this entire conversation play out in stereo quality in their head?

Why is there a part of Bucky that hopes one or both of those things are true?!

“...And?” Steve prompts, almost brusque, and Bucky gives himself a second to revel in the way his dick twitches for the hard edge in Steve’s voice.

“And I’ll, fuck- ” Bucky stutters, rocking his hips with the rhythm of his strokes, pushing himself up through his grip, “I’ll use my toys, fingerfuck myself.”

“Right, well why don’t you go ahead and start that for me now,” Steve says, off-hand; pulling back from the phone to place an honest-to-god coffee order with the oblivious intern who’s now seemingly in the room too, and Bucky’s never felt more of an affinity for the whole bored-and-ignored thing.

He slicks up the fingers of his free hand and shifts a little onto his side, hiking a knee up as he slips a finger inside himself.

“Can I take that as a yes, Mr Barnes?” Steve asks at the breathy moan Bucky lets out as he presses in first with one, and then with two fingers, and Bucky nods frantically even though Steve can’t see him.

“Yes, fuck...I'm doin' it...feels so fucking good, Steve.”

And it does. It’s a difficult angle, and he can't quite hit the spot he wants to inside himself, but the steady stroke-tug against his rim while his fist flies over his cock is working for him; winding him towards what would, in any other non time-constrained circumstance, be an embarrassingly fast orgasm.

He can hear Steve shuffling papers, making quiet sounds of agreement along with whatever conversation is going on in the background between his clients whilst they wait, unknowing, and Bucky can’t decide whether it’s a blessing or an immense disappointment that Steve has to bite his tongue right now; that he can’t unleash any of the filth he’d definitely be spitting if he didn’t have an audience.

Steve fucking loves to run his mouth, and Bucky loves to hear it; lives for the endlessly colorful obscenities Steve comes out with in the throws of it.

Just listen to you, he’d be laughing a little; his voice dripping with that indulgent, self-satisfied grin he gets, so goddamn easy for it, ain’t that right baby? Three fuckin’ days and you’re gagging for it...should be ashamed of yourself…

But Steve is in a very public forum right now, in the middle of a meeting no less, trying to give the impression that he’s very decidedly not having phone sex. Right now, he’s Steve Rogers - CEO, consummate professional.

But he is also an asshole, and when he asks Bucky “do you feel you have a firm grasp on the situation, or would a second set of hands be helpful on this one?” Bucky swears he can hear that faint hint of a smirk all the way across the fucking country.

“Might just have to go find myself a second set of hands if you stay away too long,” Bucky retorts, emboldened by the distance, and a little morbidly curious to see what sassing gets him when Steve can’t say shit about it.

Turns out, what it gets him is a full-body shiver and a throb between his thighs as Steve’s tone dips to somewhere in the realm of politely-veiled threat. “I would not advise that, Mr Barnes.”

It occurs to Bucky, then, that this won’t just be done and dusted once they hang up. At the end of the week, Steve will come back to New York, and he will absolutely have some Things To Say about this little interruption.

He can picture it now, the way Steve will stand there all calm, staring him down with his mouth upticked at the corner while Bucky fumbles his way through an explanation.

He’ll probably do that thing where he doesn’t say much but his eyes say everything, and Bucky will have to try really hard to seem remorseful even though they’ll both know he’s not actually all that sorry. And Steve won’t want him to be, not really, but it’ll be something he can use to their mutual benefit, nonetheless.

Fuck, Steve might spank him.

Bucky smothers a moan into the pillow next to him, twisting his fingers inside himself and brushing his thumb across the head of his cock as he turns that thought over, Steve bending him over his knee, or better yet, over his desk...

“Oh,” Bucky gasps, a sudden rush of heat twisting tight in his gut, “fuck, I’m gonna come.”

Steve huffs a vaguely incredulous laugh, and there’s a faint creaking sound like he’s settling further back in his chair. “Oh really? Who authorized that?”

Bucky lets out a deeply undignified whine, his whole body strung tight enough to snap; caught between the sensations of his hand moving frantically over his dick and his fingers scissoring inside himself.

“Come on,” he whimpers, teetering on the knife edge of losing it, “tell me I can finish, please.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”

Oh, fuck him, fuck him...how is he still edging Bucky when he was the one who put the rush order on this?

“Please, Daddy,” Bucky doesn’t try to hide the desperation in his voice as he changes tact, “if you don’t authorize this orgasm I think I’m gonna go blind, just fucking let me come!”

Steve pauses a beat, humming a considering sound. “No, I’m not comfortable signing off on that. We’re tabling this until I get back to New York.”

Bucky freezes, both hands stilling; his face crumbling into a mask of abject disbelief. “You can’t be serious?” His stomach drops, even as something in the back of his mind says he really should have seen this coming...or, not coming, as is the case.

“I'm sure we can come to a far more satisfying resolution in person,” Steve says, maddeningly cavalier.

Bucky’s gearing up to plead his case, but Steve’s not done ruining his night yet.

“In fact, Mr Barnes,” he piles on, “I’d like to make you personally responsible for ensuring no further action is taken on the matter until I return. Can I trust you with this?”

Bucky gapes down at his poor, oblivious cock still standing at eager attention in his grasp, unaware of the disaster that’s just befallen them, and he takes his hands off himself with a pained groan.

“This is criminal,” he objects, flopping heavily onto his back and throwing his arms out to his sides, “if my dick falls off, it’s your fault!”

“Great! Glad to hear it,” Steve chirps, as if he's not the worst person alive, “I’ll be in touch.”

“Whatever,” Bucky scowls at the shadows stretching across the ceiling, willing his mind off the throbbing ache of injustice between his thighs, “I’m totally not answering any of your calls.”

Steve’s smile bleeds into his tone a little when he responds, the closest he’s come to fondness yet. “Okay, speak soon, Mr Barnes.”

Bucky tries, really tries, to inject some petulance into his tone as he signs off with a grumbled “love you, I guess,” but he can’t quite bring himself to sulk as much as he feels the situation warrants.

After all, in exactly four days, Steve will come back to New York.

He’ll come home, and they’ll laugh about this, and in exactly four days…

Steve will make him forget what he was even upset about in the first place.

(Part 2 of the series here!)

#steve/bucky #Steve Rogers #Bucky Barnes #steve x bucky #stucky fanfic #ao3 stucky #daddy steve rogers

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shipmistress9 · 4 years

Text

Sex Toy Advent Calendar: Day 6: Purple U-shaped Vibe

Fandom: HTTYD

Rating: E

Pairing: Hiccup/Astrid

Words: 3130

Summary: Day 6 of the Sex Toy Advent Calendar. Today's toy makes up for any previous disappointment. And leaves Hiccup and Astrid eager for further explorations.

AN: I ran a bit into a wall with this one. At some point, I had to delete half of what I'd written for this chapter because it wasn't working, and then RL became pretty tough. Ah, well. At least it's finished now. And in the meantime, I had a lot of fun making notes for the future parts of this series. ^^

. o O o .

Today, it was Hiccup’s turn to be thrumming with anticipation as he and Astrid went to open today’s box. After yesterday's disappointment —though everything had turned out more than bearable in the end—her excitement had noticeably dampened. It wasn’t that she wasn’t looking forward to seeing what was in today’s box, but more that she'd lowered her expectations. Which was a shame, really.

Hiccup didn’t know for sure which gift they got today. But he'd seen a rough overview of which toys would be in this calendar when he’d bought it, and… Well, the fact that there were two black boxes with the golden letters saying ‘six’ was giving away a lot, especially with the additional information printed on the smaller one in his hand.

“So, what does it say there?” Astrid asked, eyeing the tiny box skeptically.

“It says that we can use this charging cable for the boxes 6, 12, and 24,” he said smugly. Then he nodded at the other, slightly bigger box in her hands. “Don't you want to take a look?”

Astrid's mouth had turned into a perfect O, her eyes now alight with new excitement. The sight made Hiccup smile. She was so beautiful like this. With quick eager motions, she tore the box open and held up its content.

“Okay, and what is this?”

“Well, it’s not a cock ring,” he replied in a light, teasing tone.

Astrid regarded him with a flat stare.

Chuckling, Hiccup took the purple u-shaped device out of her hands. “It’s a vibrator, obviously. If I remember correctly, it’s called Double Joy. A fitting name, because, well, both sides have their use.” He pointed at the differing ‘arms’ of the U. “The thinner side here is meant to go inside you, while the thicker side with the flared and flattened shape here is supposed to cover your clit. Both sides vibrate, individually if you want. Also, the bit that goes inside you is so narrow that I should easily fit in as well. That way, we can both feel the vibrations and also each other, and your clit gets attention, too.”

Astrid’s lips twitched in amusement as she glanced at him. “Someone’s done his homework, as it seems,” she teased. Then her attention returned to the vibrator. “But I admit, this sounds interesting. Should we try it right away?”

Chuckling, Hiccup shook his head. He wasn’t surprised at her eagerness, not at all. It was Sunday, so they both were off work today and had the entire day for themselves. And, well, she was Astrid.

But sadly, they would have to wait. “Remember this?” He held up the other box, the charging cable. “It has a build-in batterie and needs to charge first. Besides, there’s something else this thing can do, and I think you’re going to want and explore this option before we get started.”

“Who says we can only use it once?” she asked, attempting to look innocent and failing spectacularly. “But okay, the charging is a valid argument. So let's get this connected, and then you can tell me aaaaaall about its other features.”

. o O o .

Astrid’s eyes were gleaming as she went through the app’s options. She was thrilled, just like Hiccup had expected.

“Okay, this alone is worth getting this calender,” she proclaimed after a few minutes. “I can control both sides of the vibrator individually, right here in the app. Strength and rhythm, and…” she paused, her eyes growing wide. “Oooohh. I can even connect it to a playlist and it pulses along with the music?” She smirked at him. “We’re definitely going to try this!”

Having expected nothing else, Hiccup nodded, and then leaned in to show her another feature. “Then I hope you have a fitting playlist saved. Anyway, see this here? It’s a partner feature.”

She squinted at her display. “Okay? And what does it do?”

“Once paired with your phone, only you can control the vibrator. For safety. However, you can decide to temporarily give this control over to another specific app user. For example, we could go out with you wearing it, but I control it. It’s apparently extra silent, so nobody at a restaurant or at the cinema would hear it. Well, unless your moans grow too loud.” He threw her a cheeky smirk, but had to bite back a laugh at the dazed look on her face. Oh, she liked that idea, didn’t she?

Hiccup felt smug, having found this toy and within the fun context of this calendar, no less. She’d voiced interest in such a toy every now and then, and he was sure that it would see plenty of use.

Intent on teasing her further, he stepped behind her, hands on her hips and letting her feel how thinking about the possibilities didn’t leave him unaffected either. “You could also take it with you when you have to go on a business trip again,” he murmured against her neck. “And then you could allow me control over it when we video chat before going to sleep. I could make you come and watch you, even without being there.”

Astrid moan, and a shiver ran through her body. She leaned into him, her cute butt pressing at his growing erection. “That sounds intriguing,” she murmured.

“Or you could wear it when you go to work,” he went on, voice low and rough now. “I wouldn’t know what you’re doing or how aroused you already are, but I could keep playing with the control the entire day through. I wonder what your annoying co-worker would say if you interrupt another one of her self-praises with an orgasm.”

Astrid nearly choked on breathy laughter, the image no doubt appealing to her. “Mmm, we should definitely keep that option in mind. How much longer until that thing is charged and ready for use?”

“Another hour, I fear,” he said after glancing at his watch. He wished he could give her a more satisfying answer, but that was the instruction he’d read up in advance. By now, he was pitching a full tent in his loose lounging bottoms. But they could bridge an hour by doing something else… right?

It was a long hour. Astrid played some more with her new app, arranging playlists or something, while Hiccup made a food plan for the week to determine which ingredients he would have to get. Although he’d have to double-check it later with how… distracted he was.

Every few minutes, Astrid’s eyes flicked toward the clock hanging over their TV, and every time, she gave an impatient sigh. It made Hiccup grin, her eagerness and curiosity so wonderfully blatant and so cute. Not that he wasn’t interested in seeing what this toy could do, but there was just something so refreshing and endearing about watching her that he was almost sad when the waiting was over. But only almost.

When the hour was over—Astrid apparently had even set an alarm—she jumped up and all but ran toward their bedroom. Hiccup followed her, chuckling, and found her kneeling on the bed. She held the vibe in her one hand and her phone in the other, and let out a victorious “Ha!” the moment he sat down next to her.

“It’s working?” He crawled behind her onto the bed, stabilising himself with his hands on her waist as he looked over her shoulder.

“Looks like it, yes.” She tapped a few buttons on her phone, and the vibrator buzzed to life. “Excellent!”

“And what’s your plan now?” he asked, a little bemused as she turned it off again and shifted until she lay on her back. “What do you want to try with it?”

She smirked. “Oh, you’ll see.”

With one swift motion, she pushed her bottoms and underwear down, giving him an unimpeded view of her lower half, and brought the toy down to her entrance. Hiccup’s breath caught in his throat as he watched it slip inside her, easily, as if it belonged there. It really was proof of how aroused and eager she was that even after an hour of waiting she was wet enough to not need the tiniest bit of foreplay or lube.

To his slight disappointment, though, she then pulled her clothes up again and reached for her phone. A moment later, a low tune sounded through the room and Astrid’s eyes fluttered shut with a soft moan. The vibrator was indeed surprisingly quiet, Hiccup could only hear it because he was listening for it and there were no other noises around them, anyway. With his heart beating a little faster, he let out a low grunt as he watched her, clearly luxuriating in the invisible stimulation. She was so beautiful like this.

She held her hand out toward him, reaching for him. “Come here,” she purred.

Hiccup obliged happily, covering her with his body as she pulled him into a deep kiss. Her hips moved in time with the music coming from her phone, grinding herself against his thigh and making her mewl.

Oh, this was hotter than he’d expected. He could probably continue just like this, lazily making out, kissing her with one hand slowly combing through her hair, and she’d still come sooner rather than later. But tempted as he was—they had the entire day free, after all, and nothing was stopping them from just spending countless hours in bed—he still wanted to do a little more, go a little further.

He sat up, much to her complaint, and removed his shirt with one quick motion, then leaned down to resume kissing her. Astrid hummed happily as his hand splayed over her breast, squeezing her through her thin vest before it slipped beneath the fabric to peel it off her. She wriggled to help him, but instead nearly arched off the bed when the music switched to a quicker part for a short while and the toy apparently followed along.

“F-fuck!” she cursed, eyes out of focus as she gazed past him at the ceiling. Her fingers were digging into his arms, her hips moving in search of that elusive stimulation. “This… this is…”

“Oh, this is going to be fun,” Hiccup mused idly, mouthing at her ear. “I think I love this toy already.”

Astrid didn’t reply and just moaned weakly as he moved down her body and pulled aside the cups of her bra with his teeth. Her nipples were sensitive already and quickly hardened beneath his tongue, so much fun to play with.

He kept it light for now, merely teasing her. But with half an ear, he listened to the music, and right before he knew another quicker part would come, his lips closed around the hard bud and he sucked, harshly. It made her mewl with longing, and when the music and vibrations grew stronger again, Astrid cried out, limps shaking and hands tightening into fists in his hair.

Three times he repeated this pattern until she came undone beneath him with a beautiful scream. Her entire body spasmed as waves of pleasure crashed through her, her eyes rolling back into her head. It was a memorable sight, one Hiccup wished he could capture in a drawing later on. She was so utterly beautiful when in the throes of pleasure, so irresistible, so alluring. Just watching her made him feel as if he was about to come himself.

When it was over, she almost desperation reached out, whimpering, and her arm wandered around on the bedcovers as if she was searching for something. It took Hiccup a second to cotton on, still mesmerised by her sight. But then he understood, grabbed her phone lying next to her head, and turned the music off. The low buzzing stopped as well and a moment later, Astrid fell back onto the bed, blissful and relaxed.

“Oh, wow,” she gasped, her head lolling to the sight and with a huge grin on her face. “Okay, this baby alone was worth everything. That was awesome!”

Chuckling, Hiccup sat up and took in more of her sight. Not even halfway undressed but with her hair sticking to her sweaty forehead and neck, she looked the picture of debauchery.

“I’m glad to hear that. So I guess the hour of waiting wasn’t that unbearable, retrospectively?”

She let out a shaky laugh. “I’d say it was even more unbearable now that I know what I was missing out on. But just for the records. When I take this baby with me to work, promise me you won’t use the highest setting. I don’t want to fall off my chair when my body just stops responding.”

Hiccup laughed. The image was certainly intriguing, but he’d also noticed something else. She’d said when and not if. Somehow, that didn’t even surprise him.

What did surprise him though was when Astrid suddenly reached up and pulled him into a blistering kiss. He’d thought that with the apparent intensity of her orgasm just now, she needed a slight break at least. But, obviously, he’d been wrong. Once, he was close enough again, her hands were all over him, roaming over his skin in a show of very obvious eagerness.

Not one to complain, Hiccup let her guide him, getting rid of her shirt and bra, and enjoyed the sensation of hot skin against his own. Her hands on his back, her legs entangled with his own, her hips grinding against him, slow but insistent.

“You’re sure you don’t need a break?” Even with how eager she was, he still had to ask, to make sure. “You’re not too sensitive?”

She chuckled, breathy. “Actually, I am. Just a little, though. But no, I don’t need a break. Don’t want one. I want more.”

Groaning at her needy tone, Hiccup didn’t resist when she pushed his bottoms down and reached for his cock. After her lewd display, he was already hard, the touch of her hand more than welcome on his heated flesh. She stroked him slowly, her eyes drinking in his reaction, and he had to fight not to thrust into her grip in his eagerness.

Getting rid of her remaining clothes was merely a formality, and before long, she guided his cock to slip inside her along with the toy. Even with how slim this part of the vibrator was, it was a noticeably tighter fit than usual, and at first, they struggled to find the right angle. Once inside though, Hiccup sighed as her silken heat surrounded him. She was so hot, so tight, and just so… so… Astrid!

She was biting her lip when he glanced down at her, her eyes pressed shut and brows furrowed.

“Are you okay?” His voice was rough with desire, but her well-being was more important.

Letting out a keening noise, low and needy, Astrid nodded. “I am. Just intense. But good.”

To give her time to adjust, Hiccup leaned down, supporting his weight on his elbows, and breathed hot openmouthed kisses onto her jaw, down her neck, to her shoulders. It had the desired effect, distracting her and making her giggle. Then she pushed lightly against his chest with her flat hand, and Hiccup pushed himself up again, watching her curiously as she reached for her phone again.

“Slowly at first, okay?”

Hiccup nodded and was about to say something in response when the vibrations set in. Instead, he just let out a weak groan, his eyes falling shut at the unfamiliar sensation.

Oh, that felt good!

The toy wasn’t long enough to reach all the way along his cock, but that wasn’t much of an issue. As he slowly pulled out and pushed in again, he found that the toy covered him well enough, and the vibrations were enough to send an additional thrill through his body, anyway.

And the music… Astrid had picked a calm piece, beautiful, and it was easy to fall into the slow rhythm. It was almost like a dance, in a way. Not that he would call himself a skilled or anything but awkward dancer, but this was different. Easy. Letting the music set the pace for their movements, he enjoyed how it gave him time to indulge in their closeness, their intimacy. Exploring every part of her he could reach with his nose and mouth alone was something he so rarely got the chance to.

After a while, the music changed, the beat becoming a little faster. It was a natural development to follow, Astrid meeting his thrusts perfectly, and her endless string of moans and breathless sobs as the vibrations grew stronger was a beautiful addition to the familiar melody.

Hiccup was entirely lost in it all, watching, listening, feeling. The music grew faster, the vibrations stronger, his thrusts harder. On and on it went, a crescendo of sensations.

Beneath him, Astrid was teetering on the edge of another orgasm, her fingernails digging deeply into his arms. It was pure perfection, and when the music reached its climax, the same was true for them as well.

It was intense; Astrid screamed with no restraints, and Hiccup muffled his howl against her sweaty neck. Her clenching muscles were like a velvet device of pleasure around his thrumming cock, and the vibrations fuelled his orgasm even further. His hips seemed to move on their own, his thrusts carrying them through to the end even as his cum made her insides slick and slippery.

“Oh, f-fuck,” he groaned weakly as he nearly collapsed on top of her. He managed to roll to the side instead, forehead pressed against her shoulder, but he kept his arm slung across her chest in a loose embrace. After this, she would need the closeness just as much as he did.

Astrid fumbled with her phone and then cuddled closer to him once the music—and the vibrations—had stopped. “Yeah, that’s an accurate summary,” she sighed, giggling. She snuggled closer, blindly reaching for a blanket to ward off the cool air. They were both in desperate need of a shower, but that could wait for later. “I don’t know what else we’re going to find in this calendar, but I dare say this toy is one of my top favourites.”

Hiccup let out a tired laugh. He’d hoped for this to be a good one, but the reality was still so much better than his imagination.

“And you know what’s the best part of it?”

Too exhausted for many words, he just hummed weakly for her to continue.

She shifted until her lips reached his, and he thought he could feel her smirk as she kissed him.

“The best part is that we still have the entire day to keep enjoying this toy.”

. o O o .

AN: I bet neither of them will be able to walk anymore around noon at the latest. xD

* - . - * - . o O o . - * - . - *

If you want to support me you can buy me a coffee. I love coffee 😊 (Ko-Fi)

#Hiccstrid #fanfiction #httyd #Modern AU #PWP #nsft #not for children #Sex Toy Advent Calendar #Fluff

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unproduciblesmackdown · 4 years

Note

comet, moon, pluto, aquila, protostar

Thank You vm

Comet- What are you currently frustrated about?

lmaooo oh you know at any given time i’m weaving this rich tapestry of continual frustrations lol.....i’d say i’m in an Upswing Period of [simmering frustration levels closer to the surface] lately too lol like earlier in the week i pushed through a day or two there more casually but then it was like ah jeez here comes the malaise. more specifically today, even just before sitting down to answer this, i emerged from the bathroom to find there was a “dog has pooped inside despite having been outside within the last 10 min” shituation, which was wonderful.....annoyed from Waking by “smh at not being able to adjust my nocturnality, still frustrated about the near success of last friday being thwarted by the dead of night hammering debacle,” & regular Antagonizing Audio issues, aka being stressed by both the [loud, alarming] type sound & the [gross textural misophonia hell] type.....earlier i was like “where is the dish sponge” (still don’t know) & went to get a new, packaged one which had been in a drawer, but that one was gone too, good that there’s no pressing need to wash dishes rn i guess.....still struggling with the “well i guess i’m trying to put myself out there Socially” attempt to find relevant public discords, being generally overwhelmed as actually talking to randos in a group is A Lot & in theory it’s like well you meet someone Specific you’d enjoy talking to & branch off from there but unfortunately you can’t just skip to that step, also i do not genuinely Expect to get to that step either way, also i am not easily finding servers in the 1st place b/c it’s like, well i talk about Interests but what am i interested in? who knows. don’t do art “seriously” enough to rly wanna discuss it much, thought abt Language Learning but one i found wants you to have a verified account lmao like, no thanks. in theory i enjoy Socializing some but in practice it is sure a trial & i have not said anything to anyone anywhere yet, just a “well, not sure what else i could do here situation,” in theory take up an In Person hobby / group to make it all easier but that’s not happening. which, i was also Frustrated remembering oh right i spent a year as measured by my personal age in 1 location, both Pandemic & other [society] problems, & speaking of Interests & Hobbies not having them, i was also >:| over something having kicked in my Math Sensibilities (aka that i like math) & wondering like, would i have enjoyed getting more into math / some particular application, who knows, same but also even more so re: other things i get the sense i’m quite Into, like learning languages & ~performing arts~, which, i at least took math / math related classes into college level courses, which is not true for those other things (took a Language Class: never, took a theatre / drama class: for 1/4 of the schoolyear in 7th grade, & prior to that, just did a scene or two of a play in english class 4th grade, & the approx decade extracurricular of ballet, which is related but of course a different thing. anyhow, annoyed that i Simply Do Not Know & hardly see opportunities to find out on the horizon, although who knows.....which is related to being frustrated about [Society] some more like, thinking about “boy how different would it be if people were guaranteed the right to Essentials For Life like housing, food, medical care, both electricity & the internet Now A Days...” like, agonizing What If there, it is all so unnecessary that It Is Like This......just now someone made an unnecessary Post lmfao thank you xkit.......oh right, i was Frustrated, with an emphasis In Aro / Ace, about Media & Life, what else is new & then, you know, musings on The Theoretical Future & One’s Personal Past that would become even more of a like, audioscape: therapy session topic, these are frustrating things. and all of this answer has been stuff i remember getting Frustrated about in the past 24 hours. Also!!! that last night i was like, i want to play scrabble, so i looked up an online game but the Computer settings are a nightmare like, as far as i could tell the Difficulty settings were mostly attuned to Average Word Length but it was like, yeah you’re playing against this opponent given this effective total familiarity with the most obscure / archaic shit in the scrabble dictionary, not even simply the like, q words / two letter words ppl might happen to know specifically for the purposes of scrabble. there was also no “new game” button?? just had to refresh the page? smh. oh lmfao! also! you Know i was frustrated thinking about Billions, the series / interest that antagonizes you, jokes on you when you hone in on the Quant where it’s like, is he just meant to be the guy who sucks, plus he’s got depression....suppose they do at least handle him w/some sympathy / nonzero Care for this Char acter, but smh at sighing about [bracing yourself for anything promising (cough riawin) to spiral into disaster one way or another, whether it turns into a joke or plot device or just something introduced / built up / demolished for ambient drama/conflict].....what else is new. the periodic cycles of Billions Thoughts lol. was just frustrated at a video’s Editing Cadence basically lmfao. i also find it grating when the word “the jab” is used in tweets re: vaccination, which i just saw, presumably in the same sort of way where i automatically dislike the phrase To Be Fair or referring to food/eating with “fill / filling” or any variants lmfao, or earnest use of the description “hearty”......some words i hate the sound of no matter what, some i hate to hear used in a particular phrase / context......need to simply stop doing things in the middle of answering this b/c it will inevitably involve Frustrations lmfaooo. oh also i was annoyed to wake up to a clear sky. where’s that overcast atmosphere

Moon- Are you currently reading any books? If so, what book(s)?

i am not, but i’ve been considering it! just inconvenient b/c a) i gotta like, choose what book/s to read, & b) i have to read via laptop, which is kind of a pain, & c) like with everything, i always tend to basically read stuff all at once, but i’m also a slow reader lmao, so it’s like, okay, i’m probably basically devoting days on end to Reading Through whatever.....

Pluto- If you could meet anyone, alive or dead, who would you meet?

another classic Fascinating Answer of “i dunno” lol, i’ve never really had a go to answer for this or anything that’s particularly leapt out.....plus re: how i tend to feel nervous with on the spot socializing, the concept of like “if you could have dinner with someone” is too much lmfao like, a waste of time, i’d simply Be Nervous my way completely through it. the only way i could think of things is like, here i go giving someone an interview, i guess, and whomst tf would i feel Prepared to talk to lmfao. relevant to interests it’s like well of course you could ask w. roland things the in depth secret jared questions, or Any questions about quant n billions, but then it’s also like, well, there’s the questions I already have an answer for lol & either you have the same answer or i have a mini monologue, not like i don’t speak in mini monologues all the time if i have something to say at all, and my Questions go like that too lmfao, a disaster already trying to ask people about pertinent Information......never able to think of things re: people who have died, i suppose there’s fun answers re: like, getting lost / unknown Historical Info......when it comes to meeting people i don’t really consider it much in advance b/c i am nervous about everything & aware that any interacting is a Challenge lmfao. whenever these things actually happen, it’s hardly always a disaster, but i’m just improvising in the end. also, i could meet people i actually know but have never met, i.e. you, who i talk to but we are Virtual & Pandemic’d & etc & so on. but i suppose that’s kind of a given lol

Aquila- Do you prefer to read books or watch movies?

i think movies are less Involved for me, like, even if it takes me 3x their runtime (or longer) to watch any videos thanks to getting distracted & stuff, still quicker than i read a book, & unless i’m watching something for the first time and/or really wanting to properly pay attention, i can do other things while putting a movie on, whereas if i’m reading that’s the One Thing i can be doing. but overall i’m like “media, what media” whichever format lol like. haven’t consumed things, don’t often think of specific works i want/plan to consume, don’t often get around to it, etc. classique.....

Protostar- Give a random fact about yourself.

speaking of classic, me struggling to recall 101 info about myself or answer not that out there Questions, but when it’s like “alright hater what are you disgruntled about now” it’s like, Deep Inhale lmfao, but [are you okay? Is Anyone].jpeg on that one as well, we are out here......uh i’m sure i’ve said it before but i’m around 5′11″? maybe 6 ft tall but that might be overdoing it. sort of Average Tall but i am always literally looking down on people lmao.....and bumping my head into a low hanging light fixture around here.....

#nothingunrealistic1 #you know that's my On Brand query lol.....the three dozen ways of annoyed i probably am / have been on any given day

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sincerelyreidburke · 4 years

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Can we hear more about the time nando got in a fight on the ice and got ejected 👀👀👀 and why this upset quinn?? 👀👀👀

Yes, let’s absolutely talk about this. And please do forgive me for the slight delay on this one, as I was getting my thoughts together.

Here’s the original post where I brought this up, in the context of a bunch of reasons Quinn would get mad at Nando. Since apparently “Quinn and Nando fighting or bickering” is a train of thought we’ve been on in the past 24 hours (this post went up yesterday, about their first Actual Big Fight), let’s go down this road now.

TW: on-ice homophobia, implied racism, and general hate. I won’t type out any slurs, of course, but I’ll imply some really shitty things being said by a Bad Guy.

(Ask me anything about the crickets!)

- So a little backstory. We’ve established that Nando is a walking target for some of the ugliest hate hockey culture can spew. Is this his fault? Of course not. Nando should not have to deal with so much awful just for being who he is in the sport he loves. But does this cause him difficulty growing up in the sport and playing in college, despite being unjust? Absolutely, yes.

- The thing about Nando is that while guys on opposing teams (and, pre-Samwell, sometimes his own teammates) won’t hesitate to throw hateful chirps his way, Nando is also a.) not afraid to stand up for himself, and b.) gigantic.

- Look, all I’m saying is, if I were an asshole on an opposing team, I wouldn’t make fun of the biggest guy on the ice. No matter how much my toxic urges were telling me to do so.

- But Nando also doesn’t like always having to be a ‘violent’ player on the ice. He’s a d-man, and an enforcer, and a lot of his retaliation for the hate he gets comes in the form of legal checks, concentration on defending one player, light tousles after whistles, that kind of thing.

- He’s always trying to find the balance between standing up for himself (and people like him who get the same treatment) and getting in trouble for fighting too much. We know Nando’s off-ice personality, and we know he isn’t aggressive in the slightest. On-ice Nando isn’t afraid to get in a scuffle, but he doesn’t like getting in huge fights on the regular.

- The one little confrontation he got in in this fic is pretty demonstrative of how he is on the ice, usually. In that situation, somebody makes a dirty move and trips Touille, and Nando jumps to defend him, then gets in a little tousle with the guy, winds up getting penalized, and is smug when he goes to the box. Nando is generally pretty shameless about fighting when it means he’s standing up for teammates or friends.

- He doesn’t really start fights unprovoked. There’s always a cause.

- Okay, so my point going through all of this is to establish that Nando walks a careful line between standing up for himself and others and trying not to constantly get penalized or thrown out because of the roughing he gets into. I don’t mean roughing in the technical hockey penalty sense of the word; I just mean fighting.

- Anyway. Nando doesn’t get thrown out of games often. Tousling on the ice is a part of hockey, and it has to get really bad for you to get ejected, at least from what I understand about the game. (I’ve never played, but I’ve grown up in some serious hockey country, and I’ve watched my fair share of NHL, college, and youth-level games.) I actually would say that at Samwell, Nando probably doesn’t get ejected more than maybe once before this incident that I’m going to talk about right now.

- It takes a lot for him to get into a fight that’s ejection-level. For the one time it happens prior to this, I think there was likely some kind of really awful racial hate speech being thrown around on the ice, and he just can’t not fight back about that kind of stuff.

- So finally, we reach the incident you actually asked about. This is junior year. It’s once the season has already been going on for a little while, probably one of the last games of fall semester or one of the first of spring semester.

- Quinn is manager. Therefore, he travels with the team and sits on the bench for games. This is notable because this is, although not directly, the cause of the incident.

- I wrote in this Quindo facts post about some little routines they adopt once Quinn becomes manager, and the one I want to bring to your attention now is the little pregame tradition they have where Nando skates over to him on the bench and gets a little kiss. It’s always just a quick peck and a few words of encouragement from Quinn to him, and it’s very very soft. It starts probably around the second or third game of the season, and they just wind up adopting it as a post-warmup pre-puck-drop ritual.

- Why? Look, there are several reasons. First, they love each other. So jot that down. But kissing on the bench, in plain sight of plenty of college-hockey-TV-broadcast cameras and potential NHL scouts and spectators and opposing team members, isn’t just about their own internal relationship. That’s a deliberate and intentional action that they take because they want to make the ice a safe place.

- This is really important to Nando in particular. He grew up fully aware of how hateful hockey can be, and by doing this— kissing his boyfriend in plain sight before every game he plays— he’s making an active statement about himself and about the fact that there is a place for people like him in the game. He’s continuing, in a sense, what Jack and Bitty started.

- But. Of course, this decision comes with its own difficulties.

- I think Quinn is fully conscious, and a little wary, of the fact that being open about his relationship with Nando as he assumes the position of manager will mean that Nando could be targeted on the ice for even more hate than he already gets. Nando is openly gay, but this situation puts his specific relationship a bit more on display, and, well... okay, let’s just say I feel like it would be much easier to target a guy for his gay relationship when his boyfriend is literally sitting twenty feet away on the bench.

- My point is: Nando wouldn’t change his openness about his relationship with Quinn for a second, but it does create another way for opposing teams to jab at him.

- Look, hockey is, as a whole, a really cruel, really toxic sport, with an environment to match. And SMH is the most supportive team Nando could ask for, but that doesn’t mean that when they leave the confines of practice at Faber, everybody else is going to be just as loving and welcoming.

- So they’re at this game. It’s a home game. Nando and Quinn go about their usual pregame business, and some particularly assholish guy on the other team takes note of that.

- Samwell is losing the game. This guy, along with probably a few of his teammates, starts heckling Nando. It starts as just a few comments, and it grows steadily until he sort of ends up cornering him.

- Nando really tries so hard to let most things roll off his shoulders when it comes to the stuff that gets said to him on the ice. There’s so much of it, and he has so much practice just trying to brush it off. But this time is a little different. This time, the guy says something directly about Quinn.

- I don’t actually feel like typing out exactly what the guy says. Just use your imagination. There are a lot of really cruel words you can use, and he uses many of them. The details of the confrontation aren’t something I feel is necessary to lay out here.

- Something about this, combined with the pressure from the fact that they’re losing, and the way the guy is sort of threatening and menacing in the way he speaks, sends Nando over the edge.

- So they get in a fight. It’s your standard hockey fight; it’s just heated enough that they both get thrown out of the game.

- Quinn watches all of this go down from the bench, and the reason he gets mad is because they discussed the fact that Nando wasn’t going to get himself in trouble defending against cruel things said by people who don’t matter.

- That kind of thing gets lost in the heat of the moment. Quinn watches him get sent down the tunnel, and there are a number of things going through his head: one, that he really hopes he’s not injured too badly, and two, that he’s going to chew him out for getting himself in trouble.

- I think they have an argument after the fact — and I wouldn’t count this at all as a big fight but more just a chance for them to weigh their conflicting opinions. Quinn marches right up to him in the locker room and he’s sort of like, Sebastián, what were you thinking? You could be suspended! You know the disciplinary people aren’t going to go easy on you—

- And Nando is like, baby, but if you heard what he said—

- And they go back and forth for a minute, like: I couldn’t just stand there and let him say that shit about you / but Sebastián, you know people are going to be awful about us; why would you let that jeopardize your ability to play? / because I had to stand up for you, baby— / It’s not a matter of standing up for me when it’s putting your own hockey life in danger!

- And basically, the reason Quinn gets not exactly mad at him but more just frustrated is because Nando, who operates with his emotions as the first driver at all times, refuses to regret defending Quinn’s honor on the ice. Quinn really doesn’t understand the full toxicity of hockey culture quite enough to realize why this is so important to Nando.

- This isn’t the kind of argument that lasts a long time. They get it out and then they’re okay; they have a much softer talk after the fact. This is how basically all of their disagreements tend to go.

- But yeah, that’s what happens! Nando is a rough boy on the ice and it scares/concerns Quinn. We love to see it.

I hope this answers your question!

#oc taddies #crickets #nandoooooooo #mini quinny #quindo

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hansoulo · 4 years

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“A pandemic has taken the lives of more than 100,000 Americans and put more than 30 million out of work, and to top it off, there has been an almost 30-day, caught-on-tape spree of police and vigilante violence against black people. For some, it may feel like the nation is on the brink of near-biblical levels of chaos.

The responses across the nation, whether you call them riots (and you shouldn’t) or whether you call them protests, uprisings, unrest, or rebellions, are being covered by local and national news and social media. As a journalism professor who has studied and experienced media coverage of protests for years, I have watched repeatedly how poorly these events are conveyed by the media and understood by the public. Here’s what people watching the news must understand in order to get what’s truly going on, and keep your faith in America nominally intact in the process.

First, it’s important to understand the mandate of the news, and that is to get eyeballs on the screen, whether that is your television screen or the one in your hands. Networks focus on spectacle: fires, people crying, and broken windows, instead of the larger story. In most cases (such as with the Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, protests a few years ago), property damage and fires are limited to a small area, and even during those times many people are just milling about, but shaking camera angles and tight shots want you to believe that every reporter is an extra in Saving Private Ryan and every protest looks like Kanye’s “No Church in the Wild” video.

In reality, these protests are usually not completely consumed with chaos. Nighttime coverage will seldom show a full city map demonstrating that, two blocks over from a street that looks like a “city engulfed in flames,” there’s a CVS still open for business. The press flocking to dramatic images as a protest metaphor is not a new phenomenon.

Further, much of the property damage attributed to protesters is often the result of police action or inaction in the face of lawful public behavior, something I’ve witnessed from Ferguson to the far-right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. Tear gas canisters can still burn your hand hours after they’ve been launched by police, flares are thrown by riot response teams with reckless abandon, let alone live munitions and flash grenades.

Sometimes buried at the end of post-protest reports by local authorities is the fact that police munitions often start fires at protests, but this is seldom reported by the press, and there have been surprisingly few protesters arrested for arson relative to the fires that erupted during the unrest. Which is more likely to set row houses ablaze, three teenagers in face masks with “No Justice, No Peace” signs or two smoldering tear gas shells sitting on a pile of dry leaves and newspaper for two hours?

This is not to suggest that some protesters don’t cause violence or property damage, but observers, let alone journalists, should be making distinctions between the various actors that are actually on the scene during civil unrest. You have the aforementioned police who are armed. Then you have chaos agents and anarchists who infiltrate peaceful protests with their own agenda. This isn’t conspiracy theory; in Minneapolis alone, videos have emerged of strangely dressed people just engaging in wanton property destruction. No one knows who they are, but it seems unlikely that they are protesters.

Then you have your run-of-the-mill opportunistic criminals. When the police are so occupied harassing and corralling peaceful protesters and the streets are filled with smoke, it’s pretty easy to break into a Verizon store, a beauty shop, or a grocery store and take what you want. These people are often conflated with actual revolutionaries, who are protesters that target actual structures and symbols of abuse and oppression. For protesters who are angry about violent, unaccountable police in Minneapolis, overtaking and burning down the Third Police Precinct is a specific act of revolt. This is a fundamentally different action than using the chaos from two blocks over to raid a liquor store.

And, of course, none of these actors should be confused with the hundreds of men and women peacefully protesting who are usually subjected to violent reprisals by police. Which is why “they’re burning their own community” narratives are so misleading and dangerous. It’s irresponsible to not distinguish which “they” is being talked about.

Which brings us to perhaps the most important thing to understand about how to watch protests: the context of what kind of protest garners police response. Over the past three months, the 24-hour cable networks have extensively covered mostly white armed men and women threatening police and politicians at state capitols across the nation over coronavirus lockdown policies.

How often have you seen police in riot gear? In fact, police seldom use force or even present in force (protest shields, black helmets, etc.) when conservative or right-wing groups protest. When is the last time you saw a group of anti-abortion activists get tear-gassed? Yet with left-leaning groups, and especially groups of minorities, their protests are often met with shows of force. Right-wing groups spit in the faces of police in regular gear in Michigan, while SWAT teams show up like Storm Troopers for chanting teens in Minneapolis.

This lack of context is even more corrosive when national press coverage chooses one staging area of protest over another. People are marching in Phoenix, Arizona; Columbus, Ohio; and New York City in solidarity with George Floyd, and in Brunswick, Georgia, for Ahmaud Arbery, and in Louisville, Kentucky, for Breonna Taylor. Seven people were shot during the Louisville protests, but 24-hour news coverage is blanketed with images of burning buildings in Minneapolis as if that’s the default of protests instead of the outlier.

So what should be your main takeaway as an American concerned about the future of the country? Protests are not simply stories of “good guys” and “bad guys” no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. There are actors all operating simultaneously, and all too often local and even national reporting only covers the story of the local politicians and police who have a vested interest in presenting themselves as overwhelmed and beleaguered as opposed to negligent and incendiary.

Former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, who pinned George Floyd by placing his knee on the man’s neck for almost nine minutes, has been arrested and charged with murder and manslaughter by local authorities. By all accounts, whether it’s Minneapolis (or Louisville or Brunswick), if the police and vigilantes who committed these acts of violence were consistently arrested and charged, it’s highly likely that these protests would be less volatile.

More importantly, the focus and amplification of property damage over the lost lives that sparked unrest to begin with is a reflection of the press’s ghoulishly misplaced priorities. As a news consumer, you don’t have to feed the beast. You can choose to follow men and women on the ground covering events as concerned citizens. You can sift through the dross of hot-taking, moralizing pundits and pay attention to the data on the ground about what causes protests. (This was all but predicted five years ago.) You can refuse to submit to goodthink and stop using words like riot, protest, and resistance interchangeably.

In other words, you can be a sincere, informed American citizen, and recognize that your fellow Americans are hurting and expressing their pain. It does not have to be filtered and sanitized through the state or the press to be legitimized.”

#blm #black lives matter #justice for george floyd

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eponymous-rose · 6 years

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The Briarwood Arc: A Summary (with timestamps!)

With all the excitement over CR’s new Kickstarter stretch goals including an animated series covering the first campaign’s Briarwood Arc, I thought it might be handy to have a little reference for folks wanting to jump in at this point (which, as it happens, is a great jumping-in point for the first campaign). This arc is a fan-favorite because it really marks the starting point of a lot of the more serious character development in the show, while setting the standard for bringing a character’s backstory front-and-center into the main plotline. It also happens to contain a ton of especially cinematic moments.

If you just want to jump in now, the Briarwood Arc is generally considered to be episodes 24-36 of the first campaign. Be aware that earlier episodes contain the chat (often a bastion of complaints; a strategically placed post-it note on the screen goes a long way) and also a player who leaves the show permanently after episode 27 (more info here). While there are good moments and context provided earlier on, it actually works just fine to jump in on episode 28 as the start of the arc.

If you’d like a summary of the arc, complete with timestamped links to key moments, read on!

The Briarwood Arc is tied in with the backstory of Taliesin Jaffe’s character, named (deep breath) Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III.

Before meeting up with Vox Machina, Percy spent most of his time inventing and tinkering. One night, the de Rolos took Lord Sylas and Lady Delilah Briarwood in at their castle in Whitestone, invited them to stay for dinner... and the Briarwoods promptly started killing everyone, with the help of some of those inside the castle. Percy’s younger sister Cassandra helped him escape the attack, but she was shot down in a hail of arrows, and Percy barely survived by jumping into a freezing river. Not long after that, Percy started having dreams where a cloud of black smoke demanded vengeance... at which point he promptly woke up and started designing his first gun.

He’s been traveling with the rest of the group for some time now, studiously ignoring what’s been going on in the north and mostly trying to keep a low profile.

Things start taking a turn when, in episode 14, the party has a meeting with Sovereign Uriel Tal’Dorei, one of their most powerful political allies. Uriel casually mentions the Briarwoods’ names in passing (1:02:49). Percy manages to rally from that moment of shock and takes Uriel aside to fish for more details (1:25:28); he requests that any further information about the Briarwoods be sent his way.

Radio silence ensues until the party returns to Emon in episode 23, when Seeker Asum Emring (Uriel’s spymaster) approaches Percy to let him know the Briarwoods are coming to town in a week for a feast in their honor, celebrating the opening of a new trade route with the northeast (3:04:45). Asum’s clever enough (and has by now had enough northbound spies “mysteriously retire”) to be suspicious of the Briarwoods and is determined to keep an eye on them.

The start of episode 24 has the party finally talking about all this as a group; Percy explains his past history with the Briarwoods (0:20:48), and reveals that his Pepperbox revolver has names scrawled across five of the six barrels: the Briarwoods, plus three individuals who’d helped them in their slaughter. He mentions that he’d already tried to confront one of the three, Dr. Anna Ripley, but that her guards threw him into prison before he could even get close enough to see her face, which is how he wound up in the jail cell where the party first met him. Vox Machina pledge their support (0:28:47) to a tearful Percy, and start preparing for this unknown confrontation with the Briarwoods.

The plan (such as it is) is to have Scanlan turn Vax invisible during the feast, so he can do some snooping around. Percy will enter the feast disguised as Vax, just in case he gets put in a position to be recognized. They’ll play it by ear from there, following Percy’s lead.

The party runs into Asum at the main gates, and he instantly sees through Percy’s disguise when he doesn’t quite manage an imitation of Vax’s voice. (2:49:30) Asum mentions that Vax should meet him in the foyer while the feast’s underway to help him out with his reconnaissance.

Vox Machina watch as the Briarwoods make their appearance (2:59:10); they seem extremely self-possessed and charming, and a very tense dinner ensues. In the suspense, Vax completely forgets about going to reconnoiter with Asum, and then decides to follow the Briarwoods to their room at the end of the night to see what he can find out (3:39:00). After dispatching their guards, he opens the door to their chamber... only to see both of them looking directly at him. (3:43:10).

Episode 25 picks up after that cliffhanger, with an increasingly desperate Vax trying to talk his way out of the room (0:14:00). Sylas reveals himself to be a vampire, and he and Delilah attack. Vax manages to jump out a window and yell a warning to the rest of the group through the Earring of Whisper, but soon finds himself bleeding out alone at the Briarwoods’ feet (0:39:15). The rest of the party arrives in the courtyard just in the nick of time (complete with a legendary couple of rolls from Vex - 0:58:48) to rescue Vax from the brink of death, and to pull a baffled Asum out of the effects of a charm spell. In the battle, Vex is nearly killed in one shot by a particularly powerful spell from Delilah.

During the confrontation, the Briarwoods recognize Percy (1:16:38). They attempt to flee via carriage, then successfully flee via magic, but invite Percy and the rest of the party to join them in Whitestone, casually mentioning that it would be nice for him to visit his family once in a while (1:52:50).

Frustrated by the Briarwoods’ departure, Percy brutally interrogates the Briarwoods’ carriage driver, a terrified young man named Desmond (1:55:10). The party decides to lock Desmond up in their keep, mainly for his own protection. On a little side venture to help out Lillith, an ally who emerged unexpectedly during the fight, Percy snaps and completely annihilates a baddie (3:06:15), which understandably worries the group even more.

Unfortunately, after this big Percy-centric episode, Taliesin unfortunately is too ill to participate in episode 26, and Percy spends it working feverishly in his laboratory. For the rest of Vox Machina, the order of the day is having to explain to Uriel Tal’Dorei why they attacked important allies out of nowhere, which doesn’t go over super well (0:39:31). Asum reveals to the group that he’s keeping an eye on things and is trying to act like he’s still under the Briarwoods’ charm. In a frustrated attempt to improve their image by helping out some farmers, shit gets a little weird for Vox Machina (2:34:38).

Episode 27 opens with Percy waking up from a horrific nightmare about his family being slaughtered... that promptly takes form when he goes to check on Desmond and finds him being strangled by an invisible presence in the cells (0:17:07). Luckily, with Trinket’s help (and the rest of Vox Machina returning home at an opportune time), Desmond is saved and the ghostly presence is defeated, but it’s clear that there’s only one way forward: the party starts on the road to Whitestone.

In episode 28, after battling a behir along the way, the party arrives in Whitestone and cautiously scopes it out to find a city composed of an exhausted, downtrodden populace working in fear of the “new nobles” (1:39:00), with zombified giants patrolling the streets. The party’s plan right now centers around the city’s central symbol of hope: if they can bring the Sun Tree, a holy tree to the sun god Pelor in the town square, back to its earlier splendor, they hope to be able to thwart this vampiric assault on the city.

Unfortunately, as they get closer, they realize the Sun Tree has become a gallows. And the bodies are a very specific message. (2:39:13)

From an underground hideout, Keyleth uses her druidic abilities to attempt to commune with the Sun Tree, but discovers that it is, in fact, dead (2:54:05). Welcome to Whitestone.

Episode 29 starts with Keyleth attempting to resurrect the Sun Tree (and Travis and Laura battling traffic to get to the show), while Percy, Scanlan, and Vax check out a temple Percy remembers from his youth, the Zenith (0:26:27). This is the start of Vox Machina’s epic battle against doors, as it takes the three of them multiple spells and half an hour in real time to defeat... an unlocked door.

Once inside, they find the remains of Father Reynal and square off with a banshee that nearly kills Percy twice before Scanlan manages to finish it off (1:07:45). They discover that this temple has become a laboratory for someone who lost their hand attempting to replicate Percy’s firearm technology. At Percy’s request, Vax carves the de Rolo family crest into the altar, along with “Pelor lives in Whitestone”.

The party reconvenes and decides on the next course of action: attacking one of the “new nobles” of the town, one of the names on Percy’s List. Kerrion Stonefell. The party spends the night in their underground hideout, and Percy emphatically Does Not sleep well (1:29:45).

Before scoping out Stonefell’s mansion, the party decides to sow some seeds of rebellion in the city and chats with Keeper Yennen, a religious leader in the city, at his temple, the Lady’s Chamber. Percy doesn’t outright reveal his identity (the party’s been proceeding in disguise), but makes ambiguous statements that pique Yennen’s interest (2:04:30).

The party proceeds to Stonefell’s mansion and manages to infiltrate completely successfully, surprising Stonefell and launching into a vicious battle with perfect timing before he can set up his defenses (2:31:40). When Stonefell sees Percy’s weapon, he’s immediately confused and utters, “Ripley?”, revealing her to be the one who has been experimenting on Percy’s technology. Throughout the battle, dark smoke begins pouring from Percy’s body, and things get decidedly creepy as he dons a bird-faced mask to make the final blow on Stonefell (3:21:55). He promptly huddles in a corner of the room and tries to carve Stonefell’s name off his Pepperbox.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party brings around Vouk, Stonefell’s lieutenant. They try to get some information from him, and Vouk offers to take them to the Briarwoods’ “project room” below the castle in exchange for his life, which they decide isn’t very valuable information and is more likely a trap. Percy, coming out of his stupor as he discovers that Stonefell’s name has actually vanished from his gun, decides it’s best to set Vouk free, on the condition that he is marked and his tongue taken. Grog is only too happy to oblige, and Percy brands him with his gun (3:45:17). Grog and Scanlan are on board with this violence. The half-elves (Keyleth and the twins) are getting increasingly unnerved. The party carries the survivors out of the building, and Keyleth lights the mansion on fire once they’re out.

Episode 30 (which features everyone’s Halloween costumes) begins with a much-needed heart-to-heart among Vox Machina in their underground hideout about the nature of morality and trust (0:16:30). Their sleep that night is interrupted by a vampire attack that is in part thwarted by... Scanlan pissing on one, because running water (1:00:45). Even after the party relocates away from directly under the Sun Tree for the rest of the night, Percy has another restless night’s sleep, awakening with an even more heightened sense of corruption and sadism (1:31:08).

The party meets up with Jordana Whisk, the daughter of Simon, an enchanter Percy once knew who’s now working in the castle for the Briarwoods. They reveal that Percy is alive, although he can’t drop his illusion in front of her; she gives them some supplies and recommends they return to the Lady’s Chamber to speak further with Keeper Yennen. They do so, and wind up in a private conversation with Yennen and Percy’s father’s former chancellor, Archibald Desnay.

In front of these two allies, Percy finally reveals his true identity (2:35:20). But there’s another bombshell ready to drop: Archibald reveals that Percy’s sister Cassandra is alive, and has been secretly helping with the rebellion from her seat in the castle.

The party splits up past this point; there are three more nobles’ mansions remaining, so the party sends Scanlan alone to one to create a distraction while they attack another, leaving the fourth mansion for last. Scanlan... promptly turns into a triceratops (2:58:45).

Episode 31 opens with a truly epic segment in which Scanlan, working alone, just... annihilates the mansion through an increasingly bizarre sequence of events (0:14:55). It’s a glorious and surreal half-hour that culminates with the goliath Duke Goran Vedmire, one of the Briarwoods’ allies, getting thrown off a flaming rooftop in the middle of a thunderstorm. As you do.

The rest of Vox Machina, meanwhile, attacks Count Tylieri’s mansion, and discover the Count to be a vampire. Not to be outdone, Trinket rips off his head in the battle that ensues (1:32:00). The party starts interrogating a surviving guard, but when they discover that these guards were responsible for killing the people strung up on the Sun Tree, including a child, Vax slits his throat (2:07:55). Vex, meanwhile, confronts Percy, who still has smoke swirling around his ankles (2:11:32).

Once again, Keyleth burns down the mansion, and as the party reunites, they find people rising up in the streets, townsfolk beginning to hack down the zombie giants. This, it seems, is a point of no return: the rebellion has begun. Vox Machina make their way to the Sun Tree, where they find that the bodies have been cut down. In the midst of the storm, though, they see dozens, hundreds of skeletons approaching; the Briarwoods’ answer to the nascent rebellion (0:49:47).

Episode 32 opens with the unexpected return of a friend in spectral form: Pike crashes into the battle and starts annihilating skeletons (0:24:55), doing what a cleric does best. The party then splits into two groups to help the townsfolk deal with the remaining zombie giants. These dispatched, they regroup and learn that Pike’s been having visions of Whitestone, particularly of Percy; thanks to her goddess Sarenrae’s aid, she’s been sent in this spectral form to assist the party.

Heartened by the return of their friend, the party starts toward the castle itself. They find the hidden passage Percy and Cassandra used to escape during the attack and start in toward the castle. Very conscious of her friends’ concerns, alongside her own, Pike casts a restoration spell on Percy, who isn’t completely recovered, but seems a little less shaky (2:32:30).

Resting for the night in the tunnel, Percy and Vax have a heart-to-heart (2:42:45). Percy dreams again that night, this time hearing an ominous voice: “Don’t forget our deal.” (2:47:10)

Moving ahead the next day, the party emerges into the castle’s dungeons, where they find an old woman locked in a cell. After some awkward questioning, the group decides it’s probably best to come back for her later. At the old woman’s insistence, Vex pretends to try to pick the lock, and when she messes it up, the woman grabs her with both hands... except she doesn’t, because one of her hands is an illusion (3:32:40). Vex remembers that Anna Ripley lost a hand trying to reproduce Percy’s technology.

Coming off that realization, episode 33 begins with Vex revealing what she just figured out to the party (0:14:55). Keyleth dispels the woman’s illusion, revealing Anna Ripley, who immediately wants to join the party in taking the Briarwoods down. She explains that she helped the Briarwoods kill the de Rolos and seize power five years ago, but was just brought in to help out with some sort of mysterious construction project under the castle. When the work was finished, she claims, the Briarwoods were finished with her and locked her up to languish in the cell. Percy, bolstered by magical means, convinces her to lead them to Cassandra and further demands that she tell them how to find Professor Anders, his former teacher who turned on the family in the attack (Anders, Ripley, and the Briarwoods are the remaining names on the barrels of Percy’s gun).

When Percy reveals his identity to her, Ripley is frightened, but also unabashedly delighted (0:31:45). Unfortunately, around this time, Pike’s astral form dissipates.

The party, shaken and uneasy, allows Ripley to lead them to her chambers to get some of her things. Ripley reveals her latest project: a firearm she’s created based on Percy’s designs, working based off secondhand accounts. The party confiscates that, as well as a few potions, but lets her keep her armor in case of trouble.

They continue on to Cassandra’s chambers, where they find correspondence with Archibald Desnay about the ins and outs of several failed rebellion attempts. Percy starts to get impatient that they still haven’t found Cassandra (1:06:30). Ripley reveals a little more information: the Briarwoods have been working on some sort of distillery, used to melt down and focus the eponymous whitestone found in the region into “residuum”, which has powerful magical properties. The Briarwoods are using this residuum to do something with an old Ziggurat located beneath the castle, but she knows nothing more about that side of it beyond that it involves some third party. She hazards a guess that the Ziggurat is located right underneath the Sun Tree itself.

When the party expresses an interest in skipping over Anders and going straight for the Briarwoods, Ripley starts baiting Percy, reminding him that Anders was his sister’s keeper, and convinces him to go after Anders instead (1:11:55). Vex, frustrated and keeping an arrow nocked at Ripley’s throat, tells Vax to sneak ahead and check out the study.

As Vax gets close to the study, he sees a frantic-looking Anders holding a knife to Cassandra’s throat. As Vax jumps in to intervene, Cassandra calls out that it’s a trap (1:19:46). Anders promptly slits her throat. The rest of the party hastens to catch up, with Vex tasking Trinket to hang on to Ripley. Keyleth heals a very confused Cassandra (a detail the party misses: when Cassandra is healed, there’s suddenly no more blood on her skin or clothing). Grog gets caught in a Dominate Person spell and is ordered to kill Vax, which he nearly succeeds in doing; a couple more hits from magically animated suits of armor take Vax near to death, but Keyleth and Vex bring him back from the brink.

Meanwhile, Percy, bird-shaped mask concealing his face, wreathed once again in black smoke, confronts Anders (2:00:00). It does not end well for the professor. Anders’ name flares and vanishes from the barrel of Percy’s gun. Vex grabs Percy by the hand and tells him to take off the mask (2:09:15).

When the last enemies are dispatched, the party realizes that Ripley’s making an escape; Grog, Scanlan, and Trinket nearly catch up with her, but she uses magic to evade capture and disappears. A badly shaken Vax approaches Keyleth: “You know I’m in love with you, right?” (0:04:00)

Percy castigates and then thanks Vax for his rash action, then turns to Cassandra for the first time in five years. “...hi.” (0:17:57) Cassandra reveals that the Briarwoods took her in after the arrows felled her, healed her, and set her up as a caged figurehead in the castle to earn them legitimacy. They talk about the Briarwoods’ plans, and Cassandra insists that she’ll be accompanying the group, wearing her mother’s armor, especially since she’s been working against the Briarwoods by aiding rebellions for so long. She and Percy have a great little sibling moment (0:21:30). On their way down into the cellars of the castle, Cassandra reveals that Delilah isn’t a vampire like Sylas, but is instead an extremely powerful human necromancer. The two of them speak frequently of this third party, “The Whispered One”.

The party fights spirits of the de Rolo’s ancestors on their way down; one ghost comes very close to killing Percy outright. Scanlan heals him, then literally mocks the ghost to death... again. (1:59:30)

Episode 34 has the party at a crossroads, with one path leading toward the acid pits used in the residuum distillation process (Pike has also returned, in spectral form). The party finds a bronze room with several small gemstones built into the floor. After some experimentation, with each member of the party touching a gemstone, Cassandra finds a gemstone next to a door nearby and touches it... and two large walls of green glass slam down, trapping Vox Machina in the room.

Behind Cassandra, the Briarwoods walk through the door. Vax immediately notices a placard behind them and uses his magical cloak to teleport to it, slamming one hand on the button. The Briarwoods are amused as the button, horrifically, causes acid to be pumped into the room containing the rest of Vox Machina... (1:19:14). Lord Briarwood promptly uses charm magic to pull Vax to their side, and they bring him with them as they leave Vox Machina to be dissolved.

And Cassandra? Cassandra confronts Percy through the glass: “Your sister left us the day those arrows found my chest. She did not die from those wounds, but to watch you leave me there in the snow. I have a new family. I am a Briarwood, and I have a destiny with the Whispered One.” (1:26:40)

Once Vox Machina have been left alone, Pike notices that the acid melts whitestone, and that the ceiling of this room is made of whitestone. Using a flying potion confiscated from Ripley, Vex manages to turn the tubes delivering the acid so they burn an escape route into the ceiling.

As the party begins to trail after the Briarwoods, Cassandra, and Vax, Percy realizes that there’s a new name on the previously blank barrel of his gun: Cassandra de Rolo. (2:07:42)

The party manages to surprise the Briarwoods on the stairs leading up to the top of the ziggurat, and the fight begins in earnest. In the fray, Vax manages to break out of the charm spell, and while Cassandra begins the fight on the Briarwoods’ side, she eventually drops her sword, torn and uncertain. Keyleth nearly annihilates Sylas with a couple of well-placed Sunbeam spells, and Scanlan thwarts Delilah’s attempt to teleport him to safety with a Counterspell.

Percy manages to shoot Delilah, but Cassandra runs to her with a healing potion. Keyleth and Pike take that moment to destroy Sylas Briarwood once and for all. (3:44:46)

Delilah is devastated. “You can’t... I broke the world for us! No...” (3:47:11) She uses short-range teleportation to get out of the immediate line of fire. Vax and Grog knock out Cassandra and tie her up, to confront later.

Still able to fly thanks to the potion she took earlier, Vex gets a bird’s-eye view of the inside of the ziggurat: a room with the shape of a hand carved into the floor. Delilah’s standing at the center of it, reading some sort of scroll.

The party jumps into action, taking shots at Delilah from the top of the wall into the room, but she’s focused on her spell and splashes some of her own blood on a black orb in the center of the room.

The orb starts to spin. (4:04:30) All around Delilah, the walls are covered in a tapestry of hundreds of dead bodies, each missing their left hand and/or left eye, and they begin to writhe.

Vex, still flying, dives down to try to get the orb out of there. Delilah turns and casts the same spell on her she did back in episode 25: Finger of Death. (4:13:49) Vex comes within 1 HP of being permanently killed by the spell.

Delilah turns back to the orb, which spins faster and faster... and suddenly flashes, in an instant, down to the size of a dime. Her terrified anticipation turns to horror. “It can’t be too soon.”

The writhing walls stop. In fact, all magic within the ziggurat stops... including Vex’s flying spell. (4:16:40) She hits the ground with enough force to knock her out, and it takes the frantic party a moment to realize that they can’t heal her with magic, and she’s now bleeding out. Percy shoots Delilah, but manages not to kill her outright, instead shooting off her arm. Fortunately, Vex stabilizes on her own.

A terrified Vax stays with his sister while the rest of the party drags the unconscious Lady Briarwood away. Keyleth stays behind, experimentally poking a piece of residuum glass into the orb... and promptly takes a massive amount of damage and is nearly sucked into it (4:33:21). Vax realizes she stayed behind and runs back toward her... but she recognizes that her initial plan of collapsing the ziggurat isn’t going to work if she can’t use magic. The party flees.

Episode 35 starts with Vex being revived and healed outside the antimagic effect of the orb. A dazed, exhausted, and overwhelmed Cassandra explains her part in all this: the Briarwoods didn’t just keep her around for legitimacy, they kept her around to find out about and quash rebellions like the ones that Archibald attempted. (0:40:38) She finally makes eye contact with Percy, realizing that even with the (magically and non-magically) charming influence of the Briarwoods and her fury and fear at how Percy left her for dead, her family deserves to be avenged.

The familiar black smoke begins to billow out of Percy’s sleeves, and the smoke entity that’s been speaking to him begins demanding revenge. (0:41:30) Percy points the gun at Lady Briarwood’s head and demands that the entity take Cassandra’s name off the gun. “Did I even want revenge before I talked to you?”

The party’s very unnerved by this entire conversation, especially considering they can only hear Percy’s side of it and they see him occasionally putting the gun to his own head. Percy fires the gun at Lady Briarwood’s hand, revealing that the gun was broken in the fight. “I’m not satisfied. I want my money back.” The entity tries something, but Percy shrugs it off.

Lady Briarwood regains consciousness and Percy demands answers, creating the illusion of Sylas’ death to torment her (0:46:00). Delilah, boiling with fury, just mutters that the Whispered One gave her Sylas back, and Percy took him from her again. The group knocks her out again.

Pike and Scanlan recall some information about the Whispered One: it’s a phrase used to refer to the name “Vecna”, a powerful archlich, who once, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, tried to ascend to godhood and was halted in that process.

As the conversation continues, Percy begins to reach for his rifle, but pushes away the urge, and actually manages to expel the strange smoke creature from his body (0:59:19). The party very literally battles Percy’s demon, and Grog and Trinket manage to destroy it (2:02:05). A little remnant of darkness remains in Percy, but the creature is destroyed.

Percy defers to Cassandra when it comes to executing Delilah (2:03:50). Cassandra stabs her. “You took them away from me. And now we’re taking everything away from you.”

The party walks back past the acid pits. As they do, Scanlan uses magic to convince Percy to hand him his gun, the Pepperbox, and promptly throws it into the acid (0:05:26). That last little nugget of darkness in Percy’s chest vanishes as the gun is melted. Percy is somewhat more alarmed at how expensive the gun will be to replace.

Vox Machina emerge back into the city of Whitestone, where the townsfolk have gathered up the last of the Briarwoods’ powerful allies (minus Ripley, who is nowhere to be seen). Grog executes a Countess Jazna Grebin, but Vedmire (who survived his fall off the building) is kept alive, in keeping with Percy’s determination that Whitestone is now a city of mercy. Vox Machina also discreetly let some people know about the horrific scene below the castle, and start gathering people to study the orb and its antimagic effects.

Keyleth goes to check on the Sun Tree, and determines that the tree isn’t so much dead as dormant, and is now starting to awaken again. Vax finds her there, and after some awkwardness (mostly out-of-character flailing by the rest of the group), tells her that he’ll give her all the time she needs to process his confession: “If you’ll have me, I’m yours.” (0:59:14)

The sun finally sets on a clear night in Whitestone, and the rebuilding begins. (1:05:34)

(Episode 36, you ask? Episode 36 is Whitestone celebrating its first Winter’s Crest Festival in a very, very long time.)

#critical role #critical role spoilers #long text post

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beesmygod · 6 years

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netflix’s new horror movie “bird box” sucks ass and not in a funny, enjoyable way: a review

first im going to preface this review with this: im sick. i caught a cold on the way home from reno and spent the day recovering watching this garbage instead of doing anything that required a working brain. i knew i wasn’t going to get anything mind-blowing but “bird box” teeters heavily on “insultingly bad” instead of just “bad” and it kept me mad about having wasted two hours of my life for a solid 24 hours straight.

so if this review doesn’t make sense, its partly because im sick, and partly bc this movie doesn’t make sense. this review is also impossible to structure because i dont even know where to begin. maybe here: the directing is derivative, boring and bad. its like watching paint dry. the whole movie looks like your grandma’s house smells.

to re-iterate: this movie is 2 hours long. i’ll save you 2 hours by telling you that you never see the monster, ever. sandra bullock admitted to laughing out loud repeatedly on set at the monster when it was revealed to her which lead to it being cut from the movie. if we had seen the monster, maybe the movie would have been bumped up from a d- to a c+ just because the mental image of a long green baby with john malkovich’s voice is pretty funny.

the bird box, probably

for a movie about a monster, this movie has a serious monster problem. in that the monster is not a problem. the monster (which is never given a name in the movie) can’t seem to actually do anything to you if you don’t look at it. its only power seems to be making you kill yourself when you see it (unless you’re crazy which, thats a whole other kettle of fish. give me a minute). so if you don’t look at it you’re fine? there’s several points in the movie where the monster is physically close to them but doesn’t actually do anything except beg them to take off their blindfolds and look at them. its almost pathetic. as far as i can tell, the monster’s only powers are to make leaves fly upward for no reason (i.e. to indicate its in the area without the camera having to focus on anything specific) and yell at you. but, like, as long as you don’t take off your blindfold (and somehow, people do in this movie) then you’re probably fine.

now, if you’re “crazy” (I KNOW YOU’RE ALREADY ASKING QUESTIONS HOLD ON) then looking at the monster turns you into a stereotypical evangelist for an eldritch horror. you run around saying “crazy” things that read like enemy npc chatter in ps2 era survival horror game. for example:

then, you spend all your time trying to get people to look at it by holding their eyes open. “bird box” does not bother to explain what “crazy” means in this context. according the the story, roving gangs of tokyo-drifting escaped asylum patients rule the post-apocalyptic landscape of the pacific northwest. its impossible to tackle how many layers of like morally wrong it is to yet again shove the mentally ill into the role of antagonists (im getting exhausted just thinking about piling up all the reasons this is so fucking bad) to the point of making them a fucking enemy class. its almost more succinct just to point out that “bird box” thinks mental illness is an on/off switch you toggle rather than a spectrum. i know this movie is a relic of the past (dec 2018) but i feel like this is such a basic fact about the world as we know it today that the decision to ignore it makes me wonder if the writer was operating under the assumption that horror monster “rules” need to be clearly defined as though they were conceived for use in a videogame.

if_crazy=“yes”, then bird=box

speaking of the titular “bird box”: the movie is called that because they literally keep birds. in a box. the birds tell you when the monster is coming, so you can put on your blindfold. but heres the thing: the monster makes GGGGRRRRRROOORRORORO sounds nonstop when its running around in the area. you know when it’s coming. you can hear it coming from a mile away. so there’s really no point in having, a bird box. at one point the monster is so loud they can’t hear the birds over its roaring. whats the point of the birds? as it turns out, the birdbox, is useless. much lIKE THIS MOVI

this movie is a never ending cascade of cliches and stolen plot points, characters, ideas. it steals from “the happening” (blatantly, its the same movie right down to the ugly color scheme of every frame), “dawn of the dead”, “pontypool”, “the mist” and pretty much every post-apocalyptic monster movie ever. bd wong is confirmed as a gay man literally 2 minutes before he dies on screen. the black comedic lead dies next. a pregnant woman is introduced and you’ll NEVER guess what happens to her. you could set your watch to this movie. its pathetic.

welp, he’s dead

i’m going to link this guy’s deconstruction of the weird incestual overtones that are also impossible to miss and interpret without wanting to die.

im getting exhausted again. this movie is not fun bad. this post is to serve as a warning to the curious. in fact, im going to spoil the end for you, so you truly understand why i’m so fucking mad. i want you, right now, to imagine based on what i’ve told you what the most hackney, cliche, stupid, moronic ending twist could be to this movie about a monster you can’t look at. fully form it in you head. dare to imagine the dumbest thing you can.

ready?

YOU SEE

#bird box #review

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Brian Jarvis, Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture, 3 Crime Media Cult 326 (2007)

Abstract

Serial killing has become big business. Over the past 15 years, popular culture has been flooded by true-life crime stories, biographies, best-selling fiction, video games and television documentaries devoted to this subject. Cinema is the cultural space in which this phenomenon is perhaps most conspicuous. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 800 films featuring serial killers and most of the contributions to this sub-genre have been made since 1990. This article examines seminal examples of serial killer fiction and film including Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels and their cinematic adaptations, Bret Easton Ellis and Mary Harron’s American Psycho (1991 and 2000) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). The main contention is that the commodification of violence in popular culture is structurally integrated with the violence of commodification itself. Starting with the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed, this article then attempts to uncover less transparent links between the normal desires which circulate within consumer society and monstrous violence. In ‘Monsters Inc.’, the serial killer is unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

But the notion of the monster is rather difficult to deal with, to get a hold on, to stabilize . . . monstrosity may reveal or make one aware of what normality is. (Derrida, 1995: 386)

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin (1999a) memorably proclaimed that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (p. 248). In contemporary US culture Benjamin’s chilling axiom is turned on its head: it seems there is now no act of barbarism which fails to become a document of civilization. Serial killing, to take one important example of this trend, has become big business within the culture industry. In his cult documentary, Collectors (2000), Julian Hobbs both explores and contributes to the explosive proliferation of art and artefacts associated with serial killers. Hobbs investigates the burgeoning market for ‘murderabilia’ and follows enthusiasts in this field who avidly build collections which mirror the serial killer’s own modus operandi of collecting fetish objects.

Murderabilia ranges from serial killer art (paintings, drawings, sculpture, letters, poetry), to body parts (a lock of hair or nail clippings) from crime scene materials to kitsch merchandising that includes serial killer T-Shirts, calendars, trading cards, board games, Halloween masks and even action figures of ‘superstars’ like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Although it might be tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as the sick hobby of a deviant minority, murderabilia is merely the hardcore version of a mainstream obsession with the serial killer. Following negative publicity, trading in murderabilia was banned on eBay in 2001. However, it is still possible to purchase a vast array of legitimate serial killer merchandise online and elsewhere. A keyword search for ‘serial killer’ at Amazon, for example, produces hundreds of links to gruesome biographies, true-life crime stories and best-selling fiction by Thomas Harris, Patricia Cornwall, Caleb Carr and others. A search for ‘Jack the Ripper’ uncovers 248 books, 24 DVDs, 15 links to popular music, a video game and a 10’ action figure. The Jack the Ripper video game invites players to solve the Whitechapel murders, but a large number of its competitors profit by encouraging ‘recreational killing’. In some of the most commercially successful video games, one’s cyber-self may be a detective, a soldier or a Jedi Knight, but the raw materials of fantasy are constant: an endless series of killings.

In Christopher Priest’s novel, The Extremes (1998), FBI agent Teresa Simons becomes dangerously addicted to a Virtual Reality (VR) training programme which recreates infamous serial killings. It might be argued that other elements in Priest’s novel are ‘re- creations’: the focus on a female FBI agent seems indebted to the Silence of the Lambs and the VR game, known as ‘ExEx’ (Extreme Experience), recalls the SID 6.7 software in Virtuosity (1995). In Brett Leonard’s science fiction film, SID 6.7 is a computer pro- gramme which synthesizes the personalities of 183 serial killers and mass murderers including Ted Bundy, Vlad the Impaler, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler. Somewhat inevitably, SID (short for Sadistic, Intelligent and Dangerous) escapes virtuality and is hunted down by a detective played by Denzel Washington. Shortly after he starred in Virtuosity, Washington appeared in a supernatural serial killer film (Fallen, 1998) and a forensic serial killer film (The Bone Collector, 1999). Three serial killer films in four years is less a signature of Washington’s star persona than a symptom of the recent growth spurt experienced by this sub-genre. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 800 films featuring serial killers and most of them have been made in the past 15 years. Serial killer cinema has many faces: there are serial killer crime dramas (Manhunter, 1986; Se7en, 1995; Hannibal, 2001; Saw, 2004), supernatural serial killers (Halloween, 1978; Friday the 13th, 1980; Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984), serial killer science fiction (Virtuosity, 1995; Jason X, 2001), serial killer road movies (Kalifornia, 1993; Natural Born Killers, 1994), true-life crime dramas (Ted Bundy, 2002; Monster, 2003), documentaries (John Wayne Gacy: Buried Secrets (1996) and Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1994)), post-modern pastiche (Scream, 1996; I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997) and even serial killer comedies (So I Married an Axe Murderer, 1993; Serial Mom, 1994; Scary Movie, 2000). The expansion of this diverse sub-genre is facilitated by the fact that films about serial killing often appear as part of a series (Saw 1, Saw 2, Saw 3). The serial killer has also become a staple ingredient in TV cop shows (like CSI and Law and Order) and cult series (for example, Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Millennium).

According to Robert Conrath (1996: 156), ‘when Jeffrey Dahmer’s house of carnage was discovered in Milwaukee in 1991, television rights to his story were being negotiated within the hour’. Over the next few years, Dahmer was the subject of numerous documentaries (including An American Nightmare (1993) and The Monster Within (1996)), films (The Secret Life (1993) and Dahmer (2002)), several biographies and Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalized Zombie (1996), a comic strip (by Derf, a cartoonist and coincidentally Dahmer’s childhood acquaintance) and a concept album by a heavy metal band called Macabre. The extensive media coverage of Dahmer’s exploits in 1991 coincided with the release of Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (which won the Best Picture Oscar and grossed US$272,700,000 in worldwide box-office) as well as the controversial and commercially successful Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho (1991). Since the early 1990s, the translation of serial killer shock value into surplus value has become an increasingly profitable venture. This market both reflects and produces an apparently insatiable desire for images and stories of serial killing in a gothic hall of mirrors. According to case histories and psychological profiles, serial killers themselves are often avid consumers of films and books about serial killing. At the same time, the fictional monstrous murderers in popular culture, from Norman Bates to Hannibal Lecter, are often modelled on historical figures. In this context, Philip Jenkins (1994) proposes that, at least in the popular imaginary, the distinction between historical serial killers and their cinematic counterparts is dis- solving. In fact, even the label of ‘serial killer’ indirectly belongs to cinema. This term was coined by Robert Ressler, an FBI agent who named the killers he pursued after the ‘serial adventures’ he watched as a child in US cinemas. In his study of serial killers, Mark Seltzer (1998: 129) has offered a compelling critique of the virtualization of violence: ‘fascination with scenes of a spectacularized bodily violence is inseparable from the binding of violence to scene, spectacle, and representation’. The engine which drives this process is primarily economic. The commodification of violence is inseparable from the violence of commodification. In this article I wish to build on the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed towards the less transparent links that exist between consumerism itself and violence. A range of serial killer texts will be examined with the aim of uncovering unexpected intimacies between monstrous violence and the normal desires that circulate within consumer society. The serial killer will be unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

JUST DO IT: Killers, Consumers and Violence

Most people could confidently identify a serial killer, but definitions are more elusive. How many murders does it take to make a serial killer? Do these homicides need to involve a specific MO, in particular locations and within a prescribed time frame? Do serial killers have a characteristic relationship to their victim? Do they have to be motivated by sexual fantasy rather than material gain? And how exactly do serial killers differ from mass murderers and spree killers? There are competing definitions of the serial killer inside and outside the academic world. I have neither the space nor the skill to offer an authoritative classification, and so for the purpose of this article my working definition will of necessity be expansive. My focal point here will be fictional representations of the serial killer in film and fiction, but I will include reference to historical counterparts and supernatural metaphors (specifically, the vampire and zombie as figurative practitioners of serial homicide). The number of murders committed, the individual MOs, the timing and setting of the crimes, the connection to the victim and the motivation will be wildly divergent, but, in each instance, I hope to reveal covert affinities between the ‘monstrous’ serial killer and the ‘normal’ consumer.

While precise defintions prove elusive, the clichés are unavoidable. One of the most conspicuous commonplaces in the popular discourses of serial killing concerns the terrifying normality of the murderer. Rather than appearing monstrously different, the serial killer displays a likeness that disturbs the dominant culture. The violence of consumerism is similarly hidden beneath a façade of healthy normality. The glossy phantasmagoria of youth and beauty, freedom and pleasure, obscures widespread devastation and suffering. Etymology is instructive in this regard: to ‘consume’ is to devour and destroy, to waste and obliterate. With this definition in mind, Baudrillard (1998: 43) has traced a provocative genealogy between contemporary capitalism and tribal potlatch: ‘consumerism may go so far as consumation, pure and simple destruction’. The consumation of contemporary consumer capitalism assumes multiple forms: pollution, waste and the ravaging of non-renewable resources, bio-diversity and endangered species; the slaughter of animals for food, clothing and medicine; countless acts of violence against the consumer’s body that range from spectacular accidents to slow tortures and poisonings. At the national level the consumer economy produces radical inequalities that encourage violent crime. At the international level, consumer capitalism depends heavily on a ‘new slavery’ for millions in the developing world who are incarcerated in dangerous factories and sweatshops and subjected to the repetitive violence of Fordist production. In his autobiography, My Life and Work, Henry Ford calculated that the manufacture of a Model T required 7882 distinct operations but only 949 of these required ‘able-bodied’ workers: ‘670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed and ten by blind men’ (cited in Seltzer, 1998: 69). Third-world workers trapped in this Fordist fantasy to serve the needs of first-world consumers undergo dismemberments (figurative and sometimes literal) which echo the violent tortures practised by serial killers in post-Fordist cinema. And the violence of consumerism is not restricted to the factories and sweatshops. In The Anatomy of Resource Wars, Michael Renner (2002) explores links between first-world shopping malls and third-world war zones. Insatiable consumer demand fuels conflicts over resources in the developing world – from tropical forests to diamonds and coltan deposits (a mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones and other electronic devices). Renner estimates that these conflicts have displaced over 20 million people and raised at least US$12 billion per year for rebels, warlords and totalitarian governments: ‘most consumers don’t know that a number of common purchases bear the invisible imprint of violence’ (p. 53). Recent conflicts in the Gulf are fuelled by the needs of western car cultures. In the 20th century the development of a consumer economy was twice kick-started by global war and the roots of 19th-century consumerism were terminally entangled in colonialism and slavery.

The violence of consumerism is structural and universal rather than being an incidental and localized side effect of the system. For many in the over-developed world this violence remains largely unseen, or, when visible, apparently unconnected to consumerism. In cultural representations of the serial killer, however, consumerism and violence are often extravagantly integrated. In fact, the leading ‘brand names’ in the genre are typically depicted as über-consumers. In Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the eponymous Patrick Bateman embodies a merger between ultra- violence and compulsive consumerism. A catalogue of obscene and barbaric atrocities (serial murder, rape and torture) is interwoven with endless shopping lists of designer clothes and fashionable furniture, beauty products and audiovisual equipment, videos and CDs alongside multiple purchases at restaurants, gyms, health spas, concerts and clubs. As James Annesley (1998: 16) notes, ‘In American Psycho the word “consume” is used in all of its possible meanings: purchasing, eating and destroying’. Each brand of consumption is described in the same flat, affectless tone to underscore Bateman’s perception of everything in the world as a series of consumables arranged for his delectation.

Patrick Bateman thus represents a gothic projection of consumer pathology. In this respect, although his name echoes Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho, Bateman can be seen as a Yuppie analogue to the aristocratic Hannibal Lecter. Both killers coolly collect and consume body parts and can boast an intimate familiarity with fashionable commodities. In Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon and Hannibal, Lecter offers a connoisseur’s commentary on designer suits and Gucci shoes (a present for Clarice), handbags, perfume and aftershave. Lecter himself has become a voguish icon in millennial popular culture although his name alludes to mid-19th-century French verse. Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’ (1998 : 5) concludes with the following apostrophe:

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!

[You know him, reader, that fastidious monster, You hypocritical reader, – my double, – my brother!]

If we follow Harris’s allusion, Lecter can be read, like Bateman, as the dark double of the monstrous consumer. The serial killer’s perverse charisma might be attributed in part to their function as allegorical embodiments of consumer drives and desires. According to this reading, the serial killer’s cannibalism is less a barbaric transgression of the norm and more a Neitzschean distillation of reification (in its simplest terms the tendency, central to consumerism, to treat people as objects and objects as people).

In Silence of the Lambs, the casting of serial killer as predatory über-consumer is underscored by animal and insect imagery. Clarice Starling is haunted by traumatic childhood memories of witnessing the hidden violence of animal slaughter. Dr Lecter diagnoses her devotion to the law as an attempt to silence the ‘screaming of the lambs’. Perhaps Lecter’s cannibalism might be diagnosed as an alternate response to that ‘screaming’, one which reverses power relations by putting consumers on the menu. Alongside the lambs, moths are a second key symbol that hint at the widespread though often invisible violence of consumerism:

Some [moths] are [destructive], a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do . . . The old definition of moth was ‘anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too . . . Is this what you do all the time – hunt Buffalo Bill? . . . Do you ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer or the amusing house wine? (Harris, 1990: 102)

The second serial killer in Silence of the Lambs is similarly doubled with the consumer and associated with animal imagery. While Lecter hunts for food, the predatory Buffalo Bill hunts for clothing. After the chase, Buffalo Bill deprives his prey of subjectivity and treats them like livestock: victims are penned, fed and then flayed for their skins. The nickname given to Jame Gumb by the media is suggestive. As a professional hunter, Buffalo Bill Cody was one of those responsible for reducing the bison population in North America from approximately 60 million to around 300 by 1893. After the near extinction of his prey, Buffalo Bill moved from animal slaughter to entertainment with his travelling ‘Wild West’ show. Thomas Harris’s ‘Buffalo Bill’, with his own serial killer trade marks, combines an identical mixture of hunting, slaughter and flaying with spectacle and entertainment. Buffalo Bill, alongside Francis Dolarhyde (the name of the killer in Harris’s Red Dragon again links money, skins and a doppelganger monster, Stevenson’s Mr Hyde) and above all the iconic Hannibal Lecter, have established Harris as a brand market leader in the commodification of serial killing.

The roots of the brand – the repeated logo or symbol that identifies a product – lie in cattle ranching. At the first crime scene in David Fincher’s Se7en, a morbidly obese murder victim is discovered after being forced to eat himself to death. (This MO is repeated in Brett Leonard’s Feed (2005) when a serial killer force-feeds obese women and broadcasts their demise on the Internet). When the detectives in Se7en investigate the crime scene they discover the word ‘Gluttony’ scrawled in grease behind the victim’s refrigerator beside a neat pile of cans with the ‘Campbell’s Soup’ brand clearly visible. The repetition of the Campbell’s brand of course alludes to Warhol’s series of paintings on the subject of consumer seriality. If, like the detectives in Se7en, we are prepared to ‘look behind’ objects in serial killer texts we may discover further clues to the hidden violence of serial consumerism.

Discover A New You: Killers, Consumers, and the Dream of ‘Becoming’

His product should already have changed its skin and stripped off its original form . . . a capitalist in larval form . . . His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation, (Marx, 1990: 204, 269)

Although the serial killer in David Fincher’s Se7en justifies his murders with pseudo-religious rhetoric, the victims he chooses also exemplify some of the capital vices and anxieties exploited by consumerism: the ‘Gluttony’ victim is guilty of over-eating; the ‘Pride’ victim is a fashion model guilty of acute narcissism; the ‘Sloth’ victim, according to Richard Dyer (1999: 40), is a case study in the dangers of under-exercising; the ‘Lust’ victim embodies a hardcore version of mainstream desires and fetishes. By foregrounding ‘sins’ that are central to consumerism and by naming the murderer ‘John Doe’, Se7en hints at the hyper-normality of serial killer pathology. Key aspects of consumer sensibility intersect with the trademark features of serial killer psychology: anxious and aggressive narcissism, the compulsive collection of fetish objects and fantasies of self-transformation.

In Silence of the Lambs, the epiphanic moment in Starling’s search for Jame Gumb comes in the bedroom of the killer’s first victim: Frederika Bimmel. As a Point Of View (POV) shot surveys the dead woman’s possessions the spectator sees the following: a romantic novel (entitled Silken Threads) beside a diet book, wallpaper with a butterfly motif, a tailor’s dummy and paper diamonds in the closet. Starling intuitively connects the paper diamonds to the cuts made by Gumb in the bodies of his victims. The spect- ator, however, might make additional connections. Demme’s mise-en-scene offers a symbolic suturing of the normal girl’s bedroom and the serial killer’s lair. Both spaces house dreams of romantic metamorphosis driven by self-dissatisfaction: the moths in Gumb’s basement are linked to the Silken Threads and butterflies in Bimmel’s bedroom while the diet book suggests the young woman shared the serial killer’s anxiety about body image. Clarice Starling, the young woman figuratively donning the traditional male garb of law enforcement (a woman trying to make it in a man’s world) is perhaps too preoccupied with tracking down a man who wants to wear a ‘woman suit’ to pursue these leads. Silence of the Lambs extravagantly foregrounds the importance of gender to subject formation. At the start of the film we are introduced to Clarice Starling in androgynous sweaty sportswear while training on an obstacle course. When the spectator subsequently arrives at the serial killer’s house, we see Jame Gumb sewing, pampering his poodle and parading before the camera like a catwalk model.

Jame may be symbolically feminized, but in Demme’s film, as in Harris’ novels, Se7en, American Psycho and the vast majority of serial killer texts, the murderer is biologically male. There are variations in the statistics (roughly between 88–95%), but the vast majority of serial killers are male (Vronsky, 2004). From a feminist perspective it could be argued that serial killing is not so much a radical departure from normal codes of civilized behaviour as it is an intensification of hegemonic masculine ideals. For the serial killer the murder is a means to an end and that end intersects in places with socially sanctioned definitions of masculine identity in institutions such as the military, many working places and the sports industry. The serial killer is driven by the desire to achieve mastery, virility and control: his objective is to dominate and possess the body and the mind of his victims. According to the binary logic of patriarchy, the killer/victim dyad produces a polarization of gender norms: the killer embodies an über-masculinity while the victim who is dominated, opened and entered personifies a hyper-femininity (irrespective of biology). The gendered power relations of serial homicide climax but do not end with the act of murder. Post-mortem the murderer will often take fetish objects from his victim. These totems function as testimony to his continuing domination of a dead body which exhibits an extreme form of the passivity which patriarchy seeks to assign to the feminine.

While serial killing is both literally and symbolically a male affair, the paradigmatic consumer is of course female. According to patriarchal folklore men are the primary producers and unenthusiastic shoppers while most women are devoted consumers and typically figure in the family as the person with overall responsibility for decision making with regard to most domestic purchases. Brett Leonard’s Feed (2005) might be mentioned here as a particularly pure example of this stereotypical dichotomy between the male serial murderer and the female consumer (the victims in the film are ‘Gainers’ who are fed to death). However, since the 1980s and throughout the period which has seen a dramatic rise in serial killer art, the consumer sphere has witnessed a withering of gender polarities. From the late 19th and for much of the 20thcentury, women were the primary target of advertising, particularly in the fields of beauty and fashion. The female consumer was relentlessly bombarded by images and messages in magazines, on billboards, and then through radio, cinema and TV, that encouraged physical self-obsession. Beneath the patina of positivity, this bomb- ardment aimed to promote an anxious policing of the female body – how the body looked and felt, what went over, into and came out of it. The covert imperative of this advertising was to manufacture that sense of inadequacy and self-dissatisfaction which is the essential psychological prerequisite for luxury purchases. Since the 1980s, the beauty and fashion industries, recognizing the potential of a relatively untapped market, began to target the male consumer in a similar manner. Subsequently, there has been a massive worldwide increase in sales of male fashion accessories, cosmetics and related products.

In the context of this erosion of gender polarities within consumer culture, it is noticeable that representations of the serial killer often involve androgyny and gender crisis. The killer is typically feminized by association with consumer subjectivity. He is obsessed with different forms of consumption and collecting and driven by dreams of ‘becoming’ (the key phrase in Harris’ Red Dragon), of radically refiguring his appear- ance and thus his identity. The killer’s violence might be read both as complicity with and rebellion against feminization through a reassertion of primitive masculinity. According to Baudrillard (1996: 69), in consumer culture there is a ‘general tendency to feminize objects . . . All objects . . . become women in order to be bought’. The feminization of the commodity is structurally integrated with the commodification of the feminine and the serial killer aims to assert mastery over both spheres. The violence of serial homicide might even be diagnosed as a nostalgic mode of production (of corpses and fetish objects) for the anxious male subject.

In Silence of the Lambs, Lecter offers the following diagnosis of Gumb’s pathology: ‘He’s tried to be a lot of things . . . [But] he’s not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill’ (Harris, 1990: 159, 165). The killer is driven by a profound sense of lack to ‘covet’ (Lecter’s term) what he sees everyday and then to hunt for the new skin that would enable a radical self-transformation. In this respect Gumb constitutes a psychotic off-shoot of normal consumer psychology: his violent response to lack is deviant, but the desires which move him are mainstream. Gumb succumbs to mass media fantasy and advertising which have trained him to feel incomplete and anxious while promising magical metamorphoses on consumption of the ideal (feminized) commodity. The dreams of the serial killer and the serial consumer converge: reinvent- ing the self through bodily transformation and transcendence. Buffalo Bill, we might say, is merely fleshing out the advertising fantasy of a ‘new you’. This is the same dream of ‘becoming’ pursued by Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon/Manhunter. It is also the dream of Patrick Bateman, known by his acquaintances as ‘total GQ’ (Ellis, 1991: 90) but who, like Jame Gumb, experiences himself as ‘total lack’: ‘There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory . . . I simply am not there’ (pp. 376–7). Bateman attempts to fill the void with an endless procession of commodities and logos: designer clothes and cuisine, male grooming products and technological gadgets, Versace, Manolo Blahnik, Giorgio Armani. Bateman is a cut-up (like his victims) of commodity signs. He talks in the language of advertising and incessantly imagines himself in commercials, sit-coms, chat shows, action movies and porn films. Bateman’s ultra-violence gives physical expression to the acute feelings of anxiety and incompletion which accompany the consumer society’s unachievable fantasy of perfect bodies living perfect lives.

Silence of the Lambs similarly articulates the complex integration of violence, fantasy, gender identity and consumer subjectivity. The first clue that Lecter gives to Starling is the cryptic, ‘Look deep within yourself’. Subsequently, Starling discovers that ‘Your Self’ is in fact a storage facility in downtown Baltimore. Closer investigation uncovers a dead body in a car crammed alongside hoarded possessions. Forcing her way into ‘Your Self’, Starling discovers a decapitated man’s head placed on top of a mannequin wearing a dress. This tableau captures the dark underside of consumer psychology: erotics, fetishism, fantasy and death. The victim’s cross-dressing signifies the same yearning for self-transformation witnessed in Buffalo Bill and Frederika Bimmel. For the killer, the victim and the consumer, fantasy is the exoskeleton of the commodity. The murder, the dressing-up, the purchase; each is driven by dreams of metamorphosis. Consumption, Baudrillard (1998: 31) reminds us, ‘is governed by a form of magical thinking’. Numerous case studies have concluded that serial killers are prone to hyperactive fantasy lives (see Seltzer, 1998; Vronsky, 2004). It would be a mistake to dismiss these fantasies as merely the overture to violence; rather, the violence is a means of sustaining the fantasy. By the same token, the practice and pathology of serial consumerism are driven by fantasies that cannot be fulfilled and so are compulsively repeated. We consume not products, but dream-images from a collective phantasmagoria.

These fantasies are fuelled by capitalism’s official art form: advertising. Perhaps in part the serial killer’s crime is taking the promises of advertising too literally – acting out the fantasy of a world ready-made for our consumption. The serial killer is both a millennial vogue and perhaps the ultimate fashion victim. Every aspect of Patrick Bateman’s lifestyle – clothing, diet, gadgetry, interior design and leisure time – is dictated by fashion. In his basement, Jame Gumb adopts glamour poses before a camera and struts like a catwalk model. The Death’s Head moths in his garment sweatshop symbolically suture the fashion industry with fetishism, hidden suffering and death. In his critique of the French arcades, the first cathedrals of consumer capital and forerunners of the department store and mall, Benjamin (1999b: 62–3) argued that fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse . . . fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between women and ware – between carnal pleasure and corpse . . . For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman.

EXQUISITE CORPSE: Killers, Consumers, and Mannequins

The sexual impulse-excitations are exceptionally plastic. (Freud, 1981: 389)

According to Benjamin (1999b), a key fetish object in the phantasmagorical arcades was the mannequin:

the fashion mannequin is a token from the realm of the dead . . . the model for imitation . . . Just as the much-admired mannequin has detachable parts, so fashion encourages the fetishist fragmentation of the living body . . . the woman mimics the mannequin and enters history as a dead object. (p. 78)

One of Benjamin’s German contemporaries, Hans Bellmer, explored the deathly sensuality of the mannequin through the lens of surrealist photography. Eroticized dolls were dressed in veils and underwear or covered in flowers. The mannequin was shot both as whole and dismembered, sometimes posed coyly and at other times torturously convoluted and bound in a perverse meeting of the shop window and the S&M dungeon.

In the 80s and 90s, the photographer Cindy Sherman developed a more explicit and grisly mode of mannequin pornography. In her ‘Disaster’, ‘Fairy Tale’ and ‘Sex’ series, Sherman deploys dolls and prosthetic body parts in tableau that combine eroticism, violence and abjection. Sherman’s photographs recall Lacan’s (1989) work on ‘imagos of the fragmented body’:

These are the images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body . . . One has only to listen to children aged between two and five playing, alone or together, to know that the pulling off of the head and the ripping open of the belly are themes that occur spontaneously to their imagination, and that this is corroborated by the experience of the doll torn to pieces. (p. 179)

Imagos of the deconstructed body are everywhere in the infantile fantasies of consumer culture: perfect legs, perfect breasts, perfect hair, perfect teeth, bodies endlessly dismembered in the ceaseless strafing of advertising imagery. Sherman’s photography foregrounds the rhetoric of advertising: the dissection of the body by fashion, fitness and beauty industries into fragmentary fetishes. At the same time these images stage a spectacular return of the repressed for those anxieties (about filth, aging, illness and death) covertly fuelled by consumerism’s representational regime.

In 1997, Sherman attempted to import her ‘imagos of the fragmented body’ into the mainstream in the film Office Killer. Dorine Douglas, a female serial killer, murders her co-workers at Constant Consumer magazine and takes the corpses home to her cellar where she plays with them as life-size dolls. Douglas’s hobby echoes Jeffrey Dahmer’s confession that his ‘experimentation’ with the human form began with the theft of a mannequin from a store: ‘I just went through various sexual fantasies with it, pretending it was a real person, pretending that I was having sex with it, masturbating, and undressing it’ (cited in Tithecott, 1999: 46). The mannequin enjoys a peculiar prominence in serial killer texts. In Maniac (1980), Frank Zito scalps his victims and places his trophies on the fashion mannequins that decorate his apartment. In Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, Benjamin Raspail’s decapitated head is placed on a shop dummy and mannequins are conspicuous in Jame Gumb’s garment sweatshop. Similarly, in Ed Gein (2000), the eponymous killer’s ‘woman suit’ is draped over a mannequin in his workshop. The climactic scenes in the serial killer road movie Kalifornia (1993) take place in mock suburban dwellings (part of a nuclear test site) occupied exclusively by mannequins. In House of Wax (2005) the serial killer trans- forms his victims into living dolls by encasing them in wax and a similar MO is evident in The Cell where the killer bleaches his female victim’s bodies in imitation of the dolls he played with as a child.

Although mannequins are less conspicuous in Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) than in Glamorama (in which they function as a key motif signifying the millennial merger of fashion with terrorism), they still perform a crucial symbolic function. Mannequins epitomize the ideal of 80s body fascism: tall, youthful, slim, impervious to wrinkles, scars and blemishes, untouched by illness and aging. Bateman’s obsession with the designer clothing worn by others in his social circle underlines their status (and his own) as mobile mannequins. Bateman’s fetishistic fascination with ‘hard bodies’ – both the muscular torso built in the gym and the stiff and frozen body parts he collects – similarly attests to the prevalence of a mannequin ideal in contemporary consumer culture. In ironic affirmation of this aesthetic, the film adaptation of Ellis’s novel was accompanied by the marketing of an ‘American Psycho Action Figure’ – an 18’ inch mini-mannequin equipped with fake Armani suit and knife.

In pursuit of the hegemonic fantasy of the hard body, in the gym and in his daily fitness regime, Bateman remorselessly punishes himself. The über-consumer is narcissistically fixated on his abdominal muscles, his face, his skin tone, how his body is adorned, what goes into it (dietary obsessions) and comes out (especially blood). The violence that Bateman inflicts on his victims appears as an extension of his own masochistic self-objectification:

Shirtless, I scrutinize my image in the mirror above the sinks in the locker room at Xclusive. My arm muscles burn, my stomach is as taut as possible, my chest steel, pectorals granite hard, my eyes white as ice. In my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week. Two are washed off, one isn’t. There’s a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied around my favourite. (Ellis, 1991: 370)

In Bateman’s locker we witness the gender confusion of the male killer and the latent violence of consumer body culture writ large. Bateman’s attempt to transform himself into an anthropomorphosized phallus is partly offset by the accessories (a hair clasp and ribbon) and pathologies gendered ‘feminine’ by patriarchy (vanity and masochism). According to Baudrillard (1998: 129), the consumer is ultimately encouraged to consume themselves: ‘in the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other . . . That object is the BODY’. For Patrick Bateman, serial killing is a mode of extreme make-over: a refashioning of bodies, including his own, into trophies. In Demme’s Se7en, John Doe’s body terrorism (force-feeding a fat man, cutting off a female model’s nose) mirrors, albeit in grotesque distortions, the mania of millennial consumer society. Similarly, the serial killers in Thomas Harris are fixated on bodily transformation: Buffalo Bill attempts to put him- self inside a new body while Lecter puts others’ bodies inside himself. The horrific practices of these fictional killers find their everyday analogue in the slow serial torture of the consumer’s body by capital: the injections and invasions of cosmetic surgery, the poisonings, pollutions and detoxifications, the over-consumption and dieting, the leisure rituals and compulsive exercise.

In an early scene from Mary Harron’s adaptation of American Psycho we witness Patrick Bateman’s morning exercise and beauty regime: crunches and push-ups are followed by ‘deep-pore cleanser lotion . . . water-activated gel cleanser . . . honey- almond body scrub’. As Bateman admires himself in the bathroom mirror his face is sheathed in a ‘herbal mint facial masque’ that lends the skin a mannequin sheen. When Bateman peels off his synthetic second skin the gesture echoes the gothic facials practised in Silence of the Lambs. Lecter, who, at their first meeting, identifies Clarice by her skin cream, escapes his captors by performing an improvised plastic surgery – he removes a guard’s face and places it over his own. This act is the prelude to a subsequent ‘official’ plastic surgery performed to disguise his identity. Jame Gumb’s needlepoint with human flesh might be traced back to Norman Bates’s taxidermy. Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s movie) was loosely based on Ed Gein’s flaying and preserving of human flesh. Gein’s ghost also haunts the exploits of the Sawyer family in the series of Texas Chainsaw films: throughout the original (1973), the sequels (1986, 1990), the Next Generation (1994), the remake (2003), and the Beginning (2006) flesh is flayed, cut, tanned, sewed, worn, displayed and consumed. Mark Seltzer (1998) has noted the prevalence of ‘skin games’ in serial killer cinema and fiction. Beneath these ‘games’ we might catch glimpses of a profound skin disease promoted by the mannequin aesthetics of the beauty industry. As Judith Halberstam (1995: 163) has commented, ‘We wear modern monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us’.

OBEY YOUR THIRST: Compulsive Seriality

The circulation of money is the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process . . . the endless series . . . the series of its [the commodity’s] representations never comes to an end. (Marx, 1990: 156, 210–11)

The structure of repetition which is the economy of death. (Blau, 1987: 70)

Baudrillard (1998) proposes that the models and mannequins conspicuous in consumer culture are ‘simultaneously [a] negation of the flesh and the exaltation of fashion’ (p. 141). Conversely, it might be argued that contemporary consumerism entails a massive extension and eroticisation of epidermises. The bioeconomics of consumerism involves ceaseless and intimate miscegenation between capital, commodity and the corporeal. This results in both an objectification of the body and a somatization of the commodity. In his Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, Haug (1986) explores ‘the generalized sexualization of commodities . . . the commodity’s skin and body’ as it penetrates the ‘pores of human sensuality’ (pp. 42, 76). The passion for commodities, their pursuit and possession by consumers might be diagnosed as a socially-sanctioned fetishism. The collection of shoes and the collection of human feet of course involve radically different fetishistic (not to mention ethical) intensities, but these activities share psychodynamic similarities.

For Baudrillard (1996: 87) there is a ‘manifest connection between collecting and sexuality . . . it constitutes a regression to the anal stage, which is characterised by accumulation, orderliness, aggressive retention’. Case studies suggest that serial killers are often devoted collectors (see Vronsky, 2004). Their histories typically begin with killing and collecting dead animals and when they progress to human prey the murder is accompanied by the taking of a trophy. In Collectors, Julian Hobbs offers an uncomfortable analogy between this trophy-taking, the hoarding practised by the cult followers of serial killers and the collection of images by the documentary film-maker. This practice is similarly conspicuous in fictional representations of the serial killer from Norman Bates’s collection of stuffed birds, to his namesake, Patrick Bateman, who compulsively collects (and seemingly without distinction) clothes, gadgets, music CDs, body parts and serial killer biographies: ‘Bateman reads these biographies all the time: Ted Bundy and Son of Sam and Fatal Vision and Charlie Manson. All of them’ (Ellis, 1991: 92). In Silence of the Lambs, Gumb collects flayed flesh while the more refined (at least while incarcerated) Lecter ‘collect[s] church collapses, recreationally’ alongside fine art prints (Harris, 1990: 21). The killer in Kiss the Girls (1997), like Jame Gumb, collects his victims and hordes them underground. Similarly, in The Cell, the killer locks his victims in underground storage before using them to build a collection of human dolls. Although the killer in The Bone Collector is only interested in accumulating skeletal fragments, his activities similarly require subterranean investigations. Digging beneath the psychological surface of the collector and his system of ‘sequestered objects’, Baudrillard (1996) detects a ‘powerful anal-sadistic impulse’:

The system may even enter a destructive phase, implying the self-destruction of the subject. Maurice Rheims evokes the ritualised ‘execution’ of objects – a kind of suicide based on the impossibility of ever circumscribing death. It is not rare . . . for the subject eventually to destroy the sequestered object or being out of a feeling that he can never completely rid himself of the adversity of the world, and of his own sexuality. (pp. 98–9)

Irrespective of the object, ‘what you really collect is always yourself’ (Baudrillard, 1996: 91). Serial killing, like consumerism, is driven by a sense of lack. Psychological profiles of serial killers typically diagnose the cause of the subject’s compulsive behaviour as a profound sense of incompletion (see Seltzer, 1998). Although of a different order, comparable dynamics are evident in what Haug (1986) calls the ‘commodity-craving’ of consumer sensibility. Estimates vary (from 1 to 25%) but an increasing number of studies agree that compulsive shopping is a recognizable and burgeoning problem (Hartson and Koran, 2002). American Psycho offers an extended parallelism between compulsive consumerism and compulsive violence. Attempting to describe the sensations he experiences after his first documented attack Bateman relies on consumerist tropes: ‘I feel ravenous, pumped up, as if I’d just worked out . . . or just embraced the first line of cocaine, inhaled the first puff of a fine cigar, sipped the first glass of Cristal. I’m starving and need something to eat’ (Ellis, 1991: 132).

Ellis juxtaposes exhaustive catalogues of commodities with exhaustive catalogues of sexual violence and proposes that the frenzy of consumer desire climaxes, for Bateman, not with fulfillment, but increasing boredom and acute anxiety.

In Serial Killers, Mark Seltzer (1998: 64) proposes that

The question of serial killing cannot be separated from the general forms of seriality, collection and counting conspicuous in consumer society . . . and the forms of fetishism – the collecting of things and representations, persons and person-things like bodies – that traverse it.

Every aspect of Bateman’s existence is structured by the compulsively circular logics of capitalist reproduction. Bateman (Norman Bates’s yuppie double) has seen the film Body Double 37 times. When he is not watching Body Double over and over, Bateman compulsively consumes other examples of serialized mass culture: daily episodes and reruns of The Patty Winters Show (a parodic double of the Oprah Winfrey Show); restaurant reviews and fashion tips in weekly magazines; crime stories in the newspapers and on TV, endlessly repeated video footage of plane crashes. On a shopping expedition, Bateman finds himself mesmerized while ‘looking at the rows, the endless rows of ties’ (Ellis, 1991: 296). On the run from the police he is similarly paralysed by rows of luxury cars (BMW 3, 5, 7 series, Jaguar, Lexus) and thus unable to choose a getaway vehicle. Bateman collects clothes in series (matching suits, shirts, shoes), beauty products, music CDs, varieties of mineral water, recipes and menus. Despite the advertising promises of unique purchases that offer instant fulfilment, there are no singular only serial objects in consumer society and ‘each commodity fills one gap while opening up another: each commodity and sale entails a further one’ (Haug, 1986: 91).

The pullulation of serial objects is accompanied by the expansion of serialized spaces. Throughout American Psycho, Bateman is continually lost and unable to distinguish between identical office buildings, restaurants, nightclubs and apartment buildings. This confusing interchangeability extends to people. Although clothing is instantly recognizable (everyone identifies everyone else by labels) people repeatedly misidentify each other. Thus, American Psycho underscores Jeffrey Nealon’s (1998: 112) disturbing contention that, in contemporary consumer society, ‘identity, for both commodity and human, is an effect rather than a cause of serial iteration’. The killer in Se7en, the anonymously named John Doe, attempts to build a distinctive identity by performing a series of grisly murders. At the first crime scene, as noted earlier, Doe’s arrangement of Campbell’s soup cans clearly alludes to Warhol’s work on the seriality and compulsive repetition of consumerism. Manhunter (1986), the first of the Hannibal Lecter films, makes a similar point in more comic fashion. A shot-reverse-shot sequence in a supermarket is littered with glaring continuity errors as father and son remain motionless while the products lined up in neat rows on the shelves behind them change (and the sequence ends with the detective framed by the cereals aisle). In Manhunter, Dollarhyde’s repetitive violence is partly inspired by Hannibal Lecter. This repetition is repeated in Red Dragon, the remake of Manhunter. Serial killers are often copycats and serial killer cinema repeats this trait: in Copycat the killer repeats famous murders and in Virtuosity a virtual criminal is manufactured from a serial killer database. Serial killer films themselves become series, spawning sequel after sequel. Although these narratives typically conclude with the murder of the killer, the audience is reassured that he will return in a vicious circle that begs the question: can seriality itself be killed?

DARK SATANIC MALLS: Killers, Consumers, and the Living Dead

We suffer not only from the living, but the dead. (Marx, 1990: 91)

[Bateman] moved like a zombie towards Bloomingdale’s. (Ellis, 1991: 179)

Serial representations of serial killers are often haunted by suggestions of the supernatural. In Silence of the Lambs, for example, one of Lecter’s guards nervously inquires whether he is ‘some kind of vampire’. This question echoes the nicknames given to serial killer Richard Trenton Chase (‘Dracula’ and the ‘Vampire Killer of Sacramento’). In Psycho Paths, Philip Simpson (2000) tracks the ways in which ‘fictional representations of contemporary serial killers obviously plunder the vampire narratives of the past century and a half’ (p. 4). Simpson also proposes that many of the supernatural monsters that have evolved from folklore (vampires, werewolves, zombies etc.) may have been inspired by historical serial killers avant la lettre. Historical and fictional serial killers are often traced through a supernatural stencil and in this concluding section, I shall consider the supernatural monsters of contemporary popular culture as metaphorical serial killers/consumers.

Since the 80s, cinema and video audiences have consumed a succession of successful horror franchises founded on supernatural serial killers: for example, Freddie in Nightmare on Elm Street (parts 1–8), Jason in Friday the 13th (parts 1–13) and Michael Myers in Halloween (parts 1–8). The popularity of this sub-genre has grown alongside the increased media coverage of serial killing and might be interpreted as a form of displaced engagement with the urgent reality of violent crime. Within this gallery of celebrity monsters the vampire continues to be a conspicuous presence. Dracula, for example, continues to appear in fiction and film, comics and cartoons, children’s culture (Count Quackula) and breakfast cereals (‘Count Chocula’). The publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire in 1976 was the prelude to a renaissance in vampire film and fiction: Rice’s own highly successful Vampire Chronicles (including Tale of the Body Thief in which an angst-ridden vampire assuages his conscience by preying on serial killers) have been augmented by Blade and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Underworld and Van Helsing. These gothic incarnations of the predatory serial killer have never been so legion. In criticism of this oeuvre it has become almost compulsory to read vampirism as a metaphor for capitalism. This trend can be traced to Marx’s (1990) own penchant for vampiric tropes: ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (p. 342). Perhaps Marx, an avid reader of horror fiction, was inspired here by the serialization, in 1847, of James Malcolm Ryner’s Varney the Vampire. Despite his aspirations to scientific objectivity, a gothic lexicon is employed repeatedly in Marx’s work: Capital is crowded with references to vampires, the Wallachian Boyar (a.k.a Vlad Tepes, the historical inspiration for Stoker’s Dracula), werewolves, witchcraft, spells, magic and the occult and Marx claimed repeatedly to have detected ‘necromancy’ at the heart of the commodity form. In the work of Walter Benjamin, similarly packed with gothic tropes, ‘necromancy’ elides with necrophilia. For Benjamin, the sensual engagement between consumers and the products of dead labour blurs the lines between lust (appetites) and leiche (the corpse). Precisely this disturbing entangle- ment of death and eroticism is at the core of the predatory vampire’s charisma. The vampire has fascinated consumers and Marxist critics alike – the latter as an allegorical embodiment of the monstrous and mesmerising energies of capital.

A far less seductive version of the living dead, one who has received relatively little critical attention alongside the aristocratic vampire, is the zombie. The MO of the zombie – cannibalism – is also practised by many historical and fictional serial killers. In fact, the consumption of human flesh, blood and organs is the most transgressive taboo performed by historical and fictional serial killers from Jeffry Dahmner (subject of Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie) to Hannibal Lecter, from Armin Meiwes to Patrick Bateman and Leatherface. Cannibal studies has become a burgeoning field in contemporary critical theory and one of its most contentious assertions is that modern consumerism constitutes a mode of neocannibalism. For example, Crystal Bartolovich (1998) proposes that consumerism embodies the cultural logic of ‘late cannibalism’, Deborah Root (1996) detects a ‘cannibal culture’ in contemporary consumerism, art, popular culture and tourism while Dean MacCannell (1992) has similarly called for a reinterpretation of western tourism and other aspects of consumerism in terms of cannibalism. In a variety of fields, from ecology and tourism to sexuality and organ transplants, from business take-overs to pop culture intertextuality, critics in various disciplines have uncovered intricate intersections between cannibalist and consumerist modes of incorporation. Although contemporary capitalism is of course founded on a figurative rather than literal practice, with its relentless consumption of land and labour, resources and spectacles, cannibalism without necrophagy still mirrors the modes of desire and domination, the obsessive violence, wastefulness and irrational excesses that under- pinned classical cannibal practices. According to Deborah Root (1996: 3), one might detect in the endless hunger of late capitalism a ‘pervasive cannibal unconscious’.

The past few years have seen a dramatic upsurge in films that focus on flesh-eaters: Land of the Dead (2005) and Return of the Living Dead 5 (2005), Resident Evil (2002) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) (based on a hugely successful survival horror video game franchise), 28 Days Later (2002), Children of the Living Dead (2001) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). US popular culture began its colonization of Haitian folklore in 1932 with Bela Lugosi starring in White Zombie. The setting of Victor Halperin’s film on a Caribbean sugar plantation offered a suggestive analogy between zombification and slavery. Although most see the zombie as sheer superstition others have read it, like vampirism, as political metaphor. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre used the metaphor of colonial subjects as zombies. On occasion zombification could be more than mere metaphor. In 1918, in Haiti, newspapers reported that most of the employees of the American sugar corporation who worked on the cane plantations were zombies. Conspiracy theorists proposed that US chemists had finally caught up with voodoo medicine and had started poisoning the workforce to produce docile and submissive labourers.

George Romero’s seminal zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), overturned the tradition of offering zombies as symbols of oppressed colonial labour and instead offered a gothic caricature of consumers as the living dead. Dawn of the Dead is set largely in Monroeville, a shopping mall in Cleveland, some time after a zombie epidemic has swept the nation. Four human survivors seek refuge at the mall but their respite is interrupted by the arrival of hordes of zombies. One of the characters explains their presence thus: ‘some kind of instinct. Memory . . . of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives . . . It’s not us they’re after, it’s the place. They remember that they want to be here’. The zombies seem like slapstick shoppers: they are hypnotized by the mannequins, they fall over on the escalators or into fountains while looking at glistening coins. Initially, the humans have no trouble in trapping and killing the zombie-shoppers using muzak, PA announcements and by posing in shop windows as consumable bait. Gradually, however, the threat increases and Romero progressively collapses the distance and differences between the human characters and the zombie mob.

How pertinent is Romero’s carnivalesque parody of mindless consumerism? In The Malling of America, William Kowinski (2002) describes the psychology of shopping in malls as a ‘zombie effect’. The architectural design of malls induces consumers to wander for hours in an endless pursuit of goods and services. In ‘Islands of the Living Dead: the Social Geography of McDonaldisation’, George Ritzer (2003) focuses on the devivifying influence of commodification. In accordance with a socioeconomic and psychological design perfected by McDonalds, the landscapes of consumerism are so structured, standardized and disciplined that the subjects moving through them are, he contests, simultaneously alive and dead. Ritzer borrows a phrase from Baudrillard to describe this as a world that resembles ‘the smile of a corpse in a funeral home’ (p. 127). Sometimes shoppers shuffle numbly by instinct between aisles and shops (like Romero zombies), but sometimes they can get nasty (like Romero zombies). Rhonda Lieberman (1993) and other analysts of shopping disorders have commented on increases in violence in consumer spaces: mall hysteria, sales frenzy and even full- blown riots. For example, when IKEA opened a new store in Edmonton, North London, in 2005, a riot involving 7000 people and multiple stabbings ensued (Oliver, 2005). The zombie desires to consume all the time and when it is prevented from consuming it becomes violent. An emergency broadcast in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead explains why the zombie plague has spread so quickly across the country. The living dead only consume around 5 per cent of their victims before moving on in search of the next meal. The violence, wastefulness and instinctive serial consumption of the zombie makes it, like the serial killer, a gothic projection of the commodifying fury of late capitalism. Monsters Inc. is a booming business. The spectacular increase in images and narratives of serial killing in millennial western culture, from the media coverage of historical homicide to the proliferation of fictional and supernatural fantasies of serial homicide, ultimately embodies the consumption of consumption in a necrocapitalist order.

References

Annesley, James (1998) Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto.

Bartolovich, Crystal (1998) ‘Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism’, in Barker, Hulme and Iversen (eds) Cannibalism and the Colonial World, 204–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baudelaire, Charles (1998) The Flowers of Evil. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Baudrillard, Jean (1996) The System of Objects. London: Verso.

Baudrillard, Jean (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: SAGE Publications.

Benjamin, Walter (1999a) Illuminations. London: Pimlico.

Benjamin, Walter (1999b) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Blau, Herbert (1987) The Eye of the Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Burroughs, William (1965) ‘The Art of Fiction’, Paris Review 35: 1–37.

Conrath, Robert (1996) ‘Serial Heroes: A Sociocultural Probing into Excessive Consumption’, in John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet (eds) European Readings of American Popular Culture, pp. 147–58. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1995) Points . . .: Interviews, 1979–1994. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press.

Dyer, Richard (1999) Se7en. London: BFI.

Easton Ellis, Bret (1991) American Psycho. London: Picador.

Fanon, Frantz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove.

Freud, Sigmund (1981) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Halberstam, Judith (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Harris, Thomas (1990) Silence of the Lambs. London: Mandarin.

Hartson, H. J. and Koran, L. M (2002) ‘Impulsive Behaviour in a Consumer Culture’, International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice 6(2): 65–8.

Haug, W. F. (1986) Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Advertising and Sexuality in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Polity.

Jenkins, Philip (1994) Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Kowinski, William (2002) The Malling of America. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris.

Lacan, Jacques (1989) Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge.

Lieberman, Rhonda (1993) ‘Shopping Disorders’, in B. Massumi (ed.) The Politics of Everyday Fear, pp. 245–68. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

MacCannell, Dean (1992) Empty Meeting Grounds: Tourist Papers Vol. 1. London: Routledge.

Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. (1998) Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Oliver, Mark (2005) ‘Slowly but Steadily, Madness Descended’, Guardian, 10 February.

Priest, Christopher (1998) The Extremes. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Renner, Michael (2002) The Anatomy of Resource Wars. Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute.

Ritzer, George (2003) ‘Islands of the Living Dead: The Social Geography of McDonaldization’, American Behavioral Scientist 47(2): 119–36.

Root, Deborah (1996) Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Seltzer, Mark (1998) Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. London: Routledge.

Simpson, Philip (2000) Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Tithecott, Richard (1999) Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Vronsky, Peter (2004) Serial Killers: The Methods and Madness of Monsters. New York: Berkley Books.

#deviance #commodification #Consumerism #popular culture #serial killers #violence #true crime #serial murder #hannibal lecter #spectacle #consumption #media consumption #murderabilia #violence of commodification #deviance studies

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twatd · 5 years

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Once Again

We return. WicDiv is in the final stretch, and so is TWATD. The first of our two essays on #44, focusing on the issue’s echoes and callbacks. Spoilers – like oh so many spoilers – below the cut.

Alex: Remember issue #14 of The Wicked + The Divine? The Woden remix issue? I reckon, with a bit of ingenuity, you could use the same method – cutting up panels from elsewhere in the series, pasting them in new contexts – to make a fan edit of #44, front to back.

The issue is crammed tight with echoes of old images. It put me in mind of Avengers: Endgame, the way it’s constantly calling back to moments from the past twenty-one movies, and the criticism of that tendency as ‘fan service’.

In WicDiv, this echoing feels inevitable. The series has always had its repeating motifs. Going back to the very first issue, we get a whole host of phrases we’ll be seeing over and over: “Once again, we return.” 1-2-3-4. “I’ll miss you.” “Don’t.” Kllk. And images, too – from that very first cover, with its carefully-framed headshot echoed on the first page inside, something the first arc plays with again and again.

But what is the purpose of it, other than reminding us of something we’ve seen and loved in the past?

To answer that, let’s look at some specific examples – beginning, as the issue does, with Lucifer. From the very first panel of her, stood in a variation on her classic power pose, Luci is pretty much playing the Greatest Hits here. She lights a cigarette on her own inferno, holding a familiar eyebrow-cocked expression. She teases a finger-click, taking us back to the courtroom. Her threat of violence to Laura, framed side-on, recalls Lucifer’s murder in issue #5, and Ananke’s millennia of practice for that moment as seen in #36.

Lucifer wraps herself in motifs and echoes possibly more than any other character this issue, and it feels like armour. She’s the one member of the Pantheon clinging on to the lie of godhood, playing her role because it protects her from the consequences of what she’s done. She’s perpetuating Ananke’s cycle, and so she reaches for the easy iconograpy, the tropes, of the Lucifer myth.

It’s worth noting that most of these images are inverted. In that last example, Lucifer stays on the same side of the panel, but switches her role, from victim to the position of power. Even the colours of her outfit are flipped – white to black, blue to red – and her pose too, with arms up rather than down. Tim is going to be exploring the Two Girls in Hell sequence in his essay, so I won’t go too deep on that, except to point out that when Laura saves Luci, it’s by taking Ananke’s “I’ve missed you” and making it sincere.

#44 does this over and over, taking a familiar motif and inverting the meaning. We’ve heard a lot of variations on “it’s okay”. Minerva, begging Ananke to tell her it’s going to be okay, a conversation we’ve likely all had with ourselves at some point. Its answer at the end of that arc, laid out in black and white: “It was never going to be okay.”

Here, it’s Dionysus who wields the phrase, and for the first time “it’s okay” isn’t a lie. Dio isn’t pretending that death won’t come for us all, or that Minerva’s situation is anything less than fucked. Instead, he’s encouraging her not to fear the inevitable. He isn’t offering denial, but acceptance.

Then there’s the other character interaction Minerva has this issue, which inverts something familiar in a much uglier way – her relationship with Baal. Time and time again, we’ve seen Baal wrap his arms around Minerva’s tiny frame. It’s indicative of the role he thought he played in her life, somewhere between bigger brother and father figure, but he now knows this was just a way of manipulating him.

In #44, Baal takes Minerva in his arms one last time, with very different intent. That big hand, able to cup her entire head, used to comfort or protect her, is used instead to smother. That tight embrace becomes a murder weapon. The contrast turns what could be a triumphant moment – this is the defeat of WicDiv’s big bad, after all – into an unsettling one.

Of course, it wasn’t much better the last time WicDiv’s big bad got taken out, as #44 is ready to remind us. The issues it draws from more than any other are the series’ first, and its midpoint. #22 and #44 are both stories about what happens when you beat the minions and get to the dark lord in their tower to find them helpless.

Here the repeated image – Laura with arm outstretched weighing up whether to kill the villain – acts as a kind of mental hyperlink. We’ve been here before. Twice before, in fact, just a couple of issues apart. (The second also introduced the idea of Woden’s kill-switch video release, which is vitally important to where this issue ends up.)

Both times, Laura hesitated – and then acted anyway. Our expectations are primed for the same thing to happen again. But, as any comedian will tell you, you set up pattern on the first and the second beat, then break it on the third.

This time, Laura hesitates – and is talked down. We see how much she’s grown as a character, because she’s put in the exact same situation, right down to the composition of the image and the people around her – Cassandra always hovers over her shoulder like a goth Jiminy Cricket – but the outcome is different.

I’ve mentioned fan service already, but there’s an alternative term I’ve been skirting around: payoff. A good final chapter (depending on how you view the epilogue) should bring together the threads of the story up to that point. That’s as true of WicDiv as it is of Endgame, as it is of a Dickens novel.

I do still worry about accessibility – how much of this comes across if you’ve only read each issue once, like a normal person – but maybe that’s not giving enough credit to the fantastic work of Jamie McKelvie + Matt Wilson making these images so immediately iconic, so mentally sticky, that you can recognise their vague outline five years later. As Tim suggested when I raised this question, these connections are likely kicking around in the subconscious of a more casual reader, even if they couldn’t put together the full serial-killer wall I’m making here.

There’s another thing, too. The fact that all these echoes are backing up feels indicative of what Laura is trying to do: breaking the cycle. Ananke’s six millennia-long plan is in its death throes, and this is one final twitch. Over and over, the issue shows that while the circumstances and tools might be the same, intent can change the meaning and outcome.

I suspect we’ll be free of echoes next issue, for the first time. I wonder if I’ll miss them.

Enjoyed this essay? You’ve got like 24 more hours to throw a bit of cash our way over at patreon.com/timplusalex, before we close down the Patreon in August. Think of it as a going-away present. Or a tip.

#WicDiv #The Wicked + The Divine #The Wicked and The Divine #TWATD

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lifeinahole27 · 5 years

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CS ff: “Love So Sweetly” (Part 2 of 2) (au)

Summary: If you ask either of them, they’ll both claim it isn’t their fault. It starts with feuding musicians, a pair of handcuffs, and the evolution a relationship can go through over the course of 24 hours.

Rating: M

Warnings: handcuffs?

A/N: My goodness. It’s finally finished. AND I had to bump the rating back DOWN for once. WTF is that?! Lol. Sorry all. This is a first in my book, too. Much love to all the usual players for their help, especially @phiralovesloki and @captainstudmuffin for their phenomenal beta and proofreading duties. And to the Discord ladies for putting up with the fact that I only pop in ever three days to randomly yell something and promptly fall asleep. Special side dedication goes to @let-it-raines for the most recent time I ran in and screamed something in there. LOL. All right - without further ado... I hope you all enjoy this!

Find it on Ao3 or FFN!

-x-

Trying to sprint after a hint of Granny was maybe not his brightest idea. Now he’s even more exhausted than he was before, and he can feel Emma dragging along beside him as they turn another corner to find it barren of all humanity.

It’s only then that he becomes aware of how quiet it’s gotten. This late at night, all of the stages are shut down and even the dance parties that sometimes happen after hours seem to be missing tonight, probably due to the lurking clouds in the distance. They’re deep in the campgrounds, and he can hear music drifting from some of the different tents and yurts, various styles and levels of skill, but gentle music surrounds them.

“Killian, we have to stop. I’m too tired. We’ll find her in the morning. Let’s just… head out.”

“Aye, love. Sorry we lost her again,” he grumbles, wanting nothing more than to sleep for days after the evening they’ve had.

“God, and all I have to look forward to after all of this is to figure out how we’ll both fit on my stupid bunk!” Emma grouses as they slowly wander through the campgrounds.

He blames the fact that the tent they’re passing has some spirited amorous activities going on it in for why it takes him so long to connect what she’s just said with their current predicament.

“You only have a bunk?” he asks with the rise of an eyebrow. He’d just assumed she was up in the swankier trailers on the top of the hill – it’s where all the other headliners seem to have congregated for the duration of the festival.

“Yeah,” she says distractedly, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. Her eyes shift over to the tent he’s been trying to avoid and her eyebrows go clear up to her hairline when she looks back at him. There’s a hint of a smile hiding in the corners of her mouth but she says nothing.

“On a bus?” he asks, trying to distract them both from a fireworks-worthy ending as they pass the lovers.

“Yeah,” she repeats a little harsher this time, and Killian suppresses the chuckle that comes unbidden. Her tone speaks of something more than frustration at the conversation, and while there’s a temptation to prod and see what responses he could elicit, he chooses the higher road. Well, sort of.

“Oh, love, for once I finally get the upper hand with you. Turn to your left up here. We’ll go find my humble abode.”

“Killian, I’m not sleeping on a pile of rocks in some flimsy tent.”

“Where on earth would you get the notion I was sleeping in a tent? Those things are bloody miserable. Unless you’re those people, of course.” He hitches his thumb at the tent that’s now almost out of view and he smiles.

“I just – “

“Assumed that’s where I would be staying with my much smaller named band?” He cuts in, more amused than offended, and takes charge in leading them away from the truly muddy path to the less-trodden grass around them. With a few searches for landmarks and a couple more turns, he gestures in front of them to the small yurt he’s rented out. “Behold! My pirate’s lair!”

“You take this pirate crap way too seriously, for one. Also, it’s not the exterior that counts, Jones. You said it yourself. I want to see the inside of this before I pass judgement.”

With a smug grin and a lift of his eyebrows, Killian unlocks the door and pushes it open, finding the switch for the lamp next to the door to bathe the area in a soft glow. Emma whimpers at the sight, clearly seeing their sleeping arrangements for the evening as acceptable.

“Bed,” she whispers, following automatically as Killian pulls her in the rest of the way and shuts the doors behind them. From outside, the soft sounds of rain begin, and Killian is thankful they didn’t have to do another soggy dash to safety this time.

He secures the latch from the inside and goes to move towards the bed, only to realize they’re still fully clothed. With one tap of his boot to hers, Emma snaps out of it and struggles to unstick the zippers from the mud that’s begun to cake them. Killian kicks off his own before holding her steady as she balances to pry each one of hers off in turn.

Funny, when he had originally decided to full-on rent a yurt, it was for the idea of bringing back a lady friend for a night or two. He had no idea this was going to be the end result.

There’s a hidden intimacy in the delicate dance they do in the doorway, trying to ready themselves for sleep when they are both so far outside their comfort zones. He imagines, suddenly, the context being different as she brushes an errant strand of hair off her face and waits for him to grab the lamp from its hook and lead her over.

He looks disparagingly down at the both of them, but reasons with himself that the bedding is all old stuff specifically brought along in case it gets dirty, so it doesn’t exactly matter. What matters is that there’s an inexpensive mattress and pillows and they’re finally about to relax for the first time since either of them woke up yesterday morning.

“Phone,” he says, holding out his free hand to her. When she doesn’t automatically do anything, Killian smiles patiently. “I have a power pack that’s fully charged. And I have any type of cord you need. Surely after a day of running around, you’ll need a charge, yeah?”

She grumbles out some response, digging her phone out of a pocket on the side of her leggings and handing it over. They both shift to the side for a moment so he can plug in their phones and set down the lantern on the side he reasons he’ll be sleeping on.

They do another shuffle to get to where they’ll need to be in order to get into the bed before they both collapse onto the foot of the bed, pushing up and maneuvering until they’re under the covers. Side by side, they both exhale in relief as their heads hit the pillows. Emma, in a fit of wanting to be comfortable, insists on removing her leggings, and Killian endures the five-minute process of having his shoulder jolted until she’s happy.

The leggings get tossed off the side of the bed, and then he makes her go through the same thing as he pulls off his jeans. He could’ve withstood wearing them, but if she’s going to make herself at home, he’s going to do the same.

“Thanks,” Emma says quietly, after they’re both settled. “And I mean, for everything. Not just the bed. This could’ve been a disaster, but it hasn’t been the worst day I’ve ever had.”

“Same to you, love.” He pauses, taking the opportunity to roll on his side the best he can to look over at her. When she shifts as well, they both bring their hands up to tuck under their pillows. It leaves them practically nose to nose with the length of the chain.

“Your first festival, huh?

“Aye, and it was luck we got into this spot.”

“How long had you been trying?”

“This was the third attempt. The only reason we got the invite is because another band double booked for the weekend and since they’d participated a few times in the past at this one, they decided to give up their invitation.”

“It took us four tries before we made it in, and that first year, Regina was here to see another band. Once she saw us, she signed us almost immediately and the band took off. I still can’t believe it sometimes.”

“You’re a hero, Swan. I’ve seen your fans. They adore you.”

“Yeah, well, so are you. I got to see that firsthand today.”

He has no response to that, other than a flustered shrug. It’s a risk to reveal too much – he knows this, and yet, he can’t stop himself from telling her more. “You know, I rather fancy you when you’re not yelling at me.”

“Yeah?”

He hums out affirmation, letting his eyes roam over her facial features and take in all the details he’s seen in pictures. There’s different flecks of colors in her eyes that the photos just can’t capture, and he watches the faint light dance there. Her laugh lines are peeking out with the way she’s barely smiling. Barely, but still…

“Good,” she says after a moment. It’s like permission and acceptance all at once. He watches her eyes start to flutter, her body finally succumbing to the length of their day. “Goodnight, Killian.” Her quiet sentiments drift through the space between them, and he’s overtaken again by the urge to kiss her. It would be so easy, but it would mean so much more than just one night at this point.

“Sweet dreams, Swan.”

With no further preamble, he finds the switch for the lantern and flips it. It doesn’t take her long to fall asleep, and Emma is a turbulent sleeper as he soon finds out. She ends up wrapped around him shortly after her breathing evens out. Her head rests near his shoulder, and he’s thankful for the still darkness surrounding them. Unable to sleep, the best he can do is hold his breath every time she shifts and twitches next to him.

As the night chills further, he’s thankful for Emma’s improvised pullover. Or step-into. It was quite the ridiculous process but she never seemed cold from that point forward, so he’s pretty sure it was a total success. Now, that same item is keeping him warm as the summer temperatures fluctuate to their low.

Finally, after what seems like hours, Killian’s body fully relaxes and he slips into sleep, unintentionally pulling Emma closer as they both flutter through their dreams. He’s surprised then, to be awoken shortly after that, after he’d already entered a dream where they held hands without being locked together.

It’s way too early when Emma shakes him awake, and the space around them is still dark in pre-dawn bliss.

“I’m sorry,” she says when he finally wrenches open his eyes. “I have to use the bathroom.”

She’s so close, her breath fanning across his neck when she speaks, and he feels the sleepy surge of want roll through him. Instead, he clears his throat and rubs at his eyes, trying to push away the image in his head of kissing her until they both forget about the calls of their bodies.

With a yawn, Killian waves away her apology and motions her to follow him out of the bed so he can grab a pair of track shorts to slip into. He’s shoving his feet into a pair of sneakers when he turns and sees Emma, one sock lost to the covers and her legs bare. The sweatshirt from the day prior falls just to her thighs, and he swallows hard as his eyes trail back up the length of her body to meet her eyes.

“Would you like, um, for the walk?” He holds up a pair of clean boxers from his stock, trying hard to stop from transfixing on her legs some more.

She shakes her head, seemingly unaware or totally uncaring of her half-dressed state as she rips the second sock from her right foot and slips back into her boots. It’s an utterly ridiculous outfit – boots up to her knees and sweater only, from appearances, but suddenly Killian has to go through chords in his mind as he wills his body to stay neutral to the woman beside him.

“Let’s go,” she says, waiting just long enough for him to secure the lock on the outside before they wander off in search of a better bathroom than the portaloo experiences they had yesterday. All of the trips were necessary but always very uncomfortable.

After a few turns, they can see the VIP section at the top of a hill, and Killian sighs in relief. This will have stalls, where they can both stand inside, even if that’s slightly more awkward. At least they’ll be clean, with running sinks. They start the trek upward, but it doesn’t take long before Killian’s shoe loses grip on the incline.

“Oh, son of a –“

“Hey, whoa!”

The moment his footing is gone, so is Emma’s, and the both of them slide back down on their hands and knees. They stay there for a moment, the shock and the exhaustion just weighing on them for a moment.

“Fuck,” Emma exhales.

It takes three more attempts for them to get up the hill, and it’s with no lack of attitude that Emma fishes her badge out from beneath the hoodie and swipes them into one of the trailers reserved for those with the clearance for them.

First comes rinsing off their hands to avoid getting mud in places they really wouldn’t want it, and then business, of course. He hums a medley of Beatles tunes to keep them both distracted from the situation. They switch spots when she’s done, and they hum together through the last of his turn. It’s as they’re washing all their collective hands when Emma realizes there’s a shower stall where he initially thought there was another accessible toilet. She nudges him, directing his gaze with a nod in that direction.

They hadn’t come up with a plan, not really, but this might be able to get them minimally less muddy before they get back to his accommodations. There’s also some splattered along the braid that Ruby twisted her hair into sometime after their set.

“You can go first, if you’d like,” he tells her, motioning toward the potential of being clean.

She’s slowly picking at the safety pins holding the jumper on her shoulder, but something is holding her back. For once, their hands swing un-joined between them, but as she considers something, her pinkie finger reaches out and brushes against his.

“I mean,” she starts, her eyes focusing on anything but him. “It would be easier if we were in there together.” For a moment, he thinks that yeah, it would be easier if they got in there together. And her fingers slowly slide against his, her thumb brushing along his as she shifts a little closer.

When the words and their meaning finally sink through his sleep-addled brain, Killian snorts. “Why, Emma Swan, did you just proposition me to shower with you?” He tugs at their joined hands to bring her attention back to him, and there he finds several emotions flickering through her expression.

She wants; that much is plain to see just by looking. She’s uncertain, and he doesn’t blame her. It’s a bit of a risk to sleep with someone you’re undeniably stuck with, and sometimes a risk to sleep with someone you can immediately walk away from. What strikes him most is that her eyes reflect a level of passion he was not expecting. When she looked at him at the end of their set, she set his blood pumping harder than it had been from performing. Now to see it reflected back is quite the unexpected turn.

“If you don’t think you can handle it…”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the one that couldn’t handle it,” Killian counters, his eyebrow flicking up in challenge. This is it. This will be the moment that decides their course of action. Much like the anticipation during their disagreement, he waits for her next move.

And wait he does; Emma stands there immobile for what feels like hours before she yanks him down by the collar of his shirt and kisses him. She crowds him into the outer chamber of the shower, shoving the door shut behind them as she angles her head for a kiss deeper and stronger than the last.

He has kissed all sorts of women in his lifetime, but one thing is startlingly clear very quickly: Killian Jones has never kissed a woman like Emma Swan, and he could spend the rest of his life trying to recapture the way she feels and never again find it.

There’s heat and desire in the way she moves against him, and Killian will blame it on the sleep deprivation that he doesn’t consider the thousands of outcomes this moment might have. Instead, he’s intent on pulling the band from the end of Emma’s braid and slowly unwinding the thick plait with his free hand. Their joined arms are caught between their bodies, hands clasped tightly as they dive deeper into the kiss.

Removing clothing is quite the obstacle. They work together to unpin the sweater from her shoulder, leaving it hanging from one of the hooks in the small dressing space outside of the actual shower.. The stall itself is pristine, likely unused by any of the festival participants if the walls are still this sparkling white, so neither of them take much issue with kicking off their shoes and stepping into the vinyl area after removing as much as they can. His shirt, for instance, ends up balled up along the chain, along with the top she’s wearing. His now-muddy shorts end up with their shoes, water be damned.

It’s not everything – it could be but there’s some unspoken agreement between them that it’s just not feasible right now. They’re down to just underwear, but it doesn’t leave anything to the imagination as they both find each other under the steady-but-unimpressive spray of water falling down on them. He wants to look, but he’s more interested in the way Emma’s mouth fits against his, and the way the slick skin of her back feels beneath his palm.

Their shower is stilted, interrupted by intimate touches and wandering hands, as well as figuring out the logistics of how to hold their joined arms so the clothing they can’t get rid of doesn’t weigh them down. They do the best they can, though, and struggle to dry off with the towels provided. They wring out their shirts from where they still got wet, and Killian balls up his shorts with her sweatshirt to take back to the yurt. It’ll be cold outside but if they hustle, they’ll be warm again soon enough. With as much as necessary back in place, they push out into the predawn light hand in hand.

They carefully pick their way across the campgrounds to stay as close to clean as they can. As they walk, Emma hums a familiar tune, and Killian does his best to find the harmony as she continues. It speaks volumes more than anything they could say; he resists the urge to sing the lyrics as they fit the circumstances just a little too well.

My honey I know with the dawn that you will be gone. But tonight, you belong to me...

The sun is just barely cresting over the horizon, but that doesn’t dissuade them from shutting the door to the rented space, locking themselves away from the outside world for just a few hours more.

They may currently be chained together, but Killian genuinely has no idea where the next day will take them. This far in, this far deep, he knows he may walk away with a heartache if it all fell apart in the light of day.

-x-

While everything had remained dormant on their trip back to the yurt, Emma is pleased when Killian is already meeting her halfway when she turns to him inside the door. With impatient movements, they leave their shoes by the door, and she urges him to drop the clothes he’s still holding. They make their way back to the bed, and Emma crawls into his lap and presses their linked hands into the mattress by Killian’s head as her mouth turns greedy.

She wants him bare, she wants all of him, dammit, and he growls into the kiss as if he knows this as she fists her free hand in his hair to hold him steady against her, their lips devouring. She wants, wants, wants, but Killian pulls back for a moment, halting her in her tracks.

“Emma, before this goes any further, I have to know that you’re sure about this.”

The fact that he asks makes Killian one of the most considerate men she’s ever gone to bed with. Here she is, in his lap, half-naked, chained to him, and he’s still willing to give it all up if she just says the word.

There’s some part of her that almost takes the out: this could get weird. They’re likely going to be spending the rest of this festival together if they can’t get ahold of Granny tomorrow. Not that there’s much more festival to contend with. After their set in the afternoon, her obligations are completed. She could always get him back to Storybrooke and get Billy to cut off the cuffs if she has to.

And in the meantime, she thinks, here Killian is beneath her, the hard length of his cock pressed almost exactly where she wants it to be. She doesn’t have to sleep with him, she knows this, but they can certainly have some fun. Any guy willing to track down the best onion rings at the festival for her is worthy of that, in her opinion.

Something suddenly clicks in her mind, something about the food from yesterday. “Killian,” she says, her eyes trained on his. “How did you know about the onion rings? How did you know to offer me that specific food?”

It’s equal parts totally endearing and hilarious to watch Killian’s face turn red. Right to the tips of his ears and down his neck are all a tomato red she never anticipated and he blinks several times in surprise.

“Lucky guess,” he says, but it’s a lie. She can tell just by the intonation, by the way his eyes flutter so he’s not fully meeting her gaze.

“Try again.”

He sighs, shifting his focus away from her and looking somewhere at the top of the yurt. When he does speak, it’s muttered, and she has the distinct feeling that he’s hoping she can’t hear him in the quiet stillness of the solitary space. But oh, she hears him loud and clear. “Everyone knows that Emma Swan’s favorites are grilled cheese and onion rings, and hot chocolate depending on the weather. With cinnamon,” he adds at the very end, finally chancing a look at her again.

This is the first time he’s openly admitted that he’s one of her fans – in fact, when they started arguing yesterday about whatever it was that started the argument, she was sure he was totally oblivious to who she was.

“You follow me on Instagram?”

His face morphs into something distinctly mortified, but she doesn’t wait for him to answer. Instead, she bites her lip to stop the laugh that wants to escape and leans down to kiss him again. She pushes all thoughts of his previous knowledge of her to the back of her mind, instead focusing on the way his tongue is tracing along her top row of teeth before he suddenly sits up. His free arm wraps around her waist to hold her steady as he pulls her down hard against him and she gasps at the sensation.

There’s a startling thought in her mind that she could get used to this - the push and pull of who has control. They shift the dominance often enough that her stomach swoops every time he gains it back, knowing he’ll turn to putty in her arms again in a matter of moments. There’s no chance they’ll be able to be naked for this experience, so they come to a mutual understanding that they’ll take what they can get. This can be good enough, because it has to be for now.

The real question is whether or not the “for now” part will turn into “to be continued” for them. Where the thought even comes from is beyond her, but just as suddenly, their future possibilities flee her mind because Killian lines up perfectly, his erection pressing through their underwear to slide just right against her clit and her breath hitches as she buries her head against his neck, letting her teeth graze along his skin to taste and tease.

With the blood rushing in her ears, it takes her a while to grasp that Killian is repeating her name like a mantra, perfectly timed with his thrusts, and she can feel how close the both of them are by the tension in his shoulders and the way she’s clutching tightly to any part of him she can. And then she’s there, climax quick but powerful, her thighs shaking as she sits astride his lap, and she cries out softly against him as she holds on tight. It doesn’t take more than a few more thrusts until he’s following behind her, his body going rigid for a few seconds before he coaxes her head back to kiss her again.

“You’re a bloody marvel, Swan.”

His voice, his smile, the sincere look in his eyes – it’s all too much and not enough all at once and Emma closes her eyes to kiss him again, suddenly terrified of what this all means. She hasn’t felt like this in so long, and not just the boneless pleasure of a good orgasm. Killian is the first person who hasn’t dangled her fame in her face or used that as the badge to get into bed with her. It strikes her again that it took nearly the length of a whole day for him to even admit he was a fan prior to their meeting.

All of a sudden, she’s exhausted, dealing with both the physical toll their last day has had on her and the emotional toll that she just did that with him, and so she lets Killian shift her to stand and shuffle them around until he can reach his stash of clothes. This time, she accepts the boxers he hands her in favor of swapping out her underwear. They stand side-by-side, changing in tandem, and they both seem to respect the unsaid rule of no peeking.

She doesn’t have a chance to overanalyze after that; Killian leads her back to the bed, going so far as to maneuver in a way that he’s pressed against her back, their clasped hands nestled against her chest. She’s asleep in no time again, lulled by the sound of whatever Killian is humming and the gentle pressure of his lips against her shoulder.

She wakes to the sound of their phones both ringing. She’s so tired, though, that she reaches out with her right hand and stops short when she realizes it’s still attached to Killian’s left. She grunts, then, switching hands as Killian stirs, murmuring something about shutting off their alarms as he burrows into her hair.

Without looking, she silences the ringtone and lets her arm fall back to the bed. Of course, the ringing starts right back up and Emma finally wrenches open one eye enough to look at the caller ID on her screen. She flicks at the screen, accepting the call and shoving the phone against her ear.

“What?”

“Emma, ping your damn location right now so Granny can get those cuffs off. We play in two hours. Do you hear me? Two hours.”

It takes a couple minutes for Ruby’s rushed words to connect in her brain, and then Emma’s gasping, sitting up in a tangle of arms and not even paying attention as Ruby rants on while still connected.

“I’ll ping it,” she blurts out, hurrying to end the call so she can share her location with her friend in order for her to locate the yurt in the camp. “Killian, get up,” Emma urges. She shakes him the best she can, turning in their pretzel to face him and leaning down to press her lips against his frantically. “Hey, wake up!”

He seems much happier to rejoin the land of the living when she’s kissing him, but it can’t last. She has to hurry. Besides, the intimacy of that move after such a short period of time has her rattled more than she expected it would. There’s a part of her that wants to just keep kissing him, wants to stay in this bed in this little cocoon they’ve created for themselves. And while she knows she could have that, theoretically...

“We’re about to have company,” she tells him, finally breaking through his sleep haze.

“Somebody to join for a threesome, then?”

She smacks his shoulder for that, biting her lip against the chuckle that wants to break out. “No, unless you want me to step outside while you and Granny have a good time,” she says. His eyes pop open at that.

“Oh, then we’re getting out of jail?” He lifts the chain for emphasis before he struggles to sit up. They scramble off the bed like that, and Killian unlatches the door just in time for a golf cart with Granny and Ruby to pull up right outside.

“Finally! Have a good night, lovebirds?” Ruby’s already dressed, her make-up and hair impeccable, and her smile is wide and bright. “Here,” she says, leaning off the cart to hand them the key and handing it back to Granny when they’ve each unlatched the offending metal.

Emma and Killian both take a moment to rub at their wrists before Ruby interrupts to remind Emma they’re on a deadline.

“Sure, of course, gimme just a minute, okay?”

The way Ruby’s eyebrow raises up is all Emma needs and she gives her friend a pointed look while slipping back just inside the door to find her leggings and boots. She wraps her sadly dirty hoodie around her waist before she looks at Killian.

“Well, I guess this eliminates the need to find another song to duet today,” she remarks, trying to put some humor into the moment. He does chuckle, but it’s dry and solemn.

“Aye, but that’s okay. You’ll enjoy your show more when you’re able to move around without me holding you back.”

There’s something in the way he says it that punches at her heart despite the way he smiles when he says it. So it’s only natural that she’d soothe that statement with a kiss. This one is a tinge desperate and apologetic because she’s about to dash away for her own performance and they’ve just left everything a giant question mark.

“I’ll see you around,” she breathes out, a smile tilting up her lips as she runs her fingers along the back of his ear, her thumb playing with his earring for just a second. Without further ado, she plants one last kiss directly on his lips and darts out the door. She does her best to not look back and instead focuses on the day ahead of them.

Ruby’s words are ringing through her brain as they speed back to the bus where Emma can shower and change. She flashes through the water as fast as she can, only cleaning her body and leaving her hair naturally wavy as it dried last night.

“Is Killian coming to watch?” Mary Margaret asks from her left as Emma painstakingly applies her makeup. Her hands are shaking, just the tiniest bit. It’s probably the lack of sleep, and so she pauses from applying her eyeshadow to take another deep gulp of the coffee that they had waiting for her.

“I don’t know,” she answers, trying for a dismissive tone. She doesn’t have the mental capacity to deal with anything surrounding that topic right now so she hopes that Mary Margaret drops it. Her hand shakes a little more and she takes a steadying breath before swiping on her eyeliner as carefully as she can. With practiced speed, she coats her lashes in mascara and stands, giving herself one last look.

If there’s a word to describe how she feels she looks right now, it’s “softer.” It’s more than just the hair and the lack of false eyelashes. The outfit she’s wearing is the same as she would always go on stage with. The jeans are practically painted on, her backup boots are up to her calves, and the tank top she’s wearing flows freely around her torso to give her room to breathe. So she guesses it must be something about her expression, about the small smile that won’t go away no matter how stern she tries to look as she makes one last fix to her lipstick.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” Emma says, giving Mary Margaret the broadest smile she can manage as she picks up her leather jacket from the back of her chair. She doesn’t need it, not really, but it’s like armor to her. Her friend looks at her carefully, tilting her head to the side for a moment and raising her eyebrow like she’s also trying to puzzle out the difference in Emma’s demeanor. But she just smiles, holding out her hand to take Emma’s as they leave the bus and join Ruby and Mulan outside.

It’s an easy trip to the main stage, with security leading the way and Mulan assisting. It helps that they’re not making a mad dash to the other side of the festival, and that she’s not being yanked in a thousand directions. Twice now, she’s caught herself reaching for a hand that isn’t there, though.

She is surprised to find a bit of a crowd in their backstage section. There’s David with his charming smiles and supportive words, extending beyond the woman he is so clearly enamored with. And Robin and Regina are actually standing less than five inches apart which is closer than she’s ever seen her manager standing to anyone else. There’s a suspicious lack of their third, however, and Emma stifles her disappointment best she can. She wants to ask, even opens her mouth to question David, but they’re being ushered on to the stage and he gives her a shrug and a final call of encouragement.

It’s all come down to this, Emma thinks - the lights are blaring even though it’s a bright and sunny day. She’s glad she left her leather jacket back stage because she’d already be roasting if she had it on. With that in mind, she pulls deeply from the water bottle she brought with her and turns to her bandmates for the start of their show. More than once, she can hear a yell from a fan about the lack of Killian on stage, and she tries to laugh it off.

“Sorry, folks. This is a solo-Emma adventure,” she says, forcing a smile on her face when a sudden wave of loneliness comes over her.

It goes so quickly from that point forward. She takes up her guitar when it’s called for, sits down at the keyboard for one or two songs, and grabs the ukulele she uses for just two of their songs right before they make it to the halfway mark of their set.

They finish the first of those songs to wild applause and cheers, and Emma smiles as she takes the microphone off the stand. It isn’t until she brings it back up to her mouth that she realizes it’s her left hand, her right arm still dangling at her side despite her natural inclinations. She even put back on the stupid wristband that he bought them to stop the cuffs from chafing their skin. She huffs out a chuckle, closing her eyes and smiling while Ruby and Mary Margaret wait for her cue to start the next song.

She looks back to them, seeing Ruby tilt her head to call her over. Emma clips her mic back on the stand and wanders over, away from the amplifying devices. “Mulan told me that a bunch of the fans have been asking about Killian. They’d heard about some kind of publicity thing with handcuffs and were excited to see it in person.”

“Should I --?”

“Yes,” Ruby says, and Mary Margaret echoes from five feet away where she can tell what’s being said. Emma groans with nerves, bouncing on the balls of her feet for a second before going back to her place.

“I seem to have exorcised my demon too soon,” Emma says thickly into her microphone. “Turns out he may have grown on me a little. So Killian, this next song is for you.”

This wasn’t the next song on their set - not one she’s ever played in public. They mostly stick to their own original works, but sometimes she finds the best way to express herself is using someone else’s music and lyrics instead. The chords and words of “Tonight You Belong to Me” are ones she knows by heart, and it echoes their early morning trip back from the bathrooms where he hummed along right with her. Ruby and Mary Margaret both hang back, instead letting her solo with the ukulele.

When the final note rings out, the crowd cheers, the frenzied yells making her freely laugh. She glances to the side of the stage and sees both David and Robin frantically trying to text. Mulan is recording the whole thing, as she’s sure a lot of the audience members are. It’s not every day fairytales come true, apparently. Now to just hope it works.

It all gives her courage to chant the syllables of his name so they’ll all catch on. If his band members can’t get a hold of him, maybe the entire main stage can. Mary Margaret and Ruby follow suit, wide smiles on their faces as their voices join in over the sound system. She has no idea if he’s even going to hear her, hear them, but she has to try. For once in her life, she wants things to work out.

It’s astonishing to hear all these people chanting his name, and Emma can’t fight the smile that’s breaking out as she keeps it up. Not knowing if he can hear her, or if he’s on his way, or what his progress is if he is on his way, she takes a bit of a chance.

“Killian, if you can hear us, I want that second duet, after all.”

It’s like a tidal wave when it happens: the cheers start in the back - the very, very back - and she watches as the wide crowd parts little by little and the cheers get louder and closer. If she tries, she can see the figure that’s moving them, his hand shooting up once when he’s halfway back to show the matching wrist band. She watches with ever-growing fascination as he moves through the audience. As the ripples of awareness travel upwards, they move easier and suddenly he’s sprinting towards them, a look of pure determination on his face.

It takes some help from the security at the front, but then he’s there in front of her, breathless but smiling, his left hand reaching for her right to link their fingers together.

“So you missed me then, love?”

“Shut up and sing with me,” she says, smiling as he inches a little closer.

“May I kiss you hello first?”

To this, she doesn’t respond. She reaches for his t-shirt and pulls him closer, leaning up on her toes to kiss him and then laughing through it when the whole crowd goes wild behind him. “Now can we sing?” she asks.

“Aye, love. What’s your choice?”

“You know ‘Always By Your Side’?”

He flushes in clear answer to her question, and Emma smiles. It’s the first single that made it onto the radio, and even more fitting now given where they began the day.

“Good. Also? You wouldn’t have held me back, just so you know,” she says away from the microphone. There’s more to be said - this isn’t where their conversation is even close to ending - but he ducks his head in a surprisingly bashful nod. They’ll have time to discuss it all later when they’re not ticking down their stage time.

The videos of their duet on the main stage end up going viral. There are pictures everywhere of them singing, eyes locked together, matching smiles on their faces. He posts a shot of their joined hands on Instagram later that he simply captions “Best festival ever” underneath, with an emoji of chains afterwards.

The next year, when they’re both invited back, they’re booked back to back on the mainstage with one act melding into the other as they sing together to close out one set and open the next. The year after that, he posts the same picture of their hands linked together, but Emma’s left hand is clasped over top of their joined ones, the ring just catching the sparkle of the dim light of their festival lodgings. His caption this time reads “Amendment: THIS was the best festival ever.”

And really? She can’t disagree with him on that one bit.

#cs ff #cs ff au #captain swan ff #sarah writes ff #holy fuck it's done #after almost three fucking years

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