#Ham is ALWAYS wherever I exist

[im-no-jedi]

Blorbo bingo with Echo maybe?

ECHOOOOO MY BESTIE 🥰

nearly a bingo but not quite!

anyway the main "incorrect" fandom thing I see about him is in regard to the scomp arm. anyone who thinks he "needs" or "deserves" a hand is just wrong. I'm someone who thinks it would be nice for him to have a hand, but he certainly doesn't need it ok. disabled people never need to be fixed, and it's not your place as an abled person to decide whether or not they should get their disability fixed thanks 😌

also, I have very unique feelings about him in regard to my level of attraction towards him. cause on the one hand, yes, obviously he's attractive, he's a freaking Clone for goodness sakes. but also, because I associate him SO much with @jam-n-ham, I literally think of him like a brother, so I literally can't be attracted to him. is he hot? yes. would I smooch? also yes. does this mean I'm attracted to him? I have to say no!! Ham has literally told me it's ok if I'm attracted to him, but that changes nothing. he's my bro, and that's all there is to it 🤷🏻‍♀️

[nights-at-crystarium]

You know what, I assume that people always read my pinned, or notice the pointer "new reader? start here" in every new Fragments' episode. I might be deluding myself. So hi hello lemme TALK ABOUT MY COMIC.

Before I get too rambly (and I mean RAMBLY), here's a quick intro. Fragments is a comic focused on feels and slice of life, made by a queer guy, aiming to ~character study~ the main cast (Vivi, Raha, Alisaie, Feo Ul) and fill in the gaps in canon (or linger in canon moments that needed more air imo), the tone ranging from angst to fluff to meme. Good punches require a good windup, so please don't expect angst anytime soon :3c

The story's segmented (fragmented, heh) into episodes. Episodes 1-11 take place in ARR, you can enjoy them with no worry about spoilers. Episode 12 onward is ShB, with all the spoilers and lorebending.

My storytelling style assumes you haven't only played through ShB, but know it like the back of your hand, i.e. it's for nerds and thinkers. Of course there's plenty of silly moments that don't require any deep knowledge, but the overarching story does. Often I skip canon events, only hinting that they took place, simply because I don't wanna retell the msq 1:1, I've got plenty of original scenes waiting to be drawn. You're in for a treat if you like obsessing over emotional and moral implications of things. And, yes, this's a story about a morally grey mc. Don't expect to be spoon-fed "and this's why that thing's bad, kids".

Currently I've outlined all the main story beats up until post EW, so it's like, not being winged as I go. Yes I refine things here and there, but I know where I'm going. I'm going ham!!!! With the lorebending post ShB. Initially I didn't plan to, but the more I learned about Vivi and personally grew as a writer, the more courage I got to "divorce" from canon. The general xiv story may still be good wherever it's headed, but it's not suited for an established wolgraha, so I'm making food for myself.

Everyone imagines the lil scenes from their wol's life, I'm taking that a tiiiiiny step further. Fragments tells a cohesive story that's looking to be the longest project at least in our corner. I can and will hyperfixate on this for years.

I started out just like many others, being hit with ShB like a truck, I wanted to put a catboy under a microscope and rotate him forever. Although I'd already been drawing for decades, I didn't have the comic-making skills yet, or eloquence to write the dialogue, so I spent the first half of 2022 self-studying, just because I needed a mouth to be able to scream about my ship.

Vivi didn't exist prior to my obsession with Exarch. He was made for this, he started out as a reagent (or a foil, now that I know fancy writing terms) for a rich and fun chemistry, and keep myself entertained for years, first and foremost.

Me, a fool: okay let's make a guy that falls in love with Exarch in this particular moment, what kinda life must he have led to- Me: ....oh no

The chemistry quickly bubbled up and exploded in my face, involving not only Exarch, but other characters (first as a means to subtly tell about Vivi, then they also demanded their own screentime), and here I am, sitting with a massive script on my hands, drawing my blorbos every day. Thanks for enabling that btw.

I care about characters a lot. I ask a lot of whys and hows. I'm critical-minded and burned on many bad stories that did their characters dirty, and I wanna be an opposing example. What I'm doing is extremely ambitious and risky, yes, but I can only invite you to tag along and see if I stick to my word.

The internet's a cruel and unforgiving place nowadays, and here I am, pitting my passion against what feels like decaying humanity. I'm making this comic to keep myself happy above all else, being sincere and cringe because life's too short to be anything else.

Thanks for reading this, and if you haven't yet, read Fragments here!

[wheeeezeboi]

I am a living ghost

When I was a little boy my mom worked as a maid, sometimes for homes, sometimes hotels and offices, and this was during the time when my parents were split up. They're back together now, but that's a different story.

As you may know, maids don't make a lot of money, and childcare is expensive. For at least the summers, sometimes more than that, I would get dragged along to her work. She would sit me down in waiting rooms, supply closets, staff break rooms, where ever, and tell me "You gotta sit down and shut up because you're not supposed to be here right now. You have to stay put and don't talk to anyone unless they talk to you first. You don't want me to get fired, do you?" Sometimes there would be a tv or magazines in those places, but it was very boring most of the time.

I internalized that it was okay to leave me behind and alone because I wasn't supposed to be here. I wasn't supposed to exist. And the best thing I could do was not draw attention to myself. I got very good over the years at blending into the furniture. I would be left alone or with strangers for hours, so my mom could make money to keep me fed and housed.

Whether or not there was entertainment around, I'd still usually get bored quickly, and would wander off inside my mind. I'd stare at the wall and paint a mural on it in my mind. I'd retrace the route we took from home to the hotel (or wherever) and remember as many details as I could about the surrounding. (I have excellent directional sense.) I had many such games. Sometimes, I didn't even have the energy to imagine, and I would just zoom out from my body and let time pass me, losing sight of my surroundings until my mother came back for me hours later. It felt like I really had became one with the walls, as flat and emotionless as they were. I later learned this was called dissociation.

And later, when I was diagnosed with RRMS, and it became clear that it would be much simpler and less painful for me to get on disability income rather than get a job, I once again felt this disconnect from the real world, like I was a ghost haunting a cramped corner rather than an active member of society. I was always there, but I didn't really exist until spoken to. Like an Amazon Alexa, but more useless because I could barely help myself let alone anyone else.

The SSDI was enough to get me my own apartment when I was 19 but not to afford much else. I thought I wanted independence from my family because I felt I had to prove I could do something right and be an semi-functional adult, but it was so lonely. I was too disabled to travel very far out of my neighborhood, so I had no friends. I spent what everyone said was supposed to be the best years of my life completely alone in a small apartment, depressed, watching youtube videos on my phone. I tried to commit suicide 4 times, but usually I was to lazy to get beyond the planning stage. Did you know that diphenhydramine is both the active ingredient in OTC sleep aids, and in benadryl. So if you try to kill yourself by taking 20 unisom sleeping pills, you will not die, but you will trip major fucking balls and see demonic horse-spider hybrids and hear disembodied voices alternate between "kill yourself fucking loser" and quoting vines and tv commercials. The lethal dose of dph is closer 2500mg or more.

I watched a lot of ghost hunting/ found footage horror shows. Not just Buzzfeed Unsolved, also Sam and Colby, and explore with Josh, and Loey Lane and slapped ham. (My phone just auto-capitalized those names and it just occurred to me how infrequently I capitalize names in my writing. My thumbs hurt so bad typing this long post, Alhamdulillah for auto correct.) Any way. I found ghost shows to be comforting rather than scary. I like the idea of there being something after death, especially the idea that maybe we get to chose whether we want to stick around or move on. The afterlife as described in my religion never really appealed to me, so maybe I don't even want to move on.

I thought about the ghost sitting around in the same dark musty room for decades with no one to talk to until one day these two goofy dudes show up and it's gotta be the best day of their afterlife. I felt I could relate to that. Most places have more than one ghost I've deduced. So there you have another guy to talk to for all eternity and they can never leave. A built in buddy. And trust me, if I'm stuck haunting a place with other ghosts, even if they are an axe murder, they WILL be my buddy. They will see that you can't resist the K-man for very long. 😁 We're going to have so much fun playing waiting room games and haunting anyone who comes through, maybe we do some kissing. We'll see.

And the best part is, our minds will no longer be tied to our shitty, uncooperative, broken bodies. We will be free.

Anyway, I have irl friends now and I live close to a library. So I don't want to kill myself anymore.

And that's my backstory for why I am the way I am.

[angeli-marco-writes]

Dean & Seamus - At Last

A/N - 1.8k word blurb I completely forgot I wrote. Bringing this out of the archives, enjoy.

Warnings - slight cursing and angst, fluff, mutual pining.

Summary - Years of tiptoeing around one another and hidden feelings come to a head when Seamus finds a stack of art beneath Dean's bed. At last, something might happen.

“Hey Dean?” Seamus calls, breaking the silence of the half empty common room.

The two of them sitting together on opposite ends of a very comfortable and very small sofa with feet entangled in a contorted knot is not a rare occurrence, and everyone knows that the two like to be as close as possible. Dean has a notepad on the arm of the sofa, artistic pencils on the coffee table as he sketches away to his heart's content, while Seamus has a pack of muggle cards, teaching himself card tricks.

“What is it?” Dean replies, glancing up from his notepad to meet Seamus’ sympathetic gaze.

“Do you still have that muggle magic book? This isn’t going great.”

Dean chuckles, rubbing sleep from his eyes with the heel of his palm, deep brown eyes twinkling under the dim light from the candles. The way he watches Seamus when he isn’t looking is with nothing but pure adoration, not necessarily the way that friends should look at one another.

“Dean?” Seamus calls, suddenly much closer than before, kneeling in front of Dean’s legs now curled beneath him without his knowledge of putting them there.

“Uhm, the book? Yeah, it's under my bed. Careful you don’t find a banshee under there.” Dean says jokingly, curving his arm around Seamus’ torso to bring him closer, discarding his art for a moment, savouring the sound of Seamus’ laugh like music to his ears.

He stops thinking, and just exists for a second, only able to do that when Seamus is so close to him, chests pressed together, hearts beating as one, breath mingling and all inhibitions lowered. If he had a little more belief that Seamus shared his crush then he’d go the final step, bringing their lips together for more than a fleeting moment. If only he knew that Seamus in fact felt the same, equally as strong, equally as lovesick and just as scared of rejection. So for the meantime, they stuck to their own personal affections.

“I’ll be back in a minute, and I’ll call you if there’s a banshee.”

With a fleeting kiss that Dean pressed to Seamus’ cheek, the latter had disappeared up the stone stairs to the dorms.

On his way up, Seamus finds himself thinking non stop of the way Dean’s soft lips felt pressed against his cheek. Not like they haven’t kissed before, but every time it excites him, still bringing butterflies to his stomach after four years.

Their first kiss was in a game of juvenile truth or dare in second year, where Seamus revealed he’d never been kissed, and Dean was then dared to kiss him. That was the moment, for Seamus at least, that he’d realised he was gay - or at the very least, not straight.

It was half way through third year that the two had grown accustomed to holding hands and sharing clothes, stealing cheek kisses and cuddling on the odd night. None of this changed, even now they’ve become sixth years.

Seamus throws the door open to the dorm and leaps across to Dean’s bed, forever more comfortable than his own. He lies over it, inhaling Dean’s scent that he’s so used to wrapping him up whenever he sleeps. Oak and paint. The strangest perfection. After a moment of thought, he pulls up the west ham blanket, the oversized knitted quilt that the two made one Christmas night when they got far too cold, and finally the red sheets so that he gets a better look beneath the bed, which just so happens to be crammed full of random shit.

“Bloody hell Dean,” he sighs with a gentle smile, lighting his wand and sliding off the bed onto the wooden floor, preparing himself for a search.

Seamus sits and sifts through piles of books covered in dust, albeit in neat piles and just about alphabetised (all much more organised than his own), and a couple of boxes before he finds their old magic book.

Just as he moves to put everything back in its place, he comes across a locked trunk of chestnut wood and gold edges. It’s triple locked by the looks of padlocks atop the built in securities. But Seamus can’t help thinking, what does Dean have to hide from him? He’s always said “what’s mine is yours”, and that they know everything about one another. What could Dean possibly be so ashamed of that he didn’t even want Seamus to see? Chuckling at the first immediate thought, he pulls the box out and peers through a crack. It looks like… old notebooks?

“Cistem Aperio.” he utters the words used to unlock the trunk, only to find out that the padlock is a fake one and that the box itself only had one lock. Maybe the faux measures were to stop the other boys finding it, and not Seamus, but once opened, he’s astounded.

Piles of notepads and sketch pads fill the border of the box, but what’s in the centre is the most disconcerting. It’s Seamus, on canvas, ten times over. All from different angles, painted with watercolour or acrylics, all at different stages of completion because on some, the pencil lines are still apparent. Sure, Seamus knows that Dean is a bloody good artist, and Dean’s asked him to be a model once or twice, but this is another level. And even though he probably should, he can’t find it creepy.

He turns over a couple of the older canvases dating back to the bottom one, a mix of acrylic paint and heavy pencil shading. ‘Seamus, 7th April 1994; I wonder if you think of me half as often as I think of you.’

His heart stops just for a moment. Does dean… no chance. No way, there’s no way that Dean fancies him too. He could have anyone in the school, why would he fancy his dorky Irish friend?

He takes out a couple of the pads, opening to reveal pages of sketches of Seamus. The two together, Seamus at the lunch table, by the lake, with other people or asleep in Dean’s bed. Just the sight of Dean’s talent makes his belly flip. The curved pencil lines, the soft brushes of his coloured pencils, the perfect shading wherever it needs to be in the different photos. Each one has Dean’s signature, a date and a title in the bottom right hand corner., but some are a little more smudged with, tears?

He grabs the most recent sketchpad and tucks it beneath his arm, going to open a note pad filled with dozens of poems and quotes, but the most common one hits him hard.

‘You have to let it all go. The way he kissed you, the way he smelled, the way he touched your waist and pulled you in. You have to let it go and you have to let him go. Because he’ll never love you that way, he’ll always be your friend, and he’ll never be yours.’

That’s essentially all the confirmation that Seamus needs to realise that Dean’s liked him all this time. How could they have been so stupid, avoiding each other and never confessing?

He rips the page out of the notebook and runs out the door, the leather bound sketch pad bouncing in his clutch. He bounds down the stairs as ungracefully as possible, taking them two by two, his shoes resounding on the stone and hereby making a racket that the whole common room can here.

Seamus appears at the bottom, breathless and flushed as opposed to covered in soot, but his eyes are filled with a new flame.

“Dean,” he pants, eyes darting over to where he's curled up in the same spot as before, knees tucked under his chin with an art pad on the arm of the sofa, tucking his extortionately expensive pencil behind his ear when he sees Seamus all hot and bothered.

He stands, towering over everyone as he takes quick strides across the room, his breath hitching when he sees the sketchpad tucked haphazardly beneath Seamus’ small arm.

“Sea, please,” he begs, eyes brimming with tears to match Seamus’.

They stand an awkward distance from each other for a minute before Seamus takes the final step and closes the gap, gripping Dean’s tie and pulling him a little closer to his own height.

“Did you draw these of me?” Seamus asks with a raspy, trembling voice, filled with anguish and longing.

“Yes.” Dean murmurs softly.

“Did you write these poems about me?” he waves the tear stained page of perfect ink in front of Dean, making the taller boy swallow thickly.

“Yes.”

“Were you ever going to tell or show me?”

“Maybe one day.” Dean says guiltily, averting his eyes to the floor for only a second before meeting Seamus’ intense gaze once more, the flames behind the freckles on his cheeks a little intimidating.

“Do you, do you love me?” Seamus asks finally, taking a leap of faith, one that is finally reciprocated.

“Yes. Yes, so much.”

That’s all the ammunition that Seamus needs to tug Dean’s lips to his own, crushing them together and engaging in a fiery kiss of nothing but long awaited passion and love. Their tears dissipate as Seamus weaves his arms around Dean’s neck, and his curl around Seamus’ waist, lifting him up like he weighs nothing. Seamus deepens the kiss, licking along Dean's bottom lip to request an entrance which is more than eagerly granted, allowing them to explore each other's mouths finally. Dean lets out a muffled moan when Seamus bites down on his lower lip, the most heavenly sound Seamus has ever heard. Dean squeezes the ass that rests on his hips just for a moment before sliding his hands beneath his jumper, his dark palms running over Seamus’ milky skin, the perfect contradiction.

They become so enveloped in their bubble of passion, tongues dancing tantalisingly together, that they forget they’re in the common room, awkwardly withdrawing when the need for oxygen becomes too dire.

However, instead of the angry shouts and disgruntled faces they expect, it’s actually faces of sheer relief and lazy smiles all around.

“About bloody time!” Ron shouts.

Dean chuckles softly, lowering Seamus to the ground. The pair scrabble for their stuff, grasping it in uncoordinated handfuls, stuttering apologies before darting upstairs. Once at their dorm, they slam the door shut and throw their belongings elsewhere without a care, fighting over who gets to pin the other against the door.

“Have we really been dancing around our feelings since we were twelve?” Dean asks, trying to keep his focus on the time being while Seamus works tirelessly at the bottoms of his shirt, leaving kisses everywhere in his wake.

“Yes we have. And that means we have five years to make up for now.” Seamus quips, bringing Dean’s lips to his own once more, moving to enjoy their time together, at last.

[okaybutlikeimagine]

Hi first of I spend last night reading through so many of your asks they’re AMAZING. It got me thinking about Billy’s first birthday at the cabin. I feel like he wouldn’t tell anyone about his birthday because they were never a big deal for him and they’d discover it was his birthday a few weeks later and they’d feel really bad about it. So they pick a day in the next week and treat it like his birthday as a surprise and Billy is completely overwhelmed by the all love. Thoughts?

First off: you’re so damn sweet, @kingsandsaints, goodness me thanks hun ♥ (also this was so long ago but I legit started writing this right after you asked it god i’m so sorry it’s taken this long to finish)

Second OHMYGOD i love this idea so much!!!

Okay, legit the only person who knows the exact day of Billy’s birthday is Max. Like, not even Steve knows.

Billy just never talks about it. And I mean never. For as much of a ham as this boy is, he doesn’t actually like all that much attention from most people. Especially the people at school. He’s so sick of them- he’s so sick of everyone hanging off of him and touching him like he’s there to be touched. Like he’s there as their toy to play with. Like he’s there for their entertainment.

He gets so fed up.

Bc Billy is no open book. He’s real good at keeping his emotions pushed down and hidden away. He’s a private person and he’s very adamant about that because, as far as he’s concerned, no one needs to know any of his business. And his birthday is very much his business. It’s his day, his life, his choice on whether he wants to tell people and his choice is… nope.

He debated telling Steve this year just to hold it over his head bc Steve was being a bitch and Billy just wanted to hang out and smoke and suck the boy’s dick or something. But he decided against it. bc if he tells one person, he runs the risk of way more people knowing and then they fuss and they coddle and they pay way too much attention to him and he doesn’t need that.

So his birthday comes and goes and no one is the wiser. Hop picks a small fight with him that morning about drinking out of the milk carton, El accidentally scuffs a pair of his favorite boots as she was stomping around the house, and he got a C on his math test even though he finally felt fucking good about it. His teacher gives him so much attitude and he wants to pull someone’s teeth out.

But it’s a normal day. And he’d rather take the comfort of a normal day over the extravagance of some day people decide they’re obligated to be ‘nice’ to him. He doesn’t need that shit. He doesn’t need fake pity or kindness.

But, y’know… he still goes out with Max.

Bc she’d be pissed if he didn’t at least see her on his birthday. She’s gotten bratty about it. When his birthday comes around she likes to cross her arms and scowl and pout and stand in his way until he gives in and drives them down to the nearest ice cream place so she can buy him an ice cream cone or something. It’s really stupid. He thinks it’s stupid. No he doesn’t smile at all on their little adventure, thank you. And if his chest feels warm when she hands the ice cream over with that smug look on her face that Billy can’t help but think she learned from him… well he’d never ever admit to it.

This year is no different. After school he forgoes hanging out with Steve or heading home to cart El around to wherever she wants to go in favor of driving Max to the nearest ice cream place, which happens to be the next town over.

They’re bantering and bickering with each other, Max asking if she’s still the only one he keeps in his life who knows about his birthday.

“Yup.” He says, fixing the cuffs on his jean jacket. She rolls her eyes.

“Seriously? It’s still a secret?”

“Yeah, and you better keep it, you brat.

“Shut up, what flavor do you want?”

He puts his hands on his hips. “You know what I always get, Roc-”

“Yeah, yeah.” She turns to the person at the counter. “One… two scoops of Rocky Road please.”

Billy eyes her suspiciously.

“In a dipped cone.”

“Alright, what’d you do.” Billy asks, fixing the cuff on his other sleeve.

“Nothing.” Max sounds tired.

“… you break one of my records?”

“No!”

“Scratch my car?”

“Oh my god, no.” She’s rolling her eyes.

He gets down to her level, eyeing her curiously, lifting an eyebrow and then the other before asking:

“You kill someone?”

“Shut up, Billy! Oh my god.”

He straightens out with a dark chuckle. “How am i supposed to know? You’re not exactly the generous type.”

“You’re so full of shit.” She grabs the cone and shoves it his way (as if that was easier than him getting it himself, which it definitely wasn’t) before ordering her own scoop of strawberry.

They sit and enjoy the kind of humorously comfortable silence that only they have with each other before Max breaks it.

“You need to tell someone.”

Billy hits her with a look.

“I’m serious, Billy.”

“Yeah, so am I, brat. Who gives a fuck about my birthday?”

“Well no one if you don’t tell them.”

“Exactly.” Billy stares at his cone as he takes a large lick. “Looking to keep it that way.”

Max rolls her eyes. “You’re so damn stubborn.”

And billy goes about the rest of the day and then the rest of the week, more than happy to be stubborn as fuck until…

Well until one day in the next week where everyone’s acting… strange. Really strange. All antsy and secretive around him, quiet about the way they speak to each other and giving him these weird glances that make him think he’s out of the loop. Make him know he is and this is the shit he tries to avoid. He doesn’t like the whole “not knowing” thing. He likes to be in the know.

And that’s all what makes him dread coming home that day from school. Steve said he was too busy to let him come over but wouldn’t say why (Steve is the worst liar Billy’s ever known. He wonders if he’s just a bad liar to Billy or if he’s this way with everyone) so he has nowhere to go but home. And it’s not even fear in his body, it’s just nerves because there’s something going on and he doesn’t know about it.

So he walks up to the house quietly and slowly, eyes shifting over to the window before he reaches the door to see if he can see anything but the curtains are closed.

And then he’s opening the door slowly, trying to prepare himself for whatever’s going on, probably overpreparing himself if he thinks about it too much, and-

“Surprise!”

Billy flinches.

Bc while he was definitely prepared for something, some kind of surprise, potentially for his birthday (which he wasn’t actually dreading. Not that he would admit to it), he wasn’t prepared for confetti being thrown in his face.

Billy covers his eyes, wiping the little pieces of paper off.

“Oh, honey!” comes Joyce’s voice. Billy begins rubbing at his eyes and sees a blurry vision of Joyce gently taking hold of El’s arm. “Try to avoid his face.”

Billy groans a bit. He tries to make it sound like he’s not irritated.

“What’s going on?”

“Happy Birthday, Billy!” comes a chorus of voices that sounds like Max, El, and 2 quiet Byers brothers.

Billy shakes his head, scanning the people that are there, trying his goddamn best not to let his face split into a smile because… because… well what the fuck.

Everyone’s here. El, Max, Jim, Will, Jonathan, Joyce… 

And Billy is absolutely beside himself. He never quite understood that phrase until exactly this moment. He feels like he’s viewing this from a spot slightly to the left of where he is, watching himself watch in awe at these people that are… that are his, aren’t they? That went out of their way… stopped their day, honestly, just to do this. To celebrate him and his existence and this is a little ridiculous. For a second he remembers why he finds birthdays a little silly. They’re all looking at him with smiles on their faces like they’re just happy he’s here and it’s… it’s just ridiculous. Why?

He scans his surroundings in a second, though it feels like slow motion. He sees the streamers along the ceiling that were probably placed there by El (with the help of Hop), a banner in the back with ‘Happy Birthday Billy!’ written on it that was definitely painted by Will, blue balloons floating around everywhere with curly ribbons hanging off of a few of them, a couple of gift-wrapped presents on the coffee table, and then his… his family, standing right in front of him, beaming like he did something right.

He shakes his head again, the words still floating through the air.

“It’s not my birthday.” Billy says in vain, because he knows that’s not the point here. A couple of chuckles hit the air, but Billy’s still eyeing the decorations around him.

“We’re making it your birthday.” Comes Will’s voice, and Billy turns to see him smiling wide. Billy rolls his eyes, biting the inside of his bottom lip to stop the smile forming.

“You guys are-”

There’s a knock at the door behind him.

He takes a second to turn, still dealing with the slight shock flooding through his system that only deepens when he finds Steve on the other side.

Steve’s smile widens quickly.

“Happy Birthday.” He says like he’s saying ‘I love you’ and it makes Billy’s chest burn.

“I-”

“I got you something.” Steve says, pushing a (poorly) wrapped present into Billy’s chest, forcing him to take it. It’s heavy.

“You guys are ridiculous.” Billy mumbles down to the present he’s now holding close to his chest, fully aware of his face turning pink. And it only gets pinker because Steve decides to lean over and kiss Billy’s cheek and he’s gonna riot. He’s gonna fight someone for making him feel so seen.

Billy’s still standing in the doorway when Steve yells out “I brought the cake!” To the rest of the room and moves around Billy to walk into the cabin.

Billy stands there for a minute, willing his blush to go down before he closes the door and ventures into prey.

And it’s… quite the evening. Hop puts on one of Billy’s favorite records and helps Joyce make burgers and homemade french fries (that are either very crispy or very soft) for them all to eat. As they’re getting the food ready, El pulls Billy to dance with her and Will and Max as Jonathan shows Steve where to put the birthday cake and Billy is… 

Billy is kind of floating in place, being pulled around by El to the beat of the music and he kind of just wants to sit. El notices Max drag Billy over to the sofa, so she grabs onto Will instead, spinning around with him.

“Happy birthday, jerk.” Max sits on the sofa.

Billy flops next to her onto the couch in response, looking at the decorations around him before absent-mindedly pulling on the ribbon of one of the balloons.

“Do you like your party?” Max asks, leaning forward to look the boy in the eye. He just kind of scoffs a bit.

“I… I dunno what to do.” Billy says, pulling the balloon down to eye level before letting it float back up and doing it all over again. It’s an oddly nervous gesture that he doesn’t feel he has very much control of. “This is so… awkward. This is why I didn’t want anyone knowing. Birthday parties are so dumb.”

“It’s just because you’ve never had one.” Max says, punching Billy’s shoulder lightly. He pulls the balloon back down again so he can bat it into Max’s face.

“Hey!” She shrieks a bit, swiping it away.

Billy notices Jonathan walk up to them then, and he looks up to find Steve has gotten swept up in the dancing.

“You good?” Jonathan asks, settling himself next to Billy to watch his brother and El spin poor Steve around like crazy. He hands Billy an opened beer bottle. “Courtesy of Hop, by the way. He said the birthday boy deserves one.”

Billy chuckles as he accepts it. “Thanks. And yeah, I guess.” he mumbles up against the lip of the bottle before taking a swig. “S’just weird.”

“Don’t like parties?” Jonathan asks with a smirk on his face.

“Not really.” Billy swats at Max’s hand as she reaches for his bottle.

“Hm… I don’t believe you.”

His grin is smarmy. Billy glares weakly at it. “I don’t. Not parties about me. What’s that thing about big parties having more privacy?”

Jonathan laughs. “Are you quoting The Great Gatsby?”

Billy shoves his shoulder into Jonthan’s. “I don’t fucking know! I guess? There’s something… different about people looking at me when I don’t really know them. It’s easier that way.” He takes a nervous swig of his beer.

“Well, if you want, we can all ignore you for the rest of the night.” Jonathan offers with a smirk, leaning back on the sofa. Billy grabs a pillow from the couch to shove into Jonathan’s face.

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious. I’d be more than happy to ignore you. Easiest birthday gift I’ll ever give.”

“You’re so nice to me, Byers.”

“I know, my generosity is endless.”

The two are near laughing with each other when Max makes a confused noise next to them.

“You guys are weird.” She says with a scrunched up look on her face. She’s going to get up to join the dancing when Joyce and Hop call everyone to dinner.

And it’s… it’s nice. The food is good and the conversation is fairly easy. Hop and Joyce ask Billy a few questions about how his day was and how he feels now that he’s 18 and how he’s a really “handsome and confident young man” (Joyce’s words) that may or may not make Billy tear up and have to hide it in his burger. He’s thankful that Jonathan notices something’s up (maybe even gives him pity, though Billy doesn’t want to think about that) and changes the subject while Steve puts a comforting and warm hand on Billy’s thigh.

The conversation shifts away from him and he’s thankful for it. They joke around and laugh and smile and then Hop’s putting on a different record as they sit Billy down to open up his presents.

And this is where he feels every bit of awkwardness, because everyone’s sitting around waiting for him to open the presents that they specifically bought for him. Waiting for his reactions to these things that are being given to him with the implication of putting a smile on his face and it’s just… the weirdest sort of pressure?

And he likes these people. They’re like… they’re his family now. So he can’t even just not care about how they feel about his reactions. He wants to make them feel good about what they gave him.

But it’s really not that hard, bc, lo and behold, these people actually know him pretty well. It’s a… weird feeling. He can’t remember the last time he got a present from someone who actually cared this much. Max hasn’t bought him a present ever bc he makes such a big deal about hating his birthday. But here he is, a little bundle of presents in front of him and he… he feels spoiled. It’s a first that’s been happening for a few months now. Every day that he gets that spoiled feeling feels like the first time bc it’s so alien. He’s not sure he’ll ever get used to it.

So he opens them up slowly. There’s a little gray box from Will, with a cool as hell charm on a chain inside. It’s a little skull, delicately painted in various metallic colors. It almost looks mosaic from the paint.

“It’s an earring.” Will explains in a nervous, bouncy kind of excitement. “I found the charm and then painted it.”

Billy’s amazed at the detail. He musses up Will’s hair with a smile and gives his thanks, taking his own earring out to put his new one in.

There’s a very poorly wrapped present leaning up against the table, labeled “From El and Max ♥”. From the shape of the crinkly, potentially used wrapping paper, Billy thinks he has an inkling of what it is. He still acts shocked when he opens it, if only just for El.

“Skateboard!”

And my lovely friend @okayshitbird helped me out w/ ideas for presents for Billy and had this WONDERFUL idea of 1. Max yearning to skate w/ Billy again bc we both agree that Billy 120% used to be a skater back in Cali before he got a car AND taught Max how to skate. And also 2. El wanting to learn to skate bc she thinks Max is so cool and i think we can ALL agree that we were ROBBED of Max and El skating w/ each other. SO.

Billy opens it up to find a skateboard. And it’s like… a nice one. It’s clearly not brand new, it’s got a little bit of use on it’s wheels and a couple scratches already, but it’s obviously close to new. The deck itself is pretty sweet, too. The pattern is neon and psychedelic looking, and it takes a couple of seconds for Billy to make out a picture of a frog with large eyes, hidden in the chaos of the pattern. It looks… familiar.

Bc @okayshitbird ALSO had the wonderful idea of El and Max maybe possibly asking Heather for help in lifting a skateboard they may or may not have seen in the Lost and Found at the pool. And Heather definitely rolled her eyes, but she thinks Billy’s kid sister is funny so she did it for them for the low low price of a package of her favorite bubblegum. She’s nothing if not kind and generous.

But Billy remembers when he had to confiscate this. He shoots a skeptical look at the girls.

“Looks kinda… familiar. Where’d ya get it?”

“Oh uh… we may have had some help-” Max begins before-

“Heather!” El cuts in.

Max covers El’s mouth. “It doesn’t really matter where we got it, does it? But it’s yours now!” Max hurriedly grabs the board and places it down under the coffee table. “Alright, next gift.”

The next gift is in a paper bag with a little bow placed on the front. Billy pulls out the gift.

“A sweater?” Billy asks, looking to Hop and Joyce, who he assumes this is from.

“You need warm clothes.” Hop says flatly.

“Fine-”

“For the love of god, please don’t rip holes in it.”

“Fine.” Billy says with more attitude this time, putting the bag down and seeing something at the bottom of it. He looks in curiously to see a $20 bill folded up neatly. (keep in mind, back in0 1985 that’s like… $50 bucks by today’s standards.)

Billy shoots Hop a knowing look and Hop gives a nod and a little smile.

“Thanks pops.” Billy says with a little smile of his own, shoving the sweater back in the bag. He feels a little weird about pulling money out in front of everyone, so he doesn’t, but he wants him to know he appreciates it.

“Yeah yeah.” Hop nods and mumbles into the lip of his beer bottle.

The last gift on the table is the one Steve shoved at Billy.

“Best for last?” Billy mumbles a snarky little thing in Steve’s direction, revelling in the embarrassed look Steve gives.

“No no, it’s nothing.” Steve says nervously.

Except obviously that’s wrong. Bc obviously Steve 1. Is very rich and 2. Spoils Billy absolutely rotten (or at least…. As much as Billy allows for). And hell- the present is HEAVY. Like…… there’s definitely something in that box.

And Billy’s honestly irritated when he opens it. Bc goddamn it Steve…

“Do you like it?” Steve is wringing his hands.

It’s a portable stereo. Like… a brand new one. An expensive one. Billy doesn’t have one- he left his old stereo back in his old house, not wanting to carry anything he didn’t need in the move. When he listens to music he either forces Jonathan to let him use his player or he listens to records on the record player out in the living room or he just… sits in his car.

“Woah.” Jonathan mumbles, leaning in a little closer from his spot on the side chair to look at it.

Billy’s heart is fluttering.

“Billy?” Steve asks, voice obviously nervous but Billy’s a little caught up bc goddamnit. He’s… he hates being spoiled but this thing is sick and then Steve’s hand is reaching out for his knee and Billy kisses Steve’s cheek quickly and knocks his shoulder into him.

“Thanks, pretty boy.”

And Steve is blushing and so is Billy and Max is smirking and Jonathan notices Joyce is about to start cooing like she always does so he decides to save Billy from the embarrassment. Someone give him that “brother of the year” award already.

“Well open it, I wanna see.”

So Billy tears into the box, taking the stereo out and shit it’s nice. All metallic blue and steel and buttons and dials and shit it’s gonna sound so nice.

They cut into the cake (Billy refuses to let them all sing happy birthday to him, even though Max and El still do, as loud as possible, as Joyce cuts everyone a slice)(Billy tries to tickle them to get them to stop, but they just dodge him) and if Billy is feeling warmth in his chest, he’ll blame it on… heartburn or something.

It’s not too long after everyone is done with their cake that Joyce yawns, claiming herself tired. Jim nods, giving Billy the biggest bear hug possible- y’know, to really embarrass him- before heading to get ready for bed. He throws in a “Happy birthday son.” for good measure as well, to which Billy, with a strained voice as he’s being squished, says “S’not my birthday.”

El attacks Billy with a hug, Max right behind her and joining in.

“Happy birthday, you idiot.” Max mumbles. Billy pulls at her hair. Max swats at his arm before getting dragged off to El’s room to probably listen to music or read comic books or something before they crash for the night.

Billy’s the one who initiates a hug from Will, bc the sweet boy, bless him, is standing there so awkwardly, feet moving nervously with each other, mumbling a quiet “Happy birthday, Billy.” Billy doesn’t let that slide though, grabbing roughly onto his shoulder and pulling him into a tight hug, giving a gruff “Thanks, pipsqueak.” bc Billy doesn’t even try to hide it: Will is his favorite of the kids.

Joyce is still moving around the kitchen, putting plates away and refusing help from Steve, moving even after the plates are all put away, wiping at the counter like it needs to be cleaned even though it doesn’t, when Billy catches Jonathan’s eye.

Jonathan brings a hand up to his mouth, pretending to bite at his nail before his fingers move to look like he’s smoking. Billy nods, and Jonathan gives a little smile, turning to Steve and nodding at him. Steve, however, is oblivious. Bc Steve doesn’t know their weird little ~signals~ they give each other bc Billy and Jonathan always seem to be talking in some kind of code. They’re so weird w/ each other. No one understands them.

So Steve is confused.

“What?”

Jonathan rolls his eyes. Smoke. Jonathan mouths, but Steve’s eyebrows furrow.

“Smo-?”

Billy grabs Steve’s hand. “Get outside, moron.” Billy mumbles, pulling him towards the back of the house, where Jonathan is already lazily walking to.

“Oh, Billy! Can I uhm…” Joyce begins, obviously nervous. “Can I talk to you?”

Billy’s nervous now, too.

By the time she’s done digging through the drawer for whatever it is she’s looking for, Jonathan and Steve are already out on the back porch. She’s holding an envelope with a ribbon tied around it.

“I uhm… I know it doesn’t really matter as much… now that you’re 18 and all. But here’s my present to you.”

Billy eyes it curiously, taking gentle hold of the envelope, untying the ribbon, opening it up.

And thanks AGAIN to @okayshitbird for the idea bc-

“It’s the adoption papers. For my side. If you want!”

She’s so nervous but Billy’s only vaguely aware now bc… Bc his heart is dropping. She wants him to be her son. Like… for real.

She’s still rambling a bit, talking about how she doesn’t wanna force him and “you don’t have to” and “I just wanted to give you the option” and-

Billy throws the papers onto the counter to hug her. Bc goddamnit this comes with a lot of emotions. too many emotions but the good outweigh the bad and he’s a little overwhelmed and-

“Thank you.”

Joyce gives a strong hug back.

“No need to thank me, honey.”

And so she sends him a warm smile and a quiet “happy birthday” before heading to bed. Billy goes to tuck the papers back into the envelope. He places them in a safe spot in one of his drawers in his room.

When he gets outside, still a little shocked, Jonathan’s finished rolling the joint and is laughing easily with Steve.

“Finally.” Steve says, pouting a bit and reaching for Billy. “Jonathan’s been ribbing me this whole time.”

Jonathan shrugs lazily. “Somebody has to.”

“I get enough from him.” Steve says, pointing to Billy. “I get all I need from him.”

There’s some kind of insinuation in it that makes Jonathan gag.

“Please stop now. He’s my brother.” Jonathan pulls a face.

Billy’s mind is a little busy. Gets even busier at the word brother. The other boys notice.

“You alright, babe?” Steve asks quietly. Billy turns to Jonathan.

“You’re… you’re actually gonna be my brother, now.”

“Huh?”

“Joyce is adopting me.”

Jonathan’s silent, eyes getting wide. “Really?”

Billy nods. Steve breathes out a bit. Everyone understands the implication. Bc they know Billy now. They know how important this is for him. They know this is big.

They’re quiet for a second.

“Damn, does this mean I have to be nice to you?” Jonathan asks before the placing the joint in his mouth and lighting it. Billy laughs.

“If you are, I’ll send you to the psych ward.”

“No need.” Jonathan says, exhaling smoke and handing the joint to Billy. “They’d send me away for being too crazy.”

“That sure?” Billy asks before he inhales.

“Once I get to talking about the monsters that abducted my brother, yeah.”

Billy and Jonathan laugh. Steve has a bit of a harder time keeping up with how the tone shifted so quickly. He’s not sure he’ll ever understand these two.

They each take a couple of puffs on the joint in silence before Jonathan jumps to life again.

“Oh, go grab your fancy new stereo and put this in.”

He tosses a cassette in Billy’s direction. Billy has to unwrap his arm from around Steve’s shoulders quickly to catch it.

“Oh shit, Motley Crue’s new album? Sweet. I didn’t know you like them?” Billy’s in awe and Steve leans in to look at the track list.

“I don’t.” Jonathan chuckles a bit. “It’s for you, genius.”

Billy looks up in confusion. Jonathan rolls his eyes.

“Happy birthday.”

“Serious?”

“What? God forbid I buy you something?” Jonathan asks, standing up a bit to accept the joint from Steve. “Just get your stereo.”

Billy chuckles back a thanks.

And so they listen to the tape. Jonathan admits he was deciding between a few (Ratt, AC/DC, or this) but picked this tape bc he doesn’t hate the song “Smokin’ In The Boys Room”. Steve admits he thinks every song sounds like the last and gets a slap on the thigh from Billy, who huffs harshly on the joint at the words. Jonathan makes eye contact w/ Steve to let him know he agrees. Then Billy decides that the heavy guitar of “Save Our Souls” is too seductive and hot not to start making out with Steve, to which Jonathan makes a gagging noise and gets up.

“Gross.” He groans, standing up and burning the last of the joint out. “I’m heading to bed.”

Billy waves at Jonathan from where he’s locked onto Steve’s lips, but Steve pulls away to give a proper goodbye, his face red.

“Uh, g’night Jonathan!”

“Yeah, goodnight.” Billy mumbles into the skin of Steve’s neck.

Jonathan rolls his eyes, but Billy doesn’t see it.

“Just don’t fuck on the porch.” Jonathan says flatly before heading into the house and being careful to close the door quietly.

“You’re so embarrassing.” Steve chastises before pulling Billy back up to kiss him soundly.

They make out a little more, sitting just like that, listening to the music nice and clear on his new stereo.

“Did you have a nice birthday?” Steve asks quietly, rubbing Billy’s sides.

“Yeah… but I still think you’re all ridiculous.”

Steve laughs, leaning back in for another kiss.

[musashi]

Heya Mu! Sent you an ask a few days ago about infodumping prompts; here's a few just for fun. Answer when you like, no rush! Feel free to use factual lore information, headcanons, or kin stuff as you like. So, I know that Hylia and Din, Farore, and Nayru are all goddesses, but what's their "relationship"? Which came first, and why did Nintendo/the responsible deity (or deities) feel like they had to make a new deity/deities? Hylia created Fi, right? To guide her chosen hero? Did Hylia create any other sword spirits (weird tongue guy notwithstanding, p sure Demise made him), did she create the concept of sword spirits, and what prompted Hylia to give Fi a very analytical-type personality (if she chose at all and if it wasn't Fi's own choice to be like that?) (Apologies for the weird tone on this next one, couldn't figure out the right way to word it) What gives Hylia the right/ability to intervene more in Hyrule's happenings than Din/Nayru/Farore? afaik, the latter trio has a pretty hands-off approach. Are they actually invested in seeing Hyrule flourish or is Hyrule just kind of Hylia's "pet project"? Is Hyrule the only land she cares for, or does she care for other lands that have been touched by her chosen hero/his incarnations as well (Labrynna/Holodrum/Termina/Lorule/etc.)? And, finally, what came first, the loftwing or the egg? Apologies if this is overwhelming, I can break these down into separate asks if you like, I just like the way you write things and give information... Plus it kinda got away from me a bit :P Hope things are going well for you!

OH FUCK YES LETS GOOOOOO THANK YOU I LOVE SHIT LIKE THIS

So, I know that Hylia and Din, Farore, and Nayru are all goddesses, but what's their "relationship"?

i view the golden goddesses as higher deities and hylia as a lesser one--the golden goddesses had power enough to create the entire world, while hylia herself seems less powerful? she was mortal enough to be mortally wounded from demise, despite being a goddess, so it seems her power is far less infinite.

i honestly have trouble humanizing the golden three like i do hylia, whenever i try to conceptualize them as people rather than forces it just goes fuzzy in my brain? so i have trouble viewing them having any relationship with her at all. the way i see it, they simply breathed a purpose into her and let her live it, and she did what she felt she was meant to do. if anything, the trinity are guiding stars more than they are big sisters.

Which came first, and why did Nintendo/the responsible deity (or deities) feel like they had to make a new deity/deities?

it's... hard to say? the triforce existed in zelda 1, and the goddesses of power/wisdom/courage are mentioned in alttp, but they aren't named until oot. hylia is also mentioned in alttp--'the people of hylia,' is what the royal family is referred to as, with no elaboration lol, she's not named as a goddess. a goddess of time is mentioned in majora's mask that's heavily implied to be hylia, but it's probably safe to say the golden 3 came first, hylia as a goddess didn't really feature at all until skyward sword.

in the story, the golden goddesses created the world, and the point at which they departed turned into the triforce. they tasked hylia with watching over the triforce, making sure it didn't fall into corrupt hands, and living amongst the people so they would always be protected. she's a guardian deity, at her core, her place is among mortals, which is why the humans of the surface are named in her honour.

as for why nintendo just kinda threw a fourth goddess into the mix 25 years in... i dunno, probably just to spice things up for the lore! ocarina of time made the golden goddesses seem so untouchable, i don't really blame them for making a pink diamond-type goddess to live closer to humans and kickstart the whole story. when skyward sword came out the marketing was all about how it was an origin story!

Hylia created Fi, right? To guide her chosen hero? Did Hylia create any other sword spirits (weird tongue guy notwithstanding, p sure Demise made him), did she create the concept of sword spirits?

as far as we know, fi and gary hams are the only sword spirits in existence. there's straight up no trace of sword spirits anywhere else in zelda lore, like literally nothing. i would say that it takes tremendous power to enchant a sword with a spirit. hylia and demise are both gods of their respective domains.

i honestly lean more toward demise being the first. ghirahim strikes me as 'older' than fi, though that might just be that he's been autonomous & without his master for a very long time, lots of time to wander the surface and develop as an entity. sword spirits are... very morally complex creatures, because they are designed to be servants, which is never a good thing and you can't really make it better by being like 'oh, but they love it' lmao. demise designing himself what is functionally a slave to get him the upper hand is within his character, and programming that slave as a failsafe in the event of his death is exactly the kind of global evil i'd expect from him. i think hylia takes a page from his book when she makes fi, hoping to gain a similar upperhand--but with fi she's less of a slave and more of a guardian angel.

(botw confirms that fi is programmed with a similar failsafe, which is very interesting! when demise is sealed away, ghirahim awakens and persists, wandering the surface in search of anything and everything that could revive his master. when link dies in botw, fi awakens after millennia asleep and calculates, immediately, the exact scenario with the highest probability of saving him from the brink.)

what prompted Hylia to give Fi a very analytical-type personality (if she chose at all and if it wasn't Fi's own choice to be like that?)

i go back and forth on this, i have many interpretations. i can never decide which interpretation of hylia i like best. the sentimental kinnie side of me wants her to be this heavenly thing with this overflowing heart who loves and loves and loves so much, she can't help but let it spill over. the part of me who is interested in stories wants her to literally just be rose quartz/pink diamond from steven universe, this otherworldly being who is fascinated by humans but struggles to see them as her equal, as things with souls. how i interpret fi is directly tied to how i interpret hylia, so it changes.

here are some ideas i have:

hylia sucks. she made fi to get the upper hand, in both her own battles and her chosen hero's. she didn't think about much of anything when she made fi, just kind of saw the sword spirit as a chess piece. fi came out like that because hylia didn't bother to program her emotions.

hylia really sucks. she purposefully designed fi to be an unfeeling machine. emotional attachments are not efficient, they do not give you the upper hand in battle. she designed fi intentionally and carefully to be nothing more than a cold ai who exists to serve. anything less wouldn't be enough.

hylia rocks. she came down to earth a goddess who knew she was above the mortals there, but the courageous heart of one single man melted her heart to honey and she vowed to make his soul immortal. sword spirits are born as blank slates, their identities tied only to their purpose. hylia knew when fi met link, though, that would change. this hylia does not view emotional attachments as a flaw--maybe she did, once upon a time, but since knowing humans and loving humans, she's learned there is nothing more powerful than a heart on fire. hylia always wanted fi to learn this lesson, and though she programmed the spirit to be efficient first and foremost, she knew that if anyone could wake up the heart of a machine, it would be link.

What gives Hylia the right/ability to intervene more in Hyrule's happenings than Din/Nayru/Farore? afaik, the latter trio has a pretty hands-off approach. Are they actually invested in seeing Hyrule flourish or is Hyrule just kind of Hylia's "pet project"?

honestly i can't say why beyond what i said above about her being kind of a lesser deity. the golden goddesses really did just create the entire universe and the most powerful artifact known to man and then dip and leave her to it.

they seem very... ambivalent to the fate of hyrule. the triforce itself can't discern good from evil intent, it simply grants wishes, and likewise the golden goddesses make no move to intervene unless they are certain their world will be completely destroyed. i'm pretty sure the only influence they ever have on the land below is the great flood that precedes wind waker--hyrule gets so close to desolation that they say fuck it and even then they drown the world, with little care for the people below. it's just this clean sweep, survival of the fittest.

after the era of the goddess though, hylia's right to intervene simply comes from the fact that she chose mortality over godhood. she looked her divinity in the face and said 'no thank you' and chose to die and be eternally reborn instead. homegirl brute forced her way into it and as long as the royal family keeps having daughters she isn't stopping any time soon.

Is Hyrule the only land she cares for, or does she care for other lands that have been touched by her chosen hero/his incarnations as well (Labrynna/Holodrum/Termina/Lorule/etc.)?

i wish i had answers for this. i feel like her protection goes wherever link goes, though, even if it's not as strong in other realms. it is her that forged his unbreakable spirit, so in a way he carries her blessing with him always... i don't know if that makes sense, but i think there's a bit of hylia's golden love wherever link steps.

And, finally, what came first, the loftwing or the egg?

oh i know this one. it's the loftwing. i will not elaborate.

[limenysnocket]

In The Dirt. . . Pt. I

Summary: Welccome to the life of a groupie. Booze, sex, drugs and violence follows you wherever you go, and wherever you go is with the band you're following. The Wilderpeople. You expected to be tossed around the group, but one landed his official dominance over you and made you his and no one else's.

Warnings: Immediate smut, swearing, smoking

Request: A bunch of people, but to name one-- @honorarytenenbaum

A/N: I'm actually quite excited to write this one... Don't be alarmed. There is a LOT of fucking in this series. Enjoy.

○●■○●■○●■○●■○

Your teeth clenched and you wiggled your hips, pushing his cock deeper into your soaked walls. He pushed against that one tender spot now. Your moans get louder.

"Told you, if you keep moving, it's only going to get worse~," Taika hummed and chuckled deeply, adjusting himself, then continuing to jot down whatever lyrics came to mind, just from the feeling of your tight pussy around him.

"Well, are you almost done? It's been almost an hour, Tai," you groan, burying your face into the crook of his neck.

"Mm... maybe. Got a few more lyrics," He hummed, resting his free hand on your ass, beneath the shirt he let you borrow with his band logo on the front.

"Taika, I need you to fuck me sooner or later~," you begged and moaned softly, adjusting despite what he says.

"I'm sorry. Who's Taika?" He said, tapping the end of his pen against the paper again, humming. You know exactly what he wants you to call him, and he's made you call him it since the first time he pinned you to a wall, got you on your back, spread your legs and pummeled you until your insides were sore.

"Excuse me," You said quietly, the sarcasm hissing on the tip of your tongue. "I meant, daddy~."

The sound of your sultry tone must have driven him haywire, because he quickly shot you a look, bit his lip and scribbled down lyrics so fast, his handwriting turned to chicken scratch real quick. He threw down his notepad and pen, over on his nightstand, then his hand shot to your hips.

"You're a real fucking piece of work, you know that?" He whispered, his eyes glancing down to look at his cock sheathed in your walls, just beneath the t-shirt.

"Well, if that's a bad thing, it's your fault for making me this way," You teased him without a second thought, but you should have kept quiet, because, before you knew it, he was harshly bouncing you up and down, fucking the life out of you.

The room filled with moans of his name, nickname or complete lust driven gibberish. The sound of skin on skin was obvious and it echoed along the walls, like it always did in any hotel room you stayed in with him.

He was in the middle of giving you a rough, deep hickey to replace the old ones, which were fading out and healing with a disgusting yellow tint, when the bedside phone started to yell at the two of you. You whined and Taika put a finger to his lips while he reached for the phone. "Keep going~. I'll make this quick~," He smirked, placing his now free hand on the back of your head and pushing your face into his shoulder to muffle the delicious moans escaping your mouth.

He picked up the phone, then clicked it on speaker, before returning his hands to your hips, just so he could make your hips go at a slower pace so the squeaks of the bed wouldn't blow your cover. The risk actually turned you on.

"What?" Taika huffed to the phone while staring into your eyes and moving you ever so slowly along his glistening cock.

"Sir, your manager is here to see you. He requests that you come to the lobby promptly and immediately," A snobby, male, hotel employee said through the phone. It almost made you want to snort in laughter. Yeah, good luck getting Taika to go anywhere when he's in the middle of a good fuck.

"How about no," Taika snorted back rudely and smirked, your body was trembling beneath his hands and it was driving him half crazy to not just flip you over and start going ham on your soaked cunt.

"Sir, I'm afraid that--," the employee started, but Taika interrupted them again, by grabbing the phone, saying a loud and almost cheery, "Aaaand we're done," then hanging up the phone.

You were still going at the slow pace he ordered you to go at, during the call, but, as it turns out, just that speed had ticked him off enough. You promptly found yourself on your belly, face pressed against the warm sheets and ass up in the air, like a stretching dog. A pair of hands gripped your asscheeks, then yanked you back to where a hot, hard dick filled you up to the brim. You moaned again, and that fueled the fire. Taika wasted no time on thrusting into you and pounding you until you were weak.

Things were just starting to get interesting, but his phone started to buzz on the nightstand. The screen lit up and partially illuminated the room with a white glow. Taika let out a snarl and reached over to pick it up, his pace unwavering.

"What now?" He nearly spat on his phone. His aggressiveness leaked into his thrusts and made you go wild. You would have been screaming for him, if you didn't have your face buried in the sheets.

"Tai food! There you are!" You heard the sound of Taika's upkept agent over the phone and you could almost feel Taika's cringe when he called him 'Tai food.' Taika hated that name with a burning, undying passion. The only person who he lets call him 'Tai' is you. "Look, man, I seriously need you to come down to the lobby right now. We have some serious business to discuss."

"What's wrong with you coming up here?" Taika grunted, continuing to thrust in and out of you like a madman.

"Do you know how much of a mad house it is with all of you in a room at once? I once caught one of you fucking a groupie on the dining table!" His manager complained over the phone, but it made you and Taika snicker through the pleasure.

"I said it to that dickhead worker and I'll say it to you," Taika hissed, his tongue swiping over his teeth once as his thrusts got deeper and slower for a brief moment for the benefit of your pleasure. "I'm not coming down to the lobby."

"Why not? You can't possibly be busy at this time of day!" His manager sighed.

"I'll have you know, that I'm balls deep in my favorite groupie right now and I'm about to make this. Little. Slut--" He paused between each word to give you a rough thrust that slammed the pleasure into your very core and made you scream his name, despite being on the phone, "--cum all over my cock. So, yeah, I am kinda busy actually. And I would like to be left the fuck alone. Buh-bye." Taika took no shit from the complaints he was getting and all the yelling. He simply hung up and tossed his phone down on the bed where it started to buzz consistently, his manager always being the one to call him.

"God, I love this pussy~. Such a tight little pussy~," Taika groaned into your ear almost breathlessly as he fucked away until your walls pulsed around him. He wasn't going to stop until he was satisfied. That's how it always worked, from the very first night. He was a hard man to satisfy, and that's why he always came back to you. He used to have more groupies, but when you came along, they slowly drifted away due to the lack of attention they received and you became his only one. Morning, noon and night, he got you whenever he wanted and took you everywhere. Whereas the other guys who were apart of the band had maybe a whole plethora of fans and about a dozen groupies in their midst, yet it was strange to see the main singer and guitarist, who had thousands of fans across the world, would only have one as his only. There must be something about you, but you just couldn't see it. Not yet, anyway.

He slapped your ass quite a few times and elicited moans from you're precious little mouth, where he had dumped his load so many times and down the throat where it disappeared. "Such a good girl for daddy, aren't you~?" He groaned and another slap marked its place on your ass. "You know, good girls cum for daddy... right now~."

Drool dripped from the corners of your mouth and your eyes rolled back. His delicious six inch continued to press against every sensitive area in you that existed and drove you crazy, to the point where you burst on him. You watched his eyes slide all the way down where his cock was sliding in and out of your hole. Your thighs glistened in the light of the cellphone and your body untensed and quivered. Eventually, you felt his seed paint your walls and start dripping across your folds. His grip on your hips loosened and the two of you were too busy basking in the euphoria of it all to really notice that the phone had stopped buzzing.

Another smack to your ass broke you out of your post-coitus state and you lurched up a little to look back at the man who just made love to you. "Hope that pussy isn't too sore. Might have to go for another ride tonight~," Taika chuckled, this time giving your bum a softer pat, then he plopped down on the bed, right next to you. He never was much of a cuddler after sex, probably because he must have learned early on to never get attached to a groupie.

Funny, because you were already so attached to him, you wouldn't be able to lose him, but, in his perspective, he could easily flick you away like a pesky Junebug and not even have to think twice about it. You didn't like thinking about this much due to the fact that it left a big, fat dent in your heart, when you did. It always ruined the mood for you, so now, you just stuck with whatever came to mind, besides that subject.

You heard the flicker of a lighter and your drowsy eyes looked up to see Taika working on a freshly lit cigarette. Your bum dropped slowly from the air, until you were just laying on your stomach, hugging the pillow as if it were him in your arms just then, and staring up at him, dreamily. The exhaustion was settling in. This was the second fuck of the day, and it was only 2 PM. You couldn't help but wonder if Taika had any more plans for you tonight, or if you were going to spend the night in his room again, or sleep out in the living room in the groupie pileup. Luckily, Taika hasn't made you do that for months and you've had the luxury of sharing a room with him since then, since he claimed that the other groupies were too dirty for his tastes and preferred you stay away from them, as well as the other bandmembers most of the time.

You briefly stirred and grumbled softly as someone knocked on the door. You nuzzled in under the covers and Taika groaned loudly, grabbing a pair of sweatpants off the floor and sliding them on, not caring that he was going commando. His hair was flying, looking like he had blowdried it and never bothered to comb it. It actually didn't look all too bad on him, but then again, there's hardly anything that looks bad on him.

You closed your eyes again as he opened the door and just listened to the conversation.

"Taika! My main man! Pad Tai--" Oh God, it's him.

"Don't call me Pad Tai or Tai food ever again. New ground rules are set and I want that in my contract, otherwise I'm dumping you," Taika put bluntly, leaning against the door to block you away from his manager's prying eyes.

His manager laughed for awhile, thinking it was a joke until he saw Taika's serious expression. You heard him clear his throat and continue on. "I think I got you a little side gig this week, for you and the boys," his manager went on, "you might like it. I heard it's a great place to pick up chicks."

Taika seemed disinterested and you could tell, just by the silence he expressed oh so well. "Fine," Taika breathed and took a drag from his cigarette. "Where's it at?"

"It's just on the other side of town! Real prestigious joint, I gotta tell ya! You and the boys'll have so much fun, and, hey! Maybe you'll expand you're groupie collection, huh?" You could hear the schmucky grin on his face and you knew he was leaning to try and peak at you, but you also knew Taika was constantly getting in the way.

"I'll think about it," Taika huffed, then slammed the door before the screw could say anything else. You turned over on your back and sat up on your elbows to see him running his hand through his curls and smoking the crap out of his cigarette. Once he saw you looking at him, he seemed to perk up and he walked himself right on over to you. He sat down on your side of the bed, just on the edge and caressed your cheek with the hand that wasn't cradling the cigarette between his fingers.

"Think you'll be able to attend the afterparty with me, babe?" He hummed, using the slang term 'afterparty' that just meant drinking with him on the balcony. You grinned and nodded as he took another drag. He grinned too, then leaned in. He parted his lips and soft smile wafted out like fog over a lake, and as he drew closer, it slipped into your mouth.

You had grown addicted to this, suckling on his nicotine flavored lip and you didn't think this was an addiction worth giving up. You didn't even know if this addiction was good or bad either.

[purplesurveys]

1090

survey by --ranboweyes--

1.] What age is your youngest aunt? I have a relative who’s technically my aunt since she’s a cousin of my mom, but she’s like 3 years younger which makes her 18-19ish, I think. 

2.] Do you miss someone right now? The only thing I’m missing is the weekend which is quickly ending lol.

3.] What can you see to the Northwest to you? I can see our living room couch.

4.] Do you like bowling? I love bowling. I wish I could do it all the time, only if a session wasn’t so expensive.

5.] Can you pronounce Italian words? I mean I can try saying the words but I know I’m definitely not pronouncing them in the native accent. @justsurveys​ definitely can though, heh.

6.] Do you prefer black or beige colored jackets? I have more black ones, but I’m not opposed to trying out beige.

7.] Do you own a hoodie? Yes, I’m wearing one right now because it’s pretty chilly tonight.

8.] Do you like roasting marshmallows on a bonfire? I’ve only done this once, which was in like Grade 3 when we had an overnight thingy in school and our teacher planned a bonfire for us. But I’m not a fan of marshmallows at all so the answer to this is no.

9.] Do you like cheesy puffs? No. I prefer other snacks.

10.] What's your name without vowels? Rbyn or Rbn, if we’re counting out the letter y.

11.] How many layers of clothing are you wearing? Just two, which is always the case if I do have to wear more than one layer; I have a shirt under my zipped-up hoodie. I’ve only ever had to wear multiple layers once; it was when we were in Sagada and I had to wear 4 or 5 layers if I didn’t want to shiver to death.

12.] When was the last time you got a takeaway? What did you have? I usually dine in the restaurant altogether or go to the drive-thru, but never takeout. Today, though, I did order a chicken barbecue at Starbucks originally meant to be for dine-in; but I got sad in the middle of my time there so I only had a few bites and brought the rest home. Which I guess technically counts as takeout.

13.] If you could climb any mountain or range which would you chose? Mount Pulag because I’ve heard so much about it and it’d be nice to experience it for myself.

14.] Do you alphabetically arrange anything in your room? What? Nope.

15.] Have you ever visited fat-pie.com? No.

16.] Do you prefer sweet or sour fruits? Sweet.

17.] Do you like Flo Rida? Which song of his? I mean, not really. There are a few songs he’s featured in that I find catchy, like Right Round, but I don’t like like them.

18.] How's your dancing skills? There aren’t any to speak of. 

19.] What is your favorite number? I don’t have any. The idea of favorite numbers personally never made sense to me, but I do recognize that they can mean a lot to some people.

20.] Describe your best friend to me? She’s incredibly smart and creative, very motherly and responsible, and always knows the right questions to ask when her friends are troubled and what advice to give.

21.] What is your favorite alcoholic drink? Peach soju, Long Island Iced Tea, Zombie, and tequila are some of my favorites. I’m generally a fan of cocktails though, and I love it whenever bars have their own lineup because it lets me see how creative they get and because it also allows me to try their own spin on mixed drinks.

22.] Do you do any sports or have you done any sport professionally? I play table tennis, but I never played professionally or had formal training. It was a club I joined in middle school just because Angela dragged me but I ended up enjoying it, so I played and played until I unconsciously got better.

23.] What is your ringtone? Just the default Apple ringtones; I never changed them.

24.] Do you like chili flavored chips/crisps? Sure! Chili peanuts are great, too.

25.] Do you curl or straighten your hair? I don’t do either with my hair unless I’m headed to a special/fancy occasion.

26.] What's the nicest smell of shampoo? We used to have this brand that housed black shampoo and it smelled super elegant and nice, but I have no idea how to describe the scent.

27.] What smell turns you on? How about turns you off? It’s generally a turn-on when people make an effort to smell nice, e.g. applying perfume several times a day. BO and the smell of the sun are my main turn-offs.

28.] Whose your favorite comedian? I’ve only been able to watch a couple of her skits but Sindhu Vee is pretty high up on my list. I’m not really too big on comedians, though.

29.] RnB or Reggae? R&B, by a mile.

30.] What brand of batteries do you usually get? I/We haven’t had to use batteries in such a long time.

31.] Are any of your friends pregnant or have kids? A good number of people from my high school now have kids, but I don’t consider any of them friends.

32.] What is in your medicine cabinet? We don’t have one since no one in the family needs to regularly take meds. We do have a jar in the kitchen for multivitamins that my parents take every night.

33.] What's your favorite aspect of the natural world? The ocean. < I’d say so too. Mountain ranges are also beautiful.

34.] What's your favorite man made thing? Probs the internet.

35.] Can you whistle properly? Yasss.

36.] What song do you think is the most widely heard in the world? Happy Birthday or some Christmas jingle.

37.] Where's the strangest place a fast food restaurant was located? I mean...I think fast food restaurants are ubiquitous by nature, so I’ve never seen one and went, “That’s not supposed to be there,” lol. Whenever I spot a fast food restaurant, I’m usually able to make out the reasoning behind positioning it wherever it happens to be.

38.] What countries surround your country? Or are you not land locked? We’re an archipelago, so. Not land-locked. But the nearest countries are Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Indonesia.

39.] Do you own binoculars or nonoculars? What do you use them for? I don’t own either.

40.] Do you ever wish you had a telescope on the roof or attic to stargaze? I have always wanted one, yeah. I’ve always dreamed of placing it in my future living room, though.

41.] What's your favorite chocolate bar? Not a bar, but I like Reese’s peanut butter cups the most.

42.] Do you fall asleep easy in cars? How about planes, trains and boats? Unless I am extremely tired, it’s usually hard for me to fall asleep while in transport.

43.] Would you rather live a year of your life in every major country or stay in the same place you live forever without vacations? The latter sounds like an unfulfilling life to me, to be honest. Like I can’t even take vacations??? As much as I like routine, I do enjoy a bit of spontaneity and I think moving to a new country every year can do that for me.

44.] What will you not tolerate in a person? Someone who will make you feel stupid for asking a question. Also those who always have something mean to say about everyone.

45.] Do you forgive others easier or yourself? Why is this? Forgiving isn’t really in my vocabulary to be honest. Hahaha. I’ve always been more at peace this way.

46.] How was God made, if he exists? Key word here is if, so I’m skipping this question because it’s irrelevant to me.

47.] Have you ever done aqua aerobics or polo? Yeah we had to do a bit of water polo in swimming classes in high school.

48.] What age were you when you learned how to swim? I guess around 2? I have baby photos from when I was that age wherein I was having fun in our old inflatable pool. Swimming came naturally to me and I don’t think I ever had trouble with the water.

49.] What shows or characters scared you as a child? You know how older cartoons only featured the legs of some characters, like the housemaid in Tom & Jerry or the lady from Powerpuff Girls? The uncertainty of those characters always made me feel unsettled as a kid.

50.] Do you stay up all night on New Years Eve/Day or go to bed after 12am? I always go to bed well after 12 AM since my family usually holds a get-together for it.

51.] What's currently in your fridge? Some leftovers, some vegetables, essentials like bread and eggs, some condiments that need to be kept refrigerated.

52.] How about your freezer? Frozen goods like hotdogs and ham.

53.] What could you be doing now that is more productive? I should be working out but I’m skipping it for tonight because I hate Sundays, and I don’t want to make myself more tired than I already am.

54.] Give me some lyrics from the song that's stuck in your head? “Red lights, stop signs, I still see your face in the white cars, front yards...”

55.] What's your favorite type of firework? The grander the design the better for me, tbh.

[mst3kproject]

Iron Warrior

 Why yes, there is a fourth Ator movie!  Technically, this is the third Ator movie.  Whereas Ator, the Fighting Eagle, The Blade Master (aka Cave Dwellers) and Quest for the Mighty Sword were all made by Aristide Massaccesi (aka Joe D’Amato), Iron Warrior was made by Alfonso Brescia (aka Al Bradley).  Massaccessi supposedly hated it because it wasn’t true to his vision for Ator or something.  Myself, I was kind of intrigued.  What would a different take on Ator be like?

Well, I don’t know how he managed, but Alfonso Brescia pulled it off.  He made an Ator movie that makes even less sense than the other Ator movies.

The evil sorceress Phaedra used to rule this land, but then some fellow witches (I’m gonna call them Bellerians) banished her into darkness and installed a puppet king. Eighteen years later, however, Phaedra’s sentence is up and she has returned, with a legion of skull-faced minions and an indestructible cyborg named Drogar.  They kill the king and kidnap his heir, Princess Gianna.  The Bellerians therefore call upon Ator to rescue her, which he does, and then the Bellerian Leader tells them they must go on a quest to retrieve the only thing that can defeat Phaedra and free Drogar, who is also Ator’s brother, from her clutches – the Golden Chest of the Ages!  With that in hand, they head back to be crowned King and Queen of wherever this is, only to learn too late that Phaedra replaced the real Golden Chest with a fake!

According to the end credits, ‘script continuity’ was the job of somebody named Mirella Gamacchio.  I can only assume she was drunk as shit the entire time, because this movie is nothing but a series of “wait… what just happened?” moments.

There’s a bit where Phaedra decides to kill Ator before he can rescue Gianna.  She can’t just Thanos-snap him out of existence because the Bellerians have taken that power away from her, so she takes the form of a beautiful woman, lets him rescue her from random thugs, sleeps with him, locks him in a cabin, and burns the cabin down.  That seems like an over-complicated plan, somehow.  Also, Ator escapes by hiding under a wet bear rug.

To kill the king, Drogar telekinetically makes all the decorative weapons mounted on a wall fly into him and run him through.  Then Phaedra replaces the dead king and the kidnapped princess with imposters who look nothing like them and nobody at court seems to notice.  Later, Ator fights Drogar in the same weapons-adorned room and I kept waiting for the psychic stabbing thing to happen again, but it doesn’t.  Instead, Ator and Drogar throw spears at each other and keep catching them.  Finally Drogar throws two spears at once, and Ator catches one while Gianna pops up out of absolutely nowhere to catch the other, despite never having the slightest hint she was able to do something like that!

Later later, Gianna gets kidnapped by the skull-faced minions and thrown into a dungeon where her father is hanging in a doorway, with the spears still through him but apparently still alive.  He begs her for help, and then she suddenly reappears in Ator’s arms wearing a green dress instead of the red one she’s had on so far. This is one of several occasions on which I was absolutely sure that the ‘Gianna’ we were seeing was going to turn out to be Phaedra in disguise, and in this instance I was especially certain about it because green is Phaedra’s colour.  I was wrong. Even at the climax, when I was absolutely convinced the whole thing had to be a trick, the woman who looks like Gianna was always the real Gianna.  I think.

After Phaedra gets the chest, Ator and Gianna are halfway through their coronation ceremony when suddenly Ator’s in the middle of nowhere surrounded by Sand Nazis, and Gianna’s dangling off a cliff with Phaedra sitting there mocking her.  How did that happen?  Phaedra tells her that life is an illusion, which for a moment left me wondering if anything in this movie really happened?  Perhaps the whole bit when Gianna was in the green dress was just some kind of dream?  I have no idea.  Anyway, Ator beats up the Sand Nazis and then goes and shoves a torch down Phaedra’s throat, which turns out to be her weakness for some reason.  Where did that come from?  I dunno.  Then he has just concluded that Gianna must have fallen and died when he hears her calling him, and goes to untie her from where she’s sitting on a rock.  They embrace and Gianna smiles in an evil kind of way, but as far as I can tell it’s still the real Gianna because we next see Phaedra captured by the Bellerians again!  They sentence her to something else and then giggle in delight because Ator and Gianna have fallen in love.

I don’t know why Ator was worried about Gianna falling to her death anyway, because there are several points in this movie in which one or both of the couple plummet into a bottomless abyss only to wake up completely unharmed.  This is slightly plausible when they leap off a cliff into the water, but what about when they fall from a rope bridge into a deep canyon and wake up lying on rocks in a cave?  Are they indestructible?

Drogar is supposedly indestructible, which means the moment when Ator is forced to run him through is one I expected to be another trick. After all, the same thing happened earlier and Drogar just collapsed into a pile of clothes like Obi-Wan Kenobi. No, this time he’s actually dead, and Ator takes his helmet off and finds another Miles O’Keefe underneath. I think we’re supposed to assume that Phaedra discarded Drogar because she no longer needed him?  I’m sure it’s supposed to be a tragic moment when Ator has to kill his brother, but Ator didn’t seem particularly reluctant to do so.  I also think the helmet removal is supposed to remind us of Luke Skywalker’s little vision quest moment in Empire Strikes Back when he found his own face under Darth Vader’s mask, but I cannot suggest a reason why other than ‘the writer thought that was neat’.

What is even with the Ator-has-a-brother thing?  Wasn’t Ator raised by stick merchants in Solachek along with a sister he eventually married?  Fuck it, I’m gonna assume Ator is like Maciste, and his backstory resets with every movie.  The way the movie works out, the ‘brothers’ thing is never important anyway.  It’s treated as if it’s going to be – we know the revelation is coming from the opening scene and we’re teased with it a few times along the way, but when it actually arrives it has no effect on the plot whatsoever!

So yes, Iron Warrior tries to make you feel many things, but the only one you actually feel at the end of the movie is intense confusion.  The characters never have any personality so you can’t get invested in them or their relationships.  Elisabeth Kaza as Phaedra is having a fabulous time hamming up the evil, but everybody else has their Very Serious Movie faces on and mostly just looks bored. The special effects are basic at best, and the music sounds like an early 2000’s PC game loading.

Costumes and hair are bizarre.  Ator has traded his mile-high meringue hairdo for a tight braid that makes him look weirdly like Alicia Vikander on the Tomb Raider poster. Gianna has a hairdo that looks like a centurion’s helmet and wanders around the wilderness in a filmy red dress with her nipples visible right through it.  The leader of the Bellerians dresses like a budget Queen Amidala. Like previous Ator films (or Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell), there is no sense of any attempt to build a consistent world.  They just threw together a bunch of stuff that looked cool.

The movie was shot on the Maltese island of Gozo, and makes the place look like it’s made entirely of barren rocks.  There are lots of neat formations and forbidding cliffs, and it’s all very spectacular.  Unfortunately, it’s also very obvious that we’re seeing the same neat rock formations and forbidding cliffs over and over again.

As far as analyzing the movie… I don’t think I can do that. There’s not really enough substance there to analyze.  The closest Iron Warrior comes to doing anything meaningful is when it tries to use a furry toy ball as a symbol of the bond between brothers.  When we meet Ator and Drogar as children, they’re chucking this tribble at each other through some ruins, and it reappears a couple of times in attempts at foreshadowing.  The problem is that there is no bond between Ator and Drogar, and the fact that they’re brothers is, as I said, ultimately unimportant.

The impression I get from this movie is that it was written by somebody who had no idea how to tell a story.  The writers, Steven Luotto and Alfonso Brescia, have clearly seen movies (they’ve definitely seen the original Star Wars trilogy) and know that they have things like attractive stars, special effects, stunning revelations, and dream sequences, but they don’t know how to put those together into a plot, or what purposes they should serve within one.  The result is completely incoherent.  To my own astonishment I totally understand why Massaccesi hates this movie.  Ator, the Fighting Eagle and The Blade Master might have been made up on the fly, but they still made more sense than this!

[ultimaa]

TRUTH

Eren & Mikasa / 1992 words / Canonverse.

Truth is always simple, but we usually get there by the most complicated path.

George Sand.

Shigansina was chaos, a rumble, the first victim of the apocalypse. Eren Jaeger had sworn to end the world, and in his words there was as much anger as determination.

"That bastard has condemned us," were Jean's words.

They had taken cover, but the noise was such that they barely got to hear each other. The walls had fallen and the colossals walked the earth, like a walking chaos, like death incarnate.

"It's worse than that day," Mikasa thought, and she put a discreet hand on her head. Armin looked at her sideways, worried, but he said nothing.

"We'll talk to Eren," Arlet decided.

"Are you crazy, Armin? That dude no longer attends to reasons," Connie seemed to have abandoned her hope. Maybe he lost it with Sasha. He simply dropped to the ground, downcast. "It's the end. Commander Hanji and Captain Levi aren’t here. Everything is lost. How could we think... that everything would end well, that we would achieve peace? We are destined to die. Since Bertolt and Reiner appeared ten years ago, from that moment, I had to imagine that it was only a matter of time," And the tears gathered in his eyes. "Sasha's death was useless."

Armin wanted to tell him something, encourage him, slap him gently on the back and assure him everything would work out. However, hope was beginning to fade from his blue eyes. Eren was on their side, he was the protector of Paradise Island, but what was the price? If Eren devastated everything beyond the sea, they would become the devils that the world repudiated. No man could stand up to a situation like this, so Armin simply clenched his fists and thought of the old Eren, his good friend, and he wondered where that child was, that impetuous young man, but excellent in friendship.

To everyone's surprise, Jean Kirstein's face was tinged with an inexplicable anger. He approached Connie and lifted him, grabbing him tightly by the shoulders.

"What the hell are you doing! How can you say that!" the man relaxed a little, but remained serious. "You're a soldier, Connie, damn it! We can not give up. We know that suicide bastard and, in addition, it turns out that he has now gone mad and unpredictable. He has gotten into my head, the moron. Every time he got into trouble, we had to save his ass. We are used to it. We've done it before and we'll do it now, because that bastard…” He looked at Armin, and then stared at Mikasa," he has many things to say."

"What do you want us to do?" Connie sipped her nose. "Approaching him is very dangerous and we don't know if he wants to talk. God, Jean, the last time he spoke with Mikasa and Armin he behaved like a bastard, with his lifelong friends! What makes you think that now it will be different?"

"Mikasa," Jean called, "what did Eren tell you?"

The woman squeezed her lips.

"He hates me... he hates me since we were children. He has always hated me. I am nothing but a slave, my Ackerman blood chained me to him."

Kirstein let out a sardonic laugh and released Connie.

"I'm gonna have to talk to him about women's hearts, who would say it," then he turned to Armin. "Let's do it. Armin, you and Mikasa will approach him while Connie and I distract the Titans. We will clear the way. Make him right, hit him if necessary. You know him more than we do, I'm sure he will listen to you."

Jean drew his swords. Connie, after wiping the tears away from his face, did the same. Both men stared at each other, as those who will face the last and toughest battle.

"Are we gonna die, Jean?"

"I don't know, nobody knows. I have spent all these years fearing my body ended up burning in a pyre, like Marco. That's why I should have joined the Police, but I didn't. Eren convinced me not to. If I had, I would probably have finished drinking the poisoned wine, becoming a titan like all those miserables. That would be unfortunate. I joined Legion and I’m proud. If I have to die today... at least it will be fighting," he smiled slyly. "And if we die today, Connie, lots of women will mourn our death, the death of two heroes."

Mikasa put a hand on Kirstein's shoulder. He tensed for a moment.

"Don't die, Jean," the woman asked. "You neither, Connie."

And then they threw themselves into the jaws of chaos. The Marleyans fled in terror. As Mikasa moved forward, her mind was lost in the past, on that trip to Marley, and it was as if a lightning struck her. What am I to you? Why hadn't she been honest? She was not even with herself. No…

"Mikasa!" Armin shouted.

When she left her thoughts, a large hand hovered over her body. Mikasa dodged it, but she rushed into the desolate streets of the city which saw her grow. When she came to realize, she was getting up from the paving, stunned by the blow. A giant was approaching her, slow, smiling, as it was five years ago, in Trost. Why did she keep fighting? Why Eren? What part of Eren had she seen? Was it his true face, or just an illusion? She tilted the head and saw Louise lying across the street. The young girl was dead. She approached her with slow steps, feeling the presence of the criature on her back, and removed the red scarf from the neck of Louise, who was a girl so many years ago. She fell to her knees, the garment in her lap, and touched her cold face.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered. "I could not save you."

Then, like lightning, Jean cut the hams of the titan that stalked her. Again, she was saved from imminent death.

"Come on, Mikasa!" Jean cried.

The woman, making a cyclopean effort, stood up and put the scarf around her neck. She rose again, like a wounded bird, and headed like an arrow towards that hulk of bones that Eren had created, that monstrosity which encompassed wherever the sight would go. Armin watched the scene from a roof, speechless.

"Where is Eren?"

Smoke and dust did not allow to see clearly. Mikasa, without thinking too much, went into that maelstrom. Surprised, Armin went after her. The woman discerned a loud roar between the screams and followed it. There were heavy blows, and a new growl, more pitiful than the last. Mikasa could barely discern the silhouette of Reiner’s titan being subjected to something much larger, a much taller and more bulky titan, but easily recognizable to her. It was Eren. That huge creature crushed Reiner without any difficulty. Braun fell so as not to rise again. Mikasa moved on, ignoring Armin's voice, and stood before Eren. The recognition shone in his eyes.

"Eren!"

Armin confronted him.

"Stop this, things don't have to be that way! Eren, listen to me!"

But Eren did not listen, so Mikasa fired her hooks and climbed him up to hang on his mop of hair. The big green eyes looked at her furiously.

"Eren, please..."

Don’t do this to yourself.

In a deliberate act, the titan shook and Mikasa held on tight, trying not to fall. She wouldn't let him go until they achieved their goal. Jean and Connie were giving their lives for it. For this man, whose good part seemed to have disappeared, lost in chaos, subjugated by the cruelty of the world. From the beginning, it was always the world. What had it turned them into? Mikasa knew: there was still some of the Eren she knew, the real Eren. The immense creature shook its neck again and roared, and did not stop until it got rid of Mikasa, throwing her with an unusual force. She heard Armin's stark scream, but she still hadn't given up. So she clenched her teeth, wielded her swords and, with burning tears running down her face, she responded with a shout from the depths of her guts.

Fight! You have to fight! If you don't win, you will die! You can't win if you don't fight! Fight!

My head is going to explode.

She descended like divine justice and laid a kilometer slash on the titan's back. The blades barely sliced the skin and Armin's thunder spears didn't inflict great damage either. The blond gave up and considered the possibility of transforming, but Mikasa continued in her private dance against Eren, who simply dodged her and regenerated the few wounds she made in a matter of seconds. The power of the Founder ran through his veins; He was invincible, Mikasa knew it, but she didn't want to beat him. She wanted to talk.

"Eren, I know you can listen to me! You have to stop all this! Remember when we went to Marley! There are innocent people all over the world, we can't blame them all... for the evil of a few!"

For the first time in a long time, Mikasa Ackerman was filled with an animal fury because of Eren's indifference. The screams, the gigantic steps that moved away in the distance, Armin's voice, Jean's words, Sasha's death, Reiner's fall. All that surpassed her, and in her movements was engraved an agility that exceeded human capacity, something that had only been seen in the missing Levi Ackerman. It was hard for Eren to dodge her, and, finally, Mikasa gave him an accurate cut in the right eye. The pulsations of her heart touched a dangerous limit; every muscle in her body burned and howled in pain, but she had perfect coordination. Move on. Up and down. Attack, protect. However, it was a matter of time before that state was over. Fatigue, like her strength, was monstrous.

"Mikasa," Armin shouted. "Take cover, I will transform!"

I can not anymore.

The woman hung on Eren's hair, at the nape. The shattered blades fell to a vacuum of more than twenty-five meters. Mikasa stood there, hanging, feeling her hand slide slowly due to sweat. She was soaked in blood, in dust and dirt. She was the vivid image of who had already given all of herself. Only the word remained; even if they were the words of a slave, Eren would have to listen to them. He would have to listen to them while he captained the catastrophe. Inside the titan, in the entrails, he took refuge, calm, with the look of a man whose life has become an unhappy existence. A man who had condemned his soul.

"I understand you don't want to hear someone you hate," she began, dragging each syllable heavily. "It's fine. I've always... been selfish. I wanted to be by your side, protect you, but I wasn’t able to... I wasn’t able to see what was happening to you. You were suffering, and you still do. I wish I had realized before because I would have tried anything, I would have done whatever it took to avoid all this, I would have given everything for you to stay with us, with me."

Mikasa remembered the good times before the invasion of Marley, the parties with the guys. She could die with that in mind.

“You gave me a family when I lost mine, you reminded me that the world is not only a cold and hostile place, but it can also be beautiful. It was thanks to you. Thanks for showing it to me. This world is cruel, but undoubtedly beautiful," she closed her eyes and her consciousness fade little by little. "I am a liar; I couldn’t be honest even with me. You... aren’t my family. My family died a long time ago, but... I would like to start my own family with you, because the truth is I... have always loved you."

[literatiruinedme]

society

so i think this would fall under theme 6 ((the miscellaneous category)) of @riverdale-events‘ Camp Riverdale

an au set in a West Ham-esque version of Riverdale.

“Jug,” Betty breathed, gently slapping his cheek. “You need to wake up.”

Jughead groaned, turning away from her grasp.

“Hey-” She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him until he looked over at her, his features pinched in annoyance. “I need you.”

He laughed sharply, wrenching his chin out of her grasp. “Spare me your bullshit woman-of-the people routine.” He turned, wrapping his arms around his pillow. “You don’t need me,” he slurred. “Just go away.”

“Hey!” Betty crawled over him, reaching down to cup his cheeks. She frowned when she noticed his dilated eyes. “Fuck, are you on something?”

“I found these pretty little white pills in FP’s sock drawer.” Jughead chuckled, smiling up at her. “Nothing matters anymore; we live in the middle of nowhere and nothing exists outside of us, so fuck it.”

She scoffed, shaking her head. “You are a goddamn idiot.”

“Betty-”

“Do you think I could make half of these decisions without you? Do you think I could even make it out of bed if you weren’t here? ” she asked. “You’re all I have.”

“You’re our fearless leader,” he sniped, sitting up so they were eye to eye. “And I’m just your loyal foot-servant.”

“No.” Betty shook her head. “No. You’re wrong.”

“I’m wrong?” He huffed. “Fuck you.”

“Stop acting as if you’ve ever been anything other than my partner since we got...to wherever the fuck we are- before that, actually! Did you stop being my best friend at some point and neglect letting me know?”

Jughead’s hands curled into fists at his side. “I could ask you the same question!”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to make sure we have enough food to make it through winter; have I been neglecting Mario Kart night?”

“No, you’ve been neglecting me!”

Betty sat back, remaining silent as he caught his breath. She reached out for his hand after his shoulders fell in resignation. “Jug-”

“I’m sorry,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “You have to worry about food, whatever happens when our electricity runs out, keeping the peace...I shouldn’t-” He paused, taking a calming breath. “I’m sorry.”

She took his hand in both of hers, bringing it to her lips. “Don’t apologize.”

He groaned in acknowledgement, not meeting her gaze. “Can we just...drop this?” he asked, shaking his head. “I don’t want to-”

Betty leaned forward to interrupt him with her lips on his. She smiled against his lips when his hand found its way to her hair after a moment of hesitation. “Don’t apologize,” she repeated. “We’re partners. Now, tomorrow, always- okay?”

Jughead nodded slowly. “Partners,” he echoed, squeezing her hand. “Okay.”

[allyouhavetodo]

Let’s Watch The Twilight Zone: Episode Twenty-Two

The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street

Welcome to Maple Street, USA, you guys. It’s a summer Saturday in suburban splendor over here. When m, precisely at 6:43 pm,something with lots of flashing lights that’s making a whoosh whoosh whooshing noise, passes over head (unseen by the audience, but definitely seen by everyone on Maple Street).

That was weird, everyone on Maple Street concludes. But it was probably just a meteor. Extra weird that it came so close and yet we didn’t hear it crash. Oh well.

But not oh well, as Rod Serling pops in to inform us. “This will be the last calm and reflective moment before the monsters come.”

And, yeah, pretty soon after the “meteor” passed by overhead, the power goes out on Maple Street. The phones go down on Maple Street. The radio stops working on Maple Street. Strange things are afoot on Maple Street.

And everyone is puzzled about why all these things would happen at once. One old man sets off to a neighboring street to see if they are also having these problems. And defacto street leader Steve and his chubby Hawaiian shirt wearing side kick Charlie decide to go check with the police to see if they know anything about what’s going on.

Except they can’t go to the police station, because the car won’t start. But that’s okay. It’s the 60s, we can walk to the police station, if we want to. At least until intrepid teen Tommy warns them they “better not.”

What gives, Tommy? What’s your problem?

Well, it turns out Tommy has read a lot of sci fi and has a very specific theory about what’s happening here. It’s probably aliens, you see. And they don’t want us to leave. That’s why they shut everything down. The only “people” who will be able to leave are the ones the aliens sent down ahead to assimilate and trick us. They’ll look just like us. That’s how they always do it.

The adults all try to shout Tommy down at first. It was probably the meteor interfering with radio signals or something, just like sunspots. But by the end of his speech they’re all looking around at each other like they’ve got a confirmed case of The Thing and they don’t know how to go about testing one another.m to see who’s infected.

Meanwhile, another neighbor, Les Goodman, goes to try to start his car. And, guess what, it won’t. Until it does. All by itself. And then stops again. And then starts again. And then all suspicion turns to Les. Les is very calm about it all at first. Like, “gee, I dunno what’s going on,” “y’all know me, I’ve lived here for 5 years.” Until a woman claims she’s seen him outside standing on his lawn in the middle of the night staring up at the sky. At which point he starts yelling about having insomnia and advancing on the crowd, who hilariously back up every time he takes a step toward them.

Les gets it. He thinks you’re all being paranoid. “You’re letting something begin here that’s a nightmare!” he yells. Just what an alien would say!

By nightfall everyone is still standing around outside Les’s house, not sure what to do if he does turn out to be an alien but not satisfied to leave without knowing for sure.

Steve turns back up to try to be the voice of reason. Are we really turning on each other so easily? Is anyone with any kind of idiosyncrasy automatically suspect? This is some kind of madness.

Until someone else calls out of the crowd that actually Steve’s own wife has been going around town blabbering about his particularly suspicious idiosyncrasies. Particularly the weird radio device he’s got in his basement that he’s never invited anyone in the neighborhood over to see. Who you talking to on that thing, huh Stevie?

Steve yells at them all sarcastically that duh he’s spending all his time talking to little green men, when his wife turns up to proclaim that it’s just a stupid ham radio and she wasn’t trying to sell her husband out as an alien, you losers.

At this point someone starts walking down the street toward the mob. They can’t see who it is in the distance but they are pretty convinced it’s “the monster” (a monster they, again, have seen no evidence actually exists), and someone goes to get a shotgun, which Charlie (paranoid in chief) quickly takes possession of.

With the walker still far enough away that no one can see who it is and without anyone even attempting to call out to them, Charlie blasts away with the shotgun. Turns out it was that old man from before who went off to see if anyone else had power. And now he’s fucking dead. Jesus Christ, Charlie! What’d you go and do that for?

And just when everyone’s already getting mad at Charlie, the lights go on in his house. And you know how we feel about one person’s something working when noone else’s is! Everyone turns even harder on Charlie who hilariously backs himself into a bush before people (not hilariously) start throwing rocks at him.

But Charlie’s not just going to stand here with his head bleeding and let you call him an alien. In his opinion, terrible teenage Tommy must actually be the one at fault. He’s the one who started this whole thing! How come he knows all about what the aliens would do!? (A+ theory, Charlie.)

But before anyone can kill this teen, the lights start going crazy all over the street. And the residents start going even crazier. Everyone grabs a weapon! Everyone starts throwing things and breaking things! Gun shots start going off everywhere!

And the camera pans out to reveal pure chaos. People running around everywhere. Screams and bangs. All the way out to two (alien) dudes talking about how easy it is going to be to get humanity to destroy itself. Literally all we had to do was make one person’s car act weird and soon Maple Street will be no more. And, don’t worry, there are Maple Streets all over this stupid planet. All we have to do is go from one to the next, putting in minimal effort wherever we go and soon the planet will be ours.

Pan now to the sky as Rod Serling returns to remind us that the tools of conquest don’t always have to be bombs and guns. That paranoia and prejudice can kill and destroy even unborn generations. And that, unfortunately, these concepts are not confined to the Twilght Zone.

Be careful out there folks!

—

I had heard of this episode. At least by name. And I don’t think this is what I was expecting. It’s a good one, though. People lose it extremely quickly. Which is a great Twilight Zone hallmark. And the concept still works. Timeless stuff here for a bunch of human idiots.

[thebibliomancer]

50 More Days of Comics! 46/50: The Wedding of Popeye & Olive #1 (1999)

This is weird beyond words.

Popeye has a full head of hair??

What other weird oddities are hiding beneath the poorly understood surface, what Deepest Lore does the sailor man hide, not know to the wider public?

A lot! Popeye lore is a little bonkers!

Lets get into it!

Here’s one. Popeye wasn’t Olive’s first boyfriend. There was a guy called Ham Gravy or Harold Hamgravy who was the main character of the Thimble Theater comic strip (which eventually became Thimble Theater starring Popeye and then just Popeye).

He was Olive’s fiancee but also a slacker who often had eyes for other women if they were rich because he wanted to get rich quick and easy without working for it.

But apparently during his absence from Olive’s life, he has hit it rich and now dresses like a Texan millionaire.

Ham: “Honest, Olive... I never understood what you saw in him... He’s not as good-looking as me, or as rich as me, or as successful as me, or as well-dressed as me-”

Olive, pausing from upending an entire box of chocolates into her mouth: “Wait! -- Back up! Did you say... ‘rich’? You’re... rich?”

Ham: “Oh, yeah! I made huge investments in the stock market!”

Olive, with $ for eyes: “They all paid off?”

Ham: “Well... no... They all crashed! But, my dad got so mad, that when he was yelling at me about ‘em, his brain exploded and I inherited his millions!

“So whattaya say, Olive? Let me do right by you. Marry me! It’s more than that one-eyed sailor ever did for you!”

Olive, still $ for eyes: “Ham, Ham! -- Thi$ i$ $o sudden! What el$e can I $ay but, of cour$e!”

-sees picture of Popeye- “Of... of course... -- NOTTT! I’m... I’m sorry, Ham... I can’t...”

Aww. She loves her sailor man.

Ham accepts this gracefully.

Because he preemptively hired a goon to kidnap her, expecting her to say no.

That’s gracefully, right?

Also, I didn’t really have many thoughts about Olive Oyl prior to this. I had this sense that she’s one of the archetypal gets-kidnapped-so-she-can-be-rescued characters. But she is a delight in this scene.

And yes, she does immediately get kidnapped. But she has a lot of character in this conversation.

Elsewhere, Popeye accidentally saves a Just Married couple when the brake in their car fails. Which he does by standing on the dock, not paying attention, because he found a Jeep (a weird magic creature) stopping to smell the dock flowers and was worried it would get into an ‘askidenk’ not paying attention.

Also:

Popeye: “Ya may be a Jeep, but ya ain’t no car!”

Hah.

The married couple thank Popeye for saving them, by standing on the dock not paying attention so that their runaway car crashed into him, which he didn’t notice, sending them flying safely through the air into the ocean. The bride tells him that he’ll make a wonderful husband for some lucky girl someday.

And this puts him in an introspective mood about marriage.

Popeye: “Marich! A man takin’ a wife... T’sa big step Eugene! Marich... Me an’ Olive, we kin be good t’gedder! -- But I dunno... she can be so... so Olive! Sometimes I wonder.. will Olive ‘n me ever gets t’be hitched?”

But he done introspected in the right location if he wanted answers for his rhetorical questions. Because Jeeps can tell the future! Just go with it! And when Popeye asks whether he and Olive will ever get married, Eugene the Jeep bends over and waves his tail three times which means “Signs point to yes.”

Being no dummy, Popeye asks follow up questions and learns that he and Olive are going to get married soon and not next year or next week but TOMORROW, THE JEEP IS NEVER WRONG!

Popeye: “Then I gots’ta propose, ‘cause if we gets married widdout me proposin’, it ain’t gonna be offiskal! I kin not waits t’tell Olive! I kin jusk hear her muksical voice sayin’ --”

Olive, being kidnapped: “NOOOOO!”

Popeye: “I wuz kinda hopin’ for a yes...”

Hah.

Before Popeye can respond to Olive being kidnapped, goon-napped, gravy-napped, Bluto bursts through the dock. Popeye tries to knock him out but even though he punches the guy many times, he can’t wipe the smile off his face.

Winded and having run “outta soks in me sok drawer” which is an amazing turn of phrase relying entirely on comic book sound effects, Popeye wonders whats going on here.

Bluto: “Things’ve changed, Popeye! Y’see... I found the Wiffle Hen.. and rubbed her head!”

Popeye: “No!”

Bluto: “YESSSS!”

Popeye Deepest Lore is so wild.

Anyway, Bluto punches Popeye across town and then swims out to Ham Gravy’s boat. Wherein he promptly takes over Ham Gravy’s evil plan.

Ham wanted to go to his hideaway in Malta but Bluto was only going along with the plan because Ham could get him the boat he needed. And instead they’re going to Spinachania, the Kingdom of King Blozo, where most of the world’s spinach apparently comes from.

Olive: “I thought his country was called Nazilia!”

Bluto: “Nah... they changed it ‘cause Nazis kept showin’ up!”

... Welp.

Anyway, Bluto is going to eat all the spinach he can, steal what he can’t eat, and then burn the kingdom down. And then he’s going to marry Olive.

Ham: “I’m... I’m sorry, Olive... This hasn’t gone at all as I had planned... I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me!”

Olive: -pounds him into the deck like a nail-

Ham: “-- I’ll take that as a maybe...”

Meanwhile, Wimpy tries to get free hamburgers by claiming that it would be a charitable act and thus tax deductible. Old Man Geezil has finally had enough of this nonsense and is about to stab Wimpy when Popeye falls out of the sky on top of him.

Popeye promptly tries to hire a crew to help him save Olive but since he has nineteen cents to his name, everybody turns him down. Everybody but Wimpy.

Wimpy: “In the interest of our long association, I will sail with you today for a hamburger on Tuesday!”

Awww, Wimpy!

So Popeye sends Wimpy to find a ship (who steals Geezil’s, geez no wonder the man hates him) while he rounds up the ‘fambly’ Olive’s brother Castor Oyl, Olive’s parents Nana and Cole Oyl, Popeye’s reprobate dad Poopdeck Pappy, Swee’ Pea, Alice the Goon, and of course Eugene the Jeep.

On the trip, Popeye explains some Deepest Lore to Wimpy and whoever in the audience. Spinach helps Popeye be strong but rubbing the head of the Wiffle Hen years ago is what made it so nothing can hurt him, apparently.

And he deduces that since Bluto is taking pages out of his book, that he’ll be headed to get all the spinach from Spinachania and then there might be no stopping him.

Meanwhile, Spinachania and the king is having an anxiety attack. He just knows something bad is going to happen. AND HE’S RIGHT, THE KINGDOM IS UNDER ATTACK.

King Blozo: “I knew it! How many attackers? A thousand? -- A million??!”

A general: “Two, sire... B-but they’re annihilating our army!! It’s kind of embarrassing, really--”

And Bluto and Ted the Goon are indeed just kind of stomping the entire army.

They arrive at the Royal Spinach Field but when Bluto goes to grab the spinach, it THWIP!s underground. Like in a cartoon when a mole or gopher or something yoinks a vegetable underground.

But its not mole or gopher or something, its Popeye and he’s eaten all the spinach he yoinked so he’s real roided out.

Popeye rips the bag off Bluto’s back, freeing Olive and the Wiffle Hen.

Bluto calls for Ted the Goon to assist him but Ted has gone and fallen in love with Alice the Goon off-panel and now they’re having a picnic.

So Popeye and Bluto punch each other in the same pose for hours. Yes, really.

And Olive has an idea how to break the stalemate.

Bluto, looking tired: “... I don’t get it... I’m bigger’n you! Tougher’n you! I ate the spinach... rubbed the Wiffle Hen’s head -- an’ as long as the magic of the Wiffle Hen exists, I’ll still be able to-”

Cue Wimpy wandering by with a drumstick remarking how delicious rare magical birds are.

And while Bluto is panicking about not being super-invulnerable anymore, Popeye socks him in the gut. And he tries to sock Popeye back but it makes a KLONG! like punching metal and hurts Bluto’s hand.

He panics that Popeye shouldn’t be super-invulnerable anymore either.

Popeye: “I don’t needs t’be!  ‘Cause I yam what I yam an’ thass all that I yam!”

And then he punches Bluto into the sky.

Popeye then finds out that the Wiffle Hen is fine and wonders what happened so that he was able to beat Bluto if they were both super-invulnerable.

Poopdeck Pappy suggests that confidence is the real super power and that Popeye always has confidence in all things.

Popeye: “Not all... not in th’ one t’ing I shudda had all these years! But I’m fixin’ that... right now!”

And then he proposes to Olive (with a cigar band in lieu of a ring) and she immediately accepts.

Awww!

For a comic titled the Wedding of Popeye and Olive, the actual wedding only takes up the last two pages.

King Blozo marries them. There’s a gag where after they kiss, Popeye’s pipe has wound up in Olive’s mouth. And then she throws the bouquet.

And the Sea Hag of all people catches it. And immediately starts chasing Wimpy to marry him.

The Sea Hag: “Wait! I caught the bouquet!”

Wimpy: “And I’m catching the next plane out of town! -- Happy honeymoon, Popeye and Olive! I’ll drop you a line from wherever I’m hiding!!”

So that was the Wedding of Popeye and Olive and it was funny and it was cute and it has given me a new appreciation for the characters.

Thank you, box of mystery. I never would have read this without you.

[juliettegellcr]

honey, there is no right way // @petermurrayy

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time where everyone in West Ham was happy, at least decently so. They worried about exams and relationships, nothing like this. Here, wherever they were, it’s different. Things had changed that fateful night of the field trip. It was a treat from the school board to the juniors and seniors of West Ham High, an overnight camping trip near the coast. It turned out to be less of a treat, and more of a nightmare. Juliette can recall the irritation she felt upon being woken up by the bus driver, claiming that the road was blocked, and how it grew once they were dropped off with no parents in sight, including her own. Everyone had chalked it up to their parents being asleep or busy, but once their texts and calls went unsent the panic set in. It lasted for ten minutes before the jocks and the popular students, like Harry Bingham, began hooping and hollering about how it was a chance to party. In the moment, there were only two options - walk home and sit at your house in hopes of a text or phone call from your parents, or to join in on the festivities. Juliette chose the latter, and the worried thoughts disappeared. For that moment, at least.

A week passed with no word from their parents or anyone at all, no messages finished sending and calls went to voicemail. Another week passed, and then another. Soon, it had been a month since they had returned from their cancelled field trip, and there was still no sign of their parents or life outside of West Ham. Cassandra had been the one to step up in the midst of the chaos that had taken over their town, her words were soothing and her voice calm. Back home, she was always the voice of reason, the one that everyone would look to for guidance; she was Juliette’s best friend. And she was gone. Shot outside of their makeshift prom. Gone. Wrapped up in a white bed sheet, and six feet in the ground. Gone. Juliette sat on the ceramic tile of her shower, heels of her palms pressing into her eyes with her lips pinched together in an attempt to stay silent, pain bubbling up within her chest. The image of Cassandra’s body in that sheet, laid upon a table in the church was burned into her mind. A sob fell from her lips, the lukewarm water cascading over her running over her hair and skin, droplets slipping into her open mouth, as another sob came and then another. The once scalding water was cooling on her skin, soothing the welts that developed on various parts of her body. It was painful, but punishments were supposed to be that way. She should have stayed behind to help Cassandra, not left her alone like she did, but she left for home and now her best friend would never get to see her own again. Gone. Minutes had passed, and the water was now chilling, every drop on her skin being replaced with another goose bump. Juliette pushed herself up onto shaky legs and turned the shower handle, the water cutting off, and she stepped out. Flannel pajama shorts, a mixture of reds and grays, a gift from her parents on her sixteenth birthday, and a gray sweater with the word, ‘Juilliard,’ printed across the chest in bold, navy lettering, hem sweeping down to rest at mid thigh. No one was here, they never were at night, and it was the only time Juliette could find peace if only for a few minutes.

Juliette walked out of the bathroom and into the hallway, footsteps light as her feet moved across the wood. Gaze averted to the floor before her, an attempt to keep herself from looking at the frames that adorned the walls surrounding her. Photos of her family from over the years; birthdays, holidays, and graduations. Memories that would only serve as a painful reminder of the fact that her parents, Mike, and Holly were gone. The only remaining signs that they had ever existed besides the pictures and her own memories were their rooms, and they were no longer theirs. They belonged to Emma from history class, Jacob who used to work as a cashier at the grocery store in town, and others that she was unfamiliar with. They occupied the beds that once held her little brother and sister. Juliette pushed her bedroom door open and jerked backwards, heart fluttering in her chest at the sight that greets her; Peter Murray laid in his makeshift bed on the floor, book in his hands, surprise written across his features. “I-I.. I didn’t think you’d be here tonight, or right now at least,” Juliette murmured, arms coming up to cross over her chest, knees knocking together as she stood there, gaze locked on him. Everyone knew everyone in West Ham, and Peter Murray was not exempt from that. Every teenager who was stuck in this world, this place, grew up together. At one point, though they were young at the time, they were all friends and played together. Juliette can remember the first time she truly noticed Peter. It was the summer before their junior year, and she, Cassandra, Allie, and Sam had made an impromptu visit to the river, plans to lay about on the shore and soak up what little sun they could before the usual clouds took over the sky once again. She can’t remember who Peter showed up with, or even when they did. All she can remember is the way he looked. Chubby cheeks thinned out, skin stretched over his high cheek bones, dark, coarse hairs blossomed along his jaw, his chin, and above his full, red lips. He had grown taller too. His laugh was still the same. Juliette had looked at him in awe back then, the distant crush she held returning quickly the longer she stared at him, and when her eyes strayed to Cassandra, she noticed how the blonde was looking at him with the same eyes. After that day, it was no longer Cassandra or Peter, but Cassandra and Peter. 

“Um, did you not have guard duties tonight?” She asked in a soft voice, and she moved further into the room, stepping over the items that were scattered over the floor, before falling down to sit on the edge of her bed. Her arms uncrossed and her hands dropped to her lap, fingers clenching around the hem of her sweater. Juliette had planned to go about her usual routine, as she always did when she had the house to herself. Fix food, shower, and then lay in bed until she could will her body to shut down. On hard nights, where she found herself missing her family or Cassandra, she’d lay there with headphones over her ears, and cry until her throat grew raw and sore. Eyes rimmed red and itchy from the tears that fell. Tonight was one of those nights, but she wasn’t alone. Juliette looked to Peter, head tilted to the side as she studied him. “If.. If you want to sit up on the bed with me, you can. Your little mat probably isn’t the most comfortable thing to lay on.. I know that Allie said she was going to try and find you something that could fit in my room,” Juliette offered quietly, fingers trembling where they sat in her lap. “I, um, I have a few.. dvds if you want to watch a movie or something. There just in the bottom drawer of my desk if you’d like to pick one,” Her eyes glanced down to the book in his hands then back up, “Unless you’d rather read. It’s.. Sorry,” Juliette let out a breathless laugh, fingers trembling where they sat in her lap, “I just.. need a distraction. Today was really.. long,” And that was the truth. Juliette was lucky enough to be given the task of searching through the library for any books that could help; books about farming, medical journals, anything. Harry had stopped by during her shift, bitching and complaining more so than usual, his annoyance only growing and directed towards her as she shot him down. His idea of a distraction was different than her own. “Um, how was your day? It must be.. difficult being part of the guard. It seems tough,”

[howrv]

Woodstock, 50 Years Later

Living in our HOW (Home on Wheels) for the past three years has been our ticket to amazing experiences. From rodeos to The Rose Parade, art museums to boat races, slot canyons to The Grand Canyon, we have done amazing things.  

A year into our journey we planned to attend Woodstock 50, wherever it was to be.  We reserved a spot for HOW at both Watkins Glen and the original location at Bethel Woods, knowing that eventually one would become the clear choice.  As the event approached, everything went wrong for the Watkins Glen event.  Michael Lang, who owned the Woodstock name, experienced withdrawals from promoters and artists, and never got ticket sales off the ground. Somehow, booking Jay Z, Chance the Rapper, Miley Cirus and hip-hop acts did not match our expectations of what a celebration of Woodstock should be.  Rolling Stone quoted David Crosby’s take on Lang, “it had nothing to do with anyone feeling good about each other.  It had to do with certain people making huge amounts of money.”

So, on the weekend marking the 50th anniversary of the greatest love-in music festival in history, we arrived at what seemed to be hallowed ground. The spot that was once Max Yasgur’s alfalfa field is now a beautiful venue for the arts and music, set in the pristine rolling meadows called Bethel Woods. Much has changed but the vibe was still there as an anticipated crowd of 100,000 passed through the gates in this four-day celebration, (far less than the 500,000 of ‘69.)  Arriving early, we tail-gated for a while, had some wine and cheese and talked to folks who were adorned with tie-dye, beaded headbands, bell bottoms and peace-sign jewelry. Some arrived in their original restored VW buses. We met old hippies who were there a half century ago, as well as first timers.  We were surprised how many young people there were. A blended mix of peace and love seekers of all ages. (pictures below)

The first night we rented lawn chairs and sat on the hillside right behind the covered amphitheater on immaculately manicured grass.  As the sun was sinking over the fields behind us, the stage lights illuminated Earth, Wind, and Fire as they took to the the stage playing: “You Made Me So Very Happy, Spinnin Wheel , And When I Die, and God Bless The Child. The band spanned all genres of pop, rock, featuring a new kid from American Idol, Bo Bice as frontman.  

Next to perform was the biggest surprise of the night. Edgar Winter Band rocked the planet (or at least Bethel Woods) playing Tobacco Road, Frankenstein, Free Ride, Rock-and-Roll Hoochie Koo, and Dying to Live. Winter is a multi-instrumentalist but is acclaimed as the first person ever to put a neck strap on a keyboard and dance the stage with a Moog Synthesizer.  The most remarkable performance was his vocal ability.  He mimicked complex riffs and was answered by the lead guitar, bass player, keyboards and drums to the amazement of everyone in attendance.

The stage fog increased, pounding bass notes vibrated and pulsed with intensity. Strobing, motion ellipsiodals, pars and dichroics traced through the sweet smelling, pot laced air, ushering in the headliner… Ringo Star and his All Star Band.  

An extremely fit and young-looking Ringo Star danced to downstage center and the crowd responded in thunderous unison.  Gobos painted peace symbols on the upstage scrims and familiar tunes echoed through the hills.  The setlist was epic: It Don’t Come Easy, Boys, Hold The Line , Act Naturally, Matchbox, Down Under, The Weight, Anthem, You’re Sixteen You’re Beautiful and You’re Mine , Pick Up The Pieces, Work to Do, The No No Song, Photograph,  and I Wanna Be Your Man.

Leaner and livelier than Ringo’s 79 years should allow, his message was peace and love, but his anthem was FUN.  He did jumping jacks to Yellow Submarine that frenzied the crowd who responded by singing every word.  

Ringo has surrounded himself with luminaries of Rock-and-Roll fame and his band reflects amazing talent.  Colin Hay, the Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist and actor was lead singer for Men at Work.  He displayed his talents on the keyboards, percussion, bass and lap steel.

Hamish Stuart of Average White Band has played with John Lennon, Chaka Khan, David Sanborn, Smokey Robinson and the list goes on.  He led The All Star band with his signature hit Pickin’ Up The Pieces.

Vocalist, drummer Gregg Bisonnette who hailed from Van Halen, Santana and later Toto, joined Ringo to duet on the drums.

Guitar legend Steve Lukather was the original guitarist and vocalist for Toto and served in that capacity for the band’s entire existence. Steve demonstrated unbelievable licks throughout the entire set.

The Hammond organ has always given that unmistakable “goin-to-church” feel to R&B, rock and jazz.  Keyboardist Gregg Rolie who sang for Santana and Journey made me want to yell hallelujah!

Warren Ham came to the All Star Band from the Maranatha Praise Band and toured with Promise Keepers.  He also toured with Kansas, Donna Summer, and Olivia Newton-John.

Ringo’s encore finale electrified the audience with A Little Help from My Friends. People held hands and waved their lit phones above their heads.  We left that night feeling a little more peace and love and ready for the next day’s events.

The next day was special as we were able to share it with our daughter, Kirby and Phillip. We had incredible preferred seating.  We arrived early and were able to enjoy the venders, people watch, and stand in line to buy Woodstock tee-shirts.

I had mild expectations for Santana’s opening band. The Doobie Brothers, surprised us with their tight, amazing sounds and vocals.  The band’s ability to evolve and remain connected to multi generations of audiences is a testament to their craft.  Only two originals remain, Patrick Simmons and Tom Johnston, but they have added young progressive talent to their roster to deliver their unmistakable style of pushing the beat. 

Dancing erupted and continued throughout the whole set as the Doobs belted What a Fool Believes, Listen to the Music, Takin’ It To the Street, China Grove, Black Water, Jesus is Just Alright, and possibly the most recognizable opening guitar riffs of all times, Long Train Runnin’.

But the headliner of all headliners was about to emerge from the green room.  Santana began his set with dramatic video of Woodstock ’69, a documentary set to music that took you back to the chaotic days of Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Bobby and John Kennedy and the emerging peace movement.  Santana, dressed in a black original Woodstock t-shirt and played his signature red guitar. Evil Ways, Black Magic Woman, Gypsy Queen,  Maria Maria, Oye Como Va, and of course, Smooth had the crowd memorized and dancing in the isles. Carlos paid tribute to Lennon, Caltrain and Hendrix. The stage production, set design, lighting and sound were masterful. The energy level peaked and stayed there for three-and-a-half hours resulting in sensory fatigue for most of us, but a high we will never forget.  

We left with the message of peace and love, sharing and caring which, I believe, has diminished in the past 50 years, when the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Joe Cocker, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young echoed across the soggy fields known as Bethel Woods,  the real Woodstock.

[buckychristwrites]

Just A Touch | Part 6 | b.b.

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Summary: Your powers? Controlling any feeling a human can have, from emotions to pain, with a simple brush of your fingertips. Your mission? The traumatized soldier with sad stricken eyes and scream filled nightmares.

Word Count: 4.6k

Warnings: Mostly angst

A/N: So i decided that this fic is gonna be 8 parts! So just 2 more to go! Let me know what you think!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 |

Masterlist

You jumped awake, throwing yourself up in a sitting position and frantically looking around. It was a dream, you told yourself, just a dream.

And then you realized it wasn’t.

The all too familiar darkness and cold air of the prison cell you were kept in greeted you, and you felt like you had traveled back in time. Everything was the same, from the stains on the walls to the same lumpy mattress. Even the dripping noise from a leak you could never locate was still there. It was almost like it had sat here, waiting, knowing that someday you’d return to it. Your own personal hell. You began to shake, so hard that you felt the mattress vibrating below you.

How long have I been asleep? Hours? Days? You couldn’t help but wonder. Does it even matter? Even if days had passed, or even weeks, the concept of time didn’t exist in the confines of your cell. You knew that all too well.

Without thinking, you turned around, almost expectantly, to face the adjoining cell that was only separated by a wall of bars, and you were angry at how disappointed you were that it was empty. Being here was something you had dealt with before, but you never went through it without him.

Pulling your knees up to your chest, you pressed your back against the wall and closed your eyes, focusing on Bucky. Syncing with him. It wasn’t hard at this point, you synced with him so much that it almost felt like putting on pants or brushing your teeth. It was just automatic now.

He was absolutely hysterical, his emotions bouncing off walls. Frantic. Fury. Devastation. Failure. The emotions in him were so strong that you could feel them radiating off of him from wherever he was. Probably back at the Tower, blaming himself for what had happened and demanding they find you.

Unless he didn’t want to find you.

Unless they didn’t want to find you.

You had, of course, messed up the first real mission you had ever been a part of. Maybe they didn’t want to put in the effort. Who were you to them anyway? Just another sad human that HYDRA had broken. And Bucky was a soldier, someone who had a knack for efficiency and following orders. He would understand if they let you go because you couldn’t do those things without fucking them up.

Before you realized it was happening, you began to sob. Ten years had gone since you were in the hands of HYDRA, and now here you were again. And you were so fucking scared, mostly because a large part of you was deeply afraid that you weren’t going to make it out so easily this time. It was Captain America and the Avengers who saved you before, and you had no doubt that HYDRA took its precautions to ensure it didn’t happen again.

The door to your prison had opened, and you shot up to your feet. Out of the shadows came Karpov, a smug look on his face as he stared at you. He slowly approached the bars of your cell, stopping a few feet away. You swallowed hard.

“You’re finally awake,” He remarked, sounding impressed. “You have been asleep for days. We were worried about you.” You blinked slowly, but tried to remain neutral. How was it even possible that you had been asleep for days? “It must have been the exhaustion from taking care of the Winter Soldier all this time.” Your heart skipped a beat at the sound of his name, and you took a deep breath.

“How did you find me?” You asked simply. Karpov laughed, as if it was the silliest question he had ever been asked.

“You zink zat Tony Stark is ze only one who has facial recognition software?” He asked. You closed your eyes. So they had been looking for you at the same time as the Avengers were. Tony obviously got to you first, but ultimately HYDRA got you in the end. Karpov began to walk around the room in slow circles. “You vere a very hard girl to find, very careful.” He snickered. “But one mistake can cost you everyzing.” Biting your lip back, you closed your eyes to hold back the tears. If only you had been more careful. Not only would you not have eventually been recaptured by HYDRA, but you wouldn’t have been found by the Avengers either. You would’ve still been living your boring little life in that small Ohio town, and even though it wasn’t the best of lives, at least you would’ve been safe.

And maybe there would’ve been no harm in Bucky never knowing that you had ever existed.

“And zen we saw that you had found your Winter Soldier again, seeing you go into zat building with zat Tony Stark.” He scrunched up his nose in disgust. “And we couldn’t allow zat.” He stopped right in front of the bars. “So we set you up. Sending out a message we knew the Avengers would intercept about a meeting we had orchestrated to get you.” He put his hands on the bars and brought himself closer, his face pressing into the cage. “And now zat we have you, moya lyubov’, we can get our Soldat back too.”

Something inside you snapped, and you threw yourself forward. Karpov didn’t move in time to miss you grabbing his head through the holes in the bars and slamming his head into the metal.

“Don’t you dare do anything to Bucky!” You screamed, shooting bolts of pain through the nerves of the Colonel. Karpov began to shout, but you kept holding him, refusing to stop. If you killed him, they would more than likely kill you, and if you weren’t able to escape again, then that was your next best option.

Two guards came out of nowhere, one grabbing Karpov while the other punched you hard in the face to make you let go. Stumbling backwards, you hit the floor. It had been a long time since you had pushed pain like that into anyone, and it took a toll on your body. But it always had. When you sat up, cradling your face, Karpov was also being helped up off the floor as he stared at you. He was a mixture of angry and ecstatic, which made you incredibly anxious.

“You still have it,” He said, awestruck. “Can you feel it? The power? It must be so exhilarating to know that you can kill someone with just a touch.” He approached the bars again, a sinister smile on his face. “You can pretend all you want, moya lyubov’, but you are nothing but a killer. A torture machine. That’s all you have ever been good for, and that’s all you will ever be.” Despite you knowing that he would say anything to make you do anything he said, something about his words made your chest hurt. He stared at you for a second longer, before turning and walking out of the room, once again leaving you to the sound of the untraceable leak and your thoughts.

_________________________________________

Weeks had passed. You had began to count the days by the feeding schedule you were given. A small cup of cold eggs and a glass of water in the morning, and a ham and cheese sandwich with a glass of water in the evening. The first time they came in, you tried to attack the guard, but they were wearing special clothing to protect against your pain, which could only occur with skin to skin contact. So you ended up just getting the shit kicked out of you and no meals for three days.

Now you were weak. The food was disgusting, and you would only eat a little bit before kicking it away from you and into the corner to be picked up when the next meal came. You could feel the muscle tone you had gained from the training with Natasha depleting, and your body was beginning to become thin and frail. But you didn’t care. While it was convenient that you had the powers of the fast healing serum to help you if a guard decided he was having a bad day and needed to rough up their only prisoner, it began to slow with the rest of your feeble body.

Everyday, you focused on Bucky. Day and night. It was all you had that kept you sane, giving you something to focus on that wasn’t your hunger cramps or the constant discomfort and pain you were in. Most days he was the same, sad, anxious, afraid. Others he was angry, confused, desperate. But one feeling that he felt consistently, was longing. And this time, there was no doubt in your mind what, or who, it was for.

You thought about him all the time, letting every single detail of him run through your mind so that you wouldn’t forget them. His laugh, his smile, the sound of his voice, the way his arms felt wrapped around you, how he would become putty in your hands every single time your skin touched his own, the way he looked at you when you said something snarky, or the way his eyes twinkled when you said something sweet. But most importantly, you remembered the first, and last, kiss that you shared with him at the mall, merely minutes before you were captured. There was a sort of hunger on his end of it, like it was something he had been wanting for the longest time. He had never held you like that before, with his hands pressed so hard into your back that you couldn’t break free even if you had tried. You had begun the kiss to keep suspicions off of the two of you during the mission, but it turned into something else, something incredibly real, and you knew he had felt the same way. Sometimes it calmed you, to know that you had a moment like this with him. But sometimes it just hurt you, to know that you probably would never have it again.

He even ended up in your dreams when you were able to sleep. In the good ones, it was him comforting you, telling you that he was going to find you, or it was scenarios of him saving you from the prison you once shared. In the bad ones, it was him ending up back in the cell right next to yours, the two of you back to where you had started, or it was instances of him getting himself killed trying to save you. The worst part about the bad ones was that you couldn’t tell which situation would be worse.

One morning, about an hour or two after you had received and denied your first meal of the day, the door opened and three guards walked in. All of the guards looked so similar that it was nearly impossible to even try to give them separate identities. You had never seen more than three at a time, and you wondered if it was the same guards each time or if they were all different but looked too similar for you to know the difference. Maybe that was the point. You blankly watched them as they unlocked your cell and let themselves in.

“Get up,” One said as he and another grabbed you on either side and yanked you up before you had the chance to attempt to do it yourself. “The boss wants to see you.” With the two holding you up and the third flanking, the four of you walked out of the cage.

As you walked down the hallway, looking around and taking in the dark, familiar hellscape, you thought about fighting them and trying to run off, but it would be no use. The guards still brandished the thick clothing to ward off your abilities, and even if they weren’t, you were still too tired to try it. Even if you had been eating the food you were provided with, it wasn’t enough to give you any sort of strength. It was only enough to keep you alive.

They turned you down a hallway, and you had a moment of deja vu, and that’s when you knew exactly where they were taking you.

The room you had spent almost as much time in as your cell, was also exactly the same as it was the last time you had been in it. A medium sized room with dim lighting and a chair with arm restraints in the middle. The sight of it made you feel sick. On the wall in front of the chair were long chains that went around your wrists. The chains were long enough for you to reach the chair, but no further. You felt your entire body go numb as they took you to the chains and locked you into them. It was a familiar feeling, being back in those chains, and you hated every second of it. You were so focused on the cuffs around your wrists that you didn’t notice that two of the guards had disappeared, for when the door had reopened, a strangled yell filled the quiet room, making you look up. The guards dragged a beaten man that you had no recollection of ever meeting to the chair and secured him in, despite his fighting. Entering the room and closing the door behind him was Karpov, looking stern yet smug in a way that only he could pull off. He approached you, not afraid to be close considering your weakness.

“I have a job for you, moya lyubov’,” He said in a gentle voice. “Or, shall I say, a mission? Is zat what you call zem now?” He laughed, shaking his head. The guards lifted you up again and brought you closer to the man in the chair. From his clothes, you could tell he was a SHIELD agent, and your eyes closed.

“I need information from zis man, some very important information,” Karpov said. The way he was speaking was like he was talking to a child, which made you angry, but you were too weak to act on it. “We tried to do zis ze easy way, but he would just not cooperate. But we mustn’t worry, because we have you again, moya lyubov’.” You shuttered at the use of that name. Before you could say anything, Karpov turned away from you.

“Now, Agent,” He sneered. “I’m going to give you vone last chance to give me what I want.” Without hesitation, the Agent spit at Karpov’s feet.

“I’ll die before I tell you anything,” He said confidently. “So do what you must.” You watched the man in awe. While it was common for the properly trained detainees to refuse to give up information, which is why you were there at all, it was a rare day that they disrespected Karpov in such a way. The man was calm and self-assured. You didn’t have to sense him in order to know that, but sensing him did make it emit off of him and onto you. Karpov turned to you, obviously very displeased with this reaction.

“You heard the man,” He said to you. “Do it, moya lyubov’.” He turned away from you again, beginning to pace around the room.

“No.”

He stopped, still for a second before turning towards you. His eyes were widened slightly in surprise.

“Excuse me?” He asked, his voice sounding just as shocked as he looked.

“I said no.”

He was quiet for a second, and then he began to laugh. It was loud, but there was no trace of humor in it at all.

“I’m sorry,” He said, his laughs subsiding as he wiped away an imaginary tear from under his eye. “It’s just very bold of you to assume you have a choice.” You shifted, standing up a little straighter.

“I don’t have anything to lose,” You shrugged. It was quite painful for it to be said out loud. “So you do what you gotta do. Bring out the Torture Machine or whatever. But you can’t use fear to control me anymore.” He looked so incredibly angry that his face turned a bright shade of red and even his breathing started to increase in pace, but all he did was turn away from you.

“I’m disappointed in you, moya lyubov’,” He said, before he started the mantra of your trigger words. The last thing that entered your mind before your switch flipped was Bucky, and how proud he would be of you right now if he were there.

_________________________________________

A few more weeks passed and Kaprov had continued to bring you out to perform your former duties, and you continued to defy him as yourself. It was a good idea on their part to put the Winter Soldier trigger into you as well, you thought to yourself, for when things like this happened. They did it as a failsafe in case you decided to get bold back when they had first given you the pain ability, but they realized that when they used fear against you, the fear of losing your life and then eventually, when you didn’t care about whether you lived or died, the fear of losing Bucky, it wasn’t necessary.

They were probably very relieved to have it now.

There were multiple downsides to them triggering it in you though, like the deep exhaustion you felt after waking up from it in your cell or the fact that they cut back your already small portions of food and water to punish you for your defiance. It also bothered you that it left patches in your memories of what had happened during your time in it, but you always remembered when you killed someone. And it seemed like Karpov was always having you kill someone.

You continued to focus on Bucky every day. It was the only thing keeping you sane, and it kept you from thinking of what you were doing when you were the Torture Machine. It had now been almost two months since you were picked up by HYDRA, and Bucky was starting to feel hopeless. There was rarely a time he felt any sort of positive emotion, it was mostly just heartache and desperation. It killed you to know that he felt like that, and you wished that there was a way you could let him know that you were okay, or even better, where you were. It was the same compound that the two of you were holed up in before, and you wondered whether he didn’t know where it was or if he just hadn’t considered it yet. But the more hopeless he felt, the more you felt it too. It was starting to get harder and harder for you to hold on. You knew that if you didn’t start eating more soon, that you would die. Maybe that was for the best.

The door opened and you didn’t have to look up to know that Karpov had just entered the room. When you did eventually look over, you noticed he was holding a tray in his hands and he looked more smug than usual. The guards opened your cell and he slipped the tray in. Your eyes narrowed at its contents. It was a full meal, carefully prepared chicken, pasta layered with sauce and cheese and a salad with carrots and tomatoes stirred in,  a bowl of freshly cut fruit on the side and a whole gallon of water set down next to it. Karpov exited your cell, standing right outside the bars to watch you. When you continued to stare between him and the food, he chuckled lightly.

“Eat up!” He exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air. “You look so terribly weak and hungry, I know you need your strength.” You continued to stare, only moving to sit up on the mattress. It was a long stare down between the two of you, and the way he patiently watched you without falter made you uneasy.

“What have you done to it?” You asked slowly. He cocked his head to the side in what appeared to be confusion. You didn’t buy it. “Is it poisoned? What’s in it?” He laughed again.

“Nothing is done to it, moya lyubov’,” He said in a gentle voice that, if you didn’t know any better, would’ve made you believe him. “Although, I believe it was you who said that you had nothing left to lose, so what does it matter?” You looked away from him.

He was right. You didn’t have anything left to lose. So even if the food was laced with the worst of poisons, whether it killed you quick or slow, it didn’t matter. The food looked amazing, and you hadn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. So you slowly crawled to the tray on the floor, and began eating. It was surprisingly just as good as it looked, and there didn’t appear to be any trace of anything toxic. While you enjoyed the only luxury you had ever received in your combined time of being here, you were still very suspicious, and very much aware it came at a price.

“So what is it that you want from me?” You asked through a mouthful of food, your words just barely understandable. Karpov smiled widely, and you knew that he had been waiting for you to ask this very question.

“For now? I just want you to build your strength,” He said. “It is of the utmost importance.” You narrowed your eyes at him, but continued to eat. If wasn’t going to kill you, then there was no reason for you to not eat it.

After that meal, you did start to feel stronger. A few hours later, they brought you your lunch, which was of the same quality. Spaghetti and meatballs with two bread rolls, a salad, fruit and another gallon of water. Karpov and the guards silently watched you pig out, scarfing the food down so quickly that you almost made yourself sick. It wasn’t normal for Karpov to be hovering around you like this, he normally left that to the guards, but you were too consumed by the delicious food to care. By breakfast the next day, you had now had four regular sized meals, and although your body couldn’t possibly be back to where it was in just a day, your energy and sanity seemed to return to a normal level. Your body no longer ached so much and you honestly had forgotten what it felt like to be able to stand up without getting dizzy. You still looked like shit, with your ripped, dirty clothes and your unkempt hair that you tried to keep clean by pouring some of the water from the gallons you were given over it. You also tried to wash off your face with the water but without a towel, you knew that you were just pushing the dirt around, and none of it made much of a difference when you still sat on either the dirty floor or disgusting mattress. But it was a start.

When the guards entered your cell to take your tray from breakfast, two of them stayed behind, and Karpov entered shortly after. He had a sinister sort of look on his face, and you suddenly felt uneasy. Everything came at a price, and you knew you were about to pay it.

“Something has happened within zee last couple of days, moya lyubov’,” He started. You rolled your eyes.

“Don’t call me that,” You said sternly. He looked taken about for a second, but it left as quickly as it came as he looked at you with something between anger and self-satisfaction. He took a couple of steps forward.

“After all zeese nice meals we’ve given you, and you still have so much disrespect,” He said, shaking his head as he pace. Part of you almost began to feel bad, but you pushed that out of you real quick. That was exactly what he wanted. He gave you a look of disappointment, but you didn’t react to it, instead just looking away. He huffed for a second, before shaking his head and continuing the speech he had begun before you interrupted.

“As I was saying, moya lyubov’,” He said, side glancing at you when you visibly flinched at the name before going on. “Something unprecedented occurred within the last couple of days, and we needed you to be as strong as possible for it.” You watched him with narrowed eyes.

“What is it that happened?” You asked him. He didn’t even attempt to hide the smile that came with your question, and you knew that whatever had happened was very bad.

“Come with me, and I will show you,” He said, gesturing you to follow. Dumbfounded, you sat and just continued to stare at him as he patiently waited for you, his calm expression not changing once. Slowly, you stood and walked behind him out of the cell with no help from the guards. They were several yards behind you as you walked, which made you feel even more uneasy. Whatever it was that had happened had changed something in the air, a sort of tension filled the empty spaces of the hallways that you were walking through of your own free will, but Karpov didn’t seem to notice.

“Don’t be so rigid!” He exclaimed as he walked next to you. “Not everything that happens around here is bad! I think you vill like zis one. You might even consider zis… sort of a gift.” A gift. The word made bile start to rise in your throat. This was bad. You began to let your eyes wander the hallway, trying to look casual as you looked for the best way out. Most of the doors were locked, and the guards were suddenly a lot closer to you than they were before. They knew that whatever was about to happen, you weren’t going to like it.

You approached the door to the familiar chamber, Karpov stopping outside of it with his hand on the doorknob. He looked down at the floor before looking back up at you. Your breathing began to quicken as pain arose in your chest. This was it. Whatever he had been hinting at was about to occur, as soon as he opened that door. Maybe he was going to finally kill you for every time you disrespected him. Maybe he was going to completely turn you into the Torture Machine. Or, maybe he was going to completely wipe your memory and start fresh. You fully hoped that he would just kill you.

“We have a very special guest for you,” He said as he began to push the door open. You didn’t move. A guest?

“Go see him, moya lyubov’,” He said earnestly, nodding towards the door. “Your gift.” You could feel your front start to crumble as you realized what he was saying. Slowly, you entered the room.

It took you a second to process it.

Strapped to the chair in all his glory, disheveled hair now longer, beard slightly fuller, slightly bruised and bloodied but nothing too serious, was the man you had been longing this whole time for.

“Hey, doll,” His groggy voice said softly, as if he had just woken up, and he shot you a goofy smile. Tears filled your eyes as you took in the sight of him, a full minute passing before you finally spoke.

“Bucky.”

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@of-outerspace, @mia-at-work, @ioanashalala, @charmwng, @theraputicwritings, @smile-sugar, @dracobarnes, @lovenderrose, @ghostslikemydoubts, @slender--spirit, @yllwtaxi, @aurajitsu, @kawaii-satan-trash, @bodebooop, @buckysbeech, @projectxhappiness, @ilikechocolatemilk09, @ravengalaxia, @girlwhoisfearless, @quierdoofthestars, @snazzysickly, @disneyprincess-shuri, @just-little-bo-me, @celestiallucifer, @carolyns14, @unknown-error-707, @falsettos-land, @thatonelittlerose, @bexboo616, @thetimidsarcasticcat, @kawaii-little-nargle, @gabbygurrl, @glupijelen, @kat786, @stargeek727, @hello-keeley, @cutiepiemimi13, @dani11708, @imaginationgotmegood, @bitchy-ginger-1, @theinnerrebelnerd, @k-n-e, @pizzarollpatrol, @stevieboyharrington, @lixbean, @eurusholmmes, @freelittlearcher, @lupins, @laurfangirl424, @samijolles, @ellabetheunicorn, @crochetenthusiast, @myfictionalhusbands, @holyrips, @meetcally, @ajduurikscjsja, @loveislove24, @wellwwhynot, @w-elp420, @sadancing, @tealeafboi, @i-honestly-dont-care-anymore,