#I have to go get quotes from the piece but it really made some gears in my head turn like huh. not sure what THAT means but interesting!

[steveyockey]

it’s uber annoying that diablo cody was interviewed about her attempts to write the script for the barbie movie and the pull quote was just “I couldn’t write barbie as a girlboss” when she said a LOT of really interesting things about how a movie this earnest would have been laughed out of the theater if she had written it in 2015! weird to think about the changes in the media landscape over a relatively short number of years that margot robbie’s barbie is being heralded (by SOME) as a Feminist Icon

[gummimn]

Chicago Road-trip Diary

{an old story it posted; the site seems to be offline, so it is reposting here} By gummimn.

Part 1: introductions and prologue.

I was really looking forward to the coming weekend. LatexIL and I had been chatting for quite some time about the chance of getting together for a weekend of some serious play. I had taken extra days off, so we’d have all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday to play; I didn’t have to leave until Monday afternoon. I still got hard just thinking about his profile entry.

“Latex, rubber, leather bondage: intense inescapable, short or long term. Can top, SM optional. Have equipment including sleepsacks, hoods and gags, lots of restraints, can have multiple guests in playroom at once. I like to travel too. Looking for hot safe bondage players who want it tight, inescapable, with headgear controlling sight, sound, speech and air…ESPECIALLY in head to toe latex/rubber. All holes plugged, tubed, and cath’d. Layers: leather over rubber; sacks over leather; sucked down in rac. Hobbies: rubber, catsuits, sleepsacks, straitjackets, vacrac, hoods, gags, and tight, effective restraints. Keeping bottoms tied up for as long as they like it; stored out of sight, out of mind. Favorite Quote: Maybe you need another layer of rubber and you definitely need those straps tightened up…”

Even after 12 years together, Peter still didn’t get the whole bondage/rubber/sense-dep SM scene. He did his fisting and watersports, played with guys who wanted bears, and loved me. Me? I did WS as well, but man, I wanted my rubber too. Waders, suits, sheaths front and back, hoods, gags, gasmask hoods, industrial gloves and rubber work boots; my rubber English riding boots to go with the Vex Chicago cop shirt and tight cod-piece jeans; the rubber BDU from Invincible; did I mention my home-made 1piece? It was a cross-country ski suit until I got my pervy hands and 3 quarts of liquid latex on it. Add some bondage: straitjackets, ropes, chains, restraints, collars, frames, racks, sacks, locks-and I’d be a happy pig. Leather? Oh hell yeah! I never got on my rocket without full gear: suit, boots, gloves and helmet…such a terrible thing; a gear pig required by his lover to wear gear just to go riding. Sucks to be me! My first piece of leather-a biker-hippie approved biker jacket; my knee-high Red Wing loggers-black laces for formal, white for play; leather jeans and cargoes; hoods, restraints-give me my Mr. S. 4 buckles any day; padded fist mitts; padded posture collar (Thanks again Mr. S!); padded sense-dep hood, the only connection to the outside world the grommet at my mouth. Gags-can I count the ways I like to be gagged? Yes, I can. Floggers and crops; pummeling and beating; yeah, I can take the pain, and make it a ticket to that place only a Dom and his sub can go when they’re in a scene: time stops, space expands, 2 souls commune without a spoken word-nirvana in a dungeon with pain and pleasure the mantra that lets them into the garden.

Peter doesn’t get it, but he doesn’t get in the way. One of the first “big talks” we had before living together had settled that. We discussed all the mundane things that will kill a relationship when times get tough. Times always get tough. One of you gets sick, or fired; or you see someone really hot who wants you too; the weather gets too hot or too cold. Crap happens. You work out the little details beforehand, you can get through them. So we talked. Monogamy got talked over as well: go out, have a good time, remember your heart stays at home, don’t bring home diseases. It had worked for 12 years; he had his kink or two, I had my laundry list of pervs; we shared each other and our hearts and our home.

So, I was off to a long weekend in Chicago. I’d shipped some gear ahead, but not much. LatexIL assured me that he had everything that was needed, and I wasn’t going out to the bars. So I sent on my favorite waders and boots, my favorite gags and the posture collar. The only gear in my saddlebags was a rainsuit-never leave home without it; my meds and toilet kit; and bottles of Boost for the trip down. He’d asked, and I’d readily agreed, to a liquid diet starting a couple of days before hand. No need to make a trip to interrupt the scene; the external cath would take care of the rest.

Peter and I had talked over breakfast; his bowl of cereal, my bottle of Boost. We confirmed I’d call when I got there and when I left Monday. He made sure once again that he had LatexIL’s phone and address. We clarified once again the secret code I’d use if I thought the scene was bad and I needed out. Peter can be a pain in the ass when it comes to crap like that. He’s mister “plan everything out, double check the plans, confirm the details, annoy the partner with more plans and details.” I’m a bit more impetuous and spontaneous, mister “hey, that sounds like fun! Let’s go!” He was off to work; I was off to get ready.

First on the list were a trim, then shower and douche. I got out the trimmer, and worked it over my head once again. The smallest guard left only bristly fuzz that felt soooo good to the touch. Latex had sent a liquid soap for me to use; it had an intense chemical scent, but it left my body as smooth and clean as a baby’s behind. The enema was quick; three days of liquids saw to that. I rinsed off the hair from the trim, soaped up and rinsed down. Brushed, flossed, dried off, time to get dressed.

Now was the make it or break it moment. LatexIL had sent me a really cool locking gag and a custom 1-piece suit. The gag was some sort of carbon-fiber head harness with a tube to connect to my CamelBack, and another to use as a straw for Boost on the trip down. Once I locked it over the suit, I had only one way out-I had to see Latex for the key. I took the suit, and admired it once again. Sheaths front and rear; socks with toes, gloves with grippy marks on the fingers, an attached hood the only way in; stretch the mouth wide, let it swallow me whole. It was fairly thick, but still thin enough to flex with me so I wouldn’t get fatigued on the ride. It had been cut like a SlickSuit so it would conform to my every curve. It would slide up crack of my ass so the sleeve behind could slide in with the plug I was going to wear, and stretch snug across my broad shoulders while hugging my small, slim waist. It would be my skin for the weekend, if I didn’t bug out and call the whole thing off.

I got out the lube, opened the suit, and started to pour it in. I started at the feet and worked it into the toes. Up the legs, into the crotch and over the sheaths hanging inside. Starting at the fingers, I lubed up the sleeves, then across the chest. I applied a very thin film to the back of my neck, and my lower face. I wanted the hood to slide on comfortably, but I didn’t want lube in my eyes when I started to sweat under my leathers. Now it was time to slide it on. Cold at first, it quickly warmed. My toes settled in their homes, and I slid it up my legs to my crotch. I worked my dick and nut into the sack and sheath, and then used the plug to seat the sheath in my ass. That old familiar feeling began to settle in-that horny tingle that started out on the skin and worked its way into my bones and took over my brain as I felt the rubber grip my legs and transform my skin. I pulled it up my chest, and worked my hands down the sleeves until they popped into the gloves. For a moment, I had to stop and stroke. Looking at myself in the mirror, I began to grope myself. The squeak of rubber on rubber tuned my senses to the feel of the latex as it became my skin; the warming rubber gave off that heady scent of latex and sweat and my own rubber body. I was lost in the smell and the sound and the sensation. It took all my strength to pull myself back from the edge; that would have to wait until LatexIL let me go over. I pulled the hood over my head, and smoothed the eyes and mouth into place. All that remained was the gag and the last of my freedom.

I looked at the rubberman staring out from the mirror. The light caught every curve and ripple and nook and cranny of my body under its shiny new skin. I felt up my cock, worked my nipples, pushed on the plug, pulled my nut. I could still call it off, jack off, and go for a ride. Or I could put the mouth-guard with its tubes onto my teeth, pull the strap around, and place the lock. I stood there for a long time, stroking my dick, holding the head harness. Finally, I took a deep breath and pushed the guard into my mouth. I worked my tongue around to make sure the tubes on the inside were properly seated between my back molars so I could work the bite valves for the tube that would be my drinking straw and the CamelBack connection. Looking myself in the face in the mirror, my blue eyes the only evidence of a human being within the latex man staring back at me, I pulled the straps to the back of my head…and closed the lock. Now I was in for it-he had the key and my only way out.

I stood there a while longer, worried and afraid about what I had gotten myself into; more horny and lust-demented than I had been in too long a time. My misgivings were too late now. I took one last stroke of my dick with a strong tug on my nut, and left the bathroom.

I went to the bedroom, sat down, and slipped prolyprop socks over my feet and UnderArmor glove liners over my hands. A thin silk balaclava was next; I made sure it rested on my chin so the tubes from the gag were out for use. I lifted the CoolMax liner off the bed. It was my summer salvation; it kept me dry enough in the heat I could wear my leathers in the worst of July and August. It gave my body a shield against the leathers, and kept my leathers clean and free of my sweat. The lightning bolt graphics swirling over the bodysuit gave me a shiver of power and desire as I looked it over, and took in its sweet scent. I slid into the open chest, pushed my feet down the legs, my hands through the sleeves tucked the balaclava under the neck and zipped it shut. My latex skin was now armored against the leathers to come.

It had been a sacrifice, but I now had the racing suit of my gear pig wet dreams. The A-stars SX-1. Asymmetrical chest zips, molded poly-therm armor melded onto the knees, elbows, and shoulders. The same molded poly-therm cast into an armored hump down my back to protect me from whiplash if I crashed and to guide the wind over me as I lay on top of my Daytona. A vivid sky blue, white accents, black woven stretch Kevlar in the crotch and down the arms, perfed almost like mesh, memory foam armor across my chest and abs and lower back. It looked hot, the brilliant blue contrasting with the bright sunshine yellow of the bike, meeting on my A-Star Super Tech boots of blue smashing against yellow fading to white at the toe of my boots. Next was my Arai-a white star on a blue field with gold trim. I slid the Foggy Respro over my rubber face without snagging it, made sure the tubes from the gag hung free, and cinched it snug. I reached inside my suit, grabbed the hose from my hydration pack and hooked it up to the left tube so I could drink as I rode. Last, but not least, my Icon Ti-Maxx longs: blue with bling; gold plated titanium on blue gloves, gray palms with gold studs on the heel of my palm, the wrist strap snugged, the gauntlet straps firmly closed together.

I took another look in the full-length mirror on the closet door. Under the leathers, my dick stretched further up my abs. Blue, gold, white and yellow-from head to toe; armor over my shoulders, across my elbows and down my forearms; more armor over my knees and down my shins; the armored aero-hump running down my spine; it was worth every bit of overtime. The mere sight of my skin-tight leathers alone would have gotten me off in a heartbeat if I weren’t under orders to wait. My wallet was safely under the seat, the saddlebags were packed and strapped, it was time for take-off. Sense-dep breath control head-trips, utter immobility and complete helplessness waited 7 hours away. I ran to the kitchen, grabbed my keys and locked the door behind me. In the garage, I threw my leg over and started the motor. The bike safely walked out of the garage, I did the door remote and tucked it in a saddlebag pocket. I closed the golden-blue mirrored shield, slipped it into vent-lock, and launched my rocket.

Part 2: my trip and arrival

I had gotten a semi-early start. Early enough to get there before rush hour in Chicagoland, late enough to be after the morning rush here in Minneapolis. I’d only have to stop for relief and Boost breaks, so I wasn’t worried about the time. Late May can still be a roll of the dice for weather. It can be the perfect warmth all day, and still drop to freezing after sundown. You can start out dry, and end up soaking wet. Lady Latex favored the bold. It was a perfect temp to be riding skinned in rubber and encased in armored leather. Just warm enough that a layer of sweat let the latex slide over my skin without binding or chafing, no more, no less. I took the freeway just long enough to get out of town, then took my exit, and got on the 2-lane. More fun, less dangerous than the interstate, it was my preferred way to make long rides. After all, you get twisties on 2-lane, not the interstate, and I do love to put a knee down; the sound, the feel of my puck skimming asphalt gets me almost as hard as the feel of rope wrapping around my body.

I felt every bump in the road through my plug. Each crack and ripple was transmitted from the plug to my prostate, transferred to my dick, and buzzed into my brain. Once I was safely alone, away from stoplights and stop signs, crosswalks and city speed zones, I knew I wouldn’t have to shift often, so I got into my cruising position. I lay down on the tank and tucked my boots up against the passenger pegs. To corner, I would simply shift to one side or the other; to shift, I would slip my left food down to the gear shift long enough to click it, then lift it back to the rear peg. My cock and nut and taint melted into the seat sending the motor’s hum directly to my heads, both of them. The memory foam padding on my chest absorbed bumps from the road, protecting me and allowing me to breath. The rocket merged with its pilot, the two became one, and the miles slid by.

It’s strange when you’re out on a bike. Even though a car’s air-filter doesn’t really filter out all the aromas from the air coming in, there is an exponential difference when riding. You can taste each scent as it comes: the cows in the pasture, the cottonwoods by the stream, the lilacs by the farmhouse. You see it, you smell it, you taste it all in the same instant. Combine that with the hum from the motor, the buzz from the tires, and the utter bliss of being out on your own magic carpet, and you can go into sensory overload. It’s like being high without the down or the expense of weed. It’s like being born again each and every second, the whole of your being a clean slate every moment. No past, no future, only now, forever and ever amen and amen. Sometimes you just have to stop, get off the rocket, and shake your head to clear out the joy and release the beauty. Then it’s back on the magic carpet and off to the horizon again. Four times I stopped; twice to fuel my Daytona, twice more to fuel the pilot as well. Before I knew it, I was on the outskirts of Chicagoland. Taking the two-lane meant I hadn’t had to worry about tolls, but it also meant I had to heed the directions from my Garmin to twist my way into the city. Even so, it was going to be perfectly timed. I’d arrive just after LatexIL got home, so he’d be there to open his garage and I could ride right in.

After that, my freedom so real and so perfect while on two wheels would be over. My freedom freely given and utterly taken would be transformed into complete slavery in total bondage. In my servitude, I would achieve a new bliss, a different joy, a deeper beauty. I could not wait to be utterly confined and perfectly helpless. The thought of the total freedom of the ride taken to become the utter submission of my captor’s bondage made me so hard and horny I could barely focus on the road ahead.

Finally, I arrived at the address I’d programmed into my digital map. As I rolled up to the brownstone, I saw the tuck-under garage left open for my entry. I settled my rocket into the berth gently; I don’t think any of the neighbors noticed. To them I was just another sport bike rider parking my toy for the night. I stood up stiffly, and stretched, then stood off my bike. The door from the garage to the house stood open, as he said it would be. I unstrapped the saddlebags, threw them over my shoulder, and entered, closing the door and my freedom behind me.

Part 3: the scene begins.

As I shut the door, I heard a voice behind me.

“Hello blue.”

The same deep voice I’d heard so often on our Skype chats, but wrong; it’s Bryce, not blue. Suddenly, my world shifted as my mind spun. Vertigo like from a harsh fever swept through me; even as I stepped away from the door, my body came to a complete stop. I swear, for a moment, I couldn’t even breathe as every muscle in my body froze. I tried to turn to face him; my chest didn’t shift an inch. I tried to turn my head; I stared straight ahead at the closed door. I tried to lift my hand to raise my face-shield; it hung stiffly at my side. I gave one last effort to try and see him in the corner of my sight; my eyes were fixed, looking at the peephole in the door. Even my dick froze in mid-twitch! Something inside my mind had hijacked my body; I was more subdued than I had ever been in any amount of rope, restraints or chains. My mind raced, What the fuck!? What just happened? What’s with that word? Why has it paralyzed me?

Minutes passed while I struggled to move any muscle in my body. Nothing shifted the least bit. Sweat broke out over the whole of my skin as I panicked. The only motion I had was my breathing; as the vertigo swept past, it had returned. Now I was sucking air like I’d run the quarter mile as I went into full flight mode. I should’ve been tearing out the door and onto the street, the way my mind was racing. Instead I was a leather and latex statue, an armored mannequin of flesh and bone. Finally, I heard him step up behind me.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you going to turn around and say hello?”

That same deep sexy voice, now laced with sarcasm and menace.

“Oh wait, that’s right, you can’t. I’ve said the magic word.”

Fuck, the vertigo, the frozen breath, the swirling in my mind, only stronger and deeper somehow.

“Blue, turn around and face the mirror.”

Before, I had struggled with all my might to turn and face him; now I willed every muscle, every fiber, every bone in my body to stay where I was. As paralyzed as my body was before, now it moved on its own; against my will, I turned around. Looking across the entryway, a small mudroom and laundry, there was a mirror on the far wall. Like I was on a leash, my body stepped forward, crossed the 4 paces to reach the mirror, and came to a complete stop. Not like I normally would stop, you know, slowing down as I approached, then bringing my rear foot forward to rest beside the front. No, my body strode across the room and STOPPED; I almost pitched forward into the wall it was so abrupt. If I had been scared before, this display nearly shut me down with terror.

As I came back to my body, my thoughts crashed around my skull, “What the Hell? What is in that word? Why can it move me, when I can’t move myself?”

He had followed me across the room. I could see him beside me as I stared straight ahead into the mirror. Even the normal movement of my eyes, back and forth, up and down, was frozen. I could only look straight ahead, eyes perfectly level, no left or right. If he had stepped even one step to the side, I would not be able to see him, because he would be out of my direct line of sight.

“Blue, examine your reflection in the mirror. Enable sub-routine Bryce to access optical sensors without security filter 421. Apply. Bryce, can you see everything?”

Damn, that voice of his; so strong, so commanding over Skype, was beyond strong, beyond commanding when in the same room. Even as I relaxed into his voice as I had so many times before, my mind swirled again, and my vision shifted. I stared; my breath caught in my throat. I could see everything.

“What the Fuck? There’s a padlock through the chinch rings on my chinstrap; where did it come from? When had it been put there? What the hell? Why is there zip ties cinched from my suit’s zipper pulls to the D-rings on my collar? What the Fuckity Fuck is a collar doing around my neck? What the Fuck is it made of? It looks like carbon fiber! Fuckity fuckity fuck fuck! There’s another one of those freaky zip-ties around each wrist, strapping my gloves to my arms! My Boots! There’s some sort of carbon fiber strap wrapped around the top of my boots! From the top of my instep to the top of the wedge-shaped shin-guard, there’s a fucking carbon fiber strap snugged around my boots! What the hell is going on here? Why am I locked into my leathers? Who did this to me? When!?!? What is in that word!? Why can’t I do anything unless he says blue!?”

I screamed-but it was only in my head; not a sound came out of my throat.

My eyes flickered back up from my boots to look at the face of the man beside me. The open inviting smile I had seen on cam was now a malevolent grin. He was obviously getting off on my terror and confusion. He was looking at me in the mirror as I was looking at him. Waiting for me to see everything there was to see in my reflection.

“Do you like what you see, Bryce?” His deep, strong voice could make my breath stop in my throat, even in my stark raving terror. Even in my stark raving terror, I did like what I saw. The vision in the mirror, a crotch-rocketeer locked in his leathers, gloves, boots and helmet, had me hard. If I was a leaker, I’d have been dripping; but I’m not. Instead, my dick tried to crawl up out of the codpiece and into my throat. I was trembling now not in fear, but in stark raving horniness. Carbon fiber straps shone like gloss black paint over my boot tops. Wide carbon fiber straps cinched my gloves to my arms, gloss black over matte blue and gray and shiny gold. A carbon fiber collar gleamed between the collar-less top of my racing suit and the bottom edge of my helmet. The shiny chrome of the D-rings were reflected on the collar, and made the strap connecting the suit zip to the D-ring seem like a glossy ribbon of black light. There were 2 tubes hanging from under my helmet; I could feel something in my nose, I realized it must be the tubes. I could see the top of a rubber suit rising from my leathers; I was now aware it continued as a hood. I was completely sealed in rubber, from head to toe. There was a tube sticking out from the top of my leathers that disappeared into my helmet; I could feel it was attached to the gag in my mouth, and it was leaking. I could feel a catheter in my dick; that must be what’s leaking. There was a MONSTER plug in my ass; I estimated at least a 3-inch diameter. Everything his profile promised had been delivered. Every opening was tubed, cath’d, gagged and plugged. I was so horny, so hard, so turned on, I was vibrating.

As I came back to earth, I wondered what had gone through people’s mind as they had seen me at the gas station. It was very obvious to anyone who looked that my suit was locked on me. The thought that I had ridden all the way to Chicago from Minneapolis in obvious bondage for everyone to see sent my mind into another horny tailspin and made my dick twitch. At least that muscle could now move on its own!

As my mind cleared, my eyes bore into the reflection of his. Not that he could see mine through the mirrored visor. But still, they did. The horniness had given way to terror had given way to rage.

“What the fuck have you done to me? Why can’t I move? When did I get locked in my gear? Who locked me up? What the HELL is going on? What’s in the word blue that it controls everything I do?”

All what I would have shouted, loud enough to crack the mirror in front of me... If I could have spoken... but there was that gag...

“You must be a bit confused.” “A Bit!?” “Would you like to know what happened?” “HELL yeah, I want to know what happened!” “Blue…Remember this morning.”

If my body hadn’t been stone cold paralyzed, I’d have collapsed to the floor as another wave of vertigo swept my mind. I remembered this morning; oh Hell, did I ever remember this morning.

Next: “Memories Light the Corners of My Mind….”

[puckpocketed]

Autumn Hockey Diaries - Defencemen, Hockey Blinders, and the Hand of the Narrative: Brock Faber In 2 Minutes and 9 Seconds

[Foreword: This essay is not what I thought it would be. It's probably not what you think it will be either. I've cut down a lot of the content because it was approaching thesis length, and I've got a lot of uni-related writing to get through. Appendices of cut content and extra reading will be published some time down the road. Look for #puckmortems.]

Brock Faber is not on the agenda. Brock Faber is a gliding figure in the middle of my screen, on occasion. More often, he is a hunched over body on the blue line, or he’s directing traffic behind the net, or he’s a blurry smear of green-red-white on the outer edges of where the play is happening. Nonetheless, it's like he’s never off the ice. “how do i even begin to write about a rookie” I say into the void in a despondent blog post, not long after I reluctantly accept that the itch won’t leave until I do. This is deeply inconvenient. I’m already in the middle of researching for another piece, halfway through an ice hockey book which I picked up in an attempt to familiarise myself with forward cycling and forechecking systems. Ironically, I have the Flyers vs Wild game up to watch an entirely different 21-year-old defenceman. My eyes snag on Faber anyway. 

Let’s rewind a bit.

HOW DID I GET HERE?

Those following along already know this, but I’ve been meaning to write about the Anaheim Ducks. They caught my eye in December 2023, not long after I plunged heart-first into hockey — and then, of course, the Drysdale-Gauthier trade happened in January, and the idle research project I had going on kicked into high gear. I began to dig and dig and found narrative after narrative, and as I tried to sift through sensationalised click-farming and journalism, I felt the other narrative, capital ‘n’ Narrative, begin to close in. I was out of my depth; the rebuild was an abyss, Drysdale was inextricably linked to the media’s whipping boy, Trevor Zegras, and I was a little too fond of the Ducks to be any more lax with my research.

I wanted terribly to have clips and analysis on hand, real proof to throw in peoples’ faces when they made assumptions. There was too much to say, and too much tape to watch, and far too many books I needed to read in order to have the correct language and technical knowledge to do that kind of piece justice. I resigned myself to becoming one of those guys drawing over gameplay with a virtual marker one day. Afterwards, I picked up Take Your Eye Off the Puck: How to Watch Hockey by Knowing Where to Look by Greg Wyshynski. Unsolicited review: it’s got relevant information but all of that is sandwiched between unfunny Xennial sarcasm and Harry Potter references that are transparently desperate attempts at being accessible/relatable/fun — save your money unless you can hold your nose about all of the above. The man himself is possibly the worst thing you can be as a human being: annoying on Twitter. Any quoting from his book that I do is purely because, on occasion, he has anecdotes to share that can’t be found elsewhere.

So there I am, days out from the fallout of January 8th and rewatching Drysdale's first match.

WHO IS NUMBER 7? THE CALDER RACE, AND HOCKEY BLINDERS

But Brock Faber, number 7 a beacon on his back, surefooted and scanning the ice like a centre, is always just there. He’s skating every other shift, he’s on the penalty kill, or controlling the gap on a Flyer forward, he’s somehow also anchoring the power play — and really who is this guy? His name sounds familiar. The usual skim of articles turns up hype and speculation, opinion pieces written after Connor Bedard was confirmed to be out for 6 weeks with a broken jaw. They float Faber as a possible Calder contender, should Bedard somehow fail to catch up after his recovery.

And that’s where I’ve heard Faber’s name. He’s part of the class of poor bastards who have to share their debut season with Bedard, the fourth-coming of Gretzky — similar to Bedard’s draft year, yet infinitely worse because it’s the goddamn NHL and being in a different draft class doesn’t do you any good if you’ve got to share actual ice with him. All are afterthoughts, are footnotes in Bedard’s wake. When you speak of the rookies of the 2023-24 season the spectre of the Next Next Next One looms, and you can’t help but let slip the pity you nurse for those who would be the sweethearts of national media coverage, the new wave, if not for that monstrous boy and his, at the time, 33 points in 39 games.

There’s a border here. I step around it tenderly — helped along by a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance — when watching ice hockey, it isn’t to be crossed. I call them my ‘ice hockey horse blinders’, hockey blinders for short. They’re required safety equipment at this point, mandatory so that my sanity stays intact against everything ice hockey can be (aside from the best sport in the world): the retributive justice, the implications behind calling a player ‘soft’ for daring to protect themselves in a scrum; the insular masculist locker room culture which, in the end, is built upon rituals and language that degrades women and positions queerness as lesser-than.

One must also avoid thinking too hard about the way players are bandied about and dealt with like livestock, the way that they’re workers who sell their labour, too, and how they only really get to self-advocate when the collective bargaining agreement rolls around; how even then they’re hampered by all these unspoken traditions, arbitrary codes. Breathe and forget for a moment, for at least sixty glorious minutes of skating and violence, that for any athlete — for any prodigy — to exist and thrive, a child’s life was appropriated, taken in hand and moulded to fit a pipeline of production, because sports is a business the exact same way music and movies are.

The more I learn about Brock Faber, the harder it is to keep the hockey blinders from slipping off.

 “Brock Faber shouldn’t be possible,” is what people write about him in one form or another. They marvel at his strength, his size, his resilience; release article after article about how another rookie d-man would likely buckle under the weight of the work, how none of this was ever expected from someone so young and untested. Yet, the longer I sit with it the more unsettled I am. I watch his time on ice tick up and up with each game, hear on broadcast and read online that he’s on track to break the record for rookie average TOI. As of writing, he’s got 430 minutes on his next teammate for total time on ice. The only players on the Wild ahead of him are their goalies. The longer I put off finishing this essay (months now, from the time I first committed words to document) the wider this gap will grow. They say no one ever expected this from him, but an insidious thought creeps in: hasn’t the Narrative demanded this all along?

TIME, HAUNTING, AND MINNESOTA

Turns out I wasn’t wrong about Faber’s presence on the ice. The Wild have him skating minutes that usually go to veterans. He skates for 28:49 in the Philly match. Between the 10th of December and the 6th of January, Faber played 13 games. In 10 of them, he spent over 24 minutes skating. In half of those games, he logged over 30 minutes of ice time.

(NHL.com, highlights mine)

These are playoffs numbers, and they don’t just call it “playoffs hockey” because of the physicality. Exhaustion and injury go hand in hand, and playoffs hockey claims it’s tributes every year — rarely is it that this pace is sustainable, evidenced by how no teams make it through playoffs completely healthy. Top d-men are capable of it, yes, but it’s best avoided. When it happens, it’s an aberration. Poor management of ice time can result in sloppy play due to exhaustion. For the player who is exhausted, who fears exhaustion at critical junctures, they may choose to limit themselves, to compromise on plays to preserve their energy. More salient: every surplus minute extends the timeframe for possible injury, and every additional responsibility piled on top of that opens the door to potential burnout. So why do that to a rookie? What would compel any coach to do this, considering the risks?

Is Faber that good?

The question warrants another step backwards. Trouble is, this is where the tape begins to skip, a reverb-stutter-reverse that’s impossible to ignore. How far back to go? Does it start with the injuries that gutted the Wild’s d-core, shifting Faber into the limelight for sheer lack of options? Maybe further? Maybe it began in the mere hours between when Faber lost a devastating final match with his college team and signing with the Wild to play his very first NHL games — the third of which was the fucking Stanley Cup playoffs. 

Or perhaps it kicked off with the Wild buying out the Parise and Suter contracts in an effort to purge the team’s culture and start afresh? This was Wild management signalling that they’d take the salary cap penalty for now, but they were banking on a significant cap rise in the coming years. The subsequent “devastation” when Gary Bettman announced that the salary cap would only be going up by 1 million the following season — guaranteeing the Wild’s next few years would be lean ones — is what led to Faber being traded from the LA Kings for the Wild’s Kevin Fiala, after all.

But maybe linearity isn’t the play. The Narrative cannot be temporally bound, so why should this essay? The weft and warp of the Narrative sprawls out in four dimensions: the present weaves itself into the past; futures that never were dig their way down into the seams of time to rip into the present; and history is a concertina of repetitions and echoes, the same threads again and again.

Time and history are a deep well, I hover and put my ear to the dark, and Minnesota is the sound that echoes down. Minnesota, Minnesota, Minnesota.

Minnesota, the State of Hockey — and Brock Faber is a Minnesota boy. The Gophers, his college team, are a Minnesota team. He grows up going to Minnesota Wild games. And, because no kid gets to play for the team they grew up watching, he gets drafted 45th overall by the LA Kings. That’s the business; when you play hockey you are at the mercy of the draft lottery and the end-of-season standings. 

(@ mnwild via Twitter/X)

Only, this is the Narrative we’re talking about. The moment someone says ‘unlikely’ or ‘never’, it emerges and reasserts itself: sometimes things can be right out of a movie script. In Faber’s case, a dream. He talks openly about just how happy and grateful he is to be there. A real hometown hero — the title conferred upon him by media and fans and the ever-present Narrative. Faber doesn’t get to escape it just because the chances are slim, just because all the other Minnesota boys were scattered at the draft.

The Minnesota Wild as a franchise is held within its grip, too.

What do you call a Cup drought when it’s never rained in the first place? Meet the Wild, a middling American expansion team that’s not quite young enough to excuse their limping performance anymore, not quite old enough to have a sterling legacy to fall back upon. “Advancement seems there for the taking. It’s the least they could do after teasing this forsaken market April after unfulfilling April,” writes Brian Murphy; an embittered rally against the Wild’s historic floundering, even as he gushes about Faber’s first few games. Playoffs made in 13 out of 23 seasons aren't awful odds…until you read a little further to find out they’ve never come within sniffing distance of the finals. They are, it seems, perpetually on the cusp of — something. I couldn’t tell you what. Destruction? Greatness? Glory, even?

(via sergeifyodorov)

Just over 5 years ago, the front office asked for continued support in an open letter to fans. There would be a little patience required, but not too much — not when glory was just around the corner. The letter does not mention the vortex of rumours surrounding the locker room, the two veteran contracts they had to excise. They wouldn’t be rebuilding, of course, no need to panic and no need for a teardown — they had the pieces in line and were ready for a real effort, a deep run at the playoffs and a Cup, and “nothing less.”

Funny, a little over 5 years before that there was yet another letter asking for yet another small stretch of patience, right after acquiring two very familiar contracts. Parise and Suter, for those unaware, were brought in as two experienced players who would push the Wild over the line from “perennial playoff team” to Cup winners. Big name free agents, with lots of clout to go with them — and of course they chose Minnesota, says owner Craig Leipold, citing their “strong ties to the area.” Glory was, once again, just around the corner — what could go wrong?

And this time there’s been no letter but now they have Brock Faber, so bright and talented and so willing to just keep going, taking what he’s served, assignment after assignment. They have Kirill Kaprizov, a true superstar, ‘The Guy’, the kind who plants a flag and becomes the franchise. They’ve got Marco Rossi, yet another of their rookies who has made an incredible, unexpected splash — NHL-ready against the odds. The final season of the Parise-Suter buyouts will come in the next two years, and with it will arrive the much-needed relief of league-wide cap increases.And now, we see, the Narrative keeps the wheel spinning, keeps the story going in that reverb-stutter-reverse — and glory is just around the corner.

DEFENCEMEN AND THE SIZE ISSUE

Let’s talk about what it means to be a top pairing defenceman in the modern NHL. The Minnesota Wild’s d-core is fried from season-derailing (and in Jared Spurgeon’s case, ending) injury, yes. But normally, filling in wouldn’t fall to a defenceman in his rookie year. Where another team might’ve spread the responsibilities, Faber is given the lion’s share of downed d-men Brodin and Spurgeon’s duties. He's the power play quarterback, a given presence on the penalty kill; he’s out on the ice during OT; at times sent out as a catch-all shutdown defenceman versus the league’s best forwards (I watch him try to keep up with McDavid reviewing an earlier match against the Oilers and I think, with my heart in my mouth: you are so fucking young). It’s more than just a lack of options. To answer my own question: Faber might actually be that good.

I’m talking around it, but the Norris Trophy isn’t handed out to defencemen who can’t rack up points. And on the whole, defencemen who aren’t geared toward offence don’t score. The debate comes around every season now, I assume, to just make a new award for the best defensive-defenceman — this is entirely down to how the responsibilities and expectations of d-men are undergoing rapid evolution in the shadow of elite skaters and puck movers like Cale Makar and Erik Karlsson. The age of pure stay-at-home defencemen — those that play shutdown to the exclusion of all else — is seemingly winding down, has been for a while. “Offensive-defenceman” is no cute rejoinder for d-men who happen to have a little offensive upside. From Bobby Orr until now, it’s become synonymous with a set of traits that define the league’s best blueliners. Skating prowess is part of it, being able to carry and protect the puck is part of it, but the best of the best are able to seamlessly transition from defence to offence, joining the rush from the d-zone after a turnover, to become lethal in the slot.

Where Brock Faber lands on all these metrics begins with who he was before he arrived in the NHL. He makes a strange case amongst all the rookie defencemen I’ve had the chance to research, a mixing pot of what’s usually found desirable in a prospect — and a few quirks that separate him from the pack. I was shocked when I found out Faber played an exclusively defensive role for the Gophers right up until he signed with the Wild — and before then had spent no time on the power play. “I just hated getting scored on by these kids in college,” says Faber in his interview on the Wild’s official team podcast [43:31]. He goes on to tell the hosts; it actually feels easier to play in the NHL at times, because his teammates know where they’re supposed to be, and if he pushes up on an opportunity he can trust someone else to drop back and fill that gap — he is certain that this has smoothed the bumps in his offensive leap forward. And how has he done? Incredibly, by all accounts. Of the many scouting videos, podcasts, and articles I’ve perused, this trajectory is… rare. At least, for top defenceman prospects. He’s got it all backwards, see; as opposed to the archetype of the puck-moving, dynamic attacker who has leaks in their defensive game (presumably, something that must be worked on as they come into their own in the NHL), he came in a defensive powerhouse, a shutdown-d, and had to learn to let go of the blue line and attack. It took two months for the Wild to ease him into taking on Spurgeon’s role as PP1 quarterback, but since then he’s been a standout player.

Past the power play, Faber’s point and goal production has skyrocketed in comparison to his pre-NHL career — seemingly out of nowhere. He’s got the skating and the stick handling ability to do it, and now it seems he’s begun to hone that killer instinct. Coach Evason, before his dismissal, let out a critique of a then-struggling Wild: "Brock Faber can't be our best player every night.” On a streaky, at times unstoppable, at times paper-thin Wild defence, Faber was a boon.

One very obvious way Faber has adhered to the specifications laid out by scouts is his height and weight. It’s said that defencemen take a little longer than forwards to start showing up in the NHL from the time they’re drafted. It’s the body-size issue, according to some. The d-men who make the cut are older, bigger. The myth goes: while rookie forwards might get away with being 5 '9’’ and underweight on account of agility and hockey sense (and more than a little help from coaches who send them out while the puck is in the o-zone), when you’re a blueliner, and hence the only thing standing between Auston Matthews’ finisher, Nathan MacKinnon's rush, and a clear shot on your goalie and the back of the net, you can’t afford to be small. 

We’re living in a post-Statistical Analysis Revolution hockey world, though, so we know a little better about size. An alternative explanation to the size myth is something I’ve only ever heard of in oblique references — specific to d-men, coaches call it the “200 game” threshold for development. Further inquiry, (including appropriation of university catalogue access and trawling JSTOR), has turned up little helpful literature on the origins of this belief, aside from a stub of an article that called the cutoff “artificial”, taking note that prospects who failed to perform to standards by the 200-game mark were written off as doomed AHL ‘tweeners. I did, however, find a very interesting statistical analysis write-up by the folks over at Dobber Hockey.

Undersized forwards don’t float through on skill and quickness alone; one of the biggest predictors for success is, according to Dobber and Mat Porter, falling within the league average for size and weight. The theory here has been dubbed BT, short for “breakout threshold”, and represents the number of games taken for any given player to become competent and start producing consistently in the NHL. That number, for the average player? 200 games. And contrary to stereotypes, undersized defencemen and forwards struggle.  Furthermore, a stat that defies intuition arises when examining those on the taller end. Data doesn’t lie: “Bigger defencemen and exceptionally-sized forwards need 400 NHL regular season games.” Porter posits that growth spurts can be a detriment to young players just entering the NHL; the jump in body mass causing a mismatch in their expectations of their bodies, a “simple physics” problem, necessitating a slight buffering period as they readjust their physical and spatial awareness around the changes.

The belief remains, however, that larger is better. I’m understating just how much it pervades hockey discourses. It’s present in scouting reports and has had measurable impacts on drafting; I hear it on hockey podcasts; it’s thrown out casually during interviews by coaches and fellow players; it's the first thing you'll hear from a caster who isn't familiar with a player's game. I can’t read or listen to anything about Faber without stumbling across it — the preoccupation with size.

The language used to praise Faber and players like him has my stomach twisting in a discomfort that I find hard to quantify — players, coaches, and the media all talk about him, and the hockey blinders slip. He’s a “workhorse”, a “stud”, he’s got “a man’s body” — and call it projecting, call it reading too deeply into innocuous statements, but the closest thing I can compare it to is hearing my AFAB body spoken about as an object whose value can be reduced to its function, its usefulness, its closeness to sexual maturity.

Elite athleticism is produced when you derail a child’s life and set them on the path, just the same as all the other entertainment industries — think: the k-pop idol machine, pageants, child actors and models who then become adult celebrities, and, of course, the emerging phenomenon of the child influencer. For men’s sports, there’s something extra on top of the commodification of children’s bodies — it’s the vernacular of near-fetishistic worship; of the masculine, the oxymoronic youthful-but-mature, the virile.

I’ll be very clear here: I’m not reading anything malicious from specific people, I’m not accusing anyone of crimes, and in no way am I implying that ice hockey is unique here. Just the opposite, in fact. I know professional sports hinges upon producing stars, that the commodification of young bodies is endemic to the business. Those stars are, stripped down to the basest definition, workers who perform with their bodies and sell their labour, whose bodies will inevitably be coveted and revered for their adherence to the Platonic ideal of their respective crafts. MYTHMAKING: THE SHIFT

“Brock Faber’s play in overtime of the Minnesota Wild’s Dec. 14 victory over Calgary almost certainly has been long forgotten,” says Judd Zulgad in yet another article covering the miracle of Faber’s rookie season. Zulgad is wrong. This overtime play has been repeated, over and over again, a new myth constructed around Faber before our eyes. “He’s completely exhausted, but not only [gave] a second effort, he’s got the wherewithal to bump the puck back so we can gain possession and get a line change,” says Wild coach John Hynes — this particular quote is a favourite for the beat writers who mill out post-game fluff pieces.

The overtime starts like any other: face-off at centre ice, 3-on-3. The broadcast takes note that Brock Faber is starting, that he’s developed offensively in his rookie season. Things fall apart not long after.

Overtime line changes are tricky business. The margins for error are razor thin with 3-on-3; a sloppy line change during OT is a free odd-man rush for the opposing team. Almost guaranteed instant annihilation, and a pretty rude thing to put your goalie through to boot. You must, must clear the puck from your zone before changing over. This is how Brock Faber ends up on the ice; trapped with the puck in the Wild’s d-zone for 2 minutes and 9 seconds. 

Time trickles on as he engages in a scrap along the boards. The broadcast takes note of just how long he’s been on the ice around the time that I do, and then he stumbles. And what you’ve got to understand about Brock Faber is that the comments about his poise aren’t for nothing: Faber doesn’t fall, he doesn’t lose his edges. His skating, his balance, his ability to leverage his reach — is elite.

He takes a knee after the play moves away, slow to get up. The casters say what we’re all thinking as he skates back to the safety of the bench: “he’s running on fumes.” How can anyone watch this and feel anything other than sorry? He is barely there. He is carved down to the marrow, and all that made him wonderful to witness — his beautiful skating, his steadiness, his mastery of the craft — is cut away by exhaustion. Watching him tip over, watching his desperate last-second handling of the puck — it feels less heroic every time. I replay the overtime again and again to write this section and I ache. I am with him out there, losing my feet and my breath just the same.

When he makes it back to the bench, finally, there is no relief. The cameras voyeuristically linger on his pale, worn face, his eyes sweat-stung, as he slams his stick against the boards, each hit shuddering through his body. I want to take it from his hands. I want to wipe his brow and tell him he can rest, rest, rest. Later, giving an interview, instead of taking up the accolades he’s recounting how his turnover led to that endless overtime stretch. He is, of course, not wrong. But he’s not seeing the larger picture.

Consider: this is the kid who grew up watching the Minnesota Wild fail year after year, who likely held a secret hope that they’d draft him when it was his day — this Minnesota boy and his home-grown, Minnesota heart. He never once thought of himself as separate from Minnesota, because this is home, this is where his hockey dream was born; and this is where it must, to him, be fulfilled — of course he’d take on everything they ever asked, swallow down his duties and only ever be grateful.

There is no other way this could’ve gone.

THE HAND OF THE NARRATIVE

I'm trying to love ice hockey with my eyes open. If you haven't figured it out by now, my writing is rarely just about players or hockey concepts. It's about me - these posts are essentially a diary I've chosen to publish. Recently, I had a lecturer read this essay. She commented that it read like someone trying to come to terms with loving hockey. She was right.

"It would be just like the Minnesota Wild to carry on with their perennial early playoffs exits." That's how this paragraph started, when I was first drafting this piece. I'll be transparent; I believe in the potential of this team, and I want them to make an honest effort to win the Cup - but I need it to happen some other time. Armchair GM/coach moment: they aren't ready. They didn't feel ready to me, with their captain out and a rookie d-man holding their blue line together, and injury after injury piling on as the season entered its last weeks. I saw them pushing for another run at the Cup, saw their continued use of Faber in all situations, and thought, ah - see you in another five years. Wanting it simply isn't enough. And Brock Faber, as good as he is, cannot sustain this team on myth. No one person can.

I started this essay terrified Faber would get injured from over-use and play through it for the sake of the postseason, like so many players do; or that he would hit the infamous 'rookie wall' and flame out in his development (in the back of my mind, the question is still there). A few days ago, the Minnesota Wild were mathematically eliminated from playoffs contention. I breathed a little easier. I liked this team too fucking much to see them suffer. I wrote this essay with a kind of despair over Wild management and their preoccupation with Win-Now at the cost of the future. I wondered if Kirill Kaprizov's prime would run its course with the Wild barely scratching the surface of a playoffs run year after year. I wondered at times if the hand of the Narrative would intervene and make it so. The Minnesota Wild are haunted like that.

There are pages worth of writing to add to this essay that I've cut for brevity, and for the sake of telling Brock Faber's story in a way where it wouldn't be obscured by it.

I considered talking about my athlete friends. I spoke to them, informal interviews, we talked about the kind of mentality instilled in children who dream of going pro. You never say 'no'. You love your sport, you let it turn you inside out, you would do anything to keep going. Most of all, you think I'm still young. I can play through this pain. And once you aren't young anymore, you think I'm not young anymore. I'm running out of time. I have to play through this pain. And when your best years are behind you, your ideas about your body and your health are so twisted that you will grind the cartilage in your knees away to make the jump, you will play yourself into irreparable nerve damage just to be remembered, just to have the chance to touch greatness.

This is the truncated version. This is what I fear most when I think of the crushing weight of the Narrative upon someone like Brock Faber. He's hardly the first young athlete to be put in this position, he won't be the last. This essay is about him in the loosest sense that I'm covering the beats of his career and his team. It's not about him at all in the sense that it's about me and my crisis of faith.

To break character: I've been talking about the Narrative with a capital 'n', as though it is an entity with a will of its own. Sometimes it feels that way. It's not, and it doesn't, and it feels that way because we care so much. The hand of the Narrative is just how I rationalise the coincidences, the eerie parallels, the compelling threads of story that exist in sports.

I've wrestled with how to conclude this piece for months now. Since I started writing, I've taken up sports photography, produced poems and essays and assignments about hockey, and I've started ice skating - and in the process I've fallen in love with my dilapidated local rink. I'm now covering the AIHL, which zero people on this website care about. A lot has changed. I still don't know how to finish this, so here are some closing thoughts:

The hand of the Narrative is as real as we make it.

My leftist ennui about professional sports under capitalism could probably be explored on another platform - in a different essay that won't be hosted here.

That thesis I'm never writing about haunting, hauntology, and hockey is probably a symptom of some greater preoccupation. (There's an unfinished manifesto sitting in my drafts.)

If you're a Wild fan reading this - sorry for the editorialising about the Minnesota Wild. I'm quiet about it, but I do love this team and I want to see them be the best version of themselves.

Brock Faber deserves the Calder. He deserved it when I first started this piece, when maybe five people were talking about it, and he deserves it now.

Despite the turmoil of the season, the disappointments, the setbacks - I am still so excited to watch this team and write about them.

I think I'm going to love hockey for a long time.

[gokartkid]

brocedes lewis engineer au

Nico’s hand clapping down on his shoulder — heavy and warm, with all the confidence of a man in his position — makes Lewis’ smile tight around the edges. He doesn’t know why; it’s a position they’ve been in so many times before, a photograph in his mum’s album. 

Even without looking he can feel Nico’s presence next to him, the warm glow at the edge of his awareness.

“Yeah this guy,” he’s saying, when Lewis tunes back in, “he was seriously so fast when we were kids, really guys. I struggled a lot against him you know. He might be standing where I am right now if he’d kept going, really.” 

“Nah man, stop,’ Lewis says half-heartedly, laughs a bit as the other engineers, his coworkers, Richard and Michael and the rest of them chuckle, “I was just, uh, fine.”

He shoves his hands into his pockets, leans back onto his heels, nonchalant.

“No way were you just fine,” Nico shakes him a bit by the shoulder, air quotes with the other hand and Lewis tries not to feel like his teeth are about to rattle out of his head; thinks, normal normal normal. Keep smiling normal, “you beat me loads of times. There’ll be local paper articles about it at least.”

There are. Lewis knows because his dad still has them, carefully cut out and glued down in scrapbooks, some framed. Photos of him, small and serious with big eyes always observing, holding up a trophy. 

He remembers Nico too back then. Sweaty blonde hair straight out of his helmet, snub nosed, running straight into the arms of his dad who lifted him up and swung him around. He remembers Nico shaking his hand firmly on the podium, grinning with white teeth and flushed cheeks. 

When he’d met him again, a couple weeks into this job at Mercedes, his handshake had felt just the same. White teeth, blonde hair a bit more styled and swooping backwards, a man grown into his confidence. 

He’d looked at Lewis for a long moment after shaking his hand before saying “do I know you?” in that tone you greet old friends from high school with. He’d placed it a second later, snapping his fingers and saying “oh my god! Lewis!” and pulling him into a hug.

It had been kind of gratifying, and a bit of an ego boost, that he hadn’t just been forgotten by Nico as part of the mass of unsuccessful boys-from-karting.

Nico made almost a point of it now, going out of his way to talk to Lewis. He would come around and put a hand on his shoulder, his forearm, drawing him into conversations when they had a break at the same time. 

Lewis would see him moving about from place to place being followed around by an assistant, his trainer, sometimes scrolling through something on an iPad. He’d catch himself staring sometimes before shaking his head and going back to the computer, scrolling through infinite amounts of data and spreadsheets and logistics plans. 

“Why didn’t you keep going?” Michael asks him later, when they’ve decided to get back to their actual jobs. Lewis doesn’t have to clarify what he means.

Lewis shrugs. He looks down at the parts in his hand— some gears, screws, a nut coming loose.

“Usual stuff. The money. My dad couldn’t afford it any more.”

Michael clicks his tongue sympathetically.

“Thats tough, hey. Still, you’ve done pretty well staying in it, right?”

Lewis knows its a joke. Still, it’s hard to keep his hands gentle around the screwdriver as he carefully places the pieces together, slotting them in perfectly with no gaps.

“Yeah. Still in it.”

[raymond-reddington-ruminations]

This post contains all the spoilers about 10.21 and 10.22. Ye be warned.

Another Warning; I'm about to bitch.   I started writing this about 45 minutes after the final episode ended. I was going to write it in a few days, but I really need to vent if I'm going to get any sleep tonight.

It should be said that while I still love the show and the characters, and the final episodes were not objectively terrible, I had a list of things that I wanted and I got none of them. So I'm going to sound off on that.

It doesn't change how I feel about the show overall, and I'll go back to saying positive things about the show afterwards, but at the moment that I'm writing this I'm pissed, and I'm going to express it.

I remember one of the producers was quoted as saying that Ressler would be front and center when Reddington's fate was decided. What? There was no decision here. Who decided something?? Not Ressler.

And it did feel like that was coming. It looked like Ressler would be the one to catch up with him and decide whether to take him in or let him go. And I'm not just talking about the last 15 minutes, it felt like that all the way through. The other characters kind of had to declare where they stood, to some degree (dembe and Harold got off the hook) and Ressler didn't really do that. I feel cheated.

I feel cheated on many levels. From 8 years of mysteries laid out that were never answered, to dodging the central question of the show's premise, to ditching the Red/Dembe relationship which was simply the most beautiful male friendship and defined both characters, and finally, no mention of Elizabeth in the end.

What the hell is going on with Dembe? He was asked how he felt about what he was doing, and he couldn't answer. And he never did explain why. What exactly did he think would happen when Reddington was brought in? The man's already been sentenced to death.  Argh.  Makes no sense. In the end the core of Dembe's character makes no sense because they didn't explain it, or address his original stated purpose of wanting to save Reddington's soul.  The monologue covered the past, but not the present.  Bad job.

When that story of The Matador first came up, and the allusion was made that Reddington needs to risk his life to feel alive, I cried bullshit at the time. That's not the character that I've been watching. He is content with whatever life brings, he is fearless, but he does not need to seek risk to make life worthwhile. He is just as happy with peace and quiet, WHICH THEY SPENT A LOT OF TIME DEMONSTRATING IN THE LAST HALF HOUR.

So this ultimate ending with the bull just sucks balls. They're trying to imply that he chose the risk, and chose the manner of  his death, because risk is his thing, like the Matador.

Hell to the no.

And where does that leave Agnes?? God damn it, that's too much tragedy.  No, I cannot presume she's going to be okay with losing him.  I want to kick something. The show ended so very far away from what the first eight years were about; Red's relationship with Liz, and thereafter with Agnes.

I'm going to have to get my ass in gear and actually write some fanfiction. I've done only a handful of longer pieces over the last 20 years, and I recognize that I'm neither good nor proficient at it. But I don't think I can let this rest.

I'm still wound up in The Blacklist, and I don't see myself getting another fandom anytime soon. I get burnt out at the end. After many years they end in ways that aren't satisfying and I wonder why I should let myself get emotionally involved in another story.  There are some showrunners whose names I have learned because of this and will actively not watch a show they produce. I don't think that's the case here, but it might be quite some time, if ever, that I let myself fall in love with fiction like this again. Why do they need to b**** slap us, the audience who followed them for years, in the end??  Is there some kind of perception that a happy ending is somehow detrimental to their audience??

It affects the rewatchability of the show, you know? It's hard to get invested in something when you know the ending is disappointing.

Ok, ok.  It may not be the writer's fault. They always said they were going to concretely reveal Red's identity, and that didn't happen. I believe that is the network interfering with the writers. And I feel like that may have happened on more than just Red's identity. I mean... A bull.  As in, we can't write what we want to, so here's some b*******. If that was the deliberate choice, kudos to the writers. Well played. If it wasn't their intention to draw in that phrase...well. They walked right into that one.

I realize there probably isn't much of an audience for what I'll be writing, but I need to write it for myself.  It is sad to me that the fandom for The Blacklist seems to be so small. There was so much material here, and so many of the people I've known for my past fandoms could have loved it as passionately as I did, and written far more and far better than I ever could. I think if they had confirmed Redarina directly it actually would have accomplished that. The people I've been close to in past fandoms are wildly supportive of LGBTQ and would have been attracted to this character's story based on his being trans.  What are missed opportunity.

Can we get this to be a George RR Martin situation?  Where the original Creator puts out a book that contains his own ending and ignores this one?

I'm going to see about getting that first fiction written as quickly as I can. But until then, let this be said for the record;

Donald Ressler got Reddington to a hospital, and after a lengthy recovery, during which Weecha concluded that life with Reddington is not for her, Red walked free, called Agnes, and welcomed Dembe back to his side, as Red had retired from crime. They both went in search of, and found, Anne.

Addition; posting this the following morning. I did not get any sleep. I need to stop letting fiction do that to me.

[macgyvertape]

BG3 Act 1 thoughts and liveblog part 1

With super long games like this (finished in about 110 hours) I like to take notes to 1) remind me of stuff I did at the beginning of the game and 2) to enjoy looking back on because I'm not doing another playthrough for a few years.

Going to suffer through the spider and half spider people since the mods don’t fully work yet and they disable achievements

Going for dark urge first playthough along the lines of Durge is guard dog to those they imprint on and I knew I was rolling a bard, so I watched clips of Felix RedvsBlue as a good starting point for my character roleplay. Starting character quote “At the end of the day, if I'm stronger than you and if I'm faster than you, then I can kill you! And that's better than anything money can buy”

Trying Not to be a “charismatic mercenary with gruff exterior and a heart of gold” 

I killed Commander Zhalk in the beginning area with viscous mockery. True bard experience

Passed the perception check of Astarion pulling a knife, some fun dialgoue options with him, and its a delight to hear his tone of voice really change

I can’t tell if Gale is just flirty/horny or really just dedicated to the facade of being surface deep and a braggart to mask his secrets. Seems both and though he seems full of himself I enjoy this kind of companion who lies about things

I think I like the inspiration mechanic, I got a point for killing the mindflayer “leaving it to burn”

I’m really having to force myself to be “that asshole” and ask people to pay me for helping them

Got another inspirational event for killing the cultists lol. The game gives me a lot of options to talk about my dark urge but I really want to play that close to the chest

I don’t really know about pre-rewrite version of Wyll but he really seems a good alignment nice dude, and unfortunately I want to be almost evil/neutral Dark Urge.

Had to reload to save Nadira, I’m struggling with interrupting actions outside of turn by turn combat

Rapheal sure makes an entrance, my character turned him down but didn’t attack since he seemed so powerful. Keep my options open but it seems like there are a lot of options there

Gale is fucking lucky I had a extra piece of enchanted gear so I didn’t lose my very nice sword. I also feel like I’m throwing away some approval points by my character questioning him but I’m trying to play someone who isn’t altruistic or too trusting.

Ok I failed several perception checks for a kid stealing my stuff then I caught the last one, but then the kid ran off and everyone in the hideout ran out. I’m not sure if anything was still stolen from me or if this is a a bug 

RIP Alfira, was not expecting that from the dark urge. I chose to confess to the others, if my character is murdering people in my sleep only fair to explain and not hide

My character told Karlach to tear the place apart as catharsis for being hunted, and it was fun to see that scripted sequence play out

Gale is telling me his unstable magic backstory, but he’s doing it at camp so there is no reaction for anyone else during the conversation despite him saying he wanted to tell everyone. (edit: Not sure if a bug considering he also referenced being mind whammied by the Almighty before that had occurred in the goblin camp). Also deeply ironic he talks about understanding if my character wants him to leave since he’s a literal timebomb, but this is happening a day after D!urge pc killed someone brutally

Also incredibly funny Lae’zel is now interested in my character, and will sleep with me considering her dialogue post D!urge murder

Wyll gets turned by his patron demon into a semi horned being, ok so I guess just seeing what he looks like shows the obvious decision you made with Karlach

Wtf is up with Wyll, that he’s so proud he made his pact when it was just made obvious he was sent on basically an assassination mission. All his talk of “saving innocents” wonder how many innocents he’s killed from bad intel

The trifling child gang hideout is very bugged

Perception check for the swamp reveal was really cool

I haven’t been taking many long rests so I just now got the Astarion vampire one. Fun to see all the options if you let him kill you, but I save scummed to let him really go for then stop for roleplaying purposes 

I actually realized I was right by the vampire hunter so I loaded a save where Astarion hadn’t revealed himself yet and fun how different it goes, he will kill the vampire hunter out of combat to keep his secret if you don’t intervene and that’s very fun. It also gets brought up when he tries to feed on you for the first time at camp, but I haven't found a dialogue option where you can say “weird coincidence the guy called you by the same name”

Got the scene at the goblin area where the party would get mind whammied if not for the mysterious artifact. I’m really trying to pick a moment when my character would go from “more people is better odds” to “ride or die for certain characters” and I think this is a good point along the line of “oh if these people aren’t with me then they’ll immediately be soldiers against me”

I really enjoy how Astarion treats you like a fool if you say he’ll be safe because you would protect him from Cazador, in the cliche all power player character here to fix the companion’s problems. I mean my character still said it of course because that was my favorite of the 3 options at that point. Interesting I only now can ask about what offer Raphael made, like that was hours and hours ago but guess it needed specific dialogue flags 

No other game has given me an S&M scene like this for a stat buff where its fun and horny. I love Gale’s “well whatever you’re into”. The first time I did the scene (pun intended) Astarion was standing a little too far away, so I only got Shadowhearts dialogue, but its much better with them talking back and forth

My character told Shadowheart she doesn't care that she worships Shar but more along the lines of not that she likes Shar its just she don’t really care about religion 

I am majorly arachnophobic so I just covered up the screen and freed the spiders so the goblins would kill them

My character asked the priestess to meet alone then assassinated her with Astarian cloaked to get an extra out of combat turn. I expect to do this setup a lot more

I found a Selunite outpost and went down there, then reloaded since that seems way too big an area to explore right now

Setting up Minthara to be doublecrossed was a great tactical way to clear out the goblin camp, especially since I’m out of short rests

Killed Dror Ragzlin with barrelmancy, aka stole a bunch of explosive barrels and put them around him and the crowd and then exploded them from the rafters above

Note to self in however many hours when I get to Baldur’s Gate, see how Ronan’s apprenticeship faired (I bet not well)

Astarion calling my character darling and saying he’s going to like me and it's clear I like him too, definitely feels like he’s rolling to seduce and being a bit manipulative so she will like him (tangent: Margaery Tyrell was one of my favorite GoT characters kinda similar vibes) 

My character was upfront about enjoying it but very funny to say that a less trusting person would be suspicious and have him vouch that the only thing on his mind was carnal lust. I tried the immediate agreement then reloaded and I love that his response feels very different like he’s succeeded in a seduction check. 

I made my dream visitor a hot masc teifling and there is big horny energy with his scenes

Got the “morally acceptable massacre” for defending the grove. I created some barricades out of crates, blew up the sappers with fire arrows and then the enemies were just trapped at the bottom as I killed them with archery. Took a few tries for barricade positioning but then was easy and none of the tieflings died

I’d like to think my D!urge character would love massacring the goblins, in the same way she enjoyed getting the Knoll leader to kill the others then kill themselves brutally. Sort of a “I just love killin’” character approach, but my D!urge character dislikes that the Dark Urge takes away her control. 

My character absorbed Minthara’s tadpole at the prompting, I figured my character would be all about gaining power she could control. Astarion certainly had a very camp approval option. 

I then used 4 Ithilid powers across Astarion, Gale, and myself really just to get rid of the menu icon being bright red and distracting

Oh wow I completely missed doing Kagha’s secrets until now, so I could tell Halsin but not much else happens 

Didn’t expect my character could talk Lae’zel into using the tadpole powers and make a good persuasion attempt with Kalrach, and then persuaded everyone else. Playing a charismatic character is fun, she is manipulative af

[sang8262]

Random JP Headcanons (SFW, hobbies and lifestyle edition)

Likes doing the laundry and ironing his clothes himself when he can. Cybele likes it too: he loves sleeping on the fresh, warm pile of clothes.

Knows a dedicated tailor through Shadaloo (maybe a team of them), who makes sure to provide JP with the right outfit for the job.

Appearances and fashion are important when deceiving people, so he takes the time to research and wear clothes that will get him the respect or response he needs.

(Such as the Nayshalli-esque suit from the comics, and robes from arcade mode he wears while in the midst of executing his plan for the tournament, but once it's over, he changes into something following his personal tastes a la Alt Costume 2).

Probably knows how to cook, but more often eats at local restaurants and such. Not only does it taste better and saves him the effort of preparing a whole meal, they double as building rapport with business owners, or places to host importat guests for lunch/dinner.

Part of him really does enjoy travelling the world, learning about, and bonding with the people he's plotting to use for his own gain. He just doesn't care quite enough to feel bad for them.

He loves dissecting what makes people tick and finding the exact ways to manipulate or take advantage of their desires, weakness, and habits. It's much like a game for him, to see what he can do and how far he can take it, but still get away without conseauences. Reminds me of a certain attorney one must better call.

Doesn't like sleep because it's a waste of time. That said, makes sure to sleep, but just enough to not be tired, less he make the wrong decision in exhaustion.

Takes short naps with Cybele curled up in his lap. But Cybele, too, doesn't stay still for long, and they both get back to their lives soon enough.

Somewhat of an insomniac. He'd rather stay awake in bed thinking of the next stage of his plans, the logistics of his current one, or whether he made sure to feed Cybele today.

Definitely a workaholic, he's constantly working on some nefarious plan or another, keeping himself busy and his schedule full. I'm sure he spends a lot of time just dedicated to covering his tracks, and making sure his schemes are watertight to prevent any in the first place.

In an interview with devs, they said his theme is inspired to be something JP himself would be listening to as he thinks of his next move. So he definitely enjoys having music playing in the background while he works.

Enjoys various orchestral pieces, or operas, ballet, the works. Based on his win quotes for Manon ("Ballet is truly one of humanitiy's greatest achievements.") and Zangief ("Seeing you, I can't help but recall Mosolov's Iron Foundry, tovarisch."), I'm opting for the easy route and nominating Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev as some of his favorites.

I'd go into more detail about which composers or ballets he'd like, but I don't know enough about music to go too deep. That said, I swear parts of his theme are references to . something. They just sound so familiar...

Likes chess puzzles... but I'm personally not a fan of their decision to make this his canon. It seems so obvious and typical for the "evil puppet master pulling the strings behind the curtains" kinda badguy y'know?

I much rather enjoy his connection with playing cards, as if they wanted to go for a 'safe' hobby for his manipulator/ deceiver type character, poker would make a lot of sense. Chess just seems forced in there, whereas he has visual connections to playing cards with his overall design, font for his name, World Tour moment with the Antique Playing Cards gift, etc.

My hc though, would be pool/ billiards. It fits the dapper, gentlemanly aesthetic he has going on, and he wields a cane, invoking pool cue energy. He'd like practicing and perfecting those crazy trick shots. Plus, Venom from Guilty Gear: it's the ranged, purple energy, tricky type character vibes.

He says in his World Tour conversations that he doesn't keep up to date with the latest news or gossip too well... which is a blatant lie.

His entire recent plot against Ken and Nayshall hinged on using social media virality, sensationalistic news reports, and manipulating public opinion through conspiracy and entertainment: and there's no way he pulled this off by being ignortant to what the audience craves, or what the internet likes to consume.

Plus he was an accountant/ financial advisor with a keen interest in human psychology, the economy, sociology, morality, and culture. He most definitely keeps a close eye on the latest trends or world wide news, out of genuine curiosity and fascination in people, if not out of necessity to make his schemes work right.

[amazing-spiderling]

for the fandom ask game: 5 6 11 16 23 24

something you see in fics a lot and love

I really love seeing Foggy sort of leap-frogging over his panic and anger and confusion in moments of crisis to get right to the part where he works on being helpful. That, "We are going to fight about this later, but right now I need to stop that bleeding" sort of thing. Foggy is absolutely allowed to have emotions and fall apart in a crisis, but he has a good head on his shoulders and certainly after a certain point he's had to learn to compartmentalize just to survive being in Matt's life. I think it's comforting to imagine having a friend or partner like that- I guess it speaks to the idea of there always being an undercurrent of love. No matter what else is going on in the moment, no matter how furious or scared or worried the events taking place right now make them, they do not supplant the love that is at the basis of the relationship. I just think that's neat.

something you see in art a lot and love

When artists really have fun with the clothing, paying attention to details and making things really specific. When someone really pays attention to drawing a certain kind of shoe- I'm just... yeah, that's the good stuff. :)

if you’re a writer or artist, what fic or piece of art are you proud of making?

Well, I'm a little bit of both- but I guess a fic sprang to mind first so I'll answer for that. (tw for fictional CSA mention btw) So, as I've not-so-casually mentioned, one of my first big/long term fandoms was Metal Gear Solid. And I know that some of the memes from that series have escaped containment, and to the outsiders it might look like "Call of Duty but with the occasional zany moment" but it does have a lot of story (too much, some might say XD) and intricate character relationships and lore and, ugh it's just SUCH fertile ground for art and fic and all the things that make fandom great. But, it *does* also very much appeal to gamer dudes of the usual type. And normally this is fine, the transformative fans and the archival fans largely keep to their own fandom spaces- but sometimes there is crossover that rubs one group or the other the wrong way.

One such case is that there is a character who has an "affair" with his step-mother, but I put that in quotes because when the dust settles, it turns out this happened when the character in question was 16. There is TERRIBLE fallout from the event (family trauma, suicide, estrangement) and the game plays it all straight- this is something that broke the already fragile family to pieces. BUT for a long time, the joke was "haha character banged his stepmom". Which. Ew.

Anyways, I always really wanted to write a story that sort of expanded on those events, not the actual relationship/abuse/fallout, but more the events that precluded it, mostly what made the character an easy target. (Isolation, otherness, a lack of confidence in who they were as an individual). Basically, I wanted to really tell a story that treated the matter with the needed level of seriousness, if only to say, "hey, this isn't a punchline, this is a traumatic experience".

I ended up watching, "The Graduate" a few times as sort of... research? Partially for tone, partially because the themes and characterization in that movie matched the vibe I was trying to go for in my own story. (I can't help but think that Kojima, known for referencing movies in his games- might have had it in mind due to some shared imagery.) This was maybe the first time I did something like that, watching a movie to pick it apart for nuance in tone, as opposed to looking at it for canon events, timelines etc.

So that story ended up being, "Surface Tension", which first appeared in the "Metal Gear Solid: Lost Years" zine, and then eventually got posted to AO3. It's not my best reviewed fic by a long shot (understandably, it's a difficult subject material and not shippy or anything), but it's one that I can say I am proud of.

a tiny detail in canon that you want more people to appreciate

Wow, this one is tricky for me- I feel like a lot of fans are way more detail oriented than I am when it comes to canon. I'm always the one in awe when people are like, "Oh in episode seven, this one song is playing in a car as it drives by, and that's significant because it came out in 2013 and that was the year that..." and i'm just like "you guys know the names of songs?"

I guess to that end- I always liked the line in, I think it's season 1 where Matt says it's a "90's Top 40" kind of guy. I think it's really funny because people characterize him as having... well, let's just say "better" musical taste, but like, no. That dude would bop his head if you played the Spin Doctors.

the fandom you’re curious about because of a mutual

I have no idea what's going on in the Trolls fandom, and at this point I'm afraid to ask. But they all look like they're having a great time.

how has fandom positively impacted your life?

I've made so many friends, and as someone who doesn't get out as much as I'd like (especially as an immunocompromised person in the middle of a pandemic), my fandom friends are so, so important to me. I love the feeling of having a group of people who love the thing I love and being able to waltz into a space and say, "Hey, who wants to do this crazy thing with me?" and have even a few people say "Yeah, let's fucking GOOOO". ^^

I also think I wouldn't write nearly as much if it wasn't for fandom, and writing has certainly gone a long way towards helping me become better at unraveling the balls of yarn in my brain and making them into sweaters and scarves, as it were. I think a lot of the time when you write, you're practicing empathy- because you're forcing yourself to see the world from someone else's perspective. Maybe the character you're writing about had something in common with you, maybe that's what drew you to them in the first place, but identifying that also helps you understand more about yourself *and* how you relate to others. So I like to think that writing has helped me relate better to other people, even the ones I disagree with, and made me more able to slow down and ask, "well, why does this person feel/think that way?" Storytelling is so important for a lot of reasons, but that's a big one for me.

[mejomonster]

allow me to vent for a second.

i am really annoyed with Microsoft Office’s new ‘editing’ tool which does tons of style ‘corrections’ beyond just regular grammar and spell check. I would guess grammarly may have a lot of the same issues, but i’m not sure. my annoyance is that... in the new ‘editing’ tool, 1. it is very hard to turn off all the style ‘corrections’ which should realistically only be optional since they aren’t actually a matter of good or bad writing, and 2. these style corrections are very clearly geared toward specific forms of writing (business/school) which means when applying them to say personal articles you write or fictional stories, they can push ‘correction’ suggestions on you which completely ruin the intent you were aiming for. And when all you want to do is quickly double check you made no typos, and made no grammar mistakes, instead it highlights dozens (to hundreds) of other areas that actually need no corrections.

I tried to edit a novel just to check for spelling/grammar errors, and it wanted to correct hundreds of things which were style-only. Like X isn’t good for resumes (no kidding its a NOVEL), maid isn’t gender neutral (yes its not because this is a novel choosing words for specific effects not a work document), trying to change certain comma’d lists from “smart and diligent, cold and ruthless” into “smart, and diligent, cold, and ruthless” which... novels break up sentences in specific stylistic ways to make the writing read/flow a specific way... to move the commas in this case would ruin the rhythm the author wanted you to read it in. Basically... the ‘style corrections’ tool was giving me hundreds of not-real errors to sort through, slowing down me immensely, and these style corrections Aren’t True Errors. They’re useful OPTIONAL features, if you’re writing say a work document or resume and need to word yourself professionally. They absolutely butcher fictional writing, and I’m guessing if you wrote a literary analysis this tool would also be giving a ton of not-real-errors to correct every time you use a quote from the literary work. :c

:c :c :c

On the one hand, I’m very happy such new tools exist to help people figure out how to stylistically word themselves better. The skill of figuring out how to word something professionally in a work setting can be difficult, and its good as a tool to offer. 

But the fact these tools seem to slant that way Mandatorily and require so much tech skill to turn off (I had to go in and dig to turn most of these off and i still have so many accidentally turned on i’m still getting 50-200 false-errors flagged per writing piece I proofread), i cannot imagine is going to have a good effect on people’s abilities to learn how to creatively write moving forward. Or for people to be self-aware of how varied language effects your impression on your reader. And since a specific company, specific software, is the ‘guide’ being forced for correcting one’s writing stylistically, of course that can always lead to new biases in writing overall. The biases the software was made with, that the designers inherently had and were never questioned for, and people will ‘correct’ their work to reflect those software internal biases. And so while to a degree, the ‘style corrections’ will help people write more professional technical less uninclusive writing, the dependency on a software to decide what is correctly those things will mean some biases in the system will reflect into everyone’s writing using it if not proof read for that by the writer personally. TLDR: while such stylistic tools are helpful in the way another pair of eyes are in a writing group, beware of relying on them as the end all be all of correct. The software is inherently biased toward specific types of prose which your writing may not benefit from, and any inherent biases that are uninclusive or unhelpful may bleed into the software corrections so any corrections should always be read over by YOU later to make sure the writing is actually doing what is intended and not something wrong. 

And then, the other criticism: as USUAL microsoft office still flags a lot of grammar as incorrect which is in fact correct, so i still have to double check all of its grammar-flagged areas and fix them myself if they are wrong (since microsoft office at least half the time suggests an incorrect fix). So writers are going to STILL need the skill of understanding grammar enough to proofread their own documents, since these ‘correction tools’ are still not fully reliable in that aspect (except now writers will need to sort through grammar errors they need to fix themselves AND a bunch of flagged-stylistic stuff which may have been completely purposeful and needs no changes). :/ 

basically, critically read, and always proofread your own writing and edits others (and especially Programs) make to your writing. Programs have their own built in biases which you can’t just assume are perfect, and as always at least with microsoft office lol i’m still seeing it tag a lot of things as ‘errors’ that either aren’t errors or need to be corrected in a Different way than microsoft office suggests. 

Anyway. Does anyone have a guide to point me to, for turning off ALL of microsoft’s style-corrections? I only need the spell check and grammar check (and the grammar check as usual I still end up needing to fix but at least sometimes it highlights the weird areas so I can find them faster).

[myraelvira]

Soilent Green's Accidents

Soilent Green’s First Accident

Technically, if we’re going to be funny, Soilent Green’s first accident was their song, “It Was Just An Accident”, which is the first song on their album, “Sewn Mouth Secrets”. I’ve been told that the song was written about a girl that they knew, who drank a lot and got into some bad relationships (as told to me by Ben).

But the focus of this is about the two motor vehicle accidents that the band got in.

On December 4th, 2001, Soilent Green got into an accident. One article from Lambgoat, posted on December 5th, 2001, stated that Soilent got into an early morning crash, that resulted in “numerous injuries, forcing the band to cancel its touring plans” for the rest of 2001.

At around 4am Pacific Standard Time, the band’s van rolled 4 times on an icy, snow covered road, in Eastern Washington. Brian Patton and Scott Williams suffered broken bones in the shoulder area. Tommy Buckley and Ben Falgoust escaped with minor injuries. At the time, they were on tour for the “Extreme Music For Extreme People Tour”. All of the band gear survived the crash.

On January 2, 2002, Lambgoat posted an article about how Scott Williams was recovering, and in good spirits, but still in pain.

Soilent Green’s Second Accident

Less than six months later, around April 13th, 2002, Soilent got into an accident again, on the road. This time, the band got into a crash in Chicago, Illinois. Jon Model, their touring bassist was injured, along with Ben. The other members escaped the crash with minor scrapes. At the time, the band was on tour with Gwar, for their “Blood Drive 2002” leg.

An article from May 4th, 2002 stated that Ben was still recovering from the crash, which had resulted in both of his legs being broken. Falgoust was at the wheel of the van during the accident. The article quoted him, saying”

“I don’t remember much, just a few pieces. I was told that I was avoiding a car spinning out of control and as I came back into the lane, I ran in the back of an 18-wheeler. The story is still not in full. No drinking and driving, or any drug use!”. Ben went to physical therapy during this time, and Soilent was expected to be in full gear by the end of that year (2002).

An April 21st, 2002 article stated that Ben was still in the hospital. He had already gone under two leg operations to repair broken bones. He was still in Chicago at the time, and was to soon return home to New Orleans.

In 2003, Soilent made a come back, going on tour, and in 2005, they released their album “Confrontation” (Which is personally my favorite).

A 2006 article mentioned the crash, stating that Ben was nearly killed. He had to endure numerous surgeries, and go through rehabilitation to learn how to walk again. According to some people I’ve talked to, Ben was initially told that he may never walk again.

He ended up needing a skin graft on his foot, the donor site being from his torso.

I don't know what his pain management or physical therapy was like. I can only imagine it being incredibly rough and frustrating. There's a part of me that wonders if such an accident could lead to being thrown opioids constantly. I wonder if being wheelchair bound was more painful than learning to walk again. From a therapy point of view, I can't help but wonder, what the process was like. I wonder what it felt like to be told that you'd never walk again. Did that frighten him? Did it make him feel mad?

Did he truly expect to walk again? Or did he figure that it was at least worth trying?

These are just some of the questions I have. It's quite hard trying to get into contact with any of the members of Soilent Green. The last time I got to talk to Ben, he told me he didn't really do interviews anymore.

In a 2014 interview, Ben recalled some of that time, from after the accident.

“It was just bad luck, it was all timing and stuff like that. But the only thing you can do at that point is persevere and move forward and do all you can. When I was in the hospital, I remember I was in a wheelchair for like a year, and I was going into this hospital in New Orleans, and I didn’t have any money; so it was kind of like a hospital for people with low funds.

I remember being next to people and seeing some of the situations they were in. I kept thinking, you know, both my legs were broken, I tore my heel. But this guy, his face was sewn up or something and he couldn’t talk; he had to write everything down on paper. And some dude was there who got shot in the hip, and his whole hip fractured and broke up in little pieces. When you’re in those situations, you start to see a lot.

There’ll be people thinking, “Oh pity on me, I’m in this situation,” but I was like, look at this shit these other people are dealing with. You know, I need to get through this and I just need to sort it out. I had a lot of good friends and my family was really close and helpful, so that was a beneficial thing too.”.

Years later, in 2017 or so, Ben broke his legs again, when touring with Goatwhore. The ramp door to a trailer came down on his head, threw him back, and landed on his leg and foot. Initially, the door was supposed to have a hydraulic system, but the mechanics to it failed causing the injury. Of course, he had to go to the hospital for treatment, but because of his prior accident, he didn’t need to have rods put in his legs, as he already had some in there.

Nowadays, you can’t even tell what Ben has been through. It’s amazing how strong of person he is, not just physically, but mentally. The mental fortitude one must have to go through what he’s gone through is incredible. In the very least, I am so glad that he , and the others, are still around today.

Ben, if you ever see this, please know that I’m proud of you. ♥

[SOURCES]

[weyrwolfen]

Eidola: Chapter 18 - CT-7118 Quad

Rating: T

Characters: Gen, Clone Trooper OCs, Captain Rex, Ahsoka Tano, and other canon members of the 501st/332nd

Warnings: canon-typical violence; references to self-harm, injuries, and substance abuse; PTSD; it’s post-Order 66 and nobody is having a good time (but they’re all working on it)

Summary: The mission was never to bring down the Empire. Not really. The mission was to save every single one of their chipped brothers. But if doing do helped break the Empire’s stranglehold on the galaxy? Well, that was just a bonus.

“You’ve got to be kriffing kidding me,” Quad said under his breath.

“Be kind of ironic,” Dive said, throwing the Ballista into another stomach-wrenching swerve to avoid another massive, metal bolt. “If we get taken out by my girl’s namesake.”

“It’s a railgun,” Quad corrected from the co-pilot’s seat. Not that he was about to touch anything on the control panel. The flak was way too hot outside for him to jostle Dive’s elbow.

“Nah, it’s totally a ballista,” Dive said, pulling some kind of stunt which tipped the modified gunship’s nose up, rapidly dropping forward momentum and altitude in a way that made Quad’s guts try to crawl up and out of his mouth. “I mean, look at that thing.”

Sure enough, Dive’s maneuver had put one of the base’s unusual defense systems right in the crosshairs of the Ballista’s main guns. Dive fired at the kriffing massive, belt-fed railgun and then immediately kicked the ship’s sublight thrusters into high gear, not even sticking around to watch the fireworks.

“I will puke on you,” Quad threatened, not for the first time.

“You’re wearing your bucket,” Dive replied, utterly unperturbed.

“I will take it off, specifically to puke on you,” Quad repeated.

“Promises, promises,” his pilot said in a light, sing-song before slamming the ship’s yoke forward and sending them all into a twisting dive.

“Somebody want to tell us what’s going on up there?” Recoil asked over the Raiders’ open comm line. His voice sounded more than a little strained.

“Railguns,” Quad replied on the same channel. “All along the cliffs surrounding the base.”

He didn’t add that they’d already seen those things rip the engines out of one of the Mandalorians’ fighter/transports. He’d caught a glimpse of armored figures streaming out of the fatally damaged ship before it hit the ground, jetpacks carrying them to safety, but it couldn’t have been the ship’s entire contingent.

Captain Rex was on one of those ships. Quad didn’t mention that either. Worrying wouldn’t help his team.

One of the Reapers’ ships had followed the Kom’rks down, landing in the base’s central courtyard in something that might, generously, be called a controlled skid.

That had been about the same time when Quad had ordered the Convor to hang back and had given Dive permission to, quote, ‘Go nuts.’

It was the right call.

Quad was regretting every moment of it.

The sound Dive made, when he strafed past the next railgun, had no business coming out of a grown-shebs clone’s mouth.

“Did you seriously just go ‘Wee’?” Quad asked, holding onto the armrests of the co-pilots chair like his life depended on it.

It didn’t. No kriffing chair was going to keep him in one piece if Dive splattered them across the cliff face.

“Yeah, I did,” Dive crowed.

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t.” The Ballista swooped to dodge another incoming bolt. “You love me.”

“I really don’t.”

“Oh, come on! This is fun!”

“It’s really not.”

“Killjoy.”

Quad pried one hand free of his armrest long enough to flash Dive a very rude hand gesture.

His pilot just laughed as they plummeted once again towards the rocky surface of this Force-cursed moon.

A black streak cut across the Ballista’s field of view, firing into a large rectangular cavern which had been cut into the canyon wall. That would be Commander Tano, in the Imperial interceptor they’d ‘borrowed’ from the Wadj base. As Dive tore past, Quad had just enough time to see a crude hanger bay and a burning ship, too cobbled together and disreputable-looking to be anything except a pirate vessel. Dive was bearing down on another railgun emplacement.

It seemed like two other Kom’rks had gotten the same idea as Dive. Plumes of smoke were starting to rise from different points along the canyon’s steep walls, and the incoming fire had noticeably lessened.

Not that Dive was toning down his evasive maneuvers any. Shebs.

“Commander Tano’s torn up the hanger bay pretty good,” Dive said, obviously relaying a message from the pilots’ dedicated channel. “She’s giving the others the all clear for landing.”

“Good,” Quad said, swallowing down bile as the Ballista finally, finally leveled out into something resembling a sane glide path. “Get us on the ground too.”

He’d mostly gotten back in control of his stomach when Dive touched them down, light as a feather. Karking shabuir. Pilots were all crazy.

From the comm chatter, Jesse’s Reapers were already inside the base. Captain Rex was also safely out of his ship and already engaging the enemy, using one of their salvaged jetpacks to drop in on some kind of top-floor command station along with Kryze and about half of her Mandalorians.

Quad has his advance team form up on the far side of the still-smoldering Kom’rk, using the downed ship as concealment while they waited for the others to land. Their filters took care of the air quality issue from the smoke, but visibility wasn’t ideal. Quad still ordered his men to fan out and keep eyes on the courtyard as best they could, providing limited coverage for the teams who had yet to land.

The main courtyard wasn’t big enough to accommodate more than one ship at a time, not with a stretch of perimeter wall blasted across half of the open space and two downed craft junking up the rest. Dive had taken off the second the last of them had cleared the ramp. He was up there right now alongside Commander Tano, making sure their airspace stayed clear. Trip’s Jekai was just landing, but Quad also spotted another Kom’rk, settling down on the far side of what remained of the base’s outer wall.

Some di’kut leaned out of one of the upper story windows and started firing at the Jekai. Recoil put an abrupt end to that.

“This door’s locked,” Psy said, off to Chat’s left. “Code pad access.”

“Chat, see what you can make of it,” Quad said, punching one of the buttons on his vambrace to hail his second squad of Raiders. “Cling, Rasp, where are you in line?”

“We’re up next,” Cling answered, coolly professional. That didn’t tell Quad much, he’d seen the pilot maintain an air of calm precision while his ship was literally disintegrating around his ears.

“Nothing much to report up here,” Rasp added over the same channel. “It looks like most of the excitement is ground-level at this point.”

“Good,” Quad said, tracking Trip’s team’s progress. Their pilot, Talon, had angled the Jekai against the wall, dropping their ramp right up against the entrance the other Raider team had claimed. There was a slight distortion in the air around the ship, a ripple in the air which suggested that the forward shields were still fully engaged, providing the ground team with all possible cover. “Good,” Quad repeated, more than half to himself. “Get dirtside soonest.” He swapped back over to his squad’s channel and continued, “Chat, how’s the door coming?”

Chat was down on one knee in front of the door in question, blaster slung across his back. He had a crude spike already in place in the locking mechanism and was typing away at his synched datapad. “Soon,” he grunted, monosyllabic as usual.

None of the base’s other doors had been secured like this, which suggested the pirates wanted to keep whatever or whoever was inside secure. Seemed promising.

The Jekai took off in a billow dust and debris which temporarily messed with Quad’s targeting and visual settings. Cling and the Convor were already hovering beyond the collapsed section of wall, waiting their turn. Nobody was currently taking pot shots at the ships from the windows, which made Quad suspect that the pirates inside were more concerned with the clones already inside the structure.

A line of text, tagged with Captain Rex’s designation number, flashed up in Quad’s HUD, stubbornly sitting in the command chat until he could read and dismiss it. ‘Mandalorians securing upper floors and perimeter. All clone units continue engaging ground level entry points.’

Well, that made things easy enough. Quad dismissed the message.

“Done,” Chat said, rising to his feet and unslinging his blaster. Quad glanced over just long enough to confirm that the spike was indeed now flashing green.

An icon flashed in Quad’s HUD, a ping from Trip, requesting contact as soon as it could be done safely. No time like the present. He punched a few buttons on his vambrace and opened up yet another comm line.

“Quad here,” he said.

Trip’s designation number immediately popped up at the bottom of his HUD. “Confirmed chipped and collared slaves present,” the other Reaper lead reported, cutting straight to the chase. “We’re setting up jammers in a large storage room, just inside our point of entry. Have you synched up with the command map yet?”

“Not yet, still waiting on the pilots to get their osik in order.”

“Right, the location’s flagged whenever you join,” Trip said, and then sighed loud and long enough that it was picked up by his helmet’s internal comms. “Assign someone to scanner duty, the Reapers are stunning everybody and letting us sort them out.”

Karking Reapers. No finesse at all.

“Figures,” Quad grumbled. “We’ll deal.”

It wasn’t the worst news. The chances any of the pirates were feeling suicidal enough to just start activating their slaves’ chip detonators within the walls of their own compound were slim. Still, Quad didn’t like the extra hanging variable in an active firefight.

Quad caught sight of the promised Mandalorian teams moving through the rubble of the collapsed perimeter wall, right as the Convor was landing. Like Talon before him, Cling angled the ship as best he could, dropping the ramp as close to the sheltering wall of the courtyard and the door where Quad and his strike team were waiting, while not actually dumping out Rasp’s squad right on top of the wreckage of the first Kom’rk.

“Alright Raiders, form up on me,” Quad said, signaling for Chat to open the door on his count. He finally pulled up the command map and a web of trails blinked into existence in his field of view, tracing the paths his fellow team leaders had taken. That is, were taking, considering that Jesse’s icon was tearing down an unexplored path at the moment, adding a new, arcing line to the simplified map. As promised, Trip’s icon for the safe room he’d established was just across the courtyard, easy enough to locate once it became needed.

Quad snugged the butt of his blaster rifle against his shoulder. “Recoil, flash grenade. Chat, open the door on my count. Let’s get this clusterkriff on the road.”

“Contact,” Quad announced over his team’s direct channel, back pressed against the curving stone of the hallway.

Blaster shots, red and sizzling, zinged past his position, slamming into the opposite wall with a shower of dislodged rock shards.

“Who’s still got flash grenades?” he asked. They’d started running low a while back, and by now their stock was getting downright grim.

“I’ve got one left,” Blinks said.

“Same,” Alt added.

Typical. Quad had left both of them one hallway back to guard the noncombatants they’d been gathering since their last run back to Trip’s saferoom.

“Alt, bring yours up here,” Quad said,

Kibble had been working on a reusable flash grenade. He’d said something about new lenses improving light output when they’d deployed to Wadj.

But Kibble had taken an unlucky blaster round, and none of the rest of them could make heads or tails of the notes he’d left behind.

Another burst of blaster fire tore past his position, sending shards of rock flying in all directions. If the blasts hadn’t been enough to drag Quad’s mind back on task, the clatter of dislodged, superheated debris against his plastoid certainly did the trick.

What a di’kutla waste of charges.

The pirates were yelling now, a string of insults and dire threats and implications about the clones’ mothers which, given their parentage, Quad found relentlessly amusing. He just tipped his bucket against the wall and let the noise wash over him, finger tracing the rim of the trigger guard as he waited.

A solid clack against Quad’s shoulder drew his attention to Canvas and the flash grenade he was offering. Alt must have just passed it up the line of brothers in the hallway. Quad shifted his blaster rifle to one hand and accepted it.

He palmed the grenade and glanced again at the cratered wall and blaster scoring. The cluster of shots were mostly positioned pretty high up, basically head-height for a clone. Stupid target selection, especially when partnered with the less-than-expert aim most of the pirates had been exhibiting. Center of mass would have been a lot more effective, but he wasn’t exactly going to complain.

“Keep low,” he told his team. “On my count. Three,” he thumbed up the activator on the grenade.

“Two,” he waited a heartbeat and then turned to throw the grenade down the hall. One of their targets shouted in alarm.

“Flash grenade out,” he dropped back behind cover and turned his head aside, waiting for the flash. It came, along with a loud bang and even more shouts.

“Move!”

Quad pivoted back out into the hallway, staying low and bringing his blaster up as he moved. There were six sentients, each reeling from the flash grenade to one extent or another. One, a Trandoshan, must have had the presence of mind to protect his eyes at least a little, because he had retained enough vision to lift his blaster and aim at Quad.

Three blaster shots slammed into him, only one of which had come from Quad himself.

Selecting his remaining targets felt automatic, like stepping through the room-clearing sims back on Kamino. Assess the threats and neutralize them in descending order of priority.

The tall, near-human sentient on the far left was wearing some kind of helmet. It might have light-filtering capabilities. Better not to risk it. One. Two. Three.

The gray-skinned woman’s blaster was mostly pointed in their direction, even if she wasn’t actively aiming it, so she was next. One. Two. Three.

The heavily-bandaged human man was backing into the open doorway behind the group, groping awkwardly for cover. One. Two. Three.

The others… well, Quad’s brothers had assessed their priority differently.

Quad rose most of the way from his low crouch, but his blaster remained trained on the open door, watching for new threats. The next steps of their playbook required essentially no explanation. He had taken point, so his squad would advance. Rasp was in reserve, so he would check to make sure the first wave of targets had been fully neutralized. So, once it seemed like no new targets were going to present themselves, Quad held up the hand gesture to advance, picking his steps carefully through the tangle of bodies in front of the door.

The next room had the look and feel of an improvised medical facility. Quad registered the cots, the neat shelves of supplies, even as he swept the room’s corners, searching for additional targets, but finding none. There were additional doors opening off of that central hub.

Quad split his team again, setting Chat, Recoil, and Synch to keep the room secure while Quad himself took everyone else to check the satellite doors one by one.

The first room contained rows and rows of poorly-stocked shelves, but no sentients.

The second looked like a surgical room, white tiled and clean enough to feel entirely out of place in comparison to the rest of the base. It was empty of additional targets as well.

The third broke the trend.

An androgynous sentient whose species Quad did not immediately recognize stood in the middle of the cot-lined recovery room, four slender arms twisted together with both pairs of hands fisted and pressed against the synthetic fabric tunic which covered their narrow chest. Their body language seemed more resigned than fearful, eyes resolutely closed and flattened, almost reptilian features slack. There was a bulky, metal collar around the being’s throat.

A slave collar.

A near-human man stood behind them, one hand gripping the back of the slave’s neck, just above the collar. In the other hand, he held a surgical blade into the collar’s lock, the threat plain.

Quad and his brothers had alternated, cutting left and right as they’d entered the room. Canvas had gone right, Blinks had followed Quad to the left when the pirate spoke. Quad’s blaster never left the pair positioned in the middle of the room, assessing.

“One more step and I’ll blow us all sky high,” the pirate growled.

Dramatic.

Quad did stop though, making the abrupt mental shift from room-clearing protocols to high-value hostage protocols. His thumb flicked his blaster’s settings from fire to stun.

His team followed his lead.

“Here’s how this is going to go,” the pirate, the slaver, was saying, voice harsh with threat and anger covering for obvious fear. “You’re going to back out of the room, slowly.”

Quad edged slowly to the side, trying to get a better vantage. In the periphery of his HUD, he could see Canvas doing the same, but the pirate was doing too good of a job keeping his head down. Quad couldn’t get a clear shot. A stunning blast would probably take both sentients out, but one wrong twitch would send the pirate’s scalpel far enough into the collar’s locking mechanism to activate its failsafe. He’d rather not risk it.

“You sure you want to take yourself out like that?” Quad asked, trying to draw the man’s attention his way, clearing the way for Canvas to keep circling their target.

“If I’m dead already, I might as well take you out with me.”

Well, that did complicate matters.

“Are you listening to me, kronging Imp boot-lickers?” the pirate said in a harsh grate. The scalpel dug just a bit deeper between the collar’s jointed sections. The slave barely reacted; they just took a long, shivery breath, eyes still firmly shut.

Under other circumstances, expressing that kind of hatred for the Empire would have earned the pirate some points with Quad. Not here, not now. “I’m listening,” he said, shifting his blaster to one hand in something resembling a placating gesture, but which really freed up one hand to flash a series of quick ‘Advance when clear,’ signs in Canvas’s direction. At the responding ‘affirmative’ gesture, Quad took one step back, intentionally bumping into the shelving behind him with a clatter of armor against plasteel.

The pirate shifted, obviously trying to get an angle where he could see what Quad was doing without actually exposing himself to blaster fire.

Eyes on me, shabuir.

The pirate’s grip relaxed just a little, scalpel retreating in response to Quad’s seeming capitulation.

Quad took another step back towards the door, letting his awkwardly extended blaster rifle catch some of the metal cannisters which lined the shelves. Two of them fell to the floor with a crash.

The pirate jerked, blade jerking hard against the slave’s throat, eliciting a short, choked-off gasp of pain.

But Quad’s gamble had worked. Canvas used the distraction as intended, taking two quick steps to his right and dropping the pirate with a single, well-placed shot to the side of the natborn’s head.

“Clear,” Canvas said, as the rest of the brothers lowered their blasters.

Force, what a mess. Droids at least died neatly.

The mostly-headless body slumped, knife and captive abruptly freed from its grip.

Quad was also moving, darting forward to check on the slave, whose knees had buckled at their abrupt release. The being’s eyes opened wide, solid black and featureless in a way that reminded Quad of the Kaminoans. They took a deep, gasping breath as Quad eased them down into a kneeling posture. One four-fingered hand was pressed against the wounds to their neck.

“Let me see that,” Quad said, meaning it kindly, but the words came out sounding harsher than intended. He wasn’t any good at this part, dealing with shocky civilians. That had always been Hook’s job.

But Hook was dead too, and there was a literal waitlist for even semi-trained medics. Quad was just going to have to make do.

“Force, you’re bad at this,” Blinks said from behind Quad’s shoulder.

“What?” Quad snapped, annoyed by the comment. Annoyed that it was correct, if the blankly guarded expression on the hostage’s face was any indicator. He did move though, when Blinks kicked at him lightly with the side of his greave. “Fine,” he said, pushing himself up from his awkward, half-kneeling position.

“Hi, I’m Blinks,” his brother said, pulling off his helmet and smiling a little as he dropped into an easy crouch. “Do you mind if I take a look at your neck?”

And just like that, the kneeling sentient took a deep breath, mouth relaxing from its rigid line just enough to reveal multiple rows of narrow, needle-like teeth, and nodded.

Quad swallowed down a rejoinder which would, no doubt, have been caustic enough to spook the civilian again and instead turned his attention to the rest of the room.

Canvas was standing over the downed pirate, keeping a watchful eye over the proceedings. He had already kicked the blade away from the man’s hand, standard protocol even if it was pretty karking obvious that such a move was entirely unnecessary. An extensive bacta bandage had been very professionally affixed around the man’s unmoving chest, wasted effort on someone’s part now.

The situation seemed well in hand, so Quad signed for Canvas to keep an eye on things and then ducked out into the central recovery room. Rasp and his squad were already inside, and the final door Quad’s team had yet to check stood open, suggesting their backup squad had handled that as well.

Except Rasp was hovering worriedly over Chat. Before Quad could ask, his second excused himself and came over to make his report.

“There were two pirates hiding in that last room,” Rasp said in a low voice, clearly not wanting his words to carry far. “One of them managed to get the drop of Chat and pulled his helmet off before we could get a clear shot. He’s uninjured, as best I can tell, but he’s acting… drugged.”

Kriff. Okay.

“Did you see anything?” Quad asked, concerned. “Any obvious delivery device?”

“Not exactly, but the pirate licked him,” Rasp said, sounding concerned and more than a little disgusted. “Our best working explanation is venom of some kind. He’s looking pretty rough.”

“Kark,” Quad muttered. “Show me.”

Rasp led the way over to the cot where Chat was, in all fairness, starting to look pretty green and very out of it. He was wheezing in a shallow way that Quad distinctly did not like and his pupils were blown concerningly wide. Quad silently gripped his brother’s shoulder and then gestured for Rasp to continue.

The last room contained more shelving, including one which had been ripped from its supports and was tilting precariously into the space, and a large, medical-grade incinerator. That was no doubt going to get some significant use in the near future.

To dispose of the two karking slavers whose corpses were laid out in the middle of the floor, for example.

“That one,” Rasp said, pointing to the one on the right. The being was short, less than half the height of a standard clone, and squatty with bright yellow and black blotches coloring their exposed skin. “Do you recognize the species?”

Kriff. “No,” Quad admitted. Apparently it was the day for it. There were millions of sentient species in the galaxy, and all the flash training in the world wouldn’t make each and every single one of them stick.

“Kriff,” Rasp said, echoing Quad’s thoughts out loud. “This looks like some kind of a med center,” he pointed out. “Maybe they’ve got some kind of antivenom?”

“Go look, and I’ll see if I can get Kix in on a consult,” Quad said, sending out a priority request to the command channel.

He didn’t have long to wait.

Designation numbers popped up in his HUD, Trip and Captain Rex first, then Jesse, then Ridge joined the channel.

“What’s the situation, Quad?” Captain Rex said, in lieu of waiting for everyone else to chime in.

“We’ve just taken whatever passes for a medical facility in this skug hole,” Quad said, going ahead and pulling up the command map to flag his current position.

“Is it secure enough for us to start using it?” Jesse cut in, sounding very tense. “I’ve got a seriously injured trooper here.”

“We’ve got one too,” Ridge said, and Quad thought he could hear blaster fire in the background when the other Reaper spoke.

“One collared slave on site, but that’s the only current threat,” Quad said, checking Jesse’s and Ridge’s relative positions on the map. “We’ve got an injured trooper here too. If we’re not needed elsewhere, I can hold our current position and keep the area secure for use.”

“Do that,” Captain Rex said. “Everyone start transferring your injured to Quad’s position. Jesse, will this free you back up to provide Ridge with support?”

There was only a short pause before Jesse replied, “Yes.”

“Good,” the Captain continued. “Quad, expect half a dozen Mandalorian patients soon. Anything else?”

“Actually yes, but just for Jesse,” Quad said before everyone started to log out. Sure enough, the channel started to empty out almost immediately. “Any chance you could patch me through to Kix?”

“He’s a little occupied at the moment,” Jesse replied grimly, but then added, “What’s the problem?”

“One of my men has had an incident with a potentially venomous sentient,” Quad said, walking back to the door where he could get eyes on Chat. His brother was looking truly out of it by now, and both Whirl and Strill were hovering nearby, body language bleeding concern, even under their buckets. “Yellow and black? Bipedal, built like a blob?”

“Hold on,” Jesse said, going silent for a moment, but the line stayed open. “Bite or sting?”

“Uh, we think he was only exposed to saliva,” Quad said, catching Strill’s attention and signing ‘Confirmation, query.’

Strill nodded, fingers signing a redundant ‘Affirmative.’

“What does the mouth look like?”

“Wide?” Quad said, glancing back at the corpse in question. He couldn’t see very well from this angle, but that sounded right. He hadn’t spotted any protruding teeth or anything.

“But no proboscis?”

“No.”

Another pause.

“Kix says you need Blatoid antivenom, and a type three sedative.”

Quad had never even heard of such a thing in his basic first aid modules. “Is that going to be in a standard medic’s kit?” he asked, uncertain of how to proceed.

Silence, then, “No, but look around. If they had a Blatoid on base, they probably stocked some specialty meds.”

“Right,” Quad said, thinking about the sparsely stocked shelves and the generally slapped together appearance of the entire space. “We’ll keep an eye out for your trooper.”

“Thanks, brother,” Jesse said, and then the line went dead.

Quad found Rasp in the half-empty storeroom and passed along Kix’s instructions. Apparently there were plenty of sedatives, but nothing resembling antivenom. Quad sent his second to organizing their teams to secure the hallways surrounding their current position and kept looking.

The main room only had a few carts and shelves, but Quad set Synch and Boots to searching the space anyway. Then he returned to the back room, where Blinks had seemingly applied a bacta patch to the slave’s injured throat and was now doing… something to their collar. Canvas hovered nervously over the both of them.

“What the kriff are you doing?” Quad asked, because it looked like Blinks had half-dismantled the slave collar and was hooking up wires to some of the device’s internal workings.

Which, in Quad’s professional opinion, seemed like a really bad idea.

“Frag taught me his trick for getting these things off faster,” Blinks said distractedly, focusing instead on the highly finicky, highly explosive device he was currently dismantling.

“Frag,” Quad repeated. “Trip’s new kid?”

“Yeah.”

“The one who earned his name by fumbling a practice grenade and taking out his squad leader in his first training sim?”

That got Blinks to pause. “Yeah?” he repeated, but this time the word was drawn out and a little unsure. “Whatever, it works. The kid keeps a couple on base to practice on.”

Quad just stared.

“They don’t have active explosives in them anymore,” Blinks said defensively, plugging another wire into place.

Force. Right. “Try not to blow up this section of the base,” Quad finally said caustically. “We’ve got injured brothers incoming. Canvas, help me look for Blatoid antivenom.”

“Look on the far left shelf along the back wall, third shelf down,” an unexpected voice said.

Quad looked down to find the still-collared slave looking up at him. Their huge, black eyes really did remind him of the Kaminoans, but that vague feeling of irrational unease wasn’t enough to discount their words. He signaled for Canvas to check the shelf they had indicated.

“Are you a medic?” Quad asked, making what he thought was a fairly safe logical leap.

“I was a surgical intern,” the being admitted, holding very still as Blinks worked. Their voice was even and shockingly calm, given the situation. “Before I was taken,” they amended, gesturing towards their throat and the collar Blinks was still manipulating.

“Found it,” Canvas said, striding back over and offering Quad a small bottle containing a small quantity of pink-tinted liquid.

Quad took it and read the label.

Blatoid Antivenom

Oxy metab only

48 ppp, 10 d/gabs

Store at 20-22 C, 1-1.5 atm

GPSC 16-18-2XLD58

Nothing about the dose. Nothing about how it was administered, unless those abbreviations meant something Quad didn’t recognize. Great.

“The hypospray injectors are outside, in one of the rolling carts,” the being added, accurately reading Quad’s indecision with annoying accuracy.

“Got it,” Blinks announced, inserting one of the probes on his multitool into the locking mechanism on the collar and giving it a sharp, shebs-puckering twist.

Quad… might have made a sound. He thought he could be forgiven for that momentary lapse of composure. Just… what the kark?

But sure enough, the collar just popped open in Blinks’ hands. Without exploding.

The slave, the natborn surgical intern, let out a long, shivery breath of obvious relief.

“You got a name?” Quad asked.

They looked up at him again, largely expressionless face framing eyes like empty pits, and said, “Mel.” Their voice was incongruously pleasant.

Quad tamped down his instinctive suspicion and offered the being, Mel, a hand up. “Care to show me those hypospray injectors, Mel?”

“Of course,” Mel said with a deferential nod which Quad still wasn’t sure he trusted.

Kix was going to be here soon, so he could actually administer the dose. Hopefully.

Except they walked back out of the back room and into chaos.

Four brothers were heaving a fifth onto one of the cots, stretcher and all. Kix was with them, obviously directing traffic while Quad’s men were mostly pressed against the walls, trying to stay out of his way.

There was a lot of blood. A lot.

A hypospray injector was pushed into his cuirass. He looked down and fumbled the device, taken aback at the sudden, sharp expression on Mel’s previously placid face.

“Surgical suite on your right,” she yelled at Kix, whose head whipped up to see who was speaking. “It’ll prompt you for species and weight when you insert the vial,” she said to Quad. Ordered Quad, if their tone was anything to go by.

And then she was rushing forward, eyes focused on the injured trooper.

“Slug thrower?” she asked Kix, who was bristling enough to give even Quad pause.

But the medic did answer, and there was something sharp and assessing about his tone. “Yes, single slug, through and through back to front.”

“You used standard coagulant synth-foam?”

Kix’s shoulders relaxed all at once. “With a bacta suspension. You said you have a surgical room?”

“Yes, this way,” Mel replied. “I’m out of human-standard plasma,” they said, sounding momentarily concerned.

Kix gestured for the four Reapers to pick up the corners of their improvised stretcher and follow her. “You’ve got a room full of matching donors,” he said wryly.

“You’re all…?” Mel started to ask, but then stopped, head cocked consideringly. “Ah, of course. This way.”

And then the seven of them disappeared through the side door, leaving the room in stunned, awkward silence.

There really was a lot of blood just all over the place, including boot prints coming in and out of the hallway, and they had more patients incoming.

“Boots, Synch, did you find any cleaning supplies?” Quad asked, trying to figure out how the injector worked. It wasn’t the same design as the G.A.R. models, but surely the principle was the same.

“Uh, yeah,” Boots answered, pointing to a little alcove in one of the back corners of the room. “There’s a sanitation droid in a charging station over there.”

“We’ve got more like that on their way,” Quad said, walking over to the bed where Chat was now laying flat. “Fire it up and see about wiping down that cot with a sterilizing agent.”

Ah, right, if he depressed the tab on the back, the whole thing folded open to accept a standard vial. Quad slid the vial in place and clicked the housing closed again. The screen popped up with a prompt for the patient’s weight, but there wasn’t a keypad to enter it.

And Chat was looking even worse, eyes unfocused and breath coming in short, shallow pants.

Quad stabbed one of the buttons on his vambrace, sending one last call out to Trip.

The other Raider lead answered almost immediately. “Trip here.”

“If you could spare him, we could really use Lighter in here,” Quad admitted, because not killing his brothers was parsecs more important than his karking pride.

“He’s already en route,” Trip said. “Should be arriving at your location any minute now.”

Thank kriff.

“We’ll keep watch for him,” Quad said and cut the line again. “Did Rasp give you two the sedatives?” he asked Strill and Whirl, who were still hovering around Chat’s cot.

“Yeah,” Whirl said, reaching for one of the pouches on his belt. “Here.”

It was another vial. Of course it was.

Giving up all other pretense, Quad just went to the main door, opened it to the hallway beyond, and waited.

When Lighter appeared a few minutes later, as promised, Quad just shoved the hypospray device and the extra vial in the medic’s hands and said, “Chat was exposed to Blatoid saliva. The antivenom is in the injector and here is a type three sedative, as per Kix’s instructions.”

Lighter looked at him, looked at the injector with it’s still-blinking prompt, and then looked at something beyond Quad’s shoulder. From the unbroken stream of curses and complaints which had just started up, it sounded like Canvas and Blinks had decided to take that exact moment to try to wrestle the pirate’s headless corpse out of the back room.

“Where’s Kix?” Lighter asked, clearly taking a moment to just process the scene.

“Surgery,” Quad said, turning to point at the correct door. And yeah, there were Canvas and Blinks, lugging their gory burden and leaving a fresh trail of red right through the center of the room. The small, beeping sanitation droid was fighting a losing battle against the mess.

“And where are they taking the corpse?” Lighter said, sounding more resigned than anything.

“Medical incinerator,” Quad said, pivoting to point at that door as well, backing his men on this, no matter how bad the situation currently looked. And it did look pretty bad.

“Force kriff me,” Lighter said under his breath. “Just, get out of the way.”

Ridge showed up in the medical center with two natborns in tow. That wasn’t exactly unexpected. Kix and Mel had both transitioned from treating the injured to working on removing slave chips maybe an hour ago.

Except these natborns apparently weren’t newly freed slaves, nor were they the clones’ Mandalorian allies.

“Hostages?” Quad asked in a private channel while Lighter got the two arranged on neighboring cots.

“Apparently,” Ridge replied darkly. “Bo-Katan’s people found records of their ransom demands encrypted in the base’s command terminals. The woman’s some kind of aid worker. The man designs transport ships for one of the Corellian companies.”

“Are there more?” Quad asked. The natborns were both human, both battered and filthy. The man, the ship designer, immediately laid down with a groan, but the woman remained upright, cradling what looked like a broken arm against her chest.

“Just one,” Ridge admitted. “An Imperial Navy officer. He didn’t like Jesse’s paint job much.”

He didn’t elaborate.

He didn’t need to. A clone wearing the Republic cog? The Imp had probably burst a blood vessel in his eye screaming about that.

And Quad knew how the Reapers dealt with Imperial witnesses.

“Did these two see him too?”

Ridge shook his head slightly in negation. “He’s removed himself off to Kryze’s cruiser with the Commander, just in case.”

That was probably smart.

“Just, tell your men to watch their words around them,” Ridge continued, sounding a little grim. “Even more than usual.”

Quad was sure the angle of his bucket conveyed every inch of his defensive annoyance with that comment. “They’ll follow protocol.”

And they would, even though their protocols had changed and tightened after the odd run-in with Alderaanian guards Trip had reported. The adjustments were easy enough to remember. If asked, everything was classified. Everything.

Who were they? Classified.

Who was their commanding officer? Classified.

Where were they based? Classified.

Favorite food? Classified.

“I wasn’t questioning their competence,” Ridge said, tension making his tone sharp. “But this is different.”

“Because they aren’t slaves,” Quad said dryly.

“Because none of the higher ups in the Empire pay any mind to slaves,” Ridge corrected.

Quad hated to admit it, but Ridge had a point. “So why are we risking it?”

The ‘Why didn’t you kill them too?’ went unsaid, but given the way Ridge was looking at him, it hadn’t gone unheard.

“Because I still have to be able to look myself in the mirror every morning.”

Quad’s nod was at least as much acknowledgement as apology.

The woman must have felt their eyes on her, even through their buckets, because she looked up, observing them as closely as they were her. She was human, petite and pale, with a coil of long, dark hair woven up into a braided crown which had, admittedly, seen better days.

“You said the man was from Corellia?” Quad said, just fishing for confirmation.

Ridge nodded.

“Where’s she from?” Quad asked.

Ridge didn’t answer immediately, but he eventually said, “She’s been careful not to say, but her ransom demand was sent to a humanitarian agency. It’s based on Coruscant, but it has bases all around the Core.”

Kriff. This was risky. But the alternatives were worse.

AN: Other chapters are available here.

Dividers by freesia-writes using helmets by lornaka. More designs available here.

[theorangestar]

Saw the tags, and I'mma go and quote you making a sequel for eruption XD Just because I have been following you for a few years now and do read your fics semi regularly when I need my Bolin-centric works :P But please, don't stress about it. It's fine either way, hope you are well and all!!

Anyway, I agree with you and the post you tagged. I want the comic to be good, but right now I just don't want to read it just because the comics and the past have been...meh. They are so good on simple stories like how Naga and Korra met each other. Or the smaller piece when Tenzin tells a story about the the benders that vandalised Air Temple Island. But with the longer comics, they just drop the ball on the characters and sometimes the plot too. They have the tendency to just throw characters under the bus when it's convinient for the plot. Like what Opal said about Kuvira when she was a child. So yeah...I'm gonna be sceptic about it for a while longer.

The idea that people still go back and read my old fanfics even after all this time makes me really happy, so thank you for telling me that.

Yeah, the larger comic stories have not seemed enticing to me what-so-ever. Now, to be fair, I have not actually read any of them, so they could be good, but from what I've seen through page scans and fan discussions, I don't think I'd like them. Many story choices that I would never have made or would be interested in reading about, both plot points and characters (how could you make Opal say that? Why why why??!) I didn't know about the Air Temple Island story, but I did read the Korra and Naga story, and it was wonderful! More stuff like that, please! (Unfortunately, it also reminded me how little Naga has to do with Korra's story in the show and it makes me sad.)

So, some things about my Eruption sequel. I actually have the first draft finished, but many things have happened in my life since I wrote that. Other than moving on to other fandoms, I've gone through a lot in my personal life and burned myself out from most of my creative interests. Now I'm in the middle of a career change that involves going back to college, and so my life is hectic right now with classes. I want to get back into writing and art, but I think the burnout is still there a little. Every time I gear myself up to write or draw something, I just feel exhausted. I don't know what to do about that.

And about the story itself. I personally think Eruption is one of the best things I've ever written, and I've gotten lots of comments on it. The sequel is a completely different tone. I have no idea if I even like the choices I've made. I'm worried of it being a disappointment because it'd not an action story like Eruption was. Some people won't care about that, but maybe some do.

I really do want to finish that story, even though I've moved on to other fandoms. I miss how I felt when writing those fics. I just... I really wish I knew how.

[moon-cycling]

today i feel a real heaviness around me. things that could be contributing:

i have felt really calm, at peace, and happy about life for the last week

i have friends going through some serious life struggles that are in a way triggering my own thoughts about myself and my life path

my dad is losing his brother to addiction and watching the way he handles the situation as a parent would, with so much love that it actually breaks your heart. this made me cry (sob) on my drive home from our walk yesterday, and then in the bath when the end of the stutz doc was dedicated to hill & stutz's brothers who they had lost. death and loss are hitting me in a whole new way that maybe is an opportunity to face it

i spent last evening cooking soup and baking cookies for like... 3 hours or something. because i was really taking my time but i was so tired by the end of it. an example of doing something with or without expectation. just make the soup and cookies, enjoy. i enjoyed the process but at the end felt like - what did i do that for? which is kind of silly because like - its food. purpose certain. but i felt weird after and i feel weird this morning.

my period was maybe two weeks ago now, so my hormones could be shifting around. which takes me to my next segment...

quarter moon thoughts

the stutz documentary kind of echoed everything in my last new moon intentions, almost as if i further called the ideas into my life or picked up on them ahead of time

the negativity sentiment struck me last night, as i walked with my dad and looked at the moon and said something kind of meaninglessly negative about harry styles. just that i was confused as to why he was so famous because i don't know anyone who can name one song of him. just a thought lol because my dad is always talking about music news. but anyways i remembered the yoko ono quote and how easy it can be to continue that old mind pattern. i listened to an interview with someone from love is blind yesterday who was a therapist, and she was talking about how you can actively change your brain patterns, if you keep doing it.

i would watch that doc a million more times, there was so much to sit and bask in the beauty of. it made me feel like i do have control over my life, and that working on the most simple things like feeling my best all of the time is worthwhile and actually the only way to get better.

also his thoughts about people and how you need them. my inward fall certainly got me somewhere emotionally and creatively, but now i think i can find better balance between with others and with out. and don't need to have such hard rules about being alone. life can be so beautiful and simple. i want winter to be a time of communing with the people i am closest to in this world. surrounded by pretty twinkly lights and the heaviness and lightness of life itself in one season.

i am finding a better work/life balance and am comforted by stutz's sentiment of constant work. pain, uncertainty, constant work. 100% always there. i accept the work, and will do my best to have the best relationship with all of the work i do. on myself, my home, my relationships, my body, and my passions. and i feel lucky to have a people job once again. i feel proud that my work is real and matters. people matter and making people feel loved and cared for is one of the only things we have in life. i love not having a made up egotistical job, although i am heavy in the midst of trying to separate my identity from work. because ego is always there.

creativity: i am gearing up to make a real piece of art that i am proud of. all of the elements of my creative forces are coming together to create something that i love and find compelling. i have the fear of not liking it in the end, but that is the attachment i need to move away from (or the nonattachment i am moving towards rather). i will do it to enjoy the process, not feel my ego fulfilled by a certain outcome, that you can't even yet fathom. it's that little snapshot stutz was talking about

content: a constant back and forth between creating and consuming. i created soup and cookies while consuming that therapist interview and another funny one. i have begun being more intentional about what i am listening to, and actually am planning to trade in my iphone for a flip phone here soon enough. thank god i have this lovely laptop. the stutz movie and the madonna doc made me feel so much more satisfied with things to think about, not something that i want to forget like the real housewives of salt lake city lol. i love the bonding aspects of reality television amongst women. like, it is our sports and i value that and will not trash that medium. but, when i am alone and what i can encourage others to do is to watch better art, because it does have a different effect on you.

and i want to write every day. i preparation for this art piece, and for my own healing

[ginnyweasleymybeloved]

summer breezes / george weasley

hi crew :) idk why i wrote this but i was in a george mood so here we go ;)

summary: george acts like he hates you, he doesn’t really hate you. you act like you hate him, but you don’t really hate him. chaos ensues.

slight neville x reader for a second

word count: 6.9k

warnings: swearing, george being mean, lil angsty, fluffy at the end, reader’s house is not specified <3, mentions of food, kissing

let me know what you think ;)

“And what do you expect me to do? By the time I’d even realised I was falling I’d already landed face first on the proverbial concrete,” you groaned out in exasperation, while your best friend looked at you with so much distaste that anyone would’ve thought you’d murdered his family pet.

He shook his head, a scowl as clear as day splashed across his lips as he reprimanded you for your heart’s foolishness, “Of all people…” he scoffed in disgust, “Honestly, Y/n.”

“You know, you shouting at me isn’t going to fix anything,” he rolled his eyes at your statement and racked his eyes over your disheveled state. You’d obviously been battling with yourself over your—unfortunate—crush for some time. As your best friend, Ron Weasley knew he’d have to soften up on you eventually, but honestly, it was your own fault for falling for one of his disastrous siblings.

You were currently sprawled out on Harry’s bed, across from the red-headed boy you’d known since you were in nappies, your arms hanging off the edges of Harry’s four-poster. Neither you or Ron had a clue where Harry, or Hermione, had disappeared off to today. Harry was probably on the quidditch pitch practicing while Hermione haunted the library, you supposed as you listened to Ron’s rantings, wishing they’d been there to mediate.

“—of all of my siblings too! You couldn’t have picked, oh I don’t know, Charlie? Or Fred even? Merlin, even Ginny! But no! You just had to go and bloody fall for the only Weasley who actively cannot stand you.” You only caught that portion of his rave, having gotten lost in the idea of being coddled sympathetically by Harry or Hermione. You adore Ron, really, he’s your loyalist and longest friend, but Merlin was he a total drama queen.

“Charlie is five years older than me, Fred is my wingman and honestly, I snogged him on a dare last summer and I wasn’t that impressed and in case you’ve forgotten, Ronald, Ginny is dating Harry,” you lectured, ignoring how he rolled his eyes as you continued, “Also I’m well aware that he hates me. You don’t need to keep reminding me.”

His composure cracked after hearing your depressed mumble, and with a sigh he moved from his spot on his own bed and made the short trip over to Harry’s. Ron gently pulled you into a sitting position on the edge of the mattress and sat himself down next to you. He let out a heavy sigh, still slightly shaking his head—he couldn’t seem to stop—, then he dropped a heavy arm around your shoulder and pulled you into his side, finally offering you the comfort you’d been seeking out in the first place.

“S’alright, Y/n. Maybe he’ll get hit in the head with a bludger and forget he’s hated you since he was four.” Ron encouraged, very weakly.

You released a sigh of your own at that, “I feel like I’m betraying myself here. Like I’m letting that stupid git win.” Ron couldn’t stop the laugh he let out at your grumble.

“I’ll be honest, I thought he’d be the first to crack. You can be quite scary when you get going.” Ron divulged, shuddering at the memories of when he’d been on the receiving end of your rath.

Your family and the Weasley family had been extremely close since before you or Ron were even born, which meant you’d grown up alongside all of the Weasley children. Of course, because of your ages you and Ron had been attached at the hip as infants and remained that way even now, late into your fifth year of Hogwarts. Most of the Weasley children simply adored you, as you did them. However, there was one boy who, for whatever reason, hated you to your very core and as far as you could remember; he always had.

He is none other than the younger of the two twins; George Weasley. Despite the fact that Fred was actually quite fond of you, his twin refused to warm up to you in any way, shape or form. No, the tall and annoyingly attractive boy had made it his life’s mission not to get along with you, but instead, wage a war on you that spanned for the entirety of your childhood and adolescence.

“When did things change? When did it stop being a challenge? When did it start affecting me like this? I used to take his insults like a champ! I used to get him back worse!” You wondered out loud, letting your head flop onto Ron’s broad shoulder as he let out a puff of air through his nose.

“You still take it like a champ, numpty,” he chastised you gently, recoiling ever so slightly when you lurched forward in complete defeat. Your hands shot up to cover your face as you rested your forehead against your knees.

“No! I don’t,” you murmured dejectly, lifting your face from your hands to make eye contact with Ron. “Do you remember the other night in the Great Hall? When Neville told me he thought my hair looked pretty? And George, out of bloody nowhere, comes over and says and I quote, ‘I wouldn’t waste your time on this one, Longbottom. You’d have a better time kissing that toad of yours.’ Do you remember that?” Ron raised an eyebrow and nodded in confusion, your voice seemed to be steadily rising in octaves as you recalled the events of the other night. He had to admit, it had been an unusually unnecessary comment on George’s part, but the youngest Weasley boy wasn’t really sure where you were going with it.

“Well do you remember how I had said, ‘how’s that girlfriend of yours, Georgie? Figured out a way to make her stop being invisible yet?’ and then remember I rushed off? Do you wanna know where I rushed off to?” You pressed, watching intently as Ron nodded his head, unsure if he even wanted to know. “I went to the bathroom and I cried! I cried, Ron! Over something George bloody Weasley said to me!”

His eyes widened at that. Never once had George ever managed to properly upset you.

“And over something as small as that? I’ve heard him say a lot worse to your face.” Ron said in disbelief and you nodded, expression mimicking his as if you couldn’t believe it yourself.

“Right? And it’s like everytime he says something mean to me now my stomach drops and it actually hurts,” Ron regarded you softly, his eyes sad while he rubbed your back as you buried your face in your hands yet again, “Do you know what’s worse though?”

Ron opened his mouth to hazard a guess but no sound escaped as he drew nothing but blanks.

“I actually care what he thinks of me now. As if I actually value his idiotic opinions of me.”

It was at that moment that Harry entered the room sporting muddy quidditch gear and a confused expression, “May I ask why we’re having a heart to heart on my bed?”

Ron shrugged, continuing to rub soothing circles into your back as he told Harry mournfully, “Y/n likes George.”

“Merlin.” Harry whispered, as horrified to learn of your crush as Ron had been. “But, Y/n, he hates you! I mean he really hates you-“ the chosen one was cut off by a pillow making contact with his face. Ron had chucked it at him the second he felt your form begin to shake beneath his touch.

“Bloody hell, Harry! You’ve gone and upset her even more!” He whispered harshly. Harry quickly set his broom down and plopped himself down beside you, leaving you trapped between himself and Ron. The green-eyed boy rested his cheek against your lightly shaking back and managed to snake his arms around your torso.

“Sorry. Shouldn’t have said that.” He told you genuinely. “Should we go and find Hermione?”

You only shook your head. Embarrassment quickly overtook you as you realised your were crying in front of your two best friends over George fucking Weasley.

“No. No, I’m okay. It’s fine,” you sat up and hastily wiped your tears away.

“It’s okay to be upset, Y/n,” Harry spoke softly, squeezing your middle in a short hug, getting mud from his quidditch practice all over you.

With a resolute shake of your head you stood up and faced the boys, who each looked at you with pity filled eyes, then you spoke as steadily as you could, “I’m not upset. He hasn’t upset me,” you weren’t fooling anyone, really. Your eyes were bloodshot, your cheeks and nose were red and your voice was slightly hoarse when you spoke. The boys entertained you anyway, nodding in agreement.

“I’m telling you this as his brother and your best mate; you can do better.” Ron told you honestly, he wasn’t lying either, you were the type of girl who could get any boy she wanted without lifting a finger. Well, not any boy—obviously— but that wasn’t anything to do with you. Ron had his suspicions in regards to why his brother acted like such a knob towards you, however he’d been thrown off his scent recently when the older ginger stopped being mean to you teasingly in favour of being just plain mean.

You gave Ron the best smile you could muster at his words, “You are absolutely right, Ronald.”

Harry snorted before making his way over to Ron’s trunk, he rifled through it for a few seconds before pulling out one of Ron’s jumpers. He casually tossed, what you recognised to be Ron’s Christmas jumper from Molly, over to you with a grin, “Put that on. I got muck all over you.”

You had plenty of your own Christmas jumpers made by Molly Weasley but they were all the way over in your own dorm. Besides, you liked stealing the ones made for the boys as they were usually far too big for you which made them extremely comfortable to wear.

So you happily pulled the maroon jumper over your head, the wool effectively covering your dirtied t-shirt.

“Oh yes, by all means, you two just work away.” Ron grunted sarcastically. In all honesty, he didn’t care if you stole every piece of fabric he owned, if it made you feel better, he couldn’t care less.

“Right,” you said, making your way to the door of the dorm room, “I think I’ll go for a walk before the sunsets, calm myself down a bit.”

The boys nodded, “See you at dinner?” Ron asked and you gave him a smile and a small nod of confirmation before you set off out of the Gryffindor common room.

Thankfully, you didn’t run into George on your way out. You walked peacefully through the gardens and behind the greenhouses, it was around five in the evening and the sun was beginning to stoop low behind the tree line. The days were beginning to take on a chill as October approached quickly, you’d gone out without grabbing a jacket and you couldn’t deny that you were beginning to feel the cold nipping at your skin despite Ron’s jumper. Pulling the sleeves further down your wrists you carried on, trudging forward through the fallen leaves of the garden, you weren’t ready to go back inside yet. Going back to the castle meant you’d have to look your problem in the face, literally. You settled on the fact that you’d rather endure the physical cold rather than the emotional coldness you were sure to receive from George at dinner.

When you’d reached the back of the third greenhouse you could faintly hear someone humming to themselves and a soft smile found your lips when you saw who it was. Neville sat on a chair in the greenhouse, right by a plant that you hadn’t a clue what it was called, seemingly humming the little tune for the plant in question. Despite his undeniable clumsiness, there was something about Neville Longbottom that soothed you greatly. He has a good soul and his heart is usually in the right place, even if his head is sometimes screwed on slightly loose.

Gently, trying not to startle him you knocked on the closed door of the greenhouse before you opened it and walked in, “Hi, Neville. Mind if I join you?”

Neville blushed slightly but nodded his head, “Course! There’s a spare chair just there,” he pointed nervously to the chair. Once you settled yourself beside him, he let himself relax slightly.

“What sort of plant is this?” You asked him curiously. You really liked plants but you weren’t the best at keeping them alive, Neville though, seemed to be something of a green thumb.

He beamed at your question and quickly began to explain everything about the plant before you. You didn’t absorb a lot of it but listening to Neville speak so freely, something he rarely got to do amidst the other Gryffindor boys, filled you with a sense of serenity. Between his voice and the light wind that blew against the glass building, you’d completely forgotten about your red-headed problem.

“—sorry, I’m probably boring you. My nan says I have a tendency to ramble.” He cut himself off, cheeks heating up as he rubbed the back of his neck bashfully.

With a small giggle you only shook your head at the brown haired boy, “You’re not boring me at all! I quite like listening to you speak,” you admitted although you felt a bit silly after saying it out loud. Neville seemed to grow even more flustered after the words left your lips.

His eyes searched your face for any sign that you were teasing him, but all he saw was your kind eyes and comforting smile. Not exactly sure about what to say to you, Neville made an observation, “You’re cold.”

You gave him a nonchalant shrug, “I’m okay.”

Completely unsatisfied with your answer, Neville shook his head in protest and shrugged off his jacket. He was used to spending a lot of time in the garden so he was usually sporting far more layers than necessary, just in case. “Here, wear this. You’ll catch a cold otherwise,” he fretted and you didn’t have the heart to turn his offer down, you didn’t want to turn it down either, you were absolutely freezing. Gratefully you accepted the jacket and wasted no time in pulling it on.

“Thank you, Neville,” he looked you over for a moment, you could tell he was debating with himself on whether or not to speak, after a long few seconds of his eyes running over you he spoke.

“You look nice- I, uh, the jacket. You look nice in the jacket- I mean, the jacket looks nice on you-“ another giggle left your lips and effectively put the boy’s fumbled ramble to an end.

“Again, thank you, Neville. You are unbelievably kind.” You told him sincerely, quite enjoying the blush that adorned his cheeks.

“We should probably head back to the castle for dinner now. It’s gotten dark,” Neville said, standing up after giving his plant a loving pat.

The walk back to the castle with Neville was nice. The pair of you chatted idly about school subjects and house drama, but you had to admit, you weren’t paying a huge amount of attention to the conversation.

“Thanks again for lending me your jacket,” you said sweetly, shrugging the jacket off as you reached the main hall of the castle.

Neville, who seemed to be in a perpetual state of bashfulness, took the jacket back gently, a rosy blush painting his features, “It was no problem, really.”

Neville had always been incredibly kindhearted, sometimes to his own detriment. He treated people with respect and never turned anyone away if they needed help with anything at all. He is sweet, honest, loyal and, whether you liked him or not, he is indisputably adorable. And you found yourself thinking about how entirely better your life would be if your heart had chosen Neville to have a romantic fondness towards.

After separating from Neville, you made your way towards the Great Hall. On your way you bumped into Fred Weasley, who surprisingly, wasn’t accompanied by his twin. He greeted you with a wide smile and, as he always did, he ruffled your hair.

“So! I have a proposition for you,” the look on his face as he spoke was nothing short of wicked, a pit of nerves began to form in your stomach with the way his eyes were lit up excitedly.

“What are you proposing?” You encouraged exhaustedly. Whatever it was would probably end with you running from Filch.

Fred lopped his long arm around your shoulder, effectively pulling you along with him as he walked in the opposite direction of the Great Hall. Any chance of you getting fed this evening had gone out the window the second Fred clapped eyes on you, you’d made your peace with it. “I’m glad you asked, princess- “ at the sound of the pet name you let out a guttural groan.

“Freddie, please, I’m not in the mood to help you make some poor girl jealous just so you can get a snog,” you whined weakly only for the boy to ruffle your hair and tug you closer to his side.

“Let me finish! As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,” he paused to glare at you jokingly and you smiled apologetically, “I have a plan to make George stop acting like a prat.”

A disbelieving scoff left your lips, “Yeah that’s likely,” Fred laughed and pinched your cheek lightly before carrying on.

“Angelina told me that she heard you crying in the girls toilets the other night,” he informed you. Your eyes widened in shock and confusion, you didn’t think anyone was in there with you and you also couldn’t piece together what your moment of weakness had to do with Fred’s master plan. “And before you start, I know it’s because of George.���

“That’s ridiculous, Fred.” You lied, unconvincingly.

Fred laughed again, it was a gentle laugh that let you know he hadn’t come here to tease you but to help you, “I know it’s ridiculous and that’s exactly why I know you’ve been so down in the dumps the last few days.”

“Besides,” he started again when you remained silent, “Why else would Ron be giving his brother the silent treatment?”

“What does any of this have to do with your plan?” You asked, eyes sad and heart heavy for the second time that day. You’d only just managed to get the whole thing out of your mind, and yet, here it was again.

“Well I happen to know why George acts the way he does,” you met him with a raised eyebrow and a bored expression.

“Because he hates me, I know.” Fred’s lips grew into a wicked grin and he shook his head, coming to a stop in the middle of the hallway.

“That’s where you’re wrong. He doesn’t hate you,” he lowered his lips to hover right by your ear before he whispered quietly, “He loves you.”

With a roll of your eyes, you pushed the boy away, fixing him with a hard stare, “Come on, Fred. That’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking!” He exclaimed desperately, “We were in potions making amortentia, yeah? And Slughorn called George up to tell the class what he smelled and do you know what he said?” Fred retold madly, knowing full well that this was possibly the only opening he’d get to make the two of you realise your own feelings. Fred was well aware that you developed a crush on George, he picked up on it the second you began looking crestfallen when hit with a snide remark from his twin. He knew long before now that George had loving feelings towards you too, but their recent potions class was the only hard evidence he had to support his theory.

You shrugged helplessly in response, and Fred grabbed your shoulders and looked down at you urgently, “He said it smelled of cloudberries, daisies and-this is a direct quote-‘summer breezes’,” you stared at him numbly, not exactly sure what to say as the description did match the perfume you’d been wearing regularly since you were thirteen.

“That’s you, Y/n!” Fred confirmed and you pulled your lips between your teeth before shaking your head in complete denial.

“Lots of girls wear that perfume-“ Fred cut you off, ruthlessly.

“Name one.” You racked your brain but you genuinely couldn’t name another person who wore the same perfume as you. “You can’t, can you? Because it’s your smell!”

“Ok fine! So it’s my smell, what exactly do you expect me to do with this information?” Fred rolled his eyes in exhaustion at you.

“Blimey, you’re as daft as he is sometimes, do you know that?” Fred ran his hands down his face in exasperation before looking at you softly, “I except you to come with me so we can drive him mental for a bit and if he gets nasty I’ll embarrass him because I’m an incredible brother.”

You let him lead you towards Gryffindor Tower all while complaining about how you were starving only for Fred to hush you each time you let out a hungered whine, “We can raid the kitchen later on, love,” he promised and you sighed in defeat, “That’s the spirit.”

When the pair of you entered the Gryffindor common room, George was already there, probably waiting for Fred to return it. He sat one one of the sofas that faced the fire, completely relaxed and you hated the fact that you thought he looked amazingly ethereal with the way the flames from the fire lit his skin in an orange glow.

He hadn’t noticed you yet and Fred took notice of this. The older twin subtly slid his hand into yours and intertwined your fingers with his before turning his head and shooting you a mischievous wink. Fred Weasley was a nightmare, but when he was on your side, he never failed to make you smile.

Accepting that whatever Fred was about to drag you into would result in nothing but chaos you took a deep breath and followed Fred over to the sofa.

“What is she doing here?” George practically seethed, despite the intensity of his glare, you didn’t miss the nervous look he shot in Fred’s direction. What you had missed, though, was how harshly he’d clenched his jaw upon noticing your intertwined hands.

You decided that tonight you’d play the game slightly differently, if what Fred was saying was true, it would make things all the more entertaining. So, instead of your usual menacing glare and ego-shattering insult you met George with an innocent smile, “Was just hanging out with Freddie, thought I’d come say hello,” you said, sitting in the middle of the two twins.

George stared at you suspiciously, “Hello. That all?”

“Hi. No, actually, I think I’ll sit with you for a while. If that’s okay?” Fred was smirking from his spot beside you as he watched George’s face contort.

“You’ve never wanted to sit with me before.” He told you, squinting his eyes and trying to decipher what you were up to. He couldn’t lie to himself, he definitely wouldn’t mind you staying so close to him for a while, however he’d also sooner die then let you think you had the upper hand.

His and your composure cracked simultaneously at your next sentence, your truthful and somewhat vulnerable mumble of, “Well, you’ve never given me a chance to.” He knew you were right so he didn’t say anymore, opting to shift his gaze to the roaring fire, trying his best not to let his mind linger on the fact that you were wearing his brother’s jumper. His nose perked up at the scent that drifted from your spot, unusually close to him. There was no doubt in his mind that he’d fancied you for a long time, but, there was also no denying that he’d done a perfect job of making you hate him. Yet, as much as he wanted to just cut the crap, tell you that he thinks you’re the most insufferably beautiful girl he’d ever seen and kiss you and never ever stop, his pride would never allow him to cave. Especially not when you challenged him so effortlessly.

“So how come you were headed to dinner so late anyway?” Fred piqued up, growing tired of the lack of hostility between yourself and his twin.

“Oh. I was sort of worked up earlier so I decided to go for a walk ‘round the greenhouses. I bumped into Neville and I suppose I just lost track of time,” you explained halfheartedly.

Fred let yet another smirk overtake his face, “Longbottom, eh?” He wiggled his eyebrows and you let out a short giggle while shaking your head, sure, it would’ve been a good topic to tease George with, however, Neville was simply too sweet to be used as a pawn.

“Don’t get me wrong, he’s very sweet. But he’s just a friend,” George looked almost satisfied with that answer, his usual scowl making an appearance once again.

“He could do better.” It was a barefaced lie. Neville couldn’t do better than you. In fact, George was of the firm belief that nobody could do better than you.

“Of course he could, he’s quite the charmer,” you spoke wistfully, finally giving Fred the show he’d been hoping for, as you egged George on.

George pretended to think for a moment, “I’m sure he is. Personally I think you’d be more suited to Filch, although, I’ve heard his standards are quite high.”

You took the boy by surprise when you laughed, the airy giggle left your mouth had such a profound effect on George that he almost wished he’d kept his mouth shut. His heart was leaping and there were butterflies beginning to form in his stomach, he physically had to will himself not to stare at you in awe when your eyes turned to meet his. The glow of the fire only aided in showing him how gorgeous those stupid eyes of yours are. “Mmm, yeah I suppose I should lower my expectations,” you paused briefly and mimicked George’s earlier motion of pretending to mull over your options. Your next action had Fred practically howling with laughter.

“You’re available, aren’t you Georgie?” You’d asked in a mock sultry tone, leaning towards him and lightly brushing your hand down his arm. Loving the way he choked on air you got up from the sofa, not before shooting him a wink, and sauntered towards the portrait hole, “I’ll be in the kitchens. See ya later, sexy.” You directed the last part at George, who looked as though he’d been frozen in time as Fred’s laughter grew in volume.

Upon entering the kitchen, the house elves had fussed around you, handing you food at any given opportunity. You had finished eating a while ago, you were currently nursing a hot cup of tea while chatting away to one of the house elves, only to be interrupted by someone else entering the kitchen.

He set his sights on you and quickly moved to the seat across from you, a look of urgency on his face that reminded you of Fred, “Whatever he told you. It’s not true,” you raised an eyebrow, sipping your tea uncaringly.

“Mind elaborating?” You asked tiredly.

“Fred.”

“Thank you, George, very clear and helpful,” you grumbled sarcastically and the boy let out a huff.

“You were acting different. You know something. What did he tell you?” George demanded through gritted teeth and you only deflated against your chair. It always boggled your mind how everyone described George as the nicer of the twins.

Not answering, you decided to start asking your own questions, “Can I ask you something?”

“Seems like you’re going to no matter what I say,” he sighed out as an elf pottered up to him and handed him a cup full of hot tea. He took it gently and thanked the elf with such sincerity that you wished you hadn’t seen the exchange, simply because it stung to know he’d never treat you with that level of sincerity.

“Why do you hate me so much?” He sat frozen for a second. Your tone of voice took him by surprise. It was needy bordering on desperate, nothing like he’d ever heard you speak before, not to him anyway.

George took a sip of his tea and shrugged as if the question was a stupid one, “I don’t.” A cold, humourless laugh came from you in response, the kind of laugh that made his stomach drop.

“Bollox. I’m being serious, George. Tell me what it is about me that makes me so insufferable to you!” You exclaimed, heart rate increasing and tone raising in octaves as you felt yourself growing more upset by his reserved expression.

George let out a heavy sigh, the jig was about to be up. You were upset and merlin was he tired of pretending that he didn’t want you in every way, shape and form.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.” There was no trace of hesitance or uncertainty in your voice, at this point you didn’t care what the answer was you just had to know.

“Fine,” he said all too casually and you knew by his tone that he, as per usual, wasn’t taking you seriously. “I don’t hate you. The only insufferable thing about you is how annoyingly gorgeous-“ you cut him off right then, with a scoff of pure disbelief.

Shaking your head rapidly, you stood from your chair and all but stormed out of the kitchen. His footsteps began to echoed behind you a few corridors later, he would’ve caught up to you sooner had your response to his would be confession not left him completely immobile. He called your name but you didn’t stop. You couldn’t stop. Tears stung your eyes and you absolutely refused to let him know that he’d managed to bring you to the point of tears. Not that it was the first time.

“Bloody hell, Y/n! Hold on would you?” He called, finally getting close enough to reach out and grab your wrist. He spun you around to face him and quickly placed his hands on your upper arms to stop you from doing another runner. When he took you in he swore he’d never hate himself more than he did the moment he looked at you to see your eyes filled with tears, small drops escaping and carving a trail down your cheeks while you sniffed miserably.

“What?” You snapped, hostility the only thing you felt like offering the ginger in the moment. His brown eyes bored into yours with so much intensity but they held something you didn’t recognise. They looked sad, almost.

“I wasn’t making fun of you.” He stated honestly but you furrowed your eyebrows, your eyes set in a glare.

“Then what were you doing?” You croaked, letting your tears fall freely as the damage was already done. The sinking of your stomach and the tightening of your chest didn’t do a thing to ease your mind as George’s hands squeezed your arms.

He licked his lips quickly, he felt they’d become unbearably dry, and then slowly, he let his hands trail down your arms and took your smaller hands into his own. He hoped you were feeling the same electricity he was when he touched you.

“I’ve been a prick to you. You didn’t deserve it and I’m sorry.” He sounded sincere, but you second guessed him. For all you knew it was just some elaborate prank, Fred was probably in on it too.

When your gaze didn’t soften, he continued to speak, “So I understand why you wouldn’t believe me when I tell you that I don’t hate you. But I just-“ he cut himself off with a heavy sigh.

“You just what?” You squeaked when his eyes spent a moment too long observing your lips. You hardly had time to register the feeling of his hands leaving yours before they were cupping your cheeks instead. “What’re you doing?” You wondered, completely dazed by the way he stared at you. His warm hands holding your face causing your stomach to jolt in an entirely different sensation than before. As much as you wanted to push him away and tell him to shove his apology, you couldn’t help but take him in. His lips were parted ever so slightly and his cheeks were flushed, probably from chasing you through the castle, his hair was disheveled and merlin he looked like he wanted to kiss you.

Your question floated in the air, completely unanswered. Next thing you knew his lips were on yours. He kissed you as if you were oxygen and he’d just been drowning and you couldn’t help but move your lips harmonically against his too. Your hands clutched his wrists as he continued to cradle your cheeks. In all honesty you weren’t sure at what point he’d backed you against the wall, or at what point his tongue had entered your mouth or when exactly his hands had migrated to your hips, yours now tangled in his hair. His body was pressed flush against yours and the small groans he’d let out when you tugged at his hair or ran your tongue against his made you realise that you couldn’t care less if this was one big prank or joke. It was happening and that’s all you cared about.

Even as he reluctantly pulled away, he chased your lips with several shorter kisses before separating entirely. He rested his forehead against yours, his guard completely down now as he admired your swollen lips and heaving chest. The feeling of your fingers in his hair made it nearly impossible for him to keep his lips detached from yours, “You’ve no idea how many times I’ve thought about doing that.”

Your eyes searched his face for any sign that he was lying, when you found none you finally let yourself smile. A similar smile formed on George’s face, “I meant what I said earlier. I really do think you’re annoyingly gorgeous,” the boy silently praised himself when you let out a cute giggle.

“You’re quite cute too. When you’re not running that massive mouth of yours,” you teased although you weren’t really joking, to your surprise George let out a bellowing laugh before placing a fluttering kiss against your lips.

When he pulled away again he looked around the hallway, as if he only now realised where he was. Luckily nobody was wandering the halls since curfew was fast approaching and the unwelcoming cold that occupied the hallways left little reason for students or staff to be out and about. George slid his hand into yours again, this time intertwining your fingers with his. He gave you a hopeful glance and asked, “Do you wanna go somewhere?”

You nodded your head and let him tug you into one of the abandoned astronomy classrooms on the upper floor of the castle, Filch rarely ever patrolled up there which is why George decided on it. As well as that, since the classroom, which had been out of use for a good few years, had been used for astronomy the ceiling was bewitched to reflect the night sky.

George hadn’t come to this particular class in a while but thinking on his feet he remembered the cupboard at the back of the classroom used to hold blankets, he remembered when the classroom had been in use during his first year, students would be all but freezing during the winter, so they’d stocked the classroom with blankets to be brought out during the colder months.

He made his way over to the cupboard and grinned happily when his hand landed on a rather large woollen blanket. The material was scratchy but it would do for what he needed it for. He grabbed one more blanket from the dusty press before he made his way back over to you.

George suppressed a chuckle as he watched you, your face completely turned up, watching the stars on the ceiling with awe in your eyes. He busied himself with laying the wool blanket out on the bare floor, the room was devoid of tables and chairs so he didn’t have to worry about finding a space. Once he was finished, he plopped down on the blanket and expectantly patted the empty space beside him, “Come on then, sit down,” he urged and you finally tore your eyes away from the charmed ceiling.

A small laugh left your lips when you settled yourself down beside him, he wasted no time in covering the pair of you in the second blanket. With an exaggerated sigh he laid back and waited for you to do the same, he turned on his side to face you when you did. In contrast to earlier, George had an air of nervousness about him as he deftly took your hand and began playing with your fingers, not meeting your eyes. “Just out of curiosity,” he began quietly, making eye contact with you now, “What exactly did Fred tell you?”

His question forced a somewhat smug smirk to crawl onto your lips and you couldn’t help but take the opportunity to tease him. You leaned up on your elbows and twisted slightly so you could look down at him, trying not to waste too much time admiring the view, you answered him, “Oh, nothing really. Your lovely twin just happened to mention that you had a very eventful potions class the other day…” you trailed off, biting back a smile as he groaned.

“Mhm and what was it that he said you smelled from the amortentia?” You poked his cheek and he closed his eyes, a tiny smile growing on his face despite his blushing cheeks. “Cloudberries…oh! And daisies, now, what was the other thing? Let me think-“ you pretended to ponder before George cut you off by pulling you down on him and pressing his lips to yours in a kiss much softer than any of the others.

“Summer breezes,” he whispered against your lips before connecting them again, “It smelled like you,” and with that his hand snaked to the nape of your neck as he pressed his lips against yours, pouring all of his feelings into it, hoping it was enough. In all honesty, now that he’d felt what it was like to love you, he didn’t think he’d ever be able to go back to pretending to hate you.

Once he pulled away you were completely breathless, however, George seemed to have more to say. “I don’t want us to go back to the way we were,” absentmindedly you brushed his hair out of his eyes, stroking the red strands soothingly as he continued to confide in you, his voice, face and body completely vulnerable to you. Something about him trusting you with his feelings reassured you that his intentions were pure and banished any notion you possessed of the whole thing being a joke, “I didn’t like it, acting like that but you were always so unbothered that I felt like I had keep one upping you,” he confessed.

“You always gave me this feeling in my stomach whenever you’d come over to the Burrow with your parents when we were little and I didn’t understand it. I just thought that it must’ve meant I didn’t like you…” George seemed to get lost in his own mind as he gazed at you regretfully, his fingers trailed the length of your spine sofly, “By the time I realised, we were both older and I suppose I just thought you couldn’t feel the same ‘cause I made you hate me,” you hummed in acknowledgment, your fingers still working his hair, keeping it out of his eyes that looked at you so intently that you could’ve drowned in them and died happy.

“But then the other night after dinner Angie slapped me upside the head and talked my ear off about how out of order I’d been—obviously I agree with her! You weren’t even talking to me but Neville was complimenting you and I don’t know… just got possessive,” he muttered the last part, losing some confidence but regained it upon seeing the little smile on your lips. “Then Ron looked about ready to push me off the astronomy tower when I saw him this evening. Blimey, I knew it had to have something to do with you since Harry was snippy too.” You had to laugh at the exhausted look on his face when he recalled your two best friends.

Mockingly, you gave him a stern look and clicked your tongue, “Well, perhaps if you weren’t so mean to me all of this could’ve been avoided,” George groaned once again, feeling guilty he pulled you even closer and buried his face in your neck.

“M’sorry,” you carded your fingers through his hair, pressing a soft kiss to his head. Your lips against his head caused him to lift his face from the crook of your neck, “Forgive me?” He asked, a cute pout on his lips.

“I’ll think about it,” you teased, giggling at the offended look on his face. George let out a dissatisfied sigh, he pushed a strand of hair behind your ear before giving you a toothy smile.

“Don’t worry, love. I plan on making it up to you.”

[dragonsareourfuture]

Death Note As Unus Annus Quotes

I still haven’t been able to cope with Unus Annus being gone, so I’ve decided to compile a list of quotes from various videos and use them for Death Note incorrect quotes because idk why not. I had a ton of fun doing this and I hope it shows! Some of these aren’t the exact quotes word for word but I can’t exactly go back to find them now. ⚠️Warning for mature language.

Misa: you think I can fit my thicc ass through there!?

•

Mello: if I lube myself up I’ll slip right through hell and get into heaven

•

Near: I can’t.

Mello: I know, I know. You’ve got that condition where you’re...a bitch.

•

L: stab right here.

Matsuda: right here?

L: yes.

Matsuda: *stabs right there*

L: What the- why’d you stab next to my face that’s a horrible idea!

Matsuda: Ryuzaki, I don’t know I— I’m so sorry!

Light: I think you’re gaslighting him, L...

L: I didn’t think he’d actually do it.

•

*at L’s funeral*

Light: L was a humble — eh, humble? I don’t think we’d call him humble. L, he was a man. A strong man. Strong willed and strong bodied. What he lacked in intelligence he made up for with his charm, his smile, and his ... okay penis.

L, inside the coffin: ??????

•

Light: you’re not mad at anything?

L: no

Light: why?

L “Light-Kun is my first ever friend” Lawliet: well, because I got to spend the entire day with you ^-^

Light:

Light, internally: I am mad every time I hear your voice.

•

Near: *reading* “people can rarely upset you”

Near: yeah I would agree-

Mello: FUCK YOU.

Near:

Mello: are you upset?

Near: no.

•

Matt: I don’t like it when you use knives so aggressively! That is NOT a good idea!

Mello: no, you cut away from the body and then it’s safe...cut away from MY body, at least.

Matt: OH MY GOD

Mello: What?

Matt: you’re gonna fucking stab me!

Mello: why would I stab you?

Matt: because you’re an idiot!

Mello:....I am not an idiot. I am college educated.

•

Mello: So I’ve won once...and you’ve won twice?

Near: yes.

Mello: but I’ll come back for you

Near: it is statistically unlikely

Mello: “iT iS sTaTiStiCaLly uNLiKeLy”

•

Mello: I always feel like it’s fight o’clock

•

Light: are you making an accusation?

L: no...are you getting defensive for no reason?

•

Roger: how do you act in problematic situations?

Mello:

Mello: I remain calm—

All of Wammy’s: *distant laughter*

•

L: I’m not gonna do that, because I’m smart...but you’re an idiot. I think you should do it.

Matsuda: oh, no...

L: I’m just kidding-

Matsuda: No, you’ve got a point!

•

The entire Task Force @ Matsuda : bitch.

Matsuda: I’m just trying to strike up a conversation-

The entire Task Force: bitch.

Matsuda: I’m not gonna listen to you if you’re just gonna belittle me and be a big bully-

The entire Task Force: BITCH—

•

Light: I get the sense that they’re not talking to me because they sense how much more powerful I am than you.

L: I think they just like me more.

Light: why would that be a thing? Nobody likes you.

•

Matt: GAMERS ARE VERY MATURE!

•

Tiny Mello: what’s that?

Roger: this is a chalk line.

Tiny Mello: a what?

Roger: chalk line.

Tiny Mello: ch...chocolate!

Roger: chalk line.

Tiny Mello: Chompus!

•

Misa: I’m gonna die beautiful! Do you know what that’s like? No, you don’t. You have the luxury of being ugly.

L: Mhmm

•

Matt: are you a happy bimbo?

Mello: I AM AN ANGRY BIMBO!!!!

•

Matsuda : *exists*

L: oh my god, even when you’re quiet you’re mostly annoying.

Matsuda : what are you talking about? I was completely silent-

L: get the fuck out.

•

Matt: *asks Near a question*

Mello: why don’t you ask ME? Why would I not know? Piece of SHIT.

Mello: I am a man with an extensive wealth of knowledge and you are not taking advantage of me while I’m STILL HERE.

Mello: *flips hair dramatically* GOD

•

Beyond, dreamily: I forget what happens when you’re on fire...

•

Light: What’s my most incredible feature?

L: the bags below your eyes aren’t that big so that shows you get a good amount of sleep.

Light:.....wow, thanks man.

•

Beyond: a lot of people have this dream of dying in their old age, passing away in their sleep, very peacefully.

L: yep.

Beyond: what a basic bitch death.

•

Misa, finally snapping: you know what really grinds my gears?

Light, very uninterested: what

Misa: you! Because whenever I try to give you a friendly “hey, now” you say “don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” Well you know sometimes maybe I wanna be touched! Maybe I wanna be touched, Light!

•

Near: it’s a little loose...

Matt: what, they didn’t sell a child’s size?

Near:

Near: hey—

•

(Matsuda, taking his mandatory polygraph test)

Chief Yagami: so this machine is borrowed—

Matsuda: oh my gosh, somebody else’s lies are in here!?

•

This isn’t Unus Annus, I just really wanted to add it here—

Chief Yagami: Who broke it? I’m not mad, I just wanna know.

Light: ....I did, I broke it, dad—

Chief Yagami: No, son you didn’t. Matsuda?

Matsuda: don’t look at me! Look at Aizawa!

Aizawa: what!? I didn’t break it!

Matsuda: Huh. Weird. How’d you even know it was broken?

Aizawa: because it’s sitting right in front of us and it’s broken!

Matsuda: Suspicious.

Aizawa: No, it’s not!

L: if it matters, probably not, but Misa was the last one to use it.

Misa: Liar! I don’t even drink that crap!

L: Really? Then what were you doing by the coffee cart earlier?

Misa: I use the wooden stirrers to push back my cuticles! Everyone knows that, Ryuzaki!

Light: lets not fight, I broke it. Let me pay for it, dad.

Chief Yagami: No. who broke it?

Aizawa: Chief....Mogi’s been awfully quiet-

Mogi: REALLY?

Aizawa: yeah, really!

Everyone: *screaming*

Chief Yagami: I broke it. It burned my hand so I punched it. I predict in ten minutes from now they’ll be at each other’s throats with war paint on their faces and a pig head on a stick...good. It was getting a little chummy around here.

[intheticklecloset]

Just Get Me Out! (My Hero Academia)

Primary Universe

@lex-the-mockingbird​ I love writing lee Bakugou! And since no ler was specified for either prompt it was a good chance to combine the two while creating a cute one-on-one story between him and Mina! Enjoy, and thank you for the compliments! ^^

22. “I think I’m stuck…”

14. “Let’s count your ribs!”

34. “Stop! I don’t like giggling!”

You’ll notice for some of the numbered prompts I didn’t use the exact quote, but a variation thereof. This was to help prevent repetitiveness as well as maintain believable story flow. They’re still in the fic, just perhaps not word for word.

~

It wasn’t until after the buzzer had sounded and the dust had settled that they realized someone was missing.

“Where’s Bakugou?” Kirishima asked, and that put everyone on alert. The group of them looked around, but the fiery blonde was nowhere to be seen.

This had been a training session, at least; wherever he was, he had to be close by, and if he’d been seriously hurt someone would have put an end to the test by now.

“He can’t be too far,” Todoroki said, using his fiery side to help warm up his overused cold side. “He was right behind me during that last stretch.”

“Lots of buildings came down behind us,” Mina noted.

“Largely thanks to his own doing.”

“Let’s stay calm and split up to look for him,” Kiri suggested, pointing back the way they’d come. “He’ll be in that general area.”

The three of them assented, then each took a path backwards, retracing their steps. Mina deftly made her way through the rubble, more of it appearing the closer she got to the place where Bakugou had set off his quirk without warning, bringing a couple of structures down. She called his name once, twice, three times, and finally – on the fourth try – he answered.

“Over here!”

Mina quickly altered her path to follow his voice, stopping short when she finally caught sight of him. The lower half of him was trapped beneath the concrete remains of some nearby roads, and he was lying on his stomach with his head propped in his hands, looking incredibly annoyed.

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Bakugou?”

“Shut up,” he growled, sounding angry but resigned. “Just get me out.”

“You totally did this to yourself.”

“I know. Just get me out.”

“Can’t blast your way out of this one?” Mina teased as she neared him.

He scoffed. “Not without blasting myself in the process. I’m stuck, all right? Get me out already.”

“Okay, okay, no need to snap at me.” Mina chuckled, carefully stepping around him to grasp the first piece of concrete. But just as she was about to use her acid to disintegrate it, she suddenly realized what a great opportunity this was. She glanced down at Bakugou, who was stubbornly resisting wearing his winter gear even though it was still pretty chilly outside most days. He said he preferred the summer gear, and that left his underarms wide open. Especially when he was stuck.

“What are you doing?” he grumbled when he realized she wasn’t getting him out quickly enough. He tried to twist to look at her, but just as he moved he felt a finger swipe down his open underarm. “Gah!” Bakugou shot his arm down to his side and tried to roll over, but he couldn’t. “Don’t you dare!”

“Oh, come on, you did this to yourself.” Mina giggled, crouching beside him and scribbling her fingers lightly over his sides.

“Stop!” He clenched his fists and tried to swat at her, but he couldn’t hide the trembling smile on his face. “Mina! Just get me out!”

“I will,” she replied, “once I mess with you a little first.”

“Agh, Kirishima and Kaminari were right,” he growled, twisting as much as he could beneath the rubble. “You r-really are a cheheheater!”

“Ha! They’re just sorry they couldn’t take me down without their quirks.”

“Stop m-mahahahaking me giggle lihihike this, dahahahang it!” Bakugou snapped. She was digging into his sides – the lowest part of him she could reach before the rubble – and from his position on his stomach and unable to twist around at all, he couldn’t even bring his arms down to protect himself. All he could do was take it. “I hahahahate g-gigglihihing!”

“Aw, but why? It’s so cute~”

“It’s pathehehehetic and embahahaharassing!”

Mina sighed. “You’re too hard on yourself, you know that? Fine. If you’d rather laugh instead…” She started to move her fingers upward.

“Ah! No!” Bakugou grasped desperately at nothing, his giggles growing more frantic before she’d even reached the next spot. “Dohohohohohon’t!”

“Let’s count your ribs, shall we? It’s probably a good idea to make sure they’re all still there, what with that rubble falling on you and everything.”

“You lihihihihihittle—agh!” Bakugou bit hard on his lip, but his giggles kept flowing anyway, and he couldn’t hide his wide smile. “Nohohohohohoho!”

“One,” Mina began, pressing deep into his bottom rib. She grinned when he sputtered like a sprinkler system before laughing softly. She scratched the groove between ribs, then continued on. “Two.”

“Mihihihihihihihina!” Bakugou laughed, slapping his palm on the ground in front of him. “Stop, yohohohohou’re gonna d-drahahahaw attention to mehehehe like this!”

“I can’t help that you’re so ticklish,” she teased, moving up to the next set. “Three. Besides, you seem to be having fun.”

“I ahahaham not--!” He squealed when she vibrated her fingertips into his fourth rib. His cheeks and ears turned dark red. “Stohohohohohohop! Mina, lehehehehet me go!”

But on and on she went, climbing higher with each number, until she finally reached the last three sets.

“Ten.”

“Mihihihihihina, I swehehehehear on everythihihing, let me go! I d-dohohohohon’t want anyone ehehehehelse to find me like thihihihihihis!”

“Eleven. Aw, come on, we’re almost done. So far all your ribs are accounted for.”

“I knohohohow thehehey’re accounted fohohohor, you dohohohohon’t need to cohohohount them – Mina!”

“Twelve.” Mina grinned at how flustered and giggly she’d made her normally angry friend, the way he grasped at the air in front of him as if searching for a way out, the way he growled and cursed and threatened the entire time, but never really seemed to want it to stop. “And just for good measure, let’s make sure your sweet spot is still sweet.”

“No!” Bakugou cried, pulling his arms back down to try and protect himself again. He shook his head. “Mina, no, that’s not part of my ribcage! I’m gohohohohood, I prohohohomise!”

She laughed. “I’m not even there yet! I thought you didn’t like giggling?”

“I dohohohohon’t, it’s just reheheflex!”

“Uh-huh.” Mina pressed her fingers into that spot just above his ribs and below his underarms, kneading deeply.

Bakugou slapped his hands over his mouth to muffle his screech, but it did nothing to hinder the bursts of laughter that followed. “MINA STAHAHAHAHAHAHAP!! STOP, IT STIHIHIHIHIHILL TIHIHIHICKLES OKAY?! LET ME GOHOHOHOHOHOHO!!”

Mina sighed dramatically. “All right, I suppose I’ve had my fun.” Then she chuckled and grabbed onto the concrete again, melting it with her acid for real this time. “It’s so satisfying to hear you laugh like that.”

“Ugh.” Bakugou groaned into the ground. “Just get me out.”

Within a few minutes, Bakugou was back on his feet and following Mina to where the others had already regrouped. Kirishima took one look at his flushed, resigned face and Mina’s bouncier-than-usual step and smirked. “Rough day?”

“Shut up.” Bakugou crossed his arms. “Did we pass?”

“Yeah, we passed. We might get some points docked for excess damage, though, King Explosion Murder.”

“You call me that one more time,” Bakugou growled, “and I will personally end you.”

Kiri laughed, Mina winked, Bakugou grunted and shoved past them both, and Todoroki looked on in confusion as the three of them led the way out of the training arena.

The relationship Bakugou had with his closest friends was definitely an interesting one.