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pucksandpower · 7 months

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Brake Balance

Charles Leclerc x mafiosa!Reader

Summary: something about the brake issues that Charles had to deal with in Bahrain just seems off … so you take matters into your own hands while your boyfriend is none the wiser

Warnings: depictions of violence and minor-character murder

You make your way through the paddock of the Bahrain International Circuit, weaving between team members and mechanics as they go about their pre-race routines. The energy in the air is electric, everyone buzzing with anticipation for the first race of the season later tonight.

You flash your paddock pass at security and head into the Ferrari garage, eyes scanning the organized chaos for the familiar mop of brown hair.

There he is, sitting in his red race suit that matches the iconic color of the Ferrari he drives, focused intently as his mechanics make some last minute adjustments. You walk up behind Charles and place your hands over his eyes.

“Guess who?” You say playfully.

Charles reaches up and removes your hands, a smile breaking across his face as he turns in his seat. “Ah, mon cœur! My favorite surprise.”

You lean down and kiss him softly. “How are things looking for today?”

“Good, good,” he nods. “The team had to change the left front brake duct exit deflector earlier, just as a precaution. But I’m feeling optimistic, the car has been solid all weekend. I think I might even be able to challenge Max for the win if everything goes to plan.”

His confidence makes you smile. Charles has been working so hard, both physically and mentally, to start this season strong. You know a win today would mean the world to him.

“I’ll be cheering the loudest when I see you on that top step today,” you say.

Charles grins. “We’ll see. Still have a race to get through first.”

You lean in to give him a quick kiss and head to the back of the garage so you’re out of the way. The mechanics are in full focus mode now, choreographing their dance around Charles’ car with practiced precision.

Charles goes through his usual pre-race routine — sips of water, reviewing data on the screens, and loosening up his muscles. He’s the picture of calm, but you know him well enough to see the coiled adrenaline thrumming just under the surface, ready to be unleashed once he settles into the cockpit.

The time comes to head out to the grid. Charles pauses before he puts his helmet on, meeting your gaze. You close the distance between you and cup his face in your hands, kissing his lips sweetly. Then you take the helmet from him and slide it gently into place, brushing your lips over the smooth surface where his would be.

“Be safe out there,” you say softly.

He nods, face disappearing behind the tinted visor, and climbs into the Ferrari. You watch as the car pulls away, weaving between other vehicles making their way to the starting grid. With a deep breath, you head deeper into the garage and take a seat next to Charles’ performance coach, Andrea. He hands you a headset so you can listen to Charles’ radio during the race.

“Let’s hope for a good one today,” Andrea says.

You nod, butterflies fluttering in your stomach as you fit the headset over your ears. On the monitors, you see Charles lining up on the grid in P2 after the formation lap, Max Verstappen’s Red Bull beside him on the front row in P1. The lights go out and the cars leap forward, engines roaring to life. Charles gets a good start, but Max keeps the lead through the first few turns.

The pack of cars higher up on the starting grid stays bunched up through the first few turns, but then you notice Charles starting to fall back little by little. His lap time slows as Max opens up a gap in front.

“The car doesn’t feel right, something with the front end,” Charles says. Your brow furrows in concern.

Only a lap later, George Russell in the Mercedes overtakes Charles on turn 4. Then Perez in the other Red Bull breezes past not long after.

“Come on Charles, stay focused,” you murmur under your breath. But things only seem to be getting worse. Carlos battles with Charles and eventually gets by, which frustrates you to no end. Charles fighting his own teammate for position is the last thing you want to see.

“Something felt very wrong with this set, the fronts were locking up like crazy,” Charles reports over the radio. Your heart sinks. Andrea shakes his head, equally perplexed.

The issues continue to persist. “What’s going on with my front left?” Charles asks, audible tension in his voice. “I just cannot get out of front locking. Everywhere ...”

Xavi, his race engineer, replies calmly, “We have temperature imbalance, higher front left.”

“How much is the imbalance?” Charles asks.

“Around 100 degrees.”

You grimace. That kind of discrepancy could make the car undriveable. Sure enough, Charles continues to struggle. It’s clear he’s fighting with the car now rather than racing the drivers around him.

“My car is fully going to the right when I am braking. With this I cannot fight, it’s dangerous,” Charles says, frustration seeping into his tone. You chew your lip anxiously. The rational part of you wishes Charles would just retire the car before he gets himself hurt trying to wrestle with it. But you also know that’s never been in Charles’ nature — he’ll keep fighting until the very last lap, no matter what.

Lap after lap, Charles battles to keep the car under control. “I think we can forget about driving now. It’s pulling everywhere,” he finally concedes. For a brief moment, you wonder if he’ll pull into the pits and call it a day. But no, your boyfriend is never one to simply give up. After the radio, through sheer force of will, Charles somehow overtakes George to reclaim P4. You can only imagine how hard he must be having to fight to keep the car in the track.

In the end, it’s a disappointing P4 for Charles while his teammate makes it on the podium in P3. As Carlos is lead to the cooldown room with Max and Checo, you watch Charles, frustration etched across his face as he tugs off his helmet and balaclava. He doesn’t even glance your way before the mechanics descend on him to start looking over the car.

Clearly the brake issues have cost him any chance at challenging for the win today. Most other drivers would have given up even trying to reclaim P4. But not your Charles. Never your Charles. Your heart aches for him.

Charles gets led away swiftly for the usual post-race weighing and interviews. You know from his body language that he’s utterly deflated by today’s results.

While the reporters pepper him with questions, you pull out your phone and scroll through your contacts. Enough is enough — something is clearly not right with Charles’ car and you want answers.

Your finger hovers over the call button as you contemplate who to reach out to. The last thing you want is for Charles to have to fight against his own machine again. A solution needs to be found immediately, and you know just the person who can help.

With a determined nod, you press call and lift the phone to your ear, ready to get to the bottom of these brake issues once and for all.

***

The phone only rings once before a gruff voice answers. “Boss?”

“Hello, Gianluca,” you say. “I need you to do something for me.”

You go on to explain in detail the brake issues Charles faced during the race, how the problems started right after they replaced the left front brake duct exit deflector.

“I don’t think it was just bad luck,” you say. “Something seems off about the whole situation. I want you to look into it, see if anyone on Charles’ side of the garage could have tampered with his car.”

Gianluca is quiet for a moment. “Sabotage, you think?”

“Possibly. I just … I can’t shake this feeling that someone meant for this to happen to Charles’ car. He truly thought he could at least try to challenge Max for the win, then suddenly it’s like he’s driving an entirely different machine. Too much of a coincidence for my liking.”

“I’ll look into it boss, don’t you worry,” Gianluca says. “I’ll go through the team with a fine tooth comb, see if anything seems out of the ordinary. If someone did intentionally compromise Charles’ car, I’ll find out who and how.”

You let out a breath. “Thank you, Gianluca. Let me know as soon as you learn anything. Charles can’t afford issues like this again.”

“You got it. I’ll be in touch.”

The call ends and you lean back against the garage wall, gaze fixed unseeingly out across the pit lane. Your mind turns over the events of the race, Charles’ baffled frustration over the radio. He’s worked too hard for too long to have valuable points stolen away by something like this. If there is sabotage afoot within the team, you’ll get to the bottom of it.

A few days later you’re back in your study after flying home from Bahrain. A knock at the door interrupts your work and you call for them to enter. Gianluca steps in, an uncharacteristically grim look on his face.

“Boss,” he greets you. Wordlessly, he steps forward and places a thick manila folder on your desk. You flip it open, eyes scanning over photos, documents, even what looks like stills of CCTV footage. Gianluca remains silent, allowing you to take it all in.

“I went over every inch of security camera video from the Bahrain paddock and garage,” Gianluca finally says. “And I found something.”

He leans over your desk and flips to a page in the folder, tapping a finger on a freeze frame showing one of Charles’ mechanics.

“This is Tomaso, one of the brake technicians,” Gianluca explains. “I noticed him acting strange all race day. Fidgety. Nervous. He was trying to hide it but his body language gave it away.”

Your eyes narrow as you study the photo. There is a shifty, almost guilty look about the man as he glances over his shoulder.

“I watched him like a hawk after that,” Gianluca continues. “When the team went to change the brake duct exit deflector, that’s when I saw it happen.”

He flips to another page, this one showing screen captures of CCTV footage in the Ferrari garage a few hours before the race start. You can make out Tomaso slipping the replacement deflector into his pocket before taking out another piece and installing it in Charles’ car. Your blood turns cold.

“He tampered with the part,” Gianluca confirms grimly. “There’s no doubt in my mind he switched that deflector with a compromised one. Sabotage, just like you suspected.”

You sit back, shaking your head in disgusted disbelief. “Why? Why would he do this?”

Gianluca shrugs. “Hard to say for sure. Could be someone paid him off, wants to see Charles fail. But what I know for certain is that he meant to damage Charles’ car.”

You drum your fingers on your desk, thinking hard. This level of betrayal from someone Charles trusts, it’s unthinkable. An affront you won’t let stand.

“You’ve done excellent work, Gianluca,” you finally say, meeting his gaze. “Thank you for getting to the bottom of this. I’ll handle it from here.”

Gianluca nods. “Of course, boss. Let me know if you need anything else.”

He turns and leaves your study, closing the door quietly behind him. You lean back in your chair, fingers steepled under your chin. Your expression is stone, but internally your thoughts roil with anger. Tomaso will pay for this, you’ll see to that.

Charles has enough challenges to face without sabotage from his own team. Your resolve hardens — you won’t stop until justice is served and he can race with full confidence again. The treachery ends now.

***

After Gianluca leaves, your mind turns over what to do about Tomaso. The team flew straight from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia to prepare for the next race, so he’s out of your reach for now. Still, you won’t let him slip away that easily. You pick up your phone and call a trusted associate, instructing him to organize a surveillance team to keep constant eyes on Tomaso until you arrive in Jeddah yourself.

The days crawl by painfully slow as you wait to confront the saboteur. You resist the urge to call Fred Vasseur and have Tomaso removed from the team immediately — better to handle this yourself. Finally, it’s time to fly out for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Upon landing, your associate meets you at the airport.

“We have eyes on the target,” he reports. “He’s currently at the hotel bar, quite intoxicated.”

You nod curtly. “Good. Let’s pay him a visit.”

You’re led to the hotel and pointed towards the bar. Sure enough, there’s Tomaso, stumbling drunkenly out the door into the night. Now is your chance. You follow him down the street, waiting until he turns into a shadowy alley to make your move. In a flash you have him by the collar, shoving him against the brick wall.

“What the hell, let me go!” Tomaso slurs, trying to shove you off. But drinking has made him clumsy and weak.

“I don’t think so, Tomaso,” you reply coldly. “We need to have a little chat.”

His eyes widen in fear and confusion. You press on before he can respond.

“Let’s see, Tomaso Barbieri, born May 5th, 1992 in Turin. Moved to Maranello in 2021 to begin work as a mechanic with Scuderia Ferrari. Parents Lucia and Giacomo Barbieri, both schoolteachers. Sister Cecilia studying abroad in London.”

As you rattle off details about his personal life, Tomaso’s eyes grow wider and wider.

“What the hell, how do you know all that?” He stammers. “Who are you? Does Charles know the ugly truth about his girlfriend?”

You fix him with an icy stare. “Who I am doesn’t matter. What matters is that I know exactly who you are, Tomaso. A mechanic for Ferrari … and apparently a master of espionage and sabotage in your spare time.”

Tomaso’s eyes dart wildly, still trying to make sense of the situation in his inebriated state. He attempts an unconvincing laugh.

“What are you talking about man? Sabotage? I think you’ve had too much to drink ...”

Your response is to slam him hard against the wall, causing him to grunt in pain. You lean in close, anger simmering in your eyes.

“Let’s cut the bullshit, Tomaso. I know what you did in Bahrain, switching out the brake duct deflector to sabotage Charles’ car. Did you think you could get away with it? That there wouldn’t be consequences?”

Up close, you can see the color drain from his face, eyes wide with fear. He tries to retain some composure.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeats weakly. “I would never sabotage Charles’ car, I want him to win ...”

You slam him against the wall again, cutting off his lies.

“I said, enough bullshit!” you snarl. “We have you on video. We saw everything. We know you pocketed the real deflector and installed a defective one instead.”

He is trembling now, any hint of drunkenness replaced by sobering fear.

“Please,” he whimpers pathetically. “I’ll do anything, just please let me go. I made a mistake ...”

You shake your head in disgust. “A mistake? You betrayed Charles’ trust and tried to ruin his race out of what? Jealousy? Greed?”

Tomaso says nothing, eyes downcast in shame. You take a breath and continue in a low, menacing tone.

“Here are your options. One: you go directly to Vasseur first thing in the morning and resign from Ferrari immediately. You will leave the team and ensure you are never so much as in the same country as Charles again. Two: I deal with you myself, in a much less pleasant manner. The choice is yours, Tomaso. What’s it going to be?”

He meets your steely gaze again, jaw clenched. “I can’t just quit,” he says hoarsely. “My job is my life. You might as well just kill me.”

You purse your lips and shake your head. “I was afraid you’d say that. Very well.”

In one swift motion you draw your gun from its concealed holster and press the barrel firmly under Tomaso’s chin. He recoils in terror, plastered back against the wall.

“Last chance,” you say calmly. “Walk away from Ferrari and never look back, or your days end tonight in this alley.”

Sweat drips down his brow as the gun digs harder into his throat. His eyes are saucers of fear, flitting between your steely gaze and the weapon poised to end his life.

“Well?” You ask after a long silence. “What’s it going to be?”

Tomaso swallows hard, Adam’s apple bobbing against the gun barrel. When he speaks, his voice is a terrified croak.

“I … I won’t quit. I can’t.” He closes his eyes in resignation, awaiting his fate.

You click your tongue in disappointment. “That’s unfortunate. I wish it hadn’t come to this.”

Your finger tightens almost imperceptibly on the trigger …

“Wait, wait!” Tomaso cries out, hands raised in desperation. “I’ll do it, I’ll quit! Just please, don’t hurt me!”

You pause, gun still aimed steadily at his throat. “And why should I believe you now?”

He swallows hard, eyes brimming with tears. “I swear, I’ll resign first thing tomorrow. You’ll never see me near the team again. Just let me go, I’m begging you!”

You consider him coldly for a moment before lowering the gun. Tomaso sags back against the wall in relief. But you’re not done with him yet.

“Who paid you?” You demand. “Who put you up to sabotaging Charles’ car?”

The blood drains from his face again. “I can’t tell you that. They’ll kill me, and my family ...”

In a flash the gun is back at his throat, your grip like iron on his shirt collar.

“I assure you, I can do much worse than they ever could,” you say menacingly. “Now give me a name, or you can say goodbye.”

Tomaso shakes uncontrollably, tears streaming down his face. You can see the internal struggle, debating which is the lesser evil — defying you or those he conspired with. Finally, he slumps in defeat and leans in close, voice barely a whisper.

“It was ...”

He utters a name directly into your ear. Your eyes widen briefly in surprise before narrowing again. You release Tomaso and take a step back, processing this new information.

“I see,” you say slowly. You nod over your shoulder and two of your associates emerge from the shadows.

“Get him out of my sight,” you order. They grab Tomaso roughly by the arms. He sags between them, the fight gone out of him completely. You fix him with an icy stare.

“My men will escort you to the airport,” you inform him. “You will be on the first flight out of this hemisphere. And you are never to go near Ferrari or Charles again — don’t even think about trying to contact the team to explain yourself. As far as they will be concerned, you simply resigned. Am I clear?”

Tomaso nods wordlessly, defeated. The men begin dragging him away towards a waiting black SUV.

“Oh, and Tomaso?” You call after him. He glances back warily. “If I ever see or hear of you so much as setting foot in a paddock again, you won’t get a second chance. You’ll simply disappear. Permanently.”

The color drains from his face one final time. Then he is shoved into the back of the SUV, the door slamming shut behind him. You watch impassively as the vehicle drives off into the night, carrying the saboteur away for good.

Or so he thinks.

Unbeknownst to Tomaso, you have contacts everywhere, including at his destination. The second he steps off the plane, thinking he’s escaped your wrath, your local associates will be waiting. And his life will be ended swiftly and permanently, as promised. You don't make idle threats after all.

Betrayal of this magnitude must be punished, no matter how far Tomaso runs. The message will be clear — cross you, and nowhere on Earth will be safe. You've given the order, and your associates are nothing if not ruthlessly efficient. By the time the sun rises, there will be one less threat to Charles’ success. The sabotage ends here and now. You'll see to that personally, no matter the cost.

For a moment you simply stand alone in the dark alley, processing everything. This is bigger than you initially realized. Tomaso was clearly just a pawn, the sabotage orchestrated by someone higher up the chain — someone with enough power and influence to scare a man into risking his career and life.

Your jaw clenches as you think about Charles being targeted like this, not only being robbed of a deserved finish but also put in danger as collateral. Well, it ends now. The shadowy orchestrator thinks they can get away with playing games in the dark? They’re about to realize just how big of a mistake they’ve made.

Now that you have a name, you can start unraveling the web, tracing every thread back to find where it leads. And when you do find the spider at the center? You’ll make sure they can never endanger Charles again. For good.

Satisfied with this plan, you straighten your dress and exit the alley onto the brighter streets. Time to put your considerable resources to work. Phone records, financials, travel records — you’ll dig through it all, leave no stone unturned.

And you have a feeling the name Tomaso gave you is only the first thread. This goes deeper. But it doesn’t matter. You’ve dealt with far more dangerous criminal elements before. These shadow games don’t scare you. You’ll keep following the threads until you reach the source, uprooting the entire enterprise in the process.

By the time you reach your car, your phone is already buzzing with incoming calls and updates from your associates. They know the drill by now — when you give the word, they mobilize into action immediately, utilizing the full extent of your influence and power.

For you, they’ll tap every resource, call in every favor owed. Because you protect what’s yours at all costs. And Charles? He’s under your protection now, whether he knows it or not. So for his sake, you’re going to find the ones trying to undermine him, and you’re going to tear out the threat root and stem. Permanently.

Let them keep playing their games for now, oblivious to the axe hanging over their heads. They’ll find out soon enough that nobody crosses you and gets away with it. And when that time comes, no mercy will be shown. No loose ends left to unravel.

Time to remind them exactly why your reputation precedes you in certain circles, why your name is uttered only in hushed whispers. They’ll regret the day they dared threaten someone you care about. You’ll see to that personally.

With your jaw set in determination, you climb into the idling car. Time to go hunting.

***

Two days after dealing with Tomaso, you make your way through the Jeddah Corniche Circuit paddock towards the Ferrari motorhome.

Your stiletto heels click along the pavement and you glance down, frowning slightly at the flecks of blood still staining the pointed toes of your red soles. Such a shame about these Louboutins, you really love this pair. But a bit of blood is a small price to pay for protecting Charles, especially after personally dealing with the orchestrator who had been paying Tomaso off.

You had tracked them down and made sure they could never threaten Charles’ success again. Subtly, you crouch down and wipe at the stains, managing to remove the worst of it.

Satisfied, you straighten and continue on your way. The familiar bright red motorhome comes into view and you sweep inside, immediately spotting Charles standing with some team members. His face lights up when he sees you, excusing himself to rush over.

“Mon amour, you made it!” He exclaims, enveloping you in a tight hug. You melt against him, breathing in his familiar scent.

“Of course, I wouldn’t miss seeing you race for anything,” you reply, pecking his lips sweetly.

Charles takes your hand, leading you to a quiet corner where you can talk. “I missed you so much while you were away,” he says. “But I’m so glad you’re here now.”

You smile and stroke his cheek. “Me too, darling. But I’m here now and I’ll be cheering the loudest for you all race.”

Charles’ grin falters a bit. “It’s been a strange few days actually. Tomaso, one of my mechanics, just up and quit in the middle of the week. No explanation or anything.”

You school your features into a look of surprise. “Really? That’s so odd.”

Charles nods. “Very weird timing to just resign like that. But maybe it’s for the best if his heart wasn’t fully in it anymore.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” you agree. “The team is better off without any negativity.”

Before Charles can reply, Andrea enters the motorhome. “Charles, time for some quick physio before the race.”

Charles sighs but nods, giving you a swift kiss before following Andrea out. You watch him go fondly before making your way trackside to the Ferrari garage. The mechanics are in race mode, voices terse and movements precise as they make final adjustments on Charles’ car.

You stay back, letting them work, thoughts drifting back to everything you did to get to this point. A small price to pay to ensure Charles can race with a fair chance again.

Finally it’s time for Charles to get in the car. You approach as he’s putting on his helmet and balaclava, stealing a tender kiss that he returns happily. Then you lift the helmet and slide it gently into place, brushing your lips softly over the smooth surface where his lips would be. Your ritual.

“Be safe out there,” you murmur. Charles squeezes your hand, then lowers himself into the cockpit. You watch tensely as the car pulls away, the lights of the circuit glittering against the dark night sky.

In the garage you pace anxiously throughout the race, listening to the radio chatter. Again Charles qualified P2, behind Max Verstappen’s Red Bull. But this time, you have no sabotage to worry about. The Ferrari proves fast and consistent all race, not quite keeping pace with the Red Bull but allowing Charles to maintain P2 smoothly.

The SF-24 doesn’t have the speed to challenge Max, but there’s no issues, no sudden grip loss or components failing. Your shoulders finally uncoil with relief as Charles crosses the line to take P2, securing a podium finish.

The garage explodes into cheers and applause as Charles pulls into parc fermé. He’s beaming as he climbs from the car, pulling off his gloves and balaclava. You run over to the barriers and throw your arms around him ecstatically as soon as he nears.

“I’m so proud of you!” You exclaim. Charles hugs you back tightly.

“Thank you, mon cœur,” he says warmly. “It felt good to finally have a clean race again.”

You just smile knowingly, heart bursting with joy at seeing Charles on the podium where he belongs. During the celebrations, he keeps meeting your gaze in the crowd, smiling and pointing down to you in the crowd of red. As he sprays champagne with Max and Checo, he looks utterly elated and at peace. No frustration or disappointment, just the satisfaction of a hard fought race with the result he deserved.

Afterwards, in the privacy of Charles’ room, he takes you into his arms again. “I don’t know what changed or why, but the car just felt right this weekend,” he says. “It makes me so optimistic for the rest of the season.”

You stroke his face gently. “You deserve it. All your hard work is paying off.” Inside, you allow yourself a small, satisfied smile. Charles doesn’t need to know just how much work went on behind the scenes to get here. He only needs to focus on driving his heart out, and securing the championships you know he’s destined for. The rest is simply details.

“Thank you again for being here,” Charles murmurs, pulling you close. “Having your support means everything to me.”

You rest your head on his shoulder contentedly. “Always, my love. I’ll be right by your side.” And you mean that with every fiber of your being. No matter what happens going forward, whoever tries to interfere or stand in Charles’ way, they’ll have to go through you first.

You won’t let anyone toy with Charles’ performance and safety again. The lesson has been sent — Charles is untouchable now. Dare to threaten the success that is his, and you’ll come for what’s theirs.

But Charles doesn’t need to carry that burden. He just needs to keep his head held high and drive his heart out. You’ll handle the rest. It’s the least you can do for the man you love more than life itself.

So as Charles holds you close, you silently promise to always shield him from the ugly underbelly that lurks beneath the glitz and glamour of Formula 1.

He gives so much of himself already in pursuit of greatness. Let others vie for power and influence through dirty tricks and mind games. That’s not Charles’ way, which is why you’ll ensure he remains untainted. For him, you’d walk through fire without a second thought.

So really, what’s a little blood on your Louboutins in the grand scheme of things? A man like Charles Leclerc deserves that and so much more. And you’re going to give it to him, no matter the cost.

Let them keep playing their games in the shadows. Little do they know, you’ve already checkmated them all.

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etz-ashashiyot · 3 months

Text

Chapter 4: Executed Jews

By Dara Horn, excerpted from People Love Dead Jews

ALA ZUSKIN PERELMAN AND I HAD BEEN IN TOUCH ONLINE before I finally met her in person, and I still cannot quite believe she exists. Years ago, I wrote a novel about Marc Chagall and the Yiddish-language artists whom he once knew in Russia, all of whom were eventually murdered by the Soviet regime. While researching the novel, I found myself sucked into the bizarre story of these people's exploitation and destruction: how the Soviet Union first welcomed these artists as exemplars of universal human ideals, then used them for its own purposes, and finally executed them. I named my main character after the executed Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, a comic performer known for playing fools. After the book came out, I heard from Ala in an email written in halting English: "I am Benjamin Zuskin's daughter." That winter I was speaking at a literary conference in Israel, where Ala lived, and she and I arranged to meet. It was like meeting a character from a book.

My hosts had generously put me up with other writers in a beautiful stone house in Jerusalem. We were there during Hanukkah, the celebration of Jewish independence. On the first night of the holiday, I walked to Jerusalem's Old City and watched as people lit enormous Hanukkah torches at the Western Wall. I thought of my home in New Jersey, where in school growing up I sang fake English Hanukkah songs created by American music education companies at school Christmas concerts, with lyrics describing Hanukkah as being about "joy and peace and love." Joy and peace and love describe Hanukkah, a commemoration of an underdog military victory over a powerful empire, about as well as they describe the Fourth of July. I remembered challenging a chorus teacher about one such song, and being told that I was a poor sport for disliking joy and peace and love. (Imagine a "Christmas song" with lyrics celebrating Christmas, the holiday of freedom. Doesn't everyone like freedom? What pedant would reject such a song?) I sang those words in front of hundreds of people to satisfy my neighbors that my tradition was universal — meaning, just like theirs. The night before meeting Ala, I walked back to the house through the dense stone streets of the Old City's Jewish Quarter, where every home had a glass case by its door, displaying the holiday's oil lamps. It was strange to see those hundreds of glowing lights. They were like a shining announcement that this night of celebration was shared by all these strangers around me, that it was universal. The experience was so unfamiliar that I didn't know what to make of it.

The next morning, Ala knocked on the door of the stone house and sat down in its living room, with its view of the Old City. She was a small dark-haired woman whose perfect posture showed a firmness that belied her age. She looked at me and said in Hebrew, "I feel as if you knew my father, like you understood what he went through. How did you know?"

The answer to that question goes back several thousand years.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The teenage boys who participated in competitive athletics in the gymnasium in Jerusalem 2,200 years ago had their circumcisions reversed, because otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to play. In the Hellenistic empire that had conquered Judea, sports were sacred, the entry point to being a person who mattered, the ultimate height of cool — and sports, of course, were always played in the nude. As one can imagine, ancient genital surgery of this nature was excruciating and potentially fatal. But the boys did not want to miss out.

I learned this fun fact in seventh grade, from a Hebrew school teacher who was instructing me and my pubescent classmates about the Hanukkah story — about how Hellenistic tyranny gained a foothold in ancient Judea with the help of Jews who wanted to fit in. This teacher seemed overly jazzed to talk about penises with a bunch of adolescents, and I suspected he'd made the whole thing up. At home, I decided to fact-check. I pulled a dusty old book off my parents' shelf, Volume One of Heinrich Graetz's opus History of the Jews.

In nineteenth-century academic prose, Graetz explained how the leaders of Judea demonstrated their loyalty to the occupying Hellenistic empire by building a gymnasium and recruiting teenage athletes — only to discover that "in uncovering their bodies they could immediately be recognized as Judeans. But were they to take part in the Olympian games, and expose themselves to the mockery of Greek scoffers? Even this difficulty they evaded by undergoing a painful operation, so as to disguise the fact that they were Judeans." Their Zeus-worshipping overlords were not fooled. Within a few years, the regime outlawed not only circumcision but all of Jewish religious practice, and put to death anyone who didn't comply.

Sometime after that, the Maccabees showed up. That's the part of the story we usually hear.

Those ancient Jewish teenagers were on my mind that Hanukkah when Ala came to tell me about her father's terrifying life, because I sensed that something profound united them — something that doesn't match what we're usually taught about what bigotry looks or feels like. It doesn't involve "intolerance" or "persecution," at least not at first. Instead, it looks like the Jews themselves are choosing to reject their own traditions. It is a form of weaponized shame.

Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.

For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening — and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism's success. These "converted" Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime — which of course isn't antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.

I wish I could tell the story of Ala's father concisely, compellingly, the way everyone prefers to hear about dead Jews. I regret to say that Benjamin Zuskin wasn't minding his own business and then randomly stuffed into a gas chamber, that his thirteen-year-old daughter did not sit in a closet writing an uplifting diary about the inherent goodness of humanity, that he did not leave behind sad-but-beautiful aphorisms pondering the absence of God while conveniently letting his fellow humans off the hook. He didn't even get crucified for his beliefs. Instead, he and his fellow Soviet Jewish artists — extraordinarily intelligent, creative, talented, and empathetic adults — were played for fools, falling into a slow-motion psychological horror story brimming with suspense and twisted self-blame. They were lured into a long game of appeasing and accommodating, giving up one inch after another of who they were in order to win that grand prize of being allowed to live.

Spoiler alert: they lost.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was in graduate school studying Yiddish literature, itself a rich vein of discussion about such impossible choices, when I became interested in Soviet Jewish artists like Ala's father. As I dug through library collections of early-twentieth-century Yiddish works, I came across a startling number of poetry books illustrated by Marc Chagall. I wondered if Chagall had known these Yiddish writers whose works he illustrated, and it turned out that he had. One of Chagall's first jobs as a young man was as an art teacher at a Jewish orphanage near Moscow, built for children orphaned by Russia's 1919-1920 civil war pogroms. This orphanage had a rather renowned faculty, populated by famous Yiddish writers who trained these traumatized children in the healing art of creativity.

It all sounded very lovely, until I noticed something else. That Chagall's art did not rely on a Jewish language — that it had, to use that insidious phrase, "universal appeal" — allowed him a chance to succeed as an artist in the West. The rest of the faculty, like Chagall, had also spent years in western Europe before the Russian revolution, but they chose to return to Russia because of the Soviet Union's policy of endorsing Yiddish as a "national Soviet language." In the 1920s and 30s, the USSR offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government. This support led the major Yiddish novelist Dovid Bergelson to publish his landmark 1926 essay "Three Centers," about New York, Warsaw, and Moscow as centers of Yiddish-speaking culture, asking which city offered Yiddish writers the brightest prospects. His unequivocal answer was Moscow, a choice that brought him back to Russia the following year, where many other Jewish artists joined him.

But Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime — and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew, and Zionism? In the Soviet Empire, one answer was Yiddish, but Yiddish was also suspect for its supposedly backwards elements. Nearly 15 percent of its words came directly from biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, so Soviet Yiddish schools and publishers, under the guise of "simplifying" spelling, implemented a new and quite literally antisemitic spelling system that eliminated those words' Near Eastern roots. Another answer was "folklore" — music, visual art, theater, and other creative work reflecting Jewish life — but of course most of that cultural material was also deeply rooted in biblical and rabbinic sources, or reflected common religious practices like Jewish holidays and customs, so that was treacherous too.

No, what the regime required were Yiddish stories that showed how horrible traditional Jewish practice was, stories in which happy, enlightened Yiddish-speaking heroes rejected both religion and Zionism (which, aside from its modern political form, is also a fundamental feature of ancient Jewish texts and prayers traditionally recited at least three times daily). This de-Jewing process is clear from the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly — as in the many productions involving ghosts or graveyard scenes — as dead. As its actors would be, soon enough.

The Soviet Union's destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with the Yevsektsiya, committees of Jewish Bolsheviks whose paid government jobs from 1918 through 1930 were to persecute, imprison, and occasionally murder Jews who participated in religious or Zionist institutions — categories that included everything from synagogues to sports clubs, all of which were shut down and their leaders either exiled or "purged." This went on, of course, until the regime purged the Yevsektsiya members themselves.

The pattern repeated in the 1940s. As sordid as the Yeveksiya chapter was, I found myself more intrigued by the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC's roster of talent were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Ala's father Benjamin Zuskin, the theater's leading actor. After promoting these people during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Soviet Jews were no longer useful, and charged them all with treason. He had decided that this committee he himself created was in fact a secret Zionist cabal, designed to bring down the Soviet state. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a 1948 hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all the others — Zuskin and twelve more Jewish luminaries, including the novelist Dovid Bergelson, who had proclaimed Moscow as the center of the Yiddish future — were executed by firing squad on August 1952.

Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too "nationalist" (read: Jewish), today's long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being "nationalist" enough — that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet regime that they were unable to see the writing on the wall. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin's Secret Pogrom, the indispensable English translation of transcripts from the JAC "trial," Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following:

As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naive idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.

This is completely true, and also completely unfair. The tragedy — even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim — was not that these Soviet Jews sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ala was almost thirteen years old when her father was arrested and until that moment she was immersed in the Soviet Yiddish artistic scene. Her mother was also an actor in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater; her family lived in the same building as the murdered theater director Solomon Mikhoels, and moved in the same circles as other Jewish actors and writers. After seeing her parents perform countless times, Ala had a front-row seat to the destruction of their world. She attended Mikhoel's state funeral, heard about the arrest of the brilliant Yiddish author Der Nister from an actor friend who witnessed it from her apartment across the hall, and was present when secret police ransacked her home in conjunction with her father's arrest. In her biography, The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, she provides for her readers what she gave me that morning in Jerusalem: an emotional recounting, with the benefit of hindsight, of what it was really like to live through the Soviet Jewish nightmare.

It's as close as we can get, anyway. Her father Benjamin Zuskin's own thoughts on the topic are available only from state interrogations extracted under unknown tortures. (One typical interrogation document from his three and a half years in the notorious Lubyanka Prison announces that the day's interrogation lasted four hours, but the transcript is only half a page long — leaving to the imagination how the interrogator and interrogatee may have spent their time together. Suffice it to say that another JAC detainee didn't make it to trial alive.) His years in prison began when he was arrested in December of 1948 in a Moscow hospital room, where he was being treated for chronic insomnia brought on by the murder of his boss and career-long acting partner, Mikhoels; the secret police strapped him to a gurney and carted him to prison in his hospital gown while he was still sedated.

But in order to truly appreciate the loss here, one needs to know what was lost — to return to the world of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, the author of Benjamin Zuskin's first role on the Yiddish stage, in a play fittingly titled It's a Lie!

Benjamin Zuskin's path to the Yiddish theater and later to the Soviet firing squad began in a shtetl comparable to those immortalized in Sholem Aleichem's work. Zuskin, a child from a traditional family who was exposed to theater only through traveling Yiddish troupes and clowning relatives, experienced that world's destruction: his native Lithuanian shtetl, Ponievezh, was among the many Jewish towns forcibly evacuated during the First World War, catapulting him and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish refugees into modernity. He landed in Penza, a city with professional Russian theater and Yiddish amateur troupes. In 1920, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater opened, and by 1921, Zuskin was starring alongside Mikhoels, the theater's leading light.

In the one acting class I have ever attended, I learned only one thing: acting isn't about pretending to be someone you aren't, but rather about emotional communication. Zuskin, who not only starred in most productions but also taught in the theater's acting school, embodied the concept. His very first audition was a one-man sketch he created, consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old tailor threading a needle — without words, costumes, or props. It became so popular that he performed it to entranced crowds for years. This physical artistry animated his every role. As one critic wrote, "Even the slightest breeze and he is already air-bound."

Zuskin specialized in playing figures like the Fool in King Lear — as his daughter puts it in her book, characters who "are supposed to make you laugh, but they have an additional dimension, and they arouse poignant reflections about the cruelty of the world." Discussing his favorite roles, Zuskin once explained that "my heart is captivated particularly by the image of the person who is derided and humiliated, but who loves life, even though he encounters obstacles placed before him through no fault of his own."

The first half of Ala's book seems to recount only triumphs. The theater's repertoire in its early years was largely adopted from classic Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Moykher Seforim. The book's title is drawn from Zuskin's most famous role: Senderl, the Sancho Panza figure in Mendele's Don Quixote-inspired work, Travels of Benjamin the Third, about a pair of shtetl idiots who set out for the Land of Israel and wind up walking around the block. These productions were artistically inventive, brilliantly acted, and played to packed houses both at home and on tour. Travels of Benjamin the Third, in a 1928 review typical of the play's reception, was lauded by the New York Times as "one of the most originally conceived and beautifully executed evenings in the modern theater."

One of the theater's landmark productions, I. L. Peretz's surrealist masterpiece At Night in the Old Marketplace, was first performed in 1925. The play, set in a graveyard, is a kind of carnival for the graveyard's gathered ghosts. Those who come back from the dead are misfits like drunks and prostitutes, and also specific figures from shtetl life - yeshiva idlers, synagogue beadles, and the like. Leading them all is a badkhn, or wedding jester — divided in this production into two mirror-characters played by Mikhoels and Zuskin — whose repeated chorus among the living corpses is "The dead will rise!" "Within this play there was something hidden, something with an ungraspable depth," Ala writes, and then relates how after a performance in Vienna, one theatergoer came backstage to tell the director that "the play had shaken him as something that went beyond all imagination." The theatergoer was Sigmund Freud.

As Ala traces the theater's trajectory toward doom, it becomes obvious why this performance so affected Freud. The production was a zombie story about the horrifying possibility of something supposedly dead (here, Jewish civilization) coming back to life. The play was written a generation earlier as a Romantic work, but in the Moscow production, it became a means of denigrating traditional Jewish life without mourning it. That fantasy of a culture's death as something compelling and even desirable is not merely reminiscent of Freud's death drive, but also reveals the self-destructive bargain implicit in the entire Soviet-sponsored Jewish enterprise. In her book, Ala beautifully captures this tension as she explains the badkhn's role: "He sends a double message: he denies the very existence of the vanishing shadow world, and simultaneously he mocks it, as if it really does exist."

This double message was at the heart of Benjamin Zuskin's work as a comic Soviet Yiddish actor, a position that required him to mock the traditional Jewish life he came from while also pretending that his art could exist without it. "The chance to make fun of the shtetl which has become a thing of the past charmed me," he claimed early on, but later, according to his daughter, he began to privately express misgivings. The theater's decision to stage King Lear as a way of elevating itself disturbed him, suggesting as it did that the Yiddish repertoire was inferior. His own integrity came from his deep devotion to yiddishkayt, a sense of essential and enduring Jewishness, no matter how stripped-down that identity had become. "With the sharp sense of belonging to everything Jewish, he was tormented by the theater forsaking its expression of this belonging," his daughter writes. Even so, "no, he could not allow himself to oppose the Soviet regime even in his thoughts, the regime that gave him his own theater, but 'the heart and the wit do not meet.'"

In Ala's memory, her father differed from his director, partner, and occasional rival, Mikhoels, in his complete disinterest in politics. Mikhoels was a public figure as well as performer, and his leadership of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, while no more voluntary than any public act in a totalitarian state, was a role he played with gusto, traveling to America in 1943 and speaking to thousands of American Jews to raise money for the Red Army in their battle against the Nazis. Zuskin, on the other hand, was on the JAC roster, but seems to have continued playing the fool. According to both his daughter and his trial testimony, his role in the JAC was almost identical to his role on a Moscow municipal council, limited to playing chess in the back of the room during meetings.

In Jerusalem, Ala told me that her father was "a pure soul." "He had no interest in politics, only in his art," she said, describing his acting style as both classic and contemporary, praised by critics for its timeless qualities that are still evident today in his film work. But his talent was the most nuanced and sophisticated thing about him. Offstage, he was, as she put it in Hebrew, a "tam" — a biblical term sometimes translated as fool or simpleton, but which really means an innocent. (It is the first adjective used to describe the title character in the Book of Job.) It is true that in trial transcripts, Zuskin comes out looking better than many of his co-defendants by playing dumb instead of pointing fingers. But was this ignorance, or a wise acceptance of the futility of trying to save his skin? As King Lear's Fool put it, "They'll have me whipp'd for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipp'd for holding my peace." Reflecting on her father's role as a fool named Pinia in a popular film, Ala writes in her book, "When I imagine the moment when my father heard his death sentence, I see Pinia in close-up . . . his shoulders slumped, despair in his appearance. I hear the tone that cannot be imitated in his last line in the film — and perhaps also the last line in his life? — 'I don't understand anything.'"

Yet it is clear that Zuskin deeply understood how impossible his situation was. In one of the book's more disturbing moments, Ala describes him rehearsing for one of his landmark roles, that of the comic actor Hotsmakh in Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars, a work whose subject is the Yiddish theater. He had played the role before, but this production was going up in the wake of Mikhoel's murder. Zuskin was already among the hunted, and he knew it. As Ala writes:

One morning — already after the murder of Mikhoels — I saw my father pacing the room and memorizing the words of Hotsmakh's role. Suddenly, in a gesture revealing a hopeless anguish, Father actually threw himself at me, hugged me, pressed me to his heart, and together with me, continued to pace the room and to memorize the words of the role. That evening I saw the performance . . . "The doctors say that I need rest, air, and the sea . . . For what . . . without the theater?" [Hotsmakh asks], he winds the scarf around his neck — as though it were a noose. For my father, I think those words of Hotsmakh were like the motif of the role and — I think — of his own life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Describing the charges levied against Zuskin and his peers is a degrading exercise, for doing so makes it seem as though these charges are worth considering. They are not. It is at this point that Hanukkah antisemitism transformed, as it inevitably does, into Purim antisemitism. Here Ala offers what hundreds of pages of state archives can't, describing the impending horror of the noose around one's neck.

Her father stopped sleeping, began receiving anonymous threats, and saw that he was being watched. No conversation was safe. When a visitor from Poland waited near his apartment building to give him news of his older daughter Tamara (who was then living in Warsaw), Zuskin instructed the man to walk behind him while speaking to him and then to switch directions, so as to avoid notice. When the man asked Zuskin what he wanted to tell his daughter, Zuskin "approached the guest so closely that there was no space between them, and whispered in Yiddish, 'Tell her that the ground is burning beneath my feet.'" It is true that no one can know what Zuskin or any of the other defendants really believed about the Soviet system they served. It is also true — and far more devastating — that their beliefs were utterly irrelevant.

Ala and her mother were exiled to Kazakhstan after her father's arrest, and learned of his execution only when they were allowed to return to Moscow in 1955. By then, he had already been dead for three years.

In Jerusalem that morning, Ala told me, in a sudden private moment of anger and candor, that the Soviet Union's treatment of the Jews was worse than Nazi Germany's. I tried to argue, but she shut me up. Obviously the Nazi atrocities against Jews were incomparable, a fact Ala later acknowledged in a calmer mood. But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation - and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever, paid for it.

"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That evening I went out to the Old City again, to watch the torches being lit at the Western Wall for the second night of Hanukkah. I walked once more through the Jewish Quarter, where the oil lamps, now each bearing one additional flame, were displayed outside every home, following the tradition to publicize the Hanukkah miracle — not merely the legendary long-lasting oil, but the miracle of military and spiritual victory over a coercive empire, the freedom to be uncool, the freedom not to pretend. Somewhere nearby, deep underground, lay the ruins of the gymnasium where de-circumcised Jewish boys once performed naked before approving crowds, stripped of their integrity and left with their private pain. I thought of Benjamin Zuskin performing as the dead wedding jester, proclaiming, "The dead will rise!" and then performing again in a "superior" play, as King Lear's Fool. I thought of the ground burning beneath his feet. I thought of his daughter, Ala, now an old woman, walking through Jerusalem.

I am not a sentimental person. As I returned to the stone house that night, along the streets lit by oil lamps, I was surprised to find myself crying.

#People Love Dead Jews #Dara Horn #Soviet Jewry #Soviet antisemitism #antizionism is not antisemitism #jumblr

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johnpriceslamb · 7 months

Note

hihi could u maybe do an arthur morgan x fem!reader??

i was thinkin about the reader being really upset about something and which arthur (being that kinda person) he noticed quickly, they walked to his tent for then the reader to be comforted by arthur morgan (he isnt good at comforting but he tries real hard,, take ur time ofc! we love u-🎀

��𝓱𝓮 𝓯𝓪𝔀𝓷,

❥ You’re sad. Arthur finds out and comes to comfort you.

𝓑𝓔𝓕𝓞𝓡𝓔 𝓨𝓞𝓤 𝓟𝓡𝓞𝓒𝓔𝓔𝓓 ! ꒰ female ! reader . hyper-feminine ! reader . reader is mentioned 2 be physically shorter than characters mentioned below . crybbie reader sorraiiii . Karen’s a meanie pants but she loves reader . 1.1k wrd count. ꒱

❥ Arthur Morgan x female ! reader

You’re sensitive.

You don’t mean to be, but sometimes you take what people say a bit too seriously.

It’s not a bad thing to be sensitive, but you’re in a gang. A gang filled with murderers, thieves, criminals, whatever. You’re prone to being teased and made fun of- even more likely due to your soft nature and demure figure.

Usually, you spend your time doing chores or assisting Pearson with cooking. What you lacked in strength and courage to be able to hold a gun, you made up with your skills in being able to feed the gang actual food, instead of.. the usual stews Pearson made.

From then on, you gained the honouring title of ‘Pearson’s assistant.’

Then again you’d much prefer being referred to your actual name.

“—‘n I’m just sayin’..” The woman in blonde stirs her spoon in the stew you made, mindlessly blabbering about.

Karen was a sweet girl, she really is. But sometimes, she enjoys talking. A bit too much.

“You ain’t really uh.. fit for all this.” She gestures to camp.

Ouch.

You shrink in the log you sat upon, meekly fiddling with the utensil in your hand. You get where she’s coming from, but nevertheless you still took it to heart.

“Karen!” Mary-Beth softly hits her upper arm, a scolding tone picks on, “C’mon, lay off it.”

She shrugs. “‘M just saying what everyone wants to hear. It’s like seeing a fawn amongst a pack o’ wolves.”

She’s blunt. You’ve known her for a while, considered her as a friend. And you knew well enough that she does not sugar coat things. You’re not sure if you should take what she said as a compliment or not, but regardless you still feel a bit embarrassed at the fact that you didn’t really fit in.

“H—Hey,” You feel yourself crumble at the fact that your tone took on a higher pitch as a defence mechanism and the stuttering which makes her point stand even more bolder, “I’m.. I’m trying, okay?”

Karen looks at you with a demeaning expression. That’s all it takes to shut your pretty little mouth up.

Then, she lets out a soft giggle.

“C’mon girl, y’know I was just jokin’. You just sit there and look pretty for us.”

You take this as an opportunity to leave, going on with your day but with a heavy heart.

You find yourself near the lake which is situated just right beside the camp, staring off at the distance with a long look. You know Karen was just playing around, but you still can’t help that little sharp pang in your heart.

You don’t notice the approaching steps from behind. You hear the sound of fabrics scrunching together as they squat behind you, a warm hand lays gently on your shoulder.

“Hey.”

You tilt your head upwards, eyes landing on the loyal enforcer of the gang.

“Hi,” You whisper back. Unconsciously does your head lay on his chest, and almost immediately do you feel better being in Arthur’s embrace.

His arms wrap around you, a gentle kiss is placed on the side of your head. He lovingly looks at you, cold eyes which softens at the sight of his sweetheart. It falters a bit when they see those pretty eyes glimmer in the light.

“Y’alright?” He asks with a tone of concern. His arms tighten at the sight of your vulnerability.

“Mhm.” You meekly nod, feigning your expression with a soft smile, “I’m fine.”

“Mm.” His upper eyelids cover half of his eyes. His expression was almost lazy, dog-like. “No use lying to me, sweetheart. Yer lips quiver when you do.”

You almost melt at how lovely his voice sounded.

“C’mon,” He gestures for you to stand up. He lends you a hand for you to aid yourself onto your two feet, a hand rests upon the curve of your hip to guide you to his tent.

“Where we goin’?” You ask shyly, leaning into his touch.

“My tent. We’re goin’ to talk.” He replies blankly.

You don’t say anything until you’ve reached his tent. He guided you to the edge of his bed, allowing you to sit. He sizes you up a few times, quietly admiring you for a moment before sitting next to you, knees touching.

“What’s wrong, hm? Why’s gotten my girl so down?” Your hand unconsciously grabs onto his to squeeze, fiddle around with. He wants to chuckle at your puppy-like neediness but forces himself not to.

“..Just some stuff Karen said.” You meekly explain, fiddling with his fingers, “Said ‘m not really fit for.. any of this.”

“She said that?” He says with a frown, scratching at his strong jaw.

“Mm,” You nod.

“‘Reckon she’s right.”

“Eh?” You almost pout at how immediate he was to agree.

“Hey, c’mon. I ain’t even get to finish. I mean, she’s right. You don’t fit in. You’re too good for any of this.” He explains himself, biting his lip to prevent himself from doing anything to you. Your eyes did a lot to him, unbeknownst to you.

“Way too good.” He mumbles, lovingly rubbing circles on your little palm.

“You really think so?” You ask with a shy smile.

“I know so.” He nods, leaning in to press a little kiss on your forehea. He leans back to peer at your face again.

“C’mon, I know you.” He sighs, “Don’t let Karen’s words get to your mind. Even if you don’t really fit in, yer still one of us now. Y’hear?”

You shyly nod. With just one nod down to his lap do you immediately crawl towards him, cuddling up to him like a bug in a leaf.

#fem! reader #rdr2 x you #arthur morgan #arthur morgan x you #arthur morgan x reader #afab! reader #arthur morgan x fem! you #rdr2 #arthur morgan x fem! reader #arthur morgan x female reader #arthur morgan fic #arthur morgan rdr2 #red dead redemption fanfic

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bamsara · 1 year

Note

Have you seen cannon Eclipse yet?? Will Ruin be effecting how you portray them in SL?

(Ruin spoilers) Long post!!! Sorry I rambled klsdhglksd plus I pulled out some of my older art so it's a bit of a ramble post about Eclipse and how I write/draw them / the duality of man (robot) / and SL's AU universe

Most likely not since a fully-booted-up Eclipse in SL wouldn't be too terribly different from what I could work with coming from Ruin. I've already made several art pieces and writing drafts about the 'scary looking but sweet' Eclipse type more than the murder murder murder scary kill kind having to do with the virus's invovlement, so I think this developement is actaully pretty steller for me

Not to say my Eclipse won't be a bit more intense than what was shown in the DLC, but I think it still works out

I mean Look at my doodles and writings of Post-Solar Lunacy Eclipse and how they act: you've got your spooky behavior that comes from Five Nights At Freddy's being a horror game + based off of the DCA's behavior + general alternate universe junk :

and then your silly goofy:

I've always adored the Duelity of Man (Robot)

So basically: Ruin DLC will probably not affect how I write Eclipse at all because from the short few lines we got from them kinda already alligns with how I see Eclipse behaving, at least Post - Solar Lunacy. Sweet boy.

Eclipse's dialect is a bit different in the ruin dlc then how I've had it planned but I think that's okay too, considering how I had their dialect/manner of speaking pretty down similar to how Sun & Moon were speaking in the DLC at least (the short sentences, phrases, occasionally long ones) although this is kinda just a writing flow choice / au character interpretation thing that's a personal preference, since I personally have Moon less verbal than Sun and Sun a lot more talkative in my fics than even the og Sun in Security breach.

Appearance wise? Nothing really changes! The hat and sunrays combo can switch inbetween having a hat or just having sunrays (like how arcade game Eclipse just has sunrays, but character model Eclipse has Moon's hat) and it really just depends on the scene and/or if the DCA was already wearing the nightcap as Eclipse makes an appearance.

I'm keeping the four-arms deal. Best thing the fandom came up with and love it when they do that for characters. Insert 'i just think its neat' image here.

Solar Lunacy has been and still is a AU universe so like said before, some aspects of canon are choosy to whatever I think makes a good entertainment story and all, so not too worried about sticking to canon all that much. Yippie for transformative and creative expression!

THAT BEING SAID, I absolutely fucking adore the glimpse of personality we got from the few scenes of canon Eclipse in the Ruin DLC and it fits an idea of character in my head for them, so I won't really need to divert from the original draft too much for Eclipse!

I'm really happy ahh!!!!

#Solar Lunacy #writings #<< for reference #doodles #ruin spoilers

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0tivez · 1 year

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adrenalize

synopsis: a perfect student can get in toruble every now and then too, right? except this time, you get into trouble with your famous bachelor professor satoru gojo for an unorthodox reason, and he'll make sure you make up for it

characters: gojo

warnings: female reader, student reader x professor gojo, semi-public sex, age gap (early 20s to late 20s), oral (female + male receiving), very light power play, dub-con (maybe?), unprotected sex, degrading/praising, breeding. mdni

wc: 4.3k

note: yes, this is my dark fantasy of being accepted as a mean looking emo bitch. no, i'm not in love with my professor. emo sluts rise (emo=reader wears all black and has dark makeup lol sorry couldn't pull a wattpad) it's our time to have steamy office sex with 2d men. see the end for more notes!

you know, i don't really put in songs, but what the hell. this one's for the emos

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"oh, i have an appointment with professor gojo today" you tell your friend as you lay your lunch tray onto the table.

"for what?" she asks, her motion following yours. you two sit comfortably on the wooden chairs.

"i don't know. my grades, i guess? but my grades are fine, so i don't really know" you answer in confusion, and stab a big piece of chicken.

"well, i wish he would call me in his office"

"what?" you almost choke on your food. you look at your friend with big, dumb eyes. you wouldn't have been this surprised if she confessed to murdering someone, and you shouldn't be surprised at her confession either. yet somehow, you are.

"satoru's kinda hot, isn't he?" she responds, scrunching her nose. "he's also, like, extremely smart and funny"

"he's fucking old"

"um, no he's not? half of the school has bag of bones for professors, satoru's like... what, 30? i've fucked older"

"still, so inappropriate" you shut the conversation down. sure, you two had joked about how hot gojo is, and sure, the idea did entertain your mind, but it's between you two, a very private inside joke. you feel exposed this way, and the last thing you need is having that image of your professor in your mind as he lectures you about god knows what later today.

"i bet he fucks like his age too" she smirks across the table. you turn your head around anxiously to see if anyone's heard you two, but the loud cafeteria outweighs your little dirty convo.

"shut up!"

"girl you know damn well-"

"let's talk about this after i get scolded today. i don't want to worry about this man anymore"

it's 5.40 pm. where is he? he was supposed to meet you after class, yet he's nowhere to be found. and you're there standing in shame, as students pass you by, probably wondering what happened for you to be waiting like a stray kitten by his office.

of course, it's nothing to be ashamed of. god, you don't even know what you're supposed to be ashamed of yet! but here you are, cold sweat down your neck, hands nervously moving up and down your arms as you wait for time to pass.

that's how you are. quiet, nervous. yet most people have a different image of you; a colder, meaner image. it's difficult for you to socialize, so you stick to your two friends you made ages ago for your in-class interactions. for classes, you opt for quietly listening to your lectures rather than being interactive, even though you know it's not the right way, and you want to be social. that's why most professors rarely remember your name or your face- not that they're eager to know you anyways. that's why it's so confusing. what did you do to get called like this? how did he even know your name?

"ah- sorry for being late" gojo rushes next to you. his tall figure guides you to the narrow hallway where his office is hidden in. he quickly unlocks the door, and waits for you to enter first. "sit, i'll be back in a couple minutes" you nod.

once he turns around, you quickly observe his clothes. he always knew how to be stylish, even though his clothes are always basic. you figured it must be his fit figure that makes anything he wears compliment him. he's always clean and rich looking; never would he wear a wrinkled shirt. the female students would anticipate warm weathers, where gojo would sometimes wear a tight, black t-shirt and jeans. not today tho. although the weather is warm, he's wearing a light blue linen shirt with black jeans, complimented with a thick, leather belt. his shirt exposed his contoured collarbones, and arms exposed with an expensive looking watch to complete the look. and his face... god, his face.

he shuts the door behind you. you're left for your own thoughts. sitting down is uncomfortable for you, the only thing you can hear is your heartbeat. the building is empty, you can faintly hear students speaking from outside. you get up, and look around his office. it's filled with thick, leather covered books. interesting, you wouldn't assume he's into reading by looking at him, or hearing him speak. it must be professional deformation. papers are scattered around on his desk. everywhere else except for his desk is tidied and clean, but his desk is a warzone.

the door opens.

"hi, hello, sorry for making you wait. hope you didn't miss me too much" gojo paces toward his desk.

you shake your head. "it's alright, you must be very busy"

gojo stands over his desk and gathers some papers in his hand and puts them aside. "well, it is difficult to be the fun one in this department, y'know?" his blue eyes focus on yours for a moment, as he waits for a reaction from you. you chuckle in response.

gojo pulls out a paper from the batch and sits down. he raises the paper and looks at you. he calls your name. "correct?"

just the way he said your name sends chills down your spine. god, in that moment, you truly wish you would be more active in class, only to hear him call your name.

"correct"

he reads the paper quickly without putting it down. he looks like a kid doing it, yet you feel as if you were in front of a judge.

"so, interesting. you know your grade, right?" you nod.

"i-is there a problem? i thought i did good"

"oh, you did, definitely. this paper is very impressive. i enjoyed reading it." he smiles at you. "the only problem was, i had no idea whose paper i was reading the whole time"

you sit there silently. where was he heading at? he didn't call you in just to tell you to be more active in class, right?

"i mean i did know, i know how to read, but there wasn't a face you know? our class is pretty small, so i know most people. but you, who are you?"

"excuse me?" you manage to let out.

"you don't speak much in class, don't talk to anyone else in class, yet you never skip a class. and then boom! you write out this paper"

"am- am i being accused of something, sir?"

gojo looks amused. he grins, and rests on his back, crossing his arms. his muscles show up, is he trying to look intimidating? is he trying to get a confession out of you? cheating? stealing?

"no, nothing at all. i'm just curious. it's important that i know my pupils. talking to strangers affect my performance too"

"i- guess i'm more of a listener" you feel so small in front of him. this is embarrassing.

gojo gets up and walks to the chair across you.

"but you see, you don't look friendly either."

"wha-"

"i remember seeing you in class and thinking 'wow, she really doesn't wanna be here' which is new to me, cause i'm fun!" now you're sure he must be offended or something.

"sir, if that's the issue, i'll be more active from now on" you just want to leave. whatever it takes, leave.

"but why?" he ignores your suggestion. "why hate being with me?" gojo leans in to be closer to you. his long legs and big body help him be closer to you, despite the small coffee table separating you two.

"there's not a reason, sir. i don't hate-"

"i'm used to being popular among female students, y'know?"

this time, it's your turn to giggle.

"i'm sorry, is this what it's been about? you're offended that i'm not attracted to you?" lie. you're crazy for him. maybe that's why you're extra shy around him. but somehow, a wave of confidence washes over you in this moment. maybe it's the sincerity of him, maybe it's the ridiculousness of the situation. but whatever it is, it made you get a fiendish chuckle from your professor.

"it just doesn't happen. do you hate me? did i do something to you?"

"no, sir, i'm just a shy person"

"why the face?" he points at his own face, and makes a sulky face that you think is supposed to be mimicking your face.

you shrug your shoulders and smile in disbelief. "it's just my face! sir, if it matters to you, i think you're great. i enjoy your lectures, and i promise i'll be more active from now on" you wave your hands and get up to leave. gojo follows after you.

he lays a hand on your shoulder to keep you still.

"that's not it, is it? you missed something"

"e-excuse me?" what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

"tell me i'm handsome" gojo looks into your eyes. his piercing gaze makes you freeze in place. his face is too close to yours, you feel even more embarrassed to know he can see you blushing.

"t-that's not very appro-"

"oh come on! i know you want to say it" he smiles.

hypocrite.

you are a hypocrite. if this was any other person, you would have been scared shitless. yet here you are; heart beating fast, empty minded, an uncomfortable wetness growing stronger.

the sexual tension is so strong. you feel nervous, whatever you say will break the tension or make it reach its breaking point. and you don't know which one you prefer.

you stay silent.

gojo looks into your big eyes, face so close that you wonder if he'll kiss you anytime soon.

"if you're not gonna admit, i'll help you with it" he steps back. "sit on the desk" he orders, voice dark and strong. you stand in disbelief. gojo walks over to his desk while slowly taking off his watch. "you comin' or not?"

you walk over to his desk and sit obediently. your legs are closed, your nervousness can be read from your posture.

"don't be shy, you're in good hands" gojo suddenly kneels and places his palms on your knees. he looks up at you with puppy eyes. "may i?"

you bite the inside of your cheeks and nod. you unbutton your pants and rest your palms next to you. satoru grabs the hem of your baggy jeans. you lift yourself as satoru easily takes your jeans off. your baby pink, cotton panties are exposed in a comical way. satoru laughs at the contrast; your heavy and dark makeup, resting bitch face, and all black clothes hide pretty pink underwear under it. and satoru feels like one hell of a lucky man to be able to witness this.

satoru slides his hand in between your legs and lightly separates them, exposing your sopping panties. satoru's delighted to see you as excited as him. after all, you seemed scared at first.

his soft, juicy lips lay soft kisses all across your plump skin as he makes his way up to your panties. his demeanor suddenly changes, and he rips your panties beastly. one hand lowers your body further to reveal your folds better. satoru doesn't wait another second.

gojo licks your folds, all the way from your hole to cilit. his tongue masterfully dances around the delicate skin, and runs around your clit. your shy moans fill the office room. you cherish the view below you. his broad shoulders are about to rip through his expensive shirt, white hair buried between your legs, long fingers gripping your legs firmly. he plants a firm kiss on top of your clit that makes you shiver. he sucks on the delicate skin and leaves it with a tiny plop sound. he continues untill you're a moaning mess. and god, you hate to admit this, but she was right. he knows how to fuck good.

"gosh, do you do this to all of your students?" the sudden adrenaline rush takes over you, but the embarrassment follows quickly after. for a second, you're scared he'll get mad and stop, but he doesn't.

"i don't. but don't think you'll be my favorite student after this or something" he looks at you with half lidded eyes.

his warm tongue fucks your wet hole until you feel weak in your knees. you wonder how good his cock feels if he can entertain you this much with his tongue. his tongue pushes inside your hole, letting your sweet juices roll down to his throat. he's so amused at how much you're enjoying yourself, it makes his excitement only grow harder. in a few seconds, he'll fuck you till you can't walk out his office.

"s-sir!" you squirm with his touch.

"yes?" he looks up in a mischievious manner and makes gesture at you, as if you were raising a hand to speak. you roll your head back and laugh before grabbing his hair and pushing him back in.

satoru lays a flat tongue on your clit. the pressure is enough to make your legs twitch. he holds himself there for a moment, waiting for your to beg for more. and you do, you really do.

satoru runs his tongue up and down on your clit, making the pointy tip of his tongue push the skin further as he runs his tongue back up with each lap. the pointy tip draws circles around your clit, around and around. god, he feels so good. he might even cum if he continues more. it's the first time he's ever felt so good giving head to someone. your helpless little squeaks, your shy face and confident hand buried in his hair...

knock knock

you quickly turn around to face the door

"professor gojo? i brought the books" a male voice calls. "can i come in?"

gojo gets up with a sinical smirk on his face, and gently pushes you by your back down.

"give me a second!" he shouts at the door as he takes off his belt and lays it under the desk. he sits down on his chair and calls you down with his two fingers. you instantly obey, kneeling down to his knee level. gojo pushes his chair further under the desk so that you can't be seen. you quickly unbutton his jeans before gojo calls the man inside.

you grab the hem of his underwear and push it down to expose his hard cock. it's dark, your view is limited, but you make the best of it. you hear footsteps get closer, so you hold your breath. you hesitate, you're terrified of getting caught.

"so, about tomorrow's meeting..." a faint voice fills your surroundings. your heart beats fast, and your hands shakily grab his tip.

gojo's surprised at this hesitation. maybe you really do need some help after all. he pretends to listen to what the man is yammering away about. he sneaks his hand down to table and cautiously pushes your head to mouth his length. the sudden push startles you, but it gives you the push you needed.

once gojo's palm leaves your head, you start slowly taking in his dick. you hear him exhale casually, before he responds to the man. he's big, so it takes you a while to fully take him inside. you pull your head back, and lick along his cock.

"...so i figured we would go with another plan..." gojo continues. once you swirl your tongue around his tip, licking the thick precum, finally getting a taste of him. you hear his voice shake for a second. satoru pretends to cough. he must be sensitive on his tip, you figure, and focus on teasing his tip.

you start rubbing his length where your mouth can't reach. every time you release his cock, you quickly swirly your tongue on his tip so that he shakes slightly, making him shift in his chair to not expose your affair to the clueless man. you repeat: suck, pump, release, twirl. suck, pump, release, twi-

satoru spasms on his chair once again as your tongue touches his tip. you think he's cumming for a moment, but those thoughts disappear once you feel a strong hand grab you by your hair, pulling you away from his cock.

"see you tomorrow, satoru" the man says before he leaves the room. with the door closing, satoru pulls back. in a moment, you find yourself picked up like a cat and sat on the table.

"you think you're funny?" gojo growls. "teasing me like that? in front of my colleague?" his eyebrows are furrowed and jaw is clenched. he looks terrifying.

"i-i thought you wanted me to-"

"getting spoiled, hm? do you need to be disciplined?" it's almost as if gojo was searching for a reason to be mad at you, to fuck you like you mean nothing to him.

before you could respond, gojo discards your crop top and leaves you bare chested and cold. satoru can't decide whether the twitching of his dick is caused by the shock of you not wearing a bra to meet your professor or how arousing your perky, plump tits look in front of him. whatever it is, it's enough to make his beasty look go darker.

gojo hisses with what feels like frustration. he wants you, he wants you now, and he cannot waste another second. in a moment, you're pressed down onto the desk, on your chest with two strong hands pulling your ass up high. the wooden desk is warm, yet the hotness of your body combined with the cooler desk makes your body shiver. it doesn't help that gojo's teasing your entrance with his tip either. you whine under his touch, signaling him to go further in. he's amused at your neediness. you want to use your words, but you end up only being able to whine and groan. it's cute, adorable. satoru wonders how you'd be once he's done with you.

"what should i do?" gojo teases. he places his tip in your entrance, only for your hole to stretch enough to take the head in. the feeling is overwhelming even now, and you know it will hurt once he fully inserts himself.

well, they don't say curiosity kills the cat for no reason.

"p-please, f-fuck..." you whisper, tears pooling in your eyes slowly as frustration and tension grow bigger.

"hm? what was that?" gojo leans in closer to your face, making his cock enter a little more. you whimper with the new feeling. it's more painful, yet somehow very intimate.

"p-please..." you quietly respond again.

"we talked this through. speak up, don't be shy!"

you squeeze the papers scattered on the table, trying to from words, but your mind is blank.

"embarrassed? if it helps, princess, no one can hear you" gojo whispers. the irony. gojo satoru, the nonchalant extrovert that warns you in a craven tone; and you, the shy, anxious little girl, soon screaming your lungs out, begging him to fuck you.

"god, just fuck me!" you scream. it's the start gojo needed, and finally, he can unleash himself into you.

gojo slides his length inside without waiting for you to adjust to him fully. your walls stretch and shrink within a second, as he pulls himself almost completely before entering himself fully once again. your wet hole takes him fully, squeezing every inch of his thick cock. your walm, velvety walls make gojo dizzy with pleasure. his voice switches from manly groans to helpless whimpers. and you, gosh, you're a complete mess. your hair falls over your face, but you're too busy getting railed into oblivion to pick it up. you helplessly grab the edges of the desk in an attempt to gather yourself, but it's no use. the only thing you can do is scream out his name, the only thing you can think of.

"fuck..." gojo hisses into your ear. he grabs a fistful of your hair, finally opening your face. he grabs you closer to his chest and holds you in position by your throat as he uses his other hand to help you catch the rhythm of his thrusts. your back instantly arches, and you need to hold on to his tighs to not fall off. you gasp for breath as he mercilessly pounds into you behind your back. the slapping sounds are too far away from you. your vision gets blurry. it feels good, it shouldn't feel good, but it does. he moves as if he wants to hurt you, to take revenge. he's ruthless, contrary to how softly he kissed your cunt and how sweet he called your name earlier.

"yeah? feels good, hm?" gojo turns your face to his. your wet eyelashes, red cheeks wet with tears, mouth shiny with saliva... what a view he had. and him; his white hair always perfectly in place is now all over his forehead, sweat glistening his long neck, and tight muscles showing under the thin fabric of his shirt. and his eyes... his eyes screaming wildly, violently; yet his gaze is soft and caring. gojo realizes too, as he loosens his grip on your neck, and slows down his tempo. you inhale, cheeks puffed up and head slightly tilted back. gojo takes advantage of the vulnerability of the moment. satoru's soft lips lock with yours in a passionate kiss. he holds your chin in place, and you help him by grabbing his wrist. his tongue dances over yours, and all over your lips. wetness covers your lips. it's messy, you both miss your lips as satoru continues thrusting, but it's more romantic this way. you're both craving each other, something neither of you had realized before this exact moment. your heart beats even faster for a second, as you want to be like this forever. even with his most violent desire, he's so caring and romantic. you know it's all meaningless, that none of these matter, and that your affair will meet its end once he decides he's had enough. so you want to be in this moment forever.

"don't stop" you breathe in his mouth and look into his eyes. satoru's cock twitches inside you, his pace slows down. he slips himself out. did you say something wrong? did he realize what he's doing?

you look at him, confused. satoru's face is impossible to read, he just stands there looking at you. the sudden silence makes you anxious once again. you back up and hit your leg into the desk.

satoru grabs you by your leg as you almost lose your balance. he gently pushes you down by your shoulders and sits you down. he lowers his body before grabbing your knees and making you wrap them around his hips. he unbuttons his shirt but doesn't take it off. his toned abs are finally exposed. you examine every curve on his body, his chest.

satoru locks his lips with yours again. he's softer now. it's like he's known you since forever, like his tongue knows how it's supposed to move inside your mouth. this time, you don't shiver, but a warmness follows down your spine. you cusp his cheek as you deepen the kiss.

there you are, warm light framing your bodies under the sunset, bodies locked. where you end is where satoru begins. your bodies move in harmony. he gently rolls his hips into you, and you lift your hips to meet his. not leaving each others' embrace for a second. what happened so suddenly? is this the beast you were so scared of?

"yes... yes..." you moan into his mouth.

"yeah? you like it, baby?" he asks with a soft voice. you move your head and bury it into his neck. you grab his broad shoulders under his shirt tightly, making sure you're gentle. but you can't help it, you're about to snap. you dig your nails into his skin. he pants and moans into your ear. his voice gets shaky, he sounds so pathetically needy. you realize he needs you as much as you need him.

satoru holds you closer to his chest and embraces you as he fucks through your climax. his steady pace strengthens the tightness down your abdomen. you feel the tingling travel all over your body, as you beg satoru to continue.

"you close, baby? want me to finish inside you, hm?" he asks with a raspy voice. he already knows the answer.

"sa-satoru..." you breathe into his skin.

"look into my eyes" he calls your name. "fuck, look at my eyes"

you tilt your head and meet his glassy, baby blue eyes. he looks so vulnerable in this moment. satoru kisses you once more before he rests his forehead onto yours. his steady pace doesn't change, as you both wait to reach the end.

the knot inside your body tightens and tightens, until it's impossible to stand it. your body spasms under him, and you can only call out his name.

"satoru!" you squirm, not leaving his touch for a second.

"come on baby, cum for me" he pants. "my pretty little girl, you're doing so good"

you let out one last shaky breath and lose control. you shake and spasm, but satoru holds you tightly in place. he rides your climax, as he chases his own. he plants soft kisses all over your face as you lose your mind. your whole body's tingly, mind fuzzy, and numb. you stay there, watching satoru's breath get faster.

you grab both of his cheeks and look into his eyes. you don't look away or move, you hold him in place. his shiny eyes look into yours, amazed at how beautiful you are, how pretty you are for him. and how you're his, in this moment, he's yours.

satoru moves hips further once more before his thrusts stop. his moves come to a full stop. he doesn't avert his gaze, as he slaps his hips into you once more. the warmness washes over you as he empties himself deep inside you. satoru whispers your name, followed by a shaky moan. he stands still for a second, lets his cock rest inside you for a moment as you both stand in silent. he's lost in your embrace, and so are you.

all your anxieties from earlier wash away. he's right, he definitely made sure you like him. and all the papers you ruined, the ones he's supposed to show his students, he will have to think about later.

"you really are very handsome"

gojo's comeback might have taken shorter than mine, but hey, better late than never right? lol anyways, sorry for the long wait and sorry, this isn't the unboxing smut. i suddenly felt the urge to write another jjk teacher/student fic but it's a little more legal now at least. i'm also obsessed with gojo again. hope you enjoyed your meal! (ok but why do my snopsises lowkey eat harder than the fic itself)

this was... easier than i thought it would be. i missed writing so much and haven't felt this much fun and ease writing anything in such a long time! i'm so excited for jjk season 2 and the manga's progress. i think this is another jjk summer yall. also, i'm doing an unofficial internship this summer! so, since i like being active when i'm busy with daily life stuff, who knows, i might become active again

hope you guys liked it! see you next time you horny emo slut ʕ•́ᴥ•̀ʔっ

#spicy #gojo #gojo satoru #gojo smut #jujutsu kaisen smut #jjk smut #gojo satoru smut #satoru gojo smut #jujutsu kaisen imagine #jjk imagines #gojo satoru x reader #jujutsu kaisen gojo #mdni #zee comeback era #i need him all the way inside me #pussy so good he fell in love #thats what a dark emo bitch does to you

1K notes · View notes

chaotickimchi · 4 months

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Killing Your Darlings - A guide on writing death

(Inspired by some writing tips I saw on pinterest. I decided to try my hand at a “writing death” guide. Small disclaimer, these are suggestions or things to consider, there is no rule book on writing death and your story/characters will ultimately play a role in the shape and shades you colour in your scenes with.)

SHOW DON’T TELL?

How does your character discover the death? Is it really necessary to show the body to the audience?

Consider this, which will have more impact on your character, watching someone die or getting a phone call and hearing the news from afar? Depending on your story, it could be more gutwrenching if your character isn’t there to say their final goodbye. Sometimes not showing the body can be more devastating. Don’t underestimate your readers empathy and imagination, if your characters have a very strong bond, severing that tie from a distance can be incredibly impactful. Just because your character dies, doesn’t mean you have to show the body. If that’s the case for you, then you don’t have to worry about describing the “death scene” at all.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Writing a murder mystery or a battle? Well, I suppose your character will see a lot of shit, time to describe the Dead Darling.

Corpse. Cadaver. Body. Remains. Carcass. The Deceased.

Several words refer to a dead body and they aren’t all created equally! You wouldn’t call your character’s dear old granny a “carcass” for example, and how many of us use the term “cadaver” to describe human remains in a casual setting? Consider the context, who is speaking, what is their relation to the Dead Darling? The use of a particular noun can change the weight and mood of the scene, there’s a reason your local funeral director doesn’t go around saying “CARCASS” to grieving widows/widowers, it sounds harsh and nasty. Maybe your character is in denial and doesn’t even describe the Dead Darling as “dead”, instead they view them as “like a doll” or “impossibly still” or looking like they’re asleep.

Context matters, so consider the relationship between the Dead Darling and the character and also the situation they are in. Take the following as a rough example;

Detective Mc Dude has been called to a scene, he’s given a rough description of the victim over the radio as he drives to the scene. He arrives and to his horror, he recognises the body as that of his secret lover. His colleague joins him and fills him in as Detective Mc Dude tries to gather himself. “Detective, the remains were found this morning by a jogger. We’ve yet to make an I.D …” Detective Mc Dude’s mind is reeling as he wrestles against his inner turmoil and the need to maintain his composure and act professionally. Later, he goes to the coroner to discuss the autopsy results. The coroner describes the injuries they have discovered on the corpse. Detective Mc Dude begins to build his case.

While the example lacks a lot of detail and flourish, I do hope it helps illustrate how the weight shifts around with the use of different nouns throughout the example. The coroner in this example feels no attachment to the Dead Darling, this is their job, they see a corpse and try to gather evidence. Detective Mc Dude recognises her body, whereas his colleague sees the remains. Do you see the difference there? Mc Dude sees the person, her body, his colleague doesn’t know who she is or what her story is, he has less connection to her and he sees the remains, it feels more distant and impersonal compared to Mc Dude.

This might be a bit of a head scratcher, the differences are very subtle but can become really pronounced when weilded well in a scene. My advice is to pay attention to discussions of death in real life or books/tv/films etc. Read your paragraphs out loud and see how they feel, sometimes you can intuit what fits and what doesn’t. You may notice things that surprise you, for example, news readers often say “a body has been found” or “the remains of a man/woman were found”, whereas you and your friends/family are more likely to describe a deceased loved one with “his or her body”.

A detail as small as using personal pronouns can carry significant weight, likewise, the type of language used can convey a lot of emotion. His/her body can be used to create a sense of closeness or sympathy, corpse can suggest a clinical or distant view, carcass or remains could indicate a hint of barbarism or malice. That's not to say that “corpse” can’t be used sympathetically or that “body” can’t be used to convey malice, it’s worth experimenting with which types of nouns you want to use.

YOU LOOK LIKE DEATH WARMED UP- OH WAIT

Death comes in many shapes, sizes, colours, smells, and forms. A character sitting at someones sickbed watching them fade away will have a completely different vibe from Detective Mc Dude discovering a stomach-churning murder scene. Unless the dead body randomly falls out of the sky, chances are your character might notice some context clues or details in the environment before we get to the body. This could be anything from the beeps of machines and the sterile hospital smell, or maybe there’s a blood trail on the floor and the sweet stench of death clings to the air. It’s rather likely you’ll set up a scene before you zoom in on the finer details of the body, what kind of things would catch your character's attention?

Now your character has come across a body… What do they see? The glassy dead-eyed stare, mouth twisted in a painful grimmace, the massive gaping chest hole where the facehugger popped out- Wow, that escalated quickly…

Think for a second, what might your character notice first; look of terror in the victims eyes or THE MASSIVE FUCKING WOUND IN HIS CHEST… I know, the blue lips and glassy eyes might feel like a great place to start, but I’m willing to bet a massive pool of blood would catch your character's attention first, they’d probably have to get closer to see the look of terror in their eyes! Consider the larger details if your character is further away and hone in on the finer details if/when they are closer.

Not all deaths are quite so … gruesome. Maybe someone died peacefully, closed their eyes, smiled, and slipped away in a dream. Describing the “look of death” doesn’t have to be all that far removed from how you write regular emotions and expressions, except in death these expressions get locked in or frozen in time. A dead body isn’t all that different from a living one when you think about it, so why would you reinvent the descriptive wheel? A living or a dead body could “wear a painful grimace,” let your character read whatever expressions they can uncover when they find the Dead Darling.

Smells, sounds and other sensations. You don’t have to go ham with descriptions, sometimes less is more, it really is down to you, but another thing you might want to consider are the smells, and sounds going on around them. Maybe your character disassociates a little and you forgo the visual stimuli entirely and need to express death using other senses, maybe it happens in a very dark room, or maybe you just want to draw in other descriptive elements into your death scene.

Sounds: Siren blaring and alarms bleeping, the faintest little ‘huff’ as they draw their final breath, the ominous death-rattle cough, piercing shrieks suddenly cut short, a gutwrenching crunch-squelch, the click of a switch and the poignant silence of the life support machine ceasing.

Smells: bleach/disinfectant, latex gloves, blood/gore, rot and decay, sickly-sweet or vomit-inducing, smog/smoke and fire, the smell of the Dead Darlings perfume, the environment (e.g. outside perhaps the smell of death is swept away by the powerful salty-sea spray or masked by the stink of the sewer the body was dumped in…)

CONCLUSIONS

There’s still a lot to explore, but I hope this has given you some food for thought when considering death in your stories. There’s more to explore, such as what happens after death (funerals, burials, anniversaries), writing scenes where your character murders/is murdered, the various ways characters can die… Faking character deaths … like there is a WHOLE LOT but this just covers a few things I find helpful to consider or at least think about when I read/write stories or generally listen to how language works around me.

Good luck killing you Darlings ;)

#writing guide #writing advice #writing tips #writing resources #writing help #how to kill your darlings in you stories

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molluskmirage · 8 months

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the boogeyman effect following Bbh from purgatory 1 has been a very fascinating phenomenon.

there is alot of residual and lingering opinions of Bad from both characters and fans and its been interesting because having watched Bads pov he really didnt do anything more then what others did in purgatory. Q!Phil is mad because Bad terrorized his team but bad had far less kills then Tubbo, and plenty other teams were around terrorizing others Fit slaughtered Tina and soulfires farmers (most of which then never returned)

Q!Tubbo is mad for ‘day 12’ for a poor decision Bad made, but Bad was carrying the team mostly alone for many many hours the whole 2 weeks (the most out of anyone on the team) I think he could be forgiven for not having the clearest decision making skills running ragged and getting killed.

Q!Bagi feels betrayed by bad and has been more comfortable around tubbo since p1 but tubbo murdered her before she could say a word in p1 and Bad asked for her consent first before doing so.

Q!Etoiles is salty about the 2v1 but he and Fit started it by attacking tubbo alone who then had to run to bad and it was a 2v2 before then becoming a 2v1 as Fit backed away injured

Q!Phil has also mentioned that bad has not taken responsibility for his actions and this is echoed a lot in fan spaces but Bad is constantly taking on blame for things he may have only been adjacent too. He’s said he’s killed a lot of people, he jokes that he’d do it again. He doesnt often show remorse for his actions which I think is more what some are after but he does acknowledge things he doesn’t pretend it never happened. He told Pepito he was a monster. And anytime some express anger towards bad he respects their feelings (that doesn’t mean he’d chose to act differently or feel remorse in such actions but he doesn’t tell anyone theyre not allowed to feel that way)

its a fascinating subject to me because this effect has carried over so strongly within the space despite the fact Bad didn’t even have the highest kills in p1 for soulfire (it was Tubbo by quite a margin) yet Tubbo is often unnamed as the wrongdoer. Bagi set up Bad for death, while it didn’t come to fruition she still did that to Bad. Bad could not do anything but run when red team took on the bounty system which was excruciating to watch. Red also showed no mercy when the boats arrived and killed Bad the sole player for blue leaving his body in a zone that would kill a naked player.

Bad did do wrong he spawn killed Jaiden. However his stalking home bases and killing others in general was no different then all of the other skilled players repertoire. Bad had to play offensively for his team the majority of the time as he was one of the few that could, yet the boogeyman effect holds onto him and warps even his own members perceptions after the fact. Q!Tina as an example very enthusiastic about letting Bad loose in p1 too then scolding him for actions he took under her instruction.

The fan narrative has been the most acutely difficult to manage as the effect is almost to mystic proportions and finding disdain for even mundane actions Bad takes and reading into those as disingenuously as possible always set on more then retribution but truly an end to his character. Which again having watched Bads POV I havent been able to discern anything remarkable that any other character hasnt also partook in.

The difference I have noted is that Bad will always consider himself in the wrong regardless if his actions had justifiable reason behind it. Dapper told Bad to win in purgatory. After purgatory Bad put himself and Dapper down as ‘oh thats just something Dapper would say hes just bloodthirsty, but narratively Dapper has committed self harm in order to protect his siblings and other islanders ((an issue Dapper unfortunately sees in his father and perpetuates himself)) believing he is nothing more then a tool to help those he loves, he would not risk his siblings lives for bloodthirsty humor. Bad knows this but when faced with the hate others saw in him he waves off both his and his sons merit buckling down. Bad and Dapper have dark humor but are always making gifts and finding ways to help others. There is nothing on the island Bad is more set to protect then the eggs and this thought with Dappers message, Q!Bad really thought he needed to go all out to protect them, even still he held back a lot and would 2nd guess because he wanted to be absolutely certain of the egg’s safety.

He wasnt without reason yet with the boogeyman effect looming over his reasons never seem to be able to hold a candle to the more popular characters, and he often concedes a lot to it. He says it with a laugh, tease, and is sassy with it but still he concedes to others perceptions of him as he doesnt want to override others feelings. It can be a bit exhausting as things are blown out of proportion to what they were in originality but on a social breakdown of how things and information travels its very very interesting and I have been enjoying the dive even if it stings sometimes with reflective thoughts.

#Qsmp bbh Purgatory after thoughts discourse

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54625 · 4 months

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What I want out of a QSMP season two.

(Some of these points may be a little divisive - it's just my personal opinion. Content creators will be referred to as players for conciseness. QSMP as it has been for the past year, for the sake of this post, will be referred to as "season 1".)

1. TAKE A FUCKING BREAK.

I do not want to see the QSMP coming back in less than two months at the very, very least. Five or six months to a year is ideal, in my opinion.

This is for a few reasons. Firstly, the obvious; I want Quackity Studios to take the necessary time to make 100% sure that everyone who has worked, does work, or will work for them is compensated. Not just this, but I want the communication among the studio to become streamlined and consistent, for the purpose of maintaining the quality of the SMP, the quality of life of the employees, and entirely avoiding a repeat of the previous situation. Any less will be unacceptable, and prove that all people in charge, including and especially Quackity himself, have not learned their lesson.

Secondly, I am very sure that a lot of players will lack or have completely lost their motivation for the QSMP, due to the nature of the last few months of season 1. I am sure that those who had a lot of lore written up and had to scrap it or cut it short are probably still quite sore about it, and may not have the energy to pick the QSMP story back up. This is especially true if they had already given their characters a canon ending and don't want to overshadow it. When creating a new SMP, or a new season of an SMP, you first and foremost need player motivation to be high. Waiting several months would ensure that the wound of player lore being ruined would have mostly healed over by the start of season 2.

Thirdly, viewer engagement will always be an important thing to take into consideration when creating an SMP that will be televised. The large majority of QSMP fans are completely burned out from watching. Leaving a large gap between seasons 1 and 2 would let fans, who have had an exhausting last few months, recover and reset. It will also allow hype and anticipation to build up when things eventually start being teased and announced again. Fans have a lot of disdain for this project at the present moment, and waiting for a while between seasons will not only let fans know that serious action is being taken behind the scenes, but also will let the sour attitude a lot of fans have right now wear off over time.

2. RESET. FOR REAL THIS TIME.

Probably my most controversial take on this topic will be; I fully believe that if a QSMP season 2 is to occur, it should be a completely new server. By completely new I naturally mean a new map, but also ZERO LORE CONTINUATION. I know this is a hot take, but I personally believe QSMP season 2 is a perfect chance for a completely fresh start, and a fresh start cannot happen if it still takes place in the same universe.

We all know that season 1's lore was overwhelming, slightly confusing, and at the end of the day, completely disjointed. We all fell in love with the terrifying Federation and Codes, yes, we all loved the basis of the story; a group of people from different countries get stranded on a "perfect" paradise island controlled by a governmental body that won't let them leave, and have to work together; but at the end of the day, the lore of season 1 became messy. Very messy. Instead of trying again and again to salvage it, the best option is probably to just start again.

Put the same players in a different map, give them a completely different premise, and let the lore unfold anew. Which leads into my next point.

3. PLAYER DRIVEN LORE.

Let the players develop the story. If a player has an overarching storyline they are unfolding themselves, prioritise letting them do so. All of the best lore in season 1 was player created, and player enacted; Cellbit's regret arc, the happy pills, Cellbit's murdering Fed workers arc, literally everything Fit ever did, Roier's lore, ect ect ect. Server admins should only intervene in player's lore when directly asked, and big changes to the server's status quo should only occur when there is no active lore to be interrupted, everyone agrees it should happen, and it would actively drive engagement up, rather than down.

The best case scenario for a QSMP season 2, in my opinion, is for the server admins and Quackity to come up with an exciting and engaging premise for a brand new universe with brand new characters, to place the players in an interesting themed map, and just let them loose. Let the lore build naturally, and see what comes of it.

IN CONCLUSION.

I vehemently disagree with people who believe the QSMP should not have a season 2. The QSMP is a brilliant idea, and its noble goals shine through all of the incredible friendships and memories it, and only it, made. There is no other server like QSMP.

The act of uniting people from all over the world has been proven to be an extremely important and worthwhile goal. I, genuinely, admire Quackity for his passion in this, and for understanding that this thing should not be easily given up on or let go. Drastic changes need to occur, but the QSMP is bigger than just a Minecraft server; it represents so much unity, community, and love.

It is worth saving.

I hope, desperately and for the sake of everyone involved, past future and present, that the QSMP can come back better and stronger than ever, continuing to further its goals; to tell amazing stories, to forge impossible friendships, to spark joy and laughter, and to bring people together no matter the barriers keeping them apart.

Thank you for reading.

#qsmp #yer man wrote an entire literal essay completely willingly #if only I'd had this energy for my GCSEs

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katerinaaqu · 4 months

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So how old is Odysseus exactly?

A small Odysseus age analysis based on a description in the Iliad

Many make speculations of his age, me included. Interestingly we have several hints in both art and the scripts but is hard to pinpoint. In general Odysseus is considered old or one of the oldest generations among the poems.

In art he is always depicted bearded which is something only men in maturity have in ancient greek art (somewhere between the late 20s early 30s) and his beard is full indicating that he is at least in his 30s. Most art of his, ranges from the events of the Trojan war till his journey and the murder of the suitors. In all cases we see him having a full beard. So it is pretty hard to determine his age but we know he was at least 30 in the war making him at his final 40s or early 50s when he comes back home depending on interpretation.

In the Iliad in the 23rd rhapsody/book we have an interesting description by Antilochus

"And this one (Odysseus) is of an earlier/previous generation of earlier men; we call him "omogeronda" (early-old man, green old age); yet he is really hard to be competed against in speed (lit: his feet are troublesome to compete) by the Achaeans, except from Achilles"

For starters he clearly states that he is "one generation older" (προτέρης γενεής) but he also calls him with the interesting word "ωμογέρων" which means "raw old man" literally aka "not ripe old age". The word has two possible interpretations; one that he is a "green old man" aka he just began to grow older or to pass to old age and two "a vigorous and lively old man" 😉

Now it could be a tender nickname that they call him "old" but I think the first interpretation fits better to the description. So we know that Odysseus was already mature man when he entered the war (bearded=somewhere in his early 30s and above) and he spent 10 years in the war. We know that he is "one generation older".

The age of marriage differs in ancient greece (for example in 5th century BC Athens, 300 years after Homer's time and almost 1000 years after the time Trojan war took place, the age of marriage for men ideally was 30 years old when they had served their dues although it is unclear how often it was being done this way) but we are to expect that a man in his middle 20s was expected to have at least considered marriage if not already have a spouse and kids. So if Odysseus is "one generation older" on average he is around 20 years older than younger individuals (anywhere between 15-20 years could be closer) such as Diomedes or Antilochus here or Aias. Nestor who was considered an old man was in his 60s. He was still active on the field just not the same way as characters like Odysseus were.

Given the characterization "ωμογέρων" in the Odyssey and the description of him being a generation older than many young heroes I should calculate Odysseus is in the same age group as people like Agamemnon, making him older than other characters like Patroclus who was also generally older (closer to his early or even middle 30s if we assume that Achilles who was repeatedly said to be very young he was in his middle to final 20s during the war). That would make Odysseus a middle aged man and therefore closer in his 40s at the final year of the Trojan war.

My rough estimation is that he is in his early or mid-40s when this conversation takes place. He is middle-aged and yet he is vigorous, sportive and fast (so much so that only Achilles is said to be easily competing against him while most achaeans have hard time to), he is also strong given the many times his strength in spear, sword or bow were praised but at the same time he is obviously past the age of youth. That would make him in his early 50s at least when he arrives in Ithaca.

But what do you guys think? Agree or disagree let me know to the comments below! ^_^

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igotanidea · 1 year

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The spell: Dean Winchester x reader

„Sam? This better be important ‘cause I’m kinda in the middle of something.”

“I’m using the emergency line, right?”

“Last time Dean used the emergency line it was about lack of pie. I swear he’s older but acts like a complete child sometimes.” Y/N shook her head not that Sam could see that through the phone.

“Yeah.” He agreed “But I would never….”

“Remember the time when you lost a shoe?”

“That was one time Y/N! And it was…. Under different circumstances…..”

“Oh, relax, I’m just teasing. But seriously, go on and tell me what is this about, cause I really am busy.“

“It actually is about Dean…”

“Oh, I had a feeling this day would be intense. What do we deal with? Demon? Jinn? Shapeshifter? Oh, please tell me it’s shapeshifter, those are my favorites.

“A witch, in fact.”

“Fine by me.” Y/N shrugged, unaware that Sam’s words has a second meaning. Only the prolonging silence on the other side made her a bit suspicious “Sam? You’re still there?”

“Yes.”

“So? Where do we meet? At the motel or at the crime scene?”

“Stop talking like a CSI!”

“I am CSI, Sam! Now again, where do we meet?”

“At the motel. But please…..”

She did not let him finish, since Sam was making her impatient by straining information. So she had no idea what was coming for her.

***

“Guys?” Y/n entered the motel room without knocking and two pair of eyes landed on her figure. Sam was his usual self, calm and collected, sitting by the desk, working. But Dean…. Dean was distracted, in the lack of better word. Pacing around like he was suffering from the sudden fit of anxiety. “What the…..?”

“ Should have listened to me….” Sam muttered, while his older brother took one stride towards her and wrapped his arm around her without any word.

“Um… good to see you too, Dean, but what’s with the PDA?”

“Can I just hold you?” he mumbled, begin so out of character

“Yeah… I mean, sure” she frowned, hugging him back. This was unexpected, to say the least. They have been together for a couple of months now, but the older Winchester were mostly keeping his laid back attitude in the relationship. “But…..” she hesitated, but stopped the question. This was actually pretty nice. Having Dean in her embrace like this, being the one he was turning to. It made her heart stutter a bit.

“But what?” he asked pulling away

“You know what, nevermind” she smiled brightly brushing hair from his face “if you need me….”

“I always need you.” he burst without thinking

“ Oh….” She felt her heart skip a bit. That was definitely new and she wasn’t sure whether she should feel the warmth and happiness or rather get worried about his current state. “Um…that’s nice, Dean.” She hugged him again, at the same time peeking over Dean’s arm, mouthing words at Sam asking for explanation. “How about you sit here for a moment, Dean, huh? I just gotta talk to your brother, who surely owns me some explanation.”

“I don’t want to let go of you…..” Dean pouted

“I’m not going anywhere, I swear” she smiled and pushed him onto the chair next to Sam and talking the third left spot. Dean immediately leaned towards her and grabbed her hand, caressing it gently.

“Y/N…..” he turned towards her, begging for attention, even though she was doing nothing more than giving it to him

“Yes, Deanie?” her eyes focused on her boyfriend without any sign of annoyance.

“Come sit on my lap.”

“What?” now she was blushing

“Come on…” Dean patted his thigh but seeing her becoming reluctant, just reached for her, grabbed her waist and put her where he needed her, hugging her to his chest from behind.

“Um…’ she muttered, distracted by his hands. He was doing nothing, just holding her and she was already melting. This was dangerous.

“do you want me to leave you two alone?” Sam laughed, but once he met with Y/n’s murderous gaze covered it by coughing

“Talk!” she shout at him “What happened?”

“You remember when I mentioned the witch?” Sam started

“Yes, of course. Now please, cut to the chase! Not that I’m complaining, but I’d rather have the real Dean back. I want my bickering, teasing and sensitive on the inside boy.” Said boy were currently planting kisses on her neck. “Oh, god, I just can’t ….” She muttered, standing up from Dean’s lap immediately meeting with his sad eyes and mouth curved down. “I’ll be right back to you, sweetie, all right?” she smiled caressing his cheek and facepalming herself on the inside for calling him like that. What the heck was going on. Was it like the “it’s Tuesday again” situation? Did she wake up in alternative reality “Just stay here for a moment. And you.” she turned to Sam “you’re coming with me.”

***

“The charm?” fifteen minutes later Y/N and Sam were sitting in the booth in a crappy diner. The girl being herself ordered herself some pancakes, leaving the younger Winchester to do the talking “Guess I should have connected the dots… what? why are you looking at me like that?” she swallowed a particularly big piece of her dish and frowned

“You and Dean are so similar when it comes to your favorite food.” Sam shook his head and smiled lightly

“I’m hungry! I’ve been on the field for hours and didn’t have breakfast so cut me some slack! Now back to the witch. What do we do to break the spell? Burn her? Capture her? Slave her?”

“We are not doing anything. I’ve already got her location and ….”

“Sam…” Y/N sighed, putting her fork down and looking him straight into the eyes “you know the rules. You know I can’t let you go alone.”

“I’m not asking.”

“I’m not answering .”

“You either leave me alone or Dean. Given his current love-sick puppy state I think it’s pretty clear who need the supervision.”

“Sam…..” her tone became a bit warning

“Come on, Y/N, you know I’m right. It’s an open and close case. No trouble I promise.”

“You always say that….” She muttered “Fine. You really left me no other options, did you?”

“Look on the bright side.” Sam flashed a smile “you get to spend some quality time with you boyfriend. Maybe even get a little action….”

“Shut up Winchester!”

***

“I’m back Dea…. Woah!” she barely get the chance to step through the door when Dean swept her off her feet and spun In the air. “Put me down! Put me down!”

“Oh I may put you down, but I’m not letting you get away, again.”

“Oh please…” she scoffed, but not honestly not being opposed to his actions and switching rather towards teasing him about it “I was gone for like fifteen minutes, surely you did not miss me that….”

She was cut off by his lips on hers. Damn, he was such a good kisser. And because of that spell also needy and maybe a bit desperate. Holy shit… Sam was right, it has been a while since….

“How’s that for not missing?” he asked cupping her cheek and brushing thumb over it. Oh, how she wanted to give in, let him pull her closer… Sad thing, she could not. It was like she told Sam in that diner- she was not opposed to clingy Dean, searching for affection, but this was not him. She needed the assurance that all of his actions were a conscious choice not the side effect of some witchcraft.

“How about we slow down a bit, huh?” she pulled away, or rather tried to pull away, since his large hands stopped her from doing so.

“But I need you…” he whined

“I know honey, but ….”

“What? Why are you always turning away from me?”

“I’m not turning away, love.”

“I love you Y/N.”

“I love you too, Dean and that is why I think you need some rest. Don’t you wanna lay down for just a bit?”

“As long as you stay with me.”

“I will. I promise. Now come on.” She grabbed his hand and lead him towards the motel bed. It was far from comfortable, but both Winchesters and Y/N were already used to that. The girl slowly pushed Dean onto the cushions and reached for the blanket to cover him, but he was way faster. When she moved towards the edge of the bed he grabbed her wrist and pulled her flush onto his chest, sneaking one hand under her shirt, tracing patterns on her bare skin. It was nice. It was really really nice, but she could smell his neediness with every inhale and exhale he was taking. So she moved a bit, just to look into his glistening eyes.

“What do you need, Dean? Tell me.”

“I just want to feel you next to me.”

“I think we got that covered “ she grinned “you practically got me caged here.”

“I’m sorry” he looked down, but she grabbed his chin and met his eyes again

“Stop it, Dean Winchester. You hear me, stop it. If I wanted out, you would never be able to stop me, but I chose to be here. So go on. Talk.”

“Can you just hold me?”

“Sure my pretty boy. Come here.” She laid on her back motioning for him to snuggle into her arms and put his head on her belly, arms locked around her waist. “It’s gonna be all right” she cooed running her fingers through his hair “We’re gonna get you out of this mess. You are not alone, baby.”

***

Two hours later, she found out she fell asleep. The sun was slowly setting over the horizon and instinctively she turned onto the other side, hand searching for Dean but he was not there and her heart fluttered.

“Dean?” she mumbled getting up, rubbing her eyes and walking outside. He was standing by the railing, eyes fixed on the space “Hi….” She whispered slowly approaching him and wrapping arms around his waist, pulling herself closer.

“Hi baby.” He answered closing his eyes.

“Are you… back?”

“Guess Sam did some good work. And by himself. At this point I feel expendable. You two clearly can handle all this shit by yourself. “

“You idiot.” She smacked the back of his head in the lightest hit there ever was “Expendable. You are truly unbelievable. How much do you remember?” her voice trembled a bit.

“All of it.”

“Oh.” She gasped but then smiled “so you do remember the affectionate attitude?”

“Yes.”

“And how needy and whiny you were?”

“Yes.”

“And?” she tilted head trying to get any reaction out of him which clearly was going to be a little challenge. “Was it …. Was It just the spell.”

“No.”

“God, don’t piss me off, Dean.”

“It was all real, all right? Whatever charm this was it made me act the way I felt. Cause I do need you. And I should have told you that sooner.” He turned towards her and reached for her hand “you are important to me. Damn, Y/n, you know I love you, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, Dean.” She assured “you speak through your actions. And frankly ,the way you behaved was not about me. It was all about you.”

“How so?”

“You needed love. Affection. Some softness. Maybe it was all because of the fact you suppress all those needs? Cause you are reluctant to admit you have them? Hm?”

“I;m not even going to answer that.” He mumbled

“Dean, come on. We’re all humans… and yes, I believe that even despite you being a vessel for an angel, you are still human. It’s normal to need someone to hold you and love you. And you got me, so promise me, you won’t hide from me.”

“You want me to be open and honest?” he smirked

“Is that too much to ask for?”

“Yeah. Way, way too much. But I’ll try.”

“I can work with that.”

“Good. Now shut up and kiss me.”

“I thought the effects of the spell were over….” She tapped her chin in reverie

“Guess I do have to take action by myself” Dean mumbled leaning forward and capturing her lips in sweet, gentle, delicate kiss. It was not needy, not anymore. It was a promise from him to try and do better in a relationship. “Shall we take that inside?”

“You had to kill the moment” she rolled her eyes at him “Welcome back, you prick.”

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