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unhinged-summer-fun · 3 years

Text

flicker

(Max Phillips x F!Reader) | 22+

Rating: Mature (no smut, but foulmouthed language)

Word Count: 7817 (it wouldn’t let me stop writing)

Summary: You’re Max’s personal assistant. He needs you for a lot of things. Wants you for more.

Warnings: pining, nonchalant mentions of murder, etc., reader gets sick for a few paragraphs but not graphically. max is a perv. <3

A/N: this is my first reader insert fic!! Hope ya like it. Also, read/kudos on AO3.

“No, mom, I’m not an indentured servant to my boss. I’m just interested in doing a good job and building my career!” You shut the door to the car with one hip and scowl at the dusty mark left behind on your skirt. Damn it. “Quit trying to talk me out of a decision I made over two months ago!”

Your mother’s tirade of a response spills out into the air, as your face-grip on your phone fails and the device clicks to the speakerphone. “—You don’t need to serve another person to feel a sense of worth, honeybun.” You know arguing with the nickname would only make things worse.

“Everyone works for someone, mom. And I work for—”

“Need a hand with that?” Speak of the devil.

Your mom continues to prattle on until you give a clipped “gotta go” and hang up. You’re frozen in that moment, arms full of grocery bags and your purse and Max’ Saturday drink order. It’s his day off, but not yours, so you get to see him dressed down, comfortable. His broad shoulders are barely contained in a worn blue college tee shirt in a language you can’t read, and low-rise jeans that probably cost more than your monthly rent payment. The sudden glint of his shiny white teeth breaks you from your reverie.

“No, sir, I’ve got it. Perhaps the door, though?”

“Sure thing, honeybun.” A sudden flood of conflicting emotions replaces a flush of instinctual irritation. Max was a pervert at the best of times, and a walking HR disaster every morning he came in. Hearing that long-hated pet name on the same lips that called you sweet thing and sugartits like they were your name should have made you feel cool indifference, but this was suddenly more personal than all that. This was what your mother called you when she wanted to butter you up to bad news.

So really, you should have watched your step a little better.

When you fall, there’s half a second of breathtaking panic, the tip of your shoe having hit a white concrete step and sending you crashing down like a battle-axe. The latter half of that second is weightless wonder, a sudden presence of muscular arms pulling you from your rendezvous with the ground and steadying you at the next step. Max had been nearly at the front door when you’d taken your first step, but had used his supernatural vampire speed to come help you when you fell.

“Alright?” He asks, his breath just a little too soft for it to be genuine concern. You can feel the barest brush of his lips on the shell of your ear, and you wonder if it was just your imagination when he pulls back, as cool as he’d been just a moment ago. Seduction is half of what he does every workday. You shouldn’t be so affected by this. You nod, unsure if any words you might say would come out moaned and breathless. Max seems to pick up on your affect with a grin made of thick molasses: slow and dark and so sweet it makes you sick to see it so close. Luckily, the next few minutes pass in a blur, setting groceries and coffee down on the kitchen island and Max’ coffee table, respectively.

As his personal assistant, your duties aren’t tied to that of the company he works for. If he needed an executive assistant, he’d have one Turned and on payroll. But no. He wanted someone to handle the tedious parts of life he still had to deal with, though his life had ended years ago. That meant getting him groceries, driving his car to get detailed, making personal appointments and sending thank-you notes, picking up and sending out dry cleaning, meeting his weed guy, retrieving expensive coffee from the vamp café in downtown, for starters. Occasionally you had to incinerate a duffel bag of bloody belongings, but cognitive dissonance and extreme discretion had been skill requirements on the job posting.

There were downsides, but none of them were to do with his personality or attitude or undead status. Sometimes his vampire cohorts would try to enchant you, threaten to kill or turn or drink from you, and whenever Max was around, he was sure to put an end to that. When he wasn’t around, a simple pair of bewitched silver earrings and a matching choker he’d bought you seemed to do the trick. You had no intentions of becoming a vampire, and Max had no intentions of turning you. There was only so much fake tan that could conceal his true nature, and there were many things you could do that he couldn’t.

“Nearly had to gut a guy for these, so you better enjoy them.” You hold up the last box of farmers’ market strawberries, ripe and red and tempting.

“Gimme,” he says, abandoning his drink and crowding your space to pluck the strawberries out of your hands. You frown at his back when he turns to wash them in the sink. Normally, Max is very good about letting you do your job free of his help. Grocery day had its own routine, but he seemed adamant about his hard-won fruit.

You put the rest of the food away, and toss the expired things out of the fridge. It had taken quite a bit of unimpressed eyebrow raises to get Max to use the plastic bins for his blood bags, but you’re pleased to see he’s using the system you’d set up for him. He’s reaching for a bowl when you turn around to fold the bags, and you glimpse a tan, smooth stomach. You know the ab-building pills and devices he sells are bullshit, but for a hysterical moment you think he’s the perfect poster boy for it.

“I can cut those up for you, if you’d like,” you offer. He locks eyes with you and— fuck. There’s that molasses grin again, like he knows all your secrets and then some.

“You know I like to use my teeth,” Max says in that low rasp you can’t help but shuddering at whenever you hear it. You know that he’s using his seduction voice, his come climb on my lap voice. Unfortunately, for the relationship you have with him, he can act however he wants, and you have to remain professional. That fact is made even more abundantly clear when he continues, “Honeybun.”

You force a smile over your scowl, which lights up his dark eyes with amusement. You’ll kick yourself for showing even that barest bit of annoyance. He was a salesman long before he was a vampire. Leverage is his second language.

“Is there anything you need me to handle before I start my rounds, Mr. Phillips?” You ask in a curt tone.

“You’ve got a bit of dirt, here,” he says, moving faster than you can track with your eyes. He’s on you, or close to it, and his hand rests heavily over where you’d bumped your dusty car with your hip. He truly misses nothing. His hand is warm, somehow. You don’t know how, and don’t really care how, but for a single moment, all the porn you’d cum to, all the fantasies which had filled your bored mind, they all surge to the forefront of your thoughts and catch your tongue. Max’ tongue, however, never stops. “Maybe you should take it off while you do your chores.”

“That won’t be necessary,” you say on reflex, your core throbbing, crying, would have punched you if it had the means, because you rest your fingers over his wrist and remove it from your hip. “Enjoy your snack, sir.”

“Not sure it’ll fill me,” Max says, mostly to himself, but you know his words are calculated and deliberate. Deliberate in that he wants to pull that blush to your cheeks. He wants to see your throat bob with a rough swallow. He wants to hear your heart pound, your pulse race. He wants to see you fight all of that in the name of professionalism. He wants, he wants, he wants. He’s not a cruel man, but he is an insufferable tease.

And you curse yourself every day for liking it.

You catch your breath at the far end of his house. The housekeeper wouldn’t keep her mouth shut when she’d seen the blood, so you were stuck with doing the grunt work. Max thankfully put a tarp out for when he knew he’d be messy and kept the massive orgies to company property. The routine once again calmed your nerves, and you found solace in the cradle of his belongings within minutes.

You hardly see him whenever you work in the house, partly because you snapped at him not to micromanage and partly because he was almost never there. Whenever he had days off, Max liked to get out of town and drive. To where, you don’t know, because you never asked. Some people just needed solitude, but in a big postmodern monstrosity like his house, loneliness echoed and reflected on oneself a hundred times louder than it started out.

He isn’t old enough to have lost touch with the life he lived before, but you know that having his family ice him out after learning of his affliction hurts him even now, seven years on. He still looks like most new grad students, if better slept, and with all his success in business you’re not surprised. With as mercurial and opinionated as your mother is, she’d probably do the same as Max’ family, despite the affection she lords over you.

You’d been in the house yesterday afternoon, so most of what you’d cleaned is still spotless. Max hadn‘t had anyone over for dinner, so there was no bleach cycle to run. You did, however, take your skirt off for a moment to rub at the dirt while in the laundry room, but you worked fast.

Not fast enough.

It seems like Max Phillips has an innate sense of finding women in states of undress, and you have barely three seconds of time between hearing his approaching voice and the turn of the handle on the laundry room door. He cuts off his own question - something about frozen mangos and a blender replacement - when he sees your flustered expression, hears the rabbit-quick thump of your pulse. “What’s this?” He says, the hint of another smirk on his face.

“Was there something you needed?” You ask, rushed and a little breathless.

He keeps his eyes on you, raking up and down your form. “No.” The smirk emerges. You prepare for some other smart statement, but it never comes.

Your knees shake once he leaves the doorway. “Fuck,” you whisper into your hands. Your mind is already supplying suggestions of what he’d look like if he actually saw you in just your blouse and panties, how the lick of desire would spark in his eyes, how he’d push his bottom lip out into a point when he was actually trying to hide a smile. How his fangs would grow just a little, helpless to hunger like a fledgling creature of the night.

The rest of your chores go quick, and after a quick last-check, you grab your purse. “I’ve finished for the day, Mr. Phillips. I’ll be uptown most of the evening, if you need anything else.”

“Great,” he says, following you to the door. He opens it for you, guiding you out with a small push of his hand against the small of your back. “Drive safe.”

“Thank you, sir. I will.” You can’t wait to put this weird day behind you and just get a drink to forget it.

You make it all the way to the car before Max makes that impossible.

“Honeybun?” He asks, all fake nonchalance. “Your skirt is on backwards.”

You seriously, seriously consider faking your own death instead of getting up for work. If it weren’t for your boss having carte blanche access to your apartment and knowing what ‘dead’ actually looked like, you might have even gotten away with it. Still, the stupid sniffles make you reconsider a dirt nap. Max never seems to get sick, even when he eats really sick people. Perhaps he meant a different kind of sick.

Your head feels stuffed with cotton balls and your sinuses feel like water balloons. The comparison only seems to make more sense as you toss away another soggy tissue in disgust. You pull up your calendar, which is just Max’ calendar, and wince in the bright light. He’s meeting with other vamps for a social lunch, which, inexplicably, requires your presence. As if he knows you’re thinking about him, you get a text notification.

MP: Still on for our 1pm?

You’d seen what your name was in his phone, once. Considering he treats that thing like it’s a third hand, you aren’t worried about someone seeing him texting ‘Sugar Tits On Demand’ about his dry cleaning bill, but you’re still fairly annoyed with him about it. He hasn’t changed it. You expect he’d change it to something worse if you told him to. You sigh and check the clock. 10:30. You indulge in a moment of petty emotion, kicking your feet in a little tantrum and pouting. Why does the bed feel so comfortable now that you have to leave it?

You: Yes.

You can’t put any more effort into the message, which he notices. His response is almost instantaneous.

MP: What’s wrong? You don’t want me to drive you?

You’d expressed discomfort with being around so many other vampires, and having no personal means of escape, but that had been a few weeks ago. Obviously, your lack of a prompt response is enough to make him call you, his stupid fangy contact picture filling the screen. You groan once more at the ceiling and answer. “Yes, Mr. Phillips?” you ask, not even attempting to hide your state from him.

“You sound like you got hit by a truck. You go out drinking last night, honeybun?” He says after a long moment of silence.

You mute the phone to scream briefly into your pillow, before responding, “No, it’s just a cold. I can still go to lunch.”

“You do know that sick days are meant to be taken when you’re sick, right?”

“Don’t be a micromanager,” you scoff before freezing up. Did you just say that to your boss? “I—”

A bark of laughter screeches through your phone, and you hold the receiver out from your ear, wincing.

“Don’t be a manager, she says. No. You’re taking a sick day. Have fun~!”

“Mr. Phillips, you need me to go to this lunch with you, you were very intent on that!” you protest.

“I’ve got a whole afterlife to reschedule. You don’t.” It seems so simple a statement, so unquestioningly true, that it makes you startle. Your mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water, eyes staring straight ahead at the wall like it’d have the answers painted there. “See you tomorrow, honeybun.” Click.

“You bastard,” you whisper, before getting up for a hot shower.

Stubbornly, you fight sleep and rest while stuck at home, cleaning your apartment with the same intensity you’d clean Max’ house. Of course, you have none of the spectacular views of the valley, none of the modern amenities, no pool to relax at, so you just end up scowling at your dingy rug and adding to Mount Kleenex tissue by tissue. Your anger and exhaustion war against one another for hours, until you hear the door to your apartment unlock. Panic freezes in your veins for a heart-stopping moment before you remember the only other person who has a key is—

“Honeybun!”

Oh.

Max pokes his head through the door. “I’ve brought you human food.” The rest of his body follows, still in his work suit.

“Thanks for specifying,” you say with a withering glare. You can’t even feel embarrassed at being caught in your pajamas. You feel awful.

He sets down a brown paper bag, and due to your sickness, you can’t smell what he’d brought. You creep forward, but he waves you off. “Go sit. You should be resting. I may not have caught a cold in nearly a decade, but I still remember this part. Sit.”

You do as he says, reluctantly. As strange as it is to see him here, in your apartment, you are a little too fog-headed to have thought of getting yourself food. He comes over with a warm tub of wonton soup, humming and grinning to himself. The soup feels amazing against your chest, and you can almost smell it through the mess of your sinuses. “You didn’t have to do this,” you say weakly.

“No, I didn’t. Look how good of a boss I’m being.” He’s smug, of course, but this is something else. You just scoff and roll your eyes. What a ham. At least you get food out of it. Super.

To your continued surprise, he stays. He sits on your lone armchair like it’s a throne and doesn’t even put his feet up on the coffee table. Your exhaustion grows after finishing the soup, and you’d find it suspect if he hadn’t promised the soup was un-drugged, and he hadn’t used his command voice on you. “I’m sorry about the lunch, Max,” you say softly, putting your head on a throw pillow. The pout you’d indulged in earlier is clawing its way back onto your face.

His face doesn’t so much soften as it does flicker, the mask of smugness and haughtiness falling away for just a moment to reveal something soft and squishy and a little more human than either of you were expecting. The smirk is back on his face after that momentary lapse, but it seems hollow now. “Well, I’m sure you’re suffering enough for making me miss it, so just internalize that for me, wouldja?”

You shake your head and laugh, feeling sleep wrap her arms around you, pulling you from the conversation and any further thought on what that flicker meant. “Whatever you say, boss.”

He’s predictably gone when you wake up, the sun having gotten low in the sky. Disoriented, you float through your apartment, unsure of what you’re searching for until you find something out of the ordinary. It’s simple, more trash in the bin, a spoon in the sink, a picture nudged out of place on your bookshelf, but they stick in your throat a little. They’re signs of life, you realize. Signs that Max had left his mark on your home, had held that old picture of you at 12 and your fat tabby cat. He’d rubbed his thumb over your face, a soft smudge in the dust where you hadn’t cleaned earlier. You hold the picture softly, no longer feeling that sense of nostalgia and happy memories which came with seeing the picture. You instead see an oval smudge, half a fingerprint, and your expression.

You catch the flicker when the expression departs abruptly.

“Fuck.”

The next morning, you feel much better. It’s probably because of the near-lethal amounts of DayQuil you’d ingested, but you’re determined to get out of your apartment, and away from that smudged photo frame. You have a blood latte (which you’ve taken to calling blattes in the privacy of your own mind) in one hand, and a water bottle in the other, as you stalk through the cubicles toward the door marked Max Phillips, Sales Manager. The blinds are open, which had become a more frequent occurrence as soon as the employee uprisings had been quelled.

He doesn’t look up from his desk when you let yourself in, bent over a file and frowning at what he’s reading. You set his drink down on the coaster. “Anyone give you any trouble?” he asks, though he knows the answer. Vampires somehow hate the taste of DayQuil and avoid the recently-dosed population. Still, the seventeen-dollar blatte normally draws a few hungry growls from the sales floor.

“Not today.” Or at least, you hope so. The cold had moved from sinus pressure to ear pressure and fucked with your hearing a bit. Perhaps there was a rumble of a growl you just hadn’t heard. Max takes his drink and looks up at you.

“How are you feeling today?” Two inquiries about your state in five minutes. You must have taken too much DayQuil.

“I’m doing much better. I think you caught me on the upswing of whatever I had.” A lie, but Max was kind enough to not call you on it.

Wait. Asking how you are and not calling you on your bullshit? Something fishy was afoot, and it wasn’t sea-sirens.

“Good,” he says before sipping his drink. He groans. “Worth every damn penny I reimburse you for.”

“Glad to hear it,” you respond. “Have you gotten a reschedule for your lunch?”

“Jerome has moved it to a dinner, tonight.”

“Same attendees?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Well, I’ll be there.”

You wish you hadn’t said that.

Brunello’s is one of three vampire-run restaurants in the city. The others are the café you visit most mornings, and a takeout place Max is banned from visiting. But Brunello’s isn’t on that tier at all. Grigor Brunello, a 350-year-old vampire from Long Island, knows that the appeal to becoming immortal lies in the ability to get really fucking dressed up for no reason. The whole restaurant is done up in heavy velvet curtains and polished candlesticks and bone china and pure gold cutlery, and the menu features dishes for the undead and the not-yet-dead. Grigor had caused quite a stir with his management style, though not the way Max had. He understood that finding solace in a world that sought to kill you and your vampire brethren meant making quite a few sacrifices. The older vampires don’t even try to charm their way into a human’s bloodstream these days. They usually like to bite first, and pay the bill later.

Grigor doesn’t tolerate that.

So that’s why you’re here, on Max’s arm like a leashed pet, though you know it’s really the other way around. If a vampire is mannered enough to get a human to agree to dinner, then we get a reservation. It’s like saying, “look how well-behaved I am, this human trusts me.” If that guest is killed or harmed, they banned the vamp responsible for all eternity from Brunello’s restaurant chain. We can’t have nice things if we don’t play nice, Max had explained. The first time you’d come to one of his meetings here, you’d fainted in Max’ car right before going in, but after, you were surprised. You hadn’t been able to pick out the humans from the non-humans until they started making jokes and telling stories of events a hundred years in the past.

You wonder, sometimes, if Grigor approves of Max’ business methods, or if they’d studied in Romania together. You can picture Max’ aghast face, at your suggestion that he socializes willingly with culinary arts majors. Also, the inevitable “that’s so offensive, just because I’m a vampire doesn’t mean I know every other vampire out there.”

Thoughts of the hypothetical type are shaken off as you step past the velvet rope to the inside of the restaurant. The splendor and the dim lighting both require a moment to adjust to, which Max expects with a slight pause in your footsteps. A maître d’ seems to materialize out of thin air, smiling in that same insufferable way you associate with vampires past their fledgling years. “Mr. Phillips, your table is this way. May I take the lady’s coat?”

“Thank you,” you say coolly, shrugging out of the thick shawl around your shoulders and handing it to the coat-check attendant. Max had coached you in the art of Acting Like You’re Made Of Money, and you swear you can feel the pride radiating off of him from your side.

Past the other tables of the supernatural and their human tickets, you’re led to a private room in back, where most of Max’ vampiric business meetings take place.

“Maxy!” a booming voice sounds suddenly, making you jump and a couple of forks clatter to plates around you. A gigantic man walks through the room with an almost palpable confidence and ease.

“Grigor,” Max says in greeting, going for a handshake and getting a hug instead. You watch with barely concealed amusement. Grigor sets Max down and lets him dust off his suit and put himself back together.

“It’s been too long! I heard you were supposed to be here yesterday for lunch! I served that duck dish you like.” Your face flames in embarrassment at the reminder that you’re the reason everything rescheduled.

“Had a conflict come up at work. Nothing serious, just needed all my attention.” You’re always impressed by how easily Max can pull off a lie of omission. He has little to no secrets from you, as keeping information from you makes your job harder and therefore, his life harder. So you got to see his delicate wordsmithing in action, a delight.

“I’m glad you’re here tonight. Jerome has requested quite the spread for your group.” Max takes your arm again, pretending to play escort despite you being able to choose to walk away, and he’d follow. You feel the tension in his bicep.

“Best not keep him waiting much longer than a day and a half,” you say pointedly, knowing you two are probably minutes from being late. Grigor turns his eyes on you.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself. Make sure he behaves, will you?” He says with a wink. You give a nod and a smile, and he’s gone. Max somewhat deflates against your side, tension you hadn’t felt build now dissipating.

“Something wrong?” You ask once you’re out of the middle of the dining room, but not quite through the doors to the back.

“No, just. No.” Max shakes his head and takes an unneeded breath. He looks like he wants to say more, but changes his mind the last second, going for the door. How strange.

Jerome and his human husband are waiting at the small cocktail bar in the corner of the private room. Several other couples cluster around the room, and twelve place settings are laid at the grand table at the center of the room. Your entrance is met with ten pairs of eyes, a tense pause, and an approaching Jerome.

“Max,” the vampire says, greeting him with a handshake. This is more obviously familiar to your boss, and he shakes the hand comfortably. Jerome greets you by name as well, before taking your hand and laying a kiss across your knuckles. You’d been flustered and discomforted by the attention the first time you met, but at 98, you couldn’t fault Jerome for his habits. It suited the atmosphere, certainly.

“It’s nice to see you again,” you say politely, and catch a grin from Jerome. His husband comes up and greets you both as well, salt-and-pepper in his hair and love clear in his eyes.

Max seems a little on-edge, but you can’t place why. Perhaps he thinks you’re going to faint again. You small-talk for the both of you, leaving him to think about the business to be discussed soon.

Not all of Max’ business dealings were in miracle products and snake oil. Most of the immortal scene liked to ensure a healthy sense of community and growth. Vampires hadn’t warred for hundreds of years, and because of this modern mentality of civility through monstrosity, they thrived. Jerome is kind of the chapter head of the vampire clans in your state. He likes to check in and make sure things are being run well, and in line with a better future. Vampire businesses had voluntary non-compete clauses with one another, and a wide network of assistance. Jerome was even trying to set up a community college similar to the Romanian university Max had attended. Business dinners like this were full of doublespeak and agreements that were made and adjusted so quickly it flew over your head. In all fairness, your duties here were simply to exist and be alive, while Max did the legwork.

You could handle that.

They assigned seating at random, though there was always a human between two vampires, and vice versa. Though the vampire community wasn’t officially ‘out’ to humans, they encouraged socialization and diversity in opinion. Tonight, you sit between a beautiful artist visiting from New York whom you hadn’t met before, and a guidance counselor for a night school in the next town over. The artist introduced themself as Terra, and points out their human sitting serendipitously next to Max at the other end of the table. “Fox is my muse,” Terra says, swooning a little. You can’t help but enjoy the affectionate look they send the stoic man.

“Have you taken him to many dinners like this?” You ask interestedly.

“Oh yes, he’s just always like that. He’s so paranoid, since his divorce.”

“Oh?” the guidance counselor to your right says, leaning nearly on top of you to get closer to the gossip.

Dinner goes by quickly, a seven-course meal with wine pairings and blood served chilled in shot glasses between plates. Your own palate-cleanser is more wine. When things wrap up after dessert, you’re glad Max is driving.

“Perhaps the DayQuil wasn't the best thing to pair with the Bordeaux,” he says in your ear once you’re alone again.

“I’ll puke on you if you tease me right now,” you mumble, sniffling. A tissue is placed in your hand.

“Whatever you say, bunny.”

That’s new.

The goddamned air conditioner in your apartment is out. It had died at around six in the morning, right when the sun had risen, and by the time you were awake at seven, you were drenched in sweat and convinced you were dying. Even the tile in your bathroom didn’t seem to soothe the burn all over your skin. The cold shower you tried to take was merely tepid, and the walk to your car nearly had you on the phone declaring your resignation to your boss. Of course, Max wouldn’t put up with that, no matter how much he seemed to like you. So you slog over to the cafe, you pick up an iced bloffee in an opaque cup, and you trudge to the office. At least they keep it cool in the office, and you know how to make yourself look busy.

“Don’t you look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning!” Max remarks when you come in. You put the blatte down on his desk a little more forcefully than normal, and fix him with a scowl.

“My air-con unit is waiting for an interview at Grigor’s.”

“May it rest in pieces,” Max says with amusement. “Why didn’t you call me?”

Why didn’t you call your boss who flirted with you nonstop and took care of you while you were sick and took you on expensive, exclusive not-dates to the hottest crypt in town? Why indeed?

“I woke up in Satan’s asscrack, this is me on two hours of no central cooling and east-facing windows.” Max at least winces.

“Well, you know I’ve got the space at my place,” he says, going for casual, and tripping over his words anyway. Your eyes snap up to his. “Don’t make that face, you spend more time there than I do, practically.” You know that’s not true, but he continues. “C’mon. You know I won’t bite...you, at least.”

“I’m...” Suddenly the air in the room feels just as hot and thick as it had in your apartment. “Yes.” You know this is breaking a ton of rules, rules you had in place to protect yourself, but the danger is too tempting to turn down.

Max is surprised. “Yes?”

“Yes, I’ll stay at yours tonight.” There’s a bit of a beat before you continue. “For the air conditioning.”

“Of course.”

“Right.”

“Yes.”

“Yes...” Max takes his iced bloffee. “So. Let’s go over today.”

The morning standup goes quickly, and with your mind daydreaming hours away, when the sun goes down, it’s like you blink and it’s five. You nervously pick at the sleeve of your shirt, eyes flicking over to Max at his desk. He’s wrapping up work, a new product agreement coming down the pipeline from the regional office. You’d retrieved lunch for him and had to remind him to eat. With a last sigh, he closes the file and shuts down his computer.

“Did you want to meet me there or consolidate gas and go together from your place?” he asks, and you don’t know why you’re surprised, but some part of you seemed to truly have thought his offer had been a joke, or at least forgotten. Had it been on his mind the entire day, the way it had plagued yours?

“Yeah, let’s save gas,” you say, mouth gone dry.

“I’ll see you at yours, then. Text you when I’m on my way.” You take your leave, braving the suffocating drive home in your car. Things aren’t much better back at your apartment, and halfway through packing an overnight bag you text your landlord about the A/C issue.

Marcus L: You’re the fifteenth person to complain about there A/C today.

You want to shoot back a nasty text, but find it takes too much effort, between agonizing over what clothes you want to pack and just expiring on the floor. Max texts you.

MP: Outside.

You quickly shove a few more things into the bag and rescue your suffering little plant in the kitchen window. Poor thing, it looks like wilted salad. You lock up and send a nasty glare toward your landlord’s name on the tenant announcement board on your way out. Max is still in the car, cool air pumping full blast as you slide into the leather passenger seat with a groan.

“Never thought I’d hear that noise out of you without asking,” he says, and you’re too in love with the ventilation system in his car to care. The rest of the ride is spent in silence, relief too thick in the air to be brushed away by conversation.

Still, when the two of you pull up the drive to his house, some kind of strange sensation sinks into your stomach. This reminds you of an old memory, seeing your parents hold hands in the front of the car as you pulled up the driveway. This reminds you of a ritual long-lost to death and time, a brush of a kiss on the knuckles and a soft, “Home again, home again.” You can picture yourself in the role your mother usually sat in, and Max in the other seat, holding your hand and declaring your arrival with a kiss.

None of that happens, of course, but the feeling doesn’t fade for even a moment as you walk in.

“Wanna use the pool?” Max suggests.

“You just want to see me in a bikini.”

Max gives a shrug and takes off his jacket, disappearing into his wing of the house. You choose a guest room where you haven’t seen any blood on the floor, which you assume is the proper guest room, and not a place where Max takes his messier meals. His suggestion sits in your mind, an unshakable suggestion you can’t deny sounds amazing. You peek into the backyard and nearly choke.

Max has foregone any sense of shame and had undressed poolside, his work slacks in a haphazard pile to the side. His tight, bright red boxer briefs leave nothing to the imagination, and you have to take a deep breath to center yourself before looking away. You press your overheated body to the cool wall beside the window, sweating for an entirely additional reason now.

Could you justify doing the same, joining him in the pool? You know it’s kept at a comfortable temperature year-round, but haven’t had the chance to experience it for yourself just yet. You stand at a precipice, professionalism and security at your back, and the winds of desire and the unknown whipping at your front.

“Fuck it.”

You strip like Max had, but in the comfort of the guest room. You’re glad at least to be in something a little modest beneath all your clothes, though it won’t matter once you’re soaking wet. Before you have the chance to talk yourself out of it, you take a running start across the patio, and leap into the pool in nothing but your skivvies.

Max had heard you running up, but didn’t have time to look before he was hit with the wave of your splash. When the water settles and you finally surface, he can take in the sight of you, soaking wet and nearly naked. His eyes flash darker with desire, and he clenches his fists so he won’t reach out to touch you. When you finally blink the water out of your eyes and tread in place, you lock eyes with him. “Change your mind, then?” he asks.

“Clearly.” Just to tease him, you recline back and float, letting your body soak in the sun.

“You need sunscreen.” Max had patiently walked you through the myths and facts of being a vampire, and luckily, sunlight was only slightly irritating, unless there was sunscreen involved. For fledgling vampires, they could look like lobsters before noon. Max had worked with his tan guy to not only get rid of the sickly pallor so many of the newly-undead had, but also to formulate a more permanent form of sun protection, so he wasn’t going through several cans of sunscreen every week in the summer. He cared about things like his appearance, and namely, making his appearance seem deceptively human. So skincare and sun protection were on his mind.

“You gonna help me put it on?” you ask teasingly, half-expecting a lewd answer, and instead getting...

“What’s gotten into you?” He’s chuckling, but you can tell there’s a thread of genuine confusion beneath it all. You’d agreed to stay at his house with little-to-no convincing, and within ten minutes of arriving, had stripped to your underwear and jumped in a pool. Now, you were openly inviting him to put his hands on you, on your bare skin he so often thought about. You swim a little closer.

“Trying something new. It’s called relaxing.” Though your words are nonchalant, the sudden pounding of your heart gives away your nervousness. This is a leap of faith. Would Max show his cards, or let you fall on your face?

“Well, I know all about that,” he says, his voice dropping into that familiar low register that plagued your dreams. Suddenly, he’s right in front of you, holding you close when the displaced water threatens to push you back. You can’t help but gasp, his hands still so warm against you, and still just as shocking. He moves the both of you with ease, that incredible vampire strength coming out to play. He normally held back from most of his baser instincts and abilities, knowing it was messy and frightening to some, but all you feel is a thrill, as he hoists you up to sit on the edge of the pool. He pushes himself out next to you.

Sitting side by side like this, wet shoulder to wet shoulder, something warm and sticky and heavy settles in your gut. It feels like that same weightless drop you used to feel every time he would look at you. At first, but now, his eyes had become familiar... However, all at once, they’re not. They hold emotion instead of pride, softness instead of calculation, want instead of lust, and curiosity where there had been smugness. The butterflies in your stomach want out. They want to push the craving for a kiss up from your chest and into your mouth, they want you want you want.

But then Max is standing, and the insufferably hot summer’s day feels colder. You chew your lip and shiver at the feeling of water running down your back. You release that want as an annoyingly-besotted sigh, and jump when Max speaks again. “Miss me that much?” You look up at him. He’s blocking out the sun with his broad shoulders, leaving him with an undeserved halo around his silhouette.

“Don’t flatter yourself. Your ego’s big enough.”

“I think my ego is perfectly proportional,” he smirks, offering a hand up. You take it, feeling that lump in your throat dissolve under the warmth of his attention. “C’mon, on the deck chair.”

You sit, and pull your hair away from your shoulders so he can reach more of you. It’s an offering, a baring of the neck, leaving your guard down. It might be reckless, might be the wrong thing to do, but when he sucks in a quiet breath, you can’t help the silly smile that spreads across your face. He warms the sunscreen up in his hands before spreading it over your shoulders and neck, working slowly so every little bit is rubbed into your skin. “No tattoos?” he asks, once the silence edges into ‘mildly uncomfortable’ territory.

“No,” you sigh. “I’ve got a bit of an addictive personality. If I got one, I’d get a hundred more before I knew it.”

He huffs a laugh. “When I was Turned,” he starts, and your ears perk up. He almost never talks about his time in Romania aside from what you needed to know to do your job. “I had two full sleeves, they were pretty shitty, but I was proud of them, I guess. They stopped right before the end of my shirt cuffs. After the Turning, they were gone. I was white as snow, and not just from the blood loss.”

“They...how?” you ask, wanting to turn just to check and see.

“You sweat a lot during the Turning. My skin’s thicker now, physically. Kinda has to be, to fight the sun. There are other scientists and theories floating around, trying to understand what’s going on chemically, but as far as I know, no one’s tattoos have survived the process.” He sounds wistful, and your heart pangs a bit.

“And you can’t get any more now?”

“They don’t take. They’re more like really painful temporary tattoos. We aren’t perceptible to stains or anything like that, either. Helps with the blood, at least.”

It’s your turn to give a soft laugh. “That’s a shame. I like tattooed guys.” His hands falter for a moment, and you grin to yourself.

Then, his voice is much closer to your ear. “I still know how to leave a mark, bunny, I promise you that.” Your body lights up like a fucking jumbotron at the feeling of his whisper against your neck. “You just need to ask.”

You blush, despite it all.

“Let me get your arms.” Limb by limb, he covers your skin with sunscreen, and takes his time rubbing it in. You take your time enjoying it. By the time he gets to your neck, you’re having to bite your tongue to keep from squirming. His hands are just so big and strong. Two fingers tap beneath your chin, and you move willingly, baring your neck the most it’s ever been. Whereas before, he could have blamed his pace on thoroughness, he moves glacially now, pausing his fingers over your rapid pulse and massaging the tense muscles through the sunscreen.

Then, he’s tilting your head back down with his hand in your hair. He’s so fucking close, and through the chemical smell of the pool and the hot dusty smell of the patio, you can smell him: his cologne, his fucking hair product, that dangerous predator smell you couldn’t quite place. His lips are partially open, eyes dark, and his brow furrowed. Your instincts lift your hand to his forehead and smooth down that little furrow with your thumb. It’s the first time you’ve initiated a touch with him, sweet and caring and not enough.

“Can I kiss you, bunny?”

“Please.”

It’s hot and it’s messy and rough and you think his fangs may have descended on accident, but you don’t mind one bit. His mouth is heaven and his body is hot and clings to you like nothing else ever has. You’re both making tiny little noises in the back of your throat, rapturous little sounds of triumph that this is finally happening now.

You moan his name when his hand comes to rest on your lower back, and his fingers dig in just a little harder in response. You nip at his lower lip a little, playful and not at all thinking about the consequences. When you pull back from one another, he looks more dazed than you remember him ever being around you. He’s chasing your lips again a moment later, and his kiss meets your grin when he makes contact. “I’ve been thinking about this for so long...” he murmurs, kissing down your jaw to your neck. The sunscreen hasn’t dried, so he just leaves soft closed-mouth kisses on you for now.

“Me too,” you admit, finally. You’d lived in denial of your feelings for him for so long, mostly out of a sense of protection for your poor little heart, but also out of fear. Fear that he wouldn’t reciprocate, fear that he’d womanize his way into breaking your heart, fear of the unknown. “Me too,” you say again, firmly.

His eyes sparkle with delight as you repeat yourself. He pulls back and kisses you softly on the mouth, then your nose, and forehead, before wrapping you up in his arms like you’d dissolve into smoke if he didn’t. If he had a heart that beat, it’d be pounding. But you settle for the comfort you can get in the castle of his embrace. It’s a calm quiet between the two of you, before you realize something.

“I should’ve known you were a big softie underneath it all.”

He barks out a laugh. “You gotta keep that one a secret.”

“I don’t kiss and tell, Max.”

“I know you don’t, bunny.”

#max phillips x reader #max phillips #bloodsucking bastards #max phillips x you #pedro pascal #unhingery #f!reader #pedro pascal fanfiction #flicker

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ecoamerica · 2 months

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avatar-news · 3 years

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The Fire Nation Awaits 🌺 An in-depth look at the ever-elusive islands in the era of Korra and when we will finally pay them a visit

[Artwork by Avatar News; not official.]

Note: This article was published before the official announcement of Avatar Studios at the Paramount+ investor day.

“Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.” We’ve all heard those words a million times. The four elements, and the power to control them bestowed by four subspecies of giant lion-turtles, are at the very heart of the world of Avatar. The balance between them was once upon a time broken by one of the four, the Fire Nation, forming the main conflict of Avatar: The Last Airbender. For much of Aang and the Gaang’s quest at the close of the Hundred Year War, the Fire Nation was a forbidden, far-away location, until the curtain was finally drawn back in the aptly-named Book Three: Fire when our heroes entered the inferno, undercover behind enemy lines. A dramatic tropical destination! New outfits! Culture shock! Needless to say, it was a big deal.

→ 🌺 The big reveal of the Fire Nation in Book Three: Fire had its own marketing push, matching public anticipation.

When the Hundred Year War ended, the newly-instated Fire Lord Zuko dedicated his life to righting the wrongs of his forefathers and working with Avatar Aang to bring the Fire Nation back into the fold under peace. By the time Aang’s successor debuted as the next Avatar in the titular The Legend of Korra, Zuko had abdicated the five-pointed crown and his daughter, Fire Lord Izumi, took the stage leading a reformed, rebalanced Fire Nation.

There was no more war, no more enemy lines, yet the Fire Nation became more distant and mysterious than ever before.

Korra’s close encounters with the land of fire

To this day, Korra has never visited the Fire Nation, nor has it been seen at all, nor do we know anything about it in her era. In fact, practically the only thing we do know is that its leader is a noninterventionist, which conveniently gets it out of the way of making an appearance in Korra’s journey as the Avatar so far.

The closest we have come to seeing the Fire Nation in The Legend of Korra was in Book Two: Spirits, Chapter Five: Peacekeepers. In the midst of the Water Tribe Civil War, Korra sets out across the sea to get help from the royal family, however, she is intercepted by a dark spirit and never makes it to her destination. In the next episode, she washes up on a secret island home to the Bhanti sages, which probably technically counts as Fire Nation territory, but as we know from The Shadow of Kyoshi (more on that later), this faction predates the Four Nations themselves so it doesn’t really count.

→ 🌺 Korra washes up on the beach of Bhanti Island in Book Two: Spirits, Chapter Six: The Sting.

No, as cool as that location and the events of the Beginnings two-parter that happened there were, it wasn’t the main draw of seeing the Fire Nation that we’re still waiting for: seeing how the Fire Nation, which was already industrializing in Aang’s time, changed over the decades, compared to places like Republic City and Ba Sing Se; meeting new characters; visiting new and familiar locations; worldbuilding both new and expanding on what we already learned.

After this aborted tease in Book Two, we never come close to the island country again (at least not with this Avatar and in her era; yes I’m leading up to something...). Instead, the focus turns strongly to the Earth Kingdom in the third and fourth Books, and beyond.

Keep in mind that The Legend of Korra aired for about two-and-a-half years total from 2012 to 2014. Since then, the story has continued in comics. The comics era has lasted from 2015 to present-- seven years to the animated series’ two. In that time, there have only been two comic trilogies due to various production troubles, and neither have touched the Fire Nation. Instead, they directly continue the Earth Kingdom-focused threads started in Books Three and Four of Korra, both originally airing in 2014. Or, in perspective: we had a focus on Republic City in 2012, the Water Tribes in 2013, and the Earth Kingdom from 2014-2021.

Will we finally see the Fire Nation in the next graphic novel trilogy?

This question comes to mind every time new Korra content is supposed to roll around, and the powers that be know it-- it’s a pretty obvious gap in the world of Avatar right now. This franchise is iconically built around four elements and the Four Nations based on them, so one of them being MIA is quite glaring, and for that reason everyone is understandably always asking about it.

The most concrete confirmation we’ve gotten was this AMA answer from franchise co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino in 2016, two years after the show ended and a year before the first graphic novels did come out:

“Yes, hopefully in the [Korra] comics, we’ll have a chance to go to the Fire Nation and see how it has changed since A:TLA.”

Since then, as previously discussed, two comic trilogies have come and gone, obviously not getting closer to the Fire Nation-- and I would actually argue entrenching themselves further away from it.

I want to make it clear that I’m against fan entitlement. Creatives telling the tales they want to in service of the story and the artform is how the industry should run. I’m just hoping to offer some perspective on how we got to where we are almost a decade into the era of Korra and the metatextual pacing of the franchise itself.

Either way, the next Korra comic trilogy has been official confirmed by the editor for Avatar at Dark Horse Comics in this informal statement on Twitter:

We’re not ready to announce any details yet, but we are working on the next trilogy. I really appreciate your patience and hope it’s worth the wait! ✨

There’s currently some kind of holdup for which we really have zero context or information, and we of course have no idea what this next trilogy will be about. (I do speculate a bit on what it could be a few paragraphs down.)

But, like what turned out to be Ruins of the Empire before it, I faithfully made a mockup graphic for my post announcing the confirmation of the next The Legend of Korra graphic novel trilogy. And like before, I chose to completely speculatively and blindly make it Fire Nation-y, as if the next comic could/would(/should?) feature it. This is mainly because I feel like that’s what most people’s eyes would be caught by and thus result in the most successful post (hey, at least I’m honest), but also because it’s just fun.

Here are both images, from 2018 and 2020 respectively:

→ 🌺 Speculative edits I made for my posts on the announcement of previous and upcoming Korra comics before we knew anything about them.

In both cases, the response was huge, and people were super excited about the prospect of Fire Nation content just from my quick speculative mockups. I am of course hoping that the new artwork I made of the Krew for this post will have a similar effect (it’s the first time I just straight-up drew it instead of editing existing images) but again it’s really mostly just for fun.

Anyway, until the next trilogy is properly revealed, we’ll just have to wait and see.

However, that’s not the only place this could happen.

Are they saving the Fire Nation for an animated movie?

With Avatar’s HUGE success on Netflix last year, interest in the franchise rocketed to an all-time high. The streaming wars have begun, and Avatar’s owner and its parent company, Nickelodeon and ViacomCBS, have finally started to notice.

ViacomCBS is launching Paramount+ on March 4th, a relaunch of its existing streaming service CBS All Access. Paramount+ is meant to be a big expansion and refocus to compete with the big hitters: Disney+, HBO Max, and, yes, Netflix. (There’s quite an entanglement there, with Netflix being the home of Avatar’s big year and the upcoming live-action series.)

One of the keys to a successful streamer today is high-profile originals to drive new subscribers. ViacomCBS knows this and they know Avatar has just become among the highest profiles a property can have, breaking records and going toe-to-toe with other big-hitting sci-fi/fantasy/genre franchises. This knowledge goes right to the top of the food chain: the CEO of ViacomCBS mentioned Avatar by name when discussing potential originals for Paramount+.

I have previously discussed how The Search relates to this. The Search was the second ATLA comic trilogy, focused on the search for Zuko’s mother in the thick of the Fire Nation, and if you didn’t know, it was originally pitched by Bryke as an animated movie after the original series ended.

I just want to be clear that what I’m discussing here is purely speculative, but this is the only other piece of the Avatar franchise that we know was optioned for animation besides the shows themselves. It’s possible they would be interested in going back to this idea as a Paramount+ original (and it would certainly be popular among audiences), but it is of course set during the era of Aang and thus covers both a time period we’ve already seen, and also by nature of already being released as comics, events we’ve already seen too.

However, the whole point of this article is that there is one major, huge thing we haven’t seen yet, with massive anticipation building for a decade behind it: the Fire Nation in the era of Korra. So, again, this is just speculation, but it’s also possible that they could return to the very smallest seed of the original idea for a The Search movie, and do a Fire Nation-focused Korra movie now.

→ 🌺 ATLA’s Fire Nation-focused The Search was originally pitched as an animated movie.

You can skip this next part if you don’t want to see me embarrassingly promote my fan idea 😆 but this is where the artwork I made for this article comes into play. The general idea for it, and the reason I tried to replicate the show’s style as much as possible, is that it’s what a Fire Nation-focused movie could maybe look like. Something as standalone and unrelated to Earth Kingdom drama as possible, with fresh new looks for the Krew to get people excited for something fresh and new! I really feel like the Avatar franchise has so much potential for expanded content like this, that’s why I have high hopes that Paramount+ will make the most out of it! You can see the individual characters’ artwork in larger size here. Ok I’m done back to business.

If the idea of a movie seems too impossible to you, we can also take a deeper look at Bryke’s involvement with upcoming comics instead.

After Korra ended, they officially each went their separate ways. They vaguely consulted on Avatar stuff, and Mike of course wrote the Korra comics, but Bryan was planning on writing and drawing his own original non-Avatar comic series and Mike was releasing his own non-Avatar novels. This all appears to have come to a stop when they signed on to showrun the live-action retelling of ATLA at Netflix, officially reuniting the partnership and committing to Avatar again in a big way. Of course, they ended up leaving that project over creative differences, but it did result in a big, lasting change: this time they remained official creative partners and have indicated they’re still working on Avatar now, together. This is a far cry from the official breakup after Korra, so it begs the question what exactly they’re working on. I of course have my fanciful predictions of a sprawling expansion of the Avatar franchise at Paramount+, but what if it’s actually a combination of the ingredients from before the live-action series...

More speculation, but what if the reason for all the mystery behind the next Korra comics is because they will be made by Bryke, with the two of them co-writing and Bryan doing the art for the first time? If that’s the case, they could want to make them a bigger deal than the other Avatar comics have been so far, and maybe that’s why it’s taking so long to iron everything out, have a more significant story, have more of a marketing push, etc. If they’ve been saving the Fire Nation for something big, this could be it.

I personally think this is less likely than a show or movies or something, but it is possible. Anything is possible right now since we know so little about the large-scale direction of the franchise moving forward, just that it’s gonna get big.

⛰️🌋 The Fire Nation in the era of Avatar Kyoshi

We’re not done! Despite everything I’ve written here, believe it or not, the Fire Nation was actually the star of the show in the last year.

With the debut of the Avatar franchise’s first original novels, Kyoshi made a huge splash (in a way only she can). If you haven’t read them yet, you NEED to-- they’re some of the best Avatar content EVER. The Rise of Kyoshi hit shelves in 2019 and The Shadow of Kyoshi followed in 2020. The latter is of particular interest here, because it was almost entirely set in the Fire Nation and featured practically everything and anything you could want from a visit to elusive islands. Though obviously set in a historical period some four hundred years before Aang’s time, Kyoshi’s sojourn in the Fire Nation gave us a huge amount of new information, a depth and breadth of worldbuilding, culture, and character we’ve never really seen in Avatar before. It truly makes the most of the literary medium, so hats off to author F. C. Yee for the passion and effort he put in.

In The Shadow of Kyoshi, we learn about the era of the previous fire Avatar before Roku, Avatar Szeto. Through Kyoshi and her own Team Avatar, we learn about the different clans and islands of the Fire Nation, as they experience the fraught early reign of Fire Lord Zoryu and the conflict between the Keohso and Saowon clans, culminating in the Camellia-Peony War. We get a multitude of fleshed-out perspectives from the upper crust to the flea-bitten underworld, matching the heights of the worldbuilding quality of Republic City. It’s such cool, intricate stuff, and really shows Avatar’s potential (and that’s all just the worldbuilding-- the character work is also top-notch).

That’s not the only place the Fire Nation has shone recently. One of Insight Editions’ awesome scrapbooks, Legacy of the Fire Nation, gave us a tour through the royal family’s history, including never-before-seen looks at young Iroh and Ozai and much, much more.

All this just goes to show that the Fire Nation has been a hot ticket throughout the ages and there’s one conspicuous gap in that history: the era of Avatar Korra. With so much recent expansion and development of the Fire Nation in our world, it would be perfect to see the culmination of it all in the current time period in the world of Avatar too.

If this made you excited for the potential of what the Avatar franchise could look like in the coming years, same boat!

The next concrete date where something could be announced is February 24th, when ViacomCBS will host their investor day and present their streaming strategy, including Paramount+ originals. There’s no guarantee Avatar is mentioned, but I’m keeping a hopeful eye out.

As for comics, Dark Horse’s schedule marches to its own beat, so there’s no way to know when the next drop of information is coming our way.

Could this finally be the comics that take us to the Fire Nation, or could the much-anticipated visit be in another medium like animation? Stay tuned-- as always I’ll post as soon as we learn anything new!

#korra comics #paramount plus #the fire nation awaits

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the-archxr · 4 years

Text

Mamma Mia! How Can I Resist You?

steve harrington x reader

Summary: When El finds Y/N’s diary, she doesn’t expect much. But when her and Max find out about their older friends huge crush on a certain babysitter, the night becomes just a little more interesting.

A/N: So I really thought Waterloo! was going to be the only fic I based off of Mamma Mia! but knowing me and my obsession for it I was childish to assume that, cause here we are!

Song Inspo: Honey, Honey - Amanda Seyfried (and company)

•••••

El hadn’t meant to come across it. And she certainly hadn’t meant to look at it...

But with her curiosity peaked by the unassuming pink leather, sticker covered book, she couldn’t help but feel the need to look. She hadn’t expected anything important to be in it, honestly; and for the first few pages she skimmed through, she was proven right.

In retrospect, the girl didn’t actually know what a diary was. Max didn’t have one (as far as she knew) and she didn’t quite grasp the concept of a diary in and of itself, so for the six or seven blue lined pages that all had the year 1978 written in messy purple ink at the top, she had assumed that it was nothing important.

From what she could tell (from barely reading what was scrawled on those few pages) she gathered that most of the information written in the book was about your middle school and your friends and family. Some paragraphs complained about teachers you found to be annoying and some were written with excitement about what you had planned with your friends in the upcoming days.

The last page was only filled halfway, and was ended with a polite goodbye to your “diary”, saying that you felt you were “too old” to record your “childish thoughts”. El frowned at the realization that regardless of how unimportant this journal of yours seemed, she was still snooping through your things. And a concept she was certainly aware of was privacy. She complained that Hop hadn’t given her and Mike enough privacy, yet here she was.

A...what was that word again?

She racked her brain for a few seconds, until...

Hypocrite. She was being a hypocrite.

After the guilt began to really gnaw at her, she went to shut the cover of the book, until the oscillating fan that sat in front of your bed fluttered the loose-ended papers, revealing another diary entry hidden behind the one El was on.

The page was filled with words; this time though, they were written in black ink and were neat and meticulous. El recognized your handwriting as she had complimented you multiple times on it during your writing lessons Hop had you go over with her. The young girl smiled at the familiar mix of your cursive and printed letters—almost all of them looped together in a way that seemed like the words swam across the paper.

She liked to look at your writing—it was pretty and fun and she kind of hoped one day her handwriting could look like that.

Her eyes then fluttered to the top of the page, her attention immediately being drawn to the date. Wednesday, July 14, 1985.

El’s eyes widened at the script, which prompted her to read it over again to make sure that she had read it right.

And she had.

It wasn’t a trick of the eye and she hadn’t mixed up the numbers of the year at all.

“1-9-8-5.” El mumbles to herself, running her finger over the dried pen. You had wrote in the book this year. With the book in hand, El walked over to your door, and pulled it forward to look behind it. As expected, on the back of the white door was a long, bright yellow calendar on it.

Biting her lip in anticipation, she looked over the date again, then looked back to your Tower Records calendar until she found the month of July.

She then raised a finger over the days of the month until she found today’s date, which wasn’t entirely difficult as she knew that every day that passed, you crossed out with your bright pink highlighter in large x’s.

Thursday, July 15.

The shock of knowing hit her quickly once again. The writing on the page was fairly new—only a day old. El stood there for a few seconds, turning the small book over in her hands. Whatever you had wrote yesterday must’ve been important enough to feel the need to write in your childhood diary.

Slumping on your bed, El looked to your open door and hesitated for a moment before straining her ears for the sound of anything. You and Max had left just minutes earlier to pick up pizza, leaving El at home per her request.

Technically, she was supposed to be picking tonight’s movie, but as she was getting dressed into her pyjamas, she just so happened to look at your desk, where the pink book sat there, tauntingly.

After listening for a few more seconds—and not hearing anything—El came to the conclusion that her curiosity was far stronger than her guilt (at least right now), and just because she read it, didn’t mean you had to know she had. It was a complete invasion of your privacy, but as El flipped to the page, she ended up reading the first sentence anyway.

God, I can’t believe I’m doing this...

Well...with a hook like that, El really couldn’t help herself. Sitting back against your pillows, she made herself comfortable and began to read on.

Hi again, it’s me. I know that this is an inanimate object, but I just...I’m going to treat you like you’re a real person cause I really need to get this off my chest and I have no one to talk to so...yeah... I told myself when my mom first gave this to me when I was like 11 or something that I wouldn’t write about boys I liked. I guess...ya know kid me still thought boys had cooties (regardless of the many crushes I had) I always thought that writing about them would give you, my diary, cooties which in turn would give me cooties so like...of course I avoided that altogether. Anyway, you get the idea.

But here I am. So, I really didn’t keep that promise. Like, at all... It’s just the majority of my friends are the kids I babysit with...him, and as much as I love them they can’t keep their goddamn mouths shut so that’s out of the question. I can’t talk to Robin cause I know I wouldn’t hear the end of it, so that was also out of the question. And I can’t talk to him cause it’s...it’s him. So that’s really out of the question... So here I am. Telling you, my childhood diary, which I’m convinced has mould on it but whatever.

El laughs to herself. She found you to be the funniest person she knew (she would never tell Mike that) and so she wasn’t surprised your humour etched itself in your writing as well.

I like Steve Harrington.

El almost chokes on her own spit as she reads forward. She sits up in your bed and rereads the sentence with frantic eyes.

I like Steve Harrington. Fuck, maybe I love him. Who knows at this point, honestly.

It’s after she reads that sentence that she slams the book shut and throws it on your desk. And it’s at that point where the guilt really starts to eat at her insides. Because what she just read wasn’t a recap of whatever annoying thing your annoying teacher did. This was a confession to a secret you clearly didn’t want anyone knowing.

El’s breathing begins to pick up and soon she can no longer be in your room. Jumping off your bed she runs out to your living room. With a slip of her feet on your hard wood floor, she unexpectedly bumps into you (someone she really didn’t want to see right now, and who she really didn’t expect to be home yet). Instinctively, you grip the delicious smelling box and steady yourself and her before she can make full contact with the ground.

“Woah, okay.” She firmly plants her feet and looks up at you. You’re smiling down at her with your head cocked to the side a little. You have a cheerful look on your face, that is mixed with a little concern for El’s sudden frightened state, which ruins El even more because the thought of you mad at her practically kills her.

If you found out, you most likely won’t want to hang out with her anymore. You won’t trust her. She says goodbye then to the thought of making her handwriting like yours because she believes there’s no way that would happen after you inevitably find out.

Max then enters the room, equally as confused as you are and soon El breaks down. She falls to the floor and begins to sob uncontrollably—something you nor Max has seen her do. Handing the redhead the pizza, you coax El to stand up as you sit beside her on the couch. With an arm wrapped around her shoulders you frown lightly at her, wanting to give her the most attention in hopes she’ll talk about what has her so upset.

“El, sweetie...what’s wrong?”

She sniffles and wipes her nose with the side of her hand. She never looks to you though. “You’re gonna hate me.”

Your eyes widen at Max as she takes a seat on the chair near the fireplace. “What?” You ask. “Why would I hate you?”

The girl looks up to you and as her lips quiver she sobs again. “I read your diary.” Another choked sob. “I...I know about Steve.”

At that you’re convinced that your eyes are going to fall out of your head any moment now. Max raises an eyebrow. “Steve? What about Steve?”

“El, how much did you read?” Your voice wavers. This was not supposed to happen this way... Or at all.

She snorts. “Almost all of it. I know you...you love him.” You watch Max’s jaw drop through the corner of your vision. “I—I’m sorry, Y/N! I should’ve known better!”

El curls into you but is stopped by the site of Max suddenly making a beeline for your room. “Max...” You call out warningly. “Max!” Standing up, and subsequently hauling El along, you flee in her direction.

By the time you walk past the door, Max is holding the open book to her chest, a look of pure excitement and shock on her face. “Holy shit!” She looks to you, her blue eyes wide. “Holy shit!”

El sits on your bed as you rush over to Max, attempting to snatch the book out of her hand. She evades you though and slips underneath your arm, jumping on your bed with her arms high in the air.

“Dear Diary,” Max begins with a toothy grin. Her curls wild as she bounces on the mattress away from you each time you try to get closer. “I don’t know when it happened: when Steve, the obnoxious boy from my grade 9 history class became the Steve that I now would lay my life on the line for if he asked.” You bound towards her, which she also avoids by jumping off your bed and running back out to the living room.

El, who has now stopped crying runs with you after your friend who sits gleefully on top of the couch cushions. “Steve’s different now. He’s changed. He’s caring, and funny, and courageous and stupidly cute that I’m at a point where he actually makes me dizzy when he’s around!” Max recites. Looking to you she tilts her head with a smile. “Awe, isn’t that adorable!”

You groan and lean over her to grab the book. As your fingers wrap around the corner of the cover, Max rolls (quite literally) off the top of the couch and onto the carpeted floor. “I’ve never felt this way before. I mean when he looks at me...with those soft, puppy dog brown eyes I can’t help but be thrilled! So much so that it nearly kills me!”

At this point you simply watch her in shock as she continues to read on. “Are you done yet?” You finally question. You’re annoyed, but more so embarrassed as Max’s intrigue grows. She then looks to you, shuts the book, stands up, grabs the pizza and both you and El by the hands and pulls you towards your room.

“We’re not watching a movie tonight.” She says to both of you. “Not after this. I need to know more.” Her smile is wicked as she shuts your bedroom door with a loud thud.

Pushing you onto your bed, she pulls a chair up in front of you and leans back into it with her arms crossed. She’s looking at you with so much anticipation that it almost unnerves you.

El sheepishly leans against the wall behind your bed and watches the two of you with a worried gaze. Max then leans in towards you with a wolfish grin. “Tell us. Everything.”

•••••

Steve Harrington Taglist:

@wigofokoye @timeladygallifrey @fairlysuitehearts @loulouloueh @bluegreyme @coltonparayyko @readinthegarden12 @hello-therree @gothackedalready @aphrodites-perfume @fic-cheesecake @bohemiandeakyy @nerd-domland @blueoz @laneygthememequeen @xelaalec @i-justlikewhales @elen-alambil @heykarsyn @yellowhopes @veeshthefrog @justsomeficsilike @cxddlyash @aniya21890 @billyhargrovescigarette @nugturally @daddystevee @asheseiler @enchantedcruelsummer @jxnehxpper

#steve harrington x reader #steve harrington imagine #steve harrington fluff #steve harrington #joe keery x reader #joe keery #stranger things #stranger things x reader #stranger things imagines #el hopper #max mayfield #abba references #mamma mia!#look at me cranking out fics #ive been feeling extra creative these past few days #like idk why

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pastelwitchling · 4 years

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FanScription - Caulfield

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that Caulfield was as important as it was made to seem. Let’s pretend they hadn’t introduced it in the same episode in which they destroyed it. Let’s pretend this building that held Michael’s mother and so many more aliens inside for decades didn’t appear only to be blown up a few minutes later.

Let’s pretend that Caulfield was given the amount of respect it deserved.

Imagine if Caulfield had first been brought up in 1x02.

What if Max, starting from the pilot, was already mindlessly writing about Caulfield? We know he loves writing, well what if it’s been something that’s often taken hold of him? Something he couldn’t help but do when he was remembering something from his forgotten past that has to do with where he and his siblings came from?

Imagine we always saw Max writing something in his journal, though we never understood what. Neither, evidently, did Max. He would just be jotting things down, and all of a sudden, it would be as if the words had taken control, and Max would wake from a kind of trance in which he looks down on his paper and sees random words put together that he doesn’t remember writing, and that seemingly make no sense.

This is not the first time Max has written this paragraph without realizing it. With a sigh, he tears this picture out and tosses it on a pile of other pieces of paper on which he’s written the exact same thing, older paragraphs written in crayon, some in marker, some in pen, to mark the passage of time. Of years spent with Max writing this paragraph, never understanding why, but unable to ever get rid of the paper, unable to explain the reasoning behind it even to himself.

It means something, he’d always think.

(The fact that Max always kept this paper signified that, despite telling his siblings that they ought not to worry about where they really came from, he himself has been curious and unable to forget or keep from wondering. This would’ve been meaningful because it shows a connection between Max and Michael in a time when they both -- Michael especially -- feel they have nothing at all in common, and therefore there’s no link between them.)

Moving on. Upon Liz’s return, because his feelings are on overdrive, and because all of their feelings are connected to their powers, Max’s dreams become clearer, more vivid. Max starts seeing tortured people, people he doesn’t know but feels a certain kinship with. And there’s a woman, beaten and bloody, asking for her son. She wants her son to hear her, to stay safe.

This woman is Nora, Michael’s mother. Max, of course, doesn’t know who she is, and begins to wonder whether or not it’s his own mother he sees.

Max tells Isobel of his visions, something he’d discussed with his siblings over the years, but as they’d never seemed to lead anywhere, nothing was ever done about them. This time, though, things are different. Max considers telling Michael what he’d seen, but as usual, he gets into an argument with his brother almost the minute he sets foot at the junkyard. Max realizes that Michael is too resentful already of the luck Max has had, and decides that mentioning that he may have seen his mother would tip the scales on his relationship with his brother for the worst. So he doesn’t say anything.

As the episodes go on, Max and Liz have their moments with the occasional scenes of Max jotting down that same paragraph, scenes that seemingly aren’t important. We also get far more Team Human moments (for another fanscription), much more of them working together.

In 1x09, instead of getting They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named at the end, we have Jenna letting herself into Max’s house. He told her where the spare key was so she could leave behind sheriff reports to fill out and other documents. She can’t get hold of Max’s cellphone because there’s no reception where he is, and she comes by this time to leave him a note for when he gets back, as well as some Project Shepherd documents. She’s telling him that Jesse Manes has been keeping tabs on him and his siblings, and that he needed to get in touch with her as soon as possible.

Jenna’s about to leave, but then she catches sight of the bundle of torn paper, all scribbled with the same encrypted message that makes no sense. Something about it seems familiar, but she can’t figure out what. This turns out to be the same encrypted messages Jim had written about in his final few weeks, messages all about Caulfield. When Max gets back, Jenna is practically waiting for him. She’s holding a few of the papers and while Max greets her with a curious and wary, “Hey,” Jenna firmly responds with, “I think Alex Manes will know what to do with these.”

Max, feeling discouraged after his failed road trip, tries to wave Jenna off. He tells her he’s been writing that stuff since he was a kid, that it doesn’t mean anything. But Jenna tells him she thinks she’s seen it somewhere before. When Max asks her what she means, she explains about Project Shepherd and Alex Manes’s role in everything.

“Did you say, Alex Manes?” Max says, startled at the thought of this man, and the coincidental timing as he and his brother had talked about him not that long ago.

“He’ll know what this means,” Jenna says confidently, and Max wants to put his faith in his trusted friend.

He goes to see Alex who’s surprised and confused as to why Michael’s brother would come to him for help, and with a glance at Jenna, Max tells him everything he knows. Alex asks Max why he would trust him. Max merely says that it’s because of what Alex means to Michael.

Alex says he’ll try to decipher the message, but that he won’t go forward with anything until Max tells Michael about it all.

“One of us should be honest with him,” Alex says. (It’s supposed to be meaningful because it signifies just how much of a liar Alex feels like whenever he walks away from Michael, when in reality, it’s his own fear that forces him away. He feels like, with every cold word, he’s lying to Michael’s face, not doing what he wants to do more than anything, and just be with Michael. He doesn’t want to feel like Michael’s brother is lying to him, too. It’s a confession and shows the reality of Alex’s feelings and thoughts towards Michael without expressly saying them.)

So Max gathers his siblings at the bunker and tells them everything. Michael keeps glancing at Alex who is busy at the computer attempting to decipher the paragraph Max has given him.

The information then leads them to Caulfield, but this time, Team Human and the Pod Squad go. Together, they all disable the security (which there should’ve been a lot more of) and make their way inside.

(It’s ridiculous to me that in an entire facility filled with aliens, only one member of the Pod Squad was there. I -- what? Also, Noah is knocked out completely, so they just have Liz monitoring him with more yellow pollen, just in case. She knows how important this is to them, and it’s essential they all go, as they all have personal attachments to this mission.)

Similarly to the episode, they find their way inside, and there’s a moment when the Pod Squad look through the cells through which all its residents have come to their glass doors to witness these younger aliens. Max and Isobel don’t know who to go towards first (Max is wondering where the blonde woman from his dreams is), but Michael feels himself guided by an invisible force, pulling him along to Nora’s cell. They all discover very quickly that this woman is Michael’s mother, and not Max’s.

(It’s meant to be a sweet moment because Michael has had to live with the reality of Max being chosen over and over, Max with the luck, Max who’s the most beloved. But at the sight of his mother, he cries because all the years of losing to Max seem pointless in this moment.)

Same as the episode -- Michael attempts to break through the glass (this time despite his brother’s warning), and the alarms go off. Alex is with Flint while Jenna tries to get information on where Charlie is through a flash drive that Alex created that would allow her to access Caulfield’s databases, but Kyle runs back to tell him exactly what he’d told him in 1x12.

Kyle resolves to go get Jenna while Alex goes to get the Pod Squad. Alex gets to the cells to find Max unable to malfunction the circuits without quickening the countdown. Neither of Michael’s siblings can free any of the other aliens, nor can they convince Michael to leave; he won’t even look at them as he tries to free his mother.

Cue Alex, “you’re my family,” and “I don’t look away.” Michael realizes that Alex won’t go if he doesn’t. He has his final moment with his mother, and both Team Human and the Pod Squad make it out.

As Michael stares down the remains of Caulfield, Max and Isobel stand beside him, all gazing upon the ruins of their people, and the camera stills on the three of them, together, watching the destruction of all they never knew they’d needed. Max looks at his brother and sister and realizes; the time for pretending is over. They can’t go on anymore without knowing the truth about who they are.

This was my first fanscription, I don’t know how many more of these I’ll do. It depends on whether or not it’s received well, I suppose. I usually think of ways the show could’ve made more sense, how certain storylines could’ve flowed better. That’s always a big thing for me, so I’m glad I was able to share it this time. Let me know if you’d want to see more fanscriptions, and tell me what you thought of this one! Did you like my version of things, did you prefer the original, did you have your own ideas for this storyline? Whatever you have to say.

All right. It’s late, and I’m dying. I’m going to bed.

#rnm fanscription #max evans #alex manes #michael guerin #malex #isobel evans #jenna cameron #the pod squad #team human #roswell new mexico #roswell nm

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iwanttomeetdavidbowie · 3 years

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I am begging you to please info dump about 'people have always been people'

Oooooh man. Oh boy. Oh wow.

It’s happening nerds. It’s happening.

But honestly though, we’ve all seen the major posts that make the rounds here. Like graffiti that we used to think meant something important or powerful. But was really just “I f*cked your mom” or “-insert name- was here” or “this is very high” and that’s my cute “people have always been shit posters” thing. But it really comes down to the fact that people have always wanted to make their mark. People always want to be remembered. People want to talk to each other and reach out. But we always reach out in very similar ways. And when you look at the heart of it we all really interact in very, very similar ways.

My favorite stupid video on the internet is of a group of Arab men in full head cover and everything in a cab, going somewhere inconsequential. And one of them is on the phone talking to a girlfriend/wife/mother. The only reason I know in my heart he’s talking to a woman is because his friends are giggling and moaning in high pitched voices. The more flustered he becomes, the more delighted his friends become. And if anyone can sit there and tell me they’ve never seen a group of guys in their home country do the same thing they’re bold faces lying.

Or how we respond to strays. Or at least strays that we like. I love watching people rescue animals or talk to animals. Or try to get those animals interested in them. There are countless videos of all across the world of just that happening. My Chinese teacher on her hands and knees trying to convince a cat to come out from under a car to her. Even when you look at people from the past. The man who commissioned a painting of his wife with her 30+ favorite cats, or paintings of kings and queens with their favorite hunting dogs. How many pictures do you have saved of your pet or a pet you want on your phone?

Or stupid things in paintings (back to shit posting) like the painting of a medieval market that got ‘restored’ in the 20’s; but when they were working on it again recently they realized that the original had a man literally shitting in a bush, which had been painted over by the 1920’s restore. Some artist actually sat down and painted that. There’s a freaking wall hanging with a dog doing the same thing that they put up in the MET. That took days to make that little section I’m sure.

Kids are the most obvious forms of “people are people” though. Kids are wild little chaos goblins that all act so much alike and have such similar mannerisms and games. I watched a group of kids in China play a game where they were all dogs, and the leader of the group made them eat rice off of a step. At first I was horrified until I remembered eating grass as a kid because we were horses. Or when kids are interested in something they try to watch it as long as they can. Or this one time I watched a little girl try to pet a swan, but it bit her. And even though I couldn’t understand her language I could tell she was saying “and then -sob- I tried to pet it -sob- but it -sob sob- it bit me!” And her mom was just cooing and saying what sounded suspiciously like “I know, I know”

Or the way each generation is fighting for something better than the last generation had. Absolutely convinced that the last generation has no idea what the new one is going through. I used to LOVE listening to /slightly/ older people complain about modern music, I’m talking 40-55 max. And every time I would use my best fake grandma voice and say “you damn kids and your rock and roll music!” And every time they would stop and see what new pattern and role they were taking up.

Or that we’ve always loved making art, because it connects us in a way. We can look at a painting in a museum that’s been around for hundreds or even thousands of years, and we can feel the same way people from then felt. Genghis Khan felt so strongly about ‘the arts’ he would often times kidnap the artists and poets and sculptors and writers from a court he’d just decimated in order to have them in his court.

Or the way mother’s comfort babies. The way every old person has that look when they see a stroller or baby carriage and they’re trying to look at the baby with out getting in their business. Hell. The way random kids just look at strangers from the safety of their adults legs.

Idk I think that’s why Miyazaki films are so relatable. There’s a lot of body language that’s easily recognizable in so many people. But that’s a weird one for another one.

Or people wanting to be helpful.

I have customers come into my niche store every day and tell me how much they used to love to do the thing, and how much they miss it now. I like to tell them why they stopped doing the thing “because then you went to highschool and you were suddenly allowed to go to the movies on your own with the opposite sex and that was way cooler” and every time they stop in wonder because they realize that was the reason.

Or how we mourn the loss of ones we love in as grand a way as we possibly can. From sitting with a shotgun at their headstone to prevent their grave from being moved for a new road, or creating the Taj Mahal as a symbol of your love and devotion. Or the headstones/graves of children where people leave toys for a child they’ve never met, from a time before even their grandparents were born. Or the way we build temples to deities we’ll probably never see. Those things are all over the world, there’s no culture with out an example of this paragraph.

At the end of the day people have always lived, struggled, loved, cried, worked, laughed, and tried to find meaning of their life. I think often times we’re made to think of people of the past as this far off thing that’s so much grander than we are. Like pictures of MLK in black and white, even though there are plenty of colored pictures of him because most cameras were shooting in color. Or when we see pictures of grand ladies in ball gowns, but never think about how badly they were sweating or the funny way they’d have to go to the bathroom Or that story of king Tut and his ducks, I know I still have my baby blanket and my stuffed animals that brought me comfort as a kid.

I’ve reread this like 4 times, and it’s definitely just a rambling mess. I did it on my phone too so… take that for what you will.

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ecoamerica · 1 month

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youtube

Watch the 2024 American Climate Leadership Awards for High School Students now: https://youtu.be/5C-bb9PoRLc

The recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by student climate leaders! Join Aishah-Nyeta Brown & Jerome Foster II and be inspired by student climate leaders as we recognize the High School Student finalists. Watch now to find out which student received the $25,000 grand prize and top recognition!

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popcornbutterflymedia · 3 years

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the teen show genre is back. that it had announced it’s grand return at such a time of deep uncertainty and unimaginable loss, especially for an entire generation of teenagers, is relief, respite, and a necessary and urgent gain. there is nothing but gratitude for this...for its intended audience and for those of us who will live vicariously through the lives of the kids, for those of us who will watch, and walk with the kids. for someone like me who longs to feel strongly about a story enough to write again.

despite my ‘desperate begging’ for the return of the youth oriented show. i did not picture this. in my defense, i did not know about this story at all. now, when i did learn the gist of the story, i did not expect much. it is, after all, a trope we’ve repeatedly seen in practically every language. in my defense, again, i would have found this show, and watched it anyway, in support of the network, probably be mildly entertained, slightly amused, and successfully distracted. and that would have been enough. i was bound to find this show, though during a deep dive into the youtube rabbit hole, chancing upon a japanese doll and an american cutie, realizing the creative team for this show is that creative team. my favorite creative team. i was sold.

i knew i was going to love this show enough to write. the question is, how? do i live tweet, take notes, and write a post for every episode, or do i live tweet take notes, listen, take notes and write one big post at the end of the series? judging by how much detail i know this team puts into a story in the form of metaphors, seeds, pay offs, connection and clues, clearly obvious in this first episode alone, this calls for an episodic post, for the peace of my own nerdy, detailed obsessed mind.

it is worth repeating that i haven’t read the book. this focuses on the series alone. no references, no comparison to its source material.

and it begins. oddly so.

first, a note on the casting: my attachment to a show is dependent on my attachment to the cast of the show. i spent the weeks and months leading up the pilot episode learning as much as i can about this refreshing cast of newbies. i’d been watching rise since it began, and so it wasn’t difficult to develop a soft spot for the five rise kids who are part of the show. as for the rest of the cast, their interviews and streams are all surprisingly impressive. i always like to say ‘walang patapon sa mga batang ito.’ none at all. they are all so special that i am in awe of how many gifted children are in one batch at one time, in time for a show like this. the teen show slot was vacant because it was waiting for these specific kids.

everyone who was given moments on this episode made the most of their moments. episode one’s surprises were criza, who is a natural. i am just grateful naih was able to use all of criza’s kulit energy. gelo, i’ve known is funny, but it wasn’t until i saw him in character that i realized just how hysterical he is. i enjoyed his interaction with ysay, i am wondering if there is more of that. v no longer surprises. i find that she is incredibly underrated still. i love that girl. fictional life sometimes clouds my judgement, ever so slightly, but these mean girls, are the mean girls i would cheer for. i’ve just been enjoying the girls’ junket interviews so much that it is also a joy to watch them in character. aimee is spunky, sophie is incredibly poised. khloe is a joy to watch, and ash just fits in, dalia...i have never seen a girl with such strong presence and beauty since hopie. i have never enjoyed watching a local queen bee as much as i feel i would enjoy, and hate to watch kim. dalia is amusing to watch too, so there’s that. joao, you know i have always found reliable and competent. limer, i am just happy an actor like him is in a show as big as this. kaorys is my in on this show. they are favorites. i adore them. she registers well on camera, and rhys is music to my ears, and has such an animated, expressive face. i cannot wait to watch their subplot and write about them in detail. i am attached to these kids. i know they are going to be a joy to watch.

melizza, melizza deserves her own paragraph. i first paid attention to when she was answering those miss universe questions on rise, and my jaw literally dripped at how intelligent she is. that intelligence shines through in her portrayal of elle. she is self-aware, and aware of her co-stars in a scene. she is conscious of where she is in a scene. she does she is a realiable actress in that there is no fear that she will break character it doesn’t have to be her scene, but i cannot help but watch her. she isn’t a scene stealer, but she is always acting, always reacting. she gets the assignment: from speaking french to playing a nuanced mean girl whose meanness, is as she understands and plays elle, stems from fear, from being threatened. i actually love that. there is no real villain in this story, just kids navigating unfamiliar, ugly, strange feelings, with limited ways to express these feelings. melizza gets it. i said i am a melizza fan now. i mean it.

donny and belle individually: i had known of donny, watched him long enough to know him, and who his family is. since he started mostly on social media, this ate didn’t quite get the appeal. no offense, it’s just a generational thing. haha! when he started acting, he was like most greenhorns to me, appeal understandable, charming to an extent, but with still so much to learn. i missed his last acting stint before this show. i did not watch jpd.

belle is a going bulilit alum. that’s all i really need to know to trust the casting. i wasn’t a fan yet. i had no clue about the story so i did not know just how much weight the character carried, but by virtue of the fact that she’s been acting the longest out of the ensemble, i knew she knew what she would be doing. i knew the management knew what they were doing when they casted her. belle as the focal point of the story lends such an air of confidence that the story will be told well and that the necessary intimacies will be handled with care. belle’s ability to transform would make max’s arc effective. i did not watch jpd. i had heard about it.i had heard it was surprise. ‘the ending part...’ it was all too familiar: lizquen, circa 2012, must be love: ‘the ending...’

it was completely blind, complete trust.

their casting made me momentarily forget that there were multiple rounds of auditions, from which the each of the cast were carefully picked. it just seemed so random, that is, in context of say, kaori and rhys that could count kuya’s house as part of their shared history. so much of my acceptance of this new pairing depended on how much i trusted the team, and how i knew they worked. i then consumed any and all donbelle content i could find, which, at that time was painfully lacking. imagine the excitement when that first general assembly officially kicked off the hih junket, from then on, they started to grow on me.

these are two calm, cool, collected kids, with a kulit side for sure, but they both take their sweet time. there is a formality and wide open space that was begging to be bridged with these two. there were times i would will myself to see it. theirs isn’t an instant explosion of chemistry, but a sustained afterglow. once that was clear, the goal of sustaining this partnership for however long, how many other stories they can tell together, also became clearer.

it was the tv patrol interview by the lockers that had me sold. it was him joking that they were already married with three kids. it was the way he looked at her in that interview, the way he still does, with donbelle, it’s all the little, quiet things. i don’t know how to explain it, but if they were to jump into the emotional deep end together, i have no fear.

now, back to the beginning which i thought was strange. a recap of what i imagine is the entire first season, artistic as it may be, is one huge spoiler. i realized, this is based on a book. those who’ve read it obviously know what’s going to happen. such opening is meant to set the mood. it’s an invitation to emotionally invest. it’s safe to say, it accomplished those two goals, but i feel as though there is more to that opening. as someone who is clueless about the source material, it reassures that it doesn’t matter what we know, or don’t know, because this is less a story of ‘what?’ and more a story of ‘whys?’ and ‘hows?’this takes me back to the first general assembly when comparisons to the meteor garden, boys over flowers were brought up. i understand the comparisons, but now that the first episode has aired, i feel so strongly against it.

this introductory montage is proof that it is not about the pieces of the story, but how the pieces are moved around to tell a story, to give us a fresh new perspective of a trope, starring stereotypical characters. the story is told in retrospect, with our lead looking back, taking all the pieces of the whole apart, rather than building the story as she goes along (which is incidentally how i like to take in stories).

the introductory montage is a device that allows a more expanded storytelling. the story is told from max’s point of view. it’s a story of how she sees things, this makes her an unreliable narrator due to her blind spots and clouded judgement. as the story goes along, the audience sees that it is not only max’s story, it is deib’s as well, and the rest of the characters’ stories, max only sees the bigger picture in retrospect. because i am such a nerd, imagine my kilig when i realize why that choice for an opening was made? i may have screamed.

notes, questions, favorite moments.

belle’s ‘sigurado,’ the first 4-5 notes of the hooked sprinkled throughout the episode.

on the road: the transition from max on the trike and deib, in his car rushing through a countryside road, if that was clean editing, i’d celebrate it...that the two people were on the same road at the same time travelling different directions is the most clever storytelling moment thus far. i love when seeds are planted and pay offs are grand. it was hardly a meet cute, but it was some intense head on collision. okay, i got it just then, the accident was a literal representation of their metaphorical colliding. it was a lot of things for her: irritation, wonder, disturbance, fascination, disruption. it was a complicated mix for him too, except clouded by the rush of having to be somewhere else other than that moment. charged. electric. spark. lightning that escaped him. (yup. more on that later).

this encounter begs the question: what was deib doing there? why was he in a rush?

the airport scene: ‘hinihintay ka na ng kapalaran mo.’ a beautiful verbal sign of things to come.

meeting daddy: it’s what uncertainty does to max that i find so disarming her fidgeting the heart shaped pendant close to her chest, summoning said heart for strength, and grace, counting on the assurance of its familiarity.

the car conversation with dad: still disarming. charming. curious. that the necklace from which hangs her heart shaped confidante was actually her dad’s gift to her mom. how heartwarming is the thought that the one thing that makes her feel close to her mom is actually from her dad who she is meeting for what i assume is the first time? i think it’s a beautiful irony.

the dinner table scene. the family dynamic it established. elle’s french, max wrestling with the chopsticks on the side.

sleepless max. her hidden vulnerability, and with whom that vulnerability finds comfort. who is babu?

max’s fist at the school entrance, and elle calling her out on it.

the cafeteria scene, and how that whole moment is the selling point of the story - brave max who does not care for the social rules of her new school standing up to the bully who happens to look the way he does. i won’t say she’s unaffected, but at that point her view is clouded with the injustice she just witnessed, that is until they recognize each other. as a side note: ysay and lorde’s interaction made me smile.

the aftermath. max has now caught the attention of the whole school, she has caught the attention of the mean girls so much so that walking down the halls is social suicide. when aimee confronted her, (sophie did so well!) my eyes looked for elle’s eyes. there were layers upon layers of emotion there: shame, hesitation, confusion, fear, maybe anger, there was a flash of her wanting to connect too, or did i just imagine it?

the gym scene with all the boys. it’s probably my favorite...not really, but it’s the scene that gave me so much, the scene that proved to me that this is more than just a simple, one dimensional teen show. this one moment spawned so many fan theories online that i have yet to read. it’s interesting when we cross that bridge, but to me for now, it is from this point up to the debate that kind of turned the tables, and gave the story a sudden depth that’s unexpected. it made the audience pay attention to deib as well, that this is as much his story too. and on the aspect of change, in one interview (i can’t remember which one), i remember belle describing max as someone who wants to change the people around her, and through that, she is changed as well. i did not understand what she meant at that time, until this. and the debate.

the debate: i just love the debate, simply because i love words, but long-winded dialogue like that is risky especially on a show like this. i loved it. i loved the rhythm, poetry, and point of it. i love how layered it is. i loved how comfortable was delivering his lines. i did not cringe, which just means he has gotten better at this whole acting thing, and it’s always a joy to watch someone breakthrough. this moment was necessary as a springboard to the next scene, to show that the rivalry isn’t just a physical one, but a rivalry of the minds too. (i enjoyed that that was pointed out in one of the kumu lives) this is also one of the scenes that proved what the introductory montage was trying to establish: that max is an unreliable narrator, that there are things she doesn’t see. i would say the tables have turned, and it has, but we also discovered that deib has always been the romantic, and max the realist. at that moment we know that max will be changed irrevocably. that ending took the wind out of me. that hurt, but it was thrilling too, made me excited for things to come.

‘love is like lightning.’ poor deib doesn’t know he has been struck by lightning, and is prone to the electricity of one. he doesn’t know it yet because of the gray sky gloom of his shattered heart.

the kiss is everything, it was shocking, kilig and all that, but in context of the story, it is more appealing more kilig to think of all the interactions that lead up to that accidental kiss, all the pent up tension in those interactions that is channeled into that meeting of lips. oh gosh! it just occurred to me, this kiss was predicated by such a verbose exchange just to prove a point, to win. it only took this kiss to shut both max and deib up. i would say there are no winners here. they are both losers to love. except. it’s still to early to call it, right?

in terms of the team up: implied as it is, this is what i mean when i say, i am unafraid for these two to go there, when necessary. there is such a safety i sense between donny and belle, in the way they care for each other. it’s beautiful.

to say that this show only promotes bullying to its young, impressionable target demographic, could not be more wrong. this show matters because it gives its characters (who are representative of today’s teen generation), complete arcs, and safe spaces for feelings no matter how ugly they are. it’s a show that allows teens to be teens, allows them to figure things out for themselves, a show that allows them to relate with one another, as they should. and the usual byproduct of emotional teens relating with one another is bullying. it’s not the best thing ever, but it is what it is. see, we can only pray and hope that the kids turn out to be good ones, but to expect kids to be perfect is out of the question. this is a work of fiction, of course there is a tinge of exaggeration. now, if you all are that bothered by the bullying, i hope there are adults watching with you. be kilig. have fun with the show, but always look deeper.

why do you think i needed three re-watches and few days for a post this long?

i am excited for the next episodes.

(if i think to add more, this will be edited).

#tv #tv: he's into her

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birbleafs · 4 years

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[fic] It’s A Matter Of (In)Convenience

Series: Saiki Kusuo no Ψ-nan || The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. Rating: T Genre: Humour, Breaking The Fourth Wall Character(s): Saiki Kusuo, Aiura Mikoto, Toritsuka Reita, Kaidou Shun, Kuboyasu Aren, Nendou Riki, Yumehara Chiyo, Teruhashi Kokomi Warnings: None, save for canon-typical shenanigans Summary: Saiki Kusuo’s plan for a quiet Sunday spent shopping for desserts in an ordinary konbini is thrown into disarray when he runs into several… inconveniences, much to his dismay. A/N: I've been re-reading/re-watching Saiki K. during this quarantine period and I haven't laughed this hard since I was into Gintama. This series has given me so much ridiculous joy, it’s great for helping keep anxiety and existential despair at bay lol. Fic can also be read on AO3

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Saiki Kusuo could not say he dislikes commuting by public train but he’s not particularly a fan of it either. After all, it’s exceedingly more troublesome and vexing for someone like him, encumbered with psychic abilities beyond human comprehension. He’s unable to switch off his telepathy at will, so it’s no small feat being stuck in a packed cabin and trying to filter out the cacophonous thoughts of fifty-odd passengers buzzing incessantly in his mind throughout the long ride to the next town. Distance isn’t an issue today, however. Not that it had ever been an issue, mind you—he could teleport to almost any location he so wished. But Kusuo had long since mastered inconspicuousness into an art form, and teleporting to his destination and appearing seemingly out of thin air in the middle of a packed convenience store was sure to draw unwanted attention to himself. No, it’s not worth the risk, even for such a coveted goal at the end of his journey. Besides, Kusuo is a man of principle, one who does not easily succumb to using his powers for self-interest. He will do this the ordinary, pedestrian way.

In any case, travelling out of Hidariwakibara-chō to neighbouring Tonari Machi on a random Sunday morning would also mean the chances of him running into certain... inconveniences are very nearly zero. Forty-five minutes and twelve stops later, Kusuo beams in quiet triumph as he walks past the automatic sliding doors and into the aforementioned convenience store, barely registering the musical jiggle over the speakers. He steps through the sparse crowd, pausing midway through the snack and desserts aisle when he finally catches sight of the neat row of orange boxes with silver trimmings on the top shelf. Kusuo allows himself a tiny grin as he reaches for a box, eyes bright with anticipation as he gazes upon its wondrous contents—three cups of chocolate brownie and cherry parfait, infused with coffee jelly and topped with dollops of luscious cream and cinnamon sprinkles. A simple but unmatched delicacy right here in this nondescript konbini, he thinks, savouring the glorious moment a little longer. Still, as fate would have it, he would be reminded in less than ten seconds that his life is but an unfortunate series of daily disasters, and his current reprieve short-lived. And it comes in the form of a young woman who had waltzed through the crowd and is now latching onto his arm with garishly pink manicured nails, her wavy blonde hair already casting a dark cloud over Kusuo’s face. Aiura Mikoto, resident soothsayer and trendsetter gal. Inconvenience No. 1. Ah. So it begins. “Wassup, Kusuo!” Aiura chirps a little too brightly. Already two or three mob characters in the konbini are throwing scandalized looks their way, but to Aiura they’re nothing but background scenery and lazily drawn silhouettes. “Who woulda thunk we’d meet here like this? It must totes be our destiny as soul mates, fer sure!” Isn’t it more because someone is totes a stalker? Kusuo deadpans telepathically her way, even as he makes no real attempt to avoid Aiura’s smothering embrace. Instead, he fixes her with a stare as blank as stone canvas. This is an invasion of privacy. Also, what’s with the meta observation in the previous paragraph? Stop messing with the readers like that. “Man, you sure are a ray of sunshine sometimes,” Aiura pouts, before she breaks into a giggle and relents. She unlatches herself from him, putting some distance between them. “Anyway, can’t your BFF like, just accidentally bump into you while shopping for the same box of snacks you no doubt travelled all the way out here for?” So you admit you really are a stalker then, Kusuo counters drily, only to frown again at the sudden creeping presence of another aura. He feels the weight of another arm draping carelessly over his shoulder, followed by the brusque yapping of an over-eager and desperate hot-blooded young male in his ears. “Yooo, Saiki-san! What a coincidence!” Toritsuka Reita, the spirit medium and an exemplary specimen of the most depraved life-form, the lecherous scum. Also known as Inconvenience No. 2. Saiki Kusuo, a man most unfortunate, lets out a weary sigh. “I see you’ve got that accusatory glare painted all over your face.” Toritsuka wags an annoying finger before Kusuo. “Now, now. Before you also accuse me of stalking, Mister Doom and Gloom, let me just say that I’m only here for one thing.” He flicks a furtive glance towards a discreet corner of the magazine section. The shelves are filled with magazines wrapped in plastic, large R-18 stickers plastered across the covers and over the spines much like indecent warning signs. Toritsuka dabs towards the third shelf, waving a mini poster at both Kusuo and Aiura, and this sentence then abruptly proceeds to describe the close-up of said poster—a particularly titillating centre spread featuring a curvaceous model’s skimpily clad... assets. “Surely there’s no better reason to be here now than for the special compilation of EROmag’s Greatest Upskirts And Panty-shots Of The Month!” Toritsuka exclaims, echoing the thoughts of all resident perverts. “Ugh, grody to the max,” Aiura says, lips curled in utter revulsion. For once, the stars are aligned and Kusuo finds himself wholeheartedly agreeing with her sentiment. Before he can get a retort in edgewise however, he’s unceremoniously tugged closer into Toritsuka’s one-armed embrace, who then proceeds to thump a hand over Kusuo’s chest in a grand show of obnoxious male posturing and solidarity. “You women will never understand,” Toritsuka counters with an ingratiating smirk. “But Saiki-san and I, we’re bosom buddies, connoisseurs of refined aesthetics. Together, we’ll finally gaze upon those heavenly lace panti—A-ACKK!!” He hacks up a lung just as Kusuo nonchalantly drives a sharp elbow right into his solar plexus, causing him to stagger backwards onto the floor. Bosom buddies? Kusuo echoes ominously, glaring daggers at the pathetic writhing form before him. Pretty sure that ridiculous thump you just pulled is both an outrage and insult of my modesty. Hey, can I call the police? I’m calling the police. Aiura nods at that, lips curved into a Cheshire grin and looking extremely pleased with herself as though she’s the one to suggest calling the cops. “Delusional sleazebags should just crawl back into the garbage bin where they belong. Like the skeevy trash panda that they are, right Kusuo?” “Who are you calling delusional, huh?!” Toritsuka snaps, jumping back to his feet. “I’ll have you know that Saiki-san and I have been nothing but the most loyal, the tightest of all bosom buddies—” Refer to me as your bosom buddy again and I’ll crush your windpipe, Kusuo interjects without missing a beat, and the EROmag poster in Toritsuka’s hand spontaneously combusts into flames. “Argh, not the panties!!” Toritsuka yelps, watching in despair as the poster shrivels up in the blaze, only to catch sight of the eerie, voidless depths of Kusuo’s inscrutable gaze. The spirit medium pales at the split-second reminder of his fleeting mortality, sweat dripping down his nape as he carefully backs away from the precarious jaws of death. “B-B-Bros! I-I meant that we’re the best kind of bro-some buddies, ahahaha! T-That is to say, brotherly and wholesome—R-right, Saiki-san? So don’t get all conceited just because you’ve got big knockers, Tits McGee!!” “Pfft, brotherly and wholesome? As if!” Aiura scoffs, unimpressed. “You’re about as wholesome as your d*ck aura and a college frat boy’s porno stash. Just admit you ain’t nothing but a tiresome anime trope!” “Look who’s talking, Miss Fanservice. This is a wholesome shounen series, so how about you take those bazongas back to Hooters where they belong!” “Haaah? You looking for a fight, you raunchy racoon?!” “Bring it on then!” Kusuo scowls at the petty squabbling, exasperated at how easily his quiet Sunday was already going awry, much like the metaphorical train wreck poised for a manic spiral off its rails. He decides to take his leave then from the two inconveniences bickering loudly, making his way towards the self-checkout station near the entrance. He pays for his items, stealthily packing them away with a subtle flick of his psychokinesis, and is only a few paces away from complete freedom at last when the generic musical jingle blares from the speakers overhead. “♪~Welcome to F☆mily Mart Konbini, We Guarantee 99.9% Shopping Satisfaction! It’s A Matter of Convenience~! ♪” Kusuo frowns at the jingle. Why is it only 99.9% satisfaction? And really, a matter of convenience? Not when he’d already run into two inconveniences in a row and all in a convenience store. Is God conspiring with the universe and pulling a sick prank on him right now? What a horrible sense of humour. The automatic doors at the entrance slide wide open then, and in saunter three terribly familiar faces—Kaidou Shun, Kuboyasu Aren, and Nendou Riki. Inconvenience No. 3, No. 4, and No. 5 respectively. “What did I tell you, Aren? Not only did we manage to beat traffic, but this unexpected change in my Sunday routine would’ve thrown a wrench into Dark Reunion’s plans of attempted kidnapping. Too bad I, The Jet-Black Wing, am always several steps ahead. Heh.” “Uhmm, yeah I guess… Hey, Shun, look! There isn’t a queue for the limited edition Ginta-Man figurine raffle tickets here at all. Good thing you insisted we meet at the crack of dawn—Tch, Nendou, don’t dawdle around and block the entrance like that! What’re you looking at anyway?” “Oh? I thought I saw my pal just a few seconds ago...” “Huh, Saiki’s here too-?! Oh, you mean that. Don’t be daft, Nendou, that’s just a cardboard cut-out of that kiddie hero show, Cyborg Cider-man Mark II.” Seriously?? Kusuo curses irritably as he dives inconspicuously out of sight from the passing trio, right into the bath and shampoo aisle. It’s just been a series of inconveniences one after another this morning, the metaphorical train wreck already hurtling itself past the edge of no return. Good grief, what a pain. May as well have the rest of the cast show up next— Another cheesy musical jingle, another swoosh of the sliding doors, and— “Waahh, it’s really you, Kaidou-kun!” “Hello, what a nice surprise to run into everyone here.” “Oh, hey there, Yumehara and... Offu~! T-T-Teruhashi-san?!” Saiki Kusuo, ever the suffering protagonist, drags a hand over his face. See? God hates him. Two aisles over, he can still hear Aiura and Toritsuka’s voices drifting over: “Man, I’m sick of looking at your pervy mug. C’mon, Kusuo, let’s ditch this loser—Huh, where did you run off to, Kusuo?!” “Your petty squawking has given us all an earache and must’ve driven Saiki-san off as well!” Oi, oi, Kusuo flinches inwardly, seized by a helpless fear of watching his quiet Sunday careening off the cliff and further away from his grasp. Quit yelling out my name like that and throwing me to the wolves already! Too late. At the mention of Kusuo’s name, Nendou cranes his neck 270 degrees Exorcist-style like a hideously monstrous owl and rushes over to Toritsuka’s side. “Oh! Did you just say my pal is here?!” he exclaims happily, shaking Toritsuka by the shoulders like a dog shaking an unfortunate chew toy. “I knew I’d seen him when we walked in earlier!” Not to be outdone by Nendou, Teruhashi also leaps forward before Aiura with none of her previous composure, her unblemished, porcelain visage now dusted with a hint of rose, a conflicted mix of perplexity and (envious) shock pooling in her angelic eyes. “D-Did you say ‘Saiki’?! H-Hey, Aiura-san, you did say ‘Saiki’ and not actually ‘Kusuo’, right? M-My, I must have misheard things, right? R-Right?!” “What the heck is going on? Is Saiki really here?” Anxious, Kusuo grits his teeth at the growing clamour as his friends converge from all corners of the store towards the aisle where he’d been forced to hide. Guess there’s no avoiding it after all, he frets despairingly, and in less than a nanosecond, teleports unnoticed from the konbini to an empty street outside. Kusuo sighs, relieved to have finally escaped. Minor inconveniences aside, perhaps a quiet Sunday spent savouring chocolate brownie and cherry parfait in the comfort of his home isn’t beyond his reach yet. What? Didn’t he just use his powers for self-interest to teleport out of a sticky situation? Foolish readers, that was for self-preservation and completely acceptable, of course. He holds his shopping bag close, pleased that he’d managed to avoid a disaster, and begins to walk down the street—only to freeze mid-step when he feels a sudden splitting headache jolt through him… A flash of images appears: Aiura and Toritsuka crouching in fear together, Kuboyasu bracing his bleeding arm, Kaidou screaming shrilly as he shields Yumehara and Teruhashi from a masked man brandishing a gun, Nendou digging his nose with his pinky—That’s just disgusting, no one wants to see that, stop it!! The vision finally ends, and Kusuo lifts a hand to his face, massaging his temple to clear the precognitive fog from his mind. An armed robbery, huh. He lets out another resigned sigh. Good grief—What a pain, Saiki ‘I-don’t-(but I actually really do)-care-about-my-friends’ Kusuo mutters internally in annoyance, even as he yeets himself head-first into other people’s business and right back into the convenience store to stop a future robbery. Still he smiles, eyes soft with perhaps the slightest flicker of affection for this dysfunctional bunch of people in his disastrous life. Someone has to protect them and save the day, after all.

–End–

#saiki kusuo no psi nan #the disastrous life of saiki k.#saiki kusuo #aiura mikoto #toritsuka reita #fanfic #too lazy to tag all the characters here #this show's over the top ridiculousness and crack is 10/10 my type of comedy #i love it lol

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jerepars · 3 years

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Ape Dos Mil Extended Chapter Notes

1 / 9 Skeptics and True Believers

Hyperlinks appear in blue (underlined on mobile and the dashboard). The story is posted here.

She knew she hated him from the moment she laid eyes on him. Teresa’s parents had died when she was a little girl and she’d practically raised herself, so she didn’t exactly have any role models to set an example for her and teach her to be mild mannered, or to teach her that hate was not the opposite of love. She was emotionally driven, and the things she felt, she felt deep in her soul. But anyway, it was a matter of principle. She hated him. Teresa was in Dallas, in Camila Vargas’ warehouse where the prostitutes and drug mules slept, and he was in the space that could be considered the bullpen. When their eyes met for the very first time, she felt the fire ignite and build inside her chest, her heart like a caged bird trying to escape her ribs, blood thick as lead in her anger.

I don’t...I don’t know why writing about Jeresa brings up so many Saves the Day references for me. Maybe because a lot of the imagery in the lyrics are kind of extreme? It’s not a direct reference but the last sentence, with the part about her heart trying to escape her ribs was written with “You Vandal” in mind: yeah my ribs have parted ways, said ‘we’re not going to protect this heart you have’.

James was the carrot Camila dangled in front of everyone—the girls and the sicarios—to get them to do what she wanted. He was the Taylor Vaughan in the world of the warehouse; everyone would either willingly fuck someone’s shit up to be him, or, they would lose their shit to be fucked by him. It seemed to suit him—looking good while doing bad things. He was who they could never be, or never be with, and that was exactly how Camila wanted it.

She’s All That is back on Netflix and I couldn’t help myself. In my mind, there’s this whole backstory of Teresa watching teen cult rom coms growing up, and that’s why she speaks English so well when she lands in Dallas, but this part of the story definitely wasn’t the appropriate time to elaborate on that (there may never be an appropriate time to elaborate on that, lol). But she knows who Taylor Vaughan is, from seeing the movie. The way James is likened to Taylor Vaughan (portrayed by Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) is because of a line said by Dean Sampson (Paul Walker’s character) near the beginning of the movie. Dean says, “Every girl wants to be her, and every guy wants to nail her” (0:47).

This is an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while. Because Camila is certainly not dumb. James sets the bar for everyone, and it’s a standard that they can’t compete with or for. It’s like putting James in his position is her slapping them in the face with a “you wish”. James and Camila both know that, and Teresa is smart enough to figure it out quickly.

But James was good at his job. Even after he got Teresa riled up, even after she called him an asshole, even after he told her she was going to die, he got her into the custodian’s closet and she threw up every last baggie of coke. He was so good at his job, in fact, that when she was barely hanging on, declared she could not possibly go any further, he’d decided, no, it wasn’t her moment to tap out yet. James pulled the bottle of soap out of the dispenser and poured it into her mouth until she heaved on her own gag reflex one more time and the last three bags came up.

This chapter is named after “Skeptics and True Believers” by The Academy Is... . The paragraph mentions that Teresa was barely hanging on because of the part of the song that goes: near death, last breath, and barely hanging on. It also seemed fitting because it’s a story about about soulmates, after all, and it is made clear that both Teresa and James believe in soulmates.

There’s one more song reference here. The part about James deciding it’s not Teresa’s time to tap out yet is because of PUP’s “Kids”: And I had it maxed out. I had a feeling, oh. Nothing is working. And everything's bleeding, oh. I should've tapped out. Given into my demons, oh.

This is a really interesting moment for Teresa, because we know how strong she is, that she’s a survivor and fighter. But she says she can’t do it, she can’t throw up anything else. She’s defeated, which is understandable because it’s not everything she’s going through is easy. It’d be easier to give in and give up, right? But James doesn’t let her tap out and takes over when he pours the soap in her mouth to make sure she can, makes sure she survives.

“What time is it?” Teresa kept her eyes on the groud, avoiding the light from the warehouse windows illuminating the dust motes in the air.

“It’s almost three,” James said flatly, then emphasized, “PM.”

Teresa let out a long sigh but didn’t respond to his badgering.

“Get up,” James muttered. “You’re coming with me.”

She finally looked up at him and made eye contact, squinting slightly against the afternoon light, but didn’t make a move to get up. James rubbed his fingers against his thumb impatiently. She sat still.

“Where?” Teresa asked.

Okay, listen, when I use dialogue from the show I turn on the closed captions to make sure that it’s all exact to what is said in the scene. That being said, I’ve seen and watched this scene so. many. times. I turned the volume to max in my headphones as I edited this to make sure I hadn’t been mishearing it this whole time. The Netflix closed captions claim that James says “come with me” but I just don’t buy that. I swear what he says is “you’re coming with me”. If I’m wrong, I’m sorry that I wrote it in wrong. (But I don’t think I am.)

“Mil gracias, Jaime.” Charger was already waving him off, typing out a message to the supposed professional cheerleader. “Quiet night in for you and the hot redhead tonight?”

James has a lot of nicknames from George. Boaz calls him Santiago. There’s a quick moment from 2x06 where Guero is speaking Spanish and calls him Jaime. In the translated closed caption, he says, “look here, James” (0:23), but you can hear him say Jaime. I can’t have Guero being the only one to call him that (lol) so I decided that maybe a lot of the warehouse guys call him that when they speak to him in Spanish.

Teresa’s back was turned to him as he approached, making her bed. James meant to ask if she was ready to go but his voice got caught in his throat when he saw how she’d made the bed. Even though it was a thin foam mattress on a rusty frame, she’d made her space stand out. It was nice and neat, a clean line folded into the corner. It was the same way nurses made beds in the infirmary and the way soldiers did in the barracks. James believed there were certain skills from boot camp that could never be unlearned. It was how he made the bed.

When I said I’d come up with the weirdest soulmates fic ever based on the tiniest detail, I wasn’t kidding around. When Guero leads the DEA to the empty warehouse in Dallas, he knows which bed was Teresa’s because he sees the corner folded over. Then there’s a flashback scene to Mexico, with Teresa telling him she makes the bed that way because her mom was a nurse and taught her that way.

James was in the military. He was a soldier. He would have had to have made it through boot camp. He would have to know how to make those hospital corners.

And that being a thing they have in common was screaming out at me to take it in a literal sense: it’s why they’re soulmates. And, even further, it’s how they find out they’re soulmates.

The gears kept turning in my head. Because what if they don’t come to the realization at the same time? What if only one of them knows? It changes everything about their dynamic and why they do the things they do for each other through the first three seasons.

James knew Teresa was trouble. He’d told her as much, with some snarl in his voice and his eyes narrowed, as the sound of bass from the speakers in Camila’s club thumped into their conversation the night before. Pointing out the dangerous nature Teresa possessed was a warning—to her and to himself—not to get too close so she didn’t pull him down with her. The feeling he couldn’t place when he was around her would land him in serious trouble if he wasn’t careful. And he had plans for a future, completely separate and away from the Vargas cartel.

Looks like I went in hard with the pop punk references for this one. There’s a song by New Found Glory called “Don’t Let Her Pull You Down” that made me go with the phrasing that’s in this paragraph.

All things considered, it probably was an act of betrayal on the universe’s part. The odds of someone dying on their birthday were so much better than all of the stars aligning. It was why people made their plans and chose to love without the universe in mind.

One more pop punk song reference in name only. That’s just how my dumb brain works. I’ll write sentences because I think of lyrics or song titles (or both). This time it was Senses Fail’s “The Irony of Dying on Your Birthday”.

#je repars notes

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themimsyborogove · 5 years

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@lemonoran Here’s that Ragnor meeting Max fic you asked for a few weeks ago.

Ao3 link if tumblr has made the formatting all weird. I’ve been having trouble with weird spacing between paragraphs recently.

——

“Come by New York before you go. I want you to meet him.”

Ragnor waited until after dark, when he would be less likely to be noticed, before he rapped sharply on Magnus’s front door.

“Good grief, Ragnor, take that off. You’ll scare the baby,” Magnus greeted him, standing aside so Ragnor could come in.

Once the door was shut behind him, Ragnor pulled down the hood of his cloak and took off the mask and gloves. “We all agreed that it would prove useful if I remained ‘dead’ for a while longer. I can’t help that my warlock marks take a lot to cover.”

His coloring alone was hard enough to cover when the people he was hiding from could see through glamours, but his horns and the extra joints on his fingers would also give him away to anyone who knew what to look for, on top of having to hide his face from anyone who knew him personally. The end result of the disguise did make him look rather imposing. And hopefully a little cool and mysterious, not that he would admit that to Magnus.

Magnus rolled his eyes like he had guessed Ragnor’s thoughts anyway and held out a hand for the cloak.

Alec appeared from what had once been a guest bedroom, the baby (that Ragnor was still trying to wrap his head around Magnus being one of the fathers of) propped on his hip.

Magnus’s expression softened as he turned to look at them.

“Come say hi to Uncle Ragnor,” he said.

It had been a long time since Ragnor had been called uncle. He’d had mundane siblings, and they had had children who had called him uncle, though he hadn’t been called Ragnor in those days.

Alec deposited the wide-eyed baby into Ragnor’s arms, and Ragnor realized he had no idea what to do. He had never been good with babies. Once a child was old enough to talk and ask questions, it was like being a teacher in any other situation, but he didn’t know what to do with a baby too old to be content just being held, but too young to converse with.

Ragnor startled as the slight weight of the baby vanished suddenly from his arms. He looked down to find a small bat laying in the crook of his elbow instead.

He looked back up to see Magnus and Alec trying to hide their laughter. “I should have warned you,” Magnus said, his eyes dancing with amusement as the little bat fluttered over to him and turned back into a baby in his arms. Max rubbed his face affectionately against Magnus’s shoulder, and Magnus dropped a kiss on the top of his head.

“Do you think I’ll make a terrible father?”

The conversation they had had shortly after Magnus had rescued him echoed through Ragnor’s head. Magnus’s issues with his own fathers, both the demonic and the mundane, had been pushed down over the centuries, but never really gotten over. Having his own child had brought up long buried insecurities that Magnus had been afraid to talk to Alec about, defaulting to his usual method of trying to ignore the problem until it went away.

He and Ragnor had talked for a long time that night about what fatherhood meant when your only experience with fathers was as monsters. Ragnor had been luckier than Magnus there. Despite being the child of a demon, Ragnor’s mundane father had never treated him any differently than his biological children.

Watching Magnus now, cradling the baby in his arms and making faces down at him, Ragnor knew Magnus had nothing to worry about. No amount of bad influence from Asmodeus could destroy Magnus’s kindness.

“He’s been a little clingy since we got back from Shanghai,” Alec explained, derailing Ragnor’s train of thought.

Magnus sat down cross legged on the floor with the baby in his lap and waved Ragnor over. “Just give him a few minutes to get used to you.”

“I brought him a present,” Ragnor said, sitting on the floor across from Magnus and pulling the cat shaped keyboard out of his bag. He sat the toy down on the floor.

“Ki!” Max shrieked happily, crawling out of Magnus’s lap to bang his tiny fists down on the keys, setting off a cacophony of electronic meowing sounds.

Magnus and Alec looked at each other with identical expressions of horror as Max gleefully pounded away on the keyboard, and Ragnor grinned at his success. He didn’t know anything about modern mundane children’s toys, but he had asked Catarina for advice on what the best toy he could give Max that would also annoy the hell out of Magnus.

Catarina, always more than happy to indiscriminately join forces with either Ragnor or Magnus to prank the other, then let them take the fall for it, had contacted a former coworker at the hospital who had small children. Catarina had then given Ragnor a very long list of toys her friend would never allow in her house. Which was now Ragnor’s shopping list for all gift giving occasions for the foreseeable future.

“Perhaps I should change it from a cat considering the power he has,” Ragnor mused, gleefully watching Magnus wince every time Max’s chubby blue hands hit the keys, setting off more meows.

“If you change that thing into a bat that plays amplified echolocation sounds, I will end you,” Magnus said, and Ragnor roared with laughter.

They watched Max destroy their eardrums for nearly a quarter of an hour before he lost interest and crawled away from the toy to investigate Ragnor instead.

He prodded Ragnor’s leg experimentally, then looked up at Ragnor’s face. After a moment Max broke out in a huge, four toothed smile that Ragnor felt obligated to return.

He climbed into Ragnor’s lap like a cat, and Ragnor lifted a hand to ruffle his navy curls. He paused, then ran a thumb over Max’s temple again to be sure. “He’ll have a fine set of horns,” Ragnor said.

“Will he?” Magnus asked, leaning over to run his own hand over Max’s head to feel the very slightly raised bumps that Ragnor had noticed hidden in his hair.

“They must have just started coming in,” Ragnor said. “Mine came in right after I turned two. Mother said I was exceptionally cranky during the process.”

“I can’t possibly imagine you as cranky,” Magnus said dryly. Ragnor ignored him.

Max yawned hugely and rubbed his eyes.

“I think that’s my cue to leave,” Ragnor said, standing up and handing baby Max back to Alec while Magnus walked him to the door and handed him his cloak. He wished he could stay longer, but he had an appointment in the New York Shadow Market later to establish his new identity and start building contacts.

He ruffled Max’s curls again, wondering when the next time he would see him would be.

#ragnor fell #magnus bane #alec lightwood #malec #max lightwood bane #catarina loss #warlock squad #tec #rsom #lbotw #fic prompt

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venus-says · 4 years

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Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart Episodes 25-47

Light and Darkness are more alike than you think.

I know, I broke the promise I made last time, but as you can guess things didn't work the way I wanted so I couldn't put this out earlier. But that doesn't really matter that much because I'm here, and this finale was amazing, and I'm more in love with this series than I ever was and this is what matters!

After this first paragraph is not a surprise if I say that I enjoyed this second half of Max Heart. Writing this post will be a little hard for me without being way too repetitive from what I wrote for the first half because this is a pretty solid season and most of my feeling from the first half got carried away through here. The show kept on an amazing level of quality all the way through and the way they slowly started to escalate things to culminate in such a high point at the finale didn't leave that much room for a very low or very high point that needed to be discussed on a certain way that I already haven't touched on the first post.

I have barely anything negative to say about this part, but I did have a few nitpicks here and there that don't necessarily ruin my experience or anything but that were things that got me thinking about in the afterward that I feel like I need to discuss about briefly just so these thoughts can leave my head.

My first problem and the only one that is exclusive to this part is, surprise surprise, Lulun. I feel like Polun gets a bad reputation for having a somewhat rough start in season 1, but trust me, Polun is amazing, it's Lulun who -is the problem. And Lulun is a problem for two major reasons, the first one is that she's kinda useless, like, yes the show gives her a purpose but it's not something that could've been done for Polun, for example. I feel like if Lulun was written out with Polun inheriting her powers very few little of the show would change, Polun would lose those episodes where he learns about siblings love but then those wouldn't be necessary since he wouldn't have a sister and they could use that time to work with something else for him. And the other reason why she ends up becoming a problem is the fact that, different from her brother, she didn't get any development, she ended the show more or less the same as how she was introduced so there's very little to remember about it that isn't her crying and clinginess.

My next two points are kinda intertwined and they aren't specifically related to this portion of the story but for the season as a whole. I got a problem with the Heartiel and with how they just appeared whenever the show thought it was the time. The point I made in the first post about liking them remains, but it was really awkward how this was supposed to be a quest but had no quest element to it throughout the whole season but then the final Heartiel appeared because they "filled a condition" like if it was a quest so... I think they could've written them in a better way.

And this ties in with my problem with the villains, they had a similar quest where they had to watch the Boy in the mansion and make him grow, but they didn't have anything to collect and even if they did it wasn't shown to us so it always felt like the villains attack for the most part were just random, arbitrary, and without a purpose. Of course, after a certain point this wasn't more the case, in fact, after Hikari and the Boy meets for the first time Viblis start to get very overprotective of the kid so she's always ready to go all out if it meant it could keep the Boy safe, but when it comes to Circulas and Uraganos it felt like just tossups that were there just to fill a quota. Yeah, they created a lot of cool and interesting fights, but they felt very lost in the middle of all of this.

My other problem, that is more like a disappointment rather than anything else is the fact that Nagisa's story with Fujipi didn't reach a proper conclusion I feel. Like yes, they had a lot of times where they bonded on the season, and it was great as a side development for Nagisa, but I feel like this story was finished without an end. If they had made this point of the story happen a little sooner and we had the opportunity to see Nagisa actually showing signs that she's more chill about this situation it would've been a more concrete way to feel like this chapter of the book has ended rather than how it happened and it made me feel like the show ended without giving this plotline a proper conclusion.

My final nitpick is that because this is a show that happened at the same pace almost matching with the same time frame of the original show a lot of plots felt reused. Like in this second half only we had the training camp, we had an episode where they helped on a farm, we had Nagisa's birthday, Fujipi's birthday, Christmas, the school trip, the school play, another story of the girls potentially getting apart, and a few lacrosse games that were part of the tournament season I believe. I know that some of these are inevitable to change, and each one of the episodes was different from its "counterpart" from season one so it's not like a blatant copy and paste, but at certain times it gave me that taste of reheated food, which it's not bad on itself but you can still feel the difference from something fresh.

With that being said, I still enjoyed the hell out of this season. As I said, these were nitpickings I had after I already had finished the show and I sit down to think about it and think about what I'd write for this post, not something that took my entertainment or anything like that.

One thing I think this part has done very well was mixing the understand people's feelings theme they had during the first half with the theme of hope that was present through Season 1 in a way that didn't feel weird and inconceivable and without making it feel like it was forced. I'm not gonna lie, I wish that they had stuck only with the understanding theme, but that's just because I was oversaturated by all the talk about hope in Kamen Rider Wizard and I was in need of something different and not a fault of the show itself.

Something tells me I have talked about them in every post about Futari wa, but I couldn't wrap up this series without mentioning how great Akane and Sanae were in this show. I'm gonna sound repetitive but their presence as mentor figures is so strong, I'm so glad the show didn't just forget about them. Even though I feel like they didn't take all the mileage that they could with Sanae, she provided some gorgeous moments that made me feel warm inside. This season was Akane's moment to shine, having her as Hikari's "caretaker" opened up more opportunities for her to appear and all of her interactions that got the chance to go beyond the trivial stuff always yielded fun and touching moments that gave an extra flair to the season.

Putting plot aside for a little bit, it's impossible to talk about Max Heart without mentioning how great the action is. No joke, in almost all episodes of this second batch I've written on my notes "this was a great fight", I don't know what happened in between Season 1 and Max Heart that made the higherups allow for a bigger budget, but you can see that the money was spent on a very good way, especially after episode 40 or so. Watching the Max Heart fights makes you go "YAS, THIS IS WHAT PRECURE IS ALL ABOUT at least in regards to the fighting magical girl portion of the thing XD"

And I think what crowns such a wonderful and memorable season was the ending, those final 4 episodes were magnificent. They deliver on the plot, they deliver on the action, they deliver the hype, they deliver on the characters, it's just awesome. My vocabulary isn't vast enough to describe everything I felt while watching it, it was just like I was in a trance, watching it, absorbing it, being enchanted by it, and becoming an emotional mess. Like, I knew they wouldn't kill Hikari, this is precure deaths don't happen like that, but I was really apprehensive for her during episode 45, and having her "sacrifice" herself in order to revive the queen broke me, especially because I few minutes before Nagisa and Honoka were already punching me with the feels with those scenes of them looking back at moments where they felt desperate but their family was there to give them hope.

And it was also great to see a tradition being born when they started the fight against the Dark King that had possessed Baldez and the power of the people of the city brought the Sparkle Braceletes back and while the fighting was going on they had that very emotional speech that he wasn't fighting just the Precure, he was fighting EVERYONE. Like, I know at this point this is a staple, but seeing the first one happening, after everything that was build up during those 96 episodes, was just EPIC and very hype.

Rewatching Max Heart was magical and even though it irl it was a more bumpy of a road as I would've expected and wanted, I'm very glad I decided to embark on this crazy journey to rediscover this series and deconstruct a lot of silly and shallow thoughts I've carried for years about this show. This can change as a continue to go down on this franchise and I rewatch other seasons but Max Heart has definitely become one of my favorite precure seasons of all time. Pure gold.

The Splash Star post that was due to come out tomorrow will only be released on Friday because of logistic reasons, but before that, I'll release a post on the Max Heart movies that I thought of including here but 1, this post is already very long; and 2, I didn't feel like it belong with the other things I discussed in this post. In any case, thank you all so much for reading through all of this, it means a lot to me. I'll talk to y'all another time. Bye-bye~

#Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart #Futari wa Precure Max Heart #precure

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prkrnichols · 4 years

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“What do you mean he’s not coming?”

“He said something about an upcoming exam…”

“Music theory? When has Parker ever had to study for a music theory exam before?”

“I’m not getting into it David… you’ll have to go and— Brenden! Brenden! I saw that…”

Whatever his middle-son had just done or was still doing had little affect on stopping David’s movement, as he walked into his ex-wife’s new house and made his way upstairs to where he assumed the bedrooms would most likely be. It annoyed him that he was in a position to look stupid as he tapped on various doors and questioned if his son was currently behind one of them. So, by the time a door did open up, David didn’t actually mind that the occupant wasn’t Parker. He knew the girl anyway. Tahnee… used to babysit his boys, and even if David hadn’t exactly interacted with her outside of slipping his wife an extra fifty to tip her for her good work… he smiled. “Hi Tahnee… it looks like you’re on the mend…” He’d heard about the accident through Sarah. A conversation that had made him send a text (something he loathed) to the son he was still currently in search of, where he expressed in quite a lengthy paragraph that the news had rattled him. And it had. It was just, after the last weekend the two had spent together, maybe he could forgive Parker for not responding to it. Just a misunderstanding though, because even if he had lost his temper a few weeks earlier with the brunette, it wasn’t the same thing and of course he’d have cared if Parker had been the one to get hurt. “I’m after Parker—” He watched as the blonde pointed down the hall— just a room down from her own, “ah, thank you.” With a smile, he turned, finishing off the short walk between her bedroom and his son’s before raising his fist to the door and lightly knocking, “Parker…” No reply. He twisted the handle, surprised to find it unlocked, as he pushed forward and walked inside.

The room was messy and it irked him. He’d told his son before that no one respected a sloth and yet… he shifted around the piles of clothes as he walked over to Parker sitting on the edge of the bed, his feet clipping in and out of his snowboard bindings. So, it was the silent-treatment today, was it? He sighed, moving around till he could sit down on the bed beside him, “new board?” He watched as Parker shrugged and slid his boots out of the bindings again- click. “Your mom said you don’t want to go—” Another shrug, but at least time words followed, as Parker told him that he had some test— and bullshit. But he’d play along, “she mentioned that too…” he really didn’t care though. “I took the time off work, because I thought a week away— just us… and your brothers was what you wanted. No school, no homework, no piano…” he watched as Parker’s had twisted, disbelief on his face— “really?” David nodded. Where were they going to find the time to play the piano when they’d be snowboarding as much as they were planning to? “Well, you can try and pack your baby-grand, but it might look a little weird to the Swiss if you try and check that in into your hotel room—” he smiled, hand coming up to grab Parker’s neck affectionately, as his son joined in and let out a soft laugh, “come on Parker. You’re not going to leave me alone with Brenden all week long right…”

“well now that you mention it...” Parker let out another laugh, as his father’s grip tightened and he playfully pushed him back down on the bed, before standing up and telling him to get his stuff together or they’d end up missing their flight. Fortunately, for Parker he was actually already packed... the decision to not go only being a fairly recent one, “yeah... I’ll be down soon.” He watched as his father left. His hands dropping down to his board and picking it up, slipping it back into its protective bag as he made quick work gathering the rest of his things. It took him two trips to get everything and by the time he was walking back the second time around, his hands were only carrying his headphones and phone anyway. He made a brief stop outside of Tahnee’s room, contemplating saying ‘goodbye’ before deciding against it. It would be a weird thing to do and the last thing he wanted was for her to take his simple-enough goodbye and shift it into something inane like, he was saying it because maybe he’d like miss her or something. Which no... it was just goodbye-- catch you in a week and a bit, if you haven’t decided to take on anymore suicidal waves or anything by then. So, yeah, no... it was better to just leave without saying it and let his mom express something to her later, after he and his brothers were already on a plane to Switzerland.

Hugging his mom goodbye, Parker pushed Max back towards the back of the car, because he didn’t actually think he’d be riding shotgun, right? Pfft. That would be the day. After sliding into his dad’s rental Mercedes and slipping his headphones down over his ears, blocking out any chance his father might try to get him to play that infamous Nichols’ car ride game of theirs, Parker let out a sigh and closed his eyes. His loss of sleep the other night, must’ve finally caught up with him, because he ended up falling asleep the entire ride over to the airport and for a large portion of the flight to Switzerland, too. The rest being filled with watching re-runs of Archer with Brenden and stifling their laughs as their dad snored in the seat beside them both. By the time they were touching down, Parker was so amped to just have his feet back on the ground, jetlag didn’t seem to have had an effect on him. So, after checking into the hotel, Parker was quick to grab his shit up and force everyone but Max (weak) straight into the powder.

━━ ✦

“I’m king of the w--” He tackled Max into the ground with a laugh, as the younger brunette groaned out and grabbed the snow up from under him to force into Parker’s hair-- “hey...” It was snowball next that collided with both their faces, Brenden letting out a roaring laugh as he balanced on his board and wiggled his eyebrows at them both, “come on pussies! Come get me.” Parker looked at him, then back down at Max, before they both smirked and jumped up. Oh he was so dead. Running over to their boards, Parker didn’t wait for Max to click his boots back into his bindings, pushing off and trying to catch up to Brenden. Shit, though. His brother was fast. It took a few aerodynamic moves of sheer brilliance (aka leaning over as far as he could without forcing his body into a nose dive), before he was just behind him... Max too. Sweeping in front of him, Parker laughed as Brenden had to make a quick counter... oh they had the bastard now. Leaning down, Parker gathered up as much snow as he could and started to clap it into a ball, before he set his eyes on Brenden’s head and threw--. DAMN... he missed. Not his fault. It was just hard to aim and board at the same time. Max was next to take a swing at it, but unsurprisingly he missed too. Swooping down to pick up a bit more snow, Parker repeated his earlier actions only this time... the sweet sound of snow connecting with the back of Brenden’s head and the visual of his younger brother toppling head over feet into the snow was the result. Letting out a roar of laughter, as both Max and himself slid in front of him-- only Brenden wasn’t swearing and picking up snow to throw back at them-- he wasn’t moving at all. Scared shitless, Parker dropped down to his knees, grabbing his hands and twisting Brenden over-- and the little fucker. His brother laughed as he threw his hand up in his face, “Got ya!” Oh, he was definitely dead now. Climbing on top of him with his board still attached to his feet, Parker couldn’t help but start to laugh too... Max joining in, as the three of them started wrestling one another into the snow. It had been awhile since all three of them had not been at each other’s heads it was just-- it was nice not to be.

Rolling onto their backs, the three brothers let their laughs continue, before two girls stepped in front of them, shading them from the sun’s glare-- “You two are over eighteen, right?” Parker stole a glance at Max, deciding to cut him some slack for once, “yeah...” he watched Max eyes widen briefly, before nodding and sitting up a little more. “Okay, cool-- we’re having a party tonight--” The brunette watched as one of the girl’s picked up Max’s hand, removed his ski glove, and started to write-- what he could only guess from his current position was the party’s address. Cool. Hot. “Yeah, we’ll see what we can do...” He watched as the blondes smiled, said something in what? German?, before winking, turning back around and walking over to the ski lift opposite them. “OH SHIT! You’ve got to take me too!” The boy could dream. “No, we need you to cover and if you do, Max will-- Max will give you full access to his laptop-- no parental locks.” HEy--Ugh! Parker elbowed him... hard, because Max would thank him later. “Won’t you, Max?” He nodded and with a new mischievous glint in his own eyes, Brenden clapped his hands together and told them both they had nothing to worry about, he was on it. Which in the end meant that he’d manipulated Connor into asking their dad to take him to some Swiss film festival, so he could haul up in Connor and his hotel bedroom and take full advantage of Max’s collection of illegally downloaded movies and uh, other things. “Will you relax...” Seriously, he was sweating and it was snowing-- it was going to look weird. “Connor said it was going to run late and you know how dad gets about arty stuff... We’ll be fine and if he does catch us, I’ll take the fall... okay?” What was the worst that could happen? He’d take away the piano for a week? Great. He lifted his hand up to the back of Max’s neck, telling him to breathe and it would be fine, just as the door pulled back and the girls they’d seen earlier greeted them with a smile. Oh, yes tonight was going to be great.

━━ ✦

He looked over at the blonde he’d just slept with... Not something he would’ve done if Lana and himself had been on better terms, but since they weren’t he’d figured why not. Plus, it wasn’t like it had meant anything as he slipped back out of the room and wrapped his jacket back around his body, it was just one of those things you did because both of you wanted to. Wondering where Max was, Parker began to look around before he caught sight of his brother standing outside and fuck it must be freezing-- and it was. “Max?” He looked... “Are you okay?” He watched as his brother wiped at his face and turned away from him. “Uh yeah, yeah I’m good.” He wasn’t and even if they had never had the best relationship, Parker wasn’t about to let him be alone right now. “No, you’re not... what happened?” He walked up and got him to turn back around to face him... watching as he let out a laugh, a sob, and a smile at the same time... “I-- I uh had sex.” It took a moment, before Parker’s face shifted, because Max wasn’t just saying he’d had sex... he was saying he’d just had sex for the first time... and okay... “Oh, but that’s a good thing, right?” He watched as Max tried to smile, but it was clear now that he was upset about the whole thing, and okay... Parker could fix this. “You know, no one ever lasts very long their first--” he shook his head. Mumbling something out that Parker couldn’t quite get until he’d asked him to repeat himself and Max said it again, “I thought it would be more special.... that’s all.” Oh. Oh. He got it. “You know... same.” Max’s eyes widened as he tried to make sense of what Parker was saying, “but, but you slept with Lana didn’t you?” With a sigh, Parker turned to look out at the snow falling into the trees below the deck, “no. I told Lana she was my first, but. I freaked out. Lana kept telling me how special it was all going to be and how happy she was that it was going to be with me... and I just... I don’t know... I panicked. I didn’t think I was going to live up to her expectations of me, so I went out a week before Prom and hooked up with some girl at this college party and the whole thing lasted thirty seconds and I just-- I felt like crap. And it wasn’t like it helped... ‘cause instead of being nervous I would suck, I just felt guilty the entire time I was with Lana, and I couldn’t stay-- well you know... and of course, she pinned it down to first time nerves, but...” he sighed again. It felt weird telling Max this. It felt weird telling Max anything about himself. “So, hey you’re not the only one...” turning back around, his hand found his brother’s shoulder and he gripped it... “I’ll let you in on a secret though. First times... got nothing on the first time you’re with someone you’re actually in love with... now, they’re... they’re special.” He smiled, watching as his brother did the same, and maybe this was it? The thing that finally brought them together, as he wrapped an arm around his neck and reminded him if he ever wanted to see daylight again they really needed to get back to their hotel before their dad woke up in the middle of the night and decided to do a spontaneous room check or something.

━━ ✦

He woke up to an alarm clock that said, 12:06 PM... a groan slipping out of his mouth when he realised, Connor had mentioned their dad wanting to have lunch with everyone. Twisting around in his bed, he looked over to Max’s where the brunette was currently drooling on the top of his pillow-- the urge to swing a pillow at his head not as prominent as it used to be. Apparently their talk last night had shifted things. He was still going to have to get up though, so after removing himself from the tangle of his own sheets, Parker went over and nudged his brother’s shoulder with his hand, “wake up...” Max groaned out in protest, “dad wants us all to have lunch together, remember?” That did it. That always did it. There wasn’t a lot Max wouldn’t do for their father and Parker got it, because there wasn’t a lot he wouldn’t do for his dad, either. His fingers ached at the thought, as he pulled himself over to his suitcase and found clothes his dad would deem suitable enough for their lunch. After they’d both slipped into their clothes and had caught up with Brenden, who said Dad was already with Connor in the dinning hall, the three brothers made their way to the nearest lift and pressed L for lobby.

The nineteen-year-old could already tell it was one of those hotel restaurants that catered for the public as much as its own guests. The room itself grand and filled with people and signs that indicated it had earned itself a Michelin star last year. They walked over to where their dad was currently talking to Connor, smiling, laughing... and it was so weird to see his dad like this, happy... and maybe this trip was actually going to change more than just his relationship with his brother, but his relationship with his dad too. Maybe his dad really was sorry for everything-- and, “didn’t I tell you I had some of the best-looking sons in all of America...” he let out a nervous laugh, as the woman sitting in the chair beside his dad’s table, nodded and told him... if any of them were single, she had a granddaughter she wouldn’t mind-- and fortunately for Parker, the waiter had come to distract everyone... “so, what do you boys want... take your pick... anything off the menu...” He scanned the menu and of course it was all in French, so he didn’t really know what to make of it, besides... oh.... Le Cheeseburger... “cheeseburger.” He looked over at his dad, like he was expecting him to tell him to order something else... something more prestigious, but nope he wanted one too-- they were all getting cheeseburgers... the finest cheeseburgers in all of Switzerland. So, instead of holding onto it-- whatever it was that he’d been holding onto since his fingers had snapped last year, he let it go... and relaxed. "Le Cheeseburgers!”

Turns out, the Swiss can make a really, really good cheeseburger, as Parker finished off his and laughed at Brenden who’d ended up with more on his chin than his mouth. The waiter was back for drink orders now and apparently his dad trusted him enough to order one of his own... “uh, yeah house wine will be great...” he figured it would be. His dad seemed pretty happy about it earlier, so.... “bring us the bottle... and can you find out if we can use that...” He watched as the waiter looked between his dad’s eyes and the piano out on the floor in front and said something like, only the hotel Pianist has access, “I don’t think you understand who my son is and how he could--” “dad it’s okay...” “uh, sorry Sir, but it really is just for--” He watched as his dad stood up and tapped his wine glass with his butter knife. “Excuse me everyone...” the room grew quiet, “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind if my son played y’all a song on that grand piano of yours...” The room seemed confused but then after one person (an American, of course) started to clap... it didn’t take long for everyone else to fall into line and for the waiter to look around nervously, because what could he do now? Probably just as much as Parker felt he could about the whole situation. “Go on, Parker... get up there and show them what you got...” he looked up... his voice quiet... “I don’t want to.” His dad catching it though, “don’t be stupid... go on... show us all what the great LMU has taught you...” He’d been wrong to think this trip was going to go any differently... God... he’d been so naive... of course his dad would find somewhere for him to play... when had anything been about just them... just them without a set of black and white keys between them. “No...” “Dad, he doesn’t want to maybe just--” “I’m not talking to you Max...” he could see it in his eyes now... that if he said it again he’d regret it but he did it anyway. Standing up and walking out of the restaurant, making his way up to his room because he didn’t want his dad or his brothers to see him right now.

Alone in his room, he found himself reaching out for his phone-- but who was he going to call? His mom? Will? Lana? Would any of them get it? No... The door clicked open and he’d been ready to tell Max, that he needed a minute... because even despite the fact that he seemingly had his side back down there, he still knew that his brother wouldn’t quite understand it still. That he’d always been a little jealous that Parker had a gift that he didn’t and not just that-- a gift he apparently never seemed to appreciate... “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH YOU JUST EMBARRASSED ME JUST NOW!” he turned around. Ready to face the music. “You promised no piano---” “OH, so me being proud of my son... and his gift... that’s a bad thing is it?” “No it’s just--” “It’s just what!��‘Cause all I see is an ungrateful asshole who doesn’t appreciate the talent I’ve handed down to him and the talent I’ve taught him and forgets...” His father closed in, taking Parker’s hand in between his own... “I can take it away just as easily too..” his fingers wrapped around Parker’s index finger, and before he could do anything-- searing pain shot through it as his father snapped it back. Falling to the ground, his hand wrapping around his hand and now his broken finger, Parker found himself in a position his father had seen him in before, and a position he knew how to take full advantage of... “I’m sick...” his foot kicked into Parker’s ribs hard... and pain that had only been in his finger up till now, spread elsewhere. “And tired...” another kick... more pain... “of you wasting my talent, because...” kick, kick... “you’d rather surf all day...” kick... “than work hard... and...” kick... Parker cried out, as the pain spread throughout his entire body... making it hard for him to think... let alone breathe... “appreciate what I’ve given you...” Leaning down, Parker felt his dad’s hand wrap around his shirt, lifting his face up to his own.... “one day... one day... you’ll wake up and realise... what you’re throwing away... I just hope for you son... it isn’t too late by then.” After another shake of his head, another look at the disappointment his son was to him, David dropped his grip and let Parker fall back down against the edge of the bed... “you know... just like I used to tell your mom... I wouldn’t have to do this... if you’d just show a little more appreciation for what I’ve given you... fuck...” he stood up and after taking one more look at Parker, inching away from him... shook his head and walked back out the door.

━━ ✦

It was another hour or so, before Parker was back up... limping over to bathroom... and closing the door behind him. His finger the first thing he took a second to check out-- and fuck... how was he going to snap it back into place. He looked around and after another few seconds of searching and coming up dry, limped back into the hotel room to find a few mini bottles of vodka instead. With the taste now on his lips he took a few quick and fast breaths before he grabbed ahold of it and snap... “Fuckkkkkkk....” he wanted to pass out... he wanted to... he couldn’t. If Max found him like this he’d know. He wasn’t that dumb and if he knew he might confront his dad and no... this needed to stay between them, because he’d apologise tomorrow... he would. He’d realise that he’d gone too far this time and he’d say he was sorry and besides, he was right... Parker had been ungrateful... he could and should play more... and-- he lifted his shirt... the bruises already beginning to form and coat his entire chest rouge... they’d be purple by tomorrow. Was his rib-- yes.... yes his rib was broken... he was-- he was going to be sick. He ran over and tried not buckle, but he did and the vomit came quick and painfully out of him and into the toilet bowl. Throwing up with a broken set of ribs was a nauseating experience and one that kept him down there on the floor repeating the painful motion, until his stomach was empty and he’d heard Max come back into the room.

He could hear him now, pacing outside the door, his eyes slipping shut, begging... just begging him to forget it.. and go away... but he didn’t. “Uh, just wanted to make sure you were okay--” He couldn’t let Max think for a moment he wasn’t, so he went for the easier option out of the two.. the one he knew would work and keep working for the rest of the trip, “what? You think because of last night... we’re like the brothers who actually ‘care’ about each other now or something? Leave me alone.” “Parker...” “I SAID LEAVE ME ALONE!” he waited... and then... the door clicked and he was able to slide back down... press his face into the cool tiles of the bathroom floor. Where he remained till his father came back in a few hours later and picked him up... “come on...”

He remembered hearing Tay’s mother Evie once tell a kid who’d been hesitant to paddle out in The Cove that ‘your life shrinks in accordance with your fear...” and that he was only as small as he felt... well... Parker felt pretty damn small as the doctor asked him what had happened and his dad laughed beside him, saying, “kid thought he’d take on a double black diamond...” a lie that was bought, as the doctor laughed too and all Parker could do was let him put the splint on his finger and hand him a few pills for the pain. Pills he felt dig into his hand a little harder, when his father wrapped his arm around his neck and walked him back through the Swiss hospital, “see... not so bad... you’ll be able to play again soon.” He nodded. Too tired to fight it anymore... as he slid back into the rental car and turned his face towards the window. He might not have got it when Tay had first said it a few weeks ago, but he got it now... got what she meant when she said, it wouldn’t have been such a bad way to go... ‘Cause at least in the water he knew what was making it so hard for him to breathe... made sense... inside the car with his dad, made less... and how was going to find relief again, when there was no apparent surface in sight?

He closed his eyes... and pictured waves... it was easier that way.

#━━ ✦ PARKER (STORY)#━━ ✦ 003 fool you’ve landed

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whatwashernameagain · 5 years

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How does one convey to another the depth of love for the content they’ve created?

While a picture can be worth a thousand words, my art, and lack of art skills, probably only convey about 10. So maybe I’ll just have explain it through writing.

It’s a common phrase people use when they explain their favorite book - “It's like I’ve been transported to a different world.” While I’ve heard that and understood it in theory, it never really rang very true for me - until Keep Him Safe. Honest to god, even with Harry Potter (A book series I very much enjoy) I’d have a little trouble feeling like I was in that world at all times. I did very well imagining what I thought it’d look like - In fact, picture a Tv show playing but occasionally through Tv Static. Yes, you can see the picture, but it goes in and out and can be hard to really stay in the world they’ve provided. Now compared to that - To me, your book is essentially a Virtual Reality experience. Hands down, honest truth.

The depth of colorful and helpful imagery you are able to exude through your words is truly incredible. When you explain the look of Patton’s cafe, I am transported there. When a character is stressed or nervous, I feel the emotions everyone else has in that room as well. I can see with clarity everything that is going on and it blows me away. I think one of my favorite things about your descriptions, are the descriptions you give when talking about the types of hugs the men give, and how you can feel the rumble of their voice through your body. You somehow make me physically feel the hug between Logan and Patton, and not only hear the comforting low rumbling of Logan's voice, but somehow feel the vibration of his words through my chest.

...I still feel like I’m falling short in my explanation of my love for this book…

Ok, let me add this. As I’ve expressed my love for just how much I enjoy being with your characters, I should express just how much I appreciate your book for simply being. If I’m feeling blue, ecstatic, stressed to the max, or simply not feeling at all, your book helps. It cheers me up when I’m sad, makes me squeal when I’m happy, calms me when I’m stressed and makes me feel alive. It also pushes me to become a better writer because I’m always so very enthralled in the way you write.

Lastly, I’ll add that your characters also provide me with the comfort of being surrounded by strong men that I’ve never known. Not only with the comfort of being physically held, but the comfort of feeling safe. Feeling protected. While I have 2 older brothers and a father, my father was emotionally and mentally abusive, and my brothers, while they are comforting, aren’t very physical people. Reading Logan and Romans deep instilled need to protect and keep Patton and Virgil safe, gives me a sense of comfort that I’ve always longed for and hope to feel in real life.

To shorten this way down I suppose I could simply say that the book Keep Him Safe…

Well, It keeps me feeling safe.

So thank you.

And as always, I look forward to reading more. :)

***

*Whatwashernameagain reacts to getting an amazing submission*

Oh my goooosh I did a little happy dance when I saw this and nearly fell out of my hammock. This is the best. I‘m so blessed right now and i didn’t even read it yet! But I will! Right now!

Live react, here we go:

The first paragraph about seeing the world of the book??? Oh my??? !!!! I am so speechless??? This is the most- *throws hands up in frustration because words fail me* it means everything, okay? EVERYTHING!!!

You, describing the hug between Logan and Patton. Me: so that’s what being hugged through words feels like.

That was beautiful.

I just read that paragraph again and realized I had to wipe my eyes because I was tearing up. This is so amazing to me, honestly. How can I tell you how much your effort means so me???

Oh it hurts to read about the men in your family. I‘m so sorry. I wish I could take that away from you. I understand so well where you are coming from and i am grateful you share your experiences so openly. It makes me feel really close to you. I try to recreate that feeling I long for - the feeling of having a person there to protect you, usually a man in my case, because it’s a feeling i‘ve longed for my whole life. I‘ve often felt unsafe with my father because he was not doing well emotionally during my childhood and I wished for this strong male figure I was lacking. I experienced is very rarely through fanfiction and those cases stayed with me for a long time. Classical daddy issues I guess. I just want to spread the feeling of being cared for and feeling safe and a father is supposed to be the first one to give it to you. Later, a partner takes that role and you for him. I really crave that feeling and want to create it for everyone who feels the same. I really don’t know what to say to show you how much this meant to me. You shared a bit of yourself and I feel like I know you better now. This was truly a gift. Thank you.

#KHS submission #submission

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saisassy18-blog · 4 years

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City of Fallen Angels Summary

Simon a sixteen years old has been a vampire for two months. He is doing his best to handle his urge for blood while doing his best to live like a normal human being. This involves continuing to play bass for his band, the members of which know Simon is a vampire. Only Jordan Kyle, their new vocalist, does not know. When Simon’s mother finds out he is a vampire, she reacts horribly. He knows he cannot stay in his apartment anymore, and so goes to become roommates with Jordan.

At the same time, Simon is attempting to balance having two girlfriends,Isabelle Lightwood a Dayhunter, and Maia Roberts a werewolf because he doesn’t want to hurt either of them by dumping one of them. At a band gig, both girls find out about the other, and both become enraged with Simon. Maia is especially enraged when she learns that Simon is roommates with her werewolf ex-boyfriend, Jordan, something which Simon did not know.

Simon, who now bears the Mark of the Wanderer, the Curse of Cain, which brings down the wrath of God against any who would harm him, is then courted by Camille Belcourt, the former leader of the most powerful New York vampire clan. Forced out by Raphael Santiago, Camille wants to destroy him and resume command of the clan. She promises to help Simon live as a vampire properly if he will join her against Raphael. Simon is given five days to make up his mind.

Simon’s best friend Clary, meanwhile, is struggling in her relationship with Jace, a Dayhunter. Jace has been having horrible dreams where he stabs and kills Clary, and so does his best to stay away from her. This hurts Clary deeply, who tries repeatedly to be near him. Only when Jace confesses the truth of his nightmares does Clary understand that some demon is tampering with Jace’s mind. She and Jace go to see the Brothers of the Silent City, who reveal some startling truths. When Clary made it possible for Jace to be brought back form the dead she upset the balance of life and death. Jace’s return from the dead meant that all protections given to him as a baby have been stripped away, and he will need new spells to protect him. His dreams are indeed the attempted influence of a demon.

That night at a party, Jace appears under the spell of the demon Lilith to draw Clary away to a condo high rise under construction. Simon is led to the high rise by Maureen, a young girl he could not resist feeding on, and whom was ultimately turned into a vampire. On the roof, Simon and Clary come to realize that Lilith intends to awaken Sebastian by having Simon feed on him long enough to revive him, and then feed him blood to strengthen him and heal him. Sebastian will then go on to create a race of powerful hybrid demons. Jace and Sebastian are bound to one another by Lilith. Harm cannot come to one without coming to the other. Jace and Lilith end up battling, but the result is inconclusive. As Lilith moves to kill Clary, Simon intervenes by putting himself in the way. As a result, God strikes Lilith dead, turning her into salt. As the novel ends, it is revealed that Sebastian now controls Jace, who feeds Sebastian his blood.

Characters

Clary Fray- Clary is incredibly stubborn and sarcastic traits born out of her mother's over- protectiveness. She is also a very caring and compassionate person. Her hair color is red. Jace Herondale is her fiancée.

Raphael Santiago- was a vampire, a former leader of New York's local vampire clan, and Simon Lewis sire. Born to Guadalupe Santiago and an unknown man, Raphael Santiago, the eldest child in the family, had several younger brothers and lived his early life in Mexico.

Camille Belcourt- was a vampire baroness, a former head of the New York vampire clan, and a former lover of Magnuson Bane.

Maxwell "Max" Joseph Lightwood- was the second son and youngest child of Mayrse and Robert Lightwood.He was also a shadowhunter.

Maia Roberts- is a werewolf and the current leader of the New York werewolf pack. Maia was born in New Jersey,

Luke Garroway- born Lucian Graymark is the husband of Jocelyn Fray and the stepfather of, as well as the man who raised, her daughter, Clary.He is a werewolf who was formerly a shadowhunter and a member of the circle, before he was betrayed by his parabatai, Valentine Morgenstern.

Jocelyn Garroway- also known as Jocelyn Fray, and Jonathan Morgenstern,the wife of Luke Garroway and, formerly, Valentine Morgenstern.Jocelyn was originally an active shadowhunter and a member of the circle with her husband.

Sebastian Verlac- was a shadowhunter and a cousin of Aline Penhallow.

Magnus Bane- also known as " The Great Poison". Magnus Bane is the high Warlock of Brooklyn. Being over four centuries old, his life has since intertwined with several shadowhunters and Downworlders over the centuries.

Simon Lewis- was born into a Jewish family in New York.He is the second and youngest child of Elaine and her late husband Levi and was born after his older Sister, Rebecca.

Jace Herondale- is considered the best Shadowhunter of his generation and a hero of the Mortal and Dark wars. He is currently the co-head of the New York Institute, alongside his fiancée, Clary Fray. Despite this, Jace in fact has a strong moral Core.

Isabelle Lightwood- was born to Mayrse and Robert Lightwood in New York. She was born in 1991, two years after her brother Alec, and about seven years before their younger brother, Max. She was about ten years old when Jace Wayland(Jace Herondale/Lightwood) was adopted into their family.

Opinion

For me as student, this kind of story where in the first paragraph I really felt it was so exciting and giving me ideas about what's next event. I like the characters there when it comes to their attitudes and different dignity. In every chapter, I couldn't avoid how's my feeling, my emotions in there. For me, just give your best just keep on fighting whatever circumstances because I believe that in every problem there is solution. 🙏You have to face every trials and God is always there to guide and giving you hope.Yes! there is hope don't rush your time for nonsense thing.🙃💕This story is one of my favorite story giving me deeper understanding and knowledge😇. By the way this novel is the fourth installment series by Cassandra Clare.

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so-shiny-so-chrome · 5 years

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Witness: B_Kilroy

ThCreator name (AO3): B_Kilroy

Creator name (Tumblr): brian-kilroy

Link to creator works: https://archiveofourown.org/users/B_Kilroy/pseuds/B_Kilroy/works?fandom_id=51060

Q: Why the Mad Max Fandom?

A: I was just instantly drawn to it after seeing Mad Max: Fury Road for the first time. The movie was incredible, from the imagery to the people, from the story we see to the story we have to piece together ourselves. I was no stranger to fanfiction since I had written and read it in the past, so when I thought "I need to get more of this," I knew where to go. Being more internet savvy than I was several years ago meant that I was able to find more places and people who engaged in the fandom, which in turn allowed me to become more engaged, and do more for this fandom than the ones I had been a part of before.

Q: What do you think are some defining aspects of your work? Do you have a style? Recurrent themes?Which of your works was the most fun to create? The most difficult? Which is your most popular? Most successful? Your favourite overall?

A: I think even though I didn't write much for it, "Through The Looking Glass" was the most fun to create, because the goal was to take the entirety of Mad Max and reframe it with Furiosa and Max being able to contact each other through their dreams. It's fun to take that and view events through a different lens, or use one character to advise the other and shove the story in different directions. After a while, these changes would have stacked up, but it would have amounted to a serious overhaul of character and plot through four movies.

The most difficult fic was "Ear to the Ground," namely because it was a gift so I couldn't bounce the idea back off of its source to talk about it. At a certain point I pretty much stalled, and that combined with the time constraints of the exchange were some serious stressors. I've stalled many times in many fics, but this was the most difficult one to conquer.

My most popular, successful, and favorite fic to work on is by and large "Runaway." I can't truly speak for why, but I believe its relative longevity and the AU concept of Fury Road essentially never happening was what earned some attention.

Q: How do you like your wasteland? Gritty? Hopeful? Campy? Soft? Why?

A: I like a good mix of gritty and hopeful, though it does depend on what sort of fic I'm writing. I think we've all seen enough to know that you can't have good without the bad, but we also know that sometimes it's very possible to basically go about your business as long as you're smart about it. Sometimes, the characters don't have that option. I enjoy having a diverse world so characters can have a multitude of experiences.

Q: Walk us through your creative process from idea to finished product. What's your prefered environment for creating? How do you get through rough patches?

A: My creative process really varies. Often, I just start writing. Only after I have some stuff written down do the gears really start turning about the future. As I work, sometimes I'll put down specific lines I want to use, or scenes I want to see, or a general rough outline. The best thing I've done in this regard is have an outline set for "Runaway" and use the first posting of "Royce" as a first draft. The best way to create is to have something set out in front of you, so you know where Point B is, and it's just a matter of getting there.

When I wrote in college, it was pretty much wherever I could snag a seat. A handful of my old fics started in the very back of a State Government lecture hall. As time went on, I wrote in the student center or in a dorm lobby or just somewhere I could sit down that felt vaguely productive. At home, it's in my dark room with some music on.

Rough patches often signal a break in writing. I'll typically go to another fic to work on, but recently having trouble means walking away completely. For me, the only way to get through rough patches means sitting down and writing. It can be a word, a sentence, or a paragraph, and any amount is fine. All that matters is that I get the gears going, because there's no progress if I don't think about it.

Q: What (if any) music do you listen to for help getting those creative juices flowing?

A: I'll listen to a general playlist I've wrangled together if I'm writing for Maxiosa, and that can sort of get me in the mood - namely, some DJ Shadow or some Radiohead, though a lot of artists are one-offs. For other fics, or moments where I need a specific tone, I can turn to more energetic music and scratch that itch.

Q: What is your biggest challenge as a creator?

A: Inspiration and drive is my biggest challenge. Nowadays, I don't really have inspiration unless it just somehow *comes* to me - which will often be around 1 AM which leaves a lot to be desired. A lot of writing also came out of emotional distress, which thankfully I don't really experience anymore, but that means finding some other sort of fuel to write from.

Q: How have you grown as a creator through your participation in the Mad Max Fandom? How has your work changed? Have you learned anything about yourself?

A: I've definitely grown in terms of how I write. I sort of cringe at how I first wrote a lot of my stuff, which resulted in some works being removed or re-worked. My writing has done a lot better in terms of - well, I don't cringe at it as much. I'm more confident in what I write and how. It's a more mature style that I can reflect on as an era of writing separate from what I wrote when I was younger. In short, it's better.

Have I learned anything about myself? Can't quite say.

Q: Which character do you relate to the most, and how does that affect your approach to that character? Is someone else your favourite to portray? How has your understanding of these characters grown through portraying them?

A: I'd say I relate to Max the most. I understand being alone and avoiding people. That's oversimplifying it, but I sympathize with him the most. This allows me to write him if not accurately, then it helps me write him well. Writing characters in general, while I'm not writing canon material, allows me to think of them as more than what they've done on the screen. It allows me to think of them as complex characters. I fill out the blanks left on the screen and it helps make them whole.

Q: Do you ever self-insert, even accidentally?

A: Definitely. "Royce" is by-and-large a self-insert, and I think it pretty much says so on the can. It became a great way to explore what I would do in such a world, but I feel like doing self-inserts in the right way can be an excellent method to explore parts of the story that we don't usually see.

Q: How does your work for the fandom change how you look at the source material?

A: It allows me to form a more complete image of the before, during, and after. It may not be canonical, but I can appreciate the movie as more than just a slice of the world. I think about everything happening behind the scenes - what's happening at the Citadel, in the War Party, in the wreckage following the battle of the Fury Road. Instead of asking questions about what happened and what will happen, I form answers.

Q: Do you prefer to create in one defined chronology or do your works stand alone? Why or why not?

A: I enjoy the concept of trying to fit all my fics into one world, because 1) it breeds continuity, 2) it breeds opportunities for the future, and 3) it's just fun. Not only do you have the source material, but using what you create helps you get more familiar and comfortable with the characters. Writing for standalone fics means you have to resort to a different mindset for these characters, though some may enjoy that, so more power to them.

Q: To break or not to break canon? Why?

A: Both is fun. I have canon-compliant and canon-divergent fics and they both have their benefits and drawbacks in terms of familiarity and "give" in terms of what you want to do.

Q: If you work with OCs walk us through your process for creating them. Who are some of your favourites?

A: If they are proper OCs with no real inspiration, I start with basically envisioning them in my mind. What are their names and what do they look like? What is their purpose? What is their past, and do you want that to factor into what they do in the present and future? It doesn't have to be a whole lot if they're minor characters, but the more you do means you have more to play with. You can add complexity to a character or just use them as a means to an end.

My favorite OC has to be Royce just because of how I know Royce ends up, and how he's used as a storytelling tool.

Q: Who are some works by other creators inside and outside of the fandom that have influenced your work?

A: Owlship has had a direct influence on my work - I've snagged quite a few prompts from her and I've been inspired at least directly by "the centre cannot hold;". While I can't say I really look up to anyone else as an influence, I definitely give props to Weirdness_Unlimited for taking off running with "To Love Reptiles" and their OC work, and giving me inspiration to keep going with mine. I quite literally went through every single fic that looked good to me when I first found MMFR so I can't really point anything out that has influenced me except for the creativity of the community as a whole.

Q: Tell us about a current WIP or planned project.

A: Runaway is the big WIP I'm staring down right now. I've been bogged down in terms of having a hard time writing thought and reflection instead of action. I've probably said it a hundred times, but I do have an outline set up for the fic which would go pretty far if written for completely. Anyone reading it can expect something interesting in the next few chapters. I do have another WIP or two in my pocket that I'll abstain from talking about, but they'll be little one shots. One's a bit of pre-canon, another's post-canon which is the one I'm favoring. There's still gears turning, no matter how small, and I hope to get stuff going again soon.

@b-kilroy thank you for your time.

#mad max fandom #mad max fanfic #Mad Max Fandom Creator Spotlight #fury road fic #mad max creator spotlight #B-kilroy #brian_kilroy #fanfic author spotlight

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