#The fact the whole short was set at the studio itself - the way they kept all the characters from the 2D films 2D...

[stargazerlillian]

Okay, so "Once Upon a Studio" was cute... and I may or may not have felt like crying a few times while watching it...

[qqueenofhades]

The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

[jaeminscoffee]

Knee highs and short skirts | N. Jm

Pairing- Na Jaemin x reader

Genre- Smut, fluff, college!au

Word count- 3.82k

Warning(s)- nsfw, softdom!Jaemin, pretty pwp, corruption kink, slight voyeurism? (they make out in public) possessiveness, dacryphilia (getting aroused by one crying or sobbing), fingering (for prep), unprotected sex (play it safe y'all this is a fiction), slightly inexperienced?reader, unintentional overstimulation (unintentional LMAOO), pretty filthy i say. Lyra back at it with smuts lol

Synopsis- It was hard to imagine that all it took was skirts and high knee socks and cute little jumpy girls for Jaemin to get highly turned on, but here we are.

Type- requested!

@kpopscape​

It was hard to imagine that all it took was skirts and high knee socks and cute little jumpy girls for Jaemin to get highly turned on. 

Watching you as you entered the campus had always been a sort of daily serotonin boost for Jaemin. More like, watching you smile and wave at every passing acquaintance regardless of the fact whether you spoke with them or not was a serotonin boost for Jaemin. You were extremely intriguing. 

You're a jolly person, an extreme extrovert, shy at first glance of course but nevertheless outgoing, you'd had little to no problem at all at making friends. Your close ones called you the human magnet and most would agree to it. Could you help it? Company is always better than being alone (unless preferred to be alone).

The first time Jaemin saw you was when you came into the campus first bumping into not his, but a very pissed Jeno's back in a very cliché way which resulted in him accidentally pour out his anger on you, which led to Jaemin having to find you later in the day to apologize on Jeno's behalf. That experience had a very interesting impression on the two lads, well, a not too positive impression on Jeno but the opposite for Jaemin. 

The next time Jaemin saw you was in his philosophy class, and god bless you and your perfect complexion complimenting all your curves and edges and oh of course, that cute black and white knee high socks that you wore with a skirt a little too short for him to stay sane and a sweatshirt loose enough to give you adorable sweater paws. That's when wanting to see you on a daily basis became Jaemin's sole reason to attend college. 

The next time was weeks into talking to each other, getting comfortable to a point where you went over to each other's house, exchanged numbers, went on small platonic dates and where your friendship started to turn into a touchy one, and you absolutely loved it. Well, Jaemin loved it more than you. Watching your face flush when he'd place his hands comfortably a little too close to there on your thigh had him feel sorts of emotions he's never felt. How your eyes would widen each time he'd place playfull kisses on your cheeks, or when he pulled you onto his lap to cuddle up closer when watching a movie or two, Jaemin lived for your reaction. 

Weeks after that was at a small dinner send off party of sort by one of your friends for the senior batch, where seeing you in a white body fitting turtleneck full sleeve with a grey skirt consisting of blue hue with a plain white knee high sock had him crave you more than before. When the occasional touches and kisses turned into a form of self destruction for Jaemin and those longing touches turned into a want to take it up a notch. 

And maybe it's the fact that Jaemin genuinely seemed intriguing to you, or the slight intoxicity you felt after a glass of not that strong of drink went down your throat, making you want to comply with everything Jaemin wanted. The expression he wore of pure bliss and satisfaction had you feeling proud of yourself. Like you're doing the right thing, like standing in a hallway beside your classmates bedroom with his hands around your waist in a vise grip, face inches away from colliding into a passionate kiss where anyone could bump into you two was a right thing to do. Like not caring about the all 'good mean no bad' girl image you'd formed to fade away in front of your classmates and probably next the entire campus was the right thing to do. 

The next time, well, this moment right now when you went over with him to his studio apartment hand in hand after evening lectures, it had been nearly impossible for Jaemin to keep his hands to himself. How your lips pucker into a pout complaining about all the workload you have, how you jump up in excitement at the sudden strike of another topic you want to discuss with him, or how you seemed so dreamy in general and all Jaemin could do was stare at you with an expression of pure admiration, desire and want to change the whole innocent image you held. 

"so Mr. Li asked him to-ah!" and all he could do was pull you onto his lap with his hand on your hip to hold you up in place and unintentionally cut your sweet voice's narration short, but he wanted to hear you more, "I'm listening, doll. Keep going"  he cooed at your flushed expression at the sudden proximity, pulling you closer to connect you two by the hip, tapping at your now exposed thighs as your skirt had ridden up at the shift in position to urge you to step out of your daze and continue speaking. 

"What.-what are you doing, Jaem?" you ask, resting your hands on his chest as you push yourself a little back to create some space, clearly astonished at the sudden spark of something at the area between your sock clad legs, only to be pulled back closer towards him once again. 

"Something I've wanted to do for a long time, keep going, baby, I'll just be doing my thing" and so you let your hand rest on his chest while continuing your story as he looked intently at you.

Being in such proximity with Jaemin had never been a new thing, it's how no matter how many times you'd see him up close you'd still can't look him straight in the eyes for more than a few seconds because of how strong his gaze is that would have you flustered. Ever since the said party, your first proper kiss and Jaemin's first step to calling you his, you wanted to stick around him and just him. You felt like yourself around him and he made you feel so loved that you were willing to let him do anything just to have him around. 

In Jaemin's case, it was that he'd not move forward with his plans if he'd noticed the slightest of discomfort in any of your actions, fearing that you'd leave him once and for all before he could even call you his. And so in that way, you two did what pleased the others the best. 

Smiling at how you slowly got comfortable with his warmth, he leaned forward, slightly startling you but you nevertheless continued speaking, "Show his homework to him, b-but he couldn't because the only co-opy he had.." you squeal in a breath as you feel his breath fan your exposed neck, courtesy of wearing a slightly deep V-neck to college and of course to the hangout that day, "Had..?" 

Jaemin rasped in a voice a little too low to what you're used to hearing, dangerously low that you felt yourself squirming under his grip, which elicits a groan from the male. Not knowing the weightage of your action, you accidentally end up doing it again as his plush lips come in contact with the sensitive skin. "H-had was.. mine-" 

"Mine, a pretty word, right doll?" The feeling of his lip moving against your skin was ticklish to describe the best, but good, good enough to have keeping your legs closed uncomfortable from the sudden pool of arousal that bedded itself in your foolishly white panties. "Yes..?" you answer with a shaky voice, moving once again to get rid of the said uncomfortable feeling which resulted in Jaemin throwing his head back to rest on the head rest of the couch, his perfect eyebrows furrowed into a frown, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. 

"Darling, if you keep moving like this, i won't be able to stop myself from doing what all I've imagined doing to you," he spoke with the same low voice of his, which had you unintentionally moving regardless of the empty warning that lingered in the air. That's when you notice the visible switch in the way Jaemin looked at you.  Determined to carry this forward and put an end to the friends title to develop into a whole new one.

"What you've imagined doing to me? W-wha-?" you let the question linger, not really expecting an answer when he looked at you with a smirk on his perfect lips. He let one of his hands off from your side to comb through your perfectly set hair while the other wrapped around your torso to keep you upright. 

"Should i tell you what I've imagined?" Surely fueled by desire, Jaemin still counted on your consent, basic etiquette and he wouldn't let it go down the drain just because of his lust. The silent look of curiosity gave it away that you really wanted to walk through the dream boys imagination, so you nod your head. "Words, darling. I need words"

Looking at him patiently waiting for your verbal confirmation, you swallow down the nervousness before looking him straight in the eyes with your own widened ones, "Y-yes."

"Hm, well, I imagined having you close to me, just like this, all responsive to everything I do."

"Then I imagined feeling that soft lips of yours once again, the one that I remember so vaguely. Will you let me taste it once again?" He asked, leaning in closer than what your bodies would allow, nevertheless feeling ecstatic at the effect he has on you. "Hm?" you could obviously not say no to the expression he wore, filled with excitement and expectations, happiness, desire and maybe.. love? 

Instead of answering, you lean forward, closing off the small distance that kept your bodies from colliding, pressing your lips onto his with least force. The type of kiss got both of you feeling hot, bubbly as you feel Jaemin smile against your lips. 

The kiss was a mix of aggression and passion, slow and fast, lust and innocent emotions, one strong enough to deliver all sorts of emotions and of course, sloppy out of desperation, "Still as sweet as ever," he speaks against your lips, beaming down at you with the same smile as you refuse to meet his gaze at the sudden shyness that overtook your desire. 

Jaemin's hands slip up the open clothing to grip your thigh raw, the feeling of his cold fingers making you shift position again, looking down and cowering behind your palms as you shield your heated face from the lad, "What's wrong doll?" he moves his thumb up and down, massaging the skin he had his grip on, "Talk to me, princess, do you want me to stop?" 

"No!.. I mean, n-no, it's just.. I've never done this before, ever" As though your usual behavior never gave it away that you're too innocent for anyone existing in the world, you confirm Jaemin's suspicion all the more, to which his smile only just widened, the burning desire to change the status if innocence way too strong for him to contain himself now, "I know, darling, I'll go slow, alright?"

At your nod of confirmation, he wastes no time to lift your shirt out of it's confinement inside your skirt and over your head to reveal a not so appealing bra, yet, Jaemin thought you looked absolutely exquisite in it. Just a plain white lace bra, a cherry on top to the innocent image you held that he oh so much wanted to destroy, "W-wait! Can.. C-can this..-nevermind," you sigh, not wanting to disappoint the boy in front of you at your insecurity, "Can what, baby?" you shake your head, "Tell me, love"

"Can..can the bra stay on.. Just this once..?" you ask in a soft voice as Jaemin notices your tiny gestures of an attempt to cover yourself a little, feeling a little too hot, "Do you want it to stay on?" he asks in a voice all too understanding, no signs on the disappointment you were worried about, you nod, "Then it stays on" he smiles before placing a chaste kiss at the valley of your chest and swiftly shifts you on his lap in a way that your back rest flat on his chest, a hand secured on your waist to hold you as close as possible.

You feel a sort of warmth spread through your body at Jaemin's understanding and non persistent behavior towards your request as you allow yourself to relax and go limp on his body, "Do you know how many times i've imagined this? You on my lap.." he moves his legs to break your legs apart, using his knees to spread them and hold them open, "All pretty and for me to touch," He attaches his lips to your neck once again with a better access this time as he lets his hands wander up and down your legs, the hand that held your waist moving down to bunch up your skirt and pull it up to reveal to leaking mess you'd become which made Jaemin twitch and you shy. 

"All wet for me, and for me only" you whimper at his shameless words as his wandering hands move closer to your heat, cupping it as he felt up the wetness he'd caused to form there, a throaty groan escaping him while doing so as you feel yourself jump at the friction you got for a second at the place you needed it the most. The thought of someone other than you touching your sex causing your insides to twist, in the best way possible of course. 

Jaemin resumed to feel up and down your wetness from over the fabric while still keeping his lips attached to your neck, just to make sure you were wet enough to take him, or better, his fingers. 

"J-Jaemin..," 

You let out a loud moan feeling his fingers directly over your clit once he pushed you drenched panty aside, coating his fingers with your arousal before easing one slender digit in, causing your back to arch.

Way too sensitive and aroused, it was obvious you wouldn't be long until your first high, and Jaemin knew that all too well as he felt your tight walls clench over one little finger when he started pulsing it in and out of you and a steady pace, minding to not make it too much for you, though, that thought seemed highly appealing to him, but he'd rather save it for the next time.

"Does that feel good, my love? Because watching you look all angelic like this for me is what I'd imagined next" he speaks against your hair, as you try to close in your leg at the friction you're getting suddenly becoming overwhelming for you, added to that came in Jaemin's words, talks, voice laced in adoration and pure want. "Y-yes Jaem, oh god.. "

Silently moaning himself at your godly sounds, he continues penetrating you to your first ever not self made orgasm, eliciting a loud high pitched scream from your side at the very intimidating feeling at the bottom of your stomach, feeling it undo as Jaemin coaxes your first orgasm out of you,

"Just like that darling, you're doing so well, so good for me" he coos, wanting to drag your orgasm a little more, as he lowers his unoccupied hands to draw small, slow circles around your clit, making you spasm uncontrollably over him, feeling your eyes glaze over at the now painful feeling, you push his hands meekly away from your core, 

Shocked over the fact that he got you to come for him with just a finger, he added another one in, muttering silent apologies at your sudden pleas for a break to make sure your stretched out enough for that upcoming activity, "Just a little more, my strong girl, just a little more," though sorry for dragging your orgasm, he felt himself get lost at your small sobs and tiny tears falling down the side of your face which he pecked away.

Increasing the speed of his hands, he presses his thumb over your extremely sensitive bundle of nerves once again, making your arch your back in a painful angle, the crown of your head resting on his shoulder as you shake your head at him, letting him know that it was getting too much for you to handle, 

"Come for me once again, baby. We need to make sure you're prepared enough, hm? Can you do that for me?"

As if on command, you let yourself fall apart once again, a loud cry resonating through the room along with you crunching your legs up to stop the burning from the intense high, Jaemin whispering praises against your hair while running his hand up and down your forearm to soothe you. "You did so well, doll, want to stop here?" he inquired selflessly, not caring about the fact that he's extremely hard and it had taken a painful toll.

You take a second to calm your breathing as Jaemin patiently waits for your response. Making sure your breathing is normal again, you shake your head from it's position on his shoulder as he presses a kiss onto your wet cheeks, "You need to feel good too.." you speak with your eyes barely open, Jaemin smiling softly against your cheek, "Love."

You let out a sound of confusion at the random word blurted out by him as you turn your head to look at him, "Say the word 'love' if it gets too much for you, alright?" you nod, at no further actions from his side, you look at him once again, realising he's all about the verbal confirmation, "Alright.." you squeal out, "Turn around and sit facing me, doll" he hurries.

Jaemin rushes to remove his skinny jeans alongside his boxers when you lift yourself up, letting his member stand tall and free from confinement, making him feel like he can finally breathe. Slightly intrigued by the above average size, you look at him nervously which had his head turn at your innocent expression, "We'll take it slow, darling, nothing to hurt you, hm?" you nod before replying out loud. 

He gestures for you to hover yourself above his hardness once he got the panties out of the way and discarded it somewhere out on the wooden floor of his housing. "Go for it whenever you're ready" wanting to give you full control of the pace for now, he let you take your time for your first ever time. 

Chest heaving up and down in both excitement and nervousness you slowly lower yourself, knees beside his thighs, hands a vise grip on his shoulder, letting yourself engulf just a little of his member, you wince, still a little sensitive from the previous orgasms, his hardness much thicker and bigger than his fingers to just ease down quick despite how easy it'd be considering the wet mess he'd made of you, "Jaemin.. " 

Contributing from his end, he pushes his hips up to get inside you a little more, not too fast for it to be painful for you. Slowly, you let yourself ease down on him completely, sitting down onto his lap with his dick inside of you, twitching at the warmth he finally felt. Jaemin hushes your silent cry of slight pain, "You feel so good around me, doll. Such a good girl for me, " 

You take the initiative to lift yourself up just a little so that more than half of him is out and glistening from your arousal making him let out an airy moan of satisfaction, feeling your tightness, finally after only having imagined how it felt for so long.

You move up and down slowly, thighs trembling, heart pacing fast with pride at the feeling of making him feel good from all the sounds he let out, mind hazy and body covered in sweat. "oh my, Jae-Jaem-ah!" you fall limp over his body at the sudden thrust from his end, maybe from growing too impatient. 

"Should i take it from here, darling? I need to come, will you make me come, doll?" you mumble out a bunch of 'yes!' as your face falls into the nape of his neck where you nibbled at the skin like how he'd done. 

Jaemin took control once again, a sudden burst of energy sparking through his body as he set a fast pace in pistoning in and out of you, your slickness and his precum ensuring it wouldn't be painful for you, rather, it felt extremely good. "Look at my good girl taking me so well, you're making me feel so good, darling, I'm so.. Uh, I'm so close-" 

You clench around him when you feel a knot forming once again for the third time that evening when you feel his tip brush against your sweet spot, eliciting a loud gasp from you as you bite down a little too harder than intended on his hot skin while pressing the side of your face against his broad shoulders. "Jaemin.. Jaem, I'm.. Oh god"

"I know, doll, i know.. Me too, let go for me" he holds your hips in a grip tight enough to leave a light bruise or two while reaching between your bodies to find comfort on your clit again, making you let out a choked moan as Jaemin ended up being the one doing most of the work. 

You fall off the edge once again, this time harder than the previous ones as your tears slip and fall onto his shoulder, seeping into his shirt and onto the skin, making him go faster, chasing his high while dragging yours for a second or two longer. 

"Jaem, too much..it hurts-" you sob in a whiny tone which was more than enough to throw Jaemin off his edge too, rubbing fast circles on your clit while ribbons of his essence coat your walls as he lets out a loud, long groan of your name.

He stops his moment on your clit, but continues to move slowly to draw out all the arousal from his member, only stopping when he feels himself grow soft inside of you, the feeling making you clench around him weakly which makes him jolt due to the sensitivity.

Knowing it'd only make a mess to remove himself from inside you, he decides to stay in, muttering out a series of praises that he let linger in the air. 

"That.. felt good," you speak into the silence, voice hoarse and weak, worn out from all the activity as you silently thank him for making you feel so good, a sense of accomplishment spread through his chest, finally fulfilling his wish of corrupting you, and most importantly, making you his. He kisses your forehead after pushing out strands of tresses that covered it, 

"Anything for my babygirl"

[nightspeckle]

Jurdan Summer Au part 2

Description: 

Cardan and Jude have been summering with each other since they were babies. They have spent every summer at the beach together but they have never been friends, until now.

Part 1 

*****

Jude woke the next morning to the sounds of the ocean waves and seagulls squawking. The sun from the window was heating her already pink skin. She could hear her family from downstairs, they were what woke her up. Back home she would have been infuriated and yet at the beach house, she couldn’t care less. 

When she looked over to Taryn’s bed it was already empty. Of course. 

Downstairs Madoc and Vivi were eating breakfast in the kitchen. When Jude got closer she could hear them bickering again. 

“Vivienne, how many times do I have to tell you to get a job?” Madoc was pushing his eggs around his plate in a menacing way. 

Vivi just sighed “I have to work on my art portfolio if I have any chance of getting into the art school I want. I just don’t have enough time.”

Madoc went to open his mouth again and Jude decided to step in before it turned into the screaming match it had been for the past few weeks. 

“Where’s Taryn?”

“Guess” Vivi supplied and Jude knew exactly where she was.

“Great,” Jude huffed while pouring herself a bowl of cereal. 

When Jude sat down she saw Vivi was still in her PJs. “What are you doing today?”

Viv smiled apologetically at Jude, “I’m going to the studio in town to get started,”

Madoc cut Vivi a glance that reeked of disapproval before shifting his focus to Jude. 

“Why don’t you come with me and Eldred, we’re going on a hike to dragonfly cove,” Madoc looked gleeful at the prospect of spending the day with his daughter.

Jude could think of a hundred things she would rather do than go hiking with two old dads. 

Madoc could sense Jude's lack of desire and scrambled to entice her. “I’ll enforce a mandatory family dinner on Taryn tonight if you come,”

Jude knew that it wasn’t exactly very cool of her to want to force her sister to spend time with her. But it was only their second day at the beach and none of her work friends were out of school yet, so although it was selfish she didn't mind. 

“Alright,” She mumbled. Madoc’s face turned giddy.

“Perfect we're leaving at 9:30, so hurry up,”

Jude looked at the clock on the stove to see it read 9:15 and just rolled her eyes before polishing off her cereal and heading up the stairs to go change. She just couldn’t wait for a hike with her dad and his old friend!

...

When Jude piled into the back of the jeep she didn’t expect to see another child who had been roped into this hike. Cardan had his head rested against the seat. He didn’t say anything as Jude climbed back into the seat. 

When Madoc jumped into the passenger seat he cracked a smile at Cardan. “I see Eldred must have bribed you into joining too,”

“Bribed?” Eldred asked while he started up the jeep.

“I bribed Jude so she would come along, did you not?” Madoc asked.

“Of course not, I just made him,” Madoc looked at Eldred as if he was a genius. Jude just prayed Madoc wouldn’t get any ideas about forcing her into family bonding. That would not go over well. 

The top of the jeep was off and Jude's ponytailed hair started to flutter around her. She had almost forgotten Cardan was there while she watched the world around her pass by. 

“What did he bribe you with?” When Jude turned back to Cardan she could see a gleam of curiosity in his eyes. He had put an arm around the back of the seats and tilted to face her more. 

Jude was immediately embarrassed as she had agreed to Madocs terms. She didn’t want anyone else knowing how she was using her dad to make her sister spend time with her. 

When it was clear Jude was not going to spill Madoc piped up from the front. “I promised to make Taryn come home for dinner tonight,”

Jude slumped back into her seat with a sigh feeling defeated. She expected Cardan to comment on how pathetic that was but when she looked over at him he was smirking. 

“I should probably thank you for that,” Cardan said playfully. 

“It’s what friends do,” Jude jokes.

The smile Cardan sent her way was nothing like she had ever seen from him. He was looking at her like they truly were friends, like being able to smile together was normal. 

Jude was starting to wonder why she had spent her childhood constantly writing him off. She had never liked how he disregarded her when they were younger. She had always felt that he thought that Jude and Taryn were beneath him. 

But the way he was acting now made her question everything in the past. Maybe she was wrong about him. 

Jude spent the rest of the drive to dragonfly cove with her fingers dangling out of the jeep. She spent her time getting distracted by the passing green trees and the feeling of the summer sun. The only thing that kept drawing her attention back to the car was the constant terrible sound of her father's and Eldred's voices singing along to their summer reggae playlist.

She couldn’t help herself but make eye contact with Cardan when both of their fathers voices cracked. Cardan laughed then, the sound filling Jude with a certain lightness. She couldn’t help but laugh herself. 

Jude was having a much better time on her Dad's usually boring adventures. When Jude looked over at the black haired boy next to her she knew he played a larger role in it than she wanted to admit. 

This was not good.

...

Dragonfly Cove was not a particularly popular place to hike. The reason for that being that there was one trail. It went from the parking lot down to the beach 50 feet below. The path to the cove event consisted of a set of wooden stairs with rails on both sides. 

If you were to ask anyone outside of the Greenbriar and Duarte families they would say that Dragonfly Cove is not a place to hike. Instead, they would refer to it as a small beach that required a short walk to reach. 

If you asked Madoc and Eldred they would tell you that Dragonfly Cove was the best place to hike out of anywhere in the area.

If you asked their children they would tell you that hiking at Dragonfly Cove was toeing death itself. 

If after taking the path and stairs down to the beach, one were to travel to the end of the beach and climb over a massive rock they would be able to see the “hike” that Madoc and Eldred had taken their children on years prior.

The “hike” consisted of climbing up an extremely steep slope made of unstable rocks and ledges. There had been many close calls of falling in the past. Orianna had even forbidden Madoc to try and reach the top of the cliff ever again. 

Now standing at the bottom of the cliff Jude was thinking that Madoc should listen to Orianna much more. She was certain looking up at the incline that she would face certain death. 

Eldred and Madoc had already taken off. Surprisingly for their age, they seemed to have no problem scaling an unstable cliff.

“Afraid Jude?” The smug voice to her left startled her.

When she turned to look at Cardan she saw the amusement in his eyes. 

“It seems even the fearless Jude herself is afraid,” He looked to be enjoying the way Jude was squirming at the idea of climbing up the cliff. 

She kept having flashbacks to the time a rock had given way under Taryn's feet. Jude had had to lunge to grab her sister's arm before she could tumble all the way down. 

“No need to worry Duarte, I’m sure we will be back down soon if you want to wait,” Cardan said with mock reassurance. Jude could tell by the look in his eyes that he was enjoying taunting her. 

Cardan took off towards the rocky slope without looking back. Jude’s hesitance at hiking the steep slope disappeared the second Cardan had alluded to her inability to do so. Jude Duarte was not one to ever be bested. She would show him.

Jude spent the first half of the “hike” solely paying attention to her feet. She refused to make a misstep or stumble. 

She could see how effortlessly Cardan was making his way up the incline above, she would not do worse than him. 

By the second half Jude had mastered the art of scaling a steep incline. She was doing so well that she even passed a delighted Madoc and enthusiastic Eldred. 

Jude's mood improved even more when she looked back to see Cardan a good distance behind her. 

She couldn’t help herself when her foot slipped the tiniest bit. “Are you alright down there Cardan?” 

Her smile grew when he sent her an annoyed look. “I’m sure your Dad would help you up the rest of the way if you want to wait,”

“I’m quite fine Duarte,” 

Cardan had gotten closer to catching up to Jude as they continued but she didn’t mind. She had still made it up there first, which was all she cared about anyways. 

The two of them stood at the top of the cliff looking out at the ocean quietly for a few minutes. They didn’t say anything to each other until they heard the telltale signs of their fathers down below. 

They both looked down to see Madoc and Eldred huffing for air and stumbling on the rocky terrain. It was amusing to watch their overconfident fathers falter on the hike they claimed toddlers could do. 

Jude watched Eldred slip on a rock and immediately looked to Cardan. When they made eye contact they couldn't help but burst out with laughter. 

After waiting for Madoc and Eldred to catch their breath at the top they headed back down. Jude found the descent to be extremely easy in comparison and managed to beat everyone down to the bottom. Cardan was in her heels the whole time but that was a fact she would choose to omit if anyone asked. 

Cardan continued to tease her (mainly about how she had walked into a pool of water without realizing) as they made their way back to the car. She had used to believe his teasing to be annoying and insufferable and now she couldn’t help but smile every time he had a snarky comment. 

Jude was on the verge of pinching herself every ten minutes. She couldn't believe she was actually enjoying herself. 

Madoc and Eldred decided it would be fun to go on an hour long drive by the coast. Something which Judge was surprisingly happy about.

They stopped on the way back at a farmers stand selling fresh fruit. Jude bought blueberries for Viv and a few peaches for herself and Taryn. Oak was in an anti-fruit faze at the moment. The discovery that tomatoes and olives were fruits sent him for a real loop.

Jude couldn’t help but laugh when Cardan’s peach was dripping all over his face and onto his shirt. 

Jude’s own peach dripped all over her when she took a bite. The taste was worth the stickiness. It was even worth Cardan's growing amusement. 

When they got closer and closer to the house Jude felt something strange deep within. It was a very small sliver of disappointment. One she was not happy to find. Was she disappointed she was going home? Or was it that her time hanging out with her dad, Eldred, and mainly Cardan was coming to an end?

Whatever the reason, she decided that ignoring it was the best course of action. 

When they pulled into the driveway she got out slowly. Now that she was done with her bribed time with her father what would she do? Taryn was probably still not home, Vivi was busy, and none of her local work friends were out of school. 

Whatever it was that she would do, she knew that it wouldn’t be as fun as this morning, that was something extremely surprising to her.

....

Jude ended up doing some summer reading outside on the porch for a bit. When Oak came home from wherever he had disappeared off to with Orianna she supervised him at the beach. 

She actually did enjoy herself but it wasn’t until dinner that she was truly having fun again. The families were eating together outside again. 

She ended up sitting next to Cardan and Viv who had come home 30 minutes before. Jude had a few moments where she caught herself smiling for no reason and laughing because of the dumbest things.

Dinners usually lasted for a few hours with the families in the summers. The parents would stay talking for longer than they would anywhere else. Jude who usually snuck out after 30 minutes to do something else ended up staying for a couple of hours. It wasn’t until Viv declared she was heading back that Jude did too. 

“You look happier than you did yesterday,” Viv commented when they got back to their house. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jude said amused.

“You’re smiling more you weirdo,”

Jude had been smiling more than the day before. When she looked back on the day it had mainly been because of Cardan. But there was no way that he was the reason for her smiles. Maybe it was just because he was funny.

Was Cardan funny? Jude wasn’t so sure about that. 

“Oh, whatever Viv,”

Vivian and Jude broke into the moose tracks ice cream and watched a movie before going to bed. When Jude crawled into her bed it was only 11:15 but she didn’t mind. 

It was only when she was about to go to sleep that she noticed Taryn’s bed was empty. Not only was she not there but Jude realized she hadn’t even shown up to dinner.

The funny thing was that Jude didn’t even care.

~~~

tags (or my one LOL) : 

@big-daddy-maddy

[untitledtheunknown]

Psychofans & Mediacorps

(Backstory and lore on some psychofan encounters and the attempted kidnapping of Kerry Eurodyne along with some related events with Johnny Silverhand. Written as a Screamsheet because I was bored, and this all isn’t 100% since actual events aren’t always fully disclosed. Word count: 2976. Sources at the end.)

Being a world famous Rockerboy is really all it’s chalked up to be, doesn’t mean there isn’t its fair share of snags along the way. Fame and glory comes with a heavy price tag many don’t realize as they’re building their way to the top. Blinded by having your name in the lights, seeing hundreds of thousands of fans all eagerly waiting to just get a glimpse of you. Night City Legend Kerry Eurodyne commented, “It’s scary. I mean, to think that one hundred thousand people are selling their souls to see you, and you’ve got them hanging on your every word.” The very fans that would kill for a chance to see their idols live, are the very same that would put them on Trauma. 

Not just the fans either. Corporate is everywhere, in everything. Fight the system through lyrics while making them richer all the same. Media giants like N54 and DMS buying up the whole show to beat on their chest about who has the most control. The issue comes with their greed for it, keeping those who give them wealth on short leashes. Best offers, benefits, prestige of having a higher name attached to yours. But when friendship runs deeper than the quick climb to fame, other options of “persuasion” may occur. Aggressive strategies to keep themselves on top, because the company always come first.

We’re going to start this article off on arguably a lighter topic, that being the psychofans. I say arguably because they can do just as much damage as the corporations, but it's usually a bit more controlled. We'll hit on that later. There’s the usual rush security, jump fences, steal an axe, the almost seemingly normal chaotic fan behavior you can expect at most high profile gigs. Don’t lie, there’s always one in the audience. 

The sudden rise to fame with Samurai also helped play a part in this erratic behavior, Eurodyne had previously stated, “One minute we’re chugging through our old numbers in some small, no name club to the same crowd; the next we’ve sold out Wembley Stadium and there are a hundred thousand killing each other to get a look at us.” This wasn’t much of an overstatement either. Samurai’s rapid rise to fame took a mere three weeks after signing to Universal Music to reach the number one spot on EuroRadio charts. Everyone wanted a piece of Samurai then, and following the break up in late 2007 that craving didn’t soon die out. 

A number of incidents have happened, being on world tours is a crazy place. Never really know how fans are going to act until you’re in the thick of it. Most these incidents happen backstage, after gigs, or just by random chance coming across someone on the streets, in the open. One particular incident was documented in 2020 in the following of Trauma Team’s Rich “Meatball” Cramer M.D., Lifeline Trauma Inc., Night City Branch #23. 

Broken card call, 15:55, to the Grand Illusion Dance Hall and Bar. Patient being none other than one Rockerboy, Kerry Eurodyne. Compared to the rest of the logs of the night this was a breath of fresh air for the Lifeline agents, not so much for Mr. Eurodyne who was being assaulted by a gang of young female fans. Teargas was dispensed and our Rocker was extracted from the scene. Kerry was in good health at time of extraction, footing the bill of the call to the studio as well as a new set of clothes. Lawsuits were never charged as the fans left enjoying the chaos. 

Another lesser known act back in 2043-44, while performing in Memphis TN an assailant got backstage and put a knife to Kerry’s throat. Intentions of the attack are unknown. Could have been a psychofan making demands of an idol, or someone who knew the net wealth of the name Kerry Eurodyne at the time? Either way the incident ended without bloodshed, Kerry was able to talk the assailant down and promptly knock him out with a stiff pour of that high life tequila. The rest was handled by the venue’s security. Unfortunately events like these are almost common for the stardom lifestyle. 

Lives are kept under public scrutiny 24/7. “Be prepared to have your private life open to the world,” Rockerboy, Johnny Silverhand, had mentioned in a column from Advice From the Pros. Name in the lights simply means just that, private life is on show as well and nothing can truly be kept secret forever. Kerry Eurodyne had added, “Cover your ass on your social life, the mediacorps are capable of setting you up bigtime in compromising situations… Make sure you know who you’re hanging out with, and something about their friends.” Not just fans and so called friends you need to watch out for, but the very people you sign yourself away with. 

Rockers Kerry Eurodyne and Johnny Silverhand are no stranger to this cold truth. Even mediacorps you don’t sign with will have motives, and often resources, to try and gain a signature. Corporations will often go after the output/input or family of the Talent instead of the Talent itself. However, big companies like DMS, the rival to N54 News, also have other methods to “persuade” a contract breach and change. Both Kerry and Johnny were targeted by this particular company, though this time it was Eurodyne dragging Silverhand into trouble. 

After the time Samurai had broken up for good, late 2007 early 2008 Kerry was looking for a decent solo deal. This was a gamble for most Labels at the time, Johnny was the frontman of Samurai, Kerry’s true talent had yet to really flourish into the Legend we know today. At this stage in their careers they were just some new-boy artists, that had a couple songs and albums that made it big. A lot of bands will have their handfuls of top sellers and then disappear into a faded memory. However, media giant DMS saw promise in Kerry, and they quickly came out with an offer for the young Rockerboy that would put him right back on the road to stardom. 

Kerry was going to take the offer until Universal came up with an offer that wouldn’t just set him up but Johnny as well. The two decided that the offer Universal had was too good to pass up, and with good reason. Universal not only was packaging the two Rockerboys together as independent solo artists, they were offering a better deal as a whole. Since Universal already knew them from Samurai, and knew what the two could produce, formalities of signing a new band was skipped. Re-signing with Universal gave them guaranteed concessions normally only offered to major bands or superstars. 

DMS didn’t come back with a counter offer, they came back with threats. Eurodyne, and those close to him, started to receive threats from the mediacorp, these quickly escalated to hired thugs harassing and assaulting everyone in the Rocker’s inner circle, as well as himself. A common tactic for many corporations to get what they want. However, Kerry wasn’t folding to their pressure, sticking with his decision with Johnny to sign to Universal. At this point the signatures were received and Kerry’s talent was the official property of Universal Music once again. This only made the situation worse, and turned into a rather rare occurrence for the music scene. 

Major corporations have a number of outlets that they have at full disposal to get what and whom they want, when they want. DMS is not unique in this fact, but they do have one of the more unique techniques. DMS is creative, deadly, and, for a corporation its size, dangerously agile. They are known for their aggressive and ruthless recruiting tactics, and they do not take “no” with grace. 

Eurodyne’s fate, to DMS, was sealed the moment they selected him, no matter his choice. DMS starts with a fair offer, most of it coming with the prestige of having their name backing you and their benefits package. In the case of Eurodyne, where this was not enough, DMS will call on their Special Recruiting Division, which is devoted solely to recruiting and converting people who are reluctant to sign to DMS. A fancy way of saying they send in their black ops section to perform extractions on those who are bound by contract or reluctant to leave their current company. 

Extractions are illegal, but the government is in the pocket of these corporate giants. Though they hardly ever send their own people, so even if the extraction does fail the proof of finding out who sponsored the extraction is normally too timely, over looked, or asking corpses. Most these companies hire Solos to get the job done, a number of groups exist in this profession alone. Extractions are unsettling common in the corpo world that counter extractions are budgeted into company spending plans. As well many big companies have jealousy protection, and pre-planned countermeasures to prevent extraction attempts of their employees or Talents.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “If they didn’t want to work for them before, what would kidnapping them do?” Well, DMS and other companies thought about this issue as well. How do you force someone to work for you? Blackmail is the obvious answer, to the Talent, to their friends, their family, etc. It's a simple fix that will get a result, but can’t guarantee the product. Its proven effective though, reputation is everything- threats to destroy that are not taken lightly. For a company like DMS, they have a one up on this if they can't get the Talent to see eye to eye with their terms. “Talent Indoctrination”, TI for short, otherwise known as brainwashing to the common choom. It's a program used for winning over people who express resistance to “joining the DMS family” even after extraction. 

TI is only a rumor outside of the highest levels of the corporation, and those who have been subjected to it. Luckily, TI section failures are rare, unluckily survival of TI section failures is even rarer. DMS, however, is willing to risk TI only on targets with a high enough revenue generation potential. Executives are more at risk than artists, given artists are seen as disposable and the average commercial shelf-life of a DMS Music artist is only a couple years. Most only making it an average of two before they’re dropped back to performing at clubs and bars for the same hundred fans, if that. 

This was the threat Kerry was under, one that became very real one fateful day when the Rockerboy was abducted by a group of hired muscle from the corporation. While Kerry was successfully kidnapped and relocated, the extraction itself failed due to intervention of Legendary Solo, Morgan Blackhand. Blackhand was able to capture all five kidnappers, alone, and turned them over to the Federal Authorities. Beaten, battered, and bruised but all five were alive when they were handed over. This act alone humiliated DMS, who was only found later on in investigation to have been the group’s sponsor. Its not unheard of extractions being foiled, but for a company like DMS it was a shot to their pride since Kerry would know it was them that called it. The real humiliation of it comes from the fact Blackhand snagged them all alive, allowing the truth to be exposed to the public, tarnishing that royal reputation of theirs, though no legal action would be taken.

Embarrassing a huge company like that puts a major target on your back. Legality they could care less about, but reputation is not something any corporation wants to gamble with. Morgan Blackhand would become a target for a later date, DMS wasn’t done with Kerry Eurodyne yet. Now, though, their attention was brought to one of the key elements for why Kerry declined their original offer; Johnny Silverhand. 

“They were threatening Johnny and I with things like government investigations and stuff. By the time that threat was made, we’d already signed with Universal…” Eurodyne recalled during an interview. It was true, DMS had dug not only into Kerry’s past life but Johnny’s as well. They were at the stage of “If we can’t have you, no one will.” While Eurodyne’s rap sheet was arguably cleaner, DMS was preparing to go full out, and all in to find anything they could. What they had as their ace was Silverhand’s military past, and they knew they could find the same information about Eurodyne as well or paint him for it. Both Rockers had served during the 2000’s Central American Conflict, Johnny’s desertion was all they needed to start the fire.

DMS was preparing to take this knowledge to the government, and at that point they could say and paint anything on Kerry as well. Their careers were about to end before they even began. Short on time, they did the only thing they could do, they went to Universal Music. With the counter threat of exposure of DMS’s corruption and abusive power over their Talents, Universal made their position clear. This was a PR move, DMS could go to their pocket government agents to have the Rockerboy’s locked away for life, but Universal was going for their public appearance. The ends didn't justify the means, DMS backed down.

Lawsuits were dropped, threats ceased, no more extraction attempts were made on either rockstar. They were given freedom to produce their albums and do tours under the protection of Universal. It wouldn’t be for another several years down the line when DMS would rear its ugly head back into their lives. Well, only in passing.

Denny, the former drummer of Samurai, had a new band called Mastermind that was being recorded by DMS Music. “She knows how I feel about them, but the contract they’ve got is suitable for her, so I’m not going to interfere as long as she is happy.” Kerry had stated on the matter back in late 2013, “Even now you won’t find Johnny or I saying anything remotely positive about DMS… I’m just glad no one was listening when I made certain comments or some of my fans might have taken those rash words to heart and we might have had some serious problems.” A tongue in cheek response to the 13 April 2013 Arasaka Riots led by Johnny Silverhand, under the old band's name of Samurai. Rioters killed 18 and wounded 51 on that night, gutting the Arasaka complex. An event that would only deepen the wedge between the two Rockerboys, yet redefine them entirely.

Silverhand, however, would be blackmailed again later on in 2009 by EBS Records to leave Universal and sign a solo contract with them. EBS had found out that Johnny was an AWOL U.S. Marine who had deserted during the Second Conflict. The blackmail attempt was quickly dropped as Johnny came clean himself, revealing all his secrets and shining light on the plight of veterans of the covert war, with his now famous album Sins of Your Brother. 

One thing the Rocker was known for was starting changes with his music, back in late 2012 Silverhand had an assassination attempt on his life believed to be sourced from Biotechnica do to their belief of controversal opinions to their practices heard on his album Clone Wars. Being forced to take several months of seclusion to let the heat die down before going on tour himself.

Given all of this, and much more, they had been relatively lucky. Maybe not with the fans, Eurodyne still faces the masses though in some more creative ways now. Having his biometric data copyrighted, and agreements with NCPD to monitor CCTVs for any unauthorized replications. Hasn't stopped some from trying, going as far as faking nudes that broke headlines awhile back only to have frisky imaginations shot down by his management. As far as Johnny goes, I don't think anything beats the rumor that was circulating sometime after the events of Arasaka Tower back in 2023. The idea some obsessive fan sneaked past security of the city to dig through the rubble, locating his body to put on ice and keep like some kind of memorabilia? It sounds crazy, but everyone in Night City knew what kind of fans Samurai, and more importantly, Johnny Silverhand had. Made it completely possible and people didn't really doubt that it could be true.

With corporations though, the two Rockerboys dodged a bullet. Multiples if you were keeping count. Others haven't been so lucky. A number of stories of Talents being threatened and giving into demands, multiple assassination attempts to end someone's career, Talents being kidnapped and tortured, so far as one account of a musicians hands being crushed to prevent preformances. From the outside being a Rockerboy looks like a party scene, and a lot of it is, but as the longest living in the scene will tell you, keep a Solo and a Netrunner you trust close on personal pay.

Events come full circle, once you make it to the big time stardom, the public eye notices everything, hangs onto every word. Talents like Silverhand and Eurodyne control the masses in the same way the corporations do. The audiences look to them for guidance, though in some cases the lessons are lost in translation. With everything from greedy labels making backdoor deals behind their Talent’s backs, something Kerry Eurodyne and Us Cracks went through this year, to psychofans making their own demands, to corporate reputation wars. Being a Rockerboy never gets easier, but few have hardly ever survived the test of time as Kerry has. An uphill battle from his earliest beginnings, to sitting on the Rockerboy throne of Night City, well into 2077 and still holding the title of "God of Rock" without a fault. 

Sources and Quotes:

Rockerboy Source Book

Backstage with Kerry Eurodyne page 7-9

Extortion. Bribery. Kidnapping. Brainwashing. And Other Nasty Tricks. Page 44-45

Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. The Second Edition

Silverhand Update: Clone Tour Begins page 225

One Night with the TRAUMA TEAM page 231 

Live & Direct 

Diverse Media Systems “Technotainment” page 81-82

Solo of Fortune Vol II Source Book

American Angels: One of Europe’s Best Rates the Top U.S. Pros. page 63

Cyberpunk Red

Welcome to the Dark Future page 239

Cyberpunk 2077

Spector Melee Vendor Westbrook

Gig: Psychofans Gaston Slayton's computer

Shard Glam Now! - The Mag For Those Who Love This For Themselves

[minghaocouture]

Pairing: Lee Jihoon x Fem!Reader Genre: Collage AU, Fluff, the tiniest angst Warning: Minor self esteem issues (from reader), Language WC: 2.9K

A/N: @woozisnoots​​ my sweetie baby! This is your Holiday gift from me!! I wub yoooou and i hope you like this <333 The song mentioned in the fic is Tell me you love me by Bolbbalgan4 and i actually just kept listening to it on repeat while writing this lol, it’s such a cute song, and all the italic words are song lyrics (the english translations)! Also yes i shamelessly name dropped our friend group in this, don’t judge me

“You don’t accept my hi as usual I know you’re popular and handsome  but you’ve always given the cold shoulder Only to me.” 

The lyrics flowed easily from your lips and into the microphone, eyes closed as you felt the vibes of the chorus and attempted to put the right layers of emotion into the song as you did so. The instrumental paused just as the chorus ended you heard the familiar sound of your partner through the headphones.

“Can you run that one more time. Hold that last note a bit longer, and make the staccato in the first beginning a bit sharper.” On the other side of the glass sat Lee Jihoon, and the brains behind the operation despite this being a partnered project. At the beginning of this, you never would have thought that the two of you would have been working together so well. Not with how the project began. 

You gave him an affirmation of your understanding and he began from the end of the pre-chorus, letting the melody and his test vocals fill your ears just before you began again.

When you had first been assigned partners, you were less than enthused. Sure, you had a major crush on Jihoon, his passion for music inspired you and you always loved watching him in class when he would perform. But, he was notoriously a rather critical partner. During the last partnered project in class a close friend of yours, Binu, had been assigned to work with him. She ended up confessing that she didn’t really get too much of a say on anything and that Jihoon did the project mostly by himself. Needless to say, she was much happier with this project being partnered with your mutual friend Mar. 

The recording session wrapped up nicely and you began packing your things as you realized how late it was in the evening and your friends would start to get concerned if they didn’t hear back from you. So you pulled your phone from your bag and quickly messaged your group chat to let them know the situation. As you went to place your bag over your shoulder you heard the familiar sound of a stomach growling.

Your eyes quickly scanned the room and watched Jihoon sigh and sit back down at the recording booth, his laptop still open but he didn’t look like he had any intention of leaving to get sustenance. Much to your own surprise you decided to speak up.

“Hey, I was planning on grabbing some dinner. Did...you wanna come too? We’ve been here for a while and we could probably use some food.” You suggested, an inviting smile plastered itself onto your face. You hoped it didn’t seem fake, after all you had invited Jihoon to eat before and he had always denied the offer. 

Much like all previous times, you saw his rather small head shake in denial.

“Nah, I’ve got some stuff to finish up here. I’ll probably grab something before heading back to my dorms...or maybe I’ll ask Mingyu to pick me up some dinner.” You’d heard about Mingyu before, his roommate who he says he tolerates but you can tell that he does really care about the guy from how he talks about it. 

Most people say that Jihoon is hard to read and closed off, but you know they’re wrong. He just...emotes differently, he has his own ways of showing affection and you can see it in his eyes and the little things he does and says. Being around him like this has honestly only made your crush worse. 

“Well, alright, but you better eat something and go home tonight. I don’t wanna come back here tomorrow and see you in this same outfit cause you haven’t gone home.” Which...had happened on more than one occasion during this project.

He shrugged, not turning back to face you.

“I brought extra clothes this time.”

***

“Seriously? I can’t believe he said no again! Ugh, I hate him and you deserve better than to pine after that short stack!” Rolling your eyes as you listened to Krys ranting once again. 

Since Jihoon refuted your invitation you decided to invite out your best friends. The 5 of you heading to a nearby fried chicken place, crowding into the booth that your friend group had basically claimed (when it was available at least) 

“It’s fine Krys, he’s just really into his work. He’s probably going to be in the studio editing until all hours of the morning.” You explained before shoving some of the complimentary salad into your mouth as you took a break from the chicken itself. “I might even take him some food before I head back to the dorms.”

“Nu-uh! I’m not letting you! That boy doesn’t even talk to you outside of class, he doesn’t deserve your time or your energy!” Krys exclaimed.

“I mean, he kinda does. Talk to her, I mean he waved at her last week.” Maya brought up in between her unsuccessful attempts at stealing the rest of the table’s pickled radish. “We were walking to the lounge and she saw him and waved at him, and he finally waved back.”

“Oh what, after ignoring her for a whole semester? Real nice of him. My best friend deserves better!” She declared, aggressively taking another bite of her chicken before continuing. “If I weren’t already dating the best man in the whole world, I would just date you myself.”

This brought the rest of the table another fit of laughter. It was never a dull moment in your friend group and you were always grateful that you had them in your life. 

“This just in, Krys won’t leave big dick Wonwoo so her best friend can have a good relationship.” Mar joked, cackling at the thought. The laughter seemed to get worse when she realized that Wonwoo himself had just walked up to the table to set down a drink refill for Binu. The male’s face was flushed red, obviously having heard the conversation. Which prompted another round of joyful laughter from the group.

It was a good night, but your mind still drifted back to Jihoon, who was most likely still sitting alone in the studio, hungry yet still hard at work. As the conversation drifted away from you finally, you got Wonwoo’s attention and ordered a small meal for take out with a plan to deliver the food before returning home. Even if Krys would give you shit for it.

***

“Jihoon, it’s me” You knocked on the studio door as you entered, assuming you wouldn’t be interrupting anything since you saw the light on but heard now sounds from inside. Surprisingly, or rather unsurprisingly, you got no response as you entered. Simply making your way in despite any acknowledgement.

The more surprising thing was what you found once you entered. There, still sitting in the rolly chair with his head firmly planted on the desk in front of his work laptop was Lee Jihoon. Fast asleep, small snores leaving his frame as he dreamed. It would honestly be pretty cute if it weren’t for the fact that you knew this was probably happening because of how much he overworked himself. 

You let out a small sigh, placing the bag on the small coffee table in the room (you didn’t want to set it on the desk with all the equipment) and grabbed his jacket that he had tossed onto the nearby sofa before draping it over his shoulders. You couldn’t really do much more for him without lifting the male up and transferring him to the couch, and you were pretty sure he would wake up if you even attempted that. 

“Night Jihoon.” With that final goodbye you exited the room and returned back to your dorm to get some homework done for a few of your other classes.

It was about 2:30 the next morning when your phone vibrated, indicating a message. Sparing a glance to the device you read the familiar name ‘Lee Jihoon’ as the sender. The message was no more than a simple “Thank you.” but that was good enough for you.

***

As you expected, even being the harmony vocals for the song Jihoon’s talent far outshined your main vocals. You weren’t upset or anything, but you were definitely starting to regret letting him talk you into the main vocal position for this project. You didn’t even really have any commentary to or feedback to give him. His voice fit the song perfectly and you could feel the emotion in his words as he sang. 

When he exited the booth and took a seat on the sofa to take a break you spoke up.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t be the one leading the song?” You questioned, head tilted to the side a bit as you watched him gulp down a bottle of water. Your words took him off guard and he fixed you with a rather confused look, so you continued. “I mean, you have such a great voice and I really think you capture the emotion in the song better than I do. So like…”

“What are you talking about?” He cut off your ramblings before you could continue, his eyes staring intently into your own. “You have an amazing voice, I’m literally blown away anytime you step into the booth. It’s part of the reason I was glad we got partnered for this project.”

It was almost as if your brain had short circuited, you didn’t know what to say. He had never spoken about your singing like that before, much less admit that he was...glad you were his partner. A part of you worried that he was lying just to spare your feelings, but the logical part knew that Jihoon wasn’t someone who would waste the energy to do that. 

“Let me put it this way,” he began again. “If I didn’t think you were doing a good job, if i thought your vocals would get us points docked off, then I wouldn’t have let you sing the Main. Got it?” His gaze seemed to pierce right to your very soul and you couldn’t find it in yourself to argue back and decided to just take his word for it. So you simply nodded a response.

It seemed that Jihoon wasn’t done surprising you tonight, as a smile so tender made its way onto his face. Your heart skipped a beat as you looked into his eyes, you could feel the heat rushing to your face and you prayed that he couldn’t hear the loud throbbing of your heart as he watched you. 

The moment was soon broken by the loud blaring of a familiar pop song, Jihoon’s face dropping at the sound. He quickly grabbed his phone off of the coffee table and put it up to his ear. You decided to be polite and at least try not to listen in, pulling out your own phone and messaging the group chat to see what was up.

“What do you want, Mingyu?” He began, definitely sounding more irritated than before he had taken the call. You couldn’t hear the voice on the other end but from the gumbling that left Jihoon’s lips you wouldn’t have been surprised if his roommate was pushing his buttons for whatever reason.

“No. I’m not and you need to stop asking. I’m working right now.” He paused for a moment, his voice lowering to almost a whisper as if that would make you unable to hear him. “Yes, she’s here too, so stop asking. Mingy-” He groaned as the male on the other end seemed to cut him off, you weren’t too sure with what but now you could vaguely hear the loud voice of his roommate on the line and couldn’t help laughing softly. The sound causing Jihoon’s eyes to flicker over to you, causing your heart to skip a beat as you quickly tried to make it seem like you were just laughing at something on your phone. 

“Shut it. We’ll talk when I get home...yes i’m coming back tonight!” With an irritated sigh, Jihoon ended the call. You weren’t sure he gave Mingyu any time to give a farewell but if you were being honest the conversation had been pretty amusing. 

Setting his phone down on the couch, Jihoon let out a sigh and ran a hand through his thick black locks. A silence falling over the two of you as you typed away on your phone, trying not to make eye contact again. You were so engrossed with your act you didn’t even hear when Jihoon stood from the couch and made his way over to the chair you were currently occupying. 

“Before we call it, could you re-record from the bridge to the end. When I was editing it last night there was some feedback so I wanted to get a better recording.”

“Oh, um yeah sure!” You weren’t sure why he hadn’t mentioned that before, and you didn’t recall hearing any feedback from your vocals when he was recording. But still, you took him at his word and entered the small recording booth once again. 

“I’ll start from just before the bridge.” He said over the speakers once your headphones were pulled snuggly over your ears. You cleared your throat and took a deep breath before nodding and signaling him to start.

“I really like you a lot But do you think we can’t be together? I feel small in my school uniform skirt Looking big on me, Yeah The tall, pretty girls are all around you.  Oh whoa~”

Getting through the bridge you poured your emotions into it. Thinking about your feelings for Jihoon and the longing for him to feel the same for you. Honestly, through this whole process the song the two of you had written was so...cathartic for you. Expressing things you never verbalized, how despite your attempts Jihoon never really spoke to you outside of class but he always seemed so kind when you were working. Or how, because of his looks and his talent he seemed to be surrounded by girls who thought he was wonderful. 

“If you like me, or you love me Just say yes, yes, yes And then I’m your girlfriend And your my boyfriend Tell me you like me.”

The last few chords streamed through your headphones and a silence fell over the room. Just as you were about to take the headphones off you heard a voice come through, the familiar voice of your partner and crush.

“I like you...a lot.” 

You froze like a deer in headlights, almost positive that you had misheard him. Eyes quickly landing on him, watching him through the glass. You couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but through the tint you could see the soft pink dusting his cheeks and the tips of his ears as his eyes stared down at the desk.

“Don’t say anything. I just...wanted to let you know. The reason I didn’t want to sing the main vocals is because I was worried you would be able to tell.” He continued, eyes still not lifting from the table to meet your gaze. “All of the lyrics I added were about you. I just...changed the pronouns.” 

It was unbelievable to think that Lee Jihoon could possibly love you back. He was too...wonderful, and the fact that the both of you had used this song to express those feelings was almost unreal. 

Thinking back on it, on all the interactions you had attempted to have with him outside of class. You realized that he wasn’t ignoring you, his eyes had always met your own but he was just uncertain.  He had lacked the confidence to speak to you despite your obvious interest in him. It made your pinning seem silly now. 

You still honored his wishes and said nothing, simply taking the headphones off and draping them onto the music stand before exiting the booth. Stopping right next to the object of your affections.

“Jihoon, look at me? Please?” Hesitantly, his gaze turned to you and he looked flustered, more flustered than you had ever seen him. “I like you too, a whole lot.” 

Your words had his eyes lighting up, a look of disbelief crossing his face as you continued.

“Could I...would it be alright if I kiss you?” Before today, you had only ever imagined kissing Jihoon. What it would be like had been nothing more than a small fantasy that you thought about, but seeing him nod looking away still flustered, it almost seemed to good to be anything more than a dream. 

Hesitantly, you reached out a hand to caress his cheek, your heart speeding up as he lifted a hand to press over your own. When your lips met, it was like the stars had aligned. 

It wasn’t a perfect kiss, it was shy and soft but the emotion you felt simply from his lips pressing back against your own was enough to cause your heart to soar. It was like two puzzle pieces finding one another how well his lips felt against your own. You decided in that moment that he would get to hear everyday how much you absolutely loved him, he would never need to ask or hesitate again. Cause that’s what kind of love you wanted to give him, and all you needed to do was say it. 

[ozzdog12]

2020 Top 7 (and 1)

2020 am I right? We saw an insane amount of games come out and 2 brand new consoles. What a wild and weird year for gaming, and life in general. In case you are relatively new here, and to be honest that would be completely fair considering I don't post very often on Tumblr anymore, every year going on the last 4 years (on here) I have done a Top 7 (& 1) for my favorite videogames of the year. Check out 2019, 2018, & 2017. What’s wild, as I look back on my list of games that I’ve completed and played, only maybe 10 came out this year. 2020 was a huge backlog year. 

Lets get on with the ‘And 1!”

Favorite Game that Didn’t Come out in 2020: Control (PS4)

Control may very well have been my 2019 Game of the Year, had I played it in 2019. I LOVED Control. I wanted to play it in 2019, but initial reports that it was a little rough on base consoles put me off until it was fixed. And Holy smokes what an insanely fun and trippy game once I finally started it. I knew within the first 20 minutes this was going to be the shit when I went down a hall, walked into a room and talked to the “janitor” left out a door behind him and the entire building had shifted. I’ve always liked Remedy games, but from a distance. Max Payne 1&2 and Alan Wake all oozed with weirdness and intrigue, but never enough for me to finish them. I missed out on Quantum Break. The story is Control is just the right amount of mind f*!$ for me and builds a universe I didn’t know I needed. It take some time to piece everything together, then everything just clicks. The game does have a weird difficulty spike when fighting bosses and the checkpoints were too far apart at times, but those were later patched. I spent an insane amount of time within the Federal Bureau of Control building and even more time after that with the Foundation and AWE DLC and it STILL wasn’t enough. I wanted more. Outside of Prey, I can’t think of another game that stuck in my brain more after I’d finished it. Control is absolutely a MUST PLAY title. In a world where everything sort’ve feels similar, Control stands out of the crowd.

Number 7: Astro’s Playroom (PS5)

I never thought in my wildest dreams that a game I had almost zero interest in playing would end up on my list of favorite games this year. Astro’s Playroom is being labeled as a ‘Tech demo’ but that feels like an insult to what it is. It’s a full fledged game and its free! I’ve paid more for less. A charming little platformer that lives and breathes the history of the Playstation. So many cool Easter eggs and references. It certainly centers its gameplay around the DualSense controller and everything it can do, but at its core, its a completely approachable and forgiving 3D platformer. I played it just to see what it was about, next thing i knew I had completed all the levels and wanted to further explore all the nooks and crannies within the game. I wanted to see everything the game had to offer and I had an absolute blast doing so. Makes me kinda wish I’d played the previous game on PSVR (I’d have to have a PSVR too)

Number 6: Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS5)

Another quality title, albeit a spin-off, from Insomniac to add to their Spider Man universe. Gameplay felt obviously like Spider-Man, but Miles has unique abilities that made the game feel different enough, especially the cloak and stealth. I enjoyed the fact that it was short and concise. The issue with most ‘open-world’ games is that they are entirely too bloated with unnecessary filler content (I’ll get to that in a later game), something I felt the first game suffered from, but I also understand why they are there. However I could’ve use one or two more story missions to help flesh out some characters, but it wasn’t required and didn’t change my opinion one way or the other. My one BIG gripe was with Miles himself. He is an extremely smart young kid, but so incredibly naïve. Peter Parker tells him the one thing he SHOULD NOT do is tell people he is Spider-Man. I get it, that’s part of his growth, but Miles thinks he can just solve his problems by revealing his identity and it almost certainly never works out. 

Number 5: The Last of Us: Part 2 (PS4)

The Last of Us Part 2 may be the most polarizing game in the history of the medium, but for the absolute wrong reasons. I’m in the minority that I very much enjoyed my experience with TLOU2, quite a bit actually. Its better in every single way over its predecessor, except the overall story. There are plenty of fair criticisms to be had about the story and various things within the game itself, but I thought the gameplay was so tight and crunchy. There were genuine moments of suspense and terror that I felt that no other game has ever given me. The entire hospital section (2nd time) was so susensful, I had to put my controller down to gther myself. Some of my favorite moments in the series I experienced with a character I wasn’t overly fond of. How many games can do that? The Last of Us Part 2 was meant to invoke emotion, not necessarily joy. I think that's what people lost along the way. Say what you will about the direction Naughty Dog has taken over the years, but you would be hard pressed to find a studio that makes games graphically better than they do. Yes, I know about their crunch culture, but this is not a place for that. I will say, the game was a tad bit too long, which is not something it typically say for a single player, narrative driven game. The pacing and the way the story was told wasn’t my favorite, but I respect what it was trying to do, even if it failed in some aspect of that, I finished the game within the week it was released. Something I RARELY ever do. I’m a father and I related with Joel a lot in TLOU, but I also recognized how wrong he was. There is a lesson to be learned. Your actions always have consequences and while he was doing what he thought was the right thing, it wasn’t his choice to make, and in doing so set up a series of events that were entirely avoidable, but again, that’s the point isn’t it?

Number 4: Grindstone (Switch)

I’m counting this as a 2020 game since it just came to the Switch this year ( less than a month ago) but its not the first time I’ve played it. Grindstone was the only reason I kept my Apple Arcade subscription and when I let it lapse, there was a void I just couldn’t fill. I bought Puzzle Quest on Switch but it just wasn't the same. Its THE perfect game for bite sized play, even though in its addictive nature, you’ll clear a few levels and an hour has passed before you know it. It has the perfect amount of depth that most ‘match’ games don't. You have different weapons, items, and outfits w/perks to use and experiment with to keep it fresh. I went months without playing my Switch and when this was announced in August, I couldn’t wait! Sadly, I had to wait 3 months, but since then I have spent so much time on the Switch. It gave me a reason to play it again. The art style and humour is great. The variety of enemies and challenge is just right. I can’t recommend it enough. Seriously, check this game out!

Number 3: Doom Eternal (Xbox One)

I will be the first to tell you, I did not like Doom (2016). I found it extremely boring and trite. I understood what Doom(2016) was doing and it succeeded, maybe too much. Nostalgia is a helluva thing. So in saying that, I was mildly interested in Doom Eternal. Doom Eternal is nothing like 2016 outside of it being a Doom game that connects to the rest of them (& also being a sequel to 2016). The mechanics are drastically different with more platforming (for better or worse). Eternal is challenging, at times very hard, especially early on. Eternal has no respect for its players, in a weirdly good way. It laughs at how you’ve played FPS before this one and WILL MAKE you play it its way, not your way. Yes, you point and shoot, but ammo is scare and you MUST use everything in your arsenal. No more using just 2 guns for the whole game. The enemies are relentless. Sometimes you have to pause and take a breath after a battle because you go a 100 mph for the whole fight. You have to continuously move or you die. There is an enticing rhythm to it. I categorize Eternal as ‘Blood Ballet’. Its a game where when your feeling it, much like a rhythm game, you get in the zone and there is no stopping demons from getting slayed. Surprisingly, unlike most games in the genre, it seemed to get easier (sans one extremely frustrating platforming section late in the game) the longer you played it. Was that a testament that I ‘learned’ the Eternal way or it truly did get easier? I don’t know, but the final Boss(es) were....easy.. I had more problems and deaths within the first 4 hours than I did the final 8-9 hours. The multiplayer was also surprisingly fun. The older I get, the less interested I am in multiplayer, but I found myself coming back for more for a good month or so. 

Number 2: Gears Tactics (Xbox One)

As 2020 comes to a close, I came to a stunning realization. I might be a bigger Gears of War fan than I had previously thought. Don’t get me wrong. I love Gears, but I seem to love Gears more than I thought. I'm way more invested into the lore than I recall. Anyways, Gears Tactics is everything XCOM 2 SHOULD’VE been. Not only does Gears Tactics utilize the Overwatch action, its makes it EXTREMELY important. The story revolves around the father of Kait Diaz, Gabe and a ragtag group of mostly random soldiers to take down Ukkon. Anyone who is remotely interested in the Gears universe will love the story and references. The gameplay is just so damn satisfying. The bosses are very challenging and different. I actually had to change my strategy to finish the final boss. I experimented with a totally different style of class and was rewarded for it. The post game stuff is also aplenty. This game scratched a VERY specific itch for me and I’m itchy to jump back in. I’m glad this came to Xbox One because I’m current computer could not run it.

Number 1: Ghost of Tsushima (PS4)

I have a very odd relationship with massive open world games. I love them, but I get very burnt out on them. They all have a relatively same-y formula and are often populated with bloat. GoT does have some of that but to its advantage, its not very populated, in a good way. One of the things that I really appreciated about GoT and its side quest is most of them felt meaningful. The thing that really stood out to me about GoT is the absolutely satisfying combat. It just feels SO GOOD. It requires timing and patience. There are different fighting styles for different enemies and even the armor you wear is more than just cosmetic. The combat is so fun and satisfying that I was immediately excited when they announced Legends, a multiplayer add on, for free. Its so much fun and is a blast to play with a group of friends. I’m sporadically still playing the Legends mode. I initially wanted to play the game in ‘Kurosawa’ mode but I am glad I didn’t because the game, even on the PS4 is stunning, and on the upgrade on PS5 is jaw-droppingly smooth. I did play the entire game in Japanese with English subtitles. I still don't know what Jin’s English voice sounds like. GoT does a good job a drip feeding you new abilities and things to keep things fresh. I love stealth and once I unlocked it, I spent the majority of every battle taking out as many enemies as I could while in stealth mode. Ghost of Tsushima does a lot of things very well, that the few things it doesn’t can be easily overlooked.

[jocia92]

Collider: When this came your way, how was it presented to you? What was the pitch for the series and did they give you an overall sense of what it would be?

DAN STEVENS: I didn’t really know what the other episodes involved. Although, I was briefly involved in Helen Mirren’s episode as the onboard computer, so I’d seen that one play out and knew something of the style of the writing and the themes that were going on. But I hadn’t seen any of the other episodes and didn’t really know where ours fit in, in the context of the others. It was clearly a great piece of writing with a couple of great roles, Morgan Freeman, and just an incredible emotional challenge.

If you’re going to both get mad and have to hug someone, I feel like you’d want it to be Morgan Freeman. What was that like? How was it to explore that dynamic? Did you guys talk about that at all?

STEVENS: It was a fantastic opportunity to play with somebody who’s just a master of their craft and really knows how to surf the nuances of a piece of writing. It was a wonderful journey to go on, really, and in such a short space of time. It really goes there. All of the episodes I’ve seen have been incredibly moving, but I think that the “Stuart” episode particularly is a very unusual and interesting journey, with these ideas of memory and who owns a memory and what that means to our own identity. So, it’s this slightly wretched character of Otto, who shows up and has clearly had a bit of a rough journey to try and find this character Stuart, who is in possession of this thing that he is so desperately in search of, and it goes from there and takes you to quite surprising places. A lot of it was just getting yourself over to the rhythms and the nuance of the text.

All actors are colleagues with each other and I’m sure there are people that want to work with you, but when you know that you’re going to be working with someone like Morgan Freeman, do you still get nervous?

STEVENS: There was an element of that. It was very surreal. Given that I hadn’t set foot very far from my own home for quite some time, and then suddenly was on a beach hugging Morgan Freeman, it was a pretty surreal journey. The car ride home was like, “Did that really happen?” It was a strange day.

How was the whole production of this? What was this shoot like, with everything going on in the world?

STEVENS: It was amazing that it could happen at all. Kudos to the production that they put it together with these very strict protocols. It was a slightly reduced crew, but everyone was in several layers of PPE. It was not the usual working environment that any of us are used to, but everybody recognized that, if we wanted it to happen, it had to be like this. That, alone, was pretty strange, but also to have the luxury of 36 pages to get to explore with one other actor, and for that other actor to be Morgan Freeman, that was a real luxury. So, there were restrictions and limitations on one hand, but on the other hand, there was tremendous freedom and some great writing to really go to town with.

How long did you actually have to shoot this in?

STEVENS: For the Morgan Freeman episode, I shot for two days.

What was it like to have that experience of getting back on set? What was the first day of filming again, like for you?

STEVENS: A lot of nasal swabs, to begin with. Every day started with a couple of sticks up the nose. There was just a lot of that stuff going on. Really, you were kept at a distance, which is unusual. So much of what we do is about collaboration and togetherness, and just being silly with your cast and crew, and throwing yourself into it together. I suppose maybe appropriately for some of us, we were kept isolated. We were in our trailers until the take started, and then you’d go on set. It was a different way of going about work, for sure. I’m sure those protocols will stick around for a bit, but hopefully, eventually, we’ll get back to how it was.

How did you end up also doing the voice for Helen Mirren’s episode and were you ever able to actually interact with her?

STEVENS: I was live in the studio for that episode. I was in a little booth in the corner of the room, while she was in her space pod. We would chat over the monitor, as it were, as if she was talking to the computer anyway. We maybe met face-to-face a couple of times, at arm’s length and with masks on. I didn’t have a huge amount of interaction with her, but I did get to watch. In order to respond to her, I had a monitor and I was watching her work up close, for those two or three days that I was doing that as well. That was a great privilege, in and of itself, but then a very different experience to go and be in person with Morgan.

Much like getting to hug Morgan Freeman, if you’re going to be a disembodied computer voice for anybody, it seems like Helen Mirren is a good option.

STEVENS: It was pretty fun and just great to watch her get to grips with this writing as well. It was about just giving yourself over to the journey that the writing took you on. It was fantastic.

“Stuart” is an interesting episode because you’re not really playing the past or the future of this guy, you’re just fully living in this moment of his life and exploring his emotions right now. Did it feel very different to do something like that, as an actor?

STEVENS: There was an element where I was thinking a little bit about his journey, but it’s such a momentous thing that he’s doing and it really is a culmination of seemingly a lifelong quest. It’s both in the moment and a huge deal for him and a massive emotional rollercoaster, to find this guy and find what he’s in possession of and to execute his plan that he’s been dreaming of. There’s a lot going on there. It’s very much a moment that’s in the now.

How did you find the experience of working with Sam Taylor-Johnson, as a director and collaborator? Were your conversations mostly with her, or were they also with show creator David Weil?

STEVENS: I suppose they were primarily with Sam. There was a little bit of conversation with David. He’s the writer and producer, but Sam was directing this episode. It was about really encouraging both Morgan and myself to just let the rhythm of the story and the text really speak for itself and, and take us to these places. It is such an extraordinary emotional moment for both of the characters, in a funny way, with what they go through in those 30 minutes. It was all about that, really.

Did you find yourself learning anything about acting or about yourself, as an actor, from doing a project like this that is so different and where it is just you and another person?

STEVENS: I feel like I learn something on almost everything I do, especially when you’re working with someone as great as Morgan. It’s almost like an osmosis or something, where you’re just bathing in this excellence and watching it unfold. I don’t know if there was a specific lesson that I was making notes about. It was something to do with a rhythm and a bearing, and also just a willingness to let the text take you to places and not necessarily to force anything. He has such a natural gift that it’s amazing to watch it.

It was announced recently that you’re going to do Gaslit and play John Dean. Is there simultaneously an incredible feeling of being excited and terrified to take on a role like that, when you’re playing somebody that exists and that’s still very much around?

STEVENS: Yeah, there are challenges to that. What’s interesting with that story, and this is probably true of every role and project, is looking at the person, looking at the man, and looking at the people involved in this situation, and their motivations, and their flaws, and things like that. I’m trying not to think too much about the historical significance of that and just looking at the minutia and the inherent drama of being involved in that whole situation. It’s a fascinating story.

Was that what made you want to take on that project, or was it the fact that you’d be surrounded by people like Julia Roberts and Sean Penn?

STEVENS: That’s got a huge part to play, for sure. There are some great people involved, and Matt Ross is directing it. It’s gonna be very interesting. We start next month (in June).

You did some great work in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts. What did you most enjoy about being a part of that project? Did anything surprise you about doing that kind of voice work?

STEVENS: That was a lot of fun. I love that project. The diversity of it was very attractive. The themes were great. There are some wonderful characters and a very, very silly villain in Scarlemagne. I really got to go to town in the booth with that one. It was a really fun team. My kids really enjoyed it too, which is always a bonus.

Are there more voice acting roles, in your near future? Is that something you want to do more of?

STEVENS: Definitely, yeah. It’s something I’ve been longing to get into, for a long time. It looks like there’s more on the way, which is great.

What was the draw of that kind of voice work for you? Is part of it the fact that you can play characters that you’d never be able to play in live-action?

STEVENS: That’s certainly one of the appeals. I’ve always enjoyed voice work. I’ve done a huge amount of audio books and things over the years, in all sorts of different voices and characters. To apply some of that work to the animated space, and I’ve always adored animated films anyway, it’s getting to dive into something that I already love anyway. So, there are some fun things on the horizon. It’s partly about making people aware that there’s something you really enjoy doing.

[yeochikin]

pottery class. | c. san

a/n: thank you @s1ardusk for requesting. ngl i loved writing this aaa 🥺🥺🥺 also heheheh chamomile and strawberry hehehe 👉👈 dfhjdfh anyways, hope you enjoyed it! as usual, do excuse any mistakes as this has not been proofread! ✨💖

soft music played through your earphones as your eyes were focused on the notes you had written down, head nodding up and down softly to match with the beats filling your ears. your lips moved absentmindedly as you read through your notes, pursing them occasionally upon seeing the slight mistakes you had written which you made quick work of fixing them right away. you are in your own little world.

on the other hand, a pair of curious dark brown eyes peeked into your room, half of their body being hidden from the outside. san, the owner of said body, slowly crept up towards your seemingly unguarded figure, hunched over your desk. his hands reached up as a mischievous grin settled itself upon his lips before starting to part them, taking a deep breath. 

“what do you want, san?” came your nonchalant voice, turning around in your seat to look at the male who was frozen with his hands in the air.

huffing, san’s arms came down to rest at his sides as his eyes glared down at your own unamused ones. ‘no fun’ he whispered underneath his breath, causing you to laugh lightly, playfully poking his side.

“y/n, my best friend, my whole shining star in my darkest nights, my little-” he started.

“you need something, don’t you?” you deadpanned, crossing your legs on top of the other, eyeing him knowingly.

san, pouted at you, a look you know all too well from the years of being friends with him. 

“so i saw this thing…” he started, now walking to sit on the edge of your bed, leaning on his elbows that were resting on both knees as his fingers were intertwined.

“san.. what exactly is this ‘thing’?” you interrupted, the male quickly shushing you. with a roll of your eyes, you leaned back against your chair and urged for him to continue.

“i’m not gonna tell you that but all i know is that it’s a new thing the both of us are gonna like.” he said confidently, grinning his dimpled smile. 

tongue against the inside of your cheek, you caught the glimpse of excitement twinkling in his eyes. you hesitated. from the years of knowing san, he is described as the ball of energy in your life while you are the hermit of this friendship and would much prefer to stay indoors, your safe haven as you will. it wasn’t because you’re lazy but trying new things would always create so many thoughts and conclusions running around in your mind, even though you had never tried it. 

sensing the hesitation, san walked up to you, and grabbed both of your hands into his larger ones, thumb rubbing against your knuckles as if to ease the anxious feeling bubbling up in your chest. san always knew the slight panicked look in your eyes, no matter how much you tried to not show it. but he is always there by your side, giving you time to calm your nerves, even if it took days for you to finally be ready. and by the time you needed to actually do it, he would stay behind you and offer praises to you, saying how well you are doing, and how.. ‘awesome’ you are, as he worded it. with both eyes casted on your hands being held, san spoke up, effectively gaining your attention. 

“it’ll be okay, i promise. you have me.” he spoke, voice all soft that managed to make your shoulders relax as you feel the tension that was built slowly fading away. finally making up your mind, you looked up at san who was already anticipating your answer, his lips curling up into an ecstatic grin upon seeing the nod of your head.

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼

“so, this is what you wanted to show me?” you said, looking up at the sign above the doorway to what seems to be a studio, decorated with hand painted flowers along with little leaves.

san, who was excitedly bouncing on the balls of feet, nodded his head before placing his hand on your lower back to urge the both of you to enter.

turns out, the thing he wanted the both of you to try was a pottery class. his friend, wooyoung, had suggested it while the two were hanging out one day. the class managed to pique his interest, immediately having the image of your mini mug collection back at your place flashing in his mind. he didn’t exactly understand why someone would have a collection but he shouldn’t comment on that considering he has his own collection of plushies in his room. so he thought, why the hell not? you loved mugs and having to make one of your own? surely, you would love it.

and here you are, listening intently to the instructor who had her fingers shaping the clay almost effortlessly, courtesy from the long years of experience of doing so. though, you couldn’t say the same to yourself. you emitted a low at the way your clay almost falling off of the pottery wheel, managing to catch it before it landed on the floor to create a mess in your station. sadly, even though you caught it, the slab of clay was squished in between your fingers at the tight grip. 

san, who was sitting beside you and witnessed the whole thing can’t help but to burst out in a fit of giggles. you could only pout over at him before starting over yet again, wetting your fingers slightly and turning the wheel, this time careful not to let the clay fall off once again. your eyes widened ever so slightly in awe from the way the clay was moulded into the shape you want, grinning victoriously at the result.

while you were occupied, you failed to notice a pair of eyes from a certain raven haired male watching your every movement. san’s fingers were running up and down the clay absentmindedly, though he should be focusing on the instructor’s voice, you were far more entertaining to the boy instead. he couldn’t help but to coo internally from the way the tip of your tongue had peeked out at the corner of your lips with your brows creasing in concentration, the little smile on your lips as a sign of you mentally praising yourself caused san to feel his chest swell up in happiness.

he knew that you had a bit of a difficulty in stepping out of your comfort zone, and he is always prepared to stay by your side, knowing how much you needed the reassurance at times. even if you had a strong front, the years of growing up with you made him see right through it easily. it is when you finally started to ease up in new situations that made san feel proud. proud of you to try things even if you had a slight fear of them, proud of you to open up in seizing brand new memories with him. 

and even if you didn’t enjoy them, it was okay. san would bring you to your favourite tea place the next day, not only for the pastries and baked goods there, but he knew how much you liked to watch the tea maker make your teas with such grace before pouring them into the many themed tea sets she kept. he won’t even miss the fact that you would silently gush over the woman with her significant other whenever they called each other chamomile and strawberry, as cheesy as it sounds.

consider it as a reward for you to still embrace new experiences in life whether you like them or not.

“san, you’re supposed to make a mug, not a plate!” your voice cut his train of thoughts, immediately snapping his gaze down at the clay before gasping out loud. the clay he had shaped into a perfect mug (as he claimed it) was now a large flat clay still spinning on the pottery wheel, eliciting a frustrated groan from the male.

this time, it was your turn to laugh at him, said boy playfully glaring at you and lightly dipped his fingers into the water next to him, sprinkling the drops over at you in retaliation, much to your displeasure. and so began a mini water fight between the two of you. that was, until the instructor cleared her throat. the both of you stopped your little war and turned to look at her, suddenly acting all innocent as if you didn’t almost cause a huge wet spot in the back of the room. 

“as much as the two of you are having fun back there, i would appreciate it if you didn't sink my studio.” she said, both of you muttering your apologies before the instructor fixed her large framed glasses that were hanging off on the bridge of her nose. 

“sorry, ma’am!” the both of you said in unison and went back to moulding your clays, of course, with hushed teasings being thrown in every now and then.

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼

by the time the class ended, you and san made a quick glance of each other’s mugs, both bursting out into a short laughter from the way your mugs had looked. both mugs had a slight crooked shape to them, a clear reminder of how inexperienced the two of you are, along with it being messily painted on. yet you didn’t mind, you were proud to add this little guy into your mug collection. by now, both of your clothes held traces of the events that had occurred earlier, from the smudge of paint on your sleeves to a little bit of clay was smudged on san’s shirt.

“so..” san started as he walked alongside you after exiting the studio. At his voice, you raised a brow.

“so?” 

“did you enjoy the class?” he asked, eyes wide while waiting for your answer.

“well, aside from us almost making a huge mess in the studio along with us struggling with the clay..” san grimaced at the memory.

“i enjoyed it, i won’t lie.” you added, flashing him a bright beam.

returning the grin stretching over your lips with his own, san reached a hand up to playfully ruffle your hair, him playfully cooing down at you as if talking to a baby, laughing once you slapped his hand away with a whine.

“i’m glad you enjoyed it and look, you even have a new addition to your collection!” he pointed out, the mug you held being hugged close to your chest as if it was the most precious thing in the world.

which to you, it really is the most precious thing. 

the two of you continued your walk home, san walking a few steps in front of you, then stopped as his name reached his ears. turning around to look at you, he quirked a brow up as if to acknowledge the call of his name from your lips. 

“you think we can go to the tea house tomorrow?” you asked, causing san to blink a few times from the unexpected question, then having his expression soften up.

with a shrug, he nodded his head. 

“i don’t see why not, i’m craving for their strawberry tarts anyway.”

perking up from the response, you jogged up to catch up with the male’s pace, starting to plan about the little trip tomorrow and of course, teasing each other during your time in the studio.

[sxveme-2]

blueberry pancakes // bucky barnes

MASTERLIST

Description: A single mother. Juggling being a mom, a full time pediatrician, and a difficult ex who believed now would be the best time to finally be a father. A soldier ripped out of time. Ex-assassin turned superhero. Learning how to balance a new domestic life with handling demons of his past, while facing the trials of the future. a love story began over something as simple as chocolate chip pancakes with hidden blueberries.

Disclaimer: I do not own any original Marvel characters! All canon plots and canon characters belong to Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios. This is an original work. You may not publish it anywhere else

Status: Edited

Note: Takes place after endgame. I have elected to ignore Tony's death and Steve's leaving. Did not happen. Quick Reminder! My works are only published here, AO3 and on Wattpad, thank you.

Chapter Ten: The One with the Phone Call

Warnings: Mention of alcohol

Word Count: 2700

If we're being honest, Lily Osborne's past was no different than most. She was raised in an upper-middle-class family. Her parents were renowned scientists who were credible in their field and brought home their findings. Other than her parent’s overly obsessive need to have everything recycled, there wasn't much about Lily that was interesting or stuck out. Nothing that she really believed to be interesting at least. Two loving parents, who were still married. Two younger siblings whom she loved dearly. A steady career and a lovely child. She was living the overused and overly generalized, 'American Dream'. the only slight oddity of Lily's life was how young she was when she had Hunter and the fact she was only mid-thirties and already divorced. But other than that...she was a basic, domestic, woman.

That's not how Bucky saw it though.

He found her astonishing. Admirable, even. The fact she was able to complete a Ph.D. level of education, graduating as valedictorian, at the top of her class, was enough to make his heart reach out to grab onto hers. But what really intrigued him, was her ability to be descriptive but vague all at the same time. She spoke about her divorce, but never the contents. Never diving deeper than the surface of it. How she gained primary custody, and that it was due to an affair. He learned everything, and nothing, all at once. He was only able to make a general picture of who Lily Osborne was, nothing more than the basics.

"Osborne, you said?" Bucky commented, shifting in his seat as he sipped on a beer that he held in his naturally warmed hand, "I feel like I've heard of the name Osborne in the environmental field before..."

The comment he made cause Lily's eyebrow to perk up. From the sound of it, Bucky had just admitted to being a bit of a science nerd. The fact he recognized the Osborne name just from Lily mentioning her parents. It was endearing, really. The fact he let that little tidbit of information slip out, not even realizing he had. Lily had made note of it, ensuring she remembered in case they were lucky enough to have a conversation like this again. Learning about one another, becoming more educated on their pasts.

But just like the supersoldier, Lily had secrets. Maybe not as extreme, but nonetheless, they were secrets. She wouldn't give him the full story of anything. Just the slightly important details. It was like a burger, sort of. She gave him the bun, but not the meat in the middle. If she was open and honest with him, that would open up a case of vulnerability. And though a talented doctor, Lily would not be able to cure it. It'd be the crack in her armour he could use to bring her down if he so wished.

"Probably from their discoveries about eco-friendly teddy bears. They still give me nightmares." Lily chuckled, sipping the ale that Bucky had given her. Though she had elected not to drink, the small voice in Lily's head convinced her that one beer wouldn't be too harmful. She wouldn't lose her morals just from a beer. She'd never been like that.

"Yes yes, I've seen Starks kid wandering around with one. They're terrifying," he replied, steel eyes reflecting the glow of the moon that provided them with the romantic ambiance that swirled around them. The whole scenery around them was more romantic than most of the dates Gen had set Lily up on in the past. It was genuine and natural, nothing forced or rushed to make it happen. But the demons inside of Lily's heart were screaming at her to run, get out of there while she still could. However, her feet stayed planted, and her butt sat in the lawn chair. She wasn't going anywhere.

Lily was still mortified of any sort of relationship. This wasn't one of those cheesy situations where the moment she met Bucky, her fears disappeared. That all of those years of emotional manipulation and toxicity had just vanished from her psyche. Lily hadn't changed because she met Bucky. The scars on her heart were still there, and just like her, had no intention of leaving. Sure, she was attracted to him. He was a fine specimen, had a voice that was as smooth as butter that created goosebumps on her arms. His presence brought a warm blanket of comfort that he would drape around her shoulders. But the pain still sat heavily on her shoulders. All of the damage Scott had caused to her mental state and self-image. They still stood, strong and sturdy. Lily was still Lily. The same girl who had been in a troublesome relationship and managed to emerge the other end. And that's all there was to it.

Change can happen. It's just not an immediate thing.

"You've mentioned that you've been through a divorce. How long ago was that?" Bucky inquired, his phrasing eluding the fact he wanted to know more. He had a hankering for the knowledge of Lily's past. To know what she's been through. What made her the shy and meek girl in front of him. What about her history created such a fragile state of mind, yet such a strong and independent visionary. A single mother, a full-time doctor, yet riddled with anxiety.

Bucky's trained eye could see the signs. The tapping of her fingers, the shortness of her breath. The way her collarbone heaved up and down at a faster pace whenever she spoke, or even when he asked her a personal question. How she never seemed to make eye contact with him. God, he wanted her to. He wanted to see those beautiful green eyes match with his. Memorize every detail of her face. The curve of her nose. the arch of her brow. Bucky wanted to render it into his mind, so he would never forget it. So he could always have the picture of those forest green eyes in his mind. The stories they held. The pain they kept locked away. But she never would long enough for him to capture their beauty. If Lily ever caught his eyes, she'd avert them within a millisecond. He'd watch as she'd turn her head, staring out into the sky.

"Four years ago. Seven years of marriage later." Lily answered after a few moments of pause. Her cheeks heated up in a red hue at the mention of her marriage. All of the pain she went through welling up in her throat as she attempted to wash it away with the beer in her hand. The words he would use were stitched into her skin, the things he would call her. She was a ragdoll in the eyes of Scott Harvey. He would take her lifeless body and sew in the worst of the English language onto her skin. It wore her down, the emotional trauma she suffered. But Lily came out on the other end, broken down and beaten sure, but still alive.

"And Hunters your only one?" Bucky inquired, studying the way that Lily fidgeted under his glance. It wasn't as if she was nervous around him, no. From the first time he met her, she seemed to relax around his presence. It was something about everyone that made her nervous. She was a survivor of something, on top of seemingly just always being a shy person. Introverted and hidden away. Add the emotional drainage she suffered all of those years, it made her a shell almost. Bucky was trained to catch small signals, the details others wouldn't care to look at. And all of Lily's body was littered with the little things, the way she breathed, to the way her cheeks always held a red hue.

Lily Osborne had piqued the interest of James Barnes. Not just in a romantic way, though that was a major factor. No, she had different layers to her. Different parts that all connected to create the woman that sat across from him. The way her eyes were slightly sunk in from years of work. Yet her hands seemed soft and velvety smooth, the hands of a mother. The way her arms always sat across her lower stomach, crossed in a way that hid that small part of her body. All signs leading towards insecurities, anxieties, a constant need to have a wall up. Not only did Lily create an opposing side of Bucky, but he saw himself in her. The part of himself that was locked away in a cell in the back of his mind. Constantly doubting, reminding him of the pain he caused. But she wore it on her sleeve, as though it had managed to free itself and take over her persona.

"Yes, he's my one and only. Something inside of me knew I wouldn't want another with my ex-husband, so I made sure measures were taken so there wouldn't be a chance of another until I was ready," Lily answered, crossing her legs and readjusting the dress in an attempt to cover the bit of thigh that she had revealed, "He's the only male I need...my son's everything to me."

Whenever Hunter is ever brought up in conversation, Lily's heart grew four sizes. He was truly the rock in her life that kept her tethered to reality. If he was gone, well Lily wouldn't know what to do. Having a child so early in her life was never something that the blonde had anticipated, nor wanted. She had a whole life plan ahead of her. Get her degree, get her Ph.D., find a husband, then start thinking about a family. Instead, she got pregnant, got a husband, then got a Ph.D. and her degree. The complete opposite of what she had originally planned for herself. Lily was far from ready to be a mother at the age of 22, but she knew she could never, ever, give up her child. So, miraculously, she made it work. Through hours of crying and yelling trips to Gen's and her parents, she did it. And managed to raise a happy, healthy, baby boy.

"There you two are!" a familiar voice rang after Lily had finished her inner monologue about the love she had for her son. Rose. And in tow, were a few of the Avengers and a quite inebriated Genevieve Fairchild, hanging loosely onto a seemingly amused Steve Rogers. As the group paraded around the two, Lily's younger sister spoke, "You lovebirds have been up here for an hour. Gen thought you died."

Lily let out a Gentle sigh before standing from the couch that you'd typically find on a porch, but it was on a roof and went to alleviate the Captain of her intoxicated best friend. Whom, Lily could only guess tried to drink Thor or somebody under a table. Another thing about the doctor’s best friend, she never backed away from a challenge. Even when it came to going head to head against a literal God when it came to drinking. It really sometimes surprised Lily that Gen had survived this long. But, if we're honest, it's because Lily had been babysitting her for close to twenty years. That's about the only reason.

"I take it back. I have two kids. This is Genevieve, she owns the cafe you guys go to," Lily smiled, wrapping her arm around her best friend’s waist and leaning Gen into her side, to keep her up. The last thing that Lily wanted was to have her best friend pass out in front of a cute guy, as well as the literal Avengers. That would just be embarrassing. Not to mention, Gen would have passed out and that would require a hospital visit, somewhere Gen hated for some reason that even Lily didn't know, "We should get her home. Thank you for hav-"

"Gotcha," Gen grinned while shoving her fingers into Lily's side, causing the blonde to jump. Untangling herself, Gen dropped herself down onto the couch while throwing herself into a giggle fit at Lily's surprised face. The others around chuckled softly at the practical joke, before Gen piped up, "Told you she'd fall for it, Rose. Every party we've ever been to it happens. And every time, Lily goes all mom mode on my ass."

A conversation erupted after Gen's comment, and Lily just shook her head and joined the brunette on the couch that sat parallel to the chair Bucky occupied. Both Lily and he seemed to stay silent as the group around them laughed and created a merry atmosphere. Instead, they snuck shy and reciprocated glances at one another, both erupting in a fit of blushes anytime they made eye contact. Of course, this didn't go unnoticed, but instead of causing an uproar, the group just smiled at the two. They were like two school kids who had a crush on one another but were too shy to say anything. Stealing glances from across the classroom and having nervous conversations filled with short answers. It was endearing, yet aggravating.

Rose and Gen knew the damage that had been caused to Lily's perception of love. They were the two closest people to Lily, and were there for every step of the divorce, each tear, each time she screamed into a pillow, each time she shot one too many drinks in an effort to forget the pain that reverberated from her heart. The endless nights of Lily calling one of them in tears because Scott went out and had yet to come home. Or when he did, smelled of another woman. But Lily always, always, ignored the bright red sign that said he was no good for her. Rose and Gen were the two people in the world that knew Lily more than she knew herself. They saw the flowers that bloomed inside of her and the beauty that could rise from the ashes if she just allowed it. If Lily allowed herself happiness, they would witness the rebirth of her. See her smile for no reason again, dance around her house, and sing without the help of alcohol. God...her voice was angelic. But it had been ages since anyone had heard it.

Scott had stolen her voice. stole the one thing that really separated Lily from the pack. he kept it hidden as a token of the pain he had caused. a memento of the heart he had shattered with one hand while twisting a knife into Lily's back. he managed to keep it locked away for years, and Lily had grown weary and tired of fighting, and gave up. she stopped searching for the light inside of her he put out. she didn't believe it was possible for her candle of light to be lit once again. all because some son of a bitch decided to crush her life like she was nothing but a bug.

-----

The clock struck midnight, and Lily laid draped in Gen's arms on the same outdoor couch. Her best friend’s arm draped along her shoulder, a blanket that bruce had grabbed laying on top of them to keep the crisp September air at bay. Everyone was having a lovely time ignoring the party that raged down below them, that had slowly begun to dwindle down and grow quiet. Now, instead of booming music with deep bass, Lily's ears were filled with the laughter of her new friends that surrounded her as jokes and stories were exchanged. It was peaceful, and at that moment, Lily felt calm. Her palms were soft, with no sweat in sight. Her breathing was steady, and her mind stayed on one thought. There was no spiralling, no intense paranoia. just...peace.

Then her phone rang.

Hunter's contact popped up, and that calm heart rate skyrocketed in an instant. Not only was it an odd time to get a call from her son, but he was at Scott’s. if there was an issue, Hunter would go to Scott. This in itself sent that peaceful feeling that Lily had flying out the window. Throwing off the blanket, she slid her phone across the screen and stood, pushing herself up from the couch. Excusing herself off to the side, Lily's hands grew warm and clammy.

"Hunt? Baby, what's wrong?"

"Mama please come pick me up.”

[thatguywiththecoydog]

Anpanman: Apple Boy and Everyone's Hope (2014)

Introduction

Fox's primary free-to-use streaming service, Tubi, had announced that they would be picking up at least 10 of the Anpanman movies to be released in English and Spanish back last October, with them slated for a fall 2020 release. This never happened, so many fans of the Anpanman franchise that spoke native English or Spanish would have to wait a little longer for dubs of these movies to come out.

The delay of these movie dubs went unannounced, leading fans to speculate that the dub was either in limbo or just silently canceled. This was until the first of them was released on April 15, 2021, with no announcement, or even complete details on who is dubbing them or the cast list. This had fans believing for a short while that the dub had taken a bit longer to assure its quality, but as you will soon read, this was most likely not the case.

Naturally, fans were excited as this was the first time these movies would see an official dubbed release in the west. There were other dubs of the franchise in English and Spanish, such as an English dub of the television series made for India that aired on Pogo, and a Spanish made in Spain sometime in the 1990s. However, these dubs are hard to come by and there are no official ways to watch these dubs in North America, as far as I'm aware.

Promo for the Indian Pogo dub posted by @doraedoramichan2021 on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oxAx5EEdX_4

So now we have an official dub of one of the movies that can be watched at no charge with ads. Joy!

Plot synopsis (spoilers below)

The plot starts with Dokin (spelled as "Dokeen" in the dub) and Horrorman (dubbed as "Horror") as they read a book of fairy tales, landing on Snow White. They end up accidentally releasing a shadowy figure from the book as it flies off into the darkness.

Meanwhile, Melonpanna's and Creampanda's (spelled "Cream Panda" in the dub) class are making sketches of the ocean. This is where Baikinman comes in to cause trouble for them with his giant crab robot. Anpanman rushes in from the blue to beat the tar out of Baikinman to save the day as the theme song plays in the background.

After that, we cut to the movie's other titular character, Apple Boy, attempting to fly his hot air balloon over the ocean. After the balloon falls to the ocean, he is swept away by the current.

A whale finds him dehydrated and floating lifeless in the ocean, where he gives him to Anpanman so he can help. After offering a piece of his anpan head to Apple Boy, he takes him to Uncle Jam's bakery, where Uncle Jam and Batako let him stay while they wait for a new shipment of apples from SL-Man.

Back at Baikinman's lair, he discovers that the book of fairy tales was being read by Dokeen and Horror. Looking very worried, he explains to the two of them that he was told never to open that book.

Anpanman, Melonpanna, and Cream Panda find SL-Man with the apples, Baikinman comes by to ruin the apples with his giant caterpillar robot. After Anpanman slows him down, Melonpanna and Cream Panda take SL-Man to the bakery.

Uncle Jam and Batako receive the apples and make them into apple juice. They give the juice to Apple Boy which he quickly drinks and rejuvenates from.

As Anpanman is still fighting Baikinman, Melonpanna and Cream Panda come back with Apple Boy for assistance. Apple Boy ends up beating him by planting an instantly-growing apple seed on the robot's tongue, where Anpanman then punches him into the next time zone.

That evening at the bakery, Apple Boy explains to the crew, with Shokupanman (dubbed as Bread-head Man) and Currypanman there as well, that he needs his balloon to search for the fabled magic apple seeds that can apparently grow the biggest apples anyone has ever seen. Anpanman, Mellonpanna, and Cream Panda help him search for the tree that gives off the magic seeds, while Bread-head Man and Currypanman search for the Apple Balloon. With no luck in finding the tree, they return to the bakery.

As the heroes in the bakery are setting off to find Appleina, an apple girl who might have clues as to where one can find the magic seeds, Horror informs Baikinman and Dokeen of the whole situation through a mock TV newscast.

Once at Appleina's, she shows the crew (and by extension the young audience this movie caters to) how to grow large apples. After many hardships of growing the trees, they finally blossom. Just as they are admiring their hard work, a bunch of bats swoop in and suck the life out of all the other apple trees around them. Unrelated to this, Baikinman attempts to steal all the apples for himself.

At this point, the bats go together to form the wich from the Snow White book that Dokeen and Horror were reading at the beginning of the film, revealing that she was the shadowy figure at the beginning of the movie that escaped from the book.

The witch turns everyone into moldy apples for no other reason than she is evil. The only ones left standing are Apple Boy and Appleina. Uncle Jam and Batako rush to bake Anpanman a new anpan head so he can turn back from apple form and be powered up enough to beat the witch. However, the witch destroys the Anpanman Blimp's oven, meaning they can't bake the head. Apple Boy stuns the witch with the power of a magic apple that he ended up growing. This also bakes the cold head into a perfectly cooked one, giving Uncle Jam and Batako the chance to turn Anpanman back to normal.

They successfully do this and Anpanman beats the witch back into the storybook, as the movie ends and everyone sings about apples.

My opinions

Before you say it, I am fully aware this movie is made for young children, but that is no excuse not to have a quality movie in my opinion. If anything, kids deserve more good content so they can learn and remember seeing that content for years to come. It just makes me feel bad for these children who watch movies that don't have much substance purely because they are "made for children."

The movie itself

The movie is average at best, and boring at worst. I did type out a pretty large plot synopsis for this movie, making it sound like a lot, but there really was not as much as you would think. This movie is only 46 minutes in total too, so there really should have been more here. Like, there was some emotional stuff going on with Apple Boy back on the Apple Planet he came from, but it's never really relevant to the story, nor the series as a whole because of him being made for this movie and only this movie. The movie also has a surprising amount of filler. Like, the part where I briefly mention Anpanman looking for the tree is a montage in the movie that lasts about two minutes, along with a scene where Apple Boy falls off a cliff, which is also not relevant to the main plot. I want to say a good quarter of this movie in total was filler, so we only have about 33 minutes of actual plot.

The writing that is there is also broken. I believe that the most entertaining part about this series is the series villains, Baikinman, Dokeen, and Horror. They don't make too many appearances in this movie to serve as comic relief, rather, Baikinman feels shoved in here to serve as more padding to make that over-40-minute time slot. There are also parts of the movie that make absolutely no sense under any perspective, not just an outsider's. Like, why does giving Anpanman a new head suddenly transform him from a moldy apple back to normal?

Overall, I feel as though both adults and children would be bored to death by this movie. 3/10.

Dubbing quality

If the movie itself wasn't soleless enough, the dubbing somehow makes this worse.

The movie was dubbed by Macias Group, a Florida-based studio that is best known for dubbing English shows into Spanish but does have some English dubbing in their catalog.

They had hired voice actors that I have not even heard of, nor do I think anyone else has. This doesn't make the dubbing automatically bad, in fact, a no-name cast can be quite good if given the right direction. However, this cast I feel did not give enough life to the characters. Some characters sound fine, like Horror or Dokeen, but others sound like the actor is struggling to put on a good performance, like Baikinman.

The characters also tend to speak in a way I like to call "Dora the Explorer Syndrome." It's kind of hard to explain what this is over text, but characters will talk extremely slowly for the young children, along with sounding considerably condescending. Watch the first two minutes of a Dora episode and compare it to this movie and you'll hear what I mean.

The voice acting itself sounds a bit bland and flat, almost like the actors didn't really care for their roles and were just doing it for a small paycheck. I don't blame them, really. An obscure series that they most likely haven't even heard of streaming exclusively on an unpopular streaming service most likely won't pay too high certainly wouldn't get me motivated. To do something like this, it needs to pay high enough or be on a service where it will get more notoriety, and most importantly, the people need to have a passion for the project and voice acting in general, neither of which sounded like they were here. I also heard a bit of recording echo, but I'm going to chalk that up to the actors recording at home rather than a booth due to COVID restrictions. If the dub had a bit more heart, then I probably would have liked it that much more.

I feel as though some of the name changes could have been better. Like some were unnecessary like Dokin to Dokeen or Horrorman to Horror, but things like Baikinman and Anpanman were kept the same, which probably needed the most explanation to an English audience.

The iconic songs from the Japanese version were also translated to English, which is a rarity in 2021 dubbing land. However, the songs sound off from their Japanese counterparts. If you were to listen to the theme song (https://youtu.be/3qSiSWTJkzw) or the closing song (https://youtu.be/c4DY7xmLlQI), you hear that they are bouncy, happy, and catchy. The English versions sound a bit off-beat to the rhythm these songs are supposed to be in. Now, I don't mind if the rhythm is a bit different so it can be optimized to the English language better, but here, it's so off it makes the songs sound worse. Most likely, the singers were given no direction and only listened to the Japanese version a few times. Not only that, but the lyrics are nearly directly translated from Japanese, also messing with the flow of the songs. When listening to the Japanese musical tracks, it almost makes you wonder what could have been.

Overall, the dubbing is not too good and probably could have done better either with a different cast with more motivation, or a whole 'nother studio behind the wheel.

Final thoughts and other recommendations

If you do want another English dub of Anpanman that I think is miles better, watch the fandub by Thomas Blue on Fandubbers Unite, starring myself as Anpanman (renamed to Bean-bun Man) and @clwsblog as Baikinman (renamed to Cavity Creep). It has better writing, better acting, and better songs. Both kids and adults alike will enjoy this version. Before you ask me, no, there is no bias here. I truly believe we did it better and for no pay!

Here is a link to Thomas Blue's dub:

https://fandubbersunite.weebly.com/beanbunman.html

If you really want to watch the official English though, even after my warnings, then go ahead. Here's a link to the Tubi listing:

https://tubitv.com/movies/592033/anpanman-apple-boy-and-everyone-s-hope?start=true

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Star Trek: Genre and Themes

Considering the fact that Star Trek was pitched as “Wagon Train in space”, it seems almost redundant to discuss the genre of such a show.  

Since the beginning, Gene Roddenberry’s show’s genre seemed pretty obvious: science fiction-western.  And really, it’s hard to argue with that.  Kirk’s style has been outright referred to as ‘cowboy diplomacy’ by future installations of Star Trek.  The adventures and ‘exploration’ of the new territory is very reminiscent of the western television shows of the time, and the setting of outer space would seem to place it pretty firmly in the ‘science fiction’ genre as well.

But, like always, there’s a little more to it than that.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, very few pieces of media can be categorized as only one genre.  Even the most seemingly obvious and one-dimensional examples have elements of other genres.  No show is designed to fit into only one genre, with any individual television program carrying many characteristics of one specific genre, while sharing many elements of other genres.

And while it may be easy to look at the setting of a film or television show and use that to determine a genre (space = sci-fi, medieval = fantasy), that doesn’t mean it’s terribly accurate.

Such is the case of Star Trek.

As a matter of fact, despite Roddenberry’s initial pitch to the studios, Star Trek actually doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the westerns of the day (Besides Spectre of the Gun).  Kirk’s ‘cowboy’ nature actually doesn’t come into play nearly as much as one would think.  Captain Kirk’s decision making isn’t quite the same as a traditional western lead, weighing more factors than just ‘frontier justice’.  For another, the setup is totally different.  The Enterprise is a military exploration ship, full of people on a mission, not just of exploration, but of diplomacy.  Kirk’s job is not only to defeat ‘bad guys’, but to find the best solutions for problems of other cultures.

So while Kirk’s ‘good old fisticuffs’ solutions may seem a bit more of the ‘Wild Wild West’ than later incarnations of the show would resort to, it doesn’t make it a western.  In fact, Star Trek has far more in common with future versions of science fiction shows than one might think.

Star Trek, at its core, is a show about an optimistic utopia, a future where humanity has learned to straighten itself out.  A future where there is no oppression, no prejudice, no poverty, but of a unified, educated, compassionate Earth, reaching out into the galaxy to explore, extending a hand of friendship.  This is Kirk’s job: being the hand of friendship.  Set in a distant future, a twenty-third century where Earth’s problems are solved, as such, there is no need to examine humanity’s flaws as they are.

At least, not directly.

As is done with many examples of the soft science fiction (or speculative fiction) genre, Star Trek uses its setting and set-up to examine the problems with our own society through the disguise of another.  Routinely, Kirk and the gang land on a planet or meet a people that represent a part of humanity that is less than pleasant to look at.  Episodes like Let That Be Your Last Battlefield take a scathing look at racism, a huge social issue in the late 1960s.  Other episodes examined topics like the Vietnam war, labor, and, a science-fiction favorite, the dangers of technology.  

Add this onto the ‘traveling through the stars’ plotline of Star Trek, and you’ve got yourself a pretty good argument for a solid science fiction show, with or without the western elements to it.  With that said, that doesn’t mean there’s more to the show than just sci-fi.

Star Trek’s storylines typically fell into the category of action or adventure.  There were gunfights (or phaserfights), fistfights, chases, daring escapes, and space-battles galore.  There was typically at least one hair-raising action scene per episode (with a few exceptions, such as The Trouble with Tribbles or The Way to Eden).  Even the episodes without ‘action’ per say as it would later be solidified in shows like The A-Team or Magnum P.I. turned out a decent ‘adventure’ story, with emphasis on the journey and adventure as a whole, rather than action-packed sequences that kept audiences on the edge of their seat.

Star Trek was all about the adventure, as even the opening credits will make clear.  The voyage of the Enterprise is aimed at discovery and exploration.  The setup of the show is, at its core, the greatest adventure: exploring the unknown.  Every episode is aimed at the exploration of the human experience and curiosity.  By definition, an adventure is a risky undertaking, and the exploration of deep space and discovering new civilizations and planets is nothing if not risky.

It’s pretty easy to say that Star Trek fits pretty neatly into the ‘sci-fi/adventure’ category, although it does have shades of other genres.  Episodes like Shore Leave, The Trouble with Tribbles, I Mudd, and A Piece of the Action have a distinct comedic slant to them, whereas episodes like Catspaw, The Enemy Within, Wolf in the Fold, and The Man Trap have a rather sinister, horror/thriller edge.  Other episodes have dabbled into courtroom dramas, tragedies, westerns, and even war, giving all three seasons a wide range of types of stories that they tell.  However, one genre that Star Trek has always been the absolute master of, even more than science-fiction or adventure, has been the genre of drama.

At the heart of every Star Trek episode, no matter how cerebral or action-packed, is an overarching sense of drama.  Not drama in the ‘soap opera’ sense, mind you, but drama as in real character interaction and growth.  The drama in Star Trek is in McCoy and Spock’s argument in Bread and Circuses, in the death of a recently married lieutenant in Balance of Terror, in the death of Kirk’s brother in Operation: Annihilate. Star Trek’s dramatic moments are rooted in character, from Spock’s admittance and sharing of Vulcan rituals in Amok Time and his muted desperation at thinking that he’s killed his Captain in a burst of uncontrollable rage to the doomed romance between Kirk and Edith Keeler in City On the Edge of Forever. The drama in Star Trek is in people, whether human or not.

The examples of Star Trek’s use of characters, be they regular or not, is truly groundbreaking.  From Spock’s mind-meld with the Horta in Devil in the Dark to Kirk’s terrifying identity crisis in The Enemy Within, Star Trek’s strength is in the people, in the personal dynamics between the characters, most notably between the main trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.  Even the other, more minor characters on the show received levels of characterization unheard of for the time: Sulu’s love of botany and retro weaponry, Uhura’s musical ability, Scotty’s intelligence and romantic troubles, and Chekov’s obsession with spouting totally innaccurate Russian history, possibly just to annoy the rest of the crew.  Even Nurse Chapel’s flashes of snark helped her stand apart from the many nameless crew members who came and went throughout the series.

In short, Star Trek’s characters were people.  Nowhere was this more evident than in Mr. Spock.

By the 1960s, most ‘alien’ characters on television were either jokes or monsters, cast as gimmicks in My Favorite Martian or as evil conquerors in shows like The Twilight Zone or The Invaders.  But in Star Trek, the ‘alien’ was as ‘human’ as the rest of us, if you’ll pardon the phrase.

A Mr. Spock type character was unheard of in 1966.  A half-human, half-alien, treated as a respected equal of the rest of the crew, was a completely foreign concept at the time.  Spock’s development as a character, and indeed, his criticism of the human condition proved to be one of Star Trek’s best elements of its use of character and drama.  Spock as a character was constantly at war with himself, torn between the outwardly emotionless Vulcan half, and his emotional, illogical human half.  Spock’s internal struggle proved to be one of the most gripping elements of the show, and as his interactions with Kirk and McCoy proved, although Spock did not like to be compared to humans, in many ways, he was more ‘human’ than we are.  His subtle flashes of emotion and occasional bursts of illogical behavior proved repeatedly that there was a lot more to Spock than what he tried to let on.  He, along with the other members of the cast, had layers.

And Star Trek was very good at exploring those layers.

No science-fiction show would introduce characters with layers to explore if they hadn’t had every intention of making the show hang on the relationships of the characters.  And the relationships of characters is the absolute core of drama.

In the end, Star Trek is a science-fiction adventure drama, a speculative look at the nature of humanity and people in general.  Star Trek is a look at a better future, an improved society turned to exploration.  It’s about the new frontier, about the best and worst of humanity, about friendship, adventure, and morality, full of good and memorable stories and characters.  It paved the way for even more complex shows to follow, and remains one of the most thought-provoking and earnest shows of all time.

Even now, audiences remember those characters, those stories, those little moments with these people that they grew to know.  They hold up, remaining just as genuine and heartfelt as they were in 1966.

And they owe that, in no small part, to those wonderful characters.

But that’s a discussion for next time.

Thank you guys so much for reading!  Don’t forget that my ask box is always open for conversation, suggestions, or questions.  Stay tuned for the next article, where we’ll be looking at the crew of the Enterprise and their roles in Star Trek.  I hope to see you there!

[feverinfeveroutfic]

chapter fourteen: snow on the beach

It would be after sundown when Testament took to the stage under those white lights. The whole entire time that she, Marla, and Belinda stood there on the side of the stage, Sam pictured fake snow to fall upon their heads. False snow to make up for the lack of a gray streak on Alex's head.

They did, however, stand up a small Christmas tree in one corner of the room, upon a ledge which stood high up over the crowd so it wouldn't fall over onto anyone on the floor. She kept her attention on them there in the center of the stage: she couldn't recall the last time they were that intense in their energy. Alex and Eric were tight as they entwined with each other as their guitar strings painted upon the proverbial canvas right over the crowd's heads. Every so often, during the first four songs, Greg held his bass down low before his waist and he smacked the thick heavy strings with the side of his hand and the backs of his knuckles.

That time around, Louie sat in his drummer's stool more upright so he barely moved his head of smoothed out hair about when he gave the other four men before him a rolling groove. He led the way in every part of the set: at one point, Sam swore she saw Zelda right behind him. Right there right next to him with her short bob of black hair as it glistened under the white Christmas lights.

For about a full minute during the song “Eerie Inhabitants”, she recognized a portion of Alex's guitar solo from somewhere. It wasn't until after the fact when she realized that he was quoting Minerva from the Cherry Suicides' song “Dead Witches”. They never launched into a full seven minute jam like they did but she knew that she had to tell them about it once she saw them again.

The titles even felt similar to one another, as if he and Minerva jammed in the same room together when they wrote those songs for their bands. In fact, that would explain why Minerva's guitar solo felt as though she borrowed notes from him. She had her guesses, but nothing that explained any of it in full. Lots of guesses but nothing to help her out and answer those questions.

Within time, they wrapped up that second night in Reseda, neatly and with a little bow on top perfect in time for Christmas time with a ten minute long jam of “Over the Wall”, whereby the whole floor before Chuck and Alex collected into a tight mosh pit that swirled and moved about like a massive whirlpool. Louie and Greg kept going while Alex stood there at the stage's edge with that little red guitar pressed right up against his body.

Every so often, he lifted his head and his disheveled jet black curls sailed over him like the inky tentacles of an octopus. Even in the pale white light and even in the midst of the black hair dye, Sam could envision that little tuft of gray over his brow once more. Much like Minerva, he put one foot up on the amp right before him at one point. He bowed his head right over the strings as he plucked and picked at the strings and kept his hand high up on the guitar neck for a long time.

High contrasted with low. Hidden depths that were there and gone. A contradiction in and of itself, just like Alex himself.

Chuck and Eric stood back as the brightest of the white lights shone over him. Greg sauntered over to him to act as the glue between him and Louie.

And then Sam realized why he wasn't hard to understand, especially to those on the outside looking in.

He just stood there with his head over the guitar and played. Even though he played as though he hailed from a different level in comparison to everyone else, his movements were rather rigid. He had the power and the passion, but nothing to keep people's interest.

She started to wonder if Minerva really was in the same room with him when she wrote “Dead Witches.”

He moved his head back once again and that time she kept her eyes fixated on the side of his neck and the shape of his Adam's apple as it poked out from the interior of his throat. He closed his eyes all the while; Greg bowed his head over his bass guitar and his smooth wavy dark hair dangled over those thick strings.

His presence was there but he had too many buttons left in place.

Louie hit the splash cymbals a few times and Alex set both feet down on the floor underneath him, and Chuck returned to the stage with the microphone firmly in hand.

“Yeah,” he declared right into the microphone's silver head, “yeah, that's right—you can tell he doesn't shoot too many blanks.” A few people in the crowd before them applauded him. “Yeah, that's my little man right over here, Alex Skolnick. Twenty years old and playing like he's been playing about that long! Right next to him is Greg Christian on bass—this is my right hand man Eric Peterson here.” Eric himself rejoined him there at the front of the stage and he gave his smooth inky black hair a little toss back with a flick of his head.

“Behind us is our little power house—Louie Clemente on drums—” Louie hit the splashes twice more. “And I'm Chuck fucking Billy! Yeah!”

They relaunched into the fast pace of the song once again.

“They're gonna fuck the whole world after this,” Marla said right into Sam's ear, such that it caught her off guard.

“Yeah, they are,” Sam agreed with her and with a raise of her eyebrows.

“Just coiled up and rich,” Marla added.

One last “OVER THE WALL!” from Chuck, Alex, Greg, and Eric, and a big crash from Louie, and they each raised their arms up. The crowd erupted into a wall of noise for them.

“Thank you, Reseda!” Chuck bellowed in a broken tired voice. “We love you and Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!” Alex followed up into the accompanying microphone.

“Happy New Year, too!” Eric rounded it out in the same microphone. Louie stood to his feet and he chucked his drum sticks into the crowd out there.

Meanwhile, Sam and Marla stepped out of the way for the five of them. Chuck and Eric hadn't even broken into a sweat the whole entire time, either. Alex ran his fingers through his jet black hair and Sam swore she saw that tuft of gray over his brow again. Louie let out a loud whistle and pressed his hands to his hips.

“Working hard tonight?” Marla joked with him.

“Man—that was brutal,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “Shit, I need a drink.”

Eric came up right behind him, and all the while he muttered something to himself. It took Sam and Marla a second to realize that he was singing a guitar line to himself, such that it caught their attention.

“Whoa,” Marla gasped.

“Huh?” Eric raised his gaze to them.

“Yeah, do that again, Eric,” Sam encouraged him again.

“Duh duh duh de duh—duh duh duh de duh—duh duh duh de duh—”

Alex strode right up to him with his guitar still slung over his shoulder. He lifted the neck and placed his fingers on the strings so he could actually play it for real. Still plugged in and still with the right amount of distortion.

“That riff's enough to make anyone run away from home,” Chuck joked from across the backstage area: he then turned and planted a kiss on Tiffany's lips, given she stood there at the back the whole entire time.

“It's been stuck in my head since that last guitar solo, Alex,” Eric explained.

“Gonna be on the next album?” Marla asked him.

“Hopefully, yeah. We're not gonna be in the studio until February, though.”

“We're gonna be home, too,” Alex added as he pressed his fingers across the guitar's neck and the sound muted away.

“You guys are recording up in the Bay Area?” Sam asked him.

“Hell to the yes,” he replied with a wink. He took the guitar off of his shoulder and he ran his fingers through his hair again. Marla began chatting with Eric about something right then, which in turn gave Sam another chance to speak with Alex again. He raised those dark eyebrows to her.

“Come home with me, Alex,” she whispered to him, to which he stopped right in his tracks. And then he nodded his head in response.

“I have to call my parents, though,” he pointed out.

“Go ahead. I'll be right here.” She adjusted the strap on her purse and he doubled back into the dressing room, the doorway right next to Chuck and Tiffany; she awaited him there with Marla and Eric right behind her and Greg and Louie off to the right. It hit her right then: she was about to take Alex home with her, back to Santa Catalina for one mere night over.

She sighed through her nose and she listened to the audience outside as they filed out of there. She thought about making her way up to the Bay Area at some point in order to visit Ruben and also to sit in with them, that is if she could. She was a friend to them after all, a friend and the first name on their fan club. The only drawback was if she returned to New York for real, it would prove to be a bit of a challenge in finding her way out of there at any given point.

The back door cracked open a little bit and Sam shivered from the cold gust of wind out there. She then felt a tap on her shoulder, and she turned to find him right behind her.

“I gotta be home in time for Christmas, though,” he told her.

“Of course. I just wanna show you the new place and I wanna introduce you to my mom, too.”

“You guys taking off?” Chuck called out to them.

“She's taking me down to Catalina,” Alex explained.

“Catalina!” Tiffany declared. “I haven't been there in forever it seems. Have fun, kids.”

Sam gave Marla and Eric both hugs, followed by Greg and Louie, the latter of whom whispered “poison garden” right into her ear.

“Poison garden and right back down to earth again,” she told him with a bump of their fists.

Alex held the door for her and she strode outside to his car there in the alleyway. Even though it wasn't raining or snowing at that point, she could feel the sensation all around her. That heavy moist feeling all throughout the entire Los Angeles area.

Alex shivered under his plain black shirt, and he fumbled with the keys a bit before he unlocked the doors and tucked his guitar case into the back seat, and then he climbed into the driver's seat. Sam spared no expense and joined him there in the passenger seat next to him. He rubbed his hands together and at one point, he clasped them together and blew inside of the palms.

“Been sweating for a little bit,” she noted: indeed, the side of his face had a slight healthy sheen to it from the rush of adrenaline.

“Yeah—just a little bit, though. Not a lot of sweat to go about here—nothing like that of Louie. But enough to gimme a chill, though.”

“Would you like the blanket?” she offered him.

“Nah.” He hesitated for a second. “How's the boat, though?”

“The boat ride? It's heated a little bit there, especially closer to the front bow—but take the blanket, though. You're probably going to need it anyway.”

“Okay—” Alex fired up the car; he was quick to switch on the heater and then he backed out of there. He paused for a second as they reached the alley's end there at the sidewalk.

“What's wrong?” she asked him.

“Just waiting for the light to change.” He craned his neck a bit so he could have a look outside of the back window. “There we go—” Another car passed them from behind and he backed out more and into the street.

He straightened out and he began up the dark pavement. He rubbed his hands again and blew on them some more.

“I don't think it ever gets this cold up in the Bay Area,” he noted. “Jesus, I'm freezing!”

They reached the next stoplight, and Sam thought of reaching behind him for that blanket in question. He shivered and shook under that thin little shirt, but the blast of warm air told her to trust his judgment. She thought about one of the first conversations she had had with Charlie when she first moved to New York, about the snowfalls in Carson City, where it always got so cold at night given the dryness and the snow was so loose and dry as a result, like powdered sugar. At least there in Los Angeles, they had the marine layer float in from the ocean to temper things, but that still gave Alex a deep chill over his body, accentuated by the fact he had been moving about upon a stage for a touch over an hour.

The light turned over to that bright green, which almost glowed through the layer of condensation on the windshield before them.

“Which way do I turn again?” he asked her.

“Right.”

“Right?”

“Right. Right!”

He chuckled at that and then he turned right, and they began the narrow two lane street. Sam knew that would take them all the way to the 405 and then that in turn would take them to the piers down in San Pedro.

“Are you sure you still don't want the blanket?” she offered him at the onramp to the freeway.

“Maybe when we get to the pier,” he told her as he picked up the pace. “I can see that part of the trip being cold as all hell.”

“It really is—even though I sat far away from the boat's edge, it's pretty cold, though.”

He nodded his head at that.

“By the way—about that solo during, 'Eerie Inhabitants' was it? Where it was like ten minutes long—?”

“And like half of it was me soloing and Greg and Louie just keeping the pace for me?” he finished.

“Yeah! Where'd you get the idea for that?”

She took a glimpse over at him. In the dim back glow of the headlights and the lights that lined the freeway, she could look into those deep soulful eyes and the tip of his tongue as he perched it into the corner of his mouth.

“You really wanna know?” he asked her.

“Please.”

“A black woman named Minerva.”

“I had a feeling that was the case!” she proclaimed, and he burst out laughing at that.

“But yeah, she and I were just sitting in the back room in the venue over in Providence—you know, when we were all touring together then—and I was playing some licks and she was following along with me. Next thing I know, we're playing back and forth with each other, and she goes, 'hey, you should make that into a new Testament song' and I was like 'I do that, and you do what we're doing here for the show tomorrow in Boston' and she was like, 'deal!'”

“So that whole jam session during 'Dead Witches' was a bet with you?” Sam couldn't help but laugh at that.

“I wouldn't call it a bet 'cause there was no money involved, but she did it though! She went above and beyond with it, too. We only did it for a couple of moments—you know, she extended it out to like seven minutes. Afterwards, you know in between sets, I walked up to her and I said, 'you trying to humiliate me?' and she goes, 'why would I do that?'”

Sam clapped her hands at that.

“If anything, I lost a bet with her!” he declared.

“Why, 'cause you did it for ten minutes just tonight?” she asked him.

“Nah, because I had that glitch, remember? Kept getting a lot of feedback?”

“Oh yeah, that's right!”

“And she was like, 'I owe you one, Alex' and I was like 'nah, I owe you one, Minerva.'”

She laughed some more.

Soon, they reached San Pedro, which, even though it was still rather early in the night, had buttoned up with nothing more than a few streetlights about the place. He pulled up to the parking lot outside of the pier, and she climbed out first so as to fetch the blanket out of the back for him. He slung his guitar case over his shoulder and the two of them walked onward to the blue and white intimately lit boat that awaited them there.

Alex took his seat on the bench closest to the boat's porthole so he was nestled right inside of a corner.

“As long as this thing doesn't sink, I'll be fine here,” he assured her as he leaned his guitar case against the wall next to him. He leaned forward and she put the blanket around his back and shoulders. He wrapped it tighter around his body and he shivered. She huddled closer to him so he could stay as warm as possible during the whole trip. A little trickle of warm air caressed over her head in the meantime.

The gate to the boat's floor lifted up and the anchor lifted. They were off to the races, off across the waters.

“Twenty two miles,” she told him.

“Twenty two miles of this? Jesus, I'm glad you gave me the blanket.” He shivered and she huddled closer to him. Even though they were tucked in the corner and thus close to the heater, they still rode upon a boat that traversed the Channel in the middle of December.

“You'll like this house,” she told him. “It's cozy and it's—almost like one of those places you see in the Northeast that sell clam chowder.”

“Oh, okay—so like the quintessential beach house,” he said.

“Yeah, exactly!”

The waves crashed down below the bow of the boat, and Alex shivered a bit more against the cold feeling all about them.

“You're from the San Francisco Bay Area, how could you not be used to it?” she scoffed at him.

“I'm not wearing a jacket for one thing,” he explained with a straight face. And then she remembered that he wasn't Joey. “It's also a different climate. Simple.”

Within time, Sam spotted the bright lights of the harbor outside Avalon and she knew that Esmé awaited her just like how she promised her. They soon docked in the harbor and she picked up his guitar case, and she led him off of the boat. There at the far end, with her arms folded across her chest and her body leaned against the side of her car, was Esmé. She nodded at him as they came closer.

Sam glanced over at him and the fact that he swallowed at the sight of her.

“Hello,” she greeted him and he bowed his head at her.

“Alex, this is my mom, Esmé. Mom, this is Alex.”

“The infamous Alex!” She extended her hand to him and she gasped at the sight of his bare arm. “Oh, my goodness, you kids have to be freezing!”

“Yeah, it's—it's pretty cold,” he remarked.

“He just played a show so he got kinda sweaty,” Sam explained as she adjusted the strap on his guitar case.

“Kinda hungry, too,” he admitted with a shrug of his shoulders, “you got anything to eat?”

“Plenty to eat at home, so don't you worry about a thing, deary. Sam's father and I have this philosophy that a friend of her is a friend to us.”

Alex took a glimpse over at Sam with his eyebrows raised.

“I like that,” he mouthed to her and she nodded at him.

The three of them piled into her car and Esmé drove them back to the house in the hills that overlooked Avalon. She led them inside and Sam pointed at a framed photograph on the wall closest to the door: one of her father when she was five years old.

“That's my dad, Ruben,” she said.

“Mr. Shelley,” Alex declared as he took the blanket off of his shoulders. “Lives up in the Bay Area now.”

“Sam, your father is going to send you a Christmas present in the next—day or so.”

“Okay—so then I'll have his new addy on hand!”

“Right! Also Alex?”

“Yes?”

“Where should we hold your guitar for the time being?” Esmé gestured to the guitar case, back onto Sam's shoulder.

“Uh—we can keep it close to the door? That is if you don't have any animals running around.”

“Not at the moment, though,” she told him, and Sam leaned the case against the wall, a bit away from the door so it wouldn't fall over onto the floor. Alex folded up the blanket and he set it down on the couch, and then he followed them into the kitchen. Esmé took a bottle of dessert wine out of the cupboard next to the refrigerator.

“Miss Shelley, do you have anything to drink?” he asked her as he and Sam took their spots at the bar behind the counter. “I'm kinda thirsty, too.”

“I have lots to drink—oh, honey, call me Esmé,” she insisted as she rested a hand on the bottle's neck.

“I can't do that, no,” Alex told her with a shake of his head, and Sam chuckled at that.

“I would assume you are,” Esmé said to him, “having played in front of a big crowd of people—you must be starving, too! I just had dinner but you kids can enjoy a bit of spaghetti Bolognese. I can whip some up real quick.”

“My mom makes the best spag Bol, I swear,” Sam whispered to his ear.

“Pour myself a little glass first...”

“How's that?” Sam asked her.

“What the wine?”

“Yeah.”

“It's sweet, but not overly so. Well, it is a dessert wine so it should go with things like the petit fours we had the other day. Things like cakes—”

“A slice of pie?” Alex joined in in a small voice.

“A slice of pie, yes!” Esmé gestured to him and showed Sam a little grin. “I kind of like him, Sam.”

“He does his best,” she replied with a shrug.

“I really do! I really honest to god genuinely do.”

“Would you like a try?” Esmé offered them both.

“I'm only twenty,” Alex told her.

“It's okay—you're in good hands here,” she assured him, and she poured him a small glass of that light pink dessert wine straight from the bottle. Reluctantly, Alex took the glass and took a whiff of the wine inside there. He then took a small sip.

Esmé handed Sam a small glass herself and she tried a sip of it as well.

“It is sweet,” she said, “we're also gonna be here a while, Alex.”

“Kinda like it,” he told her, “and yeah, I definitely wanna eat something now.”

“Okay.” Sparing no expense, Esmé turned to the oven and fired it up to cook up a quick Bolognese for them. Sam swirled her glass as if it was brandy rather than a delicate dessert wine. She propped up her chin in the palm of her hand as she watched her mother cook up some pasta and that rich sauce.

“Hey, it's snowing,” Alex declared.

“It is?” Sam peered out the front window with him: sure enough, a thin fine blanket of white powdery snow covered the manzanita shrubs outside as well as the ponderosas. She ambled across the floor and she took a glimpse up to the dark sky and the lush orange creamsicle color that told them that more was upon them. Against the lights of the harbor and the lights that decorated the street outside, she noticed the fine flakes as they drifted down.

“Never thought I'd see snow on the beach, albeit that on an island,” he confessed as he took one last little sip of the dessert wine.

Soon, Esmé had made them two full plates of the pasta and that hearty homemade sauce, which also had a bit of white wine embedded within: she offered him a piece of garlic toast but he assured her that it was plenty for him. At the point they both finished in unison, Sam downed the rest of the dessert wine and Alex rubbed his eyes a bit more than usual. He had had a long day both of those days, from driving all the way down from the Bay Area and taking Sam to the pier and playing a show, to playing yet another show and joining Sam herself there on the island.

“God, I'm sleepy,” he stated.

“You kids got any room for—a piece of pie?” Esmé asked them with a little smirk on her face.

“I dunno, Miss Shelley,” Alex confessed, “I feel like I'm about to fall right out of this chair and roll on the floor.”

“C'mon, Alex,” Sam encouraged him, “you gotta have enough room in that tum left for my mom's pie. I've seen you eat before, too—you've got a bit of room in that tum.”

“Well, my mom and my grandma both always joked that I have two stomachs,” he noted. He nibbled on his bottom lip and then he stretched his arms up over his head, such that Sam spotted a little sliver of skin on his waist, right out from under his shirt.

“Yeah, I'll have a slice,” he told them.

“Yes!” Sam cheered, and Esmé laughed at that. She served them both a plate of blackberry pie with a dollop of whipped cream on top.

“I feel so spoiled,” Alex confessed as he licked a bit of the whipped cream off of the fork's tines.

“Consider yourself lucky, dear boy,” Esmé told him.

“Yeah, my mom didn't move to Catalina for no reason,” Sam assured him.

“It's the life,” he muttered as he took one last bite of the pie. Indeed, Sam herself found her legs feeling as heavy as lead. Alex propped up his chin in the palm of his hand and he closed his eyes.

“I'm ready for bed,” he confessed.

“There's only one guest bed, though,” she pointed out.

“I can take the couch,” he told her.

“I don't want you to sleep on the couch.”

“Why not? I've slept on a few couches—and I can tell you just looking at it that that is one of the comfier ones I'll have sat my fat butt on.”

Esmé took their plates and Alex stretched again.

“By the way—your fat butt?” she laughed at that.

“Yes! I have a fat butt! Samantha, I may look slim but look at my hips, though. Hips like this on this body? I'm bound to have a fat butt at some point. Probably got one now just sittin' here.”

She climbed off the stool and he spun around and away from the bar's edge.

“I can't get up,” he pled to her.

“You can't get up?” she laughed.

“I can't get up!” he giggled. She extended her hands to him.

“Okay, c'mere—” She grasped her hands onto his and he slid off of the stool. He almost lost his balance and he shuffled a bit like a newborn foal. He leaned against her body: his chest was right there in her face.

“Oh, jeez—” he muttered.

“Oh—hell—” She steadied him right there. His otherwise slender stomach felt so warm and full; he showed her a little smirk.

“Hello,” he said in a low voice.

“Hi,” she returned the favor.

“Yeah, I'll definitely take the couch,” he told her right into her face.

“Get going,” she teased him, and she tapped him right on the seat of his pants with two fingers. He almost stumbled out of there and into the living room.

Sam turned her attention to her mother, who shook her head at her with a smile on her face.

“What?”

“Just like me and that other boy,” Esmé told her in a low voice.

“The guy you were seeing besides my dad?”

She nodded at that, and Sam started to wonder about things as she watched Alex collapse onto the couch, exhausted and very full.

She dared not ask questions about it until he was out of earshot, however. And it would have to wait until the two of them returned to the mainland within a couple of days: Esmé insisted that he stay a bit longer than a single night.

“I'd hate for you to get here and just pick up again on the next boat ride,” she confessed to him over breakfast, “especially since it's such a royal pain for a round trip over here.”

“My parents told me I have to be back up in the Bay Area by Christmas, anyway,” Alex explained to her.

Meanwhile, Sam sat there right next to him at the bar with her cup of coffee in hand and her plate of pancakes right before her, perfectly content. It was right there that she forgot about the whole ordeal with Joey: she watched her mother and Alex converse with one another as if they were good friends. But there were moments in which Esmé had a little glimmer in her eye whenever he said something rather intelligent to her and Sam. A twinkle in her eye and her lips curled up a bit at the sight of him.

She even offered to take the both of them clothes shopping in Avalon, and Sam noticed her checking out Alex's thin lanky body a bit more in the mirrors. At one point, he showed off some new jeans that she offered to buy for him and both women gazed on at his legs and those hips in question. Sam thought about that woman on the train in West Germany, who said he was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen, and she wondered if her mother felt the same way with him.

Every small glimpse such as that happened every day for the next four days, until Sam and Alex returned to the mainland to meet up with Marla, Belinda, and Anthrax over in Long Beach for the first day of winter.

“I guess they had to cancel a couple of shows,” Alex confessed to her as they huddled down in that same corner of the boat, “I dunno that's what Scott told me over the phone before we left.”

“Wait. Scott is back with them?” Sam was stunned.

“I think? He was vague about it, but that's what he said, though.”

Another twenty two miles and they recognized Marla's bright green hair next to Belinda's short blonde locks; behind them were Chuck, Eric, Greg, and Louie, all of them huddled there on the pier like a group of emperor penguins. Someone else stood next to them, someone off to the side.

Sam and Alex filed off the boat; as she came closer to him, the more her heart pounded in her chest.

She couldn't do it with Bill, but she could do it with Joey.

“Hey, you!” he greeted her with that lopsided grin, but she wasn't feeling it at the moment.

“Hey—” She raised a hand and slapped him right across the face. Everyone in Testament gasped at that. Joey gaped at her and then she clenched her fist and socked him right square in the stomach. He bowed forward as if he was about to vomit, but instead he gasped to better catch his breath. He clutched at himself and he looked up at her, baffled, in pain, and out of breath.

“What the—the—what the fuck?” he sputtered.

“You're with another woman!” she demanded.

He opened his mouth to say something but no sound came out. Instead his eyes widened and then he straightened himself into an upright position before her, albeit with a bit of a kink in his back given the pain in his belly.

“I thought you had gone off to another man,” he confessed in a broken voice.

“No!” she said, heated. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“Why else were you movin' out to California with your counselor on a moment's notice?”

“Joey, what he was doing was illegal so Marla and Bel got me out of there. As far as he knows, I screwed luscious Louie back here.”

“What?” Louie himself laughed at that.

“But that's beside the point, though,” Sam continued, unbeknownst to him. “I would never just leave you for anyone, Joey. And I mean that.”

She stormed away from there. She didn't want to see him again. As far as anyone on that pier was concerned, she would make her space official over on Catalina with her mother, and Alex and Testament were all free to visit any time they so wished.

“Sam!” Marla called after her. She whirled around to find her best friend gesturing to the spot behind the pier, over in the park. She walked after her and Belinda, both of whom looked at her stunned.

“Not gonna lie, that was fantastic,” Belinda told her.

“It had to be done, though,” Sam replied with a shake of her head. “Anyways, where are we going?”

“The bus over to Long Beach—Scott's treating us to lunch,” Marla explained. “Gonna be a bit, though.”

Sam turned for another look back at Joey, who moaned and groaned at the feelin.

“God, you really got me there,” he muttered as he rubbed his belly. “But—it's what I get, though. It's what I get for making assumptions.”

“Don't assume anything, Joey,” she scolded him, “especially with me. Alright?”

Fuming, she turned and stalked away from him and towards Eric and Alex, both of whom awaited her there at the railing. Through the veil of fog as it settled over the entire Long Beach area, she spotted the Queen Mary off in the distance, illuminated with twinkling white Christmas lights despite the morning. Alex had a small white pad of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other.

“So where are you now?” Eric asked her.

“Well, right now, I'm over on Catalina at my mom's new place,” she explained, “as Alex will tell you. But Marla and Bel got me back to New York, though. I'm a little divided on both, though.”

“Why's that?”

“Well, because I'm kind of friends with you guys—with Testament now and my parents are both out here. But I also have my friends in Anthrax and of course Marla and Bel, too.”

“The Cherry Suicides, too,” Alex added with a slight turn of his head.

“And the girls, too!”

“Well,” Eric started, “the best thing I can tell you to do, Sam, is to go with whatever you feel like. Go with whatever rings best to you. That was how I went about with starting Testament with my cousin. I was like 'yes! This feels so right, playing in a band.' And that was how we found each other—” He was cut off by something. “Sit tight—” He brushed past her and hurried towards Greg and Louie. “—what're you guys doing?”

Sam then turned to Alex, who never raised his head from the pad of paper.

“Gotta love how the whole place warrants rain and then it just never comes,” he remarked as he shook his head. She folded her arms over the railing and stood right there next to him.

“Right? That's one of the things I miss about New York—when it rains, it rains.”

“One thing I keep seeing,” he said as he flexed his fingers and shifted his weight, “especially when I flick on the news report anymore is—do you know what climate change is?”

“I'm afraid I don't, no,” she admitted with a shake of her head.

“It's this concept where—we as a species have advanced so far along in our technology that we pollute the earth past the point of no return. You lived in New York—I'm guessing you know the whole thing about the East River.”

“It's scary polluted,” she said.

“Until recently anyway, they started cleaning it up and taking better care of that water because it was getting that bad. That's just one example, too. They've found this whole thing where exhaust from cars and even from houses and cities go up into the atmosphere and pollute it there. When there's air pollution, there's a lot of heat.”

“Explains why oleanders grow like weeds down here,” she followed along and she recalled the idea for the poison garden. “It gets so hot here.”

“They call it the 'greenhouse effect',” he continued, “Metallica recently did a song with that in mind, and I kinda wanna do something similar to that, too. Theirs is called 'Blackened'.”

“I've heard that!” she declared. “It's on their new album.”

“It's the opener and the one that starts out with the bass ackwards guitars, too.”

“Wait, those guitars are backwards?”

“Yeah.” He paused. “Yeah, you didn't know that?”

“No, I thought that was just Kirk playing around with his pedals or something.” Alex chuckled at that.

“Yeah, he kinda was, though—you're actually not far from the truth with that.” He took the pencil out from behind his ear and he scribbled down something on the pad of paper.

“What'cha writing?” she asked him.

“I just keep thinking about the little encounter you had with Joey back there—how you pick yourself up off the ground after something like that. I'm also thinking about—” He peered over his shoulder to ensure that no one eavesdropped on them, and then he returned to her, and he bowed his head closer to her. “Before he met Tiffany, Chuck went out with a girl who was trapped in an abusive relationship.”

Sam gasped at that.

“Really?”

“I was the first person he told it about, too,” he added in a low voice, “so—I dunno if he'd be okay with me telling you this, either.”

“Well, I can keep secrets, though,” she assured him.

“Well—apparently this girl saw an escape with him, but she couldn't click with him or some shit. So she went back to the guy and I guess he didn't take that break up too well. Chuck felt like he could've saved her from it, but he didn't, though.”

“That explains why you guys were so adept at getting me away from Bill,” she said in a soft voice.

“Because Chuck couldn't do it the first time around. So he was like 'hold up a minute—here's another chance at that.' So now, here I am with this paper pad. Time to write something about it.”

“And now there's Joey in the mix,” she added as he scrawled down a few spare lyrics.

“There's Joey—and the fact he went off with someone else. And now it's time for you to heal your soul. And it's New Year's, too, so it couldn't be a more appropriate time for that.” He frowned at the paper pad and knitted those eyebrows together.

“I'm gonna have to run this by him, to be perfectly honest with you, Samantha,” he confessed. “It's such a strange concept to me—like I'm on the outside looking in—but it's something I genuinely feel, especially with you in the picture.”

“Do you at least have a title for this opus?” she asked him, but he never flinched at that. Instead, he wrote, in large neat letters at the top of the paper, “THE BALLAD”. And he flashed her a thoughtful look.

“There it is,” she said.

“There is is,” he echoed her, “plus you were rubbing my butt last night. I might as well jump high.”

"Wait a minute, I was?"

"Yeah. You were asleep but you were doing it."

"Are you sure it was me?"

"Positive." Sam squinted her eyes at that. She was out like a light the night before. As far as she knew, too, sleepwalking wasn't a problem with her.

Before she could say anything else, he turned his attention to the stretch of sideway right behind him. “Hey, Chuck!”

[btsqualityy]

Bad Prank

Yoongi x Reader

Genre: Temporary angst, fluff

Warnings: The bad prank does involve faking a death and consequent discussions of death so please, don’t read this if that makes you uncomfortable.

Author’s Note: This imagine is based off of an ask I received like two weeks ago about what Yoongi’s reaction would be to his wife pulling a fake death prank on him. The idea intrigued me so I decided to write about the subsequent fallout! I hope you guys enjoy it!

“Yoongi, please.”

Silence.

“Yoongi, you know that I didn’t mean anything by it!”

Silence.

“Baby, come on. It was just a prank!” You had had the great idea of pranking Yoongi, just as a way of having a little fun together. You had planned a fake death prank, complete with fake blood from the gag store and everything. You had picked a time when Kinsley would be off at school and when Yoongi would be coming home early from the studio. When he had gotten home, he’d found you arranged in the hall by the front door, with fake blood pooling out of your mouth. He had reacted just like you knew he would, grabbing ahold of your body and crying over it. It’s when he was going to move and grab his phone to call an ambulance, that you hopped up and declared that it was a prank. His reaction after that, well, it hadn’t been what you were anticipating. 

“Yoongi, I didn’t mean anything by it,” you repeated, reaching for his hand but he swiftly pulled it away from you when your fingers brushed his. You moved to say something else but the doorbell rang. Giving one last glance to Yoongi, you got up from the couch and walked over to the door, opening to find Kinsley and your best friend, who is also Kinsley’s god mother.

“Hey girl,” she smiled and you did your best to return one to her. 

“Hey,” you said, a laugh escaping you when Kinsley moved forward and hugged your leg. “Hi, how was your day sweetheart?” You asked her.

“Really good! Me and Y/BF/N went to get ice cream after she came and got me from school,” Kinsley announced excitedly and you looked back up at your best friend.

“I told you, no sweets,” you reminded her with a laugh.

“And I also told you that as her godmother, I can do whatever I want to,” she responded with a smirk. 

“Is that my baby girl?” You heard Yoongi say and you looked down to see Kinsley peaking into the house around your legs. 

“Daddy!” She shouted as she pushed past you and ran into the house, and you looked over your shoulder to see Yoongi picking her up and carrying her into the kitchen. 

“Anyways, thank you for picking her up for me today,” you said as you turned back to your best friend.

“Ah, it was no problem! I love any time that I get with her, especially since her father likes to hog her,” your best friend responded.

“I heard that!” Yoongi yelled.

“You were supposed to!” Your best friend shouted back. “I have to go though, so I’ll call you later?”

“Yeah, we’ll get lunch or something,” you nodded before telling her goodbye and walking back into the house. You walked into the kitchen, where Yoongi had just set a cup of pudding down in front of Kinsley. 

“Thank you Daddy,” Kinsley said politely as she picked up her spoon and started eating.

“No problem baby girl,” Yoongi smiled as he reached down and tweaked her nose, which made her giggle. He then turned to walk out of the room and you saw another chance to talk to him. 

“Are you gonna talk to me now?” You asked him but he just kept walking, leaving you to lean against the wall in exasperation.

..........................

“Oh, thank God you’re here Y/N,” Namjoon murmured as he watched you walked into the BigHit building. It was day three and the whole silent treatment thing was still ongoing. To try and get Yoongi to break, you had decided to bring him some lamb skewers for lunch to the studio.

“Why, what’s going on?” You asked as you leaned aganist the front desk.

“That’s what I’m hoping you could tell me,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with Yoongi hyung? He’s been so irritable for the past,-”

“Three days,” you finished, making Namjoon arch an eyebrow up at you.

“Yeah,” he nodded slowly. “What’s up with him?”

“I uh, I played a bad prank on him and his reaction to it...wasn’t exactly what I expected,” you explained.

“What wasn’t as you expected?” Jimin asked as he walked up to you and Namjoon, Jungkook standing behind him.

“Y/N played a bad joke on Yoongi hyung and he didn’t react how she thought he would,” Namjoon explained for you.

“What was the prank?” Jungkook questioned.

“I pretended that I died,” you told them and they all grimaced simultaneously.

“Seriously?” Namjoon asked and you nodded.

“Fake blood and everything.”

“Wow, no wonder hyung’s been so mean,” Jimin murmured.

“Yeah, he’s been giving me the silent treatment ever since so we’re all suffering from his wrath,” you said. Just then, you heard Yoongi’s voice.

“I thought we were only taking a 5 minute break,” he said.

“Sorry hyung, we just ran into Y/N and were catching up,” Jungkook explained and Yoongi nodded.

“I brought you lunch,” you offered lamely, and Yoongi just looked at you blankly.

“Um, Jungkook, Jimin, why don’t we head back into the studio?” Namjoon suggested and Jimin and Jungkook both nodded, quickly following behind Namjoon as they walked away from you and Yoongi.

“Look, I know that you’re still mad at me and you have a right to be,” you started but you immediately stopped when Yoongi stepped forward and grabbed the bag that held the skewers from your hand. He gave you one even look before turning around and walking back down the hall to the studio, leaving you stunned as you stood there.

.......................... 

Five days passed by and Yoongi still wouldn’t talk to you. You had tried everything but he just wouldn’t budge. On that morning, you had the day off of work so after Yoongi had left for the studio, you and Kinsley were cuddling in bed together.

“Mommy?” Kinsley called and you looked down at her, smiling softly. 

“Yes sweetheart?” 

“Is Daddy mad at you?” She wondered and your eyes widened a little in surprise. 

“Why do you ask?”

“Because he doesn’t talk to you a lot, like he always does,” she explained and you huffed a laugh, knowing that you should’ve known that Kinsley and her silent observations would notice that things were amiss between you and Yoongi; hell, she gets that silent observation from her father. 

“He is mad at me,” you confirmed. 

“Why?” 

“Because,” you started, pausing to try and find the right words to explain it to her. “I did something that I shouldn’t have and it hurt Daddy’s feelings.”

“Soooo,” Kinsley dragged out, making you chuckle. “He’s sad and not mad?”

“He’s probably both,” you told her. 

“Oh,” she muttered. “I asked Daddy too, if he was mad.”

“And what did he say?”

“He told me he was mad and that it’s ok to be mad,” she repeated and you nodded.

“He’s right, it is ok for him to be mad,” you agreed. 

“He won’t be mad forever,” Kinsley announced suddenly, making you smile again as you looked down at her. 

“And how do you know that sweetheart?”

“Because he loves you,” she replied. You stared at her for a moment, before kissing her cheek and pulling her closer to your chest. 

......................... 

Seven days passed and you had given up on any hope of Yoongi talking to you any time soon. The only option that you had was to just let his anger run it’s course and only hope that it wouldn’t last to long (which, knowing your husband, was a long shot in itself).

You were laying in bed after putting Kinsley down for the night, having somewhat gotten used to falling asleep by yourself before Yoongi creeped inside. You were almost asleep when you felt him slip into bed next to you, and you were surprised to feel him wrap his arms around your waist and pull you back so that your back was right up against his chest.

“Yoongi,” you murmured but he quickly shushed you.

“Hush, just let me talk, ok?” He muttered and you nodded as you opened your eyes, looking into the darkness. “I’m sorry for giving you the silent treatment for the past week. That was....childish of me but I need you to understand why I did it. Alright?” He said and you nodded quietly.

“When I came in the house and found you on the floor like that Y/N-ah,” he paused to take a deep breath. “My whole world stopped. There were so many things that ran through my mind, like how was I gonna tell Kins and how was I gonna raise her without my best friend and I was trying to remember if I had even told you that I loved you before I left that morning.”

“Yoongs,” you sniffled, feeling tears well up in your eyes but he just shushed you again.

“You’re my best friend Y/N-ah, you’ve been my best friend for damn near 10 years. Imagine me having to start all over and loosing the person who knows me the best. Not to mention the fact that we have a beautiful daughter together and I couldn’t imagine her not knowing you. I mean, imagine me having to raise our daughter who looks exactly like my dead wife. That wouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world. In short, loosing you is my greatest fear.”

“Yoongi, baby,” you sobbed, turning over and hiding your face in his neck as you cried loudly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you like that.”

“I don’t want you to even think about leaving me until we’re both old and wrinkled and yelling at kids to stay off our grass,” he said, making you laugh softly through your tears. “And even then, I wanna be the one to go first.”

“And what the hell makes you think that I want to live without you either?” You whispered as you looked up at him. 

“Guess we’ll just have to go together when that time comes, huh?” He joked and you leaned your forehead against his chin. “But do you understand why I ignored you now?”

“You were hurt and trying to process,” you said and he nodded. “Also, you didn’t say this but you’re my husband and I know you, but were you also mad that I didn’t already know how you’d feel by pulling that prank?”

“Yeah,” he muttered softly. 

“Oh Yoongi, I’m so sorry.”

“Stop apologizing so much, it’s weird coming from you,” he rolled his eyes playfully and you smacked his chest.

“Don’t joke right now, I’m sensitive from a week of silence,” you pouted, making him laugh. 

“I love you baby,” he told you, leaning down and kissing you passionately. 

“I love you too, so much,” you whispered against his lips. 

“How about I try to make up for giving you the silent treatment for a week?” He offered and you pulled back to look at him.

“And how do you plan on doing that?”

“By giving you seven orgasms tonight,” he smirked and you smiled softly.

“I mean, if you think you can,” you teased him, squealing when he moved on top of you and kissed you hard.

[artnerd1123]

Chapter One

All Moving Pictures End

——————————————

Chapter one is always quiet. Until the end, that is. Henry knows this better than most. That doesn’t necessarily make it any easier. 

DTRH!AU masterpost AU askblog

——————————————

This is my first fic for BATIM, and my first fic i’m posting anywhere! I’m a lil nervous, but mostly excited! Hope y’all enjoy!!!

                                                   ————

Chapter one was always quick. Sure, he could drag his feet if he wanted. The breathing room did him good some days. But there was only so much to do. Only so much to explore. The only other “person” up here was a wolf’s corpse. Not exactly the most welcoming environment. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen it all a hundred times, anyways. He could do the whole thing blindfolded if he wanted. Not that it mattered. Everything in this place ground to a halt eventually. Every movie has its credits. Every book has its final page. And every chapter has its ending twist. It was as inevitable as his next loop around this godforsaken studio. Might as well get it over with.

                                                  ————

Henry Ross strolled slowly down the halls, gaze flicking around him. He knew it was safe. Old habits die hard, though, and so would he if he didn’t keep an eye out. And he was pretty sure there’d be a cutout jumping out somewhere soon. He eyed the end of the hall suspiciously. “Last thing I need is to get startled into fight or flight early,” he mumbled to himself. One more step. Nothing yet. Another. Still nothing. Huh, he thought, brows furrowed. Maybe it was down the other hall? His mind was drawing a blank. Always an encouraging sign. Or not. The toon shrugged. Whatever. He had a valve to turn. He took one last step, and the sharp trill of a violin sent a violent chill up his spine. His hand flew to his chest as his body shivered comically. A hollow grin peeked out at him from around the corner, ducking back around before he could do anything more than gasp. “Oh- oh c’mon, that wasn’t even fair,” Henry complained. “Cutouts don’t even do anything. Sheesh.” He rubbed his temples as he caught his breath. It’s still chapter one. The scriptwriter just wanted to throw him off his rhythm. As per usual. Once he quit his toonish shivering, he resumed his stroll down the hall. The cardboard cutout earned itself a slightly stern look as he rounded the corner. “You best behave yourself,” he told it simply. At least he still remembered the projector room’s tricks. Henry strode right in. He didn’t even blink as the projector suddenly sputtered to life. Its light spilled onto the wall, ready for an audience long gone. The animation was simple. Just a cheery demon doing a jaunty dance. Unseen speakers crackled along with it, an old recording whistling over the sound of film spinning. Henry couldn’t help but smile. There he was. The little devil darling. “Right on cue, bud.” The demon kept right on dancing as Henry ducked under the projector. Sure, he could’ve walked through the light. But it’d been a long while since he’d seen bendy dance. He wasn’t about to stop that, even if it was just a fleeting ghost of the past. Henry whistled softly along with the recording, straightening back up on the other side. The valve was right where it should be, next to where he’d grabbed the plushie earlier. Not for the first- or last- time, he wondered why he couldn’t have turned it earlier. Why Joey has me running all over kingdom come is beyond me, he thought. Gripping the sides of the valve wheel, Henry gave it a strong yank to one side. It loudly protested the movement, the grating groan of old metal ringing out. He grimaced at the sound. “C’mon, you can’t be stuck now,” he huffed. Though the racket made his ears want to bleed, Henry pulled harder. The groan resounded again, rusty joints straining as much as the toon, before they finally gave up. He let out a satisfied grunt as it spun a few slow turns. “There she goes.” The valve ground to a stop after a moment or two, clanging as the pipes above it started to rumble and creak. They might have been old, but they held the pressure of rushing ink well enough. Henry gave it a nod of satisfaction. Good. Ducking back under the projection, he gave it a thumbs up. “Step one done, bud,” he told it. “I’ll see you in a b-” What more he had to say was cut off by a very loud pop. A mini monsoon of ink burst out of a pipe directly overhead, gushing onto the toon below it. Henry gasped and sputtered like an angry cat as he scrambled out from the ink. He tripped over the step on his way out, flopping onto the floor with a wet splat. He was utterly drenched. Soaked gloves slapping against the floorboards, the poor toon tried to prop himself up. “Augh- that stuff’s spoiled- uck-” he choked, hacking up some ink. It burned on the way out. As if it was trying to stick to him. The sensation made his muscles tense as he struggled to get his feet under him. No. Not now. Not ever. His breaths wheezed as he swiped ink off of his arms, shaking out his legs and hair. Ink flew everywhere in a haphazard fashion- as if a dog was shaking itself off instead of a man. It was all gone in moments. He was clean again. Never had Henry been more grateful to have a trope at his disposal. “Eugh… talk about a bad time to be short a shower…” Henry said shakily. Looking over his shoulder, he could still make out little bits of light through the spurting ink. The cheerful whistling still reached his ears over the little waterfall roar. The sound eased some tension from him. Even under all the ink, Bendy was still there. Let’s hope that stays true, he thought grimly. Henry’s footsteps quickened as he traversed the halls again. The noise of the machine grumbled along behind the walls. Just one switch to flip, then he could really get this nightmare started. And he was gonna do his damn best to make this loop count for something.

The relic room was the same as he left it. Well, almost the same. Everything sat silently on its pillar. Dust still sprinkled over the floorboards. The screen next to the lever, however, flashed with a single word- READY- in big, bright letters. The rumbling of the pipes confirmed as much. Henry stared grimly at the screen from the doorway. Sure, the machine was ready. And him? “... ready as I’ll ever be,” he said softly. Time to start the show. He crossed the room without another thought, setting a hand on the lever. Despite the state of the studio around it, the metal was warm to the touch. As if someone- or something- had put it to recent use. He didn’t care to think on it further. Henry tugged it down with a grunt. The screen darkened for a moment before the letters changed. “RUNNING,” they declared. At once, the machinery along the wall sputtered to life. Slow at first, but getting faster as ink oiled the worn gears. Henry felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up when the lights suddenly dimmed. The only light left in the room was a bright circle- illuminating the machine’s life-giving power source. And, of course, the toon standing before it. He turned to the door as the clanking, rumbling, and groaning of old mechanics and ink ticked up louder. Step two was over. Now, he had a meeting to keep. The halls- once lit brightly- were now as dark as a tomb. More fitting, he mused, than the false mirth the old lights had given off. All that was left now were candles and emergency lamps. He passed by them quickly, trying to ignore the way they flickered and dimmed. Just one foot in front of the other. Another turn to the right, and a sign greeted him. It proclaimed itself as the “ink output schedule.” As he neared it, a couple other signs came into view. “EXIT,” one said. “DANGER, KEEP OUT,” cautioned another. He slowed to a stop before them. The ink machine was close. One more turn. “... this thing’s gonna need some serious updating,” Henry muttered, giving the output sign a tap. “As for the rest of these…” He snorted, shaking his head. If I could actually follow them, I’d be set, now wouldn’t I? But no, he’d ignore them. Again. He peeked around the corner instead. The way to the machine was boarded up already. How the boards got there, he wasn’t sure. But he supposed a little protection from what was in there didn’t hurt. The fact that he needed it, though, did. Could the demon see him? Did he know he was here? Was he already out of the machine, lurking just out of sight? Was he just a whisper of script? Words yet to be written? Or rather, words yet to come to fruition? He didn’t know how to answer any of those questions. Answers or not, the toon still knew what he had to do. He took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Fists clenched at his sides, he stepped over the pipe before him. The floorboards creaked lightly as he closed the gap between himself and the boarded up doorway. He raised a hand, forcing his fingers to flatten out. Though the determined look on his face couldn’t hide how he shook. Behind the boards, the room was quiet and calm. Deceptive as the rest of the studio. Just touch the boards, Ross, he thought to himself. Get it over with. You’ve done harder. It’s not like you can go back now. His hand wavered. Moved forward, pausing again. Trembled. And quickly, before a moment more passed, he pushed his hand against the old wood. The studio around him instantly burst into inky chaos, a devilish grin erupting before him. Clawed gloves swiped out from the gap between the boards, a loud shriek accompanying their deadly strike. Demonic talons dug themselves into Henry’s chest before he could so much as flinch. The movement knocked him off his feet, the toon crashing backwards into the floor. He let out a strangled wheeze, stars bursting across his vision. All the wind had gotten knocked out of him. He couldn’t get in any air- he couldn’t breathe- oh g- fuck- c-c’mon- By the time he managed to suck down a breath, the demon was long gone. The remnants of its appearance, however, were still very much in effect. Henry’s chest heaved as he lurched to his feet, clutching his torn shirt. Morphing stains laced over the walls as ink poured from the ceiling. There was so much- too much- that it was flooding the halls. Move move mOVE MOVE, his mind screamed, nothing more than wheezing coming from his mouth. The ink was already lapping at his feet while he struggled to get over the blasted pipe in the hall. Dark liquid clung to his legs, splashing up against the walls the more he struggled through it. He just did what he could to keep moving. Each new crash of ink rupturing old planks made him flinch. But he didn’t need the herding of inky waterfalls to get to his destination. The toon pressed on towards the door he knew was waiting for him. Henry caught a glimpse of a scrawled message on the wall- DREAMS COME TRUE- before another cascade of obsidian sludge obscured it. The irony wasn’t lost on him at all. The only dreams that come true here are fucking nightmares. He let out a strangled chuckle, grabbing onto the corner to pull himself through the rising ink. It was up to his waist now. A slow burning sensation on his legs spurred him on, the toon now throwing himself around the next corner. His hands scrabbled desperately against a chest of drawers against the wall, breaths hitching in his throat. He could see the main room to his left. The exit would be right around the corner- right there! He was close! Just a little farther, Ross! Chest leaking ink, ceiling overflowing with sludge, and spoiled liquid eating at his form, Henry splashed his way around the last corner. The sliver of light shone enticingly in the darkness. Once again, he couldn’t help but wish he could reach it. So he tried. Lurching forward, Henry all but jumped towards the light- -only for his foot to pass through nothingness. His outstretched hand was illuminated for only a moment before the rest of him pitched downwards. He let out a cry- both of fear and of rage- as he tumbled, once more, into the depths of the studio.

                                                  ————

A loud splash and a stream of curses announced Henry’s arrival at the bottom of the pit. He sat up with a groan. Ink still leaked down from above, pattering against his dark stained clothes. He swatted at it halfheartedly. Frankly, he’d already had enough of it. His free hand reached to gingerly rub his back, the other keeping him from flopping backwards. He got up as carefully as he could. How in the world he didn’t break his spine from that fall was beyond him. But, he thought ruefully, it wouldn’t be much of a story if the protagonist died right away, would it? At least the pain and injury would fade quickly. The trope of animation errors at its finest. “Alright… alright,” he grumbled to himself. “I better get a move on. Where’s those blasted valves…?” A glance around the room didn’t reveal much. It was a simple space. What wasn’t cut off by a small ink waterfall was still half flooded with the foul sludge. A metal shelving rack sat against one wall. A pipe with a valve was against another. Easy enough. Henry was about to wade to the pipe when something flashed in the corner of his eye. He whipped his head towards it, not caring that his neck protested painfully. What looked like a thin box glowed softly on one of the shelves. Henry’s brows furrowed. If it glowed, it had to be important. He paused a moment to see if he could recall… “… Oh!” he snapped his fingers eagerly. “Right! Tapes!” He splashed clumsily over to the shelf, giving the “box” a look over. It was an audio log. He could see that clearly now. A little beat up and stained, but unmistakable. A small smile twitched at his lips as he ran a hand over it. He couldn’t quite remember who this one was… but he didn’t think it mattered. Any trace of his old friends was good enough for him. The voices made him feel less alone. He could do with a little less loneliness. Henry gently pressed the play button, watching the little machine come to life. The tape clicked softly into place. There was a moment of quiet whirring before a grumbling voice rang from the speaker. “It’s dark and it’s cold, and it’s stuck behind every single wall now. In some places, I swear this godforsaken ink is clear up to my knees! Whoever thought that these crummy pipes could hold up under this kind of strain either knows something about pressure that I don’t, or he’s some kind of idiot,” a man barked gruffly. Henry recognized it instantly, his smile widening into a grin. “Tom!” he said brightly. “Good to hear from you, old friend.” Ah, yes. Thomas Connor. The studio’s repairman. Henry shook his head as the tape continued, the memories of Thomas complaining about pipes drifting up in his mind. … of course, a few choice phrases in the recording made the toon’s smile slip. “Like a dying dog on its last legs,” Thomas said about the pipes’ noise. He wasn’t wrong, but the mention of a dying dog… “This whole darn thing… just isn’t natural,” Thomas grumbled uneasily. “You could say that again,” Henry muttered darkly. Of course, it was the last phrase that really sobered him up. “You can bet, I won’t be doing any more repair jobs for Mister Joey Drew.” The final click of the recording echoed in the silence. Henry gave the log a long, hard look. “... well, you weren’t wrong, Tom,” he finally sighed. “You certainly weren’t wrong.” Reaching for the log, he flipped it onto its back. If he remembered right, he could probably get the tape out of there… a muffled click let a smile flit across his face. “There you are. C’mere, you.” He slid off a panel in the back to reveal an old tape. It had a labelled transcript taped to it, thankfully. That’d help keep track of names. He carefully slipped the tape into his pocket, setting the empty audio log back on the shelf. With the tape listened to and taken care of, Henry turned his focus to the task at hand. Draining all this awful ink. He slogged through the black sludge that stuck to his knees, making his way to the first valve. It turned easier than the one upstairs, but still made the same godawful groaning noise. “Geez Louise, you were right about the noise, Tom,” he winced. The ink level was falling, though, so he didn’t complain more. He was just glad the valves worked. “One down, two to go.” Glancing around, he spotted the door to the stairwell through the waterfall of ink. Because… of course it would be back there. Where else would the door be but behind more ink? Henry put his arms over his head as he jogged through the inkfall, shuddering at the feeling of old ooze on his limbs. He continued his jog down the steps, grumbling as yet another waterfall blocked his path. Stepping through this one gained him more than a shudder, though. It was a downright uncomfortable grimace. His foot had splashed right down into another deep puddle of ink. “Aw, c’mon now,” he sighed, wading down once again. “Can’t ever leave things simple and easy, can we?” At least this valve’s right in front of the stairs…

Another two rounds of groaning pipes, descending ink, and running down steps deposited the now soaked-and-grumpy toon in a rather cramped room. Calling the space a “room” was almost too generous. It was more like a glorified broom closet. A very drippy, very busted up one at that. “We’re gonna need a dozen teams of restoration architects in here,” Henry said flatly. “And that’s at a minimum.” Ink dripped slowly down from his hair before he flicked it away. A quick shake off had him relatively clean, minus some staining on his shoes. Once he was satisfied, the toon turned to the one other defining feature of the room. A closed door. It didn’t remain that way for long, the knob turning easily in his hand. He knew his way clearly from here. The door swung in to reveal an old workshop. Henry strolled right in, gaze sliding over the sparsely furnished area. All that was of note were a few stacked barrels, and an old workbench, and a boarded up doorway along the far wall. The bit of graffiti spattered around- a venomous declaration that “THE CREATOR LIED TO US-” drew a soft snort from the toon. Yeah, you could say that. Overall? The room was nothing of interest. No, what he was really looking for sat on top of the workbench. An axe lay out on top of it, its blade glinting dully in the dim light. Henry picked it up, testing its weight thoughtfully. It looked pretty sharp. Pretty durable, too. An axe had always served him well… “Hmm… yeah, I could go for a new one,” he said decisively. Swapping the axe into one hand, he shoved the other into one of his side pockets. He pulled out another axe a moment later. This one was slick with damp ink, its blade blunt and its handle full of hairline cracks. It had certainly been through the ringer. He gazed at it fondly as he set it on the bench. “So long, bud,” he sighed softly. “We had a good run.” Henry took a minute to swing the new axe around. This room was as good as any to test it out. It was a little different than he was used to- no doubt because it was newer- but it swung and balanced well. He gave it a pat of approval. Approaching the doorway, he glanced it over, sizing it up. “Now-” grunting, he hefted the axe over his shoulder- “new friend of mine-” tightened his grip- “let’s get-” and swung hard at the boards before him- “to work-!” The splintering of wood made a wonderful soundtrack as Henry chopped his way through the final hall. The work went quicker than he liked, but it still felt good to swing a proper axe again. Breaking boards was easy. Breaking boards was kinda fun. And, most importantly, breaking boards meant progress. At the end of the short hall, he leaned on the wall to catch his breath. The new axe really was nicer. Hopefully it’d last a few loops. One last door was before him, three boards holding it shut. He eyed it somberly. At long last, there it was. His entrance into chapter two. The toon straightened up slowly, rolling his shoulders. The axe dragged against the floor as he walked purposefully over. One more door. One more room. And one more unfortunate headache. Flipping the axe up, he promptly slammed it into the old wood. All three boards gave away like butter to a hot knife. Satisfied, Henry tucked the weapon behind his back. It was better to save things in his hammerspace than to trust that a certain scriptwriter would provide him another axe later. The door opened with a slow creak after he turned the knob. Before him was a small room, lit only by candlelight. Some sort of large ritual circle was drawn in the center of the floorboards. Candles sat flickering at six points around its edge. Edging in, Henry kept an eye on his feet and the circle. That thing might be his ticket to chapter two, but he didn’t want to jump on the train early. The location didn’t feel fuzzy as he looked around, but… well. You never know what could pop up next in this studio. At the wall across from the entrance, two coffins leaned side by side. A boarded up door was to their left. On the right side of the room, three chairs were set up. On the left side, there was an empty shelf. Whom the chairs or coffins were for, Henry couldn’t say. The sight of the door, at least, was reassuring. All that was left now was to step into the circle. “... you better make this quick, Joey,” he muttered.

Without further ado, he planted a foot squarely in the inky circle.

The pain he felt was immediate, surging up through his leg and into his head like a lightning strike. He couldn’t help but gasp, hands flying to his head as he doubled over. An image of the ink machine flashed before his eyes. By the time he squeezed them open and shut to dispel it, the pain had lurched him sideways. An image of a wheelchair greeted his newly opened eyes, and he groaned desperately. The pain was cranking higher- higher- so much he could barely see straight. He fumbled around, vision clouding up as he tried to turn back to the door. All that greeted him, though, was one last horrifying image. The ink demon was standing there. Illuminated by the light of an open door behind him. Reaching for him. Some distant part of Henry felt his body stumble backwards. His mind finally fell into darkness. And then… Then… … Nothing.

Nothing but the dark of the ink.

E̶̷̸̮͍̮̤̪̠͔͚̬̻̼̰̤͉̱͔̝̰͠Ņ͈͉̙̣͙̜̣͖͔͍͍̯̟̬̭͢͠ͅD̷̨̼͇̖̮̙ ̶̴͎̪͓̯̮̲̼͠O͏̶̸̸̞̣̦̟̫̦̞̪̳̤͎͚̯̦̝̳F̶̵̥͚̘̣̮͔ ̣̫̞̰̬͚͞͞C̭͎̥̠͔̩͕͕̯͉͍̤̬̩̙̟͎̱͉̕͠͠͠͞Ḩ̢͜͠҉̲̥̮̫A̴҉͕͚̬̳̲͙̮͙̝͡͝P̵̩͎̩͓̲̬̕͟Ţ̯̱̠͍̝̲̠̗̼͜͜E͏̷̮̬̪̬̠̙R̷̡̹̖̥̖͘͜ ̧̪͈̥̝̞̘̰̬̻̺̞̠͎͟͟͞Ó̠͙̲̞̰͔͕͡N̵̬̜̣̜̬̻̖͈̙͍͍̻̰̤͎̙̜͜͝ͅĘ̰͎̩̺̙̱̯͈̭̬͙͇͔̕.̸̸̧̳̱̣̠̺̭̖̦̹̳͙̼̳̠͠͡ͅ

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[nerevarswritingstuff]

Alla Prima Pt. 1 - Lucifer/Reader

If you like my work, consider buying me a coffee! 

You’d be lying if you said you weren’t honored to be gifted with the opportunity to paint a mural for the King of Hell himself. You were honored, beyond words in fact. You never expected him nor his family to have noticed you or your paintings. You knew there were plenty more out there that far surpassed your skills, but hey the pay is… well, “nice��� would be understating it too much.

The pay was great. It’d let you buy a new studio, new supplies, new everything. You were allowed to stay within the mansion (which was also another understatement, this place was huge) in one of the guest wings, and given all the privacy and time required to finish. It was practically a dream come true, considering how previous clients would give you unrealistic deadlines for big pieces.

However, there was one problem. You wished it was just not having the right amount of paint for it or not enough time, but no. It was the worst possible scenario any painter or artist could ever have happen to them.

Lucifer gave you fuck all to go off of for what he wanted.

In your less than five minute conversation of him greeting you in the antechamber, all he said that he wanted was a mural of an apple tree in the ballroom. Then he had his servants show you where you were to paint it and where your guest room would be.

The vagueness of what he wanted for this commission made you want to break your brushes over your knee and give him a piece of your mind. “An apple tree mural” could be so many things! Did he want a landscape? In a specific style? Is it just one tree or an orchard? Is it in Hell or the living world? Night? Day? The list is endless. There was so little to go off of you had no idea where to fucking start.

Sure, you like a bit of artistic freedom, but not this much freedom. What if your client hated it and demanded a refund? Too many variables can lead to complications and you hate complications. Of course, you’ve always handled these types of clients easily enough, as some of their blood makes a wonderful mixture for paints.

But you couldn’t exactly deal with Lucifer the same way if he hated your painting. If anything he might just kill you. He could probably just kill you with his thumb. He most likely did do just that to some poor idiot once before. All you could do was bite your tongue and deal with it.

Oh, and that ballroom he wanted you to paint in? Huge. The wall itself was about sixty feet wide and thirty feet up before reaching the ceiling. This was probably the biggest ballroom he had, which only adds more sourness to your mood. The only extra thing Lucifer said he wanted was for the mural to be on the wall opposite of the entrance so guests would see it the minute they’d walk in.

You feel like you could choke someone right now. You’d love to choke Lucifer for being so unhelpful with what he wanted. Why are the demons who ask you to paint something big always so vague? But you knew better than to backsass Lucifer of all people. Again, he could most likely sneeze and you’d become nothing more than a smear on the wall.

You just had to think on the more positive side. You weren’t given a time limit and most importantly you’d have all the privacy needed. You hated people watching you paint. You hated people interrupting you while you paint. People who do usually get a paintbrush jammed into their eye. You’re glad you kept your composure when Lucifer told you you’d have any and all privacy needed for this painting, because you know otherwise you would’ve screamed with joy and relief.

So now here you were, everything set up for you to get ready for painting, sitting back in a chair, staring at this huge ass wall and rapidly tapping your pencil against your sketchbook.

You’ve tried several various sketches, exploring what you could do for a possible mural, only to growl in frustration and try again. And again. And a-fucking-gain. The cycle went for several hours. The entire time no one bothered you. No servants knocked on the door, no other guests or even the royal family. You kind of wish someone did interrupt you so you had someone to take your frustrations out on, but no one came.

Dropping your sketchbook and rubbing at your face, you lean back and groan. Unbeknownst to you, while you sat there, seething, thinking, staring at the wall and wondering just what the fuck you should paint, the door to the ballroom opened. The heels clicking behind you did make you whirl around, lips pulled back into a snarl.

“I thought it was made clear I wasn’t to be—” You choke on your own words, your threat dying in your throat as you stare at your client.

He wasn’t even looking at you, instead glancing down at the floor where you dropped your sketchbook, then looking up at the wall. Then his eyes dart to you, a single, dark brow raised. His lips curled up into a mischievous smile, asking, “Wasn’t to be what, hmm?” He twirls his cane in one hand, the other neatly folded behind his back. When you don’t say anything, he taps the end of his cane under your chin to close your mouth. “I’m waiting.”

You hesitantly say, “Disturbed…” It definitely didn’t sound as threatening as you wanted it to be.

Either way, Lucifer seemed to have found it absolutely hilarious, as he throws his head back and laughs. “Oh, my darling little fool!” He pats you on the head with the end of his cane. “You really think I’d leave you alone for the whole, oh—” he idly waves his free hand as he speaks, still tapping his fucking cane against your head “—however long it’s going to take you to finish this mural? Little Cripps, I know better than to allow a stranger to be all alone and unsupervised in this manor.” Another twirl of his cane and he’s walking past you, looking at the array of paints you’ve organized, then at the blank wall.

“I came here to see how things were going with the mural, but seeing as you haven’t even started…” He turns to you, raising a brow once more. 

You rubbed your head, watching him all the while and frowning. You wanted to tell him that it wasn’t your fault you had so little to go off of and didn’t know where to start. He should’ve specified exactly what he wanted. But instead you say through gritted teeth, “With big murals, I don’t immediately start painting. I plan them out. Today I’ll most likely be thinking and planning.”

It honestly might take you more than a day, considering how unhelpful Lucifer was wording his request.

Lucifer hums, strolling back over to you to pick up your sketchbook and starts flipping through it. You sputter, “Hey!” Before you could even think, you swiped it out of his hand, baring your teeth. “Don’t fucking touch my sketchbook!” You tuck it under your arm and jab a finger in his direction. “If you want to see the concepts I have, you fucking ask first. Do not touch my shit.”

Anger subsiding and realizing what you did and who you said all of that towards, you quickly back off, mind going a mile a minute as to how you can apologize. But before you could even spout out some pathetic apology, Lucifer started chuckling. “You really are as quick-tempered as I’ve heard.” He starts circling around you now, looking you up and down.

In your short time talking to him, he barely spared a glance at you, but now?

Now he was taking in every last detail, interest shining in his eyes—

Hold on a second.

“What?” You watch him circle around you, turning with him. “What are you on about?”

Lucifer stops right in front of you, smacking you on the head with his cane again. Something you were getting really tired of. “You don’t think I don’t know about some of my more interesting darling subjects? I’ve heard plenty about you, Little Cripps.” He takes a step back, taking his hat off briefly to brush of nonexistent dust. “Your paintings, your techniques, and of course, your temper. The latter I found the most amusing.”

You frown. King of Hell or no, you don’t really appreciate being fucked with like this. “You hired me just because I was amusing?”

“Oh, darling of course not!” Lucifer waves his hand. “I hired you because I’ve seen your pieces and found them quite extravagant. I don’t allow just any demon into my home to paint a mural, after all.” His eyes shined with impish glee. “Your amusing temper and attitude was just a bonus.”

You blink once. Twice. Thrice. Slowly it all starts to come to you. Why he was so vague, so unhelpful, and being such a dick right now. “Are you telling me… you gave me practically nothing to work off of and are acting this way… to get a reaction out of me?”

“Yes.” You weren’t expecting such a blunt reply from him, but you really should’ve. “I wanted to see for myself. You have a surprising amount of control, however.”

You clap your hands together, close your eyes and take a deep breath. “Your Majesty… were you anyone else… I would’ve stabbed you in the eyes by this point with my paint brushes…”

“It’s never too late to try,” Lucifer jeers.

“While most sinners have a final deathwish, I don’t.” You pinch the bridge of your nose and groan. “So are you actually going to be helpful and tell me what the fuck you want me to paint?”

“Little Cripps…” He goes to tap you on the head with his cane again but you grab it.

You lock eyes with him. “I will break this over my knee.”

His smile only grows. “You’ll only end up breaking your knee. But as I was saying…” He effortlessly pulls his cane free and twirls it, constantly almost hitting you in the face. “I did tell you what I wanted.”

You have to take another deep breath, constantly reminding yourself that even if Lucifer is amused by your outbursts, you’re positive he too has a limit to how much back talking he’s willing to take. “Your Majesty… ‘an apple tree mural’ is the vaguest request I’ve ever had in my long long years of being a painter. I need more to go off of.”

Lucifer hums, tossing his cane into the air and catching it in his other hand. “No.” Then he starts walking towards the door, the heels of his boots clicking on the door, not even turning to watch your mouth drop. “You’re a talented little thing. You’ll figure it out! I do hope you start painting soon. Enjoy the artistic freedom I’m granting you, as I don’t do this often!”

“You realize there’s such a thing as too much artistic freedom?” You retort just as he’s halfway out the door.

He tilts his head, thoughtful, humming. “True. But that makes it all the more fun and interesting, doesn’t it?” He smiles at you again, his entire face radiating with a quiet challenge. “I look forward to seeing your progress tomorrow, Little Cripps.”

And the door clicked shut.