#also while i was drawing this i kept thinking back to that old jon wearing martin's sweater that's almost the same pose and wrow.... | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vivilove-jonsa · 4 years

Note

Spooky prompt: We're going to have to stay here tonight 🎃

Thank you for the prompt, honey! This isn’t really spooky at all but it’s inspired by Katrina and Ichabod’s first meeting in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow with a slight twist. I hope you like it :)

“We’re going to have to stay here tonight.”

The announcement had been greeted with no surprise. Even without tales of headless horsemen, witches or evil spirits in the forest, autumn in Northern New England carries its own hazards. The weather can turn unexpectedly.

The blizzard had kept anyone of sense from attempting the journey home and their host had gallantly offered refuge for his guests beyond the harvest feast.

“Stay as long as necessary,” Eddard Stark had told them.

Some had chosen not to stay. The Umbers had set off that first night regardless saying they did not fear a bit of snow or any ghost stories. Jon wonders how their coach and horses fared along the indifferent roads in such conditions and if they Umbers reached their hearth. Or are they now headless victims of a malicious spirit? More likely, they might be frozen corpses, their eyes unseeing and their spirits wandering through the woods railing at their own folly.

Most had stayed, like the Tarlys. Samwell is his age, a likeable though bookish boy who often winds up the butt of jests which hardly seems fair since Sam’s twice as smart as most any man here. Jon is glad to call him his good friend. He is also secretly protective of him when it comes to settings such as this where Sam might not be shown due respect by some. His brother Dickon is here as well. Though he’s a few years younger than Sam, he does not need Jon’s protection.

There are some who Jon wishes hadn’t stayed as well, particularly Harrold Hardyng. A puffed up jackanape who charms the ladies with his compliments and looks down his nose as Jon’s old waistcoat, the only one he possesses decent enough for the Starks’ house, while cruelly poking fun at Sam’s fondness for sweets when the ladies aren’t present.

Jon almost wishes he had attempted the journey back to his own modest homestead himself. He knows Tormund won’t let his livestock starve or freeze but he feels his responsibilities as a newer landowner keenly and thinks he should be there, too.

But Mister Stark looks upon his former ward quite fondly and Jon could not refuse his entry to remain. “It’s four miles to home for you which may as well be ten leagues in these conditions. Pray, stay a little longer, Jon.”

And why shouldn’t Jon wish to remain at Winterfell during a blizzard? He spent most of his boyhood here after all.

Because of Mister Stark’s daughter Sansa, that’s why.

From gawky and somewhat missish at thirteen, she has blossomed into a beauty, willowy, graceful and sweet at seventeen. Jon had liked her well enough as a girl but they’d had little occasion to converse one on one. But now? Oh, he’d enjoy sitting by her side at the hearth for hours upon end if he could.

She’d been standing by her father’s side to greet their guests upon arrival when they’d met again for the first time in years. She’d shook hands with him, giving him a friendly smile and saying how much she’d missed him here. Jon had been enchanted and his enchantment has only grown since then as one night of her company had stretched into several.

Therefore, Jon cannot bear watching Harrold Hardyng’s obvious attempts to court her right under the nose of their elders. What does Mister Stark think of Hardyng? More importantly, what does Sansa think? For her part, Sansa only smiles politely at his oafish gallantry like the gracious young lady she is but is there any attachment blooming?

Jon hopes not though he is likely a fool to hope. He’s quite proud of his homestead but knows it wouldn’t have been unlikely for him without Mister Stark’s help and it is not a scratch on a grand house like Winterfell. If he thought an offer of marriage between him and Sansa might be accepted though…oh, he is a fool to hope.

On the seventh night of his unexpectedly extended visit, the young people are growing restless. There is only so much gossip to share, only so many stories to tell. Days and nights kept indoors with mixed company relaxes some of the usual decorum and makes them bolder.

“A game! Let’s play a game!” Sansa declares after supper while Tom Sevenstrings and his friends pluck out a tune.

“The Pickety Witch!” someone suggests and several more agree.

Sansa laughs as her friend Jeyne Poole covers her eyes with a length of fine silk. What a sight she is in her pretty blue gown with her red hair shining brightly, curled and coiffed just so. Her rosy lips and that bit of black silk upon her porcelain skin, she presents an image that Jon knows will revisit him in the night. Honor will have him attempting to banish the thoughts it will spur. Carnal desire will encourage him in them.

They twirl her around three times, the children, young ladies and gentlemen chuckling and edging about the limited allotted space for the game as their elders watch from nearby smiling with nostalgia for their own youths perhaps.

“The Pickety Witch, the Pickety Witch, who’s got a kiss for the Pickety Witch?” Sansa asks with her hands stretched out before her, eager to snare a victim and guess who it is she’s caught.

All around the little area, she takes a step and then another, grasping at thin air. She’s hemmed in by her would-be captures but the space is enough to leave her uncertain of anyone’s exact whereabouts.

Beth Cassel screeches and scurries when Sansa nears her. Samwell squeaks and dodges her at one point, making his brother Dickon laugh heartily and barely elude capture himself. Little Rickon stomps on his brother Bran’s foot in his eagerness to escape his sister the Pickety Witch. She’s by far the prettiest Pickety Witch that ever was in Jon’s opinion.

Jon grins as she nears him and stands his ground. He hates to see her stuck in the middle indefinitely. And he’ll gladly let her capture him especially if it means she might choose to give her victim a kiss (even if it means he’ll be the blind man next.)

But a sound from the left draws her attention before she gets close enough to touch him and she turns.

Jon scowls, seeing that Harry has knocked the fireplace poker from its place. From his smug grin as Sansa moves towards him, Jon knows he did that on purpose.

His heart clenches, waiting for her to reach him. Like Jon, Harry isn’t moving.

She’s nearly to him, no more than a foot away. At any second, she’ll put her hands on his chest, his shoulders, touch his face and Jon will have to watch it all with a feigned smile as the sickening feeling in his stomach increases.

But when she’s right in front of Harry, Sansa does something unexpected. She darts to the right and nabs another victim.

Sam yelps. Yes, it’s a bit undignified but Sam does startle easily. Jon sees her lips twitching with suppressed laughter as his own are doing the same.

Sansa gently rubs his broad shoulders and then touches his round face. She wears an expression of puzzlement though, surely, she knows who she’s caught.

Or perhaps she doesn’t?

“Is it Loras?” she asks sweetly.

“N-no, Mm-Miss Sansa,” Sam stammers while Loras Tyrell across the room looks positively aghast at being mistaken for Samwell Tarly.

His voice will have given it away, Jon is sure.

Or maybe not.

“Ah, it must be Dickon then!”

Dickon Tarly may be younger but he is a head taller than his brother and far less rotund. Sansa doesn’t know the Tarlys all that well but she has spent the past week in their company and Jon has never heard her call them by anything but their correct names during that time.

Unkind laughter from some of the other lads breaks out. Some of the girls present titter cruelly, the girls who look at Dickon with moony eyes and give Sam dismissive looks. Jon glares at them all as does Dickon.

“No, I’m not Dickon, Miss Sansa,” Sam says, apologetically. Jon feels sorry for him.

“You must be a stranger to me then but clearly you are a noble gentleman, sir,” Sansa declares before kissing Samwell Tarly softly on the cheek. Sam’s eyes are wide as saucers as she removes her blindfold. “Oh ho, my mistake! He is no stranger at all but I was right to name him a noble gentleman,” she tells the others in a firm but merry tone.

The unkind laughter and cruel titters from a moment ago dry up in an instant. Jon can hear pleased laughter from the true friends present and everyone’s spirits are jolly again as Sansa helps blindfold and spin Sam for his turn.

Everyone’s spirits are jolly except for Jon’s, that is.

He’d never thought to be jealous of Sam in this manner but now, there is no denying that he is. Sansa kissed Sam on the cheek. Sansa has named Sam noble, which he is, and Jon has never felt less noble in his life. Sam carries an old, respectable family name and is the heir to more money than Jon will ever know. Sam would make her a finer match than most of these fools would ever acknowledge if they had any inclination for one another in that manner.

Feeling depressed and ridiculous, Jon decides to leave the circle of players and goes to fetch himself some cider. Once he has it, he retreats to the Starks’ deserted library.

He entirely misses Samwell catching Gilly, one of the serving girls, naming her correctly at once even with his blindfold in place and chastely pressing a kiss to her hand, making the girl blush with pleasure.

It is there where he broods alone in the library with his hard cider that he’s discovered. She has caught him after all. Tis only fitting. She has held him captive from the moment he arrived here.

“Why did you leave the game?”

“I was feeling…” Jealous. “Tired.”

“I hope you’re not unwell.”

“Not at all, Miss Sansa.”

“‘Miss Sansa,’ is it? That’s terribly formal. We’ve known each other since we were children, Jon.”

“Yes, you’re right. Sorry, Sansa. You knew you’d caught Sam, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Why’d you pretend otherwise?”

“I don’t like the way some of our guests treat him.”

“Nor I.”

“I know. I know he’s your friend and quite dear to you.”

“He is. He’s a very good man.”

“Yes, everyone should open their eyes and see it.”

It’s true. Why are his spirits are in such turmoil? He agrees with her but envy is twisting it, turning it into snake in his guts that would eat his heart if it could.

“I have a confession to make,” she says softly next.

“A confession?”

She bats her full eyelashes. It seems to make those impossibly blue eyes look even bluer. “I knew I was right in front of Harry. I could see just a bit beneath the blindfold. I recognized his boots. I reached for the person next to him because I didn’t wish to capture him.”

That snake in his guts is withering away as something else swells. “Oh? You do not care for him, do you?”

“No, I do not. I was actually hoping to capture someone else. I was looking for a certain set of feet but never got close enough to see them.”

“Not Sam’s?”

She shakes her head, her curls bouncing as her cheeks flood with color.

His heart may eat that snake. There is no room for jealousy here tonight. “Oh? Whose boots were you hoping to find, may I ask?”

She smiles as their eyes meet. “Who’s got a kiss for the Pickety Witch, Jon?”

He licks his lips and grins back at her before cupping her satiny cheek. “I do.”

#jonsa #jonsa fanfiction #vivilove-jonsa fic

47 notes · View notes

beholdme · 3 years

Text

All the Many Shades of Gerry - Chapter 6

Chapters: 6/19

Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist

Characters: Martin Blackwood, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Gerard Keay, Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives), Sasha James, Gertrude Robinson, Elias Bouchard

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Library AU, Librarian Jon, Artist Gerry, Trans Male Character, Trans Martin Blackwood, Canon Asexual Character, Asexual Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Ace Subtype - Sex Positive, Polyamory, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Romantic Fluff, Falling In Love, Boys in Skirts, Kissing, Demisexual Gerard Keay, Minor Character Death, Past Character Death, Canon-Typical Child Neglect, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Flirting, Minor Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Adventures in Hair Dying, Happy Ending, Banter, Gerry has a lot of sass, Gerard Keay is Morticia Adams, Jon is a very grumpy Librarian, Martin adores them anyway.

Summary: In which Gerry is a kaleidoscope and Jon and Martin can't help falling in love with him.

He happens to love them back.

Find it on Ao3

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

"Do you really hate Keats that much?" Martin asks Jon, sounding faintly betrayed. They're sitting on a pile of cushions in front of Gerry's big window, while the man himself stands painting nearby.

There has been no previous mention of Keats since they arrived several hours ago, nor in the entire course of Gerry knowing them together.

Granted, he had barely been awake when they had arrived, having rolled out of bed just seconds before the knock came, but Gerry thought he had been keeping fairly decent track of the overall conversation.

He had thought Sunday brunch was a great idea when Jon suggested it during the week. Only remembering half-way through his shift the previous night that he was normally dead asleep during that time on a Sunday. But needs must, and after coffee and food, he was feeling downright perky at having two cute boys in his apartment.

Jon and Martin had settled into the pillow pile to occupy themselves while Gerry wandered off to paint, and they had spent several hours each engaged in their own artistic endeavors, simply enjoying the energy of one another's company.

Jon had started out reading but kept getting distracted by the way the light in the studio catches in Gerry's dark red hair, tied up in a chaotic messy bun, and had idly been strumming Gerry's old acoustic guitar for a while instead. Martin had been writing in a notebook, tongue often caught between his teeth in contemplation, glasses pushed up onto the top of his hair.

Jon stops playing abruptly and Gerry winces at the discordant note the guitar lets out in protest.

"I think Keats is pretty cool," offers Gerry cheerfully.

"Thank you, Gerard, very helpful," grouses Jon in return, glaring at him. Gerry blows him a kiss and returns to his canvas.

"I don't hate Keats, Martin." Jon's voice is slow and soft in the way that indicates that he's actually trying to be sensitive, "I just think he's overrated. After spending so much time in uni pouring over his boring symbolism, I'm just sick of him."

Jon's English literature degree, which Gerry remembers with some humour does not qualify him for a job at a library, had been a pain to get, and he doesn't always remember that part of his life with any great fondness.

"I know, but-" Martin cuts off abruptly and there's unexpected silence for a moment.

"Gerry, do you have a cat?" Jon's voice is incredulous and somewhat delighted at the new development.

"Yes," Gerry replies, very casually. He looks around to find that the cat has indeed wandered in and is sitting in a shaft of sunlight, black fur shining. "Jon, Martin, meet Saturn. Saturn, this is Jon and Martin."

Saturn blinks at them, before abruptly standing, showing them his butt, and then walking over to twine between Gerry's legs. Gerry deposits his painting supplies nearby and reaches down to scoop Saturn up, before carrying him over to sit with the others.

"He's not always great with new people, but hopefully he'll warm up to you. He can be a great cuddler when he wants to be." Saturn eyes them all speculatively before sitting on his own cushion and curling up in a fluffy ball.

"So he's like the Jon cat?" Martin asks, sneaking out a finger to scratch Saturn's fluffy little ears. He purrs lightly and Gerry grins to see them getting along.

"Well-" Jon splutters indignantly, face warming beneath his tan.

They both laugh and Gerry leans towards Martin to whisper conspiratorially, "He's not even embarrassed about being bad with new people. He's shy that we know how good of a cuddler he is."

Jon presses his lips together with a long-suffering expression, also reaching out a hand to pet the purring feline. Saturn rolls over towards him and gets a belly rub for his efforts.

"There we go," Gerry mutters happily. "All my favorite boys, getting along so well."

There's more sputtering from both Jon and Martin at that, but Gerry only laughs and leans over to kiss the tops of their heads.

***

Jon sighs and rubs the back of his neck, trying to release the burning tension sitting in all the joints of his spine.

It's 1 A.M. and the library is long, long closed, doors locked and lights turned out. He doesn't know how he gets here sometimes. Elias has certainly never overtly demanded he work overtime, and yet Jon always feels the need to push a little harder, do more than anyone would consider even remotely reasonable.

He accepted a while ago, that his irrational drive for perfection in this job stems from his self-doubt and fear of inadequacy.

And yet, that understanding does nothing to get him home at a reasonable hour, even when he remembers the two men who always seem to be around when he needs them.

It's unfathomable to Jon how he managed to find himself in a relationship with not one but two incredibly understanding and supportive men who love him. He considers it a downright miracle that they also seemed to be finding their way towards loving one another. Although, who wouldn't love Martin and Gerry?

He checks his watch again. Martin is definitely asleep, and even just stumbling in to lie in bed with him would disturb him. He knows the sweet man would say he doesn't mind, but he feels like if he can't get back at a reasonable hour, he doesn't deserve to sleep next to him at all.

Gerry, on the other hand, is mostly nocturnal. A quick check of his phone shows that it's actually Friday, and he is working at the bar for another hour or so.

While Jon has his phone in his hand, he opens up their text chain.

Gerry: Don't work too late. Martin and I want you functional so that we can drag you out to that street market this weekend.

Jon: I won't.

Gerry: Yes, you will. But try to keep it pre-midnight ;)

'He's awake,' Jon tells himself firmly. 'He'll be happy to see you, even if you did work even later than he predicted.'

So Jon packs up his stuff and leaves the library. He considers a cab, but it's only a few blocks and he thinks the fresh air and exercise will unlock the tension in his poor abused spine.

He arrives at the bar just before closing. Gerry is busy charming a few drunk regulars out the door with promises of undying love and that the bar will be back tomorrow afternoon. After they stumble off, he turns to find Jon walking slowly towards him. Gerry is wearing combat boots, dark jeans, and a loose leather tank top, over a lace undershirt. He has his favorite hoop in his nose, and the light glints off the many piercings in his ears.

"Why, Gerry Delano, aren't you a sight for sore eyes." Gerry grins at Jon's teasing tone and echoed words, no sign of recrimination about him.

"I always am." Jon reaches Gerry at that, and they draw together, pressing tired lips against each other gently.

Gerry's hair has faded out a bit from the moody red, and Jon slips his hands into his hair to hold him close for a moment longer. They rock together on the street for a long, frozen moment.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" Gerry asks, pulling away and sliding his hands down Jon's arms to connect their fingers.

"I missed you," Jon confesses shakily, emotion spilling out of his voice.

"Good, I missed you too." Gerry drags him into the bar and fills the air with stories from his shift while he and his colleagues clean for the evening, closing up the bar.

They walk home arm in arm, Gerry flirting with him mercilessly. Jon sheds the day's tension as they go, and by the time they arrive at Gerry's loft, he's warm and relaxed.

He supposes he should probably go back to his own flat, but it's not a place he spends the night very often anymore, and he fears the creeping insomnia that will take him without Martin and Gerry around to soothe him into sleep. Besides, Gerry is right here with him, and he seems so pleased to have him around.

"Are you going to paint now?" Jon asks as they shed their work clothes. Jon is sorry to see the lace shirt go, but Gerry makes up for it by simply throwing a kimono over his bare chest. He throws him a T-shirt, so Jon wears that and his boxers as they settle on the couch. Gerry is still wearing his jeans, but both their feet are bare as they tangle on the coffee table.

"I'm not sure, do you want to?" Gerry asks as he lights a cigarette and offers Jon one.

"What? Do I want to paint?" Jon's voice is taken aback. He takes the cigarette and lights it.

Gerry shrugs as if it's obvious. "Sure, you used to draw with me when we were younger."

"Yes, but…"

"But what, Jonathon? You're too old to paint now? Too proper and straight-laced to get charcoal under your nails? No more piercings, no more creativity?" Gerry sways into his shoulder, drawing smoke into his lungs and letting it out as he speaks.

"No, it's not that." Jon grouses back. Gerry hums derisively in return. "I just don't see the point of wasting your drawing paper when you can do that." Jon gestures wildly towards Gerry's most recently completed painting.

Gerry eyes it critically. It's the commission that he's been slogging over petulantly. It's large and impressively done, he can accept that, but he doesn't like it very much. He hates the subject and composition Peter Lukas has demanded and compensated by pouring all his best technique into it. It makes him sad and sullen to look at, and Gerry will be relieved when it's finally gone.

"For every painting like that I've ever done, Jon," Gerry spills all his affection into the name, and Jon can feel it, "I've done a thousand ridiculous sketches and colour studies. Art is time, and diligence and joy as much as it ever is masterpieces. You don't sit down one day and magically just know how to be a maestro."

Jon looks over and up at him with big green eyes. Gerry can't help but lean over and slide his hand into Jon's hair, pressing their lips together for a moment. "So Mr. Sims. Can I tempt you to make some art with me?"

***

What they create in those soft early morning hours can only generously be called art, even Gerry's efforts. But they laugh and kiss and somehow get covered in charcoal and acrylic paint. Gerry even allows Jon to choose the Spotify playlist. Slow piano music with nature sounds play softly in the background of their impromptu art party, reminding Gerry of nothing so much as Jon himself.

The dawn is just breaking through Gerry's massive bank of windows when he allows Jon to drag him off to bed, and they collapse together in the soft morning light.

***

Late the next morning, Martin lets himself into the flat and bounces down onto the bed between them, sending Saturn flying off in a huff.

"So, I heard there was a slumber party. I brought breakfast."

"Fuck off," Gerry slurs, but rather undermines his own point when he pulls Martin down and tucks himself around him. Jon does the same from the other side, and Martin finds himself in the middle of a very sleepy man sandwich.

Gerry seems to instantly fall back asleep, but Jon eventually drags himself to consciousness, even buried in Martin's neck. "What's time?"

"Almost ten," he responds, very cheerfully.

"WHAT-" Jon flies out of bed in a blind panic, desperately looking for his phone, which is dead when he finds it anyway. "I'm already so fucking late!"

Gerry groans.

"Relax Jon." Martin tries to soothe him but is hindered by the fact that Gerry is still clinging to him in a very enjoyable way. "Gerry, love, let me go. Jon is having a meltdown."

"How unusual," Gerry mutters very unsupportively, Jon manages to notice. He flops over onto his other side and attempts to bury himself in pillows instead of Martin.

"Jon, breathe." Swinging up to sit on the edge of the bed, Martin uses his best man-disaster steadying tone. Gerry has come to realize what that tone is, but he doesn't mention it to anyone. "It's Saturday."

Jon slumps and drops the pants he was desperately trying to wrangle himself into.

"It's Saturday?" He asks.

"It's Saturday," Gerry confirms from the pillow fort.

Jon glares at Martin in a very put upon way. Martin smiles at him brightly.

He turns and wanders off to the bathroom in an effort to collect himself. Martin resumes his spot in the middle of the bed, and drags Gerry towards him, tucking himself into his back.

"Hmmm. So much noise on a weekend." The goth mutters as he attempts to resettle himself in Martin's arms.

"I'll make it up to you later," Martin promises, pressing a kiss behind his ear.

"You let that happen on purpose, didn't you." It's not a question. "Just to see that look on his face."

"Yes," Martin says, chuckling into Gerry's pillow.

"Very good, sir."

#the magnus archives #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #gerry keay #jongerrymartin #gerard keay #also on ao3 #fic

10 notes · View notes

ramblings-of-a-mad-cat · 3 years

Note

Who you should fight: Game of Thrones Edition

Your wish is my command, Anon.

JON: Damn, you really do aim high. If you want to fight Jon Snow, there's nothing really stopping you. He wouldn't want to fight you, but he would accept your challenge honorably. Perhaps you would win, perhaps you wouldn't. Jon doesn't really like violence. He was victorious in the battle of the bastards, but only with the Knights of the Vale showing up at the eleventh hour. And he would have given his life to the Army of the Dead if Benjen hadn't shown up to save him. So you might win, it's possible. Just be prepared for the Starks to send their regards if you do. With Bran's visions, there would be nowhere you could hide. With Arya's faces, you'd never know she was coming.

SANSA: Look, it's not exactly wise to fight a Queen. Something to keep in mind going forward. You would almost certainly defeat Sansa, since she has almost no experience in actual fighting, but that doesn't mean your troubles would be over. Expect the Starks, the Northerners, the Knights of the Vale, and Brienne to rise up and hunt you down. So if you want to fight her, be prepared to run for the rest of your life. But really, why would you ever want to fight her in the first place? Between Cersei, Joffrey, Ramsay, and Littlefinger, hasn't the poor woman been through enough? If you go through with this, you'll be fighting a sexual assault survivor. Think about that for a second. And then don't fight Sansa.

BRAN: Okay, okay, how about you just don't? This isn't about whether or not you should fight Bran, because to be honest - you can't. Bran is gone. Everybody forgets this but Bran is effectively dead by Season 7. So no, you couldn't fight Bran if you tried. All you could do is fight the Three Eyed Raven, and seven hells, why would you ever want to do that? Could you kill him? Maybe. He can always see you coming, but he doesn't carry weapons and he's paralyzed from the waist down. But who are you, the Night King? If you kill Bran, the world ends and the long night begins. Don't be The Night King. Don't fight Bran.

ARYA: Ahahaha...sure, go ahead. If you've got some sort of death wish, feel free to try and fight Arya Stark. I'd give some line about how the Starks would come after you but frankly, it wouldn't come to that. Arya wouldn't be in any danger and they'd be well aware. You do know this is the girl who slayed the Night King, right? The one who single-handedly wiped out House Frey? Realistically, the fight isn't even going to happen unless she's in the mood. If she is, expect her to toy with you for about ten minutes before running you through with Needle. If she isn't, then you won't ever even see her. You'll just get a knife in the back from whatever face she's wearing.

DAVOS: Seriously? You're going to fight an innocent old man who doesn't even have all his fingers? What are you hoping to gain from doing so? Does beating up old men give you satisfaction? Well, it shouldn't - unless we're talking about Pycelle. But we're not, so put those weapons away! Look, if you choose to fight Davos, you're very likely to win the fight. And in doing so, I suppose you could reunite him with his son and his surrogate daughter in the afterlife. But just do not fight Davos under any circumstances. For goodness' sake, what did he ever do to you?

THEON: In terms of physical combat, you could probably win this fight. Theon isn't shown to be nearly as strong as his sister, and he's also suffering from PTSD. So there's a very good chance that you could defeat him. But Yara is going to literally cut you into pieces if you do. With everything Theon has been through, don't you think he's suffered enough for his actions? Ramsay tortured him so much that he forgot who he was for a while. He castrated and flayed Theon. Kept him as a slave for three years. And even now, Theon is still recovering from what he went through. He still hates himself for betraying Robb. Just let the poor man heal in peace, won't you?

YARA: Go ahead, fight Yara. She's not exactly the nicest person, so she could use a good wake-up call or two. Her only real redeeming quality is that she loves her brother. On the other hand, she's Ironborn so she might just enjoy the fight. There's also the question of whether or not you would win, or even escape with your life. To which I say - don't expect anything. Yara is ruthless, and she doesn't play fair. She commands the Iron Fleet and they're loyal to her. This woman was her Uncle's prisoner. I think it goes without saying that she's tough. I doubt you could win the fight, but feel free to try.

SANDOR: This is the only character that would probably enjoy the fight, so go ahead and spar a little with Sandor Clegane. Don't actually hurt him, because he's obviously been through enough. But enjoy a nice, friendly bout with the guy and let him get off some steam. Of course, I say that under the assumption that you COULD harm Sandor. The guy came close to beating Brienne, and his final Clegane Bowl with Gregor ended in a draw. Plus he's like...huge. So not a good chance at winning. Even if you use his weakness, fire...well, he's won a trial by combat where fire was involved. Don't be a jerk, don't kill Sandor. You'll wind up on Arya's list for sure.

BRIENNE: To be honest, you aren't going to defeat Brienne unless you have exceptional skill and training in combat, and even then. The odds aren't in your favor. She's packing Valyrian Steel, and some heavy armor as well. Has Brienne ever lost a fight onscreen? I don't believe she has. Her weaknesses are emotional, not physical. In a fight, you don't stand much of a chance. Especially if she's trying to protect someone she cares about or honor a vow. That's her berserk button, so don't mention oaths. Or Jaime. Or Sansa. Really, Brienne is one of the most wonderful people in this entire series so why would you want to? Hang out with her instead.

GENDRY: This one is just a bad idea overall. The dude has all the skills of Sandor, without any of the discipline that Brienne has. Remember how the Rebellion was what Robert referred to as his glory days? How he ousted an entire dynasty because they had offended him? The Baratheons are known for their uncontrollable tempers, and we haven't seen much of this in Gendry, but it's there. Put a war-hammer in his hands, and you will never be safe. Just look at the guy. Have you seen how buff he is? Besides, Arya would definitely kill you, even if Gendry doesn't. He's such a sweet, upstanding guy to begin with. I don't understand why you would even want to. Don't fight Gendry.

JAIME: I suppose you could. The guy only has one hand now, so in terms of combat prowess, you would probably win the fight itself. Assuming Brienne doesn't get to you first. Either way, expect to deal with Brienne, and that's not someone you want coming after you with a vengeance. Even if you defeat Brienne, you still aren't in the clear. Tyrion may not be one for physical fights, but rest assured the man will make you pay for harming his brother. Someday, when you least expect it, you will pay. To be fair, Jaime does have some crimes he needs to answer for, but he also saved King's Landing. Really, just don't fight him. He already feels badly enough about his past.

CERSEI: Always fight Cersei. Always fight Cersei. This shouldn't need to be explained. Think about everything that she's done. All the people whose lives she ruined. Whatever terrible fate you can inflict is one that she deserves. Yes, she's pregnant, but don't forget - the witch in Season 5 warned her that she would only ever have three children. That baby isn't going to live no matter what happens. I suppose you'd have to get rid of Gregor Clegane first, so bring Sandor with you for a double knock-out. Other than that, I don't see anyone coming to Cersei's defense. That's just how awful she is. Jaime might try, but I think Brienne and Tyrion would be able to restrain him. Yeah, just. Just fight Cersei.

TYRION: Damn, why would you want to fight Tyrion? So he made a few judgment calls that turned out poorly. He was always trying to do the right thing, and all of his decisions were well-reasoned. His entire life has been constant suffering. Do you really want to add onto that? Well, if you insist, you'll almost certainly win the fight. Being half the size of the average man and consuming alcohol on a daily basis would render Tyrion one of the physically weakest characters on the show. You could probably get away with it as well. I mean, Jaime would come after you, and hell hath no fury like a Lannister scorned. But like I said, he's not the strongest either. Just watch out for that golden hand.

DAENERYS: Should you fight Dany? I suppose it depends on your point of view. She's definitely committed monumental crimes, but she's also saved countless people. You have to ask yourself if such a divisive person deserves to live or not. Really, we could argue that point until the cows come home. The real question is - could you fight her? Ultimately, the answer is yes...if you get close enough. You'd have to get past her armies first, but once you do, she has no experience in direct combat whatsoever. An easy kill. That you could celebrate for ten seconds before Grey Worm or Drogon rip you apart. You can only ever tie with Daenerys, there's no winning.

MISSANDEI: Stop, stop right there. What are you thinking? You know this is how we got S8E5, right? This is what pushed Dany over the edge, so, just consider that for a moment. What would possess you to ever wish pain on such an innocent soul? Missandei deserves the world. She deserves to be free and happy. And you want to fight her? Go ahead. If you could actually land a blow or two, you might win rather quickly. But Grey Worm will rip you limb from limb before that happens, if Dany doesn't issue an angry "Dracarys" first. Actually, if they don't get there, then I will personally climb through the screen myself and fight you for threatening her. She is the purest of cinnamon rolls.

EURON: I will literally pay you to fight him. The man is begging for a punch in the face.

#Game of Thrones #Jon Snow #Arya Stark #Sansa Stark #Tyrion Lannister #Daenerys Targaryen #Jaime Lannister #Cersei Lannister #Brandon Stark #Ser Davos Seaworth #Yara Greyjoy #Theon Greyjoy #Brienne of Tarth #Sandor Clegane #Gendry Baratheon #Missandei of Naath

10 notes · View notes

heyitsani · 3 years

Text

I Keep My Eyes Wide Open All the Time Chapter 2

Word Count: 6507

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Major character death (eventually), Mentions of past rape/non-con (eventually)

Pairing: Jason Todd/Dick Grayson, Damian Wayne/Jon Kent (mentioned)

Summary: With the potion to restore his memories, Damian is given the choice. Remember or remain ignorant.

Notes: We are now delving into Damian’s memories that fall in line with the timeline of the previous story! There are some scenes that will be direct parallels to the other story, but these are Damian’s memories. And it’s the experiences that mold him into the man he becomes in this particular lifetime.

This was hardly edited, just warning you. My brain is fried from having to care for my two sick gremlins. Which is also why it’s so late. Next chapter still coming Friday!

Hopefully.

If you have not read the other story, this one won’t really make much sense. So you can read that here: WYMIM

You can also read it on AO3 here

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

Frowning at the cloaks the tailor slipped over his shoulders, Damian wondered why exactly he had to wear all these uncomfortable garments for his uncle’s wedding. He had been to banquets and fancy parties before, but he had never had to wear all these heavy layers that were stiff and thick.

“Honestly, Your Highness, they cannot be that unfortunate,” the tailor teased as he adjusted some of the gold edging on the outer cloak. “Your father made much the same face when he attended his first wedding as the Crowned Prince. So much of him in you.” Damian looked at the man through the looking glass and considered him.

“Stu, these look perfect,” Damian looked up to see his father walking into the room, dressed in his own ceremonial garbs. “Are they the same design as the ones you made me for my first?” The king walked over to stand in front of Damian, smiling down at the younger before looking at the tailor.

Stu waved a hand but bowed his head in the expected respectful manner as he continued to work on a piece. “They are actually your old garments. Your father brought them to me and said you would like that particular sentimentality.” Watching his father’s smile turn from friendly to something the five-year-old wasn’t quite sure how to label, Damian frowned.

“He’s not wrong,” his father said softly, looking back to Damian. “But something tells me that you are enjoying them about as much as I did at your age.” His father chuckled as he brushed a hand through the raven locks on his head before resting the hand on his shoulder.

“Yes well, he is his father’s son.” The king laughed but kept his eyes on Damian. “I am almost finished. The Queen was quite insistent that I work as quickly as possible. But these old bones can only move so quickly these days.” The smile on his father’s face faltered slightly at the mention of his mother but was quickly put back into place.

“She is a particular woman.”

The old tailor simply hummed and continued to work, but Damian kept a close eye on his father. Though he was only five, he could tell when there were things being unsaid. Ser Jason had started showing him how to watch people to read more than just what their words told them. And his father always said much more with his expression and body then he did with his words, he was coming to find. But that didn’t mean he understood any of it yet.

“Do you understand your role today, son?” His father turned his full attention back to Damian, and the younger nodded. His mother had drilled it into her, demanding nothing but perfection in his memory of what he was supposed to do.

Straightening his spine and lifting his chin, he looked up at his father. “Mother made sure I knew what to do. She…impressed upon me the importance of my role.”

“Did she?” His father’s voice sounded odd. “And what did your mother have to say about the possibility of making a mistake?”

“To not to.”

“Of course she did,” his father said, but Damian just furrowed his brows. He didn’t understand why his father suddenly looked angry. Had he done something wrong? Said something wrong? The hand that had been resting on his shoulder fell away and his father took a step back, smoothing down the front of his robes while taking a deep breath and releasing it slowly.

“Father?”

His father watched him for a moment before answering, his tone controlled but it didn’t match the look in his eyes. “Your uncle is glad to have you carry his hand fasting box for him. He will be happy with your performance no matter what mistakes might be made. Anyone who tells you differently will have to deal with me.”

“Those sound like fighting words, My King,” an amused voice sounded from the door and Damian’s frown turned to a smile at the sight of Ser Jason leaning against the wall, arms crossed over the rich red of his cloaks. “Should you be teaching a five-year-old such things?”

“Oh please,” Stu sounded, drawing Damian’s gaze. “I have been around long enough to know he is this way because of you.” Ser Jason let out a laugh and Damian could hear his father chuckling, but Damian’s attention was on the man at his feet. “Now, I believe I am done. Does it have your approval, Your Majesty?”

“Impeccable as always. But Stu honestly, when will you just call me Richard? You’re practically family.” The older man stood and brushed himself off before looking over at the king. “Don’t give me that look. You have never stood upon propriety before. Least of all with me.”

“Yes well, you have always been your own force. Perhaps His Highness will feel differently.”

“You mean perhaps he’s being influenced differently than his father.”

“Jason.”

“Sorry, My King.” Damian looked between the three men and tried to figure out what exactly they were talking about, but none of it made any sense to him. He felt like these kinds of conversations happened a lot around him. About him. “I did come here with a purpose. His former Majesty is gathering everyone for the ceremony and requested I collect the two of you. Appears you finished just in the nick of time, Stu.”

The older man chuckled as he went about packing his tools away. Damian looked at his father and waited for his approval before he moved. “You can step down, my son. Stu, you have done a marvelous job as always. You will be at the ceremony and banquet, yes?”

“I will. I will never miss an opportunity to see my hard work being admired.”

“Cheeky old man,” Ser Jason joked as he moved further into the room and over to the king. Damian noticed Stu didn’t bat an eye at the kiss the two men shared as he gathered his things. But he also knew his father and Ser Jason only ever did this around certain people. Never anyone who wasn’t close to the family. And never his mother. “We should get you both to the carriages. I am sure Hood is there waiting for me as well.”

“And Mother?”

He didn’t notice the flinch in his father or the tightened grip on Ser Jason’s waist. “Yes, I am certain your mother is there waiting for us as well.” His father stepped away from Ser Jason and picked up an object on the table where Stu had been keeping his tools. He made his way over to where Damian still stood on the stool, holding up the crown that was specifically for the Heir Apparent and Damian scrunched his nose at it. He hated the crown, but he knew at certain occasions he was required to wear it. The royal wedding between his uncle and the Brother of the King of Kent was one of those.

“It’s so heavy,” he muttered, standing still as his father placed it upon his head and adjusted it so it sat properly.

“Just wait until you have to wear the one your father has to wear,” Ser Jason teased, holding out the Sovereign’s crown to his father, who rolled his eyes as he bowed his head so the other man could place it on his head. Damian could only remember a handful of moments when his father wore anything more than a simple crown. “But if it doesn’t suite the two of you perfectly.”

Damian watched the two men stare at each other for a moment before he carefully got down from the stool and looked up at them. “Why do you not have a crown, Ser Jason? All the high-ranking Knights have them.”

“I am not a knight, Little Prince. I am my own entity and we do not have to subject ourselves to the frivolity of a crown.” Ser Jason looked down at Damian and held his hand out for the boy to take, which he did immediately. “Now, let us away before His former Majesty comes looking for you both.”

“Yes, what a shame it would be to stress Father more than he already has been. You’d think he was still king and having to make sure all the details were in place,” Damian listened to his father speak as they walked out of the room even though it made little sense to him, his hand still gripped in Ser Jason’s.

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

“I may be a king, but he is my son. And I will not ignore him for my duties. I will not have him think I care for others more than I care for my own child.” Damian frowned as he hid just around the corner from where his father was speaking to a high-ranking member of the Council. He didn’t need to hear the start of the conversation to know that this was about the appearance he had made earlier when the Council had been in session. He hadn’t known and wouldn’t have barged in if he had, but once he had come in his father had insisted on hearing what he had come in for.

Like he always did, and Damian never gave much thought to.

“What are you doing, Little Prince?” Damian flinched when a voice sounded behind him. Turning, he found Ser Jason standing with a knowing smile on his lips and an amused glint in his eyes. “We should work on your awareness regarding your surroundings.”

Sighing, the seven-year-old turned his back completely to what he had been watching and looked up at the man who was, for all intents and purposes, a second father to him. “I made a mistake today,” he admitted, looking down at the ground. Ser Jason said nothing, and Damian peeked up at the man through his lashes. The frown that was present confused him.

“Did your father say you made a mistake?” Damian shook his head and looked back down. “Did he tell you that you did anything wrong? Treat you as though you had?”

He thought back to the moment he had rushed into the room and how his father had looked at him. He hadn’t looked thrilled, but he had looked happy at the very least. He remembered how he had heard muttering coming from the men and women at the table but how his father had ignored them and let Damian climb into his lap and tell him about the jump he had made on his horse earlier.

“No,” Damian admitted, scuffing his boot on the ground. “But…” Glancing over his shoulder, he frowned at the corner that hid his father and the Councilmember.

“But nothing, Little Prince,” Ser Jason said, kneeling to get eyelevel with him. Damian looked at the older man, still feeling ashamed for upsetting the Council and forcing his father to have to speak up. “Come with me, I’ll tell you a story.” Ser Jason stood and held his hand out for Damian to take while they walked.

Hesitating just a moment, with one last backward glance, Damian slipped his smaller hand into the much larger one. He remained silent as they walked away from where his father had been and toward the kitchens.

“When you were born your father was concerned,” Ser Jason started as they got far enough away from his father, so they would not be overheard. “Your grandmother, Talia, was not the warmest of mothers. She was strict and enforced many rules on your father and uncle. She wanted them to be the very best and she thought that meant not treating them as her children, but as her pupils. Even though Prince Timothy was just a toddler and your father not much older. Your grandfather, though kinder and more understanding, took his duty as king very seriously when he was crowned after your father was born.”

Having heard stories about his grandmother from his father, what Ser Jason was telling him made sense. And he knew his grandfather well enough to know how important duty was to him. But he didn’t understand what this had to do with what had happened today. Or why his father had been concerned when he had been born.

“He told me he was worried you would not know just how loved you were. That you might grow up the way he had because your mother was not going to be…very attentive. He worried he would be like his own father.” Damian looked up at the man and stopped walking, furrowing his brows at that revelation. Ser Jason laughed and gave his hand a tug so they could resume walking. “That face you’re making just supports what I had told him. There was no way that your father would do anything other than love you openly.”

Damian considered this information as he was led into the kitchens and then lifted onto one of the stools he and Ser Jason always sat on while indulging in a snack. He missed the way the cook rolled her eyes as Ser Jason gave her his bright smile. He didn’t see the other kitchen workers chuckling as the head cook went to get them a snack. All he could focus on was the fact that his father, the one person he had never doubted cared deeply for him, had worried Damian wouldn’t know love.

“Ser Jason?” Damian looked over at the man as he took his usual seat. The man raised a dark brow and waited for Damian to continue. “Did I get Father in trouble today?” Ser Jason looked startled for a moment before laughing loudly. Glancing around, Damian noticed the entire kitchen staff stopped to watch the pair fondly for a moment before going back to their tasks.

“Little Prince,” Ser Jason gasped, still chuckling, “your father gets himself in trouble with the Council all the time, and he will always admit when he is wrong. But on this? On this he will never admit any faults. Because loving you? Being your father first and foremost? That is not a fault.” Relaxing a little onto his stool, Damian sighed. He was glad to hear his father was not in trouble because of him.

Smiling at the cook who set a plate in front of them, Damian thanked her before turning that smile onto the man next to him. He wasn’t at all surprised to find that familiar smile on Ser Jason’s face, the one Damian knew was just for him and his father.

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

He stood ramrod straight at the top of the stairs, next to his mother who almost looked bored as they waited for the caravan of carriages and horses made their way onto the castle grounds to the main gates. He remained still because it was expected of it, but he really wanted to move. He wanted to adjust the cape he wore to keep the chill away. He wanted to shift the crown on his head, the one he hated so much more than the basic one he was allowed for events that were not quite as formal.

But his Uncle Timothy and the Duke of Kent visiting was apparently a formal affair. And one he knew his father was looking forward to.

So his mother had made it clear that he was expected to behave as a Wayne would and how an Heir Apparent should. Which meant he remained still and silent, waiting for the carriage in the middle of the entourage to stop and the two men to step out. He watched his father rush forward to hug his uncle and then exchange a handshake with his husband.

“Damian, come!” His father called. Glancing up at his mother, she gave him a stern and expectant look before nodding. Only then did he make his way down the steps to greet the visitors.

“Nephew,” his uncle greeted reaching out for a hug and though he knew he would hear about it from his mother later, Damian sunk into the affection. “You have grown so much! You will be towering over me and your father in no time.” Damian smiled up at the man and nodded. “You remember Kon.” The other man looked away from the king and gave Damian a smile, which the younger returned easily. “Surely you also remember King Clark’s son, Jon?” The young man stood next to Duke Kon, smiling over at Damian as well.

“I do. Hello, Your Highness,” Damian greeted formally. The other prince gave a small wave but remained where he stood. “We have missed you, Uncle. Father was so pleased to get your letter that you and the Duke would be coming as the representatives for the Kingdom of Metropolis for the Treaty of Justice renewal.”

The older man laughed and settled a hand on Damian’s shoulder. “So formal for an eight-year-old. Are you certain you didn’t age ten years since I’ve been gone?” Ducking his head, Damian felt a blush rise on his cheeks.

“Ah that would be his mother’s doing,” he heard his father comment. He lifted his head to look at his father but caught the eye of Prince Jon instead. He had an almost curious look on his face. “Come, let us go inside and allow the staff to help your men and women unpack and get settled. Alfred had arranged everything according to the list you sent with your letter. Has anything changed, Brother?”

“No, all should still be accurate. Will Father be joining us?” Damian watched the three older men walk ahead while he waited for Prince Jon to fall into step with him.

“Was it a hard journey, Your Highness?”

“Please call me Jon,” the boy said with his bright smile. It made Damian respond with a smile of his own, almost against his will. But he quickly glanced over where his mother had been standing earlier and thankfully found the spot empty. If she had gone back inside, then that meant he was free to do as he pleased until dinner.

“You may call me Damian,” he returned the sentiment. The other prince seemed to brighten even more at the words and it reminded Damian so much of his own father’s disposition. “Do you need to rest before dinner? Or perhaps require anything I can get?”

Jon shook his head and looked around the area as they reached the top of the stairs. “Is the Dragon Slayer around? Last time we came he promised to show me some of his souvenirs from his adventures. I would very much like to see that.”

“I believe Ser Jason is training with the knights,” Damian said, glancing toward the training grounds. He wasn’t usually supposed to interrupt the training regimes, but he supposed Jason wouldn’t be too upset this once. “Let us go this way. It is quicker to go around instead of traveling through the castle,” he gestured, leading Jon back down the steps.

The pair walked for a few moments in silence before Jon spoke up. “How exciting to have a Dragon Slayer in your kingdom! I have read every tome in our library back home about their history and great victories. And their heartbreaking defeats. Ser Todd was so interesting when we were here for the wedding.” Damian watched Jon talk out of the corner of his eye as he led the other boy toward the training grounds, enraptured with his excitement. It was almost contagious.

It would have been contagious if he hadn’t had to worry about his mother’s ever watchful eye.

“Ser Jason is a noble man. The strongest of his line,” Damian agreed as they rounded one of the walls into shortcut that would take them out to the training field. Jon practically bounced as they walked and Damian felt himself smiling at his antics. “He promised me a scale one day. I hope on his next venture he will be successful in retrieving one for me.”

“How brave! I read the dragons burst into flames when they have been slain.”

Damian nodded. “They do. That is why he has not gotten one for me yet. It is a difficult task and one must be especially quick. But Ser Jason said he is sure he should be able to get one.” Jon’s eyes widened and Damian felt his chest swell with pride for knowing Ser Jason well enough to impress him. “He is my father’s closest confidant, and he tells me of his travels frequently. I bet he would be happy to tell you of some of them,” Damian offered just as they stepped out onto the edge of the training fields.

With a glance around at the men staggered throughout the fields, working through drills, Damian caught sight of the familiar face. With a tilt of his head, he gestured for Jon to follow him through the ranks toward Ser Jason.

“Little Prince,” he was greeted as soon as Ser Jason noticed him. His smile was familiar but shifted to something more formal when his eyes shifted to Jon. “Prince Jon, how good to see you again.” He gave the prince a customary bow before glancing between the pair. “To what do I owe this interruption?” And though Damian could see the contrite look on Jon’s face, he simply smiled at the man he considered a second father.

“Jon asked after you,” he offered as an explanation. The Slayer nodded and looked over at the visiting prince.

“I promised you a chance to view some of my trophies,” Ser Jason confirmed, and Jon lit up, bouncing in excitement. “I do need to finish training, but I promise I will escort you over to the display rooms as soon as we break.” The older man smiled over at Damian and without saying anything, Damian knew what was being asked of him.

Turning to Jon, who had not lost the excitement on his face, Damian pointed to a space behind him. “Let us wait over there, Jon,” he instructed. “Are you hungry or thirsty? My grandfather’s manservant always makes sure to provide the soldiers and their spectators with refreshments.” The other boy bounced over to where Damian directed him and glanced over the options, picking a few small bites before he went back to watching the men and women on the grounds.

Passing the time chatting about how things had been in the years since they had last seen each other, Damian allowed Jon to ramble on about the state of his country and how they have faired so much better since Damian’s uncle had come to live in their kingdom. He listened while Jon talked about the lessons his father had started introducing him to, things that would help him in running the kingdom one day and Damian confirmed his own father had been doing much the same.

“Father loves to speak of our friendship,” Jon told him as the two watched the soldiers finish for the day and begin clearing from the field. “We have many other kingdoms come for treaties or international relations, but he always remains firm that his favorite is with Gotham. I hope we can continue that once we are crowned.”

“Of course we can,” Damian nodded, serious. “Our kingdoms have been allies far too long to change that when we rule.” Damian glanced over at Jon and found the prince watching him closely. “What is it?”

“I did not mean politically. Father holds his friendship with your grandfather and father very highly. I would like to do the same.”

Damian opened his mouth to reply but found he didn’t quite know what to say. Friendship wasn’t something he had ever really experienced, his mother keeping him separate from anyone his own age outside of visiting royalty. He knew there were a few kids living in the castle, offspring of servants, but he had never been allowed to interact. He wasn’t sure he knew how to be a friend. But he wanted to try.

“I would like that.” Jon’s smile told him he had said the right thing. All Damian could do was smile back.

“Now,” Ser Jason interrupted as he walked over, wrapping an arm around each boy. “I do believe I have some boasting to do. Shall we?” He glanced between the two and Damian allowed Jon to answer.

“Yes please!” The older man chuckled and guided the pair toward the castle entrance that would lead to the hall where the all of the trophies the Dragon Slayers collected were displayed. “Damian told me you are to try and get him a scale! How frighteningly fast you must be for…” Damian let Jon’s chatter fade to background noise as he spotted his mother standing in one of the upper windows, watching the trio with narrowed eyes and an expression he couldn’t quite place.

Whatever it was, it made him want to shrink back and hide from it. But as they got closer to being almost directly under her, he noticed it wasn’t the three of them she was watching, but Ser Jason alone.

And though he couldn’t place the exact emotion, his instincts screamed danger.

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

Hurrying down the hall, Damian wove in and out of the gathered staff members that had lined up to say goodbye to his uncle, the Duke, and Prince.

He was late.

His mother had insisted he go back and change into more formal cloaks for the send off and it had thrown off everything. Especially since his manservant had already left and he had had to figure it out all on his own. He had gained fresh respect for the man who had been helping him for years now.

“Your Highness!” A familiar voice called, causing Damian to stop and spin. “What happened to the cloaks you were already wearing?! You are all a mess.” His manservant rushed up to him and immediately started straightening his layers.

“Mother insisted,” was all he could say in response. The man tutted and continued to fix him. Finally, after straightening his crown, the man stepped back and nodded.

“Now rush along, My Prince. The family is already waiting.” Nodding and breathing a quick thank you, Damian continued hurrying along the hallway. He emerged from the castle to find his mother at the top of the steps, standing regally as always, but the rest of the family down near the waiting carriages.

Taking a deep breath, Damian slowed his gait and made his way to his mother, saying nothing at her silent assessment before heading down the stairs.

“There you are, Son!” His father smiled brightly when he caught sight of Damian, waving him over. “We were just wondering what was keeping you.” Damian smiled tentatively, glancing back at his mother’s cool gaze before looking back at his father. He didn’t miss the narrowing of his father’s eyes at the motion of looking at his mother, but it was gone before he could question it.

“I had a mishap with my cloaks,” was all he offered. Taking the blame was the safest bet. “But I am glad to not miss the sendoff. Uncle,” he stepped forward and accepted a hug from his uncle and then the Duke, who had had come to also think of as an uncle over the last few weeks.

His uncle wrapped an arm around his shoulders after the Duke released him and looked down on him. “We will arrange to have you come stay with us soon, yes?” Damian nodded, smiling brightly. “I will write you father about it soon. You must come in the Spring before the heat settles. It is the best season out there and there will be much to show you.”

“I look forward to it, Uncle.”

“Me too!” Prince Jon chimed in as he rushed over from where he had been chatting with Ser Jason by the horses pulling the carriage. “We will have the best time!” Damian smiled at the other boy and nodded. And even though he didn’t want his mother to know he had formed such a good bond with the other prince, he easily accepted the hug from the older boy. “Don’t forget to write. We will exchange letters, yes?”

Pulling back, Damian’s smile remained. “Yes.” Jon bounced before glancing back at the carriage.

“Well, we must be off,” Uncle Timothy spoke up, moving over to his father’s side. “Brother, thank you for welcoming me home. I have missed our time together. You must come with Damian to visit.”

His father chuckled and wrapped his uncle in a warm hug that Damian knew all too well. “I shall see if I can get Father to run the country again so that I might come visit.” Damian watched the pair laugh before parting. His father gave the Duke a hug before moving to stand with Damian. “Prince Jon, please send my well wishes to your father and mother. It was wonderful to have you join us.”

The boy smiled brightly and accepted the offered hug before he waved and bounded toward the carriages, slipping in behind his uncles. Damian waved with his father when the horses began moving forward as Ser Jason backed away and gave wave of his own.

“Well, My King,” the older man sighed as he stopped next to the king. When he didn’t say anything more, Damian glanced over at the slayer and noticed the two men looking at each other. The look on both their faces was familiar, but painful. Something he couldn’t quite pinpoint the meaning of. But it was one he had seen plenty of times over the past eight years.

“Yes, My Slayer.” The two nodded at each other before glancing down at Damian, confusing him further. “Come, Son. Let us to be office and I shall show you what happens now that the assembly has away, and we have the treaties to send out.”

Nodding his head, Damian turned and walked with his father, Ser Jason following closely behind them. He didn’t look to see if his mother was still standing at the top of the stairs because he knew she wouldn’t be. Not once the sake of appearances was over.

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

The room was quiet outside of the scratch of his quill on parchment and the rustling of papers as his mother read through letters sent from her homeland. He could tell just by the sound of the papers that whatever was written on their surface was not what she had wanted to read. So rarely did his mother bother to show much in the way of emotion around him, so when she slipped up and let some shine through it always intrigued him.

Glancing at the woman out of the corner of his eye, Damian took in her rigid posture as she got up and paced the room while continuing to read whatever had been written to her.

“Mother?” He called out when he noticed her crumple up one of the pages in her hand. His mother stopped walking and turned to look at him, looking like she had forgotten Damian had been in the room with her all this time. “Is everything okay?” The woman might not ever really show she cared about him outside of his role in the family, but she was still his mother.

Some part of her had to care, right?

“Have you finished your work for the day?”

“No, Mother,” he answered truthfully, glancing down at the page in front of him. Yes, he was nearly done, but it wouldn’t do to lie to her. “I have two more problems to solve before I am finished.”

“Then you need not concern yourself with me, do you?” Instead of speaking, Damian simply shook his head and looked back down to his work. He watched her resume her pacing out of the corner of his eye as he went back to working on the problems, trying not to give himself away. But this work he could do in his sleep and her reactions were just too curious to not want to know what news she had received.

A heavy-handed knock came to the door and drew both of their attention. “His Majesty King Richard,” the guard at the door of the study announced as he pushed open the doors and stepped aside. Sitting straighter, Damian smiled as his father swept into the room with a smile of his own.

“Damian, there you are,” his father spoke as he made his way over to the table he had his work spread out on. “The Council meeting is in a short while and you are to be in attendance today. Have you finished your work for the day?” The older man picked up a parchment and glanced over the figures that were worked out on it. “These are very good.”

“I am finishing my last right now, Father,” Damian told him, and he watched his father nod before picking up another stack of parchments to look over.

He tried not to react when his mother made her way over and kept his eyes on the final problem. “I was not made aware he was to be in Council today. I have his afternoon planned already.” The tone of her voice made Damian cringe because he knew his father was one of the very few people who she was allowed to speak to however she pleased. Ser Jason had explained the situation to him a few years ago, but he only really came to understand recently.

“Then you shall have to cancel whatever it is you have prepared.” His father’s voice gave no room for argument. At least that would have been true if he had been speaking to anyone other than his mother.

“I will do no such thing! I am his mother and therefore oversee his schooling.”

Looking up, Damian saw steel in his father’s eyes, and it made him want to cringe. It was rare to see King Richard mad about anything. Even when things were really bad, Damian could only count on one hand the number of times he had seen his father truly mad. Most of those times were directed at someone who had done wrong to another person.

“And I am his father and king, and I will have him join me in Council today. That is final. Come, Damian.” His father set down the parchments he was holding and gestured for Damian to stand. And though his mother turned angry, accusing eyes on him, Damian did as his father asked. He stood and smoothed out his clothing before gathering his work and cleaning the space. “We can deposit these things in your rooms on our way to the meeting.”

“Yes, Father,” he agreed, glancing between his parents who were back to staring at each other with fire in their eyes.

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

“You cannot just storm in whenever it pleases you and demand your way!” Damian froze in mid-reach of the door to his father’s study, hearing his mother’s angry voice. “He is my son too! You have already poisoned him against me and stolen his love from me, giving it to that….to that man! I will not have you steal his very presence from me too!”

“You are being dramatic, Catalina. I have stolen nothing. Your lack of warmth and care has caused him to seek that comfort elsewhere.” Where his mother sounded angry, his father sounded controlled. He could practically see them.

If he had to guess, his father was probably seated at his desk and his mother in front of it with her palms resting on the rich oak. He had known their argument from earlier was far from over, but he hadn’t expected it to be brought back up so quickly.

“Do not presume to tell me how to care for my own child.”

“And do not presume to tell me what I, as his father and king, can and cannot do. He is my son. He is the Crowned Prince of Gotham. His schooling is important, but he is ten years old and has responsibilities he needs to start learning. I was much younger than him when my own responsibilities began. And that work you have him doing is a joke.” There was a pause and Damian heard his mother scoff before the sound of papers being dropped onto the desk sounded. “He could do these in his sleep. He is brilliant and you are having him do work below him. If you cannot be trusted to challenge him then I will have to find someone to take your place.”

Damian’s eyes widened at the threat because he was no fool. If his mother didn’t handle his schooling, then she had no tether to this family. She had no role and no purpose to even be there.

“You would threaten my place when you owe me everything?”

“I do not owe you a single thing, Catalina. In fact, it is you who owes me. It is you who was headed for the Church of Ra’s.” Damian shuttered at the statement, knowing the cruelties of his grandmother’s home country and where maidens were forced into forever worship of King Ra’s when they reached a certain age and were unmarried. A woman facing that would likely be desperate. “The sooner you realize that the sooner we can all be much happier. You are nothing to me. You have always been nothing to me. Just a contract. You knew that long before you came to Gotham. Do not fool yourself into thinking you will ever be anything more.”

The sound of flesh hitting flesh caused him to step back and consider storming into the room. He knew there was no way his father had hit his mother and he did not like the emotion the thought of his mother hitting his father evoked in him.

“Damian?” Looking over to see his grandfather standing just down the hallways, he straightened his spine and clenched his fists. “Is everything all right?”

With one last glance at the closed door of his father’s study, Damian made his way over to his grandfather. “I was going to speak with Father regarding the invitation to visit Uncle Timothy but it seems he is in a conversation with Mother.” His grandfather regarded him closely, looking toward the room that held his parents before resting his blue gaze back on Damian. “I suppose I can ask him at supper.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be a fine time,” the older man agreed, placing a hand on Damian’s shoulder and guiding him down the hall. “Your father was telling me of your schooling the other day. He was quite impressed with how far you have advanced and I think it might be time…” Damian half listened to his grandfather as they walked, casting one last glance over his shoulder toward his father’s study before they rounded a corner.

#jaydick #past lives au #damian wayne #dick grayson #jason todd #anikah writes

10 notes · View notes

feverinfeveroutfic · 3 years

Text

chapter twenty-five: orion’s belt

a/n: i hope this one clears up any confusion from the last couple of chapters. if it’s any comfort at all, it kinda snuck up on me. 🤷🏻‍♀️ but i did what i could: this fic is all about the human condition, anyway.

“Happy birthday, Sam.” The words crept over her like the body of a snake.

It was the day after her birthday, but Cliff had finally showed up to her drawing class. The modeling for the first level had been canceled for a reason that neither Sam nor Marla had been told about, and Miss Estes told them it was because of money, but she never elaborated on anything further than that: she had hoped to see a little more of him before Christmas break, but she never could because of Metallica's new record. But the two of them put it behind them once Cliff himself showed up to their second tier drawing class, a class which included easels, perfect for that sort of drawing.

He had found a new free little spot in between the New Year and the first date of their tour. He called her the night before on her birthday to tell her about it.

“Consider it the first of my birthday gifts to you,” he told her, “my other one'll come—at some point. I can't remember. I didn't tell you about the modeling because it happened kind of at the last minute and then I just—kinda forgot about it. I also didn't know when it would come up again. That's why I didn't mention it once when we were at your parents' house.”

“It's okay—it happens,” she assured him. “I was just happy to see you when we spent Christmas together.”

He had strolled right into the middle of the room with a filmy little robe over his body. A stool stood there in the middle of the floor, right before her and Marla with their easels propped up before them. The latter had put on a thin white coat over her clothes even though it was with graphite instead of paints.

His light hair spread across his shoulders: he held onto the lapels of his robe as if they were about to get away from him.

“So do you think I can do it already?” he called out to Miss Estes.

“Well, I have to take roll call and then you can let the robe drop,” she replied from behind Sam and Marla. The former glanced over at the latter with a raise of her eyebrow; Marla nodded at her. It had snuck up on her and it also couldn't come to her at a better time. She needed to hide her love away under something like that smock, but she had nothing more than her little thin white sweat shirt. Just so long as she kept her arms close to her breasts, she hoped Cliff couldn't see her.

“Okay,” Miss Estes said from behind the two of them. “Now—for our first model for Drawing Two, we have Cliff here! First off, let me apologize for all the run around—” To which Cliff shook his head in reassurance. “—second, it's nice to know that we have someone so eager for doing it for us.”

Sam peered up at him while she kept her head bowed down; it was really happening.

“Eat all the cake, Sam,” Cliff mouthed at her.

“So, let it all hang out now,” Miss Estes continued, and he opened the lapels and at long last, Cliff revealed his bare body to Sam. His chest was toned and his stomach was flat. His hips had a nice little curve to it, and his thighs were slender but sinewy at the same time: his lower legs had a nice gentle but toned look to them. His large, narrow feet were bare. And then there was his skin: clear and soft looking from his better habits.

Sam brought her attention to his genitals, much larger than she had imagined in that room in the subway. She pursed her lips together as she picked up her pencil. To think they were so close to each other in her bed not even a couple of weeks ago, and yet they had no way of touching each other. They never touched each other once while they were at her parents' house and there was no explanation, either.

And right there she understood why, especially when he winked at her and took his seat on the stool.

Of course! Away from her parents! At least that was what went right through her mind right then as she gazed on at his body as if it was a true piece of art in and of itself. She brought the graphite to the paper and she scrawled out his hair first.

The crown of hair and then the square shape of his face. The narrow shape of his neck. His slender tailored shoulders. Then his body.

She closed her eyes for a few seconds as she thought about her struggles with shading the weeks before. With her eyes closed, she brought the side of the graphite down to the paper. She thought about the strange man in her dreams and the void upon his head. He gestured for her to come on closer to him and her pencil made its way over the paper.

Like he was guiding her. Leading her through the darkness on the backs of her eyelids.

Why didn't Cliff mention the cancellation the few months before? Why didn't Cliff do anything more for her over the Christmas break?

She opened her eyes and she beheld the sight of his hips and thighs within a mere few feet from her. So close and yet so far from her. She skimmed over the paper and the dark shading had made its way onto the curvature of his hips and thighs.

She stared on in between his hips and she let her hand do the talking, complete with the pencil. She ran the edge of the pencil over the spot in between his hips and thighs. That skin looked smooth and even delicate. She thought about how she felt him in that little closet in the subway.

Smooth and delicate, like a stick of butter. She noticed a slight crease on his waist, right under his belly button and over his hip. A crease left over from wearing a belt so much.

She made her way down to his legs. She paid no attention to everyone around her, not even Marla. Sam kept her pencil at an angle over the paper so the shading would be consistent; she pressed down a bit so it would be darker in comparison to her struggles from the previous term.

She dropped her gaze to his feet and his ankles. Nice, smooth curves. They were bare but tight and perfect.

She returned her attention to the paper before her and she gasped at the sight of the drawing.

“Whoa,” Marla breathed, and Sam looked over at her with her eyebrows raised.

“Amazes me, too,” she said.

“Wow, Sam,” Miss Estes declared from behind her. “You've come a long way since the fall.”

“I know!” Sam added as she peered over her shoulder at her.

“I'm eager to see,” Cliff told her; she signed her initials at the bottom of the page, right under his left foot. But he never did get to see it, even when he returned to Jon and Marsha's house for the evening and when he returned to the Bay Area.

A full two months had past by the time she heard another peep from him, and the whole entire time, she wished to show him that drawing: every time she looked at it, and she took her easel out of the rack on the side of the room, every day in class, she wished to show it to him. There was so much more she wanted to ask him because none of it made any sense to her, either.

In the two months following her twenty first birthday, Belinda was eager to serve her a cake courtesy of the baker down the street from where she and Marla both used to live down in Hell's Kitchen. She had spent the day with them as well as Frank and Charlie given she had no class that day, but that entire side of New York City had been slammed by a blizzard, and Marla hadn't received her grant money at that point, either.

“When it comes, I'll get you something nice,” she vowed as she left that evening. Sam told them she need not any more sweets given her jeans fit her a bit more snugly than before and her new hectic schedule didn't help matters as well: her otherwise slim waist filled out with a gentle curve over the course of those eight weeks. It also didn't help matters that Cliff ordered her a slice of cake from the bakery in Hell's Kitchen in honor of his twenty fourth birthday, and yet she took it regardless. It came from him, after all.

The weight crept onto her body, and she could feel it all the while: and her face slowly became rounder and fuller with each day. She put on her little sweat shirts and fitted tops and the fabric around her waist felt a little more tight: indeed, when she peered into the bathroom mirror, she made sight of a little more of a curvature to her body. She thought about Cliff and the way in which he touched her while they lay in her bed together.

She wished for a touch of his hand as she finished her slice of cake. She wondered if Joey could stomach a couple of slices for himself with a thought back to his birthday and the donuts he had eaten over Christmas break. So many sweets for each of themselves and it started to show upon her, especially when Belinda took a seat next to her with a plate of cake upon her lap.

“You're not fat,” Belinda assured her. “Just a little fluffy because of the winter time. In fact, you actually look better with some weight. Besides, if there's anyone who's getting chubby, it's me.” Indeed, she had a slight roundness to her face but to Sam, she just looked like good old Belinda.

“I dunno if I want to look like this when we go see Metallica, though,” Sam confessed with a shrug of her shoulders; she peered down at her waist as it gently poked out from over the band of her jeans.

“You look great, though,” Belinda insisted. “Like I said, you actually look a lot better with a bit of weight. I always thought you could use some weight, too. I always thought it always looked like you were starving.” Sam frowned at that, but it was a compliment nonetheless: she took it with a sigh and a bit of a nod as well.

“Did we get tickets for one of their shows, though?” she asked her.

“I dunno if we need tickets, to be quite frank,” Belinda admitted as she took another bite of cake, and Sam thought of Frank himself right then. “At least that's according to Marla.”

“Do you know where Marla is, though?”

“I think she could be downstairs with Frank right now. I saw her violet hair as I came up and brought the cake up here. It was courtesy of the two of us. The two of us and Charlie.”

“Charlie, too?”

“Yeah, he felt bad about the day of your birthday because it just snuck up on us and we couldn't find a cake, either. You know, it being the middle of January and everything.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

There was a gentle knock on the slightly ajar door.

“Come on in,” Sam called, and Marla poked her head in through the space there: the rich violet color was still very much intact from the winter months but Sam could make out the sight of her dark roots at the crown of her head.

“Hey, we were just talking about you,” Sam told her as she set her plate on the coffee table in front of them.

“And what better timing, too,” Marla said with a twinkle in her eye. “The five of us—you two, myself, Aurora, and Zelda—have been cordially invited to see Metallica and Anthrax both in upstate New York.”

“Where in upstate New York?” Belinda asked her as Sam stayed leaned forward in order to hide her body from Marla.

“Syracuse,” she replied, “either that or Rochester. Charlie has to check the dates first, but yeah—we're gonna do upstate New York for the bunch of us.”

“And Zelda's coming along, too,” Sam stated.

“She might see them in Providence with the Cherry Suicides, but—who knows, really?”

“Why exactly Syracuse?” Belinda asked her.

“We'll have to go on the weekend, though,” Marla pointed out, “'cause of school and whatnot. And the only dates they have around New York and Pennsylvania are in the middle of the next month. Yeah, they can't do it for spring break coming up here. We'll bounce up the road to the Syracuse on Friday for the show on Sunday and then we'll come home on Monday. We'll have to miss class. They are gonna be here in the Big Apple in—August, I think? But I dunno if Anthrax are going to be with them, though. I'm just going by what Charlie told me so far.”

“I dunno if I can wait 'til August, though,” said Sam with a shrug of her shoulders. “You know, my whole thing with Cliff and whatnot.”

“Right, right, right! Okay, so Syracuse it is. We'll have to miss class, probably.”

“The two of you might,” Belinda pointed out, “I'm just gonna be an aide for Mondays this spring.”

“We'll be taking glass together,” Marla announced with a glance over to Sam.

“Yes, we are!” she added. “I'm taking another drawing class plus sculpting.”

“Oh, boy!” Belinda clapped her hands together. “All kinds of extra physical arts. I hope I can get to aide for the two of youses.”

Sam then turned her head back to Marla.

“Care for a slice of cake?”

“Please!”

It would be another week before Metallica and Anthrax embarked on their tour together, and it was right in the midst of spring break no less. The official first day after was when Sam and Marla resorted to Belinda for advice on stained glass and the approach to the material and the class itself. Two months Sam couldn't ask Cliff of anything more, and she couldn't show him the drawing, either.

Belinda had brought them back to her bright but small studio apartment in Hell's Kitchen: a table stood on one side of the kitchen, one which she referred to as her “handy lady table” given the tools strewn upon it and the sheets of glass tucked behind the legs to protect them from the outside world. She demonstrated on how to cut glass on a spare little piece: she explained on how she didn't want to do it on her good textured glass.

“I'm gonna make a slit here,” Belinda started. “A little slit and then this little orb here—” She showed them the glass cutter, which had a small blade on one end and a metal ball on the other; “—on the back of the cutter will make it so it doesn't cut so much.”

“A little slit?” Sam asked her.

“A little slit. Make you look right at it.” Belinda had a smirk on her face when she said that.

“I'm gonna look right up a slit,” Marla joked.

“I'm gonna look right up your slit, Marla,” Sam chimed in, and Belinda burst out laughing. She brought her attention back to the glass and she kept on thinking about Cliff and that drawing back in her class. She hoped she could fetch it out of the hiding place in the class by the time her third level drawing class started that Monday. She could fetch it out for him. She could take it backstage with her and she could show it to him when she found the chance.

Indeed, she had thought about it so much that she could hardly pay any attention to Belinda's commentary and demonstration of the glass. She even had to step outside to the cool spring rain so she could clear her head. She peered up to the gray sky and she felt something cool on her waist: the thin black fabric of her sweat shirt rode up a little bit on her body. She tugged it down over her filled out waist.

“I gotta lose weight,” she muttered to herself. She thought of Cliff and the way in which he looked at her from that stool. Naked and exposed on a stool.

“Sam!”

She glanced down to the sidewalk and the sight of Joey's crown of black curls.

“Hey!” she called out to him, and he held up two big brown paper bags. “What you got there?”

“Big bowls of pho!” he replied as his voice echoed over the sidewalk and the apartment buildings around them. She awaited for him at the top of the stairs and he made his way up with a smile on his face.

“Good thing it's pho,” she said even though she kept her body close to the balcony.

“Pho is good.” And then he hesitated. “But why, though?”

“I'm trying to lose weight,” she told him.

“Why?” asked Joey as he knitted his eyebrows together. “You look great. You look healthy. Real healthy, and a little round, and full—how a girl should look.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah. Move on out and show me your body.”

She sighed through her nose and she turned to her side. She showed him the slightly full shape on her waist and the widened shape of her hips.

“You have a ways to go before you're considered fat,” he confessed. “A long, long ways to go. You look gorgeous, actually.”

She gasped at that. Cliff didn't even call her gorgeous, but he did remark on her shape. She could find the beauty of those two boys, and yet she couldn't see it with herself.

“Now, c'mon in—I wanna give you ladies something before we leave for Kansas City tomorrow.”

She couldn't ask Joey about anything that involved with Cliff but she needed to ask something, however. It started to itch, the need to ask him about the feeling at her parents' house and why he never made note of it one time to her in that time. Maybe it was because they were at her parents' house and they had no way out of it. Maybe that was really why he spat at her when she made that joke.

Maybe that was the driving force behind their argument. All the questions and all the possibilities made their way through her mind as she ate up her bowl of beef pho.

She thought about bringing up the idea of a full body drawing to Joey again as well at one point, but it slipped from her mind when Belinda gave another demonstration with the glass.

Maybe it was the lack of genuine touching paired with the intensive school work, but Sam could not recall a time in which she felt more distracted and in over her head. What she felt to be important took a back seat to everything else. All the things she had to remember for her classes as well as her own artistry, and as a result, Cliff fell by the wayside. She handed in the full body drawing as well as her other projects over the course of the winter to Miss Estes for a grade and she was on her way to the higher levels for herself. And yet, something still didn't add up to her. It all seemed to sneak up on her, from her realization that Cliff never touched her in her bedroom to their fight to his trust issues with her.

She remembered what he had said about himself and Lars, how they began to drift apart prior to the making of their new album, and it made her uneasy to think about. She needed to talk to him when she saw him again. No phone call: it had to be done in person.

There was the date in Syracuse, or in Rochester. The one chance she had to ask him about it before they left for the rest of the country followed by Europe. Months and months without seeing him again. Such was the life of a metal bassist's girlfriend.

Indeed, when that Friday came along, and she, Marla, Belinda, and Zelda piled into Aurora's car and they made the four hour drive up to Syracuse, she wondered as to how she could phrase it out to him. They were going to be backstage with all of them, with James, Lars, Kirk, and Cliff, as well as Joey, Frank, Scott, Dan, and Charlie, even if it wasn't for long. Even if it was only for a few moments.

There was always New York City later that summer. But her questions might have become water under the bridge at that point. Sam had to relish every minute she had with Cliff there in Syracuse.

Given Metallica had ramped up their way in the music world, and they were hot on the heels of their new record, security had tightened quite a bit on the venue. Add to this, both bands had a show down in Pennsylvania that Saturday and so they never showed up to Syracuse until three in the afternoon. Marla called Charlie from the hotel and he replied from the phone on Metallica's bus, and the second she told the four of them that they were an hour outside of town, Sam and Aurora darted out of the hotel room together, much to Zelda's amusement.

The very second she recognized Cliff on the sidewalk behind the arena, Sam almost climbed out of the front seat of Aurora's car while it was still moving. But once they parked right behind the bus, she hurried up the sidewalk with her hand upon the strap of her purse.

“Cliff!” Her voice echoed over the street. He turned around with a puzzled expression on his face, but then he recognized her and his face lit up.

“There's my girl!” he declared, which brought a laugh out of Kirk, who stood right behind him with his guitar case slung over his shoulder. Sam opened her arms for him and they embraced one another right there before Metallica's bus. Cliff shoved his tongue down her throat: the fuzz over his upper lip grazed onto her skin.

He then held back and he set his hat upon her head.

“I'm so glad you could make it,” he told her; out of the corner of her eye, Marla and Zelda climbed out Aurora's car with smiles on their faces. “I'm so glad you girls all could make it!”

“This is driving me nuts,” she started in a low voice, but she was cut off by James and Lars laughing about something right behind them. Marla and Zelda joined them, followed by Aurora, who proceeded to talk to one of the guards near the back door. Cliff guided her away from the bus, into the bushes.

“Well, something is driving me nuts,” he retorted to her.

“What's that?” She brought her gaze to his hips, at the sight of the shiny silvery belt, complete with studs made from old bullet casings. So fierce and fiery, and yet she knew the truth about him. She had seen the real him, underneath those clothes and underneath those bullets. She had seen the real him for herself on a sheet of paper as well as the backs of her eyelids.

“It's how you never showed that drawing to me yet.”

“Oh, you mean the full body drawing I made for my class?”

“Yeah.”

“I just haven't been able to get it out of there and towards you,” she confessed. “You being on tour and me being in class. By the way—is there a reason why you never touched me at my parents' house? Like, right before we got into that fight. You touched me a little bit, but that was about it.”

“'Cause we were at your parents' house,” he replied, “it was also why I didn't touch you when we met my family, either. Also—don't take this the wrong way—maybe that's why you're also gaining weight.”

“Gaining weight means there's been no touching,” she muttered.

“Although—but understand, I think you look amazing, even when I haven't been able to touch you and you haven't been able to see me, either. Absolutely amazing. You can rock curves so well. Come here—” He held her close to him again.

“I don't want us to drift apart,” she confessed to him.

“We won't,” he promised her. “We'll always be close. You, my parents, and my sister are all I have.” He held back for a better look into her face.

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious. I feel like I'm slipping away with them. I have a bad feeling about this tour, too—like James and Kirk are gonna force me to lay it down on Lars at some point.”

“But James and Lars were laughing just then.”

“Don't let it fool you,” he told her. “If we lose Lars, I'm out, too. I can't deal with that.”

“What would you do?”

“Be with you,” he said in a low voice.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. There's no way I can do this long distance thing, Sam. I have to be with you. I need to be with you!”

“Do—they even know about me?” she asked with a gesture to the bus.

“They do. I tried to hide it but I had to tell them about it. It only made sense to talk about it. It was the only way I could be heard to them anymore...” His voice trailed off, and Sam began to wonder if their argument about trust was at all warranted given she told Joey about the two of them.

“Hey, Cliff!” James called out, and he turned his head in the other direction, where he and Aurora both awaited the two of them.

“I have to go,” Cliff said to her. “I think Aurora got you guys into the best seats in the house, too.”

Sam sighed through her nose again as he leaned in for another kiss on her lips. That time he tasted sweeter than ever. She had finally seen him for herself, and right in front of her classmates as well. Right in front of Marla as well. And no one knew about it!

She was about to hand him back his hat but he waved her off.

“Keep it,” he said to her in a low voice, and they both bowed out of the bushes. They walked side by side but they never held hands or touched each other, lest James or Aurora see them.

“I hope we can see you again,” she told him.

“New York, baby,” he whispered to her with a lean closer to her ear. “We're gonna be in the Big Apple in the middle of August.”

“That hat looks cute on you, Sam,” Aurora remarked as they came in earshot.

“Looks better on her, doesn't it?” Cliff told her, and James gestured for him to follow him into the arena. Once the two men ducked inside, Aurora turned her attention to Sam.

“What were you guys doing right there, anyway?” she asked her in a low voice.

“I—needed to ask him about something,” Sam replied, given Aurora was still in the dark about her and Cliff as far as knew. “It's nothing important.”

Aurora showed her a thoughtful smile and then she guided her into the cool, quiet side of the arena. Within time, that place was going to be packed full of people. It was going to be even louder than she could imagine compared to that night she and her parents saw them in San Francisco. The whole feeling before hand was enough to launch her into space.

#fanfic #fanfiction #metallica fanfic #metallica #chapter 25 #fever in fever out #fever in fever out fanfic #cliff burton #cliff burton x oc #deadly nightshade #book two #m/f romance #romance #young romance #also on ao3 #writing #text

2 notes · View notes

mychemicalficrecs · 4 years

Note

Hiya! Not sure if you do this, but would you be able to suggest some non-ao3 finished frerard fics? It seems I've read ao3's entire collection 😅 Thank you so much, you're honestly my favourite blog on here xx

Thanks for your kind words, Nonny! And... congratz on reading the entire ao3 tag, there are a lot of works there :D

Frank/Gerard is such a popular ship that I was actually able to find quite a lot from outside ao3.

Non-AO3 Frank/Gerard

Thing-Thing by sinsense, 43k, NC-17. When Gerard signed the admissions paperwork for the Fordhaven School for Boys, he knew he was signing up for four years of sexual frustration. No one was gay at Fordhaven. Gerard was all-too-aware that he would be a virgin until he graduated. In his senior year, though, this stupid gay freshman disproves Fordhaven's straightness, and throws Gerard's entire world off-kilter. Now, in between drawing, avoiding bullies, running an incredibly serious tabletop RP game, failing out of math, and hanging out with friends, Gerard is also busy kind of falling for this asshole who's way too young for him. It's not what he planned on, but it's what's happening. In conclusion: high school sucks.

I Think I Thought (I Saw You Try) by thatsfinewithus, ~3,000, NC-17. Welcome to some weird AU world in which Gee only does awesome comics and Frank is a vampire.

They Came From Outer Jersey! by thatsfinewithus, 25k, R. New London Fire is an elite fringe government force assigned the task of protecting the earth from some of its more interesting threats: those from beyond the atmosphere or even the universe. They've handled dangerous cases before, but they've never seen anything like...ZOMBIES FROM SPACE. Vampires, long hunted in lore and legend, are now the earth's only saviors. There is little information as to who sent the creatures until Mikey Way, head of the NLF, finds out more by being abducted. Is it too late for him? Is it too late for the earth? Find out how six vampires, one government general, and one frustrated comic book artist save the earth in...THEY CAME FROM OUTER JERSEY!!

I never told you what I do for a living. by not0_fuckin_kay, 60k+, PG-13 to NC-17. Frank Iero, male nurse at Pete Wentz's private hospital and possibly more to one new patient he can't keep his eyes off of. When a new pateint is brought in with amnesia, just days before Christmas, and with nothing but the clothes on his back and a strange drawing, it's left to Frank to find out who he is and what happened to him. When he does, it changes Frank's life forever, as he's thrust into love and health scares he never thought would complicate his life. This is the story of how he tries to make it through, juggling his job and his love-life and just trying to make things better. With Patrick the doctor, Bob the ward supervisor, Travis the unlikely therapist, and Mikey, the sometimes wannabe homicidal geek.

Of All The Hidden Corners by moneyes, ~44K, PG-13. An epic, adventurous tale filled with alternate universes, lords, mischief, magical powers, snark, boyfriends, and luck of the bad kind.

All We Are by lightisbreaking, 21k, R. Set in the future, where humans are on the brink of evolution. For the select few born with a special awareness of their own minds - an awareness which gives them abilities beyond the norm, life is suddenly a very dangerous thing. Frightened of what this could mean, the government set out to make this new race of humans extinct, telling the public that these people are mentally unstable defectives and must be kept under observation for the safety of the public. All of this brings together a rather odd troupe of people, hiding from the government and eventually having to protect one of their own when he's taken into custody. Superpowers AU!

Tell Us a Story by bexless, imogenedisease, 32k, NC-17. The world as these kids know it is ending, and Gabe Saporta is throwing the party. High school AU based on the movie Can't Hardly Wait.

Stay Right Here by idktbh, swagneto, 28k, R. Frank is involved in an accident which renders him paralyzed from the waist down. When Frank begins to withdraw into himself, his relationship with Gerard crumbles and the band faces the hardest decision they'll ever make: whether to continue playing or not. This is a story about how MCR copes with the biggest obstacle of their career so far.

Return to Spirit Lake by inpurity, 22k, R. Gerard Way has left Spirit Lake when he was eighteen to study to become a veterinary surgeon, and with no intention of ever coming back. Twelve years later he is back, carrying secrets of a life spent away from his family and friends, and the weight of a dark, painful sorrow. His old home town has not changed, but his life, and the lives of the people he will meet along the way, will never be the same.

These Friday Night Lights by faux-disco-sins, 21k, PG-13. Gerard is the head cheerleader and wears the cheer skirt, Frank is on the football team, Pete is the school mascot, Ryan is the school’s hobo journalist, Jon does photography for the yearbook, Spencer and Patrick are in the marching band, Gabe and Ray are AV techs who do a ESPN spin-off for the school, Bob is the big scary lineman, and Mikey tries to fit in while ignoring the fact that his older brother is wearing a skirt in public.

Of Love And Superpowers by mcrnut, 20k, NC-17. Seventeen year old Frank Iero is in his last year at Mutant High. He has a couple of good friends, is doing okay in school and even though he has some issues with his Mother, life is pretty great. That is, until one day, when he overhears some of the professors talking about the well-known Anti-Mutant organization HSA and how they have already broken into two Mutant Academies and are heading their way. Frank and his friends have to stick their heads together and try to solve the mystery, and as if Frank didn't have enough to think about already, he finds himself falling for his friend's older brother, Gerard.

Cypress Grove by slashxyouxup, 24k+, NC17. My Chemical Romance fight off a town of sperm hoarding, men hating, PMSing maniac women in order to save themselves from certain doom! Also, Frank and Gerard get closer than close while pretending to not be completely in love with each other. Mikeyway is not amused.

Sleepwalker by lyrical_tragedy, 73k, NC-17. Frank Iero is one of the best cops in New Jersey so it’s only natural that his boss dumps a seemingly unsolvable case on him and his colleague Bob Bryar. With no leads whatsoever Frank enlists the help of Gerard Way, a reclusive young man who experiences strong visions and dreams of events from the past and visions of the future. However, none of them could ever begin to expect the terrifying chain of events that come into play once they delve deeper into the unknown, questioning Frank’s very beliefs on what the world actually holds. A story of visions, sacrifices, over protective brothers and love all in the midst of the attempted destruction of the world. The devil’s got your number and he will come calling, until it’s nothing more than hell on earth.

Patience Is A Virtue (You Might Be Good Looking, But You Can’t Sleep With Yourself Tonight) by eflorentino, 22k, NC-17. Frank Iero’s biggest hero is Gerard Way; the outspoken, obnoxious lead singer of the multi-platinum selling band My Chemical Romance. His world changes completely when he finds himself suddenly shoved into the limelight, playing sell-out shows every night and earning more than his usual $6 an hour. However, the infamously homophobic frontman isn’t what Frank expects, and after mixed signals and unsolved revelations he learns that, with Gerard Way, things are never simple.

But Nobody Cares If You're Losing Yourself by red_ones_fly, 16k, NC-17. It took me a while to work out that there was something wrong with Gerard, he kept it hidden well and, really, he didn’t even know something was wrong with him. To him it seemed like normal, everyday stuff. He never found any of his behaviour out of the ordinary. To him it was just reality.’ After Gerard's grandma passes away his behaviour becomes strange. He becomes less outgoing and more paranoid. As Frank tries to work out what’s going on with his friend/love interest, between school, learning psychology and dealing with the jocks, he doesn’t realise just how bad it is.

Parks and Recreation by vinvy, 35k+, PG-13. Gerard Way is an art school drop out with no prospects, student loans to pay off, and a dead end job. His mother works too hard and his little brother Mikey is keeping secrets. His boss runs shady contracts and smiles too much. It's nothing special and he tells himself that he'll learn to make peace with that- in the meantime he's got to carve out a living that doesn't involve artwork. Really, he's going to be okay. Then a crazy homeless kid comes along and screws up Gerard's Adventures in Normal Employment with his hippie magic and soulless eyes. Gerard can't shake the feeling that this guy "isn't quite right" but he's too busy fending off the freak accidents that are following him around to worry about that particular winged freak.

Empire Boys by noctecaelum, 30k, NC-17. In the city that never sleeps, it's tough to get your foot in the door. While Gabe Saporta may find it easy to blend into the socialite scene; Gerard Way spends his day blending eyeshadow at Bloomingdales. As newcomer Frank triumphs in Women's Lingerie, Gerard sparks a bitter rivalry in the vicinity of Lexington and 59th; but there's no use crying over spilt coffee because things are about to fire up. Meanwhile, on the Upper East Side, Gabe Saporta is none too pleased to read a socialite-bashing article, but when confronting the writer, he doesn't expect to meet fresh faced, pretty-boy William Beckett, who turns out to be the biggest tease this side of the Downtown Dunkin' Donuts.

The Evolution Index by theficisalie, 32k, NC-17. In a world where superpowers are just another thing that can get you sent to boarding school, Frank Iero and his friends know what it's like to operate under heavy levels of stress. After all, they did spend their formative years under the wings of the United States Government's most widespread and successful initiatives; a program that was created to protect and train young Americans with superpowers to become functioning members of society. And, as a side-benefit, the government realized that not only were telepaths great at taking drink orders, but they could also be trained to be highly successful secret agents. Under the guidance of Frank's volatile and (literally) power-hungry boyfriend Gerard Way; Frank, Mikey Way, and Ray Toro are an accomplished team of super spies. When a handful of people from Frank's sordid past crop up during an investigation of rash Superhuman disappearances across the country, the team finds themselves challenged both on and off the field as they fight to solve the mysteries plaguing their beloved nation. Frank knows all too much about uncovering things that he'd rather keep hidden, but can he and his team unravel the intricate web of crime and kidnapping surrounding Chicago without losing themselves in the process?

A Good Ocean Gone Wrong by xoxxblitz7, 32k, NC-17. Titanic AU - The Way's are one of the richest families in America and sometimes being an artist requires the need to travel. On the doomed maiden voyage of Titanic old friends are found, new love is formed and put to the test and the most luxurious crossing of the Atlantic ocean becomes a fight for survival.

A Fanfiction (In Which Gerard Has A Secret Stash of Star Wars Fanfiction) by sparklefap, 10k, R. Frank finds Gerard's bizarrely erotic Star Wars fanfiction, and is both disturbed and aroused by it. Those feelings won't do for Frank. He seeks revenge.

#frank/gerard #frerard #fic rec list

20 notes · View notes

callunavulgari · 4 years

Text

TOP 25 FICS OF 2019

1. these roads will take you into your own country by @notbecauseofvictories | American Gods | Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney | WIP | 33k

Here’s a joke for you: a Muslim, a zombie, and a leprechaun walk into a bar in Misery, Indiana. No one stares, because no one in the puckered, shitty asshole of Misery, Indiana gives a fuck. The Colts are playing.

Heather Says: So. It’s funny that another of @notbecauseofvictories‘s stories is at the top of my list again this year. Keep in mind this list is sorted by when the fic was read rather than favorites (because that would get real complicated real quick). Clearly there must be something about January. There’s just something about the writing that is easy to slip into, be it a Star Wars fic or a Labyrinth fic or even a fic about Johnny and the Devil. This was lovely and I can’t wait until it’s finished.

2. eighteen wheels on an uphill climb by @honkforhankcon | Detroit: Become Human | Hank/Connor | 91k

Hank is going to die. He’s going to die right here in Kentucky, 53 years old, halfway to broke, and tragically sober. Survived only by a nine-year-old St. Bernard and the 31-year-old twink who delivered the fatal blow.

Heather Says: I don’t think that this is the first DBH fic that I sought out after beating the game, but it is the first that I loved enough to make it to this list. I didn’t think that I would go for a modern au for this fandom, certainly not a modern au wihere Hank is a truck driver and Connor is a sex worker (albeit briefly?) but here I am.

3. Fuck pride (pride only hurts, it never helps) by ImogenGotDrunk | Detroit: Become Human | RK900/Gavin Reed | 41k

After the android uprising, Connor becomes a permanent fixture in the DPD. That’s fine. Gavin can accept that. The dipshit’s more human than he used to be, and a decent detective to boot. Gavin can deal with him being around. What Gavin cannot deal with is Connor’s replica; two inches taller, blue-eyed, and with a mouth that Gavin doesn’t know whether to punch or take between his teeth. The RK900 model has been assigned as his partner for the foreseeable future.

Heather Says: I also never thought that I’d like a fic with Gavin in it. But I got curious about all the Reed900, and well, this fic really won me over. The writing is fantastic, and it softens Gavin while still keeping him believable. Also, well, I like the enemies to lovers thing.

4. Almost Cool by @blacktofade | Buzzfeed Unsolved | Ryan/Shane | 30k

While filming the Yuma Territorial Prison episode, Shane gets bitten by what he thinks is a bat. Spoiler alert: it's not.

Heather Says: This is actually the first thing that I read for this fandom. In fact, this is the fic that got me into Buzzfeed Unsolved in the first place. I’d seen a lot of art and gifs and fics pass my way, but I was only ever slightly interested in what I saw until this fic came through my inbox and piqued my curiosity.

5. Pride by @astolat | Game of Thrones | Jaime/Brienne/Cersei | 22k

Jaime didn’t understand why Cersei suddenly insisted on trimming his hair and shaving his beard, but he also didn’t care to fight her on it, even though he’d just as soon have kept the beard: it was bitterly cold in the small tower room with its arrow-slits.

Heather Says: Wowza. This fic was intense. I’ve always loved Jaime and Brienne. I’ve loved them since the second book, which was read at least a few years before I started loving them in the show. Adding Cersei to their dynamic would have probably been almost impossible to pull off if it was anyone else, but @astolat lives to surpass my expectations.

6. Skin and Scales by Ernmark | The Penumbra Podcast | Lord Arum/Sir Damien/Rilla | 18k

The man glares, and this time, Damien is certain it isn’t a trick of the light: those eyes are violet as amethyst. He wears disdain like a second skin–- or, perhaps, like the scales that he is missing. “Lord Arum?”

Heather Says: I was one of those people who skipped through all of the Second Citadel episodes during my first listen through of Penumbra. The stories were good, but the pull of Juno was too great. A couple months after I finished, I went back and listened to everything I didn’t. And let me tell you. Lizard monster. Honorable knight. Bookish girlfriend. Poly. It hit every single button I had and then some. This fic really hit the spot when I ran out of story.

7. someone you like by caela | She-Ra | Adora/Catra | 5k

catwithabat u think ur so hipster but u just look like a lesbian 27m she_ra @catwithabat bc… i’m a lesbian. lmao 5m

Heather Says: Noooot usually a big fan of high school fics. Namely because I’m not in high school anymore and well, after you read so many in your teenage years they sort of lose their luster. This one was phenomenal enough to change my mind.

8. Sands of Time by @tirsynni | Legend of Zelda | Ganondorf/Link | WIP | 98k

Link awakens in the desert with no idea how he got there, to encounter his worst enemy...except it was the King of the Gerudo, not the King of Evil, he faced.

Heather Says: I have seen a lot of really good Link/Ganondorf art over the years, but never really stumbled across a fic that didn’t have judicious amount of non-con involved. But the Breath of the Wild 2 trailer happened, and everybody started drawing really pretty art, so I went looking. And lo and behold, @tirsynni saved the day with this gorgeous time travel/fix-it fic.

9. killed with kindness by veterization | Persona 5 | Akechi/Akira | 52k

Goro can't quite figure out why so many people keep acting like they're his friend. (Or: the one where the Phantom Thieves decide to know thy enemy, befriend thy enemy, love thy enemy, crush on thy enemy).

Heather Says: I’ve read a couple of veterization’s fics over the years, and to date they have never disappointed me. They published this in June, and I think I clicked on it mostly because I was bored and hadn’t read any good P5 fic yet. This was basically just what the doctor ordered, and I was really happy to find something where Akechi’s story went ever so slightly different.

10. paper thin by @ebonybow | Buzzfeed Unsolved | Ryan/Shane/Sara | 9k

Shane’s new neighbors are a morning-sex kind of couple.

Heather Says: So I went into this one knowing very little about how Sara fit into things. I didn’t know she was Shane’s girlfriend. I’d never even seen her, but I clicked because I like poly and I trust the author. I was 100% not disappointed. There’s also another fic with a very similar dynamic here, which is also aces.

11. damn.nation, now available on itunes by @kaikamahine | Good Omens | Aziraphale/Crowley | 11k

When lowly tempt-pusher Amphora (formerly of Stairwell 7B North, before she Fell,) gets the notice that end times are nigh, she gleefully quits her job and cancels her Netflix subscription and takes her place among the legions of hell. This, it turns out, was a bad plan.

Heather Says: Elizabeth may have only written one fic this year, but she made it a damn good one. I’ve always loved her OCs especially, so I was pretty tickled that this is 10k+ of outsider pov. Also, demons! Demons are great! This demon is great! I want like 9 seasons and a movie about Amphora, just saying.

12. The Dragon and Her Wolves by hapakitsune | Game of Thrones | Jon/Sansa/Daenarys | 60k

When the truth of Jon's birthright is revealed, control of the North and Daenerys's claim to the Iron Throne are both called into question. To preserve their tenuous alliance and secure her rule, Daenerys puts aside her personal feelings to arrange a marriage of political convenience between Jon and Sansa Stark.

Heather Says: What do you mean season 8 didn’t exist and the show totally ended with a three way relationship between the two most powerful women in Westeros and Jon Snow? Never been a big fan of Jon/Sansa before this, but this is another of those writers that I would literally trust if they wrote a fic about a fork and a spoon.

13. never tell me the odds by @wildehacked | Wolf 359 | Eiffel/Hera | 9k

“I tried Star Wars," he says, adjusting the phone under his neck, "and it was way underwhelming.”

A shaky breath from her end. “Well, where did you start?”

Heather Says: I don’t remember which of @wildehacked‘s fandoms I started reading first. Most recently it’s been The Magnus Archives (more on this later). The point is, they’d written Wolf 359 fic and it had Hera and Eiffel and it was literally everything that I’ve been looking for since the series ended.

14. Find Me Somebody by raiining | Good Omens | Warlock/Adam Young | 11k

“You left me,” he said. “You both left me, for him. And I can’t even blame you, because I’d have left me for him too.”

Heather Says: There was an Art. The art was lovely. So I went looking, because that’s what I do when faced with beautiful art depicting a rare pairing. And I found the holy grail. Like, possibly my favorite Good Omens fic? Ever?

15. flirting with fire by @brawlite | Stranger Things | Billy/Steve | WIP | 7k

Steve's a cop, Billy's a firefighter. It's not a grudge, it's just a regular old small town rivalry.

Heather Says: Okay so brawlite has written a lot of great stuff this year (more on that later), but I read this in bed at the beach house this August while I was reeling from both a horrible sunburn and like seven hours of mild to moderate day-drinking while everyone else was still throwing back shots right outside my bedroom door. Jaws was playing on the tv and I wasn’t even paying attention to it, because THIS. Long story short, I’ve been thirsty for more ever since.

16. gold, when you find me by mmtion | The Flash | Iris/Barry | 53k

It's not that Iris hates The Flash, per say - more that she hates writing about The Streak in a weekly, pun-heavy comic based on The Flash.

Heather Says: I never would have thought that a canon pairing would make it to my Top 25 list, but here we are. I like Iris/Barry a lot better when they don’t grow up together and spend a lot of time playing the Superman game, apparently. Also, this was really well-written, and sexual tension has never been something I’ve felt from Barry and Iris, but I felt it in this fic. Just. Damn.

17. never gets old by @brawlite & @toast-ranger-to-a-stranger| Stranger Things | Billy/Steve | 78k

Falling in love with a cam boy named KingSteve isn't the smartest thing Billy Hargrove has ever done, nor is it the most healthy -- but the good choice is rarely ever the fun choice, and Billy is all about living life fast and loose.

Heather Says: Told you I’d come back to it. brawlite and toastranger are a fantastic team. last year was cherry pie and under the covers, this year it’s camboys and cop/firefighter dynamics. Also, I have a really strange fascination with fics where a character has an instragram. It’s really, incredibly strange. Also also, every time I see this fic title I get that one Discovery Channel song stuck in my head. And no, it probably isn’t the one you’re thinking.

18. ways to save the world by @wildehacked | The Magnus Archives | Martin Blackwood/Jon Sims | 19k

“I left you,” Martin says softly.

Heather Says: And we’re back at wildehacked too! The Magnus Archives was a thing that happened to me. This is I think the first fic I read for it while listening, and it was so very close to what we got in canon. I think when it comes down to it though, I still prefer this fic, even if the ending of this season was pretty fantastic.

19. The Denial Twist by beethechange | Buzzfeed Unsolved | Ryan/Shane | 35k

“This is kind of surreal,” Shane says, taking a sip of his tea. It’s piping hot and delicious, except it tastes like hot chocolate and not like tea at all. “Sort of—Wonka-esque, right? Or Alice in Wonderland.”

Heather Says: While the vampire one is my favorite both because it is excellent and because it was my first, this one was bizarre and sexy and also I read it like only a month or so ago! The dancing was my favorite part, but having dreams to work with made this story fantastically interesting and I loved every second of it.

20. silver in our lungs by taywen | Spinning Silver | Miryem/The Staryk Lord | 4k

The marks had been with Miryem for as long as she could remember. There were a number of them, all the same shade, following one after the other around her left wrist. They were pale as old scars, though they felt no different from the rest of her skin, and her mother claimed that Miryem had been born with them.

Heather Says: I really like soulmate aus. There’s so many different ways to twist them and the way they can sometimes change the dynamic entirely and other times not change them at all is just fascinating. I’ve been hoping there would be more Spinning Silver content on ao3 and running into this while I was trying to decide what I wanted to do for yuletide was a real treat.

21. you got me begging, begging, i'm on my knees by plalligator | The Queen’s Thief | Attolia/Eugenides/Costis | 5k

Costis has a particularly enlightening evening. (or, that struggle when you're a guard who's in love with your rulers and it turns out you would kind of like it if they bossed you around a little)

Heather Says: I accidentally re-read the King of Attolia and it made me consider ships I had perhaps not previously considered. This was really lovely and just steamy enough.

22. something more alive than silence by pageleaf | The Queen’s Thief | Attolia/Eugenides/Costis | 21k

It was a good thing that six months after the king had promised to halve the guard, he still hadn’t done it, because since then, there had been two attempts on the king’s life.

Heather Says: I want to only type the words AGONIZED NOISES to describe this fic because that’s basically my headspace when I get 21k of a shiny new ot3, but I mean. Really. This is super good and maybe my favorite yet? Why didn’t I start reading this fandom when I first read the books?

23. Timing it Right by DragonBandit | The Bright Sessions | Mark/Damien | 14k

The dragon chooses, Mark knows that as well as any boy born in a weyr. He'd never considered what that would mean if the dragon picked someone you hated. He's starting to think that was a mistake.

Damien's gold rises at Whitney. Mark tries to make things right.

Heather Says: This should actually be somewhere back in March, but I apparently closed out of the tab at some point. I never really got into Pern much. I have the first three books, but got most of the way through the first one a long time ago and then never picked it back up. I didn’t think I would like this, mostly because of the fact that I hadn’t gotten into the books, but was surprised to find that I absolutely loved it.

24. Keep It In Your Sights Now by LuckyDiceKirby | Shades of Magic | Lila/Kell/Holland | 9k

Holland travels with Lila and Kell. Somewhere along the way, they reach an equilibrium.

Heather Says: I love the new things I’ve discovered during my yuletide trompings. I don’t think I ever actually considered this pairing when I first read the books, but I am just so enamored with the idea of the three of them together. Like, why did I not realize that potential back then? This was lovely, and I loved it, and I want so much more out of this pairing than what ao3 has to offer me.

25. Charioteer by petrichoral | The Queen’s Thief | Gen & Costis | 13k

Captured in battle and stuck in the Mede capital, Costis has given up all hope of seeing his country again. But Eugenides has a habit of turning up where he's least expected.

Heather Says: Technically this shouldn’t be on here because I only read it today, but it was really wonderful and so canon typical. Gen and Costis were perfect in it, Irene was perfect in it. Everyone was perfect and nothing hurts.

31 notes · View notes

mysterioussinkhole · 5 years

Text

Sneak Preview

Statement Summary: Statement of Tim Stoker, taken directly from subject by Archival Assistant Martin Blackwood. Tim had a younger brother named Danny who always seemed to outdo him, but it never bothered him. He loves his brother. Danny did modeling and charity races and the like, and he was charismatic. They didn’t talk much but they kept up with each other. His brother always had a new project and in 2013 it was urban exploration. He’d get pictures from trips he went on every now and then. Danny liked looking into “ghost buildings” in London where new buildings had been built over old ones. He was especially interested in Covent Garden Theater and told Tim about the architecture of Robert Smirke. That site is now The Royal Opera House, so not exactly easy to trespass in. His brother claimed he had a solid route to get in and out so he let him go. He was in Tim’s armchair early the next morning. He’d been crying and seemed terrified. Tim couldn’t get anything out of him so he let him stay on the couch. That was the last time he saw him. When he woke up later, Danny was gone and there drawings strewn about of the same clown, over and over. Tim had a hunch and followed his brother’s notes to break into the abandoned part of the opera house. It was easy. The place was unusually clean and cool. He wandered into the auditorium. It was all hewn from stone, even the audience that was packed in. Down on the stage was Danny, but it wasn’t quite him. He didn’t respond when he shouted to him. A spotlight turned on and music started as a clown crouched in the corner. It slowly reached towards Danny and began crawling towards him in sickening contortions. When the clown reached his brother it stood up, the same as the drawing and blood on its face. It looked up at Tim and smiled. It asked, “Shall I?” and it pulled the skin off of the thing wearing Danny’s skin. It was the mere impression of a dancer. The next moment he was conscious he was on the street in front of the opera house holding an old poster with a clown on it, covered in Cyrillic. He never saw his brother again.

Who Did It: The Stranger

Spooky Rating: 10/10, Jesus Fucking Christ What The Fuck Have You Done To Me

Archives Drama: Martin starts to record a statement when Tim knocks a box over and scares the bejeezus out of him. Tim starts to leave but he stops him to ask about a book he got from the library regarding circuses. It turns out no one has told Tim about the Unknowing. Martin explains and he has a small freak out. He has very strong feelings about circus statements. The recorder is turned off. When it comes back on Martin has Tim make a statement so that Jon can hear the information he has. He wants to do it in person but Martin knows that will end badly. So he does it. Martin realizes the story must be why he joined the Institute. The clown was Joseph Grimaldi. He’s angry he wasn’t told about the Unknowing and he insists on helping to stop it. Then, Elias comes in. No one is happy to see him. He sends Martin out. Elias sees Tim has a rogue element and tells him to stay away from the Unknowing. He sarcastically refuses. He’s absolutely done with Elias’s shit and tells him to either kill him or fuck off.

Stray Thoughts: Scratch my previous statement, this is Season 3’s hot streak. This episode is terrifying. Like... oh my god. I’ll be honest, Tim has never been my favorite character. I could never connect with him because every time I felt like I was starting to get him he’d do something I didn’t expect and I was back to square one. This is the episode that made me really like him. I get it now. To see all of that and then go through it all again just when you thought you were safe, it’d drive anyone into depression. I get why he took Jon not trusting him so hard. He wants to keep people safe from all that spooky shit; he’d never kill someone. It sucks that we only got to understand for a little while before he went on that kayaking trip, but nevertheless this episode is definitely one of the series’ best. I’m also interested in how they got a valid live statement without Jon. There are two possible explanations: 1) Martin has started to develop some beholding powers or 2) statements given willingly with full knowledge of their purpose are taken no matter what. It seems like two is more likely but I like to think it’s a combination of both catalyzed by the specific situation.

#the magnus archives #tma #archiving the archives #recorded live in front of a studio audience #sneak preview

24 notes · View notes

still-we-go-pumpkins · 6 years

Text

An amazing fan tribute to Weiki. Unique facts compilation 👌🎃

I've just found the post on DeviantArt. As great Weiki fan also, I can confirm that he's really that marvelous just as the author describes him. This will make you feel warm and will set smile on your face as well as you will check Helloween vids/lives while exploring this facts. So, here we go.

Further credits : SamWeiki

100 Reasons I love Michael Weikath

Possible – scratch that, definite – Fangirling ahead (I tried to keep it to a minimum and I probably failed)

1. He has the most gorgeous blue eyes. [right off, I told you – Fangirling]

2. The songs he writes are so unique and AMAZING. Most of them mean quite a lot to me, as well. I’ve always been drawn to them. They just have a certain special quality to them that I love.

3. He wrote “Keeper of the Seven Keys” for cryin’ out loud!

4. His “thanks” section in the Unarmed booklet.

5. He’d pick Judas Priest over Iron Maiden in an instant.

6. The way he sometimes answers questions. For instance, he was asked about what fans could expect from The Dark Ride and his response was: “Well....hmmmm you can expect that it will be standing in stores and it’s very likely you can buy it when you find it there! hahahahahaha apart from that I don’t know if it’s going to say anything but you can go there and buy it, listen to it, and use it, because it’s a CD and it usually makes a lot of sound if you put it into a CD player......but probably doesn't work if you put it into a toaster.....hahahahahaha.”

7. If he wasn’t a musician, he says his life would be dedicated to cartoons.

8. He dedicated the Hammond version of “Burning Sun” to the great Jon Lord.

9. He’s an artist. His little skull and pumpkin drawing is beautiful.

10. He makes the best faces in concerts.

11. I love watching him in the High Live video, especially during “Steel Tormentor”. [I did not just say that]

12. He made the frog noises at the end of “Nothing to Say”.

13. So many people have blamed him for things over the years, when he did nothing wrong, just because they feel it's easier to blame him. I experience that quite a lot and have for several years, so I understand what it's like but he seems a lot stronger than me about it, as it's very hard for me to get over a lot of that stuff. He's sort of my hero about that because it seems like he hasn't let that really stop him.

14. How he totally told off that Phantom guy. His responses were awesome.

15. A part of “Do You Know What You Are Fighting For” is Deep Purple’s “Stormbringer” backwards. There’s actually a lot of Deep Purple in that song. Makes me love it even more – both songs.

16. He played on Uli Kusch’s cover of “Eyes of the World” from the Rainbow tribute album and he played all the guitar on that song. “Yeah I played on Eyes Of The World. So I did all of the guitar work on it. Uli told me that he did not expect me to have the guitar work as close to the original song as I had it.”

17. The seven pronged star on the cover of 7 Sinners was his idea. And what a damn fine idea it was because it makes a freaking sweet album cover! It was a lot of fun for me to draw, as well.

18. When writing “LAVDATE DOMINVM”, he called upon his old Latin lessons from school and actually got to work with his old Latin teacher on the lyrics. Weiki hadn’t worked with Latin for a bit, so he had to relearn a few things and he even managed to correct something his teacher had written.

19. His response to what animal he would be: “A lion, 'cause I could be lyin' round lazy and have my food brought to me by other people.”

20. Helloween would not be Helloween without him, plus Markus and Andi wouldn’t let him quit in 2000/2001.

21. He drew the logo and original pumpkin.

22. How beautiful the lyrics to “Windmill” are. Example:

"Don't feel alone and depressed

Someone will come, at last

To soothe your storming mind

To keep it away from the evil storms."

23. You can clearly hear the man singing in “White Christmas” and he’s the most fun to listen to.

24. “Introduction” never fails to make me laugh very loudly, especially the lyrics to “Rock n’ Roll All Day”.

25. He likes Spinal Tap.

26. The way he sang “Gorgar will eat you” in the Keeper Legacy interviews.

27. He was asked what his motto in life was and his response was: Be as friendly as it comes; have fun, make money and spend it on charity to help people. ~Sei so freundlich wie es geht; Spaß haben, viel Geld verdienen und es für wohltätige Zwecke ausgeben, um Leuten zu helfen~ (it was originally in German)

28. His black and white outfits in the ‘80s and ‘90s, especially those awesome star-printed pants.

29. The entire story of the Keeper of the Seven Keys and Master of the Rings.

30. The Jacuzzi scene in the Keeper Legacy Road movie.

31. He likes Aphrodite’s Child, Nektar, and Camel. He’s cool.

32. I really don’t think I’ve heard him say anything bad about anyone.

33. The moment when he switched his guitar off and “played” a solo after he was introduced in The Legacy concert.

34. “All right… That’s enough! Now, I want to hear Dani’s drum solo!” *rapid fire – BLAMBLAMBLAM!* The first time I watched the “Smoke On the Water” bit from Hellish Rock, I nearly fell to the floor laughing.

35. About the time Pink Bubbles Go Ape came out, in an interview, Michael Kiske said something about they weren’t Metal, they didn’t do that “Heavy Metal” thing and Weiki says, “I thought we were Heavy Metal”. And Michi completely just stopped talking for a second.

36. The way Weiki messed around with Michi and Roland during the interview mentioned above.

37. How much fun he looked like he was having in the “Kids of the Century” video.

38. Every time he dances around on stage.

39. His love for Gibson Les Pauls.

40. He was reading “A Hat Full of Sky” and even recommended it.

41. He says that his writing “Keeper of the Seven Keys” kept him alive and he considers it a major turning point in his life to have come up with the idea for it.

42. The hairspray scene in the Hellish Rock road movie.

43. He actually got involved with the DJ game when they were in Japan (Keeper Legacy road movie) – the whole arcade scene was great.

44. The way he just looks at a camera sometimes and doesn’t say a word – he just starts making faces and looking off in different directions. He can be funny without saying a single word.

45. His guitar solo in “Back On the Ground”.

46. He played most of the guitar on the Better Than Raw album.

47. Weikath Syndrome is the coolest thing to catch.

48. During the German Top 6 video (1993), he was drinking a Capri Sun. I think it may have even been Wild Cherry.

49. A Gibson Les Paul looks absolutely perfect on him. I also love the way he holds the guitar.

50. How his hair has always been shoulder length (at least) since the late ‘80s (and beautiful).

51. He thinks of the younger viewers/fans.

52. All the love for him in the Hellbook.

53. I don’t how much of the lyrics to “Dreambound” he wrote, but he has a credit on that song and OH MY GOD, is it flipping incredible! I must make special mention to how amazing “the Saints” is, too.

54. He wanted to talk to Michael Kiske when they met at a festival in 2012/2013, so they could try and work things out a little.

55. He wanted “Livin’ Ain’t No Crime” to be a single.

56. His song “Number One” and how uplifting and positive the lyrics are, especially the chorus.

57. When they were on the Ferris wheel, they didn’t start REALLY laughing until Weiki did.

58. How he introduces himself as “de Michael Weikath of Helloween” and he even got Dani to do it with him.

59. He contributed a guitar solo to the German Rock Project’s “Let Love Conquer the World” (the long Metal version) but went all incognito with it and is credited as “a member of the Seventh Key”.

60. The fact that he wanted a flute in “Raise the Noise” and it sounds totally awesome!

61. The sexy witch on the cover of Better Than Raw was Weiki’s idea.

62. His makeshift rocking chair.

63. His spoken part of the Dezperadoz song “First Blood” (and “Echoes of Eternity”, too).

64. How funny was in the two Nuremberg interviews from the ‘80s that are on YouTube.

1987 – He lights a cigarette, he passes it Ingo, Ingo passes it back, and Weiki passes it back to him. Ingo then proceeds to throw it on the ground and Weiki attempts to lightly hit him but only manages to hit his hair. xD

1988 – The FUNNY one! He was so frickin’ funny in that one. I won’t give away the end of it if you’ve never seen it, but it involves a balloon and a cigarette. (by the way, Michael Weikath takes his sunglasses off and puts them back on 13 times, 10 of which are in the first three minutes).

65. After an interviewer thanks him for being there, “Ja, that’s not so much I can do about it, because somebody put me on this Earth and I went out of my mother and suddenly I was there and now I have to deal with this crap.”

66. During the Indianapolis Hell On Wheels concert, during “Halloween”, Michi passes the mic over to Weiki and Weiki does the “I’ll show you power and glory” part. Michi then makes a disgruntled face at him and rubs the mic with his shirt, causing Weiki to make a face back at him!

67. Also from the same Hell On Wheels concert, during “A Tale That Wasn’t Right”, he was stepping on the skeleton and making Ingo laugh.

68. Speaking of “A Tale That Wasn’t Right”, that song is incredible and very powerful.

69. He let the other members of the band help out on “Mission Motherland”. That song is very quickly becoming my favorite song of theirs.

70. His backing vocals in the “Sea of Fears” demo.

71. All of his little pins that he wears: the pumpkin, the W, the stars…

72. This comment he made about the Hellbook: “With the hardcover you can better smash your naughty brother... and you can with the regular as well, just maybe not as effective.” I have actually made that joke to my brother before. xD

73. Someone at a meet-n-greet in 2008 showed the band an old picture of the guys, which they all signed. It was an old picture. Kai was stunned, Markus laughed his ass off, and Michael actually said he remembered where it was taken and when. The picture was taken in 1986, so that is kind of impressive.

74. He helped me become a big fan of Deep Purple. Yes, I will admit to only becoming a major Deep Purple fan after becoming a Helloween fan - and it was all because of Weiki. And now I'm really happy because I never realized how awesome Deep Purple is. Same thing with Wishbone Ash.

75. He’s given me several phrases to use whenever applicable.

- “Impressive, isn’t it?”

- “You have to listen with your ears.”

- “It’s nice, cold, windy, sunny weather.” (which pretty much describes Florida in the winter sometimes)

76. He can still sing with a cigarette in his mouth and not drop the cigarette.

77. The intro to “Halloween”. I’m not sure if he played it on the original recording, but when he plays it live… OH MY GOD.

78. His guitar solo in “First Time”.

79. He’s fun to watch in the “When the Sinner” video when he’s shown, especially when he’s playing those power chords in the beginning (even though he played no guitar on the song) and the part in the saloon.

80. How amazing “Les Hambourgeois Walkways” is.

81. He’s written a couple songs that he has dedicated to groups of fans ~ “LAVDATE DOMINVM” for the Latin speaking fans, and “Born on Judgment Day” for the people of Brazil.

82. How he’s so easily able to make Sascha laugh behind the camera.

More here 💜

#helloween #michael weikath #power metal #oldschool #classic metal #heavy metal #metal #oldschool metal #pumpkins interact #weiki

20 notes · View notes

fourtrisheafanfic · 6 years

Text

Money Well Spent (complete fic)

Rating: Mature

Summary: Money Well Spent is a modern-AU, jonerys one-shot written for the 2018 Jonerys Valentine’s Week. I selected the Prompt Dark!Jon or Dark!Dany for day one (2/14/18). While meeting the prompt for day, I think it’s pretty obvious that both Jon and Dany are portrayed OOC. :) This short story is about a man who is obsessed with power and his career. He has found that part of getting ahead relies on maintaining a certain image. Rather than deal with the hassles of dating, he makes sure the high end escort agency sends him the right type of woman he needs to have on his arm. He feels it is money well spent, getting exactly as he demands. Will this new one be more than he bargained for?

**I have no rights to these characters, all belong to HBO and Author, George R.R. Martin**

Chapter Summary: 2018 Jonerys Valentine’s Week on Tumblr. 2.14.2018 Prompt: Dark!Jon or Dark!Dany.

Read it on Ao3: (X)

~ Night of the Westeros Industries Gala ~

Sitting in the back seat of the town car her agency set up for her, Dany adjusts the top of her strapless black gown. She knew the moment the stylist in Wardrobe had suggested this dress to wear that this evening’s event was going to be highbrow and fancy. The gown material clinging to her body in all the right places, the plunging neckline showing off Dany’s full bosom.

Biting the inside of her cheek anxiously, Dany reviews the fact sheet the agency sent over earlier that day. She has a very specific role to play this evening, as the date of Mr. Jon Snow.

Currently in her second year of law school at the University of Chicago, Dany recently started working for a high end Escort Service in the city. Thanks to her pretty looks, and well educated demeanor, she was only given high end assignments for the agency. The money is incredible, it’s not something Dany could overlook when this opportunity presented itself.

Having been recruited by a few agencies, Daenerys Targaryen was very careful when selecting which company she would sign up for, making it very clear she would never get paid for sex. Dany is the furthest thing from being a prude, but she draws the line at being paid for sex or any type of sexual favors. Sadly between being in law school fulltime and then this job, Dany has had zero time for dating. She misses sex a lot. Masturbating just doesn’t cut it, but at least she can get some relief on her own.

Diving back into the fact sheet for tonight’s event Dany chortles with a roll of her eyes. She was supposed to have a quiet dinner with one of her regulars this evening, but then forced to cancel on him as she was needed for this assignment. Tonight’s client sounds like quite the pain in the ass. His detailed list of demands on the fact sheet, leads Dany to believe he sounds like an old, pretentious, fart.

Fact sheet (excerpt):

Female must be no taller than 5’3 in height (Dany is 5’2)

Blond strongly requested

Good teeth/ smile

Heels no taller than 3 inches in height

Articulate

Black ball gown

Her understanding is that Mr. Snow is a Tier One client at her agency, meaning he has a ton of money and pays for the absolute best. Supporting that is the fact they cancelled Dany’s previously arranged evening with the sweet old widower who sees her once a week for dinner and a movie.

As her car pulls up to the event Dany opens the Escort company’s management app on her phone and checks in. The app tracks the locations and time of the employees, for safety and billing purposes. Dany steps out of the town car in front of the McCormick Place Convention Center, Westeros Industries is hosting a huge awards gala and charity event this evening. Dany remembers Jon Snow’s resume while entering the front lobby of the center.

Mr. Snow is the senior vice president of acquisitions and mergers, he has roughly two thousand employees reporting under him. He sounds very accomplished and career driven, which Daenerys can appreciate. She can only imagine just how old and hideous Mr. Jon Snow is. Why else would he need to spend money for a woman’s company?

Speaking of old and hideous, scanning the room Dany’s spots the polar opposite in the form of a gorgeous young man that is extremely handsome. Her eyes lock with the handsome man that is standing by the bar and speaking with a small group of men.

The upper half of his gorgeous ebony black hair is tied neatly into a man bun at the back of his head, he has the sexiest short trimmed beard surrounding his luscious lips. The intense look he gives her makes her pulse race, her body reacts instantly to him. He is the sexiest man she has ever seen. Dany’s mind conjuring images of what he could do with that mouth.

Quickly Dany remembers where she is and why, immediately looking away and breaking their shared eye contact. She can’t be caught checking out some young hot guy at this event. She is here for a job. Knowing her luck, the handsome young man will be introduced to her later as a coworker of the old man that is to be her ‘beloved date’ for the evening. That would be disastrous and extremely unprofessional.

Walking further into the lobby she stops by the coat check room to hand over her things. Per the directions she is to stand at the bar and order herself a gin and tonic and then wait until Mr. Snow finds her.

Per instructions she heads towards the bar, she notices the young man’s eyes still intently on her. His peers are speaking around him, but his attention is fully on her. She needs to nip this in the bud, she can’t allow silly complications this evening. Dany forces herself to look at him coldly, as if she sees right through him and then goes to the separate bar area. Ordering a gin and tonic, per orders so her evening’s date can find her.

“Hello, Daenerys,” a deep voice murmurs behind her. Dany turns around, shocked to see the handsome man from earlier. For a moment she worries that he is just some guy who likes a challenge and is stepping up his game after her earlier dismissive look. But the fact he knows her name makes her consider that he could be her date for the evening. Could this young man be Mr. Snow?

Looking her up and down, even glancing at her heels, Mr. Snow leans closer to whisper in her ear. “Isn’t this a pleasant surprise, your agency finally sent someone that meets my requirements.”

Dany is put off by his coldness while also remembering this is a job for her, and something this man is paying a great deal of money for.

“Hello, Mr. Snow,” Dany quietly says, before taking a small sip of her drink to calm her nerves. She has been on dates with a dozen different men, no one having this kind of effect on her. Why the hell is she nervous? She knows what she needs to do this evening. Be the pretty girl on his arm, and that is it.

“Call me Jon, It’s nice to meet you,” Jon speaks softly so that he is not overheard. “And you ready to get the show started?”

Gazing into his eyes, Dany smiles beautifully and nods.

Jon Snow is a successful business man that has no personal life to speak of, and he likes it that way. His job is extremely demanding and something that he welcomes. Jon Snow has been closed off from his family for many years since his father passed away. A terrible relationship with his stepmother and distance had made it easy to lose that close relationship. Jon will exchange the occasional email with his brother Robb who now lives in Jordan after falling in love and starting a new life there with his new wife.

Jon’s greatest joy is paying for the education of his two younger sisters that are college students out of state. Aside from helping them, he knows it drives his stepmother insane that his great success allows him to help where she fell short. It’s a double win.

Appreciating everything about her, her smile, her incredible breasts, even her platinum blond hair, Jon can’t believe how stunning this gorgeous woman is. He noticed her the moment she entered the lobby, immediately hoping she was the date he had paid for.

Jon is not some creep that pays for sex. Although having previously worked with other escort service companies, whose dates had aggressively offered him sex, he always kept it professional and declined. He has a very important image to protect at work and even for his personal life, nor is he one to mix business with pleasure. It’s one of the reasons he is so pleased with the current escort company he uses, there is a strict no sex policy in place for each of its employees.

The moment he saw Daenerys he prayed she was his date for the evening, he can’t wait to play the role with her. He wants to know what she smells like, what she feels like on his arm. Jon is ready to get started. For the first time he truly believes a date with this woman will be money well spent.

Leaning over slowly Jon gives Dany a gentle kiss on the cheek before whispering in her ear. “Because of my position there will always be someone watching and judging us at tonight’s event.”

Feeling her heart race at the contact, Dany needs to remind herself that Jon is acting. Posing as a romantic couple is part of the deal. Dany leans closer to him, running her fingertips along his jaw and smiling.

Jon’s eyes darken as he studies the beautiful woman that is touching his face and watching him. Shit, it is crazy how drawn to her he is. He is tempted to grab her by the hand and sweep her off to have a private romantic dinner so he can really get to know her.

But what would I learn? This is work for her, she could have a serious boyfriend for all I know. Ugh!

Jon ushers her through the lobby to greet some of his peers. Dany smiles politely, as she is introduced as his date, Daenerys. Their story is that they met through mutual friends and had just recently started dating. Jon’s arm always around her possessively with his hand on her lower back, but never too low. Dany finds herself shamelessly fantasizing what it would feel like to have his hands gripping her ass.

As cocktail hour continues the couple work the room. Jon notices that a few of his coworkers are gawking at Daenerys’s loveliness. It doesn’t hurt that her amazing cleavage is on display thanks to the cut of her black dress. The contrast of the black gown and her creamy skin shows off what amazing tits she has. Jon has to actively control himself from looking or even thinking about them. He doesn’t want to get a huge boner while in the middle of a work function. He has never been turned on by one of his escort dates before.

Right before the silent action portion of the evening starts Dany smiles at Jon and tells him she needs to use the ladies room. Jon nods and offers to walk her over. Turning down his offer so he can continue his conversation Dany leans up and kisses his cheek before walking away. She can feel his eyes on her as she retreats.

Once in the restroom stall Dany takes a moment to calm her nerves. She purposely walked to a restroom further away so that she could take a moment to be by herself. Posing as Jon Snow’s date this evening has left her confused, his sarcastic wit and snarky tone has given her butterflies more than once. She was tempted to kiss him on the mouth before escaping to the bathroom. She’s now intrigued as to why such a young, handsome, successful man needs to use an escort service. Not being completely blind, Dany recognized the cold glares of quite a few women at being introduced as Jon’s date. He is obviously highly desired by numerous ladies.

Before Dany can ponder it any further she hears peels of loud laughter erupt as a small group of women enter the restroom. She is about to leave her stall when the foul language and complains about this evening’s event stops her short. The stalls in the restroom are little rooms with a true door, the group probably thinks they are in here alone and thus acting so unprofessionally.

Part of her role at these events is avoiding conflict whenever possible. Dany cringes remembering the time she literally bumped into two women talking about giving their boss a blow job at the same time under his desk, and then later that evening realizing they were talking about the man that was her date. It was horribly uncomfortable for all.

Dany makes the quick decision to stay put and hopes they will leave soon. As the women continue to chatter Dany determines there are three women in the restroom with her.

Conversation:

Woman 1: Joffrey is such a little prick! He knew this event was on the calendar when he told his assistant to schedule us for the red eye flight tonight. What an asshole. I don’t even know if I should have left my things in the coat check room, it may be closed when we need to head out.

Woman 2: Relax, Val. I already tipped the coat check idiots, they will keep our things right by the door so we can just grab it and leave. Our car to the airport will be here at 9:30PM, so the coat check room will be unmanned at that time.

Woman 1: Good thinking. Ugh, 9:30! The awards presentation won’t be even be done by then! I really wanted to see it.

Woman 3: Oh just shut the fuck up, what do you care? It’s not like you’ve been nominated for anything.

Woman 2: Don’t be so nasty, Ygritte. I know you are pissed because Jon Snow is here with a hot date!

Woman 3: Fuck him. He obviously has no taste! Stupid asshole, I have offered to fuck him so many times just for him to say no. I even heard a little rumor that he is into kinky shit, and I offered him that too. Prick still turned me down.

Woman 1: Well, his date is really…something.

Woman 3: His date looks like a bleached-head prostitute, with her huge tits on display.

Woman 2: She does look trashy, maybe that is just his type. Although then I think he would have given you a chance, Ygritte. (The group laughs, even Dany smirks from her stall)

Woman 1: I wouldn’t worry about it, Jon looks miserable with that tramp as his date.

Woman 3: I’m not worried. Jon Snow can do so much better that that trashy skank on his arm tonight. I doubt we will ever see her after tonight.

Dany is now thoroughly pissed off. Normally she would laugh off such catty behavior, but the comments about how Jon looks miserable (WTF – does he?) and how she isn’t good enough for him have struck a nerve. She is offended, even though she isn’t quite sure why she cares so much.

Flushing the toilet, signaling to the three women that they are not alone, Dany hears a gasp. Walking towards the sinks with her head held high Dany begins washing her hands. Two of the three woman immediately step away and look mortified. The third woman, a fiery redhead stands her ground and glares at Daenerys while also standing at the sinks.

After drying her hands with a towel Dany purposely looks down to fix the top of her dress. Feeling all eyes on her, she makes sure her beautiful cleavage is still correctly displayed as designed by the dress. Dany notes that the redhead, who she recognizes as being called Ygritte has no tits and her body looks like that of a twelve year old girl. How sad for her, Dany looks directly at her chest area and smirks before walking out. Leaving Ygritte looking furious and her friends gawking at her nerve.

Dany is furious as she charges back the area where she last left Jon, knowing she needs to calm herself down. It would be completely unprofessional for her to act upset with him. Plus, it’s not his fault that women can be so mean.

Jon is getting more and more irritated by the minute. His date has been gone for a really long time, and he doesn’t like to wait for anything or anyone. Finally seeing her, he pushes aside the urge to just admire her gorgeousness. “That took much longer than expected,” he snaps at her, letting his displeasure be known.

Daenerys smiles sweetly at him and slips her arm around him before pulling closer to him. She completely ignores his grumpy mood and treats him as though he had just paid her a compliment. They finally lock eyes, both knowing what she is doing. He has to admit, he likes her sass, and he is very drawn to her.

Jon finally smiles at her before rolling his eyes at her playful demeanor and she bursts into a genuine smile that lights up her entire face.

“Come on, dearest. We must work the room for the silent auction portion,” Jon talks near her ear, making it look as though he is whispering sweet nothings into his would-be lover’s ear. Dany smiles eagerly and looks forward to spending more time with him.

They enjoy their time talking when they are able to be alone, which isn’t often as it is obvious that Jon is often the center of attention at this event. There are a couple of times that Jon is pulled away for a brief work discussion, some of the older gentlemen making it a point to tell Daenerys what a stunning beauty she is and how much they love her dress. Complimenting her dress while staring at the top part. Dany smiles politely, while also making it clear that she isn’t interested.

Jon always returns to her side, immediately pulling her close to him. He has never been so touchy-feely with a date. Everything with her feels different.

“I’m going to have to beat some of my coworkers off with a stick. Am I correct in noticing that it is the really old ones that are being the most forward,” Jon teases Daenerys as she laughs.

“You would be correct, I am pretty sure old men think they can play the age-card and get away with saying just about anything!” Dany giggles before Jon reaches down to brush his lips against her bare shoulder, both of their hearts racing at the contact.

“I better watch my back then, some of these old men may steal you away from me!” Jon jokes, enjoying their banter.

Playful, Dany laughs and assures Jon he has nothing to worry about. “I won’t be taking any of the offers from these old folks. I need a man who can keep up with me in the bedroom!”

Jon’s eyes immediately get dark with lust as he watches her closely. Dany blushes slightly, realizing what she said. But then shrugs it off since it is true, so why apologize?

Jon pulls Dany even closer to his side, he is going crazy with appreciation and desire. As his hand glides lower down her back a sudden booming voice stops him in his tracks.

“Dany Targaryen! Wow, you look gorgeous this evening. That dress, holy shit. What are you doing wasting your time with this loser?” Ramsey, a lawyer from one of the firms they use as outside counsel, jokes as he moves to stand in front of the couple. Jon feels Daenerys jump in his arms, probably caught off guard at hearing her last name rattled off.

Jon’s hold on Daenerys tightens slightly, he can’t stand Ramsey Bolton. He is obnoxious and a pain to work with. “How do you two know each other?” Jon asks coolly.

“The lovely Dany was a summer intern at my firm last summer. How is school going, Chicago Law correct?” Ramsey questions while his eyes blatantly roam up and down Dany’s body. Dany fights the urge to squirm, especially as she is in Jon’s arms and she doesn’t want him to know she is being affected.

“Yes, school is going well,” Dany says calmly. Feeling Jon’s eyes burning into her. She wonders if he is just annoyed at the intrusion or actually jealous.

Ramsey and Jon have a tense exchange about a work issue, it is obvious they don’t particularly get along. Jon hates that his company always invites members from outside counsel to this event. Especially when it is someone he doesn’t like. The men begin to get heated in their discussion, Dany noticing that they are drawing the attention of others around them as their voices begin to rise.

“Jon, my darling. I’m parched, let’s get a drink at the bar before the banquet starts,” Dany says pleasantly, placing her hand on Jon’s arm to break his attention away from Ramsey.

Jon is thankful Dany broke the moment, he was about to throttle Ramsey in the middle of this charity event, and that would have been a problem. “Yes, babe. Let’s go,” Jon then looks at Ramsey coldly before saying goodbye.

But Ramsey isn’t done there, he makes it a point to lean close to Dany and loudly whisper in her ear so that Jon can hear, “You are way too good for Jon Snow, you should give me a call.”

“Don’t hold your breath, Ramsey,” Dany retorts charmingly, her voice dripping with fake sweetness. Dany makes it a point to wrap her arms around Jon and pull him close. His eyes are blazing mad as Ramsey smirks and walks off.

“And that asshole is still checking you out,” Jon hisses, his fists clenched with anger. He and Daenerys walk off the side of the crowd as Ramsey’s leering gaze follows them. Jon is tempted to walk back over to Ramsey and break his nose for looking at his date as though he is undressing her with his eyes.

“Then let Ramsey watch as you kiss me, and hard,” Dany smiles coyly at Jon, then grinning while he pulls her body tightly against his. The idea of that asshole watching them is a turn on for her.

Jon’s mouth crashing down to capture hers in a kiss. With Jon’s back to Ramsey Dany vigorously wraps herself around Jon, pulling him even closer. One of her hands around his lower back and her second hand entwined in Jon’s gorgeous curls that falls against the back of his neck. Mouths open as their tongues move in sync for a passionate kiss.

Finally breaking apart, although it was supposed to be a fake kiss both seem to know that is not the case. Jon rests his forehead to Daenerys, both panting. Finally Dany can take no more, she leans up and kisses Jon for a second time. She doesn’t even care if Ramsey is still watching or not.

Her second kiss catches Jon by surprise, both knowing that it this is not for Ramsey’s benefit alone. Jon leans in, pulling her even closer than before.

++o++ ++o++

Jon and Dany enjoy flirting while at their table in the ballroom. Thankfully Ramsey seems to have gotten the message as he will not even look in either of their directions. One of Jon’s hands always touching or near Daenerys at all times. It gives her a rush to feel so close to him, although she wonders if he is like this with all of his paid escorts. Deciding to push the thought away, Dany tries to enjoy the remainder of the evening. She is with him tonight, not anyone else.

Dany always has a quick witted answer for Mr. Snow, especially when he tries to get grumpy with her. One of his peers casually mentioning that he has never seen Jon look so happy and at ease. Dany smiles graciously, reminding herself that she is being paid to entertain Jon. That’s all.

Later in the evening Dany gets goosebumps, sensing that someone is watching her. She notices that the three women from the bathroom are seated a few tables away and have been watching her and Jon intently. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, Dany feels invigorated. The idea of those mean-girls watching her and Jon enjoying their date is a turn on to her.

While Dany and Ygritte have locked eyes in a glare, she suddenly feels Jon’s breath on her bare shoulder. Jon whispers in her ear, “I really want to kiss you again, with or without Ramsey watching.”

Dany smirks and tucks her hair behind her ear. “Maybe later,” she says with dismissive tone, fighting to hide her grin as Jon huffs in annoyance.

Jon doesn’t like to be teased. But he has to control his urges, his hand twitches. He would love nothing more than to smack her bare ass while she is bent over his lap. Gods, he is crazy about her.

“Daenerys, I need to go backstage and get ready to present an award for the internship program,” Jon says softly. “I’ll be back soon, love.”

“Good luck,” Dany says before giving him a rushed peck on the lips. “There you go, the kiss you wanted.”

Jon’s eyes narrow at his lovely date, she seems to enjoy toying with him. And he is loving every fucking second of it. With other attendees smiling at him, Jon is forced to accept her taunt of a brief kiss with a smile.

Once Jon is gone Dany picks at the dessert on her plate while politely watching as the awards ceremony continues. When Jon is on stage and talking about the internship program Dany gets lost in thought while admiring how attractive he is. It’s more than his looks that have drawn her in, there is something about his personality that excites her.

Her thoughts are suddenly interrupted. Gasping with shock, suddenly Dany almost jumps out of her skin as she feels ice cold liquid fall down the front of her dress, wetting her breasts.

“Oh, no! I am so sorry ma’am. Look at how clumsy I am!” Ygritte cries while standing right behind Dany’s chair with a large glass of ice cold water in her hand. “I hope you can forgive me…”

Dany is seething but realizes that all eyes in the vicinity are on her. Glancing over she sees that the two other girls are sitting at their table and laughing hysterically. This was no accident. This bitch calling her ma’am was an extra nice touch.

As much as she would like to explode. Dany handles it graciously, which awards her with many onlooker’s smiles. Using a napkin to pat her chest and dress dry of the water and even some ice chunks. Ygritte looks disappointed that Daenerys didn’t lose her cool. Dany looks at her watch, it had just turned 9:00PM, she remembers these women need to leave early to watch a flight. Dany smirks to herself, remembering that timing is everything.

Not long later Jon returns to his seat and notices that Dany is getting sympathetic looks from some older women at their table. He asks, Dany if something happened.

“Someone accidentally spilled their drink on me, I thought I got it all, but…” her voice trails off, she notices that Jon looks concerned. “Actually, would you walk with me to the restroom? I think I still need to get cleaned up.”

“Of course,” Jon immediately agrees, he doesn't like to see her distressed. What’s up with that he wonders?

Exiting the ballroom Dany pulls Jon towards the empty coat check room, telling him she has something in her coat that will help with her clean up.

They get there – as she expect the coat check is unmanned because not prime time arrivals or departures of the event. Dany pulls him in any ways and asks him to help her with her dress. Jon follows obediently, having no idea what help she may need but willing to do whatever she asks of him.

Dany purposely leans against a table so that Jon will be facing away from the door. Jon’s eyes brighten with anticipation as Dany pull him close. She bites her lower lip teasingly and enjoys how his eyes don’t leave her mouth. She knows he wants her, just as much as she wants him.

“I was a little mean to you earlier, with that tiny little kiss,” Dany whispers as he moves closer to her, pressing her back against the table.

“Yes, you were. You were being a little naughty,” Jon groans as Dany runs her fingers through his hair and gives it a little tug.

“Just a little, but I hope I haven’t made you angry with me,” Dany says while eyeing him hungrily. She literally wants to devour him.

Jon briefly kisses her mouth, biting her lower lip as she had done before. “I was angry with you, but I am working on forgiveness,” Jon hisses into her ear and his hands tighten around her petite waist.

“Here is the kiss I believe you initially asked for,” Dany says as their mouths crash together before she can finish her sentence.

Their kisses are rough and passionate, Dany completely forgetting about the world around her as Jon holds her closely. Jon presses her harder against the desk as both are panting and making small noises to voice their enjoyment of the physical connection they are sharing.

Suddenly Dany hears horrified gasps coming from the room’s entrance. In her highly distracted state it takes her a couple of moments to realize that is the three girls that had been irritating her all night long. Dany got so caught in the moment with Jon she forgot all about them. She smiles sweetly at them as Jon peppers kisses along her jaw.

Jon doesn’t even look to see who it is, because he doesn’t give a fuck. “We are busy in here, get the hell out,” he snaps over his shoulder while running his hands up and down the outside of Daenerys’s thighs.

“So rude,” Ygritte hisses as she slams the door shut behind them.

Once alone again, Dany laughs as Jon buries his face in her neck to resume kissing her soft skin. She is thrilled that those dumb bitches got to see them fooling around. There has always been a dark part of her that enjoys people watching her in these sexual moments. Dany kisses Jon’s lips hard and slides her hands all over his built chest before sliding her hand to grip his tight ass.

“I thought you needed some help because your dress got wet,” Jon murmurs while kisses down Dany’s collar bone. Going a little slower he begins kissing down her cleavage as she whimpers with anticipation.

Dany guides his hand to the top of her dress where the material is still moist from the water bath she had endured. Jon buries his head in her chest as he kisses the soft flesh in between her beautiful tits. His hands kneading her breasts as he kisses and licks between them. He is rock hard and wants to do things to Daenerys Targaryen that might scare her. There is a darkness in him that he has always denied himself, he wants it with her. He wants it with her right now.

Jon slowly moves his hand from the outside of her thigh to her knee and then kisses her mouth while slowly moving his fingers up her dress. Dany kisses him harder, her heart racing as he gets closer and closer to her core. Jon’s fingertips caress over her thong, he groans at feeling her wetness through the thin fabric.

“You’re wet here too, baby. What can I do to help you with this?” Jon croons, he wants to touch her, to pleasure her.

Dany gasps with desire, but then reality comes crashing down around her. She quickly grasps his wrist and moves his hand away from her aching pussy. Jon immediately lets her guide him away from her.

“Jon, stop. We can’t,” Dany pants, feeling regret but also knowing that she can’t do this. “We need to remember what ‘this is’, please.”

Jon nods in agreement and knows she is referring to the fact that he is paying this gorgeous woman to be his date tonight. On the other hand the connection they share is something he can’t ignore. But he also knows she is not a prostitute that will be paid for sex. This is a high end agency that does not tolerate money for sex. Nor does he.

But he still feels drawn to her and he won’t ignore it. He has never felt this way about another woman before.

“Let’s get out of here, baby,” Jon whispers before nibbling on her earlobe. “My driver can pull my car around and take us anywhere, let’s just go for a ride.”

Dany knows she should say no, but with his arms around her and his lips pressed to her neck she has lost all restraint and common sense.

“Okay.”

++o++ ++o++

“I am serious, Daenerys,” Jon says for the second time. His driver is taking them for a long ride around the city of Chicago while they talk things out. “I want you to quit your job, no more dates with other men.”

“I know you are serious,” Dany says calmly, but she is not the type of woman that is going to be told what to do. “My answer is still no, Jon.”

Jon scowls, this is not what expected. He can’t stand the thought of Daenerys going on other dates through her job as an escort. He fucking hates the idea. Jon’s eyes flash with anger, he is getting more and more upset.

Why is she fucking fighting me on this? Shit, what if she has an actual boyfriend?

Oh well, fuck him. I am not giving her up without a fight.

“I don’t want to keep discussing this in the car. Come to my condo, so we can work this out,” Jon demands of her. He can’t imagine saying goodbye to her for the night, or forever “The night isn’t over.”

Dany can sense his desperation, his passion right below the surface of his cold demeanor. She also knows that her resolve to avoid getting physical with Jon is quickly faltering. Dany know that she wants him, badly.

“Okay. But just to talk,” Dany mumbles.

Jon smirks and agrees before instructing his driver to take them home.

As the ride continues, Jon pulls her nearer. She melds her body next to his, her heart races. She longs to be close to him. Jon traces patterns on her knee with his fingertips, Dany sighs happily in response. As the car nears his home Jon begins to plant wet kisses on her neck, going lower with each kiss. Daenerys moans his name, squeezing her legs tightly to help ease the ache she feels.

The couple pause to stare at each other, with no words needed between them, their lips meet in a passionate kiss. They kiss and hold each other until the car is parked in the underground garage of Jon’s building.

Thanking his driver and asking him to keep his cell phone on, Jon tells him it is possible that his guest will need a ride home this evening.

“If you choose to leave, of course. I want you to stay,” Jon tells Daenerys confidently.

Dany blushes but says nothing. She isn’t sure what she really wants or what will or won’t happen this night.

Jon takes his date on a full tour of his home, which he knows is impressive. Dany is polite as Jon leads her through his high end condo. They continue to flirt as the evening progresses, finally settling on a game of pool in Jon’s game room.

As Dany bends over to line up her shot, Jon places his hand on her back for the sole purpose of touching her. The couple has been very touchy-feely throughout the night. Dany takes her shot and pockets two, she laughs as she has finally caught up to Jon. Standing up, she feels him directly behind her as he plants a firm kiss on her bare shoulder.

“Daenerys, I want you. I want to lay you down on my bed, be rough with you while giving you extreme pleasure,” Jon admits, he can’t take it much longer.

Daenerys hears his words, frowning. She can’t blame him for saying or thinking these things. But she just can’t get over feeling like it would be wrong. It is one thing to be a paid escort that goes on fancy dates that says goodnight at the end of an event, it is another to be paid while having sex with a man. Even the physical things that Dany has already done with Jon this evening has her feeling embarrassed, ashamed even.

Jon Snow has completely put her into a tailspin.

“Say something,” Jon pushes, seeing her internal struggle.

“Jon, part of me can’t even believe I am standing here. I am twenty four years old, a college student…this is a job for me. That is all,” Dany says bleakly, making Jon visibly cringe. “To be clear, I have never been physically affectionate in this job. I certainly have never been paid for sex!”

“I understand, Daenerys. I get it because I’ve never paid for sex, period. And yes, I’ve used the escort service numerous times...but only for public events,” Jon admits. “I hope you believe me.”

Dany nods softly, she is somewhat relieved to hear this isn’t a regular thing for him but it still doesn’t solve her internal dilemma.

“I would do anything...to have you, right now,” Jon says while pulling her closer and kissing her neck. Jon’s hands holding her closely. “I want you, baby. Only you. Tell me you don’t have a boyfriend or somethings like that.”

“Would you please hand me my purse,” Dany says softly, ignoring Jon’s confused look as he does as she asks.

Thanking him, she pulls out her cell phone. Opening the phone app for the Escort Company she pulls up her user account. Jon’s eyebrows furrow as she ignores him and begins selecting buttons. She positions the phone so that he can see what she is doing.

Daenerys signals that her in progress date with Mr. Jon Snow has ended. Effectively clocking her out.

And then she flags Mr. Jon Snow as someone she will not see again as a client.

Jon is crushed, he takes a step away from her. He is surprised at how much her rejection hurts.

“Okay, if that is what you want. I will call my driver, he will get you home safely,” Jon says coolly, he is upset. Jon gets his phone out of his pocket, shaking his head as he scrolls through his phone to call his driver.

Dany is confused by Jon’s actions for a second before realizing what Jon must be thinking. He actually thinks that was her way of letting him know that she was done with him. He couldn’t be further from the truth. “I have a better idea, Jon Snow. How about instead you kiss me and take me to your bed. Since I am no longer getting paid for this evening. You made some pretty big promises earlier….the words extreme pleasure and rough were used.”

Jon’s mouth falls open and then he sees the laughter in Dany’s eyes, she is actually amused at his distress.

Jon frowns, pulling her close and kissing her before speaking. “But you flagged me as someone you never want to see again?”

“Yes, I did,” Dany laughs at his cross expression. “From now on, if you want to spend time with me - you can ask me out the old fashioned way. And take me out on a real date.”

Two can play this game, Jon thinks to himself.

“Look Daenerys, that is great and all. But now that you have flagged me as someone that you don’t want to see again, that may impact my overall customer rating...what if that influences access to all the other woman I can date at your escort agency…” Jon says seriously, looking concerned while not really paying attention to her.

Dany realizes he wants to keep seeing other women through the escort service and gets pissed. “Screw you, I am out of here!” she hisses while pushing past him. She can take a cab she decides.

“Now, now. Don’t be hasty, the least I can do…” Jon scoops the petite beauty into his arms as he walks her to his bedroom. “Is make you come before you leave.”

Dany’s mouth falls open at his nerve, she is about to demand he release her when his mouth finds her earlobe and nibbles on it sensually. Sighing, she allows him to pull her closer to him. She is upset, but her desire for him is overwhelming.

“Fine, you can make me come. That is the least you can do,” Dany huffs as Jon places her gently on his large bed.

“You are so fucking hot when you are mad,” Jon says while flipping Dany to lie on her stomach, his hand finding the zipper at the top of her dress. “Really, you are fucking hot at all times...but your wrath excites me, love.”

Dany gasps quietly as Jon slowly lowers the zipper of his dress, leaning over her he kisses down her body as the opening zipper reveals more and more of her bare flesh. She closes her eyes as the zipper nears the top of her thong, her heart racing with anticipation.

Jon groans appreciatively when he sees that she is wearing a bright red thong, a contrast to the black dress that has enticed him all evening. Feeling the blood rush to his cock he can’t take it any longer, he bends down and slowly licks behind the trail the opening zipper leaves.

“I was just joking about my rating, I don’t want anyone else but you,” Jon says while pulling her dress down and off. “But your fiery temper was a complete turn on.”

“Is that so?” Dany murmurs as she turns over to lie on her back, enjoying the way Jon’s eyes darken at seeing her now exposed breasts. “I think you better get to work, Jon Snow. I am expecting ‘extreme pleasure’ - I’ve waited long enough.”

Jon frowns, “You being a little naughty still. I told you I was joking, that I only want you, and you still seem cross with me.”

Sitting up on her elbows Dany raises her eyebrows, “And what if I am still cross with you? What are you going to do about it?” She challenges him.

Pulling off his shirt to toss aside, he studies her face to ensure she knows what she is asking for. The things he wants to do to her, he is hungry for her.

Jon roughly pulls her off the bed to stand in front of him, she is absolutely stunning. “I am going to start by kissing the shit out of you, and then I am going to fuck you.”

(Photo credit: Edit made by Tumblr user @motherdragons86 - check out her awesome work) @motherofdragons86

Dany throws her arms around his neck as Jon’s lips crash to hers. His hands sliding up and down her bare back before resting on her ass. He squeezes and kneads her plump cheeks before pressing his hard bulge against her. As their kisses intensify Dany moans loudly, Jon kissing down her neck until he reaches her tits.

Licking and sucking Jon explores her breasts as he has fantasized about all night long. Dany pulls the hair tie out of his hair to release his dark curls, then running her fingers through his hair in order to move his head closer to her body.

Jon sits on the bed, moving her to stand in front of him. He begins kissing lower and lower, until slowly pulling down her thong. “I need to taste you, I want to make you scream,” he tells her.

Dany whimpers, she is desperate for him. Jon guides one of her feet to rest next to him on the bed, effectively opening her legs to him. With her legs spread open, Dany gets excited at being fully exposed to him. Jon leans in and kisses her sweet pussy, his hands holding her waist steady as she shakes with arousal. The flicker of his tongue sending her waves of pleasure through her entire body.

Jon licks, and sucks until his darkness intensifies, testing her comfort level he gives her a small bite at the fleshy side of her pussy.

“Oh, Jon! Fuck, yeah…” Dany groans as his teeth nip her again, she can feel her body about to peak.

Jon’s mouth is all over her, his tongue fucking her as his fingers circle her clit. Dany screams out and releases, her body shaking as he holds her tight, helping her not to fall.

Lapping her juices as she calms down from her orgasm Dany trembles in his arms. She is a little sore from his bites, but she also really likes it. He didn’t overpromise. The pleasure he just gave her was incredible.

“Jon...I want more,” she whimpers with longing.

In record time Jon pulls Daenerys down to be bent over the bed, her bare ass taunting him. Jon gives into his desire and smacks her right ass cheek hard. Dany yelps in surprise before squeezing her thighs closed, she is so wet with arousal. Her juices of desire flowing again.

Jon undoes his pants and begins stroking his hard cock. Watching his hand print bloom on her creamy white skin excites him tremendously. He has never felt so comfortable with a woman, this girl is making him crazy. He traces his hand print on her ass cheek, she whimpers with longing. He knows she wants more, he knows she wants him.

Jon curses under his breath.

“Baby, what is it?” Dany asks quietly, still recuperating from her orgasm and the slight sting of his last smack on her ass.

“It’s been a really long time for me, I don’t have any condoms. Do you?” Jon asks as his fingers begin pleasuring her slowly.

“I don’t, but it’s been a really long time for me too. Oh, no boyfriend by the way. I’ve had the birth control shot, and I’m clean...I mean if...well…” Dany’s voice falters as Jon’s fingers increase their speed.

“I am clean too, I want you. I want to fuck you hard,” Jon groans while tugging and pulling at his own dick, rubbing it along the crevice of her ass.

“Then do it, now!” Dany hisses. “Fuck me!”

Jon’s free hand slaps her right butt cheek again, Dany cries out in response as he feels her clench around his finger that is still working her. He knows she likes it, it makes her aroused.

Both breathing hard Jon leans over her, his large hand clutches her throat gently. He is testing to see if she is okay with it. She doesn’t protest as he pulls her up to arch against his chest. Daenerys breaths in quickly, her head falling back on his shoulder in submission. She wants him to take her, she wants him to be in control.

Jon groans in appreciation, he wants to dominate her and take care of her at the same time. He wants her to be submissive, he needs her to trust him.

Jon wets his shaft with her wetness, she is so aroused it makes him groan with excitement as he remembers her taste on his tongue. Jon positions his tip at her slick entrance, she is so wet, he thrusts forward. His cock sliding roughly into her, making her gasp loudly at the intrusion. There is a slight sting as he completely fills her. Jon pushes every inch of his cock into her, holding her as she shudders against him.

Once Dany signals that she is ready, Jon begins frantically fucking her, and hard. With his hand still around her neck he places his other hand tightly on her hip to hold her still as he pounds into her from behind. Daenerys gasps as he pushes in and out, his pace frantic. The sound of skin slapping against skin filling the room.

“Oh fuck...yes, yes, please fuck me harder!” Dany cries as she clenches tightly around him, her ass pushing into his body.

Jon releases a short guttural sound, his hand tightening on her hip as he bends her over the bed again. This time his hand moving from her throat to hold her hair. “Your fucking amazing, Daenerys. God I love this,” Jon grunts with lust, his eyes closed tightly as his body strains to take her.

Dany gasps as he resumes taking her, the different position allowing him to fuck her even harder and faster.

“Shit!” Dany screams. “Just like that, don’t stop.”

Jon watches his thick cock slide in and out of her body, the sight is enough to make him cry out as he continues to move. He feels himself about to release, he wants her to come with him. Moving his hand from her hip he leans over her, reaching around to stimulate her clit.

Dany moans and whimpers as her orgasm rolls over her. Jon lean over and bite her shoulder as she climaxes, her pussy spasms around his cock as Jon holds her sweet flesh gently in his teeth. Jon resumes pounding into her until his orgasm rolls through him.

He pushes in deep as his seed spills into her, holding her tightly against him. His balls snuggly pressed between them.

Both crawl up the bed as Jon pulls her tightly into his arms. Dany is panting softly as she tries to control her breathing. Jon’s heart still racing as he caresses her skin.

“Jon?” Dany whispers.

“Yes, love?” Jon mumbles, kissing her forehead.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Dany smiles into his chest, her body still enjoying the delicious ache from the proper fucking he just gave her. “I will stop seeing other clients, I will quit my job as an escort.”

Jon smiles broadly, he is thrilled and relieved all at once. He really cares about her and doesn’t want to share any part of her.

“This evening with you, just getting to meet you, to know you...was money well spent. Thank you for quitting that job, it means a lot to me,” Jon tells her with a smile on his face as he cranes his neck to look into her eyes. “Now I won’t have to spank you again.”

Daenerys just laughs before kissing him tenderly. She also knows that there is no way in hell that was the last time Jon Snow will spank her, the thought exciting her.

++o+ Story End +o++

Part II: Money Can’t Buy Me Love - Read here (X)

#jonerysvalentines #jonerys #jonerys fanfic #jonerys smut #jonerys fanfiction #jonerys fics #jonerys ff #Jon Snow #daenerys targaryen #GoT #got fanfic #@mhysaofdragons

134 notes · View notes

th3p41n73dpr1nc3 · 6 years

Text

BNHA OC Template

Name: John Roderick Porter

Pronunciation: jon : rod-er-ick : poor-ter

Meaning of Name: John: Biblical Hebrew name meaning Jehovah has been gracious/has shown favor. Roderick: Middle Latin Rodericus; derived from Old High German Hrodrich (Famous Ruler), a compound name composed from the elements hruod (fame) and rik (king, ruler). Porter: English and Scottish roots; occupational name for the gatekeeper of a walled town or city, or the doorkeeper of a great house, castle, monastery, from Middle English porter ‘doorkeeper’, ‘gatekeeper’.

Hero/Villain Name: Kingslayer

Nicknames: Scip, prince, immortal douchebag

History of Nicknames: Scip is the slang used by the SCP Foundation to describe an anomalous object, person, or place. This is always connotated in the form of SCP-[Insert SCP Number Here]. Prince was given to him as a shortened version of his self-proclaimed nickname of “The Painted Prince”. Immortal Douchebag; this nickname should really explain itself.

Aliases: Mr. Death, Agent Porter, Captain, the Grim Reaper

Nationality: American (Ex Patriot)

Affiliation: SCP Foundation; SCP Foundation Ethics Committee; The Cult of Jashin

Student Number: N/A because he is a teacher.

Quirk: Quirkless. His abilities are not the result of a quirk. They were obtained through anomalous means.

Anomalous Abilities: Reincarnated by the god of death (Jashin) in order to follow His will with the myriad of siblings he has that also inhabit this world. He is invulnerable to physical damage and upon offering a blood offering, (usually his own heart by cutting it out of his chest), to be blessed by Jashin, he may access a heightened state that excels his physical capabilities to rival All Might’s. The heightened state will only last as long as the heart he as offered stays beating. As a new heart regenerates within his chest, the heart outside will gradually decay. When the new heart has fully regenerated, he no longer has his powerup. He is experienced with the use of most firearms, several forms of martial arts, including bladed weapons training, from his centuries of service to the Foundation.

Birthday and Astrology Sign: [REDACTED]

Birthplace: [REDACTED]

Death Date: [REDACTED]

Death Place: [REDACTED]

Age: ~ 475 - 500

How old does he look: Mid-Twenties

Mental Age: 12-50 (it depends on the kind of mood he’s in)

Gender: Cis-Male

Orientation/Sexuality/Preference: Prefers Alternian men. Humans began to bore him after so many failed relationships. On his first try with an Alternian, there was immense friction (giggity) but the two of them eventually learned to love and crave one another’s company through and through. (Total Bottom Bitch but still masc.)

Appearance:

Eye Color: Neon Pink

Eye Shape: Average/Round

Do they wear contacts/glasses: Both; he will keep a pair of regular brown eyed contact lenses if he is feeling a need to blend in with less effort. Glasses are more for the fact that he loves how fashionable and hates that he actually needs them.

Hair: Bleach/Bone white. Kept in a neat and tidy undercut with the hair always styled back. Light stubble on his face as well, (slightly lighter than Aizawa).

Weight: 86.2 kg

Height: 180.3 cm

Body Build: Toned/Lean. He has slight disgust for people who take their muscle masses too far. Looking like a Greek god is one thing, but it is an entirely different issue for those who “go beyond”.

Body Shape: Elongated Downward Trapezoid

Complexion: Fair skin, no wrinkles despite his [REDACTED] age.

Cup Size: [REDACTED] (lol)

Blood Type: [REDACTED]

Handedness: Right handed. (Sidenote): Prefers a bladed weapon over firearms or fists but will use the firearm if he’s in a hurry or his hands if he wishes to experience the intimacy of a kill if it’s personal.

Hand Type: Average Sized/Proportional to his body. (Practiced Hands).

Nails: Clean, Well Maintained/Manicured.

Movement:

How does he walk: Carries himself well, walks with a purpose. Typically tries to keep an average pace as he feels that if he is moving too quickly it will likely raise suspicion.

Posture: Tall/Imposing, vulnerable when he is with his troll husband.

Flexibility: Can do all sorts of things with his body.

Voice: Booming when needed, (used to train recruits). Can sing relatively well if he’s had a decent amount of liquor. Not too deep but not too high pitched either.

Speech Mannerisms: None, he is very good at orating, especially since he is a teacher at UA. Orally gifted. (Approved by Arcita Porter).

Scars: “Y-Shaped” autopsy scar, outer/inner arms and legs are riddled with cut marks from sacrificing. Back is covered in whipping scars as well as deep scratch scars from his troll hubby.

Birthmarks: None

Piercings: Ears, does not wear anything in them anymore. Had snake bites when he was much, much younger, but the holes have filled in these days.

Tattoos: Inner right forearm where scars are not as prevalent; inverted equilateral triangle inside a circle, the symbol of Jashin. Above and below this tattoo are the names of friends and esteemed colleagues that he has lost throughout the centuries. Inner left forearm has the insignia of the SCP Foundation, along with additional names of friends and colleagues. Arms and body are riddled with various runes (blood, moon, and daedric), all of which are paying religious homage to Jashin.

Facial Structure: (Will be devoting more time to bring you an actual picture of this when my drawing skills improve as I have just started drawing and am nervous about butchering my muse).

Statistics:

Power: 4.5/5.0 Stars A-

Speed: 3.0/5.0 C (Regular) : 4.8/5.0 A (Heightened State)

Technique: 5.0/5.0 A+ (He’s an old geezer he knows what he’s doing).

Intelligence: 4.9/5.0 (Experience far outweighs youth in his case).

Extra Explanation: The man is centuries old. He has no issues getting his hands dirty, as he has a long career of doing so for the sake of the Foundation’s secrecy, and acquisition of scips. He was one of the first pairs of boots on the ground when it came to rounding up individuals with quirks in an effort for his superiors to document and study what was at one time considered an anomalous humanoid. Ironically enough he met his current husband through the same way. He is loyal to the Foundation but he still has enough of a brain to think for himself. As a great agent once said with his dying breath, “You ain’t machines. You ain’t tin soldiers. You’re people, men an’ women who do the shit nobody else can do. An’ people make a choice. There’s a damned big difference between doing’ the job because you were told to, an’ doin’ it because it’s gotta be done.” Although he detests some of humanity’s more harsh decisions, he will still lay himself on the front lines if it means the protection of the masses. He does not usually talk/brag about his faith, but he has no problems answering honest questions about it with honest answers. Questions pertaining to his past/current career however are met with the typical response of “it’s classified”.

The reason he is as old has he is was essentially my own personal compensation since a genetic trait taking over 80% of a population of a number > 7 billion would take an immense amount of time. The reason that history is not nearly as long as it normally would be is because there was an GH-0: Dead Green House Scenario where the Foundation had to utilize the site located in SCP-2000. Shortly before shit hit the fan for the world a new anomalous virus was discovered that allowed humans to obtain superpowers. The virus was immensely contagious and would register as a recessive trait in the human genome that carriers often went unnoticed and were often successful in flying under the Foundation’s radar. All it took was a few of the recessive carriers to live amongst the general populous for the virus to take effect; the Foundation only being able to notice this after it was too late and reluctantly giving up efforts to confine individuals with quirks, a.) because their cells were filled, and b.) because quirks became generally accepted. However, that doesn’t essentially mean that the Foundation chose to stay uninvolved.

Eventually, through manipulation of their allied nations’ governments, they were able to obtain specimens to research on, which allowed them to design and manufacture a variety of products that ran from containment procedures and tools that the police forces of today are often found using, to various types of clothing and products that are aimed to be sold specifically towards individuals with quirks. The profits of these products go straight towards the Foundation’s budget as maintaining a global fascist coalition of a pseudo secretive shadowy organization with little oversight can tend to be quite expensive. (To be clear, none of the aforementioned products have anomalous properties, they are strictly for selling to the masses to increase funding efforts).

Description of Anomalous Abilities: John Porter is a Painted Child of Jashin. This essentially means that he wouldn’t die even if God him/her/themselves was the one pulling the trigger. He has an ability known as a “Heightened State” where through the obtainment and offering of his still beating heart out of his own chest, he is able to access Jashin’s wrath, a power boost that is highly similar to All Might but without the whole huge muscled look. The power boost only lasts as long as the heart outside his body while a new one regenerates within his chest.

Clothing:

Hero/Villain Costume: Foundation Issued Black Multicam Fatigues and Jacket, 5.11 Tactec Plate Carrier Vest, Black Hiking Shoes, a black skull balaclava, a black multicam baseball hat with a grim reaper patch on the Velcro front, a pair of Oakly Straight Jacket sunglasses with the Fire lenses, a durable over the ear headset with a microphone, a pair of Oakly Pilot gloves, and a military sapper backpack.

Equipment: (All Foundation Issued). Preferred primary weapons of choice are the M4 carbine and the SR-25 designated marksman rifle; preferred sidearm is the HK USP .45. He also has been known to carry a machete, gifted to him by the Unholy Father (Jashin). On occasions it has been known to cause people’s limbs to go missing. Where they go…nobody knows.

Uniform: He is not a student so no uniform. He does however always ensure that he is looking presentable in a three-piece suit. The colors vary as he is very gay and loves to have options.

Preferred Outfit: His husband. (Lol jk, but not really…they screw a lot). He typically likes his stay at home days where he can wear nothing but a tank top and his boxer briefs and lounge around while he is grading papers and homework assignments. Should spontaneous company show up he will wear a bathrobe.

Characteristics:

Personality: John Porter is a man who will happily sit back and observe a conversation before kicking the proverbial door in and offering his two cents. He tries to find a balancing point between giving people honest advice in ways that will not cause emotional trauma.

Meyer’s Brigg’s: ENFP, -A / -T

Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Big Five Personality Traits: Gay, Calm, Intelligent, Quiet, Honest

Enneagram: 4 Individualist, Romantic

Most prominent personality trait: His calm demeanor.

Best Traits: Gay and Honesty

Worst Traits: Gay and Honesty

Likes: Clothing, Liquor, Sex with Husband, molding young minds, seeing his husband perform in concert.

Dislikes: People’s useless bullshit, overtly preachy religious people, hero’s who abuse the popularity system for monetary or status gain.

Quirks (little silly things he does): When seated he will shake an empty whiskey glass full of ice to anyone that is walking by and is physically between him and the source of his beverage, (typically a bar).

Fear: Losing control during a heightened state and hurting someone he cares about, (this has happened on more than one occasion).

Hobbies: Visiting a gun range, visiting a winery/whiskey distillery, visiting secret bars, underground fight rings.

Skills/Talents: Can cook a variety of meals from most nationalities. Takes various types of poisons regularly to quickly and easily identify them. He is fluent in thirteen languages: English, Spanish, French, Russian, German, Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, Afrikaans, Swahili, Farsi, Korean, and Italian.

Weaknesses: Arcita’s Iron Will.

Reason to keep on living: He detests humanity on occasions but still swore an oath to protect them by any means necessary.

What their self-image is like: He believes that he is a monster, and that someday all of his past sins will eventually catch up to him. But until that happens, he will try to be as decent of a person as he can while still working for one of the shadiest organizations known to man.

Religious/spiritual faith: Jashinism

How does his faith affect him: It made him an immortal douche bag.

What superstitions does he have?: Needs a cigar and/or cigarette for the end of a mission.

Coping mechanisms: Cooking, shopping, exercising/sex with husband.

Any Life Motto: “We Secure. We Contain. We Protect.” “Praise the Unholy Father.” “Goddammit John, did you take your fucking meds today?”

Favorite things: Fine whiskeys and wines, preferably aged. A one inch grouping from 250+ m away.

Health:

Physical: Flawless

Mental: Medicated

Emotional Stability: Due to a majority of the dirty work that he has had to do for the Foundation over the years, he obviously suffers from PTSD, Anxiety, Depression, and Panic Attacks. (He and his husband Arcita share a bit of the same mental illnesses). He is medicated however and makes sure to be on schedule for taking his meds properly, knowing how bad things could possibly get if he were to slip up.

If faced with a crisis, he immediately fights.

Nutrition: He tries to eat as healthily as possible to ensure that he will have the longest amount of time possible in a heightened state.

Habits: Drinking socially, smoking occasionally.

Family History: (We’re not going to talk about this, mainly because this a muse that has gone through multiple rewrites and I haven’t gotten this far yet)

Background:

0-4: N/A

5-8: N/A

9-11: N/A

12-14: N/A

14-25: N/A

25-Death: N/A

Death-Reincarnation:

Post Reincarnation: Was captured by a Foundation retrieval team. Was able to use a silver tongue and convince them to employ him.

Did he like his upbringing: Yes, he simply regrets how he left things.

How did his upbringing shape him?: Taught him the consequences of making the blatantly wrong choices, hence why he willingly went with the Foundation to work for them. It also gave him a pretty thick skin to face the scrutiny and lack of trust he faced from his colleagues in the beginning of his career.

What did he enjoy most about his childhood: His loving parents.

What did he hate most about his childhood: everything else.

Current Dream: Mold young minds and keep humanity safe.

Long-term goal: To be left the fuck alone until the apocalypse.

Family Background:

Any Friends: Benjamin Miller (Deceased), Dr. Claire Porter(?), Koryn Wong (Deceased), Dir. Alexi Harkov, Ethics Committee Representatives Greene and Harrison, Toshinori Yagi, Shota Aizawa, Grisha Neloth.

Any Family: Husband; Arcita. Son; Novuck. Daughter: Madeline.

Relationships:

OC Family Character: Arcita Porter

· Status: Married (Husband)

· How well do they get along?

o Terrifically now. Although in the beginning the two of them were constantly trying to kill each other. This however slowly devolved into a flourishing kismesitude before mutual suffering brought out more positive feelings towards one another. The result of which was a longer and more sustainable relationship that eventually led to matrimony.

· What John thinks of Arcita: “He is the man that I would trade my immortality in for and die for again and again and again.”

· What Arcita thinks of him: “I initially saw him as a challenge. Something I could fight and dominate. These days that attitude still hasn’t changed but the context definitely has.”

· What John calls Arcita: Papa Lion

· What Arcita calls John: My Prince

OC Family Character: Madeline Porter

· Status: Single

· How well do they get along

o Madeline hated her father at first because he left her at the hands of the adoption agencies of the US. However, upon discovering why he did this, as she herself is now an employee of the SCP Foundation, she fully understands and no longer resents him. A bonding moment happened when the two of them realized that she shared his anomalous abilities. She now enjoys any time that the two of them can have to hang out together in a secret bar and exchange war stories. She finds these to be therapeutic at times as she utilizes the fact that her father is a wealth of knowledge.

· What John thinks of Madeline: “She and her brother are my entire world.”

· What Madeline thinks of him: “I used to hate him, but now I can’t see any reality where he’s not there to help me through my deepest moments of suffering. Nor could I live in a world where he would not be able to walk me down the isle one day. He may not have been there in the beginning, but he has more than made up for that now.”

· What John calls Madeline: Maddie

· What Madeline calls John: Dad (what else would she call him?)

OC Family Character: Novuck Porter

· Status: Single

· How well do they get along?

o Novuck and John are loving and endearing to one another, and there is nothing Novuck wouldn’t do for his father and vice versa. That being said, Novuck and John do not get along nearly as well compared to Novuck and Arcita. Interspecies differences aside, Novuck and Arcita simply have a better relationship, as both John and Madeline have a better relationship. Nothing to do with bad parenting.

· What John thinks of Novuck: “He and his sister are my entire world.”

· What Novuck thinks of John: “I’m really happy that someone as tough as he is, is one of the two best dads a grub could ever ask for. Considering the circumstances of how he found me, things could have turned out much worse. I’m very happy to have him as a father.”

· What John calls Novuck: Yard rat. (there’s a story behind this).

· What Novuck calls John: Dad Lusus / Father Lusus.

Canon Character: Toshinori Yagi

· Status: Single

· How well do they get along?

o Due to the Foundation’s availability of amnestics, the two get along very well.

· What John thinks of All Might: “All Might was the difference the world needed but I remain reserved to the fact that the peace he’s created is not remotely sustainable.”

· What Toshinori thinks of John: He is a good friend and a fearsome warrior, but he is also a man who understands where the battlefield ends and where civilized life begins.

· What John calls Toshinori: Brother

· What Toshinori calls John: My friend, John (any variations of his name).

Canon Character: Shota Aizawa

· Status: Single (tho John occasionally tries to set him up with Mic).

· How well do they get along?

o They have a steady working relationship, but they do not typically socialize on a personal level.

· What John thinks of Aizawa: “Aizawa is what I would call a more effective hero. The press constantly gets in the way and has a tendency to butcher whatever they can only make out in front of their faces. They never see the bigger picture and it is foolish to pander to their desires. It is for this reason that the shadows are the place where a hero can truly shine.”

· What Aizawa thinks of John: “He is a crazy man that should not be allowed to have a firearm.”

· What John calls Aizawa: Sleepy Kakashi, Broody Spiderman, Sir Sleepsalot.

· What Aizawa calls John: Crazy bastard, loose cannon, overtly covert.

Canon Character: Enji Todoroki

· Status: Married (?)

· How well do they get along?

o They don’t. John has to ensure that he is not in the same room as this man, else an accidental misfire could occur. To him, Endeavor represents everything that is wrong with the hero system. He would not willingly pull the trigger on the man in front of a room full of witnesses, but if orders came in from his respective Foundation handlers saying that Endeavor needed to go, he certainly wouldn’t hesitate to follow through.

· What John thinks of Endeavor: “I think he’s a cunt.”

· What Endeavor thinks of John: “Who is John Porter?”

· What John calls Endeavor: Fucknut, cuntbag, dipshit, fuck knuckle.

· What Endeavor calls John: Immortal Douchebag.

#bnha oc #oc #jashin #jashinism #my hero academia #UA teachers

18 notes · View notes

water-hates-learning · 6 years

Text

But It Was Home

Monster Kids AU that @mushroomminded started is too adorable. It’s so cute it’s sweeter than my Halloween candy. So naturally I had to write a thing.

******

Matt screamed for hours when Tom’s first baby tooth fell out.

Tom thought it was fascinating and kept poking his purple tongue into the hole where the tooth had been. Edd spent half his time consoling Matt and the other half making sure Tom didn’t aggravate his gums with his little claws.

He’d finally managed to get Matt to calm down when Tom asked what you were supposed to do with baby teeth.

Matt started screaming again at the idea of a little fairy sneaking into their rooms at night to take their teeth.

———

When they were small, Edd had fretted endlessly about their health. There were plenty of books and sites about defeating monsters, but very few on taking care of baby ones. It had taken a lot of digging and favors to find out how to take care of them.

Matt was the hardest. Tom could eat ground up and softened meats, usually soaked in honey or milk to make them easier on his baby fangs. But Matt needed fresh blood, right from a living vein.

Edd felt he should have been disturbed by how easy it was for him to roll up his sleeves and dig a knife into his skin.

———

They were a rambunctious pair.

Sometimes Edd wondered what insanity he suffered under to think he could raise two monster children, one whose species he didn’t even know. But damn it all if he didn’t care about the little shits. They were enduring, in their own ways.

Tom was curious about everything, always sticking his nose into every corner he could reach. And then often sticking whatever he found there into his mouth. Good lord, the things that child tried to put into his mouth. Edd almost wondered if Tom saw better through his sense of smell and taste than he did with his pitch black eyes.

Matt was more subdued but just as troublesome. He liked to collect things and stash them in places he thought Edd couldn’t find—under the couch cushions, in the kitchen cabinets, beneath the bed, etc. And he was a terribly messy eater. Edd had to burn bloodied clothes at least once or twice a week and he could not convince the vampire child to wear a bib to spare his garments.

And they both bit. A lot.

Tom was constantly chewing on something; so much so that Edd went so far as to buy several dog toys for the monster boy to sink his baby teeth into. Matt just…bit everything. He bit everything at least once just to see if he could. And then usually dissolved into tears when he realized what he was trying to bite either didn’t taste good or was too hard for him to bite in the first place.

Yeah, raising two monster kids was…an adventure.

———

Tom found out he could change into a four-legged, dog-sized tower of terror and everything went to shit.

When he didn’t get to eat dessert before dinner, he’d shift and throw a tantrum, spitting smoke and clawing at the walls. When Matt took his favorite toy, he’d shift and tackle the other boy to the floor, snapping his jaws and battering at the vampire with oversized puppy paws. When he wanted to go outside but it was too dark or too late or too rainy, he’d shift and flop down on his side and yowl like a husky dog, dead weight whinging the loss of his outside time. When he had to take a bath, he’d shift and tear around the house, crashing into walls and tripping over his too big paws until Edd would finally manage to catch him.

Sometimes it was involuntary. If he was frightened, he’d shift and snap and snarl and breathe puffs of acrid smoke into the air that would set off all the smoke detectors and frighten him even more. He slipped and slid on the linoleum in the kitchen, crashing into the fridge more than once (there was now a Tom sized dent in the thing that Edd couldn’t be bothered to fix).

While Matt’s response to fear was to scream and cry, Tom’s was to fight back. As small and scrawny as he was, he refused to take shit from anyone. It’d be admiral if he wasn’t a stubborn little brat.

———

There were sloppy crayon drawings stuck on the door of the fridge.

Most were indistinguishable scribbles in vaguely human shapes, overlapping haphazard grocery lists and forgotten reminders to water the herb garden. Some of the paper was torn from little claws or smeared with snack time blood.

But they were all lovingly displayed, no matter how messy they were.

———

Tom liked music and often sang along with songs he recognized.

Matt liked soft things and made piles of his favorite stuffed toys to bury himself in like a nest.

Once, Tom caught a bad cold and was bedridden for days, sniffling, coughing, vomiting, and absolutely miserable. Edd did his best to keep calm, if just for the sake of the boys, but Matt panicked. He asked through gasping sobs if Tom was going to die. Tom, overhearing this, burst into tears and cried about how he didn’t want to die. It took several reassurances and a careful explanation about germs, bacteria, and sickness to calm them down.

Later, when Edd came into Tom’s room to give the poor boy a bath, he found the monster child half asleep. Matt was sitting at the end of his bed, singing a song in a soft, tentative voice.

———

Edd made sure to keep his workshop door locked and emphasized to both boys that they were not to go in. There were too many plants, potions, stones, and other spell components that could potentially harm them.

He should have known better.

Tom came barreling into the kitchen one afternoon on four legs, all scales and panic, tears and smoke dribbling down his features.

The workshop door was open and Matt was dry heaving onto the lacquered floorboards. Edd only needed to see the toppled and shattered jar of ground up blackthorn to know what had happened. He quickly scooped the vampire into his arms and hurried out of the room. Tom whined and thumped his tail on the floor pathetically as Edd helped Matt clear the veritable poison out of his system.

When they had recovered, he took them both by the hand and showed them around his workshop so they understand exactly why they were not to play in there.

———

Tom asked why he looked different than Matt and Edd.

Edd told himself that the lump in his throat and the burning in his eyes was from working with hawthorn and not because he could feel his heart wrenching in his chest.

———

It was fine when Matt made friends with the little boy next door.

It was fine when the little human boy came over to play.

It was fine when Edd and Eduardo found the mutual ground of being single fathers.

It was fine until Matt sank his fangs into Jon’s neck at Jon’s insistence.

It was fine until Edd had to explain that Matt had just turned his best friend into a thrall.

It was fine because Jon still wanted to be Matt’s friend.

And it had nothing to do with magical mind control.

———

Matt picked up speech far faster than Tom did. In fact, Tom didn’t really start talking until he was almost six. Most of his communication came from grunts, growls, whines, and roars. Edd was worried about his development and spent many a late night reading up on it until he gave up. Monster children were not human children.

And then one day, a five and half year old Tom toddled up to his adoptive father, tugged on the sleeve of that worn out robe, and said in a small but stubborn voice,

“Da’. Food.”

Edd gaped at him for a full minute before crowing with happiness and sweeping the boy up into his arms.

———

Edd and Eduardo definitely did not compare their whose children were better in feats of epic, dad rivalry.

And they definitely didn’t drag Eduardo’s housemate Mark into it.

And they both most certainly did not fall over each other gushing when they found all three boys curled up in a pile, napping together.

———

Ringo was a tentative edition to the house. An adoption that Edd couldn’t say no to. He’d seen the kitten in a box outside the grocery store and the poor little gray thing had mewled at him. And the next thing he knew, he had a kitten in his pocket and was wondering how on earth the kids were going to react.

The answer was very well.

Tom instantly took a liking to the tiny gray furball and trundled around with it on all four, his tail in the air, batting at her playfully. Matt was more apprehensive but eventually warmed up to her as well.

When Ringo crept into his workshop and settled comfortably on top of his foot, he knew he’d made the right decision.

———

The house was usually in some sorry state of disrepair. Between Edd’s failure at proper house maintenance, Tom’s destructive habits and temper tantrums, and Matt’s messy eating, the place didn’t looked all that cleaned up.

Edd did the best he could to keep it livable and presentable. But it wasn’t until Eduardo came by to drop Jon off that he really had any idea how bad things were.

Eduardo took one look around at the claw marks in the floor, the chunks taken out of the walls, the blood stains trailing from the kitchen and promptly said the place looked like a murderer lived there. Then he put a hand on Edd’s shoulder and told him seriously,

“I’ll help you make this place monster kid proof. But only because you’re obviously too pathetic to figure out how to do it yourself. And also I need to make sure Jon stays safe.”

Edd gave him a breathless thanks and tried not to cry from relief.

———

The house down the lane with the weird garden and strange symbols in the door was noisy and messy and sometimes smoke came pouring out of the open windows while the smoke alarms wailed. The yard had holes dug in it by eager claws, the fence between the yards was cracked from impacts, and there was a suspicious looking dark stain on the walk up to the front door.

It was crazy, but it was home.

#8ball fics #monster kid au

174 notes · View notes

easyhairstylesbest · 3 years

Text

Dylan Farrow Would Like to Reintroduce Herself

Coat, Max Mara.

PHOTOGRAPHED BY VALERIE CHIANG

Scouring the fantasy section of her favorite bookstore near the Connecticut farm where she grew up, Dylan Farrow would pick out anything that “promised me dragons,” she says. She loved the fire and destruction of mythical beasts; conspiracy theories involving families plotting against their own kin; and the way women, children, and other small creatures wielded magical powers that made them stronger in those make-believe worlds than they were in our own. “I think it started out as an escape route,” she says. “For any fans of fantasy, whether they’re in my position or not, it’s fun escapism, a way to step outside of yourself and your problems, and, I don’t know, think about dragons for a while.” She pauses to clarify: “I’m not trying to escape who I am—I’m fine with who I am. I mean, it’s taken me a while to get here, but I can say with [some] degree of certainty that I’m okay.”

Still, the first time we talked, late last year, it hadn’t quite sunk in for her that she had her own debut young adult fantasy fiction novel, Hush, on bookshelves like the ones she’d perused as a teenager. In a lot of ways, the release of Hush has served as a debut for the 35-year-old author as well, in her new life as a full-time writer and working mother, defined by no one but herself. After all, for most of her life, Dylan has been known mostly in relation to the salacious scandals that have swirled around her famous family. She became a public figure not by choice, but rather because she was Mia Farrow’s daughter, or Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ronan Farrow’s sister. “I don’t feel like I have a father,” she says, but at one point her father was Woody Allen, Mia’s boyfriend of about a decade, who’d adopted Dylan as a child. Later, of course, Allen would go on to have an affair with, and then marry, her sister, Soon-Yi Previn. “There’s no support group for people whose sisters marry their fathers,” she says. “Or is he my brother-in-law? And is she my stepmom? I’ve got to joke about it!”

Dylan playing dress-up with Mia in the early 1990s.

Courtesy of Dylan Farrow

Then there’s the other scandal that she’ll likely never fully escape, now the subject of an HBO investigative documentary series, Allen v. Farrow. In 1992, when Dylan was seven—the same year the Soon-Yi affair blew up—she told her mother that Allen had taken her into an attic crawl space and sexually molested her, as Mia would testify in the ensuing custody battle. It was part of a pattern that Dylan later said went on for as long as she could remember, of Allen getting into bed with her wearing only his underwear, or putting his head in her naked lap. The custody fight was vicious and tore their family apart, estranged Allen from most of his children permanently, and became such a public tabloid spectacle that Dylan remembers having to be sneaked out of the back of her New York City apartment building with a blanket over her head so she could get to school without being snapped by the paparazzi. She still has PTSD from the ordeal.

A report by the Yale-New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic, whose methods the judge in the custody case questioned as unreliable, concluded that Dylan was not sexually abused and that Dylan was either disturbed and made it up or had been manipulated by her mother. The judge gave Mia full custody, finding that the testimony proved “that Mr. Allen’s behavior toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.” Allen appealed, but the appellate court agreed with the trial judge’s custody ruling. Although it gave more weight to the Yale-New Haven report, the appeals court found that the overall evidence, while “inconclusive,” “suggest[ed] that the abuse did occur.” New York State child welfare investigators later announced that they’d found no credible evidence of abuse. Several months after the custody decision was announced, a Connecticut state’s attorney announced that he had probable cause to criminally charge Allen but was declining to file charges to spare Dylan the trauma of a court appearance. Criminal charges have never been filed against Allen in the matter, and he continues to maintain his innocence. (Allen declined a request to comment for this article, but he has vociferously and repeatedly denied having molested her, and has pointed to investigations that cleared him of wrongdoing.)

“Believe it or not, the stuff that I wrote about in that essay does not encompass the entirety of my existence.”

If you know Dylan’s name now, though, it’s probably because in 2014, well before the #MeToo movement, she wrote a New York Times essay about that abuse, calling out Hollywood actors and asking whether they’d be so quick to celebrate Allen’s work had their own daughter been “led into an attic” by him. It wasn’t until her brother Ronan helped expose the misdeeds of Harvey Weinstein that Dylan’s accusations were given much credence. Dylan had emerged from obscurity to become a staunch advocate for survivors of sexual assault. But now she’s ready to emerge from that as simply a writer. “Believe it or not, the stuff that I wrote about in that essay does not encompass the entirety of my existence,” she says. “It’s a small part of 35 years of living.”

In fact, Dylan isn’t even Dylan Farrow’s name anymore. When she was eight, she changed it to a name she prefers to keep private, in order to psychologically distance herself from the events of those tumultuous years. But she’s been using Dylan as a sort of pen name, starting with the 2014 essay, to avoid confusion given that Dylan is the name in all the court documents. Among close friends and family, though, she says, “No one’s called me Dylan since I was 10.”

“I’m not trying to escape who I am. I’m fine with who I am”, says Dylan. “I mean, it’s taken me a while to get here, but I can say with some degree of certainty that I’m okay.”

VALERIE CHIANG

Reading Hush, it’s impossible not to see Dylan’s story in its themes. The book centers on Shae, a girl who is dealing with a lot and doesn’t really have time for boys. She’s “short but strong,” Dylan says, and she’s also doggedly determined to ferret out the truth—even as adults tell her it’s all in her head. The world she’s living in is falling apart, stricken by drought and a pandemic that Dylan swears she dreamed up well before 2020. A despotic leadership class wields magic to spread fake news, earn tithes, and control the populace. The written word, the people are told, will kill them; the pandemic spreads through ink. And it is only in trying to solve the murder of someone she loves that Shae finds out that she, too, can wield magic. But can she learn how to use it fast enough, when the truth is slipping away and she’s being gaslighted by powerful forces, causing her to question what she knows? Dylan says that of course the themes are partially based on her life, but readers shouldn’t try to draw too many direct parallels. “As I keep having to assert,” she says, “I do know the difference between fiction and reality.”

Fantasy writers like “Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, and Susan Cooper were all a big deal in our house,” Ronan says, adding that his older sister also “had an abiding love of anime.”

COURTESY OF DYLAN FARROW

After being awarded custody in 1993, Mia moved her large family, filled with biological and adopted children, many of them with disabilities, from Manhattan to their country house in Connecticut. Mia was determined to give the kids “the real farm experience,” Dylan says. They had horses, chickens, goats, and a cow who got lonely and tried having sex with everything, including one of the Farrow siblings’ wheelchairs. “It was a busy, noisy life full of children and animals,” Mia says.

Dylan now maintains a happy pandemic pod with her own family on that same farm, 88 acres with hiking and horse trails and a lake. She’s calling via Zoom from a home office with nothing but greenery and sunlight outside her window. Dylan, her husband (she asked that his name not be published), her four-year-old daughter Evangeline (whose name is already all over Mia’s Instagram), their pug Luna, and their English bulldog Nova stay in one house. Her brother Fletcher, who works in tech, and his wife and two daughters live in another. Their mother has a third. When we talked, Ronan and his fiancé, Jon Lovett of Pod Save America, had recently joined them from the West Coast and were staying with Mia.

Dylan’s earliest exposure to fantasy, she says, was a bedtime ritual of her mom reading The Hobbit to the kids. “My mom, I sometimes forget, is actually a really talented actress,” she says. “So she would read the bejesus out of this book, and it was the most epic thing I had ever heard. My mom would narrate and do all the voices. To this day, her rendition of Gollum is like canon tome.” At around age 11, Dylan wrote stories to read aloud to her younger siblings. “She kept them so enthralled,” Mia says. Ronan, two years her junior, says they both read a lot growing up. “Great women writers of fantasy loomed large for both of us—Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, and Susan Cooper were all a big deal in our house,” he says. “Dylan had an abiding love of anime, which I only dabbled in.” (Dylan says she also had an abiding love of Lance Bass of *NSync.)

Dylan casts a spell on her brother Ronan, whom she calls “one of the most important people in my life.”

Courtesy of Dylan Farrow

“I loved to play make-believe with Ronan,”Dylan says. “We’d play dress-up, and I’d sometimes let him play Barbies with me, if I was feeling charitable.” They collected pewter Dungeons & Dragons figurines and created a civilization for them. “We developed some pretty elaborate lore,” Ronan says. In her teenage years, Dylan wrote and illustrated a Game of Thrones–style novel, clocking in at “530-something” pages, that she says “was not fit for human consumption.” Its audience of one was her little sister, Quincy. There were dragons. The main character was an elf. There was a war. Some of it took place in space. “Every concept and every crazy notion I needed to express got chucked into the pot, and it went in a million directions and it was garbage,” she says. “I mean, my sister loves it to this day. She still talks about it.” Back then, as an author, Dylan felt supremely confident. “If I thought it was bad, I wouldn’t have written 500 pages,” she says, laughing.

The court hearings of Dylan’s childhood were, in many ways, a prosecution of her so-called “overactive” imagination. She’d described being in the attic with the “dead heads”—“which was literally because I didn’t know the word for mannequin,” she says. “I knew that people thought that I was using my imagination to tell lies,” she continues, but somehow that never affected her desire to write. Nor did Allen being a famous writer influence her in any way, “although it’s probably the reason I never wrote about New York and jazz and May–December romances,” she says.

In her senior year at Bard College, where she was majoring in art and Asian studies, Dylan decided to sign up for an online dating site associated with The Onion. This was in 2007, well before Tinder, “when dinosaurs roamed the Earth,” she says. At first, she wasn’t having much luck. “I signed up and there was, like, an influx of fifty-somethings being like, ‘Age ain’t nothing but a number, right?’ ” she says. “I’m like, ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree.’ ” Then she came across this “adorable” recent graduate living in New York City who described himself as a geek. “So I did the thing I’ve never done before or since, and I sent him a message and flirted with the guy,” she says. “I said, ‘You didn’t mention you were a cute geek.’ Winky-face emoji. I’m turning bright red telling you this.”

They met up at Grand Central Terminal and got pie and coffee, and the conversation never stopped flowing. After graduation, she moved in with him in New York. “He tried to kick me out,”she says. “He told me, ‘You’re finally independent. You should have the experience of having your own place, paying your own rent.’ I’m like,‘That’s really responsible of you, but that sounds like a lot of work.’ ” Dylan got a job as a production assistant at CNN, working the phones and the copy machine at the Nancy Grace show, mainly so she could continue to crash with her boyfriend. She was eventually laid off. “Journalism, it turns out, wasn’t for me. Wrong member of my family,” she says. When her boyfriend got a job offer he couldn’t turn down in South Florida and asked her to join him, she agreed. “In the back of my head, I’m thinking, ‘Well, I’d better get an engagement ring out of this,’ ” she says. And she did. They’ve been together for 14 years, married for 10.

Dylan has been writing stories to entertain her younger siblings since age 11. “She kept them so enthralled,” Mia says.

VALERIE CHIANG

Dylan spent the following six years in Broward County, living a relatively normal life. She worked for a weight-loss center, and later found a job as a graphic designer. Back at home, she’d write fantasy stories well into the early hours. “That was where I was finding my happy place,” she says. “I sat down with my husband at one point and I said, ‘Look, I spend every morning sitting in my car giving myself this pep talk, like, Today is going to be over at some point. And I can’t live like this.’ ” She did some soul-searching and realized she wanted to become a full-time writer. “My husband was like, ‘Okay, this is important to you. We’ll make it work.’ He’s a champ.”

So she sat down and wrote a novel. Not Hush, but a “casserole” of ideas. “It was about necromancers, set in a Spanish Inquisition–like setting,” she says. “It was maybe a little anti-religion; they were heretics.” Her protagonist was too old for YA, but the story didn’t exactly work for a broader fantasy audience either. “I wound up learning a lot about, you know, what sort of book gets picked up by publishers,” she says, laughing.

Around 2014, Dylan and her husband decided to move back northeast to Connecticut. Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine had come out to critical praise the previous year, garnering two Golden Globe and three Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Screenplay for Allen. The sexual assault allegation, the custody battle, and leaving Manhattan had all happened in 1992 and 1993. Dylan had started fourth grade in Connecticut, thinking she’d never have to worry about any of it again, except for the rare occasions when her mom went to court. “I sort of treated it as out of sight, out of mind, and I did that for about 20 years,” she says. “But then he was up for an Academy Award, and no one cared.

We were in the process of relocating, and I snapped and went crazy and the essay happened.” When she told someone close to her that she was thinking about speaking out, he said, “Well, why? Nobody cares.” When she told her therapist that “maybe this is something, someday, you know, nebulously, abstractly I’m considering,” he told her that it was a terrible idea and she’d undo all the progress she’d made.“Obviously, I didn’t listen to those people,” she says. “The thing is, in a lot of ways, they were wrong. But in a lot of [other] ways, they were right. In 2014, nobody really did give a crap. And I did undo all the progress I’d made.”

The essay caused a stir, but Allen kept his Academy Award nomination, and the star of Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett, won the Oscar for Best Actress. Meanwhile, Dylan had opened Pandora’s box. “I had to develop an entirely new skill set with different coping mechanisms based around having spoken out and the aftermath of that,” she says. “The difference was, I was doing this on my own terms.” She still struggles at times, “but on the whole, it does feel healthier to cope with it on that level rather than just ignore it. I think it’s also more helpful to the people in my life: my husband, my family, my friends. They know what’s going on now. I’m not just freaking out because I saw some random movie poster. There’s a method to the madness.”

Mia, Ronan, and Dylan in Connecticut, in 2016.

Courtesy of Dylan Farrow

Mia can see a huge difference. “She’s evolved from being a shy child to being much more assertive. And a lot of it has to do with coming out with her personal story and feeling less like a victim,” she says. “I do know that as a mother, my job, among other jobs, is and always has been to support her in whatever she needs. I’ve stood by her all these years, and I will continue to do so.”

Dylan has only seen three of Allen’s movies: 1973’s Sleeper (“As a kid, I think it was framed as, ‘Do you want to see Daddy eat a rubber glove?’ and I was like, ‘Oh yeah!’ ”) and two others, Alice and The Purple Rose of Cairo, neither of which Allen appears in onscreen. According to IMDb, Dylan appears in Alice, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and New York Stories, “which is really trippy,” she says, “because I don’t remember being in them.” For her Alice appearance, she visited her mom on set, ran up to hug her and say “hi,” and then ran off. She remembers the moment, but not being filmed. She also remembers being at the circus with two kids who kept putting their Cracker Jack in her popcorn. Years later, when she saw the movie, she realized she was watching herself. “It was weird, like seeing my memory, but with different people,” she says.

Triggers are all around her, and whether they’ll set her off depends on how she is doing emotionally that day. She’ll freeze up if she’s scrolling through a news feed and sees a face with thick glasses, or if she overhears jazz music. In the past, such things could leave her curled up in a fetal position. During a 2018 TV interview with Gayle King, Dylan burst out crying after being shown a recording of Allen denying the allegation. It hasn’t gotten better overnight—“It’s a process,” she says—but Dylan has been steadily improving since speaking out. “I try to take the mindset that I have a 100 percent success rate of getting through every single one of the panic attacks I’ve ever had; none of them have killed me.” In some ways, she says, it’s been a blessing to be Evangeline’s mother in this fraught time, to have to care for a small child and to know she has to hold it together for her. “My top priority is obviously making sure that my daughter is always safe, healthy, and loved,” she says. Asked what she says when others assert that Allen was just acting as a doting father, Dylan replies: “Let him watch your kid.”

It still baffles her when Allen’s fans come after her on Twitter, saying she’s lying. “This is something that I’m literally telling you happened to me. Who are you to say, ‘No, it didn’t’? I was there, you weren’t. Go away.” Still, it’s amazing to her that some people peddle the idea that her mother brainwashed her to believe she was molested and also to have PTSD from it—something she says Mia would have needed “military-grade torture equipment” to pull off. “It’s crazy that for some people, the idea that I was brainwashed is somehow easier to swallow than child sexual abuse,” she says.

“I guess I’m just way more vindictive than anybody gave me credit for,” Dylan says. “And I say that because it’s not entirely a bad thing. Vindictive women can get stuff done.”

VALERIE CHIANG

Dylan didn’t tell her mother and Ronan that she was going to write the essay until she already knew she was going to publish it. “I kind of wanted to wait until there were no take-backsies before I really discussed it with them, because I wasn’t sure how they were going to react,” she says. It was the first time she’d told Ronan what had happened in detail. “And he started crying, which I didn’t really expect,” she says. “He’s not super sentimental.” Even for Ronan, #MeToo warrior that he is now, there was a period of adjustment, of separating the family desire to put the past behind them with his sister’s need to expose her wounds in order to heal them. They talked often and at length, and in 2016, when Allen’s film Café Society was opening the Cannes Film Festival, Ronan wrote his own essay supporting his sister’s claims for The Hollywood Reporter. It was loud and splashy, and dominated all the press for Allen’s film. And in its own way, it led to Ronan chasing down the stories of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults. “Dylan was absolutely a voice of conscience on this issue,” Ronan said by email. “I learned a lot, watching her come forward with her story, and maintain it consistently, year after year—even when I and others around her weren’t sure it was worth the blowback.”

“Without Ronan’s support, I probably would’ve felt completely adrift,” Dylan says. “He’s one of the most important people in my life.” What she didn’t realize was just how important those conversations would be to her brother and others, through his work.

“I thought he was just, like, calling me. It wasn’t until I read his book that I realized I was actually having this huge impact on him.” It bothered her, though, that her essay from 2014 “was kind of brushed off and ignored or sidelined or outright stomped into the dust,” but when her brother said the exact same thing two years later, suddenly people’s ears perked up. “I got salty at Ronan, because I was like, ‘Do people really need a white man to say the exact same thing to get people to listen?’ ”

So in 2017, in the wake of #MeToo, she wrote a second incendiary essay, this time for the Los Angeles Times, which questioned how all these men could be taken to task, but Woody Allen was still making movies. “[At age seven,] I wasn’t, obviously, given a platform, and I was not in an emotional state to take advantage of a platform. I was literally a child,” she says. “And it’s easy when you are a white man with a considerable amount of clout, power, and wealth to silence a voice like that, pin the blame on my mom, and spin the story for 20-plus years.” The good thing, though, is that Dylan has begun to recognize her own power. “I guess I’m just way more vindictive than anybody gave me credit for,” she says. “And I say that because it’s not entirely a bad thing. Vindictive women can get stuff done.”

“I never thought I would be writing about a dystopia in a climate where that would feel relatable.”

In the end, Hush hasn’t been an escape route for Dylan, but rather a way forward out of the darkness that has clouded her existence for so long. After her first novel about the necromancers failed to find a publisher, she decided to start over, “drawing on the themes and ideas that I was seeing percolating in the world around me,” she says. In 2018, as now, fake news and propaganda were hot topics, as was a general distrust of the system. “I never thought I would be writing about a dystopia in a climate where that would feel relatable,” she says. When Mia read it, she saw her daughter in Shae. “I see Dylan’s courage against monstrous thoughts and monstrous people and powerful foes,” she says. “Being disbelieved is part of the assault.” While she says she can’t speak for her daughter, Mia thinks that in writing the book, Dylan was able to reckon with her past in a way that was “bearable,” by creating a story “which is and isn’t about her.”

Hush

Dylan Farrow bookshop.org

$17.47

As of mid-January, Dylan was nearly finished writing the sequel to Hush, with only half of the final chapter and the epilogue to go. She’s found that it’s progressing faster and is more enjoyable this time around, because she no longer has the terror of being a debut novelist who, before this, “was a known quantity for something very specific—and something with a lot of morbid curiosity around it.”

She knows that curiosity will always be there. “I can’t completely disentangle myself from it,” she says. And the publicity for this book has meant a lot of “talking about the thing that I like least in the world. It’s always going to be the elephant in the room.” But no amount of fear can take away the pleasure of holding her book in her hands, and knowing that someone else might happen across it at a bookstore and take it off the shelf. Her simple hope is that “somebody will read it and connect to it and enjoy it and maybe not take it so seriously.”

Jada Yuan Jada Yuan circumnavigated the globe in 2018 as the inaugural 52 Places Traveler for the New York Times. Before that, she spent over a decade at New York Magazine and its websites as a contributing editor and culture features writer, where she profiled Stevie Nicks, Ava Duvernay, and Bill Murray, among others.

Dylan Farrow Would Like to Reintroduce Herself

0 notes

geekmama · 6 years

Text

The Kensington House

Pure fluff and kid!fic besides, this is the 26th part of my Time of the Season series, and written for the Where prompt in the BDT of prompts I’ve been working on - 98 down and 2 to go!

There was something amiss. Sherlock knew it as soon as he laid eyes on his wife, on returning to 221B earlier than his text that afternoon had originally estimated. Molly was very happy to see him, but there was something around her eyes, and in her smile, and in her embrace when she rose from the dinner table and came round to greet him. The baby must have been put to bed already, but the three older children were their usual selves, each of them vying for attention and yammering on when Sherlock was frowning with narrowed eyes, striving for wordless communication with their mother.

But then Jon popped up with, “Oh, and Lady Smallwood came to visit today, she walked in just when we’d started playing pirates!”

And Will laughed. “Yes, we were bashing about with our swords, even Daisy. And Lexie was helping Mum with the laundry, so the place was a complete tip! I think Lady Smallwood was pretty shocked, she didn’t stay for tea or anything--”

“But Daddy!” Daisy broke in, tugging with some violence on the sleeve of his Belstaff. “She asked us to dinner tomorrow -- all of us, not just you and Mummy. At her beautiful house! May we go, pleeeease?”

Sherlock pried Daisy’s little hand from his coat and gave it a squeeze, though he raised a brow at Molly’s expression. “Is that what it is?”

He saw that she was tempted to brush it off, but then she gave a rueful chuckle. “Well, yes, a bit. Not that I blame the children! If it hadn’t been pouring buckets all day, we could have gone out somewhere, a museum and the park perhaps. But with Lexie barely on the mend from that virus...”

“Yes, the weather was far too cold,” Sherlock agreed. “It’s ridiculous for the beginning of May, and particularly inconvenient on a day when these tiresome brats are out of school and must be kept occupied lest they tear the place apart.” The tiresome brats merely laughed at this, and hugged him, and he couldn’t help smirking. But he said to Molly, “Not the best way to spend your day off. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to stay and help. ”

“Greg needed you,” Molly shrugged. “And we managed -- though I believe Will was right about Alicia being shocked. Mrs. Hudson let her in and we didn’t hear her coming up the stairs, so there was no time to put things to rights. But we can discuss this later, if you like. I believe your greedy sons have left you at least a few scraps of dinner! Come sit down.”

But Daisy, dissatisfied at this put-off, said, “But Mummy, Daddy, can we go tomorrow? If we promise to be good?”

The thought of his children on the loose in Alicia Smallwood’s elegant Kensington mansion was enough to strike dismay into the heart of a stronger man than Sherlock Holmes, promises or no. But Molly reiterated in her “Mummy’s Serious” tone, “Your father and I will discuss it later!” and Daisy sighed, dramatically sulky as only a four year old -- his four year old -- could be, but ultimately accepting the delay without further complaint.

Alicia might be known as Lady Smallwood, Associate of the British Government, but she was also very much a woman and a mother, and was not at all impervious to the sight of three of the four Holmes urchins, all dressed to the nines and fairly dancing with anticipation of a high treat as they made their way into the gate and up the front walk, their wary but resigned parents in tow.

“No running! And remember: your best manners,” Molly was heard to say, probably for the tenth time.

Alicia chuckled as Mycroft came up beside her at the door and took her hand in his.

“Let’s hope you’re still amused two hours from now,” he murmured.

“Oh, hush,” she said, giving him a severe look. “You know you love them to pieces.”

Mycroft gave a sigh of resignation. “I do, but I prefer them in small doses, rather than en masse.”

Alicia chuckled at that. “They’ll be fine.” She turned back to greet Daisy as the little girl cast off restraint and flitted ahead, up the walkway.

“Look at my new dress, Aunt Alicia!” she exclaimed, as she bounced up the few marble steps to the wide porch. She stopped to smooth the skirt of the pink satin confection she was wearing. “Isn’t it lovely?”

“My dear, you look ravishing,” Alicia assured her, bending down to kiss her cheek.

Daisy sweetly returned the favor, and then said, brightly, “Hello, Uncle Mycroft! We’re here!”

“So I see,” said Mycroft, the laughter in his voice almost entirely free of disapprobation.

“Look, lads!” said Sherlock, too brightly, as the rest of the family approached in Daisy’s wake. “Uncle Mycroft is here, too! Now we’re guaranteed a fine selection of cake!”

Alicia narrowed her eyes at Mycroft’s brother but refrained from comment as Molly had the matter in hand with raised brows and a useful jab with her elbow.

Unfortunately, he only simpered at Molly before turning his teasing gaze on his brother again. “Things must be slow at the office with both of you able to be here,” he remarked.

“An accurate observation,” said Mycroft, “and a fact for which we must all be thankful. Boys! You look very smart -- and uncomfortable. I thought school was out several hours ago.”

“We had our music lessons just before we came,” Jon said, wrinkling his nose. “Madame insists we dress like gentlemen.”

“Ah, so I recall now, and very proper, too,” said Mycroft with approval, “though if your parents permit you might at least remove your ties -- God knows your father hasn’t worn one in years. Molly, my dear, you look as ravishing as your daughter.”

Molly, who wore a lacy white cardigan over a light blue sheath that prettily accentuated her still-slender figure, said warmly, “It’s good to see you, Mycroft.”

“And you,” said Mycroft, with real sincerely, smiling down at his sister-in-law.

“Alicia,” said Sherlock. “You’re looking well.”

Alicia raised a brow. “Thank you,” she said, then silently mouthed one word at him: Behave!

He made no verbal reply, just assumed a comically wounded expression and placed his hand over his heart.

Alicia rolled her eyes and and turned back to the little boys. “I see that you’ve brought along your violin, Jon, and we’ve just had the piano in the drawing room re-tuned. Will you two favor us with your latest pieces?”

“Yes!” said Jon with alacrity, and Will smiled, too, his eyes lighting at the prospect of sitting down behind Alicia’s beautiful baby grand. “But can we play in the back garden after?”

Alicia laughed, remembering the astoundingly grubby but eminently satisfied look of the three the last time they’d been allowed the run of the back garden. The lawn and shrubbery were quite extensive for a home situated in the middle of London -- which was, of course, one reason for tonight’s invitation. Alicia said, “If your parents permit, yes, but you should probably wait until after we’ve had dinner. Now come in, all of you, and let’s have some music!”

The children had been on their best behavior, both prior to dinner and throughout the rather formal meal, sufficiently awestruck by their surroundings to be quieter and more careful than usual, and actually put into use the manners they’d been taught. Now they had been released to play in the back garden while the light lasted, much to Molly’s relief. The house was not at all “childproof”, for Alicia’s three children were grown and had been gone a dozen years or more. None of the three had elected to settle in the noisy bustle and excitement of London and now rarely even visited the metropolis. Alicia’s eldest, the current Lord Smallwood, had settled at the country estate with his wife and son, shortly after the death of his father; her younger son had emigrated to Australia in his early twenties and was still gainfully employed in the music industry when he wasn’t indulging in some extreme sport or other, to which his mother was forced to turn a blind eye or go mad with worry; and the daughter of the family had married a Scots physician and was settled in a picturesque little town outside Edinburgh, busily raising a pair of ginger-haired twin girls and apparently more than content with rural life.

“It’s a shame your children don’t care for the city,” Molly commiserated, as Alicia stepped up beside her, near the window where she had been surreptitiously keeping an eye on her brood. “You must miss them.”

Alicia gave a little shrug, though she was smiling as she looked out at the children in the garden. “Oh, I don’t know. It gives one a good reason to indulge in frequent holidays. Mycroft and I were in Scotland just last weekend, for example -- Allison and Amabel are growing up so quickly! And I believe it won’t be long before they and their cousins -- my oldest boy’s children -- will be able to come visit us in London, whether their parents accompany them or not.”

Molly smiled. “That will be an event.”

“To be sure. They’re already anxious to meet their little Holmes cousins.” But then Alicia chuckled. “Heavens, I can just see -- and hear -- Mycroft.”

Molly gave a small snort of laughter. “We’ll have to get him a bottle of his favorite wine for the occasion. Or even brandy! But he’s been very welcoming to our little savages this evening. I was a bit surprised you dared to invite us, after that display at Baker Street yesterday. Not our finest moment.”

“Don’t be absurd,” said Alicia. “Entirely understandable under the circumstances! And there’s not a mean-spirited bone among the lot of them. Really, Molly, you’ve done an amazing job with them.”

“Well, thank you, but Sherlock has a great deal to do with it, too, you know. He’s a wonderful father.”

“Marriage and fatherhood seem to have been the making of him, certainly,” Alicia agreed. “Gave him something to think about other than his beautiful, brilliant self, which was exactly what he needed. Still, who would have guessed, nine years ago?”

“Well… I did,” Molly said with a smile.

“So you did.” Alicia turned to Molly and considered her thoughtfully for a few moments, and finally Molly raised an inquiring brow. Alicia said, as if in reply. “Speaking of yesterday… not that that has anything to do with it, really, it merely reminded me why… well… I assure you I’ve had it in mind for months...”

Amused at this uncharacteristic rambling, Molly asked,. “Alicia, are you quite alright? What did you have in mind?”

Alicia took a deep breath through her nose, steadying herself, then glanced around before meeting Molly’s eyes again. “Do you like this house?”

Molly laughed. “Well, of course. How could one not?”

“Yes. Well. I like it, too. But it wants… a family. It was made for a family, all those years ago, and of course it was a splendid home for mine when the children were growing up, but… they’ve been gone a long time, now. And my husband… well. In any case, I was wondering… would you and Sherlock like to have it?”

Molly stared, gave a choking exclamation of “What? Alicia, you--”

“Rent free, of course,” Alicia interrupted, as though Molly hadn’t spoken. “Though there is still the upkeep -- I use a service now, and they are most efficient, if a trifle costly, though with the children you might want to hire some staff -- not necessarily live-in, though there is certainly room, there are quarters for at least two or three persons off the kitchen. And there are the taxes. But I’m given to understand the two of you could well afford those things and still keep Baker Street as an office for Sherlock, and as a second… ah… bolthole? Guest house? In any case, I don’t suppose you’d care to give it up. You have done such a lovely job renovating it since you and Sherlock married and the children began to arrive.”

“Alicia! You cannot be serious!”

“I am, though.” A little smile tugged at Alicia’s lips. “I have finally acquiesced to Mycroft’s wishes and consented to move into his house. There is some refurbishment already being done there in preparation.”

“Oh!” Molly smiled. “That’s wonderful! Are you… that is--”

“I have not yet agreed to marry him. We are still in negotiations on that point.”

Molly laughed. “Oh, Alicia, you are… the completest thing. To keep The British Government on a lead for all these years…”

Alicia chuckled, and looked quite smug. But she said, “So. Will you discuss it with Sherlock? Since little Alexandra came along it is all too apparent to those who love you that 221B Baker Street will soon be filled to bursting. Here there are enough bedrooms for each of your children to have his or her own with plenty left over for guests, a playroom, an office. I won’t be taking much of the furniture, just a few favorite pieces, and you can keep what you like, and replace the rest at your leisure. Daisy, and even the boys might like to pick out new furnishings for their bedrooms, for example. They still share a room at 221B, I believe?”

“Yes,” said Molly, feeling quite dazed. “John’s old bedroom, though they’re getting so big… and we’ve been in a quandary about Lexie, now that she is getting older. She can’t stay in our room much longer.”

“And here she won’t have to!” Alicia said cheerily. “There is a lovely little bedroom that would be perfect for her, just across from the master suite.”

“The master suite!” Molly repeated, even more dazed. Not that she and Sherlock had not been blissfully happy in his bedroom… well, their bedroom, for almost a decade now. But still…

“Would you like to come upstairs and take a look around? And I believe Mycroft has been presenting the proposal to Sherlock while we’ve been talking, and I haven’t heard any explosions. I take it as a good sign, don’t you?”

“Oh, Heavens. I don’t know what to say, Alicia. Why… why?”

“I don’t want to sell -- the property just gets more and more valuable. But I don’t want it to sit vacant, either. And lease it to strangers? I… I just don’t think I could do it. Think of it this way: you and Sherlock will be doing me a great favor.” Alicia laughed again at Molly’s apparently obvious bewilderment. “Come! Pull yourself together. The children will be fine out in the garden for half an hour. Let’s go see what Sherlock thinks, and the two of you can take a look at the rooms upstairs -- go all over the house, in fact, so you can make an informed decision.”

It was after midnight and he and Molly were in bed, but not sleeping. Far from it. They were both lying on their backs, staring at the deeply shadowed ceiling. Holding hands. Still both astounded at the way their world was being overturned.

Sherlock thought one minute that he couldn’t do it, then the next he remembered that he would not be leaving 221B, precisely -- he would still spend a great deal of time there. And Baker Street was just as close to the boys’ school as the Kensington house. He could imagine his sons racing over when class let out, if he were not out on some case; doing their homework or playing until he should be ready to journey home.

Home.

They could still practice their music here, after school -- Mrs. Hudson would grieve for it, else.

Ah, Hudders. What would she say to all this? She was getting on in years, of course. Didn’t make the journey up the stairs with tea and scones nearly as often lately. Visited her sister in Devon more, though that lady’s health was failing rapidly, from what he gathered. That would be a blow and no mistake. And it might not be long before she herself… well. Time was a cruel master to all, even their timeless landlady (Not your housekeeper! -- he grinned briefly in the black night).

There’d be room at the Kensington house for her, too, if it came to that.

Ten bedrooms. Lord. Not quite as bad as Musgrave, but along those lines.

They would have to acquire a housekeeper.

And a second violin for Jon to keep at 221B. The spinet could stay, since Mycroft had a fine instrument of his own and Alicia had told them she was content to leave her baby grand with the House. William would like that -- and Molly. And the girls, eventually. Daisy was nearly old enough to begin lessons already.

But… it still hurt to think of leaving. After all the work they’d put into 221B (and C) to create a suitable environment for their growing family. Of course, they had not realized just how much their family would grow when they’d begun the renovations.

Four children. Who would have thought it, a decade back? And yet here they were with a houseful -- and nothing yet done to prohibit a potential fifth. They’d have to think seriously about that, or risk another surprise. Alexandra had been a delightful one, to be sure, but five children? It seemed excessive, to put it mildly.

Though his parents wouldn’t mind. They reveled in their role, Mummy dismissing the bother with a wave of her hand, and merely hiring some neighbors’ daughters, lively teenaged girls, to help out when Will, Jon, and Daisy were to stay more than a night or two. And Lexie, soon enough.

And he gave a slight snort of laughter at the thought of denying his own happiness.

“What?” Molly whispered, turning her head on the pillow to peer at him, squeezing his hand.

He squeezed back. “I am… counting my blessings, I suppose.”

She let go of his hand and turned onto her side to face him, fingers rather shyly smoothing the soft material of the ancient T-shirt he wore. She said, “Do you think the Kensington house would enhance them?”

“I think it might. I think we’d be fools not to accept. Our children are not going to stop growing.”

She chuckled. “No! Though sometimes I wish…”

“What? That time would stop?” He moved to face her and put his hand on her waist.

“Yes,” she said, and, closing the final gap, kissed him.

He smiled beneath the kiss, bittersweet.

He’d always known there were two sides of the coin called love, which was why he’d shied away from it for so many years, and even this issue, the inexorable march of time, was an ever-present weight. Pain was always part of the joy -- and perhaps made the joy all the sweeter.

Doors closing.

And others opening, down the way.

“I’m a lucky man,” he whispered, when he could.

“You are,” she whispered back. “And a brave one, too.”

But he laughed softly at that, knowing that it was only she who allowed him to be so. Physical courage had never been an issue, and he had never lacked confidence in his intellectual abilities. But love… the one thing that truly mattered… that had required assistance.

The loyalty and perception and faith of one Molly Hooper had been necessary to complete him.

He reached up and brushed the auburn hair back behind the perfect pale pink shell of her ear, seeing the colors in his mind’s eye, even in the shadows.

How long had it been since they’d made love in the clear light of morning, or through a long, golden afternoon?

And yet, the darkness enhanced one’s other senses.

Touch.

Smell.

Taste.

“I love you,” he replied, still whispering.

“I know,” she whispered back.

And, sensing his need, she gave herself to him once again, in that well-practiced way she had… skill… infinite tenderness… an old comfort…

Yet somehow, she could still surprise him… somehow it was always, always new.

Mycroft was stuck in his office, but Alicia was able to escape for a few hours on the evening of the Big Move, accepting the invitation to join his brother’s family, John and Rosie Watson, and Greg Lestrade for a celebratory dinner of Thai take-away, and to see the changes that had been wrought at the Kensington house.

Alicia had moved out nearly two months before to facilitate matters, and was happier living with Mycroft than she had imagined possible -- and he seemed content, too. He had twice reiterated his proposal that they should marry, and she had almost accepted the last time. Perhaps it would not needlessly complicate their lives. Perhaps she was making too much of a fuss over it. She knew many women who were on their third or even fourth marriage -- and most of them were divorcees, a situation far more difficult than her own. Being a widow, with her children grown and getting on with their lives, really did simplify matters.

She was still mulling over this subject as she arrived at her former residence, and did not move on until she’d exited the car and had entered the front gate. Walking up to the door, however, she noticed how neat the small front garden looked, with three new rose bushes, a new bed of pansies beside the porch, and the bits of lawn very well-tended. The front door had been repainted, too, a shiny black, and it now sported a knocker very similar to the one on the door of 221B Baker Street.

She used the knocker in the manner for which it was intended, and it wasn’t more than twenty seconds before the door was thrown open by Jon, with Daisy just behind.

“Aunt Alicia!” said Jon -- or half-shouted, really. “Wait till you see my bed! It’s even better than it looked in the shop!”

“She has to see my room first!” cried Daisy in the tone of a four year old who’d gone without her nap and reached the limit of her patience with her older brother. She gripped Jon’s jumper with both hands and tried to pull him out of her way with some violence.

But Sherlock had apparently heard Alicia’s knock, too and was coming up just behind the children. Seeing what was toward, he snapped, “Enough!” in so sharp a tone that Alicia gave a little start herself, and the children turned to him wide-eyed.

Jon was carefully silent. Daisy, however, began to whinge, “But Daddy! Jon--”

“But Daisy,” Sherlock interrupted, bending down to look her in the eye. “You’ve been skating on thin ice for the last hour and if you utter one more word you’ll find yourself staring at the most boring corner I can find in this house. Alone. Until I say you can move, not your mother or Uncle John. Do you understand?”

Alicia tensed, fearful that the little girl would be rash enough to put her father to the test. But, thankfully, she did not. Daisy merely lowered her gaze, lip quivering.

Sherlock straightened to face Alicia, “Welcome to the madhouse.”

Alicia replied, sympathetically, “Long day?”

“My God, you’ve no idea. Come into the dining room,” he said, leading the way. “The kitchen’s set up, and the bedrooms -- and they do look like something out of Parenting Magazine. But the tour can wait. We were just setting out dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” came a tiny, discontented voice from behind them.

“Shut it!” came Jon’s hiss, just as Alicia glanced over her shoulder. Jon was giving Daisy’s arm a surreptitious squeeze in warning, even as he favored Alicia with an innocent smile.

Sherlock wisely feigned deafness and led the way into the dining room.

Less than an hour later, John and Rosie had departed, Sherlock was discussing a case with Greg over some brandy, and Molly led the way up the staircase, carrying little Alexandra, Will and Jon racing ahead, and Alicia Smallwood bringing up the rear, hand in hand with a now smiling Daisy.

Daisy’s smiles were in strong contrast to the pout she’d maintained throughout dinner, much to her father’s annoyance. Molly, tired as she was, had been rather amused, however, and had quietly reminded Sherlock that his daughter came by her pout honestly, and the avowed lack of hunger, too. John and Greg would have picked up on this, both friends hinting at numerous recollections of a certain consulting detective who’d been renowned for his petulance in the past, but they’d cut the teasing short, not because of Sherlock’s glare, but in consideration of the fact that Will, Jon, and Rosie had been all ears.

But it wasn’t hard to understand why Daisy and her brothers were anxious to show off their new bedrooms. Lady Smallwood had accompanied them when they’d all gone furniture shopping a few weeks ago, and now at last she would see the results.

Alicia had convinced Daisy that they should “save the best for last”, so Will’s room was shown first. He’d opted to keep the simple and elegant cherry furniture already in the room, only enhancing the collection with a new roll top desk to match. There were several movie posters on the walls, Star Wars, Avengers, and the like, and the framed print of the periodic table that had hung in Sherlock’s room for so many years held pride of place above his new desk. All the bedrooms had walk-in wardrobes and Will’s now held stacks of board games and neatly organized bins of Legos, action figures, and other small toys. Molly said to Alicia, “Admire it now -- it’s not likely to look this tidy for long!”, but Will, who was now ten and feeling very grown up as the eldest, said, “It will if I can keep the brats from destroying it!”

Jon retorted, “Who needs your old stuff? Come on and see mine, Aunt Alicia!”

Jon, too, had chosen a desk for homework and art projects, but had also fallen in love with a sturdy bed frame designed to look like a race car. Much to his delighted surprise, his mother had approved the purchase, though his father had been less pleased with the idea when he’d been informed. However, when the bed had arrived and Sherlock had seen its beauty and quality, he had become much more enthusiastic. He and Jon had run with the theme, and the walls were now adorned with a number of pictures and posters of race cars, and Sherlock had installed shelves for Jon’s collection of model cars. His beloved trains were relegated to the wardrobe, but Alicia noted that his old Thomas the Tank cuddle pillow was waiting for him on the new bed.

Daisy’s room was last, and certainly by far the best, at least in Daisy’s opinion. The entire room had been redone in pink: pink furniture with lovely hand-painted flowers; fuzzy pink throw rugs; gauzy pink drapes on the window and canopied four-poster bed; and tiny pink rosebuds were patterned over the newly installed wallpaper. It might have been overwhelming, but Molly had insisted on using paler shades of pink along with a judicious use of white, and the result was really quite soothing.

“Goodness!” exclaimed Alicia, taking it in. “It looks rather as though it dropped from Heaven!”

Molly chuckled. “Now all it needs is an angel to take care of it!”

“That’s me!” Daisy piped up.

“Hmmm,” said Molly doubtfully. “I don’t know… there was that little display at the dinner table. An angel would not have behaved so -- or at least she would have apologized to her father for giving into her weariness, even after a long day of moving house.”

Daisy looked between Molly and Lady Smallwood uncertainly as she worked this out, but then, coming to a decision, exclaimed, “I’ll be right back!” She ran from the room and could presently be heard yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!” as she pounded down the stairs.

At four in the morning, Sherlock was lying abed, caught up in a comfortable and eminently satisfied tangle with the wife of his bosom, the two of them having inaugurated the Kensington house in the best way imaginable, after recruiting their strength with a few hours’ sleep.

“Now it’s on its way to being home,” Sherlock murmured into Molly’s ear.

And she laughed, and turned her face to his, and kissed him. “I love you,” she said.

“I know,” he returned with a smile.

There were a great many more kisses, and some happy sighs, and cuddling: plenty of the most delightful clichés. But presently Molly extricated herself with a whispered, “Have to use the loo!” and Sherlock lay back contentedly against the pillows, stared at the shadowed ceiling, and thought once again what a lucky man he was.

He must have started drowsing again, for suddenly Molly was there, whispering his name again. “Hmm?” he said, opening his eyes. The light was dim, but he could see she’d put on her dressing gown.

“Get up for a minute!” she said softly. “You have to see the children!”

He frowned, but did as she asked, throwing on his own dressing gown and padding after her over the thick carpet, following her out the door.

“Are they alright?” he asked. “Lexie’s still asleep, isn’t she?”

“Yes. It’s the others. Come see.”

She didn’t pause at Daisy’s half open door, nor at Jon’s, but went straight over to Will’s room and motioned for him to peek in -- and there they were, all three of them curled up together in Will’s big bed, Daisy in the middle, and all of them sound asleep.

Sherlock turned to Molly and made a silent pantomime of outrage. “Tell me again why we needed to move here? We might just as well be back at Baker Street!”

But Molly shook her head, grinning. “They’ll get used to it. But now it’s really home for them, too. Don’t you see?”

There was nothing for it. He had to take her in his arms and kiss her again. “I love you, Mrs. Holmes,” he said finally.

“I love you, too,” she returned, a trifle breathless.

The proper exchange.

He took her hand up, said, “Come, then,” and, in the lovely silence before dawn, he led her back to bed.

~.~

#Sherlock #sherlolly

8 notes · View notes