#and [SPOILERS FOR THE BLACK DEATH 2010]

[skelelephant]

john lynch in armour save me…

john lynch in armour…

save me john lynch in armour…

[davosmymaster]

No Time To Die

TAGS AND WARNINGS - +18, Minors DNI, no explicit smut but sexual themes, whump, a lot of angst, blood, graphic wounds and procedures (?) probably not medically accurate, could be almost gore if you squint, hurt/comfort, two dorks in love, canon-typical violence, near-death experiences. Not based on the game, I don’t know anything about the game and I don’t want spoilers please.

PAIRINGS - Joel Miller x fem!reader

WORD COUNT -  9.6k.

SUMMARY - The main difficulty of being Joel’s closest friend is not falling in love with him, but you still do. Those feelings are buried until you join him on a mission to trade supplies with Bill and Frank. With your life now hanging by a thread, Joel is determined to get you to safety, but the clock is ticking faster than he can run.

A/N - I honestly don’t know what this is. I tried to look for angsty and whumpy fics and couldn’t find any that hit the spot just right; so I wrote my own. This story is set in some time between 2010 and 2020, or so. Bill and Frank are still very much alive. The only warning apart the amount of blood in this, it’s my own knowledge of the English language.

'Breathe'

 With a shiver, you try to comply with your own command. The action itself confuses you, and you don't know where exactly in your mind that thought came from; or why. All you know is that a moment ago you were nothing, absolutely nothing, not even human. You forgot your own existence in a still ocean made of black thick ink. The ink is now backtracking, though, but the remnants of it stay in your foggy mind, clouding it as your consciousness comes back in waves.

 Waking up from a dream is easy, you just come back into yourself from a nice trip to your own imagination. Regaining consciousness, however, is a little more difficult. Instead of going somewhere, you go inwards into yourself. Your overworked mind, already tired and busy with keeping you alive, doesn't care much about bringing you to any other place so you can die peacefully. No. And the awakening is not as it should be either.

Coming back into yourself is your body crawling its way to the land of the living, with your flesh drenched in tears, blood and sweat; and nails digging firmly into the dirt. At least that's how it feels as you go back and forth between the two worlds, rocked violently by the waves threatening to drown you in its heavy never-ending dream.

 You wake up tired, and cold. The first sense that returns is touch; and with it, a pulsing pain radiates from under the right side of your collarbone and all the way down to your chest and back. The —obvious— wound is warmer than the rest of your body. It's like you've grown a second heart right at the borders of the wound; it throbs relentlessly. The second is taste. Your mouth tastes like salt and melted butter; despite not having eaten either in at least three days. Around the dryness of your tongue you feel a sticky liquid swirling around in your mouth, plastered to your gums.

 Whatever it is, you cough it out of your mouth. The old blackened blood splatters on the wooden planks below your mouth. Then, a second later, you feel a sprawled hand on your back; and the rest of your consciousness returns with it.

 He calls your name. And he, whose presence you'd have recognized even blindfolded, even miles away from there, doesn't appear in your mind for a few seconds. But even half-conscious and at death's gates, his name leaves your mouth with a sigh of relief.

 Joel.

 "I'm here," he says, his palm now pressing a bit harder into your back, trying to comfort you somehow. If you had been fully aware, you'd have been embarrassed at the relieved groan that had escaped your lips while saying his name. "How are you feeling?"

 His voice sounds less muffled now, but the pulsing pain intensifies the closer you are to the surface. A second groan escapes your mouth as the warmth under your collarbone becomes impossible to ignore.

 "I know, I know" he says.

 Your eyes flutter open. From your point of view there's not much to see except torn wallpaper, your blood stains, and the shadow of a window. You're on the floor, your cheek pressed against the dusty carpet, your body very still laying on them, and Joel rubbing your back.

 The room is dark. His fingers enter your field of vision, they dip on the wet blood stains and turn around so Joel can see the sticky fluid staining his fingers. He takes a breath, a gasp, really.

 "Goddamnit," he mutters under his breath. His hand stops rubbing your back, and as black stains crawl from the corners of your vision, trying to take you under the waves again, he talks to you:

 "I need to turn you around..." he says with a gentle voice. It's like the icing on top of a sour and burnt cake; he's trying to sound caring, but that doesn't change the fact that it's going to hurt like a bitch. "You hear me?" he says, and his voice breaks for a second. Your ears ring, the next thing he says your brain doesn't process it, your vision has been clouded by darkness again...

 A scream tores your throat as a shooting pain lights your body on fire. It feels like lightning going through your backbone. Suddenly, the waves are very far away and you're feeling way too conscious for your liking. Despite your pain, Joel is still as careful as he can as he lays you on the floor, now facing the ceiling instead.

 The throbbing pain continues, and you blink to get rid of the tears that distort Joel's face. His hand wipes the tears from your face.

 "I know," he says. He has a crease between his seemingly angry eyebrows that you had never seen before.

 Both hands are roaming your ribs now, before you can even say anything. His warm hands give you shivers as he touches your naked skin. The pain is so unbearable that all you can do to mitigate it is hold your breath. If you could move, you'd be right now curled on the floor like a pretzel. You are not crying anymore, but you'd be lying if you said you weren't close.

 "Can you breathe?" he asks then, when he doesn't find any cracks in your ribs by touch alone. You don't respond because you can't find your own voice, and he sounds desperate at this point. "You coughed blood, I need to know if any of your lungs are collapsing."

 "It-it hurts..." you wheeze, your eyes tightly shut. For a split second, you wish you were back to being nothing. Being nothing sounds way better than having a gunshot wound in your chest. The bandages, tight over your bones and shoulder, don't mitigate the pain either. If anything, they worsen it. It feels like a tight sock over a painful pustule on your heel.

 Worst part is you know all this pain is for nothing; you know you won't make it. If you go back to the QZ, you will be executed. If not, there's nobody to help you except Joel. But even if there were doctors or hospitals, you highly doubted you could find the necessary tools to extract a bullet and stitch the wound. That is, if you manage not to die of blood loss.

 "Where?" Joel asks. Even beyond all this concern and well-hidden panic, he seems to cling to an ounce of hope. "Tell me where it hurts."

 Your fingers gently trace your skin until they reach the area under your collarbone, and you sign to your back too. There's a bandage there, but nothing else, and that's when you notice you don't have a shirt on, just your blood-soaked bra.

 "Is it bad?"

 "Not that bad. The bullet went through," he said. That explains the pain on both sides of your body; you have a literal hole in your chest. "And it clotted soon enough to stop the bleeding, but you lost too much blood anyway... Anywhere else?"

 Your whole body hurts and this abandoned house suddenly feels like penance, but you don't want to scare him further, so you shake your head no very slowly.

 "Alright," he mumbles. Joel nods once, and it looks like he is reassuring himself. His eyes betray him, he looks like he is very far away from here, very buried under all the scenes playing on his mind; but despite his stillness, his lower lip quivers.

 You can't move your right arm at all, but with the other hand, your fingers lightly touch his knuckles still resting on your stomach. He winces, and your fingers are wet with his blood too. He must have beaten to death whoever shot you, that you are certain about.

 Your voice, little more than a weak breath, whispers:

 "I-I want you to do it."

 The crease between his eyebrows deepens. He seems confused rather than angry; the reaction you were hoping for. You take a breath to repeat your own words, but he squeezes your hand.

 "Don't," he says.

 "Joel..."

 "Don't even think about it," he snarls. "You are perfectly fine, don't be dramatic."

 You don't know what hurts more; his pain or yours, but his denial makes your eyes wet with tears again. This is already hard, but he is making it even harder. All he will achieve by trying to keep you alive is either prolonging his pain or getting himself killed. You both know this is no world for the injured and the sick, not out of the QZ, at least. And in most cases, not inside either.

 All you ask of him is to not leave you for the infected to find. Is that too much to ask?

 You want to insist, but you know he won't have it. Joel has lost so much already that the thought of losing what little left he has is not even going to cross his mind. Not until it's too late, at least. Also, you don't want your last moments with him to be a fight. You are tired of fighting, of swimming against the current. You just want to let go for once, give in to the external forces, close your eyes and peacefully breathe.

 What's more, you should have already known that he wouldn't do you that favor. He is too selfish for that.

 He pats your cheeks gently with his large hands, and your eyes, already rolling back into your skull, get focused on him again with a few blinks. You breathe slowly, trying to focus on him, on the world around you slowly twisting and turning.

 "...that's it," he says, it doesn't sound like his first sentence, so you guess he's been talking to you before. When you look back at him, his breathing is shallow, and you know he is trying to take a hold of himself too, trying not to give in to panic. "Good girl, that's it. Keep your eyes on me."

 Exhausted and hurting as you are, keeping your eyes open it's like asking you not to drop a weight that you cannot, in fact, handle; but you try nonetheless. It's your fault, really, for letting yourself go, for trying to give up on your fight earlier than you should. Joel is here trying to keep you alive, mending all your broken ends and stitching them together —he has always been good at that— while you're just trying to give up on him —you are really good at that too—.

 Giving up on Joel has been one of the hardest things you've ever had to do; and now you're letting him go for the last time. Part of you is glad you don't have to keep watching how he chooses Theresa over and over again. You are even relieved that fate —or whatever there is out there— is forcing you out of the equation. After all, you would never have given up fully on him.

 He refuses to kill you, what he doesn't know is that you've been dead for a long while now. Him being your executioner would be the kindest act he could have with you, the most intimate thing you'd ever share; your last moments. You want it to be him, you want him to free you from this torment.

 He refuses, though; and it feels like a punch to the pit of your stomach. You shiver.

 He gets up from his place on the floor, where you are lying just over the carpet. You follow him with your eyes and see a fire cracking up in a fucked-up chimney. He stokes the fire, throws some more wood on it and then comes back to you, covering you with his jacket, the very same jacket you had on before he turned you around. It's warm, his, and you have to stop yourself from sinking your nose into the collar.

 "I had to take off your shirt to patch you up," he says, but he doesn't say sorry. Ever. So you guess it's his way of apologizing.

 You simply nod, aware that you had wished for this very moment to happen many times before. You had dreamt of his rough hands over your naked flesh, caressing the sides of your body. You had dreamt of him watching you with those chocolate eyes as you took your shirt off, deep black pupils spreading over the brown as he watched the lace fall like a helpless witness.

 But now the bra was covered in blood and he was watching you anywhere but the lace. He had a frightened and concerned look on his face, rather than aroused. A look that would have made you feel guilty and ashamed if it had happened in the other scenario. And instead of undressing you, he was covering your body with his jacket as if you were his child.

 "What's wrong?" he is asking now, instead of whispering 'I want you' and it hurts all the same to know he's not ever going to say it, and that Tess now will have all those words for however long their lives are.

 You guess they were made for each other. And it makes all the sense, really, no one like Joel would ever look at you twice. You were grateful that he even allowed you to be his friend.

 "Nothing," you respond.

 It's always 'nothing' when it comes to Joel. It's always that nothing whenever he notices you are under the weather. It's always nothing when you are hurt, when someone tries to rob you and they leave an angry black eye on your face. It's always nothing; and he never believes you.

 "I don't make promises, you know that," he says, taking your left hand in his. "but you will be fine, I swear."

 You don't know what to say, how to explain that you are not scared of death, that you are just scared of not seeing him again. But you can't, so you say nothing and just nod.

 Does he want to hurt himself? Okay. You can't do much while lying on the floor anyway.

 After that, both of you stay silent. Joel seems to be avoiding looking at you. His eyes are stuck in the fire creaking in the chimney, but they are too restless to be present and conscious of the yellow and orange haze.

 Your palm lands on his thigh, your fingers gently brushing the denim. You want to comfort him somehow, but, at the same time, you are scared he will reject your touch and reassurance. That's all you can do for him: no words, no further touching, just a featherlight touch that indicates you are still present. There, with him.

 "I thought we couldn't make a fire."

 "Don't be dumb. The windows are all broken, it's winter and you are in shock. How else would you heat up?"

 "Got it. You're not in a talking mood," you huff. "Alright."

 Silence settles between both of you. However, one of his big, rough hands travels to where your fingertips are gently brushing his thigh. At the touch, even if you don't want to let go, your fingers begin to back off. He's not in a good mood, and you seem to be pushing his boundaries a little too much. Except that, instead of letting you go, he catches your hand in his and puts it back over his jean. This time, it's him who brushes his thumb over your knuckles.

 For a minute, the only sound in the living room are both your breathing patterns, the flames licking the air and the wind rushing through the broken windows.

 "I'm sorry..." you start. And immediately, his brown eyes are all over you again. Your voice sounds exhausted, more than you'd have liked. "...I fucked up the mission. I know-"

 "You haven't fucked up anything," he interrupts. That's Joel, all stoic, swallowing his feelings and denying everything that it is not up to his standards. "Would you mind to just rest-"

 Your eyes well with tears.

 "Joel, for once... Just for once, don't lecture me, don't ignore what I'm trying to say just because you don't want to hear it," you tell him. Then, he thankfully presses his lips together in a pained grimace, but stays silent nonetheless. "I fucked up the mission getting injured. I know it isn't my fault, but it doesn't matter whose fault it is. If you wanna go on without me, I won't blame you."

 His fingers are now squeezing yours, but you know he is not even conscious of that. He leans in a little, his cheeks now reddened in anger. He looks like he is about to spit on your face.

 "I'm not leaving you anywhere," he says. He looks offended that you even thought he was capable of that. "You and I are gonna get to Lincoln, either if you like it or not. There, Bill and Frank will help you. We have traded all kinds of things with them, and I know they are very well supplied."

 "Why would they help me?"

 "They are not just people we trade with," he says. His fingertips brush a strand of hair out of your face. "I know they will."

 "What if they changed their minds?"

 His pupils lock into your own, his jawline swells as he grits his teeth.

 "I'm persistent."

 The mission was supposed to be an easy one. Walk out of the QZ undetected, walk fifteen miles to the town of Lincoln, just outside Boston, get our things and come back. Our cargo were the two last spools of aluminum that Joel had promised to trade with them and two packets of seeds. Theirs? Two pounds of rolling tobacco and a gun. Tess couldn't make it, she had appointments with other smugglers, probably the ones who snuck the drugs in; which was more than half of their business. If it wasn't that important, she wouldn't have stayed in the QZ for anything in the world. But Bill and Frank were also important, and Joel couldn't go alone.

 The two of you should be home by now, and you wondered if Tess was regretting her decision of asking you to go with him. Last night you had both snuck out of the Boston QZ; and it usually didn't take more than six hours to get to Lincoln. But just outside the city you had bumped into raiders; and a stray bullet had hit you. Now you were stranded in a small cabin lost in the woods, about seven miles away from Lincoln; and unable to walk a single step.

 And to top it all off, Joel was enraged and neurotic.

 Still with the same expression, he takes your wrist and squeezes two fingers into it. Even if you had preferred him not to, knowing that your heartbeat got wild whenever he was around. You let him check on you, hoping that if your symptoms got better he would let you have a quick nap. Your nervousness, however, doesn't improve despite your efforts of trying to calm yourself down.

 "Since when are you a doctor?"

 He lets your wrist go, then gets back on his feet and gets his rifle.

 "You should rest. You'lll need it," he says, now heading to the entrance. He's gonna be standing on guard all night, you are sure of that. "We're leaving tomorrow morning."

 That is when you lose it. You can't believe he is that blind, that caught up in his own world.

 "I know in your perfect fantasy this is just a scratch, but I truly can't move, Joel. Even laying here awake is hard. How am I supposed to follow...? Joel!"

 But he's out of the house before you even finish the sentence.

  [***]

  Joel doesn't keep his word.

 A few hours later, not even near dawn yet, you get pulled back from a dream. Your eyes take a few minutes to register your surroundings; again. And the memories gallop back to your mind in a rush; accompanied by the burning and piercing pain on the upper right side of your chest. Your eyes shut tight, and you inhale a shallow breath. Even breathing hurts.

 "We need to go," Joel whispers. His voice sounds muffled, especially over the sound of your beating heart. "C'mon, wake up."

 He is once again rocking you rather than shaking you awake. Just to be able to fall asleep you had rolled back into your chest, cheek once again firmly pressed against that twenty-year-old dusty carpet. When he came back from checking the perimeter, not even five minutes after your argument, he placed his backpack right under your stomach so your right side was elevated. You wouldn't have been able to fall asleep if it wasn't for that. The pain was maddening, atrociously painful. Joel had found you gritting your teeth even in your sleep.

 He had said you'd leave the next day, but you felt like not even minutes had passed.

 "Morning," you complained, half a grunt accompanying your words. Joel shook you gently again when he saw you relax a second time, and your voice came back. "Y-you said...mor-"

 "I know what I said but we can't wait any longer," he answered. "I'm gonna sit you up."

 Fear pumped enough adrenaline into your system to wake you up. The ache from before rushed back into your mind, and your 'please' and 'wait' left your mouth like a prayer.

 "I can do it," you said, but it sounded more like begging than an affirmation.

 "I know you can," he lied. As your eyes opened and you saw his expression —eyes focused on you, trembling hands, half of his face hidden in the shadows, the other half gently licked by the orange-like haze of the dying fire— you understood that you had to be in a really bad condition for him to look at you that way, and feel the need to lie to make you feel better. But then, a second right after that, his shoulders relaxed, his eyes fluttered between your face and the surface of his jacket over your shoulders. His stoic mask was back on. "I'm just gonna help you, okay? But you do it."

 He did not, in fact, let you do it.

 You had managed to lift yourself barely an inch over the carpet, using all the strength left in your healthy arm, when both his hands curled around your side and pulled you up to his chest. Clenching your jaw, you allowed him to drag you a few feet back and into a seating position against the wall; your whole weight over the left side of your body.

 "Don't lean on the other side, your shoulder blade is broken."

 "Oh..." you almost chuckled. "Great."

 For a second, Joel looks at you as if you were completely insane. He reaches for his backpack, crouching on the place where you were lying just seconds prior. Then takes his flask and doubts when passing it on.

 "I'm not that desperate for water," you respond, reaching for the flask and drinking a gulp of the liquid. You swallow despite the soreness in your throat. "Next thing you'll do is spit food into my mouth."

 "Not even getting shot shuts your fucking mouth, does it?" he says, grossed out at your comment. However, a smile tugs at the corners of his lips. Relaxing him has a calming effect on you too.

 You try to pass him the flask again, but he refuses.

 "No," he says. "Drink it all. You'll need it."

 You look at him with narrowed eyes, confused. It's hard to keep a single thought in your head other than the throbbing pain in your chest and back, but you still try. Rather than asking him how you are supposed to walk seven miles, with the aluminum and his pack, you try to approach the matter another way.

 "What's the plan?"

 He takes a deep breath.

 "You're not gonna like it," he says, his deep voice almost slurring the words. It's barely a whisper. He looks into your eyes, then. "I'm gonna carry you."

 "What?"

 "You heard me."

 There's not an ounce of doubt in his eyes. Joel has that look of determination, the one you only really see when he has his eyes set on something really fucking important for him; most times that includes his own brother or not talking about the times before the outbreak. And with that look on his face, you know there's nothing you could possibly say or do to make him reconsider his own words. He's stubborn like that.

 You still try.

 "It's seven miles, Joel..." you tell him on a thready voice, a whisper. And Joel sighs through his nose —as if he had forgotten. "And we have to carry..."

 "We leave everything here," he says. "Come back for it later."

 "They won't let us in empty-handed."

 "You don't know them."

 For Joel to be so certain about it, certain enough as to put both your life and his on the hands of strangers; you understand that their relationship goes beyond trading. Joel had told you about them, about their situation and the first time Tess and him had shared dinner with Bill and Frank. Still, you were suspicious of them, and you thought that he was too; up until now, at least.

 "It's still seven miles," you tell him, and you know him, you know he's about to stop talking to you and leave the room if you don't, at least, partly give in to his reasoning. "...are you sure you wanna do it?"

 His pleading brown eyes engulf you, then, with an emotion he had never showed before. His gaze diverts for a second to your wound, to the bandages that, as you look at them, you find they are once again covered in blood. They are soaked in it, the skin surrounding it has a large black bruise —internal bleeding, you guess. And when you try to take a full deep breath, you find yourself unable to, at least not at full capacity.

 The understanding hits you, then. You don't have much time left.

 "I don't have any other choice," Joel says, but what he means is 'I don't want to lose you'.

 "Okay."

 Not even a full second has passed from your reluctant acceptance, but he is already on his feet. Joel walks to the only table in the room, takes your gun and puts it in his hip, right inside the jean. The only other thing he takes apart from ammo is another set of bandages —and he silently thanks whatever it is out there that he put those there a month ago—. He doesn't have anything to clean the wound, though; and one of his biggest fears is that it might already be infected. Even bandaged it looks bad.

 He approaches you, crouches down so he is facing the wound.

 "I'm going to tighten the bandage, and I have to keep the pressure," he says, loosening the knot. His fingers are once again stained with you blood, and he has to fight the images of him pressing on your wound from a few hours ago, when he had found you and, with trembling hands, had tried to stop the bleeding coming out in waves. He looks at you, trying to forget the awful picture of your eyes closed, your body limp on the ground. "Bite something."

 You reach for the sleeve of his jacket, the one hanging from your shoulders; and put the padded cuff of his jacket into your mouth.

 Joel doesn't give you a warning; and you're not sure if that's a good or bad thing, either. He presses the heel of his hand right over the covered hole in your chest, with such strength that you wonder if he will end up breaking your clavicle in half. As he presses your body against the wall, you can almost feel the cracked bones in your back smashing against each other.

 Needless to say, the pain is blinding. The view of the room, the feeling of his heat around you, the scent of him under your nose... all gone in a matter of seconds. Your vision turns white, all your senses stop functioning. Over the scream that falls from your lips, muffled by the jacket, you hear him say:

 "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

 He lets go, and your vision immediately darkens, the shadows flowing from the corners of the room quick to reach you. With your last grip on reality you feel yourself melting against the wall, slowly slipping to the side. Joel catches you before you hit the floor.

 Cold water is what brings you back. Your breathing quickens at the coldness of it, and the next thing you feel are his wet hands palming your cheeks, throwing water from his flask all over your face.

 "C'mon," he mumbles. "I need you awake."

 Your eyes flutter open, your whole body relaxed now that he's not applying pressure; but alert enough that your unfocused eyes make a single shape out of him.

 While coming back into yourself, Joel does not have any time to lose. He takes his jacket over your shoulders and slips your left arm inside the sleeve, the other, where the wound is, he decides to leave it as it is; and buttons it over your chest so you're not exposed.

 "You good?"

 In any other situation you'd have said some joke, or just something to piss him off. But as of right now, nothing comes to your clouded mind; and even if something did come, you're too exhausted to even do the mental effort to say it. So you just nod.

 "Okay," he nods too, talking to himself inside his head, then takes your face in his hands and looks into your eyes. "You're fine, you hear me? I'm gonna carry you and you're gonna be on my back; so I need you talking all the damn time, alright?

 You nod again.

 "Starting now."

 "Y-yes... okay."

 "Good," he says. His hand crawls to the back of your neck, and he joins both your foreheads. He takes quick breaths. He's terrified when he whispers. "You're doing so good. I'm so proud of you."

 "Y-you... are?"

 "Mm-hmm," he says. And as his words settle into your brain, you feel your chest warm. When you open your eyes and he separates, there's a tear on his cheek, but he's quick to wipe it off. "I'm gonna open the front door."

 It's just an excuse, you both know it, but neither dares to say anything. None of you wants to talk about the elephant in the room, the fact that your chances are slim even if this works.

 Joel returns quickly, with his lashes wet and reddened eyes. It makes you speechless, to know that all this effort and tears are for you. You'd have never, in a million years, thought you'd ever see Joel Miller cry; let alone for you. He had always been so quiet, so detached from everyone, even from Tess.

 Without a word, his hands get hooked on the underside of your thighs. He lifts you up, seemingly effortlessly, and your inner thighs surround his hips. You take a deep breath, again —or at least try to— as you try not to blush and show those feelings you buried long ago. This is not the time, nor the place; so you allow your head to follow his range of motion; forwards. Soon, your nose is pressed against the lapels of his denim shirt. With your good arm, you grab one of his broad shoulders. The other falls limp, and even that little movement hurts like hell.

 He freezes, his shoulders now stiff under your hand. His beard grazes your jaw as he tries to look at you, so still in his arms.

 "You okay?"

 "Yeah..."

 Better than okay, you want to respond. Better than I've been in a long time. But you don't.

 He leaves you on the table, on the edge, with your legs dangling.  His eyes waver for a second as he leaves you there, his hands squeeze your knees in such a brief movement that you wonder if he was even conscious of that. He looks like he wants to say something, but he can't think of what, so he turns around and bends his knees a little to get you to a good height.

 "I need you to push yourself up with your good arm," he instructs. "and keep the other still, okay?"

 "Okay," you respond, fighting the urge to just nod instead.

 Not even following his instructions to a t saves you from the pain. The effort, even with your arm limp in the air, makes your body shudder and an agonizing stab runs through your whole spine. The scream that tores from the depths of your throat is so intense that Joel hesitates to put you back on the table, his back trembles for a second as his body shivers in distress. But, in the end, he has you in the air with a good hold.

 He waits, but doesn't hear anything except shallow breaths, doesn't feel anything but the weight of your head over his shoulder.

 "You with me?" he asks. He is seconds away from aborting the mission.

 "Y-yeah..."

 Your arm surrounds his neck loosely. Your fist is closed tightly, grabbing the other shoulder, and he wishes he could touch you, give you some kind of comfort, but he can't let go from his grip under your knees.

 Joel does not have the privilege of time, every second is precious, so not even giving it a try, he starts walking as if you weighted nothing. He crosses the front door and the freezing cold wind of the East Coast cuts your cheeks. If he notices —and you know that he has, wearing just his shirt in the middle of the night— he doesn't react.

 "Remember what I told you?" he asks.

 In less than a minute he has crossed the space from the cabin to the highway, where you were surprised by raiders. You look around, see the bodies of five men sprawled on the floor; lifeless, drowning in a pool of their own blood. One of them has his face mauled to nothing. The sight is so sickening —or maybe you are getting so ill— that a sudden dizziness takes hold of your shivering body.

 "Hey..."

 "I'm sorry..." you start, teeth chattering from the cold. "I'm sorry I screamed into your ear earlier."

 A sound, half a relieved sigh and half a chuckle, leaves his mouth.

 "I'm half deaf from that ear anyway."

 A light chuckle falls from your lips too. Joel keeps walking west through the highway, and you keep yourself desperately clinging to him for dear life. The moon is your only other companion; without her, you both would be completely blind in the darkness of the night.

  [***]

  Joel probably hadn't thought about the possibility of taking breaks along the way. That's why, fourty-five minutes later, and under a beautiful sunrise of orange tones, he's struggling to keep going. His knees are screaming for him to stop, his biceps and hands tired of walking with a person's weight over his shoulders. And for the first time in years he remembers the times before the outbreak, when he was capable of lifting and moving huge pieces of furniture; often times on his own, other times with just Tommy.

 He might have overestimated his own strength, assuming he was as strong as before. But it seems that not only his mental health has deteriorated after Sarah's death, no. All of him has become older and darker and more broken since then. He hardly recognizes himself in the mirror anymore.

 "Joel?"

 "Yeah..." he gasps, out of air. "Sorry, I got distracted. You were saying...?"

 It is in moments like this that he hates not to be that same person he was before. He wonders if he is, finally, paying for his past sins, for all the people, infected or not, that he has killed.

It is unfair, the fact that you're paying for his piper.

 "You should stop for a while," you tell him, your voice low like a whisper. The warm air from your mouth slithers across his skin, up his neck, over his ear, and almost sends a shiver down his spine.

 "No."

 "Joel..." you huff. Before speaking again, you take a big gulp of air. "We are not getting anywhere if you don't take breaks. You'll just wear yourself off before we reach the halfway mark."

 His mind refuses to agree, but it's as if his body takes a relieved breath when he hears the words. Little by little, his body starts to listen to you before his mind does. His thighs are screaming, sore from the pain of exertion; and before he acknowledges, even, his body has stopped moving.

 "Okay," he gasps, quick tired breaths quickly entering and leaving his lungs. "...but just a minute, we don't have time for this bullshit."

 "Okay," you say, in the same tone he used earlier with you; when he lied and said he knew you could sit up on your own. "Just a minute."

 He pulls to the side of the road, and with the last of his strength he kneels down and tries to lay you on the ground as carefully as possible. You fall on your ass on the wet ground, but at least you don't hurt yourself on the spot. He asks you for the millionth time in the last twenty-four hours if you are okay.

 "I think I'm doing better than you," you respond, but your voice is so exhausted that Joel would love to just lay next to you and lull you to sleep.

 He turns around, his whole weight sitting on the grass as he takes gulps of oxygen. His eyes shut tightly, he wipes off a tear of sweat from his temple and looks at you.

 Wide-open eyes stare back at you, but just for a split second. He gets closer, his thumb brushing the shoulder of the brown jacket, his brown jacket. His eyes pierce yours.

 "Are you sure?"

 "That bad do I look?"

 Joel doesn't look at you, not at your face getting paler by the second or the dark circles under your eyes, or your hair now dishevelled. He sees you on his memories and can barely recognize you; your skin and eyes always glowing under the sun, your hair always perfectly done. Your job was often to act as an HR for their clients, and very rarely took actual FEDRA jobs that stained your hands; you weren't like Joel, you didn't care about rations or money or whatever.

 Expert fingers gently tug at the buttons, unbuttoning them so he could take a look to the wound. He had barely a glimpse of it when your fingers stopped his hands. Joel looks at you with those puppy eyes, as if you were about to faint in the next second.

 "If you wanted to see me naked you didn't have to wait until I got shot, you know?"

 You had said it in a playful manner, kidding, as a joke; but he saw beyond that. Part of you had only expected him to laugh, the other was dying —not pun intended— for him to kiss you. You'd have never said it if you weren't in this position, you'd have never gotten in between Joel and Tess.

 However, he didn't laugh, didn't make any funny remark. The way he looked at you, from under his eyebrows, lit a spark of hope somewhere inside you. Deep, deeper than your conscious mind would have ever reached. Joel didn't say anything, not even chuckled. His eyes came back to the wound, and uncovered the full sight of it.

 He had to fight a shocked gasp. His eyes fluttered, while holding his breath, between your own face and the wound. The bandage was still soaked in blood, that he had expected, but not the large bruise growing into your neck; or your right hand slightly paler than the other. He lifted, with trembling fingers, a corner of the bandage, and his action caused a trickle of dark blood to gush out, as if he had crushed a piece of watermelon between his fingers and it was now running down his arm. He looked below, inside his jacket, and saw a trail of blood that landed right into your navel.

 This time, it was impossible for him not to react. Not only his face, but also his body. He tried to get back on his two feet again, but before he finished the action, your fist closed around his wrist.

 "Joel..." he heard you call.

 "We need to go, now."

 Pressing your lips in a sad smile, you pulled him to the ground and he sat, mesmerised on that face he had only yet seen once; that time when he got too drunk on a Friday night and told you about Sarah at three in the morning. He felt his pulse quicken, his heart beating at the ends of his fingertips.

 "It's okay," you told him. Your gentle touch brushed his palm, danced around over his tan skin. "You can rest."

 Joel felt like he was in a fever dream. The setting certainly felt like it. You hadn't left the Boston QZ in a long while, and he had never pictured you out of those big silver walls either. He had not agreed to Tess' idea either, the dangers beyond the walls were almost impossible to escape. Still, Tess and him knew the city, they could get out fairly easily, had done that for a couple years to share stories over dinner with Bill and Frank. And Joel had loved the idea of seeing you sitting at that dinner table next to him, surrounded by a garden full of flowers, going through the dresses in the boutique that Tess had sworn you'd love.

 He had not signed up for this.

 "We need to go, please..." he tried a second time, but you just shook your head. He understood, somehow, what you meant.

 "A minute won't make a difference," you told him. In reality, you wanted to tell him that you'd be dead when he got the both of you to Lincoln, anyway. "If you are tired we will never get there."

 Useless and powerless as he felt, his only option was waiting. He took your hand, intertwined his fingers with yours and took a deep breath. You had never seen him so upset.

 "What are you so scared of?"

 At your words, his lower lip quivered slightly; it would almost have gone unnoticed if it wasn't because you had been watching him attentively for so many years. He looked at you, eyes barely half open, from under his eyelashes.

 "You're very important to me," he said. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, he seemed to be even more breathless than he was before. Joel had a hard time admitting his feelings, even to himself. "I don't know if you understand to what extent you're important to me."

 "I know..." you answered, nodding, your hand squeezed his for a second, trying to give him strength. "But you have Tess home, and your brother loves you... It will hurt for a while..."

 "Shut. Up."

 His eyes were tightly shut when he said it. It was a metaphor, almost, the way his eyes were closed not just to the physical world, but to the whole situation too that he couldn't escape from.

 The tip of your tongue wetted your lips.

 "What I'm trying to say is... it will pass..."

 His chest heaved, his gaps the only sound that filled the space between the two of you. And you continued:

 "People die all the time, Joel; and most times we can't do anything about it."

 His body rushed at you, his hands locked perfectly on both your cheeks, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle finally in place.

 "Not you, you hear me? Not you," he almost growled, his face a mixture of anger, determination, and grief. "Never you. You're not allowed to leave me. I will never forgive you."

 There was something hidden between the lines, something Joel wasn't saying. It was something you had denied yourself for a long time, for years, something you had insisted on not seeing because you didn't want to see it. Because, deep down, you were afraid that Joel would never love you back, that he would break your heart, that the only good man you'd ever known inside the walls of the Boston QZ would also be the one to abandon you to your luck.

 Joel had been your family for so long, and you had unconsciously protected yourself from seeing him as something else. But now there it was, clearly, latent in his confession. Your punishment for years of silence was now time, or rather, the lack of it.

 "I'm not giving up," he said. "and I need you not to give up either."

 He's close. His hot breath smells sweet -so instinctively Joel- and it's all around your face. His flesh is warm over the freezing skin of your cheeks. His body around you is shelter, is home.

 Joel is soon leaning in. He's all erratic breathing, rapid heartbeat and trembling hands; and as you close your eyes to allow his presence to swallow you like a black hole, he closes his eyes too.

 He doesn't let go, not just yet. He breathes in into your quick breaths the same way you revel in his.

 "I need an answer," he whispers over your mouth.

 "I won't, either."

 At first it's like a collision. He kisses you angrily for a split second, demanding and impatient; then, once he knows this is really happening, once he does understand that this is —finally— not a dream, he relaxes into your touch, your fingers delineating his jawline, caressing the beard there.

 He's quick, quicker than you'd have expected him to be; definitely quicker then he would have liked. He separates, then; and looks down at his jacket and the drops of blood staining the insides of it. It's not enough blood to send you into shock again, but it means part of the wound is ripping. You need stitches, not just a couple of bandages.

 "Enough resting then," he says.

   [***]

 Seven miles is usually nothing for Joel. In the first few months trading with Bill and Frank, Tess and him usually walked the fifteen miles that separated the city and the town at least twice a month. But this is all the more difficult, not just carrying you there, but knowing that he is running out of time.

 And you seem hellbent on making the journey even more difficult.

 "So...Tess?"

 "Pass."

 You huff, and the warm air sends a shiver down his spine; but he says nothing.

 "Okay."

 Your voice sounds so disappointed that he feels a pang of guilt. You know him better than to insist, and he knows that too. The guilt increases, though; and now he's inhaling a big gulp of air while still walking as fast as he possibly can without hurting his own knees.

 "We fucked a few times, before," he says. "but that doesn't mean anything. She's my colleague. That's all."

 If he was better with words, and feelings, he could say that he didn't feel anything for her. He could say that their hookups were nothing, just a fun thing they used to do before, before he realized that the one who he really wanted was you. A few months back he had realized that it never actually satisfied him, that those moments with Tess weren't as fun and innocent as they seemed to be before. They had talked about it, of course. He didn't want to play with her feelings, and that had been the end of it. She was just as fine without him, anyway.

 "I thought you two were dating."

 "If selling drugs for a living is what you call dating, then yes."

 Without even looking at you, he knew you were smiling, he could almost feel your lips stretching over his shirt.

 "I..." you said, then he heard you take another deep breath before talking again. "I'm sorry I asked you," another breath. "I... ran out of things to say."

 His brow furrowed in confusion.

 "You can say anything," he says. "Anything you really like, even a story."

 Anything just to know you're there...

 "Well..." you started. Then, a wheezing noise filled the air, followed by a gasp. "I... liked rock music-" silence. "...back in the day."

 "You okay?"

 Your fist tightened around his shoulder, your forehead pressing against his trapezius. He heard that wheezing sound again, followed by a pant. His hands squeezed harder the tender flesh under her knees.

 Joel tried to look at her, but all he could see from his peripheral vision was the top of her head and one eye tightly closed. His throat turned into knots.

 "Baby..." that was the most gentle tone you had ever heard coming from his mouth. "C'mon baby. Hold on, we're almost there."

 His whole body felt paralyzed, and he had to force himself to keep walking.

 What he didn't know was that your lungs were burning. They felt like a pair of balloons squeezing against your ribs, trying to expand beyond its cage. And it made all the pain in your back, from the shot, double as painful. The air you tried to swallow so bad, sounded like a whistle, like the breeze through an almost closed window. You were suffocating.

 "Talk to me, c'mon."

 With a painful drag of air, you complied.

 "I can't..." your fist tightened around the fabric of his shirt. "I can't."

 "Goddamnit..." he was panicking now. "Okay, that's okay baby. Just hold on to me, don't let go."

 Unable to do anything else, you just nodded as best you could and kept on holding on to him. His eyes desperately looked for signs of the town, and far away, in the distance, the row of trees ended; and he walked faster, hoping that Bill had already seen the both of you through the cameras.

 "J-Joel"

 You struggled to find air, and, therefore, the words.

 "Easy, easy" he said. "Just a bit more. You can do it, I know you can."

 His words lingered in the air, unanswered, not even him fully believed them. Joel was starting to feel his own shirt wet with blood from your wound. The feeling made him sick, his own imagination as he pictured what Bill was watching through the cameras, made it all a hundred times worse.

 He kept hearing the panting, the wheezing, becoming more desperate by the second. He realized, with horror, that you were suffocating righ there, on his back; from a collapsing lung, he guessed.

 He shouted Bill's name as he saw the fence that separated them from the town. Joel wasn't sure if he could hear him, but tried anyway.

 He felt your grip on his shirt hesitate, and he had to fight the instinct to squeeze your hand; if he had done it, you'd have fallen from his own grip. He heard you try and say his name.

 "Save it," he responded, even if it came out not as reassuring as he would have liked. "Don't try to talk."

 Before he reached the fence, it was already opening. Bill came out running, yelling something that he was too distracted to distinguish, Frank came behind him. Joel felt his knees wobble once through the gate. And now kneeling on the floor, he called your name, tried to turn his head to take a glimpse of you.

 "You did it. We're here."

 He noticed, then, that everything seemed all too silent. Everything that happened after that, happened very quickly. The hand that had been gripping his shirt slipped, limp over his shoulder.

 His mind disconnected, completely unaware of the other two people approaching. He released you with all the care that a person could have had, and his arms immediately caught you in an embrace. The sight of your closed eyes made him panic, and not having even checked your pulse, he buried his face into your neck and sobbed.

 Trails of blood ran through his forearms, and he threw up all the words that passed through his mind; a string of 'please stay' and 'I'm sorry'.

 "Joel," Frank struggled with him, fingers digging into his shoulder. "Joel you have to let go. Let us help her."

 He was too far gone, so much so that once your body hit the floor, Frank didn't allow him to touch you again. He sobbed, and, for a second, Bill saw himself in him. He would have never thought he would see Joel in this state, but yet there he was. He kept pressure on the wound, and saw himself in Joel, and Frank in you; and promised he would never let this happen to the two of them.

 Never.

  [***]

  The sun comes out the next morning. As it always does, as it always has. Orange light and blue skies illuminate the room, the clouds shine a different color; and Joel blinks; absolutely exhausted, devastated.

 His body is heavy, even if he's not holding any of his weight. He's sitting on the cold tiles, on the floor, his sore knees and thighs in the space under the bed, his head lying on the mattress, his whole body is bent over and it feels like jelly. His eyes are the only thing moving, they look at the window and see the night sky turn into daylight.

 Joel couldn't possibly say that he slept in that position; because he didn't actually sleep. He hasn't had a second of sleep since you got shot two days ago. Lying on the bed, is you, dormant; and his thumb draws circles on the back of you hand even if he's not paying attention to it. It comforts him to a degree, at least.

 Suddenly, pretty much everything has lost its meaning. Frank opens the door an hour later, almost tripping with the tray of food and water that he left the night before for Joel. He hasn't touched any of it. In fact, he forgot about it, but if it bothers him, Frank doesn't say anything. He takes it in his hands so he can take it to the kitchen downstairs.

 "We played 'I will survive' in the radio" he whispers before leaving. "It's a 70s song, but Tess will get the meaning."

 "Thank you," he mutters, his mouth pasty from barely speaking in the last twenty-four hours. Funnily enough, the only word he's said to them is 'thank you'.

 "You're welcome, Joel," he says. After a few seconds, waiting, he makes a dissatisfied sound. Frank approaches Joel, his palm squeezing his shoulder. "You should eat something, at least. Is there anything you want?"

 Joel looks at him, lifting his cheek from the mattress for the first time. His eyes are blood-shot and black circles adorn his eyes.

 "Coffee."

 "Not coffee, you need sleep."

 He huffs, his eyes lost in the window again. Frank, knowing he won't get anything from him again, vanishes behind the door and into the kitchen. He will bring him warm food later, hoping the smell will make him eat something despite his unwillingness to listen to any signal of hunger from his own body.

 A few moments later, your hand slips from his. As he loses your touch, a pang hits the pit of his stomach. But then, as he lifts from the mattress again, your fingertips lightly touch his chin, your thumb lovingly brushing his beard.

 "Baby?"

 Maybe he lost his sense of time, because he didn't expect you to wake up yet. In any case, when he sees your eyes open he practically pounces on the bed. He sits on the edge, and swallows the image of you looking at him.

 "Morning."

 He smiles at your words, feels his strength coming back into his body.

 "You're here," he says.

 Even beaten up as you look, he thinks you are gorgeous. Your face has regained its usual color, the bruising is coming down, changing colors little by little, the wound is stitched and bandaged, and the blood flow seems to reach your fingertips normally once again. Joel has no idea how Bill fixed the collapsing lung, he had said something about medical knowledge being necessary in the field too, but he hadn't paid attention. He doesn't care about the details, though. He just cares that you're safe and sound, and despite the close call, that has seemed to be the end result to this whole dilemma.

 There's no blood in sight, not even in the bandages. Frank had washed the blood from your hair the day before, and Joel had helped with the rest. He wished he could have you like this everyday: happy, clean, safe...

 In the last few hours Joel had discovered he was jealous. He wished he had a town like Lincoln all to himself, just so he could see you picking flowers in the front garden.

 "I'm here," you told him. The words felt like strawberries in his mouth. "and I'm not giving up on you."

 He released a breath he didn't know he was holding, leaned in for both your foreheads to meet, and kissed you.

[ao3feed-brucewayne]

A normal teenage kid? Nah its traumatized!

by floofzombrs After the events of Infinity War Peter is thrown into a messed up world. he must learn how to live. however, will he do it? heavily inspired by:   time flies by(bye) by WHYISEVERYMANTAKEN Peter the pizza guy by Irisen Spiderhead by Emmacortana peter parker's dimensional travel to emo city(gotham) by ZaaratFeasal and dark matter by mysterycyclone Words: 37, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English Fandoms: The LEGO Batman Movie (2017), Batman - All Media Types, Batman (Comics), Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman: The Animated Series, Red Hood - Fandom, Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010), crime boss - Fandom, Violence Jack (Anime & Manga), proper use of micro hairs, in-proper use of death, rewriting uncle Ben's death for the trillionth time, I have no idea what I'm doing - Fandom Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death Categories: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other Characters: Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne, Rogues Gallery (Batman), Kate Kane (DCU), Reagan (Batwoman), Imani (Batwoman), Ocean (Batwoman), Mouse (Batwoman), Margot (Batwoman), Tatiana (Batwoman), Mabel Cartwright (Batwoman), Selina Kyle, Black | Catwoman (Batman Beyond), Dick Grayson, Nightwing, Barbara Gordon, Oracle (DCU), Jason Todd, Red Hood's Henchmen (DCU), Cassandra Cain, Orphan (DCU), Tim Drake, Red Robin - Character, Stephanie Brown, Spoiler (DCU), Duke Thomas, The Great Revolutionary (SIGNALIS), Damian Wayne, Robin (DCU), The Jokerz (DCU), Joker (DCU), Bane (DCU), Batfamily Members (DCU), Harley Quinn (DCU), Regulus Black, Scarecrow, Killer Croc, Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders, Ivy (Poison Ivy 1992), Two-Face's Gang, Clayface, Penguin (Character), Mr. Freeze, Slade Wilson, Étienne (Deathstroke) Additional Tags: Lazarus Pit Side Effects (DCU), Lazarus Pit (DCU), Lazarus Pit Mad Jason Todd, Lazarus Pit Madness (DCU), Lazarus Pits are Ectoplasm (Danny Phantom and DCU), Character Death, Orphan Peter Parker, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt No Comfort, Found Family, Angst, Death, Gotham City is Terrible via https://ift.tt/eb4vYGz

[notealotgoingon]

2023 Bullet Journal Cover & Lists

- movies - books - physical music stickers

(typed list below cut)

Movies

X (2022) ★★★★★ 1/9

Pearl (2022) ★★★★★ 1/10

Jason X (2001) ★★★ 1/17

X (2022) ★★★★★ 1/26

Pearl (2022) ★★★★★ 2/11

Rosemary's Baby (1968) ★★★★★ 2/11

Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine's Day Special (2023) ★★★★★ 2/12

Skinamarink (2022) ★★★★ 3/8

Re-Animator (1985) ★★★★ 3/12

Ring (1998) ★★★★★ 3/12

Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) ★★★★ 3/12

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) ★★★★ 4/2

Scary Movie (2000) ★★★ 4/3

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) ★★★★★ 4/5

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) ★★★★★ 4/18

Scary Movie 2 (2001) ★★★ 5/3

Scary Movie 3 (2003) ★★ 5/4

The Green Knight (2021) ★★★★★ 5/20

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) ★★★★ 5/21

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) ★★ 6/6

Evil Dead Rise (2023) ★★★★1/2 6/27

Nimona (2023) ★★★★ 7/2

Barbarian (2022) ★★★�� 7/6

Malignant (2021) ★★★★ 7/7

Barbie (2023) ★★★★★ 7/23

Scream VI (2023) ★★★1/2 8/1

Saw (2004) ★★★★ 8/1

Frozen (2010) ★★ 8/2

Resident Evil: Death Island (2023) ★★★★ 8/21

Studio 666 (2022) ★★★★ 9/4

The Exorcist (1973) ★★★★1/2 9/4

Saw II (2005) ★★★★ 9/9

Saw III (2006) ★★★1/2 9/9

Saw IV (2007) ★★★1/2 9/9

Saw V (2008) ★★★ 9/9

Saw VI (2009) ★★★ 9/9

Saw 3D (2010) ★★ 9/9

Jigsaw (2017) ★★★ 9/10

Miss Americana (2020) ★★★★ 9/10

Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021) ★★1/2 9/17

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) ★★★★1/2 9/24

Saw (2004) ★★★★1/2 9/25

Saw II (2005) ★★★★1/2 9/26

Dracula (1931) ★★★★ 10/1

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) ★★★1/2 10/1

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) ★★★★ 10/1\

House of 1000 Corpses (2003) ★★★★ 10/8

Friday the 13th (1980) ★★★★1/2 10/13

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023) ★★★★★ 10/19

Saw VI (2009) ★★★1/2 10/28

Saw 3D (2010) ★1/2 10/29

Saw X (2023) ★★★★1/2 11/6

Saw IV (2007) ★★★1/2 11/20

Saw X (2023) ★★★★1/2 11/20

Terrifier (2016) ★★★1/2 12/4

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) ★★ 12/4

Saw V (2008) ★★★1/2 12/4

Terrifier 2 (2022) ★★★1/2 12/11

The Green Knight (2021) ★★★★★ 12/18

Sonic Christmas Blast(1996) ★★1/2 12/22

Black Christmas (1974) ★★★★★ 12/23

Black Christmas (2006) ★★★1/2 12/24

Saltburn (2023) ★★★★ 12/29

Taylor Swift: Reputation Stadium Tour (2018) ★★★★★ 12/30

Books

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle 1/2

The Witcher: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sakowski 1/12

We Can Never Leave This Place by Eric Larocca 1/14

Causes and Cures in the Classroom by Margaret Searle 1/29

Vox Machina: Kith & Kin by Marieke Nijkamp 2/1

Black is the Body by Emily Bernard 2/4

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas 2/18

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green 2/19

Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth 2/26

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King 3/7

Ring by Koji Suzuki 4/14

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher 4/14

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez 5/8

Circe by Madeline Miller 5/19

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka 5/30

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 6/1

The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker 6/25

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson 6/28

The Lesbian Classics Get Me Off by Chuck Tingle 6/28

Icebreaker by Hannah Grace 7/5

Teacher of the Yearby M.A. Wardell 7/7

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King 7/17

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone 7/31

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle 8/4

The Writing Revolution by Judith C. Hochman & Natalie Wexler 8/10

You Can Go Your Own Way by Eric Smith 8/20

Phasma by Delilah S. Dawson 9/12

Small Spaces by Katherine Arden 9/27

Reforged by Seth Haddon 10/8

Fifty Feet Down by Sophie Tanen 10/23

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty 11/22

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett 12/2

Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade 12/7

Wildfire by Hannah Grace 12/5

Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice 12/12

Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica 12/19

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers 12/20

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo 12/28

Stowaway and Silent Song by Vera Valentine 12/29

Physical Music Media:

(this isn't all of the records/CDs I've gotten or listened to this year, but I figured I'd decipher the stickers I put in the book; these are all of the promo stickers on the outside of the plastic wrapping on the releases)

Beat the Champ - the Mountain Goats

Paradise - Lana del Ray

Red (Taylor's Version) - Taylor Swift

What's it Like? - Sure Sure

Did You Know There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard? - Lana del Ray

Stick Season - Noah Kahan

The Rest - boygenius

Midnights (Late Night Edition) - Taylor Swift

Raving Ghost - Olivia Jean

The Record - boygenius

Speak Now (Taylor's Version) - Taylor Swift

Dark in Here - the Mountain Goats

Bangerz (10th Anniversary Edition) - Miley Cyrus

God Games - the Kills

1989 (Taylor's Version) - Taylor Swift

[fuzzbraiin]

a nonsensical analysis of the OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH SEASON TWO TEASER (can’t believe i get to say that)

TEASER TRAILER SPOILERS AHEAD!

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE IS ALL I CAN DO STANDING HERE HOPING IT GETS TO YOU! it has been said that a message in a bottle rarely arrives at the person it is intended for… BUT WHO CARES! Throw that all out the window this is our flag means death a "goofy fucking pirate show" - david jenkins, and i want it to reach Ed! or....stede throws it in the sea and it hits the rocks and breaks immediately lol

some people are saying this are separate scenes, some are saying its the same scene and they're across from each other if that's the case i HOPE- its height of the battle- meet in the middle- THEN KISS! a la POTC kiss

LOVE THIS EDITING, truly emphasizes how this show is a romantic comedy!!

And … Ed is like the "crazy ex-girlfriend" trope, giving "would a depressed person make this?" yeah he would.

I’m guessing this is how many days have passed since stede left … which is 85 days!

i'm guessing this is ed's hideaway, perhaps a getaway from being "blackbeard"

this is giving tangled (2010) hmmm... i mean a man on the run looking like a prince but he's trying to find his lover with luscious shimmering long hair... is that a stretch?

LEATHER BABYYY!!! frenchie is NEVER beating the catboy allegations and jim is fucking hot with their mullet! the costume budget is here, up and rising!!

one of the many faces of a homosexual man

I LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS SCENE!!1 i keep saying "baby threw his first punch" because he did! he is becoming the man! competent!stede is truly in the works!!!

I THINK this may be the "revenge is going to blow up" allegations that were floating around, and i hope it's the finale...

torture? question mark? WEE JOHN IN DRAGGG HELLO!?! STEDE IN BLACK!! and i think he's wearing leather?

ANYWAYS! that's all i can fathom rn, will be back for clowning shenanigans in 2-3 weeks for the official trailer, because this is just the teaser! WE ARE SO BACK BABY

[g0blintears]

Dark Devotion [Yandere! Dead By Daylight x Reader]

Summary: You are a mystery to both the survivors and killers within the fog. A servant of darkness, a creature created by the entity itself, you are the shadow behind the scenes that provides the survivors with the necessities they need to survive, while also assisting killers with the weapons they need to sacrifice. You are a servant void of humanity, but not one that seeks out despair. An empty slate that perhaps just needs to be taught a little bit of hope and empathy to help the survivors escape once and for all.

Five. Vigil

NOTE: Spoilers for A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

TW: gore, MC is invasive but they’re learning boundaries

Laying in the cold paper thin bedsheets of his mattress, Quentin tossed and turned with his eyes screwed shut and his heart hammering against his chest. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead, causing his shaggy brown hair to cling to his skin. The male clenched his teeth. He was trying desperately to sleep, but he couldn't stop the memories that flashed in his mind.

Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Just go to sleep.

He chanted in his head, but no matter how many times he tried to convince himself to sleep, he couldn't stop his past from haunting him.

Dean. Kriss. Jesse. He can still see them hanging on the walls of the boiler room. Dean's cold lifeless eyes would bore into him. The slit across his throat would have Quentin subconsciously gripping his own neck as though he himself had the same wound. Kriss would be right next to Dean. She would be hanging in her nightgown, bloodied and torn to shreds with her body ripped open and her inner intestines pooling out onto the cement floor. Jesse would be on the other side of Kriss. His jaw slacked open into a scream with a giant hole punctured into his chest.

They were dead. All of his friends were dead. Nothing more than hung up hollow corpses that were void of any soul, and yet, as he stared up at their swaying bodies, Quentin could practically hear their blood-curdling screams that shrieked with every steam that blew around him. Freddy was toying with him. He had become delirious; ridden with fear as he searched around the flame covered basement. The steam in the boiler room hissed and cried, echoing all around like terrified shrieks of the damned. He was scared, but Quentin persisted in his search of Nancy. He remembered looking everywhere for her. His heart pounding in his chest and his eyes wavering all around to find the brunette only for more flames to engulf his vision.

Quentin curled up into a fetal position. His hands clamped onto his head as he shook in his bed. A pathetic attempt to bring himself comfort only for more memories to resurface.

"Wake up, Nancy! Wake up!"

Tears would form in his eyes upon seeing her motionless body, unaware that she was crying out in fear as Freddy trailed his claws over her chest while she  was stuck with him in the dream state.

Nancy lying in bed, her body limp as she was trapped in the nightmare. Quentin hovered over her, his fingers clenched around her shoulders as he gave her a rough shake.

"Nancy, please don't do this! Please! Nancy, come back! Please, wake up! You promised!"

He remembered reaching over for the adrenaline shot. With blood stained fingers, he lifted the syringe over his head and plunged it into her chest. At the time he was relieved when she woke up with a start. However, his relief would be short-lived once Freddy entered the real world.

Both him and Nancy would fight Freddy to the death. While he was on the floor watching as Freddy stared at his decapitated hand in shock, Nancy would use that opportunity to take a sharp metal rod and end Freddy's life in a single swipe. With his throat slit opened, black ooze gushing out of his neck, the dream demon would collapse, lying in a pool of his own blood.

It would end there. It was supposed to end there. Him and Nancy being taken away in an ambulance, holding each other for comfort from the horrors they had to face.

Except it didn't end.

After Nancy's mom disappeared, he knew the fight wasn't over. Sure, it may have ended for Nancy. But for him? Quentin wasn't done. He wanted to make sure Freddy died and got dragged back into hell before he could even think to lay another finger on Nancy. He wanted that dream demon to pay for everything he's done. Not just to him and his friends when they were children, but for the lives he took and ruined along the way. He wanted to make sure that Freddy Krueger died, burning in a fiery inferno where he belonged.

Quentin grit his teeth.

He could still see it. That place where it all began. Badham's Preschool. Quentin had run through the empty hallways, the fluorescent lights flickered over his head. His sneakers squeaked with every step, but he didn't stop running. Zigzagging through the different rooms, he remembered running into a can of paint thinner, immediately a plan formed in his head.

He taunted Freddy. Shouting swears until he successfully lured the killer into his trap. A smile had formed on his face, enjoying the scene of Freddy's shocked face when he looked around at the flames that engulfed him. Fire reigned upon the preschool. While Freddy succumbed to the heated flames, Quentin took that chance to run.

He ran and ran until he found himself back to the basement, and in Freddy's secret room. He had been cornered with Freddy trailing behind him with a wicked grin. The killer had thought he had won, but Quentin refused to go down. Not until he saw Freddy's corpse six feet under. He wanted him dead. If Quentin had any sort of murderous bone in his body, it was reserved just for Freddy. He wanted him dead, and he was going to do whatever he could to make sure that happened.

He let those dark thoughts consume him. It was the dream realm afterall. Everything he learned he brought up to the table, unaware of the growing fog and tendrils that rose from the ground.

With his body covered in a black mist, the brunet would find himself alone. He looked around in the empty void, lost and confused. Did he do it? He walked around a bit. This place felt like a dream, but not one that was familiar to him. He wandered around into the space of nothingness until his eyes caught sight of a figure in the distance. The mystery person wore a red and green striped sweater and a familiar looking fedora that made Quentin's hands clenched into fists.

The figure would look over his shoulder. He would rub his claws together, the sickening sound of metal scraping against each other filled in the deafening silence between them. The Nightmare would let out a sinister laugh, a wicked grin forming on his burnt lips.

One, two, Freddy's coming for you

Three, four, better lock your door

Five, six, grab your crucifix

Seven, eight, better stay up late

Nine, ten, Freddy's back again

"Hey, Quentin. Did ya miss me?"

Quentin shot up in a cold sweat.

His body ached and his fingers dug into the flimsy bed sheets as though it were his only lifeline. The male looked around the room, his eyes scanned the quiet cabin for any signs of the dream demon. The only thing he could see were dark wooden floorboards and a single light bulb hanging in the middle of the ceiling.

Brushing his hair out of his vision, Quentin rubbed his face in exhaustion. His eyes stung from the many sleepless nights where he would try to fall asleep only for his mind to haunt him with flashes of his past.

He thought it was over. He thought once Freddy was gone from the dream state then the nightmares would finally end.

It didn't.

Once he entered the fog, Quentin found himself in a never ending battle for survival. Serial killers, monsters, new demons he couldn't fathom even existing, all of them in this realm for him to face. And worst of all? Freddy was still alive. He was in this damned place too. All of his efforts, those countless sleepless nights of drinking redbull and gulping down modafinil tablets while huddled in a corner of the library, studying books, articles, and papers on lucid dreaming, all of that to make sure Freddy died and stayed in the darkest pits of the underworld- it was all for nothing.

The fog, it was a special kind of eternal damnation. No matter if Quentin stays awake or lets himself succumb to death, he would always find himself right back where he started.

In a sick twisted turn of events, Quentin sometimes often thought to himself that maybe he did get his wish. Freddy Krueger could no longer harm Nancy. The dream demon was trapped in the entity's grasp, forever serving as nothing more than a pawn.

And all it took was for Quentin to go to Hell and drag Freddy there with him.

The door knob to his cabin door twisted, catching his attention. The fearful man clenched his bedsheets in anticipation, adrenaline still running through his veins as he watched with wide brown eyes as the door slowly creaked open.

From the shadows of the night, in stepped your familiar silhouette, causing the male to release a heavy sigh. It was just you.

You walked into the cabin. Gently closing the door behind you, you turned your attention over to the restless survivor on the bed.

"You are still awake." You state with your cold [eye color] eyes observing the male, "You should be resting for your next trial."

Quentin screwed his eyes shut once more. He knew that already. He knew he should be asleep. He knew that he should be resting so he didn't hinder his teammates in the trials, but he couldn't. He just couldn't. How ironic. Back on Elm Street he was fighting the urge to sleep, but now? He needed it more than ever if he wanted to survive.

"Yeah I know, I'm just not tired," he lamely explained, but that answer didn't seem to satisfy you.

"You need to rest for your next trial." You repeated, much to Quentin's annoyance.

"Yeah, I know. But I already told you, I'm not tired." He snapped back. Weaving his fingers through his tangled hair, Quentin moved his eyes to you once more, and glared. "So I would appreciate it if you would just leave it at that and just piss off." The aggression in his voice was practically dripping with warning as he turned away with his hands clenched and his body teetering back and forth. Quentin could already feel himself on the edge of a breakdown, and having you around wasn't helping him calm down. So he had hoped you would take the hint and leave, but in spite of his irritable behavior, your demeanor never once wavered.

"In your last trial you had blown up a generator over ten times. You had caused The Nurse to change targets and you had gotten your teammate killed in the process."

Quentin's once tired eyes hardened. Why did you bring that up? Hadn't he already beaten himself up for that already? When he first entered the fog, he would always be there to lend a helping hand. He was the one the survivors went to when an injured person needed a medic. He was there to help with quick thought out plans and a fighting spirit.

But over time, that started to die out. He was getting sloppy. With each escape, he felt his will to survive slowly unravel, revealing a tired worn out young man that just wanted to rest. He tried desperately to keep up with the others, but he was drained. Nightmare after nightmare, Quentin became paranoid. He couldn't sleep. He would often faint from the lack of sleep, and when he awoke, all of his teammates would be dead and the hatch locked. Leaving him in the dying state as he embraced the entity's tendrils that would pierce his body until he awoke once more at the campfire.

He knew he had become a problem. The survivors would often give him a side-eyed glance when he walked by, but he couldn't help it. He tried. And tried. And tried. But he was tired of trying. He was done.

A sneer made its way to his lips. He snapped.

"I'm tired, okay!” He heaved, “I’m so fucking tired but I can't sleep! Every time I close my eyes, I see that bastard's face! You think I can sleep after everything he's done to me and my friends?! Who the fuck can sleep after seeing their close friends fucking corpses?! I sure as fuck can't! No matter how tired I am, I can't let myself go to sleep!" He shouted. By now he was standing to his feet, hovering a few meters before you with his chest puffing up and down as he took heavy breaths. Quentin stared at you. If his eyes weren't so dry, he might've actually cried.

"Do you know how frustrating it is to want something so bad, but you can't go for it because of your own mind? Constantly sabotaging myself and others— FUCK. I'm such a fuck up! I want to go to sleep again! I want to be useful to my team again— an-and, I even want to dream again. Good dreams, not the same bullshit nightmare I see every time I close my fucking eyes." With his body trembling, Quentin's gaze bored into yours, his blood shot eyes pleading as he held your stare.

"Why am I even suffering like this?" He asked, his voice raspy with his throat cut and dry. Shaking his head, Quentin let out a humorless laugh, "You know what? It's fine...I'm fine with suffering like this," His breathing was shallow and his entire body was hot with a hurricane of emotions. Despair. Fear. And worst of it all, rage.

"I'd be fine being here if only— if only I knew that he was fucking dead. But why? Why isn't he fucking dead?!" He screamed, "What the fuck am I still doing here?! What is this all for anyways?! It's just nightmare after nightmare, isn't it?! It's shit! It's fucking shit! This place is bullshit!"

Quentin shouted. His eyes finally caved in to his raw emotions with warm tears that streamed down his cheeks. Quentin cried, his face burning red and his body shaking, but he didn't falter his eyes away from you. He stared you down, pleading for an answer. He wished you would tell him. Tell him that Freddy Kruger can die for good. Tell him that Quentin's wish can come true. 'You want him dead? Be my guest,' and let Quentin end The Nightmare once and for all.

But no. As Quentin trembled before you with glossy eyes and an inch of hope, you met his stare with a shroud of mist.

Fuck, what was he even doing?

His hands moved straight to his face. Quickly wiping at his face to dry off his blurry vision, Quentin let out a groan. Letting his body fall limp, he sat back on his mattress and rubbed his hands over his closed eyes.

"I'm tired."

The air fell silent.

It felt like an eternity passed before Quentin felt his rage subdue and be replaced with nothing but pure exhaustion. When was the last time he vented out all of his anger? It had been a while. Now that he finally let his thoughts loose, he felt nothing. He was just done.

His eyes finally went back to you. You were still standing by the door, having not moved an inch during his entire mental breakdown.

He released a sigh. Rubbing his eyes, he spoke. "What're you doing in my room, anyways?" He asked, eyeing you down with a frown. "You always just barge in without announcement. Ever heard of knocking?"

And finally, for once the entire time since you've been in his cabin, you replied.

"No."

Quentin scoffed. "Of course not, what should I expect from you." He grumbled. Ruffling his wavy brown locks, Quentin sighed once more before turning his attention back to you. "Well knocking is what polite people do to inform someone that they're coming in." He explained in a snarky tone. Making a fist, he used the back of his hand to knock on wooden bed frame. "Like that."

"I see."

Still standing by the door, you used the back of your gloved knuckles to give his door a gentle knock. You then turned to him with a poker face.

"There. From now on I will knock on the door-"

Quentin nodded, a yawn leaving his lips. "Good."

"-after I've entered the room."

He looked at you in disbelief, "What?"

You stood up straighter. "I said I'll knock after I've entered the room, thus announcing my arrival." You responded, almost factual as if you were the one teaching him about knocking.

Quentin could only look at you with a pointed stare. He was too tired to laugh.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "No, you do it before entering. That way you don't just scare someone or embarrass them. You let them know before so they could either tell you to wait or come in."

You stared at him without saying anything. The male didn't have to see it to know you were confused.

"You know what? Nevermind."

You gave a curt nod before walking further into the room.

"To answer your first question, I have come to give you clean bed sheets." You said, stepping into his line of sight. It was then that Quentin noticed the bundle of white held in your arms.

"Oh."

You gently set the fresh blankets onto the empty wooden desk besides his bed.

Quentin could only stare at the bedsheets, his mind going blank. "Thanks." He mumbled.

Feeling a wave of exhaustion, Quentin threw his head back. Closing his eyes, he ignored your presence as to let his restless mind wander.

While he laid back on the mattress, you turned to face him. You watched as he fought down another yawn. He was a peculiar one. He claims to be so tired, but he won't allow himself to rest. The human psyche worked in mysterious ways. Ways you couldn't understand, but you found intriguing. This particular survivor was a stubborn one, full of hatred and determination. He hated being in the realm, he hated that the dream demon was still alive. However, he still had a drive to see the killer suffer. Unknown to the brunet male, it was his restless obsession to end the dream demon that drew the entity to him. It was that same drive that kept him here and not thrown into the void.

Tired? It was a mere bump in the road, one easily conquered if he were to just allow himself to replenish his energy. How bad has his condition gotten since you've last seen him?

Walking over to his bedside, Quentin felt your shadow loom over him, causing him to open his eyes and slowly sit up.

"What do you want-?"

Before he could finish that sentence, you had leaned down to his eye level. Both of your hands cupped his cheeks, and tilted his head up to meet your ice cold gaze.

Quentin felt his face heat up. He could feel your cold touch hit his pale skin. You were so close, so much so that he could smell the strong scent of burning wood and fresh pine linger off of you. With your face moving closer to his, he could see those pools of [eye color] brighten in hue as you stared at him with your pupils dilating smaller and smaller. It was fascinating, if not scary, seeing the colors in your eyes swirl with life. [Eye color] tones mixed with gold swirls, he has seen your eyes ever glow like this when the two of you would meet up for check-ups, and every time he saw your eyes, he was in awe.

But not this time. Caught off guard, his heart thumped against his chest in fear as you stared at him, expressionless.

"Wh- hey! What're you doing?!" He sputtered, trying to pull himself away. If he weren't so exhausted, he could've probably escaped your grip, but his body failed him, making him sit still as you brushed your fingers across his cheeks.

"I'm scanning your health." You explained, bringing your hand to his temples. "You've been through this process before. I'd assume you would know that by now."

"Well- yeah, but I'd be aware of it first!" Quentin hissed, his body finally moving on his command as he brought his hand up and gripped one of your wrists. It was then that you looked at him, head tilted a bit and the swirl of colors fading in your eyes.

"Is there a problem?"

"Yes." He responded, his eyes not once faltering from your gaze, "Remember the knocking thing?"

"Yes."

"Well, this applies with the same rules. It's only polite to let me know you're going to scan my health before you go on touching me whenever you want. Even then I don't appreciate that."

"Why is that?"

"Because it’s just not okay with me.” As Quentin stared at you, he could see the information sinking in. The touch on his temple was being ever so slightly lifted away, causing him to loosen his own grip.

"I see." You mumbled, brows furrowed for a brief moment before you went back to your stoic expression. "I apologize if what I did is considered impolite.”

Quentin let out a long sigh. He couldn’t quite blame you for not understanding. It wasn’t as if you were intentionally trying to be invasive anyways. You were just another weird species in the realm that had the inability to understand boundaries. So while he still didn’t appreciate you always shadowing over him and the others, he knew that you never really had any ill intent.

“It’s fine.” He groaned into his hands, rubbing at his restless face, “At the very least, you know now."

“Thank you. I will to be sure to learn from this experience and remember to always inform you when I will be performing a wellness check." You commented, eyes stern as you stared down at him. “However, I do need to continue to scan your vitals. So I will inform you right now that I will be checking on your health. It is my duty to ensure all survivors are—.”

“—adequate enough to perform in trials. yeah, yeah. I know the drill.” Quentin rolled his eyes. Of course you wouldn’t completely follow his words. Why would you? It wasn’t as if you were in an allegiance with him. He was just another prisoner in the realm— one of many victims to the entity. He was just lucky you even took his words into consideration when you had no obligation to.

So, with his head rolling back to face the ceiling, Quentin mumbled a string of swears under his breath before meting your eyes once more.

“Fine. Just make it quick." He grumbled, watching you nod and gently rest your fingers back onto his temple. While you hovered over him, Quentin could feel his face warm up once more with every passing second he took looking at you. He could see every detail of your face. The shape of your eyes and the swirl of colors in your irises, his eyes moved across your face where he noted the peach fuzz on your cheeks and followed along the curves of your lips.

Your body was almost flushed against his. Your legs stood against the side of the bed, but your body leaned in close as your hands moved across his forehead. If anyone saw him now, they would think the two of you were being intimate with the way you brushed his hair off his skin and gently caressed the space under his eyes.

Although you were way too close for comfort, he had to admit that the way you were holding his face with delicate care was really soothing. He could feel his heart returning to an even pace and his body relax under your touch. He knew he shouldn't be letting his guard down, especially around someone who works under the creature that brought him here, but the way your hands cupped his face made him feel safe again. He let his eyes close, this time without Freddy popping into his vision.

"You're sleep deprived. Your insomnia has caused you to have high blood pressure and become easily irritable."

You released his face, making him stumble forward and blink himself awake.

You straightened up, your eyes gazed down at him almost as if you were scolding him.

"I've already informed you, but The Nightmare has no access to getting to the survivors' side of the map. And even if it were plausible, all killings outside the map are strictly forbidden and are punishable."

Quentin turned his face away, his once relaxed posture straightening up as he sat back against the bed frame. His embarrassment long forgotten upon hearing his diagnosis.

"I already know all that. I keep telling you, no matter how many times you tell me these things, I can't go to sleep."

"Well, you haven't been visiting the medical cabin as much. I merely assumed you go when I'm not around. Have you stopped taking your pills?"

Quentin sighed, "They stopped working."

You were confused.

"If that was the case then why haven't you come to see me? I could always prepare you with other medication."

Quentin let out a sarcastic laugh. "So the others can keep questioning me? I already get a bad rep by falling asleep in trials, I don't want the others asking anymore questions. It'll just cause more problems."

You didn't understand why it was such a big deal, but if the brunet survivor was going to be stubborn then you would have to find other means for him to rest. Getting off the bed, you straightened yourself out before looking back over to him.

"If that's the case, then do you have any other methods of being able to fall asleep?"

Other methods?

Quentin scratched the back of his head. "Ugh, not that I know of."

The male racked in his brain for any memories. Warm milk did nothing. He's already tried exercising. And sleeping pills...he's taken so many that he's pretty sure that if he survived every one of his trials then he'd die of bad intestines. He's done pretty much everything.

A sudden flash of Nancy came to mind, causing Quentin to halt. Nancy.

He remembered those nights with Nancy after they both thought they had killed Freddy. He remembered how he would hold Nancy to sleep, lulling her with sweet words followed by small kisses. He remembered holding her as the visions would come flooding in, but once he tightened his hold on her, feeling her body against his as he cuddled her like a safety blanket, the visions would go away. It was all Nancy. Nancy was his reason to keep going. She made him strong. She was what kept him sane and the nightmares away. She was his everything.

A ghost of a smile moved on his lips.

"Did you think of something?" You asked, having witnessed his change of demeanor.

Quentin snapped out of his daze. Meeting your observing eyes, Quentin coughed into his hand, hiding his blushing face. "Yeah, but it's dumb."

"Please share." You urged, "it is vital you get your sleep to be proficient in trials."

Quentin felt his finger clam up. He hadn't really spoken about Nancy before to anyone in the fog, and quite frankly, he really didn't want to. But knowing you, if he didn't share what he had been thinking about, then you would never go away.

"When Freddy was constantly harassing me and my friends, there was this girl." He started, his mind wandering into a haze of broken memories. "She was warm, funny, a fighter- the coolest person you would ever meet. Her presence made me forget Freddy was even around." He chuckled, remembering the small moments between him and Nancy.

"Back home when we thought Freddy had died, we became a thing. Ever since those nights on Elm Street, we would always sleepover at each other's houses. We were paranoid, but being around each other brought us both comfort. Well, for me at least. I was always the one that was supposed to keep her safe, but she always made me feel safe."

Quentin smiled, "She was amazing."

The male let his mind wander, reminiscing about his time with Nancy. How long had it been since he last saw her? How was she doing? Although Quentin hated being in this realm, he was happy it was him and not Nancy.

"Unfortunately I can't bring that person here to this realm." You replied, causing Quentin to look up at you, alarmed.

"No, that's not what I want! Even if you could bring her here- that's the last thing I would want to happen!" He exclaimed, his heart aching at the thought. "Anything but that."

Burying himself in his arms, he mumbled. "I just miss not being alone."

So that's what it was.

"Well, would you perhaps want me to stay? Another presence in the room might make you feel safe from the Nightmare. You already know he can not leave the killer's side of the realm, but if it brings you peace to have someone watch over you, I can stay until you rest."

Quentin really, really wanted to decline. Although he's known you for quite some time, he didn't really know you, know you. It would be like a stranger watching over him as he slept. But, you were his only option. He didn't want to bother anyone anymore with his restless condition, and if having you in the room as he slept would keep him from bothering the other survivors, then so be it.

Quentin met your eyes and gave a hesitant nod.

"Then, please." You motioned towards the bed, "Get some rest."

Quentin reluctantly laid back in his bed. Settling under the sheets, the brunet motioned over to the desk and chair next to his bed. "You can sit there if you want."

You looked back over at the desk, and nodded. As you pulled the chair from the table and sat back, Quentin took his time setting himself back into a more comfortable position in the sheets. Although he wasn't the most comfortable in his jeans and jacket, he refused to be any more vulnerable in front of you than he already has been.

Closing his eyes, the tired male tried to relax.

Key word: tried.

While he laid in silence, he could feel your eyes bore into him, studying his movements like an animal in a zoo.

He furrowed his brows, "It's hard to sleep when you're staring at me."

"I apologize."

Another moment of silence, but this time, he could actually feel himself relax. Your strong scent of fresh pine still lingered in the air, making him forget about any thoughts of the dream demon. The only thing he could think about was your scent and the ghostly touch of fingers on his face. Before drifting off to sleep, Quentin looked over at you.

You stared out at the window, the darkness of the wilderness reflecting in your eyes.

He wanted to thank you for staying with him. But he couldn't.

So as he fluttered his eyes closed, the last thing Quentin saw was your silhouette. And for once, he allowed himself to finally relax for the first time in a long time.

Walking down the pebbled path, Feng Min wandered around aimlessly as her mind went back to the previous discussions with the others. She couldn't stop thinking about it ever since Yun-Jin brought it up.

Was it really possible to change you?

She didn't know, but she wanted to give it a try. All the facts point to you being nonhuman, obviously, but a nonhuman that didn't pick either the survivors or killers. You were a loophole, the perfect bug in the game, and she hadn't realized it until now.

Being a competitive gamer, Min wasn't one to give up on a challenge so easily. She strived to strategize, to succeed, and prove others wrong. So what if some of the others didn't believe in their plan? She was determined to change you and escape. Even if she had to do it alone, so be it. She was ready to leave.

Walking by the rows of cabins, Min caught sight of familiar [hair color] hair, causing her to halt. Speak of the devil.

You were carrying around bundles of sheets, walking into each cabin for a few minutes and shortly leaving afterwards. This was one of your routines, she noted, watching as you left Felix's cabin and walked into Quentin's.

For being a creature created by pure evil, you were surprisingly clean and maintained a perfect posture. Always doing tasks scarily quick and often appearing out of thin air. You were the perfect being, and Min often wondered if you were created that way or if that was something you learned. Did you even want to learn? Or were you just created perfect? Did you ever have any stray thoughts?

Maybe she should ask? No, she should wait for the others. They have yet to decide how to go about talking to you. They wanted to first recruit others, see how you interacted with all of the survivors, before setting up a plan.

Still, she was curious to know more about you.

Suddenly, Min heard shouting. Her eyes gazed upon Quentin's cabin with a raised brow. From the sounds of it, Quentin had been yelling at you. She couldn't really hear what about, but as soon as the shouting came, it went. Leaving nothing but silence to fill the air. She didn't really care what happened in there. If anything, you would just go back to what you were doing like how you usually do when dealing with either Meg's temper tantrums or Nea's bullying.

The black haired woman crossed her arms over her chest, and she waited.

Soon you would leave that cabin, moving on to the next, and continue your routine.

Or at least that's what she thought. But as time passed, you never left Quentin's cabin, leaving Min standing there confused and surprised.

Scratch out what she just thought. She did care. What happened in there? Why didn't you leave Quentin's cabin? What're you two doing in there? And how were the two of you associated?

Thinking about it now, Min realized that sometimes when she lingered around the campfire, she would often see Quentin go to the medical cabin, uninjured. Was he going there to see you? If so, then why? She knew Dwight would often see you because he had a crush on you, it was obvious. Well, it was obvious to her at least. But you and Quentin? Who else were you associated with?

Survivors in the realm often worked together, all of them were fighting the same fight, so there was no reason to keep secrets, right? Well, she thought that. But as she stood in the middle of the path, thinking over all the other survivors in the realm, she realized most of them were strangers. She truly didn't know some of them outside the trials.

Min hummed to herself. She didn't know Quentin all that well, but if you and him had some kind of association, maybe mentioning him to the others wouldn't be so bad.

Noting that for later, Min didn't care to stay any longer and continued on her path.

[dragonflyace]

Lighting design in Team Starkid shows, a small ramble (spoilers for NPMD--will cut before I get there)

As someone who did a bit of lighting design in high school and college theatre, I have such a fascination about different choices with lighting to help a scene along. There are a couple of choice scenes from Team Starkid that I want to talk about, though I could probably do more if I wanted to.

Black Friday

The first is from Black Friday. The lighting designer is Sarah Petty, who has done lighting for every show since AVPS in 2010.

The instance in particular is the lead up and duration of Feast or Famine (around the 41:30 timestamp). The green and red slowly begin to appear while Frank starts to do the bidding, and it stays until the song is over. These colors throughout the number have a double meaning.

They're usually seen as Christmas colors, but the colors also have separate meanings. Green is commonly associated with greed/envy and materialism, and red is commonly associated with anger and aggression. These are themes that originate in this scene in particular, and you can feel the rise of these emotions with the appearance of the red and green lights.

NERDY PRUDES MUST DIE (SPOILERS AHEAD)

The next scene I want to talk about is from Nerdy Prudes Must Die. The lighting designer for this show is Joey Guthman, and this is his first show with them!

The scene I want to talk about in this post is Max Jägerman's death. When he's been impaled by the wood, he has a red spotlight on him, visible with the regular stage lighting. When he starts to die, the light slowly begins to fade, and it's completely gone as soon as he's dead. (51:10)

The added visual representation of his life leaving his body is something that I LOVE. I noticed it the most in the digital ticket a few months ago, and I'm sad that it wasn't as noticeable in the pro-shot, but it's still there if you look for it! It's such a simple lighting choice, but it also adds SO MUCH. You're seeing the exact moment that he dies.

That being said, I just love their stuff so much. I would do a whole video essay on it if I could because I would be able to add visuals.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

As a palette cleanser for when you’re done studying, what are some of your favorite works of horror besides Welcome Home?

it's hard for me to articulate what makes a work of horror my Favorite, so i just racked my brain for the ones i tend to come back to the most often, and i came up with these. i tried to include official links only, but some of these can easily be found Elsewhere online (hint hint) and others don't have any official english localizations. i've also included a brief summary and content warnings for each one - be warned that some of these are A Lot.

don't hug me i'm scared: (channel 4 series) episodic surreal horror comedy about three puppets sharing a very normal house, learning very normal lessons from the designated "teacher" of each episode, and navigating their very normal world. content warnings include: unreality and gore. like, at least once an episode, there is gore. lbr if you're a fan of welcome home then you at least have a passing knowledge of dhmis.

sex house: a parody of early 2010s reality tv, centering around six contestants being invited to the titular house for one thing and one thing only - sex. they will have sex. the network won't stand for anything less. content warnings include: sexual coercion/extortion, one dubiously consensual sex scene between two people with an extreme age gap, pregnancy, animal death, brief but on-screen gore, drugging, death/near-death situations as a result of negligence, and one instance of Questionable asexual representation that might have just been a diversion (i really cannot tell.) also there's a scene in episode 4 where a character draws muhammad on their forehead so that they can't be filmed and i still have no idea how to feel about it.

porkin across america: a former daytime talk show host embarks on his latest venture, a food tourism show in which he samples the best pork-themed dishes every state in the U.S. has to offer. but can he see his quest through to the end while also outrunning the harsher realities of life and reality TV? signs point to no. content warnings include: gore, body horror, two instances of offscreen but audible animal death, a brief instance of drug abuse, and some casual racism on the part of the host in order to establish him as Every Unlikable American Food Tourist (this gets dropped early on.)

i want to hold aono-kun so badly i could die: two teens attempt to forge the perfect relationship with one another - an effort that is somewhat hampered by the fact that they come from less-than-perfect families. also, one of them is a ghost. content warnings include: explicit sexual content, gore, body horror, suicide, graphic suicide attempt, death, child death, animal death, and pretty much every kind of abuse (emotional, physical, sexual, neglect, etc.) in the context of both familial and romantic relationships.

devotion: a screenwriter in 1980s taiwan awakens one evening to find himself in his living room, now dark and decrepit, and attempts to navigate the ever-shifting layout of his apartment in order to look for his daughter. content warnings include: gore, domestic abuse, ableism, some flashing/jumpscares, [potential spoilers from this point forward] religious abuse, cults, and child death.

slay the princess: a visual novel (albeit a demo for now) about a princess locked away in a cabin, and the narrator who really, really wants you to kill her (for perfectly altruistic reasons, i'm sure.) but who is she? what does she look like? does she seem like the kind of person who could bring about the end of the world like the narrator insists? that all depends on how you see her - literally. content warnings include: black tabby games was kind enough to provide content warnings themselves!

the wolf house: a stop-motion film presented as a propaganda piece for a cult heavily based on colonia dignidad, following a young woman who flees in order to escape her punishment for letting three pigs escape, and ends up taking refuge in an abandoned house in the woods with two pigs (unrelated to the first three.) i honestly have a hard time describing it beyond that - i would say it's worth watching for the animation alone, but i think the story it presents as well as the historical context really elevated it for me, to the point where i don't think i would have the same appreciation for it otherwise. content warnings include: body horror, references to nazi/white supremacist ideology, cults, religious abuse, and possible allusions to child sexual abuse.

also, i didn't include works from either of these people because if i listed Every work of horror they had a hand in that i liked then this post would be 200 miles long, but i really like alan resnick and jordan peele's horror work. i was almost going to include what happens next, but that isn't really horror so much as it is a new age thriller-drama thing, and i couldn't really find a way to summarize it more succinctly than just relaying the events of the comic so far in full. good thing each title card comes with content warnings.

[avelera]

Impressions on Jujutsu Kaisen S1-S2

(In no particular order)

(Because I felt like it)

So I got up to date on the anime Jujutsu Kaisen, mostly for lack of something to watch, and found it interesting. Partially because of its popularity (#1 on Crunchyroll in Dec. 2023). S2 is just about complete at this time and as others have remarked, there's a pretty big tone shift between S1 and S2.

As someone who spent their teen and college years enjoying Shounen series like Naruto and Bleach, who used to be much deeper into anime from about 2000-2010, it's interesting to see the way the Shounen genre has "evolved" from what I knew when I was more a part of the teen/early 20s target audience.

(Cut for spoilers beyond this point.)

First of all, it might even be a misnomer to call JJK purely shounen. The tone shift in S2 takes it to some pretty violent places. Places that seem in excess of, say, Naruto's peak violence. That said, I'm not entirely sure JJK deserves the genre of "seinin" exactly, because its plot structure is still pretty grounded in Shounen action/adventure.

Thing is, for all of the increase in violence, I'm not sure the issues the show actually deals with earn it the "seinin" or more "adult" designation just yet. JJK, so far at least, to me seems to struggle with being "about" something more than its premise. For example, the magical powers gained by the girls in Puella Magi Madoka Magica are at least a little bit about the struggles of being a young woman, about growing up, about grief and loss and love. A magical girl "becoming" a witch plays into a larger theme of loss of innocence.

At least as of the end of S2, JJK doesn't exactly have a thing that being a jujutsu sorcerer is actually "about". It's not really a coming of age parallel. It's not really about coming to terms with death (though a lot of death happens). It's still very much about the big fights that are happening. Absorbing Sukuna for Yuji Itadori isn't a metaphor or even lending to a metaphor for anything else except absorbing Sukuna.

This is totally fine by the way! Not everything needs to be "about" something bigger. But, for me at least, the "not being about something bigger" is what's keeping JJK at an A- instead of an A+.

JJK is also strangely lacking in worldbuilding. And I say strangely because it almost feels like it skips the worldbuilding because it's derivatively leaning on the worldbuilding done by other shounen anime. Like, "We don't need to explain how people can randomly jump from tree to tree or hover in the air while fighting, because Naruto already did that. You don't really want us to stop the narrative to explain how Yuji leveled up all these basic magical fighting abilities, right? So don't worry about how he can suddenly do all this stuff."

Literally, Yuji will gain an ability like Black Flash within the course of a single battle. In Bleach or Inuyasha, gaining that sort of ability would take an entire arc and lots of trial and error. So I have mixed feelings about JJK kind of just skipping him struggling to learn Black Flash for any length of time because yeah, that beat can get kind of tiresome in anime. We know they're going to learn the ability, so it's just dragging the process out to make it an entire arc.

But on the other hand, making the gaining of a new ability into an arc lends a certain gravity to the story. A sense of stakes and achievement. Yuji never really struggles to learn any new ability. He picks them up in the course of any given battle (or Sukuna drops in and bails him out).

So in a way, JJK is innovating on the Shounen genre by just skipping a lot of the base level fighting ability arcs and challenges, in order to cut straight through the biggest, most epic battles. There is no little kid level ninja school, our Naruto is fighting Orochimaru-level threats in the middle of S1.

Now, the way the story also innovates on throwing endgame level threats at the hero right away, instead of a bunch of trash to slowly build them up, is by having the bad guys not die in the fight. Bad guys often escape the battle to fight another day. Yes, trash battles happen, but endgame level villains are taking part with surprising regularity for the genre. Aizen from Bleach wasn't showing up for every side character battle that Ichigo fought against him in the lead up to their confrontations. And characters who were defeated didn't really show up again as antagonists, at least not in the Soul Society or Hueco Mondo arcs. They either became allies or they died. So JJK is different in this regard, in a way that's rather refreshing actually.

Now, to go back to worldbuilding, JJK was interesting to me because it started out very authoritative about its genre. It was very paint by numbers standard shounen but so confidently executed that it didn't feel boring. We had lots of shounen genre cliches, like the plucky protagonist with tons of power potential, his dark haired team member who is brooding, the secretly powerful goofy teacher, etc.

But how the JJK universe fits into our world is strangely lacking. Part of it feels purposeful. It's very laser focused on moving the story along. It doesn't really care to answer questions like, "How are these people getting paid?" and "Why is a school tasked with saving the world?" Like, it's basically X-Men rules, so it's fine.

But by contrast, Naruto's ninja villages were an entire ecosystem, we knew how ninjas fit into society and why everyone was doing what they did. We know how Bleach's Soul Society fits into the fabric of the universe. We know how My Hero Academia's world views heroes, a ton of My Hero time is poured into explaining how this world works. JJK... doesn't really bother to say how the world works outside of how it impacts the characters in this moment. It's the thing I find most curiously lacking of all it, and I'm just not quite sure what to make of it.

A few other random thoughts: JJK is fairly refreshing in that it's not totally reductive anime nonsense with regards to women, like having tons of panty shots or whatever. Men still tend to be the most powerful, and it's still a pretty shounen-standard ratio of 2 plot-relevant guys for every 1 woman. But it does view women as people for the most part, so I appreciate that.

But JJK does have some anime nonsense in the sense of people just randomly going "over 9000" with their ability or pulling abilities that no one knew about before that moment out of their ass. I think the show is at its best when it plants its foreshadowing a liiittle further in advance, like when Mahito accidently "touched" Sukuna in that first fight. Everything we needed to know to realize what was going to happen was seeded in advance, and it was a crowning moment of awesome as a result. But besides moments like that, there's a LOT of "Well that didn't work, because I have this secret ability that I'm going to reveal and explain right now!" It's a bit like watching little kids play with action figures in that respect of just randomly having the right tool at the right time.

That said, that sort of "little did you know, I had this secret weapon that easily defeats you that I'm just revealing now!" seems in general more accepted in Japanese storytelling, whereas in Western storytelling the "rule" is more that you need to seed Checkov's gun a lot sooner before you can use it. You can't pull the gun off the mantlepiece to use at the same time you reveal it, it feels cheap. But, since there is a cultural divide between me and the writer, I'm just going to note it as something that pinged me, rather than saying it's good or bad as such. I like foreshadowing that's done further in advance, but that could be a culturally-based preference on my part.

I'm curious where JJK will go next. The violence escalation makes me think either it's going to continue to escalate, or there will be an endgame option to undo all the damage by some magical means at a later date. I'm more than 70/30 thinking it's just going to continue to escalate, but we'll see!

[callofdutylorist]

Meet: “Ghost” Simon Riley (Reboot)

Appears in Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019), Call of Duty: Warzone, Call of Duty Mobile, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II (2022), and Call of Duty Warzone 2.0

CW: Spoilers for both Modern Warfare Timelines

There are two separate versions of the character Ghost. One is from the classic timeline, and the other is from the reboot timeline. Both are absolute fan favorites and I don’t blame them. There are some major changes to the second Modern Warfare timeline that drastically affect Ghost. Primarily the fact that he doesn’t die to general shepherd like he did in the classic timeline.

Ghost is a British man from Manchester, England. He is 6′4″ and much like his counterpart is face overall not known, but hair and eye color are identified. Ghost has brown hair and brown hair (so far) in the reboot, while his Classic counterpart has black hair and green eyes.

This Ghost is primarily in the Modern Warfare Reboot timeline. His counterpart is in the Classic Modern Warfare.

Simon Riley (Reboot) first appears in Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019). 

Ghost joined the SAS, proving his skills for covert missions, including sabotage, ambushes, infiltrations, illegal trade, and more. He’s concealed his identity by his iconic skull printed mask. Captain John Price would eventually recruit him into taskforce 141. It didn’t take long for Ghost to become a commanding officer for the taskforce.

As a member of taskforce 141 Ghost assists the other members and allies of Captain Price in their dangerous missions, including starting the journey to stop Zakhaev and his infamous force. His brutal efficiency, apathy towards violence, and great skills in clandestine proved to be exactly what the taskforce needed. Although he has a brush with death due to Graves/Shepherd’s betrayal, he pushes onwards. Eventually forming a secondary team known as Ghost Team, which is a combination of taskforce 141 and Los Vaqueros. 

Ghost has three notable traits, a strong set of dark humor, apathy towards violence, and an intense need for being unknown. He is seen frequently making dark jokes, and bringing the military humor to the team (a trait he shares with his classic counterpart, but it does slightly different this time). He is also seen taking out his enemies with brutal efficiency.

Ghost shares a strong rivalry with fellow Taskforce 141 member, Soap, fueled by their rivaling national identities (English & Scottish). Overtime their frenemy situation-ship becomes an incredibly close bond, far more implied to some form of bromance. When Soap gets injured from Graves’ attempt of betrayal, he shows an increased amount of sympathy than he normally does to anything, proving their notable bond. 

Ghost is also quite close with Captain Price, as Price is quite close to all of his crew(s). He takes the time to learn Spanish both for work and jokes to get along closer with Los Vaqueros. In the past he has also worked with Mace, but not much is known about the two’s relationship back in the SAS, it is implied that they might be enemies now.

The soldier will continue to go on in his timeline, and what happens next I have no clue, but am excited to see what they come up with. This is all notably different from how his journey goes in the Classic Timelines, where he fatally meets his end from Shepherd’s betrayal alongside Roach. 

The character himself plays a major role in the Call of Duty Community, being one of the first characters the big boy companies acknowledged as a fan favorite. He’s among all the sub groups of Call of Duty’s fandoms, being the guy every boy wanted to drink with in 2010s, and now the guy every artist wants to draw in...questionable positions. 

[bzedan]

November was kind of a fucking lot! The middle-ish of this playlist ('Dance Hall Days' to 'Kiss from a Rose') is just the five-song playlist I loop on repeat for hours as brain static. Yes I play '30 Century Man' twice in a row, it's the law. Anyway, I apparently used this aural coping method so much it affected my Spotify Wrapped, something it hasn't done so notably in years, so that's the summary of November.

Related media to some of the songs:

There's a Cicada Omega song on here, though I think they've shown up before. We knew these guys (still know these guys some) in the 2010s, Chase took a lot of their promo images and they remain one of the few folks in this particular sliver of genre I enjoy.

If you haven't seen the video for 'Dance Hall Days' then it's worth a gander, I think this song would be what played for me in my personal version of the ballroom scene in Labyrinth.

'Run From Me' by Timber Timbre was featured beautifully in season 2, episode 2 of Our Flag Means Death (this scene is spoilers obvi), and then I FORGOT and I kept listening to it, wondering what I knew it from.

EMA is another musician who is a delight as a person, and one I forget I have known.

My BFF and I were talking about how songs were in the 2000s and 2010s and how sometimes a shitty rip of a song playing diegetically in a scene on a show was the only copy you had. One of those for me is 'Brian Down' by Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, a file from the early 2000s that has floated through our various drives and which is most easily sharable via listening to it on youtube, annoyingly.

Anyway here's a link to November's playlist on Spotify, with the track list below the cut.

And embedded, if you like that:

'November' - Lil Peep

'DANSE MACABRE' - Duran Duran

'Motorcycle' - Liz Cooper

'Marie-Antoinette - Sparks English Version' - Lio

'Milyonochek - Acoustic Techno' - Dobranotch

'BLACK MOONLIGHT' - Duran Duran

'Not' - Big Thief

'SUPER LONELY FREAK' - Duran Duran

'Are You With Me Now?' - Cate Le Bon

'NIGHTBOAT' - Duran Duran

'Anesthesia' - Type O Negative

'Only For Tonight' - Pearl Charles

'Heart and Hope to Die' - Tristen

'Capacity' - Charly Bliss

'Flatline' - Cicada Omega

'Wrong Direction' - They Shoot Horses Don't They

'Dance Hall Days' - Wang Chung

'The Brazilian' - Genesis

'30 Century Man' - Scott Walker

'30 Century Man' - Scott Walker

'Hungry Like the Wolf - 2001 Remaster' - Duran Duran

'Kiss from a Rose' - Seal

'What's Up' - O-Dee

'I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)' - The Proclaimers

'So Alive' - Love and Rockets

'Last Life' - Izzy Perri

'Gilgamesh' - King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

'Change (In the House of Flies)' - Deftones

'There Is a Light That Never Goes Out' - Dum Dum Girls

'I'm Real - Murder Remix' - Jennifer Lopez

'One & Only' - Oliver Tree

'Oh to Be in Love' - Kate Bush

'Run From Me' - Timber Timbre

'Chang'e' - King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

'California' - EMA

'Major Tom (Coming Home)' - Shiny Toy Guns

'Stray Cat Strut' - Stray Cats

'Inside Out' - The Mighty Lemon Drops

'The Prince - Remastered 2021' - Diamond Head

'Supermassive Black Hole' - Muse

'Help I'm Alive' - Metric

[ambrosialdesire]

OH MY GOD YOUVE WATCHED DEATH NOTE. would you ever consider writing yandere stuff for any of the characters 🤧🤧

YES I WATCHED DEATH NOTE HAHA i have the first black edition manga for it too but i haven't got the other ones lol and it was one of the first mangas that i got when i was younger (the first ones i got was the two aot: no regrets manga and the family member that got them for me did not understand why i liked reading a "picture book" HAHA)

i usually watch "old" anime from the 2000s-2010s, there's very few newer gen anime i'm interested in unless they really have good potential to be an amazing story and have an interesting art style that's good on the eyes. i feel like it's bc i prefer the nostalgia that the older animes gave me in middle school cause i used to EAT up those youtube amvs FUCK THOSE WERE SO GOOD LMFAOOOO

writing for death note however, i don't think i will as much as i like the show and character potentials. i basically write on vibes and how much i enjoy dedicating my writing and time for that certain work/fandom. also character-wise, i only really like L tbh AND MATSUDA (yk that clumsy dumbass cop that *spoilers* shot up light in the anime 💀) idk why i like him, i just find him silly lol

[dans-den]

Shazam! Fury of the Gods Review

What's going on everyone! Dan here and today I'll be reviewing Shazam! Fury of the Gods!

I'll try to not give as much spoilers as possible but there will be some, you've been warned.

First off I'd like to say, I loved the first Shazam! movie from 2019. I thought it was the best DC hero movie made in the 2010's even beating out movies like Man of Steel and the Dark Knight Rises. So when I heard Shazam! was getting a sequel, I was excited and looking forward to it thinking it'll be as good as the original, maybe even better. Unfortunately that was not the case as this movie was a bit messier than the original in terms of plot and some character development issues. This movie was horrible, but it wasn't as great as I was hoping either. I'll be going over the strengths and weaknesses of this film.

Now this is where the real problems start, Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock. As we all know, Johnson wanted the role of the Black Adam character and years later as he is now one of the top A list actors in the business, he got his wish. However, He would only do the role if he got his own stand alone Black Adam movie which he did, I have a full review of The Black Adam movie and mentioned this in that review but didn't go into how it would hurt the Shazam! franchise. At the cost of giving Black Adam his own solo film, it crippled the sequel for Shazam! especially given that Black Adam is the most iconic villain Captain Marvel himself has in his rogue's gallery. I'm sure this sequel was meant to have these two meet but unfortunately Dwayne got his way and pretty much left the Shazam crew scrambling. It's a similar situation to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever where they had the plot ready but due to the death of Chadwick Boseman they had to rewrite the script which had a very mixed reception to say the least. I find it to be a real shame we didn't get the battle of Captain Marvel vs Black Adam on the big screen, that would have been epic. Who knows? maybe they'll work something out to where they'll meet and fight, maybe Superman can get in on this too like Superman/Shazam: Return of Black Adam (which is honestly great). Though I highly doubt that as Zachery Levi and Dwayne Johnson are going through some beef due to this issue. But as it stands, they had to rewrite the script and salvage what they could.

The plot now is there are three daughters of a god named Atlas, these gods were sealed away and because of the events of the last movie, the seal is broken and they are free. Now they're after the Marvel family deeming that mortals should not have powers of the gods. They try to take those powers away all while trying to get the gold apple to plant the tree of life back at their home to restore it to its former beauty. The villains here were more or less made for the movie and aren't really Captain Marvel villains, they fit more as Wonder Woman villains if I'm being honest. The villains aren't bad and I do like the actresses who portrayed them. The sisters provided three different sides/views such as Anthea (Rachael Zegler) being the good side of the sisters, Hespera (Helen Mirren) being the neutral side of the sisters, and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) being the evil side of the sisters. They all did a great job in their role, their powers are cool but I feel are underutilized from their full potential against the Marvel Family. Hespera controlling elements she should basically be the Avatar and use all the elements to greater degrees but is mostly used as like a power puncher, Kalypso has the power to whisper in your ear and make you do as she commands and even spread it like a plague but its only used in the first half of the movie and is pretty much forgotten about later on when she has her dragon to destroy everything. Anthea has the power of accessibility where she can pull a Doctor Strange and can warp the room and areas around which is honestly cool VFX. The fighting and VFX were not bad honestly, definitely better than what Marvel has been churning out lately. As I said, they did good and served their purpose, but I would have preferred Black Adam or even another Captain Marvel villain like say Chain Lightning, she would probably be better to add to the story than random gods.

The main cast did a great job again like in the first one, Zachery Levi as Captain Marvel did great, I enjoy his humor and him as a boy in a grown mans body just like the rest of the cast being kids in adult bodies. I love the dialogue and humor with the Marvel family. I will say that there is a bit of development for Billy with having abandonment issues which makes him hold on too tight to everyone around him and Freddy especially gets sick and tired of it which causes some issues within the Marvel Family. Freddy was basically the B plot of this movie with him wanting to do his own thing whether it be as a hero or just his personal life in general but Billy is just reluctant to the idea of anyone in his family going off and doing their own thing. I wish these aspects of character development was more prevalent through out the film but it was sprinkled in here and there. at the end, Billy realizes that his family will always be there for him and this helps him realize that the wizard chose right with him. There is a cameo towards the end of a familiar hero and they'll be crucial towards the end after the final battle.

Post credit scenes are a bit jarring but reflects what plans they have for the Shazam franchise (if they can get any backing behind it now). There are two post credit scenes this movie has and both I think are meant to set up another Shazam! movie in the near future. Though after the mixed to somewhat negative reception of the Shazam! sequel, odds of there being another Shazam! movie is a bit slimmer than before. I honestly wouldn't mind another Shazam! movie but right now DC is just a complete mess with projects being cancelled out of nowhere, The Flash still going forward as planned despite the Ezra Miller controversies, and with Warner Bros just being a complete fiasco right now. Things are uncertain but hopefully things will be better from here on out or at least after The Flash movie.

Overall, the sequel wasn't as good as the original. I felt that Dwayne Johnson really threw this franchise under the bus and left them to pick up the pieces. As I said I like the Shazam! movie, I like Zachery Levi and I wanted to like this sequel but so many problems plagued this production. I wish they could have taken more time to make it better but I guess it is what it is. It's not terrible, just underwhelming compared tot he original. Hopefully DC/WB can get it together and churn out bangers in the future.

Rating this movie I'd give it:

6.5/10

Despite the problems it suffered in production, it is still a fun movie to watch and if you're looking for a fun movie with kids or family then this is definitely serviceable. I'm hoping The Flash and the upcoming Blue Beetle movie will be better but we'll see. That's all I have to say.

See ya!

[ao3feed-brucewayne]

Under the Black Mask

by FishFromMars Stephanie Brown has a very nice life with the Waynes. That all changes one day when she thinks she can take on a villain alone. OR Under The Red Hood arc but Stephanie Brown takes it on herself. Words: 3394, Chapters: 1/5, Language: English Series: Part 2 of Birds Fly in Different Directions Fandoms: Batman - All Media Types, Red Robin (Comics), Robin (Comics), Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010), Batman and Robin (Comics) Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death Categories: Gen, F/M Characters: Stephanie Brown, Bruce Wayne, Damian Wayne, Tim Drake, Jason Todd Relationships: Bruce Wayne & Stephanie Brown & Jason Todd & Tim Drake & Damian Wayne, Stephanie Brown/Tim Drake Additional Tags: Child Neglect, Orphaned Child, Loneliness, Bruce Wayne Tries to Be a Good Parent, Stephanie Brown is Spoiler, Bruce Wayne is Batman, Pre-Under the Red Hood Arc, Post-Under the Red Hood Arc, Canon Divergence - Under the Red Hood Arc, Tim Drake is Cardinal, Damian Wayne is Shadow, Jason Todd is Not Robin, Jason Todd is a Batfamily Member, More to come as I add to this story, no beta we die like robins, Reverse Robins, Batkids Age Reversal via https://ift.tt/fBOEr98

[therubyreader]

My Review of Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

See a full list of my book reviews here

*Disclaimer: there will be spoilers later on in the review*

Review Word Count, non-spoiler: 824 Review Word Count Total: 1,432

So, I caved. After seeing all the hype that Legendborn was getting both on here and on TikTok I was finally convinced to read it despite the fact that I’m not a fan of Arthurian legends or really anything medieval for that matter and honestly, it does live up to the hype. Especially if you’re like me, and were weirdly obsessed with that Disney Channel movie, Avalon High, back in the day, this book has the same exact vibes and a very similar premise. Also, sidenote, I was Googling the movie to make sure I was remembering the title correctly, I found out it was originally a book written by Meg Cabot, aka the author of The Princess Diaries, so do with that information what you will. 

The book introduces us to Bree Matthews, a 16-year-old girl grieving the loss of her mother after she died in a tragic car accident. Her grief drives her away from home and to UNC-Chapel Hill, a university that has an early college program for promising high school students. On her first night there, she witnesses a flying demon that feeds on human energy get taken down by a group of teenagers, called Legendborn (roll credits), decedents of the knights of King Arthur with incredible abilities. When one of the teenagers, a Merlin, tries to wipe her memory of the night and it doesn’t work, Bree remembers this same magic was used on her the night her mother died. Realizing that there is more to her mother’s death than what she was originally led to believe, she infiltrates the Legendborn society on campus with the help of Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn, as they discover the secrets of the society while on the brink of a magical war between the demons and Legendborn. 

Like I said earlier, this book is great, definitely worth the hype it’s getting, it’s a great modern interpretation of Arthurian legends with a good amount of diversity that is treated respectfully and realistically. Of course, the most obvious one is Bree, a black girl, who is not only going through this magical adventure but being black and navigating the world and the magical adventure. Not to give too much away outside of the spoiler section but Bree’s background and the history of black people as a whole in the US is a big part of the plot and Bree’s journey which I think is beautiful. As a non-black POC I think that part of Bree’s story was done so well, and I can really sympathize with her despite not being able to explicitly relate. There’s also a nonbinary character in the book named Greer and I honestly didn’t fully realize they were nonbinary because they were so seamlessly integrated into the story that I didn’t bat an eye at the use of they/them pronouns. And there are also queer characters who are unapologetically queer, and happy, and just being people, their identities are very much a part of their character but not their whole character.  

And, for being the author’s debut novel, it honestly isn’t written like one, the writing is good and easy to follow so you become immersed in the world very easily. I will say the prologue is written a bit like a 2010s, Wattpad story and some of the rest of the book has the same vibes from time to time but it honestly isn’t a big deterrent. I will though, complain about the love triangle because I hate almost all love triangles and think they’re bad. I might’ve said this before, but I think most love triangles are a cheap way to make your plot more exciting (which this book did not need at all, it’s exciting enough as is) especially when one of the potential partners is a genuinely nice person and the other one is very obviously a POS. Honestly, the whole book could’ve done without it, the writing and story were compelling enough to where a love triangle wasn’t needed to fill in any spots that were lacking and I was going to talk more about why I specifically don’t like certain characters as love interests but I noticed that this fandom is violent about shipping so I will keep it to myself.  

Overall, I do recommend the book to anyone who’s looking for a fresh take on Arthurian legends or YA fiction and can stomach your standard amount of blood and violence. There are descriptions of violence experienced by slaves and general racism so be warned. Besides the aforementioned love triangle beef I have, and the fact that there is some Welsh that doesn’t get translated into English which was a pet peeve of mine even more so now that I have made a Welsh friend after I returned the book to the library, so I’ll just never know. I will give this book an it’s very good and worth all the hype out of ten. 

Spoilers Below!!

Ok, let’s talk a little bit about the love triangle. I will preface this with the fact that Bree is 16 and hasn’t really experienced any romantic attention up until this point so she’s acting how a regular 16-year-old would act in that situation, and I know full well that 16-year-old me wouldn’t have been any smarter. That being said, I honestly think that Sel is a bad choice based on his actions in this book alone (yes, I have read the second one but I’m not going to talk about it here). This man literally spent the majority of the book trying to kill her and sent literal demons after her, but they slow danced once, and he called her “cariad” now y’all are foaming at the mouth. This isn’t hate towards Sel as a character, mostly, but like, come on. That’s all I’m saying because this fandom is violent, and I like living.  

Moving on to things that don’t make me mad! Let’s just take a moment to appreciate Bree’s root. I absolutely loved how the author wove in traditional African and African American spiritual practices into a world where the knights of the roundtable were magical beings and the contrast, chef’s kiss. We have root where the users give back the magic they use, make offerings, and talk to their ancestors regularly versus aether which is just taken. There is a great metaphor here about colonialism and world history as a whole, but I’m not going to go deep into that and get too radical in a book review so I’m going to let you all just think on it.  

Another thing I really liked about the book was how real the characters felt, all of them were unique individuals with distinct personalities and motivations. Not all the characters were necessarily good people, some were honestly horrible and evil, but you can understand where they’re coming from even if you don’t agree, a la “cool motive, still murder”. I did like that in the story the villain wasn’t evil just because, he had a reason to want to be evil, but it honestly made for a more enjoyable story especially when you contrast Nick’s dad with the demons who are evil just because. Also, just a side note on Mr. Davis being the villain all along, that was so unexpected but made so much sense when he explained his evil plan, I think it was a fun surprise that I hadn’t predicted in the beginning.  

Of course, I have to talk about the twist at the end where it turns out that Bree is Arthur’s scion and not Nick, mind blowing. There’s something, I don’t know how to describe it, but karmatic about a black girl being the king of the round table after her ancestor was raped by the scion of Arthur all those years ago. That old slave owner couldn’t have ever predicted that his disgusting actions would one day see a black girl as the head of his secret organization, so take that horrible man. On top of that, the organization as a whole is pretty racist, just the way that it’s all white and how they treat Bree and Sarah’s dad, so double take that racists, a black girl is your king.  

Moral of the story, read this book for a YA adventure mixed with serious real-world topics and a lovable cast of characters. Everyone who is hyping this book online is correct and I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy especially since there are rumors that the last book in the series will be released sometime next year.  

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Legendary: Harry Potter

A film that I will do a critical review on is a 2011 fantasy film called “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2”. The director and screenwriter are David Yates and Steve Kloves respectively. This film is the second part continued from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1.” For your information, this film is the finale of a film series, “Harry Potter,” consisting of eight seasons and adapted from J. K. Rowling’s seven books. Also, this film is from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” by J. K. Rowling divided into two parts, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 and 2.”

First of all, let us see a little bit of general information about this entertainment piece in brief. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2” and all of its previous seasons’ settings mainly at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry located in the Highland of Scottish. Hogwarts has four houses, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin, to divide their students under each house’s professors. Here are the names and summaries of the eight seasons of the Harry Potter film series.

(Spoiler alert!)

(1) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) is the prologue that is the introduction to the Harry Potter film series. His mom protected him by sacrificing her life on that day he was tended to be killed. Harry is chosen to be in Gryffindor and meets his two best friends named Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger. The Philosopher's Stone is wanted to rescue the Dark Lord, and also Harry is again firstly saved from the maternal love that protects him.

(2) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), the place where Ron’s sister, Ginny Weasley is used to bait to kill Harry Hotter by the mysterious and dangerous creature, Basilisk living in it. Harry Potter can save Ginny and kill Basilisk safely with the help of the school headmaster, Albus Dumbledore’s phoenix named Fawkes whose tears can heal him from Basilisk's poisonous bite.

(3) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Sirius Black, escapes from the wizard prison and comes to see Harry tell him about his father, James Potter. Sirius Black’s truth is also revealed that he is Harry’s godfather one of the Marauders, mischievous friends of James.

(4) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) is another season recommended to watch. There is the Triwizard Tournament taking place at Hogwarts. It is a competition consisting of three champions from three wizardry schools, Hogwarts united wizardry school, Drumstrang the male wizardry school, and Beauxbatons the female wizardry school.

(5) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) is when Harry Potter tries telling others about the comeback of the Dark Lord, but no one cares so he establishes Dumbledore’s Army following a group of wizards who are against the Dark Lord. The prophecy tells us that Harry and Voldemort cannot live if the other survives.

(6) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) is the season that some of Voldemort’s seven Horcruxes, magical objects that Voldemort parts his spirit into them, are revealed and destroyed and they must be all destroyed to defeat the Dark Lord Voldemort.

(7.1) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010) first mentions the three Deathly Hallows, the Invisibility Cloak that its wearer will not be seen, the Resurrection Stone that can resurrect dead people in form of ghosts, and the Elder Wand that is the strongest and undefeatable wand in the wizardry world. It is told through The Tales of Beedle the Bard (written by J.K. in reality) that the owner of these three powerful magical objects will be immune to death.

(7.2) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011) is mainly about finding the remaining Voldemort’s Horcruxes and destroying it to win against him and save Hogwarts after Albus Dumbledore’s death and his ingenious plan in helping Harry defeat the Dark Lord.

From my point of view, I think that the two approaches that help display the critical aspects of this entertainment piece are the genre approach and the auteur approach since any national approach’s notions cannot be seen at all.

For the genre approach, it is an epic absolutely legendary fantasy feature film among other fantasy films that I have seen. The fantasy genre belongs to fantastic themes like magic, supernatural elements, folklore, and myths mingled together. This genre is another speculative fiction. This film genre has various subgenres, too. For example, fantasy mysteries like eight films from the Harry Potter film series, fantasy superheroes like Justice League (2017), fantasy musicals like My Little Pony (1981), and romantic fantasy like Twilight (2008). In general, each film only focuses on one particular fantasy film element. For instance, Twilight (2008) is only about vampires and werewolves, and My Little Pony (1981) is about the power of magic or friendship is magic.  But when it comes to the Harry Potter film series, prevailing elements that can be seen widespread in fantasy films are mostly mixed used in the Harry Potter film series such as the main characters are wizards and witches who can cast spells, enchantments, or even curses. Other magical creatures like dragons, elves, ghosts, vampires, and werewolves also can be seen often in this film. There are also magical objects like the three Deathly Hallows made by the devil, the Pensieve sink that allows you to see others’ memory, and the seven Horcruxes that contain pieces of one’s spirit. The universal theme of love is mixed here with supernatural things, too. There is the power of love that can be seen through magic whether it is maternal love, friendship, or even one-sided love. It can be seen that “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2” mixes most elements of fantasy genre films smoothly, and that makes this film outstanding from other fantasy films in common. Moreover, the Harry Potter film series started with its prologue called “Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone” which was released in 2001 so there were not many epic fantasy films to compare with. It can be concluded that Harry Potter films are the historical distinctions of this genre and a prototype of other fantasy films that picked some elements from this film series and developed them individually but not as epic as this series.

For the auteur approach, the filmmakers of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2” can be considered a dream team to be honest. The team consists of the Director named David Yates, the screenwriter named Steve Kloves, the composer named Alexandre Desplat, the film editor named Mark Day, and the producers David Heyman, David Barron, and J.K. Rowling herself. There are many others in the positions mentioned but I will mainly talk about those who have participated in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2”, and also Part 1 since they have connected. David Yates directed Harry Potter seasons 5-7.2. Steve Kloves did the screenplay for all seasons except for the fifth. Alexandre Desplat composed all seasons. Mark Day edited seasons 5 to 7.2. David Heyman is a producer of all seasons, and David Barron started the fifth season while J.K. only does seasons 7.1 and 7.2. It can be seen that all of them participated in making at least two seasons that are “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 and 2.” So, they worked together very well as a teamwork to make this film an epic epilogue of the Harry Potter film series. They control how witchcraft and wizardry fantasy films look when it comes out to the public audience. Historical conditions of these auteurs are quite difficult to discuss because there was any fantasy film that mixed up almost every supernatural and magical thing altogether like Harry Potter was made of.  The auteurist unity implies their studio system that all the filmmakers have independence and make this film series a noticeable influence on other fantasy films in the industry afterward.  However, the Harry Potter series has its spin-off called “Fantastic Beasts” (also written by J.K.) that consists of three seasons and ongoing; Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022). Some of the members participated in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 and 2,” concluding David Yates, J.K Rowling, David Heyman, and Steve Kloves takes part in the Fantastic Beasts film series, too. Their role may be switched in filmmaking. Even though the Fantastic Beasts film series may not be as popular and grand as how Harry Potter was but as you can see some similar elements are shared between these two series since the filmmakers are almost the same as Harry Potter and it is a spin-off that is somewhat connected in story. In summary, these filmmakers are somehow considered a dream team of epic fantasy films.

The auteur approach used in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2” makes images for the casts of this film, and all the films in the film series. The film makes team successfully done making the trio of Gryffindor, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger alive until now by Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson respectively. Also, Lord Voldemort becomes a model for an evil character with a distorted face even though Ralph Fiennes is not recognized because it is not his real face. Nevertheless, they are unforgettable after watching the film. When Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson were, people can recognize them immediately. The team and J.K. had done it incredibly and memorably.

On the other hand, the genre approaches, the production team, and all of the filmmakers had created an extremely high bar that any other fantasy film at present can beat this film series at all. How can a fantasy movie be grand and epic like this again I am still wondering and patiently waiting for it soon.

All in all, when it comes to a fantasy film made by a great film team, the Harry Potter film series is a must. Even if you are a Potterhead, a person who fell in love with the Harry Potter film series, or a muggle, a person knowing nothing about the wizardry world, I recommend you watch “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2”. I recommend the series’ epilogue instead of its prologue because it is the best franchise ending of a film series in my opinion. If you start one season, any season, you will want to know a lot more about it and watch the rest in no time I guarantee.

References

YADIRAE. (2023, February 26). reelrundown. Retrieved from Harry Potter Movie Summaries: Brief Overviews of Films 1–8: https://reelrundown.com/movies/Harry-Potter-Movie-Refresher

 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. (2023, March 31). In Wikipedia.

Harry Potter (film series). (2023 April 2). In Wikipedia.

J. K. Rowling. (2023 March 23). In Wikipedia.

David Yates. (2023 March 16). In Wikipedia.

Steve Kloves. (2022 December 26). In Wikipedia.

Alexandre Desplat. (2023 April 1). In Wikipedia.

Mark Day (film editor). (2021 September 22). In Wikipedia.

Fantastic Beasts. (2023 March 27). In Wikipedia.

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