#and my hungarian friend is a year or two younger than me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

evereinefaust · 10 months

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. . . ⇢ ˗ˏˋ 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮 ࿐ྂ

Pairing: Romania (Vladimir Popescu) X afab!Reader

Sypnosis: Spending time with a particular blonde Romanian was always been such a pleasure, especially when he is your boyfriend. After a long day, a date is always in order in his book. Though, an unexpected surprise was also in order...

Word Count: 2,465

You were sitting on a chair inside the library, reading a fiction book your friend recommended to you. You've been inside the library for 1 hour, using your free time to get the stress out from school.

"Hey..." A certain blonde came to your table and sat beside you. "Hi, Vlad" You turned to him and gave a sweet smile. The smile that would melt his heart. "What's up?" You asked him, turning your attention back to the book you're reading. "Oh, nothing really. I've been wondering if you want to go out for dinner tonight?" He asked casually, not a hint of being nervous at all. "Sure, a date then" You chuckled, closing the book then fixed your things.

Vladimir Popescu, one of the popular males in your school, is now your 2-year boyfriend. You actually had a crush on him when you first met him. He also had a crush on you the very first time he set an eye on you. Though he can't express his feelings for you because he might think that you won't like him. You're popular with men, after all. Most of your friends are male. That's because you are intelligent, beautiful, sweet, kind, caring, and friendly toward others.

Even his two best friends, Lukas and Arthur, are close to you. Knowing about his feelings towards you, Lukas and Arthur helped him to make you answer him. And of course, you did! The two of you started dating by the time you answered him on your birthday.

"Okay, girl. This day is more special than any other, so we will do our best to make you beautiful during your date" Your Hungarian friend stated, walking back and forth. "Elizabeta, you always say that" You sighed. "And how can you say that this day can be more special than any other 'special day'?" You asked.

You are currently inside your room, getting ready for your date tonight. And Elizabeta Hedervary is there to assist you in getting ready. She is your best friend, and she is the one you can count on. "Okay, which of these two is more appropriate?" You asked the female, showing her two dresses in your hands.

In your left hand, a black dress with a white hem, sash and bow behind the dress. On the other hand, you held a pinkish-white strapless dress with a white sash. It has a pink bow behind the dress. "Hm...? How about the white one. Since your date is at night, I want you to be the focus on the date. Meaning that Vladimir will not break his attention off you" She winked at you as you blushed pink.

After you finished changing clothes, Elizabeta put on light makeup on you and then combed your hair. "You know Elizabeta, it seems that you've become my older sister," You told her, blushing slightly while she tied your hair into (favorite hairstyle). "Yup! Actually, I wanted to have a younger sister. And by the fact that you're younger than me and as well as my best friend, I felt that you're my younger sister from the start" Elizabeta smiled as she continued to tie your hair.

After you finished preparing for the date, the brown-haired female dragged your downstairs and then pushed you outside your house. "Enjoy!" She yelled as she slam the door close, with you standing on your doorstep. "Hey, beautiful" Vladimir appeared out of nowhere and greeted you. he was standing in front of you, very close to your face. "Hey Vlad, I'm sorry I took long" You greeted back then apologized, kissing his nose. "And it seems that Elizabeta pushed you outside the house, even though it was your house" He chuckled then lead you towards his car. "Yeah, I know" You chuckled with him.

Vladimir drove the car to a place you don't even know. When the two of you got to the place, he stopped the car and then assisted you outside. The place was near the river and the buildings from the other side gave light to the place. The garden was decorated with (favorite flower)-flowered bushes and there are fireflies flying around the place. There is a white table in the middle of the garden with two white chairs around it.

"Beautiful..." You breathed in awe after seeing the wonderful place before you. "Do you like it?" Your boyfriend asked you. "No, I love it!" You shook your head then gave him another heart-melting smile. "Well then, let's settle down" He pulled you towards the table and then let you sit on the white chair. "Um... Vlad? I was wondering..." You called him, looking down at your lap with fingers fiddling.

"Yeah? What's the matter?" He asked worriedly. "I was wondering, what is this place? We've never been here for as long as I know, and you never told me about this" You said, looking at the surprised but later smiling Romanian. You blushed red then steam came out from your head. "You're cute when you blush" He complimented, palm on his cheeks while looking at you with a smile. "J-just answer the question already!" You pressed the question back as you blushed even redder then placed your hands on your face, covering your flushed face.

"Alright, alright" He chuckled. "We planned that we will have our date here, in this place" He answered your question. "'We'?" You removed your hands from your face and then raised an eyebrow. "Yeah. Lukas, Arthur, and me. Additionally to that, Elizabeta also helped us with it" He said. "I see, no wonder she kept saying that this night will be special" You shrugged and then sighed. "Anyways, do you want to see some magic?" He asked you. "Oh, sure!" You replied, interested.

"Here it goes..." Vladimir raised his wand and then waved it in the air. Some sparkles appeared as well as glowing blue and green light near his wand. He pointed at the middle of the table then magically, a candle stand with three lit candles appeared, together with (favorite flower) around the candle stand.

"Amazing..." You breathed as your eyes widened in awe, looking at the object before your eyes. "There is still more to that," The blonde said, earning your attention. You looked at him and he gave a smirk, his fang was shown. He waved his wand again then pointed at the ark that was above the table the two of you were sitting. Then, (favorite flower) appeared and decorated the whole ark, and the fragrance of the flower entered your nose.

"You're full of surprises, Vlad," You told him, placing both of your elbows on the table. You rested your chin on top of your entwined hands, admiring the well-known 'vampire' before you. Sometimes, just admiring his looks made your heart flutter, feeling way head over heels for him. He noticed that you were looking at him then smiled, you broke out of your trance and then blinked a few times. When you realized what you are doing, you removed your elbow from the table and then flushed red. Somehow, the red-eyed blonde managed to make you blush several times now. You thought that it was all magic, that you might be under his spell. Even though it is, you don't want to break that spell, you wanted him.

"So, are you hungry, [Name]?" He asked as he put his wand away. "Yes, I am" You replied while playing with the fireflies that flew near you. "Well then..." You heard Vladimir say, smirking in the process. After a while, a plate was placed in front of you. You looked up to who is it then noticed that it was Arthur, Vladimir's British best friend.

"Arthur? Why are you here?" You asked, surprised that you didn't notice the Brit earlier. "I'm here to help Vladimir with his date" He replied bluntly. "So it means that you are our waiter this night?" You joked, chuckling a bit. He growled a bit as Vladimir chuckled with you. "Yes, but I was forced into this place, after all," He said, glaring at the Romanian who just gave him a grin, revealing his fang again. Arthur sighed. "Anyways, just enjoy the two of you. The faster the two of you finished, the faster I can go home and practice some magic" He grumpily said then walked away.

"He's such in a bad mood, what happened?" You asked your boyfriend. "He had issues with Francis and Alfred, and now I forced him to agree to this which made him more grumpier" He explained, imitating a grumpy troll when he mentioned 'grumpier'. You laughed at his jokes then took the spoon from the side and started to eat your dinner.

"Wait" You suddenly said, pausing yourself from eating. Noticing your actions, Vladimir wore a worried expression on his face as he also paused from eating. "What's the matter? Is something wrong?" He asked you worriedly, placing the spoon down. "You forced Arthur to be the waiter for this night, but does that mean that he made this food?" You asked him. You always knew that Arthur is bad at cooking, and that's why you kept your distance from him when he was cooking because he always let you taste his cooking. But because you are afraid to hurt his feelings when you say that it's gross, you would say okay instead.

The blonde laughed with his eyes closed, earning confusion from you. "What's funny?" You asked. "Nothing. Do you really need to guess that Arthur would cook this? You know how burnt and gross it would look like when he cook, right?" He asked while still laughing, you thought for a second. "Hey! I heard that!" You heard Arthur's loud voice from a distance. It seems that he's been listening to your conversation for the whole time. You paled for a while when you heard his voice, you might hurt his feelings even more if he know that you always lie to him with his cooking.

"Um..." You sweat-dropped then decided to ask Vladimir again. "So who cooks this then?" You asked, he finally stopped laughing and then wiped his tears away. "Elizabeta cooked this. I told you that she helped us with this date, right?" He answered, getting the spoon again then started eating. "Oh, I see then" You smiled then also started to eat. "It's delicious! I never thought that she can make this kind of food!" You beamed after tasting the meal. "Is it? Elizabeta always cooks food for her boyfriend. And she is the one who teaches Feliciano how to cook too" Vladimir said, taking another bite of his meal. "Oh, I see" You smiled and then resumed eating.

While eating, the two of you chatted and laughed, enjoying the date your boyfriend gave you. After finishing dinner, Arthur came back to take the dirty dishes with a scowl on his face. You would say that he is pretty annoyed and mad by now, so you just prayed to God that he would have plenty of patience left to deal with his friends. A moment later, after the Brit left, you heard a slow playing of the violin. "Is that...?" You started then turned around to find the source of sound. "Yup, it is Lukas" Vladimir replied to your unfinished questions, placing a hand on his cheek then resting his elbow on the table, admiring his girlfriend's beautiful features.

He never regrets having you as his girlfriend, you are nice, kind, sweet, caring, intelligent, friendly, and beautiful. He loves the way you would pout, even though it is rarely seen. He loves your blushing red face, your cuteness, and your innocence. He is mischievous alright, but he had this romantic side of him that makes you wanna fall for him again and again.

"How about we watch the beautiful scenery over there?" He suggested to the girl, pointing at the railings in the garden. "Sure, I'd love to" You agreed, giving a warm smile. The blonde got up from his seat and then went to your side, he helped you stand up as the two of you went over the garden railings. Vladimir always treat you like a princess, and you enjoyed that, even though you sometimes thought that he might spoil you, and you didn't want that to happen. "It's so beautiful..." You are mesmerized by the shining, shimmering crystal lights of the buildings. Vladimir snaked his arms around your waist as he pulled you closer to his body. "It sure is," He said, smiling to himself.

The couple stood there for a few moments, watching the beautiful scenery before them. The Norwegian is still playing the violin which made the moment even more romantic, with the two of you sharing each other's warmth. "[Name]..." Your boyfriend called on you, looking at your petite figure. "Hm? What is it?" You asked, looking at him and meeting his blood-red eyes. "You wanna see more magic?" He asked, smirking a bit. "Definitely" You replied, giving off a smile. "Okay, here it goes!" He got out his wand and waved it in the air. After a few minutes of waving, there were fireworks skyrocketing in the sky, blasting off its wonderful colors. "Wow..." Your eyes widened at the scene.

Several fireworks made words, spelled as "Happy Birthday [Name]!" with a red heart on the side. You can't believe that you forgot your birthday today, and everyone kept it a secret to surprise you tonight. You placed your hands on your mouth as you tried to hold back tears that threatened to fall. "Do you like it?" He asked, looking at you. "No. I love it, Vladimir!" You shook your head then hugged him, and he hugged back. "I'm glad about it," He said in the crook of your neck. "Yeah, thank you very much! You guys made me happy on my birthday!" You said, now sobbing because of joy. "We made this just for you" He smiled.

The two of you broke apart as Vladimir held your shoulders, slowly leaning down for a kiss. You also leaned up to kiss him as you closed your eyes. Once your lips touched him, you felt passion and love from him, melting into the kiss. While you enjoyed your moment with him, the background made a large firework blast that was shaped like a huge red heart, and the fireflies that flew around the garden gathered around the two of you and also formed a heart. You enjoyed the best birthday gift you could receive from your beloved boyfriend and friends, especially when they made it just 'For You'.

#fanfic #fanfiction #alternate universe #oneshot #one shot #fluff #reader insert #x reader #female reader #hetalia #axis powers hetalia #hetalia romania #aph

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missmouse25 · 2 years

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Back again with the other request 😂 thank youuu so much :)

Can you write something where the reader is the sister of the one of max F friends (she has like 3 older brothers help her 😂) she’a living in France and haven’t been at a rice since covid so like 2 years. Max and her had both a crush on each other but they always laugh about it together. For the last race before the summer break she decided to be there to support her brothers and she bumped into him and he is like so happy to see her but she is not alone, she’s with her boyfriend, and Max get a little jealous but he catch up with her for like hours at the Hungarian Gp. After the GP like a couples of weeks they see each other again during the holidays, him and his friends (which included her brother) are going to see her in Bordeaux. Everyone taught that they will see her boyfriend but they break up and you can choose the end about of Max F and the reader relationship:)

Hi Anon 😉 Yeah I started with this one cause well... sibling dynamics man. Hope you enjoy ❤️

The Right Guy - Max Fewtrell

gender neutral first person pov // 1784 words // implied manipulative boyfriend (nothing said explictly but proceed with caution) // opened ended ending

Context paragraph for the siblings! Adam - 27, F1 driver; Mikey - 25, influencer; Pidge (real name Liam but the family and good friends call him Pidge) 23, F1 driver; Sibling (aka the reader) - i have an irl friend who calls her younger sister Sibling so i stole that idea from her 😬 (yes, i went a bit mad with the siblings details, but idc)

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2019

For as long as I could remember, racetracks had been my second home. And that became especially true when two of my three brothers had become Formula One drivers. Not that I’d ever minded much. It was the reason I’d met Max after all. Even if everyone and their grandmother could see the massive crush I had on him.

“Earth to Sibling!”

I snapped back to reality at Adam’s words. As the oldest, Adam was especially protective and often insisted that when I visited for races, I was with him rather than Pidge who was still fairly new to F1.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“Do you want to come to the garage with me now or wait here for a bit?”

Despite it being a question, his body language told me that I was going with him now regardless of what I said.

The paddock was full of friendly faces, as always, but someone specific caught my eye standing outside the McLaren motorhome.

“Hey, Max!” I said, a bit over-enthusiastically. I felt the blush spread across my cheeks as he smiled at me.

“Hi,” he said, giving me a hug. “You ready for the race?”

“Thankfully,” Adam interjected. “I’m the one driving the car.”

The men shook hands, like they always did. Even though Max was good friends with all my brothers, Adam like to intimidate him. Mainly because of my feeling for him.

“We wouldn’t want anything to happen…” Adam continued, staring Max down.

I wished the earth to swallow me up right there and then but thankfully, the family comedian came to my rescue.

“Are we holding a family meeting?” Pidge crashed into the conversation. “Do I need to call Mikey?”

I felt my head get squished under Pidge’s arm and my hair being messed with.

“Ew, you smell gross! And you haven’t even raced yet!”

With some tussling, I managed to break free.

“So, Max, asked anyone out on any dates recently?” Pidge asked, ignoring my remarks and having resigned himself to only having his arm across my shoulders.

“You don’t have to answer that,” I told Max, watching as his ears turned red.

“I… um… No dates for me right now.” He smiled awkwardly.

“Just the way we like it,” Pidge said happily while Adam nodded along.

“Don’t you two need to get going?” I prompted. “You know… Formula One and all that?”

My brothers shared a look and before I could blink, Adam was walking me one way and Pidge was taking Max in the opposite direction. I stole a glance over my shoulder only to see Max already looking at me.

2020

Message from: Max Fewtrell

‘Hey what you up to?’

‘Hi. Still studying. Trying to keep things as normal as I can.’

‘Makes sense. And your brothers?’

‘Mike moved in with Adam temporarily. And Pidge is back home with us for now.’

‘Are they still annoying?’

‘Lmao, yeah, just as bad as ever’

‘We need to meet up when this is all over. Feels like I haven’t seen you in forever.’

‘Yeah. Without the races, I’m realising how little I normally see you.’

‘we’ll make a plan to change that.’

‘Looking forward to it!’

2022

“So, through there is where they store and prep the tires before each session.”

“Hmm…”

“Oh, look there goes Lewis! He’s the best driver on the grid, apart from my brothers of course.”

“Cool…”

“The Ferrari motorhome always looks so classy.”

“Sure.”

We walked through the crowds, hand in hand. For a Friday morning, the paddock was packed with people but seeing as it was the last race before summer break, it made some sense.

We stopped outside the garages, out of the way. Kyle looked around, almost as if searching for a way out. As quietly as I could, I took a deep breath in. Kyle was not the worlds biggest racing fan but it was important to me that he experience being at the track at least one. It was, after all, such a big part of my life.

“Oi! Sibling!”

I spun around to see Pidge coming towards us but his usual smile faded quickly when he saw who I was with.

“Kyle…”

“Liam…”

The two just stared at each other and the air grew thick with tension.

“Who’s that?” Kyle finally asked, gesturing past Pidge.

I looked to where Max Fewtrell stood taking pictures with some fans. An instinct within me told me to go to him, to hold him. It had been almost two years since I last saw him and despite who I was with right now, all I wanted to do was be with Max.

Max made his way to us, our eyes meeting. A huge smile lit up his face.

“Hey…” Max reached out to hug me but his path was suddenly blocked.

“Hi, I’m Kyle.”

Although taken aback, Max quickly held out his hand but Kyle didn’t take it. Pidge stayed still and stoic; he looked so much like Adam.

“Max, this is Kyle,” I said trying to salvage the situation. “Kyle, this is Max. He’s a very good friend of mine. Of the family’s.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t seen everyone in so long, especially you,” Max said.

“Well, with the pandemic and studying and work… There just hasn’t been a moment to come to the races,” I confessed.

“And you, Kyle?” Max tried again to be polite. “You like F1?”

“Not really,” Kyle said bleakly, peering around.

The looks Max and Pidge shared was not lost on me. I already knew Pidge’s felling towards Kyle. It was the same feeling that Adam and Mikey had: You can do better.

“We should meet up, catch up,” Max said.

It felt like my fingers were going numb and I realised that Kyle was squeezing my hand.

“Um… Maybe. I’ll see if we have time,” I smiled but it wasn’t real and Max could see it.

“We should get going,” I continued. “Pidge, good luck and stay safe.”

My brother just nodded; his jaw tight.

“I’ll see you around, Max.” I pulled Kyle away towards the motorhomes.

Quickly, I looked back to see Pidge flipping Kyle off behind his back and Max watching me leave.

Four weeks later I stood outside Adam’s apartment, debating if I was really up for this.

The ragtag group of boys had decided on one last summer party before the second half of the season kicked off. Almost all my friends would be there. Friends that I hadn’t seen since before Kyle…

Only Mikey really knew what had happened between us and it had been Mikey who had finally convinced me to join them tonight when the other two had failed.

The door suddenly swung open and Adam’s girlfriend, Emily, stepped out.

“Sibling, you came!” Her hug was warm and it hit me that I hadn’t seen her in almost a month. “I’m just popping out to get more snacks. Too many boys in there, all they do is eat. I’ll be back soon!”

She smiled before walking off to the elevator.

With the door open in front of me, I felt like I had no choice but to go inside.

A lot of people greeted me, hugged me, slowly but surely, my nerves settled down and I began to want to enjoy myself.

Mikey, looking as stylish as any influencer would, gave me a look from across the room. He didn’t have to say anything for me to know what it meant. I nod in answer to his question: I’m fine. Satisfied, he turned back to the people around him.

“I didn’t think you’d come tonight.”

The voice in my ear made me jump but seeing who it belonged to instantly calmed me down.

For the first time in forever, I flung my arms around Max’s neck and pulled him tightly against me. There was nothing and no one to stop me.

“I missed you too,” he whispered, slipping his arms around my middle.

“I’m so sorry…” The words were out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. “I’m sorry. I’ve been a terrible friend.”

“You don’t need to apologise. Things have been tough.”

‘If only you knew how tough it’s been.’

“Excuse me, less PDA in my house please!”

Adam’s voice broke us apart but I stayed closed to Max regardless.

“I’ve seen you and Emily do far worse,” Max retorted.

"Yeah, but this is my apartment. Whatever I do with my girlfriend here is none of your business."

“Ew, gross…” I laughed and both men looked at me, almost surprised, before joining in.

I was happy.

As the night went on and the party died down, as more and more people left, I found myself alone on the balcony. The air was still warm; city lights flickered in the darkness. Mikey had been right: I had needed tonight.

The door behind me opened. Wordlessly someone joined me in leaning on the balcony railing.

“Well, that was wild,” Max said with a breathy laugh.

“Everyone thinks Adam’s a stick in the mud,” I said. “But he’s the craziest out of the four of us.”

“And I’ve just learnt that the hard way.”

We both laughed softly and we caught each other’s eye.

Max looked so handsome. Not that he didn’t normally but there was something about him, standing in the half-darkness that made me ache for him to hold me.

“I don’t want to pry but…” Max paused. “Kyle?”

He didn’t need to say more than that.

“Kyle’s… not going to be around anymore.” I pushed myself off the railing and folded my arms over my body. “I broke up with him. He wasn’t a good guy. It took a two-hour long phone call with Mikey to make me see it.”

Max clasped his hands and seemed to squeeze them together tightly.

“I know I only met him once,” he said. “But I hated him from the second I did.”

He gently shook his head as he spoke.

“You deserve so much better than that arse. You deserve someone who as least shares your love for racing, damn it.”

“Someone like you?”

The moment I’d spoken, I wished I hadn’t. What was Max even meant to say to that?

The silence that followed seemed to be eating me alive: it was insufferable.

“Yes…” Max looked over his shoulder at me; a look of seriousness on his face that I’d never seen before. “Yes, someone like me.”

He stood up and faced me.

“I care about you. So much. And I completely understand if you aren’t ready for a new relationship yet but when you are… I’ll be here. I’ll be waiting.”

#Honestly i could write more with these siblings theyre so fun #but thats for another day #max fewtrell x reader #max fewtrell fanfic #Mouse Writes #ThatKindaVibe

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jayhorsestar · 9 months

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by saturday 22nd july 2023, JUMBO shop floor, afternoon, A1. 'sydney sweeney has got a younger sister, perhaps 12 of age, same height as Selena Gomez younger sister, same eyes of her older sister, both. B1. Selena Gomez has got a younger sister, perhaps 1.60cm, same chestnut eyes as her older Selena Gomez. she was w/ someone, and hugging as giving thanks, for the shopping cart mebbe, so i could only see her head turning to me and catching my eyes, me catching her look, so we have got the look!! for three seconds, then they left, was POS 8 downstream, perhaps three meters away, or less than five. C1. Dario Lopez of NYC, the U.N. dropped by (sort of), they were USA, done GYM and muscle building, and a lady (perhaps NAVY JAG that Taylor Hill must had had entered pan friend and letters sort of relationship during 2019, at NYC). their style was copied from Cristi Hrituc, hubby of Ana-Maria lawyer at Bucharest and Greek ethnic minority. so t'was like a fast walking tour, browsing allegretto, and they caught me following for ten meters, and thus his 'mom in law, the NAVY JAG lady's mom (old woman, nose like vulture), dyed hair, returned once Selgros shopping also done, and kids awaiting for her outside, had left her trekking the JUMNBO a 2nd time, alone. NEWS of U.N. NYC NYC but somewhat the Security Council, not Andrei Voicu financial background. eitherway, a deep studied very short and fast reveal, so that to prevent me start crying, sniffing, or becoming emotional. handing over the torch, carrying the light passing the light, smth like that. D1. Dorobant Bogdan, very much looking like the Insta profile of the 'dariolopez74, perhaps a younger brother of Dorobant Bogdan of same class in school w/ Allen Coliban (the Mayor) and my girl cousin Polixenia Diamantidi, of Greece nowadays. Dorobant Bogdan was 2012 Shop manager DECATHLON Brasov. then mebbe those pics of his very close relative and fake Insta profile revealed tonight hereinunder, 'dariolopez74. married to wife, who looked like some of the ladies sort of depicted onto that fake Insta (that joke of a story). E1. Alina Paraschieva, married and two kids, two little daughters, blondie and green eyes, the cashier at Admiral NOVOMATIC, 2011-2012, night shifted only, could not find her profile fcbk online whatsoever, same approach as Miranda Kerr ten days ago, she was with her family and husband, she let me know the OTHER HER of a three weeks ago, i had approached and smiled and talked to so freely, was her younger sister from COVASNA, also married, and that sister was indeed same o same o MY CASHIER LADY of Admiral NOVOMATIC of the 2011, twelve years ago. sisters, sliding doors, yet i was TODAY seeing a Miranda Kerr body built mom of two, not her suave sister of the age of twelve years ago. CANNOT find her Brasov page online, btw. YET we made eye contact and she left me note by the trollers, where hubby would not had looked, nor aware. F1. LIV MADDIE and LIZZIE, the DOVE fan account, she just like in the pic of yesterday where i was saying I LOVE YOU to younger DOVE by the left. purple color lettering, wearing light denim, same hair length and shaded color, same like in that picture, nothing changed, even her legs, strong, able carrying me if so needed. strong woman, physically. wearing same nose, and i knew of her only when she technically profiled and passing my sharp ONE O'CLOCK. G1. Tg.Mures Hungarian HU sketch lady related mebbe to E.T. classmate of Aprilly Lajos College, 2004-2005. one of the three, and whose older sister 'kissankana left for Sweden on PH vip movies adventure. H1. younger girl cousin of E.T. the Danube river Swiss cruises of 2013-2014, same what PH vip Angel today 'verobuffone, did w/ aid of 'emmacruises, later on, by 2021-2022. before the plastic titties she now has gotten. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and some more ladies representing moms and grannies, dropped by JUMBO shop floor today on a Saturday, incl several Jewish families, and also I1. Tudor, plant manager Prodlacta Inc, married to a fine green eyes, Moldova wife, young sexy 2019. m

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rokatanonc · 1 year

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Have same foxes.

So, yes, I'm still alive. A lot of things have happened and in the last two years, especially this last year, I've faced a massive art block. In 2021 there were so many things I wanted to show that I ended up not posting a single thing, and in 2022 my mother died during the pandemic. Ironically enough it was not COVID that killed her; it was cancer, but it is even more likely that the chemotherapy itself was her undoing in the final stages of her life.

The cancer was a quintuple metastasis one, starting from the liver, but in the beginning, things didn't seem so dire. A little more than half of her liver had to be removed via surgery; originally the hospital didn't want to let the doctor do it, saying "It's too risky for him", but the doctor responded that "he alone will decide what is too risky for him". This was just a little part of my mother losing her fight for life. Things somehow deteriorated quickly. With her death, a whole sh*tton of problems were unleashed upon my brother and me; quarrels about the inheritance with our maternal grandfather, disputes with mother's friends, and I could just watch as the family was falling to pieces. Even my brother and I began to become distant, and it was just horrific...

Well, fortunately, this is all in the past now, and I got my brother back. :) The maternal branch of the family not so much, but I don't really mind that as my relationship was never such a splendid one with them. I'm sure it was like a surprise for them because, on that part of the family, we could never properly discuss things on the emotional side, so me relaying my feelings to them was quite nonexistent altogether. That is if we don't count the occasional outbursts on my part, which were met with equal vehemence, but never with understanding.

So, these are my kitsune OCs, the silver fox is the father and the other is his son. The silver fox is called Soutenmaru (宗典丸, "law of essence"), but later he is just known as Kyoushi (佼志, I won't translate this 'cause there are too many possibilities) and the ash brown haired one is named Souma (颯磨, "quick to improve").

They were characters from my original story 'The Giddy Fox and the Reticent Blossom' written in Hungarian, my mother language. It's about the romance of a kitsune and a human woman; Souma and the woman meet due to the kitsune making a bet with his teacher, Kyoushi. Souma was Kyoushi's best apprentice and feeling ready to prove this, he wanted to distinguish himself. Kyoushi, on the other hand, opposed this idea, but then they eventually wagered: if Souma is able to seduce the younger twin of the Tougou brothers, then he earns the right to do as he pleases, but should he fail, Souma will have to study even harder under Kyoushy extended tutelage without a complaint. The plot twist is that this mentioned younger twin brother is actually female(!) who, due to some circumstances unknown even to her, was raised as a man. I suppose it's obvious that in these settings it's only natural that drama ensues...

Here are the twins:

Do they look like characters from Hakuouki? I bet they do, since the time I drew these I was pretty much into Kazuki Yone's style, the one artist who designed Hakuouki's characters.

The girl is called Kazusa (冬桜, "winter cherry"), but initially is introduced as Kojiro (子白, "child of white"). Her older brother is named Kazushiro (冬白, "wintry white"). Although he laughs freely, he is also angered more quickly, but despite this, he prefers to be around people. Kazusa is just the opposite: she is quiet by nature and rather would be alone. Her smiles are usually displayed because of politeness, nevertheless, she has way more tack when it comes to dealing with people.

When I first began to flesh out Soutenmaru, he was part of my InuYasha fanon. He was the young Sesshoumaru's teacher and his original design was very different. He wasn't even a fox, but a youkai of youthful appearance who was just known as the 'Genji amongst youkai'!

Okay, perhaps not so different from the current Soutenmaru. Oh, and look! A cute, little Sesshoumaru. By the way, these are from 2012. I think this will be enough for now...

#my ocs #kitsune #illustration #ramblings #little sesshoumaru #old art

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new-sandrafilter · 4 years

Video

The Making (and Re-Making) of Timothée Chalamet

BY DANIEL RILEY / PHOTOGRAPHY BY RENELL MEDRANO

He found superstardom and artistic acclaim instantaneously. Now, with unique candor, the actor of a generation reveals what it’s like to come of age in our very upside-down era.

The day after the Oscars in 2018, everything that had changed, changed back again. Timothée Chalamet had spent the previous months becoming known. He had acted in a film, Call Me by Your Name, which was critically acclaimed as well as an instant object of cultish admiration—and his performance had made him, at 22, the youngest person nominated for best actor in 80 years. He had, simultaneously, been transformed into the rarest of pop confections—fawned over by younger women, older men, and every demographic in between. And he had traveled without pause on the awards circuit since early autumn, back and forth from New York and Los Angeles, practically living out of the first-class lounge and the lobbies of the Bowery Hotel and the Sunset Tower.

But the day after the Oscars, the moment the clock struck midnight and his carriage turned into a pumpkin, Chalamet was right back where he'd been before the whole fantasy had begun: in New York, with no credit card, no apartment, and no longer any structured demands on his time and attention. Outsiders who had witnessed the arrival may have regarded this 22-year-old as being in possession of wealth and clout, but he was suddenly back on his own dime, which amounted to maybe five or six dimes, reticent to stay with family and friends whose lives he felt he was disrupting with all his new baggage. Of course they couldn't possibly comprehend the chemical reaction that had just transpired. They were still hydrogen and oxygen, and Timothée Chalamet was all of a sudden water.

And so, for three weeks, he disappeared into the wallpaper of the Lower East Side. Specifically, the wallpaper of a little apartment that the French street artist JR kept for visiting collaborators. Chalamet holed up against the ugly New York weather of late winter, and did the only thing he could think to do: learn lines. The King would be his first film since his pivot into fame, and he was anxious to get back to acting after such a long stretch of merely talking about acting. Even more, he needed to blot out the unrecognizable icon the internet was already beginning to make of Timothée Chalamet.

I met Timothée for the first time at the onset of that initial blush of fame, when all of us were being introduced to an actor who had both rare talent and the un-engineerable it that chings like an audible sparkle off a jewel in a cartoon. I wrote a story for this magazine about that first chapter in the arrival of a film star. This is the second chapter, the story of what's happened since. It wasn't evident yet, but those three weeks in New York in 2018 were the starting line of what would amount to a 30-month stretch of four new films, two new Oscar campaigns, some refreshing romance, an incessant awareness of the confusing image of himself as—what else to call it?—an emerging global movie star, and a constant concerted effort to figure himself out as both a young actor and a young person in the unceasing spotlight.

This summer, we were talking about all this on a little screened porch out back of a modest cabin in Woodstock when Chalamet recalled those three weeks. “My world had flipped,” he said. “But if I kicked it with my friends, things could still feel the same. I was trying to marry these two realities. But I don't even think I knew that was what I was doing. That dissonance was real. And thank God. Because I feel like if I'd caught up to it immediately, I would've been a psychopath or something.”

Out on that porch, I asked him a version of the same question over and over: What had the last two and a half years been like for him, as a human being? His response was a multi-hour monologue that I would characterize as: intense. He expressed unadulterated gratitude for his great good fortune. But he also expressed confusion and tension. He is firmly in a moment when he is concerned that everything he says or does or thinks will look or sound wrong. He backtracked a lot (“Wait, let me try that again”). He jumped on and off the record (“Sorry, sorry, sorry, this is just for you…”). It was important for me to know, he said, in order to communicate the context of his experience, if not the specifics.

“I want to get back to the undefined space again. I'm chasing a feeling.”

He lives in the same world all of us do—only with the potential for adoration and blowback turned up to 11. He seems, at once, to trust his own instincts while also second-guessing most thoughts the moment he's convinced of them. It is an exhausting way to be. At times, when he was up on his feet, in his T-shirt and shorts, pacing around the little screened porch, hands tugging at his mane, I could feel the gears grinding to the point of smoke. He wanted so desperately to get this right, to express what he really meant, to feel the right feelings, to live the right way, to be the right kind of man for the people in his life that he knows he can and should be, despite everything else, despite the noise. He's doing his best.

Timothée had rented the house for the month of July, as a little escape but also as an opportunity. He was slated to play Bob Dylan in a new biopic. No telling when it might film, given everything, but for now he had more time to himself than he'd had in years, which meant time to maybe huff the vapors of some Woodstock Dylanalia. “It's not like I'm suffering from lack of connection otherwise,” he said, “but it just really feels like I'm connecting to something here.” When he arrived, he discovered that his little house had a wall devoted to Dylan—to the albums he'd recorded in the run-up to his timeout in Woodstock in the late '60s. Timothée relished happening upon that wall his first day in the Airbnb. The universe offered signs if you nudged it toward coherence.

He knew what the cabin might seem like—like some young actor taking himself way too seriously, “treating himself like an artist.” But he was back and forth between Woodstock and New York all month, bombing up and down the interstate in the Honda sedan he'd rented from Enterprise. (He learned how to drive on Beautiful Boy.) All the while Dylan was top of mind. Timothée was late to the party but helplessly obsessed. He quoted him generously. He fixated on both the art and the persona. He marveled at the way the artist could be out there so much, making such an impact, while also keeping the real person obscured behind the music, the characters in the songs, the language. In the city, we spent time walking around Greenwich Village, Timothée in an identity-concealing face mask and bucket hat and sunglasses, able to search out old Dylan addresses in an invisibility cloak. He ran from site to site, with notes he'd kept while reading Dylan's memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, barreling up stairs and peering into windows. He was a 24-year-old actor, taking advantage of the pause between the second phase of his career and the third and thinking hard, daily, about how to play the next few years.

He rented the house in Woodstock, too, so that he could have a little space all to himself. He craved the privacy to try things and to fuck up. To make small mistakes now, out of view, when it was just him, when he was still young, so that he didn't have to worry about it later. At one point, he stood up and slapped an empty water bottle off the table so that it clattered against the screen of the porch. “I want to know what that sounds like!” he shouted. He hadn't taken many missteps yet, and it made him uncomfortable, wary, that he would someday. The month felt like a controlled burn. In the most innocent way, that was what Woodstock was about. He got to practice his guitar and harmonica in peace, cook himself his “shitty pasta” without judgment, permit himself space to keep growing up. So much was in the spotlight now. But in that cabin, he could sit on the couch for a while and re-familiarize himself with “the crease in the cushion” that he'd lost touch with over the past few years. The quiet. The stillness. That sunlight there coming through the trees. He could breathe a little. Sleep a little. It had all been so good for him so far. But the goodness made him anxious. When will the other shoe drop? Not there. He'd deleted Instagram off his phone. He'd stopped posting on Twitter. He was reading again. Listening to albums all the way through. Slowing down. What was it like to have lived these past two and a half years? It was like a lot of things, but here at the end of it, it just felt good to sleep.

Back at the start of the 30-month run that led to Woodstock, Timothée turned over the keys to JR's studio and went to Europe to shoot The King. The role was like none of the films he'd just received notice for. “Here I am on set with all these Hungarian men with scars on their faces, and they're like, ‘You're the center of the shot, you're the badass! And we know you tried to put on all this weight, but like: You're wearing all the chain mail.’ If they took the chain mail off, my throat is still this big…” There he was trying to keep in perspective this new fame, this new validation, this new temptation toward ego, all while being thrust into the center of “something called The motherfucking King.”

When he returned to New York that summer, he skipped off the atmosphere again with another awkward reentry. One moment he was on the battlefield of the biggest-budget drama he'd yet experienced, the next he was “back in New York, on the A/C/E at Port Authority, just like, What the fuck is going on?” It was a pattern over the past few years. The calmly intense immersion into work, the “thud of lost purpose,” as he called it, when the work ended. It happened the same way in the fall of 2018 with Little Women—reunited with Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan and the crew from Lady Bird. There was just an ease with which he plugged in with them, “a vocabulary of friendship” that existed there.

Timothée's career thus far has been filled with these sorts of friendships, notably those across generational lines. Even a casual observer may have picked up on it. Those glommings-on to older people in his life. Armie Hammer. Kid Cudi. Greta Gerwig. When I asked Gerwig to comment on the arc she's witnessed up close, from Lady Bird to Little Women, she wrote a note about “my friend Timmy”: “It's hard for me now, because I'm his friend, to see him strategically.… I love talking to him. We can get on the phone and talk for an hour or more without even realizing it, just skipping from subject to subject, making jokes, me feeling old and happy and him being funny and anxious and delightfully all over the place.” It's an odd gap he finds himself in—forced to be more accelerated than most 24-year-olds while also having not lived enough life yet to fit in absolutely with the people he enjoys spending time with most. On a recent visit with his grandmother in New York, she surprised him by saying, “I wish you would hang out with people your own age more often. It must be so weird.” It made him chuckle. Even she'd noticed. She might be right. But how could he resist the orbit of these creative geniuses he'd so long admired and who were filled with so much knowingness?

“I'm confident in the way I'm trying to approach things now, how I'm setting up the angles.”

In the winter of 2019, another Oscar campaign left him feeling disoriented all over again. Everything, Timothée said, was exactly the same as the first time except him. He'd put in this undeniable performance, but maybe one that sparked a little less for Oscar voters than that first kiss with a stranger. Now he was in all the same rooms as before, the same lunches and dinners and cocktail parties, shaking hands with the same Academy members who showed up at everything to get a little nibble of the freshest biscuit, growling ominous things at him, like: You don't have my vote yet.… “I really don't know how to talk about this stuff, man,” he told me, “because my experience of it is at the center of it. There's just some dark energy at these things, and this time around I felt like I could see it. And yet I'm thinking, Why isn't this going the exact same way?”

He wasn't nominated for Beautiful Boy, but the fresh air came, as it always seemed to, on the set of the next film: Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch. The movie is about a fictional English-language magazine (based on The New Yorker of the midcentury) and is structurally organized like the magazine itself, featuring short pieces at the “front” of the movie and a triptych of long features at the back. Timothée costars in the second feature, about a May '68-style student-protest leader named Zeffirelli and the middle-aged magazine journalist (Frances McDormand) assigned to report on his cause.

“I had seen Timmy in Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name,” Anderson wrote to me, “and I never had the inconvenience of ever thinking of anybody else for this role even for a second. I knew he was exactly right, and plus: He speaks French and looks like he might actually have walked right out of an Éric Rohmer movie. Some time around 1985. A slow train from Paris, a backpack, a beach for 10 days in bad weather. He's not any kind of type—but the New Wave would have had a happy place for him.”

The privilege of early fame that Timothée most appreciates is the ability to choose the directors he works with. His role in The French Dispatch is a minor one, but it's a Wes Anderson movie—it's as simple as that. Due to the episodic nature of the film, some of the other “stories” were already being shot when Timothée arrived in Angoulême, a town that reminded him of the one he spent time in growing up, “so French it was like a caricature,” he said. Timothée had the opportunity, then, to hang with some of the elders he doesn't act with, like Jeffrey Wright, Bill Murray, and other seasoned members of the Wes Anderson troupe. “It was immediately as if it wasn't his first time with our group,” Anderson explained. “He was somehow already part of the family. The youngest member.”

Timothée had seen McDormand around for years, but he'd never felt like she was someone he could approach. “We'd shared an agent,” he said. “And it was no disrespect to me, but I hadn't been in any movies yet. What business do I have talking to Frances McDormand? But now, and this is the gift of acting, I really feel myself coming into my own as a community of thespians, as opposed to actors. And man, that sounds pretentious, but I just mean it's not about the fucked-up ladder of success and un-success, and being the guy or the girl, and then being off the list… That's not what I'm talking about with her on set, that's not what she's espousing to me. She's talking about a long career. She's talking about marriage with a creative partner and consultant. So to be able to have conversations like that and then a story line in the movie where they're kind of on an equal field? Even if she's an experienced, wise woman and he's an idealistic, naive boy? That's the exact relationship of exchange I want with my intergenerational peers.”

There's a particularly memorable scene in The French Dispatch, reporter and subject having fallen into bed together, when there's a knock at the door. Timothée looks at McDormand, anxious about who's there, mortified when McDormand informs him it's his mother. There, in that scene, we see all the desire of Zeffirelli—this energetic young man with all the right intentions, who strains to be intellectually and emotionally riper—clash with the reality of his age. It felt familiar to me, and no doubt to Timothée. It was some of my favorite acting in the film. I asked McDormand if there was anything in their scenes that struck her as particularly mature for someone his age. “Maturity is not something a fellow actor is the most concerned with,” she said. “Playfulness, discipline, and rigor. I do recall, during our scene in bed, the crew responding to his work with true respect for his focus. He was bringing it and we sat up and paid attention.” Anderson added: “I think my favorite moments with Timmy during a scene were the ones where I saw him pause and find a new attack. A new angle, which he does very clearly and assertively. What I love is how he will surprise you with something new, completely unexpected and perfect.”

One night, while McDormand was shooting a scene without Timothée, her husband, Joel Coen—he of the Brothers—asked Timothée if he wanted to go out for a steak. Over dinner, Timothée grilled Coen about Dylan. He knew Coen was a fan and had steeped in it on Inside Llewyn Davis. “He almost seemed weary of even talking about this stuff, it was so big and potent,” Timothée told me. But Coen noted that the truly incredible thing about Dylan was not so much the quality, which was obvious, but the quantity—the rapid amount of work in short succession, one groundbreaking album after another, in those early years. That takeaway resonated deeply with Timothée. Especially as he reflected on it from summer 2020, during the pause, during the moment of no work. That gush from Dylan made him want to work—harder, longer, better, more.

A week after our conversation in Woodstock, Timothée and I were in New York City, sitting on a bench along the Hudson, talking about what he's looking for when work resumes. “I want to get back to the undefined space again,” he said. “I'm chasing a feeling. When you think you're doing some great thing, it's probably something you've done before, and when you really fucking have no clue, that's when you're doing something on the edge, good or bad.”

Timothée's mask had slipped down his face as he was saying this, and two young women, about his age, approached cautiously. “Would you mind if we got a…,” they asked, and he hopped up without hesitation. “How'd you recognize me?” he said, friendly, but genuinely curious, as if he hadn't just been shouting about art in a voice that sounded a lot like Laurie from Little Women or Timmy from late-night shows.

“Was it the scrawny limbs or the hair?” I asked him as he sat back down.

“Definitely the first.”

From France, last spring, it was straight to Hungary—right back to the exact apartment in Budapest he'd stayed in while shooting The King—to start work on Dune. Very few actors had become as famous without a blockbuster. And while he'd really gotten it down how to act on an indie set, how to make every second and every take count, he knew this would be something altogether different. It wasn't just the shoot that would prove taxing. A film of Dune's scale would likely be the can opener to a whole other stratum of Hollywood prominence.

Director Denis Villeneuve told me Timothée was his “first and only choice” to play Paul Atreides, “the one name on the page.” When they met to discuss the prospect, Villeneuve told Timothée how happy he was to finally meet the young actor. And Timothée had to remind him that they'd met before, when Timothée read for Villeneuve's Prisoners. “ ‘Of course!’ ” Villeneuve remembered. “He did a great audition, but he didn't physically fit the part. He was probably swearing at me because I didn't take him.” Timothée was party to so many stories like that one—glancing interactions with these heroes of his before he'd broken through. It reminded me of the relationship between freshmen and seniors in high school. The freshmen remember everything about the seniors; the seniors hardly notice the freshmen. But we all become peers eventually.

“I felt there was one being on this planet right now that would be able to portray Paul Atreides,” Villeneuve said—referring to the hero of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel, who transforms from an unassuming heir into a messiah figure, a charismatic outsider and commander of men and women (and sandworms). I read Dune for the first time this summer and was shocked by the source material, how much I'd consumed in culture that had borrowed from it. Star Wars. Alien. The Matrix. Game of Thrones. Paul, therefore, is a type we're familiar with but also possessing singular characteristics Villeneuve wanted Timothée for: “He has a deep, deep intelligence in the eyes. Something you cannot fake. The kid is brilliant. Very intellectual, very strong. And you see that in the eyes. He also has a very old soul. You feel that he has already lived through several lives. And at the same time, he looks so young on camera. Sometimes he'd look almost 14 years old. He has this kind of general youth in his features and the contrast with the old-soul quality in his eyes—it's a kid that knows more about life than his age. Finally: He has that beautiful charisma, the charisma of a rock star. That Paul will lead the whole population of a planet later. Timothée has that kind of instant charisma onscreen that you can find only sometimes in the Old Hollywood stars from the '20s. There's something of a romantic beauty to him. A cross of aristocracy and being a bum at the same time. I mean, Timothée is Paul Atreides for me. It was a big relief that he agreed, because I had no plan b.”

“If I get hit by a truck next week, I'm looking at 20 to 23, I don't know if you can top that.”

I asked Villeneuve if he noticed Timothée struggling at all to adjust to the larger-scale production. “It didn't show when he was on set, but I think for him the big thing was to learn how to create his own bubble on set. So that he would not have to try to be the friend of everyone. When you're on a smaller set, when there's 25 people, you can be friendly with 25 people. When there's 800 people around, you cannot be friends with 800 people.” He chuckled. “It's too much. So how to save your energy, how to focus, how to give himself permission to be in his bubble and make sure that his bubble is respected.”

As ever, Timothée had a special affinity with those people on set who were a little older, a little wiser. Villeneuve said Timothée was constantly speaking with him and his wife in this open, vulnerable way about his concerns, his fears, how to deal with certain pressures. Villeneuve also described for me Timothée's relationships with his fellow actors, particularly the trio of Josh Brolin, Oscar Isaac, and Jason Momoa. “I felt like Timothée was deeply seduced—or maybe not seduced, but I just felt it was like a kid being with older brothers,” Villeneuve said. “He was younger, he was the little one on set, and everybody loved him. There's a scene in the movie where Timothée runs into the arms of Jason Momoa, and Jason grabs him like a puppy and lifts him into the air like he was a feather. And that's real! They really loved each other. It was very beautiful to see this young man being influenced by these people he admires.”

“His positive energy is infectious,” Zendaya, his nearest peer in the film, told me. “He really is so much fun to be around. We have very similar humor, and we can keep a joke going for a long time, but when the cameras start rolling and it's time to work, you can see it's game time, and he just taps into this brilliant intensity. It's awesome to witness.” Villeneuve underlined the energy as well, describing for me just having seen Timothée the night before we spoke, and marveling at “that beautiful, strong candor.”

“I will say that looking at Timothée working, I had a deep feeling that I was watching the birth of something,” Villeneuve added. “Not that it's for me—I say that with humility, because I feel that birth in all the movies he's done so far. I'm feeling it's someone that has insane potential. When I say potential, I don't want to reduce what he's doing right now, not at all. It's just that sometimes you are in front of somebody and you have the feeling you are in contact with a strong artist and that artist, his identity is still growing, building itself, learning its boundaries, learning how to protect some part of it. I think that we are witnessing something beautiful right now.”

At the end of summer 2019, Timothée finally resurfaced from Planet Dune. He had been on social media only sporadically while shooting for most of 2019, and so, for his vast base of fans, it was an overdue glimpse of the object of their affection. First up was the Venice Film Festival and the premiere of The King. There were clothes and Kid Cudi cameos and charming red-carpet interviews. It was an example of the sort of stretch, in the gaps between shoots, when Timothée could indulge his passions for hip-hop and fashion and all these things he'd loved all his life that were suddenly accessible. It was another of the delirious disorientations of the past few years—the way that people who were once subjects of his intense fandom were suddenly a part of his life as friends or acquaintances happy to have him around. He might still embarrass himself at times, helplessly rapping back lyrics to his hip-hop heroes or gushing like a broken dam about new music or clothes or art made by the makers in his life, but they were cool with him so long as he actually kept his cool.

Timothée also spent the end of last summer promoting The King, alongside his costar Lily-Rose Depp, whom he'd been dating for about a year. He is serious about keeping his former relationship with Depp to himself, but he did share one very sweet, very funny, very sad anecdote that encapsulates the spectrum of great and terrible that accompanies the private life of someone new to mega-fame like Timothée.

After Venice, he and Lily-Rose took a few days for themselves in Capri, where they were photographed by paparazzi. One image, in particular, circulated in which they were making out on the deck of a boat. Timothée is contorting himself into the kiss and looks a little awkward. Many people had their laughs. And some even suggested that the photo was staged for publicity. “I went to bed that night thinking that was one of the best days of my life,” Timothée told me. “I was on this boat all day with someone I really loved, and closing my eyes, I was like, indisputably, ‘That was great.’ And then waking up to all these pictures, and feeling embarrassed, and looking like a real nob? All pale? And then people are like: This is a P.R. stunt. A P.R. stunt?! Do you think I'd want to look like that in front of all of you?!”

This was how things worked now. He'd disappeared into those four straight films and emerged into a new paradigm—one that followed him into the holiday season of last year and a whole new level of exposure with Little Women. Here was this film about sisterhood, female intimacy, and a feminist critique of art and commerce. And yet Timothée was still the shiniest object in the set for so many fans. “I'm very used to answering questions about Timothée's hair from 15-year-old girls,” Saoirse Ronan joked with me. “I imagine that's probably what you're going to ask me about?”

Ronan has the unique perspective of having filmed and then promoted two movies with Chalamet during the past three years, and has as clear an eye as anyone onto this early phase of his career. “He's had such incredible opportunities, and he doesn't let the reality of that pass him by,” she said. “He's incredibly gracious and grateful in relation to his work and the people he works with. I think he's become more open as an actor. He knows his instrument more. I think he works even harder now because there are projects that are on his shoulders in a way that they weren't before. And of course he's been totally catapulted into this whole other realm of attention and notoriety. So he's also having to balance the incredible fame and attention, which would completely freak me out if it was something I had to go through.”

“I've realized that as much as these heroes of mine mean to me, and as grateful as I am when they offer me advice, even they acknowledge it's just a different thing now.”

When Timothée and I were sitting by the Hudson that afternoon back in summer, there were those two young women who approached him for a photo. But there were also two other young women who caught an eyeful of his profile as they strolled by and then surreptitiously positioned themselves out of his sight line but still in mine. They did that thing where one pretends to take a picture of the other while actually shooting back over her shoulder in selfie mode. That charade went on for five minutes or so while Timothée exercised his guts about reuniting with Gerwig and Ronan on Little Women, and though I was nodding along, I was also marveling at the lengths to which those two fans were willing to go to get a picture of him.

I asked Ronan what she's noticed about that level of attention, sitting beside him for so much of it. “I'm always kind of shocked by those things—when any one person can just completely take over people's lives so much,” she said, laughing a little incredulously. “But I'm also not surprised. There just aren't many other young male actors out there like him, who are able to hold an audience in the way that he does. His look is so magnetic and beautiful. One of the things that we spoke about a lot when we were doing Little Women, in terms of our characters, but also in terms of myself and him as people, is that we both have this masculinity and femininity equally. And I think that that's one of his strengths, is that he can be incredibly sort of feminine and sensitive and sensual, and also he's a guy that, you know, girls fancy. So he covers so much ground in terms of popularity. But at the end of the day, he's always gonna have this skill. He can be cute, but that only gets you so far.… And so I've seen him learn how to separate himself from all that other stuff when he's on set, when he's working.”

In Woodstock, Timothée had described to me with greatest admiration the way that Ronan can act in these films, at this highest level of acclaim and attention, but also remove herself, uncomplicatedly, from all the fuss: “She is like a superhero when it comes to this sort of thing, going through it so healthy—with the asterisk being excellent work across the board and four Oscar nominations. I think her, like, DNA of self is really morally right.” She knows herself extremely well, he said, and has the confidence to give up only so much of herself. Whereas he feels he is calibrating constantly how much of his true self to reveal. “Saoirse's one of my best friends in the world—at least I think we're best friends. And she's never judged me for…the Coachella of it all.” That is, the part of him that can't resist fanning out backstage with his favorite musicians or occasionally allowing himself to be in the spotlight even as he talks about preserving his privacy.

“He's 24, and he's gonna have a great time, and I would never judge him. I've been to Coachella; I just never got photographed at Coachella,” Ronan said, chuckling. “But yeah, we talk about that sort of stuff all the time. We've weirdly gone through this together for the last few years. We've both become more accessible. But he's had one sort of attention—I do feel like boys get it on a whole other level. I know that ultimately what he wants is to be good at his job. And that will always steer him on the right path. I've always let him know, and he's always let me know, we can talk to each other, and we do. He has good people around him, and I'm one of them, and Greta as well—we all kind of look out for one another.”

Timothée spent late May and early June asking questions of himself: What can I do? What is my role in all this? He felt conflicted when he sprang to action and conflicted when he stood still. But never did things feel less uncertain, less self-conscious, than when he was marching, anonymously, alongside hundreds or thousands of others in Los Angeles in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. It was an active way to participate—meaningful action, without being showy, without flexing any of the levers of fame or power. He was going to get hit no matter what he did, so he tried to follow his instincts of what felt humble, responsible, right.

“This idea,” he said, “that power is the mass body politic organized—and how many bodies can you get together—that makes sense to me.” He didn't disappear but, rather, stripped himself of his him-ness and became one body, among many, taking up space and participating in an unequivocal statement. “With a mask, a hood, a hat, glasses—my face is deleted,” he explained, “and I'm literally presenting a physical form, you know?” A single body in space that, like a vote cast in an election, is democracy embodied, but anonymous. The same unit of power as anyone else. “People might find it disingenuous, but I found it really grounding,” he said. “It was Oh shit, I don't feel out of place—and yet I haven't been in a crowd like this for years.”

He spent much of the summer talking with others about how a person should be in a cultural and political moment such as this one. “After a day of protests,” he said, “I'd ask friends if they ‘felt good.’ If we do, is it a good thing to feel good, or does that mean we're doing it for the wrong reasons? How much do I want to put on social media? Is it a virtue signal to put it on social media? But all social media is performative, right?” I heard him ask dozens of self-interrogating questions like these. He cares so genuinely about doing the right thing, about doing well by his family, his friends, and his fans. But he didn't want to misuse his privilege or his platform, to overreach so that the gravity of his fame sucked up anything from anyone else whose moment it was to speak. He didn't want to take up room; he wanted to help center other voices. On Instagram, he posted videos each day during the first week of marches in Los Angeles—no directives into camera, just an implicit charge to his followers: Show up. Listen. Be a body.

“I have so many thoughts on so much of it,” he said, “but I don't see the benefit of putting it down for consumption until I've really worked out exactly how I feel about it all. Who benefits from my half-baked ideas?” Who cannot relate to this in 2020? Who would want any of their dinnertime conversations with family and friends these past months chiseled into the stone of the internet? “I care so much about this stuff. But I would never want my caring to be misconstrued. I don't want my caring to be about me in any way.”

God, this stuff twisted him up. He knows how much has gone his way. But from the summit of good fortune and power, is it better to speak constantly—or to shut up, put on the glasses, pull down the hood, and live and act according to one's convictions as one individual among many individuals? To march. To vote. To speak through action rather than words. Staying in motion, showing up, being a body—it's a good place to start while he works out the rest of how he's meant to live a life true to his values with everyone watching.

He's seeking out the right path, the right people—with help from his “intergenerational peers” and Dylan and anyone else he can find. He wants the benefit of their knowledge and experience, and he's okay if it's slow going to accrue it. He's open to playing the role of the novice still. But there have also been things in his life these past of couple years that have made him realize, as he puts it, “adults are just kids a little bit older.” When he returned to New York from Los Angeles this summer, it wasn't to his childhood apartment or to a borrowed living space of an acquaintance. It was to his very own apartment, his first, in a little wedge of Manhattan he loved for being nowhere, but on the edge of several somewheres. He relished the mundanity of setting up his own place. To hear him talk about a first trip to CB2 was like hearing another person talk about their first trip to a movie set. “But I think if people saw what my apartment looked like, they'd be like, ‘Oh! This kid has no fucking clue what he's doing.’ ” He is so young and he is so old. It is his gift. He is so patient when he can suppress being so restless. So careful with the long arc of a career when he can resist obsessing over the instant. He is so confident when he centers on the work and so searching when he gets sucked down into questions about the rest of his life. Will he always be this way? This pliable and open? This self-reflective and intentional? He trusted so little of his new life, but he trusted his talent. That was the key. He knew he was as good as anyone at playing other people, even if he was still figuring out how to play himself.

We spent a good amount of time in Woodstock and in New York City and on the phone talking about where his career might take him from here. With great humility, he acknowledges his skill. But he has been thinking a lot about the difference between preternatural talent and mastery—the work that's required to ascend from that floor of young greatness to the ceiling of realized potential. That said, he's wise enough to know that his career could pivot in an entirely different direction—that the world could change or the opportunities could dry up or “eventually there's gonna be an Oscar Isaac in his 30s who's gonna bust out of Juilliard who's gonna be the next great actor and make me feel like a piece of shit. But right now…”

He told me, “If I get hit by a truck next week, I'm looking at 20 to 23, I don't know if you can top that.” To show up with Call Me by Your Name—he knows that that film was a unicorn, the sort an actor works his whole life to find. And the immediate Oscar nomination had freed him up to not spend the rest of his career chasing a certain kind of role that might lead to a certain kind of validation. “I'm not gonna be bashing my head against a wall trying to prove that I'm an actor,” he said. “The train can run over my leg and leave a track forever, and yet the point of entry for me…,” he said, trailing. “That's a good feeling.”

He looks at all these careers—all the careers you might expect: DiCaprio, Bale, Phoenix, Depp. And he does his best to separate the strands of each of their careers that might still apply to his. But all of the rules for acting success that those performers played by, for how to be in the public eye, for career arcs and longevity—those rules are irrelevant now. Hollywood is different, the media is different, fans are different, movies are different, the world is different. “I've realized that as much as these heroes of mine mean to me, and as grateful as I am when they offer me advice, even they acknowledge it's just a different thing now.”

And so it's occurring to him that the next few years will be Timothée finding the path that's right for him. Lately, he's thought about this next phase as shining a flashlight into the dark. There are potential projects that excite him considerably, some of which he's had a greater hand in engineering. There is, of course, the Dylan movie. But there's the question of how to spend the rest of the year, when most Hollywood productions are still paused. “The rest of the year,” he says, “I'm just thinking about Trump, man.” But after that…maybe Europe for a while? The Woodstock experiment did what he'd hoped it would—a little space, somewhere else. He would love to just breathe some different air again.

He was at another pivot point, as he had been when he and I were first together for Chapter 1. In the winter of 2018, the work had been validated, the public profile had developed suddenly. But the temptations, the confusion, the money—those were all lagging indicators. By mid-2020, all had caught up. And the money, in particular, was on his mind one afternoon in New York. We were talking about how a person might stay true to one's roots with that sort of thing when the reality, for him at least, had changed with Dune. I told him that one of the things that seemed to differentiate him from young stars of the past, and perhaps was a feature of his generation, was the way that material possessions didn't consume him. He didn't buy much stuff. He didn't own a car or a house. He liked borrowing clothes, but not necessarily keeping them. He agreed with the characterization, but then got immediately twisted up about a potential future hypocrisy: “But Dan, what if I do grow to like fancy shit?!”

Boomeranging back home after the surreal adventures out in the world—that was a good and grounding thing for him. Over the weeks we were talking, he spent time with his folks, delivered some COVID groceries to his grandma, and was in touch with his sister daily. And in New York, he and I kept running into ghosts. One afternoon, when we crossed the West Side Highway at Houston Street, he gestured at the athletic complex at Pier 40, where he played soccer growing up. He scampered over to a vending machine there to grab a bottle of water. When he pulled open his wallet to pay, he had only twenties. “Bad metaphor! Bad metaphor!” he screamed, jumping away from the vending machine, as though it were one of the great threats to his selfhood. This was the sort of innocuous moment that will hum with outsize resonance for me when I think about Chapter 2 from the future. All the things that one would expect to happen had happened in the first two and a half years since the arrival of a comet, and yet he was suspicious of so much of it.

Here is another way I will remember him from this moment: sitting on that porch in Woodstock—breeze and birds in the trees, sunlight in the leaves—looking for a higher power. Or at least expressing openness, as a nonreligious person, to the idea of some central organizing force in the universe—because, given everything lately, there has to be or we're fucked, right? Some of these searching things he said to me could be mistaken as a person spinning out a little. But that wasn't it at all. There was such calm. There was such contentment with the grace that had been afforded his life and career thus far, and where each might take him next. He was questing, yes—but he was firmly at the controls. The flashlight in the dark. Someone moving forward with great confidence into the unknown, with eyes wide, mouth shut, and ears listening more than they ever had before. There were no models for how a person like him should be anymore. There were no longer any adults who weren't just kids a little bit older. There were no blueprints for how to shape a career—so much had changed. There was only a head and a heart, his, and a feeling for the moment. “Maybe I'll never do a great work of art again, but I just feel like I'm confident in the way I'm trying to approach things now, how I'm setting up the angles,” he said on that porch in Woodstock. “When you think about Dylan. When you think about what Joel Coen said about the rapidness of the art, I'm just like: Trust the beat of your own drum. Give this its best shot. Give your artistry its best shot.”

Daniel Riley is a GQ correspondent and the author of ‘Barcelona Days,’ which was published this past summer.

A version of this story originally appears in the November 2020 issue with the title "Wild Heart."

PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs by Renell Medrano Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu Tailoring by Ksenia Golub Produced by Wei-Li Wang at Hudson Hill Production

#timmy #timothee chalamet #gq interview #super long post

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antiherocorner · 3 years

Text

Huh... Alright, I'm doing... I think I'm doing it...

This is my very first fanfic ever... I'm still learning... This is a part 1 thing... I'm currently in the middle of a university exam period, so I couldn't finish the whole story yet, but I will as soon as I can, but I don't want to wait anymore... My English is okay-ish... It's not my native language, so there maybe some grammatical mistakes, I hope it's still readable... I tried my best... Just bear with me, I'll try to learn and improve... I'm very nervous...

Facts about the story: there is no age mentioning, Reader is around 25-26, I made Daniel younger in my head, 34-36 (single, no wife, no kids, let's respect the real Brühl family), Reader is female, I am Hungarian as well (possible Hungarian language in the future), I'm studying Russian (possible Russian language in the future), and I just started learning German, I used translater (sorry if I messed it up but, I really tried, please tell me if it's horrible), and one more thing... I have never met Daniel, nor I went to Berlin (yet, I really want to, and planning)... All of this are imagination, dreaming, and a little searching...

Warnings: none?... i think?... Apart from the horrible language uses and horrible jokes... Maybe swearing.

(Bad) Summary: a Hungarian girl goes to Berlin with a Russian friend of hers, as tourists. They always wanted to visit the city (not because Reader has a crush on the one and only Daniel Brühl, and wants to go to his tapas bar...of course). When the Reader goes back alone to the bar, Daniel is there too... The big meeting, adventures, fun, love, shitty romcom vibes ahead... (i hope the story is better than the summary...)

And now, after this awkward rambling, I present to you:

-----------------------------------

With Love from Berlin

Part 1

You couldn’t believe it. Finally, after months of preparation, you and your best friend were finally here, in the heart of Germany, Berlin. It was very different from what you were used to. Coming from a small city from Hungary, this was way bigger than your imagination. All kinds of people from different cultures merged into one. Museums, cafes, bars, restaurants, you didn’t even know where to begin. You took a deep breath in your hotel room. Your friend insisted on getting different rooms, in case she or you find someone to have a good time, if you know what I mean. Well, rather your friend, than you. You wanted to come here after many years, and you were finally here, so you want to experience as much of this city as you possibly could, you’re not gonna waste your time on a random (or more, glancing at your friend) man.

You arrived at the hotel around 1.00pm, so you decided to go get some lunch somewhere close. You were a little bit tired of the long hours on the train. Just around a corner from where you were staying there was a tapas bar. Bar Raval. Your friend wasn’t really into movies that much, or actors in particular, but you knew that place, although you have never been there. You didn’t think about yourself as a “fangirl”, but you really admired the work of Daniel Brühl. You knew there was little to no chance that you could get even a tiny glance of him, but in over all: you would be happy just to say that you were in his bar. Your friend liked Spanish cuisine, so it didn’t take much to convince her to eat there.

A Hungarian and a Russian woman walked into a Spanish restaurant in Germany, Berlin. Sounded comical. The place looked very friendly and funky. There were some people, not really a crowd. You decided to sit in the corner, with your back to the wall, so you can observe your surroundings. Your friend sits down opposite you. A waiter comes up to you:

- Willkommen! Was möchten Sie gerne? - he asked, looking between the two of you.

- Oh, sorry, we don’t really speak German. - you said with quite a thick Hungarian accent, because you got nervous due the potential language barrier.

- I see, It’s okay. We usually have all kinds of tourist here, so you’re good. What can I get for you two? - he asked with a welcoming smile.

You weren’t sure what you wanted to eat, you weren’t familiar with Spanish food at all, so you just trusted your friend to order something. She ordered something with pasta, and another thing with pasta. You had no idea what she just said. And some juice. She smiled at the waiter who scribbled down your order, and of he went. You looked around while you were waiting.

- It’s nice isn’t it?

- Yeah, it is. Quite bohemian. I would have guessed you would want to go to a traditional German restaurant. Why are we here? - smiled your friend knowingly.

- Well… You know…

- Is this the place of your man?

- What?! Shut up… - blushing - I just like his movies, that’s all… Anyway, I just liked the pictures of this place…

- ...and him…

- ...AND I wanted to check it out myself, ok?

- Ok-Ok...

You smiled at each other. You were best friends for years now, you could communicate without much of words. The waiter arrived with your plates. The food was good. In fact, more than good. In general, you prefer other cuisines, but you really liked this Spanish place. In Berlin. Odd, in the best way. After the lunch you went back to the hotel. Your friend wanted to go to a small club in the evening, so you decided to just chill throughout the afternoon.

The traveling took the better of you, as you didn’t just not feel fresh after your nap, but you actually felt like shit. Your friend on the other hand really wanted to get going. So you assured her and yourself that it’s fine if you didn’t go to a club. She was a strong woman, and the club which she picked was just a couple of blocks away, so she decided, after she made sure that it is truly okay, to leave you behind in your room. You have never been a party-animal anyway, and you really just wanted to plan for tomorrow. There were so many things you wanted to watch in the city. After a few hours of planning and searching, you eventually fall asleep on the couch.

In the morning, luckily, you felt much better, more of yourself than in the previous afternoon. You took a shower, get dressed (purple converse, dark skinny jeans, blue tank-top and a blue/black checked shirt...nothing can go wrong dressing like this, you thought), grabbed your camo, ex-military little gym bag, locked your room’s door, and went to knock on your friend’s door. It took a few minutes, some groans, and other small noises, when she finally flung the door open. The sight was hideous.

- The hell happened to you? - you really tried not to laugh.

- Laugh, as you like… I had a good time. Drank more vodka that I could handle though…

- Are you alone or…?

- I am… Calm down, I didn’t get lied… Although I tried… But I didn’t!!! - she said quickly after she saw the frown on your face. - But I feel very shitty… My hangover is killing me, I didn’t give out anything yet… But I might throw up at any minute now…

- How can I help you? Stay with you? Bring you something from that little shop we saw yesterday?

- Some water would be nice… But I don’t want you to see me like this… And I will be fine, i’m just gonna rest today… You can go on on your sightseeing trip.

- Are you sure? I’m gladly staying with you…

- No, no! You wanted to come so badly, I don’t want to take a day away from you. I will be alright.

- You promise?

- I do. Please, just go. - she smiled at you.

- Alright. I’ll go grab you some water, and… I don’t know, go for a walk or something. Get breakfast.

- For the mentioning of food, your friend’s face went green and particularly jumped into her bathroom.

- I’m coming back in a minute or two! - you shouted after her, than closed her hotel room’s door.

You went down to get some water, some bread and some crackers which would be easy on her stomach, yet she still would be able to eat something throughout the day. You knocked on her door, which opened just slightly, an arm came out to take the bag from your hand, a small, weak “Спасибо” and just like that the door was closed again. You giggled to her door before you headed down to the street.

You honestly didn’t really want to explore many things without her, so you tried to keep your excitement low. You decided to go back to that bar where you ate your lunch yesterday. You liked it a lot, and it wasn’t a new place to discover, which meant that your friend wasn’t missing out on anything. You went to the bar. It was still early morning, not many people were there. A few old people, some of them are couples. The younger generation (yours) was probably still sleeping. Besides, the place was more like a lunch/dinner kind of place anyway. The waiter looked up and recognised you.

- Good morning! Alone this time?

- Good morning to you too! Yes, my friend had a wild party last night, and she is standing at the gates of Hell right now.

- That sounds bad. - he laughed.

- It is, she looked scary… - that made him chuckle.

- So what can i do for you today?

- I would like just a cappuccino, please.

- Alright, just sit down, I’m on it.

- Thank you!

You sat down at the exact place where you did yesterday, next to the window, with your back to the wall. You put down your bag, and looked around. With less people, the place looked cozier. You really did like it a lot. Eventually, your cappucino arrived. You thanked it, and tasted it. It was delicious. You were one of those people who liked to read next to a fresh coffee, and you always had a book around you. You took it out from your handy-dandy bag and started reading it, holding it a little up in your hands, leaned back on your chair. You were reading one of your favourite books (Pushkin - Anyegin), while sipping a good morning cappuccino, in a nice place. You just relaxed to the small sounds of the bar and sounds of the city, which infiltrated through the door and windows.

- Eine interessante Wahl von Buch am Morgen. Interessanter als eine Zeitung, das ist sicher...

No. Just...no. You were hallucinating. You felt like everything was frozen around you. From out of 2.8 millions of people (roughly), you would recognize this voice. His voice. You physically could not look up.

- Omm.. I’m sorry, I didn’t understand what you just said… - you said with the weakest voice and in the thickest accent ever, in your whole damn life. You hoped that if you make this man say another thing you fall back to reality.

- Oh, my bad - he giggled - I just said that it is an interesting choice of read in the morning, it sure is more interesting than a newspaper.

Shit, this was the reality.

You dared to look up, and your eyes met the most chocolaty eyes ever on this whole planet, but at least in the whole of Berlin. The owner of those eyes was leaning on the chair opposite you.

- Hello. I’m the owner of this Bar, I’m Daniel. - he offered his hand to you.

- Hi, I kno...i mean I’m (Y/N), I’m the costumer…? - you finished with a questioning voice and all you wanted was for the ground to open, swallow you, and with that wipe you out of this universe. You shook his hand, without looking at him directly. His hands were warm and secure. After he released you, you closed your eyes, already feeling the burning sensation in your face. You heard a deep chuckle.

- Yeah, I guessed that. You’re not from Germany and you aren't British either, aren’t you?

You opened your (Y/E/C) eyes only to meet his curious ones.

- No, I’m not. I’m just a tourist here, I’m from Hungary.

- Oh, I’ve been there. It’s a lovely country. Would you mind if I sit down? - gesturing to the empty chair opposite from you.

- Yes… I mean no… - you took a deep breath - If you would like to you can sit with me. - This is just going great...

You earned another deep chuckle from the man in front of you, while he sat down.

- So… What are you doing here alone, in Berlin?

- I’m not alone.

- Oh… Anniversary? - for a moment you thought you saw something in his eyes. Sadness?

- Not that either. I don’t have anyone to celebrate such things. I came here with my friend, but she got wasted last night, and probably at the moment she is agonizing in her bathroom above the toilet.

- Hm… that’s not nice. - curiosity was coming back to his face.

The two of you stayed in silence. It wasn’t really uncomfortable, you were just terribly shy, and couldn’t stop blushing. You even tried to hide some of your face by leaning on one of your palms, and sipping your coffee.

This is aweful. Daniel f*ing Brühl is sitting opposite me, and I can’t even look at him. He must be thinking I’m one of those fangirls who just can’t keep it together before their idols. Which is true, but he shouldn’t have to know that…

But he wasn’t thinking that. Quite the opposite actually. You were so out of place in his bar, he had to approach you. There was something in you which made him intrigued. While you were trying to hide, which he found a little bit cute and entertaining, he tried to study you as well. There was something in you. He felt like he wanted to know your story.

- So what’s the plan for today?

...........

#daniel bruhl #daniel bruhl x reader #daniel brühl #fanfic #actor x reader #actor x y/n #daniel bruhl x you #baron zemo x reader #baron zemo

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carewyncromwell · 3 years

Photo

“It's not what I asked for -- Sometimes life just slips in through a back door And carves out a person And makes you believe it's all true... And now I've got you. You're not what I asked for -- If I'm honest, I know I would give it all back For a chance to start over And rewrite an ending or two, For the girl that I knew...”

~“She Used to Be Mine (cover)” by Chase Holfelder

x~x~x~x

Backgrounds source (x) // Created by Jam City for Hogwarts Mystery (Y6Ch26) // Edited in Lunapic and Microsoft Paint

TW: Mention of suicidal thoughts

x~x~x~x

In the early evening Duncan had drifted through the walls down into the Slytherin commonroom to pass Carewyn a message -- Jacob had returned to Hogwarts, and should she wish to see him, he would meet her at the Black Lake, if she only sent up red sparks after dark. Bill, Charlie, and Ben, who’d come to join Carewyn and Merula at the Slytherin table so they could talk, all looked at their ginger-haired friend with some concern. Ben immediately offered to go with Carewyn, thinking to offer moral support, but Bill gently dissuaded them.

“Jacob asked to see Carey,” he said quietly.

“And he can,” Ben said stubbornly. “I just don’t want Carewyn going outside school alone again.”

“I get where you’re coming from, Ben,” Charlie said bracingly. “But...well, this is between Carey and Jacob, as siblings. We shouldn’t get in the middle of that.”

Bill nodded. “Jacob’s more than entitled to see his sister in private without us getting in the way.”

Merula crossed her arms. “Don’t know if I’d say he’s ‘entitled.’ Cromwell’s brother is...well, not that awful, I admit...but he was supposed to be protecting Cromwell and me from R and the Wizard in White, not flying the coop.”

“Right,” said Ben. “Frankly I’d say he’s entitled to nothing, at this stage -- disappearing with no forwarding address and then strolling on back in here after everything’s gone to pot -- ”

Duncan actually made a violent gesture in Ben’s direction, but halted before his transparent hand could pass through the tall Gryffindor. The ghost clenched his fist, angrily shutting his eyes as he tried to rein in his temper.

“He was trying to deal with the Wizard in White,” he said at last. “R used their stooge as a lure, to lead him away from Hogwarts...and from you. I’m not going to act like Jacob can’t be really bloody stupid, but...”

Duncan turned to Carewyn, swallowing back a lump in his throat.

“...You...mean more to him than anyone else...anything else, in this world. Everything he’s ever done...it’s all been with you in mind.”

Something oddly melancholy glided over Duncan’s face. It made Carewyn look away, to hide the tumultuous feelings welling up in her chest.

She did miss Jacob -- she did want to see him. And yet...what would it really accomplish? Jacob probably didn’t know anything new about the Cursed Vaults or R -- they didn’t yet either. And talking about Rowan...the thought of opening up to Jacob again about the anguish she felt, and still felt...

Trust was something Carewyn Cromwell no longer knew how to do. It had been so hard even just opening up enough to Duncan, Ben, Merula, Charlie, and Bill to admit she needed help. To show her current face to her brother...before, it had been so easy to open up to Jacob, to share everything she was with him, but...

She wasn’t who she was then. That little girl had died the day Jacob disappeared, all those years ago. And Jacob...well, was he even who she remembered, either? Before, she would’ve never thought he’d abandon her when she needed him most. Now...now it felt like that was all he ever did.

Duncan watched Carewyn for a moment, his eyes growing more somber.

“Carewyn,” he murmured, “I know your brother’s not exactly the best at talking about feelings. And I know...you probably don’t want him to see you when you’re not at your best yourself. ...But whether you want him to see you hurting or not, that’s how you are -- partly because of the mistakes you and your friends made, maybe, but largely because of the mistakes he made. No matter how much Jacob might wish it wasn’t so, that’s how it is. You’re hurting, and that’s a fact -- one he should have to face. He’s more than man enough to face it.”

Carewyn bowed her head. The movement brought her eyes into the shadow of her ginger bangs, obscuring them from view. Then, with a soft exhale, she raised her head, smoothing her messy hair from her face.

“...I’ll go. I’ll be okay,” she reassured Ben, seeing his concerned expression. “I...think we need to talk. Jacob and me.”

Once darkness had completely enveloped the Hogwarts grounds, Carewyn used the excuse of Prefect duties to stay out past curfew and used the Invisibility Cloak she’d gotten by elicit means through Knockturn Alley to sneak out of the school itself. After all, Dumbledore had already warned her about leaving the school previously, and as much as Carewyn had long since lost most of her respect for the Headmaster, she knew it would only hinder the new Circle of Khanna’s activities if she actively antagonized him.

Once she’d reached the Lakeshore, Carewyn took a deep breath and then held her wand aloft. The gesture was like a heavy rock coming down on her chest -- the last time she’d held her wand arm up like this was when Dumbledore spoke in remembrance of Rowan...

“...Vermillious.”

The spell came out quietly, but the red sparks from her wand soared high. Once the sparks had started to fade away, Carewyn very slowly lowered her arm, staring up at the starry sky.

The following two minutes dragged. At long last, after what felt like an eternity, Carewyn heard the sound of someone running toward her, out of the Forest and through the brush toward her.

It was Jacob. His scarlet dress robes were a bit disheveled and his face was as pale and skull-like as ever as he came to a stop about a foot away from her. He lightly gasped for air.

“...Pip.”

Carewyn inhaled and exhaled quietly. “...Hello, Jacob.”

Jacob’s hollowed-out eyes trailed over his sister’s face. They took in the bags under her eyes, her lack of make-up, her undone collar...her ginger hair messily falling onto her shoulders. He seemed to have trouble speaking -- like his throat was being clenched in some invisible fist.

“...Pip...” he murmured, “I...I heard...”

He swallowed back a lump in his throat.

“Rakepick -- did she hurt -- ?”

“Me?” Carewyn finished very lowly. “No.”

Jacob’s shoulders didn’t relax. “And...your friend...the girl she...”

Carewyn looked away, unable to respond. Jacob looked like a close friend had abruptly stabbed him in the chest.

“Pip...I’m -- I’m so -- ” he had to swallow again. “...This is all my fault. I should’ve...no...I never should’ve let R lure me away from you -- I should’ve known they’d hurt you, to try to keep me in line, just like before...”

He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, trapped between pain and righteous anger. Once he’d gotten a grip on his emotions, he reached out a hand and lightly took hold of her shoulder.

“I swear to you, Pip,” he said fiercely, “I’ll make R pay for what they’ve done to you -- to me, to Ashe and Rowan...I swear, I’ll -- ”

"How?”

Jacob gave something like a flinch at the word. It had been so quiet, and yet...so grim. So dark and sleek -- like some black gemstone.

He stared at Carewyn, his hollowed-out eyes searching her pale face and trying in vain to meet her eyes. He tried to put on a brave smile.

“...Don’t worry, Pip,” he said. "I’m working on a way to the last Vault now. I promise R won’t get there first. And once I keep them from their prize...well, I’ll make sure they never hurt you or come near our family again. I promise you.”

“So you intend to leave again.”

Jacob’s smile flickered and died. Carewyn still wasn’t looking at him, but her dark, quiet voice had hardened noticeably.

“You intend to run off on your own again and leave me here on the sidelines, unable to do a thing,” said Carewyn.

Jacob looked visibly wounded.

“...Pip, I can’t saddle you with the burden of fixing my mistakes. I can’t let you get involved with this -- ”

“Well, Jacob, you’re a bit too late for that!” Carewyn burst out.

She immediately seemed to withdraw in response to her increased volume. Her hands came up to clutch at her arms, her fingers clutching at the sleeves of her black sweater.

Jacob’s face was very tense. His hand on her shoulder was trembling slightly as he gave it a light squeeze.

“Carewyn...I know you want to help. But I...I can’t lose you. If anything happened to you, I’d...”

His blue eyes pulsed with something more fragile, almost shaking.

“...Please, Pip, just trust me,” he whispered. “I will fix this. I promise.”

Carewyn’s eyes flew up to Jacob’s face, boring into his identical eyes. Then, very slowly, her eyes narrowed, hardening like some cold, ice-blue diamond as she backed up, detaching herself from his grip.

“Trust,” she whispered. “You mean like you trusted me, Jacob? Or Mum? The way you hid everything about the Cursed Vaults from us -- everything about Olivia, and Duncan, and Rakepick -- about how R was blackmailing you and forcing you to do their dirty work in Knockturn Alley -- ”

Jacob flinched. “I was only trying to -- ”

“Protect us?” finished Carewyn. She didn’t even need her Legilimency to guess what he’d intended to say. “And what about you, Jacob? Who was protecting you? And after you got trapped in a Portrait, who was protecting me then? Who was protecting me from all those people who would put me down for being the younger sister of ‘that delinquent Jacob Cromwell?’ Who was protecting me when Merula got Rowan and me stuck in Devil’s Snare? Who was protecting me when a bunch of dementors arrived at school? Who was protecting me when I had to fend off an Acromantula and a Hungarian Horntail singlehanded? Who was protecting me when Rakepick stabbed my friends and me in the back? Hell...even after you got out of that Portrait, who was protecting me? It wasn’t you, Jacob -- it was ME! I had to protect myself, and my friends, because no one else could!

Jacob reached out a hand toward her again as if to try to comfort her, but it was shaking.

“Pip...”

Carewyn moved out of his reach.

“No. I trusted you, Jacob -- I trusted you to always be there for me, to always support me no matter what, and you -- you never trusted me enough to tell me the truth. You never trusted me to let me help you, let Mum help you. And worse, you -- you disappeared, Jacob.”

“I didn’t mean to -- ”

“YES YOU DID!”

Carewyn’s hands were squeezing her sleeves in a vice grip as her eyes flooded with tears.

“The first time, yes, that was a mistake -- that was something you hadn’t seen coming, maybe, but in the Portrait Vault, I begged you not to leave -- I pleaded with you to come home with me, to Mum -- and you looked me in the eye, knowing how desperate I was for you not to go, and you left anyway! And then you went absolutely silent -- didn’t send a single letter or make a single visit, not once, for months on end!”

Her volume was rising now. It was like she’d yanked down a dam and now all of the pain and feelings she’d been keeping bottled up for so long were rushing out in a flood.

“After seven years, Jacob -- seven years of not knowing where you were, of putting my life on hold to go after the Vaults, just to find you -- after you disappeared without a trace and without a word -- broke Mum’s heart -- made it so I could never trust anyone again -- ”

The tears were streaming freely now as she shut her eyes tight, hunching in on herself.

“ -- YOU ABANDONED ME! Leaving me to pick up the pieces alone, just like before -- making me feel more scared than ever, knowing that this Cabal you were so afraid of still planned on cashing in on one of my friend’s lives! Leaving me to wonder if I’d saved you, only for you to go out and get yourself killed! And then, when you did come back, all you could tell me was stand back and stay back -- pushing me away like I’m some little girl in need of saving, when I’m the one who saved you!”

Carewyn could feel her face flushing with emotion, but she couldn’t force herself to care. Tears streamed down her face, becoming lodged in her throat and making her choke.

“I’m not that fragile little pipsqueak you used to hoist up on your shoulders and protect from schoolyard bullies anymore! I’m in this thing whether we like it or not, and I’m...I’m SICK of you acting like you’re in any place to ask me to trust you to handle things! You can’t earn my trust, Jacob! You let me down and hurt me, yet you’re acting like I’m this little angel that’ll trust you regardless? WELL, I’M NOT, JACOB! AND I CAN’T! All because you...you...”

Her words had become more and more strained as she went along, but it finally became too much. Sobs overtook her completely, making her bend in on herself and clutch at her arms. Her breath came out in painful gasps, as if the inside of her lungs were host to hundreds of long, open gashes that leaked every clump of air she managed to gulp down -- just as her heart felt like it was bleeding freely, thanks to all of the raw emotion she’d let out after so long.

What made her tears slow, however, was the sound of someone else gasping and choking for air too.

Carewyn blinked through her tears and just barely made out the shape of her messy-haired older brother.

Jacob had also crumpled in on himself. His hands were fists in his hair, pulling hard at the dark, curly strands as he tried in vain to hold in his own sobs. He was, in fact, crying even harder than she’d been -- multiple streams of tears streaked down his tightly shut eyes and his face was red with oxygen deprivation as he struggled to breathe.

“Because I failed you,” Jacob finished as a choked whisper. “Because I -- ”

His shoulders quaked as his words broke apart into sobs.

Carewyn watched him in silence, her tears still streaking down her cheeks. It took Jacob several minutes before he could catch enough breath to speak again.

“You...weren’t ever fragile, Pip. I know -- you’re not that little girl anymore...I know that, I just -- ”

He choked.

“I just -- I needed that little girl, Carewyn. When I came out of the Vault...that was who I needed. And when I first saw you...I was so stupid, Pip...I thought you were still her. Thought you’d stayed just as you were, that you’d...”

Tears streamed even harder down his face.

“Ashe said...that I needed to be there for you -- that I might be the only person in the whole world who might know what you need, after having lost your best friend. But I -- I don’t know, Pippa. Because the only reason why I didn’t end it all, after failing Olivia, getting expelled -- losing Ashe...the only thing that kept me from losing myself completely in that Portrait, the only thing that kept me sane...”

He tried hard to open his eyes and look at her, but his tears blinded him too much to see her clearly.

“...Was remembering my little sister. My small, kind, brave little sister, who’d help the old biddy who owned the ice cream parlor down the road with her errands, just because she sensed she was lonely. The little girl who’d feel guilty about insulting the bully who ripped her dress and gave her a black eye. The little girl who’d walk down the street all by herself, singing as loudly as she could, not caring what anyone else thought of her...all because she was just so excited that her big brother was coming home...”

Jacob’s tears welled up further, coming down in burbling streams down his face.

“I don’t know what to give you, Pippa -- because the only reason I’m still here is that you needed me. You were the only light that gave me any focus, when I couldn’t see a thing -- and even though I know you’re not that little girl anymore, and that things can’t be the way they were, I can’t -- ...I don’t know what I’d do, if I lost you. I don’t know how I’d go on -- how I’d keep my head and not just...stop everything. End all of it. Stop making mistakes, and screwing up, and putting the people I love through Hell over and over...”

His hands yanked his hair so hard it looked painful.

“But...no matter what I do...I can’t fix anything! All I ever do is make things worse! All I ever do...is cause trouble for everyone else -- just like Dad said...”

Carewyn’s tears stilled in her eyes. She almost never heard Jacob call their father just “Dad” -- usually it was his “old man,” in a very resentful voice. Jacob clutched at his own face, trying in vain to suppress the fresh flood of tears.

“And now...now I’m just like him,” he choked, the words making him shrink and shudder as if they were some rapid-acting poison coursing through his veins, “abandoning you and Mum -- breaking your hearts, hurting you -- ”

His nails cut into his own skin as they clawed at his tear-soaked face.

“I knew I’d hate myself for leaving you, but if I stayed -- R tried to target you once, Pippa, when you were young -- I couldn’t justify returning home, knowing the mark R’s branded me with could help them find me. I...couldn’t face Mum, face you...knowing how much I’d screwed up, how much danger I’d put you in -- how much danger I’d already put Olivia and Ashe in -- how everything that happened to them, that’s happened to you and your friends, was my fault. First I lost Olivia to the Vaults -- then I lost Hoo to one of R’s threats -- ”

Carewyn remembered the owl Lane had saved money up for to buy Jacob for Christmas one year. Jacob had sent a letter saying his owl had died in an an accident during his sixth year -- Carewyn had never thought to ask about the nature of the accident at the time...

“ -- then I lost Ashe, all because he was probably trying to pacify R so they’d leave me alone...if I lost Mum -- lost you too -- I’d have nothing -- be nothing, nothing at all -- nothing worth anything...”

Jacob’s shoulders hunched over further, making him look like he subconsciously wanted to disappear.

“...You were never fragile, Carewyn. You were always brave -- even when you were the smallest tyke there, even when you didn’t know how to use a wand. However emotional you were, and however much you’d cry back then, you were never afraid, and you never gave up. But...I know that that little girl I knew...she’s not mine anymore. She’s not my Pippa. She’s someone I barely know, now...who’s found a whole family of friends, all on her own, who inspires them with her song the way she used to inspire me...who doesn’t need me, the way I need her. But...Merlin, Carewyn -- ”

He struggled to breathe as he shut his eyes tight.

“ -- I just want you to live...free and happy, just like before. No matter what happens to me -- my life doesn’t matter, if it can’t ensure yours stays safe. Even if you’re not what I was expecting, when I came out of the Portrait Vault...even if I can’t go back, and rewrite a better life for that little girl I knew...I love you too much to lose you. Because being your brother...it’s the part of me I’m most scared to lose.”

There was a silence. Carewyn stood back, watching Jacob clutch at his face and cry for a long moment. Her silence wasn’t callous, however -- her mind was just at work.

Jacob was afraid. Jacob was scared to death of losing her and their mother, the way he’d lost Duncan and Olivia. He had been so afraid of being that “screw-up” he thought he was -- that others had taught him to see himself as -- that he’d stubbornly decided to fix his mistakes on his own...a decision all the more bolstered by his fear of losing anyone else he loved to the hands of R. And so Jacob had done exactly what Carewyn herself had eight years later -- shut everyone else out and tried to do everything alone. And just like Jacob, she’d failed, and made everything worse instead.

The memory of Duncan bent down in front of her, trying and failing to hold in his own tears as he tried in vain to hold her hand, returned to her mind.

“Maybe you don’t think you deserve to be loved, but you are loved, all the same -- by choices made by the people around you."

If it hadn’t been for her, Jacob might have drowned in despair. If it wasn’t for Duncan, Carewyn probably wouldn’t have come up for air either. Love, in the end, had saved them both, and given them enough hope to keep fighting. The only difference was that Jacob didn’t reach out to her and Lane, the way she did with Ben, Merula, Charlie and Bill afterwards. Instead Jacob stayed afraid -- stayed silent -- stayed paralyzed in the claws of that fear, rather than breaking free...and in the process, only met more pain and suffering.

Carewyn remembered her mother once saying that “love heals.” It was a phrase that hadn’t been much solace, in the wake of Rowan’s death, when Carewyn felt like she was drowning slowly in thick, black, tar-like grief. But for as painful as love could feel, when it was lost, or even when it let you down...there was still so much strength in it. So much warmth and life. As painful as Jacob’s departure had been, as Rowan’s death had been...her love for her friends, in how they all rallied around her when she needed them most, still gave Carewyn more courage and hope than she’d ever thought possible.

Carewyn’s eyes ran over Jacob’s shaking shoulders and up into his hands clawing at his own face. Her eyes were no longer full of tears, but were sadder and softer than ever as she slowly, quietly approached her brother and very tentatively brought a hand up onto his shoulder.

Jacob flinched in response to her touch. His head shot up as he stared at her, tears still streaming from his eyes. Carewyn met his gaze head-on, steadied her hand on the back of his shoulder to hold onto him, and then brought her other arm around his chest so as to envelop him in a full embrace.

“We have a lot to be scared about, Jacob,” she said lowly, “but you will always be my brother. That part of you -- that’s something no one could ever take away.”

She closed her eyes.

“I don’t care what Dad, or anyone else, told you. You don’t just cause trouble. You make people face whatever trouble comes their way -- because you’re worth it.”

Jacob stiffened in Carewyn’s hold, his breath stilling. Then, choking back more tears, he threw his arms around her, cradling her against his chest and holding the back of her head as if she was a child.

“Pip..”

Carewyn ran a hand along her brother’s back in an attempt to comfort him. Jacob trailed a hand through her ginger hair, his tears dripping down onto her cheek.

“Pip, I’m so sorry,” he mumbled. “About Rowan...I wish...”

“I know,” Carewyn murmured, half to soothe him and half to quell the painful grief clawing at her heart at the sound of her best friend’s name. “...I wish you’d have been able to meet her...I wish I’d met Duncan too, before...”

Jacob nodded, his tearful eyes closing as he exhaled heavily. “I know -- me too. ...I’m glad you did meet him, though. Even if it is like this...”

Carewyn offered a weak smile over Jacob’s shoulder. “He’s really a good person -- once he stops acting like a prat.”

Jacob bit back a choked laugh. “Yeah...I figure that’s just a mask he puts on, for whatever reason. My theory is that Slytherins are like cats and just don’t speak in a way most people understand...”

“Do I fit that theory?” Carewyn asked teasingly.

Jacob laughed a bit more despite himself. “Ha...not sure yet.”

Carewyn eased herself back away from Jacob. His cheeks were still wet with tears and his eyes were red -- most notably, though, his face looked slightly hesitant.

“What’s wrong?” asked Carewyn.

Jacob bit his lip. “Sorry, Pip, it’s just...”

He exhaled heavily.

“...I’ve just lost so much time. Seven years that felt like an eternity and yet nothing at all, and I look at you, and...even if there’s so much the same, even though I can sense your feelings and I know it’s you...it’s like...someone’s painted on your canvas, since I saw you last. Like you’ve gone through a whole cocooning process and you’ve become a completely different animal than you were. While I’m...well...exactly the same.”

Carewyn offered Jacob an empathetic smile.

“When I saw you last, though...there was a whole lot of stuff about you I didn’t know either,” she pointed out gently. “Like how much you were willing to put on the line, just to try to keep Mum and me safe.”

“Fat load of good it did.”

“You trying still matters. And really...I haven’t told Mum anything about the Vaults either, for the same reason. However misguided we’ve been, trying to do things alone...well, our intentions were good, weren’t they? And now we can pull together, to try to make amends.”

Jacob smiled. “That’s true.”

His eyes drifted up toward the midnight sky, as was often the case when he was thinking hard. At last, he spoke again.

“...How did you and Rowan meet?”

Carewyn blinked in faint surprise.

“I’ve missed a lot of your life, Pip,” said Jacob with a small, but more determined smile, “but I want to know all of it...however much you’re willing to share with me.”

Carewyn’s eyes drifted away. She was quiet for a long moment -- then, finally, she took a deep breath and spoke in as steady of a voice as she could.

“...It was right before my first year. Mum and I went to Diagon Alley for my school supplies, and I ran on ahead to Flourish and Blotts...”

#hphm #hogwarts mystery #my art #my writing #carewyn cromwell #jacob cromwell #rowan khanna #redacted #bill weasley #charlie weasley #merula snyde #ben copper #duncan ashe #GAH I'M SO GLAD I FINALLY WROTE THIS #I've wanted to write this since before we got year6ch26 and we first heard spoilers that we'd be meeting jacob at the lake post-redacted #because quite frankly this SHOULD'VE BEEN a turning point #this should've been a feelsy moment #but in the game jacob's regret fell flat for me because mc pretty quickly rushes to clear him of all blame for rowan's death #which yeah it's not jacob's fault but jacob DID still hurt mc pretty badly #he should never have just abandoned them in the vault or kept them out of the loop when it came to the vaults and R #but then again jam city also neglected to show much emotional fall-out for mc when they were abandoned so *roll eyes*#carewyn does start wearing make-up again not long after this happens but she keeps her hair down for the rest of her time at hogwarts #admittedly much more neatly just like her uniform becomes neater again as well #also jacob runs out to carewyn rather than apparate to her because YOU -- CANNOT -- APPARATE -- ON -- HOGWARTS -- GROUNDS #damn it jam city #caps cw

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thesunwillshineonusagain757 · 4 years

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Ships that I would die for F1 Edition

( this is also a guide for new F1 fans that want to know more about the driver , the fans , and the ships/ Part.2 Part.3, Part.4, Part.5, Part.6 , Part.7) Not my gifs

Maxiel :

The definition on a IT couple , the couple that first got me and many more of the f1 fans in this rabbit whole of ships . They were the first drivers to have a bromance or so to say romance , as open as they did . In the era o media and the start of the explosion on ships, Max and Daniel were the ship , people were usually first introduced to . Sadly they have divorced sense Daniel’s departure from Red Bull , but now they seem to be coming back together for our eternal happiness. ❤️

Carlando :

This ship came to be , on the horizon of the divorce of Maxiel , Carlando came as a comfort to those orphaned by the previous ship . This ship is the embodiment of the trope of the twink and the smoking hot spaniard. Carlos and Lando are the cutest ship in f1 in the moment , but there are dark times to come . As the 2020 comes to the end also the foundation of this ship, Carlos is going to Ferrari , leaving Mclaren and Lando behind , but we cannot do anything but hope that their relationship won’t change.🧡

Alex Albon X George Russel :

This two are the example of bros being bros , so much that they have heart eyes for each other , it’s only their second year in F1 but they already have amazing chemistry and present a very strong relationship. Such as when recently George defended Alex’s poor qualification on the Hungarian gran prix saying the car was the one to blame not his beloved Alex .💙

Launt/ Rathunt :

This is a ship most of the new f1 fans don’t know is one of the olderships . It was also popularized after the film Rush . But none the less they represent the old gays this ship shows that bromances were not created in the 21 centuries, but has been a think for long . ❤️

Simi :

This is a ship that was born when Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Räikkönen , were both teammates in Ferrari . The contrast of the silent iceman Kimi , and the kind Sebastian made some F1 fans love their interactions and their time as teammates. The are viewed by some fans as the “parents” of the younger generation and being two fathers themself they do bring that dad energy to the grid . ❤️

Brocedes:

This ship , well , it has somewhat of a bittersweet ending, Nico and Lewis were friends sense their early days of carting, but their relationship took a turn for the worst when they got to F1 specially when they became teammates at Mercedes . The more Lewis won the more the relationship between the two deteriorated. Even getting to the point where the two of them became more rivals than friends . This ship has a bittersweet ending when Nico left Mercedes after winning the championship and retiring from F1. 🖤 🤍

To be continued ...

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feed-the-birdss · 4 years

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The Promise

Author’s Note: I know it’s been awhile since I’ve been active, but life has been so busy, that I took a mini impromptu hiatus. That being said, things are starting to calm down now that I am more used to NYC life, and I am so excited to catch up on everything I’ve missed--especially @petals-to-fish story Fearlessly Red and @blitheringmcgonagall story We Can Be Heroes. Nonetheless, here is something I’ve finally had time to finish today!! I really hope you enjoy, and please let me know what you think. I love all kinds of reviews!!

Read it here on fanfic

Disclaimer: Anything you recognize isn’t mine.

“Daddy?” twelve-year-old Lily asked quietly.

“Yes sweetheart?” responded Mr. Evans not looking up from his newspaper.

“Daddy, you need to promise me, from the bottom of your heart, that you will never let me marry James Potter, and I mean never, can you do that?” declared Lily.

Mr. Evans just chuckled, “Sure thing darling,” he said somewhat absentmindedly as his eyes still moved across the page of his paper.

Lily got up, walked around the kitchen table, and ripped the paper right out of his hands. “Daddy this is serious! PROMISE me, you will never let me marry him. I mean it. It can never happen. If I wanted to marry him, it would mean I’ve gone crazy!!” Mr. Evans stared at his youngest daughter with wide-eyed concern over her absolute resolve. Her bright green eyes, so much like his own, were piercing his soul, begging for his help, and he could never refuse his little girl when she was looking at him like such. “Promise me,” she repeated.

“I promise.”

As a Gryffindor, James Potter was rarely nervous even though there was plenty in his life he should be nervous about. Fighting in a deadly war with his girlfriend and best friends—easy—the other side were a pack of idiots. Telling Sirius that he damaged his bike snogging Lily up against it and knocking it over—please—that would be more funny than anything. Running around with a werewolf every month as an illegal Animagus—don’t make him laugh—a child could do that—heck—he did it as a child. Disobeying Alastor Moody—if he can handle an angry McGonagall, Moody looks like a teacup pig next to her.

However, it was one of those rare times that James Potter was nervous. After apparating from his flat, he walked up to a simple looking house in Cokeworth. It was dark out, so he could only just make out the shadows of the perfectly manicured shrubbery out front. Stuffing his wand in his pocket, and using his hand to, once more, attempt to tame his hair a bit more, he held a knuckle up to the door, knocked, and then took a deep breath.

You see, there was only one thing in his life that ever made James Potter nervous: Lily Evans. He’d gotten past the nerves for, you know, just generally being in her presence after a year of dating, and this year has made him realize that he always wanted to be in her general presence—for the rest of his life if he could help it. So that’s why he’s here, outside the Evans’ house, with a speech in his head, and butterflies in his stomach. He was going to ask for Mr. and Mrs. Evans’ blessing to marry their youngest daughter.

After a few agonizingly silent seconds, James heard some shuffling behind the door followed by the knob turning and the door opening to reveal Mr. Evans.

“James? What are you doing here? Is Lily okay?” Asked Mr. Evans eyebrows scrunched together in confusion.

“Lily’s perfect sir, but she is the reason why I’m here. Would it be alright if I came in to speak to you and Mrs. Evans?” James was surprised with the steadiness of his voice given the fact that the butterflies in his stomach turned to bludgers the second the door opened.

Mr. Evans’ eyes widened slightly. James was pretty sure he was catching on. “Uh…sure son, let me just find her. Make yourself comfortable in the living room in the meantime.”

James nodded and made the familiar walk to the living room while Mr. Evans scurried upstairs to find his wife. Sitting down on the plushy floral patterned couch, James tried to control his racing heart by taking deep breaths. He couldn’t help but crave a shot or two of fire whiskey to take the edge off, but Sirius refused to let him even look at alcohol before coming here citing his so-called low tolerance. Sure one shot in the past has made James do and say incredibly stupid things, but at least he was able to do those stupid things without bludgers pummelling around inside his stomach.

He was starting to wonder if what he was about to do was another stupid thing in the long list of stupid things he’s done in his life. Now he’s back to having the same argument with himself that he’s been having for the last seven weeks—should he be asking for the Evans’ blessing? For one, Lily does what she wants regardless of what anyone else thinks. Two, she does not like aspects of her life being discussed without her. James loves these things about Lily. Her fierce independence is her sexiest quality in his opinion.

However, James also knows that while as much as Lily epitomizes a modern independent woman, she also values tradition. While she would never openly admit it, James knows that Lily loves it when he takes charge of a situation, how he always puts her first, how he’s protective of her, and how he loves to take care of her. She can do all of this for herself by herself, but James’ heart always soars at the small tug at the corner of her lips whenever he does one of those things. So, in that regard, the traditionalist in him, and the secret traditionalist in Lily, can’t help but feel that Lily’s parents, as the people she loves most in the world next to James, would want to be in the know about the biggest question their daughter will be asked in her life.

Fuck, mentally exasperated James. Lily could still get pissed about this. He then shot up his hand at an attempt to stress-grab his unruly hair, but in the process of grabbing his hair, he knocked over a photo frame standing on the side table next to the couch he was sitting on. Quickly scrambling to right the photo before the Evans’ came down, he picked it up. However, he paused before setting it back down. The photo was of Lily.

It must have been taken last summer because she doesn’t look much younger than she is now. It was of her curled up with a book under the tree in the Evans’ backyard. Such an image was so familiar to James. He can’t count the number of times he stumbled upon Lily reading a book under the tree by the Black lake when they were still in school. It was like she couldn’t read for pleasure unless she was under a tree given the amount of times he caught her there. With a small smile now gracing his face, James set the photo back on the side table with a steady hand and a calm stomach. Even just a picture of Lily could do that for James.

At that moment, he could hear the unmistakable soft thuds of socked feet coming down carpeted stairs. Turning his head, he saw Mr. Evans returning with his wife in tow.

“Hello James, dear. Lovely to see you,” she said kindly giving him a peck on the cheek as she approached him.

“It’s good to see you too Mrs. Evans,” blushed James in response to her greeting.

Mr. Evans did not make eye contact with him as he made his way over to the couch across from the one James was sitting on making James more sure that he knew what this was about.

“What can we do for you sweetheart?” inquired Mrs. Evans with a sweet smile.

Mr. Evans was still avoiding his eyes and was instead fixated on the carpet, making James’ stomach butterflies slowly begin to flutter again.

With a deep breath, James spoke, “As much as I respect and cherish Lily’s independence and ability to make her own choices, you are both the two people she loves most in the world…Other than me of course,” James added with a cocky smirk to Mrs. Evans, who chuckled in response to his joke. Mr. Evans was now glaring at the carpet.

James cleared his throat nervously once he saw that glare, and decided to switch gears back to seriousness and to stay on seriousness, “uhhh…right…now that being said, again Lily makes her own choices about her life, but because she loves you both so much, your opinions about her choices matter to her. So while she doesn’t yet know that this choice is available to her, I want her to know that you both approve of it before I offer her this choice.” Mr. Evans’ glare was only sharpening, so screw the butterflies and the bludgers—a hoard of angry Hungarian horntails were now taking residence in his stomach.

James took another deep breath to try and calm his thundering heart which he was quite sure could be heard all the way over in America, “So, with that, I hope I can get your blessings…um from both of you…in asking Lily to marry me,” James sucked in another breath as he finished his statement, and held it as he waited for their response.

Mrs. Evans responded almost right away, “Oh James! This is so exciting! Of course we would love it if you and Lily got married. I mean, you’re bit a young, but you’ve known each other so long, and you make each other happy.”

James just smiled back at her with glassy eyes behind his glasses. He didn’t realize how much he needed the approval not just for Lily, but for himself as well until he heard it from her.

Then his heart stopped as Mr. Evans started speaking—looking James straight in the eye.

“Darling, please don’t speak for both of us. I’m sorry James, but I’ve made a promise to my daughter, and it is for that reason that you can never have my blessing to marry her.”

James’ shock was consuming. He knew Mr. Evans wasn’t particularly fond of him, but he believed it was just because he was sleeping with his youngest daughter, not because he actually disapproved of him. Adrenaline started coursing through James’ body, but despite the heart-aching rush that was practically paralyzing him, he responded calmly, “Sir, if this is about you, as her father, promising to protect her, I assure you, that not only would I never get in the way of that, but I will protect her too just as she protects me.” James’ tone became increasingly desperate, ”Please Mr. Evans, I only want to make her happy, and I know I can do just that.”

“I know, but protecting her is not the promise I am speaking of here.”

“What promise are you talking about? Don’t let the poor boy suffer for your stubbornness. If you won’t give him your blessing, you better give him a damn good reason,” protested Mrs. Evans.

Mr. Evans bowed his head, rubbed a hand over his face, and let it out with a heavy sigh, “The summer after Lily’s first year at Hogwarts she begged me to promise her to never let you marry her. No matter what,” he finished in a tired voice.

James just sat there. The only indication that he gave to show that he had actually heard what Mr. Evans said was that his eyes were as wide as saucers. Is this guy fucking kidding me? James thought to himself. Lily was fucking twelve! If his parents still held things he said when he was twelve against him, he was pretty sure James would have his broomstick destroyed for finally cleaning up his act and becoming head boy.

Mrs. Evans, however, after her momentary shock at her husband’s admission began to laugh.

Mr. Evans glared at his wife, “What on earth could be funny to you? This is no laughing matter.”

The laughing abruptly stopped. Mrs. Evans stared at her husband in utter disbelief. “Please tell me you’re joking,” she practically begged.

“Of course not! I would never joke about a promise made to either of my daughters!” bellowed Mr. Evans.

“Not about the promise you daft fool!” yelled back Mrs. Evans, and with that yell, James had never before been so reminded of Lily by another person. Mrs. Evans continued, “Tell me that you’re not actually serious about keeping a promise made to a twelve-year-old.”

“Again, I would never joke about a promise made to my daughter.”

“Oh dear lord!” Mrs. Evans exasperated with rolling eyes, “You do realize that if I had known you when I was twelve then I probably would’ve asked my father to promise me to the same thing. And let’s not forget that you once also promised Lily that you would sleep in her closet every night until the monsters went away, but we both know that you snuck away after she fell asleep each night.”

“Well that’s because the monsters went away by the time I left,” replied Mr. Evans stubbornly.

“My point still stands darling, you can’t hold the requests of a twelve-year-old against the young man sitting in front of you here today.”

It was as if Mr. Evans was reminded of James’ presence, as he returned his glare back at the boy that sought to break a promise.

James took this as his cue to chime in, “If I may sir, I…uuhh…respect your…um…determination on keeping your promise to Lily, but I think…no…I know Lily sees things differently now. Also, we both know that, promise or not, Lily will marry me if she wants to, and I am pretty sure she does otherwise I wouldn’t be asking.”

“And what makes you think that my daughter, the girl who once claimed that she’d have to have gone crazy to ever want to you, wants to marry you boy?” inquired Mr. Evans menacingly.

James laughed. That sounded like something Lily would say. He paused before answering the question, thinking carefully about his words. While he knew he didn’t need it, he still wanted Mr. Evans’ blessing. He wanted his future father-in-law to know, that the man that he is today, is worthy, as anyone could ever be, for Lily.

“We’re in love, and there’s a war going on.” James’s shoulders stooped with a heavy sigh at this knowledge, “this war has put everything into perspective for the both of us in terms of what matters most, and that’s each other. You both know Lily,” James smiled fondly, “she doesn’t do anything half-assed. She loves with everything she has, and we’ve both been looking for ways to show that our love for one another is certain when the war has made everything else uncertain, and I believe one way to do that is marriage, and I think she would agree with me there.”

Mr. Evans’ shoulders too stooped with the heavy burden of war. He looked at the boy who so clearly loved his love his daughter, and thought about his promise to Lily.

When Lily first told him in a letter from Hogwarts just last October that she was dating the infamous James Potter, he spit out his morning coffee in shock much to Petunia’s utter disgust. However, he kept quiet thinking that Lily would come to her senses and remember what she once begged of him. Yet Lily’s genuine feelings for James became harder and harder to deny as the days of then dating him turned from days, to weeks, to months to now a year. Clearly, Lily either didn’t even remember the promise or just simply didn’t care about it. Whenever she spoke about James on the phone or at one of their afternoon teas, her love for James permeated every aspect of her being. She couldn’t contain it if she tried. It was in the way her eyes lit up as she spoke his name, or the way her voice would always have a hint of mirth in it as she told him stories about their time together.

James was right, Lily does love with everything she has. And his Lily wouldn’t love just anyone, it was clear that James had grown up alongside with Lily’s opinion of him. So deep down, Mr. Evans knew the promise was moot early on in their relationship. Nonetheless, like any loving father with a daughter, he stubbornly held on to any somewhat valid excuse he had to stop his little girl from becoming a woman. Lily would be so mad at him if she ever found out about this. As she should, his conscious spat at him.

Not wanting to disappoint his daughter by denying her something she possibly wants, Mr. Evans looked back up to James with a heavy heart, “You’re a good man James. A better man than the one it seemed you might’ve become given the type of boy you were.” James held his head down as a shameful blush colored his cheeks, “So,” Mr. Evans cleared his throat conspicuously to get James to look him in the eye as he said this, “I guess if Lily’s okay with me breaking the promise, I can make this one exception for her. So you have my blessing, but only if she says yes to marrying you.”

James just nodded in complete shock with the turn events. To him, it just looked like Mr. Evans went from hating him to grudgingly accepting him all in the span of a few minutes.

Mrs. Evans, at an attempt to diffuse the lingering tension, clapped her hands in excitement, “Wonderful! How and when are you going to ask James dear?”

_____________________________________________________________________

“James! You didn’t actually believe him did you!?” Lily barked with absolute mirth in her eyes.

“He can be so bloody convincing when he wants to! You of all people know that!”

Lily guffawed. James usually would’ve been annoyed that she was laughing at him, but when she laughed like that, he couldn’t help but laugh with her.

As soon as Lily’s laughter subsided to the point where she was no longer in danger of laughing off the cliff, she and James continued their walk along the Cliffs of Cornwall hand in hand.

It was a rare sunny English day, so James suggested that they apparate to Cornwall, just the two of the them, and enjoy a walk together. It reminded Lily of when they first started dating, and they would just walk around the Hogwarts grounds talking, teasing and laughing for hours. It’s how she fell in love with him.

“Do you think Dumbledore ever trims his beard, or is that tip at the end of it, his virgin stubble from when he was a tween?” questioned Lily seriously.

James eyebrows scrunched together in thought, “I mean the ends of his beard are quite brittle. So I bet that his virgin stubble…like…crumbled off long ago maybe? Still, I doubt he’s ever trimmed. Grooming doesn’t seem to be high on the man’s list of priorities now, if ever.”

“See, that’s where I think you’re wrong!” exclaimed Lily. They’d had an argument about whether or not Dumbledore cares about his appearance only too many times before. “Look at the man’s robes James! They’re always so impeccably stylish. I bet Dumbledore takes great pride in his appearance. The man is a Gryffindor after all.”

“Gryffindor’s pride does not count pride in appearances Evans. Pride is much deeper than such shallow concerns.”

“Of course it does Potter,” scoffed Lily rolling her eyes up to the beautifully clear blue sky. “You, of all people, are telling me that Gryffindors don’t take pride in their appearance!? James, forget the fact that you’ve lived with Sirius for over seven years, but you used to purposefully mess up your hair to give it that tousled windswept look you used to think was soooo sexy,” declared Lily with a sarcastic tone towards the end of her sentence.

James put his hand to his heart in mock hurt, “Lily, love of my life, do you mean to tell me that after all these years of me purposefully and artfully messing up my hair, you don’t find it sexy?”

Lily’s eyes just twinkled back at him teasingly as she smirked at him.

“I beg to differ. I mean, Hell, you were messing it up yourself in bed just this morning,” argued James. He stopped walking and stopped Lily from walking forward herself by dragging her into his embrace. He then put his forehead against hers. Lily’s breath caught at the closeness, and she leaned further into his embrace, closing her eyes. His warm breath washed over her wind-chilled face as whispered, “Just admit it, you think me messing up my hair is unbearably sexy. You even thought that when you allegedly hated me back in the day.”

Lily’s eyes opened, and she leaned back slightly to look him in the eye and grin as she replied, “In your dreams Potter. You and I both know that something big would have to happen for me to admit that.” Lily then pecked James’ bewildered face on the lips, and started walking again, “C’mon James, we should probably apparate back soon.”

“Marry me.”

Lily then turned around with an expression that mimicked James’ bewildered one from moments ago. She wasn’t sure if what she heard was right. The volume of the blowing wind and wavy ocean could’ve muffled any sound. “What?” She asked James, carefully walking back to where he stood at the edge of the cliff with his hand in his pocket and a look of pure determination on his face.

It was then when James knelt down on one knee, and lovingly reached for Lily’s left hand to hold in both of his as soon as she reached him.

“Lily, there’s a lot of fucked up shit happening right now, and with this war, not much is certain. But I am certain that I love you, and that you make me happier than anyone ever should be in a war. So, Lily Marie Evans, will you marry me?” He then pulled a small red velvet box out of his pocket and opened it to reveal a ring.

Lily looked from him to the ring with tears in her eyes as she vigorously nodded her head, “Yes!” She screamed into the billowing winds and crashing waves. James chuckled in absolute glee as he shakily slid the ring on her third finger and stood up to pull her in for a celebratory kiss.

After a few blissful moments of heated kissing, Lily pulled back and breathlessly said, “Also, of course I thought you messing up your hair was sexy. I mean, annoying at times, but still, incredilby sexy,” she laughed.

“I fucking knew it Evans,” he chuckled before he went back to kissing her.

______________________________________________________________________

Mr. Evans quickly made his way over to the ringing telephone in the living room, “Hello?” he answered as he picked it up and held it to his ear.

“Hi Daddy,” replied his youngest daughter.

“Hello poppet! How are you my love?” he asked.

“Brilliant actually!” Lily continued, “I would have loved to tell you this in person, but since I have to work all week, and I want you and mum to know as soon as possible, I am settling for over the phone, but James and I are getting married!”

Mr. Evans sighed. Just as he was about to reply with his reluctant congratulations, Lily cut him off before he could.

“Also, James told me about what happened when he asked for yours and mums blessing.” She chuckled. “You didn’t really take my request seriously did you? I was honestly shocked you even remembered me asking you that!”

Mr. Evans spluttered, “Lily you were a very tenacious child; so we were forced to take everything you said seriously. Regardless, any request of my daughter’s is one I would go to any lengths to fulfill. You should know that darling.”

Lily was still chuckling, “Oh come on dad! You just wanted to give James trouble. While I appreciate you honoring years old requests, I will let you off the hook for any others you may still have up your sleeve. I have learned to settle my own issues by now.”

Mr. Evans smiled, “Okay, darling. Whatever you say.”

Lily laughed again.

“I am happy that you are happy my dear, and I am sure your mother will be thrilled when she gets home. Any thoughts on when you will have the wedding?” He asked.

Lily’s constant chuckles suddenly ceased making Mr. Evans nervous, “Actually…Daddy?”

“Yes sweetheart?”

“I do have one more thing for you to promise, and I will be holding you to this one for sure.”

Mr. Evans gulped anxiously, “What is it Lily?”

“Will you promise to walk me down the aisle?”

He couldn’t stop the tears forming in his eyes, “I promise.”

#jily #jily canon #jily fanfic #jily fanfiction #jily fic #james potter #lily evans #lily potter #james x lily #engagement fic #feeding birds

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ljones41 · 4 years

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"MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" (2001) Review

"MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" (2001) Review There have been more adaptations of Agatha Christie's 1939 novel, "And Then There Were None" than any of her other novels. That is quite an achievement. The only other novel that comes close to producing this number of adaptations is her 1934 novel, 'Murder on the Orient Express".

Christie's 1934 novel managed to produce four adaptations, as far as I know - two movie releases and two television movies. The least famous of this quartet of adaptations was the television movie that aired on CBS in 2001. This version is famous or infamous for one thing - it is the only one that is not a period drama and set in the present day. "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" made a few other changes to Christie's narrative. The television movie's beginning established a complicated romance between Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot and a sexy younger woman named Vera Rossakoff. The number of suspects was reduced from twelve to nine. And the Orient Express was stalled by a mudslide due to heavy rain and not a snowbank caused from an avalanche. Due to the film's setting, some of the characters' backgrounds and professions had been changed to reflect the late 20th century and early 21st century setting. "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" begins in Istanbul, Turkey; where private detective Hercule Poirot had just solved the murder of a dancer at a local nightclub. After a brief quarrel with his lady love, Vera Rossakoff, Poirot sets out to fly back to London. But an encounter with his old friend Wolfgang Bouc, an executive with the the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, leads Poirot to return to London via the famed Orient Express train. During the eastbound train journey, an American millionaire named Samuel Ratchett tries to hire Poirot to protect him from a potential assassin who has sent him threatening letters. However, Poirot refuses the job due to his dislike of Ratchett. During the second night of the journey, heavy rain causes a landslide, blocking the train to continue its journey. And Rachett is found stabbed to death inside his compartment, the following morning. Bouc recruits Poirot to solve Rachett's murder. I have a confession to make. I had disliked "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" when I first saw it on television all those years ago. My main reason for disliking the television movie was the fact that it had a modern setting, instead of one set in the 1930s. It was not a period movie. And for a story like Christie's 1934 novel, I resented it. However, I do believe the film's modern setting provided one major flaw for its narrative. Since the late 20th century, passengers for the Simplon Orient Express have to book passage on the train long before the date of its departure - six months to a year, more or less. The idea of Poirot managing to get a compartment aboard the Orient Express at such short notice in 2001 strikes me as pretty implausible. And when one adds to the fact that the train travels to and from Istanbul at least once a year, makes this narrative in a modern setting even more implausible. Another problem I had with "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" was it made the same mistake as the 2010 adaptation from "AGATHA CHRISTIE'S POIROT". They used the wrong rail cars. The 2010 television movie used the blue and cream Pullman cars for the journey from Istanbul to Calais. The 2001 movie used the brown and cream Pullman cars, usually reserved for the Orient Express from London to Folkstone, as the main train, as shown below:

Do I have any other problems with "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS"? Well . . . yes, I have one further problem. But I will address it later. Aside from these problems, did I enjoyed this recent re-watch of the television movie? Yes, I did. More than I thought I would. Which is ironic, considering that I disliked the movie so much when I first saw all those years ago. I finally realized that I had automatically resented the film for not being a period drama. And over the years, I had erroneously believed that the movie was set aboard a modern train and not on a restored one from the past. It took my recent viewing of the television movie for me to realize I had been wrong. However, I did noticed that the sleeping compartments did look surprisingly bigger than usual. Despite some modern updating in the film's visual look, the characters' background and dialogue; "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" did a first-rate job of adapting Christie's novel. What many might find surprising is that screenwriter Stephen Harrigan and director Carl Schenkel did not inflict any drastic changes to Christie's plot, unlike some recent Christie adaptations from the "AGATHA CHRISTIE'S POIROT" series and one or two miniseries produced by Sarah Phelps. Harrigan and Schenkel did not drastically change the movie's narrative, aside from reducing the number of suspects and having the train delayed by a mud slide, instead of a snow drift. Yes, the backgrounds and professions of the characters were changed due to the modern setting. And characters also change nationalities - like Bob Arbuthnot, an American tech CEO (British Army colonel in Christie's novel); Senora Alvarado, a widow of a South American dictator (a Russian princess in the novel); Phililp and Helena von Strauss, a German or Austrian couple traveling the world (the husband was a Hungarian diplomat in the novel); and even Wolfgang Bouc, the Franco-German Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits executive (who was solely French in the novel). This version of "Murder on the Orient Express" was not the first or last time when some of the characters' backgrounds and nationalities were changed. All four adaptations (including the highly regarded 1974 version) were guilty of this. But despite these changes, Harrigan and Schenkel stuck to Christie's narrative. And thanks to Harrigan's direction, this version proved to be a lot better than I had originally surmised. I certainly had no problems with most of the film's performances. "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" provided solid performances from Amira Casar, Kai Wiesinger, Dylan Smith, Nicolas Chagrin, Adam James, Tasha de Vasconcelos, and Fritz Wepper, who managed to create an effective screen team with star Alfred Molina as the investigative pair of Poirot and Monsieur (or Herr) Bouc. I thought David Hunt did an excellent job of conveying the aggressive, overprotective and slightly arrogant traits of American CEO, Bob Arbuthnot. I enjoyed Leslie Caron's colorful, yet autocratic portrayal of Senora Alvarado, the widow of a South American dictator. Meredith Baxter was equally colorful as an American character actress, traveling around Europe as a tourist. Her portrayal of Mrs. Hubbard reminded me of a younger version of a character she had portrayed in the 1980 miniseries, "BEULAH LAND" - but without the Southern accent. And I was really impressed by Natasha Wightman's performance as British tutor Mary Debenham. What really impressed me about Wightman's performance is that her portrayal of Miss Debenham was the closest to the literary character than any of the other versions. There was one performance that fell flat with me and it came from Peter Strauss, who portrayed the victim, Samuel Rachett. If I must be brutally honest, I found it rather hammy. Strauss, whom has always struck me as a first-rate actor in other productions, seemed to be screaming in nearly every scene. However, there is one scene in which I found his performance impressive. The scene involved Rachett's attempt to hire Poirot as his bodyguard and with a performance that permeated with subtlety and menace, Strauss reminded audiences of the excellent actor that he had always been through most of his career. I have never come across any real criticism of Alfred Molina's portrayal of Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Well . . . I did come across one article that discussed Molina's performance from Vulture magazine. But the critic seemed more focused on the movie's modern setting and Poirot's relationship with Vera Rossakoff, than Molina's performance. Personally, I thought the British actor did a superb job in portraying the detective. He managed to capture all of Poirot's intelligence, mild eccentricities, slight pomposity and talent for emotional manipulation. One thing I can say about Molina's portrayal is that his performance as Poirot was probably the most subtle I have seen on a movie or television screen. Whether someone would regard this as good or bad, is in the eye of the beholder. But I feel that this subtle performance suited Molina's style. Some have commented that Molina's Poirot was more "youthful" than other portrayals. Hmmmm . . . how odd. Molina was in his late 40s when he shot the television movie (perhaps 47 or 48 years old). Yet, Albert Finney was a decade younger when he portrayed Poirot in the 1974 film and his Poirot came off as a middle-aged man. David Suchet was five or six years younger when he began his twenty-four years stint portraying the detective for ITV's "AGATHA CHRISTIE'S POIROT". And during those early years, his Poirot also seemed slightly middle-aged. Because of this, I find this observation of Molina's Poirot as "youthful" rather questionable. It is a pity that the "official" opinion of "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" is so negative. I used to share this opinion until I did a re-watch of the television film with a more open mind. Like others, I had been dismissive of the 2001 version, due to its modern setting. I now realize I had been rather narrow-minded and prejudiced. Despite its flaws - and it had a few - "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS" proved to be a lot better than I had originally surmised, thanks to director Carl Schenkel, Stephen Harrigan's teleplay and an excellent cast led by the superb Alfred Molina. I hope that one day, other Christie fans would dismiss their prejudices against the movie's setting and appreciate it for the entertaining production it truly is.

#agatha christie #murder on the orient express #murder on the orient express 2001 #alfred molina #hercule poirot #peter strauss #meredith baxter #leslie caron #david hunt #carl schenkel #natasha wightman #fritz wepper

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avantegarda · 4 years

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Wonderful 1000: The Merry Misadventures of Chopin the Pig

@cherepashkadrabbles requested a tale featuring an assortment of Kiraly-von Holstadt family pets and somehow this happened. Enjoy!

It was all Anna’s fault, really.

Not Anna Király the elder—that esteemed matriarch had gone to her reward over a decade prior, though Andras insisted that her spirit still kept a watchful eye over the family, particularly around Christmas. The perpetrator this time was Anna Király the younger, aged three, the apple of her mother’s eye: a plump, auburn-haired little elf with strong opinions on absolutely everything.

The opinions, this time, were regarding the family dachshund.

“Wolfgang is sad,” Anna insisted, with a fervent tug at her mother’s skirts. “Sad sad sad.”

Marta reluctantly put down the letter she was reading—a rare missive from her friend Sophie in New York—and regarded her daughter with surprise. “What on earth do you mean, Anna darling? Wolfgang is the happiest dog in Vienna. He has lots of food and a warm bed and you and Sofia and Zoltan to play with him. He has no reason at all to be sad.”

Anna shook her head firmly. “No, he sad. Lonely. He need ‘nother dog. Or kitty.”

“He’s lo…” Marta paused, her stomach twisting in sudden worry. How exactly did Anna, still practically a baby, know that word? Was Anna lonely? It couldn’t be terribly easy to be the youngest in their family, that much was true. Sofia and Zoltan, while affectionate and kind older siblings, had a tendency to disappear into their own artistic pursuits, just as their father did; Sofia with her singing lessons and Zoltan with his drawing. Leaving little Anna...well, out.

Perhaps it wasn’t Wolfgang who needed another animal around the house.

“I’ll tell you what, darling,” Marta said slowly. “Your uncle Heini spends most of his time out in the country and he knows all sorts of animals. Perhaps he’ll have a kitten or a puppy who needs a new home.”

Andras might have some objections to another pet being brought in without warning...but at the smile on Anna’s round face Marta really couldn’t bring herself to care.

Heini’s reply was swift and enthusiastic.

Dear Marta,

I was wondering when you were going to ask me this very question. Three children and only one old dog around the place to keep them company? It’s obscene.

I have just the beast for you, too. You’re expecting a barn cat or some such, I’m sure, but I have a slightly more unusual suggestion. I’ve convinced Father to let me acquire a new kind of miniature pig from the East (I won’t bore you with all the agricultural details), and one of the sows has just produced an excellent litter of piglets. Would Anna like one? As babies they’re the size of a cat, practically, and they don’t grow to be more than two feet tall. Once he gets older he might have to spend most of his time in the back garden, but I can guarantee the children will love him.

Your affectionate brother,

Heini

“A pig?” Andras said incredulously that night, as he and Marta got into bed. “In the house? I always knew your brother was just as mad as you are but this seems like a bit much.”

“But it’ll be wonderful for the children, darling,” Marta replied. “Think what an educational experience it will be for them to have a new kind of animal to learn to take care of!”

“They’ve already got more animals than I ever had as a child. I had to make do with Erszi the pigeon, while our youngsters have Wolfgang and Nyafi and all the animals at Burg Holstadt…”

“Nyafi is a wonderful cat,” said Marta, “but she spends all her time in Pest and so the children only get to see her about half the year. And Andras, I think that…” She paused, collecting her thoughts. “I think Anna needs this. Yes, she’s still very young, but she needs something that’s hers. Why not a pig?”

Andras sighed, though it was obvious that his resistance was softening. “I still say pigs belong in the barn, not in the house. Is this one of those things that’s so lower-class it’s gone full circle and somehow become fashionable?”

“Undoubtedly.” Marta snuggled closer and planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek. “And we’ll be the most fashionable family on the Wipplingerstrasse.”

“Hmm,” said Andras wryly. “If it’s a matter of fashion, I suppose I can’t possibly refuse. Now come over here and give me a proper kiss.”

Marta grinned triumphantly as her husband pulled her into his arms. If anyone ever asked why she’d given up a title and a fortune to marry a musician—as they still occasionally did—it was moments like this that she pointed to. Every single time.

The newest member of the family arrived two weeks later, carried in a basket and delivered by a beaming Heini. It was certainly a fetching creature; small and bristly and ivory-colored with dark splotches and shining eyes. And the children, of course, were utterly enchanted by it.

“What should we call him?” six-year-old Zoltan demanded. “Should it be a Hungarian name?”

Sofia rolled her eyes. “No, silly, Nyafi the cat already has a Hungarian name. The pig needs an Austrian one.”

“But Wolfgang already has an Austrian name…”

“Well, Wolfgang is named after a composer,” Marta cut in gently. “So perhaps this little fellow should be too. Andras, what music does he make you think of when you see him?”

“He has rather melancholy eyes, doesn’t he,” said Andras. He scratched his chin thoughtfully and hummed a few bars of something slow and romantic. Both Sofia and Zoltan screwed up their faces, thinking deeply, until finally Sofia clapped her hands in triumph.

“Of course!” she cried. “Chopin! It’s perfect.”

“Well, I certainly like it,” said Marta. “But Anna should have the final say. What do you think, love?”

The entire family looked down at Anna, who was crouched by the basket softly petting the piglet’s bristles. At the sound of her name, the little girl looked up and beamed.

“Chopin,” she said. “My piggie.”

There appeared to be nothing more to say on the subject.

“I am going to make that damn creature into kolbasz,” Andras growled. “I mean it, Marta. This is the last straw.”

Marta’s eyebrows went up. “Final straw? What were the first straws?” She had to admit, the last month having Chopin as a pet had been slightly less peaceful than expected, but she hadn’t been aware of anything too terrible. Besides, the children loved him.

“Well, first of all, Anna insists on letting him sleep in her room, and he knocks everything over and chews on all her toys. And then Zoltan put paint on his hooves for some piece of art he wanted to do—is that what art is coming to in this country?—and Chopin tracked it everywhere. And now,” Andras said with bitter triumph, “he has destroyed my work.”

Marta inhaled sharply. “He hasn’t broken Clara, has he?” Though technically an inanimate object, Andras’ beloved violin had been a part of the Király family since 1861, and if something happened to her…

“No, thank God. If Chopin damaged Clara he’d be at the butcher’s shop this very minute. But what he did do isn’t much better. I have a performance in three weeks, at which I am supposed to be debuting my No. 4 in B Minor which I have been working on all week, but that creature,” said Andras grimly, “has gone and defecated on it.”

The snort of laughter that escaped her lips was one Marta immediately regretted, and at Andras’ scowl she quickly apologized. “But how did he get on top of your sheet music, darling? Was it on the floor?”

“I don’t see how it matters where my papers were,” Andras said primly (which translated to “yes, they were on the floor, due to my excessive absentmindedness”). “We need to get that thing properly trained or he’ll be going right back to the country where he belongs.”

“I’ll take care of it. Now get back to work.” Marta wagged a stern finger in her husband’s direction. “If you give a performance that isn’t a success my parents still may find a way to annul our marriage.”

It was a generally understood rule in the Király household that when Andras was in his study composing, he was only to be disturbed in the event of an emergency. This was less because it would annoy him and more because when he was focused on music, he was temporarily incapable of thinking about anything else.

All of this was to say that, when Sofia cautiously entered the study shortly before dinner on Saturday, it was clearly a matter of some concern.

“Papa?” she asked. And, when her father neglected to look up, a bit louder: “Pa?”

Andras, whose world for the past two hours had consisted entirely of the concerto he was writing, jolted out of his reverie to find his hands nearly black with ink and a worried-looking eight-year-old staring at him. “What’s the matter, Sofia?”

“Have you seen Zoltan?” Sofia blurted out.

“Sofia, your brother will be holed up in his bedroom or out in the garden. Is this really…”

“He’s not, though. I’ve looked everywhere, he’s missing.” Sofia sniffled and wiped at her eyes. “And it’s all my fault. The von Braumark twins came for a visit today and Zoltan wanted to play with us but Lottie said he couldn’t because he’s a boy and Liesel and I went along with it and he was so upset, and after the twins left I went to find him to say sorry and he’s gone.”

Having grown up with three temperamental younger sisters, Andras was quite accustomed to children going missing and then reappearing at the oddest of times. Therefore the news of Zoltan’s evident disappearance was no cause to panic.

Not yet, anyway.

Two hours later, through concentrated search efforts and several hastily dispatched messages, the Királys had been able to establish a list of places where Zoltan was not.

He wasn’t anywhere in the house or back garden.

He was not at his grandparents’ house (as far as anyone could tell, though the von Holstadt mansion had eighty rooms and it took considerable time to search all of them).

He was not at the homes of any of their family friends, nor was he in the nearby park.

And while all of this information was technically useful, it was not making Marta and Andras any less worried.

“I don’t want to call the police, but I think we might have to,” said Andras, pacing back and forth across the sitting room floor as he had been for the last ten minutes. “How else are we supposed to track the wretched boy down?”

Anna, who was crouched on the floor patting Chopin, looked up eagerly. “Chopin can find him.”

“Anna, darling,” Marta sighed. “Chopin is a very nice pig but I don’t think…”

“No, Mama, she’s right. Pigs have a good sense of smell, even better than dogs,” said Sofia. “And they’re very clever too. If we give him something of Zoltan’s to smell, and then we follow him…” She trailed off, looking up at her parents hopefully.

Marta and Andras looked at each other for a long moment, until finally Marta sighed and nodded. “I suppose it’s worth a try.”

The five (four and a half?) of them made a rather odd sight on the rainy Viennese streets: Andras holding both Anna and a bright red umbrella, Marta clutching Sofia’s hand and Chopin’s lead. A proper traveling circus, that’s what they were. Marta would have found the situation more amusing had she not been scared out of her wits.

Chopin, at least, seemed to have understood his instructions. After getting a good whiff of Zoltan’s nightshirt he appeared to recognize the boy’s scent and was now trotting along briskly, pausing occasionally to snuffle at the ground. If he actually found Zoltan, Marta decided, she would feed him the finest scraps to be found anywhere in the city.

Finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably only ten minutes, Chopin halted in his tracks at the imposing gothic facade of St. Maria’s am Gestade. He snuffled at the ground for a moment as though confirming a suspicion, and then grunted with satisfaction.

“Is it sacrilegious to bring a pig into a church?” Marta inquired.

“If we’re looking for a missing child, then I’d say we’ll be forgiven,” Andras replied. “And this door had better be unlocked.”

It was, thank goodness. And when Marta’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom, she detected, in one of the front pews, a small dark-haired figure sitting completely still.

“Zoltan!”

The little boy looked up in surprise as his family all but ambushed him. “Mama? Papa? Chopin? What time is it?”

“Past time for you to be home! I am so glad you’re safe.” Marta pulled her son into a tight hug before pulling back with a frown. “But darling, what on earth are you doing here?”

“I like that painting,” Zoltan replied, pointing up at the glorious gold-hued altarpiece. “It always makes me feel better. So I thought I would come and sit here until I stopped being cross with Sofia.” He looked down at his feet and kicked his legs guiltily. “But it was naughty to run away, wasn’t it.”

“Very naughty,” Marta said, with considerably less sternness than she intended. “You’re lucky that we found you.”

“No, Chopin find him,” Anna insisted from Andras’ arms.

“Chopin was brilliant,” gushed Sofia. “Pa, you like him now, don’t you? You won’t have him made into sausages?”

Andras let out an exaggerated sigh. “I suppose so, but I expect you lot to keep him in line. Train him up. No feral pigs in my house, if you please.”

As the children launched into a debate about what tricks, if any, Chopin could be trained to do, Marta reached down and scratched the piglet gently between the ears. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I knew you were worth the trouble.”

While none of the other members of the family would believe her, Marta insisted that Chopin replied to this with a very cheeky wink.

#it's tooo loonnggg #but here tis #wonderful 1000 #my writing #unshakeable #we stan chopin the mini pig

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k-liight · 4 years

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it's been a hell of a long time since I did OC stuff, but here at last is my full cast for Warlock Enterprise! and by full cast, I mean all the characters that are at least somewhat important to the story. lmao there'll be other characters that are just kinda there for maybe like two seconds, and I may add more characters to the actual plot in the future lol. but this is everybody for now! I'm gonna ramble about them all like I usually do with my OCs so if you're interested keep reading dflfjbhgfdkgjs (also note that I made some major design changes to most of these characters LMAO)

Richard Duchaes is the confident dad who comes from a long line of demon hunters going way back into the early medieval times-- pretty much as far back as warlocks even existed in this universe! he can be quite goofy at times, but don't mess with him or his family unless you wanna see him go into angery papa bear attack mode. he's a very powerful warlock and wants his son Mason to even more powerful one day. he's very outgoing and supportive and likes to incorporate witty banter into his battles. Denise Duchaes is the sweet yet badass angel mom who can also be very goofy despite her magnificence. even around other transcendents, she'll keep in her human form, because her true angel form can be quite overwhelming. she's 90% pure light and can bend light rays at her will-- a master illusionist. when alone with her family, she'll carry herself in a dimmer form of her true self so as to not blind them-- that form is translucent and makes her look like wispy smoke. she's very protective of her children, but also likes to embarrass them both, as moms do, haha. Mason Duchaes is of course our hero, a young warlock who dreams of following in his fathers footsteps, but he's rather shy and a little bit behind in magical development. he has a degree of social anxiety making it hard for him to get comfortable around people, but he's very devoted to his family and very protective of his little sister Kalisha. he's down-to-earth and no-nonsense, but he knows how to have fun and it's very easy to make him laugh. he might get insecure of himself at times, but he's very determined to achieve his goals no matter how long it takes. he's more of a left-brain thinker, very logical in what he does and is able to make calculated decisions quickly. Kalisha Duchaes is Mason's adoptive younger sister who's extremely excitable and energetic to the point where she innocently thinks being in danger is fun. she's kind of a mystery baby, her transcendency is unclear and her parents have no idea where she came from. she was found in the woods at a mere three years old and the only thing she remembered was her own first name, and when Richard and Denise couldn't find her birth family, they took her into theirs. now, Kalisha is happy with her family and is eager to join them in the long line of demon hunters. she's quite pugnacious and enjoys fighting demons. she's a tough little rascal that gets right back up when she's knocked down. Amy Stilton is Mason's best friend and magic partner who's also here for a good time and has the unique ability to telepathically communicate with animals. Mason's parents discover that Amy is half-transcendent and half-banal, which is a big no-no in transcendent code of conduct. she also has no idea who her own father is, leading them to believe that her father is/was a transcendent who broke the rules. similar to Kalisha, her transcendency is unclear, so after Mason partners with her and dubs her an "honorary warlock", Richard and Denise set out to solve her origin mystery. she has ADHD and is thus a very creative right-brain thinker to balance Mason's logical demeanor. she's very energetic and emotional, and while she gets easily scared fighting demons, she can channel that fear into good fighting tactics. Sasha Stilton is Amy's aloof and standoff-ish mother who only shows her emotions when she wants to. she's rather trashy and sleazy, but she's also very mysterious in her ways. she smokes a lot a wears too much jewelry and makeup, but she's sympathetic as a minimum-wage worker and single mom. she seems cold at times, but she has instilled a great sense of responsibility in Amy. Maureen Burgstaller is Amy's best friend alongside Mason and also doubles as her school tutor. she's very smart and academic, but she's also sporty and loves working out in her free time. she's a star student and a loyal friend who has known Amy since they were knee-high to a grasshopper and helps her work with her ADHD. she's great with kids and wants to be a teacher one day. Edward Copperton is a wise and friendly old chap who's still very strong for his age and owns the local transcendent tavern, The Waning Gibbous, as well as the head of the area's Warlock Enterprise (which is where the name of the story comes from hollaaaaaa). he exudes kind grandfather vibes and shares mutual respect with Richard and his family. he's very fond of Mason and Kalisha and becomes a sort of mentor to them both. he's been worn down from years, no, decades, of fighting physical and emotional battles, but he is able to take something good from all of his experiences. he's rather prophetic due to his age, but never overbearing. Lucy is a bubbly and cheerful witch who loves good times and all things cute. she's extremely friendly and devotes herself and her magic to helping others. she herself is very cutesy and takes pride in being girly and powerful both. her magic is strong, but her passion is even stronger, and she can cast complicated spells with ease. Lora is Lucy's dark, evil twin sister who is much more stoic and unfeeling than her other half. she frequently teams with demons to get what she wants, but she doesn't strike a fair bargain and is very selfish even to them. despite her cruel nature, Lucy holds no hard feelings towards her. Quentin is an evil warlock and Richard's arch-nemesis since high school. he's very cocky and outgoing, and almost campy in his speech, but paring that with the many lives he's taken makes him all the more twisted. he's over-confident and has a dark sense of humor. he's very violent, but doesn't like getting his hands too dirty, though he just loves pissing Richard off. Kyle is a lowly demon and Quentin's acolyte/scapegoat. he's practically a slave to the evil warlock and is far too weak to rebel against him. he's extremely shy and unsure for a demon, and doesn't even like too much violence. he has a Stockholm syndrome towards Quentin because he believes he's the only one who sees the demon's potential. Grent is a smaller but much stronger demon who frequently annoys the other villains, intentional or not. he's incredibly obnoxious and doesn't seem to know when to shut up, which frequently gets him in trouble (not that he'll ever learn his lesson). while he is powerful, he tends to overshot himself, especially if it's to impress a clearly uninterested woman. he's obsessed with jazz music and thinks he's hot shit, but he's really not. Lady Ultimatum is a rouge vampire who feeds off others' fear. she has built her entire identity to being as terrifying as possible, and loves scaring people into eventually letting her get her way. she's a gambler, but she doesn't play fair at all. if she tries to strike an unfair "bargain" with you, you can turn her down, but over time, you'll be tormented in your nightmares by all your worst fears and eventually become so paranoid that you give in and accept her offer just to make it all stop. she's highly feared and loves every drop of it. Felix is a Norwegian hudrekall who works as a bartender/waiter at the Waning Gibbous tavern. he's very soft-spoken, but is also quite a flirt, and always pays a compliment where he can even when he's not flirting. nearly everyone is attracted to him and he knows it, but he doesn't let it get to his head and is very humble about it. he's sweet and soft, but he definitely has a mischievous side as well. Ildiko is a female warlock of Hungarian descent and Lucy's girlfriend. she's much more intimidating and less bubbly than her beloved, but she's very much a gentlewoman. she's been through a hell of a lot and has the battle scars to show it, plus the horrific marks of a severe burn to her lower face and upper torso which she covers. she's tough as nails and doesn't fuck around, making her well-respected in the Enterprise. and last but not least, Uriah is a new character added to the line-up; he's fun-loving twenty-something warlock who uses his magic in very creative ways. he has a natural ear for music, and likes to use soundwaves from his mixtapes to his advantage. sometimes he can be a bit naive, but he's still a valuable member of the Enterprise. he quickly befriends Mason and becomes like the brother he never had. damn, it took me like two hours just to type up this description XD but I think that's it for now! hopefully I can get back into the swing of OC stuff, especially for this story flbfjgkljds

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shadowofthemoth · 5 years

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Friar Laurence and Prince Escalus for the ask meme XD

Hello and thanks, wahah, now that’s what I call a perfect ask!

Friar Laurence (or Lorenzo, as I like to call him):

favorite thing about them: his general goodness. I love that he is a benign and good-natured character, very understanding and willing to help.

least favorite thing about them: he really should have thought of telling someone ahem, the Prince, ahem about the whole “secret marriage and fake death” affair instead of just keeping it all secret like a little boy playing spy. So many problems could’ve been avoided, but no. (But I still love the man).

favorite line: all of them! And in particular, this part of “J’Sais Plus”:

La vie était facileIl suffisait d'aimerMais l'encre des EvangilesDans mon coeur a séchéOh, Dieu de tous les hommesToi qui sait tout sur toutEcoute la voix d'un hommeQui te dit à genouxQu'il devient fou

brOTP: Romeo, in a way, especially if you think of the new Italian Lorenzo. They’re such good bros there! xD

OTP: Prince Escalus (obviously).

nOTP: everyone but Escalus? xD Idk, I just don’t really ship him with anyone else…

random headcanon: 1) in a modern setting, Lorenzo is a surgeon; 2) when it comes to escalawrence, Escalus is the one to fall in love first, but it is Lorenzo who confesses first.

unpopular opinion: as opposed to the way he’s portrayed in many versions, Lorenzo is actually not that old, 40 years maximum. I’d even say 36 to 38.

song i associate with them: “Angel” by Poets of the Fall.

youtube

favorite picture of them: all credit goes to Julien Vachon and my dear Rubick Chen.

Prince Escalus:

favorite thing about them: I admit that these features may be more of a headcanon than not, but I love the man’s strength and determination. He’s immensely charismatic, for sure; but it’s a character whom I - first of all - respect and admire because of how strong and resilient he is. Even based on the La Vengeance scene after the duel, it’s clear to me that Escalus hides his emotions well. He seems calm on the surface, but on the inside, there is a storm that no one is meant to ever catch a glimpse of. And being calm and rational and fair, all the while hiding that storm inside you… that takes immense strength. And that aura of strength-despite-all-the-pain was what drew me to him in the first place; and it’s still my favourite aspect of this character.

least favorite thing about them: this is more about the way he’s shown in some versions, thanks to the Le Pouvoir thing (a grateful shoutout to the Austrian and the Hungarian versions for leaving it out). I don’t like this lust for power he’s shown to have, so I invented a separate explanation for this, because I love the song itself, I only don’t like what it does to the whole image of the character.

favorite line: guys, honestly, come on, it’s “favourite lineS”.

1) Austrian:

Willkommen in der Stadt!

(”Verona”. Iconic, fucking iconic, man).

Ich als Fürst hatt’ hier die Macht,Der Hass hat mich um sie gebracht.Nur der Friede war mein Ziel,Bis meine Welt zerfiel.…Viva Verona, dunkles Verona.

(”Verona II”).

2) French:

On m'envie mais de quoi?On dit lui en parlant de moiOn me craint on me croitPour qu'ils aient chaud j'ai froid…Le pouvoir ça brûle en vousLe pouvoir ça vous rend fouLe pouvoir on s'y cramponneEt quand il vous abandonneOn en meurt!

(”Le Pouvoir”)

brOTP: idk… I headcanon that he has a close relationship with his nephews (Mercutio and Valentine), but that’s not a brOTP. I also headcanon that he was best friends with his younger sister Beatrice, his nephews’ mother, in their childhood and youth and up until her demise. Guess it counts as a brOTP?

OTP: Lorenzo, Queen Mab, der Tod, Juliet (in various AUs). Benvolio, if it’s the Hungarian version where Escalus is younger than everywhere else. Mercutio, if they’re not related by blood (and only in the Italian version). Also I now have a headcanon that (in some AUs of mine, especially in the modern AU) he was married once but his wife died very tragically, together with their child (either unborn or still very young), well before his sister died and left her children in Escalus’s care… and I’ve yet to come up with his wife’s name, yeah.

nOTP: pretty much everyone else.

random headcanon: 1) Escalus sings really well and can play more than one musical instrument. 2) in the modern AU, Escalus works in the police. Bonus round, because I feel like it: Escalus and Lorenzo have matching tattoos which depict two intertwined snakes. Escalus’s is on his left bicep, covering an old scar he got on an operation. Lorenzo was the one to patch him up afterwards; and that was when Lorenzo couldn’t hide his feelings for Escalus anymore, and they’ve been a couple ever since.

unpopular opinion: more of a headcanon rather than of an unpopular opinion, but oh well, Escalus is afraid of spiders.

song i associate with them:“My Dark Disquiet” by Poets of the Fall.

youtube

favorite picture of them: can’t find my all-time favourite atm, so I’ll post a sketch I drew based on it, ok?

Whoa, that took long! Hope you enjoy this monsterpost, my lovely anon! :3

#ask meme #prince escalus #friar lawrence #friar laurence #retj #musicals #frederic charter #boris pfeifer #shadowofthemoth is drawing #Anonymous #jesus what's up with the formatting?#I had to edit this again because everything went rogue after publishing #sorry

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ofregiums · 5 years

Text

silence ! raise the royal standard, for the king of hungary, DOMINYKAS VANCURA, has arrived. being thirty-one years old, he is currently on the throne. many around the court call him the insurgent by virtue of him being perspicacious and captivating, while also being ruthless and aggressive. —played by max irons

— THE BASICS

full name: dominykas leandro vancura date of birth: july 26th age: thirty-one star sign: leo profession: king of hungary ( canon ), hedge fun manager mi6 operative ( modern ) loyalty: hungary, house vancura, entente alignment: chaotic neutral mbti: estp spoken languages: hungarian ( first ), english ( fluent ), spanish ( fluent ), french ( fluent ), mandarin ( fluent ), russian ( advanced ), italian ( advanced ), lithuanian ( intermediate ), polish ( intermediate ), hindustani ( intermediate ), arabic ( beginner ) mother’s name: gabriella vancura father’s name: richárd vancura ( deceased ) siblings, if any: pál vancura ( older, deceased in canon ), aurélia vancura ( younger ), adelaida & angéla vancura ( younger, identical twins ), dániel vancura ( younger ) children: laima vaisvila ( aged five ) height: 6′2″ hair colour: dark brown. eye colour: blue-grey.

— CANON VERSE

first off, let me start off by saying that dom can be the wOOOoooooOoooRST. what’s his damage, heather ? well, it’s not his family. his family was super loving and supportive and he grew up loving all of his siblings and such. never rly had the responsibilities of being king so he fucked around a lot as a teenager, partaking in hedonistic behavior bc why not ?

fell like fucking head over heels madly in love at the age of seventeen to a lithuanian duke’s daughter and shit, nothing else mattered. she was his polar opposite like a goddamn ray of sunshine but she made him want to clean up his act in a way that he never though possible. he !!! fucking !!! loved !!! her !!!

yep, loved. bc he can’t be happy, duh. they got married at the age of eighteen, things were fucking great. she tempered him down and reminded him that there was good that no one else saw. about two years into their marriage, the two discovered that tiesa was pregnant. but the war was brewing and he felt like he needed to fight and that all sorta stressed his wife out a lot. she has a miscarriage due to it.

that was the first knife to the heart. dom grew resentful and numb to his emotions. he detached from his family and was a far harsher and colder man. lacking a purpose, he went off to fight in the war. witnessing those horrors really fucked him up and added another knife to the heart.

he had a partner in crime in the war, a total ride or die. this was probably the only guy that could coax a smile out of dom lately. so obviously that meant he couldn’t live. he was killed saving dom. that traumatized the hell out of him.

coming back from the war, dom was no longer the boy he’d once been. he’d become a man, and that man was more akin to something horrible. he delved headfirst in hedonism to drown the pain and clutched to anything that could make him feel – if there was anything at all.

then, his father who he LOVED was murdered by prussia. ( clearly, i’m saying fuck dom rights )

the final straw for him ? losing tiesa. after the glorious news of hearing that she was pregnant again, the two thought this would be the new fresh chapter in their book together. she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl that they named laima. but as quickly as happiness returned to dom, it was taken away -- tiesa lost too much blood during the birth and didn’t even survive to see her beautiful creation. in absolute anguish, dom plucked all the knives of trauma that had once pierced his heart and declared that he no longer had one -- save for his affection for his sister and child.

coveted the throne from his older brother, but really it’s just something to fixate on so he didn’t delve too much into his own fucked up head. he was angry that his brother refused to attack prussia for their sins against their father. considered his brother a weak leader and fully convinced himself that he would be better. (spoiler alert: he wouldn’t.)

he got the chance to make that selfish, horrendous dream into a reality when the vancura family traveled to bern for the peace talks. one night, pirates stormed the castle taking lives and innocence left to right. dom seized his opportunity and stabbed his brother in the midst of the attacks. as he died, dom promised to exact revenge on prussia for their father. when guards came around, he pretended that it was the pirates that had done the deed. oh no ! long live king dominykas, i guess.

dom is hurting and in return, he wishes for everyone else to hurt. and if that meant lighting himself on fire and burning all the bridges on the way, so fucking be it. he’s vindictive and charming like a fucking snake, and he’s just as venomous.

anyways that’s my trash son. if you’re hot, he’ll flirt. if you piss him off, he becomes a scary mass of rage. terrible temper smh.

prussia, he’s coming for you hoes.

— MODERN VERSE

born the second oldest of the vancura children, dominykas didn’t have as heavy of a responsibility on his shoulders as his older brother did. honestly, he liked it that way. he had no desire in being controlled or even having a hand in his family’s business – banking. his great grandfather created the company and soon, the ambition turned it into an empire.

while his parents had met as children in hungary, they migrated to london once they eloped for a better chance in life. dom has only been back a handful of times in his life to visit family. he hasn’t been gone by his own will since the age of sixteen and doesn’t plan on doing so.

instead of worrying about the family name, dom enjoyed being the pretty hedonistic rich boy that got everything he wanted and did everything he pleased. was the peak definition of a fuckboi growing up and was very proud of it.

didn’t really want to further his education. while he was naturally intelligent, he never had the desire to just learn for learning’s sake. but not attending university was a non-starter when it came to his strict father. he was handed pamphlets of high-end schools and was forced to make a choice. he decided on oxford university, since he had zero desire to leave england.

that ended up being the right choice because: a.) he met his best friend florian & b.) he met tiesa. she was by far the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life and the moment dom tried to use his usual disingenuous charm on her, she shut him the fuck down. holy shit, he needed it. and the reason that she called him out on his bullshit was exactly the reason he fell in love with her. after much back and forth throughout their studies, she agreed to go out with him and they started dating very soon after.

near the end of his university experience, dom was approached by a “hedge fund firm” for an internship. upon the interview process, he learned that it was in fact a cover for the secret intelligence service. they wanted to hire him as an operational officer. dom, a known thrill seeker, thought it would be fun.

keeping his lives separate proved to be difficult, especially with how things were going with tiesa. they fought a lot about him being secretive and it placed a strain on their relationship. things grew doubly complicated when tiesa announced that she was pregnant. dom asked her to marry him instantly, not wanting this to be a decision that severed their ties. they had an elopement, much to his family’s dismay, and a few months later – laima was born.

if he thought he understand love before, fuck it only grew tenfold. all he knew was that he loved his wife and his daughter and he would do all he could to protect them. ironic, considering the nature of his job.

upon graduation, the secret intelligence service offered him a lucrative new position – in the field as an operative. it sort of felt like something out a movie but this was a cold reality that would change dominykas’ life for the worst.

collecting information, by means or torture or even worse methods, wore on the man. but he couldn’t just back out of his agreement. he was in for life and that was a decision he would have to learn to accept. except, dom was a stubborn man. so, he tried to get away. packed up tiesa and laima and booked a trip to the states. he was willing to trade secrets to the cia for protection.

the day they were supposed to leave, he found tiesa shot through the head in their kitchen. laima was wailing in her nursery. the official news was that it was a botched bulgary. but dominykas knew, he fucking knew. it was them. and he had no choice but to continue to work for them. for laima’s safety.

his mind spiraled into darkness and paranoia after his wife’s death. he didn’t know who he could or couldn’t trust. could it have been one of his siblings who betrayed him ? a friend from his dining club ? truth be told, the only person that he trusted throughout this all was florian but even his best friend could not salvage the shell of the person he’d become after losing tiesa.

now, dom bitterly continues to work for the service, no longer batting an eye at the the violence and schemes of it all.

drinks a lot more than he used to. too much, actually.

no longer attempted to be there for laima as he should be. truthfully, he sees too much of tiesa in her and the reminder threatens to take him off the deep end.

#( * introductions. )#( * rich kid asshole ; paint me as a villain | dominykas vancura. )

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mysterioushogwartsrequests · 6 years

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OMG, I'm in love with your writing and I need more! I'd like to request a fix in which the MC is pregnant with Charlie's baby and suddenly goes into labour with only Fred and George with her. All three panic because they don't know what to do :)

Please remember this isn’t at all related to the Smugglers series so please don’t get confused with the timeline!

Also, this one might be my shortest work which is interesting, but I had a lot of fun writing this and I hope you all enjoy it!

Charlie Weasley and (Y/N) began their relationship during their fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. They remained together as Charlie studied dragons in Romania and (Y/N) worked to become a formidable Auror under the wing of Alastor Moody, also known as Mad-Eye Moody.

However, after a painful and potentially deathly encounter Charlie experienced with a Hungarian Horntail, he decided it was time to finally marry (Y/N), a few months after leaving Hogwarts. The pair was still very young, but they both led dangerous lives and would rather be together before an unspeakable situation took place.

Eloping in August of 1991, Charlie and (Y/N) returned to their careers as careful as ever. Even though they were separated most of the time, Charlie always came home when there was spare time, making sure his wife was comfortable and okay during his absence.

(Y/N) would work long hours at the Ministry, occasionally chatting with Arthur Weasley about current events despite the fact they were in different departments. Outside of work, Percy always rang (Y/N)’s line, asking for advice on how to work at the Ministry, something he’d been dreaming of since he was younger.

Along with Percy, (Y/N) was always happy to help out with the Weasleys. Bill visited her often, making teasing remarks on how his younger brother wasn’t treating her properly. Fred and George were always demonstrating their new pranks to her while Ron and Ginny asked for magical advice since she was the one that discovered the Cursed Vaults during her time at Hogwarts.

During the summer of 1994, almost three years of their marriage, Charlie decided to take another break so he could spend time with his wife.

(Y/N) was ecstatic to have him home. They would prepare dinner together, take walks around town, visit their family and old friends. All things she did alone, but now had him with her for company. If (Y/N) was spontaneously summoned by the Ministry, Charlie would prepare her meal for the day and handed it to her as she went off for work.

He was happy to see her thriving and the angelic look on her face every time he woke up beside her. They loved each other very much and even though they were calculated and punctual, they were also sometimes reckless.

Charlie knew his Father had a flying car and decided it’d be a good idea to unwind with a picnic and a fly around town. Borrowing the car, he made all preparations necessary and awaited the return of his wife.

“Charlie,” (Y/N) called, “I’m home and I’m bloody exhausted” She sighed, dropping her bag on the marble countertop. Charlie descended from upstairs with a small smirk on his face, twirling the keys around his finger.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” He grinned, shoving the keys in his pocket, “Get dressed and we’ll go, okay?”

(Y/N) smiled and gave a small nod, running to change out of her work attire and coming out in something much more comfortable. Walking out to their garage, Charlie opened the seemingly normal car door for her. (Y/N) had solved many riddles in her life, but Charlie’s surprise was something she couldn’t decipher.

The picnic basket and blankets had been hidden in the trunk and Charlie had never mentioned his Father’s flying car. Well, after the car took off the ground, he had to talk about it.

(Y/N) began to laugh as they flew through the woods near their home, “This is amazing!” She exclaimed, peaking her head out the window, “It’s like a broom, but better!”

Charlie chuckled at her happiness as he flew to the designated picnic spot. Safely landing, Charlie opened the door for her yet again, pulling her to the area with an array of flowers.

“Wait here,” He said, placing a kiss on her forehead, “and close your eyes!” He exclaimed as he ran back to the car to retrieve the picnic supplies.

(Y/N) closed her eyes, enjoying the sounds and the wind coming from the area. She heard Charlie struggling behind her, “Charlie, let me help you” She said keeping her eyes closed, but Charlie was already carrying everything.

“No!” He grunted, attempting to set everything down, “I got it” He muttered. Yes, he could’ve used magic, but he thought the extra effort would make the date much more charming. After about twenty minutes of struggle and set up, Charlie took (Y/N) by the hand, “don’t open them yet”

(Y/N) nodded and let Charlie lead her to the spot. The aroma of freshly made bread and pumpkin juice immediately hit her nose and she couldn’t help but smile.

“Okay, open them” He muttered, a smile spreading across his lips as he watched her eyes light up. (Y/N) wandered around the setup, pillows, and blankets with their house colors on them, a picnic basket full of delicious desserts and the same sandwiches they used to enjoy during their school years.

“Charlie!” She exclaimed, running back to her husband giving him a tight hug, “This is wonderful, you’re wonderful” She whispered, running her thumb across his cheek.

Charlie wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her close, “We haven’t been on a slightly reckless date in a while so I thought we could have a picnic, explore the woods, and camp out overnight,” Charlie said, “Just the two of us”

Charlie leaned in a pressed a soft kiss against (Y/N)’s lips. Charlie Weasley had always been the romantic type, showering her with handmade gifts since he didn’t have the funds to buy her some. (Y/N), however, wouldn’t have it any other way. His handmade gifts always reminded her of how he must’ve sat down and worked on it for hours which was worth more than a store-bought item.

After their picnic and stroll through the forest, Charlie and (Y/N) had retreated into their enchanted tent. Their intentions at first were to sleep, but the adrenaline provided by the area rendered them sleepless and they searched for other activities to pass the time.

Charlie threw (Y/N) onto the bed as she laughed, watching him crawl over her, pressing kisses all over her body. His hair had been pulled out of his ponytail and hung around his face, tickling her bare skin as he moved upwards, “I love you” He muttered, his lips latching onto hers as he laced his fingers with her’s, holding her hands on each side of her head.

(Y/N) sighed contently as Charlie pressed chaste kisses around her neck, “I love you too” She replied, pulling him down for another heated kiss.

The night in the woods was sleepless, but they wouldn’t have it any other way.

A couple of months after their secluded endeavor, (Y/N) found out she was pregnant. Her pregnancy explained all the random symptoms she had been experiencing and the news excited her.

Rather than telling Charlie by telephone or mail, she decided to travel to Romania and find him at the Dragon Sanctuary he worked at. Gathering a bag, she walked outside her home with determination, disapparating in the middle of the field.

Apparating in Romania, a somewhat difficult task since it was such a long distance and only skilled witches and wizards could apparate that far without splinching, she walked around searching for her husband.

“Calm down!” Charlie yelled, attempting to tame a large Norwegian Ridgeback by the name of Norberta. Norberta spread her wigs and sent out a loud screech, but Charlie and his team had managed to finally calm her down.

(Y/N) watched with glee as her husband worked, but once the coast was clear, she ran up to him and covered his eyes, “Guess who” she whispered into his ear and he turned around in surprise.

“(Y/N)?” He laughed, “What are you doing here?” He asked, pressing a kiss against her forehead.

“I’m pregnant” She announced, not being able to contain the news any longer. Charlie blinked in surprise, staring at his wife with disbelief

“You’re pregnant?!” He exclaimed and she nodded in response, “Merlin’s beard! I’m going to be a dad!” He yelled, picking up his wife and spinning her around happily.

It was now April and the baby would be born any day now. Charlie is scheduled to return home this week, hopefully before their child was born.

Hogwarts was on its Easter Break so Fred and George had graciously volunteer to accompany (Y/N) in her home, despite Molly’s pleads for her to come to live with them, just in case the baby was born.

Fred and George had just turned fifteen years old and felt rather grown up. However, all the lessons at Hogwarts could never prepare them for what followed suit.

The twins were playing around with brooms outside (Y/N) and Charlie’s home. (Y/N) walked around the kitchen setting up enchanted items, much like her mother-in-law, to do some cooking and cleaning since she had a hard time doing it herself.

As she walked to the porch, she felt a sting of pain shoot through her body, “Shit!” She exclaimed, clutching her stomach, “Now?!” She panicked, holding onto the front door.

“Fred and George!” She yelled and when the boys turned, the noticed her hobbled over holding onto the door. The two boys ran back, slightly panicked.

“Are you okay?” George asked and Fred’s eyes widened as he quickly figured out what was going on. He vaguely remembered how his own mother was during the time Ginny was born and this was exactly how it was.

“George call Charlie!” Fred yelled as he moved (Y/N) to a seat, “Uh we need to” He muttered to himself, running around the house trying to find a cloth he could wet.

George scrambled to the phone, dialing Charlie but it was sent straight to voicemail, “He’s not answering!” George yelled and Fred popped up from behind the kitchen counter

“Ring him again, dammit!” He yelled, turning on the sink and running back to press the cloth against (Y/N)’s forehead.

“I didn’t pack the bag!” She exclaimed, “I forgot about the bag!”

“What bag?!” Fred yelled, “Your work bag?”

“The overnight bag for the hospital!” (Y/N) replied, now fully panicked.

Charlie wasn’t answering, the bag wasn’t ready, Fred and George were running around the house screaming and yelling at each other about what to do.

“Why aren’t you calling Charlie?!” Fred yelled, shoving random items in a bag, claiming it was the ‘overnight bag’. George threw a towel at him in response,“Because he’s not answering, you twat”

George froze in the middle of the room and turned to his twin brother with an expression of pure fear, “What if we have to deliver the baby?” He whispered and (Y/N) let out another grunt of pain

“GEORGE!” She yelled, breathing heavily, “Don’t be absurd, I’d deliver it myself” She attempted to reassure, but it didn’t make the situation any better.

Fred threw the bag near the door and looked around the room, “Call mum!” He yelled, “She should know what to do!”

George ran back to the phone, but before he could make a call, it started ringing. It was Charlie.

“Hello? (Y/N), what’s wrong?” He asked, clearly unaware about what was about to unfold.

“Uh, this is George and I was calling because there’s something going on- No! It’s not bad, it’s just uh-”

A fed up Fred had snatched the phone out of his stuttering brother’s hand, “SHE’S HAVING HER KID,” Fred yelled, “GET YOUR ARSE HERE WE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO”

“Bloody hell!” Charlie yelled, scrambling to gather his things, “I’ll be right there!” With that, he hung up and rushed to his fire-place travelling back to his home in Scotland.

(Y/N) had closed her eyes and was leaning up against the chair, breathing heavily and with her hands over her stomach.

“Oh, Merlin!” George yelled, “Freddie, what if she’s dying?!”

(Y/N)’s head snapped up as she winced in pain, “I’m not dying, I just- ah!”

Fred jumped as she cried out in pain, grabbing the bag from the floor, “We have to take her to the hospital!” He announced, attempting to get her up from the chair, “Did you call mum?!”

“No! Charlie called and I didn’t-” George cut himself off thanks to Fred’s glare, picking up the phone and dialing his mother, “Mum, uh, (Y/N)’s having her baby and Charlie’s on the way so can you meet us at the hospital?”

The incomprehensible yells from the other line made Fred worried, even more than he was right now. But a wave of relief washed through the boys as a flash of green flames emerged from (Y/N)’s fire place

“Charlie’s here! Bye Mum!” George exclaimed, slamming down the phone and rushing over to Fred’s side who was moving (Y/N) to the fire place.

“I’m here!” Charlie announced, running over to his wife, “Let’s go” He said, pulling her and his twin brothers along. Fred grabbed the floo powder and held onto (Y/N)’s hand who was now squeezing it to distract her from the pain

“Saint Mungos Hopsital!” Fred yelled and the green flames engulfed all four of them. Suddenly, they were at the busy hopsital and the twins had run up to the desk, anxiously stating that their sister-in-law was in labor.

Charlie walked besides (Y/N) as they pushed her into a room, holding her hand tightly, “It’s okay, everything will be great and soon we’ll be parents”

(Y/N) smiled weakly as Charlie wiped the sweat of her forehead.

The twins collapsed in the waiting room, giving themselves a subtle highfive for what they accomplished. In a matter of minutes, the entire Weasley family was in the designated room, anxiously waiting for the new member of their family.

Even though the moments before the hospital weren’t as smooth as they could’ve been. (Y/N) and Charlie welcomed a healthy baby boy into their family, all thanks to the help of the prankster twins, Fred and George.

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