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consumedkings-archive · 4 years

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ancient names, pt. xix

A John Seed/Original Female Character Fanfic

Ancient Names, pt xix: messy hearts

Masterlink Post

Word Count: ~11.2k

Rating: Explicit; they bang it out.

Warnings: mentions/depictions of murder-suicides(though none very graphic, only mentioned in passing and after the fact, if that changes anything). Unreliable narrators abound. I think that's all, but if there's anything I missed please let me know.

Notes: I'm going to keep these notes brief just because the chapter is quite a hefty one! We finally get some plot movement, a look into how Elliot got her mantra to Keep Going Anyway mantra, and boy howdy if you thought things were bad before just fucking wait.

I have so many people to thank and I just don't know how to express my gratitude. @shallow-gravy, you are a pure angel and I just adore you so much. Thank you for being so wonderful and for cheering my girl on always, no matter what! @lilwritingraven ilysm!!! You are so sweet and I just don't think this chapter would have happened without you.

And of course, absolutely none of this fic would be possible without @starcrier's unending love and support. The amount of MEMES, the amount of screenshots and meltdowns and in general just fuckery she puts up with nonstop is remarkable and I honestly believe that without her support we wouldn't have gotten where we are today!!!

I anticipate there is, perhaps, one or two chapters left of Ancient Names. Thank you everyone who has supported, even by a single like or kudos or comment; this community is so incredible and I am so so so grateful for every friend I have made. <3

The U.S. Marshal arrives ahead of schedule.

That is to say, nobody is ready for him. Everyone seems a little nervous. He’s familiar with the area—“Familiar enough,” Whitehorse says, and Elliot thinks she can sense a bit of disdain in his voice; people don’t take well to outsiders traipsing around like they own the place, and Cameron Burke certainly carries himself with an amount of confidence that might come off as arrogant.

“Hey,” he says, when she passes him in the hallway, “you’re the rookie, huh?”

She’s already tired of being called rookie—Rook is fine, she supposes, because she likes the way it makes her sound like the chess-piece, the bull-dozer, straightforward and brutal—but she nods, clearing her throat and holding out her hand. “Elliot.”

Burke shakes her hand. There’s a bright, easy grin on his face. “Yeah, I read about you, Honeysett,” he tells her, and for a second her stomach drops; the shame rises up in her throat like a second wave of exhaustion, but he plunges on, “you fuckin’ killed it at the Academy. Flying colors, everyone tells me.”

Relief floods her system. “Tried, anyway,” she says, unaccustomed to compliments regarding her work and more accustomed to dodging questions about why Whitehorse had to think twice about letting her on. “It was—I like the work. Of training, I mean. School. I’ve always liked school.” Fuck, she’s rambling and she can tell—she’s rambling because she’s nervous he’s going to ask, but Burke watches her for a moment.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” he says after a brief pause. “This place could use some new blood. Kinda dusty, don’tcha think?”

Elliot nods. It’s hard not to smile when he’s flashing his teeth boyishly, when he sticks a toothpick in his mouth and winks at her before he sets off. It is kind of dusty, in Hope County, she thinks—and she likes it, this little stretch and slice of home, but it does need new blood. Once they clear the cultists out, it’ll be like new; and then her life will really begin.

She’ll really start over.

Joey doesn’t like him much. “Sounds like a prick,” she says that night over takeout, her legs draped across Elliot’s lap.

“I like him,” she says, fishing her chopsticks around in Joey’s takeout box for a spare bite of broccoli. “He was... Nice. To me.”

“Oh?” Joey cocks a brow at her. “You had a little chat with our friend the U.S. Marshal?”

“Just in the hallway,” Elliot replies quickly, “on my way out today, I passed him. He said he read my file.”

Joey isn’t staring at her, but she doesn’t need to be for Elliot to know that she’s listening. She’s digging around in her noodles for something when she makes a low, quiet noise of inquisition, as though to say, is that so?, because she knows what that usually entails.

“He just mentioned I got good marks,” she murmurs after a moment. “At the Academy.”

“Well, you did,” Joey says. Elliot huffs out a short little laugh and smiles.

“I know. Just nice to be recognized for my greatness.” She crinkles her nose. “Whitehorse just kind of looks at me like he’s worried I’ll fire off.”

“Oh, Elliot! So strong, so smart, so fast, so capable of shooting a man on foot or by vehicle!” Joey wails dramatically. “Your hand in marriage, I beg it of thee!”

Elliot rolls her eyes and shoves Joey’s legs off of her lap, stretching and coming to a stand. “Yeah, yeah, fuck you.”

“Not before marriage, though,” her friend intones somberly. “Joseph “The Father” Seed wouldn’t have any pre-marital fucking in his domain.”

“I don’t think he’s as stiff on that as everyone thinks he is.” Elliot walks into the kitchen and uncorks the bottle of wine, pouring herself a new glass. “Aren’t cults supposed to be weird about that kind of thing?”

She can hear Joey scoff in the living room. “You’re going to be with us tomorrow. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“Oh, great idea! ‘Hi, The Father? Do you fuck, or nah?’ He won’t be expecting that at all.”

“Perfect. See how Burke feels about that pro-strategy.”

Elliot laughs and settles herself back on the couch, holding the glass of wine in both of her hands; the fragrance of it swims in her head pleasantly. Tomorrow they take the U.S. Marshal down to the compound and finally root the Seeds out of here. For good.

She says lightly, “Anyway, I want to get tomorrow done as fast as possible.” A little sigh escapes her.

“Things will finally get back to normal.”

Burke’s hands are around her throat and he slams her up against the wall with a vicious noise.

And then he sees her—really sees her—and he drops his hands from her neck to grip her shoulders instead as he says, “Fucking Christ—Rook, I’m so sorry, fuck, I thought—”

Elliot coughs. Her lungs strain with each movement; every bone in her body feels bruised, and something slimy crawls up and down her spine when she thinks about the way Joseph leaned in close to her in the helicopter and said, no one is coming to save you.

“Burke,” she manages out, her voice hoarse, “they took Joey—they f-fucking—”

“This shit is all fucked,” Burke says. “I had no idea. We had—”

Everything in her is vibrating with a strange kind of hunger. It’s like she’s itching for something, but she can’t quite figure out what it is—movement, maybe, or a purpose, a task. It had been one thing to crawl her way out of the helicopter and start running blindly, but now she’s stationary, and in a trailer, and Joey is gone and she almost can’t think straight.

“Rookie,” Burke says firmly, but not unkindly, “with me.”

Her lashes flutter and she realizes she’s been zoning out. “Y—Yeah, I’m—here—I’m—”

And then she’s gasping, heaving for a lungful of air. All of a sudden, the ability to take a breath is gone. Her body’s normal functions have flown out the window. Her vision fuzzes around the edges and she thinks, fuck fuck fuck, don’t fucking do this, please, fuck, not right now, get it together.

No one is coming to save you.

Burke grabs her hand and plants it right on the side of his neck. His pulse beats—fast, but steady, in the complete opposite of the stuttering arrhythmia of her own heart. He’s breathing hard, but his eyes are clear and his movements assured.

“With me?” This time it’s a question, and she’s taking breaths at the same time he is so she nods.

“Yeah,” she replies, “yeah.”

“Good.” He pulls away from her and gestures for her to follow as he heads further in. “Check the room.”

She does. It’s empty. Eden’s Gate scripture decorates the walls, photos of the Seed family staring at her unflinchingly from behind glass panes of photo frames.

“Clear,” she reports, when she remembers to, and finds Burke standing in what appears to be the main living room of the trailer. The lines of his face are hard, unforgiving, and she can feel the urgency radiating off of him as he scrambles to pull together a plan.

“We’re gonna put these fucking psychos behind bars, Rook,” he says, pointing at a picture frame sporting a portrait taken of the Seeds. Elliot can’t stand to look at them. To think that she’d met John in a bar and—even considered—

“Every single one of them,” the Marshal reiterates as he rips the photo frame off of the wall and drops it on the floor, crushing the glass beneath his boot on his way over to the window. “We’re gonna—”

There are voices outside. Dread crawls up her spine; she can feel it latching on, sinking its teeth into her, gripping.

Burke shoves an automatic rifle in her hands.

“Eyes,” he barks out, back to business as he creeps toward the door of the trailer. “There’s a truck out there. You ready to fuckin’ rumble?”

She grips the cold metal. She wants to say, I don’t know if this is a good idea, because the edges of her are bleeding and blending in with everything else, and she’s having a hard time thinking about anything other than the texture of the carpet under her booted feet, but it helps to have something to hold onto.

Burke turns to her, crouched by the door, and his hand drops on her shoulder.

“Hey,” he says, “we're gonna bolt for that truck and hope it starts. Cover me."

"There's hardly any ammo in this thing," Elliot tells him, a note of panic rising in her voice as more people can be heard gathering outside, shouting to check the trailer. "What happens when—"

"I told you, kid, I read up on you. I know you were that small-town, All-American girl hitting soft lobs in the batting cage once," Burke tells her. "You'll figure out a use for the gun if you run out. And Rook?”

Elliot waits, and grips the cold metal slowly going lukewarm under her hands, flicking the safety off. “Yeah?”

The Marshal gives her shoulder a squeeze. “The second you think you can’t anymore,” he says, “you dig and keep going anyway. No matter what. Give ‘em your teeth if you have to. Got it?”

She nods without thinking about it, because the words feel good—if you can’t, keep going anyway. Dig dig dig. It reminds her of a poem she had read once.

What do we do with grief? Lug it; lug it.

“Good.” Burke drops his hand from her shoulder and gets ready to push the door open. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

There’s not a lot of detail to recall of the next few moments. She’s aware of voices, and gunfire, and the rhythmic, steady movements that she falls into. Aim, fire, drop, reload, aim, fire, rinse and repeat, until the torturous drag of time has her hauling herself into the truck while bullets whizz and clink off of the metal. The second she’s sitting, and not moving, and not breathing, her muscles start screaming; pain blooms behind her eyes.

Burke sends the tires shrieking as he speeds down the highway. He says something, but it’s hard to hear over the rush of wind from the open window, over the shouts of voices and sounds of gunfire echoing in the still, dark night. Elliot falls into a rhythm again—lean, aim, fire, pull back, reload, and again and again—while the Marshal drives over barricades and nearly throws her out of the truck.

“Nice fuckin’ shot, kid!” he says over the noise, just as the sound of an airplane rattling above them makes him lean over the steering wheel as he drives. “Fucking—you’re telling me they have God damn air support? Fuck!”

“Burke,” Elliot says, because they’re rapidly approaching a bridge with a truck ahead of them and the airplane hasn’t let up, “Burke—the bridge—”

“Yeah, I fuckin’ see it,” he grits out, fingers gripping the wheel. “Hold on, Rook.”

He punches it. He’s going to try and get around the truck and across the bridge. But it’s not enough; the truck ahead of them swerves, stops him from being able to speed past and keeping them trapped.

Gunfire from the sky rains down on them. The bridge goes up in flames; the truck is plunged straight into the water; and for a second, Elliot thinks, oh, thank fucking God, I’m done.

But she’s not, unfortunately. As she holds her breath around the water she’d swallowed upon the impact, she struggles out through the open window of the truck and fights her way to the surface. Everything inside of her wants to quit—everything says, we could just close our eyes, we could just be done, and then she remembers.

The second you think you can’t go anymore, you dig and keep going anyway. No matter what.

Her hands find soil. She hauls herself out of the water, coughing, lungs straining for air. Her vision blurs black and fuzzes, fizzing and popping in and out of existence as she considers the logistics of letting herself die. Just for a second. She can die for a second, right?

“No! Get off me! I am a United States Federal Marshal!”

It’s Burke. She can see the glimmer of flashlights on a distant bank, closer to the bridge. The dull, wet impact of something against skin quiets him; as Elliot lays back against the bank with her eyes flickering shut, she feels fingers grip the front of her shirt and haul her upwards.

“My children...”

The voice drones out of speakers—the sound speckles in and out, crackling in her head, distant but sickening.

“S—” Her voice slurs as she tries to say something; she’s being carried, and she doesn’t know to where, or by who. “W—Wait—”

“We must give thanks to God. The day I have prophesied to you has arrived.”

Elliot tries to force her eyes open. She can’t. She can’t, and she’s going to let Burke down, because she can’t dig anymore. How is she supposed to dig if her nails are scraping the bottom of the barrel?

“Everything I’ve told you has come true... The authorities who tried to take me from you are now in the loving embrace of my Family... save for one.”

She’s going to be sick. She’s going to be sick, and she wants to die, and she thinks that fucking psycho is talking about her.

“But the Wayward Soul will be found. They will be punished...”

She can see stairs. Concrete stairs, as the man carrying her hauls her down, down down down. Vaguely, hazily, she thinks, belly of the beast, now? and she wonders if she will ever feel normal again. Her vision fuzzes black, but she’s not dead and she’s not asleep; it’s unfortunate.

“And in the end, they will see our glorious purpose.”

Metal clinks against metal. Cold from the concrete floor seeps through her soaked clothes. Elliot lifts her head lazily, feeling the tug and strain of handcuffs around her wrists, and when she opens her eyes she can see she’s—somewhere. Somewhere, and handcuffed to a bed, while an older man stands at the radio. Joseph’s voice rattled on through it.

“I am your Father. You are my Children. And together, we will march too—”

The man turns the radio off. The air hangs hazy around him with smoke; something burns in the ashtray, and she thinks, fuck, I’d kill for a goddamn cigarette right about now.

“You know what that shit means?” the man asks, turning to look at her. She blinks at him blearily, and when she doesn’t answer, he plants himself in a chair in front of her.

Joey, and maybe Pratt—Burke, Whitehorse? They’re all gone, or dead, or something somewhere, and now it feels less like this was her chance to really start over and more like a set of trials and tribulations to make her suffer.

Her gaze flickers to meet the man’s, and she shakes her head uncertainly. The words won’t come out, even if she thinks there’s even a chance she’d have the strength.

“It means the roads have all been closed.”

No one is coming to save you.

“It means the phone lines have been cut.”

What do we do with grief?

“It means there’s no signals getting in or out of this valley.”

Give ‘em your teeth if you have to.

Elliot feels her stomach churn violently, nauseated. She wishes this man would have left her to die—or sleep, or whatever it was her body had been trying to get her to do on that riverbank.

“But mostly,” he finishes, leaning in to look at her with a hard, flinty gaze, “it means we’re all fucked.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

A loud knock at the door echoed in the dim, stinging heat of the bath. For a moment, she felt a jolt of instinctive fear pound through her body—where was she? Was she drowning again? Had she not made it out of the river, had she—

Burke, and Joseph, and Joey getting dragged away, and Dutch, and—

But then Elliot remembered: she was at her mother’s house, and she’d run herself a bath in the big clawfoot off from the master with a vodka soda, and John Seed was here, too, and her lungs burned because she’d been sitting under the water. The sharp, splintering pain in her chest was grief, the memory of Joey's laugh and smile freshly remembered.

Breaking the surface and steadying the breath that wanted to gasp out of her through her nose, Elliot pushed any stray bubbles from her face and eyes and waited again to see if the sound was real.

Another knock came. “El?” John called from outside the bathroom, and his voice hinged on something else—something strange and foreign, and it gave her a tiny little thrill through the pit of her stomach to know she was making him feel like that. She blinked a few times, straightening up in the bathtub as the now-lukewarm water splashed around her. It had been a long time since she’d fallen asleep like that, without sporting a metric fuckton of exhaustion for days. It was probably the alcohol.

“I’m here,” she replied, feeling hollowed out and trying not to let it show in her voice, “come in. What is it?”

The door clicked open. John glanced around curiously at the bathroom—her mother had never let her use this bathroom for anything, not even to get ready for a high school dance or her graduation, and she thought maybe that made the room all the more special—all of her mother’s glittering compacts and colored perfume bottles, carefully-maintained hanging plants, the big French windows and gauzy white curtains; they all spoke to a woman who had created for herself a safe space.

She only thought, I hate that she never let me enjoy this safe space, too.

“We should be going back soon,” he said lightly, crossing the marbled floor to drag the stool from the vanity up to the side of the tub. With one arm leaned up against the porcelain, he reached the other hand out and tilted her chin; like this, covered only by the rose-scented bubble bath foaming up around the hollow of her chest, she was sure that she looked gnarly—mottled with bruises the size of Kian’s fingerprints, all over her neck and shoulders and chest, dousing her in a faded red-wine color that made her skin prickle in faint pain when John traced the slope of her collarbone.

Kian was dead, but he was still there—lingering just below her skin, a bone-deep ache and grief that she would never be rid of because no matter how dead he was, Joey was much more dead.

“—you’re thinking about,” John murmured, his eyes flickering over her face, and she leaned back against the head of the tub.

“Come again?” Elliot reached out of the tub, snagging the half-drained glass of vodka soda and downing the rest of it with a grimace that only partially cleared out the fog of grief.

“I said,” he continued lightly, fingers smoothing over bruisy skin below her collarbone, “tell me what you’re thinking about.”

I’m thinking about Joey, and your fucking cultists dragging her out of the helicopter and taking her away from me. There was no venom in the passing voice as she closed her eyes, damp hair sticking to the nape of her neck and her mother’s bath oils filling up her senses; John was touching the spot he’d once threatened to mark her with her sin. Wrath.

I think it’ll fit nicely right here, don’t you? Maybe just over your heart.

It wasn’t enough to wear it on her skin, anymore. It didn’t feel like enough, anyway. It was inside of her; a poison that she couldn’t sweat out, embedded in the sinew of her tissue now.

“I can hear those little gears turning, hellcat.”

“What do we have to do?” Elliot asked after a moment, opening her eyes, as John’s fingers traced the shape of a letter beneath her collarbone. W... R... A...

“Do?”

T...

“For the baptism,” she clarified, as the blunt drag of his nail finished the final touch of an H. “What do we have to do?”

John watched her for a moment, gaze flickering over the quickly-fading red marks he’d left on her sternum. She knew that look on his face—he was hungry for it, this thing he had been trying to get from her all along. Even after it all, he still itched to carve it out of her.

And maybe she did, too; maybe it would feel like a penance, a purging, a catharsis, a—

That’s how, she thought after a moment. That’s how they get people.

“We’ll cleanse you...” His voice trailed off and his eyes flickered back up to hers. “And then reveal your sin.”

“Cut it out of me,” Elliot supplied, exhaling a little out of her mouth.

John’s mouth twisted around a smile when her eyes traced the exposed Sloth scar she had memorized the feel of. “Real courage.”

She wondered, briefly, if it would feel the same as when she had done it before. The scar would certainly look different—no fine gossamer wisps, ghosting across her abdomen and hips and the inside of her thighs. Those were ghosts. This one—this scar John wanted to give her—would be a neon sign flashing over her head.

Do you think they’ll understand, when they read the reports of what you did to that man? Of the trail of bodies you’ve left behind yourself?

Could she have a life after this? Would it matter if she and John even left? Regardless of where they went—if they did—they would be a pair, matching in scars and matching in sin and matching matching matching until they were the same, just as much blood on her hands as there was on his.

“Then,” he continued, dipping his hand into the fragrant water before drawing it up across her bruise-mottled shoulder, “you’ll be clean.”

I liked it, she thought through the haze of alcohol and perfumed air, killing Kian. I liked it.

His fingers came up to her jaw, and he leaned against the edge of the porcelain tub and kissed her; long and luxurious, not punishing or bruising but drawn-out enough to elicit in her a pleasant, dull ache.

“Okay,” Elliot murmured, speaking the words into his mouth, into his kiss.

John paused, but did not pull away. She could taste the dredges of what swallows he’d gotten of her drink in his breath. “Okay?”

“Yeah.” She reached up and dragged him the tiny distance back in for another kiss. “I want to.” She thought, if it’s what will convince Joseph, if it’s what’ll make it so I can leave, if it means you’ll go with me, if it means I won't have to be alone, but none of those words came. It had never been her strong suit, talking about her feelings.

John exhaled, like the acquiescence—the relenting—was enough to drive him to nirvana. She could feel his smile against her mouth.

“El,” he rumbled against her mouth, fingers skimming along the slope of her jaw, “I’m gonna give you everything you want.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“Slow down.”

They’d only been driving through Fall’s End for about five minutes—not that it took too long; you could probably drive five minutes in just about any direction and hit the edge of town—when the blonde barked out the order. It was a strange juxtaposition, to have her biting out words like that when the smell of roses wafted off of her like a perfume, filling the cab from the oils in the bath.

Elliot’s voice was sharp when she spoke; her eyes were fixed on something out past her window, evening having sunk heavy and dark over the town of Fall’s End. It was a ghost town, now, but the urgency in her voice had him hitting the brake more fervently than he intended, and the truck lurched to stop.

“What is it?” John asked, and when he did Boomer growling low and angry behind him. He eyed the Heeler before he realized even the dog was looking elsewhere.

The blonde didn’t answer. She leaned forward instead, as though straining to see in the dark. Over her head, he could see the front of the Spread Eagle where they had been only a few days ago; now it was decorated with blossoms, and at its base sat two darkly-clothed figures. This far away, John couldn’t see if they were asleep or awake.

And then he did see. He saw the arterial spray against the dark wood, flickering under neon lights that buzzed in the stillness of the night; he saw the bouquet clutched between their hands; he saw the open, glassy eyes and slack jaws, and the glint of metal sitting on the ground beside each body.

Above them, written in dark, oxidized red-brown: WRATH, DO YOU WANT TO BLOOM IN ME?

“Sorry fucks,” Elliot said, her voice flinty and steeled as she leaned back into her seat. In the cab of the truck, the perfume of the bath oils radiated off of her in gentle waves, the heady, floral scent almost dizzying this concentrated and close.

John let the truck roll forward a little, scanning warily; he didn’t see any dark shapes moving behind windows, or in the distant treeline, which was what actually worried him—the presence of more, live enemies, not the suicide love-birds.

But if it bothered Elliot, if it made her feel any type of way to see these dead bodies cradling life in one last embrace, he couldn’t see it on her face. He pressed on the accelerator and glanced at her expression through the corner of his eyes; there was a steeliness there. Not empty, not as though she had stopped processing, but as though she had, and it didn’t mean anything to her.

Good, he thought. That’s how it needs to be.

The rest of the drive back was quiet. There were an unsettling amount of coupled-bodies on the drive home—propped against trees and patches of highway railings or the occasional clifface, hands interlocked as they cradled blossoms, some more intricately decorated than others. But the basis of it was always the same: a couple, slumped and glassy-eyed. Some had the words written around them, some did not. It didn’t seem to hold any pattern that he could tell.

Elliot closed her eyes and drifted in and out of sleep until they got back to the compound, the flickering fluorescents stirring her awake. As they were pulling in, Jacob was getting a truck ready to go; it was late into the evening now, almost midnight, and a sting of apprehension skittered up John’s spine at the sight of his eldest brother loading a rifle into a truck.

As soon as she had opened the door, letting Boomer out first and then following suit, Elliot looked at Jacob and said, “Where are you going?”

“Not your fuckin’ business,” Jacob replied serenely.

“Everything,” Elliot said flatly, “is my business.”

“It’s cute that you care.” Jacob flashed her a half-cocked smile. “But don’t worry, deputy, I’m a big boy.”

John slid out from the driver’s seat, watching the exchange with some apprehension. But it seemed to fizzle and die out right then and there, like Jacob and Elliot had come to some silent truce about the matter without his intervention; Elliot rolled her eyes and scoffed under her breath, heading for the bunkhouse without waiting for John.

Which was fine, because John lingered. He swung the truck keys around his finger and said, “So where are you going?”

Jacob glanced back at him over his shoulder. The redhead regarded John for a moment before he looked to make sure Elliot had closed the door behind her and said, “Couple of ours say they spotted Burke wandering around down by the Henbane.”

Oh, John thought, the words both giving him a jolt of excitement and a little of dread. Burke being missing was a problem, that was to be sure—but if they could find him? Get rid of him without ever bringing him back into contact with Elliot? The less time for conspirators to put silly ideas in her head about getting out and moving on from Hope County, the easier it was going to be to convince her of what a bad idea that was in the end.

“You’re going to go get him?” John prompted.

“Yep,” Jacob drawled, “dead or alive.”

“Preferably dead.”

The corners of Jacob’s mouth ticked upward, and he flashed his teeth. “That a request, little brother?”

Stifling his own smile, John replied lightly, “I just think it’ll solve a lot of problems if the Marshal becomes permanently lost. And if it makes my job a little easier in the process, then—”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jacob interrupted, waving his hand. I’ll see what I can do was about as good as an anything you want if it was coming from Jacob, John knew; so when he said that, and clapped John on the shoulder as he passed, it felt like an assurance more than a cautionary ‘maybe’.

John nodded, and then said, “We saw the Family.”

His eldest brother paused in his movements, and then hauled himself into the truck, looking at John expectantly.

“They’re killing themselves,” he elaborated. “At least the ones we saw. You’ll probably…”

John’s voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat and said, “It’ll be hard to miss them.”

Jacob gave one short, brief nod, slamming the door of the truck and starting it with a rattling rumble. “Sorry fucks,” he said, his words unintentionally mirroring Elliot’s words, and it was all John could do not to tell him he sounded exactly like her.

John headed for the chapel, moving with a new and reinvigorated purpose. For once—finally—things were beginning to fall into place. With Burke out of the picture, the last of the resistance having evacuated Hope County, and Elliot’s agreement to the baptism, he thought this could only indicate smooth sailing from here on out.

Well, mostly smooth. There was still the matter of their marriage, which Elliot didn’t know about—and it was a big deal, probably, for her to know that her last name was changed. As far as the law would be concerned, however, everything would check out and be perfectly binding, and when he told her she would understand that he had done it for them, that he had done it because they needed that extra measure of protection in the instance that—

Don’t, he thought to himself, pushing the door open. We are not considering the idea that the End isn’t coming.

“John,” Joseph greeted him, sounding surprised. It looked like he had just been walking towards the doors himself to leave. His brother's gaze flickered over him inquisitively. “It’s late.”

“Elliot wants to do the baptism,” he said, trying to quell his delight at the gentle lifting of Joseph’s brows at the news. “I’ll do it as soon as you want, Joseph.”

The man paused. He seemed to roll the announcement around in his head for a while, the white leather-bound bible tucked under his arm as his eyes flickered absently over the wooden flooring.

“She’s agreed to it,” John tried again. “To the—”

“Yes,” Joseph replied, “I understand.”

Another moment of silence stretched. John kept waiting for it—the happiness, the pride that Joseph should feel at him having accomplished this last great feat. Anything, John thought, I’d take anything, if you just gave me something to work with.

“Tomorrow,” he said finally, and reached out, planting a hand on John’s shoulder. He squeezed, and a bit of relief flooded John’s system. “You baptize our deputy tomorrow—”

My deputy.

“—and then we will prepare to retreat for the End,” he finished. “Yes?”

John nodded. “Yes, of course.”

“Good.” Joseph regarded him for a moment, and then, at last, a little smile quirked the edges of his lips. “You’ve done well, John.”

He felt his shoulders sag a little in relief. “Thank you,” he said, “Joseph, I—”

“And I will forgive you the transgression of your lust,” Joseph continued mildly, “as you will make sure that Elliot joins us completely and wholly. Isn’t that right?”

The dread returned. Just a little; it was how Joseph operated the most effectively. Tiny, light dosings of dread, just to remind you who was in control, who it was that ran things around here. He cleared his throat.

“I’ve already,” John began, “confessed to those which—”

Joseph’s hand came to the back of his neck. “You have been fixated on our deputy since the moment she started taking things from us. You can re-commit an offense,” he said, his words echoing Jacob’s, and for a moment John felt a spike of anger—that they had been talking about him when he wasn’t around. “You’re not so wrathful as to go to such lengths to bring her to heel for that alone. And even if you were,” Joseph added, “it wouldn’t matter, as you had already given in to your sin.”

“She’s my wife,” John insisted, and his words were coming out angrier than he wanted; as always, Joseph could slide right under his skin like it was nothing, like it was second nature to him.

“A fact she remains, as of yet, unaware of. Regardless, you lusted after her far before that, and acted on it before then, as well. I’ve let it go because of our unusual circumstances, but you understand,” his brother replied, his words a blunt-force-trauma slap to John’s exhausted brain. A moment of silence stretched between them as John worked the words around in his mouth—I actually don’t understand, nothing about that changed how I treated her in my care, I did everything you asked of me and I shouldn’t have to pay—but Joseph said, “At any rate, all will be forgiven once we are awaiting the End." And then, pointedly, "All of us.”

John swallowed. He opened his mouth to say something, any of the thoughts running around in his brain, but Joseph dropped his hand and brushed past him, humming lightly under his breath.

“Goodnight, John.”

He stood there for a little while longer after Joseph had left, turning the words around in his brain. Once again, he felt very far away from Joseph; but all this time, he had been working hard to do exactly what his brother had asked of him. Elliot might have already been converted to their cause if he’d been allowed to break her in the way he’d wanted to before. But it was Joseph who had insisted on a more merciful route, Joseph who had reiterated step by step that to do so by mercy was the way it needed to be done for the deputy.

And now, it was Joseph criticizing the steps he’d taken, in adverse conditions, to give him what he wanted.

John pushed the troubling thoughts out of his brain. Another place, another time, he might wallow on them a little more—perhaps a time when he could drink his way through them, come back to reconciliation about the fear that Joseph somehow managed to strike in him with ease, deal with it then.

When he finally walked himself to the bunkhouse, he found Elliot sitting with Faith outside the door, smoking a cigarette while they exchanged quiet words. Faith flashed a radiant smile at John as he approached, her eyes glimmering playfully.

“Ladies,” John greeted, trying to shake his last conversation with Joseph. “Nice evening for an outside chat?”

“Fucking cold,” Elliot replied, taking a drag of her cigarette and blowing the smoke out and away from Faith.

“I was just telling El how happy I am that she’s here,” Faith told him, coming to a stand. Her very casual and nonchalant use of the nickname El was enough to spike a little suspicion in John, but when she spoke, Elliot’s eyes flickered like she was trying not to smile, like the words meant something to her and she was trying to remain stoic.

Elliot said, not remarking on the nickname and tapping the ash from the end of her cigarette, “That’s two out of four siblings that like me. Think I can go for a full house?”

Three, John thought absently, but he didn’t say; the words would have shredded his mouth on the way out.

“Well,” his sister continued lightly, “I’m exhausted. Goodnight, you two.”

“Night,” John replied, keeping his voice idle as she left. He extended a hand down to Elliot, and she took it, hauling herself to her feet; he snagged the cigarette out of her hand and said, “Speaking of sleep, how about we don’t cram it on that twin bunk tonight?”

Elliot watched him smoke her cigarette down, her gaze flickering back up to his. “It’s cute how you think I’m just automatically going to let you sleep with me all the time.”

“It’s cute how you act like you don’t like it,” he replied, pitching his voice low, “especially when we aren’t sleeping in bed.”

She took her cigarette back, finishing it and dropping it to the ground to stamp it out with her shoe. “I suppose I wouldn’t mind not having you breathing down my neck all night.”

“Oh? You suppose?”

“I’m losing the motivation to continue this conversation,” Elliot cautioned in a murmur, even as he leaned in and kissed her, his hand instinctively coming up to the back of her neck to keep her there. She didn’t pull away, or even try to; instead, after he’d kissed her breathless, she continued, “Are you going to take me or what, Slick?”

He laughed, the sound billowing out of his mouth at her little country-drawl come peeking through.

You will baptize our deputy tomorrow.

His fingers curling into the semi-dry hair at the nape of her neck, and he kissed her again—harder, now, open-mouthed and hungry, until he could feel her fingers knotting into the front of his shirt.

“Tomorrow,” he said into the kiss, “tomorrow we’ll do it. A new cleansing, revealing your sin.”

“Fast,” she murmured.

“So Joseph has decreed.”

Elliot pulled back to look at him; he wanted to lean in, chase her mouth with another kiss, but she said, “Do you always do what your brother says? I thought pre-marital fucking was a big no.”

The words twisted hot and traitorous in his stomach. He wanted to say, technically, we’ve only done that once, but he knew better. After her little display back at her mother’s house, he knew better.

He swallowed back the venom and said, carefully articulating his words, “If we could refrain from ruining a perfectly good moment—”

“By talking,” Elliot deadpanned.

“By criticizing,” he clarified, “that would be wonderful.”

She regarded him amusedly, one brow arching upward loftily. She was clearly thinking about something, working it around in her brain in a place that he couldn’t reach—still, parts of her remained locked away from him, parts of her that he desperately wanted to get his hands on and hadn’t yet.

“Well,” she relented at last, “I’d hate to ruin a moment. Show me where this luxurious bed is, huh?”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Elliot could tell that her acquiescence unsettled John. She could tell that he had been expecting more of a fight out of her; she was so tired of fighting, though. She was so tired, and she was so worn out, and sometimes she could feel her brain switching off in the middle of something happening, like a greater cosmic power was consistently turning her Do Not Disturb sign on.

She’d feel better in the morning, maybe. It helped that she hadn’t looked at the photos littering her mother’s house for too long, and that she’d drank through most of her time there to keep the memories at bay. Elliot didn’t want to linger on thoughts of running barefoot through the house, shrieking with laughter as her mother called out for her to slow down; she didn’t want to think about how many times she and Joey had curled up on the same couch that John Seed had kissed her on, eating lemon bars and flipping through teen magazines while her mother drank and hummed in the kitchen.

There were good memories there. There were memories of a time when Elliot felt like the entire world was within her reach—she could go anywhere, be anything, become anyone she wanted back then.

Things had changed.

She had changed. And even though John’s promise wavered, even though it still lingered in her chest uncertainly like a beast of its own, she thought maybe he meant it. She had seen the tension between John and Joseph as of late. Something about their interactions was waning thin, worried and worn between them, and that meant that when John said he wanted those things with her—a home, a life—that maybe she could trust him.

Isn’t that a pretty thought? A wicked part of her intoned, vicious. The man who’s lied and lied and lied to you, being truthful for the first time.

But she was tired, and she was different, and being different took work and energy and she didn’t want to think about that. What else could she think, anyway? She could operate off of nothing else.

Admittedly, not trying to fit both of their bodies on a twin bed was doing wonders for her mood. John had led her to another small building within the compound; it was laid out much like the other bunkhouse had been, with a bathroom and a small table, but the bed was queen-sized and pushed up against the far wall, tucked into a corner. With Boomer having taken off with his nose to the ground—likely chasing a scent—Elliot had stripped out of her jeans and crawled into the bed with a laborious sigh that only partially revealed the relief she felt.

“I have never,” John said amusedly as she pulled the blankets up, “seen you more relaxed.”

“You did interfere with my life at an inopportune time. My bed is king-sized at home, you know; nothing like sleeping diagonally on a giant bed.”

He laughed; as he shed his own clothes—his belt, jeans, shirt—he watched her like he was trying to figure out why it was she had become so agreeable and so quickly, why she hadn’t picked another fight with him.

Blissfully, he didn’t ask. John crawled into the bed next to her, and already he was reaching to wind his arm around her waist; when he pulled her close to him, she felt that pleasant little coil of dopamine hit her brain, and she thought, what a time, that John’s hands on me make it feel like I’m not drifting away.

She thought to say it, for just a moment; she thought maybe she could give John that, because she’d been taking and taking and taking and she didn’t think she was giving him anything.

The words didn’t come so easily to her, so instead of saying them, Elliot reached up and dragged him down to kiss him. I’m gonna give you everything you want, he’d said, and just remembering those words made her feel too-warm. She’d never, ever had anyone devoted to her—not like this, not in the way that John was, dragging his mouth reverently down her neck and sliding his hand along the back of her thigh.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” John said, murmuring the words into the skin of her neck. His mouth skimmed lower, dragging down her sternum; his hands pushed up the hem of her tank top and she felt the slick, hot flicker of his tongue against the part of her that she knew was scarred, ghosting and intent.

“Can’t,” she managed out, trying to steady her breathing, “when you’re—”

“You can.” He nudged her legs apart, glancing up at her inquisitively, the blankets dragging down with him. “Tell me.” He kissed the inside of her thigh, open-mouthed, and she felt her breath shallow a little.

“I’m thinking about—what you said, back at the house,” she managed out, as John’s breath fanned across her skin.

John’s eyes fixed on hers again. His fingers skimmed beneath the hem of her underwear; he was waiting for her to tell him to stop. When she didn’t, he tugged the fabric down, sliding it completely out of the way and discarding it somewhere on the floor.

The apprehension curled up, high and hot, in her throat. Still, forced herself to relax, to think about John’s hands gripping her hips and his eyes and his mouth and—

“When you said,” Elliot continued, “you’re going to give me everything I want, and that you wanted—”

He pressed his mouth to her; she felt the sound he made into the gesture, her vibrating straight through her and short-circuiting her brain. Instinctively, her fingers went to his hair and knotted. She didn’t know if she was trying to ground herself again or if she was trying to keep John there, but the intention didn’t matter—as soon as she pulled, even a little, she felt John’s tongue slide sly and wicked against her and she moaned without thinking about it, the sound as involuntary as breathing.

It felt too raw, too vulnerable, and she tried to think is this too much? Am I feeling too much right now?, but the pervasive thought in her brain was: yes yes yes, this is what we need, this is what we want. To be loved, to be touched, to be worshipped.

“Can't get enough of you.” John's voice was rich and dark against her skin. “So sweet for me, hellcat.”

“John, we—you don’t—” Elliot started breathlessly, but the words were strangled in her throat by a half-sighed whimper when John’s mouth returned to where he wanted her the most and he groaned, like he was starved for her, like he could barely stand the thought of not having his mouth on her right that instant.

“Fuck, I wanted this so bad,” he murmured huskily, reverent as he planted kisses along the slope of her hip. “Wanted those sounds you make, and the way you’re looking at me—knew you’d make the prettiest fucking noises when I got my mouth on you—”

Another desperate sound came out of her, just loud enough that John's response was to drag his teeth along the dip and curve of her hip bone. He sighed dreamily and leaned in to flatten his tongue against the neediest part of her; the gesture served only to make Elliot moan and squirm, and her hips instinctively arched upward to try and garner some friction—any friction—but John's hands held her down against the bed.

“Love when you’re desperate for me,” he rumbled against her, breathing the words against her skin and making her breath stutter out of her in an uneven exhale. He pressed his mouth back down, tongue flicking and dragging wet, hot pleasure against her, his gaze half-lidded and not once straying from Elliot’s.

It was almost too much, the whole lot of it; John, saying filthy things against her while he ate her out, his eyes hungry and his mouth hungrier and the way that he dug his fingers into her hips and—

“F-Fucking—tease,” she managed out, but he shook his head, rumbling against her and drawing another spiral of heat straight into her stomach, sharp and unforgiving.

“Don’t you like it when I take my time with you? You certainly seem like you’re enjoying yourself.” He hooked his arms underneath her legs and tugged her down against him. She squirmed, her lashes fluttering when he let his breath fan across her. “Thinking about how I promised you whatever you wanted. Are you going to tell me, then? What you want?”

Elliot could tell that he loved saying that, I’ll give you whatever you want, because he knew what it did to her; that it thrilled her, this shred of power that he gave her, offered to her. John dragged his tongue against her, his gaze heated and nearly blown-black with want, and stayed exactly there between her legs.

“John,” Elliot moaned, “I—want you to fuck me—” And then, in an effort to feel a little like she was in control: “Please.”

The word had its desired effect; she could feel the tension radiating off of him, straining against his carefully-manicured veneer of being in charge. And then John groaned at her words, his own eyes fluttering shut for a moment, as though her words were enough to make him need a moment before he opened them again. He pulled back from her, sitting up so that he could press his fingers into her, and fuck if it didn’t make all the more delicious to have John watching her while he did.

He said, his voice hoarse with want, “El, you’re so fucking—God, you’re so fucking gorgeous like this—asking so nicely for me—”

“Fuck me,” Elliot insisted, her voice verging dangerously close to a wail as he changed the pace of his fingers very little. She thought if John kept looking at her like that, if he kept saying those things, she might finish just like this—and she didn’t want to. “Stop teasing me and f—fuck me like I know you want to—like we both want—”

It was enough. Or maybe it was the thing John had been waiting to hear from her, because it prompted him to shed what little clothing remained between them and sidle back between her legs. Reaching down to cradle her face with his hand as he kissed her, she could taste herself on his mouth; she could feel the heady, intoxicating drag of him against her and God he was taking his fucking time.

“Want this to last,” he moaned, burying his face into her neck, “fuck, so good for me, baby, so wet already and I just can’t fucking… Can’t fucking get my fill of you.”

Elliot keened her agreement breathlessly. Yes, she wanted to say, yes, I’m so good for you, now please hurry up and fuck me, the thought driving a wedge of heat straight down her spine. As soon as John slid inside of her, he was panting into her skin, biting out swears as he tried to keep himself from snapping into her.

“J-John,” she whimpered. Her brain felt muggy, hazy with want; like she wasn’t going to be able to think about anything else except for him, and that was exactly what she wanted. Not to think. “So—feels so good—”

“Yeah,” he gritted out, moving slowly, too slowly, “fuck yeah, this is what you needed, huh? Needed me to fuck you like this—nice and slow, make you feel me every—single—time—I—”

It felt good to give him this. She hadn’t lied, when she’d said that before—that she liked giving him what he wanted, that it made her feel in-control and desired and loved and maybe that was the worst part of it all, that her brain might have been making those things up as a way to justify this. But it didn’t matter in that moment; all she could think about was the feeling of him rocking into her, hips slotted perfectly against hers and his mouth on her neck and the faded scent of his cologne mixing with the floral scent of her own remaining perfume.

Elliot sighed, “Yes, John,” in agreement, and pulled him up for a kiss; his movements hitched just a little, the delicious drag of the uneven pacing almost sending her right over the edge. So close so close, her body said, so she knotted her fingers into his hair tight and said it again; “Yes, yes, yes,” against his mouth, moaning it, until John was grinding out swear between his teeth.

“Not yet,” the brunette moaned, almost frantic with desire. “I want you to come, I want to feel you get fucking wet for me, baby—”

She knew that she could make him beg, that she could make him come undone if she really wanted to. But for this moment, Elliot thought she liked this; she liked letting him take control, liked squirming and shifting underneath him until each cant of his hips against hers had sparks of pleasure flickering behind her eyes.

John’s mouth went to her neck. His teeth dragged, and then he bit down harder than he had before; the pain bloomed wet and hot, and she moaned, her lashes fluttering as it sent her sprinting sprinting sprinting right over that edge.

“Yes,” he ground out, “yes, fuck yes, so fucking good for me, El, s-so—good.”

Elliot kissed him hard when he came, his fingers reigniting old bruises on her hips and her own high still cruising, careening prettily down; the surrender was almost better, the act of giving in and giving John what he wanted nearly as intoxicating as the idea that he was hers.

Mine, she thought dreamily as he dragged his tongue over the bite mark on her neck, the word one that wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to her but which hadn’t occurred to her in this context before. For that suspended moment in time, nothing else could matter to her; there was no space in her brain to worry about anything except the weight of his body against hers and the wicked, delicious aftershocks radiating throughout her body.

All she could think about was how nice it felt to not be so alone.

It feels good for him to be mine.

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When he awoke the next morning, there were three soft knocks at the door. John blinked, forcing himself to work through the tired haze of his mind, sitting up and reluctantly leaving the warmth of the bed and—

And of Elliot, curled up against him, stirring from her sleep.

“John?” It was Faith, mild-tempered and shy; like she knew exactly what she was going to find if she opened the door and she was trying not to let him know. It wasn’t that it bothered her; it was that Faith was exceptionally good at keeping herself in-check, so any time her tone deviated from serene was a red flag.

“I’m awake,” he called back, and even he could hear how hoarse his voice was coming out of him, rough with sleep.

There was a pause, and then Faith said sweetly, “Joseph says we need to begin soon.”

The blonde beside him rolled onto her other side, hauling the blankets up to her chin. “Fuck off.”

“We’ll be ready in thirty,” John called back.

“He said that he wants me to get Elliot ready,” she continued, and there it was; that sly little curl in her voice, the one that reminded him exactly of why it was Joseph kept her around.

John passed a hand over his face tiredly, rubbing his eyes for a moment before he cleared his throat and climbed out of bed. “Sure, alright, Faith, just—give me a minute—”

“Take your time.”

The implication hung there—that she would politely wait until he was done getting dressed, but that she wouldn’t be leaving to wait, so that anything he wanted to say to Elliot was going to have to be saved for later. Haphazardly pulling some clean clothes out of the dresser and onto his body, he glanced back over his shoulder to see Elliot sitting up in bed; she cradled the blanket against her chest and blinked tiredly at him.

“It’s time,” John said. “For the—”

“Yeah, I heard.” Elliot carded her fingers through her hair and slid out from under the blankets. Like this—in various arrays of undress—John could see the purpled bruising along her sternum and neck and shoulder, a few of them on her legs, beginning to fade into a wine color and even lighter still around the edges.

I’ll have to be careful when I’m writing her sin, he thought absently as he buttoned his shirt. As Elliot muddled her way through pulling on last night’s clothes, he closed the distance between them and reached for her; she let him, though maybe only because she was still half-asleep, with the daylight still fresh and new and the outside mostly still dark.

John cradled her face and leaned down to kiss her. “You and me,” he said against her mouth, “right, hellcat?”

It’s not a lie, he reasoned when she kissed him back. It’s not a lie to say that.

“You and me,” Elliot agreed. Her voice sounded thick, like he’d said the exact thing she wanted to hear and it had caught her off guard, and he felt a little thrill of victory in his chest.

Once she was mostly-dressed, he made his way to the door and nudged it open. True to her word, Faith had waited patiently; a swath of dark fabric was draped over her arm, silken, and as she stepped past John she said, “Okay, John, girls only now.”

Obediently, he stepped out of the building, turning and looking at Elliot over his shoulder. The eye contact only lasted for a minute before Faith beamed at him and shut the door. Inside, he could hear Faith saying something to Elliot; making out the words, however, was near impossible.

“Right,” he said under his breath. “This is fine. Everything’s fine.”

It was the first time he’d said it to himself, in a long time, and it felt true.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“It’s so fucking cold,” Elliot said, shivering. The silk slip of a dress that Faith had told her she needed to wear for the “baptism” barely did anything against the early-morning chill. Dawn had nearly crept all the way over the distant mountains, and as they picked their way down to the water, she wished they’d just let her wear the clothes that she had brought. Naturally, Eden’s Gate—and Joseph, by proxy—were completely incapable of doing anything reasonably.

“I know,” Faith replied sympathetically, their fingers intertwined as they picked their way down the path. “But at least it’s only for a little while. In and out of the water, and then you can change again.” And then, as though it were meant to comfort her, she added, “Blue’s your color.”

Elliot grimaced. Blue was John’s color. “Yeah,” she agreed dryly, “it matches well with my bruises, don’t you think?”

The woman laughed, giving her hand a little squeeze, and for a brief second in time Elliot felt a twinge of regret. There wasn’t too much time to think about it; by the time she was opening her mouth to apologize—an action which Faith seemed to elicit in her quite easily, when overall apologizing was not something that came so naturally to her—they had broken the treeline and all thoughts went sweeping out of her brain.

Joseph stood at the edge of the shore, but she barely thought of him; she barely thought of anything except for John, standing nearly waist-deep in the water, the Book of Joseph held open in one hand and his eyes fixed on her. It sent a little flurry of aches through her, reminding her that once, what felt like a thousand years ago, she had wanted to kill him. Spit in his face. Leave her mark on him and throw his entire fucking family behind bars.

But maybe Joseph had been right, when he asked if she really thought she was going to be accepted by the people she had done all of this to protect.

John's gaze swept over her as they came near; a grin split his face, and with his empty hand he reached for her. She was vaguely aware of Joseph saying something, light and tranquil, but the words didn't register in her brain. She was only barely aware of Faith letting go of her. With that same hand, she took John’s outstretched one, and he tugged lightly, guiding her into the chilly Autumnal waters; where it barely reached John’s waist, the water just crested above her belly button, and she felt the goosebumps spreading.

John cleared his throat. His eyes swept over the page in the book, before he closed it and held it out for Joseph. When the man took it, standing just at the edge of the water, he turned back to Elliot and murmured, low and barely above the sound of the water lapping around them, “You and me?”

Her stomach twisted and lurched uncomfortably, but she nodded. She’d had barely an opportunity to reconcile this moment with herself. She thought, maybe, if she made it a rebirth for herself—if she let Joseph think that it was for him, but in her mind and in the marrow of her bones it was for her, that would be what mattered. But it was hard to think that way when John started reciting the words from the book, words that sparked in her memories of the last time this had been happening.

Hands, gripping her shirt, plunging her under the water over and over and over again. The “scripture” bleeding into her head, into her heart, muffled occasionally by the water. John’s voice, slick with venom, when he said, “This one’s not clean.”

When John finished speaking, he reached up; still stuck in the waking nightmare-memory, Elliot’s hand reached up to grip his arm where the sleeve had been rolled up.

John, plunging her under the water. Holding her. Dark dark dark, and her voice rolling the word weak around as she fought for air and struggled to break the surface—

But now, his hands cradled against the pillar of her neck; now, he looked at her reverently, like she was something to be worshipped.

“Here,” the brunette said, his voice low and soft, and somewhere in the back of her mind his words overlapped with a memory that at once felt both too sharp and too foggy to recall; “with me.”

“Okay,” she whispered. He smoothed his hand along her back, between her shoulder blades, and then pulled her under.

It took every ounce of her self-control not to fight it. Every fucking ounce of it, and she still caught herself tensing like she was ready to. John kept her there, one hand between her shoulders and one hand on her sternum, the light pressure digging a little into the remaining bruises.

And he kept her there. And kept her there. And—

Above the water, somewhere out there, she heard the sound of John saying something; more voices echoed back, more than just Joseph and Faith. He pulled her up out of the water abruptly; the sudden movement had her gasping for air, her nails digging into his forearm, and she thought, he was going to let me, he was going to let me fucking drown, I—

“I’ve got you,” John said, steadying her; certainly he could feel the rapid pulse of her heart. There was something strange about his tone—it was hard, tense and tight, and she saw it in his face, too.

Shivering ferociously, Elliot kept her hand gripping his arm. She started, “John, why did you—”

“Rookie?”

The familiar voice had her head jerking back to the shoreline. There were more people there, now. There was Joseph with Faith beside him, and just at the edge of the water and staring at her, was Cameron Burke.

Behind him, Jacob flashed his teeth in a wolfish grin.

“See?” Jacob said, slapping his hand onto Burke's back like an old friend playing too rough. “Told you she was just fine.”

The Marshal’s hands and feet were unbound, but he swayed on his feet, and Elliot saw that his pupils were blown wide and dark—he reeked of a sickly-sweet floral scent that felt familiar, tingled somewhere in the back of her mind—

She couldn’t think. She couldn’t think about any of that; her brain felt like its competency had been completely reduced, that the strain of focusing on more than one thing at a time had become too much. And here, now, Burke was staring at her, and when he said it again—when he said, “Rook, is that you?”—his voice broke, hoarse and wretched.

“B—” Elliot’s throat closed tight. The air had been sucked out of her lungs; she felt the ache in her chest bloom fresh and hot and new, and it was grief—grief and shame, reopening old wounds that she had hoped would be long-since healed over.

With me? Burke’s pulse, steadfast and firm, under her fingertips.

The man’s expression crumpled. She let go of John’s arm and went to wade through the water; his hand caught her elbow and held her fast.

When she looked back at him, his expression was unreadable. He said, “El,” but that was all he said, and she heard the strain of something close to desperation in his voice. Don’t, it said, without saying it at all. Don’t do this.

With her teeth chattering and a violent spike of anger racing through her, Elliot jerked her arm out of his grip and stumbled her way up onto the bank; Burke reached for her almost immediately, catching her arms and pulling her up out of the frigid water and to him. His body felt feverishly hot, even though the cotton of his shirt, his vest long-since discarded.

You dig and keep going anyway. No matter what.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he managed out as he gripped her, and she felt his eyes sweeping over the exposed bruising, like war paint on her skin.

“Burke,” Elliot said, her voice breaking, and oh, she thought, oh, there it is; the release, the catharsis, because she was crying at the overwhelming sense of shame and relief in equal amounts at the sight of the man who had walked her through her first real firefight; big, gasping, grieving sobs, hiccuping in her chest violently because she kept thinking about Burke—she kept thinking about him grabbing her hand and saying, we’re getting out of here, and how he was here now. Now that she was—

This.

“God, what the fuck did they do to you?” Burke asked, his voice barely breaking the sound-barrier of a whisper. He pulled her forward, closer, protectively. “I’m so—I’m so fuckin’ sorry, I—”

“Found him wandering out by the old prison,” Jacob explained, presumably to the others and not to her, “having a nice little trip. Weren’t you, Burke?”

The shame washed up in her again, a nauseating cocktail that reminded her of all the things she had done. All of the awful things she had done, while Burke was out there, alone, wandering and confused and tripping on Bliss overloads and now he was here. Now he was here, and she kept thinking, what have I done?

“Hey,” Burke said against the top of her hair as she clutched at him, “I got you, Rook, I’m sorry, I’m here.”

I'm sorry, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn't come out. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm ruined now.

“Well,” Joseph said, his voice tightly-controlled and forcibly serene, “I suppose we should give the deputy and her Marshal a moment to catch up, shouldn’t we?”

#far cry 5 fic #fc5 fic #john seed x deputy #john seed x original female character #ch: elliot honeysett #fic: ancient names #people can pry burke from my cold dead hands #we stan one (1) man who actually treats elliot like a capable person #also i wish i could say sorry about the smut but u know what?#im not #i'm only sorry this shit is so long and nearly incomprehensible #anyway not to get sappy in the tags but!!!!!!#THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU everyone who reads #i literally get emotional thinking about how i never thought i was going to fit in to this fandom #anyway that's all go back to regularly scheduled tumblr feed

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adarlingwrites · 4 years

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Absolution

Summary:

noun: formal release from guilt, obligation, or punishment

The Capital Wasteland lauded the Lone Wanderer as a hero, a Messiah, a savior who’s willing to give her life for the Good Fight. Beyond the legends, the propaganda, and the mythification that surrounded her legacy, there is only one person who knew her bare soul. She gave him his absolution, and now he will fight for hers.

XXVI

January 12, 2278.

Good question.

Of all the operatives I was trained with, Vanth was the one who took to the program best. Our proctors will ask her to jump, and she’ll jump. If a contract holder asks her to beat a civilian up, she’ll do it without blinking. If a corrupt old pervert asks her to ride her fellow operative so he can get off, she’ll do it without remorse.

It didn’t happen just once, either.

Vanth’s just one of the many people I would’ve loved to put shotgun shells in, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget her cruelty.

Even before the first incident happened, Vanth had always been ruthless. Mag would scold me for calling her a bitch. She said that Vanth is just a product of her upbringing, made worse by the program. And yet, Mag isn’t capable of that kind of shit. Fuck, that’s the damn reason why she was designated as the medic. She’d rather keep us alive than shoot at anyone.

Vanth was different.

If there’s anything worse than Vanth’s complacency, it was her enthusiasm in inflicting all that hurt on other people. Her cruelty comes from the hatred those responsible for the indoctrination instilled in us: hatred for the insubordinate, hatred for the Reds, hatred for anyone who doesn’t bow to the will of the United States of America and its thirteen commonwealths, and hatred for anyone different. She took all that crap and fucking internalized it.

She hated the protestors for making a mockery of the government. She hated her fellow operatives for failing where she succeeded. She hated Mag. She hated me.

That snake-eyed blonde bitch enjoyed hurting us.

Sometimes, I imagine what life would have been like if I had been as complacent and obedient as Vanth was, if Magwayen didn’t plant ideas that contradict our conditioning in my head, and if Percy didn’t come 200 years later to help me break free from the contract.

I imagine what kind of man, if I can call myself that, I would be if I didn’t have remorse, or if I didn’t have my moral code that I kept to myself, until this woman crawled out of her hole in the ground and appealed to my better nature.

I decided that I do not like that version of me.

All this time, Percy was waiting for my answer patiently, her hands folded under her chin, while she lies on top of me. I can feel her warmth and softness of her body, then I remember Ahzrukhal’s threat to her. I remember the Talon Merc’s orders.

Something dark stirs my decrepit brain.

If they had given me the order, and I had been that man who has no remorse, I would have been like Vanth.

I would have been like Stevie.

A rapist.

Percy’s rapist.

Fucking hell. That’s just sick.

Gently, I push my partner off me and sit up. I turn away from her, ashamed of the thoughts I’ve had. Her words in the hotel room in Rivet City echoes back. The fact that these thoughts disturb me and I feel disgusted at the thought of forcing myself on anyone should reassure me.

I should feel reassured that I am not like Vanth.

But I still feel like shit.

Percy wouldn’t push me to answer if I didn’t want to, I know, but given the circumstances, with Eulogy Jones exposing my past, Percy learning about my fellow operatives, and now me blurting my rapist’s name in my sleep because of a nightmare… I’m willing to pick at the scabs and the leftover bandages off of the goddamn wound.

Maybe this time, it’ll have a chance to heal properly.

“Vanth to me is what Stevie was to you.”

My throat felt dry as I confessed that. Percy seemed stunned. She didn’t say a word or move an inch, probably waiting for me to continue talking, or just taken aback by my admission.

“May 5, 2077. It was my eighteenth birthday… and our contract holder then thought that a nice fuck from my teammate would be a great birthday gift. I couldn’t get any enjoyment out of it even if my body did. I didn’t want it. But I couldn’t say no.”

“I’m sorry,” Percy whispers.

“It was centuries ago. She’s just one of many.”

“That doesn’t make it any right.”

“I know. I was afraid I’d turn out like her.”

I can hear Percy gasp in realization. “So that explains your reaction in the hotel… and how you managed to resist the Talon Merc’s orders. I’m sorry Charon. Had I known where you were coming from when we had that talk, I shouldn’t have made it all about myself.”

“Don’t apologize. I wasn’t ready to talk about it then, anyway. If you didn’t talk to me about what happened to you that night, I wouldn’t be anywhere near confronting my own problems now.”

“Okay. You were also saying my name, while you were dreaming. Big guy, what did you dream of?”

I inhaled deeply.

“I dreamed that she killed you, just as she killed Mag on the day the bombs fell, and I was underneath her again. You… you get the picture.”

Silence.

Gingerly, her fingers pressed against my sides, and she leans over, the contact feeling like a request for permission and a comforting touch at the same time. I held her hands and wrapped her arms around my chest, or at least, what their length permits. Her soft cheek against the side of my neck, the muscles and veins underneath exposed, she whispered where my ear would’ve been.

“Do you want to continue talking, or should I just hold you?”

Heartbeat hammering, my hand wanders to hers, dwarfing it, and I give it a squeeze.

“Hold me.”

“Let’s get to bed so I can do that properly, then.”

She leads me by the hand up to our bedroom, where I lie on our bed, still facing the door out of habit. Percy presses the back of my head against her chest, and she rubs little circles on my shoulder. This won’t go away overnight, but at that moment, I felt safe.

“You’re an angel, you know that?” I tell her.

“Pfft. If you were someone else, I’d have pushed you off the bed for calling me that.”

Percy drapes her arm over me, and I fall asleep listening to her heartbeat.

I didn’t have any more nightmares.

When I woke up hours later, she wasn’t beside me anymore.

Percy’s voice was muffled as she spoke to someone downstairs. I threw on proper clothes, and went down the steps.

“Percy, next time, I’d appreciate a heads up when y’all are plotting something in this town.”

“Are we in trouble, sheriff?” Percy asks.

“Let’s discuss that when you get to the saloon. See you there.”

Lucas Simms was outside our doorstep, tipping his hat at her. Percy nods at him and closes the door.

“What did the sheriff say?”

“He needs to speak to us in the saloon. Something about the town’s security. This must be about what the slavers did to Doc Church while we were gone… Jesus what have I done?”

“Is the old man alive?”

“He is, thank God. But he’s not fine. Sheriff Simms said that it would be better if I see for myself.”

I nodded grimly. It must be bad.

“Let’s get ready. I need to pick up Dogmeat and get more winter clothes from Moira after that, too.”

Percy threw on a black shirt, then her Vault suit, followed by her jacket. She put on the cap she wore on the day I met her, grabbed her scarf on the way out, and I followed her out the house.

The tenseness came back to her shoulders. I squeezed her hand to reassure her, and she didn’t let it go.

The door to Gob’s Saloon swung open, and Dogmeat ran over to lick Percy’s face, Gob running after him. DeLoria was also there, with a few people from the Abolitionists, and Paladin Cross. Then, we were met by the townsfolk, whooping and cheering.

What the hell?

“I got you good!” Sheriff Simms exclaimed, clapping his hands. “Y'all really think we wouldn’t celebrate when a citizen of Megaton was responsible for bringing down Paradise Falls? The day you went through the gates, I knew I had a good feeling about you, girl!”

Percy’s standing stiff as a pole, eyes wide. “B-but Doc Church, and the slavers coming here and-”

“They can’t put me down that easily.” Doc Church’s voice. The old man comes into view, in crutches, one of his legs in bandages.

Percy gasps, her hands flying to her mouth. “God, Doc what have they done to your leg?”

“They mangled the hell out of my leg but the Sheriff managed to chase ‘em off before they could do anything else. Oh, don’t cry you big baby, I knew the risk when I decided to help you.”

The tenseness in Percy’s shoulders were replaced by shudders from her sobbing.

“I figured the town could use more vigilance ever since that Burke character turned up planning to blow us up. He might’ve ended up killing me if you weren’t a fast shot, too. Now, don’t you cry Percy, dear girl, you’ve done us some good again,” Simms reassures her, patting her back like a father comforting a child.

Nova comes over and pulls Percy to a corner, where she sits with Moira. Butch saunters over and before I can watch the awkwardness that followed, Simms walks over to me.

“And I suppose I owe you my thanks, too,” Simms said, extending his hand. “You’ve been a good friend to Percy. And any friend of hers is a friend of this town. Consider yourself a Megaton citizen too, Charon.”

I gave it a firm and quick shake. The sheriff didn’t recoil in disgust, and just tipped his hat afterwards.

“You kids have some fun. I can’t abandon my duties as sheriff, now.”

“Oh, c’mon Simms! Just one drink!” one of the patrons yell.

I can’t say that I feel overwhelmed by the crowd; I’ve been a bouncer in the Ninth Circle after all. I knew how rowdy people can get when they’re shitfaced. I’ve stopped brawls before. I’ve endured the obnoxious laughter and yelling.

But as I watched my partner surrounded by her friends and being celebrated by strangers from my corner, the gravity of our differences finally sank in.

Usually, when people see me, their first instinct is to stay clear, and regard me with fear or disgust. Sometimes both. When people see Percy, unless they’re raiders or slavers, they greet her, run to her for help, or check her out. Damn, I think that Bittercup kid from Big Town managed to do it all in that order.

Percy really is doing her best to do good. Half of the time, I don’t even know where she can find the motivation to stay that way in this shitsack of a world. Me? I’m just a broken old ghoul who had committed crimes that would send me straight to hell.

She told me that she’s just about to turn twenty the next month. Still so damn young to be shouldering this much responsibility, and yet here she was, organizing people to target slaver rings and doing her part in bringing clean water to the wasteland. On the other hand, I’m past two hundred, and I’m not sure how long I have before I become one of the mindless ferals.

My partner is burning bright, while my fire is slowly dying out.

The worst part is, I want her more than ever.

I shouldn’t be with her. She should be with pretty young smoothskins too.

Looks like I might have to turn her down, if she finally decides to stop waiting.

Percy has no future with me.

My train of thought was interrupted by Gob.

“Hey! Hey, everyone shut up for a moment. The news is on!”

He turned the radio’s volume up, and Three Dog’s voice flooded the room. Everyone went silent.

“News time, children!

Those scumbag Slavers way over in Paradise Falls had one big ole bee on their bonnet, and this baby knew how to sting. Gasp! But what's this? There’s not just one bee, but an entire goddamn colony, and their queen looked suspiciously like a certain kid, from a certain vault. You heard it here first, faithful listeners. The Wanderer showed up with a small army at slaver central and bad guys started dropping left and right. Reports say that among the people present are the Abolitionists Miss 101 herself assisted a few months back, a Brotherhood of Steel Paladin, and of course, her trusty Ghoul Reaper. And to top it all off, they gave us one hell of a pyrotechnics show when they fucking blew that place up to smithereens. Holy shit! Slavers of the Capital Wasteland, consider this the big ‘fuck you’ you've had coming since starting this scurrilous skin trade. What an amazing way to start the year!

What’s next? Is the Wasteland Avenger gonna give the Wasteland clean, fresh water too? Oh wait, she’s already working on that! Good job, kid! Just don’t burn yourself out, for chrissake. Keep fighting the Good Fight! The Wasteland is rootin’ for ya!

This is Galaxy News Radio and-”

“Hey! They didn’t mention me!” DeLoria cuts in, and laughter breaks out.

“If he starts calling me ‘Queen Bee’, I’m knocking his door down and stealing his headwrap. I’ve got enough embarrassing epithets already,” Percy sighs, downing a shot of scotch. Then, she turns, eyes searching, and her eyes land on me.

“Big guy! C’mon, sit next to me,” she calls out, and I obliged. Gob slides me a beer.

“It’s on the house. Consider it as thanks for getting back at those scumbag slavers for us.”

I nod and down half the bottle in a gulp.

Yeah, damn it all, I’ll celebrate, why the fuck not.

“Oh, it’s great that I finally caught you two here in Megaton!” Moira exclaims, striding towards us with a box in her hands. Goddamn. And I thought I was going to have a good night. This is the weirdo that made Percy drink atom bomb water.

“Now, I know you probably experienced it before,” she said, motioning to me after setting the box on the table. “But this is Percy’s first winter out here in the Wasteland! Here, as a show of my appreciation for getting rid of those mean slavers, I got you two some warm clothes!”

“Wow, it’s like you read my mind! Thank you so much for these, Moira.”

“No problem! Maybe we could work on a winter survival guide next?”

Panicked, I shake my head and Percy laughs.

“I think I’m going to take a break from experiments for now, Moira.”

“Oh? What’re you up to?”

“We’re gonna bring clean water to the Wasteland.”

#cw uncomfortable themes #tw: recollection of past non-con #lone wanderer #female lone wanderer #charon #fallout charon #charon fallout #fallout 3 charon #charon fallout 3 #oc: percy zhou #butch deloria #lucas simms #fanfic: absolution #series: through river acheron #fallout 3 #fallout #fallout fanfic #writers on tumblr

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setsureadsshit · 4 years

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Lost At Sea: A List of WIP’s I am finally letting go of [ Part 2 ]

[ Part 1 ]

Exactly what it says on the tin.

Very Sincerely Yours by semaphoredrivethru

Summary: Terrified at the prospect of humiliating himself in front of the ton and completely ruining his first season with his crippling shyness, omega Stiles Stilinski does the only thing he can; he invents a sweetheart away at war. A completely fictitious and utterly gorgeous captain, a gentlemanly paragon of romance and adoration, an alpha with whom Stiles spends years "exchanging" letters.Years later, an angry, war-battered Derek Hale shows up at Stiles's door. He's no gentleman, and vehemently denies the existence of anything remotely resembling romance. He's received every last letter and has come to collect on Stiles's promises of home and marriage, no matter what.

Last Updated: 2018

Fandom & Main Pairing: Teen Wolf ; Sterek

Personal Notes: AHHHHH, THERE’S NOTHING I LIKE MORE THAN A GOOD REGENCY BODICE RIPPER AU. HOW UNFORTUNATE THAT THIS ONE NEVER GOT FINISHED. IT WAS SUCH A GOOD START TOO, I AM SO DISAPPOINTED. AHHHHHHH SO SAD.

Sold by onlyastoryteller

Summary: The government has passed two significant acts that eliminate the rights of convicted felons. When Peter Burke learns that Neal Caffrey's Work Contract has been purchased by a private citizen, he springs into action.

Last Update: 2018

Fandom & Main Pairing: White Collar ; Baffery

Personal Notes: While this fic is amazing and it hasn’t been THAT long since it was last updated (trust me, I’ve held on to fics for over 5 years on the hope it’d get updated lmao), this fandom and pairing just doesn’t interest me anymore; mostly because The Bullshit Season really turned me off from the show.

Sypha’s Boys by ShifterCat

Summary: “Back in the tomb under Greşit, Alucard asked you about that prophecy involving him. And… you blushed.”“O-oh.” That brought her up short. “Yes. That.” Sypha glanced away, gathering herself, then looked back decisively. “‘The Hunter, the Scholar, the Sleeping Soldier: they shall travel together. They shall defeat great evil together. They shall… love together.’”Trevor blinked a few times, allowing that to sink in. Then: “Your prophecy says we’re going to fuck?”

Last Update: 2019

Fandom & Main Pairing: Castlevania ; Syvorcard

Personal Notes: I mean, it says what it is on the tin - it’s just a collection of smut vignettes and after the first 5 chapters the sex kinda just gets old and I start to crave actual plot. That isn’t to say it’s not well written and I didn’t enjoy it but..you know *hand waves*

Partners by wordswehavesaid

Summary: In which Barry Allen is the Starling City Police Department's forensics assistant. Yes, Starling.

Last Update: 2015

Fandom & Main Pairing: The Flash/Arrow ; Flarrow

Personal Notes: I love love love love LOVE this fic. I love it SO MUCH and it physically PAINS ME to let it go but it’s time. Still, at 25 hefty chapters, it’s not really a bad deal to put your time into it.

Take My Body by paraselenewoman

Summary: Derek and Jordan are Alphas. Stiles is their newly obtained omega. Everything is pretty terrifying.If given the chance, though, Stiles probably wouldn't change a thing.

Last Update: 2015

Fandom & Main Pairing: Teen Wolf ; Derek x Stiles x Parish

Personal Notes: ......okay listen. I never said I was proud of all of my fic reading choices okay BUT SOMETIMES. SOMETIMES A BITCH JUST NEEDS SOME GOOD OLD FASHIONED A/B/O Dom/sub DYNAMICS IN THEIR LIFE OKAY. YOU CAN’T SHAME ME - but I am a little embarrassed to admit it so let’s head to the next fic.

That Which Binds Them by Flarrow

Summary: Everyone is born with a mark shared by their soulmate, located somewhere around their shoulder blade. They say the mark burns upon meeting one's soulmate. Oliver knows what his is, but doesn't believe in the system. Barry doesn't know what his looks like, but he wants it to be a surprise.Set in The Flash and Arrow universes, but AU in the sense that I'm not sticking to the storyline laid out in either series, though I may borrow elements when they work for the story. Barry and Oliver are still The Flash and Arrow. Idea of the mark's location was inspired by the brand Oliver received in “The Fallen.”

Last Update: 2016

Fandom & Main Pairing: The Flash/Arrow ; Flarrow

Personal Notes: I read this a while back but I do remember it being a really good story. At 18 chapters, I didn’t feel like giving it the full re-read treatment since I’m currently on a role but I DID take the liberty of reading the very last chapter and I can say you’ll leave this fic satisfied if you do read it, even though it’s unfinished.

Steve Rogers and the Tri-Wizard Tournament by gryffindor17

Summary: There’s not a person who walks the halls of Hogwarts who doesn’t know Steve Rogers: the boy with the righteous streak, hot temper, and massive crush on the Romanian Longhorns’ star Chaser, Bucky Barnes. But Bucky exists to Steve only on the front page of The Daily Prophet. He has long since resigned himself to admiring from afar, catching games when he can or otherwise following Barnes’s crusade against injustice through printed page.Until the man himself walks into the Great Hall on the first night of their Seventh Year.Bucky’s life outside of the spotlight is hardly worthy of a footnote, never mind a headline, but no one wants to read about Bucky Barnes being found face-down and fast asleep between the shelves of Durmstrang’s impressive library. Between his studies and the Quidditch Finals looming around the corner, the last thing Bucky needs is something like the Tri-Wizard Tournament. He knows Headmaster Pierce is expecting him to volunteer, but all Bucky really wants is to pass his N.E.W.T.S. and maybe twist The Minister’s arm into passing the bill about guaranteed pay for House Elves.That is until he spots Merlin’s gift to man sitting at the Gryffindor table.Then things get complicated.

Last Update: 2016

Fandom & Main Pairing: Captain America (MCU) ; Stucky

Personal Notes: It’s rare that I actually enjoy Hogwarts AU’s and I’ve kinda dropped out of the Captain American fandom so, while this IS really well done, I’m just not interested in it anymore.

Part Of Your World by Jenetica

Summary: Derek's a werewolf. Stiles is a merman. They're not supposed to work.Luckily, they're both determined to prove that particular fact false.Sequel to "Sea Foam and Sunshine."

Last Update: 2014

Fandom & Main Pairing: Teen Wolf ; Sterek

Personal Notes: This is the second part in a series and you should def read the first one it’s fucking great. The second one is also good but...you know. Not gonna be finished ever so.

Knot Your Playmate by Halzbarry

Summary: He quickly closed his laptop and laid back on his bed. Somehow he’d convinced himself to not only sign up for an online ABO hookup website, but to also meet up with not one, but two alphas to potentially sleep with and get him through his heat. AU where Stiles is an omega, and has to sign up for an online ABO dating website to find an alpha to bring him through his heat, and possibly be a match so he doesn't flunk out of high school and get sent to remedial school because of Harris. What he doesn't expect is to find two mated alphas looking for an omega, and for feelings to start getting involved. Notice: Fic is on indefinite hiatus and is no longer being worked on.

Last Update: 2015

Fandom & Main Pairing: Teen Wolf ; Derek x Stiles x Parish

Personal Notes: .......LISTEN. IT’s GOOD OKAY????

Last To Know by Never_Says_Die

Summary: Kink meme fill in which every werewolf and shapeshifter in Beacon Hills is aware that Stiles is pregnant before he is. And apparently the first baby!werewolf being born into the pack (their Alpha's, no less) is a big freakin' deal and excuse enough for everyone to lose their damn minds. When Stiles figures out why everyone's been acting so weird around him, he's not amused.

Last Update: 2013

Fandom & Main Pairing: Teen Wolf ; Sterek

Personal Notes: This one is basically finished, like, it’s 21 of 22 chapters but the 22nd chapter would have mostly been just putting a bow on it, it’s already wrapped you know? It’s a really good fic I really love it, I should honestly just reblog it in it’s own right but I’ve already gone through the trouble of formating it so fuck it.

Lonely Road by CranApplePye

Summary: Stiles is running from things he doesn't want to face. Derek is running from a past he cannot leave behind. Their paths collide on a lonely stretch of road when Stiles' car breaks down and Derek is the only mechanic on hand. An unexpected closeness develops, but both men are harboring secrets and Stiles may have just found the one person whose luck runs worse than his own. When the past catches up with the future, it may be one collision that neither of them can survive, and it may end up pulling everyone they love down with them.As everything begins to unravel, choices must be made. Stiles must decide how far he's able to go to protect the people he cares about, and what he'll do when he hits his breaking point. Derek must decide whether he can overcome a lifetime of betrayal enough to trust in someone again, and what he's willing to sacrifice if he is. And Scott and Allison must decide what it means to stand by your friends, and what price they are each willing to pay to do what is right.

Last Update: 2015

Fandom & Main Pairing: Teen Wolf ; Sterek

Personal Notes: I AM REALLY MAD THIS NEVER GOT FINISHED. SUCH A COMPELLING STORY. SUCH A FRESH TAKE ON WHAT THE CANON COULD HAVE BEEN. AAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Lost In The Flood by Skaboom

Summary: When social services finally barges in and takes Isaac away from his father, granting custody to his aunt, Isaac gets the first good night's sleep he's had since his mother died, but that doesn't mean that everything is easy from there on out. There's a lot of lingering damage, and with everyone gossiping about him at school, it's hard to find someone to turn to, but with the help of a caring Aunt, a great therapist, and an unexpected friendship with Stiles, a kid on his lacrosse team, Isaac might finally be on the right path.

Last Update: 2017

Fandom & Main Pairing: Teen Wolf ; Stisaac

Personal Notes: Another sad goodbye, there has never been enough Stisaac fic in this fandom for me so seeing what few good fics there were go unfinished is particularly bitter to me.

#Teen Wolf #Sterek #stiles stilinski x derek hale #white collar #neal caffery x peter burke #neal caffery x peter burke x elizabeth burke #Castlevania #Alucard x trevor x sypha #the flash #arrow #flarrow #barry allen x oliver queen #derek x stiles x parish #Captain America (MCU)#Stucky #Steve Rogers x Bucky Barns #stisaac #stiles x isaac #Lost At Sea

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blackkudos · 4 years

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Little Richard

Richard Wayne Penniman (December 5, 1932 – May 9, 2020), better known as Little Richard, was an American singer, songwriter, and musician. An influential figure in popular music, Richard's most celebrated work dates from the mid-1950s, when his dynamic music and charismatic showmanship laid the foundation for rock and roll, leading him to be given the nickname "The Innovator, The Originator, and The Architect of Rock and Roll". Characterized by his frenetic piano playing and raspy singing voice, Richard's music also played a key role in the formation of other popular music genres, including soul and funk. He influenced numerous singers and musicians across musical genres from rock to hip hop, and his music helped shape rhythm and blues for generations to come.

"Tutti Frutti" (1955), one of Richard's signature songs, became an instant hit, reaching No. 2 on Billboard Rhythm and Blues Best-Sellers chart and crossing over to the pop charts in both the United States and overseas in the United Kingdom. It reached No. 21 on the US Billboard Top 100 and No. 29 on the UK singles chart. Richard's next hit single, "Long Tall Sally" (1956), hit No. 1 on the Billboard Rhythm and Blues Best-Sellers chart and No. 13 on the Billboard Top 100 while reaching the top ten in the UK. Following his success, Richard built up his backup band, The Upsetters, with the addition of saxophonists Clifford "Gene" Burks and leader Grady Gaines, bassist Olsie "Baysee" Robinson and guitarist Nathaniel "Buster" Douglas. Richard's critically acclaimed debut album Here's Little Richard (1957) peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard Top LPs chart.

In 1962, concert promoter Don Arden persuaded Little Richard to tour Europe after telling him his records were still selling well there even though they were not in the US. Having heard of Richard's European tour, Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, asked Arden to allow the band to open for Richard on some tour dates, to which he agreed. The first show for which the Beatles opened was at New Brighton's Tower Ballroom that October. During this time, Richard advised the group on how to perform his songs and taught Paul McCartney his distinctive vocalizations. In the fall of 1963, Richard agreed to rescue a sagging tour featuring The Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley and The Rolling Stones. At the end of that tour, Richard was given his own TV special for Granada Television titled The Little Richard Spectacular.

Richard was honored by many institutions. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of its first group of inductees in 1986. He was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. In 2015, Richard received a Rhapsody & Rhythm Award from the National Museum of African American Music for his key role in the formation of popular music genres and helping to bring an end to the racial divide on the music charts and in concert in the mid-1950s changing American culture significantly. "Tutti Frutti" was included in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2010, which stated that his "unique vocalizing over the irresistible beat announced a new era in music".

Early life

Richard Wayne Penniman was born in Macon, Georgia, on December 5, 1932, the third of 12 children of Leva Mae (née Stewart) and Charles "Bud" Penniman. His father was a church deacon who sold bootlegged moonshine on the side and owned a nightclub called the Tip In Inn. His mother was a member of Macon's New Hope Baptist Church. Initially, his first name was supposed to have been "Ricardo", but an error resulted in "Richard" instead. The Penniman children were raised in a neighborhood of Macon called Pleasant Hill. In childhood, he was nicknamed "Lil' Richard" by his family because of his small and skinny frame. A mischievous child who played pranks on neighbors, Penniman began singing in church at a young age. Possibly as a result of complications at birth, he had a slight deformity that left one of his legs shorter than the other. This produced an unusual gait, and he was mocked for his allegedly effeminate appearance.

Penniman's family was very religious and joined various A.M.E., Baptist, and Pentecostal churches, with some family members becoming ministers. He enjoyed the Pentecostal churches the most, because of their charismatic worship and live music. He later recalled that people in his neighborhood sang gospel songs throughout the day during segregation to keep a positive outlook, because "there was so much poverty, so much prejudice in those days". He had observed that people sang "to feel their connection with God" and to wash their trials and burdens away. Gifted with a loud singing voice, Penniman recalled that he was "always changing the key upwards" and that they once stopped him from singing in church for "screaming and hollering" so loud, earning him the nickname "War Hawk". As a child, he would "beat on the steps of the house, and on tin cans and pots and pans, or whatever" while singing, which annoyed neighbors.

Penniman's initial musical influences were gospel performers such as Brother Joe May, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, and Marion Williams. May, a singing evangelist who was known as "the Thunderbolt of the Middle West" because of his phenomenal range and vocal power, inspired Penniman to become a preacher. Penniman attended Macon's Hudson High School, where he was a below-average student. He eventually learned to play alto saxophone, joining his school's marching band while in fifth grade. While in high school, he got a part-time job at Macon City Auditorium for local secular and gospel concert promoter Clint Brantley. He sold Coca-Cola to crowds during concerts of star performers of the day such as Cab Calloway, Lucky Millinder, and his favorite singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Music career

Beginnings (1947–1955)

In October 1947, Sister Rosetta Tharpe overheard 14-year-old Penniman singing her songs before a performance at the Macon City Auditorium. She invited him to open her show. After the show, Tharpe paid him, inspiring him to become a professional performer. Penniman stated that he was inspired to play the piano after he heard Ike Turner's piano intro on "Rocket 88." In 1949, he began performing in Doctor Nubillo's traveling show. Penniman was inspired to wear turbans and capes in his career by Nubillo, who also "carried a black stick and exhibited something he called 'the devil's child' - the dried-up body of a baby with claw feet like a bird and horns on its head." Nubillo told Penniman he was "gonna be famous" but that he would have to "go where the grass is greener."

Before entering the tenth grade, Penniman left his family home and joined Dr. Hudson's Medicine Show in 1949, performing Louis Jordan's "Caldonia". Penniman recalled the song was the first secular R&B song he learned, since his family had strict rules against playing R&B music, which they considered "devil music." Penniman also performed in drag during this time, performing under the name "Princess LaVonne". In 1950, Penniman joined his first musical band, Buster Brown's Orchestra, where Brown gave him the name Little Richard. Performing in the minstrel show circuit, Penniman, in and out of drag, performed for various vaudeville acts such as Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam, the Tidy Jolly Steppers, the King Brothers Circus and Broadway Follies. Having settled in Atlanta, Georgia at this point, Penniman began listening to rhythm and blues and frequented Atlanta clubs, including the Harlem Theater and the Royal Peacock where he saw performers such as Roy Brown and Billy Wright onstage. Penniman was further influenced by Brown's and Wright's flashy style of showmanship and was even more influenced by Wright's flamboyant persona and showmanship. Inspired by Brown and Wright, Penniman decided to become a rhythm and blues singer and after befriending Wright, began to learn how to be an entertainer from him, and began adapting a pompadour hairdo similar to Wright's, as well as styling a pencil mustache, using Wright's brand of facial pancake makeup and wearing flashier clothes.

Impressed by his singing voice, Wright put him in contact with Zenas Sears, a local DJ. Sears recorded Penniman at his station, backed by Wright's band. The recordings led to a contract that year with RCA Victor. Penniman recorded a total of eight sides for RCA Victor, including the blues ballad, "Every Hour," which became his first single and a hit in Georgia. The release of "Every Hour" improved his relationship with his father, who began regularly playing the song on his nightclub jukebox. Shortly after the release of "Every Hour", Penniman was hired to front Perry Welch and His Orchestra and played at clubs and army bases for $100 a week. After a year with RCA Victor, Penniman left the label in February 1952 after his records there failed to become national hits. That same month, Penniman's father Bud was killed after a confrontation outside his club. Penniman continued to perform during this time and Clint Brantley agreed to manage Penniman's career. Moving to Houston, he formed a band called the Tempo Toppers, performing as part of blues package tours in Southern clubs such as Club Tijuana in New Orleans and Club Matinee in Houston. Penniman signed with Don Robey's Peacock Records in February 1953, recording eight sides, including four with Johnny Otis and his band that were unreleased at the time. Like his venture with RCA Victor, none of Penniman's Peacock singles charted despite Penniman's growing reputation for his high energy antics onstage. Penniman began complaining of monetary issues with Robey, resulting in Penniman getting knocked out by Robey during a scuffle. Disillusioned by the record business, Penniman returned to Macon in 1954 and, struggling with poverty, settled for work as a dishwasher for Greyhound Lines. That year, he disbanded the Tempo Toppers and formed a harder-driving rhythm and blues band, the Upsetters, which included drummer Charles Connor and saxophonist Wilbert "Lee Diamond" Smith and toured under Brantley's management. The band supported R&B singer Christine Kittrell on some recordings, then began to tour successfully, even without a bass guitarist, forcing drummer Connor to thump "real hard" on his bass drum in order to get a "bass fiddle effect." Around this time, Penniman signed a contract to tour with fellow R&B singer Little Johnny Taylor.

At the suggestion of Lloyd Price, Penniman sent a demo to Price's label, Specialty Records, in February 1955. Months passed before Penniman got a call from the label. Finally, in September of that year, Specialty owner Art Rupe loaned Penniman money to buy out of his Peacock contract and set him to work with producer Robert "Bumps" Blackwell. Upon hearing Penniman's demo, Blackwell felt Penniman was Specialty's answer to Ray Charles, however, Penniman told him he preferred the sound of Fats Domino. Blackwell sent him to New Orleans where he recorded at Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studios, recording there with several of Domino's session musicians, including drummer Earl Palmer and saxophonist Lee Allen. Initially, Penniman's recordings that month failed to produce much inspiration or interest. Frustrated, Blackwell and Penniman went to relax at the Dew Drop Inn nightclub. According to Blackwell, Penniman then launched into a risqué dirty blues he titled "Tutti Frutti". Blackwell said he felt the song had hit potential and hired songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie to replace some of Little Richard's sexual lyrics with less controversial words. Recorded in three takes in September 1955, "Tutti Frutti" was released as a single that November.

Initial success and conversion (1955–1962)

"Tutti Frutti" became an instant hit, reaching No. 2 on Billboard magazine's Rhythm and Blues Best-Sellers chart and crossing over to the pop charts in both the United States and overseas in the United Kingdom. It reached No. 21 on the Billboard Top 100 in America and No. 29 on the British singles chart, eventually selling a million copies.

Penniman's next hit single, "Long Tall Sally" (1956), hit number one on the R&B chart and number 13 on the Top 100 while reaching the top ten in Britain. Like "Tutti Frutti", it sold over a million copies. Following his success, Little Richard built up his backup band, The Upsetters, with the addition of saxophonists Clifford "Gene" Burks and leader Grady Gaines, bassist Olsie "Baysee" Robinson and guitarist Nathaniel "Buster" Douglas. Penniman began performing on package tours across the United States. Art Rupe described the differences between Penniman and a similar hitmaker of the early rock and roll period by stating that, while "the similarities between Little Richard and Fats Domino for recording purposes were close", Penniman would sometimes stand up at the piano while he was recording and that onstage, where Domino was "plodding, very slow", Penniman was "very dynamic, completely uninhibited, unpredictable, wild. So the band took on the ambience of the vocalist."

Penniman's performances, like most early rock and roll shows, resulted in integrated audience reaction during an era where public places were divided into "white" and "colored" domains. In these package tours, Penniman and other artists such as Fats Domino and Chuck Berry would enable audiences of both races to enter the building, albeit still segregated (e.g. blacks on the balcony and whites on the main floor). As his bandleader at the time, H.B. Barnum, explained, Penniman's performances enabled audiences to come together to dance. Despite broadcasts on TV from local supremacist groups such as the North Alabama White Citizens Council warning that rock and roll "brings the races together," Penniman's popularity was helping to shatter the myth that black performers could not successfully perform at "white-only venues," especially in the South where racism was most overt. Penniman's high-energy antics included lifting his leg while playing the piano, climbing on top of his piano, running on and off the stage and throwing his souvenirs to the audience. Penniman also began using capes and suits studded with multi-colored precious stones and sequins. Penniman said he began to be more flamboyant onstage so no one would think he was "after the white girls".

Penniman claims that a show at Baltimore's Royal Theatre in June 1956 led to women throwing their undergarments onstage at him, resulting in other female fans repeating the action, saying it was "the first time" that had happened to any artist. Penniman's show would stop several times that night due to fans being restrained from jumping off the balcony and then rushing to the stage to touch Penniman. Overall, Penniman would produce seven singles in the United States alone in 1956, with five of them also charting in the UK, including "Slippin' and Slidin'", "Rip It Up", "Ready Teddy", "The Girl Can't Help It" and "Lucille". Immediately after releasing "Tutti Frutti", which was then protocol for the industry, "safer" white recording artists such as Pat Boone re-recorded the song, sending the song to the top twenty of the charts, several positions higher than Penniman's. At the same time, fellow rock and roll peers such as Elvis Presley and Bill Haley also recorded Penniman's songs later in the year. Befriending Alan Freed, Freed eventually put him in his "rock and roll" movies such as Don't Knock the Rock and Mister Rock and Roll. In 1957, Penniman was giving a larger singing role in the film, The Girl Can't Help It. That year, he scored more hit success with songs such as "Jenny, Jenny" and "Keep A-Knockin'" the latter becoming his first top ten single on the Billboard Top 100. By the time he left Specialty in 1959, Penniman had scored a total of nine top 40 pop singles and seventeen top 40 R&B singles.

Penniman performed at the famed twelfth Cavalcade of Jazz held at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles which was produced by Leon Hefflin, Sr. on September 2, 1956. Also performing that day were Dinah Washington, The Mel Williams Dots, Julie Stevens, Chuck Higgin's Orchestra, Bo Rhambo, Willie Hayden & Five Black Birds, The Premiers, Gerald Wilson and His 20-Pc. Recording Orchestra and Jerry Gray and his Orchestra.

Shortly after the release of "Tutti Frutti", Penniman relocated to Los Angeles. After achieving success as a recording artist and live performer, Penniman settled at a wealthy, formerly predominantly white neighborhood, living close to black celebrities such as boxer Joe Louis. Penniman's first album, Here's Little Richard, was released by Specialty in May 1957 and peaked at number thirteen on the Billboard Top LPs chart. Similar to most albums released during that era, the album featured six released singles and "filler" tracks. In early 1958, Specialty released his second album, Little Richard, which didn't chart. In October 1957, Penniman embarked on a package tour in Australia with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. During the middle of the tour, he shocked the public by announcing he was following a life in the ministry. Penniman would claim in his autobiography that during a flight from Melbourne to Sydney that his plane was experiencing some difficulty and he claimed to have seen the plane's red hot engines and felt angels were "holding it up". At the end of his Sydney performance, Penniman saw a bright red fireball flying across the sky above him and claimed he was "deeply shaken". Though it was eventually told to him that it was the launching of the first artificial Earth satellite Sputnik 1, Penniman claimed he took it as a "sign from God" to repent from performing secular music and his wild lifestyle at the time.

Returning to the States ten days earlier than expected, Penniman read news of his original flight having crashed into the Pacific Ocean as a further sign to "do as God wanted". After a "farewell performance" at the Apollo Theater and a "final" recording session with Specialty later that month, Penniman enrolled at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, to study theology. Despite his claims of spiritual rebirth, Penniman admitted his reasons for leaving were more monetary. During his tenure at Specialty, despite earning millions for the label, Penniman complained that he did not know the label had cut the percentage of royalties he was to earn for his recordings. Specialty continued to release Penniman recordings, including "Good Golly, Miss Molly" and his unique version of “Kansas City”, until 1960. Finally ending his contract with the label, Penniman agreed to relinquish any royalties for his material. In 1958, Penniman formed the Little Richard Evangelistic Team, traveling across the country to preach. A month after his conversion, Penniman met Ernestine Harvin, a secretary from Washington, D.C., and the couple married on July 11, 1959. Penniman ventured into gospel music, first recording for End Records, before signing with Mercury Records in 1961, where he eventually released King of the Gospel Singers, in 1962, produced by Quincy Jones, who later remarked that Penniman's vocals impressed him more than any other vocalist he had worked with. His childhood heroine, Mahalia Jackson, wrote in the liner notes of the album that Penniman "sang gospel the way it should be sung". While Penniman was no longer charting in the US, some of his gospel songs such as "He's Not Just a Soldier" and "He Got What He Wanted", reached the pop charts in the US and the UK.

Return to secular music (1962–1979)

In 1962, concert promoter Don Arden persuaded Little Richard to tour Europe after telling him his records were still selling well there. With fellow rock singer Sam Cooke as an opening act, Penniman, who featured a teenage Billy Preston in his gospel band, figured it was a gospel tour and, after Cooke's delayed arrival forced him to cancel his show on the opening date, performed only gospel material on the show, leading to boos from the audience expecting Penniman to sing his rock and roll hits. The following night, Penniman viewed Cooke's well-received performance. Bringing back his competitive drive, Penniman and Preston warmed up in darkness before launching into "Long Tall Sally", resulting in frenetic, hysterical responses from the audience. A show at Mansfield's Granada Theatre ended early after fans rushed the stage. Hearing of Penniman's shows, Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, asked Don Arden to allow his band to open for Penniman on some tour dates, to which he agreed. The first show for which the Beatles opened was at New Brighton's Tower Ballroom that October. The following month they, along with Swedish singer Jerry Williams and his band The Violents, opened for Little Richard at the Star-Club in Hamburg. During this time, Little Richard advised the group on how to perform his songs and taught Paul McCartney his distinctive vocalizations. Back in the US, Little Richard recorded six rock and roll songs with the Upsetters for Little Star Records, under the name "World Famous Upsetters", hoping this would keep his options open in maintaining his position as a minister.

In the fall of 1963, Penniman was called by a concert promoter to rescue a sagging tour featuring The Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley and The Rolling Stones. Penniman agreed and helped to save the tour from flopping. At the end of that tour, Penniman was given his own TV special for Granada Television titled The Little Richard Spectacular. The special became a rating hit and after 60,000 fan letters, was rebroadcast twice. In 1964, now openly re-embracing rock and roll again, Penniman released "Bama Lama Bama Loo" on Specialty Records. Due to his UK exposure, the song reached the top twenty there but only climbed to number 82 in his native country. Later in the year, he signed with Vee-Jay Records, then on its dying legs, to release his "comeback" album, Little Richard Is Back. Due to the arrival of the Beatles and other British bands as well as the rise of soul labels such as Motown and Stax Records and the popularity of James Brown, Penniman's new releases were not well promoted or well received by radio stations. In November 1964, Jimi Hendrix joined Penniman's Upsetters band as a full member. In the Spring of 1965, Penniman took Hendrix and Billy Preston to a New York studio where they recorded the Don Covay soul ballad, "I Don't Know What You've Got (But It's Got Me)", which became a number 12 R&B hit.

Hendrix and Penniman clashed over the spotlight, Hendrix's tardiness, wardrobe and Hendrix's stage antics. Hendrix also complained over not being properly paid by Penniman. In July 1965, Richard's Brother Charles fired Jimi [This is possibly incorrect. Jimi wrote to his father, Al Hendrix, that he quit Little Richard over money problems - he was owed 1,000 dollars.] Hendrix then rejoined The Isley Brothers' band, the IB Specials. Penniman later signed with Modern Records, releasing a modest charter, "Do You Feel It?" before leaving for Okeh Records in early 1966. Two poorly produced albums were released over time, first a live album, cut at the Domino, in Atlanta, Georgia. Okeh paired Penniman with his old friend, Larry Williams, who produced two albums on Penniman, including the studio release, The Explosive Little Richard, which produced the modest charters "Poor Dog" and "Commandments of Love". His second Okeh album, Little Richard's Greatest Hits Recorded Live!, returned him to the album charts. In 1967, Penniman signed with Brunswick Records but after clashing with the label over musical direction, he left the label the following year.

Penniman felt that producers on his labels worked in not promoting his records during this period. Later, he claimed they kept trying to push him to records similar to Motown and felt he wasn't treated with appropriate respect. Little Richard often performed in dingy clubs and lounges with little support from his label. While Penniman managed to perform in huge venues overseas such as England and France, Penniman was forced to perform in the Chitlin' Circuit. Penniman's flamboyant look, while a hit during the 1950s, failed to help his labels to promote him to more conservative black record buyers. Penniman later claimed that his decision to "backslide" from his ministry, led religious clergymen to protest his new recordings. Making matters worse, Penniman said, was his insistence on performing in front of integrated audiences at the time of the black liberation movement shortly after the Watts riots and the formation of the Black Panthers prevented many black radio disk jockeys in certain areas of the country, including Los Angeles, to play his music. Now acting as his manager, Larry Williams convinced Penniman to focus on his live shows. By 1968, he had ditched the Upsetters for his new backup band, the Crown Jewels, performing on the Canadian TV show, "Where It's At". Penniman was also featured on the Monkees TV special 33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee in April 1969. Williams booked Penniman shows in Las Vegas casinos and resorts, leading Penniman to adopt a wilder flamboyant and androgynous look, inspired by the success of his former backing guitarist Jimi Hendrix. Penniman was soon booked at rock festivals such as the Atlantic City Pop Festival where he stole the show from headliner Janis Joplin. Penniman produced a similar show stealer at the Toronto Pop Festival with John Lennon as the headliner. These successes brought Little Richard to talk shows such as the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and the Dick Cavett Show, making him a major celebrity again.

Responding to his reputation as a successful concert performer, Reprise Records signed Penniman in 1970 where he released the album, The Rill Thing, with the philosophical single, "Freedom Blues", becoming his biggest charted single in years. In May 1970, Penniman made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Despite the success of "Freedom Blues", none of Penniman's other Reprise singles charted with the exception of "Greenwood, Mississippi", a swamp rock original by guitar hero, Travis Wammack, who incidentally played on the track. It charted only briefly on the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box pop chart, also on the Billboard Country charts; made a strong showing on WWRL in New York, before disappearing. Penniman became a featured guest instrumentalist and vocalist on recordings by acts such as Delaney and Bonnie, Joey Covington and Joe Walsh and was prominently featured on Canned Heat's 1972 hit single, "Rockin' with the King". To keep up with his finances and bookings, Penniman and three of his brothers formed a management company, Bud Hole Incorporated. By 1972, Penniman had entered the rock and roll revival circuit, and that year, he co-headlined the London Rock and Roll Show at Wembley Stadium with fellow peer Chuck Berry where he'd come on stage and announce himself "the king of rock and roll", fittingly also the title of his 1971 album with Reprise and told the packed audience there to "let it all hang out"; Penniman, however, was booed during the show when he climbed on top of his piano and stopped singing; he also seemed to ignore much of the crowd. To make matters worse, he showed up with just five musicians and struggled through low lighting and bad microphones. When the concert film documenting the show came out, his performance was considered generally strong, though his fans noticed a drop in energy and vocal artistry. Two songs he performed did not make the final cut of the film. The following year, he recorded a charting soul ballad, "In the Middle of the Night", released with proceeds donated to victims of tornadoes that had caused damage in 12 states. In 1976, Penniman re-recorded eighteen of his classic rock and roll hits in Nashville for K-Tel Records, in high tech stereo recreations, with a single featuring live versions of "Good Golly Miss Molly" and "Rip It Up" reaching the UK singles chart. Penniman's performances began to take a toll by 1973, however, suffering from voice problems and quirky marathon renditions. Penniman later admitted that he was heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol at the time. By 1977, worn out from years of abuse and wild partying as well as a string of personal tragedies, Penniman quit rock and roll again and returned to evangelism, releasing one gospel album, God's Beautiful City, in 1979.

Comeback (1984–1999)

In 1984, Penniman filed a $112 million lawsuit against Specialty Records; Art Rupe and his publishing company, Venice Music; and ATV Music for not paying royalties to him after he left the label in 1959. The suit was settled out of court in 1986. According to some reports, Michael Jackson allegedly gave him monetary compensation for his work when he co-owned (with Sony-ATV) songs by the Beatles and Little Richard. In 1985, Charles White released the singer's authorized biography, Quasar of Rock: The Life and Times of Little Richard, which returned Penniman to the spotlight. Penniman returned to show business in what Rolling Stone would refer to as a "formidable comeback" following the book's release.

Reconciling his roles as evangelist and rock and roll musician for the first time, Penniman stated that the genre could be used for good or evil. After accepting a role in the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Little Richard and Billy Preston penned the faith-based rock and roll song "Great Gosh A'Mighty" for its soundtrack. Little Richard won critical acclaim for his film role, and the song found success on the American and British charts. The hit led to the release of the album Lifetime Friend (1986) on Warner Bros. Records, with songs deemed "messages in rhythm", including a gospel rap track. In addition to a version of "Great Gosh A'Mighty", cut in England, the album featured two singles that charted in the UK, "Somebody's Comin'" and "Operator". Penniman spent much of the rest of the decade as a guest on TV shows and appearing in films, winning new fans with what was referred to as his "unique comedic timing". In 1989, Penniman provided rhythmic preaching and background vocals on the extended live version of the U2–B.B. King hit "When Love Comes to Town". That same year, Little Richard returned to singing his classic hits following a performance of "Lucille" at an AIDS benefit concert.

In 1990, Penniman contributed a spoken-word rap on Living Colour's hit song, "Elvis Is Dead", from their album Time's Up. That same year he appeared in a cameo for the music video of Cinderella's "Shelter Me". The following year, he was one of the featured performers on the hit single and video "Voices That Care" that was produced to help boost the morale of US troops involved in Operation Desert Storm. He also recorded a rock and roll version of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" that year that led to a deal with Disney Records, resulting in the release of a hit 1992 children's album, Shake It All About.

In 1994, Penniman sang the theme song to the award-winning PBS Kids and TLC animated television series The Magic School Bus based on the book series created by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen and published by Scholastic Corporation. He also opened Wrestlemania X from Madison Square Garden on March 20 that year miming to his reworked rendition of "America the Beautiful".

Throughout the 1990s, Penniman performed around the world and appeared on TV, film, and tracks with other artists, including Jon Bon Jovi, Elton John and Solomon Burke. In 1992 he released his final album, Little Richard Meets Masayoshi Takanaka featuring members of Richard's then current touring band.

Later years (2000–2020)

In 2000, Penniman's life was dramatized for the biographical film Little Richard, which focused on his early years, including his heyday, his religious conversion and his return to secular music in the early 1960s. Penniman was played by Leon, who earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for his performance in this role. In 2002, Penniman contributed to the Johnny Cash tribute album, Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash. In 2004–2005, he released two sets of unreleased and rare cuts, from the Okeh label 1966/67 and the Reprise label 1970/72. Included was the full “Southern Child” album, produced and composed mostly by Richard, scheduled for release in 1972, but shelved. In 2006, Little Richard was featured in a popular advertisement for the GEICO brand. A 2005 recording of his duet vocals with Jerry Lee Lewis on a cover of the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" was included on Lewis's 2006 album, Last Man Standing. The same year, Penniman was a guest judge on the TV series Celebrity Duets. Penniman and Lewis performed alongside John Fogerty at the 2008 Grammy Awards in a tribute to the two artists considered to be cornerstones of rock and roll by the NARAS. That same year, Penniman appeared on radio host Don Imus' benefit album for sick children, The Imus Ranch Record. In June 2010, Little Richard recorded a gospel track for an upcoming tribute album to songwriting legend Dottie Rambo. In 2009, Penniman was Inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall Of Fame in a concert in New Orleans, attended by Fats Domino.

Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, Penniman kept up a stringent touring schedule, performing primarily in the United States and Europe. However, sciatic nerve pain in his left leg and then replacement of the involved hip began affecting the frequency of his performances by 2010. Despite his health problems, Penniman continued to perform to receptive audiences and critics. Rolling Stone reported that at a performance at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C., in June 2012, Penniman was "still full of fire, still a master showman, his voice still loaded with deep gospel and raunchy power." Little Richard performed a full 90-minute show at the Pensacola Interstate Fair in Pensacola, Florida, in October 2012, at the age of 79, and headlined at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas during Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend in March 2013. In September 2013, Rolling Stone published an interview with Penniman who admitted that he would be retiring from performing. "I am done, in a sense, because I don't feel like doing anything right now." He told in the magazine adding, "I think my legacy should be that when I started in showbusiness there wasn't no such thing as rock'n'roll. When I started with 'Tutti Frutti', that's when rock really started rocking."

In 2014, actor Brandon Mychal Smith received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Penniman in the James Brown biographical drama film Get on Up. Mick Jagger co-produced the motion picture. In June 2015, Penniman appeared before a paying audience, clad in sparkly boots and a brightly colored jacket at the Wildhorse Saloon in Nashville to receive the Rhapsody & Rhythm Award from and raise funds for the National Museum of African American Music. It was reported that he charmed the crowd by reminiscing about his early days working in Nashville nightclubs. In May 2016, the National Museum of African American Music issued a press release indicating that Penniman was one of the key artists and music industry leaders that attended its 3rd annual Celebration of Legends Luncheon in Nashville honoring Shirley Caesar, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff with Rhapsody & Rhythm Awards. In 2016, a new CD was released on Hitman Records, California (I'm Comin') with released and previously unreleased material from the 1970s, including an a cappella version of his 1975 single release, "Try To Help Your Brother". On September 6, 2017, Penniman participated in a long television interview, for the Christian Three Angels Broadcasting Network, clean-shaven and without make-up and dressed in a blue paisley coat and tie, in a wheelchair and proceeded to discuss his lifelong Christian faith.

On October 23, 2019, Penniman addressed the audience after appearing to receive the Distinguished Artist Award at the 2019 Tennessee Governor's Arts Awards at the Governor's Residence in Nashville, Tennessee.

On May 09, 2020, Penniman passed away at the age of 87 years old.

Personal life

Relationships and family

Around 1956, Penniman became involved with Audrey Robinson, a 16-year-old college student, originally from Savannah, Georgia. Penniman and Robinson quickly got acquainted despite Robinson not being a fan of rock and roll music. Penniman claimed in his 1984 autobiography that he invited other men to have sexual encounters with her in groups and claimed to have once invited Buddy Holly to have sex with her; Robinson denied those claims. Penniman proposed marriage to Robinson shortly before he converted but Robinson refused. Robinson later became known under the name Lee Angel and became a stripper and socialite. Penniman reconnected with Robinson in the 1960s, though she left him again after his drug abuse worsened. Robinson was interviewed for Penniman's 1985 BBC documentary on the South Bank Show and denied Penniman's claims as they went back and forth. According to Robinson, Penniman would use her to buy food in white-only fast food stores as he could not enter any due to the color of his skin.

Penniman met his only wife, Ernestine Harvin, at an evangelical rally in October 1957. They began dating that year and wed on July 12, 1959, in California. According to Harvin, she and Little Richard initially enjoyed a happy marriage with "normal" sexual relations. Harvin claimed when the marriage ended in divorce in 1964, it was due to her husband's celebrity status, noting that it had made life difficult for her. Penniman would claim the marriage fell apart due to his being a neglectful husband and his sexuality. Both Robinson and Harvin denied Penniman's claims that he was gay and Penniman believed they did not know it because he was "such a pumper in those days". During the marriage, Penniman and Harvin adopted a one-year-old boy, Danny Jones, from a late church associate. Little Richard and his son remained close, with Jones often acting as one of his bodyguards. Ernestine later married Mcdonald Campbell in Santa Barbara, California, on March 23, 1975.

Sexuality

Penniman said in 1984 that he played with just girls as a child and was subjected to homophobic jokes and ridicule because of his manner of walk and talk. His father brutally punished him whenever he caught him wearing his mother's makeup and clothing. The singer said he had been sexually involved with both sexes as a teenager. Because of his effeminate mannerisms, his father kicked him out of their family home at 15. In 1985, on The South Bank Show, Penniman explained, "my daddy put me out of the house. He said he wanted seven boys, and I had spoiled it, because I was gay."

Penniman first got involved in voyeurism in his early twenties, when a female friend would drive him around and pick up men who would allow him to watch them have sex in the backseat of cars. Penniman's activity caught the attention of Macon police in 1955 and he was arrested after a gas station attendant in Macon reported sexual activity in a car Penniman was occupying with a heterosexual couple. Cited on a sexual misconduct charge, he spent three days in jail and was temporarily banned from performing in Macon, Georgia.

In the early 1950s, Penniman became acquainted with openly gay musician Billy Wright, who helped in establishing Penniman's look, advising him to use pancake makeup on his face and wear his hair in a long-haired pompadour style similar to his. As Penniman got used to the makeup, he ordered his band, the Upsetters, to wear the makeup too, to gain entry into predominantly white venues during performances, later stating, "I wore the make-up so that white men wouldn't think I was after the white girls. It made things easier for me, plus it was colorful too." In 2000, Richard told Jet magazine, "I figure if being called a sissy would make me famous, let them say what they want to." Penniman's look, however, still attracted female audiences, who would send him naked photos and their phone numbers. Groupies began throwing undergarments at Penniman during performances.

During Penniman's heyday, his obsession with voyeurism carried on with his girlfriend Audrey Robinson. Penniman later wrote that Robinson would have sex with men while she sexually stimulated Penniman. Despite saying he was "born again" after leaving rock and roll for the church in 1957, Penniman left Oakwood College after exposing himself to a male student. After the incident was reported to the student's father, Penniman withdrew from the college. In 1962, Penniman was arrested for spying on men urinating in toilets at a Trailways bus station in Long Beach, California. Audrey Robinson disputed Penniman's claims of homosexuality in 1985. After re-embracing rock and roll in the mid-1960s, he began participating in orgies and continued to be a voyeur. In his 1984 book, while demeaning homosexuality as "unnatural" and "contagious", he told Charles White he was "omnisexual". In 1995, Little Richard told Penthouse that he always knew he was gay, saying "I've been gay all my life". In 2007, Mojo Magazine referred to Little Richard as "bisexual". In October 2017, Penniman once again denounced homosexuality in an interview with Three Angels Broadcasting Network, calling homosexual and transgender identity "unnatural affection" that goes against "the way God wants you to live".

Drug use

During his initial heyday in the 1950s rock and roll scene, Penniman was a teetotaler abstaining from alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Penniman often fined bandmates for drug and alcohol use during this era. By the mid-1960s, however, Penniman began drinking heavy amounts of alcohol and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. By 1972, he had developed an addiction to cocaine. He later lamented during that period, "They should have called me Lil Cocaine, I was sniffing so much of that stuff!" By 1975, he had developed addictions to both heroin and PCP, otherwise known as "angel dust". His drug and alcohol use began to affect his professional career and personal life. "I lost my reasoning", he later recalled.

He said of his cocaine addiction that he did whatever he could to use cocaine. Penniman admitted that his addictions to cocaine, PCP and heroin were costing him as much as $1,000 a day. In 1977, longtime friend Larry Williams once showed up with a gun and threatened to kill him for failing to pay his drug debt. Penniman later mentioned that this was the most fearful moment of his life because Williams's own drug addiction made him wildly unpredictable. Penniman did, however, also acknowledge that he and Williams were "very close friends" and when reminiscing of the drug-fueled clash, he recalled thinking "I knew he loved me – I hoped he did!" Within that same year, Penniman had several devastating personal experiences, including his brother Tony's death of a heart attack, the accidental shooting of his nephew that he loved like a son, and the murder of two close personal friends – one a valet at "the heroin man's house." The combination of these experiences convinced the singer to give up drugs including alcohol, along with rock and roll, and return to the ministry.

Religion

Penniman's family had deep evangelical (Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME)) Christian roots, including two uncles and a grandfather who were preachers. He also took part in Macon's Pentecostal churches, which were his favorites mainly due to their music, charismatic praise, dancing in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. At age 10, influenced by Pentecostalism, Little Richard would go around saying he was a faith healer, singing gospel music to people who were feeling sick and touching them. He later recalled that they would often indicate that they felt better after he prayed for them and would sometimes give him money. Little Richard had aspirations of being a preacher due to the influence of singing evangelist Brother Joe May.

After he was born again in 1957, Penniman enrolled at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, a mostly black Seventh-day Adventist college, to study theology. Little Richard returned to secular music in the early 1960s. He was eventually ordained a minister in 1970 and resumed evangelical activities in 1977. Penniman represented Memorial Bibles International and sold their Black Heritage Bible, which highlighted the Book's many black characters. As a preacher, he evangelized in small churches and packed auditoriums of 20,000 or more. His preaching focused on uniting the races and bringing lost souls to repentance through God's love. In 1984, Penniman's mother, Leva Mae, died following a period of illness. Only a few months prior to her death, Penniman promised her that he would remain a Christian.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Penniman officiated at celebrity weddings. In 2006, Little Richard wedded twenty couples who won a contest in one ceremony. The musician used his experience and knowledge as a minister and elder statesman of rock and roll to preach at funerals of musical friends such as Wilson Pickett and Ike Turner. At a benefit concert in 2009 to raise funds to help rebuild children's playgrounds destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, Penniman asked guest of honor Fats Domino to pray with him and others. His assistants handed out inspirational booklets at the concert, which was a common practice at Penniman's shows. Penniman told a Howard Theatre, Washington, D.C. audience in June 2012, "I know this is not Church, but get close to the Lord. The world is getting close to the end. Get close to the Lord." In 2013, Penniman elaborated on his spiritual philosophies, stating "God talked to me the other night. He said He's getting ready to come. The world's getting ready to end and He's coming, wrapped in flames of fire with a rainbow around his throne." Rolling Stone reported his apocalyptic prophesies generated snickers from some audience members as well as cheers of support. Penniman responded to the laughter by stating: "When I talk to you about [Jesus], I'm not playing. I'm almost 81 years old. Without God, I wouldn't be here."

In 2017, he came back to the Seventh-day Adventist Church and was rebaptized. 3ABN interviewed Penniman, and later he shared his personal testimony at 3ABN Fall Camp Meeting 2017.

Health problems

In October 1985, Penniman returned to the United States from England, where he had finished recording his album Lifetime Friend, to film a guest spot on the show, Miami Vice. Following the taping, he accidentally crashed his sports car into a telephone pole in West Hollywood, California. He suffered a broken right leg, broken ribs and head and facial injuries. His recovery from the accident took several months. His accident prevented him from being able to attend the inaugural Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in January 1986 where he was one of several inductees. He instead supplied a recorded message.

In 2007, Little Richard began having problems walking due to sciatica in his left leg, requiring him to use crutches. In November 2009, he entered a hospital to have replacement surgery on his left hip. Despite returning to performance the following year, Penniman's problems with his hip continued and he has since been brought onstage by wheelchair. He has told fans that his surgery has his hip "breaking inside" and refuses to have further work on it. On September 30, 2013, he revealed to CeeLo Green at a Recording Academy fundraiser that he had suffered a heart attack at his home the week prior and stated he used aspirin and had his son turn the air conditioner on, which his doctor confirmed had saved his life. Little Richard stated, "Jesus had something for me. He brought me through".

On April 28, 2016, Little Richard's friend, Bootsy Collins, stated on his Facebook page that, "he is not in the best of health so I ask all the Funkateers to lift him up." Reports subsequently began being published on the internet stating that Little Richard was in grave health and that his family were gathering at his bedside. On May 3, 2016, Rolling Stone reported that Little Richard and his lawyer provided a health information update in which Richard stated, "not only is my family not gathering around me because I'm ill, but I'm still singing. I don't perform like I used to, but I have my singing voice, I walk around, I had hip surgery a while ago but I'm healthy.'" His lawyer also reported: "He's 83. I don't know how many 83-year-olds still get up and rock it out every week, but in light of the rumors, I wanted to tell you that he's vivacious and conversant about a ton of different things and he's still very active in a daily routine." Even though Penniman continued to sing in his eighties, he kept away from the stage. His last concert was on August 25, 2014 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Death

Little Richard's death on May 9, 2020, was announced by his son, Danny Penniman. The cause was not disclosed.

Legacy

Music

Penniman was nicknamed "The Innovator, The Originator, and The Architect of Rock and Roll". His music and performance style had a pivotal effect on the shape of the sound and style of popular music genres of the 20th century. As a rock and roll pioneer, Penniman embodied its spirit more flamboyantly than any other performer. Penniman's raspy shouting style gave the genre one of its most identifiable and influential vocal sounds and his fusion of boogie-woogie, New Orleans R&B and gospel music blazed its rhythmic trail.

Combining elements of boogie, gospel, and blues, Little Richard introduced several of rock music's most characteristic musical features, including its loud volume and vocal style emphasizing power, and its distinctive beat and rhythm. He departed from boogie-woogie's shuffle rhythm and introduced a new distinctive rock beat, where the beat division is even at all tempos. He reinforced the new rock rhythm with a two-handed approach, playing patterns with his right hand, with the rhythm typically popping out in the piano's high register. His new rhythm, which he introduced with "Tutti Frutti" (1955), became the basis for the standard rock beat, which was later consolidated by Chuck Berry. "Lucille" (1957) foreshadowed the rhythmic feel of 1960s classic rock in several ways, including its heavy bassline, slower tempo, strong rock beat played by the entire band, and verse–chorus form similar to blues.

Penniman's voice was able to generate croons, wails, and screams unprecedented in popular music. He was cited by two of soul music's pioneers, Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, as contributing to that genre's early development. Redding stated that most of his music was patterned after Penniman's, referring to his 1953 recording "Directly From My Heart To You" as the personification of soul, and that he had "done a lot for [him] and [his] soul brothers in the music business." Cooke said in 1962 that Penniman had done "so much for our music". Cooke had a top 40 hit in 1963 with his cover of Penniman's 1956 hit "Send Me Some Loving".

James Brown and others credited Little Richard and his mid-1950s backing band, The Upsetters, with having been the first to put the funk in the rock beat. This innovation sparked the transition from 1950s rock and roll to 1960s funk.

Penniman's hits of the mid-1950s, such as "Tutti Frutti", "Long Tall Sally", "Keep A-Knockin'" and "Good Golly Miss Molly", were generally characterized by playful lyrics with sexually suggestive connotations. AllMusic writer Richie Unterberger stated that Little Richard "merged the fire of gospel with New Orleans R&B, pounding the piano and wailing with gleeful abandon", and that while "other R&B greats of the early 1950s had been moving in a similar direction, none of them matched the sheer electricity of Richard's vocals. With his high-speed deliveries, ecstatic trills, and the overjoyed force of personality in his singing, he was crucial in upping the voltage from high-powered R&B into the similar, yet different, guise of rock and roll." Due to his innovative music and style, he's often widely acknowledged as the "architect of rock and roll".

Emphasizing the folk influences on Little Richard, English professor W.T. Lhamon Jr. wrote, "His songs were literally good booty. They were the repressed stuff of underground lore. And in Little Richard they found a vehicle prepared to bear their chocked energy, at least for his capsulated moment."

Ray Charles introduced him at a concert in 1988 as "a man that started a kind of music that set the pace for a lot of what's happening today." Rock and roll pioneer Bo Diddley called Penniman "one of a kind" and "a show business genius" that "influenced so many in the music business". Penniman's contemporaries, including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, all recorded covers of his works. Taken by his music and style, and personally covering four of Little Richard's tunes on his own two breakthrough albums in 1956, Presley told Little Richard in 1969 that his music was an inspiration to him and that he was "the greatest". Pat Boone noted in 1984, "no one person has been more imitated than Little Richard". As they wrote about him for their Man of the Year – Legend category in 2010, GQ magazine stated that Little Richard "is, without question, the boldest and most influential of the founding fathers of rock'n'roll". R&B pioneer Johnny Otis stated that "Little Richard is twice as valid artistically and important historically as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones put together."

Society

In addition to his musical style, Penniman was cited as one of the first crossover black artists, reaching audiences of all races. His music and concerts broke the color line, drawing blacks and whites together despite attempts to sustain segregation. As H.B. Barnum explained in Quasar of Rock, Little Richard "opened the door. He brought the races together." Barnum described Little Richard's music as not being "boy-meets-girl-girl-meets-boy things, they were fun records, all fun. And they had a lot to say sociologically in our country and the world." Barnum also stated that Penniman's "charisma was a whole new thing to the music business", explaining that "he would burst onto the stage from anywhere, and you wouldn't be able to hear anything but the roar of the audience. He might come out and walk on the piano. He might go out into the audience." Barnum also stated that Penniman was innovative in that he would wear colorful capes, blouse shirts, makeup and suits studded with multi-colored precious stones and sequins, and that he also brought flickering stage lighting from his show business experience into performance venues where rock and roll artists performed. In 2015, the National Museum of African American Music honored Penniman for helping to shatter the color line on the music charts changing American culture forever.

"Little Richard was always my main man. How hard must it have been for him: gay, black and singing in the South? But his records are a joyous good time from beginning to end." – Lemmy, Motörhead

Influence

Penniman influenced generations of performers across musical genres. James Brown and Otis Redding both idolized him. Brown allegedly came up with the Famous Flames debut hit, "Please, Please, Please", after Richard had written the words on a napkin. Redding started his professional career with Little Richard's band, The Upsetters. He first entered a talent show performing Penniman's "Heeby Jeebies", winning for 15 consecutive weeks. Ike Turner claimed most of Tina Turner's early vocal delivery was based on Little Richard, something Penniman himself reiterated in the introduction of Turner's autobiography, Takin' Back My Name. Bob Dylan first performed covers of Penniman's songs on piano in high school with his rock and roll group, the Golden Chords; in 1959 when leaving school, he wrote in his yearbook under "Ambition": "to join Little Richard". Jimi Hendrix was influenced in appearance (clothing and hairstyle/mustache) and sound by Penniman. He was quoted in 1966 saying, "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice." Others influenced by Penniman early on in their lives included Bob Seger and John Fogerty. Michael Jackson admitted that Penniman had been a huge influence on him prior to the release of Off the Wall. Rock critics noted similarities between Prince's androgynous look, music and vocal style and Little Richard's.

The origins of Cliff Richard's name change from Harry Webb was seen as a partial tribute to his musical hero Little Richard and singer Rick Richards. Several members of The Beatles were heavily influenced by Penniman, including Paul McCartney and George Harrison. McCartney idolized him in school and later used his recordings as inspiration for his uptempo rockers, such as "I'm Down." "Long Tall Sally" was the first song McCartney performed in public. McCartney would later state, "I could do Little Richard's voice, which is a wild, hoarse, screaming thing. It's like an out-of-body experience. You have to leave your current sensibilities and go about a foot above your head to sing it." During the Beatles' Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Harrison commented, "thank you all very much, especially the rock 'n' rollers, an' Little Richard there, if it wasn't for (gesturing to Little Richard), it was all his fault, really." Upon hearing "Long Tall Sally" in 1956, John Lennon later commented that he was so impressed that he "couldn't speak". Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were also profoundly influenced by Little Richard, with Jagger citing him as his introduction to R&B music and referring to him as "the originator and my first idol". Penniman was an early vocal influence on Rod Stewart. David Bowie called Little Richard his "inspiration" stating upon listening to "Tutti Frutti" that he "heard God".

After opening for him with his band Bluesology, pianist Reginald Dwight was inspired to be a "rock and roll piano player", later changing his name to Elton John. Farrokh Bulsara performed covers of Little Richard's songs as a teen, before finding fame as Freddie Mercury, frontman for Queen. Lou Reed referred to Penniman as his "rock and roll hero", deriving inspiration from "the soulful, primal force" of the sound Penniman and his saxophonist made on "Long Tall Sally." Reed later stated, "I don't know why and I don't care, but I wanted to go to wherever that sound was and make a life." Patti Smith said, "To me, Little Richard was a person that was able to focus a certain physical, anarchistic, and spiritual energy into a form which we call rock 'n' roll ... I understood it as something that had to do with my future. When I was a little girl, Santa Claus didn't turn me on. Easter Bunny didn't turn me on. God turned me on. Little Richard turned me on." The music of Deep Purple and Motörhead was also heavily influenced by Little Richard, as well as that of AC/DC. The latter's early lead vocalist and co-songwriter Bon Scott idolized Little Richard and aspired to sing like him, its lead guitarist and co-songwriter Angus Young was first inspired to play guitar after listening to Penniman's music, and rhythm guitarist and co-writer Malcolm Young derived his signature sound from playing his guitar like Penniman's piano. Later performers such as Mystikal, André "André 3000" Benjamin of Outkast and Bruno Mars were cited by critics as having emulated Penniman's style in their own works. Mystikal's rap vocal delivery was compared to Penniman's. André 3000's vocals in Outkast's hit, "Hey Ya!", were compared to an "indie rock Little Richard". Bruno Mars admitted Little Richard was one of his earliest influences. Mars' song, "Runaway Baby" from his album, Doo-Wops & Hooligans was cited by The New York Times as "channeling Little Richard". Prior to his passing in 2017, Audioslave's and Soundgarden's frontman Chris Cornell traced his musical influences back to Penniman via The Beatles.

Honors

In 2007, an eclectic panel of renowned recording artists voted "Tutti Frutti" number one on Mojo's The Top 100 Records That Changed The World, hailing the recording as "the sound of the birth of rock and roll." In April 2012, Rolling Stone magazine declared that the song "still has the most inspired rock lyric on record." The same recording was inducted to the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry in 2010, with the library claiming the "unique vocalizing over the irresistible beat announced a new era in music".

In 2010, Time Magazine listed Here's Little Richard as one of the 100 Greatest and Most Influential Albums of All Time. Rolling Stone listed his Here's Little Richard at number fifty on the magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. He was ranked eighth on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Rolling Stone listed three of Little Richard's recordings, "The Girl Can't Help It", "Long Tall Sally" and "Tutti Frutti", on their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Two of the latter songs and "Good Golly, Miss Molly" were listed on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

The UK issue of GQ named Penniman its Man of the Year in its Legend category in 2010.

Penniman appeared in person to receive an honorary degree from his hometown's Mercer University on May 11, 2013. The day before the doctorate of humanities degree was to be bestowed upon him, the mayor of Macon announced that one of Little Richard's childhood homes, an historic site, will be moved to a rejuvenated section of that city's Pleasant Hill district. It will be restored and named the Little Richard Penniman – Pleasant Hill Resource House, a meeting place where local history and artifacts will be displayed as provided by residents.

In early 2019, Maggie Gonzalez, a resident of Macon, Georgia, began an online campaign proposing that a statue of Little Richard be erected in downtown Macon, taking the place of a Confederate memorial that currently occupies the space. Georgia law forbids the tearing down of Confederate statues, though they can be relocated; Gonzalez has proposed that it could be moved to nearby Rose Hill Cemetery.

Awards

Although Penniman hasn't won a competitive Grammy Award, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. His album Here's Little Richard and three of his songs ("Tutti Frutti," "Lucille" and "Long Tall Sally") are inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Penniman has received the various awards for his key role in the formation of popular music genres.

1956: He received the Cashbox Triple Crown Award for "Long Tall Sally" in 1956.

1984: He was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.

1986: He was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the initial class of inductees chosen for that honor.

1990: He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

1994: He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.

1997: He received the American Music Award of Merit.

2002: Along with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, he was honored as one of the first group of BMI icons at the 50th Annual BMI Pop Awards.

2002: He was inducted into the NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame.

2003: He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

2006: He was inducted into the Apollo Theater Hall of Fame.

2008: He received a star on Nashville's Music City Walk of Fame.

2009: He was inducted to the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

2010: He received a plaque on the theater's Walk of Fame.

2015: He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

2015: He was inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame.

2015: He received the Rhapsody & Rhythm Award from the National Museum of African American Music.

2019: He received the Distinguished Artist Award at the 2019 Tennessee Governor's Arts Awards.

#12/05 #05/09

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avengersmusings · 5 years

Photo

FULL NAME: Steven Grant Rogers MEANING: Crown, Wreath NICKNAME: Steve, Stevie, Cap, Daddy MEANING: Steve’s a shortened version of his name; Stevie was a nickname started by his mom and picked up by Bucky; Cap is usually what the team calls him; Daddy is Elise’s name for him :) AGE APPEARANCE: Appears 30, is actually 102 BIRTHDAY: July 4th, 1917 ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer SPECIES: Enhanced Human GENDER: Cis Male ALLERGIES: None SEXUAL PREFERENCE: Bisexual THEME SONG(S): America’s Suitehearts by Fall Out Boy; Dancing with Our Hands Tied by Taylor Swift, Can’t Help Falling in Love by Elvis Presley; Radioactive by Imagine Dragons

APPEARANCE

HAIR COLOR: Dark Blonde/Light Brown HAIR STYLE AND LENGTH: Close cut in the back with a little bit extra on top. Think Infinity War style hair. EYES COLOR: Blue EYESIGHT: 20/20, now. Holy shit it was terrible before the serum. HEIGHT: 6″2′ WEIGHT: 230 lbs OUTFIT/CLOTHING STYLE: The uniform is a must on mission but when he’s being Steve and not Captain America it’s kahkis and plaid shirts and button ups and old man clothes. ABNORMALITIES: None. DISTINGUISHING MARKS(SCARS,MOLES): Stretch marks along hips and stomach area from serum, small injection scars from the serum, and that’s about it. Maybe some moles here and there. SELF CARE(MAKE UP): Steve always looks put together okay, the 40s shoved that into him and won’t let go. FIRST IMPRESSION ON PEOPLE: People either underestimate him because they think he’s a “dumb blonde” or immediately respect him because he’s Captain America. SKIN COLOR: White mixed BODY TYPE/BUILD: Lean, Muscular, built like fucking truck with a tiny ass waist. DEFAULT EXPRESSION: It’s either “I have no idea what I’m doing” or “you WILL follow orders” there’s no in between. POSTURE: Honestly it depends? Steve makes himself smaller and tries not take up too much space but Cap? Takes up space and commands the room when walking in. PIERCINGS: None. DESCRIBE THEIR VOICE: Steve’s voice has a subtle Brooklyn accent and takes on a softer tone than you’d expect out of him. His voice hardens and deepens when he goes in Captain mode.

RELATIONS:

MOM: Sarah Rogers HOW WELL DO THEY GET ALONG: Steve’s mom was his whole world before she died. Sarah took care of him when he was sick and her death almost ruined him. DAD: Joseph Rogers HOW WELL DO THEY GET ALONG: Joseph died when Steve was young, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t remember how terrible his father was. The man was abusive and the day he got shipped off to WW1 was the best day for Steve and Sarah. SIBLINGS: N/A HOW WELL DO THEY GET ALONG: N/A CHILDREN: N/A HOW WELL DO THEY GET ALONG: N/A OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS: N/A PAST LOVER(S): Peggy Carter (Ex-Crush) CURRENT LOVER: Elise Burke and Bucky Barnes REACTION TO MEETING SOMEONE NEW: Steve can talk to anyone okay, he makes friends with everyone he meets. ABILITY TO WORK WITH OTHERS: Steve is a team player you cannot tell me he isn’t. HOW SOCIABLE(LONER,ETC): Steve is basically a puppy he’s sociable and outgoing. FRIENDS: The Avengers team, Wanda Maximoff, Elise, Bucky. PETS: Scout, a golden retriever. LEAST FAVORITE TYPE OF PERSON: Bullies, men who take advantage of other people. PARENTAL TYPE(PROTECTIVE,ETC): Protective, Will do anything and everything for his kid. FAVORITE PEOPLE: Elise, Bucky, Clint, Thor, the rest of the Avengers LEAST FAVORITE PEOPLE: Red Skull, Bullies, ignorant people.

PERSONALITY:

..WHEN YOU FIRST MEET THEM: ? Distant, Confident, and Inspiring ..AS YOU KNOW THEM BETTER(AND THEY LIKE YOU): Affectionate, Warm, Funny. ..AS YOU KNOW THEM BETTER(AND THEY DISLIKE YOU): Intimidating, Closed Off, Guarded. FAVORITE COLOR: Blue FAVORITE FOOD: New York Style pizza, hot dogs, anything covered in cheese thanks. FAVORITE ANIMAL: Doggos FAVORITE INSTRUMENT: Saxophone FAVORITE ELEMENT: Air LEAST FAVORITE COLOR: Yellow LEAST FAVORITE FOOD: Anything from the 40s. LEAST FAVORITE ANIMAL: Emus, the bullies of the animal kingdom. LEAST FAVORITE INSTRUMENT: Honestly none of them? LEAST FAVORITE ELEMENT: Water HOBBIES: Art, slow dancing, warm baths or lounging in sunlight. USUAL MOOD: Friendly and approachable but also keeping a slight aura of leadership.

DRINK/SMOKE/DRUGS: Nope, not really. None of them have much affect on him and he was too sick to get into the 40s habit of smoking. DARK VERSION OF SELF: Most likely brainwashed into believing Hyrda is right, follows any order without hesitate or regard for civilian life, the “perfect Soldier”. LIGHT VERSION OF SELF: Intelligent, quick to make a call that will save as many people as possible, rushing headlong into trouble to help out a civilian. HOW SERIOUS ARE THEY: In Cap mode? Full on serious nothing can make him crack, but as Steve? He’s somewhere in the middle. BELIEVE IN GHOSTS: No. If so his dad would probably be hanging around and he doesn’t want that. (IN)DEPENDANT: Both honestly? Like Steve likes to pretend to be this independent person who doesn’t need help, but he also secretly craves it. So I’d say somewhere in the middle. SOFT SPOT/VULNERABILITY: BUCKY AND ELISE, failing the team or not saving something, doing something without regard to personal safety or well being. OPINION ON SWEARING: Steve won’t curse in public okay, that’s the 40s “good Catholic boy” upbringing in him but in private? He was in the army and BUCKY IS HIS BEST FRIEND :) DAREDEVIL VS CAUTIOUS: Steve “I don’t know what a parachute is” Rogers is the opposite of cautious. MUSIC TYPE: Older, softer music. MOVIE TYPE: Romantic Comedies, Comedies in general, Musicals. BOOK TYPE: History books, and then he gets mad about facts that are wrong. GAME TYPE: Cards, maybe? Those have been around for a while so they haven’t changed that much. COMFORTABLE TEMPERATURE: Steve would rather die than be cold. He enjoys warmer weather and sunshine and just not being cold. SLEEPING PATTERN: Steve’s an old man that’s in bed before 10 and up at like 8. He also takes up A TON of space in the bed and basically smothers whoever he’s sleeping with. CLEANLINESS/NEATNESS: Steve prefers things to be neat and orderly but isn’t bothered by a little mess. As long as it doesn’t get too bad or become a habit. DESIRED PET: So many dogs. HOW DO THEY PASS TIME: Doodling on scrap papers, boxing, lounging around in sunshine or warm spaces. BIGGEST SECRET: I feel like Steve really doesn’t have secrets? Maybe his dad being abusive because he doesn’t really want to talk about it. HERO/WHO THEY LOOK UP TO: Bucky and Elise. WHAT ANIMAL WOULD THEY BE: A golden retriever. FEARS: Being trapped in a cold, tight space, losing Elise or Bucky, failing the team and causing someone’s death, being lost in time again. COMFORTS: Elise’s perfume and Bucky’s aftershave, running laps with Scout, his mom’s old records, and reruns of old cartoons.

HOW DO THEY ACT WHEN THEY ARE:

SAD: Steve distants himself when he’s sad. A leader isn’t allowed to show weakness and sadness is one. He also likes talking through things that make him sad. HAPPY: Playful, energetic, probably smothering you with his biceps on accident because he gets touchy feely and wants a hug. ANGRY: Depending on how angry; it’s either the “you’ve messed up” face of disappointment or cold fury with biting, harsh words. Fists will also be thrown if he gets angry enough. AFRAID: Again, this is a weakness a leader isn’t supposed to show so Steve tries to hide it as much as possible. He withdraws and hides away until he works it out on his own or someone finds him. LOVE SOMEONE: SAY HELLO TO YOUR NEW BODYGUARD/BEST FRIEND. Steve will literally do anything for someone he loves. Anything. He’s loyal beyond believe and up for anything they ask him. HATE SOMEONE: Steve doesn’t hate that many people but those he does quickly realize that an angry Captain America is not something you want coming at you. WANT SOMETHING: Steve? Allowing himself to get what he wants? Don’t know her. He’s the definition of “waiting over 70 years to tell my best friend i love him” type of guy. CONFUSED: You know that cute look dogs get when they’re confused and trying to work things out? That’s Steve thanks.

HOW DO THEY REACT TO:

DANGER: Danger is Steve’s middle name because he cannot stop himself from running headfirst into it. SOMEONE THEY HATE WHO HAS A CRUSH ON THEM: Steve gets confused because he still sees himself as the tiny 90 pound scrawny kid and nobody really wanted that. PROPOSAL TO MARRY: Steve’s not against the idea of marriage, but it’s also not something he knows they can really do? So I don’t really know how he’d react to that. DEATH OF LOVED ONE: Each loss feels like a personal defeat for Steve so it’s twice as bad. But after losing pretty much everyone he’s ever cared about (even if Bucky came back) it doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. DIFFICULT GAME/MATH/ETC: That’s something that gets tossed aside until he has time to work it out, or send it to someone that can solve it quicker. INJURY: Steve gets injured and doesn’t realize it until after the mission is over like every time they go out. However, if one of his team gets injured, he’s taking down whoever hurt them. SOMETHING IRRESISTABLY CUTE: Steve immediately wants to go over and hold whatever it is. Babies, dogs, you name it. LOSS OF HOURS OF WORK: ........no this doesn’t happen.

KNOWLEDGE:

LANGUAGES: English, ASL, French, a little German. SCHOOLING LEVEL: High School & Some Art School FAVORITE SUBJECT (S): Art, History, & Writing INTERESTED CAREERS: An artist, maybe? EXPERTISE: Combat, Shield Mastery, Master Tactician, Enhanced capabilities PUZZLES: Puzzles take him a minute but the serum helps him figure them out rather quickly. CHEMISTRY: Chemistry is probably NOT Steve’s forte but he can follow along with basic things. MATH: Again, not his forte but he understand basic things. Plus throwing the shield takes some math skills. ENGLISH: Steve was surprisingly good at English in school, from interpreting things to reading above grade level. It was one of the few interests he had that didn’t make him sicker. GEOGRAPHY: Steve can read and understand maps. POLITICS/LAW: Politics and the Law are Steve’s thing. He frequently fights against people on the internet about their political views and will fight against laws he doesn’t agree with. ECONOMY/ACCOUNTING: The economy doesn’t really interest Steve, but he’s fully aware of the class divide and how bad some people have it. Current situations remind him a lot of pre-Depression times so he tries to help out as much as possible. COOKING: Steve cannot cook, he tries but cannot. SEWING: Sarah taught Steve at a young age how to sew because “if you’re going to keep ruining your clothes it’s time you learned to fix ‘em yourself STEVEN”. MECHANICS: Steve knows OF cars yes. BOTANY (FLOWERS): Besides the fact that flowers are a thing? Not so much. MYTHOLOGY: This is probably another subject Steve doesn’t know much about, it conflicts with his Catholic views he had growing up. DRAMATICS(ACTING,SINGING): God Steve hates even thinking about this because of the Cap tour. Ouch. READING LEVEL: Above average. Steve read for fun while sick so he’s well above where he should be. HOW GOOD ARE THEY AT PLANNING AHEAD: Steve lives off planning ahead okay. It’s his JOB as team leader to be 4 steps ahead of everyone and the bad guys. Rip Steveo.

ROMANCE:

DO THEY TAKE INITIATIVE: No, not really. He’s more content to be pulled around and go with the flow. HOW DO THEY ACT(SHY,ETC): In public? Shy, 40s boy out to play. In private? Probably the same what a loser. GENTLEMAN/LADYLIKE VS KLUTZY: Gentleman-like, please. GO SLOW VS JUMP INTO: S L O W as fuck. PROTECTIVE: Hi hello have you met Steve? ACT LIKE FRIENDS OR LOVERS: B O T H. WHAT KIND OF PRESENTS DO THEY BUY: Steve’s always bringing home flowers or gifts just because. Things for Elise to wear or a plant for the house? Also a random homeless puppy? Yeah Steve’s probably brought it all home at some point. TYPE OF KISSER: Honestly, Steve’s probably soft because he’s a soft boy but that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when he can be rough :) DO THEY WANT KIDS: He can’t have them but he wouldn’t mind having one. DO THEY WANT TO MARRY: Yes, even though he really cant. MAKE GOOD OR BAD DECISIONS: Bad decisions are unintentionally made because Steve is a reckless idiot. ARE THEY ROMANTIC: Y E S. HOW ARE THEY IN BED: Steve likes making sure both Elise and Bucky are well taken care of even at the expense of his own pleasure okay. GET JEALOUS EASY: Not really? After everything they’ve all been through none of them really have to worry about anything. WIFE/HUBBY BEATER: You mean beating up people that do this? Hell yeah. MARRY FOR MONEY: Nope. FAVORITE POSITION: Steve enjoys being plowed by Bucky while Elise is on top of him thanks. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN ON THEIR DREAM DATE: Naked art time. Just using Bucky and Elise as a canvas and making a mess while doing it? Yes please. OPINION ON SEX: Sex was always something Steve wasn’t really interested in? Mostly because nobody wanted him (or so he thought) but now that he has two people that always want him? It’s a good workout and way to spend time with his two favorite people.

#char: steve rogers #steve: bio

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unclefungusthegoat · 6 years

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Far Cry 5 Theory #3- Faith And The Greek Goddesses

Hi all, and welcome to the third in a series of Far Cry 5 meta posts! Today, I’m talking about the often sadly overlooked, beloved little sister, Faith! It’s not an original theory this time, instead I’m building on already existing and acknowledged symbolism within the game!

This one is 1972 words, so another long one, but I hope it’s interesting!

Far Cry 5 is laden with Christian symbolism- talk of God, baptism, souls and sins- but there is one very interesting example of where this trend is broken. This moment comes within the scene where Faith entices Burke to kill Virgil, and then himself.

As she approaches her victims, she says to the Deputy:

“Do you know what hubris is? Arrogance before the gods. The Greeks saw it as a dangerous form of pride that invoked the goddess Nemesis, who would seek retribution.”

This is the only example in the entire game (and indeed, the supporting materials) where the situation’s religious undertones are blatantly derivative of Greek mythology. And while Faith is heavily under the influence of Joseph’s doctrine and ideology, I feel that this very deliberate reference can shed some light on how she decided to play the new role she had been given.

Not just as a Herald... but as a goddess.

Aphrodite. Cybele. Psyche.

Nemesis.

Nemesis is the Greek goddess of retribution, justice and revenge, a figure who punishes arrogance and pride.

Immediately after making this reference, Faith goes on to say:

“If violence is the only language you choose to speak, I’ll speak your language.”

She directly places herself in the role of Nemesis, deciding that she must combat the Deputy’s violence, their hubris, by retaliating with Burke and Virgil’s deaths.

Faith is the only one of the Seeds who actually punishes the Deputy’s actions.

INSPIRATION

Due to this reference, it appears that Rachel took heavy inspiration from the Greek mythology when performing her role as Faith. It has been discussed before (in this post by teamhawkeye and weekend-writer) that she may have learned how to be a Herald from Jacob, since she directly quotes him within the game, and I also think that all of Jacob’s talk of humanity, history and falling empires may have influenced her to look at the ancient societies, to understand the faiths that made their empires so strong.

She would learn of their all-powerful gods and of cruel punishments administered to those proud enough to challenge them- think of the fates of Medusa, Arachne, Marsyas and Tiresias.

And seeing how successful the ancient gods were at eliciting respect and obedience, she decided to put their methodologies into practice.

BUT WHY?

Delusions of grandeur.

It’s easy to imagine, that having been once cast out from society, Rachel might become enamoured with her new position as a Herald, as the one Joseph hand-picked to be at his side. She rose from nothing to become a leader, loved and feared. She now held the ability to control people entirely. She was now divine.

It’s pretty likely that power went to her head.

I have been considering the possibility that Faith believes she is supposed to act as a deterrent for Joseph’s own hubris. Joseph would worry that to wield the power he has, and to carry the notion that he is chosen by God, may make him arrogant and tyrannical, and he would need someone to keep his pride in check. Greg Bryk has discussed how Faith is a motherly figure to Joseph- who better to aid him in a battle with his own sins than a parental figure, just as he, as a ‘Father’, aids the atonement of his flock?

But why would Joseph ask her to take inspiration from an ancient religion that isn’t part of the Eden’s Gate doctrine? Why would he raise her to be a godly figure, when he and his brothers were simply prophets?

He wouldn’t.

So maybe Faith, with talk of her divinity as her new form of cocaine, combined Joseph’s request to assist him, her developing delusions of grandeur, and the ancient stories she learned from Jacob, to come to the conclusion that she was special, chosen like the heroes of old?

And so she decided to become a goddess, as evidence of her worth.

Faith wasn’t named by the Voice in Joseph’s original visions like John and Jacob were, and I imagine she’d be aware of that. Perhaps she felt bitter, outcast, not quite part of the group. A Herald, but not a prophet. A Jessop, not a true Seed.

She knew she must have a purpose, after all, she was chosen.

Perhaps she was chosen as a guide for the prophet, so that he might remain humble and loyal to his holy cause?

SO WHAT PROOF OF THIS IS THERE?

HER ORIGINS

Nemesis is the child of Nyx, the goddess of night, and Erebus, god of darkness. And so it can be argued that she was quite literally ‘born of darkness’. Both Nyx and Erebor were born of Chaos which the Greeks described as a formless, eternal dark abyss between the Earth and sky, or upon which the Earth rests.

In one of Faith’s broadcasts, she can be heard saying ‘Life comes from chaos’.

The Greeks' dark void, Chaos, was worshipped as the very first thing to exist.

It seems too much of a coincidence for her to make this statement, a sentiment not shared by any of the other Seeds, if she had not been influenced by Greek mythology. And it could be that Faith’s belief in this doctrine comes from the parallels it has with her own story:

“Faith flies divine—and Rachel…Rachel gropes around in the darkness. I left her there a long time ago.”

Rachel was born into a world of darkness, by abusive parents. She tried to remake herself using drugs, but still was lost in the ‘chaos’. It was only when Joseph found her that she finally became ‘Faith’... that she became ‘Nemesis’ and came into the light, ‘born’ as the person she was meant to be.

There are also interpretations where Nemesis has no father, which is all the more interesting, considering Joseph’s epithet.

SYMBOLISM

The above depiction of her is especially interesting, as Nemesis holds two of her symbols- that of scales, and a sword. These are the very symbols of her adoptive brothers. We have little insight of how Faith interacts with John and Jacob, but we know that Joseph apparently dotes on her. Perhaps, if she is indeed consumed by the notion that Joseph chose her, made her a favourite, that she feels she has some degree of control over them too?

THE ANGELS

Faith appears to have taken inspiration from Nemesis in her manufacturing of the Bliss, and the effects it takes upon those consumed by it.

The Angels are overdosed so heavily on Bliss, that they no longer have free will. This is an irreversible process, and one wonders why such a process is needed, if the Bliss is influential enough upon most people to make them suggestible to the Project?

Well, perhaps Faith suggested it, in reference to Adrasteia.

Adrasteia was an alternative name for Nemesis, and in Ancient Greek, roughly translates to ‘one from whom there is no escape’.

Interestingly, Adrasteia is also the epithet of Cybele, the goddess of childbirth. Could it be that Faith, in a twisted way, thinks of the Angels as her children- a note from a Priestess describes them as ‘extensions’ of Faith- and one very telling phone message, has her saying:

“A baby is a sack of screaming, shitting, crying impulses with no thoughts, no personality, no understanding of the world beyond feelings. It has no soul. You have to give it one. The only soul we ever have, we receive from others. And it is only others who can take it away.”

Writings on Nemesis has also described how she uses "adamantine bridles" to restrain "the frivolous insolences of mortals”- and it wouldn’t surprise me to think that this is why her Angels wear masks over their mouths. There is a suggestion that their tongues have been removed, but why would Eden’s Gate hide that? They are hardly adverse to graphic reminders of their sins?

THE SIREN AND NARCISSUS

Faith bears the title ‘The Siren’, a creature from Greek mythology famous for leading people to watery graves by seducing them with their voices, and it therefore can be no coincidence that water is a recurring feature within Faith’s scenes. And, as The Siren, Faith uses desires and dreams to entice the disillusioned, before drowning them within the Bliss.

Nemesis is a siren in her own way, famous for leading someone to a watery grave- Narcissus, the man who fell in love with his own reflection.

Parallels can easily be drawn to Burke’s tragic tale. Once proud and confident, but discontented, he sits with the Deputy upon the water, quite literally reflecting upon his new life, filled with love for his new happier self. And though others try to save him, he cannot escape the obsession with these reflections and ultimately dies because of it.

PHYSICAL- APHRODITE?

In the Bliss, Faith seemingly possesses a pair of beautiful white wings. And while initially this may seem to suggest her angelic nature, it seems odd to brand her with the same title as the mindless Angels, when she evidently not only has free will, but also is of great value and deeply cherished by Joseph.

And so now we come to note that Nemesis is actually very often portrayed as a winged figure- the poet Mesomedes described her as “Nemesis, winged balancer of life, dark-faced goddess, daughter of Justice”.

Additionally, it can be argued that Faith also took inspiration from Aphrodite.

Nemesis was said to resemble Aphrodite, the goddess of love who is famously beautiful, and there are multiple lines of dialogue from characters within the game that reflect on Faith’s attractiveness. Hurk even asks if there would be any way of reviving her, because she is so beautiful.

It makes sense that Rachel, riddled with low self-esteem, would choose to empower herself by modelling her image on a goddess so desired. Parallels can be drawn to the Greek tale of the ‘Judgement of Paris’, where Paris, prince of Troy, named Aphrodite as the most beautiful, over Hera and Athena- just as Rachel was chosen by Joseph as the most faithful over Lana and Serena.

Finally, Faith is often seen with butterflies around her. In Greek mythology, the goddess Psyche was a beautiful woman who people began to covet and worship in place of Aphrodite, and she was eventually brought into the service of the goddess, having evoked her wrath.

Psyche is represented with butterfly wings.

SUMMARY

Each of the Seeds act according to their own gospels, inflicted upon them by their own individual ‘Gods’. Joseph’s is the Voice. John’s are the Duncans. Jacob’s is his younger self.

And so who drives Faith?

She adores (and fears) Joseph. She learned from Jacob. But to assume that they are her Gods detracts from the severity of her actions and her evil. It removes her free will... and she is no Angel.

No, she must have set out to find a God of her own.

Tracey says of Faith: ‘This is what she does. Takes. Destroys.’ Faith knew misery in her life before the Project, and so is of the same mindset as the other Seeds- that happiness can only be found by enduring suffering and pain. And she may experience jealousy of others who have never had to suffer.

A quote I found on Nemesis read:

Nemesis believed that no one should ever have too much goodness in their lives, and she had always cursed those who were blessed with countless gifts.

In other words, Nemesis believed in punishing ‘undeserved good fortune’, not necessarily making people suffer completely, but suffer enough.

Just as she did.

Faith saw herself in this vengeful, loyal, beautiful goddess. She recognised her past and new mission within the holy figure’s doctrine. And with Joseph's open attitude as to how the Heralds chose to operate, she could easily merge her fantasies with his.

She became Nemesis, challenging the rightful goddess, and committing the very sin, the hubris, both of them sought to seek out and punish.

#far cry 5 #far cry 5 meta #greek mythology #faith seed #joseph seed #john seed #jacob seed #marshall burke #virgil minkler #wikipedia is totally my friend hahahaha #i'm sorry if stuff is inaccurate #greek mythology is so complicated hahahaha #this started as just an analysis of nemesis #but the others fit so well #I just couldn't ignore them #I've been a coward about posting this for days now #I just get so nervous hahahahaha #hope you enjoy!

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weasleyismyking540 · 6 years

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@shadowfaery7 Thanks for this!! You have inspired something lol

Hello darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

Within the sound of silence

"Ginevra.....Ginevra....."

She woke up instantly and screamed as she tumbled out of her four poster bed. She gritted her teeth as her arm throbbed from hitting the concrete ground.

She looked around quickly to see if any of her dormmates had awakened. Shockingly, they had not.

She stood up and shivered, the cold air against her skin along with her dream chilling her. She stood there, letting her mind come to the realization that she was in her 5th year bow, 15 years old, no longer in possession of the diary. It was destroyed, locked away in Dumbledore's office.

"Ginevra.....sweet Ginevra....."

Ginny let out a gasp as she looked around frantically. Her mind had to be playing tricks on her. She couldn't he hearing Tom's voice. Not now. He was gone wasn't he? Harry had stabbed the diary along with his memory with a basilisk fang 4 years ago.

"You're losing it, Gin," she whispered to herself.

"Come to me, Ginevra....I miss you...."

Her body froze. She had heard that clear as day, as if Tom had whispered it into her ear from behind. She willed herself to turn around.

He wasn't there.

She breathed in deep as she tried to compose herself. She grabbed her brother Bill's oversized bedroom robe and wrapped it around her. She slipped her feet into her slippers, grabbed her wand, and crept out of her dorm.

It was 2 in the morning, but she had to take a walk. She had to get some air.

She walked down the stairs and into the common room where she had paused. She spotted a sleeping Ron and Hermione in front of the fireplace, Hermione's head laying on Ron's shoulder with his arm around her in a comforting embrace. She shook her head as she tiptoed past them. They must have been waiting for Harry to get back from wherever he was. Wherever he wouldn't tell her.

She made her way out of the portrait hole, careful not to wake the Fat Lady, as she would surely cry out and awaken the entire house with her nagging and carrying on about her being out at this time of night.

"Ginevra, my love.....you've grown up so beautiful.....come to me.....come to me...."

At that, Ginny took off. She ran as fast as she could in no direction in particular. How in the world could she be hearing his voice as if she was back in her first year? I mean yes, He Who Must Not Be Named had returned, and he and Tom were indeed the same, but he should have known nothing of her. At least not to be able to contact her. The memory of Tom knew her, not Voldemort. It made no sense.

Or did it?

Ginny ran blindly as the voice of Tom Riddle rang in her ears. It seems to be getting louder the more she ran.

She had to escape it he was taunting her. Torturing her. It wasn't fair. What had she done to warrant his return into her mind.

The next thing she knew, she was slamming into something. Not something, someone. The force was so great that she had caused him to collide with the wall.

He let out a grunt. Ginny's squeezed her eyes shut, her mind begging that it wasn't Tom. She felt her arms being gripped tightly.

"Weaselette?"

Ginny's eyes popped open. She looked up at the slightly taller than her figure that was gripping at her. His smoke like eyes stared back at her in confusion.

"Draco!!" she sobbed out, breaking from his grip and latching onto him as if he were one of her brothers. She cried loudly into his chest, her tears damping his t-shirt.

Draco broke free of Ginny's hold and pulled her into a nearby broom closet. He put a silencing charm up and lit the tip of his wand.

"Weasley, what the hell are you-"

"He's back, Draco, he's back!!" cried out Ginny, tears pouring like a thunderstorm down her face. "Tom is back and he called out to me and he won't leave me alone!! I can't get rid of him!!"

Draco gave Ginny a look of disgust. "I dont have fucking time for this, Weasley!!" he spat. "Stop being stupid, of course he's back!!"

"You don't understand!!" yelled Ginny, pounding at Draco's chest with her fist. "He's calling out to me!! He wants me to come to him!!"

Draco grabbed Ginny's arms, preventing her fists from making contact with his chest again. "And? What am I supposed to do about it? Why don't you run and tell your precious Potter about it??"

Ginny's eyes grew wide as she stared at Draco. She felt anger replace her fear as she snatched her arms away.

"I tell you that I'm hearing Tom Riddle's fucking voice in my head and all you can respond with is Harry?!? Are you fucking mental??"

"I'm not the one that ran to him, Weasley!!"

"Ginny!!"

"I said what I said!! You don't need my help anymore when you have his saintly ass to run to!!" yelled Draco, his voice slightly cracking.

Ginny stared at Draco in disbelief. "You're still angry about that?!? You knew damn well that we couldn't....No!! I'm not discussing this with you right now!! Please, Draco!! I can't take it!! I feel the darkness again!! And I need you!!"

Draco felt the wall that he had quickly built up start to crumble. To hell with Ginny Weasley. He had said it himself the moment he saw her and fucking Harry Potter walk hand in hand for the first time at breakfast. He had vowed not to speak to her. To forget her existence entirely, which was very difficult to do as he saw her at least five times every fucking weekday. She had chose Harry over him. In friendship, in partnership....in love....

"Gin..." he whispered.

"Please...." she said, latching onto him again.

The wall succumbed to her plea. Draco wrapped his arms around Ginny, squeezing her closer to him as he kissed the top of her head. What was he thinking? She had had a power over him since he was 12 years old and first encountered her in Borgin and Burkes. He had found her multiple times in the strangest places when he was in his second year. They had developed a secret kinship and he was the only one that knew outside of her family, Dumbledore, a few teachers, and of course fucking Potter and Granger that knew that Tom Riddle had caused Ginny to open the Chamber of Secrets.

She was a mess her entire second and third years. Which she only showed to Draco. He was the only one that knew of Ginny's cutting, which he had to eventually put a charm on her to force her to stop whenever she felt the urge. He was the only one that she told exactly everything both friendly as well as almost sexual that Tom had said to her. That she was pretty. That if she was any older, they would be together. How when she would get older he imagined she would grow nicely into her body. Being 15 at the time, Draco had wished the memory of Tom Riddle was still around so he could have destroyed him himself.

At the same time, it was Ginny who knew everything about Draco and his family and never told anyone. She was the one that although she wanted to believe Harry that Voldemort had returned when he had said so. Draco had confirmed it in a letter he had written to her about the man staying at his home. About how it seemed the room would chill when he would enter it. How he felt more than uncomfortable when Voldemort would say his name. How he was more scared of becoming a Death Eater than eager to be like his father. He didn't want it at all actually.

They had shared a many a conversation in secret meeting spots around the school. Each of them felt that they had a darkness in them that they couldn't escape. But somehow, when the two was together, it seemed to not bother them. The darkness didn't seem so intense when they would be around each other. And they soon found themselves seeking each other out more and more for comfort, for a cry, and just to be near one another.

He had grown to love being around her. He had began to make decisions about not doing the things that he was supposed to be doing all because of her. There was a plan. It should have been carried out ages ago. He was stalling. Horribly. Because of Ginny Weasley.

And when she chose Potter over him, all bets were off.

"What does he want with me, Draco?" he heard Ginny whisper, bringing his focus back to her. "I don't want to hurt anyone else."

"You won't hurt anyone," reassured Draco.

"How do you know that?"

"I just do. You're not capable of it. Like....like I am." he sighed.

Ginny looked up at Draco and watched as his eyes swirled with sadness and dread. She had known that there was something going on with him ever since he had written her last summer to stay away from him, which of course she didn't listen to. He has told her that he was dangerous. That something terrible was going to happen if she continued to interact with him. But Ginny stubbornly stuck with him, and he willingly let her.

"Stop it," said Ginny firmly, putting her hand on Draco's cheek. "You won't hurt anyone."

"How do you know that, Ginny?" said Draco, his cheek warming to Ginn's gentle touch. "You don't know what I'm capable of."

Ginny forced a smile. "I know you wont hurt me."

Draco gazed intensely into Ginny's brown eyes. Ginny stares back just as hard. She gasped, thinking for a second she saw something flicker in his eyes. Something that wasn't him. Before she could figure it out, she felt Draco's lips crash into hers. Though she knew it was wrong, she allowed it to happen, closing her eyes and kissing him back. It felt pleading, almost painful. As if they were both crying out to each other.

"Well done, Ginevra dear. You'll need the boy." she heard Tom's silky smooth voice in her ear.

"Well done, Draco. Bring her to me...." he heard the voice of Voldemort as if he were right in the room.

They both jumped back from each other. Their eyes locked once again, each of them trying to work out what was happening to both themselves and each other.

"You heard him too." they said to each other at the same time.

#draco malfoy #ginny weasley #draco and ginny #ginny and draco #draco x ginny #ginny x draco #drinny #drinny fic #song prompt #My writing #ask me #weasleyismyking540

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diminuel · 7 years

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Fic Reading List: January

I’ve done this before, but I thought I’d try to keep track of the fics I’m reading and share them with you too. I added little notes after the summary. There are all types of genres, from canon to A/B/O.

I’ve added the archive warnings in the brackets in case there were any, but didn’t include the tags. So make sure to read them.

Enjoy! ♥

I Wished for This by Piper_Halliwell1979 (Mature, 3.5k)

After the decision is made for Heaven to repopulate, Castiel is excluded from selective pairing. Since his biology will be affected anyway, he and Dean discuss the possibility of having a biological child of their own.

Post S13 mpreg. One-shot, with a calm and fluffy atmosphere.

Family by Piper_Halliwell1979 (Mature, 5.5k)

After a one night stand Castiel finds himself pregnant by Dean. After some miscommunication they come together to bring a new Winchester into the world.

Not season specific canon compliant story. A lovely story about an unexpected pregnancy and how it makes everything else fall into place.

How to Romance a Human by cloudyjenn (4k)

Based on a prompt from moonlettuce for the Renegade Angels challenge. The prompt was "Castiel tries to woo Dean using a Cosmo article entitled 20 ways to get your man."

S5 is canon compliant story. An immensely amusing fic.

A Song of Wind and Wings by triedunture (Explicit, 10k)

The Angelborn have not been seen in Westeros in hundreds of years. Lord Dean Winchester and his brother Ser Sam arrive in Lady Ellen's Highroad Keep after receiving word that one has been taken captive.

A lovely one shot that borrows from Game of Thrones, but it’s easy to read it as a wonderful fantasy AU without any knowledge of GoT! Also features some wing care~

Untitled by jinxedambitions (Explicit)

Castiel woke in an unfamiliar bed with the aches and pains of a night spent debauching.

A nsfw one shot where Cas wakes up in a Dean’s bed and can’t remember the sex they had. So Dean decides they should do it again.

Long Exposure by Rosewhipped (Explicit, Rape/ Non-Con, 107k, WIP)

When Dean kicks Castiel out of the bunker, they have no contact for months. Once the Gadreel/Ezekiel situation is finally resolved, Dean tries to reach out, but cannot get in touch with Cas. To his horror, he soon discovers his friend has been in trouble for a long time. Dark Fic.

Still a WIP, but it’s really long and it’s a wonderful hurt!Cas story. I’ve read it twice now and it’s been a delight both times!

Timer by galaxystiel (2.1k)

Dean doesn't have a soulmate, but if he did, he swears it would be Castiel Novak.

Cute soulmate AU one-shot with a dash of angst!

To Build On Ruins by SillyBlue (18.8k)

When Dean comes of age, he's presented with a choice that is supposed to keep the Winchester pack strong and unified: exile or submission. With war having recently ended and the winter being bitter and dangerous for a young exiled alpha, Dean doesn't really have a choice but to submit. But less than four years later Sam is presented with the same impossible question and Dean's forced to act.

Dean-centric, gen story.

You Send Me by thelonelywriter (26k)

Some months go by of Dean and Cas living together without a hitch.

Some months go by of Cas and Dean living together without Cas' heats being an issue.

And some more months go by before something shifts.

It takes awhile, but Dean realizes soon enough that he's in a little too deep...

Lovely a/b/o, friends with benefits/ room mates to real mates story!

The Unclean by TheIttyBitty (Mature, 53k)

Dean should know by now to expect the worst when his brother calls him in the middle of the night with words like, we have a situation on his tongue. Still, he's more than a little surprised when Sam asks him to take in a young man recently rescued from a cult.

Castiel - malnourished, abused, and afraid - might be more than Dean can handle, but someone's got to do it. Dean searches and finds a bright, loving man buried under those years of abuse, and he'll do just about anything to help Castiel feel whole again.

This is a hurt!Cas story that focuses on the healing afterwards! Also, Dean’s a witch, but the good kind.

What Once Was Sacred by saltandbyrne (Explicit, 55k)

Los Angeles detective Dean Winchester works tirelessly to atone for the sins of his father one case at a time. When his best friend Charlie drags him to visit Sam at his new job, Dean stumbles onto a bizarre string of deaths that brings him uncomfortably close to his past.

Dean can't stop thinking about Castiel, an enigmatic DJ who plays the sexiest music Dean's ever heard. A chance encounter at Castiel's house reveals that Castiel is an incubus, and Dean must face the lies and the reality of his childhood as a hunter. Dean comes to see that he and Castiel have more in common than he thought, and that guilt can be the hardest thing to cast aside.

What I loved a lot about this story was that even though Dean had been hunting as a child, Dean convinced himself that his father had just been delusional. It’s also got great scenes scenes and an interesting plot!

Daughter of a Killer by xHaruka17x (Explicit, Violence, Rape/Non-con, 8.2k)

Her Father was a Killer. But she wanted to know why and Papa wouldn't tell her.

Dean was in prison for 16 years and this is set after he is released. It focuses on his daughter (who never met him) finding out what exactly has happened.

No Vacancy by 60r3d0m (Explicit, 2.8k)

The shower water’s ice cold but the sweat and grime on his body is enough to make him stay.

For a long time, he holds Dean’s borrowed shorts in his hands. He turns them over, feels the fabric worn soft with age. They’re favoured shorts. Slept in often because they’re comfortable and loved and maybe echo of home.

Something that Cas doesn’t have.

After the Rit Zien attacks Cas at Nora's house, Dean takes him to his motel room to treat his injuries. He ends up staying the night.

(or in other words, the very famous fanfiction gap of 9.06 Heaven Can't Wait)

I can’t get enough of fics who address 9x06, but if you’re looking for something that fixes it? This fic isn’t it, this fic attacks your emotions. Just the kind of pain I enjoy!

He Can't Sleep by 60r3d0m (mature, 18.9k)

“I wish I could stand,” Cas says.

“Yeah,” Dean says.

Cas holds up his hand, flexes it, stares and then drops it.

“This weakness is unsettling. I can’t—I can’t even hold a pitcher of water, Dean.”

Dean makes a small sound in his throat, a non-committal hum.

He’s done soaping up Cas’ hair. He grabs the sponge at his side and starts to scrub at Cas’ skin, up along his arms, his neck, down his chest. When he runs it up his legs, to his thighs, Cas shudders and then there’s a hand cupping Dean’s cheek, cold and dripping water and soap, and Dean falters, looks at him for the first time.

“Will you sleep with me?” Cas says. “Tonight?”

Dean swallows.

He says yes.

After Lucifer's possession, Castiel stops talking.

This story spans a couple of years and gives me the worst case of second-hand pining ever. All the time Dean and Cas lost to silence...! So sad! But with a happy ending.

Sunrise, once more by 60r3d0m (Mature, 3.2k)

It’s the sun rising. It’s what he thinks as he’s walking back to the cabin, where Jack and Sam will pretend that his eyes aren’t swollen red, where they’ll pretend that they didn’t see him cry as hard as he did. But the great light that comes from behind him isn’t that. The fire that ignites from the heart of the pyre isn’t the goddamn sun.

It’s Cas.

(fix-it coda for 13.01 where Cas comes back because I miss him)

Very sad at first, but then fixes everything! ;w; I also like Jack in this one. (Attention for Dean’s suicide attempt. It’s not explicit and very short, but he drives the car into a pole. Jack fixes him up.)

Rain, Rain, Go Away by angvlicmish (Explicit, 3.5k)

Cas and Dean are in love but when they’re caught by Cas’ mother Naomi she accuses Dean of rape and lands him in jail. When he is let out for insufficient evidence a few years later he has trouble adjusting and finding work. He leaves town and goes under several different alias to try and start a new life. Cas is determined to find him to apologise and when he does find Dean he continues to pursue him even though Dean is still mad at Cas for not standing up for him.

The fic is slightly different from the summary, which was the original prompt for the story. It’s a sad story, but one with a hopeful ending. Attention: for mentions of Cas harming himself and wanting to commit suicide.

A Winter’s Tale by NorthernSparrow (64k)

Summary: Set in mid S9. Cas is sick and Dean finds a journal that Cas kept about his time alone as a human. Retelling of first half of S9 from Cas’s POV. Sick fic, hurt/comfort, journal fic. Lots of Cas angst/loneliness and a correspondingly equal volume of Dean guilt. Holiday fic too - covers Cas’s Thanksgiving and ends with Christmas.

Canon compliant hurt!Cas story that never fails to wound me and comfort me at the same time.

Spontaneous combustion by KoshiSekisen (18.4k)

Summary: “So you’re saying,” Sam repeated, his eyebrows arched high in disbelief, a notepad in one hand and a pen in the other. “Janine just…”

“She… poofed,” Sheriff Emily Burke insisted, pinching the bridge of her nose with her fingers.

An interesting case fic. It’s gen and it’s got some nice hurt!Cas~

Rutnam Shore by mnwood (21k)

Summary: Dean Winchester has never been past the city limits of the sleepy town of Rutnam Shore. Except in his dreams, where he travels the country in a classic car and fights mythical beings with his little brother. It's the only time he gets to see his brother, since Sam died in a car crash when they were kids. Dean wants nothing more than to get as far away from Rutnam Shore as he can, but unfortunately he's afraid of driving and feels like he's stuck.

I can’t say too much about the story without spoiling a major plot point! It’s interesting and satisfying to read! It focuses almost exclusively on Dean and him trying to figure our just what exactly is going on.

#Supernatural #Destiel #reading list #fic rec

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davidcarner · 7 years

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Molly vs The Life She Expected: The Egg

A/N: *Looks around, clicks post, runs away cackling*

Disclaimer: I don't own Chuck, or Molly…but I really missed her…

Hi, I'm Molly! Here are a few things you might need to know, or maybe you just forgot. Five years ago, my mommy saved me and brought be to California. Mommy met the greatest guy ever in Chuck, and after FOREVER, I got them to get married. Now Mommy is going to have a baby, and I can't wait! Oh, and Jerry is being real nice to me…because I told him to….I haven't told him yet he is gonna marry me. I don't think he's ready for that news. On with the story!

Chuck sat in the vehicle, tapping his fingers on the on the door, nervous.

"Will you calm down?" Sarah asked, amused at her husband. It was January and Sarah had informed Chuck that they needed to go to the school today. She had not told him why.

"I would calm down if I knew what was going on," Chuck said. "Did she explain how to have a baby to someone?"

"We've talked to her about that," Sarah said. Chuck continued on like he didn't hear her.

"Did she get mad at Jerry and used some of those self-defense techniques you taught her?" he said, looking out the window shaking his head.

"I just think it's important that she can protect herself if she needs to," Sarah said, knowing he was spiraling, but enjoying the show.

"What if, oh no…you don't think she set up two single teachers do you?" he asked turning to Sarah. She just gave him a look, and a little worry began to form in the pit of her stomach.

"Chuck, have you ever considered that maybe she did something good?" Sarah asked. Chuck looked sick.

"Oh, no," he said softly. "I'm that dad. I think the worst about my kid. This is horrible. I'm a terrible father."

"Chuck," Sarah said, trying to calm him. "Everything is okay. I know exactly what is going on, and I was just having some fun. You're not a bad dad, but quit worrying." He nodded and turned to her.

"So, what's going on?" he asked. Sarah smiled.

"You'll find out soon enough," she said. They pulled into the school, went inside, checked in, got visitor's passes and walked down to Molly's class room. The children were there, in a semi-circle with an egg in front of each of them.

"Why does the one in front of Molly have curly hair?" Chuck asked. Sarah just looked at him, amused. "Who are the eggs?"

"They are supposed to be the child's hero, an eggceptional leader," she said, looking at Chuck. Chuck looked at her, and started to say something, but the presentations began. Several gave presentations on historical figures, sports figures, or other famous people, but eventually it was Molly's turn.

"My hero is my daddy," she began. "Charles Irving Bartowski, or Chuck. When he was a boy, both of his parents left, and his sister had to raise him. He grew up, went to college, and there, he was accused of cheating on a test. He didn't, but they expelled him. He came back home, where he worked at the Buy More and eventually got his college degree. He and his friend, my Uncle Morgan, created a game company. Everything was going great, but then Daddy's sister, my Aunt Ellie, and her husband, Uncle Awesome, died." The room was silent. "Aunt Ellie was daddy's sister and mother all rolled up into one. Ellie and Awesome had their own baby, Clara, who Daddy had to raise. Daddy was sad, but one day at preschool, he saw me, and I was sad, because I had just found out I was adopted. Daddy asked me what was wrong, and I told him, and he said, we were lucky, someone chose to love us. Most kids have natural mothers and fathers who love them, but we had someone love us, even though we weren't their child." There were a few wet eyes. "Daddy taught me, you don't give up on people, you don't give up on love, and you just don't give up. Now he's married to Mommy, and I have a baby sister Clara and in a few months I'll have a baby brother or sister. He also makes video games and keeps people's computers safe with an anti-virus thingy he made. Thank you, Daddy, I love you, you're my hero." Sarah hugged Chuck and smiled. He looked at the egg that represented him. He thought about how much had changed in the last almost ten months of his life.

He gave a smile to Molly that she returned, and he felt Sarah's arm around him. The family had grown so much in that time. Clara was so active, Molly had seemed to be out of the phase she had been going through, and soon he and Sarah would be bringing a new life into the world. Maybe, just maybe, he had this crazy life thing figured out.

"See," Sarah said as the presentations ended. "Everything was great."

"No, Jerry," they heard Molly say as they both turned to look at their daughter. "Daddy didn't need any of the special pills when they called the stork." Sarah shoved her face into Chuck's chest, and Chuck just sighed as all the parents turned to look at them.

"You were saying?" Chuck asked. Sarah couldn't help herself, and just laughed. Chuck winked at his daughter. Chuck glanced at the teacher, who shook her head and smiled. The Burkes gave them a helpless look, and Chuck mouthed, "it's okay." They fled, but Chuck knew he'd see them soon. They walked outside.

"Thank you, Chuck," Sarah said.

"For what?"

"For being the father she needs," Sarah said simply holding on to him.

"Any time, Dear. Any time."

A/N: So, I got this idea from what my daughter did in second grade (I know, I'm a year off). It was very humbling, for her to say I was her hero, but I kept thinking about the Molly and Chuck dynamic, and it made all the sense in the world.

Until next time

#Chuck #Sarah #Sarah vs The Life Unexpected #MOLLY!#Charah #fanfic #fanfiction #fluff #Molly vs The Life She Expected

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wandering-----wonderings · 4 years

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Sydney smiled. ''Well, if we had to let out the truth about our relationship to save my life, then it was worth it to me.''

Noah gave a half smile. ‘‘I still don’t know how he [Sloane] found out about it,’‘ he said. ‘‘I wish I could figure it out - I’m always pretty cold to you in the office.’‘

Well, Sydney did tell two people within the span of the same book: Emily and Stephanie. She met Emily when she was invited to a party at Sloane's house [Free Fall] and they hit it off, and she found herself spilling the beans about a lot of things, including her secret romance with a co-worker. Remember, while Sydney doesn't really know either of them at this point, they know her, so I can easily imagine Emily sitting at her vanity after the party is over, in a dressing gown and taking off her jewelry, and rubbing lotion into her hands while telling her husband how grown up Sydney is and about everything they talked about. I can see him 'innocently' inquiring about this paramour's identity and her telling him. Which it's not like she knew Stephanie would rat her out to Sloane, but she should have figured Emily would. Seriously, you're having a secret tryst with a co-worker behind your boss' back and one of the few people you tell about it is ... your boss' wife?

Fast-forward to the end of the book, we have Stephanie reporting back to Sloane and confirming the relationship between Sydney and Noah, but assuring him that she didn't think it would get in the way of Sydney's development as an agent. Sydney and Stephanie met during SD ''summer school'' and Sydney thought they were destined to be friends with how similar they were - including them both having boyfriends that they worked with, and Sydney confided in Stephanie thinking that she in turn would admit to her own relationship with a fellow agent (not knowing that that was what Stephanie was doing to her - and it worked). Looking back, I wonder just how much of Stephanie's background was true, or if she was handed Sydney's file and told to fabricate a believable backstory to get close to Sydney and get her to open up.

After telling Stephanie that she was dating someone she worked with, she also said that Sloane ''would not like it, that's for sure'' and thinks that Wilson [her former handler] wouldn't have either. However, one book before this one [Father Figure] he didn't seem to mind.

''Really?'' Wilson raised a skeptical brow. ''I thought you and Noah had hit if off.''

''What are you talking about?'' she said, embarrassed. ''He never even talks to me!''

''Hence my suspicion,'' he said with a wry smile.

''Noah's alright,'' Sydney admitted, making Wilson's smile even broader.

(That's as far as I'm reading for this because that's where it starts to get heartbreaking.)

Four people in total knew of Sydney and Noah's relationship. Emily and Stephanie (and both told Sloane), Wilson (who wouldn't have told Sloane) and Francie, who, coincidentally enough, also found out in Father Figure when Sydney had a bit of a meltdown. (The meltdown was totally valid.)

Despite my love for the books, one thing I didn't like is how they wrote about her 'love life'. I'll admit, I can kinda see why she sorta dated Burke, but she should have broken things off as soon as she got back from Hawaii. She also shouldn't have let Gromnovich make her doubt her feelings for Noah, and while she's still an ingenue in the love department, she shouldn't have been so easily romanticized by Trevor. As well as telling Brennan upfront that she already had a boyfriend instead of letting him think that, as Francie put it, ''scored the first cutie of sophomore year'' (which was also a ruse - on Brennan's part). I blame this on the books having different authors and them trying to put their own spin on things, but when you have a girl whose a spy at 19 and 20 years old (remember, the 12 books span a year of her life; a little more but not much), she doesn't need that many romantic entanglements. ''Noah was the one she wanted, the only one she'd ever wanted.'' [Sister Spy] and they should have just stuck with that.

Most of the problems Sydney and Noah had were communication-based, such as in Disappeared, when Noah voiced that he didn't think Sydney was ready for a solo mission. Now the reader could understand that when he said he ''didn't want anything to happen to jeopardize the mission'' he was really saying that he didn't want Sydney to get hurt. Of course, Sydney didn't realize that and she hadn't learned how to read Noah yet (and still hadn't really by the end of the book series) and got mad. I can understand why Noah's closely guarded and keeps things close to his chest (being an agent for as long as he has it kinda comes with the territory) and sometimes it like just assumes that Sydney knows the same things he does (a compliment, really) and doesn't think he has to say anything. Sydney, despite being more open and forthcoming, holds back on things that need to be said. Plus, neither one of them have much experience with the whole dating thing; Noah was Sydney's first real boyfriend and Noah had claimed that ''it's just better to be alone''. Add work to that when there's supposed to be 'no fraternization', then, yeah, it can get messy.

My main problem is Shadowed. I actually have a few problems with Shadowed. It starts off with her calling Noah her ''quasi-boyfriend'' and swearing off men (while she was still dating one), and making a squabble they'd had in the previous book sound like it was big enough to end their relationship. In retrospect, the rest of the book Sydney and Noah wise kinda meshed with what was already out there, but the 'summing it all up' that the author tried to do at the beginning of the book didn't really work; it was like they read the previous books so they'd have an understanding but didn't really get the details right. Such as: Shadowed having her had ''... a relaxing week of camping on the Oregon coast''. The lie she came up with (actually Sloane came up with it) [Skin Deep] was that she was going to take care of her ill father, and while it does say she ''drove up to care for him'', it never said Oregon. So unless her ill father decided to go camping - no. Also, Sloane didn't have the ''idea'' to send Sydney into K-Directorate - Noah recommended her [Infiltration]. Two, she didn't ''finally'' meet Anna Espinosa; she met her for the first time, and Anna didn't escape Sydney's grasp. (''... remembering with irritation how Anna had - but only just! - escaped her new agent grasp''.) Sydney came up with a plan and it worked. The plan wasn't supposed to last so much as buy time, so to speak. Then, later in the book, there was the small issue of her getting out of the van in Berlin twice - on the same page even, seriously, how does no one catch that? We also never find out what Anya was doing with Sydney's jacket tag. Close to the end of the book, it's surmised that she was putting a bug on Sydney to get her voice-print. However, once we find out that Anya wasn't working with Lucy, it still didn't say what Anya was doing. Intimidation tactic?

My second biggest pet peeve, right after the whole ''quasi-boyfriend'' thing is something Francie said. ''Well, well, well,'' she chuckled. ''Looks like you just scored the first cutie of sophomore year.'' Now this is when Brennan, obviously, is expressing some interest in Sydney, and one would think this would be the moment that best-friend-Francie, after hearing Sydney declare her love for Noah a couple months prior [Father Figure] would've piped up and said something along the lines of, ''Hey, she's dating someone, but I'm available''. Instead of inquiring how things were with Noah, Francie basically encouraged Sydney to start something with Brennan. Which sorta makes me wonder if she ever met him in between books and didn't like him. In The Solution (1x20), Francie says ''He was never good enough for you.'' Now, that frame of mind could have come after Noah left and she was heartbroken for her friend, or it could mean she met him at some point after Father Figure and didn't like him and proceeded to subtly push Sydney towards other guys.

((I had something else here but I forgot what it was.))

((I'm gonna have to apologize for how ... awful and off this all sounds. I had had a rough draft written down on paper, typed it out, and then when I was looking up something else my computer went to a blue screen and then rebooted itself - and I hadn't save the document I was typing. So I had to retype everything and this is round two and it's not nearly as good and flowy as it was on the first one. It's also longer than I planned; I had a topic and then I just went off it.))((Make that round three; blue screen, another reboot, and nothing saved. I'm stopping and posting this before I lose it again.))((A month+ later ... thankfully, I haven't lost it again, but if you've made it this far in reading - thank you. I know it's not the greatest but it's backing up other things I have, so ...)))

#Alias #Sydney Bristow #Noah Hicks #Shadowed

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dweemeister · 7 years

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Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

Here is a confession: my only prior viewing history about college comedies includes a grand total of three films that I have seen in their entirety. Those films are Legally Blonde (2001), Monsters University (2013), and 22 Jump Street (2014). The “Slobs v. Snobs” comedic subgenre is also a weakness of mine, as their plots test my patience for both slobs and snobs. Combine these two, and you have a movie beyond my experience, but one that I found entertaining and wittier than expected – despite deep concerns by the rampant comedic misogyny that became more explicit in the 1980s that also appears. Jeff Kanew directed Revenge of the Nerds: the third and final episode of this prequel trilogy as it chronicles the final stages of the Clone Wars, Anakin Skywalker’s transformation into Darth Vader, the devastation of the Jedi Order, and the dissolution of the Galactic Republic for the Galactic Empire.

Apologies. That’s the wrong movie. Gosh, I can’t wait for Star Wars fans to hound me this December.

Armed with thick-rimmed glasses and pocket protectors, best friends and nerds Lewis Skolnick (Robert Carradine) and Gilbert Lowe (Anthony Edwards) are entering Adams College as computer science majors. Soon after they have moved into their dorm room, the boys – along with the other nerds inhabiting that building – are forced out by the college football team and must stay in the gymnasium. Tensions between the nerds and the football team increase to the point where Stan Gable (Ted McGinley) – the school’s starting quarterback and head of the Alpha Beta fraternity (which many of the football players are members of) – denies the nerds’ application to create a fraternity and their requests for remedial justice against Alpha Beta harassment. The nerds will then seek sanction from black fraternity Lambda Lambda Lambda (the frat president is played by Bernie Casey) – imagine if a blaxploitation movie dropped into a raunchy, largely white college comedy for several scenes – and will eventually receive their fraternity commission. The Tri-Lambs and Alpha Beta essentially go to war for the rest of the film. Nerdy sorority Omega Mu allies with the Tri-Lambs; sorority Pi Delta Pi assists the Alpha Betas.

Other Tri-Lamb members include Poindexter (Timothy Busfield), Wormser (Andrew Cassese), Booger (Curtis Armstrong), Lamar (Larry B. Scott), and Takashi (Brian Tochi). Notable Alpha Betas include Burke (Matt Salinger) and Ogre (Donald Gibb); notable Pi Delta Pis include Betty Childs (Julie Montgomery) and Judy (Michelle Meyrink). John Goodman is the football coach and James Cromwell is Lewis’ father, who drives his son and Gilbert to Adams.

If the nerds and jocks in this film weren’t as exaggerated as they are, this might be the subject of a documentary given the United States’ reflexive, masturbatory obsession for American football where the football players can do whatever, whenever they want. There is nothing groundbreaking about the depiction of the nerds and the jocks in Revenge of the Nerds, but what is remarkable about how Steve Zacharias and Jeff Buhai’s screenplay develops the nerds is that it betrays its only message: accepting others for who they are, that difference in interests and appearance is to be celebrated, and that tolerance and compassion for others is to be valued over a person’s external superficialities. The film’s sympathetic approach to the nerds in the film’s opening half is commendable; the abuse they suffer allows us to laugh – in joy, sometimes in confusion – when they are being themselves. But for near-identical reasons I find The Breakfast Club (1985) to be hypocritical, Revenge of the Nerds breaks its central idea and makes a mockery of it several times. Most everything that is shown about the Alpha Beta and Pi Delta Pi members is irredeemable – hazing based on humiliation, superiority complexes, excessive alcohol and drug consumption, and an obsession with physical and sexual prowess as a means to organize the fraternity/sorority hierarchy. The basis of the nerds’ revenge is not staying true to who they are, although they use their brainpower to figure out how their scheme will work. By the film’s conclusion, the nerds’ personalities become identical to the jocks’ – actively seeking out to humiliate their opponents, treating women as sexual playthings, and valuing their hedonism over everything else. I imagine Lewis’ father to be heartbroken if he heard about this; but given the rules set forth in Revenge of the Nerds, maybe not.

This is a comedy – a college comedy, some might emphasize – meant to entertain and skewer the jocks and their girlfriends for their behavior. But comedy is often double-edged, as it is here, and I could not bring myself to laugh as the nerds began to emulate. Maybe I do not know enough about comedies, but I tend to think the best comedies that attempt a message (that excludes pure farce, like 1980′s Airplane!) should hold steady to what they are trying to espouse as there is a moral responsibility that exists in that space. Message comedies often subscribe to a rule usually associated with journalism: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. As the nerds become relentless in their revenge, the film resorts to racial stereotypes and misogyny as supporting plot devices. For all the hilarious pratfalls of the combat between the Tri-Lambs and Alpha Beta and the end-of-film festival’s events, these depictions overshadow Revenge of the Nerds’ intents.

According to British film critic Robert Ager, a DVD commentary interview including actor Curtis Armstrong had him claim that, in this film, “nerd” can stand in for any group of people being oppressed. What Armstrong and Ager fail to note, however, is that this statement is less applicable for Revenge of the Nerds’ black and Asian characters and rooted in decades of Hollywood history.

Larry B. Scott’s Lamar is obviously gay, presenting himself as an aberration to the rigidly heterosexual jocks. But Lamar is employed as comic relief in times when the Tri-Lambs wherever the film needs him to be. The queer black male is a stock character from blaxploitation – a subgenre of exploitation film which catered to African-American audiences and emerged in the early 1970s; blaxploitation films have been acclaimed by some as portraying more empowered black characters, but have also been criticized for reinforcing damaging stereotypes. Lamar’s queerness, if we are to look at him with a blaxploitation lens, is decontextualized by Revenge of the Nerds, as the stock queer black male – as seen in Shaft (1972) and Blacula (1972) – is usually employed to challenge black masculine norms (it can be comical or otherwise), that there is more than one way to be “authentically” masculine as a black man. Lamar is indeed a nerd, but what he could represent – as a black queer man – is erased, though I will admit that the performance he gives near the film’s end is one of the most positive depictions of a gay rapper I have seen. Additionally, the depiction of the Lambda Lambda Lambda administration – recall that it is a black fraternity – is of stoic men whose appearances are bookended by the expected funk music and cultural insensitivities by the largely white kids trying to form a Tri-Lamb chapter at Adams.

The filmmakers never even try with Japanese student Takashi (Brian Tochi), rendering him overly polite to those insulting and assaulting him, mixing up or simply dropping L’s and R’s in his speech, and being completely dense to everything surrounding him. We have been here too many fucking times before. If the filmmakers’ intentions were to expose the follies of these stereotypes by replicating them and showcasing their absurdities, the final product has too many mixed messages for me to take such a claim seriously. From Revenge of the Nerds’ nerd-jock dichotomy with nothing in between, the nerds’ adoption of the jocks’ behavior, and their portrayal of black and Asian characters, this almost drowns out the numerous clever verbal and sight gags there are.

And this is not even beginning to touch upon how this film treats its women characters. From the panty raid scene to the nerds’ installation of a camera to watch females undress in the supposed privacy of their bathrooms (a young elementary school-age kid is depicted watching these scenes and enjoying them) and bedrooms to a rape-by-deception/false identity (because as long as the fornicating is mind-blowing, the sex is totally okay, and the girl will fall for your dick, right?), there is nothing salvageable about how Revenge of the Nerds treats its women. Rape is a punchline and that – call me a prude all you want – is indefensible (Revenge of the Nerds would not be the first or last film to do this).

Made with money 20th Century Fox earned with Return of the Jedi (1983), Revenge of the Nerds spawned three sequels – the later two being television movies – despite the fact Fox executives were expecting a modest box office intake (and thus left the production alone without much administrative interference). The film was shot on the campus of the University of Arizona, located in Tucson. The young cast – though some were certainly no longer the usual age for an undergraduate student – had a brilliant time shooting the movie, despite their initial reservations about playing such obvious nerds or loathsome jocks and cheerleaders. A Greek life-like atmosphere surrounded the set, and the stars found themselves partying with the university’s students when shooting was completed for the day.

Without the film’s surprisingly thoughtful portrayal of the nerds in the opening third of the film, the score that appears below might otherwise have been much lower. Without some pretty shocking or dirty lines from Lewis, Gilbert, and especially Goober, I might have liked this film a lot less than I do now (yes, this review has been scathing, but there are elements I appreciated). Yet all of that racially insensitive writing and misogyny is something that this film could all too easily could have gone without.

My rating: 5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

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bluboothalassophile · 7 years

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Hello Blu! I saw a post on your page where it said like "when your vegetarian brother wants to bake" and Dick and Jay, mostly Dick, were eating Damian' s tofu muffins and I was wondering if you would write something like that, where Damian is making vegan muffins and giving them to closest friends and family?

It’s not tofu muffins, but I hope you like! =)

VeganMuffins…

First of all, Damian was only in this stupid class becauseit was said to be essential to survival; not that he saw how it was essential.It was not like anyone in the family was ever actually allowed into thekitchen. Ever. Aside from Todd. Todd and Pennyworth seemed to have some sort ofstrange love of the kitchen the rest of the family had been banded from.

Not that Damian understood why they were banished from the kitchens.

No, it was just an annoyance that was just to be respected.

However, today Damian hated his cooking class teacher: Mr.Burk, with a fiery passion. Today they had made vegan muffins, Damian waspretty sure he had followed the recipe well enough. And was walking off theschool premises with them in hand because it was actually a part of his gradeto get a family review. Scowling at the thought of sharing this, but he wouldnot fail a stupid cooking class.

“Hey Little D!” Damian’s head snapped up from his thoughtsas he looked over to Dick who was grinning and standing at the car Pennyworthnormally picked him up in.

“Dick,” he greeted when he was standing in front of hisbrother.

“So how was today?” Dick asked him.

“Atrocious, we were required to make these for family and receivewritten reviews on them or fail Mr. Burk’s cooking assignment,” Damian held upthe muffins.

“Sure I’m sure they’re great!” Dick grinned taking one. Dicktook a big bite of one and the look on his face had Damian frowning.

“Are they not acceptable?” he demanded.

“No! No, Little D, they’re great,” Dick choked, Damianscowled as he pulled the recipe out.

“I do not understand I followed the recipe,” he muttered.Damian ignored Dick who was currently turning green as he swallowed.

“Look, Um… perhaps a different teacher is needed?” Dickoffered, Damian’s eyes flicked to his eldest brother who was smilinginnocently.

“Like who, not even Pennyworth will let me into the kitchen,”Damian pointed out.

“Well, I’m thinking of a different person, but you know him,and Alfie taught him cooking,” Dick said.

“Todd!?” he strangled out.

“Do you want to kill Bruce or Alfie on these?” Dick asked ashe tossed the muffin. It hit the school wall and richoetted back for them, Dickgrabbed him as the muffin rocketed by into the windshield of Tommy Brock’s car;the biggest school bully.

“Time to go,” dick leapt over the hood of the car as Damiandove into his car just as Tommy noticed the muffin breaking his windshield.

“What the FUCK!” Tommy bellowed as they drove by.

“Very well, we should seek Todd’s assistance,” Damian admitted.

“Let’s use those to pelt Riddler or something,” Dickdecided.

“I think they are too bouncy, but I will use them on Drake,”Damian decided.

“No Dami, you shouldn’t use those on family.”

“Penguin perhaps,” he offered.

“Go for it,” Dick nodded.

~~~*~*~*~~~

Kay, first of all, Jason only felt a few things were trulysacred in his home.

1.) His bed. He had specifically bought the damn thingbecause he did not sleep all that much as it was, and when he was sleeping hewanted to be comfortable.

2.) His kitchen. Jason did not care if he was living in a shack,the kitchen would be pristine, it would be functioning, and it would beorganized.

3.) His books. Do Not Fuck With His Books.

4.) His arsenal; both collectable and his normal weaponary.He took care of all them, they were battle ready, nothing was for decoration;even the decorations.

5.) His vehicles. His vehicles were an extension ofhimself, no one was to fuck with them without his permission, and if anyonetouched them he’d know and track them down to inflict a lot of pain.

Other than that, everything else was not his concern. Healso did not share any of his things with his brothers. Dick was a fuckingslob, Tim was a disaster, and it was just to annoy the shit out of Damian. So,when Jason opened the door to his apartment and saw Dick and Damian standing onhis doorstep he was tempted to slam the door in their faces on principle.

“What?” he asked instead. His shoulder was still stiff, andhe had bandages wrapped on his shirtless chest at this moment as one luckyasshole with a few knives had managed to slice him up pretty good last nightbefore Jason had kneecapped said asshole and knocked them out before tying themup. However, Jason’s patch job was about to be changed when his brothers hadshown up.

“What happened to you?” Dick asked.

“Not your business, now what the fuck do you two want? I’mbusy,” Jason snapped. Damian snorted on that, which had Jason’s eyes narrowingon the demon spawn.

“Can you teach Dami how to bake?” Dick asked.

“Why the fuck would I do that? The brat’s been band fromAlfred’s Kitchen,” Jason tiredly stated.

“Because I cannot feed these to father or Pennyworth,” Damiansnapped as he produced a muffin from somewhere on his person.

“Great, a muffin,” Jason shrugged.

Damian dropped it, it bounced onto the hallway ceiling whichhad Jason blinking at it being embedded in the ceiling.

“How?” he blinked.

“I followed the recipe,” Damian defended himself.

“Mr. Burk’s cooking class,” Dick said as if that were an explanationenough.

“Oh, and he still teaches there!?” Jason sputtered.

“Yeah.”

“Get your asses in here, this is a matter fucking pride now!”Jason hissed as he let Dick and Damian in. Jason hated Mr. Burk, the assholecould not cook. He would teach his brother how to pass that fucking class evenif he had to cheat and just hand Damian the plates of food for that damn class.Jason loathed Mr. Burk, the asshole had insulted one of the few things Jason hadleft from his mom. It would not stand!

“Stay here, I’m changing the dressings then I’ll be rightback.” Jason snapped leaving them alone. “And Do Not Touch Anything In MyKitchen!” he shouted over his shoulder.

~~~*~*~*~~~

A painful half an hour later he had finally changed all hisdressings and had on a button up shirt that didn’t have to have him lifting hisbandaged shoulder as he walked out in bare feet and his sweats.

“Kay, what the hell are those?” Jason asked as he stuffedhis hands in his sweats pockets.

“Vegan muffins,” Damian answered.

“Well if they break plaster they ain’t muffins. Seriouslyhow does that putz still have a job?” Jason muttered as he snatched bag off andpitched them in his trash bin gently so they didn’t bounce and break hisceiling. He didn’t have the energy to fix that right now.

“Dickhead, you better put that down before you hurtyourself,” Jason growled when he saw Dick looking through his frying pans.

“It’s just a frying pan,” Dick defended.

“Congrats, you know what it is, Now. Put. It. Down.” Jason groundedout. Dick did as he was told and Jason turned on Damian. “Kay kid, hand me therecipe,” Jason motioned.

Jason read over the list, preparing not to have most of it,but he was pleasantly surprised to see he actually did have all of it. As hehanded it back to Damian.

“Kay, first get the materials you need, I am not doing this,”Jason said as he sat on the bar of his counter. Dick got involved with thisnow, and Jason was a bit worried they’d demolish his kitchen, however, they’dclean it up or he’d sic Alfred on them.

Jason spent the next hour reading his latest novel; he wasreally liking Vincent Flynn lately, it was more modern than his usual picks,but shit it was good! Yes, he read modern literature, but he had rarely foundthings he loved.

Dick and Damian managed to blow up the batter somehow, Jasonwas still trying to figure that out. but two hours later they had a batch ofactually edible vegan muffins.

“I suppose you should have one,” Damian muttered as theywere packing up.

“What? No, Dickhead should have the first one, he helpedcook.” Jason declared, he was not eating it in fear of food poisoning. Dick andDamian had cooked them. And theoretically they should be edible; but with veganshit one never could be sure!

“No, No, No, Jay, I insist you have the first one!” Dickpleaded.

“Eat the damn muffins!” Damian growled getting their attentionas he shoved one at Dick. Jason grimaced as he hesitated before just sucking itup. He’d eaten garbage at one point, this couldn’t be that different. Taking alarge bite of it he chewed, as did Dick.

“Mmm,” they hummed in unison, Damian nodded as he walkedout.

“Just keep chewing,” Dick muttered.

“I can’t feel my tongue,” he muttered as he grabbed therecipe. “Fucking vegan shit!” he muttered as he forced himself to swallow.

“Milk! I need milk!” Dick gasped as he bolted for thefridge. Jason didn’t even bitch when Dick chugged it from the carton then.

“It’s not him, I saw everything, it’s the recipe,” Jason muttered.

“I hate Mr. Burks,” Dick muttered.

“This means war!” Jason growled.

“Hey, if it helps, this is better than the last batch,” Dickassured him.

“No, this is an insult! I will find good vegan muffins, ifit kills me, and glue Mr. Burk’s tongue to the roof of his mouth!” Jason snapped.

“Really?” both his and Dick’s head snapped to attention atDamian smiling maliciously.

“Yes, this is war!” Jason stated firmly.

#bluboothalassophile #dc comics #fanfic #one shot #batfamily #damian wayne #richard grayson #jason todd #brotherly bonding #vegan muffins #cooking

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white-collar-lawmen-and-conmen · 7 years

Text

You Give Love a Bad Name

Summary: You broke the number one rule of con artists: you fell in love with your mark. To save Neal’s life, you have to come clean and face the consequences.

Words: 2,888

Y/N – Your Name; Y/L/N – Your Last Name; Y/F/N – Your Fake Name

Requested by @sunswirls

“You pay me, then I talk.” You glowered, standing in the middle of the parking lot in the dark. Your eyes hadn’t quite adjusted to the dark after the brightness of the subway system, but you knew how to bluff. “Or else I walk right out of New York, and you’re out an inside woman.”

Footsteps crunching on gravel made you realize that Hagen was closer to you than you had expected for him to be. You fought the instinctive urge to move backwards, knowing that to do so would make you look weak and easily unnerved.

“There’s a wire transfer,” he drawled, his accent grating on your nerves. The restorer-turned-forger had a way of turning his charming foreign accent into some condescending, teeth-grinding, patronizing brogue that made you want to punch him in the face. You hated feeling like you were being talked down to. “Check your phone, darling. Then you hold up your end of the bargain, tonight.”

There was a threat there. You stuck your tongue against your teeth and checked on your mobile, a little hesitant to look away from Hagen for too much time at once. In contrast to the isolated midnight meeting, your phone screen was as bright as the light at the end of the tunnel. You had several bank accounts, none of them under your real name, and as you scrolled through your online activity, you found a hefty deposit of five figures.

Pushing your phone away, you let your thumbs catch in your pockets and glared at Hagen’s eye level. You snorted, reluctant to pay up. You knew you had to. A deal was a deal. You weren’t a rat, and you had survival sense. You knew all about the smuggler that Hagen had given the order to kill just to cover his own ass. You just didn’t like working with Hagen, but it was easy money. Charming a lonely, hopeless romantic into letting you into his life? You’d had harder challenges from people ten years younger than you.

“He’s oblivious,” you reported, rolling your eyes. “He believes I really am who I say I am. He doesn’t realize she doesn’t exist. The fakes you gave passed Burke’s background checks.”

“Burke is only as strong as Caffrey.” Hagen sneered at the implication that the FBI agent was a formidable opponent. You silently thought that he clearly was, since he’d caught the very man Hagen was afraid of. “How hooked is he?”

You smirked. “I’m going to the Rainbow Room next Thursday night, and I’m not even paying for it this time.” It was one of the pricier restaurants in Manhattan.

Hagen chuckled. “As if you paid last time.”

“Technicality.”

Fifteen Months Later…

You rolled onto your back, giggling breathlessly. Neal followed after you, curling up on his side and draping his free arm across your ribs. “We need a code word,” you snickered, burying your fingers in his hair and kissing his forehead.

“What we need is a bell to chain onto his glasses,” Neal snorted. “I swear we’ve talked about knocking.”

Yet another date had been interrupted by Mozzie. Luckily, this had not been a traumatizing ordeal. You and Neal had been cuddling on his bed in your pajamas, watching the newest season of Sons of Anarchy on Netflix. Your boyfriend wasn’t a fan, but he watched it because you enjoyed it and he enjoyed snuggling. Still, you had both playfully shrieked at Mozzie about entering without waiting for invitation. He knew when your date nights were.

Neal’s arms were strong and secure around you. You loved laying with him. Even in the beginning, you had felt like you were safe while he was holding you to him. With the hand still in his hair, you cupped the back of his head and pressed your lips to his temple, hugging him closely while he squeezed you tight, hiding his face in your shoulder.

He took a deep breath and sighed, contentment scrawled through the loose, easy way he was sprawled out by you and happiness written in the way his expression relaxed, his eyes bright and his smile open and slight. His eyes were tired and adoring as he looked up to you. You stroked his hair.

“I love you.” Neal murmured into your upper arm, pressing his mouth to your skin and depositing several loving kisses to the flesh bared by the neckline of your long shirt.

Part of you broke every time he said that. He was telling that to the woman he knew, not to Y/N Y/L/N, but when you returned the sentiments…

“I love you, too, Neal.” You promised quietly, wholeheartedly.

A phone beeped. You both groaned quietly, then Neal threw himself to the side, untangling his legs from yours. One of your phones was flashing a blue notification light towards the ceiling. Neal picked it up, glanced at the body of the device, and then passed it to your waiting hand.

“It’s yours.”

While he flopped back down on his back, stretching out his leg to press your calves together, you checked your texts. It was from an unknown number; a time and an address, well out of Neal’s radius. By now, you knew exactly who it was from without any need for speculation or second-guesses.

Already, you missed the warmth of an hour ago. The text, as well as Neal’s openhearted and earnest affection, tore you out of the daydream you had been living in – the daydream where you weren’t just kissing and telling, betraying the heart of the sweetest, most sincere lover you’d ever had just for a paycheck. The money had seemed worth it all in the beginning, but then you’d actually gotten to know the man you were conning. Now you knew that it wasn’t worth it. If you could start over, you’d introduce yourself as your real name and tell Hagen to go to hell.

“I have to go,” you told Neal apologetically, appearing exasperated. “The boss is calling me in.”

Neal pushed himself up on his elbows dejectedly. “It’s the weekend!” He protested.

“Yes, and some stupid intern deleted a ton of files they need recovered. If I’m lucky, it shouldn’t take long.” You lied as easily as you told him you loved him. You weren’t sure which was truth and which was false anymore – about yourself, about your intentions. You knew you would give up the money, the life of a free con for Neal. You didn’t know how, but you’d be willing to try to get a legit job. You were in too deep. If you cut out now, Hagen would never let you leave. Neal made you want to be the person he believed you were.

“Y/N,” he groaned, and your heart fluttered again as he tossed his head back like a petulant kid. You were gladder than ever that you had decided to use your real first name, even if you lied about everything else. Then he pushed his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up, grabbing onto your coat and bringing it to you while you slid on your shoes. “Stay warm, alright?” He brought his hands up to slide along your hips. “Warm and safe.”

You stood on your toes to kiss the side of his face, reveling in the touches to your waist. Neal was careful not to hold you too tightly, as if maybe he was worried you thought he was being too forward or too presumptuous, and at the same time, having his hands on you in such a sensual, intimate way made you believe you were worthy of the way he treated you.

You were living as two different people. Y/N Y/L/N worked for Curtis Hagen and was keeping a good man in love with her so that her boss would have leverage. Y/N F/L/N was an IT girl at a small company based in Brooklyn and was head-over-heels with the man of her dreams. You wondered where they intersected.

You still thought of yourself as Y/N Y/L/N, but you knew that, like the other you, you were absolutely crazy about Neal. At the same time, you were definitely a con artist, and there was no getting around that.

“You’re late.” Your voice accused Hagen irately. You’d been standing in the cold for almost twenty minutes now.

The heavy footsteps and the agitated swearing made you wish you hadn’t taken an attitude. You could see his eyes reflecting the streetlights, narrowed and mean. “Your boyfriend is snooping around in my project,” he sneered at you. “Way to uphold your end of the deal, sweetheart.”

Your heart jumped, but you couldn’t say if it was because you were scared for yourself or for Neal. “I didn’t know,” you defended yourself, glowering. “How can I? I work with computers, not feds, remember? He can’t tell me everything he does. You wanted inside information, not eyes in the federal building. I can tell you Neal –“ You stopped and quickly forced yourself the cough, covering up that you had stopped out of guilt. The can had been opened; you quickly dumped out some trivial things. “Neal likes dogs, he’s still mourning his ex, and he feels like I’m out of his league.”

In actuality, he was far out of yours. He was a better person than you had ever been and probably ever would be. He would never screw with someone’s feelings the way you had set out to do. What you could do now to make it better (not right, but less abhorrent) was to keep his confidences when it was important. Hagen didn’t know Neal’s father had been a corrupt cop, or that he and Mozzie still had a small stash of treasure from the U-boat hidden in a cache overseas, or that Neal wanted one day to settle down with a wife and maybe have a kid or two. You kept the most personal things to yourself out of respect for your boyfriend. It was the least you could do.

Hagen waved at you dismissively. “Forget it. Doesn’t matter. Your role’s terminated. Final check’s in the wash.”

Rather than being upset, you were nervous about what that might mean. If Neal was getting close to Hagen’s operations, wouldn’t he want you closer than ever?

Feigning anger, you crossed your arms and stomped a foot imperiously. “And I suppose you’ll be consulting a psychic for the information you’ll stop getting from me?”

His dark chuckle made a shiver go up your back. “Anyone will have to consult a psychic to chat with Mr. Caffrey after tomorrow. I’ve wasted more money on your job than it was really worth, in the end. Soon as he steps in, we’ll sweep for a wire. Standard procedure, we’ll say. The transmission of the wire he must be wearing will be jammed, and I’ll take great pleasure in making sure he moves on from all of this.”

You felt sick at what you were hearing. You knew Hagen was evil, but this was nuts. Despite your concerns about your own safety, you held your hands out, gesturing for him to stop. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve lost it. We’re talking murder. I agreed to help you scam some info, not to kill a man. Count me out.”

Hagen scoffed. “You’ve been out. It’s been more than a year, darling. The investment hasn’t been worth the deposit so far. I doubt it’ll get better. Don’t tell me you’re getting soft.”

“I’m not soft,” you objected heatedly. “I’m just not a monster. I lie to people, I steal their money, I disappear their property and collect – whatever, fine, I’m a bad person. I won’t have anything to do with taking a life.”

“Luckily for you, you won’t have to.” Hagen picked up his hand and looked at his nails, dry and uninterested. “Clean up shop, Y/N. Get out. If I see you again in this city, it won’t be with a working relationship.”

“Fine,” you spat. “Save me a seat in hell.”

You didn’t know what you were going to do about anything else, but you did know one thing for sure: you couldn’t let Neal walk into a trap, no matter what the personal cost was to yourself.

When you took the job offer, you’d thought it was a little skeevy, but hey, you weren’t going to complain. It was a lot of money, and Neal was… well, Neal. Charming as a prince, handsome as a model, smart as a whip – all qualities you found very desirable. But he was your mark. You weren’t supposed to fall in love, except you did, and now you were in an awkward place where the love of your life was in love with someone you were but weren’t, and you were about to throw away your life with him so that he would continue to have a life.

No level of mental preparation would prepare you for coming clean to the members of the WCCD. It was a necessary step. If you weren’t honest, they would waste time trying to figure out whether or not to trust you, and they wouldn’t pull the plug on Neal’s sting in time. He’d walk into a death trap.

Neal’s excitement to see you was adorable and flattering, but when you insisted on seeing Peter, not able to look at your boyfriend’s face, he realized something was wrong. He took you aside and begged you to tell him what the problem was, promising that he could make sure you were helped.

“Come on,” he urged. “Trust me. I’ll take care of you.”

He stared at you imploringly, eyes wide and impressively pleading. You took in his whole body. From his caring eyes to his worried pout, to the inviting way he faced you and the slight spread of his arms as if offering you a home in his embrace, he was in love with you. You were about to give up the right to have that devotion. You were about to give up the belonging, the love, and the life you’d created.

“Just let me talk to Peter myself first,” you found your voice and matched his pleading puppy dog eyes glance-for-glance. Then, although it was selfish, you stood on your toes and gave him a final kiss. You didn’t anticipate ever being able to share another with him, so you savored how he leaned towards you to meet your lips. His mouth was hot and moist, tasted vaguely of chapstick, and you could swear you feel his feelings through his kiss.

Peter broke the news to Neal as carefully as he could, but there was no way to soften the blow of learning that your lover was lying to you and using you the whole time. Neal turned his eyes on you swiftly, staring at you in horror.

“Y/N?” He asked, trying to sit down across from you and catch your eyes. His voice shook. He didn’t have to say anything; you knew he was praying you would say it wasn’t true.

“I’m so sorry,” you said, looking further down to your lap. “You can hit me if you want,” you offered meekly. Going by the look Neal gave you – heartbroken and astounded – that was not the right thing to say. It made you feel even worse. You’d just admitted to having founded an entire relationship on lies, and he still couldn’t even fathom hurting you. “I do love you, Neal. I never lied when I said that. I don’t blame you if you never talk to me again.”

Peter laid a protective hand on Neal’s shoulder while the artist sat across from you numbly, staring at you and searching for something. Was he looking for a sign that he should’ve seen it coming?

“Why now?” The FBI agent asked you sternly. His stare at you was cold and cynical, angry with you for betraying his best friend the way that you had. “Why give yourself up?”

“The operation you’ve been working on. I don’t know many details, but Hagen has his fingers in that pie. He saw photos of Neal’s alias and he recognized him.” You tried to look at Neal again, but now he was the one refusing to look at you. His face was blank. You spoke faster, knowing it was only a matter of time before he would stand up and leave. When he got like that, it was because he couldn’t handle what was happening. If he ran, it was against the odds that he’d come back. “He told me that he’s going to kill you if you go through with your plan tonight.” Neal shook his head slightly. You turned your head to Peter desperately. “I know I have no legs to stand on here, but I’m begging you not to send him in. Hagen will shoot him in the heart.”

“He’s not the only one. You two have a lot in common.” Neal stated coolly.

Your head snapped around to look at Neal, your lips parted. You felt like you’d just been slapped. Neal stood up abruptly, the legs of the chair in the interrogation room scraping with a metallic screech on the floor. You cringed from the sound. Neal didn’t look back as he left the room.

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