#and yes dodgy age gap

[catofthecanals289]

ooh i’m curious about the age gap one 👀

ooh yes that was an attempted gift for my lovely bestie @lilyrizzy that i gave up on

He is seventeen when Daniel first meets him. Seventeen and a terrible liar. Seventeen and claiming to be eighteen, like Daniel or anyone else in this room could be fooled. His delivery is terrible too, tongue stumbling over the number, cheeks flushed, shoulders squared. 

“Is that so?” Daniel says and doesn’t call the kid out because if Max Verstappen wants to pretend to be of age, that’s his business.

“Yeah,” Max says, and the beer in his hand is proof that he fooled at least one person this evening.

Either that or the bartender decided to not give a fuck too. Or maybe Max promised an autograph, a photo, something. Not Daniel’s problem.

“And what brings you to Melbourne?” Daniel asks, just for the hell of it, just because he’s curious what other unconvincing lies the kid will come up with. He takes a sip from his whiskey, raising his eyebrows at him.

He doesn’t disappoint.

“Just- With friends. A trip, you know,” he says, and he gives Daniel a smile, that’s certainly something.

“Oh yeah?” Daniel snorts. “And where are your friends?”

Like he doesn’t know that Max is here for the Australian Grand Prix –to drive for ToroRosso, to drive his first ever Formula 1 race.

He’s not surprised that Max doesn’t know him. There is no reason why he’d know a random RedBull mechanic. Then again, there’s no reason why he should be talking to Daniel in the first place, and yet he came up to Daniel, all awkward but seemingly determined and Daniel finds him intriguing. Or –well. Amusing maybe. He isn’t quite sure yet.

“They went home already. The hotel, I mean,” Max answers and this time it’s almost believable, the way he keeps eye contact, and doesn’t waver. He only seems to have to think about it for a second, almost deserving of a pat on the back.

Daniel hums a little in response, takes another sip from his glass, chases the taste of his lips with his tongue.

He doesn’t miss the way Max’s eyes flicker down to follow the movement.

So that’s why he’s talking to Daniel.

That’s why he came over after hovering around on the sidelines for a while, looking painfully out of place. Daniel is under no illusions that he is the only one in this dive bar who has spotted and recognized the kid, but so far he’s been left alone. Which probably won’t last and if Daniel was a good guy, a responsible adult, he’d be sending him back to the paddock right now, wouldn’t let this go on, but Max looks up at him and introduces himself as fucking Julian, asking for Daniel’s name, and Daniel decides to play along some more.

“It’s Daniel,” he says truthfully.

“And you are, like. From around here?” Max asks, passing his beer from his left to his right hand and back. He looks at Daniel hopefully, what he’s wishing for, Daniel doesn’t know.

“I’m from Perth, originally,” he answers and of course Max doesn’t show any kind of recognition in his eyes so Daniel concedes: “Western Australia.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” Max says and Daniel bites his tongue on asking why that’s cool, on teasing Max for his attempts at making conversation. “Are you here with your friends too?”

His commitment to the lie is commendable, Daniel will give him that. Still, he snorts.

“I’m 37, mate,” he says. “All my friends are married with kids.”

[radiant-reid]

Is spencer reid old enough to be my dad? Yes.

Do I care though? ✨No.✨

I love your blog btw, i hope you have a amazing day/night!❤

Lmao this is so me. I’ll be watching a tiktok where the girl is way younger then the guy but it’s legal (like a 21 y/o girl with a 35 y/o guy) and all the comments are about how in appropriate it is and of course I’m agreeing because an age gap that big is dodgy

Then the next tiktok I see is Hotch or Spencer and of course I’ll be thirsting over it, ignoring the fact our age gap would be way bigger

[tkblythofficial]

I don't understand why some of y'all don't get that R loves T genuinely and doesn't mind her association with him, she's only uncomfortable when said association is used against her bf and her relationship. She said it on tape, she had the most fun during TBOSAS and T is her favorite male lead thus far... she's only liking a few lightheaded posts about HER FRIEND, sharing pictures with HER FRIEND, and liking snowbaird stuff, like c'mon TBOSAS was her project too, she can talk the movie as much as she wants

And before y'all call me R or say im one of her associates, I gotta say im one of her fans who doesn't care about J and I absolutely understand why people are turned off by him. I personally think R could so much better, I didn't like his lack of action when R was going through the hate train...on top of the dodgy age gap. But empathizing with R, I would also be annoyed too if people were creating fantasies around my platonic friend

Does she need to be less on the internet? Yes. Should she stop giving haters the time of her day? Also yes. It is kind of annoying tbh but that's who she is, she'll always be on the internet like a good 'ole Gen Z , but I can't be mad at her for expressing her feelings. We gotta accept now R sees T only as her friend (at least for right know she does) It doesn't mean their connection is any less important. R always hypes up and talks about her friends... haven't y'all see how she talks about Faist?

That’s the issue. There’s many people out there who don’t ship zeglyth and hate J. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Anons had admitted they can’t express their criticism of R/J’s relationship anywhere except for on this blog even though they don’t support zeglyth. I think it’s weird that people say we only hate J because of zeglyth instead of talking about the real problem with their relationship. It’s heavy deflection.

No one here has denied that zeglyth is a friendship (rn). Here’s the thing celebs, not just R, don’t understand: once you put something on the internet, you can’t control the narrative of how the public views it.

I have no problem with R being chronically online but if she’s going to be actively in her own fandom, she has to accept the good, bad and the ugly parts of it. No one likes being perceived or misunderstood but that’s online culture. Not saying it’s right or wrong but that’s the truth.

Also I don’t think R has a problem with the zeglyth ship itself (romantic shipping or not because she was fine pre-Feb), she has more of an issue with people not liking her bf (which is associated with the zeglyth ship unfairly. Many people hate the boar, not just us lol). That’s what her whole meltdown was about in Feb. Ironically, she’s the reason why people started looking into her and J’s relationship.



If she never tweeted this, her relationship wouldn’t have blown up online. People had no idea who J was at the time and started digging when she called him 29. So again, her being chronically online started people seeing the truth about their relationship. And we thank her for tweeting this lol

[fictional-worlds-are-exquisite]

i have no idea why i hate flynn/eugene and rapunzel together so much but like.................. can we not.........

[thedreadvampy]

honestly not to get into this but I think we've got to find a better way as a like online community of squaring the following facts

teenagers should not be held to the same standards as adults and need to have space to screw up and learn from their mistakes

children, teenagers and young people are particularly vulnerable to bullying, manipulation and grooming

people, particularly children and young people, should have access to age-appropriate spaces where they're not constantly presented with sexual imagery and expectations

there is a substantial power differential not just between adults and children, but between older and younger teens

we live in a culture which overwhelmingly pressures teenagers to act as adult as possible, and we should aim not to feed into that pressure

significant age gaps in relationships are often dodgy, manipulative and leave lasting damage regardless of intent, especially when you're college age or younger and regardless of whether or not it is, technically, legal.

with the related facts that

teenagers are still responsible for their actions

there is no hard and fast cutoff point for this learning curve and vulnerable stage, and people in their late teens and early 20s are often similarly vulnerable even after passing the age of legal majority (and in my experience often abruptly much more targeted by creeps once they pass the age of consent)

Teenagers and young adults are going to be friends with each other and that's normal

Teenagers are going to have sex with each other, talk sexually to each other and fantasise about sex. that's a normal part of development and if it's not pressured there's nothing at all wrong with having sex with someone a similar age. yes even if one of you's 15 and one's 16. IF you feel safe doing it and IF it's genuinely what you want to do (and being a teenager is messy and confusing so you may not know but. be careful with yourself there will always be a later)

teenagers are capable of intelligently engaging with topics, and capable of learning

teenagers need to, to some degree, retain a degree of responsibility for their own internet experience (not in the sense that it's their fault if they get targeted, but in the sense that personal blogs, 18+ content and other content not targeted towards

like there must be a better way to square this than Everyone My Age Or Younger Who I Agree With Is A Literal Minor How Dare You, Also Here's A Callout Post I Wrote About A 19 Year Old For Shipping Two Teenage Characters Together When They Are A Literal Adult.

like dividing the world into Literal Adults and Literal Minors isn't.........working great, is it? people who are very clearly to my eyes still Youths (you know, like 19 or 20) are looking down at 17 year olds from their Lofty High Horse of Adulthood instead of engaging with them as people, and simultaneously people that age exist as Schroedinger's Minor - if we like them then they can't be expected to do better and if we don't like them they're, idk, pedos for having 17 year old friends even though like. my dude I have been in university classes that contain both 17yo and 21yo people, is it unreasonable for them to interact as equals???

age discourse on this site is fucked my guys and I'm speaking as someone who was Very Much Pushed To Grow Up Too Soon and consistently targeted by adults demanding sex and emotional support from 14 on. like I'm not here to diminish the importance of building safe environments for teenagers, I just think that necessarily means treating teenagers and young people as whole individuals with specific needs, not seeing an arbitrary cutoff below which you are not to be interacted with or criticised. that isn't how you create a healthy relationship between adults and young people, it's how you create a highly exploitable and exploited system of alienation, and it leaves a lot of people who should be getting support and protection out in the cold.

[winchesterxxi]

The Fundamentals of Loving | PART 1: Genesis

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF LOVING

PART 2 (SOON)  ⇒

Rating: T (Teen And Up Audiences)

Type: Fluff

Request: “Could u possibly do a din x reader where the two of them are always trying to one up eachother on missions and it’s like a little game and eventually din realizes “on my god I’m in love w/ them-“ !”

Word Count: 1.2k

Warnings:Gender-Based Discrimination, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Age Gap

A/N: Did Sam just start writing her first series? Yes, indeed. I simply thought that this request was too good to be crammed into a single fic which would probably turn out very sloppy sooooooooo here is part one of this short series, probably approx 5 parts.

MASTERPOST | REQUEST HERE | KO-FI

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You had been working with the Mandalorian since before you had ever even heard of The Child, or Grogu, as you’d recently discovered. You weren’t even a bounty hunter when Mando, as you called him, parked his ship on your planet, looking for spare parts for his ship.

That search led him to a small and dodgy corner store in a sandy village. It was a poorly lit weaponry and spare parts shop, frowsty and stale smelling, with dust  from the outside environment all over the glass cabinets that held the products.

The Mandalorian makes his way across the store to the counter, and without saying a word, sliding a few credits to the creature attending to him.

“Two coaxial cables and a few spark plugs.” comes his modulated voice.

“Let me check the backroom.” says the shop owner before grabbing the credits and waddling through a door next to the counter.

The Mandalorian stands there, taking in his surroundings through the dark visor of his helmet, as he rests his lower back against the counter surface.

Through one of the cabinets glasses, something catches his eyes.

There you stand, running your hand through a beskar blade, carefully choosing which new weapon to purchase. You were no hunter by any means, but being a girl like you in a planet full of filthy creatures, and it being known for the nasty brothels, knowing how to handle yourself has come in handy more than once, as some men have tended to assume that every female in your home is up for a grab.

Just as if on purpose, and to prove your point, a trooper wanders into the store, with two other of his companions, none of them wearing a helmet, but the three of them extremely drunk.

“Oh I might buy a few of these.” one of them exclaims at the entrance, eyeing the riffles and blasters on the first cabinet. You look at them through the corner of your eye but avoiding turning your head as to ignore them. But they don’t ignore you.

“And what do we have here?” the second trooper walks over to you, leaning against the cabinet you were next to. “Come here boys, I found something you’ll definitely want to buy!” the two other troopers, come closer to you, completely circling you against the cabinet. At this point, you are still with your back facing them.

“I’m not for sale.” You state between clenched teeth.

“All of you are.” the third one growls before sliding a gloved hand up the back of your tight.

On the other side of the cabinet line, The Mandalorian grips his blaster, ready to take it out. It was not normal for him to meddle into other people’s business. He only wanted to do his job. But somehow, seeing how defenseless you looked, he felt the need to somehow intervene.

But as soon as that one trooper’s hand reached your bottom, in a fraction of a second, you turn around, slashing him across his bare throat with the blade you had in hand. Quickly you had the two other troopers trying to take you down, but you are quicker and slicker than them (also given the fact that they were drunk), kicking and punching them in all the right places, before grabbing both of their heads and smashing them together, bloody faces crumbling to the ground.

Only then, looking up, did you notice the other presence in the room. Your breath is still altered as he takes a few steps around the cabinets and comes to stand a few feet in front of you.

“That was impressive.” he says with modulated waves.

“Thank you.” you say, bending down to grab the bloody blade from the troopers neck before pulling it out, blood dripping from it.

“Are you a hunter?”

You clean the blade to your pants before turning to face him.

“No. Just someone who has to know how not to get killed.”

Only now does he take a good look at you. He’d never guessed that much skill and strength would fit inside your delicate appearance, you were definitely at least a decade younger than him and you looked like you belonged on a palace next to the highest ranks of the galaxy. Yet here you were, fighting for yourself, covered in dust and rags.

“How would you like to have a job?”

“I’m not one of those.” she said, assuming that The Mandalorian was requesting the services that every other female on this planet seemed to offer.

“I mean as a hunter. Help me catch bounties. I could use someone with your skillset.” sliding the blade through your belt, you cross your arms looking at his helmet.

“I thought Mandalorians worked alone.”

“Let’s just say I’m not as young as I used to be.”

You consider his words, lifting your chin up. “What’s in it for me?”

“A place to sleep and eat, food, experience with flying and getting far away from this place.” With the last part, he motions with his helmet to the pile of the three bodies behind you.

“And credits?” you question

“Don’t worry about them. I’ll buy whatever you need.” he tells you.

“No.”

“No? I’m offering you a job, you’re not the one who sets the terms.”

“You said you need my skillset, and I don’t work for free, spent too many time having to scavenge for my survival.” you pause a brief moment eyeing the place where his eyes would be. “60/40.”

“80/20.”

“I’m not your slave. 65/35.”

“75/25.”

“70/30. Final offer.”

He takes a second, eyeing you head to toe.

“Deal.”

“It’s a pleasure doing business with you.” you smile at him, at the same time the shop owner emerges from the backroom, eyeing where the two of you stand and specifically the trio of troopers on the floor behind you, blood pooling around them.

He takes a deep breath in before motioning for The Mandalorian to come back to the counter, exasperatedly letting out a “I’ll clean it later.”

The Mandalorian motions you to follow him.

“There you go.” the parts that had been requested are laid on top of the counter and your new partner, picks them up and puts them away in one of his belt’s pockets. He thanks the creature with a nod of his helmet before walking away in direction of the outside world.

Once outside, the sun is almost blinding as you reach your hand to hover over your eyes. From your side, you catch The Mandalorian walking away from you, through the middle of the street, slowed down by the sand.

“Hey,” you shout behind him, causing him to stop and turn to look at you. “where are you going?”

“Back to the ship.”

“But that’s the town border, there’s nothing but sand after that.”

“The ship is parked in that direction. I walked for two days to get here, we are walking back.”

“Two days? You have to be kidding me.” No way you were walking across this hell hole for two days.

“Less complaining, more walking, princess.” The nickname alluding to the vision that he had compared you to, the first time he laid eyes on you, but to your ears not sounding more than a sarcastic remark on how you were acting like a delicate flower than wanted to be carried. Little did you know that wouldn’t be the last time he’d use that name.

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Want a completely personalized imagine just for you? Click here!

[dreamy625]

The Party

A ficlet for Steve’s birthday

Words: 835

Content: plotless fluff, kind of a fix-it. One little swear word!

Uses the OC from my main fic (hey, recycling’s good for the planet!) but many years ahead of that timeline. You don’t need to have read any of that for this to make sense. 

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By 10pm the older Leppard progeny have formed a scratch band and are playing the only three songs that they all know for the second time, while the younger contingent careen around the room evading their parents and bedtime.

Alice and Steve are dancing. Well, Alice is dancing and Steve is doing his standard swaying from side to side. Periodically, departing guests stop by to say their goodbyes and once again wish Steve a happy birthday. As the opening chords of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ kick in for the third time, Steve grabs his partner’s hand and steers her to the side of the dancefloor. 

“Phew.” He pulls her into a hug, resting his chin on the top of her head and trying to catch his breath. “We are so fucking old!”

“Speak for yourself.” retorts Alice with a fond smile, always mindful of the simply enormous age gap of five years between them. “And actually, that’s a good thing.” 

“It is?” He looks unconvinced.

“Yes, it’s amazing! What did they say to you? You’d be lucky to get to thirty? And here you are at twice that! Okay, with dodgy knees and a liver that looks like badly-cooked steak, but you’re alive and dancing. Sort of dancing.”

“Hehe, I guess I won!”

“Winning. We have to go for the next thirty years now.”

“Wow. That’s a long time. I’ll need you to push me in my bath chair when my knees give out.”

“But I’ll need you to push me in mine when my back seizes up.”

“I’m sure there’ll be robots to do that?”

“Or trained Shetland ponies?”

“Maybe we should get a stairlift?”

“Only if we can turbocharge it.”

Just then Gavin claps Steve on the shoulder. He’s got his bass slung over one shoulder.

“Our turn now, mate. Time to show the kids what real music sounds like!”

“Yeah? Have you got Dave and George?”

“George is up for it, can’t find Dave though. He went for a slash and then we lost him.”

“Bet Joe’ll do it, he’ll sing anything if he’s got an audience!”

Gavin heads for the stage and Steve turns back to Alice, “D’you mind if I…”

“I would love it.” She reaches up to flick his hair back into its characteristic swoop over one eye. “Do some Pearl Jam for me.”

He ambles off to the back of the stage and picks up a guitar from behind the PA system, joking with his old mates on the stage and even older mates in the audience as he plugs in and checks the tuning. Luckily Dave comes back from the loo so Joe is spared lead singer duties (for now, from previous experience the whole gang will be up there joining in before long), and the band breaks into a passable rendition of ‘Lithium’.

Steve’s played with several other bands over the years, and worked with numerous other musicians including some of his own heroes, and the guest spots with Ded Flatbird of course, but this lot have been the most constant. George is still the new boy, even though he’s been with them for at least ten years now, but Gavin and Dave are originals from that jam session upstairs in the King’s Head back in 1994. Gavin’s a producer and Dave, unlikely as it seems given the tattoos and eyeliner, was an accountant for a software company in the nineties, and now owns a restaurant. George is a bona fide musician, drumming with two other groups, one of which even makes records and gets played on the radio. This is a side project for all of them, playing covers and some of their own songs for friends and charity events and those little local festivals that have sprung up everywhere. They started with grunge, but these days they throw in some punk, classic rock, and even metal if they’re in front of the right crowd. Alice believes that, truly, this was what saved Steve from himself after quitting Def. Obviously the therapy and the medication helped, but having that creative outlet and getting to do what he loved with like-minded people and very little pressure was crucial. Realistically, nothing was ever going to stop him drinking, but this was the lifebelt that stopped him from drowning in it. 

Watching her love of so many years relaxed and happy and still doing what he was made to do, Alice feels her eyes well up again and blinks rapidly (she’d already cried when Phil did his little speech, and when Lyla gave him the present from the Lepp guys, and at the video message from Beryl, and her mascara is not going to survive any more!). It’s been a weird life, so far from what she’d envisioned for herself as a kid that it’s almost unbelievable. There have been amazing experiences, and joyous successes, and dark days that seemed interminable, and some moments where she, they, had barely held on by their fingernails. She wouldn’t swap for anything.

[stxrshxpxd]

a gra fic! :)

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Pairing: 2010s graham coxon x reader

Word count: 2.383

Warnings: smut, age gap (45ish/20ish)

Requested by anon x

(ok so i didnt really know how to premise this but i decided to make it like an au where hes not famous and hes just a guitar teacher, to avoid any dodgy family friend relations or whatever for the ppl that feel uncomfortable with that heh (bc famous gra probably wouldn’t be teaching guitar to someone whos not already a friend in some way, if he was still a famous successful musician, you know???)) anyway enjoy this very very unrealistic fic x

* * *

“Try that for me,” Graham asked in his usual small voice. He was sitting across from me - his knees almost touching mine - with an electric guitar resting on his thigh. I was holding one as well and desperately trying to focus on what his hands were playing, rather than the details of the veiny pattern on the back of them.

“Uh,” I mumbled and tried to place my fingers like he had placed his on the strings, but quickly getting confused. I had been taking guitar lessons with Graham for a few months and it was getting harder and harder to push away the inappropriate thoughts.

I had never really had a crush on a teacher before, but of course a guitar tutor would conjure up those feelings in me. Musicians really are a whole different breed.

“Like this,” Graham helped and moved my fingers to the right strings. He was leaned in closer to me and I could feel my heart beating harder behind my ribs.

“Ah, sorry,” I apologised for my inability to pick up such a simple pattern. I caught a second of eye contact with Graham before turning my head down to hide my hot cheeks.

“Oh, don’t be,” he said with a cute concerned tone in his voice. “That’s why you’re here, to learn.”

I nodded and desperately continued to try chasing my inappropriate thoughts away. I played the chord progression almost flawlessly, and mentally beat myself up for the small errors I did. I hated failing in front of Graham. He was one of the sweetest and understanding people I’d ever met but he still intimidated me because when he played guitar he was a completely different person. I just needed his approval so bad.

“Good,” he mumbled and nodded his head. I looked up at his face again. His glasses had slid a bit further down his nose and his dark fringe laid messily across his forehead.

“Y/N.. Is there something wrong?” Graham asked after a short moment of silence and me getting a bit lost in his dark brown eyes.

“What?” I asked back and shifted in my seat. The awkward tension grew between us and Graham stared back at me with a puzzled expression and a small confused smile on his lips.

“You seem distracted,” he explained.

A war broke out in my head. One part of me wanted to just spit it out and admit to being extremely attracted to him, and another wanted me to shut up and stop acting so odd and pathetic. I settled for a stiff shrug of my right shoulder and an increased heartbeat.

“You’re probably not gonna learn much if you’re thinking about something else… Has something happened?” Graham asked. Concern had completely taken over his voice now and he was still leaned in close to me. It made my chest tighten with infatuation for him and the way he was genuinely worried about me.

“No, I’m just.. thinking,” I shrugged again and looked down on our knees that were even closer to touching now. 

“About?”

I could tell was being as careful as he possibly could and he really didn’t want to put any pressure on me. And he didn’t. All the pressure that was on me I put on myself. At last the impulsive side of me won and I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“Your hands.”

Graham was taken aback a bit and laughed nervously. He leaned back again and I felt like throwing up. Why did I have to be so stupid?

“What about them?” he chuckled.

I had already dug myself a hole that was impossible to get out of, might as well keep digging.

“They’re, uh.. attractive,” I mumbled and swallowed nervously. I couldn’t think of a single adjective that felt appropriate to use. It felt like I was sweating from every pore and there wasn’t a single cell in my body in which I felt sexy or like I was capable of seducing this forty-something year old man.

“Attractive?” He asked and sent the ball right back to my court. To be fair, I was the one who had started this whole thing. I deserved to feel this uncomfortable.

“Yeah, like.. I-want-them-on-my-body attractive. That sort of thing,” I kept digging my hole and Graham’s cheeks were now getting a bit red too.

He stared at me in silence for four seconds. I counted them carefully and slower than normal, so it was probably even longer in reality. He then looked down for another few prolonged seconds. I began lining up all the curse words I knew in my head and threw them at myself.

“Okay,” Graham said quietly as he slowly looked up again. He was still hugging the guitar and his hand tightly clasped the neck of it, rather nervously.

“Well,” he continued uttering words, but not forming a sentence that carried any of this agony forward or backward or in any direction really. I couldn’t speak because I knew whatever I said I would make everything worse.

“Would you like to do something about it?” he asked cautiously and suddenly took a giant leap in the conversation. His head was tilted downwards slightly but he was looking me in the eye as my stomach turned over with nerves. I knew I should’ve said no and he knew he shouldn’t have asked that but here we were and I couldn’t think of any other answer but yes.

“Yeah,” I answered in a weak mumble.

Graham reached out to put the guitar back in its stand and I figured this was one of those times when actions speak louder than words. I did the same and sat back again with my clammy palms resting on my thighs. Graham had his bottom lip trapped between his teeth as he reached his hand out. He touched my leg gently with his fingertips and lifted my hand from my thigh. The notion that all this was highly inappropriate was forgotten as soon as he loosely held my hand and rubbed his thumb across my knuckles. I felt like I’d been holding my breath for the last ten minutes.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded. Graham held my one hand a bit tighter and reached out for the other one. I took it as a sign and took a giant metaphorical leap of my own. I stood up on wobbly legs and clumsily straddled his lap. He was wearing a pair of loose fitting blue jeans and I was wearing a pair of tight black ones. Even with all this fabric separating us, I could feel Graham harden a bit under me as I slowly grinded my hips back and forth a couple times. His hands let go of mine and immediately held my face, making me look into his eyes.

“Tell me if it’s weird,” he whispered. I could’ve sworn his lips were already touching mine - with the way I could taste his breath - but I soon realised they weren’t. I wanted them to be.

“You tell me,” I said with a nervous laughter. “I started this,” I joked and looked away from his eye contact. I was caught in a feeling more conflicting than I had ever felt before. Half of me wanted to tear every part of clothing from our bodies, while the other half was terrified and wanted to run away and never have to expose my body to Graham. The thought that he was old enough to be my father crossed my mind fleetingly and I was turned off for a minute, but at the same time I couldn’t keep from kissing him for much longer.

Graham’s hands were calmly resting on my hips now. I pressed my sweaty palms against his soft stomach under his shirt and watched his gaze fall to eye me up and down - or down and up, rather. He helped by raising his arms and I pulled his striped t-shirt off. I threw a glance at the, closed but not locked, door. We had about fifteen minutes left of the lesson, but I knew there was still a risk of another tutor or student walking in at any second. It made me more nervous and more excited.

I realised I would have to step down from his lap to take my jeans off. Now when I had finally gotten it I never wanted to break my contact with his body. I stood up hastily and struggled to get my tight jeans off. I then tore my hoodie off and felt completely naked. I was still wearing my pair of mismatched, yet oddly flattering, bra and pants as I stood frozen to the ground and allowed myself to stare at Graham’s bare torso. He looked even more handsome without a shirt than I could’ve ever imagined. His shoulders were broader than his waist and his stomach looked smooth and warm with a few soft hairs around his belly button and his chest.

“Help me out of these,” Graham suggested and both our gazes fell to his crotch. My heart skipped a beat at the sight of the bulge inside his jeans.

I nodded and kneeled down in front of him, placing my hands on his firm thighs. I could see a modest grin begin to form on his lips. He was clearly enjoying the sight of me on my knees in front of him. As my breathing picked up, I undid his jeans and pulled them all the way off his legs as he stood up to help. My hands were back on his thighs as he sat down again and I let one of them wander up to cup his prominent bulge outside of his underwear. A quiet moan fell from his lips. There was something raspy in his otherwise soft and gentle voice.

“You’re so beautiful,” Graham mumbled, the newfound rasp still apparent in his voice.

“Thank you,” I breathed shyly and kept rubbing his erection for a few more intense seconds before I decided I needed him inside me.

I stood up again and Graham pulled his pants down to the middle of his thighs. I didn’t mean to sound so defeated or in absolute awe - even though I was - but I exhaled sharply at the sight of a nude Graham with his hard cock in his hand. My reversed gasp made him smirk again. It looked out of place on his face but I liked it.

“Come here,” he mumbled softly and leaned in to give my stomach a few wet kisses as his large hands held my waist. His grip around me was just as gentle yet firm as his grip around his guitar.

He pulled me onto his lap again and kissed up my body, until our lips finally connected. Graham pulled my underwear to the side and my whole body twitched lightly as I grinded my clit against his length. He dropped a mumbling comment about how wet I was and I giggled nervously. I refused to believe I had made him this hard.

“Do I make you this hard?” I asked. I realised right away that it was a stupid question to ask.

“Yes, clearly,” Graham chuckled. There was a bit of struggle in his voice again as he was just about fed up with my slow teasing hip movements.

Graham held my hip as he finally guided the tip towards my entrance. I sank down slowly as his size stretched my walls out and made them ache. A few whispers fell from my mouth and I could feel him watching me. I opened my eyes and looked into his. They were large and round and just as dark and beautiful as always. I kissed him again and we both moaned quietly into the kiss. Graham’s left hand was still on my hip and his right was gently cupping my  breast. I was still wearing my bra but he pulled it down slightly and moved his lips from mine down to my nipple.

“Do you mind if I leave some marks?” he asked and kissed around my nipple softly as he waited for me to answer.

“Not at all,” I breathed. 

I had fully adjusted to his size and rode him faster and faster as I came closer to my climax. Graham sank his teeth into the skin on my chest and sucked hard on it. It prompted an even louder moan from me and even made Graham hush me as he laughed quietly. It was a smug laugh.

With the wonderful pain from his teeth sinking into my skin and his cock as deep as it could go inside me, it wasn’t long before the orgasm built up inside me. It came quickly and almost caught me off guard when it washed over me, contorting my whole body and making me exhaustedly fall down with my forehead pressed against his shoulder. Graham held both my hips now and thrusted a few more times before he pulled out suddenly and came all over his hand and thigh. Seeing his veiny hand all covered in his own cum and hearing his heavy breaths almost made me want to go for another round right away but I contained myself and backed away from him. 

I glanced at the clock on the wall as I buttoned my jeans and pulled my hoodie over my head. Graham had found some tissues to wipe his hand with and was standing faced away from me. His back was broad and beautiful and I wanted to kiss every inch of it.

“Well, I’ll.. see you next week then,” I said awkwardly and Graham turned around. The apples of his cheeks were still tinted pink and I could imagine mine were as well. He laughed lightly and walked back up to me. He gave me a quick peck on the lips and smiled.

“Yeah..”

I grabbed my stuff and awkwardly waddled out of the room with sweaty palms and a small grin that was untameable. My skin was still burning with the feeling of his teeth and lips on it. I knew there were already bruises and marks all over my chest and neck.

***

❤️❤️❤️

[snowonthebeachmp3]

the deuxmoi subreddit is so annoying my lorde. did you see that post where op was like oh i love this subreddit because i love feeling superior over celebrities? that basically sums up the entire sub lmfao. they all act so high and mighty over celebs. like gossip should be fun, but there's no need to be absolute cunts to these literal strangers you've never met

also their attitude towards taylor is so weird. they loooove basing their opinions of celebrities based on fan encounters (which is so weird; celebs have off days and they're not required to be nice to random people on the street begging for selfies), but the moment someone points out that nobody has ever had a negative encounter with taylor, and everybody who's ever met her says she's the sweetest woman alive, they claim we're crazed stans. like no, we're just pointing out that taylor isn't the evil bitch y'all want her to be to justify your internalized misogyny. and the recent post on taylor's hypocisy is so dumb too. yes, her dating connor was weird af. but the age gap was 18 and 22, not 17 and 23, and she's talked extensively about how she didn't really mature in that era, so it's not inherently terrible, and in no way negates the abuse she experienced from jake and john. like why are y'all defending JOHN MAYER to insult taylor? people would rather defend the man who called his dick a white supremacist than taylor, huh

sorry, that's a long rant, but this has been really bothering me for the last couple of days lol

yeah i totally agree with you. i mean i still read it for the gossip and there's always some questionable taylor takes on there (like that one commenter who insists joe is a frat boy who's messing taylor around and refusing to commit to her) but i do think red tv has brought more taylor haters than usual out of the woodwork. like yall.......give up trying to make taylor into a mean girl. also people make the dumbest fucking criticisms of her. the thread i posted screenshots of earlier is full of comments about celebs being rude or racist or hitting people with their cars, and then someone's like 'you know what OTHER dodgy thing a celeb has done? taylor cares too much about her career being successful' wow god fucking forbid she wants her music to do well. do you clowns think people get to the top of the music industry by being apathetic

[wiypt-writes]

Leave No One Behind

Ch4- Not So Little Problem Co written with @icanfeelastormbrewing​

Episode Summary: Ari deals with the aftermath of his conversation with Hannah the previous night, and the resort has some unwelcome visitors

Episode Warnings: Bad Language words.

Episode Pairings:  Ari Levinson x OFC Hannah Horowitz

Leave No One Behind Masterlist // Main Masterlist

Chapter 3

“I’ll be there to comfort you, build my world of dreams around you, I’m so glad that I found you.”  I’ll Be There by the Jackson 5

19th March 1971

“Oh Mama!” Hannah beamed at her mother as the large chocolate cake was set in front of her, complete with candles “Did you make this?”

“Of course I did!” her mother smiled “I’ve made you every birthday cake you’ve had, naturally I would make your 21st one!” “It stops here Han!” Sammy grinned, leaning back in his chair. “Mama ain’t made me a cake for the last 7 years.” “You’ll get one on your 30th.” Mama Navon narrowed her eyes “That is if you cut your hair. What on Earth makes you think it looks good?”

Ari let out a snort at that point and Sammy gave him a punch on the arm. “It’s a mullet, Ma, it’s fashion”

“Fashion, really?” Ari asked.

“You’ve no room to talk…you had that dodgy mop top for years.” Ari shook his head laughing, running his hand through his newly shorn hair, careful so as not to disturb the side parting he’d spent ages ensuring was pristine.

“Yeah, you’ve gone from George Harrison to George Lazenby.” Hannah winked at him and Ari grinned back.

“Whatever, get those candles blown out, I want some cake.” Sammy grumbled.

“Yeah, Han, make a wish!” Hannah’s friend, Amira instructed. The rest of the table began to join in, and with a grin she leaned forward, pulling her long bouffant pony tail back out of the way. She glanced over the table, looked at Ari before closing her eyes and blowing her candles out.

“Speaking of Bond…” Sammy spoke as their Mother began to slice the cake up. “The new film is due next month.”

“Connery returns, thank fuck!” Hannah nodded “Because Lazenby is shit.”

“Yeah, hear that, shit…” Sammy nudged Ari who shrugged.

“Hey, the fact that Firefly think’s I’m like James Bond is good enough for me.”

“Well you are an agent so… “ she shrugged, before she grinned wickedly “Although I’m not sure he would wear white skinny Levi's...” she gestured to his pants and he looked at her, his eyebrow raising.

“Erm, I’ll have you know that these are Sta-Prest and happen to be the height of mod fashion” he scoffed.

“Whatever.” she shrugged, before she smirked again “At least you don’t look like Rod Stewart. Mama’s right, that mullet needs sorting Sammy.”

“Can everyone stop taking the piss out of my hair?” Sammy glowered.

Once the cake was eaten, they all had another drink each before the meal came to a natural close. At this point Hannah’s mother wished them all goodbye and headed off home, the rest of them heading to the club across the road.

They headed straight to the bar and then Sammy vanished to go and find a couple of American Green Berets who were on a secondment into Mossad for 6 months, pending a potential formal recruitment following a successful mission a few weeks back.

They all placed their orders, and Ari took a quick check over his shoulder before he moved behind Hannah, bending over to speak into her ear.

“You know, you should be careful what you wish for, it might come true”

Hannah took a breath before letting it out slowly, and turning her head to look at him “What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about Firefly…” he arched an eyebrow at her.

“So you think you know what my wish was, Levinson?” she asked, coyly, looking up at him.

“I think I know, yes” his voice was loaded.

“And are you gonna make it come true Lobo?”  her eyes were suggestive as she bit her lip and Ari smirked a little. He wasn’t an idiot, he hadn’t missed the signs Hannah had been giving him for the past 3 years since her 18th. He’d been trying to ignore it, due to the 7 year age gap but in the 4 years he had known her he had watched her turn into the amazing, gorgeous young woman stood in front of him, and now, well, it was getting increasingly hard to come up with reasons as to why he should be ignoring her, especially now she was 21.

Before he could respond, Sammy returned interrupting their little moment, slapping Ari’s back.

“Let me introduce you to my little sister, this is Hannah, Hannah meet Andy and Max.”

Ari didn’t miss the way Andy’s eyes travelled up and down Hannah’s form and felt himself bristle a little as the man took in her outfit. He couldn’t blame them though, she did look good in her blue and purple paisley print mini dress and knee high white boots.

“Nice to meet you guys!” Hannah smiled at them both.

“Pleasure is all mine” Andy grinned.

“Sammy say’s it’s your 21st” Max looked at her “Happy birthday” he grinned, kissing her hand.

“Thank you” she smiled

“Yeah, congratulations.” Andy grinned, bending over to kiss her cheek. .

Ari shifted on the spot, reaching for the scotch that the bar tender had set in front of him. He took Hannah’s Campari and Soda, handing it over to her, her fingers brushing his slightly as she took it and he saw that adorable pink tinge appear on her cheeks.

“So if it’s your birthday why you hanging bout with these 2 morons?” Max asked, jerking his thumb in Sammy’s direction.

“I’m not, they’re hanging with me.” Hannah shrugged, taking a sip of her drink through the straw.

All of them laughed, and Max looked at Sammy, then Ari, then back to Sammy again. “I like this girl.”

“That’s my sister for you.” Sammy shrugged, turning to the bar tender to place his order.

“Yeah, be careful, she looks like a Firefly but can bite like a mosquito.” Ari looked at Max before he glanced at Hannah.

She winked at him and then turned to Andy and Max. “Well, seeing as you guys are in town for a while, come with me and I’ll introduce you to a few of my friends”

Ari watched as she led them over the light up dance floor, tapping Amira on the shoulder. She started to talk to the rest of the her group of University friends, and he saw one of them, a red head, Abigail, lock eyes with him and he smiled politely before looking away.

“She giving you the eye again?” Sammy smirked, nodding to Abi and Ari shrugged.

“Got my eye on someone else.” he said simply. For once Sammy didn’t pry.

15 minutes or so later, the band was in full swing running through a number of hits from the 60s through to the present day. Hannah seemed to be having a good time, and as the opening bars to Sweet Caroline struck up she grinned over at Ari and Sammy. Ari, done with observing from a far, downed what remained of his drink and jerked his head towards them. Sammy nodded and followed him over to the group where they joined in the dancing and singing and laughing as they all chanted along, When that finished it morphed into another song, then another, then another… they were dancing for a good half an hour to hit after hit, and then Twist and Shout by the Beatles started. Hannah gave a cheer at this point before her and the girls launched into some kind of dance routine, twisting on the balls of their feet, dipping to the floor, laughing as they did so.

It was the perfect opportunity for Ari who moved behind Hannah, giving her a hug from behind. No one paid them the slightest bit of attention as they were too busy dancing themselves so he took it upon himself to pull her back closer into him, his hands falling to her hips as he swayed with her to the music, grinding up against her, his face resting against her neck, the short whiskers of his beard scratching at her skin. Taking her hand in his he spun her out, then back to face him, his spare arm curling around her, hand splaying on her back.

She glanced up at him as the music faded into “I’ll Be There” by the Jackson 5. The song was slow enough but not too slow, so he could keep her in that hold and it looked perfectly innocent. Just two friends enjoying a dance, even if the electricity between them was crackling…and then she leaned up to whisper into his ear.

“What were you saying about making my dreams come true?” she purred, her eyes locked onto his, a sultry look on her face as she blinked slowly.

Ari swallowed and glanced at Sammy, who was fooling about with Max, Andy and a few of Hannah’s friends and he felt himself hesitate. Was he doing the right thing? Was this really appropriate? It was an unwritten rule that you didn’t touch your best friends little sister, especially when she is 7 years your junior. And then there was the whole thing about was he good enough? She was a bright, young, clever woman...with a huge career as a doctor ahead of her which was almost unheard of for a female... Fuck! He had been so sure before but now it actually came down to it, he was plagued with doubts. Subconsciously he loosened his hold slightly and Hannah, as perceptive as ever noticed.

“Are you backing off, Levinson?” she looked at him, reading his face as always.

“Hannah, you look amazing, you are amazing but..”

At that point she rolled her eyes and pulled back slightly “Oh just don’t…”

“Firefly…” he began to protest but she stepped away, shaking her head.

“I need the bathroom”

And with that she headed off over the dancefloor.

Ari watched her leave, groaning as he ran a hand through his hair, grappling with himself once more. He wanted her, like he had never wanted anyone before, and he knew that there was something there on her side too. But was it right? But then again, how could something that felt this good be anything but?  

With a last glance at the group, he strode after her. Positioning himself outside the women’s bathroom he leaned against the wall, trying not to look like too much of a pervert. It took her a little while but when she emerged he reached out, grabbing her hand.

“Ari?” she asked but he didn’t say anything, simply laced his fingers between hers and dragged her outside.

Once there he spun round, backing her against the wall to the left of the door, placing his hands lat against the concrete either side of her head, looking down at her

“You’re driving me crazy.” he looked down at her as she bit her lip, her eyes wide, suddenly her demeanour was all coy. He chuckled and shook his head, “Don’t play innocent with me now, Han. You want me as much as I want you.”

“Well, sometimes we don’t always get what we want do we, mi Lobo hambriento?”

Fuck that nickname! It did things to him, inappropriate things and he gave a little groan as he looked down at her.

“You can have what you want Firefly.” Ari’s voice was low as he looked at her “I’m all yours, but I think you already know that…”

Her breathing became deep and Ari could tell she was turned on but he wasn’t going to do anything until she had given him a sign. He was ensuring she had the power, that this was her decision. Her eyes bounced across each of his, as if she was searching for something, making sure he was absolutely telling the truth. Which he was. He had come clean about his feelings it was up to her now. As he watched, her gaze flickered down to his lips and then back up again and she took a deep breath that was almost a gasp.

“Ari it’s almost midnight…” her voice was soft, almost a whisper. “And I’m pretty sure birthday wishes are supposed to be granted on the actual day…”

Ari grinned, arching his eyebrow slightly “Better not keep my girl waiting.”

His hands moved to her face, cupping her cheeks gently before he leaned down and kissed her. It was soft at first but quickly became heated as her hands slid up to his chest, clutching fistfuls of his black sweater. He kissed the life out of her. It was raw and heated as they both poured out 4 years of fucking frustration in one another.

Eventually Ari broke the kiss, more to breathe properly than anything, pressing his forehead to hers, both of them breathless.

“Were you serious?” Hannah asked.

“About what?” he frowned, and he watched as she bit her lip and looked down before she glanced back up at him.

“About me being your girl…”

“I thought I just made myself perfectly clear…” he said, his eyes boring into hers.

She looked at him, a smile playing on her lips before she shrugged, her hands sliding up round his neck, pulling his face back down to her.

“Hmm, maybe you better show me again…”

******

Ari woke up when the first rays of sun seeped through the latticed window above his bed. When he opened his eyes he was hugging his pillow for dear life and it took him a couple of seconds to adjust to reality, the memories of that night slowly retreating to the back of his mind where they had been kept for nearly 9 years now. He yawned and stretched and pulling his bed sheets away, he sat up on the edge of his bed and rubbed his eyes.  

He groaned when he looked down and his eyes focused on his erection. Fuck, he thought. He tried to remember when the last time he had had a wet dream was but couldn't even recall it. Being around Hannah and stirring old feelings and painful memories was surely having an effect on him. An effect he had to sort immediately if he wanted to impersonate his role as the owner of this God forsaken hotel in front of the group of Germans that had unexpectedly arrived the previous evening. 

Once he had got rid of his, not so little, problem in the shower of the small bathroom attached to his hut and after pulling on a pair of black shorts he headed out in the scorching Sudanese sun.  

He went round the side of the building and he met Max leading some kind of class to a group of tourists, apparently Tai Chi. He saw Max turn to him standing on one leg and give him a wave, and so did the tourists mimicking Max movements. Ari waved back, an astonished smile on his face. He was surprised Max knew Tai Chi, a trained assassin and sniper giving an ancient soothing martial art class clad in what looked like a pair of pyjama pants. And to make it more surprising he had stopped eating to do so, seeing as he, for once, didn't have food in his hands. 

Ari watched him for a second before looking down and giving a huff of a laugh. He decided then to head towards the main building with the intention of getting a cup of coffee. He stopped again as he saw Rachel walking from one of the jeeps, carrying a load of what looked like new bed linen, followed by a member of the staff carrying a box of groceries. Ari wondered where the fuck had they got all that, but then concluded they must have gone shopping as he spotted a load more boxes and baskets in the back of the open trunk of one of the jeeps.

And just as he turned towards the doors of the main building he saw Sammy walking from an outhouse with a basket of laundry and a blatantly grumpy expression on his face. He didn't stop, but gave Ari a stare instead of a good morning greeting.  What was wrong with him? Ari wondered if he would still be pissed at him for the incident during the mission the previous night. Whatever. He shrugged and headed inside the main building.

He entered the kitchen and grabbed a mug. The kitchen and the reception area were deserted at this time of the morning. As he poured some coffee he noticed there was still no sign of Hannah, or Jake for that matter, and he thought it was probably for the best given the way things had gone last night and his damned dream and issue that morning when he woke up. Moreover, he wasn't quite sure how he should handle himself around her. She would probably be upset at him if not mad. Or maybe she simply wouldn’t give a damn, which would be worse because that would mean she didn't care anymore about their.... past. But then again it had seemed like she cared last night. A lot if you asked him, she had even admitted she had been in love with him back then.

Sighing slightly he grabbed his coffee mug and headed out to the seafront part of the building only to find Jake led on a sun-lounger in a very tight pair of red speedos. And, Damn it!, he spotted Hannah next to him in another lounger. She was lay on her stomach, her chin resting on her folded arms, and her head turned towards Jake who was explaining something to her, probably some of his exotic diving adventures.

Ari then noticed she was wearing a red bathing suit which had cut out panels on each side of her waist. She hadn't worn it before, Ari thought he would definitely remember if she had. Her hair was piled on her head in a messy bun and her eyes were covered by her Aviators. Ari couldn't help but check out those damned legs and curves, and that ass and he was suddenly glad he had jerked off in the shower that morning, though he still felt something stirring in the pit of his stomach.

He hesitated but he then decided to approach, watching as Hannah turned half her body to Jake and resting on her right elbow, her head  on her hand just a moment before the two of them burst out with laugher. With the green eyed monster in the pit of his stomach groaning, Ari walked over to them and saw Jake had matches between his fingers and thought that would give him the perfect opportunity to engage in conversation and see where that would lead.

"What's with the matches?" he asked Jake.

Hannah lifted her head to face him. Ari couldn't see her eyes, hidden as they were by her shades but her demeanour didn't appear angry or stiff…just passive which was what he feared the most. Had someone asked him how to handle her, the answer would have been no fucking idea.

Jake looked up and then at the matches, which fell out at the motion of his hand moving his shades up his face, before answering which gave Ari the perfect opportunity to steal another glance at Hannah. A very appreciative one, now that he could take in the curve of her breasts and her cleavage.

 “It's the only way to spread the tan evenly.” Jake answered.

 "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard." Ari replied.

Hannah snorted at Ari's comment and Jake looked at her slyly before saying “You won’t be laughing at the tan lines you'll get from that thing.”

She frowned and looked down at her body. As did Ari, and Jake.  Ari looked at Jake a second later and caught him checking her out. Not that he could blame him. He himself had been doing the same thing since he had spotted them both, but for some reason it pissed him. Then Hannah spoke bringing him back from his thoughts.

“Not like anyone’s gonna see em Loop.”

Ari swallowed hard and brought his coffee mug to his lips to conceal his raising uneasiness. Ok, so now we are on pet name terms. Fuck my life.

“You never know Red…” Jake winked.

Hannah laughed before retorting “I should be so fucking lucky…”

What in the name... 

Ari tried to divert the attention and looked around him before asking Jake "What's going on here?"

"Well, your brochure mentioned the daily relaxing Tai Chi class. Irving" he said nodding at Max. "Liam is doing laundry because he lost a bet." he continued.

Ari looked down back at Jake, a dumbfounded expression on his face.

"He bet Rachel that Max didn’t know how to do Tai Chi…stupid bastard, not like he ain't known Max for 9 years or anything…" Hannah explained rather harshly.

“Are you mad at your brother?” Jake asked turning to look at her.

“Damned right I am.” Hannah snorted. Jake looked at her, raising an eyebrow but she said no more so he looked at Ari who shrugged. It was clear to him that he was not getting a reason why.

Ari shifted position and put his left fisted hand inside his shorts' pocket as he knew all too well what the reason for her bitterness against her brother was. He suddenly felt uncomfortable and looked behind them both, seemingly interested in the Tai Chi class while Jake continued his report of the chores assignment at the resort.

“Angela went shopping after giving a massage to a hairy Nazi. And now I'm giving a diving tour…”  and at that he looked at his diving watch as he stood “which starts in exactly 12 minutes…” Jake informed, giving Ari a look “as per your fucking brochure.” But before leaving he glanced down at Hannah.

 “You coming sweetheart?”

“Hell yeah…” she replied taking the hand Jake was offering her to help her up, but she then stopped.

"You promise I'm not gonna get eaten by a shark?" Hannah asked.

"Don't worry, I'll look after you." he chuckled. "Come on."

They both started to walk off without any more explanation before Jake turned to Ari. “Care to join?”

Ari looked at them for a moment but didn’t answer, he simply scoffed and drank his coffee. He was taken by surprised. He hadn't expected Jake and Hannah to hit it off and become so close in such few days. The green eyed monster now stopped groaning and started growling. He decided to shut it up by finishing his coffee and going to call Ethan and Isaacs to debrief the previous night successful mission in the privacy of his the outhouse where they kept the diving equipment.

***** Ari got back to the main building after the call to Tel Aviv and sorting a misunderstanding with a German couple who had been assigned separate rooms by mistake. Ethan and Isaacs had been giving him a hard time about the radio failure issue, Ari was willing to bet Ethan hadn't believed any of the excuses he had improvised. And seeing the turn the conversation with Isaacs had taken, he wouldn't like to be in Ethan's shoes and having to deal with Isaacs in person.

By the time he entered the main dining room Hannah and Jake had already come back from their diving tour and Hannah was gushing about the marine life, and how Jake had been amazing on the tour, showing everyone where to go and what to see. Max, Sam and Rachel listened carefully to her colourful account of Jake's expertise in the matter while Jake leaned back casually on one chair smoking and brushing off Hannah's flattering comments.

Honestly all Ari wanted to listen to was the sound of Jake's jaw breaking from his punch.  But he faked interest as he sat on one of the free chairs and lit a cigarette after brushing his hand over his hair, an equally fake smile on his face. Rachel then suggested it would be nice if they all took a trip that afternoon after lunch seeing as they would be dismissed from their chores by then. 

So for the second tour of the day, the entire team bar Sammy, who allegedly had a phobia of fish no one knew anything about and so offered to stay in the boat as spotter, decided to take a dive.

Later that day, when all the equipment had been checked and the tourist taking part in the diving tour were all settled in the boat on the way out, Sam sat next to Hannah who shifted in her seat. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he whispered. “You’ve been avoiding me all morning and now you’re looking at me like I murdered someone…”

“Not someone…” she replied without even bothering to look at him and shrugging. 

If Ari could have turned himself invisible he would have, but seeing as that was impossible he was seriously considering throwing himself overboard and getting eaten by a shark instead. But chances were there wouldn't be sharks in the Red Sea, given his luck lately.

"What do you mean?" Sammy asked a bit taken aback.

Hannah shrugged again not looking at him. She still was undecided about how to confront her brother about his big fuck up many years ago, but it surely wasn't gonna happen in a boat in the middle of the sea with a group of chubby sunburnt tourists and Ari fucking Levinson nonetheless.

"What have you done to her, man?" Max chuckled.

"The fuck I know." Sammy groaned, looking at him

"Time of the month cracker?" Max asked Hannah, grinning.

 “Seriously?” Rachel groaned.

"Like, that’s the one thing I never understand, why men assume when a woman is a little moody that they’re on their period?" she huffed.

"The one thing I never understand is why lesbians use dildos or strap-ons. I mean they either like cock or not." Jake thought out loud.

Ok, I might as well give a chance to the sharks, Ari thought.

"Maybe they like cock but just can’t be arsed dealing with the 6ft useless ball sack attached to it…" she offered before cursing in Spanish "Maldito cabrón." (Fucking asshole) Ari noticed Sammy rolling his eyes, clearly understanding whatever curse she had just spoke. Then a middle-aged German woman laughed and said something to Hannah in Spanish.

"Con quién estás más enfadada?" (Which one are you most angry at?)

Hannah laughed and glanced at Ari, Sammy, Max and lastly Jake.

"Ahora mismo, con todos." (Right now, all of them)

Sammy turned at her giving her a questioning look, but he couldn’t blow cover in front of the tourists so he bit back the urge to ask her what the fuck was going on.

Ari rubbed his face. Suddenly this boat trip was taking too long for his liking and his wetsuit felt far too tight.

Everyone remained silent, lost in their own thoughts. Silence only broken by sound of the waves and the lively chatter of a pair of overexcited German youths.  Once they had reached the diving spot, Jake helped Hannah as she tumbled backwards into the sea before helping the tourists to do the same. Then it was Rachel and Max. Ari was the last to go. 

"When did those two become so close? Is Jake hitting on my sister or am I imagining things?" Sam asked Ari, who merely shrugged before he tumbled backwards into the sea effectively determined to have his date with destiny... and sharks. Thanks, Sam.

God. Hannah had been right. The bottom of the sea at that spot was gorgeous. Being there, underwater, diving through the crystal-clear waters among all that rich variety of fish was simply overwhelming. Ari could recognise butterflyfish and clownfish along with sea turtles and some eels, and then a school of an unknown to him species of fish came swimming off a breath-taking  coral reef when the group approached it. And just when he thought he couldn't be more amazed, Jake led them to a rather ghostly ship wreck. 

The experience was as amazing as Hannah had described it, yes. But it would have been even better if Ari hadn't had to put up with her and Jake diving close together the whole time and him guiding her instead of the tourists. He would be lying if he said he wasn't low key pissed at them, had he a reason or the right to be or not. And he might or might not have not voluntarily kicked a school of fish with one of his fins. And to make things worse, that tight short legged wet suit she was wearing was doing nothing to help.

Just when he had decided to dive a bit more inside the ship wreck in order to keep his mind and his eyesight away from the pair, he felt a tug on his line. He swam up a bit and saw it was Sammy pulling so he heading up to the surface. He bobbed at the side of the boat gripping the boat side handle with his right hand and pulling his mask off with the left one.

"What's up?" he asked Sammy catching his breath.

Sammy just nodded towards the shore and said "Turn around."

Ari turned around and saw a bunch of armed guards all stood along the beach.

"Shit" he cursed. "Ok, I’ll go down get the others."

A few minutes later he had warned Jake and they all had gotten the tourists back in the boat and headed back to shore. Ari trying to keep calm so as not to scare the tourists and to reassure his team at the same time. Everyone more or less succeeding in keeping up appearances till they got to the beach. 

When they descended the boat, Ari saw a man in an army uniform, with his hat on his head and a pair sunglasses covering his eyes. He quickly guessed it must be Colonel Ahmed of the local force, the one Kabede had warned him about.

"Hello." Ari greeted walking towards him, followed by his team.

"How can I help you?" he asked reaching his hand out to the Colonel, who looked back at him seriously as they shook hands.

"There's been an incident last night, and we wanted to make sure that all of you in the hotel are safe." Ahmed informed in his thick accent.

Ari looked back at his team, trying to buy some time, before turning back to the man.

"What kinda incident?" he asked faking a curious expression.

"Smugglers."  Ahmed replied as he turned and walked back towards the hotel, all of them following.  "They drove through one of our roadblocks last night. Nearly killed two of my soldiers." 

The team exchanged glances as the soldiers began flanking them as they walk, guns held in their hands.

 "I heard there's a smuggling problem up and down the coast, I hope no one was hurt." Ari offered casually.

Ahmed stopped in his tracks and turned to look at him. He inspected Ari's expression carefully before smiling an ample white toothed grin. He then nodded and continued walking, heading straight for the trucks parked at the left front side of the main building.

Ari had to put his quick thinking skills to the test before Ahmed started suspecting he didn't want his trucks inspected. He stopped as Ahmed walked to the trucks and leaned against the bonnet. He removed his glasses and gave Ari that inspecting look again before speaking.

"My soldiers shot the trucks. So the trucks from last night should have bullet holes in them."

Ari kept his face passive. Behind him Max and Jake both move nearer to Hannah and Rachel in a protective mode as the soldiers started circling the group. Tension was rising fast.

Ahmed resumed his walk round the side of the trucks towards the rear of them "There's no reason why your trucks should have bullet holes, Mister..."

"Thomas. Guy Thomas" Ari offered, walking after him.  "And no. No reason."  he admitted laughing a little with the last two words, as if he found it all ridiculous.

Ahmed didn't spare him a glance and proceeded to check the trucks, pushing at the wooden panels. Ari stood there watching. Then he looked at Ahmed whose face had fallen as he hadn't found the bullet holes he was sure he would find. 

Overtaken by frustration Ahmed then barked something to his soldiers in Arabic. A second later a soldier ran up, saying something back as he nodded and Ahmed looked at him, before looking at Ari and returned to check the truck again. 

Ahmed comes back a few seconds later and said something to his soldier, his voice steely, before beginning to make his way back down the side of the truck to his troop. Ari lowered his head with relief and in a bold move, encouraged by the rush of adrenaline, he chimed

 "I hope you come visit us again real soon." 

Hannah looked at Max and hissed "Seriously?" once the armed men had jumped back in their trucks. “I hope you come visit us again?” she looked at Ari, “You’re such a dick…”

Ari frowned as she turned away and with a shake of her head waked back down the sand and took a right towards the boat that they had occupied little over 10 minutes ago which were now moored by the launching ramp near the diving centre part of the resort. Max looked at Ari, gave him a shrug and then shouted after Hannah.

“Cracker, wait up…”

She stopped and turned, allowing him to catch her and Ari stood with his hands on his hips as Max tossed an arm round her, gave her a squeeze and they fell into step with one another walking down the soft sand.

“Come on, let’s get the gear away and we can talk.” Ari said, tearing his eyes way from Hannah’s back and nodding to Jake. Between them they all grabbed various bits of equipment and began hauling it up the beach to outhouses. It was hot work, the boys all undoing the tops of their wetsuits in an attempt to keep reasonably cool, but as Ari felt the sweat dripping down his back he could think of nothing better than getting out of the damned thing.

Once the last oxygen tank was placed on the floor by Jake, he let out a loud breath and wiped at his brow then his chest with a towel. Ari saw Hannah look at Jake and smile and that damned green eyed monster stirred in his gut again.

“Like what you see Red?” Jake teased with a wink and a smirk as he gave a little twirl.

“Well, there’s not much left that I ain’t seen, Loop, thanks to those fucking speedos.” she shot back and he gave a laugh, as she unzipped the front of her wet suit before she paused and then stopped when Max broke the silence.

“Smugglers huh…”

“Well they weren’t wrong.” Hannah mused “Just not smuggling the types of things they expect…”

“I almost shat in my wet suit.” Jake said, with a chuckle.

“Yeah, if that soldier hadn't been too scared to admit he'd missed, we'd all be locked up right now.” Sammy spoke, shaking his head.

Hannah’s attention flicked to Ari who wasn’t listening. Instead he was leaning against the wall, looking out of the window at the guests on the beach, one arm folded across his bare abdomen, the other playing with his beard and she could tell from the look on his face that an idea was forming in his head.

“Come here.” he spoke to the group as he pointed out of the window, his hands falling to his slim hips “What do you see?”

With that he turned and looked into the hut. Hannah, who was stood closest to him stepped up beside him, following his gaze to the tourists who were sat out on the sand, a few of them drinking beer from a cool box. Sammy moved to stand next to her and raised an eyebrow.

“Unsuspecting collateral damage?” he huffed a sarcastic laugh.

Hannah rolled her eyes and give him a filthy look as she shook her head, her hands falling to her hips. She shared a glance with Rachel who smiled at her, clearly they were both on Ari’s wave length.

“Best cover we could ask for.” Hannah said. Ari turned to look at her, smiling as she met his eyes her face almost smiling back.

“Imagine if the Germans hadn't been here when Ahmed arrived.”  Ari looked at Sammy before he turned back to the window, folding his arms again.

There was a moment’s pause as the group stood looking out of the window for before they glanced round at one another, Max, Rachel, Hannah, Jake and Ari all grinning. Ari turned his attention back to the tourists, the idea was genius. Operate as a fully functioning hotel! They had the staff, and it was the perfect damned cover should anyone come sniffing around. Granted it might slow things down, they’d need a good few months to get it fully operational, and then there was the task of getting Ethan and Isaacs on board but he was confident he could sell it, especially with all the team’s support.

Well, almost all the team that is.

“You're kidding, right?” Sammy deadpanned.

“Yeah, coz this is one big fucking hilarious joke Sammy.” Hannah snarked and Ari turned round everyone’s attention focussed on her “Ari has a point…”

“What a surprise, you’re backing him up, again!” Sammy rolled his eyes.

Ari gave a sigh and stepped forward a little “Hey, hey come on…” he placated but Hannah ignored him completely and glared at her brother.

“Oh fucking grow up Sammy!” she shook her head, before she barged past him, shoving into him with her shoulder before she stormed out of the group.

“Oh fuck this…” Sammy grumbled, following her out.

Hannah stormed down to the sea front, Sammy hot on her heels.

“Hannah! Hannah, STOP!” he yelled, “What the fuck is your problem?”

“You really wanna know?” she rounded on him, her eyes blazing.

“Well I’d appreciate it if you told me instead of the snidey, bitchy comments and looks!”

“Would you appreciate it if I came round to your apartment one morning and punched you in the jaw…sound familiar?”

Sammy’s eyes grew wide and Hannah shook her head at him as the realisation spread across his face.

“How did you…” he started to ask but Hannah cut him off.

“Fuck you Sammy, how could you? You had no right to interfere in my life!”

“Hannah, you were my little sister…”

“I was 21 years old….a fucking adult.” she shook her head.

“I just…” Sammy sighed, and shrugged “I was trying to protect you.”

“From what? From Ari?” she shook her head “He’s your best friend Sammy, I mean how bad do you really think he is?”

“I know what he’s like Hannah.”  Sammy shook his head “He’s a great guy but he’s reckless and arrogant and selfish…” “He wasn’t…” Hannah swallowed “He wasn’t like that with me.” “Look at what happened with Sarah.” Sammy sighed “That would have been you.” “Well, funnily enough neither of us has a husband now do we?” she shot back.

“Don’t say that.” Sammy looked at her.

“Why not?” she shrugged. “It’s true.” “You were 21…he was 28…”

“And?” “You had all your training to do.” “You had NO RIGHT!” she screamed at him “You had not right to decide what was best for me…I fucking loved him Sammy!”

At that Sammy’s face fell, and he looked down, shaking his head. “Hannah, I-“ “I loved him…and you took him away from me.” she sniffed “Why you would do something that you knew would hurt me so much?”

“I was trying to stop you getting hurt.” Sammy shook his head

“I mean, was it jealousy, is that it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous Han.” Sammy scoffed.

“You were scared I was gonna take your best friend or something?” she looked at him

“I didn’t know how serious it was.” Sammy looked at her “I didn’t know you’d been together for any amount of time…” “Hang on…” Hannah frowned “You didn’t know, so what? You just saw us at the party and then decided you’d punch him in the face?”

“I…I never saw you together.” Sammy looked down.

Hannah stopped dead and looked at her brother as he raised his eyes to hers “What? Then how did you-“ “I never saw you Han.” he repeated “Someone else did and they told me.”

“Who?”

“Hannah, does it matter?”

She snorted, remembering how Ari had said the exact same words to her the night before and let out a sarcastic laugh.

“I’m getting sick and tired of people telling me what does and doesn’t matter. I want to know. WHO told you?” “Hannah, don’t do that to yourself.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?” she said loudly “I have the right to know, tell me Sammy who told-“ “It was Andy!” Sammy yelled back “Ok, you happy now?” At his words Hannah visibly recoiled, stepping backwards on the sand. It felt like someone had just slapped her round the face.

“Andy?” she whispered.

“Yeah…” Sammy sighed

Hannah looked at her brother again, before she took a deep breath and turned and headed back up the sand towards her hut, the tears stinging her eyes. Her husband had been the one that had caused Ari to leave her. She didn’t want to believe it, but she knew her brother wasn’t lying. It felt like a double betrayal, from both of them, and it hurt. It physically hurt.

“Cracker?” Max stepped into her path, his voice gentle as he gently laid his hands on her shoulder

“Just...leave me Max, please…” she said, the tears pouring down her cheeks.

“I can’t leave you like this….” he said softly “What’s wrong? What are you and Sammy fighting about?”

“Hannah?” Ari asked softly as he appeared and Hannah groaned inwardly. She really didn’t need this. All she wanted to do was go and lie on her bed, curly up and cry. “Firefly, what happened?”

It didn’t take a genius to work out what the siblings had been arguing about. Ari watched her as her chest heaved with sobs, debating whether or not to hug her but he stopped himself, not sure exactly how well it would be received.

“He…” she started to talk and shook her head, taking a deep breath before she turned her beautiful blue eyes onto his, they were shining with tears “It was Andy.” Ari felt like the rug had been pulled from his feet, he knew instantly what she was referring to but couldn’t quite believe it.

“Andy?” he repeated, looking at her and she nodded.

“Andy saw us that night, and he was the one that told Sammy…” “Aah, shit…” Max sighed, and both Ari and Hannah turned to look at him. “That isn’t exactly what happened”

“How do you…how do you know what we’re talking about?” Hannah frowned.

“Because it was me. I saw you.” “What? Hannah whispered as Ari let out a groan and turned away for a moment to gain some composure.

“I saw you and Ari outside Cracker, and I made a joke to Andy because he liked you….and we knew Ari had some secret girlfriend he was refusing to tell us about and…”

“God, Max!” Ari spun round to look at him, shaking his head.

“I didn’t know he was gonna tell Sammy, or that he did…I swear.” Max finished, apologetically “I’m so sorry.” Hannah looked around at Max, lost for words.

“Cracker…” he said but she simply shook her head.

At that point Sammy approached and that was it, she’d had enough.

“You….” she pointed at Sammy “Had no goddamned right to interfere…” she turned to Max “You should have kept your mouth shut…and you…” she looked at Ari, wanting to scream and shout and rail at him for walking away and not fighting for her, but as his eyes locked onto hers, she saw the sadness behind them and even now, with the anger and hurt coursing through her veins, she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Instead, she simply turned and stormed into her hut, slamming the door behind her.

**** Chapter 5

[fuckofffuckofffuckoffloveme]

Runaway - Part Six

~Masterlist~

Concept: Hazel Richards is a twenty-year-old woman living in London. When she meets a mysterious time-travelling alien known only as the Hunter, she’s thrust into a world of wonder she could only have imagined.

Warnings: swearing, follows S1 of Doctor Who.

As the TARDIS materialised, Hazel smiled. "So how long have I been gone?" she asked as they stepped out onto the Powell Estate.

"About twelve hours," the Hunter replied, having decided to keep her look with the beanie and the trenchcoat.

Hazel nodded. "Right, I shouldn't be too long. I just want to see Jace."

The Hunter raised an eyebrow. "What're you going to tell him?"

"Oh, that I've been to the year 5 billion and only been gone twelve hours," Hazel replied sarcastically. "No, I'll just tell him I spent the night at Shazia's. See you later. And don't you disappear." The Hunter saluted with her metal hand, smiling as Hazel ran off to her flat.

As the Time Lady turned around, intending to find a wall or something to sit on, she noticed an old poster stuck to a concrete lamppost. She read it, and her eyes widened. Immediately, she started sprinting up to the flat.

***

"I'm back!" Hazel called as she let herself into the flat, depositing her keys in the bowl as usual. "I was with Shazia. She was all upset again. Are you in?" She smiled as she saw Jason come out of the kitchen with a mug of tea and stop still, his eyes wide. "So, what's been going on? How've you been?" She blinked when Jace didn't move. "What? What's that face for? It's not the first time I've stayed out all night."

Jason dropped his mug, and it smashed on the floor. "It's you," he whispered, his voice haunted.

Hazel frowned, confused. "Of course it's me."

"Oh my God. It's you. Oh my God." Jason ran forwards to hug her tight, and Hazel saw a variety of missing person posters on the table over his shoulder.

The Hunter burst through the door. "I'm so sorry, Hazel! It's not twelve hours, it's twelve months. You've been gone a whole year!"

***

Later, Jason's shock had given way to anger, and Hazel was curled up in an armchair trying to calm him down. "The hours I've sat here, days and weeks and months, all on my own. I thought you were dead, and where were you? Travelling. What the hell does that mean, travelling? That's no sort of answer." Jason snorted derisively. "Travelling."

"That's what I was doing," Hazel protested.

Jason raised an eyebrow. "When your passport's still in the drawer? It's just one lie after another."

Hazel sighed. "I meant to phone, J, I really did. I just... forgot." She winced at Jason's expression.

"What, for a year? You forgot for a year? And I am left sitting here. I just don't believe you. Why won't you tell me where you've been?" he pleaded.

"Actually, it's my fault," the Hunter confessed. "I sort of employed Hazel as my companion."

"When you say companion...?" Jason trailed, his eyes wide.

"Not in the way you're thinking," the Hunter assured him.

"Then what is it?" he demanded. "Because you, you waltz in here all charm and smiles, and the next thing I know, she vanishes off the face of the Earth! How old are you, then? Thirty? Thirty five? What, did you find her on the internet?"

"No, I just -"

Jason cut her off, cornering her against the wall she was leaning against. "That's my sister! I thought she was dead, because of you!"

The Hunter's eyes narrowed. "If there is one thing you can believe about me, it's that the last thing I would do is leave you with a dead sibling." With ease, she pushed Jason away, and marched out, heading for the roof.

***

Later, Jason and Hazel were sitting in the kitchen over a couple mugs of tea. "Did you think about me at all?" Jason asked, frowning.

"I did," Hazel assured him. "All the time, but -"

"One phone call," Jason cut her off. "Just to know that you were alive."

"I'm sorry. I really am," Hazel sighed, leaning her head against his shoulder.

Jason put his arm around her. "Do you know, what terrifies me is that you still can't say. What happened to you, Haze? What can be so bad that you can't tell me, sweetheart? Where were you?"

***

Hazel sighed as she joined the Hunter on the roof. "I can't tell him. I can't even begin. He's never going to forgive me. And I missed a year. Was it good?"

"Middling," the Hunter shrugged.

"Ugh."

The Hunter raised an eyebrow. "Well, if it's this much trouble, are you going to stay here now?" There was a hint of sadness in her eyes that Hazel picked up on.

"No, definitely not. But I can't do that to him again," she stated.

"Well, he's not coming with us."

Hazel snorted. "No chance."

"I don't do families," the Hunter said quietly.

"He squared up to you!" Hazel cried in an attempt to change the subject.

"Nine hundred years of time and space, and I've never been threatened by someone's brother," the Hunter shook her head.

"Your face!"

"I was scared for my life!" the Hunter joked, smiling.

"You're so gay," Hazel sighed.

"Well, yes," the Hunter agreed easily.

Hazel nodded. "Okay... When you say nine hundred years?"

"That's my age," the Hunter clarified.

"You're nine hundred years old," Hazel raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah."

Hazel blew out a breath. "Jace was right. That is one hell of an age gap." The Hunter laughed, and Hazel sighed. "Every conversation with you just goes mental. There's no one else I can talk to. I've seen all that stuff up there, the size of it, and I can't say a word. Aliens and spaceships and things, and I'm like the only person on planet Earth who knows they exist."

A deep foghorn-like noise interrupted her, and a huge spaceship passed overhead, trailing black smoke. It was heading for the city, and smashed through a few faces of Big Ben before swallow-diving the Thames. The Hunter and Hazel watched as a plume of black smoke rose into the air on the horizon. "Only person on planet Earth, huh?" the Hunter asked cheekily.

"Oh, that's just not fair," Hazel pouted, before following her friend as she ran off down the fire escape.

***

"It's blocked off," the Hunter sighed as they got as far as they could, to where the army had put barriers across the roads.

"We're miles from the centre," Hazel frowned, standing on her tiptoes to try and see over. "The city must be gridlocked. The whole of London must be closing down."

The Hunter grinned. "I know. I can't believe I'm here to see this. This is fantastic!"

Hazel narrowed her eyes. "Did you know this was going to happen?"

"Nope."

"Did you recognise the ship?" she asked.

"Nope."

"Do you know why it crashed?" she tried.

"Nope."

Hazel rolled her eyes. "Oh, I'm so glad I've got you."

"I bet you are. This is what I travel for, Haze," the Hunter enthused, spreading her arms. "To see history happening right in front of us."

"Well, let's go and see it," Hazel shrugged. "Never mind the traffic, we've got the TARDIS."

The Hunter made a face. "Better not. They've already got one spaceship in the middle of London. I don't want to shove another one on top."

"Yeah, but yours looks like a big blue box," Hazel pointed out. "No one's going to notice."

"You'd be surprised," the Hunter told her. "Emergency like this, there'll be all kinds of people watching. Trust me. The TARDIS stays where she is."

Hazel sighed. "So history's happening and we're stuck here."

"Yes, we are," the Hunter smiled.

"Well, we could always do what everybody else does. We could watch it on TV," Hazel suggested.

***

Hazel smirked as she watched the Hunter flicking through the channels, sipping at a coffee Jason had grudgingly made her. The Time Lady rolled her eyes as people started turning up and chatting, practically drowning out the TV. "Oi, I'm trying to listen!" She watched as specialists were brought in, but frowned when the channel switched to Blue Peter. The toddler that had pressed the button grinned up at her from her lap, and she rolled her eyes, taking the remote and switching it back. "Go on," the Hunter muttered, seeing the body had been brought to Albion Hospital, with members of the army arriving.

Eventually, having seen all she needed, the Hunter deposited the toddler with his mother and went for the balcony exit of the flat. Hazel followed her out. "And where do you think you're going?" she asked, crossing her arms and raising her eyebrows.

The Hunter turned to look at her, leaning against the railings. "Nowhere. It's just a bit human in there for me. History just happened and they're talking about where you can buy dodgy top-up cards for half price. I'm off on a wander, that's all."

Hazel raised her eyebrows higher. "Right. There's a spaceship on the Thames and you're just wandering."

"All right," the Hunter sighed. "I just want to check something out. You don't need me. Go and celebrate history. Spend some time with Jace."

"Promise you won't disappear?" Hazel asked.

"Tell you what." The Hunter reached down into her pocket and withdrew a golden key on a matching chain, similar to the silver one around her own neck. "TARDIS key. It's about time you had one." She handed it over, smiling, before setting off towards the TARDIS herself. "See you later."

***

Back in the flat, Jason was proposing a toast. "Here's to the Martians!"

"The Martians!" everyone cheered, except Hazel, who rolled her eyes. The door opened, and she looked over, hoping to see the Hunter, but froze when she saw Mike, who's eyes widened at the sight of her.

"I was going to come and see you," Hazel tried as the room went silent.

"Someone owes Mikey an apology," Shazia raised her eyebrows.

"I'm sorry," Hazel apologised immediately, but Shazia shook her head.

"Not you."

Jason made a face as everyone looked at him. "Well, it's not my fault. Be fair. What was I supposed to think?"

***

The party had started back up again in the living room while Mike, Jason, and Hazel had retreated to the kitchen, Mike shutting all the doors and the serving hatch. "You disappear, who do they turn to? Your boyfriend. Five times I was taken in for questioning. Five times. No evidence. Course, there couldn't be, could there? And then I get him, your brother, whispering around the estate, pointing the finger. Stuff through my letterbox, and all cause of you."

Hazel frowned at him. "Mikey, you're not my boyfriend. I don't know where you got that from, cause it weren't me. Besides, I didn't think I'd be gone so long."

"And I waited for you, Hazel. Twelve months, waiting for you and the Hunter to come back."

Jason held up a hand to stop him. "Hold on, you knew about the Hunter? Why didn't you tell me?"

Mike nodded. "Yeah, yeah. Why not, Hazel? Huh? How could I tell him where you went?"

"Tell me now," Jason ordered, looking worried.

"I might as well, cause you're stuck here," Mike gloated. "The Hunter's gone. Just now. That box thing just faded away."

Hazel rolled her eyes. "Shut it, pikey."

"She's left you," he goaded. "Some girlfriend she turned out to be."

The girl ran out of the flats, coming to where the TARDIS had been, with Mike and Jason following her. "She wouldn't just go, she promised me."

"Oh, she's dumped you, Hazel!" Mike taunted. "Sailed off into space. How does it feel, huh? Now you're left behind with the rest of us Earthlings. Get used to it."

"She would have said," Hazel stated, nodding confidently.

"What are you two going on about?" Jason asked as he caught up with them. "What's going on? What's this Hunter done now?"

Mike laughed. "She's vamoosed."

Hazel growled. "She's not, because she gave me this." She showed him the golden key on its chain around her neck. "She's not my girlfriend, Mike. She's better than that. She's much more important than -" She cut herself off as the TARDIS key started to glow, the ship herself beginning to materialise a few feet away. "I said so!" Hazel's eyes widened when she saw Jason staring at the TARDIS in shock. "Jace! Jace, go inside. J, don't stand there, just go inside. Just, Jace, go. Oh, blimey."

The TARDIS fully materialised, and Hazel ran inside while Mike and Jason stared for a moment before following her.

The Hunter smiled when she saw Hazel come over to her. "All right, so I went and had a look. The whole crash landing's a fake. I thought so. Just too perfect. I mean, hitting Big Ben? Come on. So I thought let's go and have a look -"

Hazel cut her off, wincing. "Jace and Mike are here."

"Oh, that's just what I need," the Hunter rolled her eyes. "Don't you dare make this place domestic."

Mike stalked over, clearly annoyed. "You ruined my life, Hunter. They thought she was dead. I was a murder suspect because of you."

The Hunter looked over his shoulder at Hazel meaningfully. "For future reference, this is what I call domestic."

"I bet you don't even remember my name," Mike snorted.

"Spike," the Hunter replied confidently.

"It's Mike."

"No, it's Spike."

"I think I know my own name," Mike raised an eyebrow.

The Hunter snorted. "You think  you know your own name? How stupid are you?"

Hazel followed Jason out as he ran off, overwhelmed. "Jace, don't! Don't go anywhere. Don't start a fight! J, it's not like that. She's not. I'll be up in a minute. Hold on!" She went back into the TARDIS. "That was a real spaceship."

"Yep," the Hunter agreed.

"So it's all a pack of lies? What is it, then? Are they invading?" Hazel asked.

"Funny way to invade, putting the world on red alert," Mike pointed out sullenly.

"Good point, could be a little more cheerful," the Hunter evaluated. "So, what're they up to?"

***

"So, what're you doing down there?" Mike asked, peering down at the Hunter as she meddled with the circuits down in the grating.

The Hunter sighed. "Spike."

"Mike," he corrected.

"Spike. If I were to tell you what I was doing to the controls of my frankly magnificent time ship, would you even begin to understand?" the Hunter raised an eyebrow.

"I suppose not," Mike admitted.

"Well, piss off, then," the Time Lady snapped, going back to her tinkering.

Mike rolled his eyes, going over to Hazel, who was leaning against the console. "Some friend you've got."

"She's winding you up," Hazel told him. "I am sorry."

"Okay." Mike didn't look convinced.

"I am, though."

The man sighed. "Every day, I looked. On every street corner, wherever I went, looking for a blue box for a whole year."

"It's only been a few days for me, maybe a week," Hazel confessed. "I don't know. It's, it's hard to tell inside this thing, but I swear it's just a few days since I left you lot."

Mike raised an eyebrow. "Not enough time to miss me, then?"

Hazel swallowed, uncomfortable. "I missed all of you."

"I missed you," Mike admitted.

"So, er, in twelve months, have you been seeing anyone?" she asked.

"No," Mike replied.

"Oh," Hazel nodded, edging away from him a bit.

"Mainly because everyone thinks I murdered you," Mike shrugged.

"Right."

"So, now that you've come back, are you going to stay?" he questioned.

Hazel's eyes widened. "I can't," she blurted.

"What do you mean, you can't?" Mike frowned, glaring a little.

The Hunter hauled herself up out of the grating to push between them, to get to the monitor. "Usually, one means almost exactly what one says, Spikey."

Mike glared at her. "Excuse me, this was a private conversation!"

"I know, I heard," the Hunter replied nonchalantly. "Anyway, I patched in the radar, looped it back twelve hours so we can follow the flight of that spaceship. Here we go." She held out her metal hand, and a lever just out of her reach flicked down. "Hold on, come on." She moved slightly out of the way so that Hazel could see, sneakily nudging Mike further away from her.

"Is that the spaceship?" Hazel asked, pointing to a small dot moving towards Earth on the radar image.

"Exactly. That's the spaceship on its way to Earth, see?" The Time Lady followed it with her metal index finger. "Except, hold on..." She turned a dial telekinetically, and the image rewinded. "See? The spaceship did a slingshot round the Earth before it landed."

"What does that mean?" Hazel wondered.

"It means it came from Earth in the first place. It went up and came back down." The Hunter sighed, thinking hard. "Whoever those aliens are, they haven't just arrived, they've been here for a while. The question is, what have they been doing?"

***

Later, the Hunter was sprawled on the jump seat, trying to concentrate on figuring out who these aliens were and what they were doing. Mike was rather hindering her progress as he kept channel-hopping on the monitor, providing a fluctuating level of noise that didn't help the Hunter's concentration in the slightest. Hazel had gone further into the TARDIS to get some peace and quiet so she could call Jason. "How many channels do you get?" Mike questioned.

"All the basic packages," the Hunter replied, opening her eyes in annoyance. She looked up a little as Hazel reentered, not looking too much happier than she had when talking to Mike.

"You get the sports channels?"

The Hunter rolled her eyes. "Yes, I get the football." She blinked, recognising someone on the news. "Hold on, I know that lot. UNIT. United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. Good people."

"How do you know them?" Hazel asked quietly, and Mike scowled as he noticed the Hunter's gaze soften as soon as it hit her.

"Cause she's worked for them," he stated, smirking at her raised eyebrows. "Oh yeah, don't think I sat on my backside for twelve months, Hunter. I read up on you. You look deep enough on the Internet or in the history books, and there's her name, followed by a list of the dead."

The Hunter gave him a weird look. "Oh, yeah, that's nice, Spike. Always good to know I'm being stalked."

Hazel smirked a little. "If you know them, why don't you go and help?"

"They wouldn't recognise me," the Hunter explained. "I've changed a lot since the old days. Besides, the world's on a knife-edge. There's aliens out there and fake aliens. We want to keep this alien out of the mix. I'm going undercover, and I'd better keep the TARDIS out of sight." She thought for a minute, putting on her trenchcoat and a pair of fingerless gloves to cover most of her metal hand. "Spike, you've got a car. You can do some driving."

Mike scowled, but didn't bother correcting her. "Where to?"

"The roads are clearing. Let's go and have a look at that spaceship," the Hunter decided. They walked outside, right into a helicopter spotlight, and she winced. "Or not." Mickey ran off.

"Do not move! Step away from the box and raise your hands above your heads!"

Hazel and the Hunter raised their hands warily, and the human flinched as Jason came running out the flat, only to be held back by a couple of soldiers. "Haze! Hazel!"

The Hunter smirked, looking right up at the soldier carrying a megaphone. "Take me to your leader," she called.

***

Hazel looking around the well-furnished police car in surprise. "Wow, this is a bit posh. If I knew it was going to be like this, being arrested, I would have done it years ago," she joked.

The Hunter shook her head, pulling her beanie snugly around her ears. "We're not being arrested, we're being escorted."

"Where to?" Hazel wondered, frowning.

"Where'd you think?" the Hunter raised her eyebrows. "Downing Street."

Hazel's eyes widened. "You're kidding."

"I'm not," the Hunter assured her.

"10 Downing Street?"

"That's the one."

"Oh my God. I'm going to 10 Downing Street? How come?" Hazel asked.

The Hunter winced. "I hate to say it, but Mike was right. Over the years, Apollo and I have visited this planet a lot of times, and we've been noticed."

"Now they need you?" Hazel inquired, deciding not to touch on the mention of the Time Lady's brother.

"Like it said on the news: they're gathering experts in alien knowledge. And who's the biggest expert of the lot?" the Hunter asked smugly.

"Patrick Moore?" Hazel teased.

"Apart from him," the Hunter rolled her eyes.

"Oh, don't you just love it," Hazel laughed.

"I'm telling you, me and Moorsy, we were like that," the Hunter exclaimed, crossing her fingers. She frowned for a moment. "Who's the Prime Minister now?"

Hazel snorted. "How should I know? I missed a year."

***

"Oh my God," the human girl whispered as they entered 10 Downing Street, giggling in excitement.

"Ladies and gentlemen, can we convene?" a man was saying. "Quick as we can, please. It's this way on the right, and can I remind you ID cards are to be worn at all times." He handed one to the Hunter as they approached, and the Time Lady noticed his ID named him as Indra Ganesh. "Here's your ID card. I'm sorry, your companion doesn't have clearance."

The Hunter narrowed her eyes. "I don't go anywhere without her."

"You're the code nine, not her," Ganesh stated. "I'm sorry, Hunter. It is the Hunter, isn't it? She'll have to stay outside."

"She's staying with me," the Hunter insisted.

Ganesh sighed. "Look, even I don't have clearance to go in there. I can't let her in, and that's a fact."

"It's all right," Hazel shook her head. "You go."

"Sure?" the Hunter raised an eyebrow, not wanting to leave her alone.

Another woman bustled up to them. "Excuse me. Are you the Hunter?"

"Not now," Ganesh scowled. "We're busy. Can't you go home?"

"I just need a word in private," the woman pleaded.

"You haven't got clearance," Ganesh told her. "Just leave it." He turned to the Hunter. "What about the Doctor? Is he coming?"

The Hunter's face clouded over, and she ignored the question, speaking instead to her companion. "I'll be out as soon as I can. Don't start a fight." She hugged Hazel, then went into the conference room.

Ganesh turned to Hazel. "I'm going to have to leave you with security."

"It's all right," that woman butted in again, making Hazel smile at her persistence. "I'll look after her. Let me be of some use." She started walking down a corridor with Hazel. "Walk with me. Just keep walking. That's right. Don't look round. Harriet Jones, MP Flydale North." She stopped in a clear corridor. "This friend of yours, she's an expert, is that right? She knows about aliens?"

Hazel narrowed her eyes. "Why do you want to know?" Harriet promptly burst into tears.

***

The Hunter started scanning the prepared papers as soon as she sat down, ignoring everyone else.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention, please," General Asquith began. "As you can see from the summaries in front of you, the ship had one porcine occupant."

Standing up, the Hunter interrupted him. "Of course, the really interesting bit happened three days ago, filed away under Any Other Business. The North Sea. A satellite detected a signal, a little blip of radiation, at one hundred fathoms, like there's something down there. You were just about to investigate and the next thing you know, this happens. Spaceships, pigs, massive diversion. From what?"

***

Harriet had lead Hazel to the Cabinet Room, still crying. "They turned the body into a suit. A disguise for the thing inside!"

"It's all right," Hazel told her. "I believe you. It's, it's alien. They must have some serious technology behind this. If we could find it, maybe we could use it." She started opening cupboards, looking for anything alien-looking, when a man's body fell out of one, almost hitting her. "Oh my God!" Is that the -?!"

Ganesh sighed as he saw Harriet through the doorway, and marched in. "Harriet, for God's sake. This has gone beyond a joke. You cannot just wander." His eyes widened as he saw the corpse. "Oh my God! That's the Prime Minister!"

***

"If aliens fake an alien crash and an alien pilot, what do they get?" the Hunter theorised. "Us. They get us. It's not a diversion, it's a trap."

***

A plump blonde woman appeared in the doorway. Harriet and Ganesh recognised her as Margaret Blaine. "Oh! Has someone been naughty?" she asked.

"That's impossible," Ganesh protested. "He left this afternoon. The Prime Minister left Downing Street. He was driven away!"

Margaret smiled innocently. "And who told you that, hmm? Me." She reached up to her hairline, and started to unzip her forehead.

***

"This is all about us," the Hunter realised. "Alien experts. The only people with knowledge how to fight them gathered together in one room." She rolled her eyes as the leader of the meeting, Green, farted. "Excuse me, do you mind not farting while I'm saving the world?"

Green smirked. "Would you rather silent but deadly?"

General Asquith removed his cap and unzipped his forehead. The room filled with a blue light, and the Hunter struggled to see as an alien wriggled out of the skin suit. As the blue light faded away, she saw an eight foot tall green creature with huge black eyes in small baby-like faces. "We are the Slitheen."

"Thank you all for wearing your ID cards. They'll help to identify the bodies," Green smiled sweetly. He pressed a remote activation switch, and the ID cards emitted electric shocks to their wearers, including the Hunter, who fell to her knees, biting back a scream of pain.

~~~

If you enjoyed, please like and/or reblog, and if you can spare anything to donate to my Kofi, I’d be incredibly grateful! Thanks for reading :)

[honourablejester]

My sister and I were playing Far Harbour for the first time last night, and I’ll be honest here, I really don’t like the dialogue wheel when DiMA asks you if you might be a synth.

Like, okay, your options for responses are as follows:

How would I know?

I’m a human

I’m a synth

Sarcastic

Just looking at the flat, on-the-face-of-it choices for a moment, that’s …

This is where the dialogue wheel really struggles. Because those look both completely flat and completely arbitrary. Except for the first one, which is something you might actually say. So we said it. And then he prompts towards how you might know (dodgy memory gaps), and then just basically asks you again, so you have to choose one of the others.

Look. Before we get to any of the other answers, I don’t like this.

This is one of the driving questions of FO4. There is so much doubt, for everybody you meet, over who might be a synth, what that might mean, are their memories real, are they real, how would they know, if it was confirmed what would they do, and so many other questions. The entire Commonwealth is having a mass existential crisis over this question. No one knows the answer. And DiMA (or at least the dialogue wheel) just wants you to … arbitrarily pick an answer? With no indication of how you came to that conclusion? Yes, I’m a synth. I decided just now. No, I could only possibly be a human. Never mind that I’ve been helping the Railroad for ages and I’m in love with Nick Valentine, I instinctively reject the possibility that I could be a synth myself. They’re not …

I know how it’s maybe meant to sound. That you’re picking what your character instinctively feels about themselves. But there’s no room for doubt. The wheel just plops it flat. Are you or aren’t you. There’s no allowance for how pretty much every other person he could ask that question will have spent a decent portion of their lives wondering. Unless they’re a confirmed synth who knows their designation, and even then, they probably still wonder.

If you pick either option from that annoyingly flat and blunt choice, they expand out to:

I’m a human being, not a synth

I have to be honest, um, in the back of my mind, I’ve always suspected …

So, yes, apparently the first option was meant to make you sound vaguely racist. The voice acting (at least for the female survivor) puts a bit of an emphasis on ‘not a synth’ that does make her sound vaguely defensive and/or disgusted. It’s portrayed as a knee-jerk rejection.

If you choose the synth option, Nick likes it. So I’m guessing it was meant to be the more friendly option if you’re a general ally of synths. Or, you know, in love with one.

But. The thing is. Why are you saying either of them? There’s been no indication up to now (at least in our playthrough, and to be fair we haven’t gotten into the Institute yet) of what the survivor might actually think. There’s been no real indication of what she should think.

Why would she think she’s a synth? I’m not saying why would she wonder, there’s an infinity of reasons for that, I’m saying why would she pick an option that initially looks like conclusively saying she knows she is one. She doesn’t.

She could be. Very easily, though since we haven’t gone to the Institute yet our survivor doesn’t know a good few of the reasons why it would make sense. The most logical place for her to have been swapped would be that first wake-up in the cryo chamber, when Shaun was taken. It’s very easy to imagine that the original survivor actually died then, rather than got refrozen, and the one that woke up the second time was a synth. Especially since I gather it looks like Father was doing a lot of experimenting in general in allowing the survivor to be woken up. It would be very easy to think that the survivor that exists in the wasteland is a synth. There is the question of the memories, how would they have gotten a brain scan enough to picture some of the pre-War things from a corpse frozen in a tube, since Father himself likely can’t remember, but there are a good few sources of pre-War memories in the Commonwealth (hi Nick!), so it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine the Institute got their hands on enough to prompt and then fake the rest.

There are lots of little dialogue options in the game, usually when you’re talking to pre-War ghouls and/or Nick himself, that do make it sound like you have more pre-War memories. Remembering the details of Silver Shroud episodes, things like that. But, again, the Institute clearly has access to pre-War brain scans from CIT, so that can be explained.

But that doesn’t prove she’s a synth. And there are a lot of reasons for her to think she’s a human that have nothing to do with apparently being slightly racist. Primarily, because her story is already so weird as it stands. I’m a pre-war popsicle (possibly with brain damage from being frozen, defrosted, refrozen and defrosted again) that woke up in an apocalyptic wasteland. That’s a lot to swallow from a standing start, without wondering if I’m a robot with fake memories on top of it.

Admittedly, DiMA does say that. There’s a lot of explanations for dodgy memories that could happen to anyone, let alone someone with such a massive trauma and huge before-after divide as the sole survivor. Which, possibly, makes it more likely for her to be a synth, because hello tailor-made past to explain away internal inconsistencies. She’d make a great experiment. But it doesn’t make it more likely for her to believe she’s a synth. She thinks she comes from a time before they even existed. She has every reason to believe her own internal narrative about Vault 111 and waking up 200 years later. Regardless of her feelings about synths in general, she has no particular reason to believe she herself is one.

Which I think is my main problem with this dialogue wheel. It’s not really posing the question as a philosophical or existential conundrum, a question the survivor might actually ask herself. It’s asking the question as a means to make her pick a side.

So the option to say you’re human comes out vaguely defensive, something a Brotherhood operative would say. And the option to say you’re a synth makes the synths around you happy.

The wheel has nothing to do with what you actually think you might or might not be. It gives you no option to say you’re really not sure, you can’t decide, you don’t know. Well, it does, and then forces you to make a choice between them anyway. It makes you pick an option, and only gives a nod to doubt in hindsight, and only if you pick synth. The way the options play out, it makes it sound like you don’t make the choice based on what you think you are, you make the choice based on who you plan to side with (or have been siding with back in the Commonwealth). While presuming that the only reason you’d pick a side is that you’re part of it on a racial level.

It makes it sound like the only reason to think you’re human is because you hate the thought of being a synth. That any reasonable person would think that they probably are one, especially if they already like them and are an ally to them. That the only reason to be an ally with synths and want to help them is the idea in the back of your brain that you are one yourself.

Like, I don’t know if I’m overthinking this slightly because I didn’t like the flatness of the choice and then how our particular choice played out. We picked human, because to the best of our knowledge our survivor had no real reason to think she wasn’t one. And then what we said came out sounding like Maxson could have said it. Which, given that we’re a staunch Minuteman/Railroad member, and in love with Nick Valentine, did not please me in the slightest.

But I really do feel that the wheel is too flat, too arbitrary, comes out of nowhere, and frames your choices in a really manipulative way. While the base game does ask a lot of questions about who is or is not a synth, and several people do challenge you as one because they’re in paranoid meltdowns, this is the first time we’ve really been asked if we think we might actually be a synth. And for the first time you’re asked something, especially something so existentially fraught as this, are you really going to be able to give a flat, definite answer? Yes or no? Sure, I’m totally a synth. Not sure how I came to that conclusion, but absolutely I am one. Off the top of my head, yup.

(Sidenote: the way it dismisses your question of ‘How would I know?’ also annoys me. I know it’s because it’s meant to be a general ‘asking for clarification’ prompt, but it actually makes more sense as an answer in itself. How would she know? Why can’t that stand as her answer? But no, the wheel/DiMA presses you on to make a binary choice)

Why would you, as the player, pick ‘I’m a synth’, except that you’re siding with synths? The game has given you no evidence or asked you no direct questions up to now for you to genuinely think that your character is a synth. And I get RPing doubts, and the expanded version of that answer, what you actually say, is something I might have said had that been given as the initial option. In the back of my head, I have wondered if I might be. Because basically everyone in the Commonwealth has probably wondered that by now. But we had no reason to say ‘I am a synth’, like that was a thing we knew. Because we don’t.

The baseline assumption is going to be that you’re human. All your memories and evidence point that way. Unless you’ve been to the Institute and pulled your file and synth designation off their databanks, you’d have no way of knowing you’re a synth. So why would you say you are?

To get in good with Acadia. That’s why you’d say you are. Because you want to ally with synths, or infiltrate them, so you blithely say that you are one. Because clearly everyone knows that the only reason you’d help a synth or ally with them is if you are one.

I don’t like this dialogue wheel. I really, really don’t like it. I know it’s a system problem. The wheel system doesn’t expand on what you’re actually going to say, so you have to make your best guess based off dodgy summary prompts (which is why we basically never choose the ‘sarcastic’ option, because holy Hannah we’ve no idea if we’re going to be mildly snarky or cut someone to the bone with that one, and most of the time we’re not chancing it). But the particular way the initial prompts and then the actual dialogue in this one plays out has some very unfortunate implications. It does really feel like it enforces the ‘humans vs synths and if you are one, you’re antagonistic to the other’ divide. It feels like a choice designed to make you pick a side, and to declare yourself racially in order to do so. And I don’t like it.

Um. Right. Sorry for the rant.

(For the record, I am enjoying the DLC generally at the minute. Far Harbour as a setting is fantastically spooky and Lovecraftian, and running around it with Nick is great so far. But that particular moment really bugged me. Like a lot. Heh)

[bi-dazai]

damn lol ok for anyone concerned the giomis thing is literally the only mildly bad thing i 'ship' and it's mostly me like...talking abt they way araki gay coded giorno and mista. i can reassure yall that I barely talk abt it and the only giomis ppl I've ever followed havent been endorsers of anything that's any worse bc yes, the giomis age gap isn't something I would like in most other media and def not irl. I kinda see giomis like kataang - the age gap I don't like but it's minor enough in context that I can get over it just this once and enjoy it

Edit: I'm also not active in the jojos fandom anymore so I really don't actually consume much JoJo's content in general

I fully understand why it's seen as problematic and I recognise and agree with those aspects, but within the context of vento aureo exclusively i have an exception. again i use the example of kataang as the only other time in my life that ive shipped smth with a *dodgy* age gap, and mention that in my honest personal opinion me shipping soukoku is far worse. I also wouldn't write a relationship with the giomis age gap in my own work, and would not ever support a relationship with this age gap in real life.

I'm not going to be offended if you unfollow or block, but I'm writing this just to promise that I'm not a fucking weirdo pro shipper and I'm not going to disagree that the age gap is bad, esp applied irl. I'm also clarifying that I don't associate with other giomis shippers or even the jojos fandom at all (i don't think im actually in any fandom any more) mostly due to the fact that a significant portion of them, when I was in the jjba fandom, were into weird shit that I, as an anti, wasn't supportive of. However I'm going to input that there is a sect of giomis shippers that are similar to myself as described above which was the sect I involved myself w for the brief time I was actually in jjba fandom.

Cheers

[unpack-my-heart]

EXIT

@tinyarmedtrex​ @xandertheundead​ @constantreaderfool​ @violetreddie​ @oldguybones​ @eds-trashmouth​ @moonlightrichie​ @toziesque​

The noxious smell of formaldehyde and death hung in the air like smoke, but Richie, for the most part, didn’t smell it anymore. Perhaps in the morning, when he walked through the large blue double doors, ash on his tongue from the cigarette he’d abandoned on the wall outside, cherry slowly turning octopus-ink black, he’d smell it, and his nose would wrinkle automatically, but it never lasted. Soon enough, it would filter into his nose and sprout its tendrils, stoppering up all the tiny smell receptors, until Richie could never remember smelling anything but that very specific odour that he’d smelt for the first time fifteen years ago, and had been smelling ever since.

The linoleum floor squeaked under his shoes. He squeaked down the labyrinthine corridors, passing nurses and doctors and people who were here now but wouldn’t be here tomorrow, he squeaked into the lift, he squeaked down more corridors, and he squeaked into the third floor staff room. His locker was the first on the left, the one with the broken door and the broken shelf, but he continued to bundle his meagre belongings into it anyway. He’d do this even though he knew that when the clock struck eight he’d stumble in here, exhaustion clogging his veins like cotton wool, and he’d pull the door open, and his trainers would smack him on the forehead vengefully. The locker door protested loudly, a great metallic whine, and Richie shoved his bag inside before slamming it shut again.

It was a Thursday morning. The clock struck six fourteen minutes ago, which meant that Richie was sixteen minutes early for work, for no other reason than he’d simply been bored at home. He’d woken before his alarm, almost an hour before his alarm, and had laid in bed almost petulantly, desperately trying to throttle sleep out of the slumbering body of the night, but it hadn’t worked. He’d quickly tired of staring at the small cracks that tumbled over each other on his ceiling, vein-like, so he had hauled himself out of bed, feet landing on the threadbare carpet with a soft thud. Wednesday night had become Thursday morning whilst Richie was still awake, and still he had woken before the rest of the world had even entered REM, eyes yet to flicker jubilantly behind velvety eyelids.

Read the rest under the cut or on AO3 HERE

Richie wiggled his socked toes. The staff room was empty, save for three coats hanging, limp and lifeless, from the hooks that lined the wall. Change-over was in three minutes, when his manager would bustle into the room, eyebrows pre-emptively raised, the uniquely disappointed look that he only gave Richie. He was the arse-end of twenty, just over half Richie’s age, and yet, he was still able to turn Richie’s knees into the gelatinous chocolate pudding they serve in the cafeteria when his eyebrows shot up like startled caterpillars escaping a bird.  The schedule tacked onto the flaky corkboard had his name written on every morning shift this week, Monday through to Friday and then Saturday and Sunday as an extra added ‘fuck you’ to Richie and his bustling, raucous social life that didn’t exist.

When Richie had taken this job, fifteen years ago to the day, it had been a temporary stop gap. “Something to pay the bills,” he’d told himself and anyone who’d listen to him. The lady doth protest too much, the cricket on his shoulder would whisper casually to him, as the first week became the first month became the first year became the fifth year became ten years later and here he is, fifteen years later, older, greyer, wiser but only in ways that don’t count. Fifteen years an orderly, fifteen years a fucking fool in grey-white scrubs. ‘Are you the doctor?’ people would ask, simpering and with reverence in their voices, humbled by the glow of the M.D.-halo hovering over Richie’s head, until Richie would point out that the light of the halo was just a dodgy lightbulb, and that he was, in fact, just the person they employed to push people around and clean up their piss. Then, the reverence would slide off their faces like butter, and all that would remain was apathy tinged with vague disgust.

The door burst open.

“Ah, Richard. Finally decided to join us, have you?”

“I was fifteen minutes early, Henry.”

“Patrick was thirty-five. Now, Mrs Jefferson’s knee hasn’t improved so she’ll need wheeling down to x-ray at nine, but before that you need to clean up …”

The rest of Henry’s impassioned speech, Julius Caesar to the deaf Roman Republic, dissolved into the stale air of the staffroom like sugar in water that Richie refused to drink. As quickly as he’d arrived, Henry was gone, leaving behind nothing but a list as long as Richie’s forearm that simply had to be completed before Richie was allowed to disappear into the staff cafeteria to snatch at some feigned respite and to pretend that the meatloaf was anything but inedible.

With thirteen and a half hours to go, Richie stepped out of the staff room, and walked down the corridor, regulation crocs slapping the floor with every step.

– X –

When the interviewer had asked Richie why he wanted to be a hospital orderly, the answer that had come tumbling out of his mouth was well-rehearsed and only half a lie. He’d told the very bored looking man in the ill-fitting suit that he wanted to help people, Sir, and that the job of a hospital orderly perfectly suited his innate skill at problem-solving and would allow him to work with people who needed the most help, something I believe is so valuable, Sir, especially in the current nihilistic political climate, Sir. The sweaty, uncaring man simply stared at Richie, rolled his eyes, and told Richie to show up at half six the next day, and not to bother showing up at all if he can’t deal with mopping up the piss and shit of elderly patients who can’t wipe their own asses. Richie had grinned, manic, wide, false.

Mr Reitzman’s eyes were still open, and, had this been the first time Richie had come face to face with death’s prickly hand, he might have been shocked. Still a naïve young man whose only experience of death was the death of his hamster when he was nine, the first time Richie saw a dead body the predominant emotion he’d felt was confusion. Hollywood death, the death that’s illuminated on the silver screen, is powder-perfect and serene, bodies lying on tables, eyes closed demurely against the bright white light of the mortician’s lab, skin still a flushed petal-pink, even though their blood lay still and coagulated in their veins. Real death, the sort of death that comes creeping up on real people before pouncing and slashing and clawing and biting is … cold. Cold, stiff bodies, arctic-cold rooms with stacks of beginning-to-bloat bodies that are swiftly turning a grizzly grey colour, eyes that stare, glassy and cold. Cold. Richie was cold, and Mr Reitzman was cold. Richie tugged his open sweater closed, zipping it shut with a flourish. Mr Reitzman continued to stare at the ceiling, stare past the ceiling, stare into the void. The void stared back at him, reflected in his blown pupils.

There’s a picture on the wall of the room. The hospital tries to keep the end-of-life rooms – the rooms where people are wheeled into in a wheelchair, blinking, and are wheeled out of on a gurney unblinking – as light and fresh as possible. The walls are a clinical white, the sort of white that displays blood and piss in gory, vivid technicolour, and the bedspread is white, and the floor is white and the curtains are white, like every other room, apart from in the end-of-life rooms, the light and fresh end-of-life rooms, there is a picture on the wall.  

Richie wonders idly whether the picture of a dozen small sheep grazing on a hillock made the rupturing of Mr Reitzman’s stomach any less painful, and whether the shepherd guarding the flock soothed him as his stomach acid dissolved him from the inside out.

The room is easy to clean. The mop glides over the floor, dances over the ice-white linoleum, and Richie hums tunelessly as it flies this way and that. Three other orderlies that Richie can’t name bustle in, heave Mr Reitzman’s rigor-mortised body onto a gurney, and wheel him out of the room, sheet placed pulled up and over his body, as if the sight of death would cause the whole world to scream in pain, in denial. In reality, Richie knows that the body will linger in the morgue until Mr Reitzman’s wife claims it, and then it will linger in the ground until the worms claim it, and then it will linger nowhere, forevermore.

Now, with nothing in the room but Richie, the bed, and the now redundant IV, the air feels warmer.

– X –

The end-of-life room only remained empty for as long as it took Richie to scrub the last remanences of life once lived out of the floor, before another life that was clinging to existence by a thread was bustled into the room. Where Mr Reitzman had been comatose for much of his stay, and had barely been able to grunt in Richie’s direction, the new end-of-life occupant was much more vocal.

“I want the best doctor, Eddie-bear, the best doctor they can find, I don’t care if they have to fly him in from… from Kentucky! Do you hear me, Eddie? Edward, are you listening to me?”  

“Yes, Ma.”

The voice that spoke first was tea-kettle shrill, metal grating against metal, the sound of nails on a chalk board. It spoke with a nasally inflection that tugged at the ear, and warbled on without taking a breath. The voice that spoke second was small, retiring, reserved to the point of annoyance and Richie’s head whipped around as the screeching wheels of the wheelchair came to a halt just behind him.

“And who might you be? Are you the doctor?” The first voice implored, demanded, and Richie blinked.

“Richie Tozier, ma’am. Just an orderly, I’m afraid, you’ll have to –”

“Oh. Well, fine. Fetch the doctor then, go on, what are you waiting for?”

“Ma,” the second voice scolded, a verbal slap on the wrist that was as effective as a sugar placebo, “don’t be so rude.”

“Rude? Shut-up, Eddie. I’m dying, or have you forgotten? That your own mother is about to shuffle off this mortal coil with a tangled gut? Is that it? You’ve forgotten?”

The owner of the second voice, a smallish man around Richie’s age with a pinched face and bruised, lifeless eyes, sighed.

“You know I haven’t forgotten,” the man – Eddie – replied, helping the nameless orderly lift his mother onto the bed with Promethean effort.

Richie watched dumbly from the corner of the room, mop clasped between his hands, as this pantomime of family duty continued to unfold before him. Eddie and his bleating mother seem to have forgotten that he’s there, nestled in the cheap seats, as they continue to speed through the first act of their tragedy. Richie doesn’t plan on sticking around for the fifth act finale.

Before he can slip out of the room unnoticed, Eddie catches him by the arm with calloused fingers.

“Hang on, wait a second,” Eddie said, but Richie pre-emptively shakes his head.

“Look man, I don’t know where the doctor is, the cafeteria is down the hall on the left, there’s a toilet through that door right there, I don’t know how long it’ll take her to die. Just,” Richie shrugged, hoping that the hopeless motion of his shoulders would communicate more than his words could ever dream to, “just leave me alone. I have another room to clean.”

Eddie dropped his hand from Richie’s arm as if Richie had suddenly combusted into hot, blue flame.

Two little words floated after Richie as he all but ran from the end-of-life room and those damn sheep grazing on that damn hillock, they chased him through the hospital as he scrubbed and cleaned and mopped, they followed him home that night, and they burrowed deep into his brain as he lay in bed, sleepless, staring at the ceiling, eyes fighting the dark.

“Thank you”

– X –

The shrieking woman is still alive in the end-of-life room when Richie marches in the next morning, mop lodged safely under his arm like a musket. The man whose words had stalked Richie as he tossed and turned in his bed last night was slumped in the chair in the corner of the room. Family didn’t usually stick around. That was another thing that had thrown Richie when he’d first started here. He’d assumed that he’d be falling over the slumbering, weeping bodies of relatives who camped out in the wards, desperate to hold their loved ones in their arms as they slipped peacefully off to a better place. Death is a solitary experience, Richie had learnt this quickly. It happened in the middle of the night when relatives had gone home, when visiting hours were over and those who weren’t attached to machines with plastic tubing were tucking into their evening meals or fast asleep, wrapped in blankets and the womb-like comfort of unconsciousness. It happened in the middle of the day, when people were at work, faces buried in spreadsheets. It happened when the rooms were empty, silent, save for the laboured breathing of the person who was about to breathe no more. Death, for those who don’t die, isn’t an experience, it’s a discovery. The dead wait patiently for the living to have time to grieve.

The shrieking woman wasn’t shrieking when Richie shuffled in, she was asleep, snuffling and snorting like a newborn. Eddie looked up as Richie entered the room, before closing his eyes again.

Richie cleaned. Eddie breathed.

“What’s your name?”

The question came barrelling out of nowhere, cutting through the air like a knife through cheese.

“Uh, Richie. Richie Tozier, orderly extraordinaire, at your service,” Richie said, and Eddie let out a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a sob.

“Yes, yes, you told me yesterday. Look, Richie, I’m –”

Richie knew what was coming, he knew that he should stop Eddie from apologising for his mother, knew that the harpy lying in the bed was more trouble than Richie could even care to imagine, but he let Eddie continue anyway.

“I’m sorry about her. She’s … She’s scared.”

“Aren’t we all”

“I suppose so. She’s got cancer, lung cancer. The doctor said her lungs look like she’s smoked forty a day for twenty-five years, and that just set her off, “I’ve never smoked a day in my life! Dirty, dirty habit” and all that. She’s funny about that stuff. Do you smoke?”

The question wrapped itself around Richie’s legs and tugged, pulling him off balance.

“Yes, yeah I do, but don’t worry, I won’t – it’s against hospital policy to –”

“I do, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Started when she got diagnosed.”

“…Shit”

Eddie laughed, properly this time, and it was an ugly sound, too high pitched and breathy, but it chiselled a smile out of Richie’s icy heart.

“Is that really fucked up? I don’t even like it, it tasted disgusting and it’s fucking with my asthma but … it seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Teenage rebellion twenty years too late?” Richie asked, wringing the mop out.

Eddie chuckled. “Something like that.”

The woman’s snuffling became moaning which became groaning which soon became loud, verbal protests which made Richie’s teeth itch, and sent Eddie skittering off to his mother’s bedside.  

“It huuuuurts Eddie-bear! Fetch the doctor, fetch him now, it huuuuurts!”

Richie took that as his cue to leave, the tragedy having steamrolled straight into Act II without him even noticing. He picked up the mop bucket, and left the room, but not before sending a quiet, “goodbye Eddie” over his shoulder.

The woman’s noisy protestations about her son befriending the janitorial staff followed Richie down the corridor, and Richie grinned.

– X –

The staff cafeteria of the hospital was hidden away behind a large white door marked with ominous red letters, STAFF ONLY DO NOT ENTER, as if it was concealing something much more exciting than lukewarm casserole and stale bread rolls. Richie often found himself in there, choking down whatever food the chef had decided to punish them with on that given day, as he hid in the corner of the room, sat at a table that hadn’t been cleared for days. This lunchtime was no different. The table was covered in used plates and cookie wrappers, and Richie sat hunched over his phone, trying to crush candy in a desperate pretence at fun. A small knock  at the door echoed out across the room, and Richie glanced around. He was the only person in the room. The knock sounded out again, louder this time, and again, and Richie groaned.

Food now abandoned to becoming cold and more inedible, he got up and slunk across to the door, before pulling it open.

Eddie was stood on the other side, wringing his hands.

“Hullo, Richie. I was wondering, y’see, she’s asleep again, and I’m … well, I’m bored of watching her breathe and listening to her fart.”

A spluttery laugh erupted from Richie, and Eddie grinned.

“Do you want to come in? I can offer you stew that tastes like nothing and apple cake that tastes like pork”

“… Sounds appetising. Are you sure I can come in?” Eddie asked, gesturing to the ominous message on the door.

Richie shrugged. “It’ll be fine, and if anyone does ask, I’ll just tell them you’re interviewing me.”

“For what?”

“Orderlies Weekly, Orderlies Monthly, a podcast about menial labour jobs, some shit like that, I don’t know. Look, do you want this apple cake or not?”

– X –

When things take a turn for the worst, you can feel it in the air. Outside the room of the nearly-dead, the air ripples violently, as if preparing to absorb the energy of a life expended, and the cold creeps in, slowly at first, unnoticeable, but before long the room is frigid, held tightly in the gaping maw of Death, who won’t wait much longer. The air shifts around Sonia Kaspbrak’s room at four in the afternoon on the Tuesday after she’s admitted, and the tragedy reaches its climax. The medication has stopped working entirely, both the painkillers and the last ditch attempt at shrinking the cancerous squatters currently making the cavities in her lung their home. She’s left, bereft of all chemical comforts, to fend for herself, to will her broken, bruised, rebellious body to spare her some pain, to ease her into the sweet sleep of death without too much discomfort, but her body, as it is wont to do, proves stubborn. She moans in her sleep, grasping at her chest with arms on auto-pilot, as if she might rip through the papery skin on her clavicle and grasp her lungs, patch them up, make them work. Eddie watches her writhe in her bed, and Richie watches Eddie.

Eddie has barely moved from the chair for two days and two nights. He’s pushed it right up against his mother’s bed, crushed as close as he can possibly get to the metal bed frame, and he sits rigid in it, standing vigil over his mother’s sleeping body, as if he might catch her last breath, as if he might shock her stuttering heart into life one last time. He’s all but mute, nodding wordlessly to doctors who speak rapidly, popping into the end-of-life room for nothing but a cursory nod at the dying mother in the bed, and the already mourning son clutching at her crow-claw hand.

“She’s on her way now, Edward,” they say, voices hushed and gentle but removed, always removed. “It won’t be long now.”

Act IV of the tragedy rips past in a blur. A blur of endless silence, the only sound being the slopping sound of the mop on the floor, and of the regular beeping of the machines. Eddie barely breathes. Richie breathes enough for the both of them.

– X –

“Coffee.”

The word is sour in Richie’s mouth, and he spits it out. It falls out wrong, and Eddie blinks.

“Pardon?”

Eddie’s voice is hoarse, and it cracks violently, as if it hasn’t been used for hours, maybe even days. Richie knows it hasn’t.

“Come with me. You need a break, you’ve been sat in that damn chair for days, Eddie. Coffee. My treat.”

Eddie gets up wordlessly. Richie, who had steeled himself in anticipation of a fight, exhales. As the barista is mixing their drinks, the air shifts violently, once, just once, as if Atlas has shifted his grip on the world, and Richie knows it’s happened.

“Eddie,” Richie says, and he reaches out and grabs Eddie’s hand from where it was resting on the table, “it’s going to be fine, okay? You’re gonna be fine.”

Eddie cocks his head, a dog confused at a command, but nods once, then twice, then his jaw is set and Richie knows he knows.

They get back to the room twenty minutes later and Sonia’s body is covered with a sheet. Her eyes stare up, open, unblinking.

Eddie doesn’t cry.

– X –

Cleaning the room is harder this time. Sonia’s body is removed almost immediately, and Eddie goes with it, eyes glistening with damp but no tears escape them. His voice wobbles but it doesn’t break. He is picture-perfect composure, and Richie is almost scared of him.

The room smells like bodies, the warmth of life hasn’t been chased out yet. This syrupy warmth makes the clean-up harder, changing the sheets sends beads of sweat down Richie’s spine, turning off the equipment has him panting and by the time he’s moving the chair back to the corner of the room he’s practically sobbing.

He doesn’t notice Eddie standing in the door way, a bunch of flowers clasped loosely in his hand, so Eddie coughs awkwardly.

“Richie?”

“Hiya, Eds,” Richie says, tears now streaming freely down his cheeks.

“These are for you,” Eddie says, thrusting the flowers at Richie. They’re a slapdash bunch of shocking reds and yellows and umbers, and they’re beautiful.

“Isn’t it supposed to be me who buys you flowers?” Richie asks, taking the flowers in his hand and staring at them as if they held the secrets of life, the universe and everything. They smiled up at him.

“Isn’t it supposed to me be who cries?”

“Ah, you got me there. I just –”

“It’s weird, isn’t it.”

“It never has been before.”

“Did you know any of them before?”

“No, but I didn’t know your mother either.”

“You knew her about as well as I did,” Eddie says, and Richie is caught in a web of silence and something that claws at his gut, something he doesn’t understand, something he doesn’t want to understand.

“You were very kind to me,” Eddie continues, “and these, they’re from the shitty hospital gift shop, but these … these aren’t shitty.”

Eddie gestures at the flowers, and their tiny red and yellow heads seem to turn in Richie’s grasp, turn away from the white room, and the white floor, and the white curtains, turn away from the picture that hangs, melancholy and alone, on the wall, and they turn towards the sun.

The room feels warm, and Richie grins.  

[dxmedstudent]

On contraceptives and medicine...

Occasionally you come across threads online where people seem to think that contraceptives are some kind of medical conspiracy. There’s a narrative that ‘medicine doesn’t know ANYTHING about women’s problems so medicine is useless and doctors don’t know anything’. There’s still been a lot of research; not enough but that’s true of many conditions. Whilst there’s a very real gap in research and accommodation when it comes to women, how it is depicted is often simplistic.  We do need more research, but in the meantime we need to encourage people to make use of what we have now to empower themselves. As a woman, I have to make do with what we have now, whilst I encourage medicine to do better.  Science and medicine hasn’t always served women, but it’s something that is slowly being addressed. Yes, contraceptives also have a checquered past. A lot of medicines have a dodgy and far from illustrious past; we can’t realistically throw out everything in history with a less than perfect past. On an individual level, some people have horrible experiences with doctors. We need to hold people to account if they are failing their patients and work on better training for new doctors if current training is lacking.  I, too, haven’t always been ideally served as a patient. As a woman and doctor, I think this is harmful because it dissuades people from seeking help. If you keep hearing that nobody is any good, and that nobody knows anything anyway, why would you bother? We need to encourage people to educate themselves and empower them to look for doctors who can listen and help, not spread the idea that it’s useless.  So there are a few ideas that I think it would help to clear up: Asking about your sexual health is part of holistic healthcare It is wrong for a doctor to assume that a young person (or person of any age) should be sexually active. I’ve had chats like that as a patient when I was younger and it’s awkward because you shouldn’t have to explain why you aren’t sexually active; it’s enough for that to simply be a choice you’ve made. And it shouldn’t be treated as a weird thing. However, it’s not wrong for a doctor to ask if someone is sexually active; sexual health is part of holistic care. I’ve seen people literally say ‘doctors asume we’re all sluts’ or ‘doctors are patronising by assuming I don’t know all about sex’.  I can’t argue if someone feels that their doctor took a patronising tone they need to improve on. But asking if someone is having sex of any sort is not assuming that you’re promiscuous, and it does not inherently have to be a value judgement. It’s covering the fact that many (actually most) people are sexually active at some point, and the vast majority of people are sexually active before marriage. A good healthcare professional shouldn’t care at all whether you are having sex before marriage (or at all); it should be a neutral topic to them. Their only care should be; does what you are doing fulfil you, and how can they make it as safe as possible. If a doctor is being judgemental, that’s on them, and that’s bad care. But being judgemental is not an integral part of the process. And that’s part of your health care that especially needs covering if you go to see a doctor about your reproductive organs. It’s also important for healthcare professionals not to assume how much you know about your reproductive tract, sexual health or contraception. We all have a different amount of knowledge and different experiences; if their manner is off, that’s frustrating and they need to work on that, but that does not make it wrong to try to ensure that you’re starting from a good foundation. I’ve talked to patients with a very wide range of understanding of their bodies - our jobs as clinicians are to ensure that whatever someone’s baseline knowledge is, we can relay information in a way that suits them, rather than with jargon.

PIV is not the only form of sex We also need to abolish this idea that there is ‘the Sex’ and ‘everthing but’ as if they are two wholly separate patterns of behaviour. Sex of any sort is part of the spectrum of sexual behaviour. It doesn’t matter if the P hasn’t hit the V; sexually transmissible infections are still a thing, as long as any bits get anywhere near genitals and body fluids have a way of getting... everywhere. Sex, even playing around, is a messy process. I’ve definitely seen a few posts in these threads with the theme of ‘well I wasn’t virginal, but I was technically a virgin’ -  it doesn’t matter and you shouldn’t have to explain yourself in terms of how far you did or didn’t get. Holistic care would still recommend the discussion of contraception and limiting the risks of infection transmission, if you have any sexual activity with someone. You can still be a ‘technical virgin’ and be at risk of STIs, and therefore in certain contexts that’s still an appropriate discussion for clinicians to have with you. That’s not to say that people don’t often have important reasons for enjoying different kinds of sexual activities at different times in their lives; you’re not accountable to anyone for your choices and it’s your body. But I feel that in some of these posts I detect an underlying theme of ‘ well, what I was doing wasn’t real sex, so don’t lump me with those slutty people having premarital sex’.

I mean, it’s pretty weird - someone could be playing around with their partner and as long as they stop short of PIV, it’s considered acceptable, but PIV is taboo - but all the other things are also pretty intimate, and, also well, still sex. You can put yourself through all sorts of mental gymnastics about ‘real sex’ versus ‘everything else’ to justify things, but in the end it’s all pretty similar. You’ve got intimacy and body fluids going on.

You don’t have to have Sex (TM) to be at risk of infections. And infections aren’t something to be ashamed of, or a sign that you’re promiscuous, or even that your partner has been promiscuous; all it takes is for them to have been with one other person in their lives. And frankly, it’s ridiculous that someone can have had sex with exactly (1) other person in the context of a loving relationship and be labelled slutty.  I know these threads are often in the context of US conservative Christian marriages, but sex outside of heteronormativity exists, and protection is still very necessary even in those situations. Most people these days are having extramarital sex, regardless of their orientation, and medical care needs to reflect that. So you may be asked questions about the other kinds of sex you are having, if it’s relevant. Vaccines are important and STIs don’t come with warning labels. The HPV vaccine is important. I’m glad my GP told me of a prescribing loophole through which she could prescribe it for me; I was a little older than the cut-off, but I had never been sexually active, and she knew that it was important to protect as many people as possible. The vaccine itself isn’t 100% but it’s better than nothing, given that HPV is almost ubiquitous. 8/10 people will catch it, and condoms are only about 70% successful at preventing spread, so if you have sex with anyone, there’s a good chance you might get it. Saying “I don’t need the vaccine because I only ever plan to have sex with one person” is risky and badly thought out.  Because it relies on that other person never having had sexual contact with anyone else, ever, and I don’t think it’s fair to place that expectation on a partner. And if they know there’s that expectation, what’s to stop them from lying? Anyone is entitled to refuse vaccination, of course. It’s a free country. But refusing a vaccination is never without risks, which are almost always greater than those of the vaccine themselves. Cervical cancer is horrible and people can die young, and treatments can affect your ability to carry pregnancies. Plus, genital warts are nasty, and if you can decrease the risk of both, why not?  The cervical cancer vaccine carries a stigma specifically because it relates to sexual activity. Whilst we’re at it, there’s no such thing as ‘I know my partner doesn’t have STIs’. This simply does not exist. You can’t 100% know for certain that your partner has never had sexual contact with another person - if you’re in a cultural situation where people expect their partner to be a virgin, you’re also in a situation where people are motivated to lie if they fall short of this expectation to cover their reputation. And if they have been with anyone, then you don’t know if they could have caught something. Hey, I’ve seen a lot of penises and vulvas, and although I can say that someone looks healthy or normal, that’s not guarantee of not having infections. For example, chlamydia and gonorrhoea are often symptomless but can damage fertility, and HIV can often go years without any symptoms or problems. Unless someone has tested negative (and they haven’t slept with anyone new in that incubation window period), then you just don’t know.  You also can’t 100% know that your partner isn’t cheating or has never cheated. Now, on a personal level, we all have to believe our partner is honest; that’s how relationships work, through trust. So I’m not going to tell you to assume your partner is doing the dirty on you.  But on a statistical level? Cheating partners cause significant spread of sexually transmitted disease, particularly if they have sex with sex workers. This is something that happens around the world, in conservative as well as liberal environments.  So even if you never plan to sleep wth anyone else, sometimes you can still suffer the consequences of someone else’s risky behaviour. It’s not fair and it’s not nice, but in healthcare we have to deal with that reality. That’s also why the vaccine remains relevant even in conservative communities. On a statistical level, even in communities where promiscuity or sex outside marriage is discouraged, it isn’t nonexistant. Contraceptives are valid medical treatments, but nobody HAS to use them. Particular kinds of hormonal contraceptives tend to be effective and frontline treatments for hormonally treating particular conditions; for example PCOS, endometriosis, fibroids. It’s perfectly fine to want to explore the options, from doing nothing, to managing as conservatively as possible, to considering operations (if possible), to hormonal treatments, etc. You’re allowed to decide to not do something, or to choose how aggressively you want to treat something. Some people seem to be frustrated that doctors can’t offer many non-hormonal treatments. But that’s partly because many problems relating to the gynaecological system are affected by your hormonal cycle. A lot of what goes on with that system is closely tied up with our hormones. The way we make endometriosis less bad is by stopping periods. The way we make PCOS less of an issue is by managing hormones.  Depending on the problem, sometimes there are non-hormonal treatments that can help with symptoms (for example, there are medications for painful or heavy periods, or acne that aren’t hormonal), but they can’t inherently change what is going on there.

I know there’s a lot of concern from some people about the effect of hormonal contraceptives, and I think that concern about the longterm effects of any treatment is reasonable. There are risks associated with hormonal contraceptives. And more research on long term effects of any medicaiton should always be welcomed.  But I do wonder in this case how much of that concern is tied up with the taboo surrounding sex, particularly if it’s ‘consequence free’ as some people describe it.

There are lots of reasons why people might not want to use hormonal contraception, and in the end nobody has to. They are simply a choice. Some people can’t get on with the side effects, some don’t like the risks involved, some have religious objections, some people just don’t want to take tablets or stick things into their bodies. It’s your choice, and it’s all valid. But it’s not valid to trash that choice for other people, or to imply anyone who lives differently is degenerate. There’s a lot of judgement in these threads.

Contraceptives do not turn women into a sex object. Contraceptives do not objectify women by turning them into a sex object. I’ve seen people suggest that they only exist so women can be consequence free receptacles of sex for men and are therefore inherently tools of the patriarchy. For people claiming that contraceptives objectify women, these people are literally embodying women as semen receptacles with no agency of their own and having the audacity to pretend they are feminist. Women have agency. They are people. They do not become sex objects because they choose to have sex. They do not become sex objects because they have ‘conseqence free’ sex. Regardless of whether that sex is in marriage, or not. And with one partner, or many. The funny thing is that initially ontraceptives were only prescribed to married women with their husbands’ permission; society very clearly didn’t want to give women the ability to control their own reproductive choices. Even historically, they weren’t about turning women into objects, but allowing married women the ability to choose when to plan their family. Nowadays, contraceptives allow anyone with a uterus/ovary combination the ability to control if they menstruate or are likely to get pregnant. That’s it. They don’t force you to have sex or dictate the kind of relationship you have with penis-havers. You know what happened before we had contraceptives? Women still had sex. Men, when they wanted to, still pressured women into sex and raped them.  Husbands still had sex with their wives. Women still had sex outside of wedlock, sometimes willingly, sometimes through force. They just... didn’t have as many options to prevent pregnancy or prevent the transmission of disease, so they had to deal with the stigma of having sex outside of marriage, or carrying an illegitimate child; consequences that men never had to deal with. And that doesn’t seem to have stopped many men through the years doing what they like, no matter what the social consequences were for women. It didn’t stop men failing to look after their illegitimate children or the women who birthed them. It didn’t stop life-threatening abortions. It just created an atmosphere of shame and secrecy; of unwed mother’s institutions and babies disappearing or quietly being given away. Even in the context of loving marriages, many families struggled to look after the many children that ensued; imagine if they had the knowledge or resources to pace out their children so they could afford to look after them. So arguing that contraceptives mainly benefit men is completely disingenuous. Sure, perhaps men get to have a bit more sex now because women feel more happy to have sex knowing they are a lot less likely to get pregnant. Men can still be deadbeat or missing fathers if they choose. But women have benefited far, far more, despite the side effects and risks because historically, having sex and giving birth have always been risky for women. It’s not that birth control is an easy, fun choice, it’s that the choices have often been dire. For many women around the world, the choices are still dire. Lack of access to contraception means many girls and women around the world still bear children they do not want to have, and catch infections from the men who have sex with, or rape them. A woman who can’t recognise that other women around the world might desperately need to stave off having kids or protect themselves, just because they themselves don’t feel this particular method is for them, is not acting as a feminist. By forgetting the situaiton that women around the world are still dealing with, we’re letting our own privilege get the better of us. To be honest, commentary like this  makes me pretty suspicious of the underlying beliefs of some posters who otherwise purport to be feminist. Since these people believe they have the agency to choose to have sex (it’s implied this is within marriage, almost always, in these threads) it’s clear that what is being attacked when they criticise contraceptives here, is the agency of women who choose to have sex in a context these people disapprove of.  Having safe, ‘consequence-free’ sex is not dirty, or immoral. It does not, in itself, turn you into a sex object, because women are grown human beings with agency and the ability to want and enjoy sex on their terms. I hate the term consequence free sex, because it implies sex ought to come with consequences - what? Risks? Punishment? Diseases? Babies? The consequences of sex can be fun, intimacy, enjoyment, bonding and an expression of deep love. For many people, it’s an integral part of relationships and often, ultimately marriage if that’s what they want.

And if a woman doesn’t have agency or is being coerced or pressured into sex, that is not her fault. And in such a situation, contraceptives may still play a vital role because they prevent people from falling pregnant in dire situations. In such a situation, contraceptives are not the bad guys, and the woman would likely be coerced regardless of whether she was protected. But it’s disingenuous to claim that doctors are pushing an agenda without reflecting that the people telling you hormonal contraceptives are bad or that you shouldn’t be having premarital sex etc are also pushing an agenda. The largest critics of hormonal contraception have historically been those in power in conservatively religious communities who have strict rules about what women are and aren’t allowed to do. And that those rules have very rarely been empowering for women. Allowing people to break free of those rules hands the choice back to us. What people do with the freedoms that contraception allows them is up to them. And feminism will always be about giving people the knowledge and the choice to do what is best for them. If that’s not having sex, good for you. But that may equally mean having sex for someone else. Disclosure of interests: I don’t get paid by manufacturers of contraceptives, I don’t even prescribe them on my current job. Before anyone caims that I’m a proponent of ‘hookup culture’ who just can’t ‘get’ people who don’t want to have sex, I don’t personally do ‘hookups’ and waited til I was ready. I’ve spent a ton of time single. I really don’t care if people wait until marriage or have sex with 10 people every day. I don’t believe people should be stigmatised for having sex, or not having sex. It simply is not a reflection of anyone’s worth or morality.

[stuckwith-harry]

hey you, i only followed you recently and I really like your hinny fanfics and your poetry. Would you mind telling me about your process when you write? I really wanna learn how to write properly and you seem to take your craft so seriously. How do you built a story, how often do you edit, how much time do you spent on your work, what do you try to go for,...? Thanks xxx

Anon, this is the coolest ask I’ve EVER received, and I’m hanging it on my wall next to all the colour-coded flashcards with poems on them. This is going to be LONG, and by no means exhaustive - I’m gonna jump around and ramble a bit and if there’s anything specific you wanna hear more about, please ask! I fucking love talking about writing!

I’m gonna put most of this under a cut, but before we dive in: yes, I tAkE mY wRiTiNg sErIoUsLy in the sense that I’d like to publish some original bodies of work in my life and to have physical copies of them exist on a bookshelf that’s not my own. I don’t need it to pay the bills, but if you googled my full name I’d like for, like, a poetry collection to show up and not, I don’t know, the two poems I got published in a regional newspaper when I was eight.

(And please let the record show that they’re fine poems for a primary schooler. The cringe years came way after that, kids.)

So, even having some ambitions in the industry, the reality is that I’m a 19-year-old kid with a keyboard and a dodgy internet connection who discovered fanfiction when she was twelve and got hooked for life. We’re going to retire the idea of “writing properly” for now, because writing is supposed to be fun and I haven’t actually gotten accepted into that Creative Writing Bachelor’s degree I so desperately want to do. YET. Don’t let the fancy writing blog (@jessicagluch) fool you into thinking I know what the heck I’m doing. But, okay, with that out of the way, let’s get into what I’m personally doing right now, yeah?

Fanfiction

You asked about process, and the truth is, I don’t … really have one. For the Muggle/FWB AU called “Let Me love” I just published, I actually wrote a pretty detailed outline that I then filled in, which was fun, but it’s not a habit exactly. I’d written a lot of assorted scenes and pieces of dialogue for that one, too, so I had a lot of material and just had to put all the scraps and pieces in order and stitch it all together. After the brainstorming, word-vomity part of writing Let Me love, my #1 task was figuring out where everything went, and making sure it’s all there.

As soon as I’d written a full first draft, no gaps, and the anatomy of the whole thing had somewhat clicked into place, I moved away from it for a while. Wrote something else. Came back maybe a week or two later, polished up the prose a bit very late at night.

Figure out when your creative hours are, if you can pinpoint it at all. Mine are precisely “I was supposed to be asleep two hours ago and I’ve got an important thing tomorrow” o’ clock. Sigh.

Just - leave it alone for a bit, come back with fresh eyes. I love writing Let Me love - I’m working on part 2 right now - but after you’ve fucked around with the same sentence fifty times, you get sick of it. And I did. At some point you have to decide to put down the pen and let it be.

Especially because fanfiction isn’t something you’re writing for a publisher - hopefully, you’re writing it mostly for you - no one is holding a gun to your head to get rid of every last adverb or stuff like that. I can do what I want, MOM. I am allowed to make the thing I’m writing as tropey and campy as I want and hold up a big old middle finger to the rules, if that’s what I want to do.

Fanfiction, to me, is this grand, batshit writing playground. That’s why I fell for it in the first place - it’s inherently self-indulgent and hedonistic and that you can write everything EXACTLY as you please is the primary purpose it serves as a genre. So go wild.

(Process-wise, the one thing I do very consistently is making moodboards and playlists. I like having some inspiration material to swim around in, which helps me figure out what the story looks and feels and sounds like in my head. 

Every fic has a soundtrack. SOUNDTRACKS ARE IMPORTANT, PEOPLE.

Like, Let Me love is all coloured lights and night-time London and texts left on read. It’s neon signs and wearing somebody else’s t-shirt, messy bedsheets and hangover breakfasts and quarter-life crises.

This is the Pinterest board.)

What I pay most attention to is the stuff that gives the text depth beyond the surface. I look for metaphors - and I personally prefer the ones that carry through the whole thing, ideas we explore throughout the story and revisit at the end. I look for themes that hold a story together beyond the plot. I look for subtext and imagery and I want symbolism, goddamnit. 

(That’s the poet kicking in.)

And of course, I’m a product of my generation, so I love referencing other bodies of work and subverting tropes and stuff like that. Hey kids, intertextuality is fun!

(Like, do you see what I did there? See how the phrase “hey kids x is fun” in itself is a reference to something? See??? I’m a fucking genius.)

I think we need some examples. Allow me to toot my own horn for a minute.

In the Halloween 2018 oneshot I wrote, which is about Harry grappling with the anniversary of his parents’ death when he’s a little older, he visits the graveyard with Ginny and Lily Luna. Ginny comments that “it’s freezing”, to which Harry responds with the titular, “you’re warm”. And yes, it’s October, it’s probably cold. They’re keeping each other warm. And yes, it’s maybe about comfort in harsh situations in general, a more metaphorical warmth, if you will. I get it. 

But when you remember this exchange is taking place on a graveyard, you might start to wonder about warm, living bodies as opposed to cold, deceased ones. And then you think about how this whole story is about the living remembering - in a sense, living with - the dead. And how it’s about death as a part of Harry’s life. And you can probably guess by now that all my literature teachers fucking adored me.

(But he’s also choosing a side here, maybe. But I’m merely the author, you don’t have to listen to me at all. My words beyond the words don’t mean shit unless you decide they do and even then you’re going to find yourself knees-deep in a debate around authorial intent in record-time. In the age of “Nagini was a cursed human woman all along”, I’m not sure I want that.)

I also reference other pieces of work a lot. Often poems, and even more frequently, songs. The songs in Let Me love are VERY IMPORTANT and I can’t show you the full playlist right now because SPOILERS. But the chapters are split into sub-sections via song lyrics. Those are part of the playlist. There’s also a lot of referencing songs in general because Harry is a big music fan in this one, but that’s just indulgence on my part. If I want to make a 21st century Harry a Mitski stan, then I will. And I did!

(AND Let Me love has a Friends reference. For funsies, but also, for much more than funsies.)

“I love you / please do not use it” was inspired by a poem by Savannah Brown called “organs”. (It’s linked in the author’s notes at the beginning.)

“It’s two sugars, right?” borrows and/or references a ton of lines and phrases from T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. Most noticeably:

Sublety isn’t my middle name, exactly. (The forget-me-not-blue sky in The Bride On The Train, anyone?)

In short: I like when my fanfictions are worth rereading. I like when you can come out the second read having found a little more than you did the first. I like when you can wander around a little, and, like a treasure hunter, make some strange new discoveries.

Lastly: of course, writing from your own experience helps. Spy on your own life. Collect all the ways in makes you feel, like a thief, write it down, memorise it, put it in the story. Reuse! Recycle! ✊🏻

I fortunately don’t relate to Harry’s childhood trauma, but the feeling at the beginning of “We’ll figure it out” - which is a story set shortly after him and Ginny find out she’s pregnant and he’s struggling to connect with everybody else’s simple bliss, because he’s terrified, and he’s terrified of admitting he’s terrified - that was real. That “wait a minute, this moment is amazing. I’m supposed to be the happiest person on the planet right now. Why am I not feeling it? What is this emptiness? Am I not happy right now? Why am I having doubts? I’m not supposed to have any doubts! What the fuck is wrong with me?”, that was lifted from a specific experience.

Side note, I’m really proud of that one.

Okay, poetry! 

Where there is even less rules and more fucking around ensues!

I read and promptly lost a quote recently about how explaining a song sort of defeats the purpose. (I’ll link it here if I ever find it again.) In some ways, poems and songs work really similarly, and I think it applies here as well: if you could really explain the whole poem in one sentence, or a few sentences, if you could accurately and concisely summarise exactly how it feels, then you wouldn’t really need the poem. My favourite poems (or songs) tend to be the ones that outline a really specific emotion via a few powerful images, but I couldn’t precisely tell you what the emotion is. Like, I know exactly what this thing is saying, I know this exact feeling, I GET-GET it, but don’t ask me to explain the thing, just READ the THING, and you’ll KNOW.

Mitski does this really well. Like, I couldn’t explain to you what Last Words Of A Shooting Star makes me feel, but it does. I can tell you that “I am relieved that I left my room tidy, they’ll think of me kindly when they come for my things” cuts through me like a hot blade but I can’t pinpoint exactly why and I don’t want to. All I know is she Gets It, and that I want her writing chops, goddamnit.

Or, like, look at Laura Gilpin’s Two-Headed Calf. Yeah, I’ve read that poem a hundred times and thought a lot about all the themes it’s presenting me with. But I have zero desire to explain those themes to you, because I’d kind of be robbing it of its magic. I don’t want to tell you what it’s about. I want you to read it and I want to simply sit with the knowledge that we know, we Get It, that “twice as many stars as usual” kicked you in the shins, emotionally speaking, as much as it did me.

Few words, max impact, is key.

In Mary Oliver’s words, we want something inexplicable made plain, not unlike a suddenly harmonic passage in an otherwise difficult and sometimes dissonantsymphony - even if it is only for the moment of hearing it.

I’m realising right now that leading with these shining examples and then following them up with my own thing is nerve-wracking. But I like to think that I accomplished something like that with a little poem I wrote called Basements.

It’s is based on the prompt “back to nature” and follows that, uhm, somewhat loosely, a little subverted. I think it’s about impermanence and nostalgia and the fact that the places we lived in continue to exist even when our lives in them don’t anymore. It’s about that and a lot of other things. Maybe. The truth is, I don’t want to explain it to you: I just want you to read it, and then I hope that it made you feel something, and I’m going to trust that you Get It. Maybe you don’t get the same things I did, but that’s great. I’d love nothing more.

Before it was all those things, it was a poem about my life. The neighbourhood with the yellow house across the graveyard that I spent nine mostly happy years in. (The house, not the graveyard.) Every single thing in there is true: my sister really bust her lip and we both cried; wild lilac really grew there; we did spend most of our summers catching tadpoles, and yes, that neighbourhood was a construction site from the first day we lived there to the very last.

And I really sat in the driver’s seat of the family car about a year ago and watched it from afar. I didn’t come up with that - it’s my life. I only went on a scavenger hunt through my own memories, through the places and records and mementos of my life, and arranged a few specific anecdotes in a way that would give them meaning.

It’s kind of what I’m proudest of when it comes to my poetry - that I get to just live my life and see the metaphor and the meaning and symbolism as I’m experiencing it. I sat in the car and I thought, huh, that’s definitely making me Feel A Thing right now, that I’m sitting in the driver’s seat looking at this place I haven’t really been to in years, my childhood home, where I don’t live anymore. That I drove here myself.

I think that, when done right, specific makes universal. If you arrange a kaleidoscope of memories in just the right way, what it’s making you feel will speak for itself, and you won’t have to explain it. Most people who’ve read “basements” probably didn’t spend countless summers playing in literal holes, originally dug out for basements that were never built because no one wanted to move there. Holes that then grew full of weeds and wild lilac and felt like miniature jungles right outside our parents’ houses. It was perfect, it was specifically mine, but the feeling behind it is universal, I think.

Like, that’s how half of Taylor Swift’s RED works. That’s how most good Taylor Swift songs work. That’s why the bridge in Out of the Woods is so good and why I love New Year’s Day so much and it’s EXACTLY why All Too Well is considered her best song by so many people. Because she zoomed in on the details of her life and let the world take a look. Because “we dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light” is a line in that song. THAT’s why it MAKES YOU FEEL THE THING.

Back to poems? This:

So we tell them all about the dayWe planned revolutions on my bedroom floor, or how we onceSpent an entire Monday lunch break making life plans over ice creamAnd most of our parties talking politics over beerWe both paid for ourselves.About the days you drive me to school. In your carI am the girl, front-seat passenger of our lives,Who does not need reach for the steering wheel –The road is alright. 

isn’t fiction. These are my memories, carefully selected and re-arranged for Politics at Parties Boy.

I didn’t make up these film stills of a non-romantic relationship that never became anything other than non-romantic because neither party ever made a move. What I did is look at my own life like it’s a piece of fiction. If these memories were a movie, you could pluck them apart and say, see, the screenwriters put this scene here to communicate that.

The truth is, I am the screenwriter and the protagonist and the actress and the director and the camerawoman. I looked at a teenage girl who refused to let her friend buy her a beer at a school party and decided “huh, I guess that tells us everything we need to know” because I was that girl. 

And I did pay for the beer, so we’d never move into “let me buy you a drink” territory. He was already driving me to school.

That’s my best lesson on poetry, really. I look at my life like it’s a piece of fiction and then I make it one. I put personal memories in poems meant to be read by other people, I overinterpret everything that happens to me, am literally constantly thinking about how to work every knock-back and struggle into my narrative arc and look for symbolism in anything from the date, the weather, and the colour of my front door. I watch myself in third person all the time and thus become my own muse. I’m the painter and the painting.

It’s a somewhat narcissistic and masturbatory approach to poetry, but as far as writing about your own life goes, it’s what works for me.

As far as writing about not yourself goes - well, I’m a narcissist and I’m bad at that, but I wrote a poem about the Mars rover Opportunity that shut down this February called Spirit shuts down and Opportunity feels no tremble, no ache. For stuff like that, if you don’t happen to be Struck TM by a lightning bolt of inspiration (which is the exception, not the rule), a good old-fashioned mind-map helps. I just let my robot grief go wild on the page for a bit and what I ended up writing about was death and the human condition and being a teenage girl, maybe.

I really enjoy taking two concepts/ideas and juxtaposing them, watching a theme unfold in the overlap. Like, it’s a poem about a robot AND about being a teenage girl and in between those two lies a poem about the futile attempts to teach a robot human emotion. Maybe.

It’s a poem about how my mum always cries at the airport and about me making my own happiness my priority and it kind of ends up being about my intense guilt of making my parents watch me change and grow and leave.

It’s about the night I wandered through a quiet street in Central London at 1 a.m. and realised that the city of my dreams sleeps like any other place, that people wake up early and make coffee and go to work and have bad days here. That it’s not all dream. It’s some people’s lives. But it’s also about watching another person sleep - the way someone’s face changes when they do.

In the middle lay a poem about finding a friend in a lover. Not the daydream, but my life.

Lastly, I can’t talk about my own poetry without talking about my darling poem 5 disasters. It’s my pride and joy. Like, you could kill me write now and I’d be like, it’s okay, I’ve written the poem I want to be remembered for and it’s this one. I wrote it in less than a day and every time I think about the fact that I wrote

I cravedsomething more violent than death, somethingviolent enough to bea beginningand for my life to be thousands of themI wantednothingto remainexcept the girl that sentthe disastersand survived -may this wasteland bewhere I find her.

… I lose my shit a little bit.

(5 disasters was a rarity in how quickly I wrote it. It often takes me weeks. Sometimes months. There’s poems I’ve been meaning to write for years now and I still haven’t found the words. Take your time.)

5 disasters is a lot of things, but within the context of the poetry collection it’s hopefully going to exist in one day, it serves as almost an instruction manual for metaphors: here, the floods and rainfalls are always change and the forest fires are always my highschool demons and my friends and how they look the same. The colour yellow is always referencing the same love. Basically, I like pinpointing my symbolisms and then crafting a poem around them. You end up creating something like an in-poem universe that you get to navigate like a fantasy novel. Like you’re telling a story about a natural disaster, but it’s all a metaphor, Hazel Grace.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As I do.

I hope this serves as a starting point of sorts, anon. Most importantly, have fun, don’t concern yourself with all the rules too much. Experiment, be bold, read lots.

Again, if you’ve got any questions, I’d be thrilled to help. Thanks for the opportunity to toot my own horn to this outrageous degree, it’s been a blast.