#because I had a total freakout in the car today | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jiminrings · 3 years

Note

can we get a fratboy Jimin and good girl oc with pinning from both sides 👀 ahhhh thank u in advance love ur writing!!

cherry king

drabble week: day four

drabble week masterlist

pairing: fratboy!jimin x goody two-shoes!reader

wordcount: 3k

glimpse: "y-you uhm, you-? y'know, you like... doing that? is that why it's your nickname?"

feedback + support mean the world to me!!

“next!”

great!! the line’s moving :D

that’s only like the 87th time jimin has heard the word next and it makes him wonder how much more would it take him to bring him to the front

(it’s actually only been 14 times and jimin might just be a self-admitted impatient bitch!!!)

he understands that yes, it’s ten in the evening!!! and reasonably-large stores/pharmacies like these can have less staff at the time compared to ten in the morning

sure, checkout machines and cashier lanes could be broken down!! or they could just not be open at all

jimin gets that alright, maybe the self-checkout machines are close at this time of the night because it is ten in the evening

what’s not clicking in his mind, however is that at the exact time that he comes here

as in the EXACT time that he’s here (!!!) — there happens to be dozens of people in a store at ten in the evening, and there happens to be a grand total of one (1) cashier lane

atleast random store music would be entertaining :((( all he hears are the beeps of a scanner and the chatter of groups of people who came here

jimin was eavesdropping on some guys in front of him and he wAS invested but lmao turns they were just discussing the plot of die hard or any testosterone-jacked movie like it

he’s also tried looking at the smaller middle-aged woman’s phone in front of him who’s scrolling through her facebook feed, but quickly decides against continuing it

because what if u could see his face and when she turns it off, she’d see a college guy deeply-invested in the baloney article she was reading about how subway sandwiches are the work of the devil

so uh yeah he’s just looking everywhere besides the front, back, and the sides of him and in all angles basically

he’s,,,,, aimlessly scrolling through his instagram feed he’s already scrolled through tHREE times and his explore’s page a little too dry

it’s a good thing that jimin’s entirely sure he’s the nosiest person out of this line and no one else is trying to figure him out

might be wrong though

“cherry king?”

hold the fuck on

jimin’s eyes widen, head snapping up and clueless to the fact that he doesn’t look discreet at all, and his head-cocking’s the most movement he’s done the whole time in this store

WHO’S SAYING HIS NICKNAME?????

it can’t be a coincidence either because as far as he’s concerned, there isn’t anything named cherry king that’s being sold here

there is literally NO other plausible scenario happening here besides the fact that someone who knows him is in the store!!!!

his gaze falls to the person behind him, brows knitted in confusion until it clicks

that was you?

“jimin? huh, it really is you. i thought i was losing my mind for a second.”

“y/n?”

okay maybe hE’S the one who’s losing his mind here

he knows you!! you’re the smart girl in his year who’s known for being pristine and stuff!! you’re like the good-est girl he’s ever known and heard of

.... quick question lads is that weird to know someone by

“you could’ve just called me by my name, y’know,” jimin chuckles heartily, still a little dumbfounded to see you here but he’s grateful for the interaction nonetheless

you look casual today?? like you still look like yourself but everyone else would think it’s an out-of-body experience to see you out of your pretty dresses and monochromatic get-ups

it’s you..,.. in a hoodie three sizes larger than your size with your pristine shoes traded in for socked-feet wearing slides

jimin thinks that you look like grace under pressure

“i wasn’t sure,” you smile right back and it’s the first time he realizes that there’s glasses atop your nosebridge, softening your image more from the usual composed look you carried

“how were you sure enough to say my nickname out-loud though?”

jimin questions you, bringing light to how he’s wearing a plain white shirt and is looking as relaxed as ever with how he’s dressed — his hair long enough to be put into a messy sprout of a bun

you clear your throat, the amusement bubbling in your scratchy throat

“you have yourself as your lockscreen, jimin.”

oh my gOD

he winces when you say it, eyes screwing shut in embarrassment that he whines in pain with how direct you put it

“n-no way — fuck you respectfully, y/n. i-i’m not- i’m changing it right now!!”

does he look the vainest person alive rn

the way he has a mini freakout entertains you to your core, giggles unable to be suppressed as he finds the latest-taken picture he has of dogs that he comes across with

that’s 10/10 an experience he doesn’t want to repeat again

“it’s okay. i won’t tell anyone.”

he hears you reassure and he believes you, a flustered blush on his cheek still as he coughs to make up for a diversion topic he couldn’t think of

frankly, you’re getting bored too and jimin’s the only form of entertainment you have because using your phone atm would be too disorienting

“what are you doing here, by the way?”

your head tilts in query and he’s relieved that you address something else, not being relieved seconds later when he realizes his answer

“just a little supply run for our frat. we weren’t supposed to run out of things for three more days, so this is just a lil emergency haul for awhile.”

you nod in understanding, glancing down at his basket and uh

uhm 1/4 of the space is literally occupied by boxes of condoms

....

......

jimin’s confused to why you turn silent, thinking that he must’ve gotten boring to continue talking to until he follows your gaze to his basket

NO WAY?!]>|>]%%[%]%]

“i-it’s not l-like that!!!” he crouches and immediately gets the food and the bottles of shampoo and conditioner to bury the condoms in the bottom of the pile, attractively getting more attention from you who’s ready to let it go

“i-it’s not — it’s ours — n-no!! t-they just gave me a list and i just put it because it’s on the list b-but like it wasn’t my-...”

how many more times will the universe fuck jimin up in front of the person he has a lil happy crush on

you only smile meekly, tilting your head and he thinks this is the part where you tell him how much of a douche he is

"y-you uhm, you-? y'know, you like... doing that? is that why it's your nickname?"

“t-that?” jimin clarified albeit confused, thinking back to his nickname as he tries to rapidly connect the dots to not look like a fool

cherry king? that?? what do you-

WAIT WHAT

“nO!! o-of course not!!”

he almost shrieks and his voice sounds ultimately defensive, shaking his head no

why does he look so frantic

“hey, hey, i believe you! — calm down, jimin. you don’t have to explain anything to me.”

whew

fuck

but he argues that it iS the truth though!!!

but why won’t you just ask him why he’s called cherry king though >:(

you’re already content with the silence after the conversation but he isn’t, still wanting more

is it so bad that he wants redemption D:

“how about you? what are you doing here?”

you don’t answer instantly and it’s because you’re nudging jimin to continually walk, the cashier looking much more visible now as he’s nearer in line

he takes a look at the handful of things that’s in your basket —

electrolytes, hot pockets, soup, cup noodles and fever patches...?

“oh. i think i’m running a fever.”

what???

what are you doing here aLONE if you think you’re running a fever???

he’s not gonna lie about the fact that you don’t look too good

what if you pass out and no one’s there for you and all the graveyard shift employees do is put a wet floor sign around your figure???

“y/n?? what are you doing here alone then?? are you oUT of your mind??”

the panic in jimin’s voice is clear as day and you’re a little startled, instead responding to tapping him on the shoulder to point that he’s already the one on the cashier

what he does is grab your basket before he is, putting it in front of the conveyor belt because he couldn’t even wait for it to roll out

“i said i think i’m running a fever.”

jimin stops from simultaneously rummaging for his rewards card and putting his items on the counter to unceremoniously drop the box of condoms down jUST to put his hand on your forehead

“you are.”

you surely don’t think low of jimin but you can’t help be surprised either at his concern for you when this is the only time you’ve had a conversation with him!!!

“you drove here?” he asks in seriousness, sending you a look while waiting for the total amount

“walked. the airconditioning makes me even more sick,” you answer with no fuss because even thinking about car fresheners while you’re sporting a fever makes you want to gag. “let me-...”

jimin already pays for both your items in cash, getting them bagged separately as he’s not gonna take no for an answer for what he’s gonna propose next

“then i’ll keep the windows down. i’ll drive you back to your dorm.”

he grabs both your bags in one hand and uses the other to beckon you over, holding you still because it’s dark out and a fever vision wouldn’t exactly help

it’s only when he straps you in and (true to his word) puts the windows down and starts his car that you start asking

“why are you doing this for me?”

why IS he doing this for you??

jimin thinks about his answer in a second

“would you do the same for me?”

well

if you were in front of him at a godforsaken line, had yourself as your lockscreen, realize that jimin’s behind you with a fever and is by himself in a store at 10 in the evening

“of course i would.”

jimin smiles, steering away from his parking spot

“then i would too.”

( ♡ )

maybe you’re thinking of jimin

no wait you’re dEFINITELY thinking of jimin

you’re much better now and your fever’s already subsided enough for you to go back to class!!!

the whole interaction with him was three days ago and maybe your head is just full of him at this point

“are you sure you’re okay to handle this by yourself??”

jimin worries when he drops your bag to your hands, briefly coming inside your dorm to set it down

“mhmm. i’ll just sleep it out.”

“i think if you’re missing a couple of steps.”

you snort as his paranoid features, waving him off. “i’ll eat. then go to the bathroom. and then sleep.”

okay good enough

“what if this just-“ jimin trails off, his expansive mind suddenly running as he points to your chest, “stops????”

cute

“i have a smart watch.”

“would you put me as one of the emergency contacts? please?”

he’s making you take down his number without malice because jeez he’s gENUINELY worried!!!!

it may not always be great sharing a house with his frat brothers, but he knows that if he has a fever, atleast half of them would dote over him and you have atleast one who would go into hysterics!!! it’e a full package!!

“i’ll be okay, jimin. i’ll call you when i need someone to hand me my puke bucket.”

“please do. i’m not even kidding. get better now because i miss your dresses.”

o_O

uhm

“n-no i meant your usual style!! wait, not that there’s anything wrong w-with your style right now. i-i was-...”

“yeah. i miss them too. now go home, jimin.”

“you sure?”

u never really had the impulse to invite a guy to go inside your place but maybe now you do

“mhmm. drive safe.”

okay

:-)

“good night, y/n. call me whenever.”

classes were a bit rough today because you’re still easing yourself on getting back to the groove of things, but it was tolerable!!!

you’re getting your key out of your backpack when a lock clicks open a couple doors away from you, the hinge noisily squeaking

it’s jimin who leaves it, with seri who’s the actual occupant of the dorm leaning on the doorframe

“y/n—!”

he squeaks the moment his eyes land on you

your hand automatically waves, the same meek smile for him to see

“jimin.”

( ♡ )

the last interaction you had with him is still on jimin’s mind, a whole week later

it’s been bothering him recently that you know what it looks like the last time around!!!! but he could swear up and down that it wasn’t

he just feels this great urge to explain even if you haven’t asked

“oh. so we have to move out for the time-being?”

jimin clarifies with namjoon, the head of the frat, and he’s met with a solemn nod

it makes sense!!!

the house got checked today and there were mULTIPLE fire hazards!!! and it needs to be fumigated anyway under new campus protocol so it indeed makes sense

practically everyone's going home because it’s a long weekend anyway because of a holiday

and he’s not sure if he wants to take the same route.

“hi.”

jimin squeaks the moment you open your door, surprise evident on your face but not shock to the point you’d close the door on him

“jimin?”

okay maybe he’s gonna go straight to explaining

“frat house needed to be closed because of some complications, and it wouldn’t be open to us for another three days. most of the guys are coming home,” jimin clears his throat, his head down while he shyly scratches the back of his ear, “i have one, but i’m not sure if i wanna.”

it’s that problem

it takes one, two seconds before it all registers in your head, nodding surely

“you can take my bed. i’ll take the couch, it’s a pull-out anyways.”

you open the door for him widely and the only thing you ask if he’s had dinner and if he’d like some

god you’re really throwing him in a loop here

it’s after a batch of your cooking that jimin’s only ache is why you were the way that you were, half-dazed the whole time he’s met you properly

“why do you never ask me?”

“hmm?” you hum as you dry the dishes that you’ve used, wanting to get it done as soon as possible so your full attention would be on him

no, actually. jimin WANTS you to pry!!

he wants you to worm your way into his privacy and into the confines of his mind

but it seems like you’ve already did without even asking.

“ask me why i’m called the cherry king.”

you tilt your head in confusion, that time playing in your head of why jimin looked confused when you didn’t continue to ask further

maybe you’ll indulge him

“why are you called the cherry king?”

jimin smiles, leaning to your couch with his arms relaxed

“we did secret santa for christmas at our frat house. taehyung thought it would be nice if he pranked me by gifting me a jar full of cherries, but i thought that was his actual gift, and i liked it to the point that i finished it in one sitting.”

tHAT’S ACTUALLY PRETTY ENDEARING

cute, even

“ask me why i came out of seri’s apartment last week.”

oh that’s.,.,. that’s a bit higher in level compared to nicknames

“why did you come out of seri’s apartment last week?”

“because seri’s the ex-girlfriend of hoseok, my frat brother, and he wanted me to return all her stuff because he doesn’t want to be reminded of his cheating ex.”

well that was definitely weighted

jimin plays with the hem of his shirt, the words tumbling out of his mouth

“ask me why i love you.”

why do you wHAT

your mouth drops open, the new position you took on the other end of the couch taking an impact on him

“w-why do you love me?”

jimin’s a lot of things but he’s not drunk tonight

he doesn’t know why he’s letting his feelings slip either, but it’s the bottomless need that he feels when he’s around you

“i feel wanted. i feel needed.”

he smiles cheerfully even if he feels shy dropping this on you all of a sudden

“not sure if you want me nor need me, but i feel welcome with you if that makes sense.”

“you just make me feel loved, i guess.”

jimin looks at you for the first time since he’s opened his mouth, an equally fond look on your face

you said no words but what jimin receives is a gentle tug, your hand on the side of his face until he’s leaning on your shoulder

“i wanna know what's up there.”

he points a finger to your temple, an amused lilt to his tone, “surprise me.”

it’s an unfolding of things that was weeks in the making but months in developing, the distant glances leading you to recognize jimin in the shop in the first place

“i feel the exact same with you,” you answer honestly and it makes his laugh from his chest, his cheeks warm and his heart content

and you just wanna suspend yourselves in this moment forever

“oh! and if i were to lose my virginity to anyone at the moment, it'd be you!!”

...

....

jimin swats at your shoulder to which you only giggle at, a toothy smile on display as this is the warmest he’s ever felt

“i wasn’t kidding!!!”

you yawn when you defend yourself, predicting that you’d fall asleep sooner or later on the couch, but for the time-being, you just stroke jimin’s hair to soothe the both of you

jimin is now the furthest thing from sleepy

"what? you told me to surprise you!!"

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sunlightandsuffering · 3 years

Text

When Mikasa hears the news that Eren is in the hospital she drops everything.

It's finally happening, all of her worst fears and nightmares come true, everything. It hurts because this is why she should have told him she loved him, this is why rejection doesn't even matter, nothing does. She just needs him to know, needs him to understand how loved he is. How much she loves him, how difficult it would be for her to continue without him, how colourless her existence would be without his bright green eyes and stupid antics.

He's her best friend and she's let her fears of rejection and messing up their relationship stop her. She never should have. Life is too short for that. So when she gets a call from Carla, "Honey, don't freakout, Eren is just in the hospital I need someone to-" She cuts Carla off, asking which hospital and she doesn't get any further details.

Her adrenaline pumps through her as she speeds through traffic, barges her way through nurses, urgently telling the nice lady at the front desk that she HAS to see him right now, that's her fiancé in there!

She doesn't care what she has to make up, she just needs to see him.

And when she finally does, finds him sitting up in his hospital bed spoonfeeding himself jello she drops her bag and launches herself at him.

Eren catches her with a pained groan and the tears finally come as she considers how she could have lost him. Everything he's been through and she confesses before she really even thinks about it, her concern clouding her judgement, her need to just get it all out there, because anything can happen at any moment.

"I love you, Eren," she cries into his neck, soaking his skin with tears, "I love you so much, and I need you to know. I don't care if you don't reciprocate, I just, I love you so much, and I could never live with myself if you died and you didn't know, I--"

Eren cuts her off, grabbing her by the shoulders and forcing her to look up at him. "Mikasa!"

She's teary-eyed and sniffling staring up at him, truly broken by the possibility that he could have died today, and she can feel the beginnings of another heaving sob as she thinks about him not being around, her lip beginning to quiver. "Miki that's great, I promise I'm thrilled, love you too actually, but Miki I had appendicitis, needed emergency surgery but ittook an hour, they gave me a jello cup, and I can go now. That's why mom called you, she's busy at work and I can't drive."

Mikasa sits back a little bit on his bed, "Oh." The start of a little grin is quirking at his lips though she can tell he fights it, instead grabbing a pudding cup from the bedside table and spooning some into his mouth to keep the smile off his face.

"So you aren't dying?" "No." "No brutal car accidents or life-altering diseases?" He shakes his head, mouth still stuffed with pudding.

Mikasa groans, "So I just confessed my love to you for absolutley no reason?"

This time, Eren really does grin, a big smile all pretty white teeth before he offers her a scoop of pudding, which she takes gratefully. "Yup! You were so cute too, oh i'm going to remember this when we're old and married, it's gonna be in my wedding vows."

"I hate you." "Love me," Eren taunts before he shoves another scoop of pudding into her mouth, "totally 100% in loveeee with me."

She glares as she swallows her pudding and he leans in for a kiss to her nose, "But i love you too, so I guess we're even Miks."

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dameronsgalaxygal · 4 years

Text

I’ve Been Waiting For You - Chapter 10: Angel Eyes

series masterlist

Pairing: modern!poe x reader

Word Count: 3003

Warnings: angst, mentions of death, language, implications of smut.

Song: Angel Eyes

A/N: Alright, ya’ll have been wanting to find out what Poe’s been hiding. Here it is. I’m pretty sure I overhyped it, but oh well. Next chapter will go into more detail, which means more angst. Taglist is open and comments and feedback would be lovely!

Summary: It’s your one year with Poe. Poe has a freakout, which freaks you out.

“Would you have guessed that we would have made it a year?” Poe asked you honestly.

You and Poe were sitting outside a small cafe in downtown Miami on the early morning of your one year anniversary.

“Honesty? I wouldn’t have guessed I would even been in a relationship,” You chuckled softly.

You had officially been living in Florida for over a year, and you had spoken to your parents a total of four times: your birthday, their birthdays, and christmas. You hadn’t heard from Kyle at all, which was surprising. Well, except for one voicemail that you had received on a whim one afternoon a couple weeks ago that you still hadn’t opened. You were doing well, really well, and you weren’t going to allow one voicemail to ruin that for you.

Things with Poe were phenomenal, including the sex. At first you questioned why you waited so long, but you knew you made the right decision. With your past, you needed to be ready, and the first time you two slept together was truly a date you were going to remember. You had never felt so loved by anyone more than you felt that night. You were glad you waited until you were physically and emotionally ready, because if you had slept with him that night after the bar, you wouldn’t be in the position you were in now. Happy.

Poe smiled sympathetically, “I know I tell you this all the time, but I am so proud of you. I’m lucky to be your person. I am lucky to be your boyfriend,” He took a bite of his toast.

You sipped your lemonade as your cheeks turned a bright red and Poe chuckled.

“Blushing, are we?” He teased.

You shot him a look and he winked.

You continued to eat breakfast for a while until Poe spoke again, “So, since you wouldn’t let me plan anything, can you finally tell me what we’re doing today?”

You shook your head, “It’s a surprise.”

“Baby,” He groaned, throwing his head back, “Can I at least get a hint?”

“Nope,” You grinned mischievously.

You had decided to plan out the whole day for you and Poe, a change from the normalcy between you two. On most days, Poe was the one to organize the dates. Today, you decided to take charge. Mostly because there was a big event happening in Miami Beach that coincidentally landed on your one year and you felt like it would be a perfect way to celebrate.

You were taking Poe to the Miami Beach Air and Sea Show. It was perfect. Poe loved fighter jets, and you were very much aware of this. Since you started dating, you had seen Top Gun a total of 12 times, and he had even bought pre-sale tickets for the sequel (which doesn’t come out for another four months), you had noticed more books and antique fighter jets around his house and sometimes he would even talk to you about his knowledge on them. It was no secret he had an obsession with flying. What better way to spend your anniversary than watching him witness what he loves?

You finished up breakfast quickly, checking your phone for the time. You needed to be at least two hours early if you wanted to find parking and get a good spot before the show started. Poe paid the check, the one thing he did insist on doing for your anniversary, before you two headed toward the car.

“Keys.” You held your hand out for Poe to toss you his car keys.

“Can’t you just tell me where to drive?” He pouted.

“Well then what’s the fun in that? Keys.” You repeated, winking.

He rolled his eyes playfully before reaching into his pocket to grab his keys. He placed them in your hand and you pecked his lips before getting in and driving towards the show.

As you started to approach, large billboards surrounded the area with arrows pointing to garages with bold letters that said ‘Event Parking’ and security guards led cars through to avoid any unnecessary traffic.

You pulled around a corner to get through to the parking garage when you noticed Poes face shift.

“Um,” He swallowed hard, “Where are we going?”

You glanced at him briefly and shot him a smile before continuing to drive, “The Miami Annual Air and Sea Show.”

“Oh.”

You frowned, “You aren’t excited?”

He looked at you, “No, no, no. I am. I am..”

“You don’t sound like it.”

He sighed, “I just wasn’t expecting it. How did you find it?”

You nodded, “Well I was looking into things to do for today and this popped up. I thought it would be fun given your obsession with Top Gun and all.”

“Right, yeah.” He smiled softly.

You furrowed your eyebrows at him in confusion but turned back to the road, finally finding a spot to park. His reaction was odd, you had expected him to be more excited. You managed to brush it off once he put a hand on your thigh and squeezed it.

Poe held you close to him as you walked down to the shore. His arm was wrapped tightly around your waist and he chewed his nails nervously, looking around as if he was looking out for something.

You looked up at him, frowning.

“Babe.”

“Hm?” He continued to look around.

“Babe, what’s going on with you?” You reached up to move his hand away from his lips.

“What? Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Baby,” He stopped walking, putting a hand on your cheek, “I’m fine. Just.. I’ve...I’ve never been here before. Lots of people. It’s intimidating.”

You chuckled, “Poe, there’s nothing to be intimidated by. It’s fun. Everyone sits on the shore and watches the ships and fighter jets do cool tricks and stuff. It’s a way to honor the special forces.”

“Trust me, I know,” He said almost too quietly, looking away.

“Huh?” You tried to meet his eyes.

“Nothing.” He smiled softly, “Come on.”

Okay. This was getting weird. Regardless, you headed to the shore.

You found a spot a bit further back on the sand but with still a good view of the ships and, of course, the sky where the planes would be flying. You laid down a blanket before sitting down.

Poe stayed standing, analyzing the view. He sighed.

“Poe? Are you sure you’re alright?”

He looked down at you before sitting next to you, “Yeah.”

You nodded, putting your head on his shoulder. Soon, a man came onto the loud speaker to thank everyone for joining the show and that it would be starting in approximately half an hour. You turned to Poe.

“Would you mind going to get some drinks? I’ll stay here and watch the stuff. Plus, I could use a little tan.” You smirked.

He chuckled, leaning in to kiss you softly, “Sure. Beer?”

“Margarita if they have them, please.”

“You got it.” He smiled, going to the small bar located on the boardwalk.

Poe sighed in relief as he turned away from you, walking up the dock. He made his way to the bar, waiting in line with his hands in pockets. He looked around as people walked by with food and drinks, talking about their excitement for the show. He took a breath.

“Well, well, well, if that isn’t Poe Dameron.”

Poe shot his head to look at where the familiar voice was coming from. A man and woman stood before him.

Poe clenched his jaw, “Zorii. Hux.” He greeted them.

“Didn’t think you’d come back here after what happened.” Zorii crossed her arms.

“Yeah, what, with how you basically cut everyone off… and with what you did. You’re ballsy, Dameron.” Hux smirked.

Poe swallowed hard, “My girlfriend brought me here. I didn’t know.”

Zorii nodded unsympathetically, “Ah, so you haven’t told her? Because if you did, I doubt she would bring you back here.”

He took a deep breath, his body completely tensing, “No. I haven’t told her.”

“Why not?” Hux asked.

“It’s none of her business.”

Hux chuckled, “I think I would like to know if my significant other was kicked out of the military.”

“Oh, for sure.” Zorii smirked at Hux then looked at Poe.

“It’s not that easy.” Poe stated.

“Really? All you have to say is ‘by the way, I don’t listen to orders very well, so I got kicked out of the service’.” Zorii said dramatically.

“Stop.” Poe begged.

“Oh, what are you going to do, go cry to mommy? Oh wait...” Hux made a fake pouty face.

Poe’s face turned bright red in anger, “Shut up.”

“Like I said, you are ballsy for letting her bring you here. I’m sure it brings back memories,” Hux sighed dramatically, looking around.

“Remember when you were that fucking cocky, you thought you could do whatever the hell you wanted, and you wound up…”

“Dishonorably discharged.” Hux finished Zoriis sentence, a wide smirk plastered on his face.

With that, Poe pushed past the two and rushed back to where you and him had been sitting. You were laying on the blanket, sunglasses on and arms behind your head.

“Y/N.”

You snapped up, “Fuck, Poe.”

You put your hand on your heart, “You startled me,” You looked at him, wondering where the alcohol was, “Where are the drinks?”

“I didn’t get them. We have to leave.” He said quickly, his breath picking up.

“What? Why? The show hasn’t even-”

“We need to leave.” He gritted his teeth, packing up the bag.

“Poe, what is going on?” You stood up in fear, watching as he bunched the blanket into a ball and handed it to you.

“I’ll explain when we get home. Just please, we have to go.”

You only stared at him for a second before nodding slowly. You had no clue what was happening, but you had never seen Poe freak out like this, so you followed him in hope that you would get some answers soon.

He dragged you to the car quickly, throwing things into the trunk before getting into the car, slamming the door. You jumped at the noise before getting in yourself. He quickly drove off in the direction of his place.

The car ride was silent and awkward. You were sad that your plan for your anniversary didn’t follow through. You thought Poe would enjoy it, from what you knew about his love for aviation and his favorite movie being Top Gun. However, Poe seemed really nervous, even scared, and you were worried, so you let it go. You wanted to know what was going on, though.

You finally got back to his place and he rushed inside, you following shortly behind him.

“Finn?” Poe called out as he walked in.

No response.

“I think he was going out with Rose today,” You said gently.

“Oh thank god.” Poe sighed in relief, heading to the cupboard and grabbing the bottle of vodka and a shot glass.

“Poe,” You put your purse down on the counter, “What the hell is going on?”

He poured himself a large glass before turning to you, “I’m sorry I freaked out like that.” He downed his drink.

“It’s okay,” You walked toward him carefully, “I just want to know what’s going on.”

You rubbed his arm as he took another shot and placed the glass on the counter. He sighed, putting his hands on your hips, squeezing them.

“Baby,” You searched for his eyes.

He took a deep breath, looking at you, “Um…” He searched for what he wanted to say.

You squeezed his shoulder, letting him know it was okay to tell you.

“I haven’t been totally honest with you.” He admitted.

You gulped, “Okay..”

“My mom,” He started, “My mom didn’t die of cancer.”

You cocked your eyebrow.

“She, um, she died in battle.” He took a shaky breath.

“Battle?”

He nodded, “My mom was in the service. Air Force.”

You bit your lip, nodding.

“She died when I was eighteen. Her jet was shot down and she died when it hit land. It exploded and…” He stopped for a minute, looking up to collect his tears.

“She was dispersed immediately.”

Your heart broke for him. You knew he was close to his mom, his tattoo proved that. You understood why being physically in front of fighter jets would be rough for him, his mother died in one. You didn’t understand why he lied to you, but you rubbed it off. He needed to be comforted.

“I’m so sorry, Poe.” You whispered, looking down.

He sighed, “It’s okay. There’s just a difference between seeing fighter jets in movies and having action figures and seeing them in person. Brings me back to the day I found out.”

You gave him a sad smile, nodding. “I understand.”

You didn’t understand his exact situation, but you understood trauma. Bad memories brings you back to dark places, and it probably did the same for him.

“You could have just told me, you know.” You rubbed his arm again.

“I know.”

You sighed. He still seemed uneasy.

“Is that it?” You asked softly, genuinely wondering if there was anything else he wanted to tell you.

I was discharged from the Air Force for disobeying orders. I nearly killed a man and myself in the process. I cussed out my Colonel and slapped my roommate.

“Yeah, that’s it.” He smiled softly.

He wanted to tell you, he wanted to tell you so bad. But his issues didn’t matter. Yours were more important. He needed to take care of you. Make sure you are okay. Right?

“Okay.” You leaned up to kiss him softly.

He kissed you back gently.

“I’m sorry I ruined our anniversary,” He frowned.

You shook your head, “You didn’t. I still want to go out to dinner tonight, if that’s okay with you.”

He smiled and nodded, “I’d love to.”

“Great. We have reservations at six. Until then…?”

Poe smirked, leaning down to kiss your neck, “To the bedroom, madam?”

“Please.”

“Seriously, I don’t know why I waited so long.” You collapsed on his chest, catching your breath.

He laughed, stroking your hair, “Yes you do. You’re just saying that now because you’re realizing how good I am.”

You rolled your eyes playfully, swatting his arm.

“Ow!” He chuckled.

“Oh, you’re fine. What time is it?”

Poe reached over to grab his phone, checking the time.

“4:45.”

“Shit,” You popped up, “We have to get ready.”

“It does not take that long to get ready.” He crossed his arms.

“For you! I have to go home and change and do my hair and makeup. I wasn’t expecting to fuck all day, I actually had plans.” You got up, grabbing your clothes and throwing them on quickly.

He smirked, “What, these aren’t good plans?”

You shot him a look and he winked.

“I’m going to go home and shower and then I’ll come back over and we can go. I’ll be back soon, okay?” You started for the door.

“Okay. I love you!”

“Love you!” You yelled as you left.

Poe sighed happily, leaning back in the pillow. His smile dropped when he remembered he was still keeping something from you. You did deserve to know, but he was so focused on making you feel safe that he didn’t feel like his problems were important. He was so focused on earning your trust.

Your trust. Shit.

He groaned, running his hand down his face. He stayed in bed for a bit until he checked his phone again. It was 5:15 and he needed a shower. Maybe he would tell you everything over dinner. You couldn’t get mad at him at dinner right? He figured out what he would say while he showered.

“Poe!” His door was unlocked, “You ready?” You called out.

“One sec,” Poe emerged from his room while he fixed his tie.

You smirked, “Well hello handsome.” You giggled.

Poe whistled at you. You were wearing a beautiful dark blue tight dress and black heels with your hair curled and makeup done nicely. Nothing too extravagant, but it fit the occasion.

“Hey there sexy lady,” He kissed you urgently.

You giggled against his lips, tapping his chest, “You keep kissing me like that and we won’t make it to dinner,” You teased

Poe wiggled his eyebrows.

You rolled your eyes, “I was kidding. Let’s go.”

He laughed, “Okay, okay. Let me find my keys.”

You nodded as he searched around the kitchen searching for where he last placed them.

“Oh shit,” You groaned in realization.

“What?” Poe shot his eyes to you in fear.

“I forgot a jacket. Do you have something I can wear?” You asked desperately.

He chuckled, “Yeah, just check for something in my closet.”

You smiled and nodded, heading to his room and going into his closet.

You looked for something that would at least match your dress, even though you wouldn’t be wearing it very long. Just while you traveled to and from the car.

You pushed through the shrine of jackets, nothing catching your eye until you got to a green jacket with a patch that matched the logo of the Air Force. You pulled it off the hanger and examined it. On the patch read ‘Captain. Poe Dameron’. Your mouth opened slightly.

“Hey, baby. It’s 5:45, are you ready to-” Poe walked in and saw you holding his old Air Force jacket.

Fuck.

Poe ran a hand through his hair, “I see you found a jacket.” He put his hands in his pockets.

“What is this?” You asked.

Poe swallowed hard, “It’s my old Air Force jacket.”

“Your old Air Force jacket? You were in the military?” You rose your eyebrows.

He sighed, “Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Poe sighed, running his hand down his face.

“Poe.”

He looked up at you.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was going to be a long night.

taglist <open> @twomoonstwosuns @darksideofclarke @damnyoudameron @demigod-dragonrider-schoolidol @rewritingstarrs @aidela @softly-sad @fanfiction-trashpile @lanatheawesome @fantasticcopeaglepasta @the-cry-of-youth @yeeintensifies @itsamedeemoney @yougottakeeponkeepinon @cloud-leader @multifandomlife22 @aroseamongthestars @liadamerondjarin @eternallyvenus @xremember-me-notx @frietiemeloen

#poe dameron x reader #poe dameron #modern poe #poe dameron fanfiction #poe dameron x you #I've been waiting for you poe #poe x reader

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tellywoodtrash · 4 years

Text

immj2 04.11.20 lb

ok speed-watched the 3rd nov ep and here are the highlights:

mummy and kabir ka freakout about ragini being alive.

someone in a mask (siya??????) knocking already paralysed riddhima out with chloroform when she tries to make a call to kabir.

kabir sneaking into the mansion and riddhima passing on a message to him in the form of a conversation with vansh, during which she challenges V that she'll steal ragini away from him.

kabir looking 👌🏽👌🏽👌🏽 hey boy are you a family pack of haldiram's aloo bhujia coz you AN ABSOLUTE SNACCCC. (i think there was a convo between him and mummy ki she has to help riddhima so that riddhima can get him to ragini. but i was too busy staring at his neck/chest coz......... tharak. 😜😜😜)

vansh digging a grave in his backyard at midnight like the fucking weirdo he is, and riddhima being like smh really, i got horny for THIS dude???????

some cocky talk by vansh next morning about how his mission for revenge is finally gonna come to a head today and how riddhima should be happy coz this means that they can start their new lives together. followed by some truly savage dahi-cheeni eating that grossed me tf out. this show really doing The Most to make this hot dude absolutely repulsive to me.

vansh instructing ishani to keep an eye on riddhima to make sure she doesn't leave the house today.

ok now that you're caught up, onwardsssssssssss!

———————————————————————

*pink panther theme music playing*

mummy distracting ishani from noticing riddhima in the most Boomer way possible; phone mein app download nahi ho raha, mere liye kardo plssssssss.

“teen saal pehle jo kaam humara fail ho gaya tha woh waapas aa raha hai.” 0.0% surprising revelation that they the ones who tried to murder ragini.

mask person has knocked riddhima out YET AGAIN. THE SECOND TIME IN LIKE, 12 HOURS. DUDE. THIS CAN'T BE GOOD FOR HER HEALTH. Y'ALL FUCKING CRAZY.

oh thank god, dadi is finally back. not that inki kuch khaas chalti hai, but at least these three raisinghania hellions will stop constantly giving riddhima mini-comas every 6 hours, on the dot. yes, i'm fully including siya in it, i'm absolutely sure that she's the mask person now. idk why, but i am.

mummy is like oufff isko nikalna tha aur behosh ho gayi aur ab yahaan baithi juice pee rahi hai manhoos.

riddhima like yup, there's definitely another person here other than ishani who's helping vansh. YEAH IT SIYA YOU DUMBASSSSSSSS.

riddhima doing bukhaar waali acting and i'm sure has hacked the thermometer hum hain raahi pyaar ke style to show temp of 103.

a doctor has been called and kabir has been informed ki riddhima is awwal number ki nikkami jisne saara plan fail kiya hua hai.

but behen is super duper determined and convinced that she will beat vansh no matter what. yeah sis. beat him. beat him over the head with a danda.

lmaoooooooooooooo look at these two smirking at each other over their shady shenanigans. the real love story of this show.

“aise important mauke waste karna hi uska talent hai.” i truly live for mummy's verbal evisceration of riddhima.

kabir sure ki this is part of riddhima's plan. get you a man like kabir who has fulllllll confidence in you. not one like vansh who constantly underestimates you. oh, and paralyses you.

ishani is truly Forever Mood.

gaadi ruk gayi. smirky boys not smirking anymore.

snort. someone’s been watching a little too much ipk on hotstar.

riddhima has picked up a trick from the raisinghanias. aur do issko ideas.

“i'm so proud of you riddhima!!!!!!!!”

i love his snarky asssssss so much.

SHE WAS RUSHING AROUND SAYING TIME NAHI HAI TIME NAHI HAI HAR EK MINUTE KEEMTI HAI RAGINI KO BACHAANE KE LIYE, BUT NOW SHE HAS TIME TO STAND AROUND AND IMAGINE HER TWO BOYTOYS DEBATING ABOUT PYAAR AND FARZ. GODDDDDDDDDDDDD

waise bhi, do hotties ko saath mein imagine karr hi rahi ho toh bhi yeh lameass debate? wouldn't be me. my imagination would have them shirtless and wrestling for my hand in marriage.

BITCH EVERY MAN IS A UNIQUE NIGHTMARE IN HIS OWN WAY; STOP WASTING TIME OVER CHOOSING ONE OF THEM AND JUST GET YOUR ASS MOVINGGGGGGGG

rrahul's angry acting is unbearable.

doctor has to be a dumbass not to ask her why it took her HALF AN HOUR to just give one injection. and what's with the drastic change in eye makeup situation?!?!!?!?! the patient gave you a makeover?????

ishani yeh ghatiya blue lenses hatao toh tumhe dikhe jo mummy ko dikha.

idhar they've literally been standing around doing jack for one hour. in this time, literally 40 autos have passed him and he didn't think to hail even one of them.

EVEN NOW HE'S SCREAMING AT THE CARS TO STOP AND NOT THE EMPTYASSSSSSS AUTOS. ARE YOU ALLOWED TO BE A MAFIA LEADER OR WHATEVER THE FUCK HE IS THAT MADE HIM SO GODDAMN RICH IF YOU'RE THIS FUCKING STOOOOOPID????????

pachchis minute to reach aaaaaaaaaaaaaand...........

yup. this is the choice he makes. wonderful.

riddhima’s new gig as an uber driver has commenced with an auspicious customer.

RACE SAANSON KI.

RACE CHAAHAT KI.

RACE DHADKAN KI.

MY HEART IS RACING ON!!!!!!!!! (because i am very very unfit and have severe anxiety.)

watch out milind soman, you got competition in the hot-dude-running-for-absolutely-no-good-reason department.

ishani knows bhaabi sus as hell and damn near breaking the door down.

but dadi came and took her away. but not before they peeked in and saw SOMEONE in bed and assumed it's riddhima. raisinghanias really got shit for brains.

meanwhile..........

yeah, this looks like it's going as well as i expected.

he just hurt his leg and then when he stood up the pant leg still spotless white.

if kabir wasn't a murderous psycho who wanted to murder ragini himself his righteous anger seeing her haalat would totally turn me on rn.

LMAO WHAT, YOU WANT HER TO TAKE RAGINI OUT WHILE YOU HANDLE THE NURSE?!?!?! HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE HOW IS TINY BIRD LIKE RIDDHIMA SUPPOSED TO SMUGGLE AN UNCONSCIOUS WOMAN HER SIZE OUT???? LET *HER* HANDLE THE NURSE AND YOU CARRY RAGINI OUT, YOU FUCKING DUMBASS.

“usse harm mat karna.”

kabir nods yes AND THEN PROMPTLY GOES ON TO SUFFOCATE THE NURSE. MAN, YOU PPL IN THIS SHOW REALLY TAKE UNCONSCIOUSNESS VERYYYYYYYYYYYYY LIGHTLY.

how is ragini's hair so shiny and conditioned and still in the braid after being bedridden for 3 years, when my hair is a fucking chidiya ka ghosla after a half hour nap????

lo, yeh mahashay finally pohunch gaye.

OH SHITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

oh thank god. idk why i'm so invested in kameena kabir getting away with his shit, but i am. i just like him better.

he knows someone is here and made the nurse unconscious. THEN WHY THE FUCK IS HE YELLLLLLLLLLLING AND LETTING WHOEVER IS TRYING TO GET RAGINI KNOW THAT HE’S HERE AND COMING INTO THE ROOM?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?

pls god can this show free rrahul??? he needs to be in a softboy romantic role where he can flash his puppy eyes and sassy smile. this role is just notttttttt a good fit for him. THIS IS LIKE WHEN THEY MADE OMKARA A CRAZYASS JUNGLEEEEEE IN DBO ALLLLLL OVER AGAIN. IT JUST DOESN’T FIT THE ACTOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

LMAO ISKI KHUSHIIIIIIIII TOH DEKHO. truly, nothing makes me happier than a woman who has fucked a man over and made him miserable. and this one toh particularly deserved it also. i know it’s all gonna turn to shit later coz she’ll have ruined some mission that had a “noble” reason behind it, but for now, i’m happy she managed to get at least a small badla for the paralysis thing.

#ishq mein marjawan 2 #immj2 #immj2 lbs #episode liveblogs

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getthesamovarready · 4 years

Text

First Sight

I just love this chapter honestly

also on ao3

Chapter 2: twist of fate

TK is sitting at the kitchen counter when he walks in the door. “Long night?” He asks, bringing his coffee to his lips. Owen cringes silently, shutting the door behind himself. He shouldn’t be coming home to his son trying to parent him, and his stomach rolls over in guilt. Immediately though, TK drops his frown, descending into a fit of laughter. “Glad to see you’re embracing your new surroundings Dad.” He stands from his stool, padding across the floor. “Don’t take too long getting ready, we have to be early today.” He pats him on the shoulder, making his way to the stairs. “Oh!” He calls, halfway up the stairs. “I really hope there doesn’t end up being a bunch of mini-Strands running around Texas.”

Owen pours himself a desperately needed coffee from the pot TK brewed, following him upstairs with a laugh. With the amount of times he caught TK sneaking home in the early hours, he supposes he should let his son enjoy this one. Even if it is a little humiliating.

He didn’t notice it this morning, but when he takes off his shirt he catches a whiff of perfume, and it shocks the breath right out of his chest. He can feel her hands on his chest, and his stomach twists as he tries to shake it off.

It takes a shower, and the familiar comfort of his skincare routine, to stop heart racing and memories of last night sending tingles down his spine. His hard work is undone, however when he starts to dress for work.

His work shirt is perfume-free, but still his fingers fumble with the buttons, unable to avoid thinking of unbuttoning the back of Michelle's dress last night. He screws his eyes shut, willing his shirt to cooperate with his hands.

When he makes his way downstairs he is flustered, and TK's casual leaning on the countertop doesn't help. "I thought I said not to take too long?" He smirks at him, glancing at the clock. An hour isn't too long, Owen thinks, but he doesn't respond. He just scowls at TK. "Oh wow." TK chuckles. "Must have been some night." He notes Owen's flush. "She really did a number on you didn't she?" He pushes himself off the counter to head to the door. "You sure you're fit to drive in that daze?" TK calls from the doorway, and Owen leaves indents in his fingers as he squeezes the keys in his fist.

Knocking on Dustin's door probably wasn't what Owen had in mind when he suggested that she celebrate Iris's birthday. He definitely wasn't suggesting that she slam at it, and scream until he called the cops. But that's what she did. And she actually feels a little better, kicking his house. She feels a little of her tension dissipate.

So she doesn't even feel that guilty when Carlos's squad car pulls up. She even nearly smiles when she greets him. She doesn't feel the usual guilt when he has to handcuff her.

She doesn't smile, however, when he pauses. And her chest tightens when he coughs. "What's that?" He asks her, and she whips her head around to question him. He's staring right at the back of her shoulder.

She flushes instantly, remembering Owen unbuttoning her dress, kissing her neck, his teeth dipping lower to nip at her shoulder. She turns her head forward again, determined not to answer Carlos's question.

"Michelle…" She huffs, desperately wishing she could tug her sweater to cover the bruise. "Do you have a hickey on your neck?"

"So what if I do?" She snaps. She's a grown woman, what's it to him what she does anyway? She starts to walk towards the car, Carlos close behind.

"I just...you didn't tell me you were seeing anybody." There is a hint of disappointment in his voice, and she realises that maybe she's been more distant than she thought recently, if he really thinks she could hide something like that.

"I'm not." She tells him when he opens the door, and her stomach twists at the look on his face.

"So who?" He starts to ask, closing the door behind her and slipping into the front of the car. "So who was that?" He points at his own neck, concern lacing his voice.

"A guy." She mumbles.

"A guy? Just some random guy?"

She sighs. "I met him at the Honky Tonk last night." This is honestly way more humiliating than the handcuffs around her wrists.

"Last night? You let some guy you don't know do that?" He's eyeing her through the rear-view, and she squirms. "I'm assuming you did more than just…" He huffs out a sigh, gripping the steering wheel tightly. "You let some random guy you don't know take you home?"

"Actually… I took him home." It gets exactly the reaction she expected.

"Michelle!" He groans. "What the hell? You let a stranger into your house? He could have been a murderer! Or like… robbed you? What's wrong with you?"

"Not everyone is a criminal Carlos." She groans. "Some people are normal!"

"Says the woman I just arrested for violating a restraining order for the fifteenth time!" She slumps back in her seat. He has a point, and it's not the first time he's tried to convince her that maybe Dustin might be innocent.

"If you people would do your jobs I wouldn't have to violate any orders, because you would have found out what happened." She snaps back. "It's her birthday Carlos, I can't just let her go on her birthday."

"We're not gonna have any new birthdays to celebrate anytime soon are we?" She struggles for a moment over his question, wondering what on earth he could possibly mean.

"Oh my God, Carlos!" She scoffs. "I'm not a total idiot."

"I just had to be sure." He eyes her again through the mirror.

"Whenever you want to stop being my father and start being my friend, just tell me." She glances out the window. "Hey, I start work in twenty, can you just drop me there?"

"Michelle, I'm not an Uber." He chuckles.

"I wasn't gonna tip." She smirks at him, chuckling when he takes the turn for the firehouse. "He was lovely, by the way. Not even a little bit murdery."

Carlos, back to being her friend again, laughs at her. "Good."

"You know," she leans forward. "Normal friends, when their friend has sex for the first time in a very long time, are happy for their friends."

"It's not that I'm not happy for you, Chica." He taps his hands against the steering wheel. "It's just...not like you. And you've made some...questionable decisions recently." She isn't sure if he's talking about Billy or...everything else in her life. But she wouldn't call Billy 'recent', so she assumes he's talking about the multiple arrests in the last few years, and everything else since Iris went missing. "It just feels very… new-Michelle."

"I know." She mumbles behind him. It is very new-Michelle. She'd had this very problem last night. "He was really nice though." She smiles, blushing as she thinks of how sweet he was about her little freakout. "He was really nice to talk to."

"Yeah, I'm sure you did lots of talking." Carlos scoffs, smirking.

"We did, actually. We talked a lot."

"So what does he do?" Carlos asks casually, and she flushes.

"I don't know."

"What's his name?"

"Owen...something. " He eyes her suspiciously.

"You talked to this guy, a lot. You took him home with you. And you don't know what he does? Or who he is?" Her cheeks are absolutely burning. "I don't even have a last name to find out about him! How are you supposed to show him to me? How could you have sex with someone and not let me know what he looks like?"

"It didn't seem important." She defends, omitting the fact that it seemed important to her not to know any of these things last night. "I'm sorry that I can't show him to you. He was quite something." She grins.

"Just his looks? Or?" He doesn't finish his question, and she giggles slightly when she finishes it for him in her head.

"Not just his looks." She sends a wink through the mirror, and he nods approvingly. She smiles out the window, the tension from Carlos's initial questioning gone completely.

He lets her off at the firehouse, with yet another warning. "Don't want you to make a bad impression on the new team." He tells her, unlocking the handcuffs. "Good luck today, Chica." He pulls her in for a quick hug, pressing a kiss to her hair.

"Come out for a drink with me after work?" She asks, pulling away. "I'll probably be taking the team out anyway, but it's Iris's birthday." She explains. "We should celebrate it."

"I'd love to." He squeezes her hand with a nod, turning to get back into the car.

It takes her a while to walk inside, and she's glad Carlos managed to drop her off early. It's quiet when she enters, and completely different to the last time she was here.

Nothing is the way it used to be, and she has to wander a bit before finding her office. She doesn't see a soul, and she can't help but wonder where they could all be. But she's not in uniform yet, and her shift starts in five minutes. So she finds the changing rooms, and she's just made it back downstairs to meet the team, when the alarm blares, and a group of unfamiliar people rush past her.

Tim and Nancy follow the group at a stroll, and smile weakly at her when she sees them. "You guys okay?" She asks, casting her eye over the new firehouse. The pair of them shrug. "You met them? What are they like?"

"They're nice." Tim shrugs, frowning slightly. "They're okay I guess."

"Captain Strand is more than okay." Nancy mumbles with a smile, squirming her eyebrows at Michelle. The pair of them chuckle, while Tim shakes his head.

“You guys okay? You ready for this?” She’s pretty sure she’s not ready for their first call out in six months, but still, she leads them to the ambulance, her hands shaking only a little when she reaches for the door handle. “If you’re not…” She can technically get dispatch to send another team. But that probably wouldn’t do any good.

But Tim and Nancy assure her that they are fine. Months out of the rhythm of things, has the three of them silent the whole drive there. Each of them rehearsing the motions in their heads.

Michelle thinks she's finally okay, that she's ready for her first call in months. Until she hears the Captain speak, and her stomach drops. "So we have some room to work." She catches, her stomach twisting itself into knots as she steals herself for the inevitable.

"You mean give us some room to work?" He spins around like a shot. "This scene belongs to us." She looks him in the eye only briefly, a warning for him to calm his obvious panic, before she brushes past him. She does her very best to hide hers, shoving it down as far as it will go before starts to direct Tim and Nancy.

"You must have missed the part where they made me the captain of the 126." It's suggestive, late-night, Owen, and she whips around, steeling her features.

"Michelle Blake, Paramedic Captain." She introduces herself coldly. "And this scene is medical, so I run the call."

"Woah, since when does EMS tell Fire what time it is?" She has to give it to him, he does a remarkable job pretending never to have met her before. Probably something to do with his newfound talent for getting on her nerves.

"Guess you didn't read the Travis County Manual, did you?" She presses, starting to get to work.

"I'm more of a … visual learner." She doesn't miss his eyes trailing over her, and she turns her head to catch him in the act.

"In Texas, EMS calls the shots involving medical emergencies." He has a hint of a smirk on his lips, and she can't help but snap at him. "So you do what I say, Captain." It's so unlike last night, and if she wasn't freaking out so much she would probably find it funny. He hides it well, but she can tell that Owen finds it hilarious.

She's good at her job. She always has been. She knows that she's impressive, but it's nice to have an audience, and this one is enthralled. They've obviously heard that the old 126 was in serious need of a re-haul, and probably didn't have high hopes for the remaining members. When she's finished, she looks back at Owen, and he's still watching her.

"Nice work, Captain." He smirks when she passes, following behind Tim and Nancy. "Impressive."

"Welcome to Texas, Captain." She winks. Immediately, she regrets it at the flush of his cheeks. And she's brought back to this morning, in her robe, letting him out of her house. She starts back on her way to the ambulance, blushing furiously.

He's in his office when she returns. He looks like he's deep in paperwork, she suspects the county manual, but almost as soon as she sees him he's out of his seat, making his way to her office. "Captain Michelle Blake." He stops in her doorway, leaning against it. "What a happy coincidence."

"This is not a happy coincidence." She huffs, dropping into her chair. "This." She gestures to him. "Is payback from God for my bad decisions." Of course she couldn't have a one night stand and move on with her life, of course there would be some kind of consequences.

"From God?" He chuckles. "I didn't think you were all that concerned about God, Michelle?" At least, not when that god wasn't Owen in the middle of the night.

"When things like this happen, I start to think maybe I should be." Carlos is going to have a field day with this.

"You say payback." He steps into her office fully. "I say fate." She can't help but smile, blushing softly. "Come on, it's like a movie. I think that if God had anything to do with it, he's giving us a sign." It is, it's exactly like some stupid romantic comedy.

"It's not a movie Owen." She sighs. "This can't be anything, you get that, right?" He doesn't seem to get it, his head cocking to the side with a hint of a pout. "Owen, we work together now. It would be a really bad idea." He looks like he disagrees, moving to sit on the edge of her desk.

"Okay." He sighs with a nod.

"No one can know about this. No one can even suspect." A smile springs on her lips unexpectedly. "So, if in future, you could avoid checking me out when I'm working, that would be a big help."

"Fine." He grins with a laugh, before sobering up quickly. "So, you okay? First day back?" If it hadn't started with such a shock, she would probably be less okay. But she nods silently. "I know the place is really different. I know that can be difficult…"

"I'll be fine, Owen." She assures him. She's actually a little bit glad the place looks so different. She had been worried about being assaulted with memories at every turn. But the place is bright, shiny, and new. "Thank you."

He nods softly, standing from the desk. Just when he reaches the doorway, he taps it with a sigh, turning around. "I should probably warn you." He bites his lip. "TK works here, he's on the team."

"TK?" Her eyes widen, and he turns again. "Your son TK?" And he's gone.

Xxx

When she gets back from their next call, there is a cupcake sitting on her desk. Owen, the only person she can think of who would do this, isn't in his office, so she can't immediately go berate him for doing something so sweet. So she approaches the offending cake, picking up the post-it that sits under it.

Couldn't get a candle quickly. For your sister. -O

She sets the cake aside, smiling at it every now and then, while she does her paperwork. She decides against indulging immediately. It's the only cake Iris is going to get, and it doesn't seem right to eat it on her own, at work.

Owen is in the kitchen when she emerges for a cup of coffee. "Captain Blake." He greets her casually. "How's your first day back?" His head tilts towards someone rummaging in the fridge. "TK whatever you're looking for isn't going to be there if you haven't found it already." His eyes dart over to her when she straightens her spine. He smirks at her, and she glares pointedly at him.

"I don't even know what I'm looking for Dad." TK admits, emerging from the fridge with a soda. "We really gotta work on the snacks in this place. And by that I mean I gotta do it, I don't trust you. We need things like cookies, and chips."

"There's a bakery around the corner." They offer in unison, both of them immediately flushing and avoiding the other's eyes.

"It's great," Michelle continues, thinking about many an impromptu celebration catered by said bakery. "And they like us, might even do you a deal." They liked the old team anyway, but she's sure they'll warm to any member of the 126.

TK thanks her, leaving the two of them alone in the kitchen.

"Way to not be suspicious." She laughs, almost going to nudge his arm, but thinking better of it at the last minute.

"He'll just think I've been sneaking around in secret eating illicit cookies." He brushes it off easily.

"Thank you, for the cupcake. It was really sweet of you." She blushes. "I really appreciate it."

"I told you to celebrate today." He shrugs. "I wanted to make sure you could."

"Speaking of celebrating." She starts, twisting her fingers. "I think we, the team I mean, should go out for a drink? After work?" When he starts to nod, she bites her lip nervously. "The thing is… we always went to the Honky Tonk after work." He stops nodding, twisting his lip awkwardly. "I think Tim and Nancy would like it if we did the same. And I told Chris last night I'd take the new team…"

"Sure."

"Sure? That's okay? It won't be weird?"

"Of course it'll be weird." He scoffs. "It's fine though, tell the team." She nods, starting to walk away, when he stops her. "I uh...I just wanted to ask. I left my number, on your bedside table. If I didn't work here...would you have called it?"

Her answer is easy, and it twists in her stomach. "Yes."

#michelle blake #Owen Strand #owelle #michelle x owen #911 lonestar #owen is the sweetest in this fic honestly #he doesn't really deserve it #also im really trying not to let this be a captain strand rip-off so sorry if anyone thinks it is but i really hope it doesnt seem like that

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artificialqueens · 3 years

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Gimme Love, 3/9 (Miz Cracker/Blair St Clair) - Grinder

AN: Hey, guys! I hope yall are enjoying this fic so far! Throw me a like please if you do. TW for this chapter: Grief // Homophobia

2003 High School. The bane of my existence. Just as I thought elementary and middle school were terrible, High School really was something else. From my childhood therapy sessions, I learned to conceal my anger, avoid freakouts, and channel my emotions into other things. It was good for me, yeah. But it also made me a more reserved person. Things still made me angry, the other kids at school being a primary key to that. But I never defended myself. Ever. Of course, Jujubee always had my back. Only in later years did I learn to appreciate the times she'd yell at the other kids, telling them to fuck off and whatnot. But back then, I wished she hadn't. It only drew more negative attention. All I wanted was to get through those tough years. I would come home a lot, look at pictures of myself as a child. And I'd be so mad because only then did I see that I wasn't an ugly kid. I was adorable. But, God clearly had favourites 'cause puberty did not do me any favours. If only I had grown up in a more modern time when no one gave a shit about looks. When people were outspoken about the cruelty that came with shaming someone for their looks. When people were more aware of the psychological damage that could do. Again, God had favourites. From years of my eyesight getting worse and needing a new pair of glasses every time I went to the eye doctor, I had thick-rimmed frames that made me look straight out of the 70s. And the lenses made my eyes look huge. I looked like Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys. My hair was bigger but full of split ends due to lack of giving a shit about it. I begged Mom to let me bleach it blonde. She always straight up refused. I had braces for a whole year which, yeah, many people had braces, but one time while answering a question in class, I drooled. And no one let me hear the end of it. And makeup wasn't something I really fucked with. I tried it once, safe and sound in my own bedroom, and it looked woeful. Instead of working to get better, I accepted defeat in that I would always be ugly. "I'm serious, girl. The foundation was so bad. And it was too dark." I ranted to Jujubee as we headed to the bus stop. I was trying to smoke my cigarette as fast as I could before getting there. Mom never knew, and what she didn't know couldn't kill her. Of course, I didn't just go into the store and buy them myself. Instead, I took one a day from my Grandpa's supply. "Girl, you gotta test it first." She pointed out, adjusting her bag straps. "Juju, I got the lightest colour they had. I don't fucking get it. Every other girl in the school uses it. Maybelline shouldn't sell this shit." "You just need to find a different brand." She grabbed my shoulder and pulled me closer, "OK, don't tell my Mom, but I tried some of her MAC shit the other day, and my skin looked fucking flawless." She let me go, took my cigarette from me, taking a toke herself. "Well, how am I supposed to get my hands on that?" I took the cig back. "I don't see any MAC stores around here." "Oh, yeah? Well, you know what your Other World self would do?" Jujubee's brow raised, a sweet grin appearing on her mischievous face. "She would say fuck school, hop on the next bus to Cleveland and go straight to the MAC store." Blowing out some smoke, I looked at her, "Well, Other World you wouldn't be encouraging that sort of behaviour." "No, she wouldn't 'cause she'd be the first on the bus." Jujubee countered. "And she'd start the sing-song." "Yeah, well other world me would out-sing you 'cause she's a star. She's a fucking diva, bitch. Mariah Carey has nothing on her." We were too caught up in our fantasy world; we almost missed the vehicle driving past us. Only when we saw the cackling faces of the boys at the back of the bus did realisation take over. We were going to miss the bus. "Fuck." I uttered, watching the guys still flipping us off as they moved further and further away. To make matters worse, a car pulled up beside us. And of fucking course, it was Trevor Preston, the Captain of the football team. His two sidekicks were in the

back seat, Logan and Noah. "Aw, look, guys. The geeks just missed the bus." Trevor fake whined. In these situations, I just shut down. I thought it was for the best at the time, but fuck, if I could go back and punch that guy. "You know what? Why don't you mind your own fucking business, Trevor?" Jujubee squinted her eyes at him. “Wow, little fiesty, Juju.” He continued, "How about this? We all say sorry, and we can both ride with us to school." 'Hell fucking no.' I thought. "Oh yeah? And what's the catch?" Jujubee raised a brow. "You let me feel your tits," Trevor smirked, his two cronies snickered. "Ah, there it is. I thought that was what your pea-sized brain would come up with." Jujubee nodded her head. "So, hey, Brianna," Trevor shifted his attention, "You're awfully quiet. Don't I at least get a hello?" I was still frozen, feeling my anxiety brewing within. "Dude, don't be so sensitive. You know, if she opens her mouth, she'll just drool all over herself." Logan added, the three axe wounds beginning to snicker again. I felt like I should have at least opened my mouth to prove them wrong, or maybe spit on Trevor's car. But still, I just stood there. "Trevor, if you don't fuck off right now, I'm gonna key your car." Jujubee threatened. "Juju." I tried to stop her. "Wouldn't even have the chance, sweetheart. Either of you bitches come near my car; you'll never walk the halls again." How gentleman-like, threatening two girls. Funny how our safety was the price to pay for a car. Oh, men. "Keep that in mind," Trevor concluded before driving away with dumb and dumber. "You didn't have to do that." I looked at Jujubee. "I'm sorry they're such assholes." She replied, taking my hand in hers. I shook it off, however. "No, I mean, I wish you wouldn't do that." Jujubee crossed her brows, "what? So I'm supposed to sit there and just take it? No fucking way." "I know. But," I paused, "they kinda scare me. You know?" "Brie, there's nothing more pathetic than a man sweating over the safety of his ride." She retook my hand, "Don't be afraid of a cunt like him." "I mean, I can try not to. But I can't make any promises." I shrugged. "Anyway, what's the plan? How are we supposed to get there on time?" Jujubee was silent for a moment before replying with, "my Mom?" Her Mom did end up giving us a ride, much to my dismay. I would have preferred to take the day off. Or better yet, to just fucking drop out altogether. But Jujubee was always there to reassure me - I adored that bitch. I would have fucking taken a bullet for her. I would like to say that it wasn't just Jujubee and me, that we had a group of more friends. But these guys, I never really counted them as friends. A year prior, we both decided to try and improve our social lives by joining a club. The only one that would accept us was the chess club. Every other member was a guy, and they were nerds. Not that Jujubee and I minded. However, the problem was that they only let us in because...well, do I even need to explain? "So, Brianna," Jimmy decided to approach me at the end of one session, licking his hand and sweeping his hair from his face. "Because I beat you twice today, what do I get?" "...Excuse me?" "My prize. What do I get??" He put an arm around my shoulders. I was puzzled, "Uh, you can have my chicken nuggets at lunch." His grin was beginning to disappear. "Oh, I was thinking of something else. A kiss, maybe?" I felt bad for doing it, but my fight or flight response told me to just run from the room. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but these guys were just on another level of thirst. And it wasn't just me who they flirted with. Jujubee had informed me of a time Arnold convinced her to make out with him. She was all for it until she realised how awful of a kisser he was. And as the boys became more desperate, we decided that we were better off alone. Again, I was so grateful for Jujubee. I was surprised she stuck around, considering she had seen me at my worst when we were still so young. How the fuck had she not developed

issues of her own? Jujubee was the number one reason I even found the strength to just get up in the morning, drag my ass to school, and do my work - Well, aside from wanting to get good grades so I could go to a good college. The second reason? Blair. Unlike me, she was thriving. Our lives were totally cliche - me being the kid who grew up to be the nerd who only speaks when it's to answer a question. And Blair, growing up to be the head cheerleader. And I was still very much in love with her. What a fucking cliche. I avoided Blair at all costs for several reasons;

differing social circles (in my case, lack of),

her boyfriend, who was the Captain of the soccer team and wasn't shy about giving me and Jujubee grief,

her friends,

and, of course, my massive crush on her.

So, why was Blair the second reason as to why I dragged myself to school? Her smile. That was enough. As much as I tried to avoid her, the world decided to do a big "fuck you" on me and sometimes put us into situations together. And every time, I'd be internally freaking out. The worst was when we were both 16. It was that time of the year when the school would invite someone to subject us to the most humiliating moment of our lives. How the fuck were you supposed to put a condom on a banana without bursting out laughing? How the fuck were you supposed to sit there and keep a straight face when the educator used words like 'flaps'? We filed into the class, Jujubee and me taking seats at the back of the room. We knew this was going to be hilarious, so best to avoid the attention of the teacher. "Juju, I know you are dying to make jokes during this, but I'm begging you. Please don't." I spoke quietly to her as other students filed in. "But you know I'm going to, right?" Jujubee smirked, putting her bag on the ground. "No. We wanna keep a low profile. If we laugh, we draw attention, and then we risk being singled out. You know? We'll be at the front of the class demonstrating whatever this bitch asks us." Obviously, I was referring to putting condoms on bananas and the like. Juju, however, raised a brow, "I wouldn't mind that, babe. Don't worry. We won't need to take our clothes off." I stared at her for a few seconds, unable to think of how to respond to that. Jujubee winked, and I forced myself to look away. "That's not what I meant." Blair strolled in with Denali and Rosé, already I could feel my stomach knotting. They went to sit together somewhere in the middle. "Ugh, nope. I don't think so, ladies." Ah, Miss Jaida Hall, if only I could have warned you not to say what you were about to say. Somehow Blair and the two others knew she was speaking to them. She continued, "This is an important class, and I'm not gonna have you all laughing and snickering during it." She had a point. The three girls usually whispered to each other in class, giggling about all sorts of shit. It was never anything malicious about the lesson or teachers, just inside jokes with each other, pretty harmless stuff. But it pissed the teachers off so much. "You can't be serious, right?" Denali replied, clearly scandalised. "Very serious, actually." Ms Hall nodded, "Denali, sit with Brian. Rosé, with Gigi. Blair, with Brianna." I grabbed Jujubee by the wrist, the pressure making her squeak. This wasn't happening. This wasn't happening. Blair was not rolling her eyes as she made her way to the back towards me. This was not fucking happening. As instructed, Jujubee stood up and let Blair sit down, moving to sit somewhere else. I was alone with the one person I tried my hardest to avoid. She slouched down in her chair, arms folded like she was already over it. I wanted so badly to ask if she was OK. But I couldn't bring myself to. And as the lights turned off and the sex-ed lady pressed play on the video player, I wished I had said something. As the way too enthusiastic narrator explained step by step the act of sexual intercourse, I tried hiding the blush on my face with my hair. I tried so hard to focus on what I was being taught. The truth was, I was still a virgin, as were many of the others in the room, I'm sure. But unlike them, I had no idea how sex worked. It wasn't something I ever gave time to think about. I felt a tapping on my hand. My body tensed as I glanced to the side. Blair was looking at the screen, then at me, then her fingers brushed against my hand. I stared back, unsure of what was happening but also knowing full well what she was doing. She leaned closer and pressed her lips on mine. … OK, that's not what happened. Life wasn't a movie. This was the beginning of the fantasies. Was I ashamed because I was thinking about Blair like that? Or was I ashamed that I enjoyed thinking of Blair like that? "This is ridiculous," Blair whispered. Was I supposed to say something back? "What do you mean?" I

whispered back. "Do they actually think we're that dumb? We all know how sex works. We don't need this stupid class." Blair rolled her eyes. I almost told her that I belonged to the small percentage that didn't know. But I stopped myself. I couldn't bear her knowing that information. Instead, I went with the awkward, "haha. Yeaaahhhh…" For the rest of the film, we sat in silence. Still trying to focus on the screen. Not the absolute stunner sitting next to me. And as if by magic, the video ended. I wanted to say I was relieved, but I couldn't lie; what I learned from the film left me nauseous. He puts his hoo-ha in her what, now?? "Well, that was really cool and hip, right?" The educator enthused. I cringed internally. No woman wearing a crucifix necklace and ankle-length skirt has the right to use words like 'cool' and 'hip'. "I know it's probably all so confusing. So that's why I'm here to answer any of your questions, dudes and dudettes." Already, one of the boys put a hand up. "Go ahead, homie." "What about the other hole?" He said with a straight face before his friends started laughing. He laughed back as he fired one of them. "You know. The back door?" Ms Hall shot him the 'look'. He was toast. The sex educator fixed her hair quite uncomfortable, "Well, there's a reason that is an out hole, young man. I warn all of you, do not go down that road. You will get aids and die. Now, does anybody else have a question?" The educator rambled, fixing her hair awkwardly. I heard the rustling of clothes beside me, and glancing around, Blair had her hand straight up in the air. "Yes, sweetheart?" Sex Ed lady pointed to her. "OK, so this is interesting and all, but I was just wondering, what about non-heterosexual sex?" Her brows knit for a moment. I looked around at her now. The breath caught in my throat. "I'm sorry?" Sex Ed lady asked. "You know. Man on man. Girl on girl. What about all of that?" Blair raised a brow. "I mean, you gotta know there's more than just heterosexual people out there. Maybe some even in this room right now." "Blair." Ms Hall began. "Because, if you disagree, then that's ridiculous. Oh, and if you think aids is some kind of death sentence, then you seriously need to educate yourself." Sex ed lady looked appalled, her Christian beliefs quite clearly threatened. "That's it. Get out." Ms Hall stood up. Blair huffed, pushing her seat back, lifted her bag and left the room, Ms Hall following behind. "OK. So, any other questions? Reasonable questions only, please." Jujubee was looking over her shoulder at me now, sharing the same expression I did. Thank God for lunch next period. Jujubee and I were hiding at the back of the school, in an alley between the building itself and the old workshops. The perfect hiding place for a smoke and to freak the fuck out about specific events. "Juju, she knows. She knows I'm a lesbian. She knows I like her." I paced. "I'm moving. That's it." I stopped. "But why would she speak up for me of all people? It doesn't make sense." My eyes widened. "Unless she's also a lesbian. I mean, that makes sense, right?" Jujubee had been sitting on the wall, patiently listening to my manic ramblings. The first few minutes, she was just as astounded. But the more I theorised, rambling on and on, she was over it. "I highly doubt that considering the boyfriend." "Then she must know. Why else would she say it? I highly doubt there are other gays in that class. Speaking of which, I had no idea lesbians could have sex like; how does that work. I'm gonna look into that somehow. But getting back to the point, if she did know, why would she speak out for me of all people?" My ramblings were non-stop. I tried my best to avoid Blair for the rest of the day, not that I could, considering we were both in the same last period. Blair's outburst was the talk of the school. I wasn't sure if it was a positive response or not. The only thing I did know was Trevor was pissed. "Brie, look." Jujubee tapped me. I turned from my locker and looked where everyone else seemed to be

looking. Just down the corridor, Trevor was standing over Blair, their conversation clearly heated. People were shamelessly moving closer, Jujubee following in their path. "Juju, don't," I whispered. But she didn't listen. I went after her as if it would stop her. "Trevor, this isn't that big of a deal," Blair said. "Not a big deal? Blair, do you know what the guys are saying? They think you're gonna dump me for a girl. Do you know how humiliating that is?" Trevor held a hand to his chest "And what if I did?" Blair challenged. The few people standing around cooed with excitement. "Oh, please. Don't get all cocky now that you have an audience." Trevor pointed. But Blair took a step closer to him. "What, 'cause you know you're the one who looks like an idiot? Maybe if you weren't so insecure, you'd know I would never do that to you." "Don't call me an idiot." Trevor lowered his tone, choosing purposely to ignore her reassurance. "Fine. But don't criticise me for a valid question I asked in a class you weren't even a part of. It's none of your business, no one's business for that matter." Blair bit back. "I can do what I want, Blair." "OK. Whatever." Blair brushed past him. Trevor quickly spun around, grabbing her arm. "No, we're not done having this conversation." My stomach twisted. "Let go of my arm, Trevor." Blair tugged, her voice cracking. Trevor did as was told now that the air was thick with tension, "We are not done talking," he stressed. Blair took a step back, "Yeah, we are, actually," and she turned to walk away. "If you walk away right now, we're finished." Trevor threatened. It was as if time was at a standstill, waiting for her reaction. But at the same time, it felt as though time was counting down. Like we were in a competition show. The contestant has to decide before time runs out, while the audience yells, 'DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!' No one was shouting, but you could feel everyone's excitement. Blair's lip curled upwards. "OK. Fine by me." And, finally, she walked off. The people were cooing with excitement again. "Shut up!" Trevor shouted. I grabbed Jujubee by the shoulder and ushered her back. Trevor kicked his locker, the thud echoing through the halls. That was the last straw. Knowing Trevor, he'd take his anger out on us. It was time to flee the scene. It was all Jujubee wanted to talk about for the rest of the day. Now I knew how she felt during my smoke break. But I couldn't blame her. The scene played in my head over and over again, leading to so many questions. Was there more to this breakup? Did he grab Blair like that all the time? What would happen now? Would she find a new guy? A girl, maybe? I came to the conclusion that Blair and Trevor's breakup was neither good nor bad. Bad because, as I said before, now he had more pent up anger from the humiliation of being so publicly dumped. Therefore, Jujubee and I would most likely be subject to more harassment. Good, because maybe Blair did like girls. Maybe there was still some little chance for us to be together. But if we were going to be together, there was one issue; I still had no fucking idea how lesbian sex worked. Cut to later that night, I'm in my room, sitting in front of my computer. I needed to distract myself from my thoughts of the breakup. While the scratchy dial-up tones emitted the machine, I psyched myself up. Even though I knew sex was normal to learn about at that age, it was still daunting. With shaky hands, I searched 'lesbian sex'. And fuck was it a mistake. What I wanted was educational articles, guides, etc. And what I got was porn. I watched all but a few minutes, all the painfully bad acting scenes that took place before the main event. Upon hearing the first moan, I clicked out as fast as I could. Looking behind me, Piggie was just playing with a stuffed animal on my bed. "You saw that, right?" He looked at me with perked ears. I still felt judged, so I opened my bedroom door and let him out. I needed to be exact. 'How do lesbians have sex?' And Brianna Caldwell was never the

same. My mind was opened that night. This was no mistake. This was a surprise. I couldn't look away from the computer screen, no matter how slow the Internet connection was. All of this information was all too much but not enough at the same time. And it made me feel less nauseated than I felt after watching that stupid video in class. And I built up the courage to go back to that porn site. And I watched every damn second. Then I watched another one. And another. And just one more 'cause why the fuck not? My bedroom door opened. "Brianna, I'm ordering - -" "Get out," I shouted, closing the site down like my life depended on it. But she stood there for a few seconds, eyes wide and hand still on the door frame. "Honey, are you - -" "Mom, oh my god. Can you just - -" I couldn't even form a proper sentence. She gave an apologetic look and closed the door. But she remained on the other side. "I just wanted you to know that I'm ordering pizza for Grandpa and me. Do you want some?" My forehead was in my hand now. "Yes." "What kind?" "Just…" I wanted to shout, "Pepperoni." And with that, she left. But that wasn't the end of it. When the food arrived, I waited a few minutes before going downstairs to grab a few slices. Grandpa was in the living room watching an old rerun of The A-Team. But she was there, in the kitchen, as if she was waiting for me. "Honey, look. I know you're getting to that age where you're curious about certain things and - -" "Mom, no. Please, don't do this." I whined. "I know. I know. I just wanted to let you know that this is natural, and…" she continued to deliver the same talk we all got in class. My eyes were wide, face red with humiliation. -_-_-_- 2020 I picked up a slice of pepperoni pizza, instantly reminded of the traumatic event. OK, maybe that was too strong of a word to use. But of course, you are going to dread the thought of that time your parent talked to you about sex. I walked into the living room, pizza slice in hand, trying not to dwell on the memory. "So, Brianna. Any update on the love life?" Tamisha asked. I loved that bitch; being one of Mom's closest friends, she was present for most of my life. But she always had a tendency to ask questions I wasn't up for answering. I took a bite from my pizza and answered with a full mouth, "dry." "Girl, you're almost 40." She continued. I was ready to challenge her because I was actually just 33 when Mom took her turn to speak. "Yeah, get yourself a man and make me a Grandma already." She wasn't serious. She knew I hated these types of talks, but that didn't stop her from encouraging the others. The funny thing about the time she caught me watching porn, she never clocked it was girl on girl. Of all the years I've been on this planet, I hadn't given her a clue that I was a lesbian. Would I ever tell her? I didn't see the point. From previous failed relationships and being too busy with my job, I wouldn't end up with someone anyway. But of course, I'd make an exception for a certain someone. Monét poured the first round of shots. I already knew I'd hate myself the next day. I wasn't drunk already. Just sort of buzzed. But that changed within an hour. I was hammered. Mom, Monét and all her friends were singing all the old songs in the living room. I was out in the kitchen, trying to drink 8 glasses of water. I only managed 3. Piggie ran in and put his paws up on my knee. "There he is. My baby. My fucking son." I slid down to the ground and let him sit in my lap. "How is your night going?" Just great, Brianna! Anyway, how about that Blair girl, huh? Piggie's non-existent voice said. "Oh yeah," my eyes narrowed. I unlocked my phone and opened up Facebook. And I bravely searched up her name. I say bravely because it does take some balls to go and stalk your crushes social media accounts. All it took to fuck everything up was the slip of a finger, and before you know it, you've liked a post or sent a friend request. "Let's do some digging, Piggie." I cuddled him. Immediately, she was the top result, with Jujubee

being the only mutual friend. "Yeah, girl. Infiltration." I commented as I clicked into her profile. And then her profile picture. "Holy shit." She hadn't aged. She still looked as young and radiant as she did back in high school. "What do you think, Piggie?" I showed him the screen. He glanced at it before tucking his head under his arms. The enthusiasm. I rolled my eyes. I looked at her info. 'Single'. Promising. Scrolling down to her timeline, I noticed she didn't post a lot. Fair enough. Facebook was becoming a dead site in recent years. There were just your average Facebook posts, sharing giveaway posts, a post from an old lady saying, 'Blair, this is Granny. Could you go to Walmart and get me some applesauce? Love granny xx', a shared post from a guy called George Miller. And my finger stopped scrolling upon seeing Blair holding a baby. "Oh God, we've encountered our first obstacle, Piggie," I whined. I clicked into the comments. That George Miller guy commented, 'congrats, Blair!' She replied, 'thank you, but she's my cousin's lol'. "Thank you, Jesus." I put my phone down for a moment to put my hand up to the good lord. I scrolled some more, seeing many inspirational quotes, a link to Adore You by Harry Styles. And a picture of her. With that George Miller guy. With his arms around her. Pressing a kiss to her temple. I could feel my heart sink the more I studied it. Yeah, I knew Blair and I were never meant to be anyway. But it was still upsetting. Relax. They could be friends. Yeah, that's right. Friends hold each other and act all affectionate, right?? I cuddle with Jujubee sometimes. That doesn't mean anything. Right? I needed evidence, just anything, to make it not true. I scrolled some more. There was a video, she was sitting on her sofa, with a girl playing the guitar sitting on the other end. "I've been running races on empty, Pour it up 'cause my cup so empty. Gotta make time for the real me. I've been running, I've been running on empty." And my nerves were settled again. I had only heard Blair sing a few times. She and her friends would pretend they were famous singers in early elementary years, and she'd always be the best. Then another time was in high school, at the winter talent show. I specifically remember it being A moment like this by Kelly Clarkson. It was unreal. 'Jujubee 💋💅🏽 is typing…' I clicked into Snapchat before she even had a chance to type the whole message. "Do you remember Jujubee?" I asked Piggie. Again, he was silent. 'I hope you're having fun, babe ❤ lv u'. "Thanks," was all I could manage to type. A shadow cast over me. I looked up to see Monét join me on the ground. "Hey, girl." She greeted me. "Hi, Aunt Monét." I smiled. Piggie hopped off my lap and onto hers. "Aunt Monét? Honey, you haven't called me that since middle school." She smiled. I returned the smile, only mine probably looking goofy. "I'm just wasted." "I noticed. No more shots for you anyway." She noted, taking a drink from her own bottle. "Anyway, how's the project?" "We got fucking Ed Sheeran involved." I then cursed myself internally for bringing it up. "I heard. Your Mom was telling me. Ugh, girl, why him? Why not someone like…" she paused to think, "like Beyonce. Or Lady Gaga." "OK, man-hater." I quipped, reaching over to pet Piggie. "Not true. Not all men are bad." Monét pointed out. "Speaking of which, when are you getting yourself one?" I could have given her the usual 'I don't have time for men's talk. But the alcohol said no. "Monét, I like girls." And I felt no shame in saying it. A moment of silence fell between us before she asked, "for real?" "Yeah." I nodded. "Does anyone else know?" "Yeah. Juju. And Piggie probably." I replied, leaving one more name out for the sole purpose I didn't want to get into that. "And Mom?" "Nope." She nodded. "I guess this is one of these aunty-niece confidentiality things?" "Uh-huh." I smiled. Bless Aunt Monét. "Well, no matter who you live, we still love you." She laughed for a moment before taking another drink. I knew

she was right. Maybe coming out to Mom wasn't such a bad idea. "You know what, Brianna?" She paused, "Grandpa would be so proud of you, right?" My smile slowly began to drop. Fuck, the touchy subject. "Oh, I...thanks." I thought the change in my mood was hard to miss, but Monét clearly had. "You and I ain't ever talked about him since...you know." "OK," I said quietly, feeling like my chest was a fist, beginning to clench tighter and tighter. "And sometimes, it's just good to look back on - -" "I gotta go." I quickly stood up, feeling the dark fog already come over me. I rushed from the room, my aunty calling my name and apologising. I avoided going into the living room, rushing up the stairs and racing for the bathroom. As soon as the door was locked, I let myself crumble, my face hidden beneath shaking hands, a cry clogged in my throat just begging to belt out. Mom would definitely hear it. I wasn't going to ruin her day. Absolutely not. Tags: rpdr fanfiction // s10 // as5 // miz cracker // jujubee // blair st clair // blair x cracker // denali foxx // rose // fluff // coming of age // hurt/comfort // lesbian au // highschool au // grinder // tw grief // tw homophobia [Cover image here] AN: Hey, guys! I hope yall are enjoying this fic so far! Throw me a like please if you do. TW for this chapter: Grief // Homophobia [read more] 2003 High School. The bane of my existence. Just as I thought elementary and middle school were terrible, High School really was something else. From my childhood therapy sessions, I learned to conceal my anger, avoid freakouts, and channel my emotions into other things. It was good for me, yeah. But it also made me a more reserved person. Things still made me angry, the other kids at school being a primary key to that. But I never defended myself. Ever. Of course, Jujubee always had my back. Only in later years did I learn to appreciate the times she'd yell at the other kids, telling them to fuck off and whatnot. But back then, I wished she hadn't. It only drew more negative attention. All I wanted was to get through those tough years. I would come home a lot, look at pictures of myself as a child. And I'd be so mad because only then did I see that I wasn't an ugly kid. I was adorable. But, God clearly had favourites 'cause puberty did not do me any favours. If only I had grown up in a more modern time when no one gave a shit about looks. When people were outspoken about the cruelty that came with shaming someone for their looks. When people were more aware of the psychological damage that could do. Again, God had favourites. From years of my eyesight getting worse and needing a new pair of glasses every time I went to the eye doctor, I had thick-rimmed frames that made me look straight out of the 70s. And the lenses made my eyes look huge. I looked like Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys. My hair was bigger but full of split ends due to lack of giving a shit about it. I begged Mom to let me bleach it blonde. She always straight up refused. I had braces for a whole year which, yeah, many people had braces, but one time while answering a question in class, I drooled. And no one let me hear the end of it. And makeup wasn't something I really fucked with. I tried it once, safe and sound in my own bedroom, and it looked woeful. Instead of working to get better, I accepted defeat in that I would always be ugly. "I'm serious, girl. The foundation was so bad. And it was too dark." I ranted to Jujubee as we headed to the bus stop. I was trying to smoke my cigarette as fast as I could before getting there. Mom never knew, and what she didn't know couldn't kill her. Of course, I didn't just go into the store and buy them myself. Instead, I took one a day from my Grandpa's supply. "Girl, you gotta test it first." She pointed out, adjusting her bag straps. "Juju, I got the lightest colour they had. I don't fucking get it. Every other girl in the school uses it. Maybelline shouldn't sell this shit." "You just need to find a different brand." She grabbed my shoulder and pulled me

closer, "OK, don't tell my Mom, but I tried some of her MAC shit the other day, and my skin looked fucking flawless." She let me go, took my cigarette from me, taking a toke herself. "Well, how am I supposed to get my hands on that?" I took the cig back. "I don't see any MAC stores around here." "Oh, yeah? Well, you know what your Other World self would do?" Jujubee's brow raised, a sweet grin appearing on her mischievous face. "She would say fuck school, hop on the next bus to Cleveland and go straight to the MAC store." Blowing out some smoke, I looked at her, "Well, Other World you wouldn't be encouraging that sort of behaviour." "No, she wouldn't 'cause she'd be the first on the bus." Jujubee countered. "And she'd start the sing-song." "Yeah, well other world me would out-sing you 'cause she's a star. She's a fucking diva, bitch. Mariah Carey has nothing on her." We were too caught up in our fantasy world; we almost missed the vehicle driving past us. Only when we saw the cackling faces of the boys at the back of the bus did realisation take over. We were going to miss the bus. "Fuck." I uttered, watching the guys still flipping us off as they moved further and further away. To make matters worse, a car pulled up beside us. And of fucking course, it was Trevor Preston, the Captain of the football team. His two sidekicks were in the back seat, Logan and Noah. "Aw, look, guys. The geeks just missed the bus." Trevor fake whined. In these situations, I just shut down. I thought it was for the best at the time, but fuck, if I could go back and punch that guy. "You know what? Why don't you mind your own fucking business, Trevor?" Jujubee squinted her eyes at him. “Wow, little fiesty, Juju.” He continued, "How about this? We all say sorry, and we can both ride with us to school." 'Hell fucking no.' I thought. "Oh yeah? And what's the catch?" Jujubee raised a brow. "You let me feel your tits," Trevor smirked, his two cronies snickered. "Ah, there it is. I thought that was what your pea-sized brain would come up with." Jujubee nodded her head. "So, hey, Brianna," Trevor shifted his attention, "You're awfully quiet. Don't I at least get a hello?" I was still frozen, feeling my anxiety brewing within. "Dude, don't be so sensitive. You know, if she opens her mouth, she'll just drool all over herself." Logan added, the three axe wounds beginning to snicker again. I felt like I should have at least opened my mouth to prove them wrong, or maybe spit on Trevor's car. But still, I just stood there. "Trevor, if you don't fuck off right now, I'm gonna key your car." Jujubee threatened. "Juju." I tried to stop her. "Wouldn't even have the chance, sweetheart. Either of you bitches come near my car; you'll never walk the halls again." How gentleman-like, threatening two girls. Funny how our safety was the price to pay for a car. Oh, men. "Keep that in mind," Trevor concluded before driving away with dumb and dumber. "You didn't have to do that." I looked at Jujubee. "I'm sorry they're such assholes." She replied, taking my hand in hers. I shook it off, however. "No, I mean, I wish you wouldn't do that." Jujubee crossed her brows, "what? So I'm supposed to sit there and just take it? No fucking way." "I know. But," I paused, "they kinda scare me. You know?" "Brie, there's nothing more pathetic than a man sweating over the safety of his ride." She retook my hand, "Don't be afraid of a cunt like him." "I mean, I can try not to. But I can't make any promises." I shrugged. "Anyway, what's the plan? How are we supposed to get there on time?" Jujubee was silent for a moment before replying with, "my Mom?" Her Mom did end up giving us a ride, much to my dismay. I would have preferred to take the day off. Or better yet, to just fucking drop out altogether. But Jujubee was always there to reassure me - I adored that bitch. I would have fucking taken a bullet for her. I would like to say that it wasn't just Jujubee and me, that we had a group of more friends. But these guys, I never really counted them as

friends. A year prior, we both decided to try and improve our social lives by joining a club. The only one that would accept us was the chess club. Every other member was a guy, and they were nerds. Not that Jujubee and I minded. However, the problem was that they only let us in because...well, do I even need to explain? "So, Brianna," Jimmy decided to approach me at the end of one session, licking his hand and sweeping his hair from his face. "Because I beat you twice today, what do I get?" "...Excuse me?" "My prize. What do I get??" He put an arm around my shoulders. I was puzzled, "Uh, you can have my chicken nuggets at lunch." His grin was beginning to disappear. "Oh, I was thinking of something else. A kiss, maybe?" I felt bad for doing it, but my fight or flight response told me to just run from the room. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but these guys were just on another level of thirst. And it wasn't just me who they flirted with. Jujubee had informed me of a time Arnold convinced her to make out with him. She was all for it until she realised how awful of a kisser he was. And as the boys became more desperate, we decided that we were better off alone. Again, I was so grateful for Jujubee. I was surprised she stuck around, considering she had seen me at my worst when we were still so young. How the fuck had she not developed issues of her own? Jujubee was the number one reason I even found the strength to just get up in the morning, drag my ass to school, and do my work - Well, aside from wanting to get good grades so I could go to a good college. The second reason? Blair. Unlike me, she was thriving. Our lives were totally cliche - me being the kid who grew up to be the nerd who only speaks when it's to answer a question. And Blair, growing up to be the head cheerleader. And I was still very much in love with her. What a fucking cliche. I avoided Blair at all costs for several reasons;

differing social circles (in my case, lack of),

her boyfriend, who was the Captain of the soccer team and wasn't shy about giving me and Jujubee grief,

her friends,

and, of course, my massive crush on her.

#rpdr fanfiction #s10 #as5 #miz cracker #jujubee #blair st clair #blair x cracker #denali foxx #rosé #fluff #coming of age #hurt/comfort #lesbian au #high school au #angst #gimme love #grinder #tw grief #tw homophobia

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coffeeandcalligraphy · 4 years

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Witness State & Coup de Grâce | Feeding Habits Update #3

Hey People of Earth!

Before we get into this update, TRIGGER WARNING that this chapter discusses attempted suicide, mental health issues, animal cruelty, toxic relationships, and some nods to starvation, so if these are topics you’re sensitive about, I would skip out on this update!

This chapter was a slight nightmare to draft as it went through many, many iterations due to a real struggle to attain the desired emotional arc, and also because of a few logistical problems. In total, it’s about two and a half months of work as it combines some scenes from the old chapter two while also patching areas I cut with new content. Despite the difficulties, I am so happy I pushed through because the final product is quite strong. Here’s a scene breakdown:

Scene A:

We start at the “beautiful place” AKA the cove Lonan and Eliza frequently visit. The last time we’ve seen Lonan was at the end of chapter two, when he had his mild “public freakout moment” on the steps of a cathedral.

On the beach, he rests on the shoreline while reflecting on all the things he’s been tormented by since chapter two (wicked children, fathers, parenthood etc).

He sees an illusion of his father who is obviously not there (he’s very dead!) which propels him to converse about him with Eliza (remembering that Eliza and Lonan’s father were once romantically involved).

This conversation goes south as Lonan is able to unpiece some of Eliza’s mistruths until Lonan finally admits he wants to see his father again, insisting he’s still “alive” through the darkroom abandoned in Oregon him and Harrison failed to destroy in ch. 1 of Moth Work.

Scene B:

Lonan watches a moth through the window (that moth motif tho). Here he recounts what occurred at the hospital in ch. 2--the mother and her three kids taking him there, and then eventually being whisked away by Eliza.

Lonan heads to the kitchen to drink an acetaminophen but quickly realizes he’s not alone in the main apartment. His father sits on the couch looking over photo albums, each leaf holding the same photo: the postcard of Eliza that Harrison initially finds in chapter one of Moth Work. This vision obviously does not exist and is prompted by sleep deprivation but he doesn't know that lol.

Seeing this photo and his father prompt him to believe that he can only get away from this feeling of being haunted without Eliza in his life and further bad decisions ensue which I won’t get into!

I explained the meaning of the title HERE.

Excerpts:

Here’s the opening bit which is the most recent addition to the chapter:

The water is never murky, but today it doesn’t sparkle. Like it’s taken a low dose of cyan, it foams pale against the shore, an offering that wets the tips of Lonan’s shoes. He sits under the cove with one hand pressed into the current, each singular wave like a finger tottering over his veins. Today, their beautiful place is only an arched wall of stones and roily ocean.

Eliza is sunbathing. She lies on her back in the centre of the cove, where its mouth opens to a ceiling of sun. On the drive from the hospital, they both remained silent, Eliza’s hands taut like leather around the steering wheel, and Lonan’s head soldered to the cool window. Even when she pulled into the lot of a diner, named after a vague Canadian city or perennial flower, she said nothing, exiting the car to return to it with two crayon-coloured slushies, his red, hers orange. By the time she pulled up to the beach, her drink was half empty, his fully melted, urging against the brim of the cup. He followed her when she exited the car, parked against a row of pebbles, and placed his hand palm-first against the water the moment she lay against the sand and closed her eyes. Now, water puckers over the shoreline and between each of his fingers, a sort of absent massage. The water is a dull, vitamin-like blue. Warmer than he’s expected for the middle of February, pleasantly pruning his fingertips.

This is a direct continuation of that:

The sun has started to set. It flares against the horizon, its orange singeing the water’s blue. Like in front of the church, it fills him, its heat a comfortable grip around his throat. Though it should remind him to keep awake, its warmth lulls him closer to the sand until he rests his head just where the water laps. He knows it says nothing. He knows he has not slept in days. But to him, its rays nurse his skin like the loop of a nursery rhyme, and when he is parallel to the sky, he closes his eyes and welcomes the sun like it’s an infection. As colours pulse underneath his eyelids, water soaks the crown of his head, and it truly is like being buried at sea, just him, the sun, and the water at his perimeter.

The next chapter in this update is chapter four, aka Coup de Grace. This chapter was an absolute joy to write after struggling to get a handle on chapters two and three, and I’d consider writing this chapter to be, by far, the best writing sessions of my life. In this chapter I feel I really figured out the “crux” of Lonan’s character/his darkest secret, and that’s essentially that he believes all children are the wicked stems of adults, a belief he actually doesn't want to have, and actively combats until he sort of becomes absorbed by it. I learned a lot about my boy in this chapter and learning such important details about a character I’ve been writing for five years feels like a gift!

This chapter plays with form/the timeline a bit because we jump around on the timeline, almost like a movie that begins at the end. This was difficult to do in fiction, but I think I pulled it off, and am really happy with the chapter. Bear with me tho as this breakdown may be confusing:

Scene A:

We start with Lonan rapidly making his way to his father’s darkroom which sits in the middle of a forest. He’s brought supplies with him to destroy it.

The first line of this chapter mimics the first line of Moth Work, which you’ll see below.

Scene B:

We jump back in the fictive past to the morning that would’ve occurred right after the end of chapter three. Lonan goes about his morning routine but is disrupted by a loud thud from outside. Anya, the woman he’s befriended from chapter two, has jumped from the roof of the apartment complex. This attempt is unsuccessful.

His first reaction is to run to Anya’s apartment to see if her son, Joey, is okay.

Scene C:

Less of a scene and more of an internal monologue of Lonan reflecting on Anya’s attempted suicide, and that he feels in some ways, she’s administered her own “death blow”.

Scene D:

Eliza takes Lonan to his father’s cabin to “get him away” from what’s happening at the apartment since he’s really taking the news badly.

Eliza tries to get Lonan to eat something because he hasn’t eaten much since Anya’s news, and they have a conversation about Eliza’s motives in volunteering Lonan to help Anya in the first place.

Scene E:

A flashback where 14-year-old Lonan and his father are at the cabin, about to kill a fish using the ikejime method. His father has informed him the fish is dead, but Lonan knows this is very much a lie.

Scene F:

The fictive present, where Lonan lies on a couch inside the cabin, Eliza tending to a fire. He has a bad feeling (he’s right about that lol)

Scene A2:

We continue the events from scene A as Lonan enters the darkroom, only to find out it’s been cleared out save for three pictures hanging that tell a story and reveals a lot of Eliza’s secrets.

All you need to know about these photos is that it makes their romance feel somewhat like a lie lol.

Eliza finds him at the darkroom despite telling him not to go alone, and Lonan tries to process the new info/secrets revealed.

Scene G:

In the fictive present, Eliza cuts off Lonan’s hair and together they burn each weft. They discuss a few things (his father, the women he’s befriended, future children, mating habits of the praying mantis)

Scene E2:

Back to the flashback where Lonan and his father have killed, cleaned, and eaten the fish. They rinse their hands off in the lake before his father knocks them both into the water.

Excerpts:

This is the opening, ft. the mirroring first line which makes me a lil too giddy:

The darkroom isn’t haunted, but a dead man owns it—and he knows exactly where to find him. Through the woods, Lonan brushes past bushes of gooseberries and wild rhubarb, a gas can sloshing rhythmically in his hands. In his teeth, he holds his flashlight so its beam brightens the pathway. It is not yet dawn.

This is a description of the darkroom that leads to the end of the scene:

He shouldn’t know where he’s going. The forest is so dense and unanimous, a duplication of itself, nothing more than repetitions of the same tree, same flower, same stream. But he doesn’t need to see to know where his feet take him—he doesn’t even need the flashlight. He’s memorized the direction to the darkroom like the pattern of veins on his own arm.

He is not surprised to see it still stands. As if protected from rain, thunderstorms, the fallen trees that crisscross at the walkway; it’s always been a divine place. The air is damp, and particles of mist cling to his throat.

He sets the gas can in front of the steel panelling that makes the door with urgency. He does not need to rush but cannot take his time.

Wildflowers burst from in between the cracks of concrete the shed sits on and he knows each species like they’ve been bred in his blood. Wax flowers, thistles, clusters of asters he’d sometimes gather as a boy and leave as offerings in the heart of the forest’s most prominent clearings, like an offering, or a ransom.

Lonan kneels once the first thread of sunlight leaks between the whisper of trees. He is familiar with this forest, the cabin not too far away, the messages the water speaks to him when he sits at its edge most nights, why the darkroom was his father’s favourite place and why it always will be. So when sunlight hits his eyes, he presses his fingertips against his lips, and looks to the sky for mercy.

Lonan watching his fave TV show that leads into Anya’s jump:

He turned the television onto its usual program while on his last three mandarin segments and looked on as a herd of caribou dotted a waterway. They moved like the current, pattering along the prairie, worriless. He should have heard the part where a wolf caught up to the herd, the same wolf that would later go on to single out a young fawn and silence it with two teeth in its throat like bullet wounds. He should have seen the part where the prey was consumed, its flesh a desperate shade of red. But the thud distracted him. Maybe not even a thud, more like a crash. A sound he felt in his temples, a ringing in his ear, like a chickadee. Lonan set the skin of the mandarin onto the coffee table and stood slowly. It’s his body that moved him, no force of the mind, toward the balcony. In one movement, he unlocked and shoved open the glass sliding door, rucking it forward with his body weight when it stuck. On his lip, he tasted citrus and salt, a mixture of fruit and sweat.

He heard death before he saw it. The way each identical sliding door of the apartment units around him shook open, just like his. What a woman on the sidewalk declared, her tone so shrill, he couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified, something like, “I thought she was a bird—I thought she was a gift from heaven.” The garbled sound of an infant, confused by the sound concrete makes when a human batters it.

We get Lonan’s first response and some Joey and *that stunning motif tho*:

Lonan did not deescalate the stairs to the ground floor to join the growing crowd. He did not call an ambulance or rush to perform CPR. He ran upward, scaling flights of stairs as if airborne, with little effort. Once he reached her unit, it was the tin of madeleines he noticed first, sitting unopened, untouched, dare he thought, neglected on her welcome mat. It’s this that lulled him, freezing him in place for a moment. He recollected nothing of bringing the madeleines to her the evening previous, of leaving them neatly tucked against her straw welcome mat. Innocently idle there, his gift unrecognized.

Joey sat on the couch. The television was on, projecting technicolor polygons onto the boy’s face. Lonan did not register what it was he watched, which animated shapes pounced and danced on screen. Joey did not cry at first. He sat, staring wondrously at the screen like it was a trap door to a different dimension. The socks secured around his miniature feet looked freshly ironed, and his hair smelled like his mother did when Lonan first met her—like coconuts.

The buzzing of onlookers and neighbours sounded like the caribou running. A constant drumming of a snare, a guttural kind of ambience. He thought of Anya the day previous, her desperate excitement to paint over the wall, the way she mixed that orange juice drink, incredulous, experienced. He thought of the sourdough he never picked up, and there on the counter they sat, one torn down the middle like it was ripped bare-handed, the other skewered with a chef’s knife. He thought of Anya’s hospitality, her coy excuses to help them both avoid embarrassment, the way each part of her apartment transformed into gold. He thought of their conversation, Anya’s initial instruction when she left him alone with her son. So when Joey cried, Lonan knew exactly to reach for the remote and tick the volume up until his sobbing quieted, like the last few minutes of a rainstorm, passionately loud, then stunningly silent.

Here we briefly reference 2 Kings 21:6: “And he burned his son as an offering and used fortune-telling and omens and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.”

Anya will never be the mother she once was, in the capacity she longed to be. Joey will grow up without a father and with a mother who cannot mother him in the ways she’d always hoped; he’ll have no one to recreate. That is the real loss—what could have been. Anya burned herself into an offering, administered her own kill shot, provoked her own fate; either life or death, and her fate chose neither.

The following mirrors something Lonan’s sister, Reeve, says in Houses With Teeth about hunger:

The day Anya jumped from her balcony onto the sidewalk below, Eliza took Lonan to his father’s cabin. In a daze, he watched her pack a bag with enough things to tide them over for a month, and in that same daze, they reached the cabin before sunset. That night, Eliza rifled through the cabinets to put together a meal, and her findings assembled as a can of tuna topped with crumbles of saltines—cheap take on a deconstructed pâté.

She served him his dinner on a set of plates he vaguely recognized—terrazzo with a scalloped edge, maybe held a scrambled egg or halved tomato when he was a child. He stared through the French doors, down to the water that padded below. Even when she tried some for herself, putting on her enjoyment in exclamations like “It’s a culinary masterpiece. Refined. Daring. A little spectacular,” she couldn’t convince him to eat. His appetite disappeared when Anya fell from the sky; there would be no hunger as penance.

This is the fish flashback:

Lonan knows the fish is not dead. He is fourteen but not naïve. Sun warms the back of his neck; maggots shimmer over the gummy slick of the water’s surface. Today is what someone would describe as the perfect day. Trees whisper secrets amongst the spines of their leaves. Birds teeter on the neck of birch trees. A butterfly dusts its wings of the shore’s sand and nips at his childish knuckles.

The fish is not dead. This is fact. In his palm, it expands, its gills like the crescent cut of the moon. The fish is not dead. Its mouth kisses the air like it’s a divine thing, each blip of its lips greedy, like the air tastes of gold. The fish is not dead. Its scales grate against Lonan’s palms, shimmering, its prettiness its last defense mechanism. The fish is not dead.

More with this fish memory:

“It’s dead. It does not even know the taste of life. Why save it?”

“I don’t want to save it,” Lonan says. His father’s wedding band digs into his forehead. To an onlooker, it may look like he’s about to dip him forward into the water, not a drowning, but a baptism.

“What do you want to do with it?”

Mourn it, he wants to say. Pity it. Sacrifice it.

The water whistles ahead of them, all the uncaught sunfish gloriously slashing naively in the water. They are unaware of their future demise, and the current demise of their loved ones, bodies all piled into the net as if on display. Lonan’s eyes sting with lake water, a streak of it dripping onto his lip so when his father reaches over him and secures his hand like a marionette around the screwdriver, he tastes salt and doesn’t stop tasting it.

And the end of part A of the fish memory that gets a little gory:

“It dies for us,” his father says, his voice dampened, like the distant blip of the lake. “So we give it mercy in return.”

As the screwdriver’s tip lowers closer to the fish, Lonan licks his top lip and asks, “Why do we need to show it mercy if it’s already dead?”

“Le coup de grâce. A death blow. To end the suffering of the wounded.”

“But it’s already dead.”

“Even the dead still suffer.”

Lonan does not register when the screwdriver impales the fish’s brain. He does not register when his father uses both their hands to slit the fish’s gills with a hunting knife or register the warm spurting of its blood up their knuckles. He stares at the fish’s glasslike eye, and as he and his father gut and scale the fish, puppet and puppeteer, he imagines the way he’ll feel with its head in his mouth.

Here’s a section from the fictive present:

Seven days after Anya jumps off her apartment’s balcony, Lonan lies on a pig’s leather couch his father once towed in from the city, a damp washcloth doused in eucalyptus essential oil pressed to his forehead.

At first, he fears the blinking comes from stars and that the cabin’s roof has been removed. But as he comes to, he smells it, the earthy crack of wood, the wisp of smoke, and he knows the light that pulses is a fire.

Lonan opens his eyes. As he’s thought, he lies on his father’s couch, essenced water dribbling down his temples from the washcloth. Eliza sits hunched on the stone of the fireplace’s ledge, her shoulders ripening under the orange heat. She’s burning something. The scent of scorched film is not unfamiliar to him. Like his mouth, it is dry and acrid, like the lick of a battery.

“You promised,” she says, as if sensing he’s awoken. Lonan does not move, even as the eucalyptus soak drizzles into his eyes.

Eliza no longer wears the parka. She’s stripped to a pearl-coloured camisole, her feet bare and propped flush against the brick. Glossy red lacquer colours her toenails, reflects the light in ovular patterns along its surface.

“A false witness shall be punished, and a liar shall be caught,” she says. “Proverbs.”

Going to leave this tea here casually:

The darkroom was misplaced. This was Lonan’s first thought when he yanked open its steel panel door and entered to reveal its contents. He did not need the glimmer of a flashlight to confirm his instinct. This was not the same darkroom he’d known as a child, or the darkroom he found his sister in, or the darkroom him and Harrison tried to destroy. Everything was slotted away, puzzled back into a configuration so unknown to him, so wrong to him, that the organization felt more like war.

Unlike when he and Harrison had last stepped foot inside of the darkroom, lugging the gas can along with them, not unlike what he did then, the photos that used to string clothespinned in no justifiable order were now taken down. The bricks of photo paper forming a maze around the developing tables, the amber bottles of chemicals—all of it, meticulously put back in places Lonan knew they never had. Under his boots, he did not feel the crunch of glass or slip of forgotten negatives. The darkroom had been swept clean.

Lonan dropped the gas can at the darkroom’s entrance, and removed the flashlight from between his teeth, thumbing it off. He worked his way around the shed like he’d been wounded, staggering, stopping to hold himself upright. Nothing was in its rightful chaos. Expired film lay stacked in a waste bin he’d never seen before. Bad paper cuts had been shredded. The photos he’d been so accustomed to not looking at, all gone, except for three, evenly clipped on the last three lines.

In the distance, an eagle cawed. The stream trilled. Tadpoles cricketed along the embankment.

Lonan approached the remaining photographs like they’d electrocute him. They were displayed one after the other, each on its own line. The first, a picture not unfamiliar to him. Eliza standing in front of a colourful street of vendors. Her loopy signature on the back a jagged indication of where she signed it, most likely wobbling on a train, or in the back of a taxi. He picked it off its clothespin and held it up to a hole in the roof where sun bled through. Nothing had changed from the photo since he’d taken it last year, and he was almost grateful she’d left it fossilized when she took it from his pocket. His gratitude did not last by the time he saw the second photo, so unexpected, he had to glance twice.

His father stood arced slightly behind him, his hands not visible. Lonan knew where they were—one secured around his forehead, the next urging a screwdriver up a stone. Sun scalded the water’s surface, wrinkled it with light. He remembered the song his father whistled as he fried the sunfish on a birch branch, truly less of a song and more of a reminder as he hummed up and down each minor scale, not once stopping to check his work, like he knew better than any instrument.

Lonan plucked the photograph off the line and held it closer. Though he was shaded mostly by his father’s back, he knew they were both in it. He shouldn’t have been surprised when he turned it over to find that same looping signature inked onto the back, smudged, like she’d forgotten to let the ink dry before handling.

It would’ve been easier to think about the second photo’s implications had he not seen the third. He could’ve excused it—a shot taken by a neighbour, though the cabin was remote. A shot that fired itself, the camera discarded on the ground, though it was taken at eye level. A shot signed with familiar initials E.L.K, as if those letters could stand for anything but Eliza Louise Kiang. It would’ve been easier to excuse her presence. To excuse her knowledge of him, to forget she’d ever told him she didn’t know his father had children, that she swore she’d never have been with him had someone informed her. It would’ve been so much easier.

The last photo was not a photo at all, not in the same capacity at least. The ink had gone purplish from the elements but swirled, almost horror-like around the photo’s frame. He could have pretended the white swishes of colour were strands of lace, or the awkward scratch of photo blur. He could’ve pretended to not understand. But there it was. The light funnelling down on the black and white shape so he understood it was not a photograph he looked at, but a child.

I have already shared this line a few times, but it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever written oops!:

When she looked at him, she grinned, and he turned his face to the ceiling where a hole in the roof caved around a branch. The sun’s eye disappeared behind the bullet of the wood, leaving only its outer edges to skirt the sky, a veiling that felt less like an eclipse, and more like evidence of an exit wound.

Obligatory “I’m the grass” shoutout:

“All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field,” he says without once reading what’s actually written on the page. “Isaiah.”

“Isaiah was onto something, don’t you think? Poor grass, poor flowers—they all die in the end, but they have their God. They have their saviour. Everything dying except for God and his word.”

Eliza cuts another clump of hair. The fire welcomes its feed with haste.

“What does this have to do with children?”

“Do you feel you’re the God of these women, Lonan? Are you their saviour?”

Lonan shakes his head. “I’m the grass.”

And to finish:

After they eat the fish, Lonan and his father rinse their hands in the lake. This is respect. This is self-ordinance. This is a holy act.

His father stoops farther into the stream than he does, water nipping his knees. The sun has disappeared beyond the horizon, the sky now coloured periwinkle, silvering his hair. The taste of sunfish coddles Lonan’s tongue, oiled and briny with saltwater. They share a bar of orange glycerin soap, its scent cloying, like a rotting fruit basket. His father peels the bar between his palms, scrubbing until his fingers disappear under suds.

That’s it for this update! Hope y’all enjoyed! :) I’ll be back soon to update on chapter 5!

--Rachel

#writing #amwriting #writeblr #writerblr #writingupdates #fostered #mothwork #feedinghabits

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drunkkenobi · 5 years

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Catt’s Favorite BuzzFeed Unsolved Episodes

This Friday (March 27, 2020) BuzzFeed Unsolved is going to air its 100th episode! I have no idea if they’ll acknowledge it, but exciting all the same. In celebration of it, and because watching two dummies ghost hunt and talk murder is actually a good use of everyone’s time right now, I’m going to list my Top 10 Supernatural and Top 10 True Crime episodes. (But first, subscribe to Watcher)

BFU Supernatural Top 10

10. The Haunted Quarters of the Dauphine Orleans Hotel - Both New Orleans episodes are a hoot and a half, but I give the edge to the Dauphine because of the bedsharing, the spooky footsteps, “I STOLE THEM OFF A WOMAN WHO DIED ON THE TITANIC”, and, of course, two ghost bros chillin’ in a jacuzzi tub six inches apart.

9. The Search for the Mysterious Mothman - While this episode is so enjoyable (the pizza, the ogling of the Mothman statue, the Mothman calls, etc.) on its own, I love it so much for introducing Mothman into the BFU mythos. I think about Ryan saying he’d ride Mothman for life almost every day of my own life.

8. The Hunt for La Llorona - The Weeping Woman - Yes, a sponsored episode made my top 10 and it’s because Curly is a goddamn treasure and brought out so much weird chaotic horniness in Ryan. Also they got some spooky spirit box answers at the cemetery.

7. The Subterranean Terrors of the London Tombs - The best Unsolved episodes are when some spooky stuff actually happens (as it does here, with some unexplained noises and a light turning off), but what freaks Ryan out the most is just a very normal haunted maze attraction. Magnifique.

6. The Mysterious Disappearance of the Roanoke Colony - This one is just so fucking funny. Ryan’s theories getting increasingly bonkers are always a fun staple, but never better than when he gets to drop that “the Roanoke colonists turned into zombies” bomb on Shane who throws Timmy’s ball he’s so mad.

5. The Unbelievable Horrors of the Old City Jail - a newbie, but still worthy of the top 10. Yes, Ryan’s freakout on his solo investigation is what makes this one, but we can’t forget the completely bizarre bellybutton courting and Ryan and Shane’s rap. Nor the way Shane very softly greets Ryan after his freakout.

4. Return to the Horrifying Winchester Mansion - I love the Winchester mansion, it’s a place I’d love to visit someday. (I don’t think it’s all that haunted, I just think it’s neat). The boys return is very fun, especially their overnight stay in separate rooms. Ryan’s running monologue of begging the ghosts to stay away from him (even though he’s there to collect evidence of their existence) is never funnier than here. It also gave us an all-time moment in the Post-Mortem where Ryan admitted that Shane provided him a great deal of comfort.

3. Three Horrifying Cases of Ghosts and Demons - The one that started it all. It remains a favorite (and their most watched) for a reason. The original Winchester ghost hunt and the Island of the Dolls are good enough on their own, but it’s Sallie House that made the show into what we all know and love today. Ryan screaming at a flashlight, Shane laughing at Ryan screaming at a flashlight...that’s it, that’s the show.

2. The Terrors of the Yuma Territorial Prison - “This episode is underrated!!!” she screamed from the rafters. Shane is in a very odd mood in this one, insisting to Ryan that he did hear some strange footsteps (and Ryan doesn’t seem to believe him), he gets into an argument with a possible ghost on the spirit box, “I’m strange and OFF-PUTTING!”, that goofy ass gift shop investigation, and then there’s the bats. It’s a great thrill to see what Shane is like when he’s actually a little freaked out, and it’s, as always, an even greater one to see Ryan reduced to tears.

1. The Demonic Goatman’s Bridge - Is it an obvious #1? Yes. Does that make it any less worthy? No. One of my favorite things about this episode is that Shane’s iconic antagonizing of Goatman happens in the first half of the episode. Then they have to go into the woods and yell about cult stuff and be afraid of real people hanging out in said woods after! The energy started chaotic (”Are you taking off your pants? We’re in public!”) and never stopped from there. An absolute classic and it always, always makes me laugh.

BFU True Crime Top 10

10. The Historic Disappearance of Louis LePrince - I think season 3 of True Crime is really strong, in general. As a true crime fan, it had a lot of cases I had never heard before and I think they’re all pretty interesting, this one included. I also like that it gave Shane a chance to shit on Thomas Edison. He deserved it.

9. The Odd Vanishing of Amelia Earhart - Like Shane, I do like to imagine Amelia crash landing among the crabs. It’s a good mix of a classic mystery we all know a little about and the boys taking it to the extremes.

8. The Enigmatic Death of the Isdal Woman - One of the best directed episodes of Unsolved (great job Sara), I really enjoy all the flourishes this episode has. Plus, it’s a great mystery. Yeah, she was probably a spy, but that’s only one part of the story.

7. The Terrifying Axeman of New Orleans - The boys have a lot of fun with this, especially the rumors that the Axeman was somehow supernatural and able to shrink down to enter doors.

6. The Creepy Murder in Room 1046 - One of those mysteries I had never heard before and I was totally enthralled for this episode because of it. I’ve even heard this on other True Crime programs since then, but Ryan and Shane talking about it is still much more interesting and entertaining to me. This episode did introduce us to the running joke that will not die, Ricky Goldsworth, but it’s helped by the realization that Ryan 100% named his ~evil alter ego after his childhood dog.

5. The Thrilling Gardner Museum Heist - This one holds a special place in my heart because it was the episode that really hooked me on the show. It wasn’t the first I watched (that would be Bobby Mackey’s), but it was the one that interested me enough to keep clicking around on YouTube to keep watching these two cute doofuses. It’s also a very fun mystery since no one dies.

4. The Disturbing Murders at Keddie Cabin - One of the most visually stunning episodes of BFU, the boys trip to the Keddie Cabins is one of the most genuinely unsettling episodes. The rainy day and glances of townspeople watching them poke around the remnants of the cabin where a woman and children were brutally murdered really add to the mood, especially because of the rumors that town and police corruption are why these remain unsolved.

3. The Mysterious Death of the Eight Day Bride - Ah, the polyamorous episode, as I refer to it in my head. It was nice to see them tackle a case that included a possible queer angle and treat that part of it pretty respectfully. It was also nice for Ryan to compare himself to the third wheel of the story when talking about hanging out with Shane and Sara all the time. (this episode also gets a slight boost for having the best Post-Mortem of all time. He would ride Mothman for life, y’all.)

2. The Strange Disappearance of DB Cooper - It’s just hilarious. They have a ball discussing one of the biggest American mysteries of the 20th century, nearly choking on their bourbon and sodas, “SPRING BREAK!!!”, and laughing at the “phantom of the sky”.

1. The Treacherous Treasure Hunt of Forrest Fenn - Ryan Bergara emerging from a Best Western bathroom dressed up as Indiana Jones while Shane stares in stunned silence is the greatest 3 seconds this show has ever produced. I will not be taking critiques at this time.

No, but seriously, this episode is a full-on blast. I love how different it is from anything else they’ve ever done. I love the “over-produced montages”. I love the actual thrill when Ryan sees that square rock. I, obviously, love the Indiana Bergara of it all. I love that they really did do a lot of research into where to look for Fenn’s treasure. I loved their stupid Post-Mortem outfits and renting an expensive car all for a stupid bit because that’s why I love these two dummies. They delight each other so much with their similar bullshit and sense of humor and it’s never more apparent and charming to me than this episode.

#buzzfeed unsolved #ryan bergara #shane madej #buzzfeed unsolved supernatural #buzzfeed unsolved true crime #my lists

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baritonetcc · 4 years

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[August|Confusion]

09:00

Hey guys, it's been a while since a good entry.

So, last night, I came across the new schedule that my school will be using when we start virtually. Unfortunately, the class period that I usually have M's class is at a time that I cannot be there for first semester. They may do something different for the actual order of classes, but I'm not banking on that.

It was quite late when I realized that, and figured I would just write a post about it the next morning (today). Well, then today happened.

As I was getting ready to go exercise, I had a gut feeling that maybe today was a good day to head back home on residential roads, rather than the main road. On my way home, I decided that it would be totally fine if I just walked home on the main road as usual. A few minutes in, someone who looked like a district staff member drove past me and into a coffee shop parking lot. I thought nothing of it. A few minutes passed, and I crossed paths with a teacher I had before. I mean, that was normal; we live in the same town and we both like to walk. A minute after seeing them, I realized that they were wearing semi-normal clothes...and had a backpack. What would they need a backpack for in this tiny town? Everything is easily walking distance and I'd imagine you'd want to pack light if you were racking up miles. Uh oh. They weren't going for a stroll. They were on their way to work.

Literally one block after seeing that teacher, I tried to cross the street and someone didn't stop for me. I looked at the driver...and it was ANOTHER TEACHER.

First of all, I wouldn't even want my closest friends to see me in the state that I was in. Greasy, sweaty, hair barely up, sweatband doing its job, still wearing the shirt (old band shirt) I had on yesterday...overall not a great sight. Instead of turning off, which I literally did not think of until just now, I became deadset on making it home as fast as possible. Gay Walk™️ was on the highest gear.

I was five minutes from home when a white car went by with two women in it. The passenger was a young blonde woman wearing sunglasses. As the car passed, the woman's head was turned towards me. She gave me a huge smile and my heart sank, let me tell you. I had a huge freakout, put my hands on my head, then immediately put them down in case she was still looking because I didn't want her to know I was freaking out. I don't know if it was REALLY her, I'm always paranoid of seeing her out and about so I tend to imagine things. But who else matching that description would look at me and smile like that?! I hate that I still get intensely nervous upon (possibly) seeing her. It's a little funny though.

Moral of the story is: always know of an escape route and I fucking hate car windows.

-Frazzled Bari

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moonlit-imagines · 5 years

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Rhiannon

Steve Harrington x Hopper!reader

warnings:

a/n:

prompt: @depressed-comics: “Steve Harrington x reader were the reader is Hopper's daughter, and she is extremely shy. She really likes Steve, but doesnt know how to talk to him without stumbling over her own words. One day Steve comes to pick Eleven up to take her to Mike's since he has to babysit them. As he waits for El he hears the reader singing Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac, and after the song ended he tells her she has a beautiful voice. But the reader freaks out and locks herself in her room. Once El is ready Steve asked Eleven if he did anything wrong for the reader to hate him, but El tells him she's just shy. Basically the whole time at Mike's Steve can't stop thinking about the reader and the party can see that. They tell him to man up and ask the reader out already before the go insane. Meanwhile Hopper comes home and hears the reader crying, so he asked what's wrong. The reader explains that she embarrassed herself in front of Steve and that he'll never like her, and Hopper tells the reader to stop thinking so negative cause he knows for damn sure Steve likes her too. When Steve drops Eleven off he finally gets the courage to ask her out she says yes, and Hopper is happy to see the reader happy”

You were cleaning up the house a little before your dad got home, you wanted it to be nice for him since he was having some rough days at work. What else is new? Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac was being played on a vinyl record, and you were singing along.

“All your life you’ve never seen,” you sang loudly and elegantly, “a woman taken by the wind, would you stay if she promised you heaven, would you ever win?” You skipped around the house with a bag of trash in hand, taking it to the bin out back. You had totally forgotten that El was getting picked up by Steve Harrington, your latest crush, today to go to the Wheeler residence. While you were singing at the top of your lungs in the kitchen, Steve was admiring your angelic voice. “Taken by, taken by the sky...Dreams unwind, love’s a state of mind.” You capped off the song.

“Wow,” you hear a voice behind you say, you whipped around to see who it was, “you have a beautiful voice.” Steve complimented. Your jaw dropped and you rushed into your room, slamming the door. El walked out of her own room with a bag, curiously staring at your door. “Did I do something wrong?” Steve asked El.

“She’s shy, doesn’t like when people hear her sing. Only me and Hop.” El walked past Steve and out the front door to get to his car. He parked in front of the Wheeler residence and met everyone in the basement, and he did not look like he was in a good mood.

“Jeez, who pissed in your cereal today, Steve?” Dustin remarked. Steve fell back into the couch abd let it consume him.

“I messed up.” Steve mumbled.

“Come again?” Max cocked an eyebrow.

“Y/N, El’s sister? Yeah, so, I like her, but I guessed I embarrassed her by hearing her singing, which she has an awesome voice, but that’s beside the point.” Steve explained to the party.

“Shit, Steve, everyone with half a brain knows she’s shy as hell and easy to startle. What were you thinking?” Dustin argued. Steve threw his hands into the air.

“I was thinking, ‘damn, y/n has an amazing voice, I really like her!’” He shouted.

“She likes you, too.” El sat next to him. “Don’t tell her I told you her secret. Promise.”

“Yeah, I promise.” Steve muttered.

“Just man up and ask her out tonight, alright? Think of what your going to say for a little bit, so you don’t freak her the hell out.” Lucas reasoned. Steve slouched back and tapped his foot while he went over the possibilities for dialogue.

—————

You could hear your dad shut the frony door and drop his coat on a piece of furniture.

“You cleaned? It looks great, y/n!” He called to you in your room. You didn’t reply, and as he got closer to your door, he heard muffled sobbing. He knocked on the door softly. “Are you alright, can I come in?”

“Yeah.” You choked out. Your dad found you curled in a ball, hugging a pillow on your bed. He rushed to your side, shiftin the mattress as he sat down.

“Hey, what’s going on, kid?” He asked you calmly.

“It’s nothing.” You sniffled. “I’m just, you know, me.”

“Seriously, y/n, what’s wrong? Talk to me about it.” He watched you sit up without letting go of the pillow.

“You know that Harrington kid?” You asked and your father returned with a nod. “Well, when he came in today he heard me singing.” Hopper sighed.

“And you didn’t want him to hear that because you like him...” He figured.

“Dad!” You swatted him.

“Hey, I’m just trying to put it together.” Hopper shrugged. You leaned back onto the headboard of your bed.

“Well, yeah, I just got startled and made a bigger fool of myself by running away. Dad, he’s never gonna like me.” You buried your face into your pillow and your dad scooted forward to hug you.

“Hey, don’t worry, you have a beautiful voice. If anything, he had to have loved your singing. Who doesn’t, you’re so talented—” He was cut off by the sound of the door closing. “One second, that must be El.” Hopper left your room and slowly shut the door. There stood Steve Harrington standing in the middle of the room.

“Hey, can I talk to y/n?” Steve asked. Hop nodded and let him into your room. Your eyes widened at the sight of him. “Can we talk?”

“Sure...” You shuffled up in bed, wiping your eyes frantically.

“I’m sorry about earlier, I didn’t mean to upset you,” he grabbed your hand, “truth is, I really like you and was wondering if I could take you to dinner tomorrow night?” Your jaw dropped.

“Oh—well, yeah, that’d be nice.” You we’re trying to surpress the giant freakout you were going to have.

“Great, I’ll see you tomorrow! Goodnight.” He kissed your hand and left the room. “See you later, sir.” He told your dad and left the house. As soon as you heard ths door click shut, you burst out of your room and hugged your dad.

“I got a date!”

#steve harrington x reader #steve harrington imagine #steve harrington #stranger things 3 imagine #stranger things #stranger things x reader #stranger things 2 #stranger things imagine #stranger things 3 x reader #hopper!reader #eleven hopper x reader #eleven hopper imagine #jim hopper x reader #jim hopper imagine

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unexpectedreylo · 7 years

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What’s With Star Wars Fandom Anyway?

Last week I posted this piece on the condescending attitudes of BNFs, bloggers, and professional fanboys toward Reylos and fans of romance in general.

This got me thinking on the long-time sense of discomfort I have had with other Star Wars fans for many, many years. Long before the prequels or Reylo or bizarre petitions against movies. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve also met a lot of terrific people, some of which have been friends for decades. But the level of discourse, especially on social media, has reached a nadir. It’s honestly the worst I’ve ever seen.

Some of it reflects where society is as a whole. Social media was meant to connect people but it’s created tribes and turned friends and families into mortal enemies. Total strangers feel comfortable being cruel to other strangers. People seek validation and dopamine hits from “likes.” Even I’m guilty of this!

Some of it reflects what’s terrible about nerd/geek culture. On the one hand, my entry into the world of fan fiction and zines in the ‘90s was a welcome change from the are-you-cool-enough world of indie/alternative that I was in beforehand. On the other hand there was an element of “yes but are you as much of a fan as I am” that is too prevalent today. As anyone who has read “Misery” knows, fan passion can easily be warped into something destructive, especially when things don’t go the way the fan wants. I used to call fellow fans like that Annie Wilkeses and joke about hoping George Lucas’s car never crashes in front of their houses. (I guess I should say that now about Rian Johnson, Kathleen Kennedy, and J.J. Abrams.) Nerds generally make perfect the enemy of very good, pretty good, or just good. If it’s not a face melting experience it’s the worst thing ever.

Some of it though is because of what Star Wars has been specifically. Star Wars has always had tremendous mainstream success, which means it’s always been open to all kinds of people, on a global level. Yet there’s always been a subset of moviegoers, people like you or me, who are very passionate about it. This gives Star Wars an easy entry to a particular cult within a larger more casual fan base. This cult has all of the problems of other cultish things along with a large variety of people with a large variety of views, beliefs, lifestyles, etc. who are involved in it.

The other thing I’ve come to realize is that many Star Wars fans look to the saga as comfort food they want served their way, not as art. The only logical conclusion I can come to after 41 years of loving Star Wars and 26 years of observing fandom is that what many fans want is safe, easy, predictable, and familiar, not what’s challenging. There’s a reason why the second chapter in every trilogy so far ends up with the lowest box office of the three. It’s always the chapter that says, “You think you know Star Wars? You think you know what’s going to happen next? Guess what? You don’t.” Nothing symbolized this better than the camera panning upward instead of down to an inverted Naboo royal starship at the beginning of AOTC, a ship that then descends into fog on Coruscant. Even the hallowed TESB left people perplexed with its unexpected twists and its cliffhanger ending. Today it’s regarded differently precisely because it took chances, yet so did AOTC and TLJ. I’ll get to why TESB today doesn’t get the same backlash dumped on the latter two films in a minute.

I believe there is a reason why TFA is the way it is and why it seemed that Lucas’s ideas for the ST didn’t seem to manifest much until TLJ. Abrams and company KNEW there was a backlash against TPM was because it didn’t feel familiar enough to Gen-X fans. No, it’s not because of kid Anakin or even Jar Jar. They were excuses, lightning rods for reasons people can’t or don’t want to articulate. TFA had a huge advantage in that it had the OT3 back while TPM had an entirely new cast, Yoda and droids aside. It carefully made sure its setting looked enough like the OT to be comforting to those fans of the old school. Some of the new characters were easy to place in missing slots: Rey was like young Luke, Kylo Ren was like Darth Vader, Snoke was like the Emperor, Man Kanata like Yoda, etc.. A lot of it was lighthearted and funny. And it worked. Not everyone was thrilled with it. I had criticisms of the film at the time. Eventually a slow burn backlash developed, mostly accusing TFA of being unoriginal and making Rey a Mary Sue, but it wasn’t anything on the scale of hysterics that I saw with the prequels and with TLJ.

Why do many Star Wars fans demand “comfort food?” It has to do with the first film and the way it presents a galaxy in black and white, where good and evil are identifiable and its sense of deep familiarity in spite of its setting due to its expert use of archetypes and tropes. I’m not criticizing this at all. It is at the heart of ANH’s brilliance and charm. It was released at time when America really needed to believe in itself again after the chaotic ‘60s and early ‘70s. To a generation of latch key kids and broken homes, it also provided comfort, clarity, certainty, and adults to look up to. Don’t believe me? Why the freakout then over Luke’s portrayal in TLJ? A lot of people my age, myself included, put them up on a pedestal. Naturally a film that provides those things will attract people who seek them out. The Star Wars saga has moved away from those stark differences in the other films but there’s still a clear morality.

As I had previously noted, TESB initially made some people scratch their heads. But it became the cool kid at the table years later. Why is that? Sure some of it was Gen-Xers who had become accustomed to darker entertainment, antiheroes, irony, and cynicism having retro respect for a blockbuster movie that didn't have a happy ending. But I think it’s also because of familiarity. When you watch a movie 75 times it’s not quite so shocking anymore. Instead it becomes that album where you know every song by heart, even every bridge and chord change. It’s part of your DNA. I think this may be a reason, though not the sole reason, why it seems the prequels are gaining more respect. After 13-19 years, they’ve become familiar too. And to many fans, familiar is better than scary and unknown, which is what watching any new Star Wars movie for the first time is like.

This is why TLJ really threw them for a loop. They thought TFA made it clear what was going to happen next: Kylo was going to be even badder, Rey was going to train and find out she’s either a Skywalker or a Kenobi so that justifies her existence, Snoke was going to be revealed as someone really important, Rey was going to hook up with Finn or maybe we’ll get something even more “progressive” with a gay romance, and Luke was going to return as his lovable old self. And none of that happened. Instead of just saying, “Okay, I guess I was off then,” they revolt online as though Lucasfilm is going to listen to a social media mob. They also attack other fans who aren’t on the hate bandwagon along with them.

The problem is there’s little anyone can do about it. The good news is they make up a small portion of the Star Wars moviegoing public and Lucasfilm knows as much as they complain, they will still show up for their fix.

#reylo tlj star wars fandom

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officialstandardhumans · 3 years

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SH52: The Climate Crisis — What's Going On?

How many trees would you have to plant to offset your carbon footprint?

Which countries are environmental leaders? And which are laggards?

In this episode, the humans discuss environmentalism and sustainability. Looking at how humanity is doing globally, how Canada matches up to the rest of the world, and what you can do to help.

Standard Humans is hosted by Aidan Dennehy and Evan.

Shownotes:

Ceilo Farm Bed and Breakfast

This Is Your Brain on Pollution - Freakonomics Podcast Ep. 472

Carbon Neutral Goals by Country

Bhutan

Economic Freedom Index - Bhutan

Suriname

Country CO2 Emissions per Capita

List of countries by population

Economy of Trinidad and Tobago

Economy of Canada

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

Carbon Footprint Calculator

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Evan: I think honestly, in Canada, and in the U.S., because we have so much exposure to nature around us, we take it for granted. Because we're like, I can drive out camping, like I did this weekend, two and a half hours in my gas powered car. And just hang out there and make a ton of garbage while I'm there and then throw it away. And then, it takes away the pressure to like actually make more sustainable sort of stuff.

[00:00:23] Evan: Yeah. Welcome back. It's been a little bit due to various working and cottaging. Maybe not more than normal. I don't know.

[00:00:33] Aidan: Actually, I was a little bit ahead before this, on the editing so that there hasn't been a delay yet. And we'll see what happens in the future.

[00:00:40] Evan: Well then hello listener after may be the normal amount of time.

[00:00:44] Evan: Much for you cottaging and for me, going around Gatineau has been done. How was the Cottage?

[00:00:50] Aidan: Cottage was excellent. The goats were fantastic.

[00:00:55] Evan: What?

[00:00:55] Aidan: Oh, yeah, it it was just a guest house on a farm, a little outside of Peterborough. And they had all sorts of animals. And we got like fresh eggs from chickens, maybe like 50, or a hundred meters away from the house.

[00:01:07] Evan: What is this place called?

[00:01:08] Aidan: It was an Airbnb, it was like Cielo farm or something like that.

[00:01:13] Evan: That's amazing.

[00:01:14] Aidan: Yeah, actually, it's a public listing. So like, why not just give them a little plug there? It was a great experience.

[00:01:21] Evan: Holy cow. That's that sounds like the most cricket and me place to ever exist.

[00:01:25] Aidan: It does actually, it's pretty chill. And it has a stupendous view because their house is like a little bit on a hill, like overlooking, just like big fields and farms.

[00:01:34] Aidan: Would recommend. I'll leave the link in the show notes.

[00:01:38] Evan: Yeah, these guys are going to be like, oh thank you. Because we got one new visitor and it was Evan.

[00:01:45] Aidan: Hey, that's the standard humans effect. When we check someone out who they go viral.

[00:01:52] Evan: Yeah. We're going to leave an Amazon link to buy the farm on Amazon. And so we get 10%.

[00:01:58] Aidan: Oh, that'd be great. I've heard that rural real estate agents make a killing. So like, if we can get a cut of that, like cool.

[00:02:04] Evan: Oh yeah. This is what the whole podcast is actually been about.

[00:02:08] Aidan: It's a play to get into rural and farm real estate.

[00:02:11] Evan: Sweet rural money,

[00:02:13] Aidan: Perfect. That's where the real cash is at, all those fools moving to the city.

[00:02:18] Evan: But that this is kind of related. Sorry, if somebody was excited, that's not actually what this one's about. This one is about environmentalist and, our individual role in it. If this seems pretty random, it started from a click hole, just like a Google hole or a Duck Duck Go hole.

[00:02:39] Aidan: Okay, thank you for elaborating on that. Wasn't quite sure what a click hole was.

[00:02:43] Evan: I don't know if I'm using that term actually correctly, but basically you just hear something and then you Google it and then you Google something related to that. And then you click on a link from there. And then it's just two hours just learning about those of random subject.

[00:02:57] Aidan: I'm familiar. It's both a great time and a can be a time suck.

[00:03:01] Evan: Because of that. I'm actually pretty well versed on the fino-russian winter war.

[00:03:05] Aidan: An excellent subject.

[00:03:07] Evan: No. So this one kind of starts with a story. So a week or two ago, I was, had to pretty chill work. Yeah at the gym because they're open again. So I've been able to go back. At the gym and then I was like, you know what, I'm going to do a little bit of a cool-down maybe walking a treadmill for like 10 minutes, 15 minutes. See what's up.

[00:03:27] Evan: And the treadmill was playing the news, which I never usually watch, but I was like, I don't want to bother with this, with the controls. I'll just watch it. And I'm all across the news there was that UN report that's like, we're all gonna die. That obviously isn't what it actually said, but it was the media has taken it very drastically. They're, they're very drastic about it, which honestly, I think is maybe a good thing.

[00:04:03] Aidan: Yeah, in terms of sparking action, that's probably a good thing. And it's also just the media's thing.

[00:04:08] Evan: Yeah, exactly. They just want you to click on it. And if it's, like the planet is going to explode, you're like, I'm going to click on that.

[00:04:14] Aidan: Not a bad headline. Maybe that's what we'll name this podcast.

[00:04:17] Evan: If this is worrying anyone the actual report, isn't actually that intense as the news is. It is interesting though. I've, I've checked out. Some of them haven't heard the whole thing cause it's really long. I've looked up more about it. But basically seeing that instantly gave me a stomach ache. And between that and the recent Ontario forest fires. How have you guys in Toronto gotten like smog from it?

[00:04:43] Aidan: Not that I've seen, but I'm going to be honest, I don't go outside every day. So.

[00:04:48] Evan: I guess I should rephrase it. Have you guys gotten more smog from it than your usual Toronto smog?

[00:04:54] Aidan: That is a good point. Not that I've noticed, I've been thinking I should check the air quality more often. Cause I don't really usually do that, but I haven't noticed any visible smog.

[00:05:05] Evan: I am not sure what you, what you do with that information. Maybe like, or a gas mask outside of them.

[00:05:11] Aidan: Or just go outside less often.

[00:05:12] Evan: Side note. I'm drinking to you right now. I hope that's not being picked up in my mic and just grossing everyone out.

[00:05:17] Aidan: I wasn't hearing it that you made some great like tea preparing noises at the beginning.

[00:05:22] Aidan: Lots of clicking and clanking and whatnot.

[00:05:25] Evan: Some new Japanese green tea I bought today. Very delicious. Um, But yeah, here in Ottawa or Kanata, I guess, we had a few days maybe seven in total, five to seven, somewhere where it was like, it was this weird layer of smog. And it was super freaky. And it was, from the forest fires, the air just coming from you know, the Northwest and coming down on us.

[00:05:49] Evan: But those things together. Yeah. That just gave me like an instant stomach ache. And I think with all these environmental issues. there are a few things going on, like obviously changes are being made at like the governmental level, but I think it is causing more and more people, more and more sort of mental freakout.

[00:06:08] Evan: Because we're hearing all these things, but on a personal level, with a problem that big, that's just basically like too much pollution. Most people like don't know what to do. And so that was that was my thinking. I was like, I want to do something, but I have to know what to do.

[00:06:24] Evan: What am I going to go drive up to the Northwest and pour a bucket of water on there? Maybe.

[00:06:28] Evan: So basically what I wanted to do here was find ways that one individual person could actually do something. I find there's a lot of, conflicting information too. Because it's like, oh, if you want to help the planet, you can go vegan.

[00:06:43] Evan: It's oh no, actually grains are destroying forests because of farmland. So you actually got to go paleo or go local. Or like, you should have an electric car. It's oh no, the batteries are super bad. You actually got to take the bus. So yeah, I just thought we could, first sort of go over some facts about Canada. Some of them I found very surprising in my research and then do the little carbon footprint quiz. But this is a more interesting one because it has some more concrete results at the end.

[00:07:15] Aidan: Ooh. That sounds very interesting, actually.

[00:07:18] Evan: Yeah. Basically, I'm just making what I wanted about two weeks ago. It's like what, what is actually going on and what can I do?

[00:07:27] Evan: Am I going to oversell my tea? Oh, wow. You know, It's coming out really slow. So you just keep pouring it into your cup because you think it's going to just like peter out, but then it just keeps going constantly, and you're like, ah.

[00:07:38] Evan: Anyway, so yeah, let's start with some Canada information.

[00:07:42] Aidan: Big prediction. Canada's doing shit with all its mining and whatnot, in terms of the environment and its goals.

[00:07:49] Evan: I'll just say, this this is on visual capitalist.com. I'm not saying this is like an infallible resource, but this data here matches up pretty closely. Like it's not like wildly inconsistent with all the other data I've found. It seems like generally okay. But the specifics might be contested.

[00:08:07] Evan: This is called the race to net zero carbon neutral goals by country. And, I came across this first because. A few months ago, China instituted a carbon cap and trade system nationally, which they'd never had anything like that before. Huge moves for the carbon in the atmosphere being gone. Actually not gone, that would suck. That would be pretty bad.

[00:08:29] Aidan: You need some carpet.

[00:08:30] Evan: Yeah. you need a little bit you need a normal amount. Not too much. Not too little. Otherwise the trees are like borough, but anyway, so that brought me here. And they have all the carbon neutral goals by country.

[00:08:43] Evan: And there's currently one country. Uh, hope you haven't looked. There's currently one country in the world that is pretty much by all accounts, carbon neutral or sorry, carbon negative. They actually absorb more carbon than they transmit. There's a couple of more that claim it. And it's possible, but it seems more dubious.

[00:09:03] Evan: But yeah. Do you know what that country is?

[00:09:06] Aidan: Yeah. Maybe send me the links after, cause I did glance through the article already. Unfortunately. Shout out to Bhutan for having both the best flag in the world and being carbon neutral or achieving their goals.

[00:09:17] Evan: Oh, the dragon?

[00:09:18] Aidan: Yeah. Love Bhutan.

[00:09:20] Evan: Yeah, me too. And they've got cool monasteries. Like what a place.

[00:09:24] Aidan: Yeah. What's not to love about Bhutan.

[00:09:26] Evan: Yeah. Bhutan is currently well, the only country that I've found, like pretty much every source saying is carbon negative. Another one mentioned is Surinam another one I've seen as well as Morocco.

[00:09:37] Aidan: Where is Suriname?

[00:09:39] Evan: It is the north east coast of south America

[00:09:43] Aidan: Ah, okay.

[00:09:44] Evan: And they speak Dutch they're, weirdly.

[00:09:47] Aidan: It's the Americas, man, this shit just happens. I don't know. Colonialism, am I right?

[00:09:52] Evan: So yeah, Butan is the one that I found pretty much every source agree upon is carbon negative. Pretty interestingly, they have super green energy. They have environmental protection laws designating that no less than 60% of their country has to be like undisturbed forest or undisturbed nature.

[00:10:10] Aidan: Oh, okay. That would help.

[00:10:13] Evan: Yeah. And they, they did it very early compared to other countries, basically they just put less of a pressure on modernizing and industrializing and more on sustainability, like earlier than a lot of other countries.

[00:10:24] Evan: And I think, if there's any country to learn from, for this sort of thing, it would be them. Granted it's a lot easier to do these things in a largely homogenous, smaller country than it would be in a, very diverse, larger country, like Canada, or even more so U.S. But there are definitely things that we could learn from them just about like prioritization and balancing business and the economy with the environment.

[00:10:48] Aidan: What even are their exports. I know nothing about them other than monks and the dragon.

[00:10:53] Evan: Well, One thing I know about them is that they have, I believe they have free energy. So they dissuade people from heating or cooling their homes with their own like gas stoves and whatnot. I guess you wouldn't call it with that, but like, or sorry, burning wood themselves. They have free energy. That's what I saw on some sites that I cannot verify.

[00:11:11] Aidan: After three years in the moderately free category Bhutan's economy fell back into the ranks of the mostly unfree this year. The government has a lot of tariffs and other restrictions on trade.

[00:11:21] Evan: The King? The have a King still

[00:11:23] Aidan: Oh, no, they, I transitioned from absolute monarchy to constitutional parliamentary democracy in 2008.

[00:11:31] Evan: Wow.

[00:11:31] Aidan: That's late

[00:11:33] Evan: That's really cool. Actually. What the heck. Places with Kings, I think it's so cool though.

[00:11:38] Aidan: An absolute monarchy until 2008.

[00:11:41] Evan: it's actually wild.

[00:11:42] Aidan: Reading what is this heritage.org article? It says Butan has one of the world's smallest and least developed economies, even late into the 20th century. The landlocked countries, largely agrarian with few roads, electricity and no modern hospitals.

[00:11:56] Evan: That I believe is both like a sort of a cause and an effect of their like, priorities or net carbon negativity, less focused on industrialization. It was ranked the happiest or one of the happiest countries in the world. So that's quite interesting.

[00:12:12] Aidan: But yeah, no. Definitely gets to your point that like, it would be easier for them, but that's also partly just because of their way of thinking or prioritization, as you said.

[00:12:23] Evan: And yeah, being smaller and more homogenous as well, does make things easier for that sort of thing.

[00:12:29] Aidan: It's easier when you have an absolute monarchy.

[00:12:31] Evan: Yeah. That's what I've learned. We need to get a king of Canada. To have absolute power. And then it's David Suzuki is the king surprise,

[00:12:40] Aidan: Anyways off that tangent. Thank you, Bhutan. Let's see, I guess now we know there's only one country with that carbon neutral or even negative status.

[00:12:52] Evan: the, yeah,

[00:12:53] Evan: Carbon negative is a thing that take in more than they expell.

[00:12:56] Aidan: Is that all because of all the trees they're able to take in?

[00:12:59] Evan: They have a lot of forest and yeah, relatively little mining oil and gas industry like that. Um, And not that densely populated. Probably more than Canada. But that's not hard.

[00:13:13] Evan: So once we heard about that, we see if the CO2 emissions of how it's net negative for some countries, well one to three countries, on worldometers.info, Uh, this is another site where the information like the actual numbers, maybe like contested, but the general gist is inline with the rest of the information I've seen. So for total CO2 emissions, do you want to guess which countries do the most total?

[00:13:47] Aidan: The most total CO2 emissions? And this is current? So like last couple of years or?

[00:13:53] Evan: Yeah, it's all a couple of years. Actually, it's 2016 for the total.

[00:13:56] Aidan: Okay. Because top one would have to be China. I know that they've used more concrete in last, like 10 years than the U S did in the whole like 20th century.

[00:14:07] Evan: Wow.

[00:14:08] Aidan: Yeah. Like They are building like mad.

[00:14:10] Evan: And they built the Hoover Dam.

[00:14:11] Aidan: Yeah. China would, I would say hard, like number one there. U S would definitely be up there.

[00:14:18] Evan: U.S. Is number two.

[00:14:19] Aidan: Ah, got them. And then next, India has a lot of people, but not that much, I'll say like industry or I shouldn't say industry what's the other word infrastructure. That's what I'm going for. So I would say they might be lower than like maybe other European countries, even though they're

[00:14:37] Evan: They are number three.

[00:14:39] Aidan: just the EU as a whole.

[00:14:41] Evan: No, No india.

[00:14:41] Aidan: Oh, India is number three. Interesting okay.

[00:14:44] Evan: Relative to the population, they have relatively little infrastructure, but when you're, when you're dealing with a continent's worth of people in one country, you're still going to have fricking load.

[00:14:56] Aidan: Good on them. I mean like that, it's a sign, I guess, a lot of ways of developing and people coming out of extreme poverty. Which is nice. I mean, Hopefully going forwards, we'll figure out ways to have that those not be tied together,

[00:15:08] Evan: That's the main thing. Because when a country's poor, you can't really ask people to like put sustainable uh, growth over like, will your family eat this week?

[00:15:19] Evan: well, We could make a shit ton of money and like, have, the general population, like be much more healthy and well fed. If we like sell all this oil we have. Or we could

[00:15:30] Evan: like put more priority on sustainability. Like you'll never get elected that way. Cause people are like, I want to eat.

[00:15:36] Aidan: I don't know, There's a whole double standard in there too of all the developed countries went through the phase of developing and they put out all sorts of CO2 just in getting to the point or the quality of life we have now, then we're saying to everyone else, it's like, no, no, but you can't do that because you have too many people and if you did that would just mess up the entire planet.

[00:15:56] Evan: Yeah, exactly. Hopefully just more sustainable ways of developing. Well, That's what has to happen.

[00:16:02] Aidan: Yeah, there was a lot of interesting stuff on that in Bill Gates' book. He lays out all of the big categories or he did lay out all the big categories that CO2 comes from and where we are right now on all. Whether we need like new innovations or just new policies or whatnot was a very good read. You'd probably enjoy.

[00:16:20] Evan: Yeah, I'm sure I would actually, and related to like where we are now, for most, or for a lot of north America and almost all of Europe The CO2 emissions actually have already peaked and are on the down now. But again, it's because they're pretty much done developing.

[00:16:35] Aidan: Yeah, we don't have too many more buildings to build. Or like we do, but like it's a small amount.

[00:16:43] Evan: Um, And then when people yeah, have guaranteed food and shelter, then there'll be like, then they might actually choose to do sustainable things or to make sustainable, like environmentally sustainable choices over gain an income because they don't need it as bad.

[00:16:57] Evan: But yeah, I'll just read the top 10.

[00:17:01] Aidan: Wait, I'm going to guess Canada isn't on the top 10.

[00:17:06] Evan: I'm just total emissions. Like not per capita. Just per country?

[00:17:09] Aidan: Per country, yeah, I'm going to say maybe top 20, but not top 10.

[00:17:13] Evan: Canada is top 10.

[00:17:15] Aidan: Oh, no Canada.

[00:17:17] Evan: But yes, it's China with 10 billion CO2 emissions. That's tons for that year. And then us has half that at 5 billion. China has half that at 2.5 billion. Russia has 1.6. So Russia is number four, Japan. Number five, Germany number six, Canada number seven, Iran eight South Korea nine and Indonesia 10.

[00:17:38] Aidan: What was Canada's gross?

[00:17:40] Evan: Yeah, just total was 675 million tons.

[00:17:44] Aidan: Okay. That is actually very in line with per capita, with the U S which I guess makes sense. Very similar lifestyles.

[00:17:51] Evan: Yeah. I initially was like, okay, Canada's got so few people, we can't possibly be in the top 10 like for total emissions, but we totally are. And it's I think like, honestly, Canada and the us are like some of the least sustainable lifestyles kind of out there.

[00:18:09] Evan: One thing, yeah, one thing I really don't like about a lot of Canada, that's kind of unavoidable with just the population density and stuff. Well, It's not unavoidable is that you have there's a lot of pressure to drive everywhere, super car based society.

[00:18:22] Aidan: Yeah, there are pockets where you don't. I don't own a car because I live in Toronto, which is real nice. And I enjoy it. Like I prefer not to drive, so it's cool. But if I'm ever outside of, I'm going to say like maybe Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, you probably need a car.

[00:18:39] Evan: And now that Ottawa has a train.

[00:18:41] Aidan: You've got to train. Is it working now?

[00:18:42] Evan: It's working now? I took it today.

[00:18:45] Aidan: They've got the doors figured out?

[00:18:46] Evan: Maybe I took it today and I was fine. Ottawa, I would say you can get by without a car. I would say Kanata is the farthest you can live and get by without a car. If you live any of the like, Stittsville like anywhere more on the outskirts, you definitely need a car. But uh, even if people live downtown, a lot of people, just because that's what is the norm for us.

[00:19:07] Evan: Even if you can easily get places by train and bus, a lot of people will just drive anyway, because it's just ingrained in us. If you want to go somewhere, you've got to drive. Or even a lot of people if they live like a 15 minutes walk from a grocery store because of we got like the Costco model where you just get a ton of shit, like once a week or once every two weeks you drive two minutes and get there and just load it, load up your minivan and drive back.

[00:19:31] Evan: It's too bad, but I think for stuff like that, it can't really be relied on like for each person to make an individual choice to be like, I'm going to walk, I'm going to take the bus. I think it has to be infrastructure, like increase amount of buses, make buses electric. Instead of giant block of houses, giant block of stores, maybe more like, in a lot of the rest of the world, it's just house have store house has store.

[00:19:54] Aidan: Very walkable community. You can get to every place that you need to go by walk.

[00:19:59] Evan: Walk in public transport centered sort of places. yeah, when I was staying in France, this is just a product of, because it's a very old city. It was, it would be like hugely impractical to drive most places because driving so annoying, like the streets are tiny, you can't park anywhere and you wouldn't ever need to.

[00:20:17] Evan: Cause there's a butcher, a bakery, a grocery store, like a liquor store, like a bar restaurant within like three blocks. It's pretty much anywhere. Or like within, let's say max, like 20 to 30, 30 minutes walk. So I think, I think aiming towards That sort of model would be much more sustainable.

[00:20:38] Evan: Another thing is because we have a very large fossil fuel oil and gas industry still, and a statistic I heard this is not verified, but what I heard was that the U.S. Gets more oil actually from Canada than Saudi Arabia.

[00:20:53] Aidan: That is odd. Yeah. I guess we are much closer, so it'd be cheaper to transport, though, cargo ships are pretty cheap way to transport anything.

[00:21:02] Evan: And we're just a big country. I think honestly, in Canada, and in the us, because we have so much exposure to nature around us. We take it for granted, because we're like, I can drive out camping. Like I did this weekend, two and a half hours in my gas powered car. And just hang out there and make a ton of garbage while I'm there and then throw it away. And then, it takes away the pressure to like actually make more sustainable sort of stuff.

[00:21:27] Evan: So basically why I think that we're so high CO2 in Canada because everybody drives everywhere because there's not as much infrastructure to not. And because of our industry. But now let's go CO2 emissions per capita.

[00:21:43] Aidan: Yeah, I was going to say, our per capita is going to be off the charts. Cause I looked up the like countries by population on Wikipedia. And we're like 37th in terms of total population. And you said we're seventh in terms of total emissions.

[00:21:56] Evan: This is interesting, actually. So obviously, yeah, with China and India are in the top three, obviously they're going to be much lower for per capita because they're playing in the billions. We're not even playing in the a hundred million, so we're not even playing at half a hundred million.

[00:22:14] Aidan: Are we like top

[00:22:15] Evan: We, we are still top 10 per capita. This was actually really interesting. So for CO2 emissions per capita, the number one, this, I guess isn't that surprising Is Qatar. With 37 tons per person per year of CO2 emissions. Uh, And then this one was a bit surprising Montenegro after that.

[00:22:33] Aidan: Is that one of those like micronations

[00:22:36] Evan: Yeah.

[00:22:37] Aidan: is that one of the ones that's all like billionaires with their like yachts and jets?

[00:22:41] Evan: Maybe it's because everybody has Ferrari's that they tried better or I dunno, or everyone has a yachts that are like gas-powered I dunno.

[00:22:49] Aidan: I guess. Yeah.

[00:22:50] Evan: Montenegro, Kuwait. Not that surprising. And then number four is super surprising to me. Like, I to me. Like, I don't understand this at all. Trinidad and Tobago with twenty-five tons per capita. Like them, I don't know if they have a giant oil and gas industry or? All the Arabian peninsula countries to me makes total sense. Cause like huge oil industry. Like you got all the other rich dudes right in their g wagons. Like I get that. It's hot. Everybody's blasting the AC, makes sense. But Montenegro in Trinidad and Tobago, I'm like what? I don't understand.

[00:23:29] Aidan: Apparently it's the wealthiest country pretty much in the Caribbean.

[00:23:34] Evan: Oh well, I have been there. It's lovely.

[00:23:36] Aidan: Yeah. And the fifth largest by GDP in the Americas, at least like their economy, but. Ah, it's the leading Caribbean producer of oil and gas. Its economy is heavily dependent upon these resources, but it also supplies, manufactured goods, notably foods and beverages, as well as cement to the Caribbean region. Oh, that'd be big.

[00:23:57] Evan: Okay, this makes a lot of sense. Cause I was, I was really confused by that one.

[00:24:02] Aidan: Yeah. That's like oil and gas is 40% of their GDP and 80% of export. But only 5% of employment, which is interesting. That might be a lot of foreign contractors or something going on there.

[00:24:14] Evan: There is a decent amount of income inequality. Then, so on number five, the UAE United Arab Emirates makes sense. After that Oman, again makes sense. And then Canada, we're at number seven. At 18.5 tons per person per year CO2 emissions.

[00:24:34] Evan: And honestly, it seems like all of these so far. These are pretty much having been to only one of the other ones from what I've heard are all mainly car based nations and uh, whatnot, but it seems like a lot of it is just mainly to do with an oil and gas industry.

[00:24:53] Aidan: That seems to be a common thread through all of them. Like including Canada, like we're probably, I would guess the least dependent or that would be the smallest, like piece of the pie.

[00:25:03] Evan: I would guess for the least dependent, because I'm not coming from the prairie's here. I'm not coming from Berta.

[00:25:11] Aidan: Yeah, we've got such a large country that like, it really depends on where you are. Like this wikipedia article is saying that logging and energy industries are two of our most important. And we also have a big manufacturing center with automobiles, and aircraft's being really big. And we also have a big like seafood industry as well as just like software and entertainment.

[00:25:35] Evan: We just do everything at a smaller scale than the states, except for actually, except for the naturalism. We do that kind of bigger.

[00:25:43] Aidan: Define naturalism.

[00:25:44] Evan: Like trees, rocks, water. Got a lot of trees and rocks and water here. But then yeah. So rounding out the top 10, I Brunei, Luxenberg and Bahrain. Brunei has a Sultan. That's a cool fact about Brunei.

[00:26:00] Aidan: That's interesting, actually I assumed Luxembourg was all like bankers. Is that just their lifestyle?

[00:26:07] Evan: I assume it's lifestyle. Cause everyone's very well off. So maybe everyone's got a ton of cars and like there's no buses cause everyone's rich. So they'd just drive everywhere.

[00:26:15] Aidan: Okay. Actually, I'm looking at the little, like breakdown of Canada's. I think this is GDP. Yeah. In 2017 and gas and oil is the biggest. I'm going to take a hot guests and say all these little numbers add up to like 25.

[00:26:29] Evan: Okay. That's still, I that's a lot. Luckily, not as high as a lot of other countries above us, but yeah, so Canada is quite high for our CO2 emissions per capita among the rest of the world. We hear in Canada all about like, oh, China's making all these emissions. India is making all this emissions and pollution. We got to remember that for per capita, we're doing way worse than them.

[00:26:54] Evan: Let's scroll down here. I'm scrolling down. I'm trying to find either China or India and. China. Okay. yeah, China's around 41. Interestingly, actually, the us is not in the top 10. I think it's because they don't have much of an oil and gas industry.

[00:27:11] Evan: And India, I'm scrolling. um, Let's keep going. Alright. I've scrolled very far. Past 50 and I've given up,

[00:27:21] Aidan: India is just not on the list in terms of per capita.

[00:27:24] Evan: Very low emissions per capita. That's something to remember. I think that initially I was like, oh no, Canada is so bad, but now I'm like, That's a good thing. If we're such a big player in like total emissions and like emissions, both total emissions and emissions per capita in the world, then you know, that's something actually that we can in some way affect, either through voting or like whatever or their actions just because like we live here.

[00:27:52] Evan: So that's actually quite reassuring that if I just, have, make some change to you know, the emissions and the policies of my country, then that actually will have a pretty large effect on that greater world.

[00:28:02] Aidan: That's actually interesting too. I just noticed that out of the top 10, we are the smallest population.

[00:28:08] Evan: Wait,

[00:28:08] Evan: Wait, Montenegro and Luxembourg?

[00:28:11] Aidan: Sorry. I was looking at the total list. Total CO2 emission.

[00:28:14] Evan: Oh yeah. So I guess, so we have the largest population.

[00:28:18] Aidan: Out of per capita maybe, but we have the smallest out of the total emissions. So meaning that all the countries ahead of us and like behind us for a bit have much larger populations and less like much lower per capita than us. So it's was just emphasizing here, we can really play a role.

[00:28:34] Evan: There's a lot of stuff that we can do, which is actually yeah, reassuring.

[00:28:38] Evan: The last thing I sent You I might've sent you my results by accident, but conservation.org. Again, I don't have any affiliation with this website. It is not gospel. It's just an interesting thing I found, but it, just it was sort of interesting to me. And so what we're going to do is calculate our footprint.

[00:28:59] Aidan: Let's do it. So this is a website that basically you tell them some like demographic and some other things about yourself and like, I guess your activities like your transportation and travel, yada, yada, and then they tell you what your carbon footprint is.

[00:29:14] Evan: Yeah, exactly. So I thought we'd, read that I can see. And then after this something to do as well. We'll get to that after.

[00:29:21] Evan: Have you got the like household transportation and travel thing?

[00:29:24] Aidan: Yes, I do.

[00:29:25] Evan: Okay. Cool.

[00:29:26] Aidan: Okay. I'm here to just got my footprint calculated.

[00:29:30] Evan: Okay. What is yours?

[00:29:32] Aidan: Your footprint is 12.69 tons.

[00:29:36] Evan: Oh, mine's 13.41. So I'm slightly more.

[00:29:40] Aidan: Evan you monster. Why do you hate the environment?

[00:29:43] Evan: it It says it takes 192 trees to offset your annual footprint.

[00:29:48] Aidan: Yeah, mine saying it takes me 181.

[00:29:53] Evan: What I found really interesting was the offset option here. I do not know where that money goes. It says you, you can offset your carbon footprint by like buying It's a, it's a tax deductible donation. I don't know where it goes. So I need to do research on that. See if it's legit or not.

[00:30:10] Evan: But then 192 trees, I found that really interesting. Cause I'm like, I can do that. I can responsible for probably 10 times that this year people who plant trees say they can do more than that in like a day.

[00:30:22] Evan: What I want to do is be responsible somehow either by planting them, myself, or donating to tree planting or otherwise, I want it to be responsible for what at least 192 trees planted this year.

[00:30:34] Aidan: That is a cool goal, yeah, that actually just off sets your carbon footprint.

[00:30:39] Evan: And in the bottom it says some things you can do. Oh, and like where the U.S. average is for like energy consumption or carbon, actually carbon emission. And it looks like the highest is just your house, which I find very interesting.

[00:30:52] Aidan: That is. Yeah. So what is it about here house that changes, because we just said like how size basically a number of people.

[00:31:02] Evan: I think it would be heating and cooling would be a large one as well as lights. And just how much space you have that is not forest.

[00:31:12] Evan: And they have some tips in the bottom like: meatless Mondays, fly direct. I think these are the same for everybody. I don't think that tailored for our results. Cause it says take the bus and improve your fuel economy. When I said I don't drive and I take the bus often. But these are some interesting, interesting things.

[00:31:29] Evan: But yeah, so the, my main takeaway from this is I want to, I want to be responsible for around 200 trees. Like I'd like to plant them myself, ideally. Cause I feel like I could do that in a long weekend, 200 trees. But if not, find some way to be responsible for that.

[00:31:44] Evan: And so I hope everyone uh, checks out some info like that about themselves. Maybe you just gets a scale of like where you live, what's the situation, you know, what can you do? How much are you responsible for yourself? And I hope this helps maybe ease some people's anxieties about the sort of stuff.

[00:32:00] Evan: But yeah. That's my main takeaway there. Maybe we should update later in the year, on what our takeaways from this.

[00:32:07] Aidan: Possibly. Yeah. And how many trees you've planted.

[00:32:11] Evan: And the other main purpose of this listener, I hope it inspires you to get involved where you live and just, get informed to get the information uh, about the sort of stuff as it pertains to you.

[00:32:21] Aidan: That is interesting. Yeah, because as we mentioned, Canada has a big opportunity to step up here. And I think the vast majority of our listenership is Canadian. So.

[00:32:32] Evan: Yeah, and I think also most Canadians think we're actually probably one of the more environmentally friendly countries.

[00:32:40] Aidan: Because you can just be like, look at the U S they're doing terrible. We were obviously doing great.

[00:32:46] Evan: And you'd be looking at many forests we have. Look at all that we can't be that bad.

[00:32:50] Aidan: Yeah. But they're all on fire. They're about to leave.

[00:32:53] Evan: And listener, to get involved and inform yourself.

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the-pontiac-bandit · 7 years

Text

bring your good times and your laughter

amy santiago is the youngest captain in nypd history, and a freakout of corresponding magnitude ensues (feat: mentions of peraltiago babies, husband of the year detective jake peralta, and a ref to kokomo). title from celebration. as always, i owe my life and all my worldly possessions to @jakelovesamy and @elsaclack. also on ao3.

The door shuts behind Captain Amy Santiago (she’s been in official possession of that title for a full three hours, and she has every intention to use it on even her takeout orders, just to hear the sound). The click of the doorknob is louder than expected, and she pauses for a moment, hand hovering, to see if anyone outside noticed, but the chorus of “Celebration” is blasting so loudly that the blinds are rattling against the windows. She shuts them, suppressing a reflexive sigh at the thought of the confetti littering the bullpen - her bullpen - and focusing on the overwhelming joy of this moment.

She moves behind her desk, savoring the feel of the new, heavy medals against her shoulder and the hat resting atop her perfectly smooth bun (she’d spent at least an hour ensuring every hair was in place. It could’ve been half that time, but Rae and Ana, nothing short of tornadoes, had spun through their bathroom halfway through the preparations, already in their pajamas for the babysitter, to grab Amy by the bun and plant large toddler kisses on her forehead, leaving bumps in Amy’s ponytail that refused to settle). Her desk is nearly bare, with only two framed photos perched below her desktop. There hasn’t been time for case files to accumulate, for her detectives and beat cops to need signatures or approvals or second opinions. The thought of the work excites her and terrifies her simultaneously, and it’s only as she’s sitting at this desk, so similar to that of her mentor’s, two precincts over, that the gravity of her situation hits her.

She, Captain Amy Santiago, is the youngest captain in NYPD history.

She takes a deep breath, and then another. Then she lets her eyes flit to the frames. In the one on the left, four smiling faces fill a simple 4x6 wooden frame, messily decorated with her daughters’ misshapen squiggles that Jake swore a hundred times were supposed to be hearts (the ones that he actually drew, decorating one corner, are only slightly more discernible). Wide smiles and scrunched up eyes from her three favorite faces ease the sudden tension in her shoulders at the thought of the work ahead, and her own eyes crinkle, the smile she hasn’t been able to wipe off her face all night widening at the memory of clutching Ana closer to her chest, tickling her chubby two year-old belly, while Jake pressed his cheek against hers and held Rae in a vice grip to prevent her escape attempts, Charles tearing up a bit as he furiously snapped pictures.

Then, almost on instinct, her eyes move left, to the far older picture, faded with time and years at a desk that got afternoon sunlight. Her ugliest selfie-worthy grin on a face nearly six years younger, with Jake grinning goofily beside her. The picture had been on her desk since she was a detective in the Nine-Nine, when he’d been in prison and she couldn’t bear to look up from their shared desks and see anything other than his wide smile. She updates everything in her life with meticulous detail - the picture in the frame on the right is updated every six months like clockwork - but this one, this one has stayed.

Her hand has drifted to the medals, pinned to her dress shirt only an hour before to thunderous applause from Gavin, her partner from when she was a brand-new beat cop whose kids - toddlers when she met them - sit in college sweatshirts beside him; from her current precinct, with a crew of unruly, talented detectives holding up meticulously decorated posters; from her family at the Nine-Nine, grins so bright she thinks she’ll go blind; and from Jake, making a Taylor Swift-style heart with his hands, pride shining from his eyes with such strength it’s nearly palpable. It’s all a little overwhelming in her head, this much love and this much success and seeing her dreams all come true in front of her, knowing there’s so much work ahead. She just needs a minute.

She’s startled, drawn out of the memory, by the sound of the handle clicking open, and she’s already babbling excuses, pushing out of her chair to get back to the party being thrown in her honor just outside (the song changed to “Happy” at some point when she wasn’t listening). But then, almost as though she’d summoned him, Jake’s sliding through the small crack in the doorway, his eyes shining with so much affection that a lump rises in her throat at the sight, mixed with a tinge of concern.

“Hey,” he says quietly, turning the lock on the door behind him as he moves further into the room. “You good? I saw you leave earlier, and—“

She’s already moving to meet him, has her head buried in his collar before he can finish his sentence. His arms wrap around her on instinct, careful to avoid creasing her freshly pressed new uniform as he envelops her in his warmth. His breathing is steady against her chest, the air tickling the back of her neck on its way out to the room, and for just a few seconds, it feels like she could be back at home in his flannel shirt, Rae and Ana sandwiched between them as he holds them all close. It feels like home.

She can feel the manic energy draining from her body, sense the tension flowing out of her shoulders in his embrace. Her breathing slows as the job ahead becomes instantly more manageable. She knows Jake can feel it, too, because his arms shift around her, loosening just a bit so that she can look up at him.

“So, you’ve had a weird day,” he comments, a glint of laughter in his warm brown eyes. “Too bad mine was better - there were bacon-wrapped quiches at the after-party, and I had twenty.”

A giggle forces itself out of Amy’s throat at the thought. “So that’s where they all went,” she replies, noting with surprise that her voice is a little shaky. “No fair – I wanted some!” She slides one hand up his back to hit him in the shoulder.

“Well, you snooze, you lose,” he shrugs. “You were busy, and they just kept bringing more out. Someone had to eat them.”

“I was busy being congratulated by the chief of police of the NYPD for my ‘outstanding achievements’!” she retorts, hints of braggadocio and their old competitiveness driving the uncertainty from her voice.

“Damn straight you were.” His voice is unexpectedly soft in a way that brings a lump to her throat. He’s looking at her as though she hung the moon and the stars, and it melts her just as completely as it did this morning, when he caught her eyes over their daughters’ heads while he made oatmeal and she pulled silly faces to entertain them, and as it did nearly nine years ago when she pulled away from his lips in the evidence locker of the Nine-Nine.

It’s only when he pulls one hand off her shoulder blade and brings it up to swipe his thumb across her cheek that she notices she’s crying, that his thumb is wet and there’s a matching damp spot marring the collar of his dress blues.

She starts to babble an apology, her hands jumping to his collar to straighten it before the words spilling from her mouth find any semblance of coherency. But then he’s laughing, swatting her hand away, and reminding her firmly that a day when tears are the only thing that end up on his shirt counts as a win. At that, she lets out a watery chuckle, her fingers finding the spot on his chest, strategically concealed beneath his medals, where he’d spilled the applesauce he stole from their pantry in the car as they drove to One Police Plaza and poking it pointedly.

“Yeah, so maybe you took all the wins today, Ames. Some of us had to make sacrifices to the karma gods for this.” He pretends to be offended, but he can’t wipe the smile off his face long enough to look affronted.

“I swear, you’re worse than Rae,” she laughs, the memory of her daughter’s ketchup-covered Sesame Street pajamas soaking in their kitchen fresh in her mind.

“She had to get it from somewhere,” he reminds her, unexpected pride in his voice. “I mean, the badassery, that comes from you, but I’ll claim the messy eating.”

“Badassery isn’t a word, Jake.”

“Fine, then,” he replies with an exaggerated eye roll. “Badassicism, badassness, badassion, bada--point is, you’re it.”

She laughs as she leans in to give him a firm kiss, her lips smiling against his as his nose presses into her still-damp cheek. “I love you. So much,” she mumbles quietly as she pulls away. Her voice cracks a little bit on the last syllable, so she buries her face back in his shoulder.

“For realz, Ames, are you okay?” He asks, concern once again coloring his voice as he rubs small circles on the center of her back. She pauses for a second, trying to find her voice, to reassure him that she’s fine and thrilled and totally freakin’ capable and definitely not panicking, but the words don’t seem to come. Three seconds pass, and then three more. And then Jake takes a deep breath, moving his shoulders against her cheek. “You know, it’s fine if you’re not.”

She looks up then, a little surprised. “No – I’m ok. I’m happy, for sure. And excited for the challenge. And still a little shocked that I actually pulled it off. I’m just…really overwhelmed.” Her voice gets smaller at the end, shrinking to almost a whisper as her eyes drop away from his down to the buttons of his shirt. “What if I can’t do it?”

“Ames. You nerd,” he replies, without hesitation. “You just got promoted to your dream job, and you’re so badass that you’re the youngest person to have the job in history. That’s a pretty great reason to be overwhelmed, and it’s okay to be terrified. You know I would be.”

He frees an arm from her back, uses it to push gently against her chin so that she’s forced to meet his eyes, before he continues. “But you’re gonna do it. And you’re gonna do it better than anyone else yet. Because that’s what you do. And it’s okay to be scared, but tomorrow you’re gonna come into work and you’re gonna start kicking ass and as soon as the first case shows up on your desk you’re gonna relax because this is what you do. And you do it unbelievably well. Okay?”

He holds her gaze, his brow furrowed in concern. She’s busy remembering a similar speech, on a rooftop a billion years ago before what she was sure would be the scariest moment of her life. But for the gray touches by Jake’s temples and the hat perched on her head, she’d swear they were in the same spot, that she was an eager detective terrified of moving forward on her life calendar. But she’s not anymore. She’s done a billion things scarier than that test in the years since, Jake’s hand in hers, and he’s never once been wrong – she’s always been fine. So she squares her shoulders and nods firmly. “Okay.”

She wants to find the words for how much he means, for I love you and thank you and I couldn’t have done it without you. But she’s not sure her voice can manage to convey the sentiment, so instead she settles for a kiss on his cheek, her fingers brushing through his fluffy curls (she makes a mental note she needs to schedule him a haircut).

His eyes are closed, savoring the moment, for a few seconds after she pulls away. By the time he opens them, she’s busy smoothing her uniform, dabbing at her cheeks with the edge of her sleeve.

“Am I good?” she asks him, standing to attention for a uniform check.

“You look gorgeous, babe,” he replies, his entirely serious tone contrasting sharply the goofy grin slowly breaking across his face.

“Not what I meant.” She rolls her eyes at him – a breach of stance nothing short of shocking – and waits patiently for his proper answer.

“Perfect uniform, Captain Santiago,” he replies, standing to attention and saluting, his face as serious as she’s ever seen it. At the sound of her new title, though, a smile so wide it threatens to crack her face in half breaks across her own.

“Ready to face Charles’ playlist?” he asks, only half kidding as he holds out a hand for her to grab, lacing their fingers together when she takes it.

“Never, but I don’t think I have a choice,” she groans, remembering for the first time in a while the party that awaits her on the other side of her door.

“Nope! I heard he added ‘Kokomo’ - perfect dancing music!”

“Don’t break a hip on the dance floor,” she grumbles, her smile widening as she gives his hand a squeeze and he opens the door, beyond which friends and laughter and octopus donuts await.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Captain Santiago.”

#b99 #brooklyn 99 #my writing #jake peralta #amy santiago #peraltiago #peraltiago fanfiction #rey and ana and eli #yes i know rey is rae here there's a whole post abt it ok #anyway #i'm love u all and writing again was fun even if this is Tiny Af

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