#bizarre stuff went on in his white house and his mind

[tompoose]

if you had to smite from the earth either nixon or garfield who would you eliminate. history will continue unchanged except if you smite nixon all the nixon memes disappear and if you smite garfield the orange cat goes with him

I would sacrifice anything that is dear to me to scrub this animal from all the veins of culture that it has slithered into. I was frustrated with the Garfield comic strip from the twentieth of August, 2024.

Jim Davis has given up trying to claw from the mud. He has drawn a cat looking at the reader and telling a wet joke. By making Garfield a mere static image to surround text, Davis has taken the work of his heart and lowered it to the level of the borders that surround a pop up window. My feelings on this topic eclipse and obliterate any other nuances to your question. If ever presented a shot at this king, I would take it.

[superheroauthor]

And The Gods Do Play

And The Gods Do Play

CHAPTER ONE - A Lonely Man

   Jake was a lonely sort of young man. A small, thin weedy man, barely five and a half foot tall. He was aged twenty-five and never had a friend in his life. It was not as if he wasn’t a nice man. He had a very sweet disposition. It was that every time he came close to making a friend something would go wrong.

   He might blurt out how desperate he was to have a friend, for some reason revealing his true thoughts to another. It might be the other person’s attention was attracted by a true friend. It might be an elephant dropped on the house and scattered the people, taking the attention of all.

   Oh, yes that had happened. A pack of giraffes had knocked him half way down the street another time. Yet another time he had just been talking to this woman who seemed friendly when suddenly he had been kidnapped by a masked gunman. It had been a case of mistaken identity and he had been released shortly after.

   Truth be told, every time he tried to make a friend something awful would happen, Like the time he had been arrested for murder as he was making a friend of a small sociable chap, another case of mistaken identity. Or the time he and his maybe friend were nearly run over by a tank that for some reason was going full pelt down the high street of his home town.

   As he lived in a small town these things were unusual to say the least. Like the time at a party, just as he got someone hooked on a humorous story, a vampire appeared. No, not a person in fancy dress but a true vampire. One that made the people scarper and another chance was lost.

   People in his own neighbourhood avoided him now. He was seen as someone who bought bad luck, someone who caused terrible things to happen, like the twister, a tornado that ripped houses apart. It had appeared just as he was talking to a . . . dog!

   He could not even make friends with a dog without something bizarre happening.

   It happened the day after a meteor struck down half the shops in the retail centre while he was talking to a shop assistant.

   He rose above the Earth, seemingly getting lighter and lighter and rising. A freak burst of wind pushed him to one side and he saw Mountain Hill. The largest hill for ten miles and craggy to climb. At the base was good green grass, a picnic area for the local populace, taking their brood out on a Sunday.

   To the top of this hill the wind swept him and then gently dropped him down on the flat face of the top of the hill. A beacon stood here, a facsimile of one that had been there for centuries. A flaming beacon that would alert the local lord of an attack upon this area. No local lord now of course. No marauders or armies that would attack the area. It was however to Jake’s mind, a nice touch.

   Out of the ground rose a man but what a man. First the head fully ten feet large, then the neck and body and then the legs. The giant of a man stood astride on the left and right banks of the hill, fully sixty feet tall.

   “Puny mortal. Do you know why you have been summoned here?” Boomed a deep voice that made the ground shake and shattered the beacon.

   Jake although petrified was made of strong stuff though. A life alone can do that to you. Toughen you up or break you. Jake had not broken.

   “You want to be my friend?” Jake asked facetiously.

   Laughter reverberated throughout the area.

   “Something like that.” The giant of a man smiled. And shrank. Yes, shrank, down to only ten feet tall.

   Now that may not sound much but you meet a person who is six feet nine and you think them impossibly tall. This man had an extra three and a bit feet to that.

   He was dressed in a bright red jacket and checked breeches. Yellow woollen stockings or socks went from the black leather boots to those britches. A soft cap with a feather from some strange bird finished the ensemble. The feather was striped, black and white, like the skin of a zebra. The man’s face was florid, red as if he were a drinker. Craggy too as if he had seen a lot of life. His hair was as white as snow, a short bristly haircut with the snow-white hairs.

   “Come with me.” Said the man and took one of Jake’s hands in his own.

   Now Jake was flying again but straight upwards. The hand was not pulling him though. It seemed just the contact was enough for them both to fly high and up. Through the clouds they went, higher and higher until Jake’s breath was coming out as a cold mist. Through one more cloud and then . . .

   A kingdom! An area of buildings so high as to make Jake look like an ant. And such beautiful buildings, adorned in gold and jade and turquoise. Every type of building he could think of from little houses no more than huts to huge palaces of gold. From onion shaped buildings to magnificent homes that were topped by jade domes.

   The two swept to a square whose only adornment was a single monument. Five lightning bolts radiating out from a ball of fire. This was no stone carving though, this was a true ball of flame with lightning showering sparks to the blue earth below it.

   People were there, all eight foot tall or slightly smaller. One giant man hung around at the rear of the group. He was easy to spot. He was bulkier and taller than the rest at about eighteen feet tall.

   They landed in front of these people.

   “Behold the true Gods of England.” The man accompanying him said. Only now he did not have a soft cap with a feather in it. He had a thin coronet around his head with a huge ruby set in the centre. Not so much a crown as a circlet of a silver material, maybe platinum.

   “And you all want to be my friends?” Jake said derisively, his dark humour coming out.

   Oh, he believed them to be Gods alright. There was a presence, an aura to each that spoke of great power. But what did he have to lose? A lonely life with little happiness.

   The populace here did not get angry at his words, instead they all laughed uproariously.

   “But you are right.” Said a stunningly attractive woman, a woman that stirred him, mind and body. Indeed there was something about her, something more than beauty that stiffened him in all the right places. Especially one. Just the sight of her, the feel of her power. Piercing green eyes that did not scare him but somehow said ‘come to me and you will be loved’. Her long black hair swept around by the wind seemed to beckon him close offering him the world.

   “You are right. What do you have to lose? You are lonely! And that is our fault.” She called out.

   It was if she had read his mind.

   “How so?” He could not help asking. “How is your fault?”

   Again that uproarious laughter.

   An imp like man answered him. Smaller than the rest, the size of . . . well Jake. Five and a half foot tall with tiny little horns at the sides of his head. Furry feet and clawed hands. His colour was purple.

   “You have no friends because it was decreed you have no friends. Decreed by the Gods until you were of service to us.”

   “You wrecked my life because of some decree you made?” Jake was angry, maybe the most wrathful he had ever been in his life of five and twenty years.

   “Actually, it was more of a bet.” Said a man with clothes that seemed to drip water from every inch of their blue-green cloth. “A bet between the King of the Gods, Cathbhar and the rest of us. We said you would have no friends until your summoning. He said he could provide you with at least one.”

   Jake guessed this was his summoning. Summoned before the Gods of England.

   “I lost!” Shrugged Cathbhar the King of the Gods. “I owe each one boon.”

   It did explain elephants dropping from the sky, also the freak meteoroids and twisters, was Jake view on the matter.

   The King swept his hand all around and they were all standing on some sort of game board made up of hexagonal outlines with the marble road now divided up.

   “You fools! Most people would have gone mad with the pressure you put me under. It was like I was cursed.” And he had been, sort of. What curse could be stronger than the will of the gods trying to ruin your life?

   “Yes, why didn’t you?” Asked the imp. “I had an extra bet on that. I owe the fair Lavinia a wheel of gold for losing that wager.” He indicated the woman who was so stunning she reached the parts that other women did not reach. At least, not on a single sighting.

   “I am stubborn!” Exclaimed Jake as if this answered the question. “Too stubborn to give in.”

   Of course, he knew mental illness was a lot more complex than that. To him though, most of the world’s people seemed to be suffering, it was only natural he be one of them. If anything, what he did, was adapt. Adapt to a life of loneliness.

   “Well said, that mortal.” Exclaimed the beautiful goddess Lavinia. “You adapted and survived all the torments we sent your way.”

   Ah, she could read his mind. That much was now obvious. Could they all do that wondered Jake.

   “Some, not all.” She replied to his thought. “You were . . . tested for a reason. If you survived, more or less intact, you would become a hero. A chosen mortal to enact the will of the Gods.”

   It took him like a curveball but he eventually got it. He was to be an emissary of the Gods.

   “Choose a God, mortal.” Cathbhar the King of the Gods called out. “Will it be Lavinia, Goddess of Nature? Myself, the King of the Gods? The Imp, Kaelin the God of Happiness? Mighty Quaid at the back, the Blacksmith of the Gods? Airgid, God of Prosperity?” He indicated a man in robes that seemed to made out of rubies crushed into a material. “Janna, Goddess of the Beasts and Monsters?” This was a tiny woman compared to the others, a mere five foot tall. Her face was one of fur with a snout and gleaming red eyes. Her clothes, robes marked with the stripes of animals with an eye covering the portion of her belly. “Jared, God of the Mountains?” A man who looked to be hundred years old, his weight resting on a stick, his back bent with seeming age. “Here . . .”

   Jake interrupted him. He had eyes for only one god, or to be more precise, goddess.

   “Good choice!” All murmured.

   “You will be my champion. Prove yourself and you can become my hero on the mortal realm.” The goddess crooned at him with satisfaction in her voice.

   A gold figurine appeared in one of the hexagonal floor tiles. Jake saw it was a perfect representation of himself.

   “It is but a simple task. Do you know of Victoria Park?” Her questioning was offhand. He nodded, of course he knew of Victoria Park. Had he not lived in Burchill his whole life? Was not the Victoria by far the biggest park in the whole town? You could fit a council estate in there. Tennis courts and play areas, a bandstand and a bowls green. A statue at the centre of it. A huge bronze of Queen Victoria surrounded by four lions that faced north, east, south and west. “There is a stand of ancient oaks . . .”

   “More like a little forest.” Interjected Jake. “They were there before the park was even thought of.” He knew this from his local history class in Junior School. “They cover the north of the park. A little forest . . .” He laughed. “Supposedly guarded by nymphs and fauns.”

   “It used to be.” The goddess Lavinia told him quite seriously. “But I have had to withdraw them. Modern times do not mythical creatures suit.”

   “So, what is the threat?” He asked of his Goddess, her with the long black tresses.

   “They are proposing to pull down the trees and build a swimming pool.”

   “Oh yes, I heard about that. An outdoor pool, a big one, to be part of the park.” He paused in thought. “Would there not be some preservation order on those trees? The one in the centre of the little wood is supposed to be over four hundred years old.”

   “Six hundred and sixty-six.” She commented her eyebrow arching. “An order has been asked for many times but somehow your local council never got around to it. Nor did the government bodies in charge of such things. There is no way of stopping the bulldozers knocking down those beautiful trees.”

   “How did they get permission to build past the council? Those ancient oaks are a part of the town, just as much as the park, just as much as our shopping centres.”

   “Graft!” She laughed without mirth and nodded towards Airgid, God of Prosperity with the robe of ruby material. “The council are in the pocket of the leisure company building the new lido. The government bodies are not doing anything at all, just sitting on their hands. It does not help that several of the MPs are consultants for the firm that fronts for the leisure company, their publicity agency. Indeed, both the Minister for the Environment and his civil service secretary both sit on the board of directors of that agency.”

   It was a stitch up, from the top down. From minor corruption in the country’s government all the way down to the local councillors. No doubt all planned out by the publicity agency.

   “The bulldozers are already hovering. There are seven of them in the parking part of the park. It is rumoured they will rip apart my woods at dawn tomorrow. Three months ahead of the council’s permitted time. That time is to allow objections to be raised . . .”

   “Too many have been raised already.” Commented the God of Prosperity. “The wood will be flattened, ripped asunder and the company in charge of the bulldozers will take the blame. They will simply say they got their dates wrong. Of course, a suitably large bribe will be given to the owner of that company.”

   He sounded smug and Lavinia looked sour. Maybe these two were wagering on the outcome of the survival of those trees.

   “And how am I stop them? The whole government of the British Isles is ignoring the matter and just letting it happen. How am I stop councils and governments?” Jake asked with emotion, although hiding the real question behind this one. Asking that question of the Gods might get him thrown back down to the Earth and it was a long way down.

   He was not worried about the long way down. It was the landing that terrified him. He would resemble a huge mass of strawberry jam after that impact

   Lavinia whispered in his ear and he looked amused at the idea. Amused and impressed. It did answer the question of how.

   “As to the other question in your mind. The one you thought you so artfully hid, I will give you a further power upon successful completion.” She added with amusement.

   That answered his other question too. ‘What do I get out of it?’ A question that some Gods would find impertinent and smite him down for even asking. After all what was he to them, a mere mortal.

   “I decreed that both parties only used mortals in this stage of the game.” The King of the Gods told Jake. “This is not a matter, or a wager, where Gods can descend to the Earth to intervene personally.”

   “So why have you tortured me all my life?” Now he was being impertinent but he thought it fair question.

   “We are Gods. Most of us can see the past, present and parts of the future. It was deemed that if you were strong enough to take the pain of loneliness and the shocks of our . . . ways of preventing you making friends . . . then you would be sufficiently practical to hold powers that Gods give you. Even if only given a power to do one thing, that power will stay with you forever. You will be more like a hero of old than any mere mortal on that planet. Therefore, you had to be tested first.”

   It seemed the Gods had their own strange ways of doing things.

   “I knew upon your birth that you might be a . . . worker for the Gods, a hero, maybe one day a demi-god.” The King of the Gods said in his bold manner but then added sneeringly. “Of course, you could not live here in Britannia. This is the city of the True Gods, the forty four. Apart from us there are many other Gods of course, hundreds . . .”

   “One thousand and eleven at present.” Jared, God of the Mountains told the assembly. “Of course that does not include demi-gods and heroes.”

   For some reason Cathbhar, the King of the Gods, did look happy about this correction. He continued with his speech. “. . . hundreds of minor gods, fifty or so demi-gods.” He stared at Jared as if daring him to speak. “And a hundred or so true heroes.”

   “We each have our own hero.” Kaelin, the God of Happiness, the imp-like god told him. “Others work for all the Gods or make their own path.”

   “If you want powers though, true powers . . .” Lavinia said. “You work for all the Gods as their hero. I have known heroes who allow themselves to be used by the Gods to have much more mastery of skills and powers than any of our household heroes.”

   “True . . .” The mountain God, Jared said. “Look at Caratācos. He did many jobs for the Gods, tried to defend our land against the Romans. Caratacus the Romans called him. Eventually he became our link with the Roman Gods, our ambassador between us. He is now a demi-god with a small but pleasant land of his own on this plane of the Gods. He is much admired by the Gods and is still useful.”

   Caratācos would want to be a full God was Jake’s thoughts on the matter. He would stay useful, hoping to gain enough powers and skills to become a minor god. He thought it unlikely that any of the minor gods would ever live here. Even if they had more ‘strength’ than a major god, the places set for the major Gods would have been set out millennia ago.

   Jake had studied the Gods of the Greeks, Romans, the Norse Gods and the ones of the Germanic Hordes. Even a little about the Celtic Gods. These Gods though did not seem to be the Celtic gods. Mind you, little was known of the Gods of England. There was no written history of those Gods, only bits and bobs of information, mainly from the Roman scholars. Some of that information too was tainted. The Roman historians usually had a patron who looked after them, a rich man who would pay their bills for the beauty of the works they made. A patron would support anyone useful to them as well. Thus, some historians tended to add pieces that would glorify their patrons and were not strictly true.

   The King of the Gods at some time, in Jake’s opinion, set out who were the major Gods. These would be the major Gods of this time, maybe one or two replaced due to angering Cathbhar and being cast out, another to replace them who had done some truly magnificent deed for the King of the Gods, or indeed, all of the Gods. Such things happened though maybe once in a millennium or two. A thousand years could pass, two or even three thousand years before one God was cast out and another took their place. Even then, it might not be a minor god. It could be another god, or a hero or demi-god lifted up to truly divine status.

   Yes, history and the Ancient Religions were passions of Jake’s. He studied them as a hobby, not as a necessity of work or because he wished to go to a university.

[prettyflyshyguy]

Alright Season 3 lets give it up for season 3 everyone.

Cannot believe this show left me on "How do you know what you brought back it 100% pure Sam?" and I just said to myself

GODDAMN

and then just didn't watch S3E1 for three days

Anyway. Liveblogging spn while I work tonight. We're bringing back the old days where I did this with x files if any of you remember that LMAO

Kicking things off with a bang (and me trying to not post too many rambles about a stupid tv show, so I'm conglomerating my thoughts into big posts instead)

we have S3E1 - The Magnificent Seven

Love this show's deep appreciation for full black contact lenses MWAH

cheffs kiss

Sorry I know I should be focusing on the evil demon smoke going to infect whatever city this is but like. Do you guys actually genuinely have flags out the front of your houses like this for real

Like really. Do your houses really have flags like that.

OH YEAH BABEY SEASON 3 GOT AN INTRO STING GRAPHICAL UPDATE!!!!!!!!!! NICE

He is SO concerned

No one is giving me practical effects like this show is and I'm living for this

I WISH there was more of a scene in australia cause god I'd work as a prop maker for a living if it was a viable career to do more horror aligned stuff here.

They've spiced up the camera work this season and it is FUN!!!!

These two are great I hope they're gonna be regular supporting characters PLEASE

Highly entertaining seeing Dean's superpower of "Flirt with woman successfully" actually used as a utility (bonus points because it's making him uncomfortable)

RARE HAT-LESS BOBBY SPOTTED

Oh.

Absolutely visceral death, but a real damn shame because these two were cool :(

This show has no right just putting jokes like this right after a scene like THAT.

These dickheads are far too fun to be a one off PLEASE

Australian chanting

FOIGHT FOIGHT FOIGHT FOIGHT FOIGHT!!!!!!!!

Alright that was a fun way to start a season. Nice recap. I get it. It'dved been a while since it last aired. I like shitty pissed off Sam a LOT.

Are you tired of being nice Sam? Don't you just want to go apeshit?

Round 2 Electric Boogaloo with S3E2 - The Kids are Alright

Starting strong once again with a callback to Victorian worksafe ads!!

(Victorians know.)

Love that Sam inherited NONE of the lying genes in the family

I'm sorry you cant make the comment "as many as I can squeeze out" (EUPHAMISM) and then immediately smack me in the face with a fucking GUMBY REFERENCE?????!!!!!!!!!

Fuck off I hate this show. Fuck you dean you stupid piece of shit

A FUCKING

GUMBY REFERENCE (how many of you know what that is LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOO)

Look I get it, I do, but c'mon he looks so fucking awkward getting cake while these two women are talking about the explicit details of his prior intimate experience with Lisa from 8 years ago

Like what the fuck did they DO to illicit a reaction as intense as these two women are giving

No I will not suspend my disbelief for the running gag No I'm not taking this too literally NO i don't have a problem with interpreting jokes

The closeup of Dean's face as his brain was doing the dialup tone killed me, then immediately PANIC but don't drop the cake (SAME)

Anyway. Lisa I love you. You're amazing. Please be done justice by this show. Please.

Need you all to know I go through hell (HAR HAR) to watch this show

And I thought my conversations in cafes sounded unhinged to bystanders (LITERALLY had some old dude tell me and a friend we were weirdos as we minded our own business drawing horror art in a cafe hgakjrhgkagh)

HATE that my brain just went "NOT THE SARAN WRAP SKIN" (we don't call it that. Next I'll start pronouncing things more wrong than I already do)

Not the white DS Lite!!!!!!!!

Remember this kid you bullied in highschool? This is them now

Oh this show doesn't pull punches and it has some NICE shots

Anyway bye Lisa I love you I hope you come back soon :(

the running gag of bizarre interior décor hotel room never ceases to entertain me, I'm like a small child

Anyway

ran out of room for more images on this post so. Who knows maybe I'll fuck off or I'll do a part 2 tonight we'll see

[duhragonball]

Duhragonba11

(That title looked cooler in my head for some reason.)

Hi, I'm Mike, and on December 21, 2012, I made the first post on this blog. It's nothing special, just a fandub video that always amused me. I didn't have any particular agenda with this thing, which is why I went with the name I chose.

I signed up for tumblr in 2011. Livejournal was dying, I had just moved to a new place and I was kind of looking for a fresh start. My main blog, @sodiumlamp, was my half-assed attempt to do a cool science themed blog. I thought you had to have a moody aesthetic on this site, because a lot of popular tumblrs posted black and white photos with wistful poetry and shit. I was burned out on """fandom""" and wanted to try to write something focused on a more general-interest topic. To be honest, I still want that, but it took a back seat as my priorities changed.

I created a few sideblogs, and decided the only thing I was missing was one for anime nonsense. It feels weird that I waited so long to go through with it, though. That first year or two on tumblr, I was kind of wary of the site, like I didn't know what to do with it, and I was worried I'd screw something up. Anyway, I broke my leg in the fall of 2012, and I spent about five months laid up at my parents' house. It was on the evening of December 20 that I made up my mind to set this thing up. Maybe I just couldn't settle on a name for the blog, or I wasn't sure I could post enough stuff to it to make it worth the trouble. My sleep schedule was a mess in those days, so it doesn't surprise me much that the first post was made in the middle of the night.

What really made this important for me was a post I made a few days later. I decided to just write about Raditz, and it got a lot of notes. Well, more than a hundred, which is kind of a big deal to me. There seemed to be an audience for this stuff, which led me to devote more and more time to this blog. Over the years, my other blogs have fallen by the wayside, and this became my main internet presence.

I don't think this thing is all that "big" in terms of popularity. I currently have 3957 followers, which sounds like a lot, although I usually only see 20-30 unique users in my activity reports. Still, it's a lot for me, and I'm grateful for it. I think things started to pick up in 2015, probably because of Xenoverse 1, Resurrection F, and Dragon Ball Super all starting up around that time. I got a lot of positive reinforcement from my audience, and that was a major factor that led to me getting back into writing fanfiction.

The Luffa concept was something I had been sitting on for years, but I never tried to write it because it seemed like too daunting a challenge, and even if I could finish a story like that, I wasn't sure anyone would bother to read it. But in 2015 I felt a lot more confident about giving it a shot. And people read it! They seemed to really like it! And in early December of that year, I even got fanart of the story.

(Art by @bluewavelengths)

It still blows my mind that this happened. It's eight years later, and I still find myself kind of averting my gaze when I look at this. Like, it's just sort of overwhelming. I really need to assemble some sort of gallery for Luffa art. I've got a folder with a lot of XV2 screencaps and loose drafts, and I'll run across this image from time to time and it always gets to me. Thank you, Nico.

So Luffa kind of took over a lot of this blog space from 2016 onward. I still felt like I should maintain some sort of general presence for an audience that wasn't interested in the character. I don't know if that makes sense or not, but that led me to kind of half-assedly liveblogging JoJo's Bizarre Adventure in 2017, which led me to three-quarter-assed liveblogs around the time I got to Stone Ocean and Steel Ball Run. That kind of set the stage for much of the stuff I do these days. Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z in 2019, Hellsing and Battle Tendency in 2021, and GT and Super in 2023. Well, I like to think I use my whole ass now when I liveblog these things, but I guess I should let history be the judge of that.

I'm not sure there's a coherent message to this. Honestly, I noticed back in January that I passed Year 10, and I thought I should really make a point of doing some sort of retrospective on the next anniversary, so here I am. I kind of debated making it a shitpost, or blowing it off altogether, but now that I've settled on revisiting the history of the blog, I feel like the common denominator here is that I can express myself and there are people who are interested in what I have to say. Every so often someone will tell me they liked something I wrote, and it's great. I'm not good at taking the compliment, but it's still gratifying to know that someone actually paid attention long enough to go "Yeah, he's got a good point." That matters. It matters a lot. If you're reading this, thank you.

I don't know what the future holds. I mean, I'm gonna keep posting stuff here, but for all I know Tumblr will get sold to Yahoo again and go out of business. In the short term, I still have fic work to do, and I've got a lot of messages in my ask box that I need to get back to. Also I'm gonna try to watch Evangelion next year, and reread Jojolion now that it's finished, and see if it makes more sense. Other than that, we'll see.

Serious question: Did I coin the term "Knife Lady"? Like, other people call her that now, but I think I may have been the one to get that started. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but it's fun to think about sometimes. I just don't want to steal fandom valor from the actual inventor of "we should all call that Saiyan 'Knife Lady'." But if it really was me, then that's pretty cool.

[sauntering-down]

weird dreams this morning... in the first one i'd gone to Epcot with a family i don't know. there were parents and a younger daughter, but the only one i interacted with at length was the older daughter, who was perhaps 18 or 19. a little weird (she was wearing a fluffy, heavy knee-length white coat in Florida...) but nice. and then we went into a store that sold all kinds of stereotypically 'witchy' stuff - crystals and rocks especially, also tarot cards and little statues and bundles of herbs and so on. wandered around a bit and looked, and as i'm leaving, the older daughter comes up to me looking all downtrodden and says she's going to die in April. i was like uhhhh... why? and found out the cashier had given (for free) this girl a transparent oval rock that had a bunch of stars that looked like confetti suspended in it... and on the back she'd written a note about how this girl was foreseen to die on April 9th, it was ~in the stones~ and therefore inevitable. i said "mmkay, not to be That Guy acting like a skeptical asshole in the crystals-and-tarot-cards store, but that sounds like complete nonsense." unfortunately the girl pretty much refused to believe me and was convinced she'd drop dead on April 9th. so we all just went to a part of Epcot called 'The Land' which apparently still exists even though i haven't been there in 15 years.

second dream, i was getting ready for school and there was too much random shit in my backpack. i went outside and cleaned the random shit out, keeping only a small stack of important papers and some magazines, but as i'm doing this i realize i can't take my car to school for some reason. noticed a neighbor across the street as i'm inexplicably dumping my trash in her garbage pail - she was headed to work and i was going to ask if she would mind dropping me off on her way, but then i realized she had her toddler with her and her car had only two seats so... never mind! went back over to my house, where my dad was wheeling his bike down the driveway, asked if HE could give me a lift. he mentioned the neighbor but i explained about her kid, said he could just leave me at the traffic circle and i'd walk the rest of the way, and finally he agreed. his bike was... bizarre... it was sort of like a tandem bike except the two seats were REALLY close together - i sat on the front one and hung onto the top row of handlebars, where the ones below actually handled the brakes and steering? idk. i didn't have pedals, either. so on our way down this hill we lived on, it abruptly began pouring and i'm trying to close the snap on my hood so it'd stay in place, while telling my dad i forgot to pack a lunch OR grab any money so i wasn't eating lunch today, apparently. despite this weird uncomfortable ride, we made it down the hill and over to the traffic circle at the next hill. instead of stopping, though, my dad said he'd just take me the rest of the way since it was close - he did pause though, swiped a random dollar bill off the ground and gave it to me. so i was like "well, at least i can probably buy a drink now!" and then we passed this garden with all sorts of money littering the dirt, but there were two-dollar bills and six-dollar bills and i had a feeling this was Fake because money in my dreams is ALWAYS some weirdass denomination. my dad just gave me five bucks from his wallet instead lol, but when we got to school i compared it to the dollar bill and realized the five was way too tiny and misprinted to be real... and then i woke up late.

[notesoncrocs]

ICYMI 1

it's been a blur but i want to write this down. here it is:

on thursday i finished that final paper i was talking about and went to simmons dining with @anas-bizarre-adventure (shoutout to swipe sharing!).

i give it a 3.75/5. could definitely use more variety but what they had was done well. look, plantains! hooray! (and yay, milk!) ana and i spoke spanish throughout this meal and i surprised myself by being kind of funny in spanish (recuerdo que dije "las personas en simmons son similares a las personas en next, pero las personas aquí duchan.")

friday, @budumtssss and i woke up late (for different reasons) and hit up the new house gym, working hard to build the fattest, filthiest dumptrucks we could. we were definitely feeling the weight and walking slowly afterwards.

we walked slowly with ana all the way to pika, because @emill-lirios invited us to their bbq at 3pm. we arrived at around 4pm, but due to a cultural misunderstanding between poc time and white people time, we were baffled to see that the bbq was winding down. some people had already eaten and were hanging out or smoking or going back into the house, and there we were, adrift, three ducklings without a mother, facing each other in a circle to prevent other people from talking to us, with no idea how to go about getting plates or hamburger buns and no willingness to ask. it was not very dignified.

luckily we had one almost-complete computer science education (pending a final on tuesday, good luck!) to share between the three of us, and we mustered up enough social intelligence to figure out how to get food (some guy asked ana if she wanted cheese on her burger and that was the breakthrough). michael was ready to break his plant-based diet, surely by accident, but ana caught it and someone got him his rightful plant-based burger. then em ale finally came and we didn't have to worry about the possibility of being asked why we were there. a collective sigh of relief.

a 4.25/5. not that the food itself was better than simmons, but the vibes were so good. free food in the backyard of a cool house in cambridgeport with friends! what more could you ask for?

em ale took us on a tour of the house and we played games on the roof and the basement until dark. on the roof i kept thinking that it was moments like these where i remember why i love the onset of summer. the sun was setting, the wind felt nice, and we were losing our minds over a dice game. this month of may feels just like all the other mays before it: always some kids killing time, dying to move onto the next grade, waiting for school to let out and summer to actually start.

once we had enough of michael throwing books on himself and falling over (charades in the game cranium) we headed back to ihouse — but then @lvcyklm called me and invited me to a freestyle dance session somewhere in central. thank god for lucy. i think she might think i didn't like it that much — it was very scary, and i didn't do much, just watched mostly — but it was really cool to see people find new and interesting ways to move the human body, and cool to find out that i could (maybe) move and do things in a way i hadn't before. and it's always cool to see people at school outside of the context of school entirely.

i didn't grab a picture of the dancing but to close out, here's a picture lucy took of me and ana on dorm row the other day:

the sun is setting and we look so happy. this is the kind of stuff i want to keep and save from this place — not MDPs or RNNs or whatever, but these kind of moments. i don't know. going places. killing time. life.

i have to get back to studying, and i have to stop listening to big star by lorde ('i've got so much to tell you and not enough time to do it in' / 'you're a big star, wanna take your picture'). stay tuned for more excursions! see you soon x

[raziroo]

Cotton Candy

Pairing: Lotor x gn!reader

Genre: Fluff

Warnings: Saying "Shit" twice

Word count: 2,076 (yay) (also, I edited this, I still need to update the word count)

Author’s Note: I'm crap at writing dialogues, and this is my first time writing for a gay couple. I'm so sorry if it seems forced or unnatural or shitty. Don't be afraid to call me out.

Story Moodboard!

It’s with a grunt of effort that I manage to lift the carton containing the cotton-candy-maker.

‘Here, dad,’ I say as my dad takes the box from my hands. ‘That’s all?’

‘Yep, that’s all of it. We’ll conquer this carnival with our delicious cotton candy,’ I nod, doing jazz hands while saying the last part. Dad chuckles. I grin.

‘Hey, Honey!’ I turn back, squinting to spot where my other dad is in the crowd of bustling people. Where, where…? Yep, there he is – in his embarrassingly brilliant sunshine yellow and bottle green striped shirt and hot pink trousers, a sharp contrast to his natural bright red hair. Don’t say that it can’t look that bright; you’ll never know just how blindingly bright bottle green can really be until you see the shirt my dad’s wearing. And trust me, he usually dresses in simpler tones; such bland tones that you’d be surprised to know he was capable of wearing colourful hues as well. It’s only that he’s very passionate about his job, and so whenever we set up a booth in fetes such as the current one, he never misses to match the shop logo.

‘Hul-lo, father dearest, how seems to go your day?’

‘Oh, quite lovely, if I do say so.’

‘Well, that’s simply charming –’

‘Alright, enough,’ my other, not redhead dad snaps with an exasperated sort of smile on his visage. You see, my not redhead, a.k.a. brown-haired dad happens to be British. And that means that me and dad would rather paint our teeth blue than to not tease him. ‘You both need to shut it and start helping me with the decorations, now. You know I’m trash at all that.’

‘Aw, now don’t get discouraged,’ I say, patting dad on the back. ‘After all, not everyone can be as blessed as me, can they?’

‘Hey, why don’t you go look around for a bit? You’ve been helping out since before I have.’

‘Yeah, he’s right, pet. You should.’

I huff, rubbing my palms on the fabric of my jeans. ‘You guys sure? I’m not tired, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘We’re not worried, we’re just saying you should also get a look, you know? There’s a lot of surprising booths this time around. I mean, there are aliens participating too, so…’

‘Hmm,’ I play with my bottom lip a little, then, ‘yeah, okay. I’ll be back in like, an hour? Forty five minutes? Sound okay?’

‘Sounds great.’

‘Bye, then.’ And with that, I turn on the heels of my Converse, wandering about the pretty stalls and eager children and kissy couples and aliens with curious features.

It really feels bizarre, just how astonishingly fast mankind has accepted the existence of aliens. It seems simultaneously ages and just a day before when conspiracy theorists raged all around the world, presenting baseless theories and concepts as to why and how the three-man squad on the Kerberos mission disappeared. Then came the Galra, bringing along with them global terror – because alien life, intelligent alien life existed and humanity remained oblivious all these millennia, and now they were actually attacking us. It could’ve been, perhaps even was, in some other dimension, the end of Earth. But then a defender appeared; Voltron appeared in all its glory, bringing along with it proof that however much these purple aliens claim that humans are scum of the universe, humans were, in the grand scheme of things, the ones that saved the universe too.

It feels even more puzzling to actually be on a first-name basis with the leader of Voltron; that’s right, I’m personally acquainted with Keith Kogane. It was around six months after him leaving the Garrison did I come across him. He’d been loitering around the neighbourhood, had ended up in a fistfight with some other kids, and along with that a split lip and bruised cheek. I’d been watching. When the fight ended, I (somehow) persuaded him to come along so that I could at the very least provide him with a band-aid.

Long story short, we’d bonded over how our moms were no-shows and how dads were the best and we became surprisingly close friends; the only difference was that after the death of his old man, he lived alone. I’d been adopted by my two current fathers. I told him about how when they’d initially adopted me, I was excruciatingly shy. I wouldn’t even come out of my room except meals. It was only when I came to know that they knew how to make candy floss had I timidly approached them if I could have some, because previously I’d always been grossed out at the thought of having to eat that. I’d overheard this group of kids saying that cotton candy was actually just dyed granny hair, so that’s where that came from.

I love cotton candy now. So much so, that even at the age of twenty-six, I will pout if someone takes some of mine without my permission. As if I’d ever allow them to.

Speaking of Keith, I haven’t seen him in years. We lost all contact when he turned eighteen, and then he went off into space, and even when he came back, I didn’t get a chance to meet him. I bear no ill will, though. He must have formed some close relationships. Our past friendship is comparatively much more trivial.

I spot a booth selling grilled corn. I instantly head there.

As I’m about join the crowd of humans and aliens who also want corn, a familiar call of my name leads me to pull a three sixty.

Lo and behold. Keith Kogane.

Despite him having obviously grown a lot, the face was still the same. I’m sure that, if he gets a split lip and bruise on his cheek right now, he won’t look all that different.

There’s a questioning hesitance on his features; he’s probably wondering if he’s got the right person. My pleasantly surprised smile and raised eyebrows assure him. As I step away from the grilled corn stall, I notice a motley crowd behind him; some are purple, some are holding Voltron plushies, and some look way too curious to be in a carnival. The introduction is going to be fun.

‘Keith! You're gonna live a hundred years - I was just thinking about you. But anyways, it’s – it’s great to see you,’ I say with a little giggle. ‘Though I am kind of surprised you actually approached me. The sixteen-year-old you would never.’

He smiles awkwardly in return. ‘Y – yeah… I, just… oh God, this is – I’m sorry,’ he says, his inner turmoil evident.

‘It’s all good. I know you’re shit at small talk, so… like, introduce me? Maybe?’

He nods rapidly, brows furrowed. ‘Yeah, um,’ he turns to the people behind him, telling them my name, how we met, the whole affair. I give them a wave. Most of them greet me back.

‘And, this is Shiro and Curtis,’ he points to the tall, white-haired yet young man, holding hands with a tanner guy, ‘Lance, Pidge and Hunk,’ he points to a lanky, bright-smiled guy, a buffer, kind-seeming person, and a short chestnut-haired woman who, despite wearing baggy jeans and a baggier tee, looks somehow better dressed than me. ‘Then that’s Allura, Coran, and Romelle, they’re Alteans,’ a woman with enchanting beauty and a regal aura surrounding her, a redhead who’s significantly older than the rest with an impressive moustache, and a youthful appearing girl with a big grin, ‘and Lotor, he’s Galran. The Galran Emperor, in fact.’ Lotor is a tall, lilac-skinned man with aristocratic features who shares the same cheek markings as the Alteans. Oh, and he’s unfairly gorgeous, his hair a luscious mane of white which I just know will be soft. It’s hard not to stare. You remember how I said Allura looked like royalty? Yeah, the way this man carries himself, he has the aura and visage of a God. Even in a white tee-shirt and jeans he looks way better than should be legal.

I rip my eyes away.

‘So…are Noah and Oliver here too? I’d love to see them. I mean, I never did get to thank them to permit a possible criminal to sleep in their house.’

I laugh. ‘Never mind that, but we actually sit up a stall here. I could, you know, maybe even get you guys something to eat.’

‘Free? Please don’t.’

‘It’s nothing, really, just… I don’t know, accept it as a small thank you present for not letting the planet go to shit.’

A bit of thinking. Even after a nod from Shiro, it was Lance who said yes. Good ol’ Keith.

When we reach the stall, my British dad is the only one we find there. He looks up, about to say something to me, when he notices Keith.

‘Dad. You remember Keith?’

‘Your possible criminal friend who turned out to be the saviour of the universe Keith?’

‘That Keith. He wanted to see you.’

‘Oh? Well then,’ he dusts his hands, stands up, and greets Keith. Both of them engage in a conversation.

‘You guys wanna try something?’

‘What do you got?’ asks Pidge.

‘What do we got? Um, we got chocolates, candy, marshmallows, jellybeans, tortilla chips, ice cream, popcorn – butter, cheese, caramel, peri peri – Lays, like, a lot of Lays, and the good old cotton candy. What d’you want?’

So, after providing the humans with two Cream n’ Onion Lays, a pack of tortilla chips, a double scoop of butterscotch and chocolate, a small tub of popcorn, and three cotton candy sticks, I turned to the aliens.

‘I’m assuming you guys aren’t familiar with a lot of this stuff, so you could either pick whatever looks to be good, ask your friends, or I could recommend something. What’ll it be?’

Romelle was the one who asked, ‘What’s ice cream like?’

‘It’s sweet. It’s cold. And it’s like… heaven in mouth.’

‘Ooh. I want an ice cream. The… pink one?’

‘That’s strawberry. You can eat it in a cone, or in a cup.

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Well, the cup you can’t eat. The cone is like a crispy biscuit,’ judging by her face, she didn’t know what biscuit was. ‘I’ll just give you a cone. It’s all on the house, so no worries if you don’t like it.’

I watched eagerly as she licked the ice cream. An unreadable look crossed her face. Then – ‘This is almost as good as Hunk’s cookies!’

‘Really?’ Coran asked, twirling his moustache. ‘Well, then…’ he squinted to read the names of the various flavours. ‘I would like “cookies and cream”. Yes.’ A cone of cookies n’ cream was served.

‘Allura?’

‘Do you have something that isn’t sweet?’ That was a plot twist. I’d have taken her as someone who appreciated sweeter foods.

‘We do. You want spicy?’

‘…Sure.’ Peri Peri popcorn was given and enjoyed.

And last… ‘Lotor. What would you like to have?’

It takes me a lot of will to not laugh at Lotor’s way too analytical expression. ‘What would you recommend?’

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Out of all this stuff, candy floss is my favourite.’

‘Candy floss… the item that looks simultaneously like a cloud and an old woman’s hair?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I would like a helping of candy floss, then.’

As I hand Lotor a stick of cotton candy, I wait with anticipation for his reaction.

‘How am I supposed to eat this?’

It takes me a moment to process that. ‘Uh, you just… pinch a little of the stuff in between your fingers, then eat it. Or you could just, um, go in directly, which I’m thinking isn’t really your style.’

He narrows his eyes, but follows my instructions nonetheless. Only a second after putting the stuff in his mouth, Lotor purrs.

Everyone around him, being me, Coran and Romelle (Allura’s off telling Lance how great Earth food is), looks with wide eyes and raised eyebrows. Lotor appears as if he’s just died inside. The berry-shaded blush on his face is adorable, though.

'I didn't, like, poison you or something, right?'

'No. It's that... I would never in my lifetimes have expected something so tooth-rottingly sweet to be this delicious.'

'So you're okay?'

‘Yes. In fact, I quite like… this cotton candy.’

I grin.

[tinyinvadr]

Here’s Chapter 2! Told ya I was invested!

Ch. 1/Ch. 3/Ch. 4/Ch. 5/Ch. 6

Petal in the Audience

Chapter 2

“I’m just saying, I wanna make out with a clown. Is that so wrong?”

I was watching from the crack again. Logan was going into another one of his bits again, and I was trying not to laugh too hard. He’s been coming over to this house for so many years now, and somehow I never got tired of his bizarre sense of humor.

“Yes, yes, you and your clowns. So, are we going to the boardwalk?” Kira asked.

The three of them grabbed their bags and headed out. I was disappointed there wouldn’t be much of a show, but I’d still have some time with them. Not much, but at least the rest of the month. It would take a while for my parents to pack all our things.

With a sigh, I headed back to my room.

My room didn’t really have a lot in it. I had the necessities, a bed, clothes, a few plush toys that Mom made, but that was about it. Even though I was 14, my parents still didn’t want me borrowing yet, so there wasn’t really much in our home that I could call my own.

I didn’t really mind that, though. My room was just where I went to sleep. I spent most of my time at the crack.

It was right then and there when an absolutely crazy idea came to mind. The sane part of me wanted to dismiss it, but the part of me that wasn’t ready to let go yet took control, and soon enough, I was sneaking off to my parents’ room to grab the borrowing gear.

While I couldn’t reveal myself to the humans or properly say goodbye, the least I could do was bring a little bit of them with me when we moved. All I had to do was venture out, find three things that were significant enough to them, but small enough to carry and wouldn’t be missed.

I figured a pencil from Kira would probably be good. She had plenty, and they all had fun, colorful patterns on them, so one would definitely look cool in my room.

Randall had a cup of board game dice on his desk, so that would also be an easy borrow. He likely wouldn’t notice just one missing, and even if he did, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Logan would be the hardest, since he didn’t actually live at the house, but he was notorious for accidentally leaving stuff behind. I’d just have to hope he left something that I could easily take with me.

Soon enough, I arrived at the small hole in the wall, hidden underneath Randall’s bed. The coast looked clear, so I ran out and headed for the desk.

Even though there was no one around, I felt very exposed. After all, this was my first time borrowing, and I was out in broad daylight.

Not only that, but it was very easy for me to forget just how small I was when I was just watching from the walls. The crack was at an elevation, so it was easy for me to imagine that I was the same height as them. But actually standing in the room, on the floor… everything was gigantic.

I shook those thoughts aside as I tossed Dad’s grappling hook at the desk. It took a couple tries for it to catch, but I managed to climb up. It was kind of terrifying, but I just kept my mind focused on the task at hand so I wouldn’t be tempted to look down or think about how high up I actually was.

Finally, I reached the dice cup. It was about as tall as I was, so I couldn’t really see inside, so I just blindly reached in and pulled one out.

The one I got was pretty cool. It was a green, transparent one with white dots. I think it came from that pirate board game they used to play all the time when we were little.

From my place on the desk, I scanned the room to see if I could find any of Logan’s belongings. Laying right in the center of Randall’s bed, I saw it: Logan’s iconic black coat.

Of course, I couldn’t take the whole coat with me, but maybe a button. The thing was already pretty old and beat up, and Logan always had that “I don’t care” attitude, so he probably wouldn’t miss it. I decided to get the button on the way back, though, because I still had to venture off into Kira’s room, which I wasn’t as familiar with.

I ran across the hallway, and thankfully, her door was just on the other side. In comparison to Randall’s room, Kira’s was much neater. While Randall wasn’t super messy, his room was very much “organized chaos.” Kira’s was just plain organized, and also very pink and pretty and cute.

Similarly to what I did back in Randall’s room, I used the grappling hook to climb up the desk. There was an assortment of pencils in a metal container. I wasn’t sure which one to take, but I eventually decided on a light pink one with white cats on it, since Kira has a cat ear headband that she wears sometimes.

So, with my pencil and my die, I made my way back to Randall’s room so I could get my button.

Getting a good grip on the sheets, I climbed up onto the bed, and headed for the coat. Unfortunately, none of the buttons were loose enough for me to just pull off. I’d have to cut it.

I swear I could hear Dad lecturing me about only taking what’s lost, and that this is technically stealing, but pretty much our entire way of life is technically stealing, so I don’t really think there’s much of a difference as to HOW the stuff is acquired.

So, with Dad’s little blade, I cut through the string, and released the button. With a sigh, I plopped down on the bed, and took a moment to admire my treasures. I still wasn’t ready to move, but at least I didn’t really have to say goodbye to my “friends,” I could take them with me. There was no doubt Mom and Dad would notice this stuff, but I hoped they would be understanding. This would also prove to them that I’m ready to start borrowing. After all, I went out on my own in the middle of the day, got all this stuff, and did it all without getting caught!

…Or so I thought.

I didn’t even notice the sound of his footsteps. He moves so quietly, it’s really strange. It was like Randall just appeared in the doorway. I sat there, dead still, my gaze locked onto him.

To my relief, he didn’t seem to notice me, and instead just sat down at his computer. This was my chance to escape! I just had to be very, VERY quiet.

I tucked the pencil under my arm and clutched the die and the button to my chest as I made my way to the edge of the bed so I could climb back down. I only wish I realized beforehand how much harder it is going down than it is going up.

I was doing okay, but the pencil proved to be a problem. It was starting to slip out from under my arm. I kept trying to tighten my hold on it, but it was no use. It dropped, making a noticeable “clunk” sound when it hit the hardwood floor.

I didn’t have to turn around to know Randall was staring at me. I held my breath and clung to the blanket like my life depended on it, and there was a good chance that it did.

“What the…? What is that?”

No. Nononononono!

Just like before, I could barely hear his footsteps. But I knew he was getting closer, judging by the massive shadow falling over me. I tried to hold on tighter, but I could feel my palms getting sweaty. My heart was beating at a rapid pace, it almost felt like it was going to explode. There was no way out.

And just like that, I lost my grip, and I started to fall. To my surprise, I didn’t hit the floor, but instead landed on a softer surface.

“Whoa… you’re a… person?”

I didn’t dare move. I knew exactly where I was, and I didn’t want to make myself feel worse by looking. I was in his hand. He was holding me. My entire body, he could just… pick me up and do whatever he wanted with me.

“Hey, are you okay?” He asked in a soft voice. “I know, I must be scary, I’m sorry. But I’m not gonna hurt you, I promise.”

I wanted to be reassured by his words, but I was still terrified out of my mind. As much as I knew about him and his friends, I still didn’t KNOW any of them personally. I had no idea what was going to happen to me.

“Please… don’t tell anyone, Randall.” I said, forcing each word out despite how shaky my voice was.

“Huh? How do you know my name?”

At that, I started crying. I couldn’t control it. There was way too much happening at once and I couldn’t process it.

“Shh, it’s okay, you’re okay. I won’t tell anyone. But… can you at least tell me what’s going on? Or, if not, is there anything I can do to help you?”

“C-Can I go home?” I asked.

“Of course! Uh, where’s home?”

“No, I can’t tell you, just… leave the room and let me get back on my own, okay?”

He tilted his head and frowned, his dark, messy hair covering his eye a bit. “Yeah, that’s fine. I understand.”

At that, he gently nudged me off his hand, and I was back on the floor. He scooted back, giving me space, but he didn’t get up to leave yet.

“I’m… guessing you’re not coming back after this. I’m really sorry.”

“N-No, it’s fine, you didn’t do anything wrong. I was just stupid. I shouldn’t have come out here. Thank you for catching me. But… you probably won’t see me again after this. Things are really complicated back home, and… I’m just really glad I got to meet you, Randall.”

He chuckled. “Heh, thanks. Though, I don’t really know why you came out here to see me. My sister’s the popular one.”

“Well, I mean, I wasn’t planning on meeting anyone. I just wanted to borrow a few things to remember you guys by. I know you don’t know me, but I kind of grew up with you, Kira, and Logan. I always wanted to meet you all in person, but I was too scared. And… I might’ve just said too much…”

Randall smiled, and all my fears melted away. I remembered why I liked him so much in the first place. He was always so sweet and patient, and just seeing him like this, as terrifying as it was, it felt good that he was confirming in a sense that we’re actually friends.

“Don’t worry about it. Hey, before you go, did you wanna meet Kira, too? She’s in her room right now.”

“Uhh… maybe tomorrow. Not sure I’m ready yet.”

He nodded. “Okay, no problem. I’ll see you tomorrow then, too. Oh, one last thing. What’s your name? I mean, you know mine, so, I guess I should know yours.”

Feeling more confident, I stood tall and proud, smiling up at him. “I’m Petal!”

“Petal? Like a flower petal? Heh, that’s cute.” He said, gently scratching my head with a finger. “See you around, Petal.”

At that, he got up and left the room like I asked him to, leaving me to return home without him seeing. I gathered my borrowings and ran under the bed, then went into the hole leading back to my house…

…and I ran right into Dad.

“Petal? What do you think you’re doing?”

[inskz]

lucky charm - lee minho

pairing - lee minho x reader

genre - college!au, best friends to lovers, very cliche fluff (lucky girl starring lindsey lohan kinda vibes???)

words - 4k

note - this is just a cute little drabble i wrote while im still waiting for my covid test results to come back so that i can leave my room and see the sun again 🤪 pls be careful everybody take care of your health 💚 enjoy!!!

- - - - -

“You must be kidding me,” you sigh when you see Minho’s hand has turned into a fist, his rock crushing miserably your scissors. Once again, you lost at rock, paper, scissors. And once again, you’re the one that is going to wash your best friend’s dishes that have piled up in is tiny kitchen sink throughout the week.

“Fuck that. This is so unfair,” you grumble, throwing the dishtowel in Minho’s stupid yet perfectly chiseled face.

You make a beeline for his bed, which is actually only a few steps away from the kitchen. Being a broke college student definitely doesn’t allow him to rent a spacious studio, let alone a two-room apartment. You throw yourself headfirst onto his uncomfortable mattress, whose springs always poke your back at night.

“Life is so unfair,” your friend mocks you, dragging out every vowel of his sentence dramatically.

No doubt, you would be strangling him at that very moment if you weren’t so busy playing dead, hoping he would forget about your pitiful existence.

But there is no way mister Lee Minho would miss out on an opportunity to have his gross plates cleaned by someone else. Grabbing onto your ankle, he drags you out of bed until you plop down on the dirty carpeted floor (Minho has the unfortunate tendency to procrastinate vacuuming too). At this point, you are fake crying, throwing a literal tantrum, like a 6 years old child would.

“Life is unfair!” you yell, your feet kicking in the air in pure anger.

At least it is to you. You can’t remember the last time you’ve been lucky. The only instance you got remotely close to it was when you found a four-leaf clover last summer. Well, only if you disregard the fact you stepped into dog poop  on your way to picking it. Oh and that you were wearing brand new white Converse. 

On the other hand, it seems like the boy has the whole crew of the Olympus gods on his side. Not one day goes by without his guardian angel manifesting its presence. 

Minho has always been the lucky type. The type to get an extra nugget in his box of 10. To find 20 dollars bills on the ground. To win every single Instagram giveaway he participates to (and lord knows how much he likes participating to them). 

But how can you be mad at him when he always happily shares his food with you, invites you to the restaurant without you even asking, and gives you his prizes, pretending he doesn’t need them? You don’t believe him when he says he see no use in a panda onesie or a waterproof bluetooth speaker. Deep down, you know it’s his way to silently love you. 

But well, you can still blame him for occasionally taking advantage of your misfortune to make you do his dreaded house chores, just like right now. 

Everyone thinks you are a bizarre duo. Even you can’t fathom how in hell you two became best friends, considering how awfully your first encounter went three years ago. 

On orientation day, he asked you for the time, probably because his phone was dead (or maybe because he was dying to talk to you?)

Without hesitation, you lifted and rotated your wrist so that you could see your watch. Little did you remember; you never actually owned a watch and you were holding a fancy 7 dollars iced coffee, which, of course, did not have a lid on because plastic is bad for the environment (duh). 

Minho couldn’t help but burst out in hysterical laughter when the whole drink spilled on your jeans. For your defense, you didn’t sleep at all the night before  since you were terrified of being alone in your new dorm room the first few days (weird stuff happens all the time in dorms, okay?). If he had asked you for your name, you probably wouldn’t even have been able to tell him. 

But Minho thought you were the funniest person on campus, and he really needed a clown like you to entertain him throughout his endless college semesters. That’s what he told you anyways. Not that he thought you were the cutest human being he had ever seen. 

Why would he when you are the literal definition of a mess: always having toothpaste stains on your sweater, bags under your eyes, messy hair, tripping and falling, missing buses, breaking things, losing stuff. 

Most of the time, you just forget your keys and Minho lets you crash at his place since he hasn’t got any roommate and he isn’t used to sleeping alone, especially without his cats. It surely isn’t because he loves waking up next to a very groggy but adorable you every single morning, no.  

Minho manages to bring you back to the countertop despite your reluctance. Positioned behind you, his arms trapping your body to make sure you can’t run away from your duties, he dips your hands into the soapy water, and you can’t help but squirm at the touch of an unknown substance sticking to a plate that has probably been soaking here for a week. You despise doing the dishes and your friend knows it.

You hear him giggle in your ear while he is playing with your arms like you are some type of marionette, making you to take the sponge and squeeze dish soap onto it. 

You’ve never been the kind to like proximity nor seemed to be Minho, but for some reason, you always end up glued to each other. You hate public displays of attention and pet names a little less when it comes from him. Or maybe you don’t hate it at all and actually crave it every single minute that goes by.

Before he has the time to come up with the Machiavellian idea to soak your pajamas in dirty water (because you know he would inevitably have at some point), you yank his hands off of you and start scrubbing angrily the dirty cups. 

Minho stays behind you anyways, observing your every move, his chin propped up on your shoulder like a curious little bird. To be honest, his presence is kind of getting overwhelming. But whatever, it’s not like his slightest touch makes your heart warm up in comfort or that he smells like fresh linen drying out on the porch of a cottage house on a sunny Sunday morning or anything. 

“You missed a spot. Here” he murmurs teasingly, his lips almost touching your earlobe, while he points at the handle of his hideous ‘world’s greatest dad’ mug Jisung gifted him last christmas. 

You know he has noticed the way you shivered violently at the feeling of his breath tickling your skin because he starts snickering loudly. 

“I swear to god if you don’t shut up and go seat on the couch, I’ll slap you so hard with this spatula you’ll regret you were even born,” you say, turning around suddenly to menace him with the plastic utensil. 

Of course, he isn’t afraid one bit. Right now, you really wish you could make the smug, but oh so attractive, look on his face disappear. 

“Alright, ma’am” he laughs, holding up his hands in surrender. “I’ll let you do your thing”. He lets himself fall onto his dingy couch. 

You can hear him humming one of his favorite songs above the sound of the water running. It would probably be getting on your nerves if his voice wasn’t so pretty.  

“Chan’s sick, so we’re not going to the gym tomorrow night. Do you wanna eat tacos? El Huero has even better deals than usual” he asks you, scrolling mindlessly through his phone. 

“Aren’t the deals supposed to be on Tuesdays?” You frown and scrub a little harder the frying pan Minho has burnt the night before while trying to make chocolate chips pancakes for diner, because why eat savory food when you can have dessert for every meal, right? It is one of the few advantages of living without your parents you both truly enjoy. 

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Tomorrow,” he yawns, probably exhausted after what you put him through last night. You forced him to catch up on the entire season of Love Island because you desperately needed someone to bitch with, and what better partner than Lee Minho.  

You take a quick glance at him and see him stretching himself across the cushions like a cat. You always thought there was something feline about his features. While you’re drying the mugs with the dishtowel, your mind wanders uncontrollably, thinking about his piercing eyes, his delicate nose, the corners of his lips that curl up a little… 

All of the sudden, your hands freeze. Minho is too immersed in TikToks to notice the stupor on your face. “Wait. Today is… Monday?” you stutter. 

Alarmed by the sound of your voice, his eyes finally leave his phone’s screen to look up at you. “Yeah” he repeats slowly as if you are the dumbest person he has ever encountered. 

And you truly are. You are pretty sure your heart has stopped beating. Minho’s “world’s greatest dad” mug you’re holding slips between your fingers and comes crashing on the floor with a deafening sound. The pieces are now scattered all around you, making you unable to make out what’s written on it anymore. Not a big loss, if you ask. 

“Y/N, you know that’s my favorite mug!” he exclaims, leaping up from the couch. “I’m sure you did it on purpose,” he mutters while he’s trying to collect the small fragments, in vain. 

But you’re too shocked at this very moment to pay attention to the glare your friend is giving you. To be honest, Minho has only two moods: glaring at you or teasing you.  

“My interview,” you finally manage to say, and Minho’s eyes go wide as he realizes the critical situation you’re in. 

You check the time on the microwave: 10:45. In 30 minutes, you’re supposed to be on the other side of town, being interrogated by boring businessmen that are going to decide whether or not you’ll be accepted for a paid internship in one of the most reputable music label of the country. Basically, decide whether you’ll live a happy and fulfilling life, working in the sector you’ve always dreamed of or end up miserable with a boring office job and a massive college debt. 

“Holy shit,” Minho whispers. You can see a wave of panic washing across his face for a split second, but, as always, he manages to find his composure back immediately. 

He has never been the kind to lose his cool, except to scold you when you forget the names of his cats and their respective coats’ color (which you unfortunately often did forget). 

“What are you doing? Get dressed!” He tells you when he sees you’re still standing there dumbfounded in the kitchen, like the famous Robert Pattinson meme, wearing an oversize Kermit the frog shirt with a dozen holes in it and his favorite Adidas sweatpants you always stole from him.

“No, it’s too late. I can’t make it,” you mutter, your breath short. You’re paralyzed, as if there is a 20lbs rock sitting at the bottom of your stomach, pinning you to the ground. 

This isn’t bad luck, you think. This is karma. This is what you get for skipping classes to watch telereality shows in your bed with your best friend and not even realizing it isn’t the weekend anymore.

“Miss me with that bullshit.” He runs to his closet and rummages through his drawers, throwing every piece of clothing that’s on his way to find an appropriate outfit that would fit you. 

“You’re gonna go do this interview even if I have to drag you all the way there.” He pushes you into his bathroom since you still haven’t moved an inch. 

You manage to brush your teeth and your hair, fighting through the nauseous feeling that is building up in your tummy. 

When you come back to the living room, Minho has found dress pants and a sweater that might not look utterly ridiculous on you. He lets you change in a corner, while he runs around the room collecting all your essentials. 

“You’re coming?” you ask him when you see he is already wearing his puffer jacket.  

“You really think I’m gonna let you go all by yourself when you’re literally not even able to put your shoes on properly”. You are, indeed, struggling with your laces, as if your fingers are suddenly made out of butter. 

Minho ties them up for you and you literally feel like he’s your babysitter. You know you’re gonna hear about this for months – what are you saying- years! But all you can think about at the moment though, is the fact that sneakers are definitely not appropriate for an interview. 

He throws your warmest coat at you, grab his keys, and by some type of miracle, you’re both out to the door in less than 10 minutes. 

You try to call the elevator, but Minho grabs your arm and leads you to the staircase. His hand never leaving yours, he runs down the stairs and you have no choice but to follow him as fast as you can. 

You can’t count how many times you missed a step and fell at this particularly slippery spot, between the 5th and the 4th floor, but weirdly enough, it doesn’t happen today. 

When you finally reach the ground floor, you exit the complex and Minho hops on his old and rusty bike that he had attached to nearest tree the night before.

“There’s no way I’m riding behind you on this death machine,” you laugh nervously. The memory of that one time Minho convinced you to seat into his bicycle basket (as if you could even realistically fit in it) and you both fell seconds after he started to pedal is coming back to your mind.

Sure, it was after a long night of drinking, you were both tipsy and it was the only way to get you home since you had spent all your uber money at the bar, but still! You’re pretty sure the bruise on your butt hasn’t disappeared to this day.  

“Hurry up,” Minho groans, ignoring your complaint. You unwillingly seat on his flimsy pannier rack and wrap your arms around his torso. 

You haven’t even left, yet you’re already holding onto his puffer jacket for dear life. A giggle escapes your friend’s mouth (which you think is very inappropriate in such a desperate situation) before he lifts his feet off the ground and starts pedaling. 

You try to ignore the loud squeaking of the bicycle drive by shutting your eyes tighter and rehearsing your introduction you have prepared over and over in your head. No matter how hard you are trying, you can’t remember what you are supposed to say just after your age (which, as you can imagine, isn’t really far into your monologue). 

By the way the wind is lashing your face, you can tell Minho has picked up the speed. His breathing is getting louder, his heartbeat faster and you can’t help but think you’re probably way too heavy for him to bike you around like that. Maybe he shouldn’t skip his gym sessions with Chan so often. Or maybe you shouldn’t have eaten the leftover pancakes for breakfast after all.

You find the courage to open your eyelids and are pleased to see you’re already halfway there, probably because every single one of the traffic lights you encounter is green, and your friend is going surprisingly fast. Is luck finally starting to smile upon you? 

Your mad race comes to a halt when you reach the address of your interview. You hop off the bike and so does Minho who, by the way, is a panting mess. He’s barely able to catch his breath, strands of hair sticking to his sweaty forehead, but he’s beaming at you when he realizes you’re just on time. 

“Go” he gasps, pushing you in the direction of the building’s hall. 

You walk up to the glass door but as your hands are about to push it, you pull a 180. Your friend sighs loudly, already knowing what’s coming next. 

“Wait. No. I can’t do this. I’m not prepared” you tell him frantically. “I’m freaking out. I think I’m gonna pass out.” You are now walking in circles, mumbling incoherently. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” 

Your heart is racing in your chest and your hands are getting clammy at the simple thought of failure. But guess what? You can’t fail if you don’t even try! One more good reason to just go back to bed and forget about your sad life for a good 8 hours, right? 

“Y/N, you’re the most talented person I know, you’re gonna do just fine” Minho catches you in his arm to stop your endless pacing. You would probably think this gesture is endearing if it wasn’t just meant to make sure you couldn’t run for your life.  

“No, I’m not. What if I throw up in front of everybody like that one time during the Romeo and Juliet musical?” You look up at him and his face is only inches away from yours. You’re sure you would be swooning at how beautiful he looks if you weren’t so terrified at this very moment.

“You were nine,” your best friend says, and you swear you have never heard him speak to you in such a sweet tone before. His voice is like honey and lavander but it doesn’t soothe you like it should. 

You manage to break free from his embrace to crouch down, in an attempt to slow down your breathing. If only you had data left, you could be watching those short relaxing videos on your phone. They always work. But no, you had to spent it all on online games, just one week into the month. You really are beyond help.  

“Y/N I know you’re scared, but if you miss out on this opportunity, you’re gonna regret it for the rest of your life.” Minho is lowering himself so that you can hear him, even though you’re curled up in a ball. 

“And I’m warning you, I won’t want to hear you complain about it,” he adds, this whole situation obviously starting to get on his nerves. 

If you were him, you would have probably left a long time ago. But this isn’t your best friend’s way of behaving. You know he would never abandon you no matter how annoying you could be (and you could be very annoying sometimes). After all, he is always the one holding your hair while you puke in the toilets when you had a couple too many drinks.

It takes all your willpower to stand up but there is no other way, you have to do it. You can hear the time ticking dangerously in your mind, as if your brain had turned into a clock.

“You’re right. Slap me,” you say, looking at him straight in the eyes, dead serious. 

“Wha -“

“Slap some sense into me. They do that in movies when people are panicking. It’s like throwing a bucket of cold water in someone’s face. But clearly we don’t have a bucket and we don’t have cold wa- “ you start blabbering. 

“What the fuck are you talking about? I’m not gonna slap you!” Your friend isn’t usually that horrified at the thought of beating your ass. In fact, he has felt the desire to rip your head off more than once, especially when you’d steal all the duvet at night, but at this moment he is just scared you might have actually lost your mind.  

“Just fucking do it Minho!” you scream, your hands clenching the front of his grey hoodie he always looks so divine in. 

Minho has never obeyed you, and this is not the day he is going to start. 

He puts both of his hands on the sides of your face and crashes his lips onto yours. 

You would be lying if you said you have never imagined the day your best friend would kiss you. It happens pretty much every single time you look at his cute pout a little too long. But one thing is certain, it isn’t like you pictured it to be at all.

You were convinced your heart would go so wild it would burst out of your chest and your head would spin so furiously you’d lose your balance. You thought your stomach would fill with butterflies to the brim and your whole body would be on fire.

But none of that is happening. On the contrary, every single muscle in your body relaxes under his touch. The way his soft mouth presses gently against yours makes you calmer, almost at peace amongst all this turmoil. 

Minho is kissing all your tension and stress away and you catch yourself letting a sigh of relief escape your parted lips.

As if you have kissed him already hundreds of times in your past life, Minho feels like home. He’s a safe haven you can always take refuge in during troubled times. Ever since the day you met, he has never left your side.

When he breaks away from the kiss, you notice your breath isn’t so ragged and your mind isn’t so foggy anymore. You’re serene. His cold hands are still cupping your face, slightly squishing your cheeks, and you feel like an idiot sandwich for asking him to slap you seconds before.

“That can work too, I guess…” you mutter.  

“You’re okay?” he asks, staring at you with the softest eyes you’ve ever seen.

You just nod, unable to say one more word, and sprint to the entrance, not wanting to make your interviewers wait any longer than they already have.

“Good luck!” You hear him yell just before the door closes behind you and you can’t help but grin from ear to ear.

- - - - - 

Thirty minutes later, you finally step out of the fancy lobby to find a very bored Minho leaning against a tree, patiently waiting for you.

“You’re still here?”

“Of course, I am,” he says, his mouth full of croissant. He gives you a large iced coffee he probably went buying to kill time. Your lips unconsciously curl up into a smile when you notice it comes from the same chain that the one you spilled on your lap on the day you first met him. 

“How did it go?” he asks you, sticking his buttery pastry into your mouth so that you can take a bite.

“Way better than I thought” you answer, right after you swallowed. You hate the way flakes would always get stuck between your teeth. But Minho is always there to warn you about it before anyone else notices, and even pick them for you if you can’t manage to, which, when you think about it, is kind of gross. 

There are two things the boy knows about you: you’re the greatest pessimist on earth and you’d rather die than admit you were wrong (especially if it meant he was right). So for you to even say it wasn’t that bad, means it went phenomenal. 

“I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ but I told you so.” He smiles so wide you can barely see his eyes anymore. You have to look away, otherwise you know you might become instantly blinded by love.

“Maybe I could use some more of your luck” you mumble, staring at your shoes and kicking the red leaves that were surrounding your feet on this sunny autumn morning. 

“Really? And what makes you think I’ll share it with you,” he teases you, leaning forward to incite you to look at him in the eyes. 

“That.”

Your hand finds the back of his neck and pulls him in, in order to close the space that is still left between your mouths.

At first, Minho stiffens, taken aback by your bold move. But soon enough, he caves into your touch. He kisses you back fervently, like he means it. 

His fingers entagle in your hair, his arm wraps around your waist and his chest presses against your body. You’re melting in his embrace, submerged by a wave of bliss which he alone seems to know the recipe. 

It feels new, yet so familiar. Like it was supposed to happen, like it was written in the stars. 

He tastes like croissant and Americano. Like fortune and fate. 

And you can’t help but think you’re the luckiest person on earth.

Who cares about winning the lottery when Lee Minho is your lucky charm? 

[watermelonlipstick]

Dreams, Chapter 5

If you haven’t read this series before, you might want to start on Chapter 1, or check out the Dreams Masterlist! Here’s the series description:

When Dean dies for good leaving Sam and his girlfriend (the reader) behind, they must figure out how to carry on without him. Alone, reeling, and unsure what to do next, trying to honor Dean’s memory and follow their hearts gets even more complicated when their nightmares become dreams that feel a little too real.

GET. READY. This is a bigger chunk but I really think it’s worth it. 

Title: Dreams, Chapter 5

Pairing: (past) Dean Winchester x Reader, (eventual) Sam Winchester x Reader

Word Count: 5343

Summary: Dean’s birthday proves easier than expected in some ways and harder in others. 

Warnings: angst, fluff, swearing, alcohol, s l o w  b u r n

           Sam pulled back from you, opening one eye drowsily. “Are you okay?” he says, voice gritty with sleep.

           “Yeah, I…he didn’t die,” you breathed, confused.

           He cleared his throat. “What?”

           “He always dies. He fell off of Bobby’s roof, but he just broke his ankle, he, he didn’t die.”

           Sam rubbed his face with his free arm, trying to wake up more in earnest. It was still dark, so it couldn’t have been later than 7:30. You hadn’t been asleep for more than a few hours but suddenly felt beyond alert. “That’s good, right?”

           “I—yeah, it’s good. Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you up.”

           “Do you want to talk about it?”

           The reflex was to say no, usher Sam back to sleep. But your reflexes had already been wrong once today. “Can we?”

           The way Sam kept the surprise off his face was admirable. It was the first time you’d agreed to talk about the nightmares that plagued you since losing Dean. He propped himself up on his elbows and flicked on the small lamp beside the bed. “What happened?”

           You told Sam all about the dream, sparing only the details you couldn’t really remember or only made dream-sense, like the way you knew it was 4th of July weekend without having been told. He listened thoughtfully, the focus obvious in his expression. He waited a long beat when you were done, sure not to step on your moment of vulnerability.

           “What do you think it means?” he asked gently.

           You thunked back onto your pillow to gaze up at the popcorn ceiling. “I don’t care, to be honest.” The almost-dark made fuzzy static pulse in your vision. “I think I’m going to write about it, actually,” you said, and startled yourself.

           “Oh, uh, okay,” Sam said encouragingly. “Do you want me to—” he asked, pointing a thumb over his shoulder.

           “No, no. I’ll be back in a little bit, see if you can go back to sleep.”

           Sam nodded with more than a little concern and you climbed over him, yanking an old sweatshirt out to throw over your wilted tee and scampering off to the kitchen table.

           The house was ice cold and dark aside from the ever-present Christmas lights and you could feel the needles that had begun to drop from the tree under your bare feet, rapidly cooling on the cheap flooring. You picked up the notebook and pens Sam had gotten you and sat down at the kitchen counter to write.

           In the days that followed, the constant and varied nightmares of Dean’s deaths returned. When you woke up, more and more often making it to the morning, you kept writing to Dean about them and sometimes your day as a way of processing. You never ‘told him’ about exactly what happened and tried to focus on the sweet things you remembered that made the worst dreams a tease, moving them to your daytime memory and trying to wash away the despair the nightmares left you clawing through.

            By the middle of January, you and Sam had fallen mostly back into old patterns. The Christmas lights were still up, a sort of night light against the long Midwestern nights, and you couldn’t help feeling a small sense of despair sweeping up loose pine needles when Sam was in the shower every day. You didn’t want the winter to end, as weird as that sounded with the ice and chill and fingertips that never warmed all the way. It felt like if you moved into spring that you were leaving the time-out that you’d created and would have to figure out a longer-term solution than this rented cabin, all thin drywall and poorly insulated ceilings. Even your jobs didn’t feel permanent, the summer vacationers sure to come back and reclaim their spots in the town as it came back to life with the plants.

           The ‘mostly’ was that the boundary you broke with Sam never truly came uncrossed. When you were washing dishes he would come stand behind you, the heat of his lips seeping into the shoulder of your old sweatshirts. You’d intertwine your fingers with his while he drove, realizing only when you went to open the car door and found yourself tangled, or running your hands through his hair while he read next to you on the sofa. You never met Sam’s eyes in these moments—somehow it felt like a secret, private thing that would collapse into dust if gazed upon, some sweet, small creature you were protecting. Neither one of you talked about it in the time since that tequila-soaked night.

           As much as you’d needed to be close to him before, you began craving Sam in a way that scared you. You’d always found him beautiful in the way you admire someone you love, but you caught yourself taking notice of the pillars of muscles along his back when he broke down stock boxes and the dark swoop of his eyelashes. The comments about how lucky you were to have him that used to make you nervous your cover was about to be blown started to make you ache a little with fear and something you couldn’t place. You felt a bizarre flick of jealousy when some twenty somethings drinking White Claw dragged their eyes over him at the bar before leaving on their snowmobiles, like he really was yours to claim. It seemed like a manifestation of your fierce attachment and unresolved grief not only for Dean but your old life with the Winchesters, when they sort of were: your teammates and no one else’s. You resolved it had to be and explained it away without inspection, even when these ‘isolated’ moments became less and less isolated.

           Before you knew it, you were hurtling toward Dean’s birthday.

           “What should we do on Sunday?” you asked early on a Thursday afternoon, trying to keep your voice light and easy while you and Sam got ready for your last day of work for the week.

           “I don’t, uh, I don’t know.”

           “Did you guys ever do anything when you were little?”

           “I mean, not really. Sometimes like a cake or whatever I guess, but Dean was always better at that stuff. By the time we were in our 20s, he only wanted to go meet girls and play up the ‘kiss for the birthday boy’ schtick.” Sam grinned sheepishly as though you didn’t know who Dean had been.

           You couldn’t help but smile, remembering the cocksure half-boy you’d met all those years ago. “Okay, well, if you didn’t have anything in mind, I have a couple ideas.”

           “Oh, yeah, I had only really come up with a cherry pie and a bottle of whiskey.”

           You stood up from the kitchen table and grabbed Sam’s empty plate, leaning into his drying hair for long enough to inhale the minty earthiness of his shampoo. “I mean, that’s a given.”

           In Sunday’s late morning you slipped out of the house while Sam was in the shower, leaving a note behind that said you’d be back in a few minutes. You careened down the road to the quaint main street, running through the list in your head. The grocery store was first for the only bottle of scotch they kept in a tiny plastic container and the fixings for bacon cheeseburgers, then the coffee shop had a cherry pie that looked better to you than whatever pseudo-Entemann’s they had in the limited grocery bakery section. The hardware store had everything else you needed and some extras; you praised the cold climate necessity of having multiple places in town to get gloves and thick woolen socks as you threw a couple on the checkout with the rest of the haul. It was awkward to get everything in the trunk, and you were thankful in this moment that you weren’t trying to drive the little sedan you’d had years ago when it was just you, even as annoying as it was to park the Impala sometimes.

           Back at the cabin Sam was solemnly cleaning up, his eyes red as he wrung out a mop. You took the pie and whiskey out of the bag and put the other groceries away without removing your coat. In truth you only took off the boots you were wearing as a concession to Sam’s mopping, feeling itchy to get back outside and let the complexity of your emotions explode into fresh air unencumbered.

           You tossed a pair of new woolen socks to Sam, who caught them against his chest. “You’re going to want these.”

           “What? Where are we going?”

           “Somewhere I think Dean would’ve liked. Put on some layers, too.”

           Sam obeyed with a crooked eyebrow, coming out of the bedroom a few minutes later looking like a lumberjack catalogue model. You didn’t say anything when you realized the hoodie he was wearing used to be his brother’s.

           “Ready?”

           “I’m not sure, I don’t know where we’re going,” Sam answered honestly.

           You gestured toward the door and he followed you out to the car. Thankfully it had snowed that morning, and tiny billows of powdery snowflakes blew up around each car that you passed on the way.

           The hill was massive. It was a little surprising considering the flatness of the majority of the Midwest, and you’d had to remind yourself that there were some small skiing outfits in the upper half of the state when you’d found it, sure that it was a garbage dump that had been covered lazily in grass seed and left to its own devices. Less impressive surrounding slopes reassured you when you’d scoped it out a few days earlier, and the fresh glittering snow made it look even more spectacular now than you’d remembered. You decided not to push it taking the Impala onto the snow, instead parking at the dead-end you thought was closest.

           “We’re here?” Sam asked, obviously still confused.

           “Yep. Come on,” you said, enjoying the surprise more than you’d thought you would.

           Popping the trunk made it obvious when the bright plastic sleds were wedged in alongside the miscellaneous weapons whose permanent home it was. You watched Sam’s face as recognition dawned, closely followed by a smirk you knew was in large part to humor you. Yanking them out in one big pull, you handed Sam the green one and one of the pair of gloves you’d gotten that morning.

           “These are huge, where did you even find them?” he chuckled, popping the plastic tie between the gloves and sliding his hands into them.

           “You’re huge, it’s not like I can put you on a kid’s one. Besides they must be pretty serious about their sledding up here, these were just from the hardware store.”

           Sam shook his head and waited for you to put your gloves on. They were comically big on you, but you knew you’d regret not wearing any and tried your best to grip the sides of the plastic sled through them as you took off toward the hill. After a few steps, Sam took the sled from you without a word, able to hold it easily with both his well-fitting gloves and the many extra inches between his arms and the ground.

           The walk up the hill was somewhat of a trudge but the way the crisp air sliced through your lungs was a welcome distraction. Snow dampened the ambient noise so all you could hear was Sam’s rhythmic breathing like a mantra, and with one foot in front of the other, by the time you got to the top you felt like you’d been meditating. The view was amazing from the top, a painting or old illustration with its tiny homes and cottages over meandering fields, the snow washing everything out as if you were watching someone else’s dream.

           “Should we race?” Sam asked, the swirled pigment of his irises lit up by the reflection off the snow.

           The next thing you heard was Sam’s laugh behind you as you took a few big strides and jumped onto the sled. Careening down the hill, your hair snapped around, tiny whips cracking into your wind-tenderized cheeks as you tried in vain to steer the sled in slices across the straight pass. Sam’s cackle was distant but comforting over your shoulder. You closed your eyes to feel the speed underneath you and the wind across your face; listen to that laugh that you’d heard so little recently, an old favorite song to be put on repeat. On January 24th of all days it felt like you were being baptized in the clear crystal sound of it.

           When you came to a stop, Sam was only a half second behind you. You fell over in a fit of giggles listening to him play-whine about cheating and “Totally not fair, after I carry your sled all the way up for you!”

           “I’ll beat you again with no head start! Unless you’re chicken,” you taunted, brushing snow off your legs to start back up the hill again. Sam scrambled to his feet, passing you up quickly with his huge strides as you started to run after him. Gasping with laughter and exertion, you and Sam half-wrestled and chased each other to the top, collapsing to your backs like snow angels. After catching your breath, you propped yourself up on your elbows to look over at him.

           “Rematch?”

           Sam’s smile, all straight pearl teeth and cold-flushed cheeks, was as breathtaking as the icy wind as you tore down the run, this time on your stomach with your head low like a bullet, trying in earnest to win again. The front lip of the sled in your fingertips rumbled against little imperfections in the snow. You glanced to check how much of a lead you had on Sam and had barely turned your head before you realized you were also dipping your shoulder, tilting the sled on its greased-lightning path and therefore you with it. Sam was right on your tail and narrowly missed crushing you when you fell off the sled by bailing out of his, your legs tangling together with misplaced velocity. You tried to hold still so you wouldn’t catch his face with a flailing limb, only moving after a beat when it seemed like the collision was over. Sam’s fall seemed to have been more graceful than yours, as he still had a hand on his sled and only a left arm and hair full of snow that he shook loose like a puppy.

           “Are you okay?” he said, getting to his knees to reach out to you.

           You could feel the scrape on your cheek before you got up, but Sam’s wince was only minor when he saw it which was reassuring. He snatched off his glove and brushed snow off your face gently, barely grazing the broken skin. The warmth felt so nice and you would’ve curled up in his palm like Thumbelina if you could. “What’s the damage?” you asked, trying to think about the way your breath puffed up in clouds around you rather than the snowflakes caught in Sam’s eyelashes.

           He was analytical as he took it in, tilting your head carefully in the light. “Doesn’t look too bad. Does it hurt?”

           “Nah. Did you think I’d get soft that fast? I used to get stabbed like once a month.”

           Sam chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Do you want to go home?”

           It didn’t feel as odd as it should’ve, knowing exactly what home meant in this context. “And let you think I only won by cheating? Fat chance!”

           “You don’t even have a sled anymore!”

           You glanced around you and saw your sled sitting smugly an easy 30 yards past the base of the hill. “Gimme a ride?”

           It was a little awkward until Sam sat down on the sled with each heel straddled and digging into the snow, allowing you to crawl between his legs without unintentionally sliding down the rest of the slope. He seemed unsure of himself as he wrapped his arms around your torso, and you hooked your hands around each of his legs to do your part to hang onto him. “Ready?” he asked, his breath warm on your neck.

           When you nodded, he unstuck his heels and you shot like a racehorse down the hill. Sam’s chest was solid as a rock behind you, cushioned with his layers and fastened with his seatbelt arms. You could feel the muscles in his legs moving against your hands, trying to balance the weight of the two of you on the flimsy material. Despite your fall only moments ago, it was safe in a way you hadn’t felt in a long time. The ride came to a stop only a few steps away from your cast off sled.

           You turned into Sam to get to your knees before standing up and slipped on a wet patch on the plastic, the melted snow turning the surface impossibly slick. It made you fall forward into Sam, his seated position not giving him enough stability to stay on balance—the sled shifted back underneath the both of you and brushed your lips across his as you ended up with your scraped cheek against the rough canvas of his jacket.

           “I—oh my god I’m sorry,” you stammered, springing back gracelessly.

           Sam looked somewhat like a little kid or a doll, sitting wide eyed with his legs still spread out around you. You stayed back on your knees feeling like you should move slowly, that maybe you could back away unscathed yet. Sam reached his hands out and you thought it was okay, he understood you wouldn’t cross yet another line with him, that it was a simple mistake and he was going to move past it or ask for your help up, and then his heavily gloved hand slid into your hair and he was leaning toward you, the breath that had felt so comforting on the back of your neck as you flew down the hill now on your bottom lip. Your needle-sharp inhale drew that air from him, and you started to feel dizzy. He waited for a moment, searching between your eyes for you to pull back, to turn it into a joke, but you couldn’t. Something in the light pressure of his hand was an anchor and you found yourself glancing at Sam’s lips and slowly, agonizingly, Sam closed the distance between you.

           His lips were so soft and gentle that it made you feel like you were going to cry and then you were crying, just one hot salty tear that stung the fresh abrasion on your cheek as you moved against him, this foreign and scary part of the person you knew the best on this earth. Somehow kissing Sam was exactly how you would’ve guessed it would be—tender and sweet and reverent. The sound dampening of the snow amplified your other senses: the feeling of the cheap Gore-Tex catching one or two hairs as Sam supported your weight, the small brush of Sam’s breath through his nose, the tight flick of the wind against your coats. It was over as quickly as it started, leaving you and Sam staring at each other bewildered while your hair tangled around you.

           You could feel that your eyes were as wide as Sam’s. Completely unable to formulate a thought or feeling, much less something to say, you silently extricated yourself from the sled. Sam did too, staring at it like it was some complicated spell, even turning away from you as you crossed over to your own store-bought chariot. You could read his tension even in his back, the tight stretch of his shoulders as he clutched at the scruff of his neck, and just wanted to make it better.

           “Okay, rematch for real this time? I would say I won’t fall again but, no promises.”

           Sam looked scared when he turned back to you, his voice gruff when he choked out a halfhearted, “yeah, sure” and followed you up the hill. He was far enough behind you that you couldn’t hear his breathing anymore and it took him a little bit to reach you at the peak. His body seemed like it was cracking around him, aging in moments as he shakily got into his sled beside yours. You wanted so badly to tell him it’s okay, it’s just some dumb mistake, we were just goofing off but you knew it wasn’t true and you didn’t want to lie.

           The only thing you could fix your mouth to say was, “Count us down so you can’t say I’m cheating again,” and hope he heard the apology and forgiveness in it.

           Sam obeyed dutifully and you kicked off down the hill, trying to use the speed you gathered and the clarity in the way it split open your lungs to try to understand what had just happened. The same trip that had felt like glorious ages before was over in a second and you were up out of your sled before you remembered you were supposed to be measuring whether you or Sam had gotten down faster.

           “Tie, we’re going again!” you yelled over your shoulder as you did your best to bound through the deep snow up the side of the hill, not waiting to see if he was following you.

           Once again at the top, ragged and out of breath and only a few steps ahead of him, you took a second to collect yourself before putting your sled back in the snow and holding it in place with one foot.

           “I’m sor—” Sam started before you cut him off.

           “Okay, third time’s the charm!” you said with panicked cheerfulness that you knew instantly was too much, but Sam stopped talking and dejectedly sat on his sled next to you.

           You and Sam spent probably an hour more sledding, your legs turning to jello underneath you as you ran up the hill over and over again and your cheeks getting more and more wind chapped, before Sam finally smiled, exasperated at some joke about still beating him up the hill with legs that were half as long. It was all the fuel you needed to keep chipping away at him until the sun started dropping and the chill broke through all your layers.

           The two of you plodded through the snow back to the car together. Gloves and sleds in the trunk, you flopped into the passenger seat with that sudden too-hot feeling of getting out of the wind and tore at your coat to desperately strip some layers. Sam threw his own jacket in the back. Without giving him a chance to protest or hook up his phone, you turned on the tape deck and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here pounded out like rocky silk.

           “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” you murmured. You looked over at Sam, who burst into a kind of frantic laughter that you completely understood. You couldn’t stop yourself from laughing either, because of course this was playing during the tense peace on Dean’s birthday in Dean’s car, and then you and Sam were cry-laughing in the rapidly humidifying air of the Impala while Syd Barrett waxed poetic. By the time the second chunks of Shine On You Crazy Diamond started, you were gasping for air and clutching at your sides.

           You drove home after that in relative silence, the fatigue of fresh air and running all afternoon catching up with you. Sam took a shower while you put together burgers, switching spots with you to cook them while you washed up. They were pretty good due in large part to how seriously Wisconsinites take their cheese, bacon, and beef, and you wolfed yours long before your hair had stopped dripping onto the collar of the threadbare sweatshirt you’d changed into.

           The first shot of scotch burned like it always did, offsetting the sweet tang of the cherry pie and reminding you of the way Dean used to taste when you kissed him at the end of a long night. You looked out the window at the last purple glow of the sunset as it turned the evening into deep, endless inky blue.

           “I’ve gotta—I’m so sorry,” Sam spat out like the words were beating their way out of his mouth.

           “You don’t have to be sorry,” you murmured, unable to immediately meet his gaze and looking down at your pie.

           “I just—I can’t—I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” he stammered.

           You couldn’t help but smile at the absurdity of the whole thing. “Join the club.”

           Sam smirked but it was mirthless. “No, I know, but it’s just…I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He stabbed a deflated cherry with pursed lips, and you watched his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. The fork clattered to his plate. “It’s not getting any easier. Every day I wake up and I’m so mad. It’s so fucking unfair that I have to stay here without him because I know that’s what he fucking wanted, and I feel like there’s no point in trying to have anything like good or normal because I’m just running out the clock. And then today’s Dean’s fucking birthday and I kiss his girlfriend—what is wrong with me?”

           The outburst hung in the air, a toxic smoke that excluded everything else. You slammed the rest of your glass of scotch, relishing the way it scalded. “So I’m just Dean’s girlfriend?”

           “No, that’s not what I—I mean I guess—it’s not like you aren’t—I don’t know, it just seems like you’ll always be his girlfriend.”

           “Are you still Jess’s boyfriend?”

           It was the absolute most cruel and wrong thing to say and you regretted the words as soon as they left your tongue and crashed into Sam, not even really knowing why you’d thought them. They distorted his face in incredulity and betrayal but you didn’t back down, maintaining eye contact until he snatched the bottle and refilled both glasses. When he spoke again his voice was gravelly and broken.

           “I guess I deserved that.”

           “Sam, this is fucking weird. It always has been, us being alive without Dean, and if you’re just now getting that then you’re not as smart as I thought you were. I don’t—I don’t really know what’s going on either, but I know that you’re the only thing that’s keeping me from ending up with a bullet in my skull or in a locked ward, so if you’re waiting for me to forgive you for something, for anything you’ve ever said or done, it’s already forgiven. But we’re too tied up together for every tiny redrawing of the boundaries to send us over the edge. Please.”

           “Tiny redrawing of boundaries? I kissed you!”

           “And I kissed you back, Sam! What do you want to do about it? What’s the absolution here? If you want to leave, I’m not going to stop you. Take the Impala and I’ll find some other car, I’ll borrow the Kaisers’ other one or something. Or maybe you want me to go and I’ll go; I’ll do anything you want me to. I’ll leave right now, you never have to see me again if that’s what you want but I know Dean loved you and loved me and I don’t think he would’ve wanted you to torture yourself all the time so what is it that you want?”

           “I want us to be fucking normal and I don’t want to feel like I’m cheating with my brother’s girlfriend! I don’t want to have a cover story and I don’t want to keep running away!”

           “Then fucking stop! Stop feeling guilty and talk to me about this stuff!”

           Sam laughed, hard and bitter and choked off.

           “I’m serious. We can’t keep doing this shit, at least I can’t. We need to start talking—about Dean, about everything. It’s like this lump of decay and we’re just spraying Febreze and not dealing with it.”

           Sam’s mouth popped open as he tongued his molars. He bit his lip in frustration before crumpling up his napkin and threw it on top of his half-eaten pie. “Okay. Let’s talk.”

           You weren’t expecting that. For all the ways it had seemed like Dean had been the more emotionally closed off, he was always much easier for you to read than Sam, who managed somehow to talk about things without actually communicating how he felt. It was good if you needed to be supported but made it extremely hard to be there for him. Refilling your glasses a bit more conservatively, you offered up an open palm to let Sam go first. His jaw tensed and he swallowed hard.

           “No bullshit?” he asked.

           “No bullshit. What’s the point of bullshitting anymore? After everything?”

-

Continue to Dreams, Chapter 6

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[superheroauthor]

And The Gods Do Play

CHAPTER ONE - A Lonely Man

   Jake was a lonely sort of young man. A small, thin weedy man, barely five and a half foot tall. He was aged twenty-five and never had a friend in his life. It was not as if he wasn’t a nice man. He had a very sweet disposition. It was every time he came close to making a friend though something would go wrong.

   He might blurt out how desperate he was to have a friend, for some reason revealing his true thoughts to another. It might be the other person’s attention was attracted by a true friend. It might be an elephant dropped on the house and scattered the people, taking the attention of all.

   Oh, yes that had happened. A pack of giraffes had knocked him half way down the street another time. Yet another time he had just been talking to this woman who seemed friendly when suddenly he had been kidnapped by a masked gunman. It had been a case of mistaken identity and he had been released shortly after.

   Truth be told, every time he tried to make a friend something awful would happen, Like the time he had been arrested for murder as he was making a friend of a small sociable chap, another case of mistaken identity. Or the time he and his maybe friend were nearly run over by a tank that for some reason was going full pelt down the high street of his home town.

   As he lived in a small town these things were unusual to say the least. Like the time at a party, just as he got someone hooked on a humorous story, a vampire appeared. No, not a person in fancy dress but a true vampire. One that made the people scarper and another chance was lost.

   People in his own neighbourhood avoided him now. He was seen as someone who bought bad luck, someone who caused terrible things to happen, like the twister, a tornado that ripped houses apart. It had appeared just as he was talking to a . . . dog !

   He could not even make friends with a dog without something bizarre happening.

   It was after the meteor struck down half the shops in the retail centre that it happened.

   He rose above the Earth, seemingly getting lighter and lighter and rising. A freak burst of wind pushed him to one side and he saw Mountain Hill. The largest hill for ten miles and craggy to climb. At the base was good green grass, a picnic area for the local populace, taking their brood out on a Sunday.

   To the top of this hill the wind swept him and then gently dropped him down on the flat face of the top of the hill. A beacon stood here, a facsimile of one that had been there for centuries. A flaming beacon that would alert the local lord of an attack upon this area. No local lord now of course. No marauders or armies that would attack the area. It was however to Jake’s mind, a nice touch.

   Out of the ground rose a man but what a man. First the head fully ten feet large, then the neck and body and then the legs. The giant of a man stood astride on the left and right banks of the hill, fully sixty feet tall.

   “Puny mortal. Do you know why you have been summoned here ?” Boomed a deep voice that made the ground shake and shattered the beacon.

   Jake although petrified was made of strong stuff though. A life alone can do that to you. Toughen you up or break you. Jake had not broken.

   “You want to be my friend ?” Jake asked facetiously.

   Laughter reverberated throughout the area.

   “Something like that.” The giant of a man smiled. And shrank. Yes, shrank, down to only ten feet tall.

   Now that may not sound much but you meet a person who is six feet nine and you think them impossibly tall. This man had an extra three and a bit feet to that.

   He was dressed in a bright red jacket and checked breeches. Yellow woollen stockings or socks went from the black leather boots to those britches. A soft cap with a feather from some strange bird finished the ensemble. The feather was striped, black and white, like the skin of a zebra. The man’s face was florid, red as if he were a drinker. Craggy too as if he had seen a lot of life. His hair was as white as snow, a short bristly haircut with the snow-white hairs.

   “Come with me.” Said the man and took one of Jake’s hands in his own.

   Now Jake was flying again but straight upwards. The hand was not pulling on his own. It seemed just the contact was enough for them both to fly high and up. Through the clouds they went, higher and higher until Jake’s breath was coming out as a cold mist. Through one more cloud and then . . .

   A kingdom ! An area of buildings so high as to make Jake look like an ant. And such beautiful buildings, adorned in gold and jade and turquoise. Every type of building he could think of from little houses no more than huts to huge palaces of gold. From onion shaped buildings to magnificent homes that were topped by jade domes.

   The two swept to a square whose only adornment was a single monument. Five lightning bolts radiating out from a ball of fire. This was no stone carving though, this was a true ball of flame with lightning showering sparks to the blue earth below it.

   People were there, all eight foot tall or slightly smaller. One giant man hung around at the rear of the group. He was easy to spot. He was bulkier and taller than the rest at about eighteen feet tall.

   They landed in front of these people.

   “Behold the true Gods of England.” The man accompanying him said. Only now he did not have a soft cap with a feather in it. He had a thin coronet around his head with a huge ruby set in the centre. Not so much a crown as a circlet of a silver material, maybe platinum.

   “And you all want to be my friends ?” Jake said derisively, his dark humour coming out.

   Oh, he believed them to be Gods alright. There was a presence, an aura to each that spoke of great power. But what did he have to lose ? A lonely life with little happiness.

   The populace here did not get angry at his words, instead they all laughed uproariously.

   “But you are right.” Said a stunningly attractive woman, a woman that stirred him, mind and body. Indeed there was something about her, something more than beauty that stiffened him in all the right places. Especially one. Just the sight of her, the feel of her power. Piercing green eyes that did not scare him but somehow said ‘come to me and you will be loved’. Her long black hair swept around by the wind seemed to beckon him close offering him the world.

   “You are right. What do you have to lose ? You are lonely ! And that is our fault.” She called out.

   It was if she had read his mind.

   “How so ?” He could not help asking. “How is your fault ?”

   Again that uproarious laughter.

   An imp like man answered him. Smaller than the rest, the size of . . . well Jake. Five and a half foot tall with tiny little horns at the sides of his head. Furry feet and clawed hands. His colour was purple.

   “You have no friends because it was decreed you have no friends. Decreed by the Gods until you were of service to us.”

   “You wrecked my life because of some decree you made ?” Jake was angry, maybe the most wrathful he had ever been in his life of five and twenty years.

   “Actually, it was more of a bet.” Said a man with clothes that seemed to drip water from every inch of their blue-green cloth. “A bet between the King of the Gods, Cathbhar and the rest of us. We said you would have no friends until your summoning. He said he could provide you with at least one.”

   Jake guessed this was his summoning. Summoned before the Gods of England.

   “I lost !” Shrugged Cathbhar the King of the Gods. “I owe each one boon.”

   It did explain elephants dropping from the sky, also the freak meteoroids and twisters, was Jake take on the matter.

   The King swept his hand all around and they were all standing on some sort of game board made up of hexagonal outlines with the marble road now divided up.

   “You fools! Most people would have gone mad with the pressure you put me under. It was like I was cursed.” And he had been, sort of. What curse could be stronger than the will of the gods trying to ruin your life?

   “Yes, why didn’t you?” Asked the imp. “I had an extra bet on that. I owe the fair Lavinia a wheel of gold for losing that wager.” He indicated the woman who was so stunning she reached the parts that other women did not reach. At least, not on a single sighting.

   “I am stubborn !” Exclaimed Jake as if this answered the question. “Too stubborn to give in.”

   Of course, he knew mental illness was a lot more complex than that. To him though, most of the world’s people seemed to be suffering, it was only natural he be one of them. If anything, what he did, was adapt. Adapt to a life of loneliness.

   “Well said, that mortal.” Exclaimed the beautiful goddess Lavinia. “You adapted and survived all the torments we sent your way.”

   Ah, she could read his mind. That much was now obvious. Could they all do that wondered Jake.

   “Some, not all.” She replied to his thought. “You were . . . tested for a reason. If you survived, more or less intact, you would become a hero. A chosen mortal to enact the will of the Gods.”

   It took him like a curveball but he eventually got it. He was to be an emissary of the Gods.

   “Choose a God, mortal.” Cathbhar the King of the Gods called out. “Will it be Lavinia, Goddess of Nature? Myself, the King of the Gods? The Imp, Kaelin the God of Happiness? Mighty Quaid at the back, the Blacksmith of the Gods? Airgid, God of Prosperity?” He indicated a man in robes that seemed to made out of rubies crushed into a material. “Janna, Goddess of the Beasts and Monsters?” This a tiny woman compared to the others, a mere five foot tall. Her face was one of fur with a snout and gleaming red eyes. Her clothes, robes marked with the stripes of animals with an eye covering the portion of her belly. “Jared, God of the Mountains?” A man who looked to be hundred years old, his weight resting on a stick, his back bent with seeming age. “Here . . .”

   Jake interrupted him. He had eyes for only one god, or to be more precise, goddess.

   “Good choice!” All murmured.

   “You will be my champion. Prove yourself and you can become my hero on the mortal realm.” The goddess crooned at him with satisfaction in her voice.

   A gold figurine appeared in one of the hexagonal floor tiles. Jake saw it was a perfect representation of himself.

   “It is but a simple task. Do you know of Victoria Park?” Her questioning was offhand. He nodded, of course he knew of Victoria Park. Had he not lived in Burchill his whole life? Was not the Victoria by far the biggest park in the whole town? You could fit a council estate in there. Tennis courts and play areas, a bandstand and a bowls green. A statue at the centre of it. A huge bronze of Queen Victoria surrounded by four lions that faced north, east, south and west. “There is a stand of ancient oaks . . .”

   “More like a little forest.” Interjected Jake. “They were there before the park was even thought of.” He knew this from his local history class in Junior School. “They cover the north of the park. A little forest . . .” He laughed. “Supposedly guarded by nymphs and fauns.”

   “It used to be.” The goddess Lavinia told him quite seriously. “But I have had to withdraw them. Modern times do not mythical creatures suit.”

   “So, what is the threat?” He asked of his Goddess, her with the long black tresses.

   “They are proposing to pull down the trees and build a swimming pool.”

   “Oh yes, I heard about that. An outdoor pool, a big one, to be part of the park.” He paused in thought. “Would there not be some preservation order on those trees? The one in the centre of the little wood is supposed to be over four hundred years old.”

   “Six hundred and sixty-six.” She commented her eyebrow arching. “An order has been asked for many times but somehow your local council never got around to it. Nor did the government bodies in charge of such things. There is no way of stopping the bulldozers knocking down those beautiful trees.”

   “How did they get permission to build past the council? Those ancient oaks are a part of the town, just as much as the park, just as much as our shopping centres.”

   “Graft!” She laughed without mirth and nodded towards Airgid, God of Prosperity with the  robe of ruby material. “The council are in the pocket of the leisure company building the new lido. The government bodies are not doing anything at all, just sitting on their hands. It does not help that several of the MPs are consultants for the firm that fronts for the leisure company, their publicity agency. Indeed, both the Minister for the Environment and his civil service secretary both sit on the board of directors of that agency.”

   It was  a stitch up, from the top down. From minor corruption in the country’s government all the way down to the local councillors. No doubt all planned out by the publicity agency.

   “The bulldozers are already hovering. There are seven of them in the parking part of the park. It is rumoured they will rip apart my woods at dawn tomorrow. Three months ahead of the council’s permitted time. That time is to allow objections to be raised . . .”

   “Too many have been raised already.” Commented the God of Prosperity. “The wood will be flattened, ripped asunder and the company in charge of the bulldozers will take the blame. They will simply say they got their dates wrong. Of course, a suitably large bribe will be given to the owner of that company.”

   He sounded smug and Lavinia looked sour. Maybe these two were wagering on the outcome of the survival of those trees.

   “And how am I stop them? The whole government of the British Isles is ignoring the matter and just letting it happen. How am I stop councils and governments?” Jake asked with emotion, although hiding the real question behind this one. Asking that question of the Gods might get him thrown back down to the Earth and it was a long way down.

   He was not worried about the long way down. It was the landing that terrified him. He would resemble a huge mass of strawberry jam after that impact

   Lavinia whispered in his ear and he looked amused at the idea. Amused and impressed. It did answer the question of how.

   “As to the other question in your mind. The one you thought you so artfully hid, I will give you a further power upon successful completion.” She added with amusement.

   That answered his other question too. ‘What do I get out of it ?’ A question that some Gods would find impertinent and smite him down for even asking. After all what was he to them, a mere mortal.

   “I decreed that both parties only used mortals in this stage of the game.” The King of the Gods told Jake. “This is not a matter, or a wager, where Gods can descend to the Earth to intervene personally.”

   “So why have you tortured me all my life?” Now he was being impertinent but he thought it fair question.

   “We are Gods. Most of us can see the past, present and parts of the future. It was deemed that if you were strong enough to take the pain of loneliness and the shocks of our . . . ways of preventing you making friends . . . then you would be sufficiently practical to hold powers that Gods give you. Even if only given a power to do one thing, that power will stay with you forever. You will be more like a hero of old than any mere mortal on that planet. Therefore, you had to be tested first.”

   It seemed the Gods had their own strange ways of doing things.

   “I knew upon your birth that you might be a . . . worker for the Gods, a hero, maybe one day a demi-god.” The King of the Gods said in his bold manner but then added sneeringly. “Of course, you could not live here in Britannia. This is the city of the True Gods, the forty four. Apart from us there are many other Gods of course, hundreds . . .”

   “One thousand and eleven at present.” Jared, God of the Mountains told the assembly. “That does not include demi-gods and heroes.”

   For some reason Cathbhar, the King of the Gods, did look happy about this correction. He continued with his speech. “. . . hundreds of minor gods, fifty or so demi-gods.” He stared at Jared as if daring him to speak. “And a hundred or so true heroes.”

   “We each have our own hero.” Kaelin, the God of Happiness, the imp-like god told him. “Others work for all the Gods or make their own path.”

   “If you want powers though, true powers . . .” Lavinia said. “You work for all the Gods as their hero. I have known heroes who allow themselves to be used by the Gods to have much more mastery of skills and powers than any of our household heroes.”

   “True . . .” The mountain God, Jared said. “Look at Caratācos. He did many jobs for the Gods, tried to defend our land against the Romans. Caratacus the Romans called him. Eventually he became our link with the Roman Gods, our ambassador between us. He is now a demi-god with a small but pleasant land of his own on this plane of the Gods. He is much admired by the Gods and is still useful.”

   Caratācos would want to be a full God was Jake’s thoughts on the matter. He would stay useful, hoping to gain enough powers and skills to become a minor god. He thought it unlikely that any of the minor gods would ever live here. Even if they had more ‘strength’ than a major god, the places set for the major Gods would have been set out millennia ago.

   Jake had studied the Gods of the Greeks, Romans, the Norse Gods and the ones of the Germanic Hordes. Even a little about the Celtic Gods. These Gods though did not seem to be the Celtic gods. Mind you, little was known of the Gods of England. There was no written history of those Gods, only bits and bobs of information, mainly from the Roman scholars. Some of that information too was tainted. The Roman historians usually had a patron who looked after them, a rich man who would pay their bills for the beauty of the works they made. A patron would support anyone useful to them as well. Thus, some historians tended to add pieces that would glorify their patrons and were not strictly true.

   The King of the Gods at some time, in Jake’s opinion, set out who were the major Gods. These would be the major Gods of this time, maybe one or two replaced due to angering Cathbhar and being cast out, another to replace them who had done some truly magnificent deed for the King of the Gods, or indeed, all of the Gods. Such things happened though maybe once in a millennia or two. A thousand years could pass, two or even three thousand years before one God was cast out and another took their place. Even then it might not be a minor god. It could be another god, or a hero or demi-god lifted up to truly divine status.

   Yes, history and the Ancient Religions were passions of Jake’s. He studied them as a hobby, not as a necessity of work or because he wished to go to a university.

© Copyright Michael Sheppard 2024

Reblog for next chapter

[moony-meadow]

Going for Goldie (1)

Summary: In an attempt to prevent Lucifer from confiscating his beloved Goldie, Mammon swallows the credit card. The only problem is, he can't seem to hack it back up. Lucky for him, he just so happens to know a handy dandy human he can shrink and send in after it.

Pt. 1 / Pt. 2 / Pt. 3 / Pt. 4 / Pt. 5 / Pt. 6

As I stepped into the House of Lamentation, I broke into a wide mouthed yawn. After a couple hours worth of studying in the library, I was feeling pretty exhausted and quite ready to just relax for the rest of the night.

Quietly, I crept through the halls towards my room. I had little doubt that if I attracted the attention of any of the brothers, I’d be pulled into yet another one of their dramas. Some of the time, I didn’t mind it. It honestly felt kind of nice to feel like I was a part of their weird, dysfunctional family. However, on days like today, I wasn’t really in the mood to contend with it.

“Y/N, there ya are!” At Mammon’s voice, my eyes slid shut as I released a soft sigh. I had a strong feeling that my chances of relaxing for the rest of night had just flown out the window.

I slowly pivoted around to see Mammon leaning out of his bedroom, a look of urgency on his face. “C’mere!” he hissed, beckoning me over with his hand.

As much as I wanted to just ignore the white-haired demon and continue on my way, I knew he would likely just end up pursuing me. Plus, he looked pretty distressed and it only seemed fair that I come to his aid considering how many times he’d come to mine. While he could be a major pain in the neck at times, Mammon was a reliable friend, despite what his brothers might think.

So, with just a touch of reluctance, I shuffled my way over to Mammon. As soon as I was within arm’s length, the demon reached out and yanked me inside his room, eliciting an involuntary yelp from me.

“Jeez, you didn’t have to be so rough,” I complained as Mammon snapped his bedroom door shut behind me.

“I have a problem,” the Avatar of Greed announced, seemingly ignoring my comment.

I bit my tongue to prevent myself from fatigue-induced snappishness. Mammon’s problem, whatever it was, could be very serious. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I was bratty to someone who was already hurting. “What kind of problem?” I inquired carefully.

Mammon wandered further into his room, nervously wringing his hands in front of himself. “It all started ‘cause Lucifer was tryin’ to take Goldie from me again,” he explained. “He was on his way here and I knew he’d find her no matter where I stashed her in my room.” He paused, halting his aimless meandering to turn and face me fully. “So I had the brilliant idea to put Goldie somewhere Lucifer would never look.” Mammon grinned proudly as he gestured at his stomach.

I quirked a single eyebrow as I tried to make sense of what exactly he was talking about. It took me a moment of confused staring before I finally processed what was being insinuated. Then both my eyebrows shot up. “You ate it??” I asked incredulously. With hands planted confidently on his hips, Mammon nodded in confirmation. “How the hell did you manage that? Didn’t it get stuck in your throat?!”

“Well no, because I shrunk her.” Mammon informed me, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

After how long I’d been in the Devildom, I really should have gotten used to all the bizarre crap that went on. But honestly, it was kind of reassuring that I still reacted in a normal, human way. It made me feel like I still had a connection with home despite the fact that I was so far away. “You can do that?” I questioned.

Mammon shrugged. “Sure,” and then he added, “we can even shrink people too.” I immediately didn’t like the look that had formed on the demon’s face. It was the look he always got when he was about to explain his latest hairbrained scheme.

Arms folded over my chest, I started back at Mammon. “Where exactly are you going with this?”

“Weeeelll, the problem is that I may have shrunk Goldie a bit too much,” the Avatar of Greed stated. “I can’t seem to bring her back up.” He paused as he took a few steps closer to me. “That’s where you come in.”

I gave the demon an inquisitive look. “Are you gonna ask me to do the heimlich on you, because I’m pretty sure that only works on stuff stuck in your throat,” I pointed out. Plus there was the fact that I only very vaguely remembered the lesson they’d given in health class on how to do the maneuver a couple years ago.

The corners of Mammon’s lips turned up in a sly smile. “I was thinkin’ more of a search and rescue mission.”

[thetransguard-archive]

couldnt find the promt posts but: joenicky monster/supernatural au? i absolutely adore ur writing btw💕

you cannot hand me the word supernatural and not expect me to think of buzzfeed unsolved RGEHFBRWFHKJL im sorry this turned into a ghost hunter’s au i just don’t know how to write vampires or werewolves or whatever else constitutes supernatural

nicky does not believe in ghosts.

so why is he standing in front of a long-abandoned house, carrying several hundred dollars worth of largely useless equipment, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a big cartoon ghost? he tells himself it’s a favour being returned. his room mate, lykon, is endlessly more enthusiastic then he is, mumbling to himself as he fiddles with the camera that was paid with money that probably should’ve gone to rent.

“don’t look so worried nicky,” lykon says, as they step inside the threshold. his best friend flashes him a wide grin which is immediately contradicted by the alarming creak of the floorboard under his foot. “we’ve got holy water and everything else. we’ll just check to see if there are any ghoulies in here, they can’t hurt us.”

“you know i think this is a load of horseshit. i’m more worried about the house collapsing on our heads.”

“don’t be dramatic, dude. it’s in perfectly good shape.”

as they start setting up lights, laying out their sleeping bags for preparation of sleeping the night in this place, nicky is forced to admit there’s a sort of melancholy beauty to the place. it would have been a very nice house, once, not too ostentatious like the other houses they’ve “investigated”, with high ceilings and large windows, and stunning art covering the walls. landscapes, bowls of fruit, studies of fire and light and the night sky. but not a single person. nicky notices the same sprawling signature on all of the art, and steps closer to see if he can make out a name-

“nicky! let’s start recording.”

lykon begins unrolling the backstory of this house and the ghost allegedly haunting it, and nicky interjects throughout, punctuating the otherwise dead serious narrative with bursts of skepticism and humour, the way they’ve always done. lykon’s little ghost hunting channel is small now but getting bigger every day, and nicky can’t say he doesn’t enjoy it, verbally sparring with his best friend. lykon’s a believer and nicky isn’t, and while they’ll argue fiercely on camera they agree in pretty much every way off screen. apparently this house used to be home to an artist who’d been slowly making his way up in the art world before being murdered mysteriously. with no convictions, the story went that people were compelled to stay away from the house, wouldn’t be able to write without doodling, and smell fresh paint. also the standard doors opening and closing on their own, lights turning on and off, footsteps and the like. nicky was not exactly enthused to spend a night on the dusty floor, but hey. it beat sitting on the couch watching reruns of the same bland reality tv shows.

nicky’s halfway through a longwinded joke when lykon jolts like he’s been zapped, hand gripping nicky’s forearm, eyes darting around in sudden fear.

“what? dude, let go.” he elbows lykon in the ribs gently to get his attention back. “hello? what happened.”

“swear i heard a laugh, from upstairs, maybe,” he replies, face furrowed in concentration. he flashes a smile at the camera. “alright, i think we got all the background done. lets investigate.”

predictably, they find nothing. well, nothing of worth to nicky, but lykon insists that the room that used to be the studio feels colder then the rest of the house, they hear noises from inside the room once they leave it, and the spirit box spits up a few noises that lykon insists are words. a pretty standard investigation, then. they pack up their stuff and tuck in for the night. lykon spends half of it jumping at every little noise, but eventually drifts off as the exhaustion of the drive here finally gets to him. nicky turns over in his sleeping bag, hoping to salvage at least a few hours of rest from the night, but-

is that paint?

nicky breathes in as hard as he can, and it’s unmistakeable, that scent of chemicals that reminds him very vividly of the disaster that was year seven art class. he sits up, rubs his eyes. lykon doesn’t stir and nicky sniffs again. it’s still clear and strong, and now that his ear isnt pressed against the pillow, he can hear faint clattering, like the lid of a paint tin being wedged off. it’s coming from upstairs, where the artist’s studio would be, if he had to guess.

oh, fuck. 

there’s a perfectly rational explanation for this, he reasons to himself, even as he crawls out of the sleeping bag to cram on some shoes and get a torch and a camera. he should probably wake up lykon, but something inside him is telling him, wait, to just see for himself first. maybe we disturbed the paint when we were in there earlier. an old house like this, it’s probably just settling. hell, there’s probably raccoons in the roof, or something. ghosts aren’t real.

the studio is... not how they had left it. it had been such a sad space, everything covered up in white sheets, shelves of paints covered in dust. now, the room is strangely warm, like the summer sun had spent a few hours streaming in through windows that were now uncovered, the night visible through dusty panes of glasses. there is an easel set up, with an empty, clean canvas about the size of a dinner table on it. and on the floor, a thin, fine paintbrush rocks back and forth, like it had just been dropped.

this was entirely too much weirdness for nicky’s brain to handle, but he wasn’t giving up on his hard line stance on ghosts just yet. strangely enough, he doesn’t really feel afraid at all. 

“if this is a prank,” he says, deliberately loud in the empty room, as he bends to pick up the paintbrush. the tip of it is still wet, and the paint looks black on his fingertips. “if this is a joke, lykon, i swear-”

hi, nicky.

the words appear abruptly on the canvas, a rushed hand like whoever’s writing isn’t sure if they can keep it going. nicky almost drops the paintbrush he’s holding, but steps closer. the paint is still wet on the canvas, and it’s the same dark shade as the stuff on the brush. he shines his torch at it. it’s a very dark blue, not a black like he’d first assumed, the colour of a twilight sea.

“what the fuck,” he mumbles to himself, touching the canvas. it’s just fabric on wood. what the fuck.

did i scare you? i didn’t want to do that. 

"i’m not scared,” he says, feeling oddly giddy. “this is a very strange dream.”

i promise it’s not a dream. tah-dah! ghosts are real. i am one of them.

as whoever it is writes, they doodle around their letters with incredible skill, little birds and flowers and suns circling their words. it’s strangely endearing. the paint smell gets stronger and nicky finds that he does not mind.

“what’s your name?” he asks, remembering that he is technically a ghost investigator and he should probably be doing some investigation. his phone is left forgotten in his pocket, though. he doesn’t know if he should be recording this or not.

joe, joseph, but it’s yusuf, really. the art world of my time was not quite ready for a name like mine, but i suppose it doesn’t matter anymore.

“you’re the artist, then.”

who else would i be? as far as i can tell i am the first, last and only death of this house.

“you were murdered.”

yes, but can we not talk about that? it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

the last full stop of yusuf’s sentence is darker then normal, like he’s pressed harder. nicky touches a finger to the canvas.

“i’m sorry. i won’t bring it up again.”

thank you.

nicky takes a step back, the room is lightening around him. he hadn’t realised it earlier, but the windows of this room all face east, which is why he supposes yusuf chose it to be his studio. on some level, a part of him is wondering why he isn’t screaming and running to get lykon right now. he really isn’t afraid, though. yusuf hasn’t meant him any harm.

“why did you choose to talk to me? we were up here earlier.”

it’s harder when more alive people are in my room. you take up so much energy. the handwriting pauses, like yusuf is considering. and most people are so afraid. i’ve tried talking to others before, but they get so scared. you didn’t seem frightened at all.

“that’s because i didn’t believe in any of this stuff.” nicky presses a finger to yusuf’s words, just to check. his finger comes away dark blue. “part of me still think i’m dreaming, though.”

well, you can’t see reflections in dreams, i’ve heard. there’s a mirror behind you.

nicky turns to see a sheet drop off a large standing mirror in an ornate frame, and sure enough, he can see his face, a pale shape in the darkness of the room. he steps closer, and skids a finger over the glass, leaving a smear of paint behind. not a dream, then.

he feels a gust of air, warm, behind him and he turns. nothing but the canvas. when he turns back, that’s when he sees him.

he’s about the same height and build of nicky, standing just behind him and to the side. handsome, a full beard and a rueful smile and curls, and eyes that are the kindest nicky has ever seen. and the most startling thing- he is opaque. his head and shoulders are more or less solid, but his torso peters out into nothing at all.

“ghosts are real,” he says, to the spectre in the mirror, dumbfounded, and yusuf’s half-smile widens to a proper grin. he does a little wave in the mirror and something in nicky’s chest swells. he smiles back.

“your friend downstairs is waking up.” a breath, barely a whisper in his ear. and sure enough, noises from below. he can almost hear the sound of his name.

“i won’t tell him about you, if you don’t want me to,” he says, and yusuf shrugs, flickering.

“i don’t mind, but i'd rather you not. the more people come in here, the harder it is to... exist.” 

nicky can hear footsteps on the stairs now, and he blurts out, quickly, before this bizarre moment is over, before he is thrust back into the mundane of his normal life. “we’re leaving now. can i come back, sometime?” and the thing is, he really wants to, wants to know this strange, sad ghost with messy handwriting and beautiful art, and kind, kind eyes. he has so many questions. what’s it like, being a ghost? are you lonely in this house? and, why do you not have any paintings of people? yusuf meets his eyes in the mirror and smiles again.

“i’d like that.”

“nicky!” the door opens and nicky blinks, his hands dropping to his sides. lykon sweeps his gaze around the room looks at him with a raised eyebrow. the canvas, nicky is stunned to realise, is now as clean and blank as when he’d walked in.

“c’mon man, you know we’re not allowed to mess with this stuff.” lykon steps forwards and plucks the paintbrush out of his hand, the tip still wet with paint, and sets it on the easel. “you said it yourself, nothing in here now. we’ve gotta get going.”

“sì, of course. i was just... looking around. it’s a beautiful room.”

his room mate just gives him a look. “uh okay. whatever, man. let’s go.”

before nicky leaves, he picks the paintbrush back up again, tucks it into his pocket. says to the empty room, slowly filling with light and colour from the rising sun, “i’ll be back, yusuf, i promise.”

the faint ghost of laughter as he walks out feels, somehow, right.

[hamsterboos]

I think my dad is Santa Claus

🎄Day 6 of 12 Days of PJO Christmas🎄

At first, when the screaming started when Annabeth was sitting in the Athena cabin doing some reading, she didn’t know what was happening. Her first instinct was to think that a monster had somehow broken through the barrier and was attacking the camp.

However, when she ran out of the cabin holding her sword, she stopped dead in her tracks at the sight.

It wasn’t a monster attacking camp.

It was Poseidon dressed as Santa.

PSA: These drabbles are canon-compliant till HoO and just acknowledge the existence of Estelle. Also technology use is a thing.

Read on AO3

~~~~~

At first, when the screaming started while Annabeth was sitting in the Athena cabin doing some reading, she didn’t know what was happening. She was alone in her cabin, and her first instinct was to think that a monster had somehow broken through the barrier and was attacking the camp.

She dropped everything, grabbed her sword and ran out, expecting a battle to be going on, but when she ran out of the cabin, she stopped dead in her tracks at the sight.

It wasn’t a monster attacking camp.

It was Poseidon dressed as Santa.

“What the—” she muttered, staring at Poseidon handing out wrapped gifts to the younger campers near the center of the camp. He was wearing the bright red Santa hat with the white beard, covering his own black one, with a red overcoat and white pants. In his hands was a big red bag filled to the brim, and he kept taking boxes out and handing them out to the cheering kids. Annabeth blinked in confusion, wondering if she had accidentally been given something by one of the Stolls — who had also come to visit that winter — that was causing her to hallucinate, but after a quick pinch to her arm, she deduced that she was, in fact, not hallucinating.

She immediately glanced around for Percy, knowing that he must have a hand in bringing Poseidon to camp, and sure enough, she found him talking to a group of young campers near the Big House with a look of apprehension on his face. As she quickly jogged over, she kept noticing that he was constantly stealing glances towards Poseidon — god, she couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that the King of the Seas was wearing a goddamn Santa hat and beard — and looked just absolutely stressed. His messy hair was even more messy and looked almost like a bird’s nest; Annabeth could imagine that he had already run his hands through it several times.

Percy caught sight of her when she was within a few feet of him, and he broke away to grab her arm and drag them away from the horde of kids that were surrounding Poseidon. He took her towards the weapon shed, and once they stopped, he turned to look at her with wide eyes.

“Annabeth. Help.”

“What did you do?” she hissed, flinching when a bunch of kids ran past them, screaming about presents. 

“I didn’t do anything!” She leveled him with such a flat look that he winced and retracted his statement.

“Okay, technically I did do something, but I didn’t mean to! It was an accident,” he pleaded, taking a hold of her hands. 

“Percy, I have way too much work that I should be doing right now to be dealing with this,” she threatened. 

“I may have, uh, accidentally wished for dad to bring a few presents down.”

She raised an eyebrow at her boyfriend. “Accidentally?”

“Okay, see, one of the younger Ares kids was complaining about how he realized Santa didn’t exist, and he was so upset. It made me think of Estelle, and so I said that it was okay that Santa didn’t exist because his parents would get him gifts, anyways. But then, he started crying about how Ares had never once given him a gift, so instead I ended up showing him that maybe if he asked for a gift during offering, Ares might agree. Then I ended up asking dad for a gift and maybe also have him bring down extras to give to a few to the younger campers as well. How was I supposed to know that he was going to become Santa?!” he cried, hands pulling at his hair. “What am I going to do, Annabeth?”

Annabeth was stunned at his word vomit, her brain slowly catching up as she understood exactly what happened. Biting her lip, she resisted the urge to start laughing and took a deep breath to calm herself. Percy must’ve misunderstood her actions because he started apologizing profusely, but that triggered her, and Annabeth lost her control and ended up laughing.

“Oh my god,” she laughed, a hand coming to rest on her stomach as she bent over slightly, “that’s so funny. Percy, I’m not mad. Just slightly annoyed, but gods. Just look at Poseidon! You have to admit, it’s kind of worth it to see him like that.”

“That’s my dad!” he moaned. His wish to want to jump off a cliff was written all over his face, and she grinned at the reminder of the Christmas dinner from last year when Athena and Poseidon showed up at their family dinner. She felt a tiny bit bad for the poor guy who was going to be reminded of the fact that his godly parent had dressed up as Santa for the next year (at least), but it was also just so utterly ridiculous that she couldn’t help but laugh more.

“Alright, Santa spawn, let’s go deal with the mess,” Annabeth laughed, grabbing Percy’s hand and leading him down to where the presents were being given out. It took them a while to get even through the campers that were crowding around Poseidon, and Annabeth wondered why it was taking them so long because it seemed like the campers who had already gotten a present were going back for more. 

It wasn’t long before Annabeth and Percy pushed through to the center of the crowd to realize that the reason the crowd had grown exponentially was because Apollo and Mr. D had also joined in the gift giving. Thankfully, they hadn’t fully dressed up as Santa but they were wearing Santa hats. 

Mr. D was helping Poseidon pass out gifts as Chiron tried to control the kids from jumping all over the gods (and stop Mr. D from giving out wine) while Apollo stood a few feet away singing All I want for Christmas is you by Mariah Carey.

Suddenly the crowd had become chaotic, and it wasn’t long till a lot of the older campers had finally come out to see what was happening and join in the crowd. Apollo’s rendition of Mariah Carey brought about a round of caroling where the campers began to join in, and all Annabeth could do was stand and stare until Percy dragged her out of the stampeding group of demi-gods.

“I can’t believe one dumb wish led to this,” Percy muttered, leaning against one of the cabin walls. “We can’t even get through to them to stop them. Hell, Chiron’s stuck too.”

Annabeth snorted. “I can’t believe Mr. D went along with it. We all knew it was a matter of time until Apollo showed up.”

All I want for Christmas is you was already stuck in her head.

“I think he just lives to bother me at this point.”

“You are his favorite Peter Johnson, ”she teased, poking him in the ribs repeatedly. “I guess he wants to give you the special treatment.”

Percy glared at her and swatted her arm away. “I was talking about dad.”

“You're his favorite son,” she replied.

“Annabeth.”

“Oh come on, Perce,” Annabeth laughed. “You have to admit that this is actually really nice of them. A lot of the kids aren’t going home for Christmas this year, and it’s hilarious.” She walked closer to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Hey, at least my mom’s not glaring at you this year.”

“Don’t even say that,” he groaned, wrapping his arms around her waist as well. “I feel like she’s going to magically jump out of the statue, and then it’s going to be a repeat of last year.”

“You would think that being nineteen and spending the majority of our lives in this world would make us immune to most of the stuff we’ve seen, but this is just…” Annabeth trailed off, not knowing how to explain the bizarre sight that involved a Christmas concert given by Apollo. 

‘’Do they not have better things to do with their time than whatever the hell this is?”

“Clearly not.”

They stood in silence for a bit, just wrapped up in each other’s arms, as they watched the crowd slowly begin to start dispersing as Poseidon’s huge bag was running out of gifts. Chiron had also managed to drag Mr. D away, and Percy took that as a chance to walk up to his father.

Percy didn’t bother with formalities as he just spoke up, “Dad, seriously?”

Annabeth bit her lip as she tried not to laugh as she took a closer look at the Santa Claus costume.

“What? I granted your Christmas wish last year as well, despite the fact that you were joking, no?”

Percy gaped, and Annabeth lost it (again) and let out a loud laugh. 

“Oh my god,” she breathed. 

Percy groaned as he face-palmed. 

“I hate myself. I’m never asking for anything ever again.”

~~~~

Day 1 || Day 2 || Day 3 || Day 4 || Day 5

[watusichris]

A Mile or Two in Joe South’s Shoes

My 2016 Joe South career retrospective, restored from Internet Purgatory.

**********

If you know anything about the true breadth of Joe South’s talents, it’s remarkable to consider that if he is known for anything at all today, it’s for just two songs.

For a hot minute in 1969-70, South looked like he was on the way to a major career. “Games People Play,” the tune that introduced him to the public at large, rose to No. 12 on the national singles chart; a radio ubiquity, it captured two Grammy Awards in 1970, as song of the year and best contemporary song. A year after that breakout hit, he rose to the same chart slot with the stomping, soulful “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” a number that would be covered in short order by Elvis Presley.

After those two signature songs, Joe South pretty much disappeared off the American pop landscape. It was an astonishing vanishing act, for, in terms of sheer reach and ability, he came as close to genius as a musician can get. He was one of those cats who could do it all.

He wrote almost all of his own material; before his late-‘60s emergence, he had already made his mark writing for others – most notably fellow Georgian Billy Joe Royal – and one of his songs, “Rose Garden,” became one of the biggest country hits of 1970-71 in Lynn Anderson’s hands.

South had all the chops to put across his material. He was a terrific, expressive baritone vocalist. Perhaps more importantly, he was a dynamite guitar player who had honed his craft as an A-list session man in New York and Nashville. And he knew his way around the studio booth, too. He produced nearly all of his own records, and they were big, opulent sides, dressed with strings, horns, and chorales (in the manner of Chet Atkins’ countrypolitan sessions, Atlantic Records’ castanet-snapping R&B outings, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound). Yet at the core of South’s early records was the gutbucket sound produced by his family band, the Believers.

Though you could broadly categorize South’s music as “pop,” there was nothing weak or watered-down about his stuff. Like any musician who grew up in the South, he was reared on country music, and all his singing and picking reflected those roots. His style also had a strong R&B backbone and backbeat – not surprising, since one of his early hits as a songwriter, “Untie Me,” was for the Atlanta beach music act the Tams. And he could rock hard, and was unafraid to use the studio tools at his disposal for up-to-the-minute effects: Many of South’s most interesting tracks are overtly psychedelic.

Joe South was primed to go places – almost anywhere he wanted to go, really – but a predisposed dislike for the necessities of the music business, the usual rock ‘n’ roll pitfalls of drugs and alcohol, and, most critically, a devastating family tragedy knocked him out of the game when a brilliant career appeared his for the taking.

He was born Joseph Souter in Atlanta in 1940. His family was attuned to music and the arts: His father played guitar and mandolin, and his mother wrote poetry. He began playing guitar at an early age, while his younger brother Tommy took up the drums. Like many Southern households, the Souters tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry on Nashville’s WSM, as well as the popular local DJ Uncle Eb Brown on WGST.

“Brown” was the air name of Bill Lowery, who had been a mover and shaker in Atlanta’s music community since the early ‘50s as a broadcaster, station executive, and music publisher. It’s said that in an attempt to advance his musical aspirations, young Joe Souter boldly went to visit Lowery during his radio shift. No doubt impressed by his spunk, Lowery took the wannabe performer under his wing. One of his first pieces of advice was that Souter should change his name to the regionally reflective Joe South.

Beginning a professional and personal relationship that would survive for nearly five decades, Lowery brought 18-year-old college dropout South on board at his new independent record label, National Recording Corporation. The young picker was at first employed as a member of NRC’s house band, which also included the future recording stars Jerry Reed and Ray Stevens.

South began cutting singles in his own right for NRC, in varying pop, rock ‘n’ roll, and rockabilly settings. His lone chart record for the company came in 1958: “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor,” a sort-of-sequel to two recent novelty smashes, Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater” and David Seville’s “Witch Doctor.” Bouncing onto the chart briefly at No. 47, it was the only bright spot during his time on the label, which went bankrupt in 1961.

He continued to work as a performer, cutting singles unprofitably for the indies Fairlane and AllWood and for MGM, the former home of Hank Williams. But he began to hone his chops as a behind-the scenes player with his writing, playing, and production. He made his first mark with “Untie Me,” which became a No. 12 entry on the U.S. R&B charts in 1962.

He made his biggest impact in 1965-67 as writer and producer of Marietta, Georgia-born Billy Joe Royal’s hits on Columbia Records. Their partnership was announced with the propulsive poor-boy-loves-rich-girl saga “Down in the Boondocks,” which climbed to No. 9 in 1965. Royal road-tested such other South compositions as “Leanin’ On You,” “Rose Garden,” “Yo-Yo,” and “Hush.” The latter track reached No. 52 on the Hot 100 in 1967, but became better known in a 1968 cover by British hard rockers Deep Purple.

South also left his imprint via several noteworthy sessions. He played guitar on Simon & Garfunkel’s first bona fide electric sessions, which became the bestselling 1966 folk-rock album Sounds of Silence. He contributed guitar and bass during the Nashville recording dates for Bob Dylan’s groundbreaking two-LP 1966 set Blonde On Blonde. And in 1967, in the company of FAME Studio’s crack Alabama rhythm section, he laid down the signature guitar licks on Aretha Franklin’s hit “Chain of Fools.”

By 1968, Joe South had little left to prove, and Bill Lowery helped midwife a deal for his protégé at Capitol Records, already the home of such progressive pop-country talent as Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry. South was given extraordinary latitude for his first album: He produced the collection, wrote all of the material, and played lead guitar, backed by the Believers, a group that included his brother Tommy on drums and his wife, Barbara, on keyboards.

The resultant LP, Introspect, is an impressive piece of work that didn’t sound quite like anything else on the market. It was a widescreen sound, immense and layered, but at bottom down-home and funky. It drew from several stylistic tributaries. Its lead-off track “All My Hard Times” was an updated rewrite of the old spiritual “All My Trials.” The mocking “Redneck” was a loping countrified lampoon that can be seen as an early anthem of the New South; “These Are Not My People” was an alienated piece of similarly styled, Dylanesque social commentary. The strikingly trippy “Mirror of Your Mind” bore a startling out-of-time passage in its middle, while the equally expansive “Gabriel” was a psychedelic parable cut straight out of the Old Testament.

As great and unique as it was, Introspect was a marketplace failure, and Capitol’s accountants yanked it off the market just as a single drawn from it was beginning to make some noise.

Sporting a unique lead guitar line -- fabricated by South on either, depending on which source you believe, a Coral electric sitar or a Gibson Bell guitar fed through an outboard Echorette echo unit -- and a lyrical hook derived from the title of Eric Berne’s 1964 pop-psychology bestseller, “Games People Play” became a slow-rolling hit. Realizing they may have deleted Introspect prematurely, Capitol decided to capitalize on the song with a hybrid new album.

The Games People Play album – essentially a second debut album for South – resuscitated the title track, “These Are Not My People,” and, in an expanded psyched-up version, the song “Birds of a Feather” (which would appear on three of South’s six Capitol collections). To these were added a couple of new originals (including “Hole in Your Soul,” a frenzied vocal version of the Believers’ two-sided psychedelic instrumental single “Soul Raga”), remakes of several early-‘60s compositions for the Tams and Royal, and a potent rendition of South’s Brill Building-styled 1963 single for MGM, “Concrete Jungle.”

This bizarrely reconfigured opus failed to make any waves, but South gained some name recognition with his “Games People Play” Grammys. Moreover, he made some longer commercial strides with 1969’s Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home? The LP, which ultimately reached No. 60, sported not one but two hit singles: the title cut, a poignant look at the toll wreaked by modern life upon the Southern landscape, and the visceral, gospel-styled “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.” It also contained the most hallucinogenic entry in the South catalog: “A Million Miles Away,” a dense instrumental overlaid with a recitation of the album’s personnel and an extract from a telephone call between South and some staffers at the Nixon White House.

These ambitious records might have suggested to some that South’s potential was unlimited. But there was a problem: He didn’t like to tour, and was at heart a studio animal. He also didn’t respond well to the intense pressure of coming up with material that wouldn’t just equal the sales of his chart records, but would better them.

Perhaps in a hope of shaking things up, the 1971 album Joe South was recorded on home turf at Atlanta’s Studio One, where the Atlanta Rhythm Section was the hot session band of the hour. But -- save for “Rose Garden” (included to cash in on Anderson’s enormous hit with the song) and the “Brown Eyed Girl”-like “Birds of a Feather” (it was the third time around for this belated single release) -- the material, a mix of tepid new tunes and recut warhorses, was scarcely South’s best. The disinterest seemed to carry over on the second LP South issued that year, So the Seeds Are Growing; only seven of the album’s 10 tracks were original compositions.

The disenchanted South’s drug use had begun to escalate, and his brother Tommy, who suffered from depression, was also self-medicating. A turning point came on Oct. 11, 1971, when the younger South took his own life.

The immediate result of this tragedy was South’s final Capitol album, A Look Inside, released in 1972. The LP jacket bore a cover photo of South with an open window in his skull, and the most confessional songs on this dark, unsettling record mirror the graphic perfectly. Its first two songs, “Coming Down All Alone” and “Imitation of Living,” are candid and frightening reflections on drug addiction, and they have lost none of their power. But the record’s true killer, which kicks off with a tart quote of the “Game People Play” melody, is the ironically titled “I’m a Star,” possibly the most blunt, world-weary, and self-reflective deflation of the music industry ever released.

It was a record made by an artist at the end of his tether. As South said frankly in the notes to what proved to be his final album, “I flipped out. I just went completely into the ether in the wake of my brother’s death. I just had to get away, so I went out to the islands, caught Polynesian paralysis and just lived in the jungles of Maui for a couple of years.”

He returned, briefly, in 1975, for his lone release for Island Records, Midnight Rainbows. Though it began promisingly with the fittingly introspective original medley of “Midnight Rainbows” and “It Got Away,” the album – again employing members of the Atlanta Rhythm Section – is disappointingly short on new original material; its strongest tracks are wrenching covers of Jerry Butler’s “For Your Precious Love” and Johnny Adams’ “You Can Make It If You Try.”

The last track on Midnight Rainbows is an instrumental titled “Cosmos,” and that’s exactly where Joe South headed. He was virtually invisible on the public stage from the release of that last LP until his death on Sept. 5, 2012, in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Before Bill Lowery’s death in 2004, he issued a couple of singles on his old sponsor’s independent labels: “Jack Daniels On the Line” for 1-2-3 Records in 1981, “Royal Blue” for Southern Tracks in 1986.

The last work he released during his lifetime arrived as a bonus track on the Australian label Raven’s 2010 repackaging of So the Seeds Are Growing and A Look Inside. Sung by South in a charred latter-day voice, “Oprah Cried” is an apparently faithful account of his appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, where his story of life’s hard knocks moves the hostess to tears. “Son, I thought I’d heard it all,” she tells him.

Considered in light of what might have been for Joe South, it’s one of the saddest damn songs ever written.

[duhragonball]

Cult Classic

I had a really exhausting week, so I’m going to try to chill out by writing this thing about cults that’s been bouncing around in my head since... oh, like January 6th?   For some reason?     But it’s also about my insanely long OC fanfic slash vanity project slash concept album.  Join me, won’t you?

Okay, so back in... geez 2018?   Has it been that long?   Around October 2018 I started working out the details for the big climax of the “1000 years ago” section of my fanfic.  From the start I had this idea that the Legendary Super Saiyan would be locked into a death struggle with pretty much the entire Saiyan population, led by a Saiyan King who just can’t handle being upstaged.   But I had to figure out a lot of details to make that actually work.   What I finally ended up with was the Jindan Cult. 

Why a cult?  Because I wanted my King character to be the main villain, but also be physically weaker, but also he needed to be powerful enough to challenge the heroine. I came up with all these different ways to beef up his power level without making him a Super Saiyan himself, but ultimately I wanted him to have an army of Siayans at his back.   That led me to consider some sort of magic elixir that would make them all stronger, but especially the king, since he’s ultimately in this for himself.  At first, I considered having him mind-control all of his goons, but I spent the mind control nickel in earlier arcs, and I’ll have to use it again later, because Towa and Demigra use it.   Then I thought of drug addiction, which is sort of like mind control but not literal brainwashing or anything like that.  And that led me to the cult concept.  

One major inspiration for me was the real-life cult called “NXIVM”, which made the news back in 2018 when their leaders started getting arrested, including “Smallville” star Allison Mack.   Every time I read about it, it felt like something from a movie, but it was real.   I guess the celebrity angle made it more bizarre to me, because it’s sort of like “Hey, this isn’t just some group of randos; someone you’ve heard of is in this thing.”   Not that I ever paid much attention to “Smallville”, but you get the idea.  She didn’t just join NXIVM, she eventually became one of the top recruiters.   Some of the character arcs in my fic were my own attempt to understand how a person goes from Point A to Point B. 

The big plot hole, though, in my mind, was that I came up with this whole master plan for the bad guys, but it involved sending wave after wave of Saiyan cultists to die in pointless, unwinnable battles against Luffa.    I couldn’t have them win much, because if they beat her, they’d just kill her, and the story would be over.    It struck me as fishy that these Saiyans would sign up for a war where the casualty rate is 100%, but I tried to lampshade it as best I could.   “Yeah, all those other chumps couldn’t beat Luffa, but I’ll pull it off because I’m special!”   It still seemed a bit unlikely.  

But then 2020 happened, and I guess the main thing I learned from that year was that people will accept almost anything in order to believe a comfortable lie.  The joke I’ve seen on the internet is that we need to retire the expression “avoid it like the plague”, because it turns out a lot of people don’t actually avoid plagues very well at all.   The horrifying thing about COVID-19 is how easily people will accept the climbing death tolls.   “Oh, well this person was already in bad health, so they would have died eventually anyway.”   I don’t want to get too political here, but I’m pretty sure a lot of the anti-mask, coronavirus-is-a-hoax crowd are the same people who made up tall tales about “death panels” in Obamacare.    “They’re gonna euthanize your grandma!” they would say, but now they say your grandma is acceptable losses if it means reopening bars and restaurants.

Actually, I do mean to get political, because holy fuck, Qanon stormed the Capitol Building.    Look, if you don’t believe Joe Biden won the election, I don’t know what to tell you, except please get far away from me, right now.  If you’re not familiar with Qanon, a few years ago some guy on an image board posted a bunch of cryptic messages and claimed to be an important government figure who would know about important things.    People started “deciphering” his “clues” and when he stopped posting new ones they started inventing their own “clues” and interpreting them any way that suited them.    This led to an overarching narrative that Donald Trump was actually part of this massive sting operation to arrest hundreds, maybe thousands of left-wing politicians, celebrities, and whoever else.    Any day now, he was supposed to have Hilary Clinton arrested, and also JFK Junior would somehow show up and help him, even though he’s been dead for 22 years.  Every day, these Qanon guys would add on more bizarre lore to their “theories”, and every day none of their predictions would come true.  Then Trump lost the election, which put them in a bind, because their whole mythology is based on the idea of him saving the world as POTUS, and now he wasn’t even going to be POTUS for much longer.  

I’m pretty sure this had a lot to do with the lies about election fraud.    Trump himself refused to accept defeat, and his supporters didn’t want to accept it either, so they all told each other that it wasn’t real, and they believed each other so much that they dug in their heels.   But then they’d take this stuff to court and the judge would be like “Uh, what evidence do you have of mass voter fraud?” and they would just be like “lol nvm!”  I mean, if there was proof for any of this, why would they not want a judge to see it?   But for Qanon, it was more than just being sore losers.    They needed all their whackamaroo predictions to come true, and Trump losing re-election would upset the applecart.  

So then they started telling themselves that they could win this thing through the boring certification process.   I think it was like, December 14 when all the states had to certify their results.   So they held out hope that nothing was over until then.    Then they pinned their hopes on the Electoral College, and that there would be enough faithless electors to hand Trump the victory, in spite of the voters.   I found this one amusing, since I used to see tumblr suggesting the same thing back in 2016, when they were still trying to come up with ways for Bernie Sanders to win.  

Then they decided Mike Pence could fix everything, because on Jan 6, Congress would officially count the Electoral Votes and formally declare the winner, and Mike Pence would step in and overrule the whole thing, because the Vice-President oversees that process.    Except he just oversees it, he can’t legally change the outcome, especially on a whim.    And then the riot at the Capitol happened, and I’m pretty sure all these Qanon types thought it would mark the beginning of a nationwide uprising, with all seventy-odd million Trump voters going apeshit, but it... didn’t work out that way.  

Then they convinced themselves that everything was building to January 20, because the innauguration was actually a clever trap, and once Joe Biden took the oath of office, he could then be arrested for treason, so you see, they had to make it look like Trump lost the election, because it was the only way to fool Joe Biden into incriminating himself... or... something.   But Jan 20 came and went, so the latest fallback position I heard was that there’s a double-secret REAL inauguration day, and it’s in March, and the January 20 one isn’t legitimate, even though Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2016, but whatever.    That, or the guy we see in the White House now is actually Trump disguised as Joe Biden, or a Joe Biden android or something.   

I think I sort of understood that Qanon is a cult, but I didn’t really put the pieces together until the events of January unfolded.    Pre-November, it just seemed like a conspiracy theory, without any real timetables or prophecies, like Flat Earth.    But once the end of the Trump Administration was in sight, it really started to look like all the doomsday cults I’ve heard about over the years.  The predicted events wind up failing to come true, and they invent new predictions to explain away the old ones.   It’s not about the veracity of the claims as much as the claims themselves.    People want to believe there’s this whole elaborate explanation for everything.    They wanted to believe that Trump was this hypercompetent superheroic messiah, because the alternative is to face the uncertain reality: that he had no idea what he was doing, and real people were going to suffer for it.  

I think I sort of worked that idea into my fictional cult, but I backed into it.   NXIVM was a sex cult, not a doomsday cult, or an elaborate conspiracy theory, so I was mostly fixated on all the depraved things the cult could do to its members.   But they all share the same lure: a belief system that promises to make everything fit. I’m not sure what the hook was for NXIVM, but Allison Mack didn’t go in thinking about how much fun sex trafficking would be.   That came later, after she was convinced that NXIVM had all the answers, and one of those answers involved sex crimes, apparently.   In the same vein, Qanon attempted to explain mass arrests and executions by claiming that Hilary Clinton eats babies or something.   “Well, I don’t want babies to get eaten, so I guess breaking into the Capitol building seems like a reasonable course of action.”  

Weighed against real life, a bunch of Saiyans accepting a 100% casualty rate doesn’t seem so outrageous.   It also helps that sometimes the leaders of these groups can buy into their own hype, and think they’re infallible when they’re really not.    This week, I started reading the Darth Plagueis novel again, and I’ve seen the Sith from Star Wars referred to as a cult, but I never gave it a lot of thought until I noticed that Plagueis buys into the whole Dark Side of the Force thing a little too hard.   At times, he’ll wax philosophical about how the Jedi are the real bad guys when you think about it, and he’s not just saying that to be manipulative.   He honestly believes that the Sith can save the galaxy from decline, which is stupid and hypocritical, because they’re the ones causing all the decline.    I always got the impression that Darth Sidious understood that it was all about accumulating power as an end unto itself, and any high-minded talk of necessary evil was just to keep the rubes in line.    Rise of Skywalker plays into that idea nicely.   He somehow survived Episode VI, but he let the Empire collapse, because if he can’t rule it, he doesn’t want it to exist at all.   But he’s still playing himself, because he thinks he can win by following the same failed ideology that got all the previous Sith Lords killed.   

That’s pretty much all I have to say about it right now.    I need to move on to other topics, because Towa’s not doing a cult thing, so my fic is moving in a different direction.   But I feel better for getting this out of my head.