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norrisjpg · 1 month

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scott street - ᴍᴠ¹

in which, the pressure of the 2024 formula 1 season becomes too much for the dutch driver, so instead of leaning on his best friend for support, he pushes her away.

contains: angst, swearing, crying, unresolved conflict, unhappy ending, shouting, mentions of childhood trauma, depression, jos verstappen mentioned (ew), a gilmore girls reference, not proof-read.

max verstappen x unnamed female character

...

...

she thought something was off, something wasn't right - and she was correct.

it was right after the belgian grand prix, after max had lost another win through no fault of his own, after mclaren had gained a few more points on his beloved oracle red bull racing.

she was there, she always had been, waiting for him after the race like she always did. although she had prepared herself, nothing could have prepared her for this.

he knew he needed her, but he was just so wound up, so tired of the shitty car, so done with the team that he couldn't even bring himself to look at her when he walked into his driver's room.

"hey, are you okay?" she asked softly, standing up with the dutchman entered the room, his usual sadness replaced with something else - he was fuming. "max?"

"i'm fine." he mumbled, discarding his helmet carelessly to the floor.

"do you want to talk about it?" her voice was somewhat comforting, but nowhere near enough to calm the pure rage bubbling in his chest.

"no." max sighed, refusing to turn around and look at his best friend.

she nodded, not that he could see her, but it was more of a nod to herself. okay, he doesn't want to talk, that's okay. but she also wondered if he knew it wasn't his fault, because he couldn't help a ten-place grid penalty brought on by his team, and he certainly couldn't help that the mercedes were exceptionally quick today and being held up by cars he was lapping wasn't helping him either - it just wasn't his fault.

of course, she knew he'd be annoyed about his race - but that wasn't the route of his emotions, his father was. max had obviously told her about the traumatic events of his childhood, long after they'd happened, although she was around when most of them took place.

however, she didn't bring it up.

"max?" she spoke quietly, her voice a little airy. "it's not your fault, you know that, yeah?"

"i know it's not my fucking fault." he spat back quickly.

"come on, max, please talk to me." she pried a little more. "it hurts to see you like this."

"oh, it hurts you?" he scoffed, finally turning around to look at her, anger ever-so-present in his pretty eyes. "how the fuck do you think it makes me feel? you always manage to make everything about you, don't you? just can't stand the attention being away from you for just one fucking second, can you?"

it took everything in her to not physically recoil at his words - he'd never ever been like this, and she wasn't going to lie, her heart shattered at his cold attitude toward her. she was only trying to help him and he was acting like this.

"nothing to say, huh?" he almost laughed, but there was nothing resembling a smile on his face. "you know what? just get out."

"sorry?" was all she could muster, an expression of hurt confusion on her face.

"you heard me, leave." he repeated it, squashing her hopes that he was just angry and didn't mean it, that he'd apologise and lay in her arms and just tell her how he really felt.

she got up, putting her phone back in her pocket, glancing over at him to see that he'd turned back to desk, fiddling with something on there.

hearing the door shut behind her was confirmation of what he'd just done - why the fuck did he do that?

head in his hands, he slumped down on the couch, already missing her presence. clearly, max hadn't meant any of that, but it was like word vomit. he felt as if he was floating outside of his body, watching him shove his best friend away, and he couldn't do anything about it.

outside, she stood there, motionless. what the fuck had just happened? gritting her teeth, delicate tears fell down her cheeks as she started to walk out of the red bull garage in aimless despair.

maybe if she hadn't said anything he wouldn't have lashed out of her? did she pry too much? why wouldn't he just talk to her?

"ah, good afternoon." a familiar voice came from behind her as she stood in the paddock, unsure of what to do with herself.

daniel ricciardo.

"oh, hi daniel." she thumbed away the salty tears and sniffled before she turned around - but it was no use, daniel caught on straight away.

"what's wrong?" he furrowed his eyebrows, putting a hand on her shoulder.

she knew there was no point in lying, daniel would get it out of her eventually. "max kinda... blew up at me? told me that i make everything about me and then told me to leave- don't say anything to him though."

"you know i can't promise that, but are you okay?" he shook his head, mentally noting to bring that up with max in the near future.

"i'm not sure."

...

a pretty afternoon in monaco had brought about a lunch between max verstappen and daniel ricciardo. a whole week had passed since the incident, and neither had spoken to each other - both absolutely terrified of what the other would say.

max was scared that she'd push him away, the same way he did. she was scared that max didn't want her back.

the reality was, max needed help - he needed her back. since his outburst, things had gone downhill. the car wasn't looking as good as he'd hoped in the factory, one of his cats was ill, and someone had rear-ended his car somehow - it was as if the universe was screaming at him to just apologise to her, get in his car and go to her apartment, tell her he didn't mean any of it and then finally tell her how he really felt - but max verstappen had fallen deaf, clearly.

luckily, daniel ricciardo hadn't.

"max, what is going on with you?" he asked as the two sat on the bench, slightly hot from the round of padel they'd just played.

"what?" he scrunched his nose at the australian, glancing at him briefly.

"you." daniel repeated. "you're drinking way more than usual, i'm the only person you've seen other than for work purposes, and then you pushed your best friend away - god, why did you push her away?"

"how the fuck do you know about that?" max snapped, quickly apologising with a look afterward. "sorry, how do you know about that, though?"

"she was crying in the paddock after the race." he nodded, pursing his lips. "told me what you said."

"i didn't mean to, okay? i miss her. i know i shouldn't have said what i said, but i can't undo it. i just... i'm scared- what if this is it? what if she won't take me back this time?"

"max." daniel said firmly. "i promise you, that girl will always take you back - you could kill someone and she'd still stand by your side."

"what have i done, daniel?"

...

she was more okay than she thought she was going to be. monday evenings were always reserved for max - dinners, movie nights, whatever they decided to do, it was together.

this monday night was different though.

there wasn't the familiar dutch laughter bouncing around her apartment. there wasn't the delicious smell of home-cooked food lingering in the corridor. there wasn't the colour of freshly bought tulips adding to her plain white kitchen (max always gave her pretty flowers when he came over.) and there certainly wasn't the comforting smell of max's aftershave stuck on her cushions anymore.

it had been three weeks and no word from him.

maybe it was time to move on. maybe he wasn't coming back this time.

she decided early on that it was his decision to return - he was the one who pushed her away so why should she make an effort? in no way was she saying it was for the better, but she was... relatively okay. yes, of course there were things she missed about him - no one wanted to do anything on a monday evening apparently.

so, she spent her monday evenings alone, drowning herself in blankets and fast food, watching some movie that she would never even the end of of - because she fell asleep every time, without fail.

so she did move on.

max on the other hand? he was moving backwards - rapidly.

he thought he was borderline depressed. rotting in his apartment with his cats, occasionally venturing out of the house to buy food or see daniel and lando - but that was it. it was as if all the life had been sucked out of his existence - all the colour, all the light.

so, when he turned up to her apartment on a rainy monday evening, it was a knife to the heart, to the head, to the gut.

he walked into the lobby, planning on going straight up to her and confessing every single feeling he'd had since that dreadful day in belgium.

but, he was met with an unexpected sight. there she was, smiling, with a man.

she was laughing, with him. they were walking towards her apartment, about to head into the elevator. if they were on normal terms, max would have waltzed right up to her and asked who he was - but he didn't have that privilege anymore, remember?

so, he turned around, shocked and almost reduced to tears, and he left.

if only he knew, she would have run to him in a heartbeat.

but, maybe it was for the better.

...

coming next... novacane, ʟɴ⁴ motion sickness, ᴍᴠ¹ (part two)

#formula one #fanfiction #f1 fanfic #formula 1 #max verstappen #max verstappen angst #max verstappen x reader #scott street #norrisjpg

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ghost-1-y · 1 year

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Nightmare

Incubus!Gojo x AFAB!Reader

Content Warnings: MDNI, dark content, dubcon, stalking, yandere themes, infidelity/cheating, manipulation, possessiveness, sexual content, penetrative sex, oral sex (f! receiving), aphrodisiac, blood sucking, using horns as handles, symptoms of sleep paralysis, feelings of insecurity (reader), mentions of voyeurism (gojo), dacryphilia, degradation, corruption k!nk, gojo feeds off of reader's life force, mentions of potential exhibitionism (reader’s husband might hear them going at it), breeding k!nk, mentions of impregnation, creamp!e, no aftercare, reader's husband is nanami-coded, please let me know if I missed anything!!

Summary: It’s been weeks since your husband had touched you in the way that you wished, and you’ve started to grow tired of his constant flirting with other women at work. Completely fed up with both him and the never-ending dry spell you’ve been going through, you retire to the guest room’s bed to fall asleep without your husband, unaware of a shadow that’s been lurking in your home each night, waiting for the right moment to prey on its new victim.

Word Count: ~3.6k

Divider Credit: @/benkeibear

A/N: Sorry this is an hour late!! I had a super busy week and didn't get to edit/revise at all until today, but I hope it's worth the wait!

Y/N’s POV

You were tired.

Not in the normal sense – you didn’t feel a need to sleep. On the contrary, you found it quite challenging to do so recently due to the never-ending thoughts of your unhappy marriage, as you wondered how exactly it reached this point in the first place. At first, your marriage was beautiful – you were in love, and everything in life was tinted in rose. Your husband treated you as his one and only, his everything, his soulmate.

When are you having kids?

You two look so cute together.

I wish my marriage was as happy as yours!

Your friends and family would always compliment you and ask you for the latest details of what you and your husband were up to. You were soaring, so happy that you found someone to share your life with.

But then, he started working overtime at his job, started taking on more shifts, and you’d go to sleep on an empty bed and wake up to his side being cold the next morning – nothing indicating that he was there other than the disheveled sheets that he didn’t bother to fix before heading out again. Your mornings were lonely, and your nights were quiet. You started making dinner for one, rather than wasting food on a meal that wouldn’t be eaten. You tried to be understanding of your husband’s absence, knowing that his job required a lot of him, so you never told him how much it bothered you, thinking it would only add more to his never-ending pile of worries.

It truly felt as though a ghost lived in your home, only ever seeing remnants of life from the half-empty coffee mug or the folded-up newspaper that was left discarded on the dining table. The fridge would be left ajar and the front door unlocked as though he was in such a rush to get to work that he couldn’t be bothered about simple things – relegating those tasks to you, his good little housewife.

Sometimes, whenever a door closed on its own, or you thought you saw something out of the corner of your eye, you’d jokingly call out to your husband in the emptiness of your house. Of course, you’d get no response, and you’d almost laugh at your antics if it weren’t for how your life was slowly turning gray – the rose tint slowly fading the longer you were alone.

However, one night, in your darkened bedroom, you heard a car drive up to your house. You slowly got out of bed, clinging to your sleep robes as you walked towards the window, and you saw your husband get out of the car. Warmth filled your veins as you gazed down at your husband for what seemed to be the first time in weeks, happy that you’d be able to welcome him back home. However, that warming comfort quickly dissipated as the driver also exited the car – a woman, presumably a coworker you hadn’t met – and walked over to him. As you peeked through the blinds, you saw your husband meet the woman halfway, the headlights of the car illuminating the two figures, and his hands sought her face as he kissed her.

Surprisingly, you didn’t feel your heart shatter as one might think – you had your suspicions already that he was seeing someone else, and this only confirmed your thoughts as you closed the blinds and left your shared bedroom, deciding to retire to the one meant for guests who stayed over.

Maybe that’s all I am at this point, you thought as the front door opened, only wishing to sink into the mattress and cover yourself in its sheets as you closed the guest room door behind you and removed your robe. The mattress was stiff and unused, and you stared up at the ceiling as you heard your husband’s heavy footsteps padding their way up to his room, as you became more and more of a stranger in your own home.

You tossed and turned as you walked the line between sleep and wakefulness, your thoughts racing just a bit too much to allow you to seek the comfort of dreams that you knew would never come true, or to notice the slightest creak coming from your bedroom door.

What seemed to be a hand ghosted over your hip, fingers dragging along your sides as you slowly became aware of the strange feeling grazing over your body. You squirmed, thinking it was some strange breeze that came in from the window – before you noticed the heavy weight that was pressing into your chest, rendering you nearly immobile.

“Such a waste to not take care of a pretty thing like you…” a voice drawled, and you opened your eyes – fearing that someone had trespassed into your home, only to find nothing out of the ordinary inside your little guest room. You sighed, thinking that you must’ve been hallucinating – sleep paralysis was a possible explanation, after all.

The voice, however, returned, chuckling in response to your eyes frantically searching for the source. “Oh, sweetie, your eyes can’t see me!” it exclaimed, as though it were obvious, “but I can see you, pretty, I’ve seen all of you.”

Gojo’s POV

You were sweet.

Like candy – if he were able to taste it, anyway. You had an aura about you that lit up any room you were in, one that he’d gaze upon from afar in the shadowy corners of your house, something he couldn’t touch, lest he burn from the light that was your smile.

He loved watching you – seeing you get dressed (he loved the curves of your body), how you’d cook and clean and make everything look so pretty for a husband who didn’t appreciate it…

He especially loved watching you from one of the shadows of your bedroom as your husband fucked you – his cock throbbing as he watched you being used like the cute little cumdumpster you are, always wondering how tight your cunt would feel wrapped around his cock instead.

He would observe each and every single action because it was you who performed them.

And you looked delicious.

But he couldn’t feast upon you – not yet, at least. Your light was still too radiant, it shined upon everyone and everything and was nearly all-consuming.

So he left – just for a little while, of course. He’d be back for you, you just needed to give him some time.

He interrupted the dreams of one of your husband’s coworkers, filling her mind with lewd images and thoughts of railing your husband to the point where she just couldn’t bear it. So, eventually, she approached him at work – and he initially denied her advances, acting like the good husband he should be – but that just wouldn’t do for the plan Satoru had in mind.

So he did the same with your husband, and provided him with dreams of fucking that same coworker, how wet and tight and good it would feel to have his filthy cock inside someone else’s pussy. Satoru knew it would hurt you, but it wasn’t completely his fault – you see, it was your husband’s choice to act on his desires, and his coworker’s choice to reciprocate despite knowing he was a married man.

And so your husband started coming home late, but not from work like you’d thought, no. He was arriving home after laying in the bed of another, engaging in an illicit affair that he excused as simply working overtime at the office. You initially believed your husband, but eventually, you developed your suspicions, and your light dulled – which pleased Satoru – because he could get closer to you. He would sometimes even try to alert you to his presence, but that never went according to plan – you’d always call out your husband’s name in response. You were loyal, and that annoyed him to no end because he already decided that you were his.

He just had to be patient.

Until tonight – he had been watching you from the corner of your room. You couldn’t see him, of course, he was nothing more than a shadow to you. But that fated car had shown up, and as you peeked out the window, the last bits of your light finally blinked out like a dying star, and Satoru damn near rejoiced.

He soon followed you to the guest room, smirking to himself as he opened the door to see you tossing and turning, restless and alone – just how he wanted you.

Because you were his – to claim, to ruin, to feast upon.

“Such a waste to not take care of a pretty thing like you…”

Y/N’s POV

“Who are you?” you asked the darkness, eyes still darting about as you covered your top half with blankets as though that’d protect you from whoever– whatever this was.

“Hmm? Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me! Although I guess I can’t blame you – our bond isn’t quite strong enough for you to see the real me…” he considered, “you’ve called out to me many times before though, sweetie, even if it was by the wrong name – which was annoying, to say the least.”

If you could see this…thing, you would’ve been able to discern the very obvious pout on its features. But, as its words sunk into you, a chill ran up your spine and every artery, vein, and capillary became doused in fear – realizing that this entire time you’d been joking to yourself about a ghost living in your home, it had been true.

“My name is Satoru Gojo, sweets, so next time you call out – please use that name instead of the one owned by that disgraceful husband of yours,” the voice insisted, tracing its fingers along your side – a movement nearly invisible if it weren’t for the fabric that moved ever so slightly in response to his hand.

“How– how do you know about my husband?” you asked, and he laughed.

“Oh, sweetie, you should realize that I know everything about you by now! I know how you take your coffee, how you perform chores around the house,” his voice dropped to a whisper, breathing directly into your ear, “how that husband of yours is unable to fuck you the way you want.”

You shuddered, unable to deny the slightest spark of arousal that nestled deep within your gut, but it did little to quell your fears of this…thing. You didn’t want to admit that he was right about your husband – not even to yourself – but the way he held that woman…

“Oh c’mon, relax. I can smell your fear, y’know – but I’m not gonna kill you!” Not yet. “I want to help.” The lies dripped like honey off of his tongue, sickly sweet as you drank them in. “Close your eyes for me, will ya? I promise I won’t bite,” he smirked.

Hesitantly, you obeyed and closed your eyes, and you felt the softest, sinful touch of his lips against yours – it was dizzying how they caressed you before he slowly entered his tongue into your mouth, causing a burning feeling to slip down your throat – as sharp as alcohol and as saccharine as sugar. Your mind relaxed, with the blood in your veins heating up before that warmth sunk down into your stomach and then lower. Your fear had been eradicated by lust, and as you finally opened your eyes, the being in front of you was one you’d never seen before – a tall, white-haired male, with eyes that deceivingly matched the heavens, who was adorned with wings and horns colored in a dark charcoal.

“Now you see me, don’t ya, pretty?” he smirked, “I’m gonna take such good care of you – you’ll let me, won’t ya?”

You nodded without hesitation, only desiring more of the euphoric feeling that he seemed so keen on providing you with.

“Need your words, baby, or else I can’t do anything,” he growled softly, and you squirmed underneath his weight as you forced your mouth open.

“Please,” you begged.

“Please what?”

“Please– please fuck me!”

You felt a sudden rush of cold as the bedsheets flew off of your body, leaving you stark naked on the mattress below you. Still, the cold was quickly replaced by the scorching hot yet featherlight touches of his hands tracing along your body – moving along your sides and then up towards your breasts, which he fondled before kissing you again with those syrupy lips, allowing more of that warmth to spread down your throat and into your skin. The weight on your chest was unrelenting yet pleasant as his tongue slipped into your mouth once again.

His hands toyed with your nipples, pinching and rolling them in between his fingers, pulling a gasp from you as he parted from your mouth in favor of sucking on your neck, licking a long stripe up toward your jaw before biting down just enough to draw blood with his fangs – he needed to feed off your life force somehow – you moaned as a heat spread from where he bit you all throughout your neck and shoulder, a pleasurable feeling which allowed him to drink in more of you before moving on to your tits, sinking his teeth into your nipples as well as he drinks freely from you, lapping up the blood with the flat of his tongue. You cradled his head as he sucked at your breast, encouraging him to keep going as a breathy moan escaped you – because it never felt this good before when your husband would do it.

“Mmh, yeah? You like it when I play with your tits like this, baby?” he asked, voice muffled against your soft skin. You whined, eyes closed as you arched your back, the euphoric flow of pleasure coursing through you. He could tell you were slowly becoming obsessed with the way he was treating you – he just needed to wait a little bit longer.

“Fuck, so good– never…never felt this good before,” you moaned, and Satoru smirked as he sucked just a little bit more on your tits before traveling down towards your needy cunt.

“That so? Your husband doesn’t know how to fuck you, does he?”

You shook your head, unable to voice an answer as his breath fanned across your sopping pussy.

“It’s okay, pretty, don’t worry – I’m here now.”

He delved a single finger into your glistening cunt, gathering up your slick and bringing it up to his mouth to taste you. He groaned as he gathered more of it, forcing his fingers into your mouth, and your tongue immediately lapped at them like a puppy with its owner.

“You taste so good, pretty. So fuckin’ wet for me – such a good slut,” he smirked. He removed his fingers from your mouth before going back down and licking a fat stripe up your cunt, causing your legs to jolt at the touch. He snickered, “bet your husband didn’t know how to please you, bet he never even went down on you, the sick bastard.” You whined in response, causing him to chuckle.

“Thought so.”

He buried his face into your messy cunt, his nose nudging against your swollen clit as he delved his tongue inside of your hole, licking up all of your juices into his awaiting mouth. You moaned, bucking your hips up into his face before he pinned them down, eating you out like you’re his favorite meal and he’s a man starved. It’s messy as he groaned into your heat, working his jaw as he savored your sweetness. He moved his mouth slightly up to your clit, pursing his lips around it and sucking hard as he probed two fingers into your needy hole, curling them inside of your sloppy heat. Your hands clasped around his horns and you arched your back, trying to push him deeper between your legs, obsessed with the way his fingers and tongue felt while pleasing you.

He pulled moan after moan out of your pretty little mouth, and he laughed to himself as his plan was going oh so well – to make you drunk on the pleasure he gave you until you became fully addicted and obsessed with him, becoming his little cock slut that he can breed and fill with his cum whenever he wanted.

Eventually, the tension building up in your lower abdomen snapped, and a sense of euphoria rushed through you, causing your legs to shake and clench around his head. He groaned, drinking up all of the juices that flowed out of you. Satoru looked up at you as he fed upon your cunt, and grinned as he watched your soul slowly but surely fade through his eyes.

“I was right to choose you,” he groaned before slurping up the rest of your juices, overstimulating you as your grip on his horns tightened, pleading with him to let up on his ministrations.

“Feeding me so well, pretty.” He nipped at your inner thigh once before sitting up and grabbing his cock, giving it a few strokes before lining it up with your sopping hole. He rubbed the bulbous head along your pussy, “tell me, how much do you want this cock, baby? You wanna get fucked by a demon like me?”

You nodded, and if you were any less delirious you might have questioned what he meant by ‘demon’, but you were too far gone to care, simply nodding and begging “please” over and over again.

He slowly pushed his cock into you, grunting with how tight you were wrapping around him. “Shit, pretty–” he sighed, sinking into you until his balls were flush against your ass. He grabbed your legs and pulled them up so your ankles reached over his shoulders before slowly pulling out and plunging back in. His grip tightened on the flesh of your thighs as he started moving faster, his balls slapping against your ass with the force of his thrusts. Your mouth parted and tears fell down your cheeks, only being able to take what he gave you as his dick filled you up to the brim while pounding into your sopping cunt.

“You cryin’, baby?” he chuckled, and you could only whine in response.

“Good.”

He soon flipped you over and got you on all fours, slamming his cock back into you. You wailed as he kept forcing his fat cock into your greedy little cunt – the intensity only building upon itself as you felt your orgasm approaching once more.

“‘M close…’m close,” you babbled, encouraging him to fuck you harder. Satoru reached around to rub your clit, and you gasped as you fell apart once more, gushing around his cock. Your legs trembled and you fell forward, unable to hold up your weight any longer as pleasure coursed through your veins. Satoru took this opportunity to trap you under him, with his torso flush against your back as he continued fucking into your tight pussy, not caring for how overstimulated you were becoming.

“Fuck pretty, you love this dick, huh? Cumming all over me like that,” he grinned, his dick throbbing as he continued pounding into you. You nodded in response, but that wasn’t enough for him, so he gripped your chin and forced you to look up at him. “Uh-uh, tell me how much you love this cock, baby.”

“Uh– fuck! Love– love it! Hah– need…need more–!” you babbled, tears flowing down your cheeks. He placed his hand around your mouth, and your moans became muffled as he dragged his cock inside your messy cunt.

“Shh, pretty, don’t want your husband to hear you getting fucked, right?” he grinned devilishly, “though, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already heard us – he’s probably stroking his dick to your sweet sounds, the cuck.”

You whined, oddly enjoying the idea that your shitty husband might be able to hear you – you took pride in the fact that he might know that you’re getting fucked better than he ever did with you. You started fucking yourself back onto Satoru’s cock, and he grinned widely – satisfied with how he’s turned you into his little cock slut.

“Shit, baby– ‘m not gonna last much longer,” he admitted, his thrusts progressively getting sloppier and sloppier as he rutted his cock into you.

“Hah– you want me to cum inside you, baby? Want to get filled with my cum? I’ll fucking get you pregnant, breed you with my seed and turn you into my cumslut – you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Fuck– say it baby, say you want me to cum inside you” he groaned, his dick pulsing inside of you as he reached his end, and you nodded your head.

“Please, please Sa- Satoru–! Cum inside me! Wan’ to be your cumslut! Please!” you begged.

“Shit– ‘m gonna cum, pretty, fuck–” He pushed deep inside you, hips flush against yours as he released his hot seed into your womb, thick ropes of his cum filling you up until it started leaking out of your abused cunt. As he pulled out of you, causing you to whine at the feeling of emptiness that it created within you.

“It’s okay, baby, I’ll be back for you. I’ll visit you every night if you wish, just so you can get your fill of my cock,” and so I can get my fill of your delicious soul, he thought, grinning to himself.

Suddenly, the weight lifted off of your chest, and once you opened your eyes – he was gone, leaving you a mess with his cum leaking onto the bed sheets. You sat up and hobbled your way over to the shower to clean yourself off, trusting in his promise to come back each night.

You’d be waiting for him, not realizing that was his plan all along.

Taglist: @o-oreo , @k-a-t-h-r-i-n-a @wow-im-gay, @peanutpunchy, @love-me-satoru, @perfect-again, @dinosaur-crime-scene, @thisbicc, @gojoscumslut, @everyonesfinaldestination, @leehoonii-i, @kyojurismo, @crazycatlddy, @briefrebelfanalmond, @izuoyarmin, @ahashiraswife, @d1gitalbathh, @223princess (if your name is crossed out, it means tumblr didn't allow me to tag you - apologies for the inconvenience)

I hope you enjoyed!!

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mywitchyblog · 7 days

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Can someone please explain to me who the hell is so upset with me that they’ve resorted to going into other shifters' ask boxes as an anonymous user and started bullying them in my name? It honestly baffles me that someone would stoop so low. If you have an issue with me or something I’ve said, be direct. I’m not one to hide behind anonymity or drag innocent people into something they have nothing to do with. If I had a problem with you, trust me, I’d say it to your face. I don’t need to hide in the shadows.

Now, there are only two possibilities for what’s going on here, and neither of them reflect well on the person responsible:

The first possibility is that this person is intentionally creating drama by sending themselves an anonymous ask. Maybe they’re looking for attention or trying to stir up conflict where there is none. It's sad, honestly, if that’s what’s happening because it just shows how far some people are willing to go to manufacture chaos.

The second possibility is that I’ve managed to piss someone off to the point where they’re now impersonating me, using my name to spread hate and start fights in spaces where I’m not even involved. If this is the case, I can’t say I’m surprised that someone would go this route rather than confront me directly, but it’s still frustrating. I don’t hide from criticism, and I won’t shy away from addressing issues head-on. But to use my identity in such a toxic way? That’s crossing a line.

To the person this happened to (I found out about this through a mutual, and I want you to know that I’m aware), I am truly sorry. I hate that this situation has dragged you into something you didn’t ask for, and I genuinely wish it hadn’t happened. But let me be absolutely clear: it wasn’t me. I did not send those messages, and I would never engage in that kind of behavior. It’s not how I handle things, and it’s certainly not how I treat others.

You are fully entitled to your own opinion, just like I’m entitled to mine. I’ve never denied that right to anyone, and I wouldn’t start now. We don’t have to agree on everything, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to attack you for your perspective or allow someone else to use my name to do so. That’s not how this works.

And just to set the record straight for the final time: I am not a pedophile, nor do I endorse, encourage, or support anything related to that disgusting behavior. It’s beyond insulting that I even have to keep repeating this, but here we are. In fact, I went out of my way to age myself up by a few years or to completely discard the DRs that felt problematic or uncomfortable. I’ve always been mindful of the spaces I navigate, especially when it comes to shifting, and I’ve made conscious decisions about what I’m comfortable with.

If you’re unhappy or confused about something I’ve said or done, talk to me like a human being. Bring it to me, and let’s figure it out. Don’t jump to conclusions or, worse, involve other people who aren’t even a part of the conversation. It’s cowardly and completely unnecessary. This whole thing could’ve been avoided with a little bit of maturity and honest communication.

At the end of the day, it’s honestly pathetic to bully other people just because they happen to have a different opinion than yours. Why are you so bothered by someone else’s perspective that you’d go out of your way to hurt them or cause unnecessary drama? We’re all individuals here, and our experiences with shifting, our journeys, and our beliefs are going to vary. No two people will see everything the same way, and that’s okay. It’s actually something to be embraced. What’s not okay is tearing each other down because of those differences. That only reflects poorly on you and shows how little respect you have for other people’s paths.

So, let’s try a little harder to be civil and respectful. You don’t have to agree with me, and I don’t have to agree with you, but at the very least, we can treat each other with decency.

#reality shifting #shiftblr #desired reality #shifting #shifting community #shifting realities #shifters #reality shift #reality shifter #shifting antis dni

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strawberry-jan · 10 months

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I had thought that my days of writing long fandom effort-posts were behind me but then I finished Gaiden and welp, here I am. I ugly sobbed at the ending and then spent the next several hours ugly sobbing in textual form at friends. I have some thoughts; I am going to put a few spoiler-heavy ones (read: a lot of them) under the cut after this brief (read: lengthy) spoiler-free introduction.

Y6 and Y7 left me feeling like the writers should’ve just retired Kiryu from the series after Y5, even if it meant leaving him lying there in the snow and never following up on whether he’d actually made it back to Haruka or was just dreaming. I have complained at length about nearly every aspect of Y6, but since it’s directly relevant to my feelings about Gaiden, let me state my gripe with the ending specifically: it was an absolutely bizarre move to position that game’s ending (1) after Y5 and (2) within a game that hits the player over the head repeatedly with the message that setting yourself on fire to keep other people warm is a mistake that hurts not only you but also those around you.

Kiryu walks down the sunny path away from Morning Glory at the end of Y6, and everything about the framing suggests that even though it’s bittersweet, it ultimately tends toward sweet: the old generation has made way for the new, Yuta is there to look after Haruka in Kiryu’s place (don't get me started on this), and his family is safe for good. The problem with this is that it’s a shit resolution considering the game’s themes and also a devastating ending specifically for Kiryu. We’ve just come off the heels of Y5, where it’s more obvious than ever that despite his gruff, stoic exterior, at heart he’s a warm, caring man who badly needs to be with the people he loves. Exiling himself to Nagasugai made him unspeakably unhappy; what he wants, and what everyone in his family wants, is to be together, and this is something that Y6 harps on initially and then forgets in its ending. Walking away from Morning Glory forever is condemning himself to a lingering death and neither Y6 nor Y7 acknowledges this meaningfully. (Y7, in fact, is infuriating about this; Kiryu’s cameo there felt so cheap and unnecessary that I, one of the man’s biggest fans, was irritated at seeing him there.) It would have been kinder to just kill him outright at the end of Y6.

In that context, Gaiden feels like an apology that also tells you, gently, that we're at the end of an era - for real this time.

Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Still Thinks Sunglasses Are a Proper Disguise is a roughly 25-hour outing (depending on how much time you sink into mahjong and whether you can get over your embarrassment long enough to close your blinds and watch the painfully awkward live-action hostess videos) in which the writers spend most of the run-time reassuring you, “Yes, actually, we do understand this character and the ramifications of his decision.” There are so many points in the story where it comes up that his family is the one thing that Kiryu wants and the one thing he can’t have. He’s explicit about his desire; you can go so far as to ask a wish-granting vagrant in a silly substory full of Dragon Ball (and also ball) jokes to give him his happy, peaceful life back, because even when Kiryu’s up to his balls in testicular puns, that’s what’s on his mind. There’s no façade that he puts up; the game simply acknowledges this want and goes, “Yes, that was the lesson you learned and discarded; sorry that you can’t act on it anymore, but that window closed in 2016 when you decided to die instead of taking the briefcase full of cash.”

So. This is sad enough. But what really broke me about the ending – and what I know really broke a lot of other people – was the fact that it’s so devastatingly clear that even if Kiryu were to have taken the Omi’s terrible offer to do away with Hanawa and get himself back to Okinawa, it wouldn’t have mattered. I think the writers were very deliberate about having everyone refer to the “kids in Okinawa” (yes, also in Japanese) when they make threats toward Kiryu’s family or talk about his desire to see them again. Kiryu thinks of them as his kids, but when he looks at the recording on Hanawa’s tablet, he sees adults with adult jobs and adult lives of their own. They love him, but their world has moved on without him, and there are no “kids in Okinawa” to return to; all this time, Kiryu has been clinging to a vision of his peaceful life with his kids that doesn’t exist and, in fact, cannot exist anymore. The series has always taken place (barring the spinoffs) roughly in the present moment with real time passing between entries, and I’ve never felt it so painfully acutely as I did in that moment when Kiryu realizes that Haruto can write.

And this is all of a piece, I think, with the speech he gives earlier in the game about wanting to do right by Kazama, Nishiki, and Yumi – more idealized visions of people he once knew and still loves. Hell, even though I’m disappointed not to get the fanservice that would’ve been Kiryu talking to Daigo, Majima, and Saejima at length, none of those members of the old guard have interacted with him since he left the hospital and went to jail at the start of Y6. It’s not just his kids who have moved on: Daigo is doing things for himself without sneaking back into Suzuki Taichi’s life to beg him for advice, and though Majima does roll his eye at Kiryu and tell him to stick around for a bit after the brawl (and the little knife-throw made me go hohohoh because I'm shameless and will take whatever scraps the studio deigns to give me), he and Saejima are bickering and joking around with each other like an old married couple. They’ve moved on, too, and Kiryu’s world is ghosts all the way down.

It's not all miserable, of course. I do genuinely love that Kiryu’s kids are happy, and although Kiryu sobs that he needed them more than they needed him, that seems more like a function of his chronically low self-esteem than anything based in reality. You can tell that the Morning Glory kids regarded him as a positive force in their lives and that they still do as adults – Taichi, for instance, says that he decided to be a firefighter because he wanted to protect people like Kiryu did. Kiryu’s family looked up to him but, crucially, without falling into the cycle that Kiryu did when he looked up to his own father figure. And it really warms my heart that clearly Haruka has been telling Haruto about her dad, such that the kid knows enough about oji-san to draw a picture of him with the rest of his family. I think a lot of other media’s writers would have chosen to make the Morning Glory kids bitter about Kiryu’s absence, to have them resent their dad for repeatedly disappearing on them. Maybe they did in fact feel upset with him for a while, but the video presents them all as happy and hopeful that maybe someday their not-dead dad will come back to have a drink with them – and I do hope that Y8 allows this to happen in some way. It wouldn’t be a return to his old life, but it would be something.

Anyway: I’d feel weird about talking at such great length about all of this without talking about the Big Dissolution Brawl and everything around it. It's all connected, after all. Just as Kiryu comes to the painful acknowledgement that his little world has moved on, so too does he have to beat it into Shishido’s skull that the organization that he’s still clinging to is a thing of the past. It’s not just that anti-Yakuza laws are making it more difficult for them to function and that the police and politicians have found ways to use them as scapegoats and pawns. It’s also that everyone who’s been in the business long enough understands that even the best men among them are still bastards and their organizations aren’t worth saving. Tsuruno – probably my favourite new character – is a fiercely loyal man who’s known for taking guys like Shishido under his wing; he also has no compunctions about plotting to murder Hanawa, threatening Kiryu’s family as a manipulation tactic, threatening Kiryu himself with a red-hot branding iron, and using Kiryu as an accessory to murder. Notable cool dude Watase made use of the Kijin Clan because their assassination services were necessary for him to get ahead, and he and Tsuruno readily discard Nishitani III the second he becomes a liability – gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet, after all. (I am not going into anything else about whatever the writers thought they were doing with Nishitani. I think there was something to do there with the game's interest in names and legacy but then, in classic RGG Studio fashion, they forgot to elaborate on it in any meaningful way.) For the first time since the late 80s, Kiryu is even forced to explicitly consider Kazama’s faults – albeit only briefly, and only in a substory.

Shishido himself wants to be the final boss of a previous game as if there's some kind of throne left to contend for (and his final fight is actually pretty reminiscent of the brawl with Aizawa, a high point in the series). And, at Kiryu’s insistence, he’s allowed to get out his blustering final speech about it – but he shouts about refusing to allow the old guard to dismantle the structure he’s ascended while everyone around him who actually matters is standing there, like, “Dude, the Tojo and Omi are over; read the room.” We're playing through the epilogue to Kiryu's saga, and we're seeing everything that drove that saga's conflicts being tied up or taken apart as needed. The kids will be alright no matter what happens to Kiryu, and while we already saw the Tojo Clan bite it in Y7 after its long decline over the course of the series, we're finally seeing that from the perspective of the guy who prolonged things by shoving Daigo into the chairman's seat and coming back to Kamurocho once a year or so for a Millennium Tower punch-out. Kiryu even acknowledges that, like Shishido, he loves this shit - "You hear someone out there's stronger... And soon your only thought is how to defeat them," he tells the man. But he goes on to say that that dream is meaningless in the face of other people's daily struggles. Again, it's time for everyone to move on. It's time for you as the player to move on, and you're being given one last real-time shirt-rip brawl against a man who won't accept that the era is over in order to underscore the point that it's over.

I’m not entirely sure how to finish this already too long post. There's a lot I haven't even touched on. I will say that I love Hanawa and Akame and Tsuruno. I love going back to Sotenbori. I love yet another game in which I can slam through the koi-koi and mahjong completion lists. I love all the callbacks and the sequence in the castle where you fight not-Kiryu and they've given him Gun and Sword like some kind of budget Sakamoto Ryoma. I love playing dress-up with my big burly guy. I love everything about the big boys’ night out in Chapter 4. I love that immediately after being tortured by Daidoji agents Kiryu can wander into the next room over to ask for a turn on their Sega Master System. I love how funny this game is when it's not socking me repeatedly in the gut. More than anything, I love that even though Kiryu’s enduring the world’s most drawn-out death sentence he’s still Kiryu and he’ll still snark at people and get really into little cars and involve himself in people's problems at the drop of a hat. I wish that I’d gotten to see Kiryu getting tripe with the old Tojo guard at the end of the game, but that’s what fic is for. I will not be writing that fic any time soon because I’m still way too deep in my feelings about this game to write anything cheerful about it. As I said, Gaiden feels like an apology, and while it made me cry harder than a video game has ever made me cry before, I’m so happy to have received it.

#like a dragon gaiden #there are no spoilers above the cut but if you click through uhhh watch out #this was an embarrassing number of words SORRY #and I hardly touched on some aspects of the plot

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stylexrepp · 6 months

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Stolitz // The Next Full Moon -

(I did not proof read so if you see any grammatical errors… you didn’t)

*After Stolas had given Blitzø the Asmodean Crystal, Blitzø had shouted at stolas for being a selfish entitled rich prick, this was his way of still trying to hide his feelings and make Stolas hate him before he could say something he would regret in a time like this. While the berating tookplace, Stolas just stood there and took the backlash. He would rather Blitzø be happy and hate Stolas than have him unhappy.*

———

Stolas sat in his bath filled with his tears and lukewarm water. After their arrangement had ended Stolas had done nothing more than cry, work, and sleep, leaving no time for himself. Only staying awake to wrap his head in paperwork and try his best to keep up with Octavia, making sure she is happy.

*CRASH*

Stolas jumped up from the tub and ran to see what happened, ignoring the fact he is fully exposed and his robe was laid perfectly where he left it out for after his bath.

As he dashed into his bedroom he sees Blitzø tripping into his quarters.

“You STupID AsS bIrD BrAIn!! You tHiNk yOU Can JUst diTcH me lIKe tRAsh!!!” Blitzø slurred

Stolas stood in disbelief, “Blitzø what on earth could you possibly be talking about! You are way to tired to be talking about this right now, please come lay down darling.” As he approached Blitzø he could hear his heart rate increase.

“IM NOT DOING SHIT FOR YOU!!” Blitzø screeched

“Blitzø ple—“

“YOU SHUT YOUR MANGEY BEAK FOR THREE FUCKING SECONDS, AND LISTEN HERE. I AM HERE TO GET MY MONTHLY FUCK AND PISS OFF LIKE USUAL. SO DON’T TRY AND PUSH ME OUT LIKE LAST TIME OKAY!!”

“Push you out! Blitzø I gave you the choice and you walked away, you think I’d ever just use you for pleasure?” Stolas’s bottom eyes began to tear up

“Oh PLEASE you never wanted me for anything more than my dick! Let’s just get this dicking over with, come on!!!” Blitzø started shuffling towards him and placed his hands on Stolas’s hips. Stolas flinched away from the touch. “Fuck ‘s that all about huh?”

“Blitzø do you not remember a month ago when I poured my heart out to you! I gave you my all and I was completely and utterly vulnerable with all my feelings for you. Did you just forget all of that, all that I said when I laid my heart out for you on a silver platter!!” Stolas was basically sobbing at this point. He began to walk back into his bathroom hoping Blitzø would not follow him but Stolas was wrong. Blitzø followed along directly behind him staring as his feathered ass. “Stols come on, I know you want this ‘thick red dick’ so stop it with your innocent prude act. Just get your bird cunt over here!!” Stolas refused to listen and closed the door on him.

“STOLAS YOU CAN TRY TO LOCK ME OUT BUT WE BOTH KNOW ILL FIND A WAY IN” Blitzø shouted from outside the door.

“Blitzø if you are just here to continue our outlandish arrangement I-I won’t have it! Just leave if that’s all you are here for my dear.” Stolas begged at the foot of the door. As his tears fell he started to wheeze as he waited to hear Blitzø’s footsteps walk away.

Blitzø didn’t even think twice before yelling back, “There you go again being a spoiled fucking brat thinking you can tell me what the hell to do. Well, guess what bitch? I'm done being your ‘impish plaything’. From now on, I'm going to treat you like the worthless, empty piece of shit prince that you truly are. You don't deserve my time, or my energy, You are nothing but a sex toy for me to use and discard, just like you did to me. So enjoy your lonely ass existence, because I’m done letting you decide what the fuck I do with my dick!”

Stolas didn’t even respond. He sat there in a pool of his own tears soaking up every word blitzø said. Stolas had always blamed himself for everything no matter what happened. But hearing someone that he truly loved tell him he was to blame put everything into perspective for him.

Stolas walked over to his vanity and looked himself in the eye and all he could see was a monster. All of a sudden full of rage Stolas punched the mirror causing it to shatter, tearing up his hand now covered in black blood and glass shards. As Stolas began to drop to his knees Blitzø busted open the door to see what had happen.

“Stols…”

“P-please Blitzø just leave. There is no need for you to stand here and torment me any longer, I’ve had enough right now. If you wish to continue to batter me you can come back tomorrow but I cannot do it tonight.” Stolas was a shell of himself. He showed no emotion what so ever.

Blitzø made no effort to leave, he just stood there trying to find any kind of expression in Stolas face to be able to make a suitable comeback.

“BLITZØ LEAVE, DO I HAVE TO GET ONE OF MY GUARDS TO ESCORT YOU OUT OR CAN YOUR LEGS DO IT THEMSELVES” blitzø was shocked that Stolas had just raised his voice to a yell for the first time. Usually if he was upset he wouldn’t get too heated but Stolas was at his breaking point.

“Stols I-“ Blitzø didn’t have anything to say. As he looked down at Stolas he realized how much harm he really caused. This whole time he thought everything wrong with this relationship, or whatever you wanted to call it, was because Stolas was a prissy royal when all along Blitzø just refused to let him in and kept pushing him away.

Stolas looked up at Blitzø with the most heartbroken look on his face. Neither of them said anything for a minute. With tears sneaking past his eyes he let out a heavy sigh, Blitzø knelt down beside Stolas, reaching out to gently touch his cheek. Once again Stolas flinched away from his touch.

“I'm sorry, Stolas. I not good at this talking shit and the sappy fucking feelings, but I know it’s not an excuse for the way I’ve treated you" he whispered, his voice filled with remorse. He blinked back his tears and kept all his concentration on NOT fucking up again (like that’s gonna happen). Stolas held his gaze on the floor knowing that if he looked at blitzø he would break down for the hundredth time today.

“Stolas please just look at me, I know you don’t give a rats ass about what I have to say but right now is the only time I will probably ever be this vulnerable.” Blitzø said with sniffles as he couldn’t hold it in anymore. Stolas peered up at Blitzø slightly and winced as he accidentally placed his hand back down in the glass shards.

Blitzø took a deep breath, his eyes locked with Stolas'. "I need you to know this," he began, his voice tinged with vulnerability. "I've spent so long blaming you for everything that went wrong between us. But the truth is, I was scared. Scared of letting you in, scared of being vulnerable, scared of letting you get hurt again, scared of me fucking up everything we created." He paused, his voice wavering slightly. "But, Stolas, I can't keep pretending that I don't need you in my life. You're the one person who sees me for who I really am, and I don’t understand how you like me this much I mean got not even M&M like me enough to talk to me on off days for sevens sake!” (unless I’m stalking them) “I've been pushing you away because I was too afraid to admit it." Blitzø's gaze softened, his walls crumbling with each word. "I love you, Stolas. And I'm sorry for all the pain I've caused your bird brain.”

“Yo-you love me blitzø?” Stolas began to cry yet again being the emotional man he is. Everything was twisting and turning in his head. Any words blitzø had said now were going through one ear and out the other.

Blitzø's heart clenched as he watched Stolas cry, the raw emotion in his eyes tearing at Blitzø's own resolve. "Yes, Stolas, I do, but I can’t promise I’ll ever say those shitty words again" Blitzø replied softly, reaching out to gently wipe away Stolas's tears. "I've been too much of a pussy to admit it but don’t expect anymore more of this mushy bullshit." He took a shaky breath, his own emotions threatening to overwhelm him. "But seeing you like this, it's breaking me too. I can't stand to actually see you hurt because of me."

Stolas sniffled, his tears subsiding slightly as he looked up at Blitzø with a mixture of disbelief and hope. "Blitzø, I... I l love you," he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper. "But we can't keep antagonizing each other like this. We have to figure out a way to make this work, or else..." He trailed off, the weight of their uncertain future hanging heavy in the air.

Blitzø nodded, his resolve strengthening as he tightened his grip on Stolas's hand. "I know, pretty bird. And I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make things right between us," he vowed, his voice filled with determination. "We got a long fucking road ahead of us, but I believe we can try this as long and I pull the plug out my ass and man the hell up." With those words, Stolas showed what he could of a smile. His hand had finally healed, not like he didn’t expect that, and went to go grab his robe finally realizing he was butt naked.

“Sorry for my indecency dear, I didn’t expect anyone to smash through my window ever again.” Blitzø took a hold of Stolas’s arm before he could reach his robe. He ripped Stolas back across the room. “Never bothered me pretty bird!” Blitzø smashed his lips onto Stolas’s beak. Blitzo pulled back and sternly looked into Stolas’s bottom eyes, “Also, Don’t you ever fucking try to get rid of me again!!”

#stolitz #stolas x blitz #stolas goetia #stolas #blitz #blitzø #blitzo #helluvabossstolas #helluva boss #helluva blitzo #helluva boss blitz #hb

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leggypuppy · 1 year

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I feel like the Cultist feels unhappy because they are, well, hurling themselves into the hidden world and in doing so they stop caring about the world they live in.

It... Reminds me of Theresa and Christopher. While she loved the Glory to the point of sacrificing every other love she had, the new Book of Hours lore shows that Christopher kept going after her! He studied music, he traveled the world, but he still visited the Orchard at times, so he lived in both worlds! The Cultist is trying so hard to enter the Mansus and see the beauty there that they forgot everything else.

To the Cultist everything is a catalyst. All those incredible things they gathers have incredibly narrow uses! They drops the books after reading them because they're now useless as he already absorbed the knowledgr, he can't use the Kingskin Bodhrán to play music like it's MEANT to. They likely don't even THINK of it. And they treat everyone as tools to be discarded at their leisure! Even relationships can be abandoned at the drop of a hat.

The Exile can use the things he gathered in his journey, for passing through doors, to defeat challenges. His friends aren't simply tossed into a dungeon, he goes in there and fights against Percussigants and Younger Sisters by their side!

And even when the Cultist is a literal Long it's still not enough to make them happy. Even when they achieve what they seek there's still that itch. "Perhaps I shall rise even higher." In the very moment of their triumph they're still unsatisfied.

And obviously we have the Librarian. So in the retrospect, the Cultist needs to touch grass.

That's a really good take on it, I think, and it's kind of adjacent to the way I've always interpreted the characters.

To me, it's never seemed so much that the Cultist stopped caring about the world they live in so much as they couldn't find anything to care about in the first place. I think there's a reason the minor endings (Ever After, the one where you get a fancy house, generally the ones where the Cultist stays in the mortal world) are considered minor by the game- there's clearly enough in them to theoretically keep the Cultist grounded, but compared to what they could achieve, well...

playing as the Cultist is about striving for something Higher, hunting out the ends of reality to instantiate yourself in. As the aim becomes greater, so do the costs. Happiness isn't even really a concern. Contrast that with Illopoly, who can strike something of a balance, or wants to and tries to, and as a result, can never go too far in either direction, achieving breadth of experience, but not the kind of depth that ends up eating you. But it seperates him from Theresa- in the end, he can only visit.

And that's one of the fundemental tensions that runs through the Secret Histories world as a whole, I think. Depth and intensity of one type of experience comes at the cost of being able to experience or be anything else. Breadth and balance allow you to retain your centre, but you will never follow others that go further, and the gulf between yourself and them will only get wider. How far along each axis are you willing to go?

#book of hours (game)#cultist simulator #cultsim #weather factory

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honeydukesheroine · 15 days

Text

Update: HP ⚡️ Re-Read Challenge

Philosopher's Stone

So I actually finished Philosopher's Stone on Sept 1st! But forgot to post my notes.

I imagined making these notes more readable (for anyone remotely interested), but honestly ... laziness wins. So decipher these how you will! 😂

If you want me to dive into any of the bullet points, send me an ask and I'll be happy to have an excuse to take a break from writing explore them more!

Ch 1

- Family relationships with uncles and aunts and children. How people drift apart with styles of life and partner

⁃ Shows how the predjudice comes out in the durlseys and Harry probably rejecting all of that to be as different as possible

⁃ How dumbledore must’ve been feeling when he dropped off Harry. Guilt? That there was something he could’ve done. “When you could have been celebrating? I must have passed a dozen feasts and parties on my way here” - is he looking for commiseration?

⁃ Is he really gone? “It certainly seems so, we have much to be thankful for” then a distraction…

⁃ You flatter me, had powers I’ll never have

⁃ Dumbledore gave a sniff

⁃ What dumbledore means by growing up away from all that, for the sake of humility? “Until he’s ready to take it” …. Hmmm

⁃ Where was dumbledore ? With snape?

⁃ “Good luck Harry” feels heavily loaded

Ch 2

⁃ Harry told to never ask questions

⁃ Joy to experience new things

⁃ How he can keep his sense of humor, sarcastic and honest observational deadpan

⁃ First signs are Defensive magic!!

⁃ "First friend" - he asks about the snakes roots and is empathetic. Observant and questions and curious

⁃ seems to have a relationship with himself, not self conscious or insecure. Sarcastic and eager to know more. Curious but not allowed to ask questions. Purely himself and unapologetic. Lonely, but knows who is to blame

Ch 3

⁃ almost playing with Dursley's and teasing them

⁃ Harry gets furious and angry from the righteousness of not having what belongs to him. Having something for his own. He’s been waiting and dreaming for this moment when someone would save him and know EXACTLY where he is.

⁃ Headcanon: that they never cleaned out all of Dudley’s junk. That the room was where they put discarded items and Harry fit right in. Everything in his way and crushing in around him

⁃ Dudley must’ve thought making fun of Harry had been a game

⁃ Vernon no doubt was physical with the boys and not afraid to hit them around the head and perpetrated this behavior with Dudley

⁃ He’s obviously unhappy with them, but not in a way that has degraded him completely. Abused, yes but resilience.

Ch 4

⁃ first info he gives Harry is about his parents and how he looks like them, connecting to them

⁃ What is it about Hargrid, being the one to bring Harry into the wizarding world and the symbolism of carrying him to the final face off with Voldemort. Why hagrid? A gentle giant who has love and comfort all over him

⁃ The key to questions he’d been asking all his life, now the first person to come along that can give him information about his parents and why mysteries things happen to him

⁃ Dudley’s like to control Harry

⁃ Petunia girl, been holding that in for 10 years have you?

⁃ Echo of the cold cruel laugh, could be a sign of horcrux “remembering?”

⁃ The real beef with dursleys coming after they can’t control him anymore and son was magicattacked. Fear response driving their concerns plus jealousy?

Ch 5

⁃ probably Harry’s first time in true London!

⁃ Such amazing and efficient world building. The details and specifics of characters that make them multi dimensional and human

⁃ Judge of character I forgot Malfoy was the first student he had met!

⁃ In that moment after Malfoy interaction he felt the sting of being discriminated against for something he couldn’t control

⁃ First time that Harry felt self conscious and glum

⁃ Keeps a sense of him being an eleven year old boy, trying to buy all this fancy stuff

⁃ Theme of similarities between Harry and Voldemort (HBP)

⁃ She could’ve picked any other name for the barkeep. But decided on Tom just before introducing quirrel

⁃ Self questioning at the end of the chapter with the “everyone think I’m special” reminding me of his insistence in the 5th book that everything is reactionary during the first DA meeting. A confusion about his life and what he means to the wizarding world. They will always see him as the famous Harry but he wants people to see him at his level and understand the struggle. He’s introduced to the world as a hero and they expect things from him. His relationship to self and fame throughout the books!

Ch 6

⁃ aunt petunia must’ve known how to get to the platform

⁃ The weasleys!!

⁃ Love Ginny for saying “the boy with manners, yep he’s the one”

⁃ “Oh, him, I mean yes I am"

⁃ Ron’s nerves on the first day, having a lot to live up to with funny brothers and prefect Percy

⁃ Scabbers. Toss him out the window

⁃ Love the bonding session with Ron and Harry. Voicing their concerns and connecting over low means and very different fears going into hogwarts, having to live up to expectations. Cute

⁃ Ron feels like he has a lot to share with Harry- information while Harry shares pasty

⁃ Wonder if Hermione got to choose for the hat too. She said that Gryffindor would be best because dumbledore was in it “but Ravenclaw wouldn’t be too bad”

⁃ You’ve got dirt on your nose, by the way. Did you know?

⁃ Neville losing Trevor had a lot of references on the page. Hermione helping him was interesting too, but even she would’ve rathered been with Harry and Ron?

Ch7

⁃ the meal is the most British dishes ever

⁃ “The dursleys had never exactly starved Harry, but he’d never been allowed to eat as much as he liked”

⁃ Hermione and Percy talking, always wanted to explore that parallel

⁃ Harry’s dream at the end? Is this the horcrux trying to control Harry into slytherin, making it easier for the piece of Voldemort to take control?

Ch 8

⁃ “wish mcgonagall favored us”

⁃ Hermione desperate to prove and please and perform. Pleasing authorities and wanting to emulate them to prove her worth

⁃ Teacher leaving a bunch of 12 year olds unattended

⁃ Neville has so much screen time compared to rest of series

⁃ Love the idea of motor memory helping him here for flying. That the work he did with his parents restored itself when he defended Neville’s. The happiness is almost a memory of his parents buried

⁃ Ron and Hermione bickering and Harry “shut up the both of you!”

⁃ Neville was there for the first outing

⁃ “Harry thought she was probably right but wasn’t going to tell her that”

⁃ Neville bungled their cover by crashing into armor. Like to think that Neville needed the chance to develop on his own without feeling like a Peter pettigrew

Ch11

⁃ Hermione freezing in the moment of distress

⁃ Respect for Hermione for covering for them and lying to a teacher to show her priorities. It’s a shift for her to look to authority instead to honor the sacrifice the boys made for her.

⁃ Her fear realized, being criticized by a teacher

⁃ From that moment they liked her. She found that fitting in with them was more worth than following the rules?

Ch 11

⁃ Hermione’s change of heart with authority. Her starting to trust her own know how over the intentions of other is a big step

Ch 12

⁃ Hermione is determined to uncover flames and snape

⁃ Purpose and mystery

⁃ Ron didn’t get a letter on his sweater?!?

⁃ So many beautiful parallels but this has to be my favorite chapter

⁃ The ghostly and ethereal way he interacts with family. He’s so close to them but far the terrible ache mixed with joy to experience them

⁃ First time we’re seeing moody and brooding Harry

⁃ Their first close up interaction

⁃ Dwell on dreams and forget to live

Ch 13

⁃ Neville so present in this book and they’re kind to him but must not trust him enough

Ch 15

⁃ we’ve got no proof!!

⁃ The quicker he leaves the forest the better they know or get “have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets?"

Ch16

⁃ in years to come Harry would never quite remember...

⁃ Harry thinking like a detective and realizing hagrid was set up

⁃ Role of their chess pieces!!!!

⁃ Ron’s chess is strategy and fireside and knowing sacrifices have to be made

⁃ How did dumbledore know to get the stone when he did? What rumors stirred that caused it. Did Voldemort know Harry would be coming back that year? Yeah probably...

#honeydukesheroine #harry potter reread #harrypotter fanfiction

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jow99 · 1 month

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St Malo to Cancale

It was raining this morning which made packing up not terribly nice and everything was a bit muddy.

Once we left the campground our first stop was the supermarket for a big shop given we’ve been winging it post our Sunday glitch. It was a huge Carrefour in a shopping mall so we emerged close to 2 hours later after shopping and coffee. It’s always an adventure when we shop - different layouts, different products 😂

Thankfully by this stage the rain had passed. Next order of service was to exchange the gas bottle as we’re expecting to be in Aires on and off. Then it was time to try and find a home for tonight somewhere out around Pointe du Grouin and Cancale. There are still motorhomes everywhere so a lot of places are full.

We ended up in the Aire just near Cancale. In the end we were not unhappy with this result. Having parked we set off down to the port for lunch. Cancale specialises in seafood but predominantly oysters. They have on oyster market on the pier so you can just sit and eat them there. We also caught our first sites of Mont St Michel!

We had a lovely long lunch. I ate more seafood than I’ve eaten in a long while, including things I’ve never eaten before - periwinkles and whelks. Both were quite good and I think were cooked with pepper and thyme. Not a skerrick of seafood passed Jose’s lips 😂

After lunch we wandered through the shops at the port and up into the main part of town via the tourist information. We arrived back at the Aire around 6:00ish, just in time to enjoy a glass of wine in the last of the days sun.

It’s been a funny old day weather wise. It was raining this morning and even when we left to walk down to the port at lunchtime we had our puffer vests and long sleeve t-shirts on/with us. Admittedly they were soon discarded and only some put back on for the walk back to the Aire.

The rest of the evening was spent comfortably inside Tessi avoiding the wind that had now come up 🙄

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kuwdora · 1 year

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WIP Sunday Snippet... from the vilgefortz wankery. This snippet remains in my discard pile because how many paintings is too many to be referencing in this fic? I think I'm up to 5 or 6 at this point. I might put it back in though...we'll see. Soooo... Geralt and Vilgefortz are in a wing of the gallery that features some of the more critical artwork.

Sunday Afternoon on The River of Alabaster Bridges depicted a rotting corpse of a dragon floating belly up in the middle of the Pontar. Peasants in the foreground went about their harvesting, scythes in their hands while a small child played naked in the shallows. A small rowboat with two lovers were mid-river, hands joined in a moment of quiet intimacy and indifferent to the decay beside them. The brushstrokes of the water were inelegant, and the usual gleaming color of the river was polluted by the fetid body. The human figures were painted in a dull grey in contrast of the dragon whose golden scales were melting off its body in the heat of the sun. A mage in a deep red cloak stood at the corner of the painting, holding a magnifying glass up to a melted scale he had fished out of the water.

It was the work of Hugo Bluewythe, the only gnomish artist whose work was featured at Aretuza. Born to a Mahakham family, he was a successful metallurgist, had local fame and a family who was proud to call him one of their own. After several decades of monotony, he grew tired of embellishing weapons that he knew would be used to kill. So he picked up a paintbrush instead. His customers and family were unhappy with this change in vocation because he dared to express his vision by other means. But he didn’t allow their criticisms to get in his way and he became quite renowned for his work depicting humanity’s indifference to non-human suffering.

Vilgefortz watched Geralt frown at the painting.

Anyway, this is 100% a riff on Pieter Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Auden's poem about the painting.

Musée des Beaux Arts By W. H. Auden

December 1938 About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

#vilgywank #my witcher wips #there is actual fucking in this fic #there's also just a lot of art history and political and moral philosophy too. okay. TWN did not have enough of that.#vilgefortz of roggeveen #geralt x vilgefortz

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robhorninginternalexile · 7 months

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AI structuralism

In the last chapter of The Order of Things, Foucault touts structuralist forms of psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics as models for the means of thought beyond the self-cancelling limitations of the human sciences. I wonder if he would have included contemporary computer science to that list if he could have anticipated then the developments of AI now.

Lévi-Strauss brings up cybernetics in La Pensée Sauvage and goes so far as to wish for a machine that could perform the "classification of classifications" at the scale necessary to completely describe the possibilities of knowledge in some supposedly objective way. Since the machine he dreams of didn't exist, he writes, "I will, then, content myself with evoking this program, reserved for the ethnology of a future century."

Foucault is not so explicit as that in The Order of Things (the whole book felt like a fog of abstractions to me) but he suggests that thanks to the structuralist project, "suddenly very near to all these empirical domains, questions arise which before had seemed very distant from them: these questions concern a general formalization of thought and knowledge; and at a time when they were still thought to be dedicated solely to the relation between logic and mathematics, they suddenly open up the possibility and the task, of purifying the old empirical reason by constituting formal languages, and of applying a second critique of pure reason on the basis of new forms of the mathematical a priori." I take that to mean that the old dream of producing a formula that explains everything that can happen in the world suddenly seemed back in play; the limits and situatedness of the human observing perspective on the world — the "unhappy consciousness" that Hegel described — could be surmounted.

In an essay about The Order of Things, Patrice Maniglier describes the book as "an attempt by Foucault to get around the philosophical opposition between hermeneutics and positivism and thus to disentangle the anthropological circle, all in the hope of a new way of thinking whose premises he perceived in structuralism." In other words, Foucault at the time saw structuralism as a way around the problem posed to knowledge by the subject/object divide, the fact/opinion divide, by the fact that words and things are separate, that language is not transparent, that people don't understand their society, the point of their efforts, or their own lives and decisions. Structuralism was seen as maybe solving the crisis of modernity and its perpetual struggle to recenter the decentered subject. Of course structuralism failed in that mission and was largely discarded as an intellectual movement by the 1970s. But it seems as though its assumptions, methods, and aims have been resurrected, wittingly or not, by AI developers, who posit generative models and so forth as ways of producing knowledge without requiring a human subject.

In one of The Order of Things last few paragraphs, Foucault writes

Ought we not rather to give up thinking of man, or, to be more strict, to think of this disappearance of man —and the ground of possibility of all the sciences of man — as closely as possible in correlation with our concern with language? Ought we not to admit that, since language is here once more, man will return to that serene non-existence in which he was formerly maintained by the imperious unity of Discourse?

One might understand LLMs, in their idealized form, as that "imperious unity of Discourse" restored. They posit that language can have meaning without a speaking subject investing it with intention and context. And perhaps one can expect LLMs to fail just as structuralism did, and that no amount of commercial enthusiasm for them can eradicate the subjectivity they still presume even as they encode it it ever more obfuscated and extenuated ways.

#ai structuralism

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nammikisulora · 2 years

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Unquiet Nights

For @mechtober2022's 26th daily prompt, Favourite Headcanon.

I couldn't choost one fave-fave one, so I ended up doing a consistent one I'm rather fond of: Jonny finds literal sleeping together to be something very intimate and vulnerable, far more so than sex. So let's have a look at when it happens anyway!

This one got a bit darker than previous ones, with an M rating on AO3 (but as I feel, within this event's rules). CWs for canon-typical everything and a little more, detailed list below the fic itself.

On AO3 here, as well as below the cut. Maybe be better to read on AO3 on account of length, just over 3,5k words.

---

When he agrees to travel with her, the Doc gives Jonny his own room on her small ship. It’s barely more than a supply closet with added sleeping accommodations, but it’s… it’s certainly more than Jonny’s ever had before. He swallows and glances shyly at the Doc.

"Um, uh. Thank you", he mutters. Did she somehow… know how he feels about sharing a sleeping space with people? That he'd kind of worried about that bit, when he said yes to joining her in space? But what if asking about it would make her change her mind, just to make a point of who's in charge? No, better not.

Fortunately the Doc just smiles and leaves him to settle in.

When Nastya first joins them, Jonny kicks up such a fuss that Carmilla immediately discards the idea of letting him stay with her in the lab to make sure nothing goes awry. He storms off, fuming and relieved at once.

Once she is well enough to choose her own quarters, Nastya prefers to sleep in warmer places than Jonny can stand, probably doing unspeakable things with the ship while she’s at it. This means that while they strike up a tentative friendship during the day, he isn’t ever subjected to any awkward suggestions of a sleepover, which he still fuzzily remembers from his childhood with a vague sense of dread accompanying it.

Then they’re suddenly planetside, and the Doc’s gone off on her own. They’ve bedded down as far as possible from each other in the small hotel room, but Nastya is shivering so hard that the chattering of her fucking teeth is keeping Jonny awake.

“Hey, what the fuck?” he asks after a while, struggling to keep his tone light and conversational. He doesn’t want to pick a fight, just get some fucking sleep. Nastya mutters something that definitely sounds like a Sprussian curse, then she sighs and turns around.

“I’m cold”, she says. “M-my blood. It’s cold. Aurora usually helps to keep me warm, but she is…”

“Not here”, Jonny supplies, before he’s subjected to any kind of lovesick whining. Nastya makes an unhappy, affirmative noise, but doesn’t say anything more. Instead she just continues to make the bed frame rattle with her shaking. Jonny closes his eyes, and tries to ignore it.

It’s impossible. He gives it a few minutes, but he quickly realises it’s a lost cause; he can’t fucking stand it anymore.

“Hey, Nas?”

“Mmh-hm?”

“Do you want to. Share a bed. For warmth. I’m, y’know, not as hot as your spaceship – pun extremely not intended – but maybe we could actually, y’know. Fucking sleep.”

For a minute, the silence is absolute. Then Nastya sighs again, deeper than before, and says, “Alright”, between chattering teeth.

And fucking hell, she’s cold as a fucking icicle when she crawls beneath the covers of Jonny’s bed. She’s brought her own blankets too, and spreads them on top of Jonny’s. They lie stiffly next to each other, barely touching, while Nastya continues to shiver violently.

“Can I, uh. Hug you?” Jonny asks, not entirely sure what he hopes for the answer to be. But when Nastya nods jerkily, he wraps his arms around her without hesitating, the cold of her skin seeping through his clothes.

It takes a long time for them to fall asleep, even after the shivering dies down. Feeling too awkward to speak, the night passes slowly, but the silence grows more comfortable after a while. Just when dawn has started breaking, Jonny finally slips into an uneasy slumber, thinking that maybe sharing a bed with someone isn’t so bad after all.

Fortunately Nastya seems to agree, because they need to repeat the sleeping arrangement for the next few nights, as long as they’re staying at the hotel. It gets easier each night, but that doesn’t stop him from being extremely grateful when Nastya returns to the warm embrace of her ship-girlfriend the moment they’re back onboard.

He still prefers his own sleeping space, thank you very fucking much.

Ashes is the coolest person Jonny has ever met. After what they did to Malone, he doesn’t even hesitate to tell them so.

“You’re alright”, they tell him, and Jonny has to fight hard to keep his beaming mostly internal. He does make sure to steal them some very nice cigars when they land on one of Malone’s most remote asteroid outposts to refuel, though.

To his eternal amazement, they also respond positively to his clumsy attempts at flirting, and for a while sex with Ashes even beats violence as his favourite pastime. While they do occasionally end up in a bedroom out of sheer convenience, Jonny never sticks around for long afterwards. Sometimes he wonders what it would feel like, though, to stay and doze off on their arm… but in the end, he figures that asking would be too fucking weird.

Another thing that both puzzles and amazes Jonny is how well they seem to be taking – well, everything. The whole thing that lead to their first death, being mechanised by the Doc, and then erasing their whole fucking world from existance. Ashes seems to be remarkably well-adjusted for someone who just went through all of that, taking it a whole fucking lot better than Jonny did, and he’d only killed two people and burned down a single casino.

Then, after maybe a couple of months, Cyberian ship time, Ashes simply… crashes, and Jonny realises he’s misinterpreted the situation badly. Fits of uncontrollable rage alternate with screaming nightmares, and so many things are set on fire that Nastya starts to seriously fear for the safety of the ship.

Very predictably, Ashes’ interest in fucking Jonny drops pretty drastically during this time, which he mourns in private but isn’t stupid – or even insensitive – enough to bring up. He still spends time with them, though. Partly it’s because Nastya half ordered, half begged him to, but mostly because he genuinely likes Ashes and would prefer them not to be distressed. The problem is just that he has no fucking idea how to help.

So he plays cards with them for days on end, offering them booze to sleep and cigarettes to share, and always leaves feeling wretchedly inadequate because nothing he does seems to make the slightest fucking difference. Then one night, Ashes breaks the pattern by suddenly dropping their cards and avoiding his eyes.

“Stay”, they whisper. Jonny chokes on his inhale, his eyes watering from the smoke. When he’s done coughing, Ashes sits half-turned away, hugging themself with tears glittering in their eyelashes. Jonny swallows, feeling altogether unqualified for what’s being asked of him. But Ashes, cool, amazing, put-together Ashes, looks like they’re about to fall apart, and Jonny doesn't want to find out what would happen if they do.

"Yeah, okay."

They halfheartedly offer to fix up a makeshift bed on the floor for him, but Jonny just snorts and shakes his head, then clambers into their bed.

He doesn’t get much rest that first night. Ashes thrashes in their sleep, crying out to the ghosts of their past, and despite Jonny’s efforts not to listen, he learns a whole lot of things he rather wouldn’t have, at least not like that. But the fact that they bury their face in his chest and sob when they startle awake in the middle of the night cycle, instead of setting the washing machine on fire again or something, probably counts as a win.

So he moves in with them, at least for the time being. It’s weird as hell, sharing his living space with someone else like that, but it’s a hit he is actually, for once, willing to take for the team. A nice bonus also turns out to be how nice Nastya is to him when she realises what’s being set on fire instead of her beloved ship and their furniture.

Eventually Ashes calms down again, and Jonny gradually migrates back to his own quarters. It's a relief in most ways, but sometimes he finds himself reaching for a warm body next to him in bed, only for his hand to close on empty air. He rarely asks to spend the night with them, though, but he also rarely declines when they ask him to stay with them.

Brian doesn't sleep. Not in a way that a more flesh based being would call sleep, at least. He does occasionally… power down in a way that takes some rousing if someone needs him urgently, but it still isn’t sleep.

Jonny kind of likes that about him. He hangs out with Brian on the bridge, pushing the boundaries of how long he can stay awake himself, before he staggers off to crash in the safe solitude of his own room. Fortunately Brian doesn’t seem to mind Jonny’s increasingly incoherent ramblings when he’s stayed up for too long; he even appears to appreciate the company. Still, sometimes he looks at Jonny with sad, fond exasperation, and tells him, very gently, to go the fuck to sleep. Jonny’s heart always gives a weird, metallic twinge at that, and he usually heeds Brian’s request.

He almost doesn’t notice it when he simply starts dropping asleep around Brian instead. The first time he conks out in the co-pilot’s chair, he wakes with a hellish crick in his neck, feeling like he’s been hit by a space freighter.

“Briiiiiaaaaaan”, he whines, “break my neck for meeeee…”

Brian shakes his head like he can’t believe what he was hearing, but kindly does it for him. Jonny feels much better when he revives.

Then Jonny finally pushes too far with the Doc, and she decides that she needs to make sure he hasn’t actually damaged his brain with some of his violent antics. Because there is no way he's stupid enough to actually endanger the ship over petty resentment… right?

He crawls out of the lab on his hands and knees, nearly two full day cycles later. The Doc tried to convince him to stay, offering treatment to mitigate the symptoms of the examination, but he’ll be damned if he spends another fucking minute in that fucking torture chamber of a lab… He makes it all the way around the first corner before he collapses, too exhausted and in too much pain to move another inch.

That’s how Brian finds him, an indeterminate amount of time later.

“Jonny? Are you alright?”

Any other time, he would’ve flipped Brian off and sniped some sarcastic remark about robotic observation skills. Right now, he feels too awful to do anything but whimper.

“Ngh.” Jonny winces when the cool silicone of Brian’s palm touches his cheek. There's a muffled clang when Brian kneels down next to him. He tries to shy away, but quickly gives up and simply lies still again, panting.

“You need help”, Brian says. It isn’t a question. Jonny whimpers again.

“N-no…”

“Yes, you do. Let me help you.” Brian lifts him as if he weighs nothing at all, careful not to jostle him too much. Jonny still thrashes weakly, fighting both his grip and the nausea re-awakened by the movements.

“N-no, don’t take me b-back, don’t – don’t –”

“Shhh, I won’t. Just rest, Jonny.”

Reassured and rocked in Brian’s arms, he slips in and out of consciousness, quickly losing track of where they’re heading. He jolts awake when Brian sets him down on a bed; his own, to be precise. After depositing him there, Jonny expects Brian to leave, his job done, and is surprised by the lump forming in his throat at the thought. Some long buried part of him longs to reach out, grab Brian's hand and hold on –

But Brian makes no move to leave. Instead he stretches out beside Jonny on the bed, not touching him, but close enough that it can be passed off as accidental when he rolls over to lie with his face and forearms pressed against Brian. It doesn’t take long for him to succumb to sleep, confident that Brian will keep him safe.

When he wakes up again, Brian is still there. He doesn’t budge at Jonny’s half-hearted insults, thrown to cover up his embarrassment over Brian seeing him in that state. Finally he gets tired of Jonny’s tomfoolery, and fixes him with the kind of serious stare only Brian can pull off.

“If you want me to leave, I will. Otherwise, stop it.”

Jonny shuts up, and goes very quiet for a while. He squirms a little, but the thought of Brian leaving him makes him feel all cold and queasy. The words seem to stick in his throat, and he has to stop and clear it a few times before he manages to get them out.

“Don’t – don’t go. Stay.”

Brian stays.

And then there’s Tim. Tim, who slept curled in Bertie’s arms until a Lenny shell tore them apart forever; Tim who blew up his moon in retaliation for his loss.

Tim. Angry, beautiful, grieving Tim, who lashes out at anyone who attempts to get too close, not allowing anyone to comfort him. So Jonny turns to the only sensible course of action, and sets out to piss off Tim as much as he can. That way Tim will be forced to temporarily snap out of his state of abject despair, and actually interact physically with someone, even if it’s only to murder him.

It’s an arrangement he’s pleased with, Jonny tells himself, while still recovering after a particularly violent scuffle. Tim had him pinned on the floor, straddling his chest while strangling him slowly, his face radiating fury. After Jonny lost consciousness, Tim must have ripped him limb from limb with his bare hands, judging by the state he revived in, and left.

So now Jonny is very slowly making his way back to his own quarters, aching in a whole host of interesting places that he barely knew could hurt. His slow, limping route takes him past Tim’s door, and of course it’s only a coincidence that he stops there to rest. Yeah, that’s it, he just stops to catch his breath, not to eavesdrop, it’s not his fault that sound carries so well around here. So it isn’t on purpose he hears the muffled wails from inside.

It’s a choice not to immediately keep walking, though. He should have, Jonny knows; Tim doesn’t want anyone around to see how much he hurts. But Jonny doesn't leave. Instead he leans against the wall beside the door to listen, and his chest feels tight at the noises of distress coming from within.

Clenching his fists, Jonny resists the impulse of knocking, just to see what Tim will do, and that’s when the thought pops up for the first time, unbidden and unexpected. I want to hold you when you sleep. Jonny startles. What the fuck? Then he realises with a sinking feeling that it’s true. He wants to hug Tim until he’s calmed down, and hold him the way he remembers that Tim likes until he can sleep easily again…

Oh, fuck. Jonny shoves himself away from the wall and stumbles off in search of something strong to drink.

Fortunately for everyone, but most of all himself, Tim does mellow somewhat, given time. He even comes around to the idea that if he and Jonny are going to share a living space indefinitely, at least most of the time, it’s better not to be on openly hostile terms. It’s more of a relief than Jonny would admit to anyone. Not even to Ashes, despite the fact that he locks himself in their room to collect himself, the first time Tim invites him to a joint shooting practice session.

“Fuck, you’ve got it bad, huh?” Ashes says dryly when Jonny works through a whole pack of cigarettes in quick succession, huddled on their bed. Jonny glares at them.

“I do not.”

Ashes snorts and shakes their head, but thankfully leaves it alone.

Then they find their way to Kind Cole’s war, and it’s great. Jonny loves it, the pointless bloodshed, the tragic backstory, the violence… and best of all, when he asks Tim if he wants to join up as soldiers together, Tim says yes.

It’s amazing. Jonny loves every fucking second of it, and Tim seems to enjoy himself as well. They fight and kill and laugh and sing and die, and Tim, covered in gore and grinning like a madman, is so fucking beautiful it makes Jonny’s heart ache. He wants to lick the blood off Tim's lips, he wants to devour him whole, he wants to brush the dirt off Tim's face and fall asleep with him curled up in his arms…

The problem with being immortal is that neither of them are particularly careful. What does it matter to be shot down when you'll just get up again? Quite a lot, it turns out, if you're thrown into and buried in a mass grave before you've had time to revive.

Jonny swears loudly and keeps digging, occasionally shouting Tim's name. Sifting through the bodies is heavy, nauseating work, the stink of it even making Jonny’s jaded stomach turn.

"Tim!" he yells, the sound muffled by the cloth he's tied over his face. "TIM!"

At first he's afraid that he's picked the wrong grave, but finally, several layers down, something moves.

The first thing Tim does after Jonny manages to extract him from the corpses is to be profusely sick. The second is to flop bonelessly in Jonny’s lap, trembling and drawing huge, gulping gasps of putrid air. It’s clear he’s in no state to move on his own, so after failing to get any coherent responses for a few minutes, Jonny settles for half carrying, half dragging Tim back towards the rebel army camp. He manages to clean the worst of the gunk off them both and relocate them to a mostly empty storage shed, where he tries to make it as comfortable as the situation allows.

The whole time, Tim refuses to let go of him, except for the briefest, most necessary moments. He still hasn’t spoken more than the odd word, but he holds onto Jonny with a white-knuckled grip, and panics when Jonny tries to leave him alone for a minute to fetch a blanket for them.

“D-don’t g-go”, he gasps, “d-don’t l-leave me al-lone, don’t – don’t let th-them b-bury me ag-again.”

“I won’t”, Jonny promises. He helps Tim lie down on some mouldy cushions, and pulls a tattered tarpaulin over them. It’s going to be a cold night, but it’s the best he can do for now. Tim clings to him, still shaking, and Jonny hugs him, once again promising to keep watch. To keep him safe, to bring him home. Fuck knows how he’ll get hold of Nastya on short notice here, but he’ll figure out a way. He doesn’t tell Tim that, though; it doesn’t seem to be the time.

Jonny doesn’t sleep that night, but eventually Tim does, when exhaustion wins out. He wakes up more than once, gasping for air, but calms down a little when Jonny is right there, warm and alive.

And Jonny? Oh, Jonny savours the feel of Tim in his arms, trying to impress every sensation of it in his memory, forcing down the little niggling of guilt at enjoying it so much. It’s not like he’s going to go out of his way to fabricate situations to replicate this one. There are lines even he, Jonny d’Ville, won’t cross, and while he’s many things, most of them bad, he’s not a fucking creep.

It takes them a couple of weeks to get back to the Aurora, most of it spent dodging both the royal army and the rebel one, who’ll shoot deserters on sight. But Tim makes it clear that he’s very much done fighting for the moment, and Jonny doesn’t argue; soldiering isn’t the only way to fulfil a taste for violence in a place like this. And Tim continues to stick unusually close to him, which Jonny relishes in a way he refuses to examine.

However, once back on the ship, he disappears to his own quarters, presumably filled with guns and octokittens, after declaring he needs a break from Jonny for an indefinite amount of time.

It stings. Jonny wanders around the ship, restless and irritable, until he finds himself outside Ashes’ door. Not sure what he hopes for, he knocks.

“Come in”, they call, and Jonny enters, shoving his hands deep into his pockets to hide how sweaty they are.

“Can I, uh. Can I stay here tonight?” he asks without looking at them. Ashes makes a surprised noise in the back of their throat, but manages to grab his wrist before he has time to bolt.

“‘Course, come on.” They drag him inside, and Jonny quickly shrugs out of his belts and outer layers. Then, without speaking, he crawls into bed, lying down to face the wall. Ashes joins him a moment later, curling themself around the curve of his back.

“You don’t have to tell me”, they say. As if he would have! Jonny swallows.

“He thanked me for taking care of him, then told me he didn’t want to see me again for as long as possible, and fucked off.”

“Oh. Huh. Yeah, that’s…” They trail off, which Jonny is thankful for. He burrows into their warmth, closes his eyes tight, and lets their steady breathing lull him to sleep.

---

Detailed CWs: temporary character death, violence, and arson; unhealthy family dynamics; post-traumatic crash; a character gets temporarily buried alive-ish in a massgrave and needs to be dug out (not graphic); emetophobia warning (brief, not graphic); mentions of sex occuring; corpses & war.

#mechtober 2022 #the mechanisms fic #angst #hurt/comfort #vulnerability #jonny/ashes #unrequited jonny-sided hearteyes pining #detailed list of CWs at the bottom of fic below the cut #it's kind of funny how i set out to write a favourite headcanon and ended up not doing mutual hearteyes lol

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envelopedbyoblivion · 2 years

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🦅 Do you outline fics or fly by the seat of your pants? and/or ✅ What's something that appears in your fics over and over and over again, even if you don't mean to? !!!!

1. I outline everything. I have to at least have the first half figured out before I start anything. For The Highwayman, I didn’t have the ending completely figured out, but I had the general idea. I came up with the fight scene pretty much as I was writing it, and for a while I was super unhappy with it because I didn’t have time to get used to it before it was already done. Thankfully, I’m pleased with how it turned out (six months after writing it lol).

2. Humanity overcoming its struggles by banding together. Man. I’m a sucker for the overwhelming, fundamental goodness of humanity. Especially in a book where the theme is isolation from said humanity. My deus ex machina is other people.

Also, people having to choose between their own selves and that of their significant other. Not in the life/death kind of way (but that too) but rather in the compromising of identity. Weighing their needs and wants against those of someone they love - even to the point where choosing one means completely discarding the other (a la Tango choosing Jimmy in ch. six of The Highwayman even though it means abandoning his future and way of life). And also, exploring the consequences of that! So many consequences *evil laugh*

#the highwayman #mcyt #fic #fanfic #envy ask #envy speaks #jimmy solidarity #tangotek #ask game

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chilope · 2 years

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i have a really good buddy, i was a bridesmaid in her wedding, i found out recently that her brother doesnt like me. he was in charge of planning her bachelorette party and everyone who was going was invited to a group chat to help plan and give input. he asked us for ideas so me and some of the other exceptionally anxious people in the group started coming up with ideas for things that we thought would be fun, which he discarded out of hand because he found them too lame (totally fair - we were suggesting things like a big brunch or a costume party, things that we were comfortable with and that we knew she would like, but that didnt involve things like alcohol or crowds) (the bachelor party ended up being like that, an escape room followed by a game night at a fancy hotel). he ended up settling on what he viewed as a compromise - dinner at a nice restaurant and then visiting a drag club. our other anxious friend and i had a terrible time. the restaurant was crowded and loud and we couldnt afford anything on the menu (we ended up splitting an appetizer) and the club was literally just a club on a friday night and all that entails. it was pretty miserable, and both of us hit a point pretty early on where we couldnt easily hide how miserable we were. and that like. really annoyed my friends brother, who felt like hed bent over backwards to accommodate us and then still had to deal with us being unhappy. and theres a part of me thats like.... should i just not have gone? like if they wanted to do a traditional bachelorette thing why did they invite two people with major sensory issues and ptsd. i feel like, during the whole planning process we were trying our hardest to explain the situation and offer alternatives and everything and all of it was disregarded and then in the end we were still the assholes for not having a good time. its difficult for me to even wrap my head around how a drag club is a compromise, like if thats the low-key option what would they have preferred?? but like. fuck idk. i feel like an asshole because i understand that what everyone wanted was for us to just like. be fine for a night. like just. dont have a panic attack or dissociate from the noise and lights and drinking. not going would have been rude and entitled ("if we arent doing what *i* want then im not going!") but going meant that everyone had a worse time because they had to deal with us.

anyway i dont like when people hate me and i dont like being inconvenient and i dont like realizing too late that i screwed something up really badly

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hologramcowboy · 2 years

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Hi! I hope you have a great weekend!

I have a few questions for you, if you’re willing to weigh in.

Do you think Beau will actually end up with Jenny on Big Sky? Or is the show only going to hint at a romance enough to try get people interested? Also, have you noticed Jensen leaning into his character having feelings for her before, potentially, the most recent episode?

Also, this is not related to BS but, I see Elta as the embodiment of a “Mean Girl,” do you think that is the type of woman Jensen actually likes, and is he just a “Mean Boy” behind the scenes? It doesn’t totally sound like it from what coworkers say, but he does throw shade people at times. Did he get duped by D and now he’s just stuck, or did he never care about her personality because it was always just an arrangement for him?

He seems like he’s changed a whole lot from his early days in interviews and such. He used to talk about his family often and seemed more truly humble. Now, he only seems to see her family, seems to feel the need to brag and be constantly craving a drink. People crow about his confidence now (like when he’s on stage singing) vs his shyness before. But I think I liked his earlier persona more.

Thank you for the beautiful wish, hope your weekend is lovely and full of magic.

Thank you for the beautiful ask as well. 💕

Big Sky confuses me on a lot of levels because the writing is extremely weak, I will be honest and say that I have no clue if Jenny and Beau will get together or if the writers are stringing us along and that's because they failed to earn their connection, no momentum was built so I genuinely wonder whether they are baiting us or not. Last episode Beau suddenly showed signs of having feelings for her. Like Boom. 🤣 No credibility whatsoever precisely because that connection was not earned. I think they wanted Jenny and Beau to be the it couple people rooted for but failed to deliver due to the writing.

I see Elta as the embodiment of the Mean Girl, I do mean girl because she clearly never evolved past high school mentally. Her image is my biggest issue with Jensen, everything about him made sense up until he chose her and then alarm bells went off. Why would someone down to earth, honest and deep choose someone like Elta for a spouse? It doesn't really gel with his image. He does throw shade but I think he models her, in the past he never displayed behavior like that. Then again, he was very private previously, too private and then you hear him say things like "Jessica Alba is a bitch" and it kinda makes you realize he's not the angel you thought he was. He seems to have taken a lot of pages out of Elta's book, especially with the self aggrandizing, arrogant comments, unflattering, almost bully like comparisons, it's all very her and he clearly is influenced by her heavily. I would say they are quite similar now.

Jensen is extremely hard to read because he is very cryptic and also carefully crafts and projects a persona. Could he be a "Mean Boy" behind it all? He has displayed some narcissism traits as of late so it's a possibility. Birds of a feather flock together. Clichè but very true.

I always thought Danneel duped him and that's why he's so unhappy now, she pretended to be his ideal and then reality crashed all around him when he discovered she was not what he thought she was. But I have to answer your question honestly and add that, at this point, I'm leaning more towards the possibility that he's always been like her but I've just been blind. Because there are too many inconsistencies in his stories, his behavior, choices, body language all clash and his image is all over the place. He is being inauthentic and impossible to read, while Elta is clear as day. If that's the person he chooses as a partner then he couldn't possibly be the humble, kindhearted person I thought he was.

This is just my impression, of course, so please discard anything that doesn't resonate. ♥️ Maybe time will prove me wrong, I hope it will, I always do but right now I tend to think he is extremely similar to her or, at least, emulating her heavily.

I too deeply appreciated and admired his previous persona and though it was clearly still just a crafted persona, I resonated with it deeply.

Despite everything I've written above, I feel a pull towards all the endlessly beautiful emotions I've felt thanks to Jensen and I must believe that something about them is real, that something there is authentic or he wouldn't be able to inspire such emotions. So I hope that he will bring out those incredible qualities that made him unique and drop the toxic patterns he's acquired. He is blessed is so many ways and he can connect deeply with people so I often wish to see him fully step into that leadership role, I also think that's going to create the inner shift required for casting to view him differently because Hollywood runs on energy. It's very important to embody the ideal energy (for the roles you want to have) and I think Jensen has so much potential, I would love to see him fully embody that rather than get caught up in Elta's low vibration patterns.

#anti jenneel #jensen critical #anti danneel

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inprometheanfire · 2 years

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@tothedevilsshow sent: LETTER ( tothedevilsshow Helena / Andrew

♦ sender delivers a letter to the receiver that reveals their deep love for the receiver.

→ i love you prompts

What’s he supposed to do with this scrap of paper he didn’t even ask for? With these feelings that were scratched into its surface as if they were meant to persuade even the hardest of hearts? His heart’s made of stone. Or he likes to think so. Helena could very well get on her knees and beg and he’d still turn her away. But she’s sent a letter instead, and Andrew wants nothing more than to crumple it in his hands, throw it to the fire, watch it burn to ash with everything he might’ve felt for her in the past. There’s no arguing with a letter, is there? There’s no trying to convince it that it’s wrong or forcing it to see things from your point of view. She knows him well enough to write a letter at all because Andrew’s argumentative and insistent and will outright deny everything she says just to prove he’s unfeeling and heartless. But he doesn’t crumple the letter up or toss it into the fire or discard his feelings like he’s wanted to all along. It’d be the right choice to make, of course. To push her away so that she doesn’t get the wrong idea ― but they’re past that, aren’t they? And it’s gotten to the point where she’s sending letters as little affirmations of this imagined love between them. It’s fake. It’s got to be. It’s something they were good at for a time, this pretending like there’s nothing between them just because it’s easier, safer. The last thing he wants is to lead her on some more. However, this letter is undeniable proof that they’re beyond the pretenses and the well-crafted facades. That they’re holding on because they can, because they’re all that the other knows. Or maybe that’s all on him. He’s never known someone like her before, after all. Andrew rereads the letter more times than he cares to admit, committing the words and her handwriting to memory as a precautionary measure just in case he were to throw it away. This flimsy piece of paper that he wants so badly to destroy in one way or another but can’t. He just can’t. Not when its weightless substance feels so heavy in his hands. Instead, his eyes close to the image of Helena sitting at a desk and writing out everything she’s kept locked up in her heart. Her hand, shaky. A single tear falling from her lashes, even though there was no evidence of it left behind. Perhaps it’s a little much, but Andrew’s always secretly been one for melodrama. And he wonders if he’s strong enough to deny her this. If he can look her in the eyes and tell her truthfully that the letter means nothing, that he feels nothing. That this, whatever this is, means nothing. Andrew presses the letter to his lips, not for a kiss but to breathe in the lingering scent left behind from her skin, her hair, her very presence itself. He considers writing a reply to pour his heart out like she has done, to just tell her. To finally tell her everything. But he can’t bring himself to do it when the very act of putting pen to paper would condemn them to an unhappy life together. Instead, he slips the letter inside the drawer of his desk and then locks it with a key. He won’t reply to her. He won’t even mention it because that makes it real, doesn’t it? Sometimes, it’s better to just set aside the distractions in an effort to focus on the bigger picture. Inevitably, he’ll have to avoid her as well. Ignore her phone calls and texts. Refuse anymore letters. Never see her again, even if his heart breaks at the loss of their friendship. Helena’s at fault for that, of course. This letter’s proof of it. So, why not pretend like it doesn’t exist, if only for the sake of protecting his pride? Come tomorrow, he’ll brush her off and say that yeah he got the letter but it didn’t leave much of an impression. Much like her, undoubtedly. But will she catch onto these little untruths? Can she read between his uneven lines? Even though he’s dying to know the answer, he won’t cave into what he wants because it’ll leave him wide open and vulnerable for her to pick apart. He’s already given in far too much. Spending all this time together was a bad idea, though he did nothing to stop it from happening. Except now when it’s too damned late to go back from it. But tomorrow. Therein lies the promise. He’ll have to be strong enough to push her away. That’s easier said than done when she’s always looking at him with expectation in her eyes. To deny her is to deny himself. Like fighting the urge within that’s begging for more. It’s these kind of thoughts that’ll get him in trouble. It’s thinking like this that’ll make him reconsider everything just to try at loving her. Is it such a terrible thing? Little does she know just who he is and what he’s about. The kind of man who doesn’t deserve her, who will only hurt her in the end. So, he prepares himself for the day to come because it’s going to take a lot of strength to resist her. Meanwhile, the letter will remain locked in his drawer in an effort to hide from it. If he acknowledges it, he just might tell her that he feels exactly the same way.

#helena ; tothedevilsshow #interaction ; andrew & helena #tothedevilsshow #answered meme #char ; andrew vanderbilt

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