#but man what an immediate and visceral response to being told to 'write more' for a fandom I have already written >100k for this year alone

[sunmontuewrites]

Man my brain works in very weird ways... getting a comment like "please write more" make me immediately want to do the complete opposite (like dig in my heels and cross my arms type reaction).

Yet in a post on a side blog I ask people to tell me which fics they want me to bang out >250 words on... (And I also run a poll on which WIP I should focus on next) and I am managing days of 3-5k words EASY...

WHY THE DIFFERENCE BRAIN? WHY?

[kindness-ricochets]

I’ve been seeing a lot of thoughts and hc of autistic wylan lately and you seem to also be a fan of the concept. May I ask why? Exactly? I could definitely kinda see it but wanna hear you thoughts you’re always so eloquent

Hey there anon! Sorry for the delay—I’m guessing you already found an answer to this elsewhere while I was off Tumblr for a bit, but just in case, here are my thoughts. This will be heavily personal, but… well, you can’t very well ask an autistic person about autism and expect neutrality!

Autism is different for everyone and can be difficult to pin down, so while Wylan is arguably autistic, he misses several beats that for me would have made him definitively and undeniably autistic. For example, when the bells start to ring, triggering black protocol—I work in a place with a lot of bells and am frequently caught too close to one and normally press my hands over my ears until it’s over because that sound is like shrapnel raking across my insides. All of them. Not just the ear and brain parts. Wylan doesn’t have that sort of visceral reaction, but that may just mean he doesn’t have the same sensitivities that I do, or to the same level. He also never, that I recall, eats meat—as weird as that might sound, eating meat is incredibly complicated with heightened sensitivities to taste and texture. I’m not sure how old I was when I realized it was strange to get up from the table to spit out my food because it viscerally repulsed me. So it might be that Wylan is autistic and has different experiences than I do. Those are things I would include in a story as major indicators of a character being autistic. This might also mean that his father’s way of raising him taught him to hide unusual reactions and stimming behaviors. It’s not that much of a reach to assume a man who tried to abuse the dyslexia out of his son would take the same approach to autism. (More on autism and abuse later.)

So while I’m going to lay out why I read Wylan as autistic, that’s why I think it’s valid to read him as not being autistic as well. Both are valid.

A final caveat, I am well overdue for a reread of the books, so I likely left something out or could have found better examples. Take this as a few of my reasons for a personal headcanon. Anyone who feels differently, that's fine! We can each read things our own way :)

1 - Hyperfixation: The way Wylan loves music

Most of the Crows’ backgrounds color how they see the world: Kaz’s shrewdness, Matthias’s tactical thinking and superstition, Inej’s faith and Suli wisdom, etc. That’s a sign of good character writing. But very little of Wylan’s upbringing seems to have influenced how he sees the world. It comes closest when he thinks about how his father would scorn his new friends, but we never see that scorn from Wylan.

The way a hyperfixation feels, it’s like you’ve always lived in a close parallel world, never fully been a part of the other one where it seems like everyone else lives, but suddenly there’s this bright shining piece of your soul laced through the other world. It lets you connect, it lets you exist in their realm, and you can’t help but filter everything new through that lens because it’s the brightest, most wonderful thing. (I had been between hyperfixations for a while when I started a new job; six months into that work, I read Crooked Kingdom. One of my coworkers thought I had fallen in love, it was that marked a difference.)

So, combining these: Wylan never really acts like he was part of his father’s world, and indeed is in some ways separate from the other Crows, but he parses everything through music, his hyperfixation. He sets words to music to remember them, like he does with the contract. Even his own anxiety is made sense of through music, when in his first narrated chapter, he sets it to music: what am I doing here what am I doing here…. When he’s overwhelmed, his thoughts are “a jangle of misplayed chords”. The Crows have backgrounds that influence how they react to the world, but Wylan’s hyperfixation is his means of experiencing and understanding the world.

2 - Literal thinking: Wylan responds to exact words

In this post, I went into detail on the line where Wylan suggested waking up men to kill them. Wylan is generally unsupportive of killing people—Oomen, Smeet’s clerk, his father… he advocates not-murder in each of these situations. Accepting his aversion to murder, his suggestion to wake men up and kill them seems like a genuine reaction to Jesper saying he doesn’t want to kill unconscious men. Wylan takes things literally.

This happens the most with Jesper, probably because Jesper talks to Wylan the most. Nina and Matthias don’t really register him past how he might be useful, Inej is usually quite direct, and Kaz is very deliberate when he speaks with Wylan. This really interests me because Kaz tends to vary his speech more than the others do, he adapts more to being around other people. He jokes a little with Jesper, spars with Nina, speaks more openly and more sharply with Inej, and he’s precise with Wylan. Kaz may not know what autism is, but he recognizes what’s effective with Wylan.

Another example is when Wylan is sketching the Ice Court plans and Jesper says it looks like a cake. There are plenty of valid responses here: pointing out that concentric circles look like lots of things, that it’s just a sketch, telling Jesper to stop looking over his shoulder. Instead, Wylan says that the Ice Court is sort of like a cake. That… doesn’t sound like something Wylan would normally say. He’s not addressing the whole situation, he’s addressing the specific words Jesper said.

One of the most heartbreaking examples of this (to me, anyway) is with Marya. Wylan does the same thing with his mother, when she asks if he’s there for her money and says she hasn’t got any, and his response is, “I don’t either.” We understand as readers that what Marya is communicating here is that she is so accustomed to being utterly ignored unless she is being used, and if she told Wylan that no one visited but to take advantage and she assumed he was here for the same reason, he would say it wasn’t the case. But he just responds to the immediate statement.

There are a lot of examples of this.

3 — 0% perception, 100% creativity

Wylan can identify things that don’t make sense or that he doesn’t understand, but at the beginning of the series he can’t make leaps, only ask questions. On the Ferolind, he wonders about the source of water at the Ice Court; though Kaz doesn’t say as much, he was clearly wondering, too, because he eventually figured out the underground river. There’s an interesting parallel here where, in the beginning of Crooked Kingdom, Wylan asks a question about how they’ll break into Smeet’s and Kaz tells him to use his eyes instead of running his mouth—at which point Wylan is able to figure it out. I don’t think this is because he never tried before, though, but because no one ever bothered to teach him. Kaz can be harsh but he gives harsh corrections rather than harsh rejections and Wylan learns from him.

It’s hard to understand the world for people with autism. The world is designed and run by and for people whose minds are fundamentally different from ours, whose thoughts and experiences are unlike ours. Imagine trying to learn English or Spanish or Mandarin or any other spoken language if your first language was olfactory. That’s sort of what it’s like for someone with autism to just get dropped into the world and expected to figure this out.

This can be attributed to Wylan’s upbringing, but I disagree with that because none of the others were brought up in the Barrel, either, and Wylan doesn’t understand trade or politics with any special skill. Kaz wasn’t born in the Barrel, but he managed to go from “stealing is wrong” to “wrong isn’t my concern” real quick; Colm Fahey didn’t raise his son on gambling and firefights; the Ghafas never expected their daughter to be away from the family. Only Nina has relevant training—and even that’s precious little, she left school way too early. The others figured it out; Wylan needed a bit more help. He also seems surprised by the way his father conducts business. Wylan takes things on face value—like the time he’s surprised someone would do something, simply because it’s unlawful. This is something he expresses to a group of gangsters. He’s never been taught the way of any world and these things are not intuitive to him.

But Wylan isn’t stupid.

He doesn’t know how to understand the world, but he does understand how things go together. Given a pointy diamond, a handle, and a screw, he cut through Grisha glass. He carries flashbangs and magic napalm, he recreates military hardware—Wylan understands how to make things interact for a specific result. But to me the most telling thing isn’t just that he puts together chemical pieces, it’s that he figured out Jesper controlled bullets. He saw the pieces and put them together.

Wylan can understand when things don’t make sense, but he can’t make sense of them—yet when he understands things at their basic level, he understands them without preconception, for what they are. This is a very autistic way of thinking about things, it goes back to the literalism. He can’t make the leaps of logic other people can, but he also doesn’t make the assumptions they do—“I’ve never heard of a bullet Grisha, so that’s not a thing” vs “Well Jesper’s an almost impossibly good shot and he controls metal and bullets are metal, so why not?”

4 - Broken brain/body connection

Wylan’s great at chemistry and drawing and playing flute or piano—but he’s something of a disaster other times. This is in particular contrast to the other characters, all of whom are physically adept. Meanwhile it’s a challenge for Wylan to climb a rope ladder and he spends a full paragraph trying to figure out what to do with his hands. It’s easy to say, well, he’s used to a sedentary lifestyle, but at this point he’s not. He’s worked in the tannery for months. He’s just physically awkward.

I have less to say on this point only because it’s about something I don’t fully understand myself. I don’t really understand what it would be like to have a body that just… does things? Like normal stuff? Without tics and stims. No idea. Only that Wylan’s discomfort in and seeming lack of mastery of his own body feels very relatable to me.

5 - Abuse

One of the most familiar things about Wylan is how he has been so thoroughly abused and broken down that he’s afraid to do or say much of anything. Again, this is a place his background can be an obscuring factor. Of course Wylan didn’t think to blow up the walls when the first met the parem-juiced jurda and got trapped, he’s a spoiled rich kid! Except, he also startled when Jesper said his name later. Wylan didn’t hesitate because he was spoiled, he hesitated because he had no confidence.

He also thinks Kaz would laugh at him for playing music at his mother’s grave. Now, personally, I can’t see Kaz laughing at Wylan—being indifferent, thinking it’s pointless sentimentality, shaking his head, maybe commenting sharply that they need to go if they don’t have the time. But not laughing. Kaz is a snarky, sharp-edged jerk sometimes, but he doesn’t go out of his way to criticize, he just lets people know when they inconvenience him.

Wylan has been trained to identify attention as negative by an overbearing abusive father who literally saw him as less favorable than a demon. Now, that may have been hyperbole, but Jan criticized everything he could about Wylan—art, music, emotion—and made clear that he was worthless and competent to nothing. (Jan Van Eck can suck a rotten donkey dick but that’s neither here nor there.)

A lot of people with autism experience levels of bullying that have similar impacts. Or as the kids these days are calling it: we go to school. We go to school where we are weird. Where we look weird and move weird and talk about weird things and there’s a whole little bevy of asswipes to makes sure we know it. I got teased more for playing Pokemon and sitting alone reading than the kid who pissed himself onstage at assembly. (This was before Pokemon was cool. I’m old.) And that is not unusual for autistic kids. It’s also not unusual for this to be compounded by relatives or even parents who may be trying to help but don’t understand and can make things even harder.

So we can’t read social cues and we’re taught at a vicious age that everything that comes naturally to us is wrong. Imagine trying to interact in society with that background. There is no guide and most advice from neurotypical people isn’t actually what they mean. It breaks you down.

Wylan’s anxiety isn’t definitive of autism, but isn’t something that was incredibly familiar as someone whose neurodivergent experiences created a strong level of anxiety.

6 — High Compassion, Low Social Competence

Wylan isn’t very good at making friends. In fact, none of the Crows likes him much in the beginning, and only some of them soften toward him by the end. (Matthias and Nina come to respect his skills as a chemist but neither seems to particularly like him.) But you can see throughout the books that Wylan wants to connect with them and be one of them, he just… isn’t. He’s off-beat. He’s weird. He asks questions and mimics behaviors (trying to be cool and tough like Jesper, saying “mission” like Matthias does, imitating Kaz’s scheming face) but he doesn’t quite get how to adapt.

But he still cares about people. Not just them. Everyone. He cares about the people they leave in the ditch outside the prison wagon, he cares about Hanna Smeet, he cares about Alys. He cares about the people who’ll take a hit from Kaz’s sugar caper.

Wylan’s awkward social skills have undeniable big autism energy. I posit his compassion does as well. This is simply who Wylan is, and that means being someone who cares about everyone. I have nothing to back up that this is related to autism. I can say that it’s like me. (Not to brag.) I can’t turn off the part of my brain that says everyone matters. Individuals can opt out of that compassion, but they have it by default. There’s a certain agony in feeling a pull toward and love for just about everyone and yet an inability to develop meaningful connections with them, and that keen loneliness… it just burns.

Again, it’s not definitive of autism, but it’s very similar to an autistic experience.

I said in the beginning that I didn’t think Wylan certainly had autism and I stand by that, but he is a powerfully honest reflection of many people who do. So he can be understood to have autism, and that’s part of the reason some people have that headcanon.

[slytherinsnekxvii]

let's talk about lily evans. she's an interesting character—or rather, the case surrounding her character is quite interesting.

i honestly don't know if i can say i dislike her. by all means, she should be a fan favourite, and she is... but for some rather intriguing reasons.

for one thing, due to the fact she's hardly expanded on in the series, certain parts of the fandom have been forced to either take the few qualities that she displays canonically and amplify them to the extreme (eg. immediate righteous anger at the slightest hint of injustice in fic) or create an entirely new personality (eg. no, i didn't actually disapprove of your pranks, it was just sexual tension). of course, the option of creating a new personality is much more tempting when you can just add amplified canon traits on the side.

for another, her relationship with james sometimes seems likes it's being weaponized against snape and his fans. i've seen arguments that go like "haha, snape just wanted to fuck lily, but james got her in the end anyway, sucks to be you", and not only does it entirely reduce her to an object, it feels like they don't even care about the relationship, the dynamics or the characters. she's basically a plot device.

and thirdly, half of her characterisation in fic is to be a peter stand-in. we don't like the rat man, so let's take the pretty girl and put her in place of the guy who was canonically a member of the marauders, even up until he was named secret keeper. suddenly, she's a prankster and an enabler.

but, snek, you may say, all of that is fanon lily, tho. you just explained that people seem to like her because they just put any personality they want into her as long as she's at least vaguely a good person. you would be right.

let's look at canon lily. she's described as the brightest witch of her age, most everyone speaks favourably of her. in fact, the only people we see actively disliking/being upset with her are petunia, out of jealousy and the invasion of privacy concerning her letter, severus, who lashed out and used a slur that also applied to him in a moment of serious distress and apologised after, and well, pureblood supremacists by virtue of her being muggleborn. interestingly enough, even this dislike manages to develop everyone's character more than it does her own.

as a teenage girl myself, let's look at her actions as a teenage girl. not necessarily in chronological order because I'm writing this at 2am and my memory is already mediocre at best.

1. she's done well enough in school to be considered trustworthy and responsible enough to be a prefect.

okay, i can respect that. a good few of the prefects at my school were really just appointed based on how much the teachers liked you, but at hogwarts, there's so few of them that they must put at least a little effort into it, so i'll move on.

2. she does not press for details when informed that her best friend's life needed to be saved by someone who has been publicly tormenting him for years

now, see, there's no reason why she needs to play therapist. it's not her job, she's just a girl, and we know that snape wasn't supposed to talk about the incident, so he would've been stuck if she had asked for an explanation. however, i also feel like she doesn't seem particularly concerned about his wellbeing, and when he brings up his concerns about lupin, rather than ask for proof, she dismisses it. which, fair enough, i would hate to listen to someone talk about the same thing over and over and over, but, i also feel like the fixation on a theory like that would be cause for concern.

3. she dismisses the actions of a group known to play tricks that harm people and have specifically been tormenting her best friend on the basis that they don't use dark magic

first, i'm going to establish what i usually assume dark magic refers to. aside from jinxes, hexes and curses, i also include anything that produces an effect similar to any of the unforgivables (takes away your life, your free will or your ability to feel safe in your own body, such as when you're in excruciating pain), and magic that would require a sacrifice of some sort.

when snape tries to point out the danger in what the marauders do, she insists that they don't use dark magic. and they don't... but they do use illegal magic. she then argues against the company that snape keeps, which, again, to be fair, is justified considering mulciber's done something to mary macdonald... it's also not a particularly realistic ask. snape probably shares a dorm with these guys, and he's a poor half-blood so he's already on the outs. as far as he knows, any dissent will be met with him getting hexed in his sleep. but, i digress.

given that the marauders have been shown to be doing extremely dangerous with little regards to anyone's safety, and actively tormenting her best friend, i disagree with her choice here. on the other hand, she's made her own friends in gryffindor and perhaps she sees a nicer side of them that we don't get to. she's justified in her actions, but i still disagree.

4. she intervenes when her best friend is hung upside down by a spell of his own invention at the wands of the people who have tormenting him for years

she does object to the marauders' treatment of him, and she does try to get them to let him down. if i were in her position, i would absolutely do the same. i respect the decision to stand up for her friend.

5. she does not seriously attempt to help him or punish the marauders

i do not respect how she handled it. at any point, she could have drawn her wand. but, snek, you say, perhaps she didn't want to get involved physically. she wanted to follow the rules. in that case, at any point, she could taken points, assigned detention, or sent someone to get a member of staff. she does none of those things and i viscerally disagree. if we were ever friends and someone tried to hurt you, i can assure you that i would try to at least see to it that they'd be punished, even if it wasn't immediate or by my own hand. lily, however, chooses to argue rather than take action.

6. she smiles when severus gets hung upside down

chances are, it was more than likely an involuntary reaction, like laughing when your friend has fallen over. however, the fact that it was intentionally written in seems like it's mean to be an indicator that the friendship was already falling apart.

7. she comments on her best friend's poverty and uses a name that's been used to make fun of him after he calls her a slur that also applies to him

she was 100% within her rights to be upset by being called a slur. it is never okay to use slurs. the only situation in which a slur could possibly ever be appropriate would be if you were an oppressed group attempting to reclaim said slur which is not at all what snape was doing here. he was experiencing cruelty, being humiliated, publicly, for no reason beyond existing and he was in distress, choking on soap and upside down. it was damaging to his pride, especially when james suggests that he needs lily to fight his battles for him (paraphrasing) which is an emasculating statement to make, especially to a teenage boy. so, snape lashes out with the most hurtful word he could think of, which happened to be a slur that also applies to him. lily was 100% justified in being upset about this, and she retaliated in kind. she was very much allowed to say what she said. i understand that she was hurt and angry and i respect that, especially as i can't guarantee that i would not have been just as upset in that situation.

8. even when the threat of sexual harassment is made, she still does nothing

i get it, at this point, she's hurt, she's mad, she wants him to suffer since she's a teenage girl and teenage girls hold grudges like it's nobody's business, but... i definitely couldn't just stand by and watch it happen. she basically just let them go through with it.

9. she does not accept her best friend's apology for calling her a slur that also applies to him, effectively burying the friendship

she is, by no means, obligated to continue being friends with him. however, if i were in that position, and the apology was sincere, i would take the friend back.

10. she goes on to date and eventually marry the guy who bullied her former best friend for his entire school life

no. i disagree. but, snek, you say, james changed. no. he didn't. we know, that at this point, james was still going after snape behind lily's back. you can say that she didn't know, but that means that she would have allowed james to lie to her and that doesn't sit right with me bc a relationship built on lies is a relationship that is going to fall apart, especially when your partner has been disappointed by your actions before. you can say that she did know, and that proves that she simply didn't take her responsibilities as head girl seriously enough to stop the head boy from harassing people when she explicitly told him not to. the point is, no. there is no way that this would have worked out as a long term relationship. james is too comfortable lying to her. i can't even say she was justified. there is no circumstance where i personally see this as okay for anybody involved.

alright, so, essentially teenage lily was justified in (most of) her actions, even if i find them questionable.

adult lily dies at 21, while saving her son, but her death also helps save the wizarding world. good job. she, as expected, did what any good mother would.

and that's canon lily.

my thoughts: she's a perfect example of why writing tips are so adamant on making sure people try to show and not tell. we were told that lily is meant to be good and pure and lovely, but the author never bothered to actually prove that, so what we're left with a dissonance between what we see and what we know.

as a result, i still don't know if i truly dislike her. her actions are justified, but they don't match with what we've been told, and we don't have any other information to go off of. at best, i can say for certain that i disagree with many of her choices, despite understanding why she would have made them (except for marrying james potter, uggghh, the only good thing to come out of that was harry and the saving of the wizarding world by extension, ig).

thanks for reading all that, btw! hope it made sense :)

[19red]

hello, this is me trying to strong-arm my brain into stopping the constant tweaking and re-tweaking of the same stinking 3k so I can write on and get to the good parts of this project namely p and j having all the sex thank you very much

+

The day after Patrick and Jonny bang a chick together, Patrick wakes to the weight of an alien limb squashing his bladder. The alien limb belongs to a furnace-hot, tentacular mass plastered all along his back. The mass smells oddly familiar, kind of citrusy—as if it stole Jonny’s body wash.

Patrick squints his eyes open. A blade of sunlight filters through the half-drawn curtains and stabs him in the face. Right under the window, Jonny’s suitcase dribbles clothes onto the floor.

It shouldn’t be hard to put two and two together, but Patrick’s really dumb first thing in the morning. Plus, he needs to pee. Bad. Which is pretty distracting.

He paws at the tentacle swung over his waist, fingers catching on—a beaded string. Did the alien mass steal Jonny’s bracelet too? Patrick struggles to lift his head. He wants to see.

The alien mass stole Jonny’s whole arm. What--?

A growl spills in a damp, ticklish huff into the crook of Patrick’s neck as the mass coils itself closer. Something hard pokes Patrick’s ass. His nostrils fill with a waft of scent his hindbrain understands as so viscerally Jonny that recognition smacks him dizzy.

The mass is Jonny. Last night, he and Patrick banged a chick together. That thing wedged between them, growing firmer by the second? That thing is Jonny’s—

Patrick’s heart plummets straight to his dick.

It’s okay. It’s whatever. Patrick isn’t gonna freak over a physiological response. Bodies are also really dumb first thing in the morning.

“Jonny,” he says, wriggling to catch Jonny’s attention. Jonny has always been his go-to guy in a crisis. Except, in this instance, he is also the crisis itself. Jonny’s hips buck forward once, twice—Patrick stops breathing for the handful of seconds it takes Jonny’s sleep-drenched, horny-ass body to lose interest and stutter back into relative stillness.

Fuck, Patrick thinks. Visions of impending awkwardness swarm his brain. If Jonny were to wake up right now, full-mast boner pressed to Patrick’s ass, and discover the tent pitched in the front of Patrick’s sweats, he might rush to conclusions. Their ability to make direct eye contact would definitely endure permanent damage. They’d have to restructure their life with the aim of reciprocal avoidance. Patrick would have to request a trade. Jonny would probably drop out of the NHL. He’d forsake hockey and society at large and end up trampled to death by a giant moose while he hides from Patrick in the Canadian wilderness.

Fuck, Patrick thinks again. When a whole minute drips away and Jonny doesn’t stir, he thanks the hockey gods. With very little, very slow movements, he dislodges the arm pinning him to the mattress. By the times he’s free, the light slanting in from the window changed the angle of its assault to his pupils. Still careful, he slides the covers off himself, sits up, swings his legs off the bed. His feet land on the floor just as a variation in the pattern of Jonny’s breathing alerts him it’s all been for nothing. Jonny is awake. Or, like, as close to awake as Jonny manages to be coffee-free and before noon. Which is not much, thank fuck.

“It’s early,” Patrick reassures him. Jonny gets real pissy when he doesn’t get his full eight hours. Patrick doesn’t want to get stuck with Captain seriously cranky and his legitimately lethal death glare on the flight back to Chicago.

Jonny hums, lids fluttering open and back closed immediately, dark lashes kissing the top of his cheekbones. Patrick expects him to just roll over and sink back deep into snoring, the man is easy like that, instead he plumps an arm over the empty space next to him and mumbles, “Come back,” so low Patrick feels the vibration of it in his belly more than with his ears. Jonny must think Patrick’s some chick, maybe his ex or the one from last night.

“Dude,” Patrick chuckles to clear his throat. This is prime chirp material. Jonny’s such a clingy loser. “It’s just me.”

The side of Jonny’s mouth that isn’t squashed into the pillow tugs up in a smile, then his eyes tremble open, searching the space in front of them for Patrick’s, as if he knew where to find him, as if he weren’t surprised. It’s a bit like being punched but with weird, devastating gentleness. Patrick’s left breathless and dazed, a slow ache spreading below his ribs. “Sorry,” he says, legs moving on their own accord. “Sorry, gotta piss.”

Jonny flops onto his belly and sprawls across Patrick’s side of the bed. With a sigh, he hugs Patrick’s pillow to his face. “Be quick,” he whines—or maybe not. It’s muffled and Patrick is already halfway out the door so he can’t be sure. It doesn’t really matter.

***

“Where’s Tazer?” Duncs asks in lieu of good morning when Patrick shows up at breakfast almost two hours later, no captain in tow.

Patrick chomps on a hunk of strawberry toast and shrugs. Contrary to popular belief, no clause in his contract bids him constant awareness of Jonny’s whereabouts.

Duncs squints, clearly feeling entitled to a degree of eloquence involving efforts of the verbal variety and resenting their lack.

“Don’t tell me he’s sick,” Shawzy says.

The legs of Stromer’s chair screech against the floor as he scoots away from Patrick. He ends up almost in Brinsky’s lap. “It better not be catching.”

“Oh my god,” Patrick puffs the words fat with annoyance. “He’s sleeping. I mean, I guess he...” He is for sure. No chance Jonny is still waiting. If Patrick barged back into his room right now, Jonny would laugh, would tell him to stop trying to make things weird. Patrick knows this rationally. Yet some spiked grip squeezes his insides with the same vicious strength of an anaconda trying to crush itself a snack.

People can’t die from upset conscience, can they? Especially not if the upset is unquestionably misplaced, right?

“I mean,” Patrick snaps after a second, “the fuck do I know.”

Duncs eyebrows shoot halfway across his forehead.

“Whoa,” Stromer gasps.

“Wait,” Shawzy says. “Are mum and dad fighting?”

Patrick grinds his molars. Everyone’s so fucking pressed. It’s not like Jonny is a regular at team breakfasts. In fact, unless attendance is mandatory, Jonny prefers to limit the number of people upon which he inflicts the ghastly spectacle of his slow de-zombification to a minimum.

Patrick casts his mind back to the last time the two of them didn’t resort to room-service during game trips. He dredges up both no recollection of that happening in years and the stomach-sinking hunch that maybe this is weird. Maybe he should have gone back. Maybe that would have been the normal thing to do.  

“Shut up,” he says, to the voice in his head and everyone else. He grabs a pitcher of coffee and fills his cup until it brims. “Don’t talk to me. I’m waking up.”

“He’s rubbed off on you,” Shawzy appraises.

He’s more right than he’d probably care to know—nope. Patrick yanks his thoughts away before they can trip over that precipice and splat into the phantom embrace of Jonny’s body and its heft, its warmth, its neediness.

“Shut up,” he repeats, and with big emphatic motions designed to put a period on the conversation, he whips out his phone. He trusts the mindless scrolling will work its time-warping, mind-numbing magic and when he’ll look up next, all the weird will have been purged from this day.

Between sips of coffee, he pores through the stats for the last game, skims the emails in his inbox and rage-reads a review trashing the new Twilight book. He considers sending the link to Erica so he can vent about the snobby assholes who think they’re smarter than everyone else just because all the books they read are boring as fuck, but she’s probably at work already. He scrolls through his contacts. The one of the chick from last night jumps out. Her name’s Chelsea, which is pretty lucky. She was hot, Patrick recons, and thinking that feels normal. Feels safe. Feels like something Patrick would love to feel more of, thank you very much.

Hi, he types, riding the spur of the moment. This is Patrick from last night.

Stupid and risky, his inner Jonny warns. Never give your number to one night stands. Patrick ignores him and for the sake of clarity and glory, adds, The one who made you see god with his tongue.

“Look who’s joining us,” Shawzy’s voice announces just then.

Patrick’s gaze springs up, landing squarely across Jonny’s chest. Patrick knows it’s Jonny’s chest even though he doesn’t let his gaze climb up to the face attached to it for confirmation. The chest is sailing across the breakfast hall toward Patrick. Well, not toward Patrick specifically. Toward Patrick and the rest of the guys.

“Morning,” Jonny mumbles, dropping his scrambled eggs on the table and his ass between Seabs and Crow.

Patrick’s phone chimes.

well hello patrick 😜

“Slept well?” Shawzy probes, feigning innocence. Patrick’s hackles rise.

“I guess,” Jonny says.

Patrick allows himself another quick glance. Jonny looks good, which means like his usual self, which means nothing like a dude who went through the transformative experience of witnessing his best friend o-face.  It’s kind of annoying, actually. Patrick’s nerves are all fried. He’s half-convinced in the right light anybody could look at him and simply—tell. Patrick Kane got off with another dude in the room and enjoyed it. For a blink he’s fourteen and trying to fight a guy almost double his size who called him a cocksucker, that slammed him against the boards and told him not to bother standing up since everyone knows he does his best work from his knees.

His phone chimes again.

“Tell me the truth.”

totally hit me up again next time ur back here

“What?”

Patrick’s heart rate spikes. Would Jonny even be up for it?

Won’t be for the rest of the season :(, he types.

Maybe things feel weird because threeways are a novelty, maybe they just have to work up an immunity. People have threeways all the time and afterward their lives go on undisrupted. But if you’re ever in Chicago… his fingers are so clammy they smudge the screen when he hits send. He reaches for his cup.

“Did you keep our Kaner up all night?”

Patrick’s head jerks up.

“What?” Jonny says, flat.

For the first time since Patrick sneaked out on him, they make direct eye contact.

Shawzy drones on in the background, “Saw you trying to score that hot--”

It last precisely long enough for a sip of coffee to get its lanes mixed as it plunges down Patrick’s throat and somehow u-turn its way out of his body through the nostrils.

Patrick’s lungs try their best to turn inside out.

“Dude,” Shawzy says.

Stromer slaps Patrick’s back a couple of times, hard.

Duncs throws a handful of paper napkins in his general direction and winces in open disgust as Patrick snatches one mid-air and uses it to dab at the liquid leaking out of him. “Gross.”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Patrick informs them tartly between fits of coughing. Some treacherous asshole on his right is fucking cackling. He sweeps the table with an encompassing glare and catches Jonny’s eyes again, all dark with concern. The back of Patrick’s neck prickles with embarrassment. “I’m fine,” he repeats, steadier, and Jonny looks away so Patrick does too, hurriedly withdrawing like from the touch of something scalding.

He zeros in on Chelsea’s new message.

might fly in for a couple of weeks around christmas actually

Patrick latches on to the conversation, blocking out his surroundings, trying his hardest to look busy. Fuck everyone and Jonny too.

We could catch up then if you have time ;)

totally 👅🔥🍆🔥, she texts. And after a moment, say hi to porn dick from me btw

Who?

🙄

Patrick bristles. For some reason, the thought of this random stranger sitting around with her head full of pictures of Jonny’s dick makes him hitch. His chest riots with some misguided protective instinct. Jonny would be insufferably smug if he knew, no doubt about it. It’s not that big.

it is! 100% porn worthy

You don’t know what you’re talking about

???

I’m just saying, are chicks even into that? he writes, just to be an asshole but also because he’s pretty sure chicks hate porn. It’s supposed to be a feminism thing. Erica once made him a whole speech about it or whatever.

big dicks? They are

Haha

their also into porn btw this aint the middle ages AND they have way better taste in it then men

Can you prove it? he asks, hoping it sounds flirty and not confrontational. He wants this chick to bang him again but not over the head with a blunt instrument.

maybe if u stop trying to outdick ur bf with ur personality ill send you some recs

“Who are you texting?”

Patrick elbows his cup off the table and scrambles to catch it before it crashes against the floor. “Fuck,” he mutters, shaking his coffee-soaked hand.

Jonny laughs and at the sound, Patrick’s heart stumbles, then sprints up his throat. “You’re a mess,” Jonny says. He stole Stromer chair.

“Yeah, no, fuck off.”

Stromer is nowhere to be found. He and the rest of the guys must have migrated to the lobby. Patrick picks up the phone from where he abandoned it to make the save and shoves it deep into his pocket just as it pings.

Jonny quirks an eyebrow. He’s smiling.

It feels like Patrick trudged around all morning with a lead rib-cage before the universe caught the glitch. The sudden slack from gravity makes him giddy.  “Don’t be nosy.”

“I’m not!” Jonny protests, all put upon outrage. He flicks Patrick on the hand. “Just saying, team’s gonna suffer if you sprain a thumb.”

A laugh bubbles up Patrick’s chest, loud and easy, and just a little embarrassing.

For a moment, Jonny looks impossibly pleased but then he catches himself. “Everything alright, yeah?” he asks, turning bashful. His eyes drift to the small heap of crumbs he’s sweeping together with his pinkie.

Patrick nudges his thumb against the back of Jonny’s hand. “Yeah. You?”

Jonny’s lips curl up at the corners. “Of course,” he says, looking up, gaze dark and soft.

Of course, of course, of course. Jonny would never let anything happen to them. Patrick stomach flutters. “Okay,” he smiles, dimples out, and Jonny beams back. Time goes fuzzy as they stare at each other in silence—until the ping of an incoming text makes them both startle.

“Again?” Jonny bitches. A moment later, his forehead creases and he puts his serious face on, “Everything okay with your sisters?”

“Yeah, no. It’s not--” Jonny’s eyes flicks to Patrick’s mouth. Patrick hadn’t realized he’d been chewing on his bottom lip. He stops and it tingles, his own breath turning chilly enough to sting as it laps over the bite. “Just-- the chick from last night,” Patrick’s tongue says forgoing any input from his brain. It’s fine. It’s whatever.

“Oh,” Jonny says.

The world keeps rolling. Unfortunately, so does Patrick’s tongue, “Yeah. She’s cool. She was fun.”

“She was okay.”

Patrick can’t believe the understatement. “Okay? Just that? You’ve got some tough standards, man. She was--” as he searches for the right adjective, it suddenly hits him that Jonny has more experience, at least when it comes to threeways. It’s fucking unfair, but entirely possible, the mind-blowingest sex of Patrick’s life would barely chart as okay for Jonny. While he was dating Lindsay, the two of them got up to some kinky shit, Patrick’s pretty sure. Not that he spent any time thinking about it. He licks his lips. “It was hot, right?”

Jonny scoffs. What an asshole.

“Fuck you.”

“It was hot,” he grants. His cheeks are turning pink. He means it.

It feels like scoring the game-winner in the Stanley Cup final. The rush of triumph makes him cocky. “Hotter than the one you had with Lindsay?”

Jonny scoffs again, to Patrick infinite delight. “It was!” Patrick surmises.

“Lindsay’s hotter than her.”

“No way,” he is so offended on Chelsea’s behalf, he barely registers the deflection. Lindsay dumped Jonny. No matter how she looks, her insides must be rotten. Patrick hates that Jonnys is still hung up on her. He kicks Jonny’s foot to make sure he has his attention. “Maybe we should try again. Chelsea’s coming to Chicago around Christmas.”

“Is she?” Jonny kicks him back. “You two move fast.”

“She’s got family there, I think.”

“Sure,” he sounds skeptical. He admitted it was hot, why wouldn't he want a rematch? He and Patrick and some hot chick, she doesn’t even have to be Chelsea, she can be whoever. Small and blonde, like Jonny likes.

“Or we could find someone else,” Patrick says, growing more committed to the idea each second it lives in his brain. “Just go out and see what happens.”

“You think that’s smart?”

Patrick rolls his eyes. “I think you’re boring.” He goes in for the kill, “Captain serious.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’d even let you pick, I don’t care.”

“Starting to sound a bit desperate there, Kaner,” Jonny flashes his most punchable smirk, the one that’s a little lopsided and always makes Patrick squirm.

Patrick starts a mental list of ways to wipe it off his face. Maybe if he shoved two fingers up Jonny’s nose… “What?” he asks, kind of distracted.

“I’m just saying, If you want to see me naked that bad, you only have to--”

“Fuck you,” Patrick sputters. “I was being generous. Bros before hoes or whatever.”

“I’m telling Erica you said that.”

The thought is terrifying. “Don’t,” Patrick shrieks, so loud people in their proximity stop mid-munching to give them the stink eye.

It’s their cue to clear off, a pretty timely one, considering they barely make it on the bus. They’d probably be yelled at, if they weren’t Kane and Toews.

Jonny saunters past Colliton’s glare and flops down next to Seabs. Patrick takes the two seats right behind, stretching out until he’s almost horizontal.

He checks his phone. Chelsea sent him a text and a link. The texts says, one of them looks a bit like your boy. you’re welcome. The link-- Patrick slaps the phone face down on his thigh.

“You okay there, Kaner?” Jonny asks, glancing over his shoulder.

Patrick feels his ears burn redder than the Hawks home jersey. “Yeah, no. Real peachy.”

[thetaoofzoe]

Fic: The Hand and The Hammer

August Walker x Reader (YOU)

Word count: 5K, Explicit

Summary: August Walker has been living rent free in your head for five years. For half a decade, you had been deployed all across the world to hunt down the elusive anarchist, all because of a long standing one sided love/hate relationship between he and your unhinged employer.

Thanks to @lightsidecalling​ for your support

Part I

You lie beneath cool white sheets, watching the white-yellow wash of early morning sunlight tickle at the edges of billowy sheer curtains. It takes several minutes for the light to seep through the curtains, spill across the bare stone floor and then paint indulgent stripes of gold across your duvet.  

Throwing off the sheets to allow the rising sun to caress and warm your naked skin, you close your eyes and bask in the heat like a contented house cat.  

You have absolutely nothing to do today. Your diary is gloriously empty of responsibilities and just as you've done for the last three weeks, you fully intend to take advantage of your free time.

You stretch and yawn,  feeling comfortable exactly where you are, and you consider sleeping in. However, your stomach growls and abruptly the quest for food is suddenly top priority. You grab the mobile phone that's tucked beneath the pillow and the face brightens at a touch.

You can see that it’s almost eleven am.

You perk up at the rattle of a room service cart being wheeled through the sitting room outside of your bedroom door.

Right on time, you think.

You had requested that breakfast be brought round at a certain time, and everyday,  it was there without delay. The staff in the rented oceanside bungalow was always on the ball, always attentive and you appreciated that.

Rising easily, you walk lightly across the cool stone floor to the adjoining bath.  Powdered and perfumed,  you dress in a light, peach coloured sundress and sandals.

An ocean breeze ruffles your dress when you step out onto the sunny patio where breakfast is waiting. It is quite a spread, for just one person, with juice, coffee and tea services, seasonal fruits, cheeses, breakfast meats and a lovely stack of golden french toast that is still pert and fresh from the cooker. You walk to the shade provided by the umbrellas over the long glass table and help yourself to the food.

Nearly  a half hour later, the service door behind you slides open on quiet rollers and you can hear your assistant striding across the paving stones.

'Phone call for you,' he says in that gentle familiar voice.

You replace the coffee cup on the saucer and shift, fully expecting him to slip a thin mobile phone into your hand. Instead, he lays a bulky black leather case on the table. You look down at it and swear under your breath.

It is the satellite phone. And the satellite phone means only one thing.

You pick it up and hold the earpiece it to your ear.

The messenger down the line delivers the information quickly, sparing no words and then asks if you understand. You say that you do and the call is disconnected.

So much for a day of nothing.

You finish your breakfast and return to your bedroom. Waiting for you on the freshly made bed  are two white envelopes. You pick up the larger of the two. In it is a stack of your destination's local money, and airline tickets. You tuck that envelope into your handbag, dress in comfortable, but chic travel clothing and pack a small carry-on.

You then pick up the second, smaller envelope that you know contains information regarding the target. This envelope, unlike the first, is sealed with a black wax stamp. You recognise the initials of your employer and the envelope comes open with a flick of your fingernail. You slide out a black and white photo and have an immediate and unnamed visceral reaction to seeing the face. Unconsciously clenching your teeth you resist the urge to rip the cursed photo to pieces.

'Fuck...' you mutter, glaring down at the strong, unbearably handsome face peering back at you.

It was the infamous Hammer.

August Walker.

Again.

You struggle to get yourself in hand and after a long,  cleansing breath, you turn the photo over and read the neatly printed message about a lonely summer in Italy addressed to a fictional, 'My darling Véronique.'

With picture still in hand, you walk to your writing desk. Opening the top drawer, you pull out a piece of white card-stock paper that has in it, several cut out ovals of different sizes. You’d received this little holey card-stock in the post three weeks earlier with no accompanying explanation, and while it was strange, you knew enough about your employer's methods to keep it.  

Lining up the white card over the writing, you read the secret message revealed by the ovals.

'Target - August Walker. Find and Take Alive.'

'Ohh,' you groan, exasperated. 'Not this again.'

August Walker has been living rent free in your head for five years. For half a decade, you had been deployed all across the world to hunt down the anarchist, all because of a long standing one sided love/hate relationship between he and your unhinged employer.

You were good at your profession. Very good. And you had no trouble using your skill and your people to get close to hard targets. Yet, August Walker was not a bloody hard target and was NOT hard to find as he seemed to leave a trail of destruction and bodies that in turn led directly back to him!

So much for subtlety.

So it didn't matter much that you were able to pinpoint his location or get a visual bead on him days after the start of an assignment, as your employer invariably hit the mission abort button because 'things had changed'.

You were still paid handsomely. But being at the whim of a mad employer made you start to hate August Walker a little as well.

At least, at first.

Your hate soon turned from a hot coal sitting heavily in your gut to little butterflies that frantically scrambled about at the sight of him.

Over the course of your assignments, you'd had the opportunity to see him do nearly everything ranging from eating, to fighting, to blowing up buildings. The way he moved during a fight, his well-placed blows, his underhanded methods of winning were intoxicating to watch. The man was an absolute menace.

You'd told yourself that your physical delight was just a response to your clear admiration for his chaotic skills.

That admiration was purely professional, of course!

But the more you followed and watched him,  the more those little butterflies of admiration ignited into an unquenchable fire that only your hand seeking out a little self-pleasure beneath the duvet could put out.

But honestly, you would have fallen on your proverbial sword before you admitted to yourself that you found everything about August Walker, sexy.

And then he disappeared.

No destruction, no bodies and the trail was cold.

During the rest of that assignment, you didn't see him for two month until the night he climbed through the french windows of your Parisian hotel room.

To say that you were surprised to see him was an understatement.

But there he was, standing in your bedroom, like a fever dream, with that ridiculous moustache and that infuriating smirk.

He did not give you the opportunity to react, before he was upon you.

But that didn't matter, for you wrapped yourself around him, greedy and eager and August Walker took his time showing you how much of a menace he truly was.

You neglected to tell your employer about those few glorious hours of mission deviation.

No use throwing petrol on that unstable fire, you'd decided.

You were pulled from the field shortly after that because 'things had changed' and it was no longer necessary to bring in the target.  

Your last and most recent assignment ended in Beirut ten months ago. You had come so close to legitimately ensnaring him. You had been in top form and August had been cunning, but it was not enough to elude you. You'd had him dead to rights and all you had to do was give the word to tighten the noose round his neck. But before you could, that damned satellite phone call dragged you back from the brink.

And you remembered standing there, dirty, and exhausted on a crumbling rooftop watching that smug bastard escape through the streets below on a stolen motorbike.

The only thing that soothed you was a text from a blocked number, received a week after the Beruit incident, that read, 'Next time, baby.'

You had to laugh at that. It was so something August would do.

Coming back to the present and shaking yourself of your memories, you realise that you're still standing in your oceanside bedroom holding the photo of August Walker. Checking the time, you see that you're going to be late and you grab your bags.

The photo along with the cardstock go into the shredder, and you listen to the machine choke down the evidence as you leave the room.

Your flight to Heathrow is late arriving and the  airport is as busy as ever, full of children escaping on their summer hols and tourists out to see the world. You walk confidently through the melee and to the taxi stand outside. You want to get to your hotel quickly and have a nap, as you need to be sharp to handle what's coming your way.

**

Part II

Later that evening in your hotel, you shower and scrub up thoroughly, excited about the prospects of the evening's plan. You powder and perfume your body carefully and choose a pair of glossy red high heeled court shoes to go with your black dress. You feel sharp, clear-eyed and ready for a little fun. This assignment was going to be played on your terms and was probably going to be your last.

Carrying your kit bag with all of your tools, you hum along with the lift music (The Girl from Ipanema) as you descend to the lobby where your contact waits. You follow him to a black car waiting outside and climb inside.

As you are driven through the city, your contact sits next to you not saying a word. Your only form of communication is through the tablet he puts on your lap. You look down at the digital photo on the screen.

It is an image of August in what looks like a dance club. Only he didn't look like he was there to pick up women, or to have drinks with friends. He looked big and bulky and out of place amongst the scantily clad glittery people having a fun night out. He looked like he was lurking, and waiting for something.

'That was taken one minute ago,' says the contact as the car, caught by a traffic light, slows to a stop.

'In that one.' 

The contact points towards the window on your side of the car.

Your eyes follow the line of his finger to the brightly lighted neon sign spelling out the name of a club.

'Am I on the list?' you ask and a sudden giggle surprises you.

You open your mouth to apologise for the awkward comment, but you grab your kit bag and slam the door without waiting for a reply.

You walk up to the front of the club and survey the queue waiting to get in. You count up the number of bouncers but keep walking. You make a quick right, cut through the alleyway and come up to the backside of the club. There is a young woman wearing the club's uniform, standing under the emergency building light, and using her weight to keep open the rear door. She is smoking and scrolling through her mobile.

'Hullo,' you say pleasantly, as you approach, your heels clicking on the dry  macadam.

She raises her bleary bloodshot eyes to peer at you. You look at her name tag and under her name is a strip of tape on which is scrawled, 'Barkeep trainee'.

She looks like she is having a rough night as if she didn't know how to handle all of the drinks that overly generous customers bought for her, as the bartender.

'You're not supposed to actually drink it when they buy it for you, you know. You're supposed to spit it into your empty beer bottle.'

Her only answer is a wet burp.

Grinning and shaking your head, you put a finger to your lips and make a soft shushing noise as you put two hundred quid into her hand. Then without asking, you enter the club.

Once inside, the whole world shakes around you, vibrating with the thunderous bass that accompanies some nameless, formless song. You lean against the wall between the men's and the ladies' toilets for a moment, letting your eyes adjust to the dim lightning. The scent of urine and alcohol permeates your hiding place, but you don’t mind, as you aren’t going to be hiding there for very long. The ancient cigarette machine across the narrow corridor seemed to eye you disapprovingly.

'Yeah, I don't want to be here either,' you mutter.

Opening your kit bag, you fish out your small purse. In it are your syringes, and vials of incapacitating drugs. You are going to go in there with all guns blazing and August Walker is not going to know what hit him. You even left the satellite phone in the hotel room. You weren't going to give your employer an opportunity to back out of the deal and order you to let him escape. Again.

Squaring your shoulders, you stride into the main hall. The club is partitioned into two levels, where the floor above overlooks the main floor on all four sides. You stand by the lower bar and let your keen eyes crawl all over the neon lighted faces. The music screams unpleasantly and immediately your head starts to hurt.

It is the stress, you think.

The stress and the travelling and you haven’t had any water all day.

But instead of water, you order a whisky sour and drink it quickly. It doesn’t quell your headache, but it bolsters your mood. You continue to look around and honestly, if he hadn't moved, you would have never spotted him up on the second level.

Your heart picks up speed.

Dear God, there he is. The unbearably sexy August Walker.

Ducking away from the bar, you go round to where the stairs dog-leg to the next level. Once up there, you weave your way through the thick standing crowd. Then you just stop moving and the crowd buffets you for a moment. You realise that in your zeal to just get your hands on August, you have no other plan.

Sure, you were going to jab him with the hypodermic, but what were you going to do if his knees just gave out beneath him. You would have to make a scene to get your contacts in there to drag the big man away. You were not going to be able to haul him down to the car on your own. And the last thing you wanted to do was to draw attention to yourself.

You growl with frustration and push your way to the more intimate bar at the back of the area. It is just a little quieter there and you take the needed space and time to regroup. You order another whisky sour and face the bar to drink it and think.

Have I been hasty?

Am I unprepared for this?

Has my judgement been clouded by my hubris?

A tall man comes close to you at the bar, but you ignore him. He is probably just ordering something and will move off soon. But when he doesn’t order, or move away, you turn to look up at him, ready to give him the business.

August Walker towers over you, smirking and looking like the cat that ate the canary.

In your mind, you know that you should feel angry, or disappointed, or even afraid, but you can't bring yourself to feel anything but relief.

He grabs you up by the arm and all but pulls you through the crowd and to one of the private rooms in the back. The room he picks is dim and backlit with baby pink and purple lights and the furniture looked soft and fun. The room is also clearly occupied by several people who looked to be having a private coke party in the corner.  However they do not object to your sudden presence.

August crowds you up against the soft bubbly wall, one hand against it above your head and the other hovering at your waist.

'I'm going to search you,' he says, his eyes boring into yours.

A surge of heat rushes up inside you, but whether it was from anguish or arousal, you aren’t sure. Two whiskey sours on a stomach that only had jelly babies is making everything start to blur together.

'No you will not!' you manage to growl indignantly.

He raises a dark brow. His smirk lengthens into something more mischievous and his blue eyes warm considerably and you know he's not a threat.

'Then show me that you are not armed.'

'You can go fuck yourself.'

August  grunts with amusement and you bite your lip.

This is not the time to bring up sex.

You can see the wheels turning in his head and he heaves himself backwards. With the movement, you catch his scent and you are immediately rocketed back to the night he positively wrecked you. You remembered feeling deliciously tender for the rest of that week. 

The demon inside you lurches in its metaphorical cage.

Want him, want him, want...

He holds open his plain  black suit jacket with both hands in an obvious effort to show that he is wearing his weapon in a hip holster. Unfortunately, all you can see is how his tie nestles quite contentedly between his big, meaty pecs.

The demon in the back of your mind reminds you that he's got soft hair on his chest and belly and you fight the desire to touch him.

August clears his throat and catches your attention.

Yes, you think. Yes, focus. His face is right there, focus. Not on the memory of that beautiful chest.

He quirks his brows to indicate that you need to show that you aren't packing. But you are only wearing a thin dress with a light half jacket and couldn't possibly be hiding anything. Instead, you cock your head and mock him, opening your little half jacket to show him you weren't armed. At least not in that spot.

August seems to accept it, because he is obviously more interested in the reason why you are there.  

'It's time to end this.'

'End what?' you ask feigning innocence.

He takes your handbag, and opens it before you can protest. Seeing the contents, he flattens his lips into a tight line and then tosses the bag onto the floor. You watch it roll over once and come to rest in the corner.

'Stop. Following. Me,' he growls and leans in closer obviously using his powerfully built frame to intimidate you.

'I-- I can't. I have a job to do.'

You keep your face turned away, eyes still on the handbag in the corner. 

It’s the only way that you can remain sane with him this close.

Against your back you can feel the thump of muted music, you can smell his cologne and hear the faraway voices of the other occupants. You are starting to drift a little more, buoyed by the particular pleasure you’re receiving from his attempt to cow you.

August is good at reading people and when his big hand come to rest at your waist, you know he’s read you like an open book. He slides that hand to the small of your back and the other hand reaches down to touch you where your dress hem meets your lower thigh.

He arches you against him and you let out a soft  eager gasp.

'Well... well...'

His voice is low, breath warm against your temple and he sounds excruciatingly self satisfied.  

'What am I gonna have to do to get you off my back?'

Mmm there is that tone again. That tone that tells you that he is a man who does not mince his words. He is a man who is unafraid to show his intentions with his actions. Your heart wrenches in your chest. You feel sexy and mysterious in his presence. You are the woman he can’t get enough of. You are in control, not him, and deep down, August knows it.

You roll your head away from where you were looking at the purse. You look up into his eyes and  slide your arms about his neck.  

August needs no other prompting. His big hands tighten round your waist and he heaves you up off of your feet. One of your court shoes slips off of one foot and when you land on your knees astride his lap on the soft, pink couch, you grab the heel of the other and fling it over to its mate.

August Walker is an incredible specimen of male human form. His smirking face and ridiculous moustache arouses feelings of frustration and anger in you even as his thumbs inch up the hem of your dress. The foolishness of your flighty employer, August's elusiveness (for the most part) and the whole incomprehensibility of your futile, prematurely aborted missions, all suddenly  come to a head.

You sit back on his lap and scowl, giving his meaty chest a thump with the base of your loosely curled fist. That stops him and surprise is evident in his blue eyes. You narrow your eyes in return and baring your teeth slightly, you tighten your fist and hit him again. Harder.

Then again, even harder.

You pull  him up by his neatly knotted tie and slap his face. The sound of skin on skin is loud in the quiet room.

Oh, that felt good.

A second stretches into an eternity between you and you watch a mixture of hurt,  and something else that decidedly wasn't anger ghost across his face. It was arousal. Slapping him across the face obviously turned him on.

You huff a laugh and he grins, the challenge is clear.

'Looks like you wanna play,' he rumbles darkly.

August reaches both hands beneath your dress and grabbing your knickers, he drags them down your trembling thighs.

‘Up,’ he instructs you and when you  rise to your knees he slaps your ass and grabs an indulgent handful. 'Good girl.'

You yelp and moan with delight, steadying yourself with both hands against him. With his help, you manage to only get one leg free, but you don't care. August has enough access and you watch him lick two fingers which he slides into your wet heat.

You gasp and shudder, lewdly pushing your hips towards him rocking in time with the motion of his fingers dragging across your sensitive slit.

Fuck... fuck! This shouldn't be happening, you think, trying to keep your thoughts from running together. Not here, not now this is crazy!

'C'mon,' August encourages you, warm hand stroking your bum. 'Take my cock out. I wanna fill that sweet little pussy up.'

You drop into his lap again to do as you were told. His cock is thick and hot in your hand and he groans when you give him an experimental squeeze. August cups your hips and lifts you again. There's no longer any perceivable space between the two of you and when you let him push you down on his ready cock, there is no longer any singular breath. It's just one breath, your shared breath.

You wrap your arms about his shoulders and bury your face into his neck. You  need his steadiness to keep from exploding into tiny pieces.

'You drive me crazy,' you gasp, breathless from the rush of heat drowning you.

August holds you and you match the motion of his body. It isn't long until he has built a relentless rhythm and you are begging him for release. You can feel yourself taking out all of your pent up frustrations on him. The heat and strength of him inside you is enough to drive away all of your fears and worries, replacing them with pleasure.

You lift your head and kiss him. His mouth is soft and yielding and you are confused by this new tide of tender emotions that rush in on the aftermath of your orgasm.  

You melt against him, hiding your face in his neck to recover from the high and just like during his unexpected visit to your hotel all those months ago, August caresses you until you're able to recover.

You hum softly and open your eyes to sheepishly peek at the other people still in the pink and purple room. They're far away enough, but you can see that they are way too coked out to care about what you two deviants are doing.

'They know you're here,' you murmur after a moment, stroking his stubble rough cheeks and smoothing his rumpled curls.

'Hmm.'

'They got you on film.'

'I'll take care of it,' he whispers back, matching your intimate tone.

You nod and with a groan, you heave yourself off of him and stagger back to your feet. He grabs you to help you regain your balance and you're grateful for his quick reflexes. You didn't want to end the night falling and cracking your head open on a coffee table. There's a stack of napkins by the wine bottles on one of the tables. You grab a handful and hand some to him. You both avoid each other's eyes as you clean up and you grab your purse and shoes. 

Contemplating the contents of your purse you say to him, 'Are you gonna let me jab you with this?'

August grins quite suddenly and you are charmed by his disarming smile.

'No,' he says with laughter in his voice.

'Tsk... ok.'

You feign disappointment even though you know that you were going to go through with it anyway. 

Back in order, August pushes himself off of the couch. He takes you by the wrist and pulls you close. He holds your gaze, making sure that you cannot mistake his meaning.

'Come with me.'

You stare at him. Oh, it's so tempting that it hurts when you turn him down.

'You know my methods... why I do the things I do. You know, and I know you understand me.'

‘I understand. I understand. But I can’t.’

August flattens his lips into a grim line again, but he nods and releases you.

‘Don't forget to take care of that… thing,’ you tell him in parting.

You want to stay so badly. You want to run away with him and you nearly turn around when you reach the room door. But you force yourself to keep moving forward and out of his life.

There is a message waiting for you when you return to the hotel. 

Mission aborted. 

Reason - ‘things have changed’.

**

Part III

You lie in your oceanside bedroom listening to the room service cart rattling through the adjoining room. It's time to get up for breakfast. You get out of bed, stretch, yawn and disappear into the bath to wash up and prepare for another delightfully leisurely day.

The stone floor is warm against your bare feet and you walk towards the patio and out through the sliding doors. The mid-morning sunlight is blinding and you put a hand up to shield your eyes. The beach is empty today with only a few boats dotting the clear blue waves. Maybe a swim later is in order, you think as you turn towards the umbrella shaded breakfast table.

A strange sight makes you stop in your tracks. There is a dark haired man sitting at the table, with his eyes closed, and his face tilted up to catch the sun not blocked by the edge of the umbrella.

'August,' you whisper softly to yourself as if saying his name any louder would make the mirage fade away.

You walk closer and clasping your hands together, you hover at the far end of the table.

'August.'

Alerted to your presence, he lowers his head and opens his eyes to look at you. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

'What are you doing here, August? You shouldn't be here... it... it isn't safe.'

'I came for you,' he says as if it were the most natural thing in the world to say.

'No. No, you're leaving now. Right now.'

He looks at you for a moment and with his foot, August slides out the chair next to him and gestures a lazy hand to it.

'Breakfast first.'

Sure, you think, rolling your eyes. Breakfast first. You sit down beside him.

August pours coffee for you. You watch him quietly and without really meaning to, you reach out to put your hand against his cheek. August stills at your touch and when he leans down to kiss you, you curl your fingers into his sun-warmed hair.

'Come with me,' he murmurs against your lips. 'I want you to be with me.'

'You know I can't.'

And even as the words come out of your mouth, you don't believe them.

August scoffs and is about to try another tactic, but is interrupted by the softly opening service door.

You watch your assistant approach with the heavy satellite phone. He gives August an impassive look and hands the phone to you. Your assistant also places two white envelopes on the table by your empty plate. August watches you put the phone up to your ear.

The messenger down the line is different this time, but delivers the information in the same monotone voice before asking if you understand.

'I understand,' you say. 'But... but, I will open the envelope before I agree to the job.'

A beat passes.

'Go on,' says the messenger.

You open the smaller of the two envelopes, the one with the black wax seal and pull out a photo of the target. You suck your lower lip between your teeth and turn the photo around to show August his own face.

'The target is August Walker,' you say.

'Have you seen him?'

You look directly into August's face. He looks apprehensive, you think. Does he think you'll turn him in? After all this?

'No, I haven't seen him. But I won't--'

/Take the job/, August mouths to you.  

'I mean I will take the job.'

You disconnect the call.

'Why did you want me to take the job?' you ask a sense of giddiness beginning to simmer in your gut.

'Because you'll never catch me.'

You tap the phone and grin.

'I can give you up right now.'

August glances at the phone.

'Will you?'

You smirk.

'Mmm, breakfast first.'

0-0 END 0-0

Thanks for reading and please like and reblog  💖 💖

[memory-mortis]

Hi! How are you? :) Could I please request some Josuke angst? Maybe he's jealous? Maybe he's having a bad day?? Up to you but I love me some angst. tysm for your time

Hi there! I’m great, thanks! Thank you for the request <3 I’ve kind of deviated from the options you gave me? I hope you don’t mind, because I really enjoyed writing this one ahhh. Anyway, one Josuke angst coming right up!

High Visceral

TW: death WC: 1.5K

“God dammit!” The muffled voice of your boyfriend entered your ears. Everything was dark and fuzzy all around you. The coldness of your own body scared you, but you could not react in any way, completely paralyzed, stuck in the same position. You tried to make sense of what was around you. You were lying down, that's for sure, the gravel digging into your back indicated that you were facing the sky. But how did you get there? You tried to rewind the whole day.

It all started like usual. The ringing of your clock, sun beaming down on you through the window, breakfast with your parents. Ordinary events of an ordinary school day. You even managed to get out of the house earlier, so now you had the time to enjoy the walk to school at a slower pace. That was a luxury that your two best friends would not grant you, though. As soon as you heard Okuyasu yell your name from behind you, you just knew that all peace was gone. Not like you were complaining though. “Good morning, Okuyasu, Josuke,” you smiled at the two and Josuke pressed a kiss to your temple as a greeting. This made you flush bright red, as you hadn’t gotten used to all the affection yet. Right, Josuke wasn’t just your best friend anymore, he was your boyfriend. You resumed your walk to school, this time with the fun duo by your side, who didn’t fail to make you laugh as per usual.

The school day was also nothing but ordinary. You tried your best to pay attention in class and every break you would hang out with Josuke, Okuyasu, Koichi and Yukako. The time when it all went wrong was after school.

“Y/N, we’re going to meet up with Jotaro, are you coming with us?” Koichi asked and you looked at your boyfriend with an apologetic smile.

“Sorry, looks like I won’t be able to aid you in finding Kira today. My parents want me to go home immediately,” you explained. Josuke walked up to you.

“Should I walk you home?” he asked.

“No, it’s fine, I can take care of myself. Don’t forget that I have a pretty fierce Stand!” you beamed up at him confidently. He pouted and gave you a kiss on the cheek.

“Be careful, then,” he warned you, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah! See you tomorrow.”

And with that, you were off. Perhaps you should have accepted his offer to walk you home. Because no matter what, there were 2 facts you had no way of changing. Firstly, you were a woman. And secondly, you had a pair of very pretty hands, which caught the attention of a certain black-haired man.

The rest of your memories were a blur. You remembered running as fast as you could and being pulled into an alley. The more you tried to remember, the stronger the pulsating pain in your head got, however that didn’t stop your efforts. You fought the man with all your might - but in the end, there was an explosion. Your last memory was that of the sky above you, completely peaceful and serene, as if nothing had happened. The life around you kept going as you lay on the ground in a pool of blood, and as time passed, the pain in your entire body disappeared. You closed your eyes.

“Y/N!” you heard the voice once more. “Y/N! Please! Please, wake up, please!” This time it was choked, Josuke cried out his pleas among sobs. He was crying. This gorgeous boy that always smiled at you no matter how desperate he was, who was always there to cheer you up and make you laugh, was now weeping right next to you. You felt a pang in your chest at the way his voice broke and when you thought it couldn’t get worse, you heard Okuyasu crying in the background as well.

Something inside you started moving, the gears began to shift once again, and warmth filled your body in steady beats. A couple of salty teardrops fell onto your cheek. The darkness clouding your vision crawled away and your limbs didn’t feel as heavy anymore. Hunched over you was Josuke, bawling his eyes out, and your heart broke at the sight. You raised your hand with difficulty and cupped his cheek, which forced him to freeze and open his eyes in surprise. You stared back into the blue depths for a couple of seconds.

“Y/N…” He seemed to be in shock, but quickly broke out of it to pull you into a tight hug. “Y/N! You’re alive!” he cried out, now sobbing even more from what you presumed to be happiness. You smiled weakly and hugged him back.

“I’m back, Josuke,” you said, even though he probably didn’t even need your answer.

“Y/N!” Okuyasu screamed as he joined the hug and squeezed any remaining air out of your lungs.

“Oku- I can’t- breathe-” you wheezed and Okuyasu immediately let go, giving you space.

“S-Sorry! I got too excited,” he laughed nervously. God, you were happy to be back.

Still feeling weak after facing death, Josuke carried you on his back all the way to his house. His mother called your parents and let them know that you were staying over, thankfully they didn’t protest much. You slept through most of the journey, only waking up when the bright lights in his room hit you. You groaned in annoyance and rubbed your eyes as Josuke set you down on his bed. That’s when you noticed the concerning silence that surrounded him.

Josuke wasn’t a quiet type of person. Quite the opposite, really, even though he had a laid-back personality, he would always make some sort of noise or joke around to fill uncomfortable silence. This was a jarring difference from his usual self and you could tell that something was weighing down on him. You sat up on the bed and watched him walk to his desk and lean onto it, his head hanging low. Surely seeing you dead had to be traumatic to him.

“Josuke…” you whispered, and although he heard you and his head perked up a bit, he still didn’t turn around to face you. “Jojo. I’m… sorry that you had to see that.” No reaction. This was really bad. You got out of bed and walked up to him, wrapping your arms around his chest and resting your head on his back. He let out a hitched breath and finally reacted by cupping your hand in his. 

“Y/N… this... “ He paused for a moment, formulating a proper explanation in his head. “It’s my fault. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

“What do you mean?” You stepped back as he turned around, tears in his eyes. He avoided eye contact at first, but eventually gathered enough courage to look at you, then cupped your cheeks and leaned down to rest his forehead against yours.

“I’m such a bad boyfriend, Y/N. If I had gone with you, insisted on walking you home, you wouldn’t have had to face him. You… were dead for 2 minutes. No heartbeat, no breathing, even after Crazy D patched you up. It’s a miracle that you came back,” he began to vent, tears finally spilling over.

“No, no, no, Josuke,” you cupped his cheeks, eyebrows furrowed. It pained you to see him so broken up about it. Sure, it was the most terrifying moment of your life, but he couldn’t blame himself for it. “Stop this, it’s not your fault, okay? How were you supposed to know I’d meet him? What matters is that I’m here.” Josuke closed his eyes, his hands moving to grip your wrists gently.

“And besides,” you added, “I think… it was your voice that brought me back.”

Josuke’s eyes snapped back open. “Wh- what do you mean?”

“I… don’t really know. I remember lying in this darkness… everything was cold and dead silent. But then I heard your voice. At first it was muffled, but became more clear every time you called out to me.” Josuke’s jaw dropped at what you had just told him. He couldn’t believe his ears. Somehow you heard him when you were dead…

“But that’s not the point. Please don’t blame yourself, Josuke. Kira was the one truly responsible. We have to find him and put an end to this, and even though it’s been proving to be difficult lately, I know that eventually we will catch him. So let’s do our best.”

Josuke stared back at you with newfound determination, then smiled and pecked your lips.

“You never cease to amaze me, Y/N,” he said, picking you up and walking to the bed with you. Once he lay you down and crawled over you, he grinned from ear to ear. “I’m gonna have to work hard tonight to one up you, you know.”

You chuckled into the kiss he gave you.

“Trust me, you’re already doing a great job,” you said and giggled at the tickling sensation of his lips on your neck. You raised his chin up with your index finger to look him in the eyes. “I love you, Higashikata Josuke. Not even death can do us part.”

[presidentrhodes]

Spider-Man Far From Home spoilers

I just finished watching it and, honestly, I’d say it was a pretty good way to bid farewell to the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

Spoilers under the cut. This is pretty long and rambly. 

1. Midtown high is supposed to be a school for geniuses but these little shits use comic sans in tribute videos and steal watermarked Getty Images pictures to put in them. I loved it, particularly with the song choice and the fact that Vision’s picture was from the Civil War airport standoff in Leipzig — that means only Peter could’ve provided it and no one bothered to ask how he got it. 

2. Tom Holland really wasn’t kidding when he said the film was a love letter to RDJ/Tony Stark. He was everywhere, his sacrifice was being recognised around the world: they even had a documentary on him, which was available in the in-flight entertainment, plus, there were murals and photographs in Venice and Prague. He was very much present throughout the film. 

3. EDITH. In a nutshell, it’s an augmented reality-enabled AI that controls a tactical and defensive system Tony built to protect Earth in the aftermath of his demise. Think Ultron’s perfect self minus the winning personality — EDITH controls a bunch of massive Stark Industries satellites in orbit that are equipped with thousands of weaponised drones. It can remotely target individual threats and take them out with simple voice commands. It also is able to connect to any network in the vicinity, so, Peter was able to see what his classmates were doing on their devices. 

I’ve already seen so many angry posts comparing EDITH to Project Insight without taking into account a) intent; and b) the reality of the MCU. Tony didn’t build EDITH for the same reason Zola built Project Insight. The former was meant to be a last or first line of defence, controlled by an Avenger Tony personally trusted. The latter was a means to subjugate the world population to Hydra’s will. 

All tech in the MCU is dangerous when it falls into the wrong hands — that’s why they’re called the wrong hands and why Steve once said the safest hands are their own. The supersoldier serum gave us Steve Rogers; it also gave us the Winter Soldiers, a bunch of dangerous, invincible highly-trained assassins. Pym particles gave us Ant-Man and the Wasp as well as time travel; it also gave us Yellowjacket, who immediately wanted to weaponise the tech. The Iron Man suit gave us Iron Man; but also gave us Iron Monger, who wanted to build an army of metal soldiers. Wakanda’s highly-advanced weapon systems were able to withstand a full-scale invasion from the Outriders, but those same weapons almost started a global war in Killmonger’s hands. Project Insight and Ultron showed us the bad side of AI; JARVIS, Vision, FRIDAY, Karen and EDITH, to an extent, showed us the good side of AI.

The point is, technology in the wrong hands will always be a bad thing yet people only seem to gripe about Stark tech while ignoring every other piece of advanced technology we’ve seen weaponized or misused. I wonder why. Since the MCU canonically isn’t made up of one big Luddite colony, there’ll always be new technology being developed and bad guys finding ways to abuse them. 

Just look at the holographic tech Mysterio designed while at Stark Industries. Even before he was fired, his ambitions were grander and afterwards, he weaponized it and willingly sent people to their dooms so that he could play a hero. When 16-year-old Peter Parker, MJ and Ned — literal children — found out the truth and Mysterio risked being exposed as a fraud, he actively tried to kill them. Mysterio beat the shit out of Peter and threw him in front of an incoming high-speed train, so, no, I don’t care if Tony Stark was mean to him by firing him, he was a piece of shit who tried repeatedly to kill a kid. 

Tony, meanwhile, spent $600+ million on the holographic tech to design B.A.R.F — a technology with some really promising applications in the MedTech sector to help people overcome their PTSD and trauma. That’s the fucking difference between a superhero and a supervillain.

Sure, EDITH also has massive privacy concerns. That’s on Tony, but after the Decimation, I think people have bigger problems to worry about than whether Peter Parker is snooping on their text messages. Ultimately, EDITH offers Peter, and whoever else is going to fill up the Avengers roster in the future, a plan B to strike the bad guys from a safe distance. I

4. Tony left Peter in charge of EDITH. Not the Avengers, not SHIELD, and definitely not the US Department of Defense — a fact that actually pissed off Mysterio. Tony left it in Peter’s hands because he knew Spider-Man took the meaning of responsibility far more seriously than he ever did. All those years ago, Peter told him if one could do the things he could, and they didn’t, and then the bad things happened, they happened because of them. And, honestly, if anyone deserves to have control over such a potentially dangerous piece of tech that can help in future battles, then it’s Peter — even more so than Tony. 

5. Again, Peter is 16 in this film and still coping with loss and trauma. He willingly gave controls of EDITH to Quentin because Mysterio had everyone fooled, including Nick Fury/Talos — they’re both highly experienced soldiers. Fooling them wouldn’t have been easy and Mysterio’s plan was extremely well thought-out and perfectly executed. Peter redeem himself in the end and takes back control of EDITH. 

6. Peter and MJ were super adorable. Spider-Man is the only franchise apart from Iron Man, where the secondary lead characters are allowed to grow without it all being about the main hero. MJ is allowed to explore her feelings for Peter and measure them against Brad’s affection. Ned is allowed to also grow in his character and be more than Spider-Man’s best friend/guy in a chair. 

7. Happy and May were also adorable.

8. Happy ruined a perfectly good bed of tulips just to rescue May’s nephew and give him the TLC/pep talk he needed after, again, Beck pushed Peter in front of a high-speed train that would’ve killed an ordinary person. 

9. Peter confusing ACDC with Led Zeppelin is the most Gen Z thing ever. Happy watched Peter design his own suit and it reminded him of the times he spent watching Tony tinker in his lab. You could feel Tony’s absence pretty viscerally in that scene on the jet. 

10. Peter tingle. Lol. 

11. Happy’s words about Tony were beautiful. He said something along the lines of, “Tony was my best friend. He second-guessed everything he did. He was a mess. But the one thing he didn’t second-guess was picking you.” That really furthered the Iron Dad Spider Son narrative.

12. Iron Zombie was the w o r s t thing ever. Again, Beck emotionally manipulated 16-year-old Peter Parker and said if Peter was any good, his mentor would still be alive just as he projected an illusion of a decaying Iron Man corpse attacking him. To give you a sense of how manipulative he really is, he told his guy in the chair that Peter’s blood will be on his hands because he had failed to report a missing drone part that MJ had discovered in Prague. 

13. Peter finally understanding that he doesn’t have to be the next Tony Stark or Iron Man. He just needs to be the next Spider-Man and Peter Parker. 

14. Peter choosing to safeguard EDITH. 

15. J. Jonah Jameson and J.K. Simmons. That is all. He’s the MCU equivalent of Alex Jones and I love him so much. I wonder if this means we’ll see Doctor Strange offer Peter his help to erase everyone’s memories about the reveal of his secret identity. 

16. Every Nick Fury scene automatically becomes 2000x funnier when you realize it’s Talos posing as Fury and 90% of the time, he has no idea what the fuck is going on and he’s just winging it as he goes along. Also, he was furious that he and his wife, as members of a shapeshifting species, were unable to detect Mysterio’s ruse. 

17. Mysterio was a douchebag. Apart from trying to kill actual kids because he feared they might expose him, he did nothing worthy of a hero. He was jealous and angry about Tony, and he wanted to usurp Iron Man without doing any of the hard work. He willingly put people in danger, was prepared to sacrifice people to make his actions seem more realistic and wanted to take credit for saving the day and preventing an Avengers-level catastrophe. I’ve already seen reviewers trying to sympathise with Mysterio, and his persistent attempts to kill a 16-year-old kid because Tony was apparently mean to him. 

18. And, no, Tony did not steal B.A.R.F tech from Mysterio as some review sites are claiming. The narrative is unreliable at best because we hear only Quentin’s point of view — the same Quentin who had been using his holographic tech to deceive people and put them in harm’s way because he wanted to shake the Queen’s hands or some misguided bullshit. He deserved to fired. Plus, he was a Stark Industries employee. Tech companies almost always own the patent to whatever tech you design or invent for them when you’re on their payroll. It’s how corporations work.

19. Tony quoted Henry IV to Fury when he told him to give EDITH to Peter and said Spidey wouldn’t get the reference (Heavy is the head that wears the crown) because it’s not Star Wars. It was a nice, poignant moment — made funnier when you realize that’s Talos in disguise, which means at some point, Fury had to have a conversation with him about Shakespeare and Star Wars. Someone pls write the fic. 

20. The most important thing is that this film actually tried to address the Decimation. Endgame pretended to gloss over it to give Gay Joe Russo his 15 minutes of fame. But this film actually started with May and Peter organizing an event to help the displaced. Pepper sent a huge check and apologized for not being able to make it in person. :( 

20a. I love Jake Gyllenhaal. I had expected Quentin to be a dramatic thot but he really brought a lot of depth to the character. 

Overall, I liked the film a lot more than I had anticipated. Some people are going to scrutinize this film to death to prove Tony was the ultimate MCU villain and, hey, if that’s the hill they choose to die on, I don’t really care. After 11 years and 23 films later, if they still think that Tony was the real villain all along, then nothing we say or Marvel does, will change their mind. 

Personally, I thought this film was a good send off to Tony, now that they’ve firmly established that Peter Parker/Spider-Man is going to be the new face of the MCU and will carry with him the Iron Man legacy. He wasn’t always right and a lot of his choices tended to backfire but, in the end, his motivations were good and he still went out as the man who saved the world. He, unlike Beck, or Vulture before him, never tried to kill a child, not even when he brought him to a parking lot brawl among friends. 

Now, if only Marvel can just leave Tony’s legacy alone and let Peter, and the rest of the MCU, thrive on its own instead of retconning established Iron Man lore to fit new narratives. 

[fanforthefics]

For the writing prompt, #16 for Tyson/Gabe! Bonus points if it has anything to do with Tys’ return to Denver! 🥰

16: One person pouting, only to have it removed by a kiss from the other person.

“So...” 

“He’s not here,” Nate says, immediately, and Tyson. Well. He’s pretty sure his face does a thing, even when his face has been doing things since he got back to Denver. It’s the weirdest mix of heartbreaking and great that he’s ever felt--he thought he knew what this was like, after his dad getting traded all the time, but it’s different. Being back in Denver, back in the familiar tunnels of the rink, but not. The visitor’s locker room is different. 

Nate’s not different, though, and neither are the rest of the guys, when Tyson ditched the team after practice and he and Kerf went to crash the Avs’ locker room. It all feels so familiar, down to Kerf messing around with JT and Josty in the corner. It feels like letting out a breath, being here. It might have been different, if shit had been better in Toronto, but now--

Now, he’s willing to take the W of being able to be standing next to Nate, to catch up with Willy and EJ like he didn’t text them all the time anyway. To be with guys who know him already. 

Except for one. “Where is he?” Tyson asks, giving the room another look. There’s one blonde head conspicuously missing. It’s a head that’s usually hard to miss, because it’s so big, but also because, well. Tyson always knows where Gabe is. 

“IR,” EJ says, sounding surprised Tyson has to ask. Tyson rolls his eyes. 

“Yeah, no duh,” he says, because of course he knows that. It hasn’t been good, that Gabe’s laid up, but it’s been kind of nice that they can both be miserable at the same time, if for different reasons. There have been a lot of whining texts on both sides. It’s always nice to remember that no matter how much everything sucks for Tyson, Gabe’s always going to be more dramatic about it. “But, like. He said he might come in today? ‘cause, you know. For the game.” Tyson can’t quite make himself say ‘Because I’m here.’ 

They weren’t--they were really good friends, but they weren’t that. Quite. Or they had almost been? It had felt like maybe they were going to be there, at the end of the season, but then the Trade had happened and Gabe hadn’t said anything and Tyson had been too busy to deal with all his overwhelming feelings for his not-his-captain-anymore, so like. Tyson had left and they still texted all the time, and they weren’t anything. But Gabe had said he’d try to come in. 

EJ’s face does something that’s almost sympathetic. It’s bad, if EJ thinks he has to do sympathy. “He didn’t say anything to me,” He says. Which. Okay. Tyson can take the hint. 

“Whatever,” Nate interrupts, throwing an arm around Tyson, because he’s the best bro ever. “Who needs Landy. We’re getting dinner, yeah? Everyone?” 

“As long as I’m not paying,” EJ retorts, and Tyson grins at him. At all of them. His boys. Not like, his boys anymore, because the Leafs are that now, and he’s like--he likes them, and they’re getting there, but these guys are different. He went through fire with them. 

“I missed you guys,” Tyson says aloud. Nate makes a sad face, because he knows that and also he doesn’t like to think about Tyson being a country away. 

“Missed you too,” Willy says, sincerely. EJ makes a face. 

“Shut the fuck up, Brutes,” he tells Tyson, which Tyson understands means that he missed Tyson too. 

So they go out for dinner, and Tyson--it’s fun. but he also can’t stop fucking thinking about it. 

WTF Landy? he texts under the table, when Nate’s getting them a round of drinks. 

Then, when Gabe doesn’t text back even though Tyson knows he saw it because he sees everything--

Are you avoiding me? 

Still nothing. Which is a yes. Tyson’s getting pissed, actually. Like, whatever they were or weren’t, they were friends. Tyson counted Gabe as one of his guys too, and he’d thought Gabe did the same.  

“Is he mad at me?” Tyson asks into a lull in the conversation. Nate rolls his eyes. 

“No,” he says. 

“How do you--” 

“Because he asks about you all the fucking time,” Nate informs him. “Which I don’t get, because he could just ask you too, but all he fucking wants to talk about is how you’re doing and shit.” 

“Because he’s bored and on IR?” Tyson fills in.

Nate gives him a look, which is fair. Tyson knew that wasn’t the answer either. But then, “So why isn’t he here?” 

“I don’t try to understand Landy.” 

“That’s fair, it’s dangerous to try to understand that twisty Swedish brain. Pretty soon your head would be growing and you’d only be eating meatballs and talking about IKEA, and then what would we do?” 

“You’d be happy with two Landys.” 

Tyson has a brief mental flash that’s sort of mindblowing but also needs to be tucked away until he’s very, very alone. His cheeks probably go very red, thinking about it, but whatever. 

“But I couldn’t give up my Dogg,” he says, and Nate grins a little, happy. Nate’s easy. Not like, actually--Nate’s grumpy and bullheaded and emotional and actually takes a lot of managing as a best friend, to keep him on an even keel, but all that is easy to do. Tyson gets him. Tyson’s always gotten him. 

Gabe, on the other hand...

“Maybe this is like, giving me a hint. I could probably take a hint.” Tyson had taken the hint, thank you very much, when Gabe hadn’t said anything when they left. Their texting had all been super things bros would say. Or, well, Tyson wasn’t great at figuring out the bros line, because he’s flirty with all his bros, and Gabe is too, so maybe it’s not the most platonic, but not like, out of the usual for him. Gabe wouldn’t need to drive the point home by ghosting him. 

Nate makes a not-sure face. “What?” Tyson asks. 

“I...” he trails off, makes the sort of face that means he knows something but isn’t sure if he should tell Tyson, probably because he feels some loyalty to his captain. 

“What do you know, Dogg?” Tyson demands. “Come on. Best friend privileges. What happened?” 

“What are we talking about?” EJ asks, sitting back down next to them. Nate gives him a warning look, but since when has that worked. 

“Nate knows something about why Landy’s ghosting me and won’t tell me,” Tyson informs EJ. “Because he doesn’t respect best friend privileges. See if I let you stay with me in Toronto,” he adds to Nate. Which is an utterly empty threat, like he was giving up Nate time, but Nate still makes a horrified face. 

“Oh, you mean how I’m not sure who’s sulkier when you don’t text them back immediately, this one or Gabe?” EJ asks, casual, jerking his head at Nate. “Or how  I’m pretty sure he was crying over that clip of you scoring against Arizona?” EJ adds. “Or like, doing something else, I wasn’t going to ask. Whatever is up between you two is between you two.” 

“Like you don’t want all the gossip?” Tyson retorts, but--okay. That doesn’t sound like Gabe’s trying to give him a hint to ghost him. “See if I tell you what Factor told me about--” 

EJ tries to look superior, but he’s the biggest fucking gossip in a league of gossips, so he caves pretty quickly. 

Tyson tries not to dwell. He’s with Nate, with his boys, he can breathe again--he got a goal at last, Babs is gone, maybe things will be better now--but he can’t fucking stop dwelling. It’s uncomfortable. Tyson’s not meant to dwell, he’s not good at it. But what the fuck is Gabe doing? It’s bullshit. It’s Gabe pulling his Gabe bullshit, that he thinks he can get away with because he’s hot and charming and Gabe, and Tyson’s historically so easy for him, but-- 

“Just go,” Nate says at last, interrupting a story Tyson was half-telling about Kerf and Mo. 

“What?” 

Nate rolls his eyes. “He’s at home. Just go figure this out.” 

“But--” Now that Nate’s said it, it’s all Tyson wants to do, but also he doesn’t want to leave. Gabe is Gabe, but he doesn’t want to give up his time with these guys either. There’s not enough. There won’t be enough, again. 

“Go,” Nate tells him. Grudgingly, but sure. "Figure this shit out. You need to.” 

Tyson loves him, so much. “You’re the best Dogg a man could ask for, you know,” he tells Nate, and Nate flushes and looks away, sheepish like he gets when he’s confronted with being a good person. 

So Tyson goes. The uber ride to Gabe’s is so viscerally familiar, the same as he’s done for years. But like. Different. Because he’s not the same, or whatever. It shouldn’t be this weird. Tyson’s moved away from friends before. But somehow, it is. 

Then he’s at Gabe’s, and the lights are on, so he’s definitely awake. He was definitely ignoring Tyson, then. 

Tyson knocks. There’s no response. Open your door, Tyson texts him. Then, when that doesn’t get a response, he leans on the doorbell. He is very good at annoying Gabe into doing what he wants. 

Sure enough, there’s barking, then the sound of a cast clomping on hardwood, then the door jerks open. 

“What the--Tyson?” Gabe asks. He’s--somehow, Tyson had forgotten just how hot he was since he’d seen him, or maybe just forgotten how hard it hit every time, even now when he was in basketball shorts over his cast and a ratty t-shirt, his hair messy like he hadn’t left the house in days. Even when his mouth was hanging open in confusion and shock in a way that should have been unattractive. “What are you doing here?” 

“Saying hello to Zoey, clearly,” Tyson informs Gabe, and raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to let me in?” 

He’s a little worried Gabe’s going to put up a fuss on the doorstep, but Gabe steps back, and Tyson pushes past him. He drops down to his knees immediately to greet Zoey, who’s barking excitedly and licking at his face, because he wasn’t lying about missing her too. The pictures Gabe sends of her isn’t enough. 

“Okay, enough, Zoey,” Gabe says, after a minute or so. His voice sounds sort of tight. “Tys. Why are you here?” 

Tyson gives Zoey one more pet, just to be contrary, then stands up so he can glare at Gabe. “Why do you think I’m here? What the fuck, Gabe.” 

“I--” 

“You can’t just fucking ghost me like that,” Tyson goes on, warming to his theme. “Like, so you don’t want--whatever, that’s fine, I’m an adult, I can deal with rejection. Or not even rejection, just like, not taking off. I’ve been preparing myself for that since the beginning, you’re you and I’m me, that was always like, inevitable, that’s whatever. But I thought we were friends at least, and that’s shitty of you, I’m only here for a day and it’s been so shitty and I just wanted--” 

“We are friends,” Gabe interrupts. He sounds pretty offended Tyson would think otherwise, which is rich. 

“Then maybe act like it,” Tyson snaps. “And don’t ghost me while I’m in town.” 

“I didn’t--”  Tyson glares. Gabe flushes, the sort of stubborn flush he gets when someone calls him on his shit. Tyson’s been gone a few months and this is what happens, clearly. Other people on the team call him on some of his shit, but most of the team is too in love with him to tell him when his drama’s going overboard, and EJ thinks its too funny to say anything and Nate won’t say anything if it doesn’t affect the game. Tyson’s had long years of figuring out how to both be kind of in love with him and also call him on bullshit like this. 

“If you don’t want to see me, that’s--fucking shitty, but whatever, you don’t want to. You could say so.” Tyson crosses his arms. “It’s called communication. I’m pretty sure they’ve heard of it in Sweden.” 

“I wanted to see you. I want to see you.” Gabe says it in his voice where he’s so fucking earnest, where it’s impossible not to believe him. Tyson makes an inarticulate, angry noise, because if that’s true what the fuck is even happening? 

Then, because Tyson has never been inarticulate for very long in his life, “Could have fooled me.” Tyson tightens his arms around himself. “And like, if this was you trying to give me a hint I shouldn’t--that whatever was happening--” there’s no way to say it when they’d never acknowledged it, whenever the vaguely antagonistic flirting that had always made up their friendship tilted into something more real. “That we’re just friends, or whatever, there are less shitty ways to do it. Hell, you could tell Nate, he’d tell me. Or EJ, he’d probably think it was funny. Unless this is a way to mess up my game tomorrow? Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t need you to mess up my game, I’m doing that well enough on my own, and--” 

“That was Babs,” Gabe interjects, fast and fierce. “That wasn’t you, he wasn’t letting you play your game. You looked a lot better--” He cuts off, flushing when Tyson gapes at him. 

“What the fuck, Gabe?” he demands, yet again. “You ghost me and then you say that? I can handle whatever is happening here if you just tell me what it is! If--” 

“I couldn’t, okay?” Gabe bites out. Not like he’s angry at Tyson, but like he’s angry at the words themselves. He’s drawing himself up to his full height, anyway, and Tyson is suddenly faced with how ridiculous it is that they’re doing this in Gabe’s front hall, with Tyson still in his jacket and shoes. But it’s hard to remember Gabe’s ridiculous when he looks like he does, all big and righteous. “I thought I could, I wanted to see you--I want to see you--of course I do, but then it was today and I just--couldn’t.” 

“Why not?” Tyson demands. That’s not enough. 

“Why do you think?” 

“I don’t know! If I knew, I wouldn’t be here, I’d be hanging out with my best friend, who I ditched to come here and yell at you, because you’re being a dick.”  Tyson gives Gabe his best stare down. “I was going to get Nate to break his diet plan to take me to Dairy Queen, Gabriel. That’s what I gave up to do this.” 

Gabe snorts, shakes his head. Smiles, but not his usual overwhelmingly big smile. Something sad in it. “Fuck, I’ve missed you, Tys.” 

“Could have fooled me.” 

Gabe sighs, and runs a hand through his hair. Tyson only thinks about doing that himself for like, a second, which is probably a win. “I couldn’t,” he says again. Which is still not a thing. “Not when--we were so close, at the end of last season. Something was going to happen, finally, after--or I thought something was,” Gabe interrupts himself, giving Tyson a questioning look. Tyson bites his lip, but he nods. 

“Yeah. I thought so too,” he admits. Gabe’s smile flickers across his face. 

“But then you were traded, and nothing did. Which I get,” he adds, captain-earnest again. “You needed to settle in. And long distance is hard, when you need to bond with your new team.” 

“Are you saying I’m the reason nothing happened?” Tyson asks. Gabe shrugs. 

“You didn’t say anything, before you left.” 

“Neither did you!” 

“I didn’t want to push you,” Gabe retorts, his back up a little again. “You had a lot going on, I thought you’d say something if you could handle it.” 

“What the--that’s not how it works!” Tyson protests. “That’s--you were always going to have to make the move, I thought we both got that. And,” he goes on, because Gabe looks like he’s going to protest. “It’s always the person staying who’s supposed to make the dramatic gesture, like, running after me at the airport, or whatever. Not the person who’s leaving. I--” he cuts himself off. “Anyway. We’re circling back to that,” he informs Gabe, who looks like he’s trying not to laugh. “But continue.” 

“I wasn’t here, I couldn’t chase you through an airport,” Gabe points out. Tyson is tempted to keep arguing this, because he would absolutely not put it past Gabe to take a transatlantic flight for a grand gesture, but he refuses to be distracted. 

“Gabe.” 

“Right, so we were almost there, and then we weren’t, but we were still--close. And I, fuck. I missed you, Tys. A lot.” Gabe says it like a fact. Not like something to throw at Tyson, not accusatory, not a confession. Just something true. “And it killed me that things have been so bad for you and I couldn’t help.” 

“You helped,” Tyson has to interject. Because that’s true too. Just being able to talk to Gabe about it, to hear Gabe’s anger on his behalf, had helped. 

Predictably, Gabe perks up a little at that. “Good.” He pauses, then shakes his head a little. “But--you were going to be here, and we still weren’t--you know--and I just--” He makes a face at himself, like he’s frustrated at his inability to articulate something. It’s not a face he makes often. “I couldn’t do it, Tyson. I couldn’t see you like we were just friends, for just a few hours. I just couldn’t. I knew I’d do something drastic. And you’d just be leaving again, and nothing had changed about why nothing happened, so--” 

Tyson blinks. “So let me get this straight,” he says, slowly. “You ghosted me because you missed me too much, and didn’t think you could see me without doing some dramatic gesture? That you thought I don’t want?” Gabe opens his mouth, but Tyson’s not done. “That is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.” 

“I--” 

“Long distance is a fucking thing,” Tyson interrupts. “Hell, half the team is long distance with someone. That’s just how hockey works. It’s not the end of the world. It’s doable.” Gabe’s face is doing something unacceptable, in how it’s lighting up. Tyson has never been able to deal with Gabe’s face when he’s happy. Especially when he’s pissed at Gabe. “Which you know if you’d fucking talked to me, and maybe said any of this, instead of being such a drama queen and hiding alone in your house like some sort of Victorian spinster or whatever.” 

“Tyson,” Gabe says, in that stupidly happy voice, and takes a step forward. 

“You have had so many opportunities to say something,” Tyson goes on. “It’s so easy. Just, hey Tys, so we have a thing, what do you think about figuring out what it means and how good we are at Skype sex? Which I think we’d be pretty good at,” Tyson adds, flushing, because it’s not like he hasn’t thought about it. “I mean, I don’t shut up and you’re good at talking, we--” 

“Hey Tys,” Gabe says. He’s taken another step forward, towards Tyson, so Tyson’s back is against the wall. Tyson tilts his head up and resolutely does not respond to that tone of voice, half glee and half growl. It’s really hot, but Tyson refuses. Gabe was being an idiot. He’s not rewarding it. 

“No you don’t, I’m pissed,” Tyson warns him. It’s very hard. Gabe is very close and he’s so large and his face is so fucking perfect. “You could have done this when i got in this afternoon, instead of having us do this whole thing, you don’t get--” 

“Come on, Four,” Gabe murmurs. Tyson maybe shivers, but he refuses to let Gabe win this. 

“That’s not my number anymore,” Tyson points out. He maybe looks at Gabe’s lips, because he’s weak. But still. 

“I really don’t care.” Gabe lifts his hand to touch Tyson’s cheek, but lets it hover. “Yeah?” 

Tyson is still pissed, because they could have avoided this so easily. But also he knew Gabe was a drama queen when he irritatingly tumbled into whatever this is, and like, he doesn’t have much time here. 

“Fine,” he says, half sighing like he can at all hide the eagerness in his voice. “But don’t think this means I’m not still mad, you’re going to have to--” his mouth keeps moving against Gabe’s mouth for a second, trying to talk, but then it sort of registers that he’s kissing Gabe, and his brain short circuits and his body takes over. 

It’s good. It’s so good, and Gabe kisses like Tyson had thought he would, overwhelming focus and like he’s trying to make sure Tyson can’t think at all so he’ll stop arguing, which is working irritatingly well. Tyson’s not going to let that stand, and the best way to deal with that is to kiss him back, to make sure he knows what he was missing, so Tyson wraps a hand into Gabe’s hair and tugs him closer. 

When they break apart to breathe, Gabe stays close, his forehead resting against Tyson’s. Tyson takes a second, then, 

“We could have been doing that for so long if you weren’t an idiot,” he says, “You owe me so much, imagine if I’d indulged you and we didn’t--” 

“Be quiet, Tyson,” Gabe says, laughing, but then he kisses Tyson again, which isn’t exactly a good way to incentivize Tyson not talking. 

“Okay, but now we only have a little while, ‘cause I’ve got to get back to Nate’s tonight,” Tyson tells him. Gabe pulls away enough to gape, looking affronted. 

“You’re going to stay at Nate’s? Not here?” 

“One of the two of you made an effort to see me today,” Tyson points out. “And anyway, you know perfectly well my list of priorities and where you fall on it compared to Nate. It goes Ralph, Nate, Zoey, you. Or, no. Ralph, Nate, Duke, Zoey, Cox, you.” 

“Zoey doesn’t beat Duke?” Gabe demands, sounding more irritated than he has been during this entire conversation, and Tyson can’t handle him even a little. 

“Look, the heart wants what the heart wants,” Tyson says, and tugs on Gabe’s hair a little, experimentally. given the noise Gabe makes, it seems to work. “Are you going to argue about it or kiss me again?”

“Kiss first, then we’re arguing that,” Gabe says, and cuts Tyson off with his mouth before he can reply. Tyson lets him. Gabe’s admittedly doing a pretty good job of convincing Tyson to stop being pissed, and Tyson guesses he’s willing to be convinced. 

(The next day, visitor’s locker room: 

“Bear, you have a visitor,” Mo tells him, throwing a towel at Tyson. 

That really doesn’t specify anything--Tyson’s pretty sure Nate won’t manage to stop by, after losing, but Willy totally would manage it. Or maybe Emily wants Tyson to humiliate himself on camera a little, for old times sake. 

Still, Tyson goes outside, and then he grins for a second before he puts on his irritated face. 

“So you made it today?” he asks Gabe. “Enjoy the game?” 

Gabe’s face does something very fun, which Tyson’s going to enjoy for a while, probably. Annoying Gabe is always fun. “That was a good goal,” Gabe admits, a little grudging, but also Nate has it on good authority he likes watching Tyson’s hockey, so he’ll take it. 

“Yeah?” Tyson asks. “So you just came here to tell me that, or--” 

“Come here,” Gabe mutters, and then he gets a hand on Tyson’s wrist and is pulling him away towards an empty room. “How long do you have?” 

“We leave in like an hour,” Tyson tells him, and grins when Gabe pushes him against a closed door. “Think you can handle seeing me for that much time? Or are you going to do something drastic?” 

Despite the game, Gabe grins, that ridiculously happy thing that always makes Tyson go all squirmy and stupid. “Definitely something drastic,” he says, and then Tyson has to save up his retort for that for when his mouth isn’t better occupied.) 

[magaprima]

The introduction of Adam 2.0 has many effects, including narrative, but one of the things I loved the most was how it really opened the gates for showing us Lilith’s story, why she is the way she is, what her experiences are and, what I believe, is used as a metaphor for female victims of male and domestic abuse. 

This essay got hella long as it covers Adam 2.0, theories about First Adam, Lucifer’s abuse, Lilith’s story as victim, and one who encourages the abuse cycle as well as breaking it, how male abuse influence her and Sabrina’s relationship, the development of her relationship with Sabrina in general, freedom and self-worth....it covers a lot of stuff. 

I wish to note in advance that my analysis is here based on my qualifications in film studies, writing for performance, cinematography, my mother’s study into domestic violence and women in the home, as well as my own negative experiences at the hands of men, and therefore is still only an opinion/observation. I like analysing stuff, I enjoy it, but always remember it’s fiction, it’s TV, and therefore intended for fun, so please remember opinions can be shared or ignored, enjoyed or blanked. 

Firstly, we establish from her very visceral reaction to the mere mention of the name ‘Adam’ how much of a shitstorm her experience with the First Adam was. We’ve all had that person, be they male or female, who have had such a negative impact on our lives that even the name alone is enough to dredge it all up in our memories. For Lilith it’s so extreme, and also because she’s Lilith, she attempts to kill him from an armchair within hours of meeting him. 

Also, when she enters the cottage and Adam is there she immediately suggests a backrub, she expects that a man in a relationship with a woman expects the woman to serve him, to worship him. And then, later, Adam makes a comment on her appearance;  

Adam: You look so different Lilith: You don’t approve

When Adam comments that she looks different, Lilith immediately jumps to the conclusion that it’s a judgement, that he will disapprove. We can presume this is how First Adam was, how he told her to how to be, also the False God, and also Lucifer. These are three main male roles in Lilith’s existence and they have all tried to control her in one way or another, so much so that she expects it from Adam 2.0 as well.  

She also immediately presumes she will be judged, and he will disapprove, when he catches her about to spike the punch (admittedly she’s poisoning the punch, but he thinks it’s only alcohol). “Don’t judge me” she immediately says, a knee jerk reaction with how quickly she says it. She has only been with Adam 2.0 one day and yet she is already regressing to how she was in the beginning with the First Adam, and, we can presume, given what we’ve seen of their interactions, even with Lucifer. The fact she is regressing to these knee jerk reactions of presuming judgement, is really revealing of Lilith’s experiences.

Similarly, when he declares he has a gift for her, she’s already internally expecting something generic and what men typically give women-- more flowers like earlier perhaps, or chocolates or jewellery. Yet, she is genuinely surprised to find it’s not something generic at all, but something he’s bought specifically because he knows Mary will love it (and coincidentally so does Lilith. He inadvertently buys something Lilith adores. Which begs the question why Wardwell and Lilith have the same tastes). The fact Lilith is so surprised and delighted by this suggests no man has actually ever considered her so personally before, not even Lucifer. 

When Lilith declares she doesn’t ever want to get married and Adam 2.0 suddenly jumps up and marches over to her side of the table, she looks at him wide-eyed, there’s no anger, no defence, just surprise and also the markers of fear, however mild, as if she is expecting an angry protest or even a violent outburst. This is the marker of a woman who is scarred by her past, an abusive past. It can be implied here, I believe, especially considering her reaction to the Adam name earlier, that it isn’t just that she refused to submit to the First Adam, but that his reply, his refusal was a violent one, but primarily it’s that the Dark Lord’s replies to any arguments are always violent ones. She is not able to refuse him, and if she tries, she is punished. Hence, out of habit, she expects a violent reply to her refusal here too. 

She also avoids Adam’s eye when he says “I promise I’ll never hurt you”. Avoiding eye contact, the down slump of the shoulders, the way her hands remain out of the way, chin down, are all typical body language markers of a survivor of abuse, of someone who has learned to behave a certain way in order to minimise punishment/injury. And if we consider how much Lucifer abuses and manipulates her, in the mere scenes we see alone, to the point that she has been convinced all this time that she has free agency (and that she was simply working for a promotion basically) when she didn’t. 

“He was cruel to me, Adam; he was only ever cruel”

Again, this could be taken to mean First Adam or Satan, or it could mean both, that the only men in her life were both only ever cruel, but we know for certain, with Lucifer, that it has been cruel and it has been constant. Regardless, the way she leans into Adam 2.0′s touch is for comfort and reassurance-- she might be playing the game, doing what’s expected, but the way she rests against his hand does seem genuine, and this is supported by how, in the very next moment we see the first genuine kiss between the two of them. Previous kisses are all Adam, Lilith has her eyes open, surprised, and doesn’t return the kiss, but in this moment she kisses back, her eyes are closed, she’s enjoying it, giving back. It’s immediately followed by the forehead touch, looking at him, which is all very emotionally intimate. This is the very first instance of Lilith experiencing something non-abusive from a male. 

Later, we see  her leaving the bedroom, calling out ‘I’ll be right back, my love’, as she leaves Adam in bed. It’s very calm and post-coital, there is even an element of romance in the air. She’s casual, content, walking slowly, enjoying herself, pouring herself a drink, temporarily without a care in the world. We have never seen Lilith like this before. 

And then suddenly, Satan arrives, and Lilith drops the jug on the floor, smashing it, as she is so shocked and panicked by his sudden appearance, he breaks right through her calm and we see her tense again, on edge again. This is typical of someone caught by an abuser: she’s wide eyed, not blinking, heavy breathing with panic and fear, she whispers his name with that same shock and fear. These are all the very classic reactions of an abuse victim caught ‘in the act’ of something forbidden by an abuser. In a normal mundane environment, this would be her caught talking to someone or being out of the house too late, but regardless of the supernatural elements, it’s still the signs of an abuse victim.

Satan then says:

“Get rid of him, Lilith, you belong to me and only me”

This is very typical abuser language; you’re mine, you’re my property, you’re not allowed to be with anyone else, talk to anyone else, without my permission because you’re mine. The controlling language of this is obvious and immense and it’s paired with Lilith’s response. Her expression is not just wary of his wrath, but also resigned. She’s remembering what her life actually is. That’s it’s not the pleasant little house-play she had moments ago, where she was promised she would never be hurt, she is the Dark Lord’s Handmaiden, she’s his to do with as he pleases. This is in direct contrast to Adam 2.0 saying how he didn’t care whether they were married or not, just so long as they were together. She is, ironically, free with the mortal, but a prisoner with her Dark Lord, the one who was meant to free her. 

Now we see, shortly after, that despite realising how trapped she is, she chooses to defy him and protect Adam 2.0. She disguises it as ‘I won’t get to play with him’, but there’s something much deeper here; it’s as clear to the viewer as it is to her familiar. And it’s proven in how desperately and urgently she tells Adam to put the enchanted ring on and never take it off. This is the action of someone determined not to lose the one thing that is making her remember herself, the self that defied the False God, defied the First Man and became the First Witch. Someone who wanted freedom, to be equal. 

And the whole scene plays out like a real, genuine proposal. If you were shown the scene without any context of the characters, the setting etc you would simply see a ring being slipped on a finger and a man picking up a woman, the woman laughing (she actually laughs, genuinely laughs happily when he picks her up)...they look like a genuinely happy couple getting engaged. This is essentially a metaphor for a woman escaping her abuse cycle. We see it in life, and in dramas depicting life, as usually the woman running to family or friends, leaving the home and finally daring to try and make new links, new ties, beyond the abuser’s circle. For Lilith, it’s Adam 2.0. 

As she looks at him in that proposal scene, the way she bites her lip, looking up at him with...well, love, it’s incredibly sad, especially when you know it won’t last, because here we get a glimpse of who Lilith was before, when she was first created. Before she was abused and controlled and manipulated and any other number of things at the hands of the False God, First Adam and the Dark Lord. Just like long-term abuse victims lose who they were, lose themselves in the abuse, so Lilith has lost herself (We do see hints of her original self in the way she helps students at Baxter High, though it serves no true purpose beyond just simply helping them, we see it in the way she does become genuine with Sabrina upon occasion etc but this is the first time we start to see glimpses of it properly). 

Experiences at the hands of men, no matter who those men are in relation to you, can change you, depending on the experience. It can warp you, it can make you feel less than yourself, trapped, injured, disgusted, especially if it’s been constant as it has been for Lilith. And these feelings stay with you, they never go away. And they can make you hate all men and want nothing more to do with them, even if you love the idea of them, or even the concept of that perfect relationship, it’s prevented by how your opinions are now effected by your experiences. And I think we can safely say this is the case with Lilith when her origin story includes saying she is equal to Adam, she doesn’t ask to leave him, she doesn’t say she doesn’t want to be with him, she says she doesn’t want to be less than him. So we can presume Lilith would have been happy with a romance if it had been a partnership not a domineering dynamic.

Lilith is a female icon, and her dialogue and actions in this show often add to that, alongside many other reasons within the CAOS mythology as well as as Dianic, Witchcraft and revised Jewish mythology. But her story, particularly within the context and established mythology and narrative of the show (which does choose to take different pieces from all mainstream and modern religions and combine them) is also one that shows her as representative of female victims of abuse at the hands of men: what it can do to us, how it can make us unrecognisable to ourselves. As I said in my previous post, Adam 2.0 didn’t have to be a man for this new dynamic, it’s not about a man rescuing Lilith from abuse and making her happy, it’s about a person doing that, a person showing her there’s something else, another life. It’s simply poetic narrative to have it be a man named Adam. 

We continue to see her happy and content when she’s strolling through the woods with Adam 2.0, she’s the most relaxed we’ve seen her be with anyone (she’s certainly not relaxed in any of her scenes with Satan. I mean remember her first scene in part 1? Where she was begging forgiveness and kissing his feet? The first blatant clue that this was not a good relationship, and there was definite control and abuse in the dynamic) , she genuinely laughs at his suggestion about Tibet and then looks genuinely awkward when she realises he’s serious. She is falling into this relationship, and though I know other viewers will disagree, but for me personally, you are seeing someone falling in love. Even if she doesn’t quite identify it yet herself (she only says love once he’s dead, unfortunately). 

She has this gentle surprise when Adam 2.0 says he wants to show her the world. She’s freaking ancient, she’s literally been around forever, she has seen the world and everything in it, but Adam 2.0 wants to show her a world where she’s free, where it’s just the two of them, no arrangements, no deals, no promises, just two people, travelling together, equals. And she knows this. This is the moment where suddenly she’s awake. Adam 2.0 is making her realise that Lucifer has been as much a prison as First Adam and the False God were, and here is a chance to run away from all that, to finally have no prison at all.

 And so she says with genuine feeling ‘I will consider it’. This is very much the part where, in a normal drama about an abuse victim, the writers would typically having her finding a romantic connection and the partner begging them to run away with them, the victim trying to get up the courage. Narratively and cinematically we do start to see full on, direct parallels here. Especially when he tells her to make a wish, and she genuinely does so before throwing the pebble, smile on her face, then laughing with his arm around her. The way she looks at him when he’s not looking (which is something you do do when you’re in love), genuinely considering him, sort of bewildered for this is literally the first time ever that she has felt this way, with the person she’s with not demanding anything of her. He has asked her to go to Tibet, he hasn’t demanded, and he’s asked because he wants her to be with him, not because he needs her to do something. 

This all very much the set-up trope we see in those very serious TV dramas, where we see the victim planning to be free of her captor and abuser and we, the audience, feel so worried it will never happen. 

And just like the TV drama tropes, we have the scene where it all goes wrong. We see Lilith eating a meal with ‘Adam’, she’s relaxed, she’s enjoying herself, she believes she’s free, she’s found a path to choose for herself, something to do for herself. When she replies to ‘Adam’ suggesting she’s going to say yes to Tibet, she speaks firmly, confidently. ‘Yes I am’ is saying goodbye to her chains, it’s saying ‘Yes I am leaving my abuser’, ‘Yes, I am leaving and doing something for me’. 

But the way she looks at the ring when she pulls it out of her mouth, the confusion, the bewilderment, she was so certain of her escape, of her plans, that what the ring signifies hasn’t clicked yet, there’s a small delay as denial argues with facts. The entire cinematography of this scene really does remind me of basic murder dramas, when the person comes home and doesn’t yet realise that their loved one has been murdered, or when we see the person being happy and carefree and they haven’t yet realised it’s all about to be ruined by what’s behind the door. 

“Did you really think you could deceive me, Lilith? Our bond is eternal. Our bond is unbreakable. There is no escape to Tibet or anywhere else”

This could not be more obvious abuser language if it tried. It’s threatening, it’s possessive and it’s reminding the victim that there’s no escape, emphasising the idea of an unbreakable bond. Like, ‘did you really think you could just leave me?’ and we see the utter horror in her eyes at this, at the ring, at Adam 2.0′s head, at Satan’s words, all of it. She is utterly horrified in a way we’ve never seen before. She’s incredibly human in this moment. 

We see this type of scene in a lot of films and dramas where an abused wife believes she is finally getting away from the husband, but then he’s there, blocking the doorway, having discovered her plan, and she has no idea if he’s going to kill her for it. The way Lilith silently cries at the sight of Adam’s severed head, the way every time she looks at it she gasps for air, her shoulders heave, this is all very much a parallel to when the abused character in dramas realises all their plans were false hope and that they’re never getting away. Sometimes even in those non supernatural dramas, the lover, the friend, is still killed by the abuser just as Adam 2.0 was, in order to teach the wife/girlfriend a lesson. 

“Now clean your plate of the mortal,” only adds to this parallel, as it is so much like when you see, on screen, the abuser character beat the victim’s character senseless, before adding ‘now clean this mess up’ as if it is all her fault (Think of the way Bill Sykes behaves with Nancy in Oliver, until he does eventually beat her to death) and her whole expression is exactly what would you would expect. She looks trapped, scared, horrified; she is so broken by this she almost cries at the table. 

And even though we know she eats male flesh, we’ve seen her picking her teeth clean with delight, here we see her vomit it all back up, every piece of Adam 2.0 is expelled. This is partly to show us how the taste of Adam 2.0 is vile to her, because it’s not what she wanted (and supporting hints from Part 1 that it isn’t just any man that she eats. If she wants a real meal, it has to be the right choice, like the misogynist nightmare of a principal) and because of how she felt about him. But it’s also what we tend to see in dramas in post-abuse scenes; crying over the toilet basin, vomiting, before crumpling onto the floor. Out of context, she looks simply like the trapped abuse victim, the abused wife who has suffered this for so long she doesn’t remember it being any other way. Yet, she recently had hope for it all changing, but that hope is gone now, taken away by her abuser, and now she’s more trapped than ever and it makes it so much worse than before, because before she lived in ignorance and now she’s awake, but still trapped. 

A lot of abuse victims don’t acknowledge they’re abused because that’s worse, admitting it makes it more painful and more unavoidable (things are easier to live with if you don’t think it’s true). It’s especially true in Lilith’s case, because it would be admitting that she left one abuser for another. And when we consider a following scene with Sabrina in a later episode: 

Lilith: Promises were made Sabrina: And you believed him? Lilith: You don’t understand. He was kind at first. Gentle. We’d spend our days near the place where he’d fallen and hit the earth. The more time passed since the fall, the more he turned into this thing of darkness

This dialogue is so typical abuse victim dialogue. The ‘he wasn’t like this before’ is extremely typical as reasoning for his behaviour and the reason why they stay. No abuser starts off the abuser, they start off kind at first, engaging, drawing the victim in and by Lilith’s own words we see this is exactly what Lucifer did too. And so we see Lilith has lived in wilful ignorance of his behaviour, remembering how he was before, focusing on their promises, their lovemaking, how the relationship was in the beginning, as many abuse victims do, in order to remind herself why she stays and to convince herself she doesn’t want to leave. But now, with Adam 2.0 and Satan’s murder of him, and the way he made her eat his flesh afterwards, has forced her to wake up and admit the abuse, admit that he is no longer the same person at all. 

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand. How did the Dark Lord discover us?”

This is another abuse victim signature; questioning yourself, trying to figure out what precisely went wrong, to find the rhyme in the reason, an excuse for why it happened, why the escape didn’t work. This reasoning and questioning is so desperate and internal, because if a reason is discovered, an excuse, then it means that it’s not that she can’t ever escape, it’s that this time she did something wrong and was caught. An excuse means hope isn’t entirely extinguished. 

Yet, when she finds out the ‘thing that went wrong’ was Stolis, that her own familiar had been the one to tell Lucifer about her and Adam 2.0, is a direct metaphor for an abuse victim discovering that their friends are, in fact, the abuser’s friends rather than their own, the discovery that she has no supporters around her, that her social circle is a false circle. It is confined to simply Stolis with Lilith, but he is, admittedly, the only one in her intimate circle. 

But abusers do this: they surround the victim with people they believe are friends, people that they will share things with and talk to, treat as a confidante, when in reality, these ‘friends’ are false and in fact serve as spies to the abuser, just as Stolis was resurrected under the pretence of returning a companion to Lilith but in truth it was just so Satan could know everything she was doing. Eventually, with this abuse technique, the victim begins to feel that they can trust no one, reach out to no one. Lilith was betrayed by her own familiar; that is how deep the control and abuse goes in this relationship, that even that bond cannot be trusted. 

She then proceeds to put on the enchanted ring like it is a wedding ring while saying ‘He took away the one thing I loved’. This is an abuse victim who has lost the one person who didn’t use her, didn’t abuse her, he was the one person who was her escape and so, yes, she even grew to love him (and as I have said, it could have been anyone who treated her equally and had interest in her. That love would have grown with anyone in this situation, it is the way she is treated by the person rather than the person itself that makes this dynamic turn romantic). Because of this, because she had equality and free will with this person, she feels comforted by the feeling of the ring, not just keeping him close but keeping that feeling close. 

Now, when an escape route for a victim is entirely ruined, usually one of the following things happen. Either they resign themselves to this life they are stuck with, and give up the fight entirely, or they try to resist in one last do-or-die attempt. Lilith chooses the latter, even burning everything to do with Adam in order to give her the emotionless strength to destroy Lucifer’s love as he destroyed hers (the fact Lucifer’s love is his daughter, not romantic, is an interest point, because, in retrospect, it emphases the familial dynamic with Adam 2.0, as family, traditionally, means equality, everyone together).

“You did this to me; you made me weak, Adam”

She places blame entirely on Adam 2.0 because she needs to do this in order to survive. She calls herself ‘a grieving widow’, which is her admitting to herself she saw their partnership as legitimate, she had been making official plans around it, she had been making a new life for herself, away from Satan and now she is genuinely mourning not just that life, but the person she was going to make it with. But specifically the use of the term ‘grieving widow’ is especially revealing as it shows how much her dynamic with Adam 2.0 was more of a relationship than her ancient dynamic with Lucifer. Because with Lucifer it is just abuser and victim. And that’s all she has again. 

But being a ‘grieving widow’ is weak in her eyes and she needs to be strong. A lot of abuse victims need to cut out parts of themselves to survive; sometimes it’s the ability to feel things at all, sometimes it’s their empathy for others, something it’s their own goodness, their own morality, anything that they feel will help make the abuse more bearable. 

“I was getting very comfortable in this woman’s flesh suit”

Not only is this Lilith admitting she was starting to enjoy parts of Mary’s life, the line between them blurring a little, but by this phrase we see that Lilith is choosing to forget she was ever just a woman herself, ever just a witch. Being Mary was making her remember that, and this is another part of herself she needs to cut out to survive, she believes; her humanity (because remember, Lilith does have humanity, as that was what she was created as originally and, technically, that humanity is still there, it’s just been pressed down by experiences and abuse and time). Yet as she says this, she is stroking the doll, the gift from Adam 2.0, affectionately, which betrays her words. This wasn’t about getting comfortable, or forgetting she’s in a ‘flesh suit’, she genuinely felt something here, something unquantifiable, and something that can’t be so easily ignored. 

So, because she still has these feelings, all different ones for different reasons, but all very much making her feel things, which, right now, she is reasoning it’s something that will make her weak,  she literally tears them up and destroys them, physically burning them, declaring that she’s now remembering ‘who and what I truly am’, but this isn’t true. What she is remembering to be now is what and who Lucifer has made her into, it’s not actually her. Her is who she is when she’s free from him. 

She then says ‘time to burn the monster’, which with all this in consideration, could mean the monster she has been made into, or that the monster is Lucifer, or it could be the monster is Sabrina because of what Lucifer wants her to be. We, the audience, could even take it to mean all three. But, regardless, as she burns everything, we see a woman who has decided no one can save her, but she isn’t saying ‘no one can save me I’m stuck here’, she is saying ‘no one can save me, I’m going to save myself’. 

And what’s her first step in doing this? Making her own person to control; and this is where we see what can happen with abuse victims-- the abuse cycle begins, where the victim then becomes the abuser. Although, with Lilith it’s not with any actual person, it’s with a creature she creates, just as she was created, well...more specifically how Eve was created; with a rib. And it’s no small coincidence that she has to kill a man to make this creature.

Lilith: I’m your Mother. Do you love me? Adam 3.0: (nods) Lilith: Then you’ll do what I tell you to do. 

This is the only kind of love (With the exception of Adam 2.0, who, technically was loving Mary, not Lilith. Although he seemed to be really into the Lilith changes in Mary?) that Lilith has ever known. And we love from experience, the love we know is the love we show. And so abuse victims, to quote Regina Mills (another complicated character who has abusive and grooming relationships that dictate the Evil Queen she becomes) ‘don’t know how to love very well’. If all you have known is abusive, controlling love, then that’s what you think love is, and that’s what you repeat. That is an abuse cycle.

Now, we come to when we see Lilith with Lucifer properly for the first time. As in, it’s now him permanently here, and him as the man she recalls in her memories, only we discover despite his beautiful face, he just as dark and abusive as ever. 

Lilith: Those things you promised me are going to Sabrina Lucifer: It’s not your turn Lilith: Nor ever. Begging the question; why her?

Abuse victims who feel they have no escape, who have resigned themselves to this life, tend to get defensive against and jealous of other women coming into their life and threatening to take their place. It’s basically the feeling of ‘I put up with this abuse, but at least I reap the benefits’, but when a newcomer arrives, it’s now ‘I suffer the abuse but someone else is reaping the benefits’. It prompts irrational jealousy, which is, personally, what I feel we’ve seen with Lilith towards Sabrina throughout the series; her flip of emotions towards her, her erratic behaviour with her, change of vibes etc, is all linked towards this irrational jealousy caused by the fight for importance, for any kind of benefit,  within an abusive dynamic. 

“Self pity bores me, Lilith. And you know what I’m like when I’m bored”

Lucifer grabs Lilith’s chin forcefully, with a menacing firmness, as he says this, and lifts it, forcing her to look at him. The entire body language as well as the verbal language, the low, implied threat, is so demonstrative of extreme domestic abuse, so much so that it’s entirely impossible to ignore. He is controlling her, his menacing air is as blatant as is her tension, her fear. We see Lilith constantly strong against others, defiant, but here she doesn’t resist, she lets him lift her chin because she has no choice and she opens her eyes to look at him directly, because she knows avoiding him, refusing to look, will make it all worse, he’ll be even angrier, and then she immediately agrees to what he asks of her. If we only had hints and metaphors for abuse here, here we see it beyond metaphors and parallels; it is very literally demonstrated. Long time abuse victims, those who have suffered it constantly, repeatedly, over a long period of time, reach a point where they no longer have to be ‘controlled’ by physical abuse; the threat of it is enough, even the hint of the threat. 

“No good to run; believe me, I’ve tried....Come now, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting...and now you have to come to him or he will come to you and destroy everyone and everything in his path”

This language is extremely resigned-- we saw Lilith broken before, but still with fight left in her, but this time the fight is gone entirely. And we also see her resignation to another victim being made. Yes, Sabrina is her ‘competition’ and taking her promised place as Queen of Hell, but the entire dynamic here can also be taken as an abuse victim bearing witness to another victim being added and having nothing they can do to stop it. The only power they have is to try and lessen the pain of the transition, given them the advice they didn’t get. 

When we have ‘The Beginning’ scene, Lilith says ‘I was his handmaiden and he was my master’, so that we see from the off, from mere language alone, that he has always controlled her through the illusion of partnership, which is exactly what abusers do. They don’t arrive and abuse immediately from the beginning, it’s subtle at first, disguised as simply being caring and protective; ‘I just want to take care of you’, ‘You’re so small, I can protect you’, ‘you mustn’t do that; I’ll do that for you’. 

Sabrina: Why do you still serve him, even now? Lilith: It’s all I’ve ever known

This is very much a typical abuse victim answer, and the entire framing of the scene, the way Lilith and Sabrina are sat in the chairs, the luxurious surroundings, the waiting on the other side of a curtain to be called by the ‘boss’ echoes a human trafficking scenario, with the new ‘livestock’ being brought for presentation, the former victim, ‘promoted’ to assistant, and thus made to recruit the newer ones. This is especially emphasised when Lilith nods at Sabrina and she steps through the curtain to meet Lucifer who is sat there like the head pimp of hell. 

“He’s not a God. He’s just a fallen angel”

This quote is extremely important, because it’s a reiteration of her moment in the bathroom where she reminds herself that Lucifer isn’t everywhere and can’t see everything, but also because it’s her admitting aloud, to other people, that Satan may be powerful but he isn’t all powerful. She is admitting her abuser is beatable; this, along with sharing his weak spots with the Spellmans, is her breaking away from the abuse

But when it fails and Lilith is sent to prepare Sabrina for the wedding regardless, we see her crying at the dress, because despite everything, despite admitting he is an abuser, talking of gutting him, sharing his weak spots, she still wants to be his Queen (well, Queen in general, but at this point she believes he is going to rule, so Queen only exists besides him) because despite everything, abuse victims do often return to their abusers, or at least still want their love, especially if they know they are trapped with them regardless (a logic of making abuse easier if there’s love there, at least).

Yet despite this, despite this pain, despite still wanting his love, despite wanting to be Queen, Lilith manages to say to Sabrina ‘You’ll make a wonderful Queen’ and it does sound genuine, resigned, yes, but also genuine. This is partially because she knows Sabrina no more wants the title than Lilith wants to lose it. There is a break of the abuse cycle here (the cycle she did continue with her Adam-Monster) as she is broken, losing, but she manages to wish Sabrina well, perhaps even manage to suffer less than Lilith did. In the room we have two resigned women, two women abused by the same man, together, allied even if they don’t win. 

Sabrina, however, hasn’t been broken yet, she hasn’t suffered yet as Lilith has, she hasn’t known Lucifer as long as Lilith has, and that’s what she observes

“Plucky till the end. But you’ll learn. He always gets his way”

There’s something so entirely resigned and cynical about that, and it also implies that the rebellions we have seen against Lucifer in Part 2 are, perhaps, not Lilith’s only rebellions, that there had been times in the past when she has tried to win. We can imagine that after leaving the garden because she refused to submit to First Adam, and then agreeing to serve Lucifer because he promised to make her Queen, she must have realised, after time, that she was being to Lucifer what she refused to be with First Adam, that she has ended up with the same fate regardless. And Lilith is a strong person, she’s strong, she knows her own mind, she’s determined, we can easily imagine she began to push against him, to try and claim what was promised, to get her equality again, but like with abuse victims who fight back in the beginning, they are beaten down so many times, that their rebellions become smaller and smaller until they stop rebelling at all.

When it is the Masquerade scene and the coronation, Lilith is constantly tense, holding back a wave of understandable emotions, ranging from fear to jealousy to resignation to sadness to determination, but as she is feeling all these things, Sabrina looks back at her through her mask and smiles, she even looks at Lilith as the crown is placed on her head; there is an alliance here, two victims of abuse at the hands of the same abuser standing together and Sabrina’s gazes are showing that support. The fellow victim saying I am with you and I am fighting beside you.

And I think it’s as much this visual confirmation of alliance and support, as well as things that happened in the lead up to this moment, that prompts Lilith into her ultimate defiance against Lucifer. A defiance that is for Sabrina’s sake more than her own; she physically, by her own magic, holds Satan back, stopping him from attacking Sabrina physically. We can presume he has attacked Lilith physically before-- it’s evidenced in the way he grabbed her chin, the way she cleans his feet, the way she flinches when he gets angry or comes too close-- but she uses her power to stop him from ever even starting on Sabrina. Not a hair is harmed on her head. 

“Hold that nasty thought; I can’t restrain him forever”

The long-term victim is finally standing up to her abuser, calling him out for what he is, and she is doing it for herself yes, but she’s also doing it to help another victim. In a mundane drama, this would be the moment where the script would depict the abuser about to hit a young girl, the new girl, and the older victim would bash him around the back of the head with a bat. We’ve all seen those types of scenes, and this is what we’re seeing here as well...only magically. 

Before, even when Lilith advised them how to stop him, how to attack him, she stayed hidden, she didn’t risk exposing her rebellion in case it went wrong, she hedged her bets still out of fear and caution. But in this ultimate moment, it all goes, she doesn’t backtrack, she doesn’t go back to his side and beg forgiveness; she defies him openly and completely. She finally breaks free of the abusive relationship, and considering Lilith was originally created to be the ultimate symbol of womanhood and maternity, I think it’s incredibly important that she does all this in a moment of protecting Sabrina rather than herself. It’s Lilith returning to her true nature; she is the First Woman, she is the woman who said women were equal, she is the woman who would not submit to a man, she is the First Witch, the first to have power, the first to heal. 

And from this, it is extremely important that not only is Lilith crowning herself, taking power for herself without needing any man or any coronation but her own, but that it is Sabrina who hands her the crown. This is two women having defeated the man who had power over them and them each giving one another power in return. They restore each other. This is an entirely female moment. 

“I restore all your witchly powers, so now you may have both power and freedom. And may you never give up either again”

And for the conclusion of Lilith’s abuse narrative, this quote is so incredibly important. Not only is it Lilith restoring Sabrina’s powers and thus showing she no longer sees her as a threat or competition, she no longer views her through jealousy over the attention of a man, but she is also stating she has her freedom. Satan has always demanded they sign the Book of the Beast to get the most out of their powers, he demanded in exchange for power they must always do what he asks, that they belong to him. Lilith is Queen of Hell, but she doesn’t ask for anyone to give up their freedom; she took power for herself way back in The Beginning, and so the new witches can have power for themselves as well. It is very revealing of the type of ruler Lilith will be, a victim who has learned from her abuse rather than choosing to repeat it (giving Sabrina back Ms Wardwell, recalling that she was her favourite teacher, is also further evidence of this)

May Sabrina never give up her power or freedom again, yes, but it is, obviously, implied that Lilith is also speaking of herself and that she will never give up her power or freedom again either as she did that day when she agreed to be Lucifer’s handmaiden. 

[dilldaydreamer-blog]

Crystal Clear

((In which PI has a meeting with Droog about Aradia’s Death.  Starring @talldarkloathsome​ @undertakinggraveshift​ ))

Your name is Pembrooke, and you're currently sitting at a table in Moreli's Diner at 5th.  The diner is fairly empty around your area...a detail most likely because you pulled badge and rank and told the staff you wanted it so.  It's a very surreal feeling, having enough authority to be able to pull moves like that.  You almost can see why the mobsters love it so, it is certainly thrilling. Your morail is with you, as you may have flung him into the car the second you got the reply so you could get there pronto.  The last thing you wanted to be was late.  And the earlier the arrived, the more likey you could get your anxious social speaking bees under control.  The pressure was on, this was not a simple casual meet n greet and not even close to the D&D game you had just a month prior been chattering to Droog about running. In the back of your head you are already re-arranging that because that may be off the table depending on how things go. You sit, and wait. Unsure if you really have the means to stop a mob from tearing the city apart but also ready to do what you can to prevent this city you love from turning into a pile of ash.

Death

Good thing Death was already dressed in his Sunday best, because to him, appearances were important no matter the situation. He was meeting a grieving mobster after all, and the situation required looking professional. An apology was given to the staff as they were vacated, and Death did his best to assure everyone that everything was okay, meeting with the manager even to exchange information to let them know when it was fine to come back. Patting Pembrooke on the shoulder and giving him a smile, Death settled near the door to the diner instead, waiting to meet Droog there so that he could open the door for him and lead him to the chosen table once the mobster had arrived.

DD

You arrive, for once in your life, underdressed compared to those around you.  You trudge in from the snow without so much as a coat or a scarf, though you do not look the least bit cold.  The tie Slick had brought for you hangs loose about your unsecured collar.  Your hair, air dried, has not been brushed, and looks it.  No jewelry, no expensive color to announce your presence three feet ahead of you. Just you.  Hands shoved deep in your pockets, cigarette hanging from your lip, looking the very picture of a man who has not slept in nearly three days. When you enter, your deadened eyes look to Death with something that cannot be called mild interest.  A blip in your line of vision, seen once, and then fading from view.  You nod to him, and you say nothing.

PI

You look up, see him, and immediately know this meeting is going to be short.  You had taken the time to have coffee prepared at the table but even this you expect won't get touched.   At least the staff will not be busy.  It doesn't go past your notice that this is perhaps the most raw and perhaps even vulnerable you've ever seen Droog...and that is saying something considering you were there at the Festival when his arm was removed. The script you had planned was already crumbling as you realize you are not going to be talking to the proverbial Dignitary...the savvy silver-tongued business man who once even according to history smooth talked his way to the Prospitian Court and turned the tides of a war.  You're talking to a man who lost something more precious than any wealth this city could provide and has the means to make this city pay for his loss in blood. Your posture stiffens, you give him a nod.

"Afternoon.  Thank you for your time and this meeting." The tone of your voice is unwavering, a small miracle you will thank later after you have your customary 'oh god social speaking heebidy jeebidy' anxiety release dance.  It is best to just keep things to the point, you have no doubt he cares nothing right now for condolences from you.

Death

Death nodded to the man who looked the part of death more than Death himself. His expression was sympathetic and with a motion of your hand after waiting for Droog to slip inside so  Death doesn't unceremonially slam the door on his ass, the coroner lead him to the table for him to take a seat. He settled in beside Pembrooke after, feeling it best to take a seat rather than loom over the two.

DD

You slide into your seat unceremoniously as well, a lackluster thump of flesh on lacquered wood than a graceful slide one might expect from the former Dignitary himself.  You do not give the men before you the courtesy before taking a cigarette from your breast pocket and lightly it with a flick of your prosthetic fingers together.  The end of the black pill glows purple. At least you blow the smoke toward the ceiling and not toward them.  But you don't talk yet, not even to return the greeting.  Even as you drag the ash tray across the table toward yourself, you simply stare, blankly but not without something distinctly sour drawing across your brow, between the two men. For a long moment, the silence grows in the air.  And then you say, with a voice uncharacteristically gruff, "Gentlemen." As good of a 'Out with it without being outright rude' as they were going to get.

PI

You watch the man quietly, taking in the details and memorizing what you can of his bodylanguage.  The hairs on the back of your neck prickle, a sensation that even after over a decade in this form still feels like a surreal novelty at times.  The combination of disheveled without regard concerns you.  Droog had always been a man of composure, a creature who had always tried to strive for a flawless demeanor.  To be in such a state yet uncaring who seems him... Your posture straightens and you clear your throat as the smoke drifts upwards.    "I'll cut to the chase.  You and I both know whoever did this is a dead man.  Even if my men were somehow to arrest him, put him in the farthest cell on another planet...I have little to no doubt you and yours would get ahold of them.  Which isn't to say I condone the action, but I'm not a fool." Exhale, inhale.  "What I am though is concerned you and yours are going to tear this city apart  trying to track down whoever was responsible.  And I'd like to avoid a witch hunt or a riot where innocent people get caught in the middle. So I'm asking for some kind of way to help sort this with minimal casualties.  What happened was and is deplorable, and I do want to see the ones responsible paying for their deeds. But I don't want this city to burn over the actions of one man.  We want to help, but I have no doubt that the biggest leads to what happened are yours to give."

Death

This is about what Death had expected. He had seen what this man was capable of time and time again- he had seen what all of what Droog and the Crew were capable of, but at the end of the day, they were still people who felt love and pain as anyone else. Why would Droog act any differently than any other parent at the news of their child's death... especially something so... outrageously brutal. And to be the one to carry her... Death had definitely lingered as the flames had been lit. He continued his silence, lacing his fingers together on the table. If the time called for it, Death would have praised Pembrooke's way of handling the matter, but that would be for another time.

DD

You listen, or at least do a passable job of pretending you're listening, with all the world still stifled and distant as it had been that night in the snow.  Deadened.  You can't even make a show of looking at him; distracted as you are, your eyes have drifted off to the grey skies and the snow drifting down onto the blanketed cars and the streets run a disgusting grey with dirty slush. After the Inspector lapses in his speech, the silence creeps in once more.  It coils about the lazily circling ceiling fan as the smoke does and descends between the lot of you.  You can't stop thinking of the freezer. You shift, after some time, opening your suit jacket to pull out your cell phone.  It is certainly nicer than regulation allows, but the image gallery you pull up and hold out to show to them now are far more pressing.  There is so, so much red.  Wordlessly, you flip through the photos:  the trail and the rose petals, the photo strips in the blood, the writing on the wall. Aradia, as she was displayed for you. Lingering there on that last photo, you turn the phone away from them at last, staring down upon it.  It's all you've done for over two days.  You say, around the filter of the cigarette chewed into a nasty mess between your teeth, "All due respect, I already know who did it.  But it isn't just the actions of one man that lead to this moment, and I think you know that full well."

PI

Since this whole ordeal began, there had been a pit in your stomach. Like a small seed evergrowing and tilling the soil as more information became relevant and the clues started falling into place.  As the phone is pulled out and you see the visceral montage, you can feel the pit in your stomach blossom as it churns your insides and you aren't able to hide the expressions that cross your face.

Some people say that it gets easier, seeing death or the scenes of the crime.  Perhaps they were just lucky, as it had never been the case for you.  Never been the case seeing the face of those who came across the scene and would never be the same.  Seeing what some of the sickest minds sometimes do in this city. As the phone turns away, you close your eyes and turn away for a moment as you process this information. Damnit. This was about as much as you expected but also more than you wanted.  Nevermind the fact Droog has technically destroyed an entire crime spree and did public property damage. Or the fact he has all the evidence on his person.  There has and likely never will be a way to ask a grieving father for well...that. You remove your glasses to set them on the table as you rub the bridge of your nose. "I..." You inhale deep and look back to him. "I'm not going to make a fool of myself giving some lecture about justice to one such as yourself.  But I am going to ask if there is anything we can do to keep blood from spilling on the streets.  What has happened is deplorable. And I and my fellow officers do want to not leave this deed unpunished.  But what we can or cannot do depends on you and yours.  Right now you do have the law on your side Mister Spektor. But if you take things into your own hands..." You put your glasses back on, trying your best to not think about how you'd feel if this had been Jude in those photos. Or Elliot.  "Mister Spektor. Please believe me when I say I genuinely want to help."

Death

Death knitted his brows, and for a moment it took him a second to figure out what to do from there. He saw this, handled his reaction then... mentally and mostly focusing on Aradia's spirit. What would be a normal response now? In the end, he decided it was better to keep a controlled look of pained sympathy rather than retching. However, he did want to reach out and take Droog's hand. He also refrained from that too. He gently bumped the side of Pembroke's thigh to Pem's own. You're okay.

DD

Help. The word brings a small breath of laughter to your mouth, but the sound falls flat as it trips over your tongue.  You sniff once, palming at your mouth, as you swallow the sick that's been ever-present in your throat since that day.  You've already gotten all of that out, Diamonds.  You can't be doing this shit again, especially not here in front of these guys. Swallow it all down, and sigh deeply. "You're good people, Ingleton.  For as much shit as I give you, you really do have my deepest respects, for a law man."  The cigarette is smoldering between your fingers, and you ash it.  "And for what it's worth, I appreciate the kindness you are extending me.  So I'll extend a kindness to you in turn, by telling you this:" You stand from the chair and you lean forward over the table, palms spread and splayed across the table.  You're close enough to see yourself in his eyes. "Pursuing this is going to get you hurt, Ingleton, and it ain't gonna be me doing the hurting.  Those green motherfuckers are too fucking stupid to realize that you putting that salt-encrusted shit-for-brains in the clink for life would be in his best interest.  Because when I finally get my hands on him, he's gonna wish he'd been given the chair, cuz that's gonna be quicker and less painful than what I intend to do with him and all the rest of his sorry fucking organization." You straighten yourself once more.  "Are we clear, Inspector?"

PI

Some say this city has a way of changing people, and you cannot even argue it.  Here you are, a far cry from your first few months on Derse as a bright eyed bushy tailed investigator.  You're quite certain your former self would have withered on the spot being in this situation, face to face with one of the biggest crimelords as he says all the things you both dreaded and expected. He's right.  In all of it.  And you're almost upset at how true that will all play out.  That despite this kindess extended, you and he both know you're still going to try anyways. And fail. And get hurt. Scratch that, you are rather upset. No almost about it.  The temptation bubbles up to through out all pleasantries.  Bring up how Droog's fire destroyed so much evidence. That him holding onto Aradia's body and those photos could count as obstructing justice and tampering with evidence.  Hold him accountable to arson....just something to momentarily pretend this situation isn't so far out of your hands. But instead your face is emotionless, not even a nod given as you respond. "Clear as diamonds....Droog."

[tlbodine]

Writing Disabled Characters

Okay. So. I am unwisely wading into this because I’ve seen way too much about this on my dash this week, and I feel like there are some really good points being made but also a lot of people getting angry and talking past each other. 

In case you’ve missed the debate up to this point, it goes something like this: 

Person A: I wish there were more representation of disability in fiction. 

Person B: It just isn’t realistic, though. How is a disabled person going to do all of the cool stuff a story character is supposed to do? 

Person A: Actually it isn’t that hard. You can do this and this and this. Also what about This Piece of Popular Media Already Featuring a Disabled Protagonist? 

Person B: But that media doesn’t count because that person Isn’t Really Disabled and also wtf why do I have to write disabled characters into everything? Why does every story suddenly have to have all this representation shoe-horned in there?! WHY CAN’T I JUST TELL A STORY?!?!?! 

Person A: *now visibly angry* Just admit you’re being ableist. 

Person B: You’re not even answering my question so obviously you’re just being a jerk right now and hiding behind labels 

*cat-fight snarling and cartoon dust cloud ensues* 

Okay y’all. We’re done. We’re finished. All of you go to your corners and calm the fuck down. 

Let’s take a deep goddamn breath and talk about disability* in fiction. Buckle in, because this is a long one. 

*(Note: I think all of this also probably applies, in one way or another, to any other type of representation, be it racial or sexual or whatever, but right this second I’m gonna be focusing on disability because I want a can of worms not a dumptruck of worms) 

Nobody is saying that your story has to have a disabled character in it (and if someone actually is saying that, they’re being kind of a dick). 

There is no Representation Police that will show up at your doorstep and pound on your door and confiscate your laptop if you are not hitting the appropriate quota of disabled characters in your fiction. If you don’t want to tell a story with a disabled character in it, that is your prerogative, and literally no one is going to hold a gun to your head and force you to do it. 

However, you gotta accept some responsibility that you are choosing not to write a disabled character. Because there is nothing stopping you from including one, aside from your own decision not to do so. 

And maybe you should take a step back and ask yourself why you are making the decision not to write a disabled character. 

Do you think it would just be physically impossible for a person with a disability to do all of the things you need your character to do? You might be right! On the other hand, someone with no legs reached the summit of Mt. Everest, an athlete with a wooden leg won 6 Olympic medals in 1904, and a man with cerebral palsy traveled across 20 European countries in a motorized wheelchair. 

Just for starters. 

No, not all disabled people are going to be capable of amazing feats of whatever, and no, disabled people don’t exist to provide inspiration porn etc. etc., there’s stuff to unpack here, but my point is that physical disability does not immediately preclude a character from being able to do cool and heroic shit. So if that’s your justification for not writing a disabled character into your story, maybe you just need to do a bit more research because you don’t realize what’s actually possible. 

Have you never seen a disabled character in media and you’re afraid it would be too fucking weird or niche or only appeal to the SJW-type subset and not have mass commercial appeal? 

You know what? I actually sympathize. I totally get that concern. You don’t want to look like you’re pandering. You’re just here to tell a good story, you don’t want to have to shoe-horn in a character just because somebody told you that not putting them in was ableist. 

But like. There are already highly successful, commercial, mainstream pieces of media with disabled characters in them. 

Professor X. Bucky Barnes. Edward Elric. Matt Murdock. Bran Stark. Gregory House. Toothless (and Hiccup by the end). Just to name a couple off the top of my head. 

And you know, their representation isn’t always perfect and ideal (it always bothered me that Daredevil’s blindness is often conveniently ignored for example) but it’s already there. In wildly successful pieces of media. The presence of a disabled character does not automatically make your story less commercially viable. 

Would making your character disabled mess up the story you’re trying to tell in some way? 

Be honest with yourself. Would it really? Why? 

Maybe you’re absolutely right! Maybe you’re trying to tell a story about a very specific thing, and introducing extra variables into it would detract from that story. And you know what? That’s totally fine. It is absolutely fine to write your story however the fuck you want to write it. 

But if you don’t want to write it because: 

It seems unrealistic

It seems too logistically difficult

“People like that wouldn’t exist in this setting” 

It literally never occurred to you and now you’re embarrassed and defensive about it

You are vaguely viscerally uncomfortable at the idea for a reason you can’t explain

Then, well. Maybe you have some internalized ableism and you need to tend to that. Or maybe you just haven’t thought past the surface, and you should take some time to figure out why you forgot that disabled people exist. Or maybe you’re being intellectually lazy. And maybe all of those reasons are why disabled people are angry at you, and maybe taking a second to (shudder) check your privilege and see where they’re coming from is more important than rushing to defend your own wounded ego. 

Because, I feel like I need to reiterate: Nobody is forcing you to write stories in any particular way - which means that everything in your story is part of your own conscious or unconscious decision-making, and you need to own that and accept responsibility for it one way or another. 

And you know what? 

You in the back! You over there with your disabled characters! You, who is at this very moment inching your mouse cursor over the reblog button with the intention of smugly pointing out that your book is full of disabled characters, and you always care about representation. Good for you! Also, I do not care. Until you also tell me what the book is about, and why this character is interesting, and your writing is solid -- I do not give even the single tiniest of fucks. 

Because writing diverse media isn’t enough to make it good. 

Diversity is not a sole goddamn selling point for a story. 

And if the only thing you can tell me about your story is how much representation is in it, I have no way of knowing whether or not it’s any good or whether I’ll enjoy it, so you don’t get to claim any kudos points. 

You gotta ask yourself the same question as hypothetical Mr. “That’s Just Not Realistic” McGee over there: 

Am I writing this just to get brownie points with someone? 

Am I writing this to target a specific niche (ie, a disability-focused magazine)? 

Am I writing this to feel morally superior? 

Am I writing this because I’m disabled and I want to tell a story about someone like me? 

Am I writing this because I want to understand disability better? 

Am I writing this because I want to explore some or another topic or theme or trope and it seemed interesting? 

Am I writing this because it would work with my setting so why the hell not? 

I don’t care what the answer is, but you should. Art demands intellectual honesty. Know your motives and fucking own them. If you’re writing something in a particular way so that it will get reblogged by a particular person? Just admit that. If you’re writing something in a particular way because it’s your experience and you want to write a goddamn story about it? Say that! 

But don’t let yourself get caught in the trap of believing you’re morally superior to somebody else because you’re Doing This One Thing Right, okay? 

Do I have any advice on writing disabled characters? 

Damn right I do. I mean. You know me. I’ve got advice about fuckin’ everything. 

But that’ll have to wait for a future post, because this one’s gone on way too damn long already. 

[drabbles-and-shit]

The Mailman is Really Attractive and Dean is Smitten

When Dean first saw the new mailman that Saturday afternoon, his body had such an immediate and visceral reaction, he had to excuse himself to his bedroom for a little quality time with his right hand.

Seriously, it was insane; nothing like that had ever happened to Dean. He only figured out that he was attracted to both guys and guys about a year ago, but he’d never even had that sort of response to a girl. And what’s worse? It was one of the best experiences he’s ever had jacking off.

Like, no shit, that mailman was the hottest human Dean ever laid eyes on, and he wasn’t even Dean’s type! Dean had always gone for the petite guys, because you know, he was a dom. Well, with guys he was. He had actually started experimenting letting girls top him, and much to his own embarrassment, he actually really liked it. There was something about someone else being in control that was hot as fuck. But, just girls. He wanted nothing in his asshole, ever, thank you very much. But anyway, even though he only ever had pursued twink-types, the mailman was buff as fuck. He had looked like he was about Dean’s height, and the summer heat-induced sweat made for a uniform that clung to his body just so Dean could see rippling muscle underneath. And the shorts, no matter how silly looking for being as short as they were, let Dean see the legs of either a runner who swims in his spare time or just the legs of an actual Adonis. And his forearms! God, so strong and tanned and--Dean noticed he was developing another situation down south and forced himself to concentrate on gross things like old people making out or his brother Sam’s face. Good, good; the situation went back down.

~***~

An uneventful week later, and Dean was back looking out his front window, shamelessly watching and waiting for the new mailman. He had no idea if he was actually going to come around again; hell, he might have just been filling in that one day for the old guy that Dean normally saw bringing the mail.

But Dean’s curiosity was rewarded, because after about ten minutes of casual spying, he noticed the mailman walking up the sidewalk with his messenger bag over one shoulder, radiating sexual appeal. God, he was just as hot as last week.

Oh my god, wait, he walked by the mailbox and towards the door. He was coming to the door. He probably had a package or something. But not the porno kind. Shit, what if he saw Dean last week? Dean jumped behind his couch as fast as humanly possible and tried to not breathe, because nobody was home. No one. Was. Home.

The doorbell rang, and Dean sucked his breath in and froze. Shit, the TV was on. He had completely forgotten it, and now the sexy mailman was going to know he was hiding like a kid afraid of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he was going to judge him ughhhh. Suffice to say, Dean was fucking embarrassed.

He waited a solid five minutes before sneaking back to the window and checking the mailman was gone before opening his front door and grabbing the package off the step. His embarrassment was forgotten quickly, because it was his Star Trek phaser from ThinkGeek! Charlie was going to be sooooo jealous, and he couldn’t fucking wait to gloat. He snapped a picture of it and shot it off to her.

Dean: Looks like I win the gayness contest, because I can set phasers to STUN #2fab4u

Charlie: Oh my god, it came!!

Charlie: You had better bring that to work Monday so I can play with it

Dean: Only if you promise to not break it

Charlie: Btw did you see the hottie today??

Dean: Duh where did you think the package came from?

Charlie: DID YOU TALK TO HIM?!?!

Dean: You kidding? No way, Jose

Charlie: Ugh you’re no fun

Charlie: Wait. I have an idea! You should write him a letter and put it in your mailbox so he can read it when he brings your mail!!

Dean: Do you even know me? Charmando, I wouldn’t do something like that if my life depended on it

Charlie: You’re such a scaredy cat, Winchester

Dean: And proud

~***~

Drunk Dean sometimes did things that Sober Dean had to pay for, especially when his best friend/arch nemesis Charlie was involved. They always went for drinks together after work on Fridays, and somehow Dean always ended up being the only one of the two of them that did stupid, drunk person stuff. He was beginning to suspect that maybe she didn’t actually even drink, just pretended to so that she could talk his more malleable alter ego into doing what she wanted him to. Like, just a random example, writing a note to the sexy mailman.

He was going to kill her. Saturday morning met him with a skull splitting headache, and more importantly, oodles of regret. Because yes, he could vaguely remember sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper last night and writing… something. God, he couldn’t remember what the hell he had written. Maybe he had enough time to run out to the mailbox and take it out before it was too late!

Dean pulled on his sweatpants and charged out into the painfully bright midday sun. Despite his body’s many protests, he made it to the mailbox in record time, but it was for nothing, because when he opened it up, the note was gone and had been replaced by what looked like a bill and some coupons for pizza. He couldn’t really be sure, because his eyes felt like he was stabbing them full of needles. He defeatedly walked back into his house and pulled out his phone.

Dean: Dude. What happened last night. Tell me or I’m going to send your girlfriend your prom photos

He waited for a response while chewed discontentedly on a piece of cold bacon from the fridge and sipping a glass of water. He didn’t have to wait for long though, and he soon heard the telltale R2-D2 beep that was Charlie’s text alert noise.

Charlie: You were so plastered, my man. It was wild.

Charlie: I take it you only just woke up and didn’t have time to get the letter out of the box?

Dean: Shit, so that really happened? Dear god, tell me I didn’t write anything too embarrassing?

Charlie: You politely told him you wanted to suck his dick

Dean: I’ve got the picture ready to send!

Charlie: Ugh, fine. No, all you said was that you thought he looked nice and were wondering what happened to the old guy who used to bring your mail. Tbh it was pretty cute. I love drunk you

Dean sighed in relief. It was still as embarrassing as balls, but maybe the guy will think Dean has a kid or something and they wrote it. He can only hope at this point.

~***~

When Dean got home from work Monday evening and opened up the mailbox, his hopes that the mailman would just ignore the letter were proven useless.

Sitting there in the box, on top of a classic car magazine he subscribed to, was a small blue envelope with no stamp and just his first name in rather lovely script in the middle. He ripped it open before he even got inside, because holy fuck, there’s no one who would drive by his house just to put a letter in my mail other than Mr. Sexypants. It read:

Dear Dean,

I’m guessing by your handwriting and subject matter that you’re either a child or a drunk man. If it’s the former, please tell your parents that I am not a pedophile. Please. If you’re an adult and just have terrible handwriting, I’m sorry for touching on a sore subject.

Anyway, Cain, your previous mail carrier, was only working your route temporarily. He actually is one of the higher-ups for the USPS and was delivering mail as a sort of extended vacation from management. Odd, I know.

I appreciate that you think I look nice, and if you’re the adult male who lives at this address, I think you do too. If you’re a child, I’m sure you look nice, but in a non-pedophilic way.

Yours,

Castiel

Oh my god, Dean was in love. Haha, just kidding. He’s not in love; what are you talking about? Totally not in love. Nope, not at all. He lunged inside, pulled off his jacket and tie, and began furiously debating whether or not to tell Charlie about this. On the one hand, she’s his only real friend besides his younger brother, who is constantly busy with lawyer-things. But on the other hand, she would totally gloat about this for the rest of her life. But fuck it, he needs to talk to someone about this, because he never has romance in his life!

Dean: Omg you’ll never believe what happened\\

Charlie: Ooh! What??!

Dean: Mr. Double Stuffed Hotness is named Castiel, and I might want to marry him

Charlie: HE WROTE BACK?!?! It’s fate, my young grasshopper

Dean: I’m gonna send you a pic of the letter he wrote back so you can help me figure out what to write back

\

Charlie: You had better let me be your best man!! AND let me officiate!!! I’m already planning my speech

Dean: Don’t get ahead of yourself… but I’m actually kind of psyched rn

And so the planning began. Eventually, they decided on a note that read the following:

Dear Castiel,

As you deduced, I was drunk. Don’t worry, I’ll tell my parents you aren’t a pedophile anyway, just in case. Of course, they’re both in their 60s and will probably also assume I’m drunk, but better safe than sorry.

Thank you for saying I look nice, though I can’t imagine when you’ve seen me. I’m normally at work when you bring the mail (around 1:30pm, right?), so have you seen me on a Saturday? Okay, you don’t need to answer, just in case you’re actually a stalker or something. It’s never good to confront the bad guy in horror movies, and I’ve learned my lesson.

Hey, is your name really Castiel, or is that a pseudonym? I googled it, and it’s the name of the Angel of Thursday? What’s so special about Thursdays?

Live long and prosper,

Dean

~***~

Dear Dean,

I’m very glad I won’t be going to jail for calling a child attractive. You can probably hear my sigh of relief from there.

I can neither confirm nor deny when/where I have seen you. Also, are you calling me the antagonist of a horror film? If so, please enlighten me on which one, because I’m rather a fan of being scared shitless, and I’m sure seeing myself as the murderer will make an horror viewing experience even more terrifying.

And yes, my name is really Castiel. Let’s just say my parents were hippies. Many people call me Cas, though, and my siblings call me Cassie. I don’t like my siblings very much.

What about you? Why are you named Dean? Did your parents hope you would create a list of exceptional people? Or perhaps they wanted you to grown up to resemble Dean Martin?

I’m sorry, I don’t know where all that rude sass came from; it’s been a long day.

Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan,

Cas

~***~

Mr. Spock,

I had a girlfriend named Cassie once! Sort that information away for a future test, I suppose. How many siblings do you have? I one brother, and he can be such a bitch sometimes, so I definitely get where you’re coming from.

As it happens, I’m named after my grandmother, Deanna. And I swear to god, if you make fun of me for that, I will, um, do something… I don’t know exactly what yet, but I’ll figure it out, and it’ll be awful, I promise!

So, is it really that hard being a mailman? (You said it had been a rough day.) I’m a mechanic, by the way. If you ever need to know anything about cars, just hit me up, and I’ll be happy to help. For a price… Ha, just kidding. Maybe…

Dammit Cas, I’m a mechanic, not a doctor!

Dean

~***~

Bones,

I find it slightly perturbing that my nickname is also the name of your ex. But I always ace tests, so I guess I’m glad to know it anyway.

I have 5 siblings. I know. Hippies don’t believe in birth control, I guess. But yes, family of 8, from Michael the oldest, down to Sam the youngest. Since I’m on the subject, I suppose I might as well list off all my siblings. There’s Mike, Gabe, Luce, me, Anna, and Sam, ranging in ages from 37 to 21. Oh, I’m the ripe old age of 29, by the way. Not that that matters. Jesus, this entire letter is me talking about my family, sorry.

And no, it’s not hard being a mailman, but it is hard having to take your beloved cat to the veterinarian because they’re refusing to eat, not having bowel movements, and rolling around on the floor, meowing in pain. The poor guy had a blockage and almost died. It was a tough day.

I might just take you up on your offer to help explain things about cars, because I am completely clueless about them. I drive an old clunker that eats gas money like nobody’s business, and I really need to get a new car as soon as possible.

Have you been at the Romulan ale again??

Cas

~***~

Castiel,

I know I signed my last note with a Bones reference, but make no mistake, I am 100% Kirk, and I would appreciate it if you referred to me as such. Thank you for not forcing me to pursue legal action.

Dude, my younger brother is named Sam! Well, technically he’s named Samuel, after our grandfather, but still. Weird. And I’m 32, so that’s cool I guess.

I’m sorry to hear about your cat; that sounds pretty awful. I’ve never really had pets, and I’m actually allergic to cats, but I remember when Sammy’s dog was hit by a car and how distraught he was. I’m guessing your cat is all right now, though? If so, I’m glad. If not, sorry for rubbing salt in the wound.

Dude, do not drive that car. Like, stop it now. Please, for the sake of car lovers everywhere. Take it down to Singer’s Auto Salvage Yard; Bobby is a friend of mine, and if you tell him I sent you, he’ll give you a good price for it, and then you can use that money to buy something that’s not a piece of shit.

*funny Star Trek reference here*

Captain James Tiberius Kirk

~***~

Jim,

Can you sense me rolling my eyes? Because there’s some serious ocular oscillation going on right now in reference to your threats.

And I shortened my Sam’s name, too. His full name is Samandriel. Hippies, am I right?

Yes, my cat is fine, thank Talos. He is my best friend, and I don’t think I would be able to function properly if something happened to him. He���s a black shorthair named Toothless, by the way. Yes, I’m a basic bitch. Bite me.

I’ll try and take your advice about the car. I think my car is actually the automobile form of Sauron’s ring of power, because every time I’ve tried to get rid of it, it talks me into keeping it. I know in my heart that it needs to be torn apart for scraps, that it is taking advantage of me and should be destroyed before it does something terrible, but it’s mine. My own. My...precious…

Oh, my biggest problem is that if I sell her, I don’t know anything about buying cars, so I’m afraid someone will take advantage of my naivete and sell me an equally shitty car for a ridiculous price. Any suggestions?

*I can do this too*

Spock Spock Spock-ity Spock

~***~

Spockity,

God, I wish my parents had been hippies. Instead they were hippos. Yep, I was adopted by a pair of hippopotami at the age of four. Don’t believe me? Ask the Topeka Zoo, and they’ll corroborate my story. (Please don’t actually do that; they might remember me from when I was a teenager and broke in there to try and pet the giraffes.)

And I will never judge anyone for loving How To Train Your Dragon, because that movie was legendary. Toothless is the cutest dragon probably ever, and Hiccup is such a dreamboat.

Um, we definitely need to get rid of that car. Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks! I’m trying to help you. And speaking of helping you, if you find a car and want to know just how swindled you’re going to be, just send me the information, and I can let you know if you should buy it or not!

So… what kind of music do you like? I’m a big classic rock fan, and if you aren’t I will become determined to change that about you.

Can we up switch references? Maybe Princess Bride or something?

Princess Buttercup

~***~

Buttercup,

I find your story inconceivable. But did you truly grow up in Kansas? Personally, I grew up in the wilds of Washington; Seattle, actually.

And good; I would be very upset with you if you didn’t love Toothless and Hiccup, though I must say Hiccup is not exactly my type. I like my men a little older than he (recall that I’m not a pedophile), and I think any man I may date should definitely be my size or larger, or else I might kill them accidentally in bed. Huh, I guess we haven’t really talked about sexuality ever, so sorry if that made you uncomfortable.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would actually send me your phone number or email or something, so I could send you the information on a car I’m seriously considering buying. If you’d rather not hand out such personal information, I completely understand though.

I confess I haven’t listened to much classic rock. I mostly listen to classical music, though I’ve been delving into the genre of lofi hiphop, and I actually really enjoy it.

As you wish,

Vizzini

~***~

Vizzini,

You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means…

Yes, I grew up in Kansas, a little town called Lawrence to be precise. And the bit about breaking into the zoo was real too, so please don’t report me.

And honestly, I’m kind of in a weird experimental stage with my sexuality right now. I know, that’s supposed to happen during college, but maybe I’m just not a normal guy, all right? Anyway, I think I’ve officially decided I’m bisexual, but who knows? Romance is tiring, but sex is fun, and I don’t really mind who the hole belongs to. Jesus, that sounded awful and disgusting; sorry. I’m not even really like that any more. I haven’t had a hookup for like three months, which has got to be some kind of record. Sorry, this I should stop writing while I have the chance.

Totally send me the deets about the car, man. My number is 1-866-907-3235

Dude, I’m going to indoctrinate you. You fucking need to listen to classic rock; it’s the stuff of gods. Maybe I’ll make you a mixtape or something so you can listen to all the best songs. Weird question: do you have a tape player? I’m kind of old fashioned, so yeah, I’m going to make you a cassette tape with my favorite Zepp tracks on it.

Mahwage, dah bwessed awangment,

The Dread Pirate Roberts

~***~

For some reason, it was taking Cas a long time to get back to Dean. They had kind of worked out an unspoken schedule by this point; one of them put a letter in the box Monday, the other responded by Wednesday, and then the first sent back a response the Friday of the same week. Basically three letter a week for the past month or so. No, that’s not weird or creepy for two adult men to do at all.

Dean had dropped off that last letter on a Monday, but no reply came on Wednesday. He tried to not let it bother him, thinking Cas was probably busy or something. But then there wasn’t a reply Thursday or Friday either, and he started to get a little miffed. The least Cas could have done was to text him now that he had his number, but noooo. Unfortunately, Dean had to be out of town that Saturday, so no confrontation could happen over the 1:30 mail delivery.

The next Saturday rolled around with no word from Cas again, and Dean was starting to get legitimately worried. He would have understood if the guy took some time off maybe for being sick or something, but two weeks? Nobody takes two weeks off, especially without telling their… friend? Suddenly, Dean’s ridiculous number of insecurities started blaring at him. What if he and Cas weren’t friends? What if he didn’t actually mean anything to Cas at all? He probably was just another drain on Cas’ time, and Cas had finally decided he’d had enough and didn’t want to talk to Dean anymore. Hell, he might have requested a different route because Dean was harassing him. Shit, of course all this was too good to be true. Dean never made friends; Charlie was the only acception to that painful trend, and he had no idea why she still hung out with him.

Dean knew those thoughts too well; he knew his own self-loathing always came around and wouldn’t leave until he started thinking about other things. So, he thought about Cas. It was almost 1:30, two weeks since he’d heard from him last, and he decided to camp out at the mailbox and wait for whoever came. He had to know if Cas was all right, at least. The guy was his friend, even if maybe Cas didn’t see him as one.

He didn’t have long to wait before seeing his old mailman (Cain, was it?) peddling a sleek bicycle down the sidewalk with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder.

“Um, hey, sorry to bother you. Cain, is it?” Dean fidgeted, feeling awkward as fuck.

“Yes, that’s me. Can I help you with something?” Huh, okay, Cain seemed like a pretty chill guy. Maybe Dean could actually avoid a panic attack from doing something this wild.

“Uh, yeah. Do you know Castiel? He brought mail on this route for a while? I just haven’t seen him in a while, and I was worried that something happened.” Dean was talking too fast, but he couldn’t help it, okay?

“I know Castiel, and I know he took off a few weeks. Don’t know why though; maybe a vacation or something. I wouldn’t worry about it though, if I were you.”

Oh Dean was gonna worry about it, no doubt about that. Because wow, he was glad Cas was all right and not dead somewhere, but Jesus, what kind of douchebag friend goes on an extended vacation without so much as a goodbye?? So yeah, Dean was going to worry about what he did wrong and why he never could keep friends, and why he was such a fucked up excuse for a human being. Awesome.

~***~

Dean was depressed. Charlie tried cheering him up but to no avail. He was just depressed. He actually took the day off on Monday, because he was such a fucking sissy who couldn’t deal with anything. God, no wonder Cas didn’t care about him. No one should care about him; he was so pathetic.

The doorbell rang. Dean lifted his head from the pillow it had been buried in for the entire first half of the day and decided he probably ought to answer the door, seeing as there was a 98% chance it was Charlie with pie and beer and a chick flick to make him feel better. God, she was too good for him; he didn’t deserve such a good friend.

He pulled the door open and was greeted by the invisible man; wait no, there was a package and a pile of mail on the front step. He sighed and picked it all up, then promptly dropped it all on the floor, shut the door, and collapsed on the couch. He didn’t feel like looking at the mail. He didn’t feel like doing anything except for sleeping. Ugh.

But maybe that package would cheer him up. He rolled his eyes at the tiny optimistic voice in his head and then rolled right off the couch and crawled to the pile of mail. He grabbed package without so much as glancing over the letters, probably all bills, and violently tore it open. Ooh, it was those custom leather-bound journals he ordered off Etsy. One was embroidered with his Hogwarts House logo (Hufflepuff and proud!) and the other matched it but had Charlie’s House (Ravenclaw, more like Raven...dumb! Good one). One of the few things he was ashamed of about being a sissy was doing things like buying matching things for himself and his best friend, or having sleepovers with his best friend, or planning his future wedding with his best friend. ANYway.

Okay, cool, the opening the package plan had worked! Dean was feeling better already. But then he saw it. Underneath the topmost bill was a little blue envelope. Dean’s hand had never moved so fast (yes, never).

Sure enough, it was from Cas. But unlike all the other letters Dean had gotten from him, this one was stamped and had both mailing and return addresses on it. Without stopping to think about what the fuck that could possibly mean, Dean ripped open the letter and read:

Dear Dean,

I am so sorry I haven’t written you in so long. To put it succinctly, my father had a heart attack, and I had to go to to Washington to be with him. The past two weeks have been about family and rekindling our relationships with each other. My father passed away two nights ago, and the funeral was yesterday. I know we never really talk about serious things, but I hope you won’t mind if I tell you this.

Honestly, as heartbroken as I am to see my father pass, I’m grateful that it has brought my family back together. All of us were there with him at the end, all of us were gathered around his bedside as he breathed his last. And he went peacefully, so I’m also grateful for that. I’ll be staying up here for another few days before flying back, and then I’ll be back to work as normal. I put my address that I’m staying at while I’m in Seattle as the return address, but I’ll add my home address too at the bottom of the page; it only feels fair that since I know where you live, you should know where I do too.

Again, I’m sorry if I made you worry at all. I know you might not see me the same way, but you’ve actually become one of my closest friends over the past month. What that says about my personal life? That I’m very awkward and antisocial, that’s what it says.

I hope to talk to you soon,

Castiel

Thank the fucking lord. Dean let go of a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and grabbed his phone.

Dean: Cas is okay!! His dad died but he’ll be back soon

Charlie: Wait, his dad died, but he’ll be back soon? Who is he, god? I mean, Jesus. Whatever, I’m not required to make good religious jokes

Dean: Haha, very funny

Charlie: But yay!! I’m so glad for you!! Maybe now you’ll stop sulking like a little lost puppy

Dean: I make no promises

~***~

As promised, Cas was back by the end of the week, and Dean couldn’t stop grinning when he looked out his window Saturday to see Cas walking up to his mailbox.

He pulled the door open and ran out, unprecedented behavior from the man afraid to make eye contact with girl scouts selling cookies outside the front of the grocery store.

“Cas! It’s good to see you, man!” He went in for a hug, but then it got a little too real, so it ended up being one of those awkward side-hugs that no one really likes but everyone has to deal with.

Cas smiled back widely, and Dean got a little lost in his eyes. Wow, he’d never actually seen Cas up close, and now that he did, he could tell that Cas was actually the most attractive man alive. His ocean blue eyes drew Dean in, and he found himself completely phasing out to the point that Cas had to repeat a question three times before he could respond.

“Sorry, um, what was that?” Was the response. Classic.

“I asked if you were all right; you look a little phased.” No shit, Sherlock.

“Uh yeah, I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

“I was a little worried I’d scared you off with my last letter, seeing as how you didn’t write back.” Shit, Dean had forgotten to.

“Fuck, I totally forgot that I had your address. I guess I’m not used to actually properly sending letters, not just putting them in the mailbox.” They shared a quiet laugh before Dean went on, somberly. “I’m really sorry about your dad. My mom passed a few years back, and I know how painful it is.”

Cas smiles sadly. “Yeah, it was rough, but like I said in the letter, it really brought my family together, and I’m sure dad would have been happy to see the impact he had on us.” He paused, and Dean could there was something more rolling around in his mind, so he decided to stay silent and let Cas finish his thought. “It’s funny, he was such an absent father when we were growing up. I know he was different when he and my mom were first married; I think he was a carpenter or something, and he was always at home with Mike and Luce when they were little. But then his business took off, and by the time I was in diapers, he was hardly ever around. Business trips, late nights working, early morning meetings, it never ended. It kind of tore our family apart, bit by bit. First, Gabe ran away when he was 16. He didn’t get in touch with any of us for almost a whole year. Later, he told me he just couldn’t stand to see all the arguing and pain in our family. Then it was Luce, angrily storming off to college and refusing to answer our calls or emails. He loved all of us, his siblings so much, and I think watching dad’s absence affect us younger kids really took a toll on him.”

Suddenly, Cas’ eyes flashed up, and his cheeks grew pink. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I’ve just been standing here, telling you my life’s story. And fuck, I’m on the clock; I really need to run.”

Before Cas could move, Dean grabbed his wrist. “Wait, can you give me your phone number? I put mine in my last letter to you, but I’m guessing you didn’t get that.”

They exchanged numbers as quickly as possible, and Cas ran off towards the next house on his route. Dean grinned as he watched his run away and immediately send him a trial-run text.

Dean: If you gave me a fake number, I’m going to go to your house and shave your cat

Off in the distance (only about 200 feet, to be perfectly honest), Cas stopped and looked down at his phone, and Dean could not hold back a huge laugh.

Castiel: Toothless would kill your sorry ass

~***~

Regina George,

Oh my god, you’re so fetch.

Sorry Cas, I don’t know why, but I really felt like I had to change our theme to Mean Girls. Sue me. (Also, you better have fucking watched Mean Girls, or there will be hell to pay.)

So, my friend Charlie talked me into this, but I guess I kind of agreed with her that I ought to do it. And you can totally say no thanks, not interested, and it’ll be completely fine! But, I was wondering if maybe you’d be interesting in going on a date with me sometime…?

Wow, I am a child. Well, a teenage girl, to be precise. Oh shit, and you keep telling me you’re not a pedophile, so you’re definitely not going to want to go out with me now that you know my true identity. Well this is a fine mess I’ve gotten myself into.

Have you sold that car yet? You should really get on that.

Yours forever,

Amy Poehler

~***~

Mother,

Of course I’ve seen Mean Girls, I’m not that out of the proverbial loop.

And would you please thank your friend Charlie for me? I’ll admit, I’ve wanted to go on a date with you for a quite a while now, but ye ole’ social ineptitude wouldn’t let me ask. Maybe text me when you get this, and we can work out a time/place? Saturday nights are usually best for me, considering I’m always off Sundays.

Please Dean, if you’re a teenage girl, then I am too, and then it’s not pedophilia.

And no, I haven’t sold it yet, because I haven’t decided on a new one to buy yet, because in case you hadn’t noticed, my life has been a little hectic lately. I’ll try and text you the details on the car I’m looking at soon, though.

Fours yorever,

Reginers

~***~

Saturday night is there before Dean can get his shit together. He had frantically texted Charlie minutes after making the date with Cas asking her what he should wear and how he should act and whether he should just run away and never come back. You know, normal stuff.

In the end, he and Cas had decided on meeting an a small burger place near Cas’ place, so Dean knew he shouldn’t wear something too fancy. But he didn’t want to wear just his every minute of every day bluejeans, t-shirt, and flannel combo. So, with some sagely advice from Charlie, he’s decided on his most flattering pair of grey jeans and a button down maroon shirt, freshly ironed. Honestly, not half bad, even by his self-degrading standards. He toyed with the idea of a grey tie with the top two buttons of his collar undone, and decided it was too snazzy for him to refuse.

A 15-minute drive later, he was walking into the restaurant and looking around for Cas. And boy, did he find him. Cas was wearing a tight pair of black jeans, an Egyptian blue button down, and a black waistcoat, and holy fuck, Dean was having another southward situation just at the sight. He repeated the words ‘puss, flesh, old-people skin,’ in his head for half a minute until everything was hunky dory again, then made his way to the bar where Cas was standing.

“You look great, Cas.” Dean grinned when he saw Cas blatantly checking his ass. The good old grey jeans never fail.

“As do you, Dean,” Cas responded, his pupils mildly larger than probably normal.

They made their way over to a small corner booth and waived down a waitress. Adorably enough, they both ordered the same bacon cheeseburger, and in the time it took for their food to arrive, they discussed possible future heart health and how they were both going to die eventually, so it might as well be from eating delicious food.

“Dude, if bacon’s what gets me, I win,” Dean remarked right before taking a huge bite into his burger.

Cas harrumphed in agreement, then moaned around the first bite of his own burger.

Uh oh. Turned out, visual Cas is nothing compared to audible Cas in terms of making Dean’s nether regions all kinds of interested. To put it simply, Dean was sitting at a booth, on a first date, a burger in his mouth, almost completely hard. Awesome.

“Dean, are you okay?” Shit, Cas apparently noticed the panicked look on Dean’s face, and Dean’s face burned red.

“Um, yeah, I’m fine. I, um, just kinda have a little… situation. Downstairs. God this is so embarrassing; I’m soooooo, so sorry. Please don’t hate me.”

Cas was quiet for a second, then burst out with infectious laughter, and Dean couldn’t help but join in. “Oh my god, that’s hilarious. Was it become of the groan I just made or…?”

Dean ran a hand through his hair before responding, “Um, yeah. Fuck. Look, I haven’t gotten

laid in close to three months, so cut me a little slack. And honestly, I’m really sorry. I wanted this

to be a really special first date, but I feel like I kind of ruined it.” Like Dean ruined everything.

“Oh, no no no! Really, I understand much better than you’d think,” Cas assuaged his fear and sorrow with a comforting pat on the back on the hand. “It’s honestly fine. Now, do you need to go to take a trip to the bathroom, or are you all right now?”

Dean informed Cas that apparently humiliation was not one of his kinks, and the situation had resolved itself, and they were able to go on with their dinner like it had never happened.

But you know, it did happen, and Dean hadn’t had sex in months, and Cas was the hottest date Dean had ever had. SO yeah. Things happen.

~***~

After an amazing evening of burgers, pie, beer, and literal hours of conversation, they decided it was definitely time for them to part ways. Cas had walked to the restaurant, so Dean offered to drop him off on his way home, and Cas gratefully accepted.

The car ride was normal, if slightly tense. They were both slightly buzzed and totally attracted to each other, after all. But it was chill.

Dean pulled up to Cas’ home, a cozy-looking apartment complex, and parked his car in one of the visitor spots. They both climbed out and walked together up to Cas’ door.

“So, I had an awesome time tonight,” Dean half-mumbled, really trying his best to appear like he wasn’t desperate to go out with Cas again as soon as possible. “You think you might want to do this again sometime? I mean, really, I totally get it if like I’m not your type or you’re just not into me or you think I’m too--”

Cas slammed their faces (particularly their lips) together, effectively cutting off Dean’s self-abusive train of thought and filling his mind with only the pure bliss of Cas’ warm mouth on his, their tongues fighting for dominance. Cas’ mouth tasted amazing, like apple pie and happiness. Dean hungrily chased the flavour, and he couldn’t get enough. They broke for air for just a minute before Cas wheeled Dean around and up against his apartment door, weaving one hand into his hair and grabbing Dean’s own hand with the other, pinning it up against the door above his head.

Dean had never felt less in control, and it was amazing. He could feel the strength in Cas’ body shoved up against his own. He felt vulnerable, but for once in his life, he was okay with that vulnerability.

Cas moved his mouth down from Dean’s mouth to his neck, peppering the skin with hot, wet kisses. He settled on one spot, the meaty place between Dean’s neck and right shoulder and assaulted it with licks, kisses, nibbles, and sucks. He was driving Dean crazy, and Dean honestly couldn’t stop himself from moaning out, “Uhhhh, Cas…”

Maybe it was something about how he broke the silence, but Cas suddenly stilled and looked up at Dean, alarm filling his eyes. “Oh my god, Dean, I’m sorry. I’ve never done this before; I don’t know what came over me.” He stepped back from Dean and rubbed his hands over his face.

“What? Why’d you stop?” Dean replied, feeling suddenly abandoned.

Cas locked eyes with Dean and said very seriously, “I have no idea what I’m doing, Dean. I’ve never had sex; hell, I’ve never been in a relationship that lasted longer than a week. And you’re this amazing, attractive man who has had so much sex and knows all about it, and I’m just going to embarrass myself and it’ll be terrible and--”

This time, Dean satisfies the cliche, cutting off Cas’ river of doubts with a kiss into which he poured all the words he wanted to say but didn’t know how: that Cas made him feel safe and comfortable and like he could be himself and still feel appreciated and cared for and special and important.

Cas seemed to get the message, and he quickly took control once again, holding Dean tight in his arms and kissing him with more passion than is in an entire episode of Casa Erotica.

Dean had been hard for a while now, and as Cas clung to him, he could feel that Cas was in about the same spot as he was. But shit, if Cas was a virgin, that would put a lot of weight on Dean’s shoulders, right? He wanted to make it perfect for Cas, because that’s what Cas deserved.

But apparently, Cas had a completely different idea. He pulled away from Dean, and with his pupils completely blown wide and dark, moved his mouth to Dean’s ear and whispered, “I’m going to make you feel so good.”

Huh, well, Dean realized at that moment he was completely, 100%, no doubt about it, a bottom. And apparently, Cas’ self-confidence boosted itself threefold when he was horny, so yeah. That was pretty sweet.

Cas fumbled with his apartment keys and opened the front door before pushing Dean inside and slamming the door behind them. He kiss-walked (that thing where people are joined at the mouth but still manage to move around, that’s honestly kind of impressive if you think about it) Dean to what Dean assumed could only be his bedroom and shoved him onto the bed before climbing on top of waist and resuming kissing him like a man dying of dehydration and Dean’s mouth was a fucking water fountain.

Without breaking their lip lock, Cas scrambled to get Dean’s tie off, and Dean did his best to help with the clothing removal process, but his efforts were mostly futile.

Finally, after a  pathetically long and unromantic struggle, they were both naked, and Dean was basically drooling at the sight of Cas’ dick. Like, holy hell, it’s not like Dean himself was small, but Jesus, he was embarrassed of his own length in the presence of Cas’ massiveness.

Cas grinned with a hungry look in his eye as he took Dean in, and Dean felt suddenly self conscious as Cas scanned him so carefully.

Cas noticed the change in Dean’s demeanor and guessed the source quickly. “Dean, you are so beautiful,” his husky voice reassured before leaning in and capturing Dean’s lips once again, this time with a contrastingly gentle and loving kiss, and for once in his life, Dean let himself actually believe that about himself.

The kiss soon got more heated, and Cas’ hands began exploring Dean’s body, starting in his hair, traveling down his chest, over his hips, and down his thighs. Dean moaned and realized that, much to his embarrassment, he was actually close.

Fortunately, Cas seemed to sense he should advance things, and he trailed his hands back up to Dean’s throbbing cock. Dean let out a punched groan at the first touch to his hot member, squeezed his eyes shut tight, and clenched his fists behind Cas’ back. “So good, Cas…”

Cas’ hand left his cock for a minute, and Dean heard the telltale sounds of someone spitting before the hand returned, slick and tight. Just a couple tugs and Dean was coming with a shout. “Oh, Cas, oh fuck, Cas!”

He had never come so quickly in his entire life, but Dean couldn’t even find it in himself to be ashamed, especially as he heard Cas grunting as he followed directly behind him.

“Cas, that was…”

A sudden worried look fell over Cas’ face. “Was it bad? I’m sorry, I know we both came really fast.”

Dean laughed and tried his best kiss the pouting look off of Cas. “No, it was amazing, Cas. Jesus, that was the most vanilla shit I’ve ever done, but it was perfect.” Dean sighed and steeled himself before continuing. “And actually, I think the reason it was perfect was because, well, it was with you, Cas.”

~***~

“Honeybee, I’m home!” Dean stripped off his big winter coat and hung it on the hook by the front door.

“I’m in the kitchen, Dean!” Dean stalked through the house and up behind his husband, snaking his arms around the other man’s broad chest and leaning over his shoulder to give him a peck on the cheek.

“How was work today?” Dean asked, glancing around the kitchen and noticing with a grin what looked suspiciously like the mess left after someone has baked an apple pie.

“Work was lovely, thank you. Of course, that was mostly because of the letter I got from my favorite stop on my favorite route.” Cas grinned and spun around to give Dean a proper kiss.

“I’m your favorite?!” Dean grinned and pulled back before Cas could kiss him

Cas rolled his eyes, “No, I’m talking about our neighbor, Mrs. Tran.”

“I love you too, babe.” Dean finally let himself be pulled into his husband’s eager arms and smiled into the kiss. Fate was kind of awesome.  

[my-healing-journey]

So I had a few dates early this year, before Jake decided to be an asshole to our kids again and sent me into an anxiety spiral, with this guy who I’ll call Max.

Max is a nice man. He’s younger than I am, by about 5 years. Which is very odd for me; I’ve only ever dated men who are older than me. This was an adjustment to make, for sure.

We are very different people. I think part of what drew me to Max in the first place is that he reminded me of myself, before Jake. Honestly, now that I’ve written that down, I think that makes a lot of sense. Max is a Christian who feels weird about church for some of the same reasons I feel weird about church - namely, how the LGBTQ+ are treated by Christian sects everywhere, and how Christians in general tend to be really weird in their right-wing craziness as though Jesus would support capitalism as it exists now. But I digress.

I enjoyed talking to Max. I had a good time hanging out with him. I liked the presence he shared with me, and I appreciated his kindness, but there just…

There wasn’t anything more than friendship in this for me. I didn’t feel a spark, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that, well… he’s so young.

I’m a DV survivor and a single mom of two kids, who has faced religious shunning head on because I dared speak up for myself and my abused children. I carry a lot of baggage and life experience, and Max… is still trying to figure out if he wants to go to college, with no goals in mind. (Keep in mind, I also put Jake through school, and I do not want to do that again. The next person I willingly put through school will be me, thank you very much.)

I told Max that I felt only friendship for him. It was a little hard to tell him that, and I tried to be gentle about it. It needed to be said, though. I didn’t want to lead him on.

He accepted that at first.

A couple months later, we met for dinner and talked for a solid two hours about religion, spiritual beliefs, family, etc. Conversation with Max is always easy. But again… I still feel no spark.

Well. His grandfather passed away in recent history, and I felt so bad for him. I know I was crushed when my own grandmother passed away, and he was close to his grandfather, too. I offered for him to take a short road trip with me that same day in order to pick up my children from their dad’s house (about a 3-3.5 hour round trip) so that he could talk through what he was feeling while I drove, but he turned me down and instead asked me to let him know the next time my kids were out of town with their dad, because he wanted alone time for hugs and snuggles.

I felt very uncomfortable about that, and I struggled with how to respond to him, so I mulled it over for a few hours and then apologized for the loss of his grandfather, tried to sympathize with him because death of a beloved family member is so so so difficult, and reiterated that I didn’t feel more than friendship for him and explained that I was uncomfortable with the idea of snuggles.

He wrote back almost instantaneously that he didn’t mean for us to snuggle, etc.

(I wasn’t born yesterday, my friends.)

My point that I wanted to make here was that, although it is difficult to judge tone of voice over text message, the very last responses he sent me seemed snippy, like he was annoyed or upset with me, and immediately I felt like I wanted to curl up into an anxious ball and freak out a little.

Over a few words in a text message.

I know that reaction didn’t come from Max. It came from me remembering ways that Jake would talk to me when he disapproved of something I’d done (which was most days, because he just didn’t approve of anything about me in general). Regardless, it was such a visceral reaction that I had to force myself to breathe and practice my grounding techniques. (“Name five things I can touch right now. Okay. The ground beneath my feet, the clothes on my body, the pillows in my hands, etc.”) Thankfully I didn’t spiral into a panic attack, but the sheer power of words and tone of voice really struck me in that specific moment, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how I reacted to Max’s words. And I wonder.

Will I ever not be totally screwed up? Will there ever come a time where I might actually be able to handle a relationship? Is there a man on this earth who is patient enough to learn and avoid my triggers? Especially when I’m still learning them myself? Is there a man out there for me, who is willing to be kind and understanding toward me when I eventually meet a trigger and have to freak out for a while?

Am I destined to be alone? Has Jake really screwed up any chance I have at a future relationship?

I don’t want to be alone forever. I mean. Being alone is a huuuuuge improvement from being with Jake, but I do want a partner. I liked being married, and would like to be so again someday (this time with a good man, though).

People say that you don’t have to fix yourself before getting into a relationship, and I can see how that might be true, but... I have respect for any future partner of mine, and I also have high standards. It won’t be his responsibility to fix me, just like it won’t be my responsibility to fix him. At what point do I truly declare myself as ready for a relationship? Is it when I no longer have episodes where simply the wrong tone of voice causes me to spiral? Or is it ok for me to still be broken in that way? Because let’s be real. Jake left me with some pretty deep scars which I may very well carry with me for the rest of my life.

I still wonder. Can I handle a relationship with anyone? It’s been four years since my divorce was finalized, and more than five years since I separated myself from Jake. I feel so so so much better about myself and the world now.

But is it enough?

I’ll write about another man later.

Despite my recent posts, I promise that I am doing so much better in my life. I’m an undying optimist, I’ve worked very very hard to get that part of myself back, and I am never going to allow myself to lose it again. I am confident and strong, smart and capable. I can do hard things. Most days are good days.

[purplebowties]

Chuck Bass Analysis

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to read an article about shame-based personalities that immediately made me think about Chuck and I decided to take the time to write an essay about it. I’ll be using lines from the article to write this dissertation, which means it’s only right to credit it. You can find it here. The blog has many fascinating psychology articles; if you’re interested in the subject you should definitely follow it.

As the article I’m referring to explains, blaming and shaming a person are two different things. While blaming someone implies recognizing a fault in the person’s behavior, shaming someone isn’t about guilt or responsibility; it doesn’t require the person to do something that the accuser interprets as a mistake. Instead, shaming means affirming there’s something wrong with the person accused; in other words, the fault doesn’t lie in the person’s actions, but rather in their personality.

Before I begin exposing my thoughts regarding how and why Chuck’s personality was built through a dysfunctional shaming process, it must be said that both the aspects I’ve mentioned – blame and shame – played a role in his life.

For most of his life, Chuck has lived with a shattering sense of guilt coming from the conviction he had killed his mother by coming to life. I tend to think Bart has never really put into words this accusation, but it is sure that, as a child and later on as a teenager, Chuck read this through the lines of his father’s detachment. Consciously and not, Chuck learnt to consider himself responsible for his mother’s death, because the explanation he gave himself helped him to give a meaning to the emotional and psychological abuse he was subjected to.  

That being said, the guilt he took is a “blameless” one; in fact, it might be more accurately described as an original sin, a visceral, ancestral fault that has nothing to do with responsibility (even if Elisabeth had actually died giving birth, the baby wouldn’t have been guilty of her destiny). 

This irrational, inconsistent and implicit accusation suggests that there’s something terribly and irremediably flawed in Chuck, it somehow hints to the fact that his role in the world is to destroy – and metaphorically, to kill (“He hated me. It makes sense if his beloved wife died giving birth to me. Sometimes I swear he thinks I killed her” Chuck, from 2X05)

It is likely that, in truth, Bart blamed Chuck for the simple fact that he was Elizabeth’s son – the woman who had cheated on him and eventually left him to raise a child he probably didn’t even want. In Bart’s mind, having her as a mother was enough to make him a worthless and inadequate person – and irreversibly. This “definitive verdict” is indeed expressed through the story he told Chuck: not only Elizabeth “died”, but she was also “killed” by her own son. It’s a vision that allowed Bart to hate them both and set Chuck for being an eternal disappointment to his eyes.

It is definitely a form of shaming.  The article mentions a few examples of shaming statements, which sound very similar to many things Bart told his son all the way through the series:

• “You were a mistake; I wish I’d never had you.” || “No matter how I’ve tried to turn you into a man, it still remains the one, big failure of my life” (6X09)

• “You’re useless; you’ll never amount to anything.” || “Nice gesture, but misguided as usual” (2X10), “I haven’t seen anything in the last year that suggests you have what it takes. If anything, you’ve been a disappointment” (3X12)

• “You’ve ruined my life; you ruin everything for everyone” || “Bart thought it would be better if the family bonded without me for a while” (1X14), “Letting people down is your forte” (2X10), “Every time I think we’re making progress, you show your true colors” (2X12).

 According to the article, adults shamed in childhood have some traits that I recognized in Chuck as well. I’ll mention each of them and try to see how they showed in his behavior. 

1. They are afraid to share their true thoughts and feelings with others.

This first trait is pretty obvious in Chuck’s characterization. However, truth to be told, his difficulty in sharing his thoughts and feelings is only the tip of the iceberg.

Chuck is indeed emotionally crippled. He doesn’t simply have issues when it comes to conveying his feelings; his problems start with his inability to recognize them and then accept them. Season 1 is all about it; Chuck can’t give a name to what he feels for Blair (“I feel sick, like there’s something in my stomach…fluttering”) and when she hurts him, he can’t metabolize the pain he feels and ends up hurting her as well in a way that is absolutely childish – an act of spite.

This is obviously the outcome of an education intended to make him think of feelings as weaknesses. Chuck grew up with the idea that detachment meant strength, while displaying emotions – or even having emotions – was a synonym of vulnerability. And vulnerability was the ultimate fault, the one thing Bart could have never accepted.  

Episode 3X12 (but, in general, season 3) is pretty enlightening in this sense, because it gives us an accurate idea of how Chuck has always interpreted his father’s behavior and words – and, as we’ll find out later on, his view of Bart was sadly truthful.

The Bart Chuck sees condemns his love for Blair (“You opened your heart to Blair and that made you weak”), for it makes him immature and unsuitable for being the businessman he is expected to become. The image of Bart tells Chuck he doesn’t have “what it takes”. This conviction Chuck can’t let go of is so weighty and so deeply rooted that it will be one of the reasons that will lead him to betray Blair in order to save The Empire – “I did what I had to to win. I couldn’t let my feelings cost me all that I’ve built” (3X17).

As I said, Chuck’s perception of his father was exact. In episode 5X24 it becomes clear that he judges his son’s love for Blair and in general his feelings as a demonstration of his irresponsibility other than what keeps him from being a “great man” and from “growing up”.

It’s only logical to assume that Bart’s reiterated insistence to urge Chuck to repress his emotions and, overall, his disdain for the mere existence of those feelings and the consequential shaming, led Chuck to try to suppress them as much as he could.

The constant repression is something I’ll talk about later in the essay while analyzing other traits. Though, it is important to underline the fact that Chuck tends to keep his emotions under control through a rigid process of suppression, until he can’t contain them anymore. This implies that when he finds himself unable to shut down his feelings, they tend to blow up in a devastating way – for himself and for those close to him.

It’s something that, with time, Chuck definitely learnt to handle better. It was indeed one of the crucial points of his growth; he still tends to diminish his feelings, but he manages to cope with them in a healthier way. By the end of the series, for example, he is able to accept Blair’s support and to contain the shame he feels towards his weaknesses; it doesn’t happen right away and it takes patience from her and also the special delicacy she reserves him, but eventually he lets her in fully (check this scene from episode 6X08).

However, Blair remains one of his few exceptions. He is only able to show his vulnerability to a very restricted group of people who he is able to trust. Outside his “circle of trust”, he is still an especially cold and detached person – and I assume a pretty ruthless business man too.

2. They are terrified of intimacy and put up walls in relationships. They also fear  commitment as they expect to be rejected. “You couldn’t handle feelings,” Blair tells Chuck in episode 3X12, giving us, as usual, the most precise insight on him and his difficulties dealing with emotions. Nevertheless, she comforts him, reminding him that he’s “not like that anymore” and that he’s “becoming a man in a way that his father never was”.

It is absolutely true. In spite of his fear of weaknesses, Chuck has feelings; he cares, loves and is exposed to deep emotions. He is, though, used to block them, out of shame and fear; fear of vulnerability, but also fear of the feelings themselves, of their meaning and their consequences.

The basic consequence of caring is the construction of a bond with another person, with all the risks that come with it – dependence, pain, abandon. Accepting to have feelings for someone means accepting the possibility of rejection and rejection is, to Chuck, absolutely terrifying. One of the most insightful quotes that explicates it is from episode 2X01. Trying to explain Blair why he didn’t spend the summer with her and abandoned her, he says: “I was scared you’d see…me.”

Here lies the core of Chuck’s personality: the conviction that no one could love him for who he is, for he is impossible to love and also impossible to “fix”. He is irremediably broken, a destined to disappoint.

The article I’m referring to also mentions that people with shame based personalities struggle with feeling of worthlessness and often feel ugly and flawed. In Chuck’s case, this is the consequence of a growth and an existence that has always been marked by rejection. “Unfortunately, all I know if what he didn’t want,” he says, talking about his father, “which is me”.

Chuck’s deep self-esteem issues have their origin in the way he’s been shamed and neglected all the way through his childhood. As a result, he is honestly convinced of his inadequateness and of its invariability. The lack of value he sees in himself is deeply characterizing; it guides, sometimes subtly and sometimes blatantly, most of his actions and decisions. For example, he was incapable of waiting for Blair on the top of the Empire State Building because he expected her not to come, since he didn’t think he deserved her arrival. I don’t want to discuss whether his thoughts were valid or not; it’s simply not the topic of this essay. What I’m trying to point at is that it was tragically easy for Chuck to believe that she didn’t love him anymore.

Inevitably, starting from these presuppositions, commitment and especially intimacy become incredibly scary to Chuck. It’s not the dedication and the faithfulness they require that scares him; Chuck is, indeed, a profoundly devoted and loyal person (he values family, he has never cheated, he gives importance to long lasting friendships). Instead, his fright has its origin in the changeable nature of relationships: they’re hazards, they bring with them the possibility of being abandoned.

Only that, to Chuck, abandon isn’t a mere possibility, it is almost a certainness. Trusting that people he loves won’t leave him is incredibly hard to him, since abandon has been a constant in his life. He expects to be abandoned – and, according to him, rightfully so. People who leave him are justified by his worthlessness and their decision to give up on him is only logical.

This partially explains why he is so forgiving; recognizing people’s faults and responsibilities is almost superfluous to him, since, in some ways, he fundamentally thinks he deserves to be hurt. In this sense, it is important to mention how Chuck never really stopped justifying Elizabeth’s behavior; by the end of season 6, in spite of all the pain she caused him, he still hadn’t completely given up on contacting her (5X19), he still had her picture in his room and the combination to his strongbox was still her birthday’s date.

In some ways, this is also connected to the lack of love and affection that sadly marked his growth; he craves to be loved so much and, at the same time, he expects so little from those who are supposed to love him that he’s willing to take whatever he can get from them and to excuse even the most horrible betrayals (see how he allowed Jack to come back into his life). Every bit of care and respect look almost miraculous to him.

As the article explains, another fundamental trait in shame-based personalities is a debilitating false guilt. As I mentioned at the beginning of the essay, guilt plays a central role in Chuck’s life. Though he isn’t shy and definitely doesn’t pay attention to people’s judgement, he does tend to feel responsible even when he’s not. Similarly to what happens with his tendency to forgive, Chuck also expects to be accused and accepts the way people blame him, even when he has no faults.

This ingrained sense of guilt, which clearly has its roots in the childhood and the teenage years spent living with the thought of having caused his mother’s death, leads to the conviction of being unable to make the woman he loves happy. Each time he lest Blair go, he does it because he is genuinely persuaded that he’ll end up ruining their relationship and making her miserable; he keeps giving up on her to give her the chance to be with a better man, a less troubled, lighter person.

3.  They may be narcissistic and act as if they have it all together; alternatively, they may be completely selfless, almost to the point of being a doormat.

Both aspects of this trait show through Chuck’s behavior, since, as it often happens, his actions and his perception of himself tend to be extremely polarized and sometimes even contradictory – he goes to extremes.

He builds and invincible persona, “Chuck Bass”, who is powerful, indifferent, perfectly controlled; Chuck Bass is the façade he presents to the world, it’s his vanity, his mania of grandeur, it’s the self-satisfaction he feels when he’s called infamous, it’s his egocentrism and his arrogance. It shows through his eclectic style, through the self-celebratory way he conducts his business (his hotel is “The Empire” and it’s permeated with his notorious reputation), through the way he indulges the sort of legend created around his name. He enjoys his fame, his influence and he’s power hungry. Though somewhat more superficial, none of these aspects are pretended; Chuck can actually be self-centered, self-important, he can be haughty, cold and unscrupulous.

Yet, at the same time, he is incredibly fragile and he is often incapable of recognizing his value. Sometimes, actually, his selflessness is so extreme that he becomes quite literally “self – less”, meaning that he reaches such a worrying level of self-loathe that he ends up neglecting himself; his needs, his ambitions, his desires, even his entire personality (the beginning of season four is the most blatant example of this dysfunctionality, but part of this behavior is also recognizable through season five). He is haunted by the thought people would be happier if he was out of their lives.

4. They have a pervasive sense of loneliness and always feel like outsiders (even when others genuinely like and love them). This trait is noticeable and inevitably linked with the ones previously mentioned. Reluctant to share his feelings and scared of building meaningful bonds with people, Chuck is profoundly reserved. Though he enjoys an active social life (parties, galas, ecc) and he is capable of being sociable (he is, among other things, also a hotel and clubs owner, so it is necessary), he still doesn’t let people get too close; he constantly maintains a distance between himself and the world and he often prefers spending time alone.

It must be underlined that Chuck is an especially selective person. Since trusting people comes so difficult to him, he tends to maintain a few but very solid relationships. As I’ve already mentioned, he defines a circle of trust – one that is terribly difficult to enter and, at the same time, almost impossible to exit.

Making a quick analysis of his relationships, it’s clear how discriminating and at the same time how devoted he is: Blair isn’t simply the only woman he’s ever loved, she’s also the only one he considered building a life with; Nate has been his best friend since they were five and Chuck has never showed the need to create the same kind of bond with anyone else; once he let Lily in, he never stepped back and was actively part of her family – he’s never stopped treating Serena and Eric as his siblings.

That being said, even with his most trusted people, Chuck is still hesitant when it comes to letting his guard down and allowing himself to be vulnerable in front of them. Even Blair, who is definitely the person he trusts the most, occasionally can’t reach him; she has to find a way to connect with him – sometimes she uses sex to get in touch with his blocked emotions.

As a result, Chuck has an inclination to isolate himself, since he considers his feelings incomprehensible and unacceptable; to his eyes, they’re too dark and too horrible. This idea leads him to the conviction that he shouldn’t share them and that he should deal with them alone. Aware of this belief, both Lily and Blair, actually, felt the need to remind him that they wouldn’t have left even in front of his worst moments (“The worst thing you’ve ever done, the darkest thought you’ve ever had, I will stand by you through anything” – Blair, from 2X13, “No matter how ugly and dark your feelings may be, you shouldn’t have to bear them alone. My love for you is unconditional” – Lily, from 5X10).

5. They are often defensive and find it hard to bear the slightest criticism. They feel as if they are being constantly watched and judged.

This trait mainly comes out through Chuck’s attitude towards business and work. He is extremely exigent with himself and incapable of considering failure as a sometimes inevitable part of life. He’s a perfectionist and has Stakhanovism problem. Being driven by an ambition that isn’t completely healthy, Chuck expects the best from himself and has a tendency to push himself too hard to reach his goals. The first few episodes of season 3 are a good example of this behavior. In episode 3X02 Chuck tells Serena: “My father turned his first profit by the time he was 22. I hope to do it by the time I’m 21.”

The fact that Bart is Chuck’s basis for comparison is a crucial element to analyze how this personality trait presents itself. His need to thrive and his greed for success partially have their origin in his fear to disappoint his father. Even after Bart’s “death”, Chuck kept trying to please him through his dedication to business; he was constantly trying to live up to the expectations Bart had.

Driven by his tendency to forgive and by his desperate need to justify his father’s faults, Chuck built, over the years, some sort of idealized image of Bart: the perfect business man, the person he was supposed to become but couldn’t – because of his weakness. And when, by the end of season four, this twisted view of Bart shattered, Chuck found himself having to survive a deep existential crisis. “Everything I believed about my father,” he says in episode 4X20, “everything I thought I wanted to be, what I needed to be for him, it was all based on lies.”

The article also describes people with a shame based personalities as adults who tend to feel judged and controlled. It is important to say that, being a libertine, Chuck generally ignores people’s judgement when it comes to his morality, to his way of living and to his values. This careless attitude, though, has a few essential exceptions.

The first exceptions are Blair and Lily. Chuck truly values their judgements and not only when they’re positive. Since he respects them and feels supported and understood by them, he’s willing to accept even their criticisms. Their opinions and advice have a positive effect on him and they generally manage to encourage him and make him feel better about himself – or, at least, to question his actions. The key of his trust and respect for them lies in the way he knows that behind their words there are acceptance and care. Their loyalty and their affection isn’t necessarily linked with his actions – they would always forgive him and love him for who he is rather than for what he does.

Bart, however, represents a negative exception. His judgement, whether actual or simply imagined by Chuck, influences Chuck’s behavior through fear of rejection

In some ways, for a long time, Chuck lived with the perpetual feeling of being tested by this unreachable man he had to satisfy (“It’s like he’s setting me up to fail from beyond the grave” Chuck, 2X15). In other words, Chuck turned his successes into a mean to finally conquer his father’s love and acceptance and his failures into confirmations that he didn’t deserve his father’s approval and affection. In both cases, affection – or lack of it – is linked to an action; Chuck’s personality, indeed, remains intolerable for Bart.  

6.  They tend to block their feeling through compulsive behaviors

I will start by stating, just to be clear, that Chuck isn’t an addict. As I said, everything in Chuck’s life is subjected to a rigid repression; and it definitely includes his use of drugs and his drinking. Under normal circumstances, even though he is a drinker and an occasional drug user, Chuck keeps his vices controlled.

That being said, it is true that, during moments of profound crisis, we saw him losing control and showing compulsive behaviors intended to keep him from feeling a pain he couldn’t handle. It especially happens when Chuck has to deal with loss – since he can’t elaborate it, he suppresses his emotions however he can (abusing alcohol and drugs, meaningless sex, ecc). At the beginning of season five, the repressed pain of losing Blair causes him to detach from his emotions in such a deep way that he becomes unable to feel anything – even physically. 

It also must be mentioned that, for a long time, Chuck has had almost no respect for his life. Though the only time he was actually suicidal was after Bart’s “death” (2X14), he still showed till season five a dangerous carelessness with his health and with the value of his existence. He was often reckless and irresponsible; to use his own words from 3X22, he “didn’t care if he lived or died”.

His attitude towards sex, though, is probably the clearest example of a compulsive behavior implemented to suffocate feelings.

There’s no shame in sex and it’s not my intention to judge anyone’s sex life as right or wrong. Chuck was a precocious boy; he had his first sexual experience at the age of eleven, he is a very sexual, passionate person and eroticism certainly has an important role in his life. He enjoys sex and he’s completely open-minded about any kind of practices in this area.

However, it’s undeniable that he also uses sex to kill the pain. Generally, to Chuck, sex and intimacy don’t coincide. He doesn’t establish a connection with his sexual partners; he never sees them again after (in 2X21, he mentions he only has sex with people once) and sometimes entertains himself with escorts – the less emotionally demanding way to have sex ends up being paying for it. While sex (even random one) is usually an engaging experience, to Chuck sometimes it is a mere mechanical act that has the only purpose to numb sufferance and anxiety.

Blair, of course, is an exception. She was the first person with whom he managed to build a true connection, to the point that sex became fundamental in their relationship. With her, he reaches a complete emotional involvement; he concedes himself to her fully, he’s generous, trusting and attentive. It is interesting to notice, as I’ve already mentioned, that when Chuck is emotionally blocked, Blair consciously uses sex to reach out to him, for she knows that a physical connection with her will also lead to an emotive one (for example, she seduces him to bring him to say “I love you” in 2X25 and in 3X14 she has sex with him before he manages to talk to her about his mother).

7. They find it hard to establish and enforce healthy boundaries with others.

Considering everything I’ve explained, it is understandable why building healthy relationships for Chuck is hard – and why he had to work so hard on himself in order to handle them better. I think it’s safe to admit, at least from my point of view, that his relationships will never be completely “healthy” (although this is a pretty relative concept), for the simple fact that he is, logically, a profoundly and somewhat irreparably damaged person.

That being said, over time and thanks to a long and hard journey, Chuck learnt to cope with his daemons and to make his relationships work in a less dysfunctional way; he learnt that he doesn’t own the ones who he loves, that trust is fundamental for a bond to be unbreakable, that relationships work through compensation and ability to compromise and, eventually, that allowing the people he chose to spend his life with to see his weakest, most vulnerable sides doesn’t mean failing; it means accepting their love and their support and allowing them to make him stronger.

Above all, trusting people represented the biggest problem to Chuck and his inability to do so was often the main reason behind the crisis of his relationships. Having been tested his whole life by his father (it is my opinion, for example that Bart left him the responsibility of Bass Industries when he faked his death with the intention to see if he was capable), Chuck used to assume that testing his loved ones’ loyalty was the only way he had to be sure of their affection. It’s a behavior that often puts him in a lose/lose situation. What happens in 3X17 is probably the most exhaustive example.

Betrayed by his mother, Chuck tests Blair’s love and devotion in a way that sets him up for losing her: if Blair accepts to have sex with Jack, she gives him a proof of her love, but she betrays his trust; if she doesn’t accept, then her love isn’t what he expected it to be. Either ways, he’ll be destroyed.

His difficulty to trust people is also what brings him to be so jealous and to expect from others the same exclusivity he gives to relationships. In his friendship with Nate, for example, he doesn’t tolerate other people’s intrusions; Nate’s need to have a wider circle of friendships almost feels like a betrayal to Chuck, since his fear of abandon leads him to think those who love him will find someone better than him and realize he’s worthless.

His insecurity tends to make him suspicious and his inability to communicate his feelings and his needs leads him to manipulate people around him to keep them from leaving him.

In conclusion, I think Chuck shows all the traits of a shame based personality. Personality is, according to my view, an only marginally changeable element; consequentially, it is my opinion that the dysfunctionalities coming from the structure of personality Chuck presents still belong to his life and inevitably play a role in it. However, a journey of growth and evolution taught him to live with it in a healthier way, one that allowed such a damaged and emotionally deficient person to build a happy life for himself and for his family.

[boycopter]

hello jag sir would youmst like to tell us about your Favourite Opera

THE DEEP VISCERAL EXCITEMENT THAT THIS ASK JUST FILLED ME WITH .

my favourite opera is not quite an opera. it is an operetta, and perhapes that makes me a fake opera fan, but elitism is dead and old white men can kiss my ass. it is called die fledermaus which is the bat in german and is consequently the only phrase that i know in german off of the top of my head. i have gone to germany once and did not need to know any german so it’s entirely okay.

fledermaus has one of the most convoluted plots in existence, so please bear with me.

act one starts in the eisenstein residence. the eisensteins are rosalinda and gabriel, but he’s referred to as eisenstein through the operetta and i kind of hate his character, so he gets no respect from me. anyway it starts with rosalinda being flirted at by alfred, an opera singer (very meta) who is standing outside her window, very beautifully singing an aria that boils down to “rosalinda come fuck this!” rosalinda reminds him that she is married and therefore must wait will not come fuck this. at the same time, we meet adele, rosalinda’s chambermaid. she is shit at her job. she has received an invitation from her sister, the ballerina, to come to a party that the wealthy prince orlofsky is throwing in his vacation home. (it’s not actually from her sister. it’s a forgery. more on that in a bit.) so she does what is natural and tells rosalinda her aunt is fucking dying so that she can take off of work and go to this rager. adele has used this same excuse before. her aunt has been dying for so long. she actually told eisenstein at one point that her aunt was dead. she hates being a chambermaid and wants to be an actress. (very meta.) anyway, rosalinda sees through her aunt excuse and tells her to fuck off and do the dusting. rosalinda also receives an invitation to a party - one that specifically tells her to come disguised as a “hungarian princess”. then, eisenstein and his lawyer, dr. blind, who is blind, very meta, storm onstage. eisenstein is LIVID because dr. blind is a dumbass and, instead of shortening eisenstein’s prison sentence, made it longer. everyone’s very upset about the whole ordeal. then, dr. falke, an old friend of eisenstein’s, comes over and basically convinces eisenstein to blow off going to prison to come to orlofsky’s party. they “fondly” recall together the last party they went to, where eisenstein played a Funny Joke and left falke’s drunk ass on a park bench. he was dressed like a bat. (die fledermaus!!) eisenstein says bye to rosalinda because he is “going to prison”. he’s a liar and men ain’t shit. eisenstein fucks off, alfred fucks on. rosalinda tells adele to go take care of her “sick aunt” so she can… definitely not go fuck alfred. alfred is also rosalinda’s former lover, so it’s all very scandalous. he starts putting on eisenstein’s clothes to get rosalinda to, again, come fuck this. but alas, the police show up. and the governor of the prison, frank, immediately assumes that alfred is eisenstein. rosalinda doesn’t want people to think she’s cheating on her husband, because she does love him, and she actually isn’t cheating. she’s not going to come fuck this. so she forces alfred to take eisenstein’s place. he goes to prison in eisenstein’s place, but not before saying that he absolutely must kiss his “wife” before he goes. he kisses rosalinda many times. disgusting little man.

act two is in orlofsky’s house. i love orlofsky. i sang orlofsky. orlofsky is basically an extremely rich, extremely bored teenager. nothing interests him. falke pulls orlofsky aside and tells him that he has a show that he intends to put on during the party that will absolutely amuse orlofsky. orlofsky says “you know what man? make my day.” everyone shows up to the party - rosalinda, disguised as a hungarian princess; adele, disguised as an actress, wearing a dress she’s stolen from rosalinda; eisenstein, disguised as the “marquis renard”, a frenchman (eisenstein doesn’t speak french); and frank (the prison governor), disguised as “chevalier chagrin”, another frenchman (frank doesn’t speak french). orlofsky gives adele his ENTIRE WALLET to go to the game room because he doesn’t give a fuck about money and he is very attracted to actresses. he says, specifically, that “actresses are very lucky for me”. that is a REAL quote. fucking weirdo. orlofsky sings a really fab aria about how he’s seen everything and nothing amuses him. see the link in the third sentence of this paragraph. eisenstein - “the marquis” - is introduced to adele - “the actress” - and immediately points out that she looks like his maid. she makes a point of seeming AS OFFENDED AS POSSIBLE to prove that she is absolutely not a maid. frank arrives and he and eisenstein, both not knowing french, both thinking each other are frenchman, start spouting random common french phrases at each other. orlofsky is amused by this. i love him. falke introduces rosalinda - “the masked hungarian princess” - to the party, but no one is properly convinced that she’s hungarian, so she sings a folk song to prove herself. eisenstein, not realising she’s his wife, tries to flirt with her and convince her to take her mask off. men ain’t shit. while he’s flirting with her, she pickpockets him and steals his pocket watch. sneak 100. orlofsky comes in and toasts to champagne for making things interesting, because this company really does not know how to enjoy things if they’re not drunk. eisenstein and frank both run away from the party because they’re both supposed to be at the damn jail. idiots.

and finally, act three. it’s the next morning, and everyone is at the jail. alfred’s been pissing everyone off by singing opera in the jail. the prison guard, frosch, says that opera should be illegal, and he’s fucking right. (frosch is also very drunk because frank, his boss, has been gone.) adele begs frank to sponsor her career as an actress because she still thinks he’s the “chevalier chagrin”. frank is far too poor to do that. it’s sad. alfred asks for dr. blind to get him removed from jail, and frank brings in dr. blind. oh yeah, everyone’s gonna be in this finale, or the composer’s name isn’t johann strauss. enter eisenstein, saying he is ready to serve his sentence. but wait! someone’s already in his cell! it’s alfred! frank tells eisenstein that the man in his cell was singing Mating Songs in the street to rosalinda and kissed rosalinda before being taken to prison. eisenstein goes ape (he steals dr. blind’s wig and glasses and pretends to be him in order to yell at alfred) and accuses rosalinda of cheating - something she never did. i am absolutely team rosalinda. then rosalinda pulls eisenstein’s pocket watch out, throws on the fake hungarian accent, and basically calls him a hoe. falke comes in with the whole “it’s just a prank bro!” and everyone is delighted. you know, except for rosalinda, who threatens to divorce eisenstein’s hoe ass. but then eisenstein says “but babe. i was drunk on champagne.” AND SHE FORGIVES HIM IMMEDIATELY. let me tell you how mad this makes me. he actually, real life attempted to cheat on her, and then blamed her for cheating on him. she did not cheat on him - all jokes aside, rosalinda denied alfred in all ways possible from the beginning. the only infidelity on her part was when alfred kissed her, and even then, she told him to stop. (alfred’s really obnoxious and i really do not like him.) eisenstein fully intended upon cheating on her with the “hungarian princess”. he can actually choke. anyway, she forgives his hoe ass. orlofsky promises to sponsor adele’s acting career because he was so amused by the drama that falke put on (die fledermaus!!) that he finally felt joy. the company toasts to champagne again. end of opera.

anyway! this is my favourite opera in the world, specifically because it contains chacun à son goût, orlofsky’s aria. that was the aria that i heard a woman sing at music camp that made me desperately want to sing opera because it was the coolest thing i’d ever heard. basically, i can attribute my love and passion for opera to die fledermaus. especially because orlofsky is a trouser role! trouser roles are traditionally men’s roles that are written for and played by mezzo sopranos. before i went on testosterone, i was a mezzo soprano, and trouser roles like orlofsky, oscar (from un ballo in maschera) and cherubino (from my second favourite opera, le nozze di figaro) gave me a safe outlet to explore my gender and my presentation while i was deeply closeted. opera has always blurred the lines of gender and presentation, and i find it incredible for that reason particularly! despite being a super old art form, it’s become very accessible to transgender performers! it’s part of the reason i want to be able to teach trans vocalists. because everyone has a place in opera.

thank you for sending this ask. i listened to the recording i have while writing the response and it was very fun for me. :)

[how2to18]

IN HIS 1985 ALBUM, Southern Accents, Tom Petty attempted to make a concept album about the South. But what was intended as a masterpiece ultimately failed. Michael Washburn, in his first book, also titled Southern Accents, argues that we can glean significant cultural understanding from Petty’s failure. Flawed from the beginning, Petty’s narrow vision of the South was all white and deeply embedded in nostalgia for the Lost Cause. I spoke to Washburn, a native of Kentucky, shortly after his own failure to complete a 74-mile ultramarathon through the mountains of North Georgia. We discussed Tom Petty’s ambitions for Southern Accents, the enduring visual language and ideology of the Confederacy, and Washburn’s own Southern heritage.

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CONNOR GOODWIN: Which track from Southern Accents should readers listen to before we get into the interview?

MICHAEL WASHBURN: If I’m being honest, I might say none. [Laughs.] If you were going to approach Southern Accents and see the best of what the record had to offer, I would say one of two songs. The most popular song on the record and one of Petty’s most popular songs in his entire career is “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” But if you wanted to see what he was going for, when it came down to his aspiration for a Southern concept record, listen to the title record, “Southern Accents.”

As you mentioned, Petty wanted Southern Accents to be a concept album and you argue that the significance of this album lies in its failure. What did Petty want to accomplish with Southern Accents, and how exactly did the album fail?

I think there’re a couple of different ways to answer this. If you want to look at Petty as rock star, [he was] tired of what he’d been doing up until that point. He’d been on this decade-long record, tour, record, tour cycle. The record before Southern Accents, Long After Dark, had not been as large a commercial hit as people had anticipated or expected from him. And [Petty] thought he was starting to sound the same. So partially Petty was trying to vie for artistic legitimacy and make this big bold move to be considered a Springsteen-like force. Someone who could paint on a broad canvas with more vibrant colors.

From Petty’s perspective, for reasons aesthetic and narcotic, the conceptual frame of an album about the South didn’t end up making sense when he released it. There are a core of songs that fit the Confederate, sorry, Southern theme. But then he hooked up with this guy Dave Stewart and they cooked up “Don’t Come Around Here No More” and some other stinkers that fractured what little coherence there was to an album about the South.

Why that record’s failure is important today is the cultural assumptions embedded in what Petty’s South was. Petty’s vision of the South was flawed from the beginning for two reasons. His vision of the South was the white South. And his South, however unconsciously it might have been, was deeply indebted to the sociologically sophisticated theory of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. I’m not saying at any point that Tom Petty is a racist, [but] I am saying that he effectively made a neo-Confederate record. And, even if you don’t want to go that far with me, he did make a record about the South that effectively denies the existence of African-American people in the South, which is not a record about the South.

I’m not so naïve to say that there is one South. He made a record about one guy’s South and that one guy’s South was indebted to the Lost Cause. I think a lot of people who want to read about Petty don’t think about this stuff all that often. Unlike Springsteen [who] has all this love for the working class, and is therefore read as some sort of chronicler or bard of the working class, Petty is often overlooked as someone who wasn’t influenced by cultural currents and the archaeology of American frailty and failure. But that’s just not true. The reason he made these mistakes and is so indebted to the Confederacy is because he was a kid from the South.

When Petty goes on tour, he “doubles down” on the “Southern mystique” and uses Confederate imagery on stage. What are some examples of that coming into play, and why do you think he had that response if he was frustrated while recording the album and dissatisfied with the album?

I think he probably wasn’t — and I know from the guys in the band that I spoke to — [they] were not immediately dissatisfied with the final product. They became quickly dissatisfied with it, but it was a matter of months, not minutes. I know that Petty had deep frustration with certain tracks. This is famously the record where he shattered his hand because he was so frustrated. When Petty was done with the project, he was somewhat satisfied with it as some kind of coherent document.

In the press after the fact, sometimes he would play up the fact that it was a concept record or sometimes he would play this down and jettison the concept. The further he got away from the record, the more he talked about having this random idea that he never intended to fully stick with.

There are several reasons why I don’t believe that. A lot of that is just the convenience of the way his story changes as he moves away from [the record] and it gets more and more critical disregard. But if you look at the way he then totally adopted the trappings of the Confederacy and the plantation South in his stage set-up, it shows this was a doubling down. Petty was not a guy who let other people call the shots. When I spoke to the art director of the record, he told me that the Confederate flag used on the tour book and on interior of the original LP was Petty’s personal flag. [Petty] stressed that he wanted this to be the design element of the record, and that blended over into the tour.

The stage had these marble columns, like a plantation house. Specifically, in a song called “Rebels,” the first on the record, a big electric Confederate Battle Flag lit up behind them. It’s a creepy Ra-Ra moment. You can see that if you get your hands on a copy of the live concert film they made during the tour called Pack Up the Plantation: Live!. It’s been excised from YouTube, but you can see on YouTube this moment where he takes off his topcoat and the lining of his coat is a Confederate flag.

He doubled down on the worst aspects of it. Picking up a Battle Flag — that really seems to be motivated and is deeply problematic.

Was there any critical reception of the Southern Accents at the time of its release? Not in terms of the music, but of Petty dredging up Confederate imagery.

I’ve read every magazine and newspaper clipping that I could find about Petty and the decade surrounding this record and there was very little mention of it. Places like the Houston Chronicle would say something like, Keeping true to Petty’s rebel roots, there’s a battle flag and faux plantation trappings. More often it was just glossed over. The most notable person who brought it up was Peter Buck of R.E.M., who is also from the South and basically said, You have to be an idiot to think this was an acceptable thing to do in modern America, to drive around the country touring with the Battle Flag. And then there was a coalition of African-American artists who made public statements denouncing both the title of the live recording, Pack Up the Plantation, and the tour itself.

This book is not just music criticism, it’s also cultural commentary and personal reflection. In the course of writing this book, what did you learn about yourself and your Southern heritage as a white man from Kentucky?

I think it’s fair to say that, to some extent, I am the data for a lot of the argument. Part of this book is rock ’n’ roll stories of the record, part of it is the Confederacy and the way the Lost Cause lingers in American memory. I had known that a lot of that ran in my veins being a kid from Kentucky. In dumb ways, like Dukes of Hazzard or when playing war I always pretended I was in a gray uniform.

There’s a moment where I’m in Virginia, off the Chesapeake Bay, and I’m sitting in this cemetery that has little Confederate parade flags on the graves of soldiers who died during the war. As I’m thinking about it, I had this moment of deep reverence for all the loss and, if you’re from the South, living under this yoke of defeat, that you would want to find some way to redeem all this stupid lost life. And that revelry was really just because I’m a Southern white dude. It’s all part of this big historical nostalgic complex that was deeply embedded within me. And I knew that it was in me, because I’m not a dummy, but I had never really felt it viscerally. If the book is going to matter to anyone, there’s a lot of people, even in the book, who say, [regarding] the Confederate Flag, that it was a different time or we didn’t know any better at the time. Except, no, white people didn’t know better.

Reading about your visit to the graveyard in Virginia reminded me of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s Pulitzer-winning portrait of the white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof, who you also write about. She details how Roof, in the weeks leading up to the killing of nine Black people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, visited “historical sites related to slavery and Confederate history, and practice runs to Mother Emanuel.”

You write that Tom Petty, in trying to work back some of the nostalgia he had for the South, would later perform “Rebels” as a “muted, solo acoustic number thereby stripping the song of its mood of glory.” Do you think there’s a way to also strip historical sites associated with Confederate history of their sense of glory? 

I don’t think you can look at Tom Petty’s defanging of “Rebels” and use that as a model for the rectification of Confederate monuments because they are a different medium. The performance of the song carries the meaning. The difference in medium isn’t that tricky, but the question you’re asking is. I’m thinking of Richmond, Virginia, and Monument Avenue and there’s such martial ferocity in these statues and there’s not really another way to interpret it. So I want to say they should be taken down.

After an event I did with the philosopher Christopher Lebron, I was in a conversation with him where Calhoun College at Yale was brought up. And he said these things could stand if they could be converted into monuments of our shame. I found that really striking, but I also find that impossible. I don’t see how all these things can be effectively converted into monuments of shame. That’s just going to create more reaction. So my position would be, and it’s not a very nuanced position, but it’s that most of this stuff needs to come down.

You point out that the conversation around the visual language of the Confederacy has shifted from the Battle Flag to public monuments. What accounts for that shift?

I feel like the reason the conversation has moved from flag to monument is because there is more plasticity around the flag. It’s easier to get away with saying, “This flag means this to me,” as opposed to a statue of Robert E. Lee. I also think the people rallying for this stuff, I don’t want to say they have a more sophisticated understanding, but it seems like there’s a bigger emphasis on mechanisms of power. Statues are almost always endorsed by governments and municipal sites, right? That is more of an affront to democratic flourishing than some yahoo who wants to put a Battle Flag in the window of his truck. I think that accounts for some of that transition. I don’t know if that’s right, but that feels right to me.

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Connor Goodwin is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn, New York. His writing has appeared in theWashington Post, BOMB Magazine, Modern Painters, Fanzine, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere.

The post Tom Petty: A Cool, Gray Neo-Confederate? appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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