#ended up calling the manufacture to confirm

[actual-changeling]

autism win! the manufacturer somehow hasn't gotten rid the exact glasses frame i got four years ago, so my new glasses will literally look like my current ones

[smutstationchoochoo]

Desperate

COD Men x FemReader

Hear me out: a sex pollen fic where reader isn’t affected but he is and he is gone.

Word count: ~3.6k

A/N: It’s just the poorly written sex pollen drabble of my dreams, it’s fuck or die lads. Insert your favorite COD man here. Please forgive me for any spelling/grammar mistakes and my complete lack of knowledge regarding military things, all I know is that these men are hot and I love them.

Warnings: sex pollen, unprotected PIV (wrap it up), overstimulation, dubious consent (consent is sexy folks)

Banner credit: @cafekitsune

You all had been briefed at 0200. The flight to Berlin left at 0300 where the team would be infiltrating a terrorist hideout, a suspected manufacturing site for a new chemical agent. You were told that as long as you didn’t ingest it, you would be fine.

The fact that it had been made airborne was not in the fucking briefing.

The team had been split into pairs, you and he took the North side of the suspected warehouse. The size of it should have tipped you all off. Everything was running smoothly until 3 combatants had come from the door at the end of the corridor. He called for cover and ran ahead. You dropped two before he even got a stride in. The other he disarmed in seconds and then with a deafening crack, both men slammed through a door and into the resulting room. A brief struggle then silence. You heard him start to call the ok, his voice in the comm sounding clearer than earlier, then a noise, a pop, and the sound of air. You froze, watching a gas spill from the open door and dissipate immediately. Just when you started moving again, a growling, “Don’t,” tore through the comm. Then, the sound of ripping Velcro and something hard (his helmet you realized with a sickening drop) hitting the concrete floor echoed out to you. Soft murmurs that grew into angry outbursts of fuck fuck fuck transformed into one that became a groan of what sounded like complete and utter pain. You didn’t even have to think, the severity of the situation settled in. “It’s a gas,” you barked into the comms, “Northside hit, need medevac in 30, going dark.” You waited for confirmation, seconds after getting it and receiving news that the warehouse was almost cleared, you went to find him.

You knew what it did, you all did. Jokes had been made, smirks shared, but you all knew how bad it was. You weren’t even close to prepared. He was sitting against the far wall or rather pressed into it using it to keep his now shaking frame upright, gear strewn around the room, combatant on your immediate left with a mask (his mask, the masks you all were wearing just in fucking case) gripped in a dead hand, an empty canister mockingly sitting in the middle of the room. 

You gripped the combatant by his legs and dragged him to the hall, before slamming the door shut upon reentry and grabbing a near chair to jam the door. You immediately began stripping yourself of your outer tactical gear until you both matched in only your boots, pants, and base shirts and then you turned your attention to him. Now kneeling by his side you took him in, looking for any other injuries noting nothing serious. That almost made you laugh with relief until you saw the front of his pants and him frantically palming the growing outline. You swallowed and quickly looked at his face shocked back to the reality of the current situation. The usually stoic, always larger than life, incredibly strong man in front of you was reduced to tears dripping from his now blown and hazy eyes, falling down flushed cheeks and landing on the front of his shirt that clung to his hyperventilating chest. You knew he had been shot, stabbed often, and left for dead a time or two, but this…

Shiny and new neurotoxin, you remembered the brief, attacks the nervous system, causing the mark to feel intense arousal and as if they have been lit on fire, specially formulated not only to cause pain but a complete and utter breakdown of will as victims often experience hallucinations and loss of self. If left in the system, it raises the core temperature until convulsions set in, and then heart attack occurs. Do not touch it.

No one had to ask how it was worked out of the system. Then again, they all believed they were too smart to touch the shit. Couldn’t do much about breathing it in when your mask was ripped from your face though.

  Your hand pressed to his slick forehead now radiating heat, and feeling as if it could burn you like an open flame. At the touch of your blessedly cool hand, he hissed a low fuck through his gritted teeth, keening into your touch. You swallowed, hand tilting his cheek to look up at you when you asked, “Can I help?”  His hair was sticking up at all angles from the helmet being hastily pulled from his head, and he looked up at you and gave one weak nod, “Please.”

Upon looking at the desperation pooling in those dark eyes (those eyes you often were caught staring at) any small reservations evaporated from your body under his burning gaze. You swiftly reached out, mercifully helping him escape from the now too-tight pants, the bite of his zipper. The moment your skin brushed against the head of him he was bucking up against it. You had to reach the other hand out to steady yourself against his shoulder, another touch that jutted his hips and had him twitching into your grip.

“Is- is this helping?” you croaked out, struggling to swallow, struggling to contain the wave of arousal that was threatening to course through you. He nodded, chin slack against his chest as he watched your hand work against him, moving up and down against the veins seemingly trying to break through his skin. No thoughts went through his mind other than the knowledge that you were jerking him off and that it felt so good that he could cry in relief. But then something shuddered within him, something loud and fast like a wildfire, burning just as much, and hot thick ropes of cum spilled over your hand. He couldn’t even cry out, it happened so fast. His breath was coming out in loud pants, when a new thought, the thought that he had just come in maybe thirty seconds flashed through his mind but it was quickly replaced with the horrible realization that the feeling of being on fire wasn’t going away. It was getting worse, out of control, containment measures failed. At this, he let out a sob as his hips moved of their own volition into your still soothing grip. It wasn’t enough, he knew, you knew, it wasn’t enough.

 You stood, and he whimpered at the loss of your touch but all sound stopped in his throat when he watched you decisively unzip your pants and pull them down to your ankles underwear included, kicking off a boot, and one pant leg. When you straddled his lap he desperately pulled you down onto him, your exposed core grinding down where he wanted you, where he fucking needed you, that’s when he began to talk. Begging you to help him, saying that he’s sorry over and over, that he needs your help, incoherent babbling from a breaking mind, please it hurts so bad, I-I don’t, I can’t- fuck, I need you... All cool, calm, collectedness burnt to fucking ash. Just a man reduced to pure longing and want. A longing and want that might be what was threatening to kill him, not the toxin, just the build up over the days, weeks, months he had been around you threatening to crush him. He almost wants to die, this was never how it was supposed to be. He wanted it to be good for you, you deserve that, you deserve better, he could have given you better-

But now what was he? A heaving chest under a sweat soaked shirt beneath eyes that watch you like some feral animal. Hands wanting to claw at the clothing now so heavy, hot, and itchy against his burning skin, but instead were gripping onto your hips like it’s going to save him from burning to a crisp. The broken moans tearing their way from his throat when you line up his painfully hard cock to your entrance makes you throb, and then his choking cry as you slide down on him punches the air from your chest.

“Does this feel ok?” you panted out after a moment, struggling, trying not to drown in the pleasure of him stretching you, filling you. He couldn’t form the words, couldn’t even nod. His forehead falling to your shoulder in utter relief, mouth dropped open as he repeats your name over and over like an apology, a thanks, a goddamned prayer. How all he can do is sit there on the floor of some warehouse, back against a wall, the only thing resembling his usual strength is that ironclad hold he has on your hips as he helps you drag yourself up, then, accompanied by the tortuously obscene sounds of your wetness, back down. Brokenly pleading with you not to stop, don’t stop, fuck p-please don’t stop. You feel like molten heaven against his cock, your moans like angels (or devils, he’s too far gone to care at this point) singing through the blood rushing in his ears. One of your hands again steadies yourself on his shoulder, the other steadying him, an anchor point, with your achingly gentle hold on the nape of his damp neck (so gentle that it breaks his fucking heart, he wanted to give you more, you deserved more) as you ride him. Your hips rock once more, twice more, before his body seizes up with electricity that ricochets up his spinal cord and reverberates through his skull. His fingers dig into the soft skin of your hips, teeth grinding and eyes slamming shut, as he releases inside of you with a shattered cry. The sound of you gasping, now clutching, raking your fingers into him, has his hips continuing their rutting up into you, pushing his cum as deep as he can within your walls.

He stills for 10 seconds at most, panting breaths thunderous between you two, before pulling you into his chest, his hips slamming up into you, hard and hot as if he didn’t just fuck you until he could see every neuron firing behind his eyes. His hot open mouth finds your shocked one in a perfectly surprised “o,” more apologies pushing from his lungs and into yours between loud wet kisses as he listens (is blessed with thank you God) to you beginning to come apart. You couldn’t help it, as you ground down into his thrusts, even though you knew the threatening climax was going to be terrifying. Your breathing was ragged now as well, the air becoming harder and harder to drag into your lungs in between you cursing and moaning, and then- fucking hell- you’re at the precipice. Before you can even utter a syllable you are being flung over the edge. The pleasure rips through you, waves breaking against the rocky shore, with such intensity that it hurts, causing you to dig your nails into his skin, and bright spots to dance behind your closed eyes while the distant feeling of wetness registers from between you two. He explodes again with a gasp, feels you clench around him like a vice, his name, his real name, forcing its way from inside you and into his mouth with every pulse and it tastes so so good that he can’t stop, he never wants to stop, just filling you up until it drips from you, filling you with him because you’re his, his. Even when you both whimper and shudder with overstimulation, his arms shaking in their grip around you, he can only press his forehead to yours, rolling it desperately, as he begs for your forgiveness. I can’t stop, it won’t stop, I’ll make it good, please next time I’ll make it good.

“It is good,” you whisper to him with hitched breath from each thrust, trying to reassure him, “It’s ok, it’s ok.” You don’t know if he can hear you, his eyes are wild and don’t seem to even register that you are actually on top of him, that he’s inside of you, that he has made you yell out his name over and over and over. You don’t think he even knows what he is saying. Next time.

 His own voice comes to him from somewhere far away, through the flames licking at his mind, please- fuckin’ hell please, just a little more- I just need one more, I need you, please don’t stop, I don’t want to stop nearly unrecognizable as he comes inside you again and again and again.

It isn’t until the medevac came and he was sedated that what just happened began to sink in. For a week, a fucking week, he’s in critical condition. No one talks about it, at least not in the way you all did before this. You saved him, you’re told. You don’t want to think about it, if you think about it then you think about how good it felt, how fucked it is that it felt good, and how everything is gone. If you think about all he said, you’d overthink, give meaning where there was none. He probably won’t be able to look at you anymore. You went to see him that first day. You sat next to him for mere minutes before bolting, the fear of him waking up and looking at you with disgust, telling you to get out in that icy voice you knew so well, sent you running straight to the mats to train until you wanted to scream. That’s all you did now, and that was where you decided you would stay until you died. That is until someone came and found you, told you he was awake, and that he had asked for you. The whole walk to the infirmary had adrenaline coursing through you, you wanted to run, to fight, to freeze right there in the hall and never move another fucking muscle. The thought of losing him, him being there but not wanting to be near you anymore made you feel sick. It had been so long, so long of repressing those feelings that flared in your chest when he smiled at you during sparring, the feeling of him seated next to you on a flight, his eyes catching yours just so you could stay with him. Well, you thought with dripping ire, that had literally and figuratively been fucked now hadn’t it?  

You knocked, heard his gruff voice, and entered. You stopped dead in your tracks three steps into the room after mistakenly looking up and finding him staring at you from where he sat on the edge of the bed, already dressed, looking like he was about to head out on another call. You were desperately trying not to shake but your hands gave you away. You could take on a man twice your size without batting an eye but this?- you were terrified.

The moment you walked into the room, all his time that morning when he first woke thinking about what he would say to you, how he could face you, was knocked from his mind. You had saved his life. He never wanted that. He wanted to give it to you, it was yours after all. He didn’t know when it had become yours, every single part of him, but if he had to wager a guess it was the moment he found you in his life. And it might all be ruined.

The memories had started coming to him immediately after waking up, almost more clear and real now than in the moment.  It jolted him awake so hard that the attending ran into the room for fear that his hammering heart had in fact given out. Once his breathing had calmed a little, he tried to sift through the fog. His recall of the smell of you, the arousal dripping from between your legs, mixed with your sweat and the familiar scent of your grapefruit and ginger shampoo, nearly pulled a groan from his chest. The soft touch of your hands, cool and strong against the fire that spread through his blood, had brought him back. The feeling of you breaking, the soft whines, the way you said his name… the things he had said, he couldn’t just shut the fuck up could he?

He had to bring his hands up to cover his eyes, willing the images to go away, just for a moment, please, he just needed some time, if only he had time- next time. Next time, he had told you. A desperate promise, a reassurance, trying to tell you that it wasn’t just the chemical coursing through him, it wasn’t just his hijacked nervous system. Did she know? Did she understand? That’s when he asked for you, without thinking, just wanting to see you, to explain. He had never been good with words unless it was biting sarcasm across comms or coolly delivering ultimatums in an interrogation. Then he remembered, the thing that sent his heart barreling through his chest for the second time, the machine next to him screaming. It is good, you had said, it’s ok, it’s ok, you had whispered.  

He ripped the monitors off his chest, ignoring the doctor's protestations, found the clothes that had been brought in for him and got dressed. Now that you were standing here before him he was unsure. You looked scared, and he could count on one hand all the times he had seen you in such a state.

His staring was unnerving, more unnerving than if he had shouted, yelled, grabbed you, anything but this, this was fucking torture. You had to leave, just get off base, go somewhere, anywhere but here- the sudden sound of your name shook you from the reverie. The tone had your eyes finding his immediately.

He stayed seated, scared that if he stood, if he made his way to you, you would run, and you both knew that you were much quicker than him. If you ran, if you left, he would never catch up.  Only when his knuckles began to ache did he realize how tightly he was gripping the edge of the mattress in an effort to keep himself there. It was hard to look at you and not remember the way you had looked when you pressed your hand to his forehead, when you had thrown your head back in pleasure, when you had grabbed his face when he was too exhausted to continue but thankfully no longer felt like he was burning alive. It was hard to remember and not stride across the room and hold you. He took a breath and forced his shoulders to relax in a way that he had done so many times before.

“I-,” he started, his voice cutting through the room, his normal voice, the one you recognized as him and it set you slightly at ease from sheer familiarity, “I’m so sorry.” Now he had to turn his eyes downcast.

“What?” Your response, the shock in your voice, forced him to look at you again. Your hands itched at your sides, confusion rippling across your face.

His eyes narrowed, he knew you so well. Always blaming yourself. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, “I’m sorry that happened, I’m sorry you were put in that position,” the word choice made him nearly cringe. He continued, “I never-I didn’t want it to happen that way.”

Your brain jolted, standing there in shocked silence, his words thundering through your ears accompanied by the pleading of next time.

He pressed on, desperately trying, “I know you, you’re going to think this was your fault. It wasn’t. There was nothing either of us could do, thank you for your, uh, help. Just- fuck, please just say some-,”

Shock still swept through you, the words escaped your mouth before you could think, “Did you mean it?” You figured by the way he leaned back that he knew what you were talking about. Then he held out a hand, palm up, an offering. Before you knew it, you had crossed the room, putting your hand in his and letting it gently pull you between his legs. His giant frame meant even sitting on the gurney that his gaze was level with yours, and those eyes searched your own when one word sounded through the room.

“Yes.”

This word broke you. One fucking word, one word that answered every glance between you two, every smile shared, a word you brokenly whispered into the night when you had a hand between your legs thinking about him knowing you shouldn’t. You hadn’t cried all week, but now the giant tears rolling down your cheeks felt like a release. When his free hand, warm and rough, swiped them away you couldn’t help leaning into it, just as he had done. All tension, all fear, dissipated from the room. That hand continued to just below your ear, cupping your neck, and gently pulling you forward to press his head against yours, eyes shutting, just resting there against each other in the moment.

“What the fuck are we gonna do?” you sighed.

You could feel the smirk that you knew was slipping across his mouth.

“Well, I did say next time.”

This time when you rode him with the small bed creaking beneath the movements, he stopped you any time you tried to speed up (it was your turn to beg and plead), keeping you at a languid torturous pace. That way the bastard had all the time in the world to whisper into your mouth, letting you taste each word, all the things he would do to you next time and all the times after that.

Thank you so much for reading, please let me know what you think! :)

[losergames]

Chop Shop is strictly 18+ for language, themes, and potential explicit content. 

🔗 - Game Intro | Bug Report | Ko-Fi

Episode Three is now available! (+ 86,000) - PLAY HERE

Get your first taste of the underground car scene.

Meet some other players in the game.

Be made an offer.

5 achievements up for grabs!

And more!

AN: thank you so much for the patience - i've been dying to put this update out. lots of new characters and lots of variation!! there are 3 major paths to choose between in this ep, i recommend trying them all out! and thank you to my betas for keeping me sane lmao

This update comes with a patch and UI refresh (Version 1.1.2) Notes are under the cut. If preferred, you can access them in game in the start menu.

STORY

EPISODE 01:

MC should now be able to smoke! Buying cigarettes at the shop was not triggering correctly. If playing with an old save, you DO NOT have to restart as code at the beginning of EP 03 has resolved the error. Player will need to restart if they wish to read smoking related scenes in previous episodes.

Updated MC Name selection. Player can now choose from a list of names instead of having to input one to proceed.

Player can now give Taha their chocolate bar if it's in their inventory.

When asking Maz about their scars, the second choice 'You want to ask about it but you're going to keep your mouth shut.' should now take you to the correct response.

Extended and updated 'End Game' scenes.

EPISODE 02:

If MC is faint after exiting the car, but also drunk, they should now get the fainting scene, followed by Dilani helping the MC in the bathroom.

UI + TECHNICAL

SETTINGS:

Autoname Save is now defaulted to ON. This is to add ease and flow to gameplay, especially for mobile, tablet, and app users, instead of calling for an inputted saved name. If player wants to input save names, toggle Autoname Saves to OFF.

Autoname Save previously only used the forename of the MC but now includes the surname as well.

Removed the Fullscreen toggle as it is only intended for desktop use. Player can still toggle fullscreen function via the UI bar on the desktop interface.

Added a choice indicator toggle. (This probably won't come into effect until EP 04 or 05)

Changed serif font from Vollkron to EB Garamond.

OTHER:

Changing the MC's pronouns via the Dashboard has been updated. Additionally, after confirmation will take player back to the Dashboard and not close the dialog boxes entirely.

Hovering over 'Personality', 'Motives', and 'Skills' titles in the Dashboard will now display an information box with a definition. Mobile and tablet users will need to tap on the title.

'Resume Game' now only appears on the main menu when there is an autosave in the saves log.

Choices styling changes.

General UI and button style changes.

Fixed errors with the text message styling.

Added styling for reading text off of a page in game.

Darkened blue in light theme 'Skyline' to reduce eye strain.

CREATE A SAVE

Introducing Create a Save! This feature allows players to quickly manufacture a save file and start at a later point in the game.

Set your identity, appearance, history, and statistics; including personality, motives, and skills. Continue to set key decisions made in previous episodes.

Randomise options available for creating a PC and key decisions.

OTHER

Fixed gaps and spacing issues.

Minor phrasing and sentence structure changes.

Grammar and typo fixes.

whew -- that's a lot of patch notes! apologies for so much that needed to be fixed.

this update shouldn't break/ mess with saves but as a disclaimer i will say, if you spot anything funky, broken, or you don't think things are triggering correctly, try starting a new save. the new create a save feature is incredibly code heavy, and it's been tested relentlessly, but i wouldn't be surprised if something crops up.

if starting a new save doesn't resolve your issue - please submit to bug report or just send me an ask/message.

some things have been meaning to get fixed for Some Time - thank you to everyone that is using the bug report form!

apologies if there are typos and/or bugs - this was a long one to edit and my lovely betas did an OUTSTANDING job reading so much for ep 3 - thank you so much again!!! this time i am going to give it a bit more time before i put together a patch so i can grab more error responses haha.

create a save has also added a wee chunk to the word count, somewhere around 6k, but i'm not including it in the episode 03 word count as it's purely code. so, if you think the total wc is off, that's why!

if you've read this far, happy reading and thank you so much for the continued support!! :) - becky <3

[awarmcupofmilk]

Gojo x reader "Broken Mirror"

afab!reader

summary: you knew gojo was the one. gojo wasn't so sure.

content warnings: breakup/sad, angst, deviations from gojo’s past arc

word count: 1,226

note: hi lovelies, I'm back! I'm thinking of turning this into a series, thoughts?

© 2022 awarmcupofmilk

please don’t repost, edit, translate, use, or copy my works on any platforms (if you’d really like to please reach out – reblogs are welcome)

You’d known for a while Satoru was the one.

When he’d thoroughly humiliated the elders through cheeky comebacks and downright threats because Gakuganji made a remark about your way of dress off-duty.

When he called off classes for the day to host a hot dog eating contest, just because you were having a hard time with your sister getting engaged---fresh out of high school.

When he literally saved your life on that mission.

But what sealed the deal was this adorably clueless look on his face, set so vividly apart from his usual smirks and sneers, when he got daifuku on his cheek.

You were in love. And in it bad.

At first, you knew you were alone in your convictions. Satoru hadn’t ever prioritized love and you didn’t think you’d convince him otherwise. You told yourself it was fine, that you’d date for a few months, maybe a year and then move on for the better.

But you don’t move on from the strongest.

You couldn’t taste anything else once you’d had him. Nothing else held appeal.

You kept telling yourself it was fine. You were still young, you still had time to date without a future. But the smell of his aftershave, the way his hair curled behind his ear, his distaste for alcohol. It all drew you in, too deeply, and you wanted it too badly.

Satoru would stiffen when you brought up the future.

He was happy to make plans for Friday date night, but anything about revisiting the clan or moving in or god forbid, marriage had him giving non-answers and changing the subject at the first opportunity.

It was a stabbing pain, seeing the look on his face, and a few times after a particularly sobering conversation you’d almost considered ending it. But he was so sweet. By all other accounts he was a wonderful boyfriend. Chivalrous---opening the door for you, insisting on paying the bill, unfolding the napkin at restaurants to cover your lap. He genuinely listened. And yes, he had a slight habit of being a little too friendly with no doubt interested women, but he’d always own up and do better when you called him out. And you just clicked. So effortlessly, so seamlessly. So, you told yourself it was fine.

You had your whole life ahead of you at twenty-three. And you knew, any third party would tell you that you were being unreasonable. But you loved him. You were sure about him. Surer than you were about most things. Maybe anything. You used to be so cynical about marriage. You didn’t buy anything about soulmates or true love or the one. But Satoru was it for you. You just knew.

But the more you wanted him, the more anxious you were to hold on, to not lose him. You found yourself asking, “Are you going to break up with me?” As a joke from the outside but in truth a deep fear, seeking opposition or confirmation, you didn’t know.

And Satoru would always respond easily, with that trademark suaveness, “Not planning on it.”

You asked more and more often, and whether or not Satoru noticed, more and more anxiously.

And each “I don’t see that happening,” each “No” followed by a soft kiss sold it to you more. You stopped telling yourself it was fine. You’d be together forever. You were sure of it.

Things weren’t perfect. You two had your rough patches and fair share of fights. But you wanted each other enough to make it through anything. If the you from a few years ago could hear yourself, this madness probably would have been put to an end. But you loved him. You loved him in that cliché, film way that looks manufactured in hindsight. But it felt so raw, so pure, so real. You’d be together forever.

Soon, despite yourself, you began hinting. Rings. Nice houses. And even, though you were now appalled at the memory, babies. Not to be had then, of course, just for the far-off future. You could be patient if commitment was promised.

And for whatever reason, Satoru played along. He started engaging in talks about the future, even though he used to say he didn’t want to make these promises, didn’t want to plan so far. You had reminded yourself of what he used to say, that look on his face when you brought up plans. But for some reason hidden to him and you, he bought into it too. He started fantasizing with you. Of course, to you it didn’t feel like fantasizing. But he seemed to want it, almost as badly. You thought his face lit up picturing your lives together in the next few years. You thought he smiled a little wider, laughed a little louder.

He wants this too. You told yourself. We’ll be together forever. You said.

You told this to yourself like a mantra, and soon it became indisputable truth.

✧

“Hey,” you started, leaning on Satoru’s shoulder. You snuggled closer to him on the couch and pulled the blanket over your shoulder. “Does it ever bother you that I ask about the future?” You said.

Satoru stiffened, and your heart dropped.

“What do you mean?” He asked.

“You know, like do you not like talking about plans long-term?”

You were fishing for an easy answer, some artificial reassurance, a “No, I like it fine.”

But he paused. You couldn’t breathe.

“I thought I told you I didn’t want to make promises.”

“Oh,” was all you could say. It sounded like you had let out a breath. A small cough.

“I mean, it’s kind of fun to fantasize,” he said.

You hadn’t realized how much the word “fantasize” bothered you. How seriously you took your “plans”.

“But I mean, I can’t promise what will happen in a few years,” Gojo continued.

You felt dizzy. “You don’t see us together in a few years?” You asked. It sounded like a whimper and you hated yourself for it.

“I just mean I don’t know what my life looks like in a few years.”

“Oh,” you said again.

There was silence. You’d stopped resting on his shoulder and you didn’t know what to do with yourself. You pulled the blanket off and fidgeted, eyes glued to your lap.

“…where do you see this going?” You finally asked. Quietly.

He let out a breath. “Look, I’m going to be honest, I’m twenty-four, I can’t make any commitments right now.”

“Oh.”

You felt oddly calm. “Um, thanks for being honest with me,” (finally, you thought).

“Sure,” Gojo said.

“So we have an expiration date, huh?” You asked.

Gojo frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean this is going to end at some point.”

“I mean, I’m not making a decision right now about the future,” Gojo said, you thought he shrugged. “I still want to be with you now,”

But he didn’t understand. That was the point. You’d decided on forever without a second thought, and he just let you. But sooner or later, when he decided it was time to experience life without you, he’d leave you behind. You didn’t want now if you couldn’t have the future.

You didn’t meet his eye. “Gojo, I think we should end things.”

It’s funny how the things you love the most can shatter in an instant.

✧ Masterlist ✧

[faerlygraceful]

So I rewatched all of the “Begins” episodes last night and it only managed to cement my head canons about Tommy, which began forming after we saw him again.

Of course I don’t know if they thought this was going to be where the character ended up when they filled the firehouse back in season 2. I don’t know what Lou thought about his character. I don’t know what the intentions were. What I am doing (since this is my head canon), is taking new knowledge and using it to recategorize previous interactions. I’m queer, it’s what we all do.

So I’m going to share my analysis with all of y’all cause this is the internet, and I’m allowed.

Spoilers for… well everything.

Tommy is one of the three characters who shows up in all three Begins episodes, the other two being Athena and Sal DeLuca. His first appearance in the show is Hen Begins, but as we know Chimney Begins is chronologically first, so we’re starting there.

Chimney Begins

1) We first see Tommy when probie Howie walks in. He doesn’t seem to notice that Howie is a probie, asking who didn’t tip the takeout guy. Gerrard quickly takes the role of antagonist, and that’s when we move on.

2) At one point when they’re coming back from a call after Howie has been there a while, Tommy says, in a surprised tone, “You’re still here?” I think this is less of a, “You don’t belong here,” and more of a, “You’ve been here for weeks/months and haven’t been out once, I would have quit, why haven’t you?”

3) While man behind, Howie helps a guy who was having indigestion and a panic attack at the same time. When the rest get back, Howie tries to bond with them over the call, but is ignored. They are talking about takeout options and Gerrard asks Tommy, when his girlfriend is supposed to come in and cook. Tommy sounds extremely contained during this interaction, gives a a day, and when pressed he stammers and promises. The conversation fades off so we don’t hear what he promises, but he didn’t seem all that enthusiastic about his girlfriend coming in.

- Now this is where we really start getting into my hcs. Either Tommy is bi (which we’ll hopefully find out tomorrow) or he’s closeted. The tightness in his voice (which is all we have to go on because the camera is focused on the POV character), tells me that he’s extremely uncomfortable with the interaction. He’s been put on the spot, and he doesn’t like it. I think the girlfriend is either a) a friend he’s brought by the house once and everyone inferred or b) someone he manufactured in order to get out of team events ie, “Oh I can’t go out tonight, my girl is cooking.” He is uncomfortable with what his boss (a confirmed bigot) is asking for, and the man is pressuring him to produce his beard. If she was actually his girlfriend and Tommy is also bisexual, it could just be that’s he’s uncomfortable exposing her to the environment that the 118 is at that point.

4) Howie starts to try and broach the barriers between himself and the other firefighters, only to be rebuked. At one point he corners Tommy in the locker room, and starts naming off all these topics, stating, “Tell me what your thing is and I’ll make it mine.” Talking about his formidable people skills and asking if that means Tommy just didn’t like him that much.

Tommy tells him, “If I thought about you at all, I probably wouldn’t.” Which tells me that Tommy has already built his mask, his persona, and since the others don’t try to look beyond the surface he’s able to maintain it, but he can’t afford to let anyone in. He can’t think about the new guy on the squad, he’s too busy making sure Gerrard doesn’t find out about his closet. That would be just another person to have to hide from anyway.

This is when Howie gets pulled for the ambulance. Eli tells him that it’s not personal, because friends die and funerals are held. Which makes me also think that Howie stepped into the shoes of a firefighter who died. Maybe one who Tommy was particularly close to? Eli goes on to call Howie a puppy who doesn’t get a name until they know it’s gonna come through.

The next thing that happens is Kevin Lee’s death. Which is incredibly sad and is a big part of how Howie develops as a firefighter, but this meta is Tommy focused so moving on.

5) The garage collapse at the mall, and Tommy almost dies. More to it, Howie saved him. So Tommy decides to share some things with Howie. “Love Actually, monster trucks, and craft beer”. Maybe not a coming out story, but he did declare that one of his favorite movies is a rom com. It’s a start.

Hen Begins

1) Tommy is first seen when Hen walks into the house. He’s comes up to the railing after Gerrard calls for everyone and is positioned between the captain and DeLuca. Now it’s my personal opinion that DeLuca is an ass and that’s backed up by these episodes but even Hen defends him in Bobby Begins Again, and that started with this episode. But again, we’re not here to get into Sal DeLuca’s headspace, this is about Tommy. When Gerrard calls Hen an “diversity” hire, we see Tommy looking very uncomfortable, and Sal is the one to take up some of Captain’s dirty work for him (“For real?”). This is the episode where I truly see Tommy as “falling in line” with the captain. He’s opened up a little to Howie (no nickname yet), a little more inclined to joke, but still is holding these boundaries.

2) DeLuca talks about taking his girl to see some vampire movie and Tommy immediately knows it’s Twilight. DeLuca talks about how he likes Kristen Stewart (with Hen agreeing) before saying something about getting behind that, which makes Hen uncomfortable. (According to this, it would put it in 2008, which means she’s a paramedic for ten years prior to Buck joining which I hate. All those movies came out rather fast but could all be classified as “Twilight” so it was probably at least Eclipse in 2010 especially with the references made…. But then we start to go into how much I hate this timeline because nothing makes sense ever) Tommy talks about how he doesn’t understand the attraction to KS because she’s too… (Sal puts in hot here) broody, and Sal asks him if that means he’s Team Jacob (which is what makes me think it’s at least during Eclipse, I don’t see DeLuca being a Twi-Hard, and so his frame of reference would be movie based), and when Tommy acts confused (not sure if an act or not, he knew what Twilight was, but that doesn’t mean he knows about Team Edward vs Team Jacob), Chimney confirms that he’s implying that Tommy is gay. You. See. Him. Freeze. There is a few seconds where Tommy freezes in place like he’s processing before he makes a joke, blowing a kiss at Sal before laughing. Gerrard puts a stop to the conversation, and Hen takes a seat.

— Remember when Tommy has buried himself in the closet? What happened when someone rattles the door with a gay joke? One where it’s being implied that you are gay? When you’re bigot of a boss is sitting not five feet from you at the same table? You freeze to not immediately deny the accusation in a way that would make you look sus, and then you make a joke out of it. It hurts, so much.

———-Ah shit I’m going to timeline this———

From what we know, Tommy was in the army as a pilot. For Timeline purposes we’re going to assume that Eli leaving is the reason Hen went to the 118. During her med student arc it talks about how she was a paramedic for 10 years, so 2012 makes sense there. It doesn’t make sense with other thing’s because in Lonestar’s Hold the Line (2021 would make this make sense), Hen tells Owen that Denny is 10 and she and Karen and her were married for 8 years, (Same sex marriage has only been legal in CA since 2013). Bobby was their captain for a year in Worst Day Ever, they had a captain parade for two years (six captains) and before that they had a someone who was cleaning up after Gerrard. Also Hen and Karen were freshly back together when DADT was repealed. That makes Denny a baby on September 20th of 2011.

Enlistment periods are 8 years but that’s a mix of active and inactive duty. If Tommy signed up out of high school (18), was an active duty pilot for 6 years (24) and then moved to the reserves for the remaining two while he became a firefighter, it means he could have been a firefighter for two years longer than Hen or Chimney while being less than 10 years older than Buck.

Now none of this helps in placing where these episodes fall in the timeline, but I would say that Bobby’s first day falls about a year before the pilot, and Chimney Begins and Hen Begins butt right up together. Also I have no more information on Eli and how long he stayed after training Chim, and I probably never will because I cannot watch Boston.

More timeline BS. Hen and Karen had to have gotten together during the captain parade because Gerrard would not have let her on a call where she got hurt enough that Chim would make the call to Karen.

——————— Timeline bs over ——————

3) Tommy asks about how “New York bitchiness” could be a compliment after Howie mentioning that she has an East coast vibe, and Hen thanks him for the compliment. And then Howie makes it seem like Tommy’s calling her bitchy, but I don’t see it that way. What’s more likely is that’s the only vibe he knows from the east coast, so when Howie suggests she has it, he’s like, wait you think that’s a compliment? Howie treats it like Tommy’s calling Hen a bitch, but it honestly didn’t come off that way, more like Tommy trying to clarify that Howie wasn’t calling Hen a bitch by saying she has an “East Coast Vibe”. Anyway this conversation quickly devolves in Gerrard being a misogynist, and Tommy and DeLuca quickly scamper off.

4) Not Tommy related, but we do have someone with insight into being an openly gay firefighter now. Casey with the 115. He says that they knew he was gay from the moment he walked in, and it didn’t matter that he was the strongest guy in the firehouse. Here we have proof that it doesn’t matter your qualifications, if you’re perceived as gay, you’re automatically singled out. He said it was so hard that he was told to quit and find a new dream by his partner. Now, there is a red flag about your SO tellingly you to give up your dreams, but can you imagine how bad it would have been for the boyfriend to get to that point? The person you care about coming home every night defeated and downtrodden over something that’s supposed to be his dream? The ease in which Casey shed the boyfriend makes me think that they weren’t together long enough to earn those privileges, but the job also gets a red flag for being so bad that you’d advise your short term boyfriend to quit.

5) Hen’s speech. During this we don’t see him often, because he’s off to the side. The camera is more focused on Gerrard, DeLuca and Howie for the most part. But he does seem very closed off, when you do see him, his arms crossed, not standing defensively or challengingly like DeLuca, but like he’s trying to shrink. Actually it kind of reminds me of another queer firefighter that we all know.

6) We don’t get to see much more of the reactions because we go immediately into a call where a party limo crashed into a flower truck. Which we only know about because Hen went looking for it, saving the life of a little boy. Tommy tells her good job, that they would have discovered the secondary wreck eventually but that it would have been too late. She also has now earned Sal’s respect.

7) When they get back the Chief is there. Now remember, she gave her speech, they went out, they come back out and Gerrard is being removed. Nothing that happened on that call or involving her speech has anything to do with this. She thinks she’s being fired, that Gerrard called while heading to or back from the scene to have her removed, but that’s not the case. Her speech wasn’t actually necessary because everyone was already complaining about how Gerrard treated her. They even talk about someone who compared Gerrard and his behavior to hemorrhoids. Which I’m not saying could be from the army pilot who was probably deployed and had to undergo long-term constipation or diarrhea, but it could be.

Now all in all, there nothing really bad about Tommy’s behavior that we’ve seen. He doesn’t approach Hen, but we’ve seen from her interactions with Howie that she barely accepts his overtures of friendship in the beginning, and Tommy is much more closed off, remembering how he only opened up to Howie after he saved his life. He also doesn’t stand up for Hen to the captain’s face, but as an Army guy, he follows the chain of command. Doesn’t mean he won’t file one or two or three complaints through the proper channels. He just can’t afford to put himself in Gerrard’s crosshairs, can’t afford to undergo his scrutiny.

Bobby Begins Again

1) Hen has started a betting pool on the newest captain. Over under is 6 weeks, making me think that that’s the least amount of time a Captain stayed (about a month and a half and if they had 6 captains in 2 years that’s an average of 4 months). Tommy gives Nash a month and has to run to the ATM. DeLuca is obviously the main antagonizer, it sounds like he wanted the 118 and was denied (Also ABC, maybe bring him back ala Billy Tyson? Might be fun.).

2) Tommy has never worked on a farm, or dealt with toddlers. Cause he was floundering and falling all over himself when trying to catch Maurice the rooster. All in all these calls don’t show much. Tommy follows Bobby’s instructions, even though part of time he’s just parroting what Sal says, no arguments. Adds further credibility to the fact that he follows chain of command. It doesn’t matter that this guys only going to last a month, he’s my captain now.

3) During the Guillermo’s fire, Sal breaks rank to save the kid (which considering who that kid grows up to be, it sucks that he was successful). But when Bobby takes him to task for endangering them all, Sal doubles down. I thought I was paying attention during this scene, but it’s hard with the yelling. At least two people try to get him to cool it, one of them being Chimney who calls DeLuca “Fredo”.

4) They’re all at the bar, talking about Sal getting fired when Bobby shows up and the vibes change. Now sometime over the past twoish years Tommy is single, and it seems chronically at least to the house. Maybe because Gerrard is gone he doesn’t have to maintain a beard anymore, but with the endless captain parade and DeLuca being a tool, he doesn’t feel comfortable coming out? I think he’s also classified the 118 as unsafe, so maybe this lended a reason for his later transfer. But as he says, “Single is easier. Having the scars impresses women, getting ‘em freaks ‘em out.” Which gives heavy implications that like Buck in season one, Tommy isn’t dating but hooking up. If he’s gay, then his partners would have to be okay with the fact that he’s still closeted. And mention of women aside, it’s implied that a longer term relationship ended because he got hurt on the job. (This is why I don’t ascribe to the Tommy dated Abby theory. She implied that her relationship ended because of Patricia, and Tommy implies his last was due to injury. Which could be. He got hurt on the job and she couldn’t handle care giver burden for both of them? But that’s also turning Abby into Shannon Diaz pt 1 and while I dislike both women, they don’t need to be same character different font.) Here’s what I think. He got hurt on the job, and his long term boyfriend couldn’t even go to the hospital to check on him because he wasn’t out to his crew, causing them to break up.

Also for all you Buck/Tommy writers, Tommy canonically has a scar on his right side from a piece of shrapnel that he caught. He says it’s from a factory explosion. I don’t have the ability to get screen shots atm, but it’s pretty.

5) Tommy quotes Fight Club with Chim. So maybe another victim of the Han School of Movie References?

6) Bobby starts with family dinners. Tommy decides to transfer. The cake says, “The 217’s lose is our gain,” and they push his head into it.

The very next scene is Buck walking into the 118.

So all in all, we see Tommy as a deeply guarded character. He doesn’t open up easily, he follows orders, he has a soft side. I don’t really know how to conclude this because I sprinkled my impressions throughout, but I hope that this helps anyone who’s looking for Tommy characterization, and we’ll see tomorrow if any of this is right.

[fuck-customers]

So this customer placed an order late last week and one of the items was special order (listed as such on the website, with an estimated timeframe) so I sent them an email letting them know we'd send the rest right away and restating how long the special order would take.

They email back upset that the website didn't say the item was "backordered" (again, it says right on the website this is special order and takes longer to ship, also special order is not the same thing as backorder) and demand that we cancel that item because they're in a hurry. I tell them we can do that if they want, but it will actually make the rest of the order take significantly longer, because instead of some items going out that day or the next and the special order going out later, we'll have to take the whole order out of the queue and put it on hold until the refund is processed and an updated invoice is generated, which can take 2-3 business days, and then it will go back into the queue at the end of the line, which will be another 2-3 business days to get through shipping again. I ask them to confirm that knowing this, they still want to cancel the special order item. They say yes, they definitely want to cancel it.

Today (three business days later) right before closing they call in blazing mad that their order hasn't shipped. I pull up the order and recognize it, and tell them hey, looks like it got held up for a bit because there was a request for a partial cancelation, but the refund has been processed, it's back in the queue and based on its position it will probably go out tomorrow.

Customer loses their mind yelling that this is insane and next time she'll buy direct from the manufacturer (who is on the other side of the planet and only sells through dealers, but never mind) explains slowly and loudly that "slow is BAD" like she's talking to a toddler and hangs up on me.

Like, yeah it sucks that we're so short handed it takes a few days for cancelations to be processed, but YOU waited until the last minute to order your stuff, YOU didn't read the estimated shipping time frame on the product description before ordering, and when I specifically told you the cancelation would cause a significant delay YOU confirmed you understood that and still wanted it done. If you hadn't gotten impatient it would have gone out days ago. Heck, even the special order would be halfway here by now. We might be slow, but the extra delays on your order were entirely caused by you and your unwillingness to read or listen. We're transparent about how long things will take and have actually consistently been within the time frames we provided to you since the order was first placed.

Also screaming at me after shipping is closed for the day speeds up nothing, it literally cannot go out until tomorrow, which is when it would have gone out anyway at this point if you hadn't called and thrown a fit. There is nothing I can do to make it get to you faster.

Posted by admin Rodney

[adnauseum11]

Operational Risk Management (John Price x Reader)

Kate calls with some bad news.

1k words

CW: swearing, military inaccuracies

This work is part of the S.N.A.F.U. series, master list also pinned to my blog.

Masterlist

Ao3

John’s phone lights up in the center console with an incoming call just as you are returning to the flat. Two hefty shopping bags of new glitter-less decorations are safely secured in the back seat. His patience ran out about half-way back from your excursion, locked in a snarl of holiday traffic. When he began to grumble about the lack of common sense on display, you reminded him that he wanted to tag along with you. The look he gave you afterwards was dark, but you didn’t let it faze you, used as you are to his intermittent grumpiness. Still, you’re happy to claim your spoils and clear off so he can take his phone call in peace, his annoyance doing nothing to dampen your spirit. 

“Hello?” 

John’s tone is curt. The familiar sound of chopper blades swells and then he can hear Kate over the staticky line, immediately picturing her cupping her hand over the bottom of the phone as she clears the rotors. 

“John? Got some news, you aren’t going to like it. Can you talk?” 

She’s moving, likely just landed. John’s brain is leaping ahead, trying to fill in the gaps. 

“Yeah. What happened? Gaz alright?”

Kate cuts straight to the chase, apparently no time to waste on pleasantries. 

“The commander Gaz is working under is a younger brother to man killed in Las Almas - belonged to Shadow Company. He’s leveraged his position with Norris to start knocking on doors to find out what happened to his brother and he’s managed to get enough intel to hold the 141 responsible.”

“Jesus Christ Laswell.”

John’s palm comes down with a slap on the steering wheel, his mood worsening. He can feel his blood pressure rising as Kate’s terse voice washes over him.

“I suspect Norris is feeding him information. We’re going to keep working on that end, see if we can confirm anything. When you turned down the contract and that photo popped up, he tried a different path. The commander did basic training with your girl’s would-be-assailant years ago, before the dishonourable discharge. We think he’s currently switching tack again. Gaz is obviously compromised, and they’re about to ship out.”

“Ah hell Kate.” 

John’s violently pushing his fingers through his hair, the implications of Gaz being in the thick of this commander’s operation making his stomach turn to lead. 

“I didn’t know John, didn’t think Norris’ men needed further vetting. Lesson learned. I’ve got a potential intercept point. Right now, we’re handling some rendezvous communications for them as we’ve got friendlies in the field, Gaz being one. They’re going to be sent to recon a chemical manufacture plant in Lithuania for a potential raid.”

Kate’s tone suggests she’s well aware of her fuck up, and John respects her enough to leave it there, satisfied with her acknowledgement.

“There’s got to be a vulnerability we can exploit to get Gaz to safety.”

John’s instinct is to plan, even without any intel yet.

“Ghost is planning an avenue of approach for the potential intercept point before whatever the commander is up to comes to fruition out there. We urgently could use an extra set of hands in the know, Captain. Timing is critical here. Gaz’s assigned taskforce won’t be expecting us. If we do this correctly, we can bury this for good with no one the wiser.”

John looks up at the flat, can almost picture you flitting around, rearranging items to account for your new prizes. His heart sinks as he makes the only decision his conscience will allow. 

“Yeah, my bag is mostly packed. I can be at the base in a few hours for pick up if you can arrange liaison.”

Kate asks the question he’s been dreading since this conversation started. He can guess at the outcome and is in no hurry to be proven right. 

“Your girl going to be ok with the last-minute change of holiday plans?”

At the mention of you, John’s brain immediately pulls the image of you naked in the shower, flushed from the orgasm he’d just given you, admitting you’re in love. The center of his chest aches at the thought of leaving you alone during the holiday you’re so obviously excited to share with him. At one point, early on, he was confident that he knew exactly what he was doing. His emotions lately tended to be out of control and headlong, almost impossible to moderate. After years of relentlessly telling himself it was better to keep his distance, to stay platonic, he’s finally getting what he’s coveted after all this time. And still, he can’t stop his greedy heart from wanting more. He fights back the uncharacteristic swell of emotion and clears his throat, refocusing on the conversation at hand.

“I’ll handle it. Not leaving anything this volatile for someone else to clean up. I want assurance it’s over.” 

“If you’re sure. You’ve been moving fast with this woman John. I’m assuming you know what you’re doing here.”

His laugh is dark, the sound of a man whose best laid plans are unravelling in front of his eyes. 

“Gaz would do the same. I’ll sort it out on my end, set up the liaison for 19:00.”

John is all business, putting any indecision firmly to rest in short order.

“We appreciate the assist; I’ll debrief you further once you’re on route. And John?”

“Yeah?” 

He’s preoccupied, already trying to work out how to explain what’s about to happen to the woman he loves.

“Good luck, hope you bought her something nice.”

Kate’s tone is a mix of gentle teasing and honest concern. John’s foul mood refuses to rise to the occasion.

“Piss off Laswell.”

John grates out before hanging up the call and sighing deeply, gripping the steering wheel tightly. He shouts a handful of curses into the empty car, grateful for a mostly vacant street to witness his outburst. He takes several deep breaths to gather himself again before stepping out of the car to rejoin you in the flat and break the news.

Next Chapter

Tag list:

@deadbranch @beebeechaos @cadotoast @writeforfandoms @syoddeye @itr-00 @chloepluto1306 @batw3nch

[starblightbindery]

Binder's Note for Forms by Trebia

How Forms fits in the long tradition of Star Wars fanfic.

My hope is that this project captures a snapshot in time from Star Wars fandom het shippers between December 2015 and December 2017, before the franchise confirmed any emotional intimacy—if you can call it that— between Rey and Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017).

Trebia, then aged 24, wrote and published the first chapter of Forms on Archive of Our Own on December 18th, 2015—the exact release date of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. When posting this first chapter, Trebia noted, “I’m just working off of memory from the one viewing I saw last night.” The entirety of the fanfic was completed and posted an exact month later, making this fic historically significant in Star Wars fandom as one of the earliest published “Reylo” stories.

A serialized novella that was churned out in an astonishingly short time frame, Forms is notable for predicting many elements of The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019), including the Reylo Force bond, Rey walking away from her training with Luke Skywalker, Kylo Ren pleading with Rey to join him, and Kylo Ren pushing his Force energy into Rey to save her life.

Throughout the story, Trebia mashed new and old Star Wars elements together—characters like the Mandalorians and Admiral Daala, settings like Illum and Kuat⁠—evincing her fondness for the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Forms has classic tropes from this franchise, like stealing a uniform to go undercover in an enemy base and the forced proximity of a “Slow Boat to Bespin.” Present in Forms are scads of fan theories from between the release of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. These included the theory that—echoing a Legends plot line from Dark Empire (1991) where somehow Palpatine returns and Luke Skywalker joins the dark side to try and take him down from the inside—Kylo Ren had strategic reasons for his apprenticeship to Snoke. Like many Reylo fan-works set in-universe, Trebia lends justification to his many antisocial acts, part of shipper efforts to make the character more self-relevant and sympathetic.

Forms weaves in tantalizing threads that were tossed around by fans and concept artists but ultimately not pursued, including Dark Rey, Stormpilot (Finn/Poe Dameron), and Rey's saberstaff. Trebia even predicted the Kuat Drive Yards plot line started in The Last Jedi (Rose Tico’s contempt for weapon's manufacturers on Canto Bight) and continued in the abandoned Episode IX: Duel of Fates script by Colin Trevorrow. Forms also addresses loose ends that probably should have been covered for a more cohesive nine film saga, like the Chosen One prophecy and direct interaction between Anakin Skywalker and Kylo Ren.

No discussion of Forms can be complete without also placing it in the context of Star Wars fandom in 2016. Reylo was a fringe pairing that made intuitive sense to many Star Wars fans, particularly women; however, prior to The Last Jedi, the ship was dwarfed by the popularity of slash ships like Finn/Poe and Kylo Ren/Hux. At the time, many fans theorized that Rey was Luke Skywalker’s long-lost daughter, making her Ben Solo’s first cousin, making Reylo an incest ship.

As noted on the Fanlore wiki, the tags on this fic changed over time. In addition to “Riding the bus to hell either way” Trebia joked with tags like “Possible incest?” and “Not incest until proven guilty in the court of law.” Following the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Trebia celebrated by replacing those tags with a celebratory “IT AIN’T INCEST.”

The story's strong influence in early Reylo fandom reflected a hunger for more Star Wars romances about the pull between light and dark. After all, the sequel trilogy did not set up Kylo Ren as a horned, alien-appearing monster or a wrinkled geezer. Unblemished by the ravages of the dark side, Kylo Ren was depicted with pillow lips and a fabulous, voluminous coiffure unencumbered by his helm (which really should have flattened it to his scalp.) The groundwork for a lightsider/darksider romance was previously explored in other Expanded Universe stories. At the forefront of these were watered down lightsider/darkside romances like the tepidly written romance between Luke Skywalker and former Palpatine agent Mara Jade. Given Mara Jade was hardly a champion of the dark side, there was no risk of corrupting Skywalker. But the Expanded Universe also boasted stories that played with this dynamic, like the twisted connection between Fable Astin and Jaalib Brandl by Patricia A. Jackson for the Star Wars Adventure Journal (1994), the conflict between Jaina Solo and Zekk in Kevin J. Anderson's Young Jedi Knights (1996),or the passion between Darth Revan and Bastila Shan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003). In this respect, Forms and the rest of the Reylo fan fiction oeuvre continues the grand fan tradition of Star Wars villain fucking.

“Darksider and lightsider conflict is one of the most fascinating points of Star Wars,” Trebia said in 2016, when interviewed by Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic. “Rey and Kylo represent the fight to find the balance.” Yet, at the time, the fledgling “Reylo” ship was abhorred by affirmational Star Wars fans who despised the emphasis on shipping with a female gaze, as well as scorned by media commentators who found the ship to be “problematic.” In male-dominated, established fan spaces like Reddit and Jedi Council Forums, discussion of Reylo was effectively banned by moderators through the freezing of threads. In other fandom spaces like Twitter and Tumblr, discourse about Reylo mirrored larger purity culture. The ship became a convenient target for alt-right misogynists, and also for anti‑shippers concerned that the ship “romanticized abuse.” Productive and unproductive debate arose around media consumption construed as agreement or approval, whether a sympathetic Kylo Ren lends people to give more latitude to real-life white right-wing men with anger management problems (or if it's the other way around), and if shippers can tell the difference between a fictional antihero and the same dangerous thing in real life. Critiques of Reylo fandom also included the implicit racism inherent in the sidelining of John Boyega’s heroic character Finn in favor of white whiny fascist Kylo Ren. (It did not help that 2016 also saw the election where white American women voters decided to displace a competent Black man with a white whiny fascist.)

In the September 2020 issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies, Andrea Marshall notes that Reylo “fan fiction acts as a locus of resistance to gendered oppression as feminist authors construct selves that critique the source material and the fandom for gendered oppression within tropes and attitudes.” By having Rey actually interact with and befriend a woman other than Leia, Forms already improves on the source material. It's a delight to see Forms depict older women over age fifty who are plot-significant and interact which one another, if only because Star Wars movies are fairly gender regressive. On the other hand, Rey's strategy to convert Kylo back to the light is to uh, suck the badness out of him. It's Padmé Amidala logic—sure, he arranged the wholesale slaughter of an entire village, but he can also deftly finger you to orgasm! Granted, Star Wars is infamously a franchise of excuse making, where really shitty dudes manage to turn it around and do the right thing at the last minute. Forms also doesn't push all that hard to actively resist the neo-fascist allegory in the sequel trilogy, particularly in Trebia's appendix, which dissatisfactorily explains that all of the First Order war criminals in the story ended up as instructors in military academies. (Who would even hire them, Albus Dumbledore?!)

Fics like Forms led to “ship wars” discourse, which led to the publication of ozhawkauthor's “The Three Laws of Fandom” meta essay on January 1st, 2016. “Laws” is a bit of a misnomer since there is no enforcement body; the essay is more of a request for courtesy in fandom spaces. The laws were also meant to apply specifically to shipping, not fandom or media criticism as a whole. “It’s not up to you to decide what other people are allowed to like or not like, to create or not to create,” wrote ozhawkauthor. “That’s censorship. Don’t do it.”

For fans conscious of fandom history and the impact of censorship in spaces like FanFiction.net and Livejournal, ozhawkauthor's guidelines—(1) Don't like; don't read, (2) Your ship is not my ship, (3)Ship and let ship—felt intuitive. This is reflected in spaces like my bookbinding guild, Renegade, which—similar to Archive of Our Own—takes a hands off approach to policing content. This did not prevent widespread handwringing about Reylo content. Star Wars fan ughwhyben reflected on the “gigantic fandom that is suddenly experiencing a renaissance, where an influx of mainstream folk are trickling into (or running into) the fic side for possibly the first time right now and don’t have this training. It’s like we’re flickering back and forth between the modern evolution of fic side fannish culture and what things were like in, for example, 2001 when I first stumbled in.”

Decades ago, in May 1981, Lucasfilm reacted to the publication of “Slow Boat to Bespin” by Anne Elizabeth Zeek & Barbara Wenk by declaring a ban on smut in fan fiction. I've included in the errata of this binding a letter from 1981 written by the Star Wars fanclub president to circulating fanzines threatening legal action. While slash was also caught in this net—disproportionately targeted given non-explicit gay romance was not okay even though Star Wars has non-explicit het romance—it was this fairly tame (by fic standards) heteronormative fic, featuring Han Solo and Princess Leia, that signaled to Lucasfilm that smutty fanfic was no longer on the fringes and now needed to be addressed to protect the “wholesomeness” of the franchise. Subsequently, fanfic writers had to make a conscious decision to flout Lucasfilm’s policy and go forth with propagating their smut.

And, in 2016, of all the ships in all of fandom, it was the Reylo Star Wars pairing, featuring this specific heteronormative female power fantasy (of being able to leash a villain by the dick to drag him back to the light) that led to a communal reaffirmation of these fandom norms. In her interviews with the The Atlantic, Trebia directly quotes from the Three Laws of Fandom, endorsing “ship and let ship” as a basis for creating Reylo fanworks. “I am fully involved in the garbage compactor that is this pairing, and I love it,” Trebia said. “No matter what way it goes, I will stick with it.”

After studying early romance novels from the late 1600s and early 1700s, Ros Ballaster observed a polarity between didactic love fiction and amatory fiction. Didactic love stories are sweet—aspirational, moral, and idealized—while amatory fiction is spicy—erotic, transgressive, untethered from social sanction. We do see representations of didactic love in Reylo fan fiction, particularly in contemporary romance “Modern AUs” like Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis (2021)where the Kylo's homicidal Sith rage is sanitized to a more socially-acceptable grumpy academic brooding. One can comfortably bring Adam Carlsen, Ph.D home to meet Mother. But certainly, the majority of Reylo fic written by fans gravitate towards and come with the self awareness of the amatory. For one, Trebia loudly proclaims in her Chapter Two author note: “MORE TRASH FOR THE TRASH GOD.”

Discourse over the “morality” of Reylo fan fiction tends to overlook the distinction between the didactic and the amatory. As compelling as the idea of a “Force dyad” is in fantasy, this relationship is not meant to be aspirational in a literal sense. Yet, readers of Reylo fiction were and continue to have to defend their interest in the archetype with disclaimers—yes, it's trash, yes, I know it's problematic—while men in fandom are not held to the same standards when it comes to “problematic” media they consume or enjoy, whether it's a Michael Bay blockbuster film or male-gaze pornography.

As Deborah Lutz notes, “The Dangerous Lover Romance” is a centuries old, conventional way to represent erotic desire and romantic love. The “sublimely tormented Byronic hero” is hardly groundbreaking, to the extent that Rian Johnson's depiction of Reylo in The Last Jedi subverts the trope—at the end of the film Rey isn't enchanted, she's repulsed. The same way Star Wars replicates Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey monomyth, Reylo stories like Forms reflect the broad appeal of the “how-the-turntables” Dangerous Lover romance—where the woman protagonist, initially subjugated by the debased, restless misanthrope, ends up subjugating him through her strength of will and the power of love. Trebia's Kylo even sports malevolent scars like so many Gothic male romantic leads before him—always on the face. In the Gothic romance, the heroine accesses socially undesirable aspects—power, rage, craving, desire—as expressed by her double, the Dangerous Lover. His presence in the story provides a basis for her disinhibition. The Reylo ship follows a well-trodden cultural script of transgressive female desire.

Forms the fan fiction novella is a notable cultural artefact reflecting a distinct period of time in Star Wars fandom. At the time, Reylo fanfic held all the promise of improved representation for women characters, crossed with the instinctual, regressive insistence that maintains a white male character in the forefront. Reylo fan fiction produced in early 2016 also led to the reification of anti-censorship values in fandom. Seven years later, a fandom that was once derided has gone fully mainstream, as fic writers like Ali Hazelwood, Ashley Poston, and Thea Guanzon top traditional publishing bestseller lists. What Trebia knocked out, hours after her introduction to the characters, is now it's own Star Wars literary tradition.

[jesswritesthat]

Oikawa Tōru: Abnormality (Part 4)

Fandom: Haikyuu!! — [ Masterlist ]

Summary: A slow-ish burn

• You had your own plans set in motion since graduation, planning only a select few had come to learn. With everything in place, it was time to see Oikawa in Argentina for the final time.

Warnings: Timeskip spoilers

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |

>>>>——————————>

"(Y/n)...?" The only person you knew in this area of Argentina was currently in Japan afterall...

"Um (L/n)! My apologies, in Japanaese it's (L/n) first..."

The Spanish speaker instantly corrected themselves, approaching you with mild apologetic hesitance since you were mid-call which prompted you to abruptly end it due to sudden realisation.

"No way, hi— I gotta go, enjoy Miyagi and talk soon." Once ending the call to a concerned Oikawa, the person had your full attention, a warm smile on your face due to the initial recognition.

"Brajkovic-san, you know who I am?" The language barrier was tricky to navigate, but you hadn’t been learning Spanish for nothing.

“Yes, thank Tōru Oikawa for that. So would you like to meet the team since you're here?" The player graciously laughed, nodding in confirmation before gesturing to the VBC training centre behind you both.

"It's best to get acquainted, you might be seeing a lot more of me soon. Thank you."

"Oh yeah? Your Spanish is pretty good, what's going on?" The player raised a sceptical brow, one that led you to manufacturing yet another scheme as you walked into the building.

"Well..."

———

It hadn't been long since you'd felt the sweltering heat of Argentina - the last trip highly productive despite Tōru being absent in Miyagi at the time.

Cheering echoed around you as the final point was scored by perfectly timed spike with a set courtesy of the man previously mentioned.

"Congratulations, Oikawa-chan~"

Praise was expected after games, whether win or lose because the entity of the team was talented in their own right. Not many voices could speed up his heartrate though, and only one could get his skin exceptionally hotter even after a high-cardio match.

"(Y/n)..."

It was disbelief initially, sweeping smile blinding you when he’d jogged toward you eagerly, gaze scanning your entire figure.

"My jersey - how did you...?"

"I had help, from your teammates." You nodded gratefully to Brajkovic and the others who each wore knowing smiles.

"You could've just asked me, I would've got one for you!"

"Then you wouldn't have been surprised! I wanted to do something worthwhile for you since you're always doing that for everyone else." Came your reply, his justification falling flat due to how flustered you’d gotten him with words alone.

"Why— why would you— (Y/n)! You can't say things like that!"

"Okay, think of it as me putting a price on you - about €30 to be exact." You comprisimised with a teasing tone, one he’d missed greatly if he’s honest with himself.

"Eh?!"

"Yeah, I brought Brajkovic-san lunch as a thanks."

"I'll address being worth more than €30 another time but for now: You went on a date with my teammate - before me?!" The petty attitude of Oikawa had kicked in now, hands placed on your shoulders, even it was delivered dramatically there was noteable heartache etched into his eyes.

"In my defence Tōru, you never asked."

"Fine! Go on a date with me!" Pouting, he crossed his arms over his chest as if challenging you.

"Fine!"

"Fine!"

Meanwhile the San Juan team overlooked the scenario, amused but also confused as they muttered to one another.

"...is that the Japanese custom?"

"I don't think so, it's just Tōrus' custom."

"It sucks. (Y/n) and I didn't even go on a date." Brajkovic added assuredly, his team nodding along in awe.

"But it worked."

There was a moment of laughter as he left with his team to get changed, only offering you a small wistful smile as he disappeared.

Soon he’d returned freshly changed as dismissed for the day, you hadn’t waited long but he apologised anyway before reaching the exit of the venue.

"We'll walk, I know places."

"I can drop you off if—"

"It's bright outside so we can walk, thanks though." Your offer was immediately cut short by his decisive assurance but the instance of it left you questioning.

"Why'd you wanna walk, so you could show me the sites?"

To as spend as much time with you as possible before you leave again.

"To increase the chances of you tripping over so I can film it for blackmail." Oikawa taunted proudly, phone waving in his hand as emphasis.

"Not if you trip over first Captain." As you'd spoken, you'd pushed him off the path and Oikawa gave a mocking noise before nudging you back.

———

Casual conversation fuelled your sunset walk, the two of you playfully flirting with one another whilst Oikawa pointed out various things on the route like a tour guide. However, when passing a familiar building you took over and pointed across the street.

"That school has an amazing education programme, I can't wait to start teaching it next month."

"Next month? That's an odd time frame." It had gone right over his head, your sheer nonchalance about the whole thing certainly aided that, and you’d decided your follow up would reveal everything.

"Well yeah, I need time to settle into my apartment and move my furniture in. Although I suppose that's far too organised for you to comprehend huh~"

You noticed the accompanying steps subside paces back, yourself stopping and turning back to a frozen Oikawa who stared at you incredulously.

"You're - you're staying here?” He’d pointed to the pavement with both index fingers (a failed reference to Argentina you’d admit). “You're living here?!"

"I told you before we graduated that I had dreams to follow dumbass, god don't you listen?"

He caught up to you, standing opposite with his usual (non)charming disposition that you’d grown so fond of.

"Most things leaving your lips were insults, of course I didn't listen - and what about Makki?! You two live together right?"

"We agreed to go our separate ways so Hiro moved to Tokyo for work and I came here." Accompaning your wistful smile, a touch of longing there due to parting from your best friend.

"Sorry, I need to process this, uh feelings too -and I feel a lot right now- explain it to me again?" He shook his head, running his fingers through his auburn hair apologetically.

"I got qualifications in Spanish, which means I can teach Art here and hold Japanese language classes for extra money if necessary. Honestly I'm surprised you didn't work out my plans, Great King." You playfully enlightened, admiring the cute scoff he gave you at the nickname, softly continuing with a bit of nonchalance. "And well, one of my dreams happened to be in Argentina so..."

"You came here for me?" There was a a spark of hopefulness, his eyes shooting up to meet yours with a brightness you hadn’t seen since you’d first kissed him all those years ago.

"Ah no, you're a nightmare but the sun here is gorgeous~"

"Whilst we're on the subject, I'd like to reiterate that this nightmare is worth more than 30 Euros!"

Rolling your eyes at the remark, you proceeded walking and continued the conversation topic.

"When you were in Miyagi last time, I thought you would've asked me to come with you. It'd be funny, as my answer would've been yes."

"I thought about it, god I desperately wanted to, it killed me. But I didn't want to put either of us through that again." Oikawa admitted sheepishly, flicking his gaze to the sky wearing a sentimental expression.

"Look at you, getting all mature. Well, occasionally."

"Excuse you!"

"Yes excuse me, I need directions so I can account for how long it’ll take me to get back."

"I'll walk you to..." Your hotel? Your apartment? The whole thing was still incomprehensible to him, dreams don't normally come true so effortlessly. Though he supposes you'd had your turbulences along the way.

"My new home? Of course, I'll show you around, it's quite cute actually." You grinned brightly, pulling the route up on your mobile whilst Tōru only raised an expectant brow.

"I'll have to show you mine, it's what cute actually looks like."

"Yeah, you're looking at it~" Came your smug grin, confident but playful finger guns sent to the Setter who only rolled his eyes. Yet when you'd looked away laughing, he couldn't help the loving smile gracing his lips nor the look of pure adoration crossing his eyes.

It was more than simply 'cute' he was looking at...

It was enough to subdue a snarky remark form his lips, the lack thereof surprising you greatly, but you'd let it be. This time whilst you navigated the direction, Oikawa idly typed away in his device too - more accurately hitting up the group chat.

[ Tōru: GUESS WHAT!!!! 💕🫶✨🎉🔥 ]

[ Hajime: What? ]

[ Takahiro: always so dramatic 💕🫶✨🎉🔥 ]

[ Mattsun: ^^^ ]

[ Tōru: I'll complain about you being rude later because I'm too happy - (Y/n) is staying in Argentinaaaa!!! With me!!!!! ]

[ Takahiro: yeah and what 💀 ]

[ Tōru: Obviously you knew, this ain't for you 😤🙄 ]

[ Mattsun: We all knew tho... lol you didn't??? ]

[ Tōru: Um? Excuse me? ]

[ Hajime: (Y/n) told us a month ago, they had a leaving party and everything. ]

[ Tōru: Oh? And my BEST FRIEND; my PARTNER; my favourite ACE didn't tell me? Iwa-channnnnn 😭🥺🥺 ]

[ Hajime: I heard that in your annoying whiny tone and it still grates me. Thought you knew, but get over it and go see the love of your life dumbass. ]

[ Tōru: EWWWWW!!! Disgusting 🤢🤮 Hate the very air they breathe, couldn't even look at (Y/n) for 5 seconds thx 💀 ]

[ Mattsun: (Y/n) feels the same about u 🤡 ]

[ Takahiro: true. as the best roomate and human (Y/n) knows - i vouch for what Mattsun says ]

"Everything okay?" Your teasing and knowing tone cut through his thoughts, the brunette looking to you quizzically.

"Oh yeah, just a bit distracted."

"Me too, but Mattsun is right by the way." You knew, how could you have possibly my known?

"What?!"

"I feel the same about you." Was your innocent response, two digits moving to your lips accompanied by a false gag noise, and a smug smirk on your face. Oikawa silently cursing Makki as his name lit up your notifications, the Captain whining his complaints until you’d reached your home.

———

Once arriving at your newly dubbed residence, you excitedly let him inside and skipped over a few lingering boxes filled with unpacked belongings. The necessities and personal touches were evident though, but Oikawa didn't even think before he thoughtlessly spoke.

"Y'know you could've just moved in with me..."

"What?"

"I mean we know each other and stuff, just nevermind. Your place is pretty okay looking, not as good as mine but I'll let it slide." He’d said it like it didn’t mean anything, like it was a normal thing for two friends to do. Except, you hadn’t been ‘just friends’ for a very long time.

"I'll let you slide down the toilet in a minute Shittykawa."

"So rude! That's not how you treat a celebrity houseguest (Y/n)-chan~"

You froze at the familiarity, staring at him hopelessly, like a deer in headlights. It's been a while since he'd called you that... adding that damned '-chan' to the end of your name like a stupid insult. Endearment.

"No comeback? That's not— what's wrong?"

"You added '-chan' to my name." A breath. "It's... nice to hear."

"I never thought I..." Regaining composure, Oikawa was quick to recover. "Aw do you miss it? I knew you secretly loveds it my darling little (Y/n)-chan~"

"Hell no, you ruined it. I take it back, it was a moment of weakness. Missing you must've gotten to me." Dismissively waving your hand, but he’d caught it effortless when closing in on you.

"For what it's worth, I missed you too. I'm glad, that I get to spend my life with you again."

"Yeah, me too Tōru."

It was a heavy and understanding atmosphere, an intimate but comforting air that lingered around the two of you and making it difficult to breathe in the silence of years of built up things left unsaid. Even if only centimetres apart, touching him felt like shattering the fragile wall of glass you'd always kept between you.

"So uh... what do I taste like?"

It was Tōru who'd spoken, your fingertips immediately withdrawing when he'd looked up from the floor.

"What?"

"Before I left the first time, you— you said you wanted to know, I just never found the right moment to ask." The was a hint of awkwardness lacing his tone, as shaky as it was. He was nervous now, a side you'd rarely ever seen as if he was mistaken. He wasn't, but that only fuelled your flustering.

"O-oh, I did didn't I? Can I… check again?"

There was a brief indication, him immediately understanding what you’d wanted and gave a small curt nod instantly, tilting to give you easier access. Then your lips brushed his, warm and careful like you were testing the waters, before an encapsulating warm captured you. The kiss was as heart racing as the last, but more tentative, and full of possibility. Even when you pulled away.

"It was different than the first Tōru, now you taste like watered down strawberries..."

"And?" Oikawa lowly poised, indicative in every sense of the word.

You kissed him again.

"Velvety vanilla cream..."

And again.

"Mm." His pretty whines were sweet, you'd noted.

Again.

"Your lips are, well fine I guess, I'd say €25. So, what do I taste like Tōru?" A wicked smirk danced on your lips, now deeper in colour, but ever the charmer Oikawa was immediate on his response.

"My lovely, beautiful, (Y/n)-chan - poison, specifically made with venom because of your mean tongue. Plus I'm priceless~"

"Hey! Is that some kinda witch reference? I thought we moved past that!" You argued back, the two of falling into playful taunting once more, like you’d never been apart.

"Never~ You taste like me then, since you couldn't get enough!"

"Oikawa!"

—

Maybe you'd both grown individually, but some things never changed - like the unique relationship you shared...

Although as the Setter skilfully dodged your strategic attempts at getting him back as you both raced around your home, he couldn't help but realise your signature taste hadn't changed either.

You weren't poison or anything of the sort, you never had been (only, Tōru could never pass up an opportunity to irritate you).

You didn't taste like him either (as much as he'd like you to), your lips had a unique flavour all of their own, an all encompassing heat that haunted him from the moment he'd kissed them years ago.

How could he say that though?

Just how was he supposed to illiterate, that you had always tasted like 'home'?

<——————————<<<<

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |

[ Masterlist ]

[covid-safer-hotties]

No Novavax COVID-19 vaccine in Canada this fall, immunocompromised N.B. woman feels 'expendable' - Published Sept 6, 2024

Linda Wilhelm wants protein-based vaccine, cites rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups after mRNA vaccines

Linda Wilhelm, 64, of Bloomfield, N.B., is planning a road trip to the United States. But it's not to go sightseeing or shopping.

Wilhelm, who suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis, hopes to get the updated Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, which won't be available in Canada as part of the fall vaccination campaign, unless provinces and territories order doses on their own.

Wilhelm, president of the Canadian Arthritis Patient Alliance and a member of the Canadian Immunocompromised Advocacy Network, says the protein-based vaccine is a better option for immunocompromised people like her than the more common Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines. She says she feels "expendable" and urges the federal government to reconsider.

Less than two months ago, the network wrote to numerous federal, provincial and territorial officials, calling for improved access to Novavax and increased awareness.

They contend many immunocompromised people have suffered adverse reactions following immunization with mRNA vaccines, but have responded well to Novavax, which is included in the National Advisory Committee on Immunization's fall guidance for people 12 and older.

Disease flare-ups after mRNA shots Wilhelm says she has received six mRNA vaccines, both Pfizer and Moderna, and experienced longer and worse flare-ups of her rheumatoid arthritis with each one.

"You're tired and you're sore and you feel like you have the flu all the time," said Wilhelm, who was diagnosed at age 23.

When her third shot prompted a three-month flare, she started to think, "This is not real good," because the disease that ravaged her body for decades and resulted in 14 joint replacements or fusions, including both knees, both hips and both shoulders, had been stable for about 20 years. Prior to that, she was largely bed-bound and required a wheelchair.

But the married mother of three and grandmother of six was "terrified" of getting COVID, so she kept getting mRNA shots, with her latest flare lasting more than eight months and affecting her left elbow — one of only two healthy joints she had left.

In addition, her hands, while badly gnarled by the disease, never used to hurt. After the boosters, however, she suffered a "gnawing, uncomfortable, horrible pain" that kept her awake at night.

No adverse reaction to Novavax Wilhelm heard through a friend that immunocompromised people who received the Novavax vaccine had fewer adverse reactions. But she contracted COVID in October 2023 before she found a pharmacy that carried it.

She was "very ill" for two months, and in her weakened state ended up getting RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, for about another two months, but recovered.

In March, Wilhelm began her search for Novavax again. After being referred back and forth between pharmacies and the Department of Health, she received a dose in mid-April in Saint John — about 45 minutes from her home, with no adverse reaction.

She wants to stick with Novavax, but that won't be an option here, Health Canada confirmed to CBC News.

Up to 19M mRNA vaccine doses coming Canada will be receiving up to 19 million doses of mRNA vaccines, pending regulatory authorization, said spokesperson Nicholas Janveau.

Health Canada is currently reviewing vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna that target the KP.2 strain, he said. The latest strains of Omicron circulating in Canada and the U.S. have names that start with KP.

Health Canada is also reviewing a vaccine from Novavax that targets the earlier JN.1 strain. "However, Canada's current contract with Novavax only provides access to domestically manufactured vaccines, which Novavax has been unable to confirm for the 2024/25 season," Janveau said.

If Novavax's JN.1 vaccine does get approved, provinces and territories "may choose to procure independently from Novavax from supply produced in India for their fall vaccination campaigns," he added.

But "New Brunswick and other provinces have investigated and are unable to find other options to procure this vaccine," according to Department of Health spokesperson Sean Hatchard.

"The amount of vaccine that needed to be ordered to procure it independently was too large based on the minimal demand in the province," he said.

'Very low' demand for Novavax Demand for Novavax has been "very low" across the country, according to the Health Canada spokesperson. Of the 125,000 Nuvaxovid XBB.1.5 vaccines ordered in 2023, only 5,529 doses have been administered, as of June 30, 2024, he said.

Wilhelm contends uptake has been low because many people either don't know about the protein-based vaccine, or have had a hard time trying to get it.

About 14 per cent of Canadians aged 15 or older have a compromised immune system, as of 2020, according to Statistics Canada. That's a "significant portion" of the population, Wilhelm said.

Immunocompromised people can use either type of vaccine, said Janveau. "Canada's National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) no longer preferentially recommends one vaccine type over another."

Adverse reaction stats by vaccine type Wilhelm suspects mRNA vaccine reactions in immunocompromised people and others are underreported, due in part to the "abysmal" reporting system that does not include an online option.

In addition, many people may not think to file a report, she said, noting that even she, as an advocate, failed to report her reactions until recently.

Cost of vaccine in U.S. not covered Wilhelm says she's trying her best to stay healthy and not cost the health-care system money. "But [if] the government doesn't give me the tools I need to do that, then what do I do?"

Her only option, she said, is to drive to Maine — either three hours return to Calais, or six hours return to Bangor, depending on availability.

Wilhelm expects it will cost her about $180 US, or $243 Cdn, which the province won't cover, but says it's a small price to pay compared to the risk of another long flare-up, or getting COVID.

Still, she hopes the government will reverse its decision.

[dontkickmyshin]

i've been rereading weak hero season 2 since the latest chapter dropped and i have some things to say about donald

spoilers under the cut

okay first of all i am so fucking pissed at seopass😭😭i can't really say much about the storytelling aspect of choosing to allow donald to die but honestly it does feel very sudden and just unfair to his character. perhaps the suddenness is my reaction because all this time it seemed like he just couldn't die, then he had had the whole arc in the final battle where we finally see a vulnerable side of him and get his full backstory, then all of a sudden he dies?? it just feels so incomplete, like the build up was for nothing🙁🙁🙁.

second of all, i'm only realising just how sad his backstory is now that i'm rereading it.

it's not just about his mother being ill, his father being abusive, and being bullied in school but also the loss of innocence in young donald. at first he was so sweet and cute, but by the time he's thirteen, he's also got a whole baby gang going, beating people up and even doing breaking and entering in one instance, taking his step father's money. then he exposes the dirt on his ex teacher and had myles joo and his boys beat him up, and smash his car outside of the school.

it also reminds me of how much donald has grown- now he would never b&e or smash an adult's car so recklessly (though ofc he did it originally knowing he couldn't get the police called on him). though still heavily involved with delinquents, violence and crime, his methods have refined as he grew, and you can see him become more calculated and less uncouth. despite the maturity of his actions at 13, in a way they're still childish, and it's a reminder that even if he's acting tough he's still a baby🙁🙁

while i was glad to watch those people get their comeuppance, i honestly felt so heartbroken watching their callous and flippant nature to crime. like, he literally has a baby face!!! he's like 5'0!!! and he's here stomping people in alleyways and committing burglary?!!! it reminded me of kaz brekker from SOC for some reason, who was innocent and naive till he had to grow up at 12 or 13 and started hustling people in gambling dens and getting in trouble with the law.

it hurts to watch how cruelly he was treated by his teachers and his schoolmates because of his poverty, and how no one did anything about it because it was just normal to them that in a school full of rich kids, it was just a given that donald was considered less than trash. then at night he was kicked out by his step father so he could cheat and drink and he had to wander around yeongdeungpo all on his own in the cold, hungry, and huddle under an apartment block?? ARE YOU JOKING😭😭

he changed so much due to the circumstances of his situation and he grew into something no one should ever have to. he isn't just strong and smart and always five steps ahead becaude of his natural talent (though that definitely helped), but because he had to be. doing badly has never been a choice for him. he needs it to survive. i've always liked donald, and i've always suspected this about his character, but hearing it be confirmed just makes me like him more.

it's so sad realising how everything about him was manufactured to fit his image- his piercings, his hair, his clothes, his tattoos, his image, the way he talks- he didn't even LIKE any of them, but they just became a part of who he was nevertheless. thinking about the way he found his tattoos repulsive when they were all over his body, and were the first things he saw whenever he looked in the mirror must've been so painful to him. but he probably thought being affected by it made him weak so🙁.

and finally, the end where it shows his attachment and love for his inner child who was never loved or taken care by anybody and had to fend for his own. the image of the older donald, covered in tattoos taking care of his small, crying younger self is so powerful😭😭like look at this i wanna kms

i wonder in another life how donald na would turn out if none of these things happened to him🙁🙁he wanted to be a NASA engineer you know🙁🙁🙁😭😭😭he had his own dreams

other things that i noted were that donald actually changes in public a lot. like seriously a lot....first on the rooftop then in the library, like this guy was just stripping at every opportunity.

and also that him not inviting gilshin and jimmy bae into the union was done on purpose as a technique to make them more willing to join? what?? that's so smart😭😭

i also found out this way that myles was a member of the union before it was even called the union?? like they rode together for three years and donald still beat his ass like damn! he is unsentimental.

i'm going to write something about the funeral chapter but that deserves its own post

[toujokaname]

Matrix / Epilogue 2

Author: Akira

Characters: HiMERU, Rinne, Kohaku, Hiiro

"HiMERU doesn't dislike that kind of sharp sarcasm which flies over the heads of such fools."

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[ Read on my site for a better viewing experience using Ois~su ♪ ]

Season: Winter

Location: Matrix Stage

HiMERU: Of course, that's what being an idol entails. We're manufactured personas, so embellishment and dramatization are just par for the course.

However. ES seems to enjoy treating us however they want, taking pleasure in their dominance—

Yet this time, even that ES has been thoroughly tricked by the deception Rinne fabricated.

They proudly parade their satisfaction, still deceived into believing the false Amagi Village is genuine.

While watching such a naked emperor, Rinne sneers at their expense.

Truly, who is the one being strung along?

This time it was just a trifling lie. But if ES continues to get carried away while making a mockery of our lives, of our stories—

Next time, they'll likely spin even bigger, deadlier lies. That's precisely when ES will devise schemes to crumble from its very foundation.

Rinne, no, we as Crazy:B, will defy even the colossal and arrogant ES, injecting our stingers with a venom so vicious it'll leave them writhing on the floor in agony.

This appears to be Rinne's declaration of such. Of course, ES, who is completely deceived, probably doesn't even realize Rinne's irony.

They must feel quite satisfied, thinking they're making us dance to their tune.

HiMERU: HiMERU doesn't dislike that kind of sharp sarcasm which flies over the heads of such fools.

ES's thick skin prevents them from even realizing they've been stung. Just thinking about their stupidity makes a slightly cruel laugh well up inside.

Rinne: Gyahaha, Merumeru's gotten completely dyed in Crazy:B's color, huh ♪

HiMERU: And what would that vulgar color be?

Rinne: Huh~? Even if the warning color's poisonous, there are those who think it's beautiful, right?

And so. As long as there's even one person like that, we can do our best. Singing, dancing, and keeping a smile on our faces.

Look. Do you see that woman waving a glow stick happily over there?

That's the real Akan-san. By the way, the guy who called himself Akan in front of you is a retired ex-idol—

The first idol I ever admired when I came to the city.

Now he looks like any regular guy, and he seems to be working as a teacher at an all-girls school that has nothing to do with idols.

HiMERU: Ah, he did mention he's doing something like producing girls.

Rinne: Mixing reality and fiction, he slid right into Akan-san's shoes.

As expected of an ex-idol, he's got acting skills, and since she was originally assigned to him, he knows Akan-san's character very well.

He was a good choice to be Akan-san's fake.

HiMERU: It's somewhat perplexing. Why did you go out of your way to involve us with a fake AkanP? What was the purpose?

Rinne: There ain't a deep reason. It was just a test, as to whether ES—whether the idol industry would remember Akan-san or not.

To see if they remembered even a little bit of the people they discarded and trampled upon.

To confirm that, I wrote Akan-san's name in the proposal. And then, despite not being an ES employee, he ended up being able to do the job of a producer as if it were nothing.

Rinne: Because it's been a long time since the real Akan-san did producer work, it seems like nobody remembered.

Still. She was trying with everything she had, so it would've been nice if at least someone remembered her.

Before we know it, people will also forget that we ever existed here. All worldly things are impermanent, huh. Though thinking about it makes it all seem so futile.

Even so, I won't forget. I won't forget Akan-san, who tried so hard and almost worked herself to death, was never rewarded, and was so frustrated and heartbroken she even threw up.

Kohaku: Ain't it better to forget that for her sake?

Rinne: I'm never forgetting. The bad things, the painful things, all of it.

All of that, bundled together, is what makes up our lives.

Rinne: Beyond my hometown, there weren't only sparkling, beautiful things, but also things so dirty they'd make you wanna look away.

And yet. A utopia filled with only beautiful things would be boring, wouldn't it?

It's because this world's brimming with chaos and worthless stuff that it's precious—Right? Hiiro ♪

Hiiro: You suddenly shifted the topic to me. Nii-san always does that.

Talking only about what you want to talk about, never listening to what I have to say.

Rinne: What, you got something you wanna tell your Onii-chan?

Hiiro: Umu. I just remembered that I haven't properly expressed my thoughts.

Rinne: What are you talking about?

Hiiro: Nii-san might have forgotten, but... you were the first idol I ever saw in my life.

Back then, I didn't know anything; I just clapped along to your songs without really understanding. But now, I can express my thoughts and feelings properly.

I still don't know enough about singing or idols to really comment, but... I was happy that Nii-san sang so earnestly for me.

It still makes me smile just to think about it.

Ahh, it took quite some time, but I finally managed to say it.

Rinne: Oh, uh... You know, the me from back then wasn't much of an idol at all. Nothing like the idols I saw when I first came to the city.

It was just some kid's awkward imitation.

Hiiro: Even so, from the day I was born, anytime, anywhere, Nii-san has always been my older brother who I admired.

You're greater, wiser, more serious, stronger, and shining brighter than I am.

And you're always kind and giving it your all. That's the Nii-san I look up to—forever.

Rinne: ...Is that so. Thanks, Hiiro.

I got a reward out of it, too, huh.

Hiiro: Umu. I followed Nii-san's example and tried to return the favor!

Rinne: But it's not gonna work if all you do is imitate me, Otouto-kun! Even if you mimic my ways, you won't reach me, just like in the first match of Matrix.

You should aim to be your ideal idol in your own way. Weeell, I guess I don't even need to tell you that now, do I?

Hiiro: Umu. Whether it's ALKALOID or Crazy:B, whether it's Hiiro Amagi or Rinne Amagi, we don't know which idol is superior, and it's not really important either—

But I'll become the kind of idol Nii-san loves so much, he'll admire me someday.

That's my dream now.

Rinne: Really? But, you see—that dream came true a long time ago, Hiiro.

It happened back in the summer. Even before that, and even now, it's still coming true.

To me, you've always been a real idol who puts a smile on my face and makes me happy.

Hiiro: "~...♪"

Rinne: "♪~♪~♪"

[ ☆ ]

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[breakingarrows]

Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies as Literature

Within Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies are two parallel narratives. One is a man recalling the memories of his time as a child during a war. This war is the one that you participate in during missions as Mobius 1, the call sign for the player character, and follows their ascension to becoming a legendary icon over the course of that conflict.

Missions are your general arcade flight simulation kind of tackling varied objectives to rack up high scores, combating air and land targets, picking your aircraft and armament as you proceed along the linear progression of the game's campaign. In between missions will occasionally be interludes, allowing the player to view the recollections of someone who was a child during these same concurrent periods. These are presented with still images, with voiceover by the adult child and greatly moving pieces of music. The first interlude, “Prelude”, is scored by the composition “La Catedral” by Paraguayan guitarist and composer Agustín Barrios Mangoré (1885-1944) and generally considered one of his greatest compositions. This piece introduces the overall mood of these interludes, and the game proper, as a melancholic reflection on what is later described as a “meaningless war.” It is the first, and most recurring, of the three tracks composed by Barrios that appear in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies.

The emotional crux of this prelude is the death of the child’s family, the result of a plane crashing to earth after being shot by an invading army. The only identifying factor for the killer was a yellow 13 on the tail of the plane that circled around to confirm the kill. The death of the child’s family is dramatic, and at the same time so casual. These are the facts of war: civilians who aren’t involved suffer no matter their allegiance or status. Throughout the interludes the child has to grapple with the fact that the new family he has found, a group of ace pilots, are the ones responsible for his loss. This is revealed in another interlude featuring a piece from Agustín Barrios named “Session." This piece is played diegetically by the lead pilot of Yellow Squadron, whom the child joins on his harmonica after it is revealed that this pilot is Yellow 13, and the song is one the child’s father played at the end of each day, connecting them not only through death but also in life.

The child’s complex feelings are the basis for all the interludes. He hates Yellow 13 for being responsible for the death of his family, but also finds himself loving this same man for offering protection and warmth during an occupation. The child feels obligated to support the resistance within his town, but also follows the Yellow Squadron after they are routed. He grows to admire Yellow 13 for his moral character, but continues to imagine their eventual confrontation over his family’s death. When Yellow 13 discovers the barkeep's daughter is responsible for recent sabotage, the child yells, “Get out of our town, you fascist pig!” It is the last time we see them speak to each other. Yellow 13 lets the two go, unable to turn in these children, and similarly feeling a mixture of both love and hate towards those he watched over reveal their resentment towards him and what he represented.

These complex feelings can also be felt by myself for this game, and the series as a whole, as one that actively engages with and benefits imperial industries. By licensing real world models from various manufacturers, and rendering them in lavish detail, Ace Combat projects these airplanes as noble creatures fighting for the benefit of mankind which is far from the reality. As Autumn Wright wrote of the series, “But we also can’t, we mustn’t, separate a games fiction from its own politics of creation. To do so would be to betray the story, the artistry, the work.”

There is a shared fascination with how planes, specifically fighter planes, can be objects of such beauty but also of such violence by many artists. Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is about Jiro Horikoshi, an engineer whose desire to create aircraft was subsumed by Japan during World War II and led to him helping develop planes that caused much destruction over the course of that war. His film has been the subject of much analysis and debate over interpretations of its message in regards to Horikoshi and their contributions to the war machine. As someone who grew up both day dreaming and sometimes even lucid dreaming about being able to fly myself, I have a fascination with the freedom granted by flight, especially that of fighter pilots with their speed and maneuverability that easily outpace any private aircraft. I also find myself fiercely opposed to instances such as the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) casually integrating something as awful as white phosphorus into its plaything multiplayer mode. I criticize Call of Duty’s obsession with rendering their guns in the most “real” style, I should do the same for Ace Combat and its rendering of aircraft built to kill. Most of my reluctance to condemn this series’ participation in propaganda, despite atrocities constantly committed by military aircraft, is due to the smaller mindshare it has compared to Activision’s preeminent shooter. Ace Combat has never been as commercially successful or influential as Call of Duty. Nonetheless it has the same responsibility towards what it is presenting. Project Aces was able to produce an entire fictional world and history for players to inhabit. I think they can also produce fictional planes to further separate themselves from promoting war machines and benefiting their manufacturers. Though it will cost them the World of Tanks obsessive crowd, it would be worthwhile to see a line drawn not only by the series’ themes but also by its rendering of aircraft.

It doesn’t help that as the series progressed, it lost the subdued tone that is found here in Shattered Skies. Future entries would increase the superweapon scale and stretch the reality further. Belka, a country found nowhere within this entry, would become such a boogeyman for the series that they have become a meme within the community for its frequent employment as the “true antagonist” in games such as Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, and the latest Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. In that latest installment, the dissonance between the arcade-style flight sim and serious war storytelling becomes much more prominent and harder to buy into as compared to Shattered Skies. As Ben Sailer writes of Skies Unknown, “But the unintentional sub-text of its design decisions undermines its sense of escapism its otherwise throwaway plot tries to create, breaking its own sense of illusion by failing to stick within a consistent narrative universe.” Reviewing Ace Combat Infinity, a multiplayer-focused entry taking place on Earth as opposed to the “Strangereal” conjured for Shattered Skies, Nick Capozzoli writes, “But Ace Combat once chased its Top Gun guitars with Agustin Barrios Mangore. It interlaced vignettes about the personal lives of rival squadrons in among its screeching dogfights. Those old games were idealistic and enthusiastic (occasionally embarrassingly so), full of operatic flourishes and moments of pathos that few video games can claim--let alone ones about planes. These were games that knew that when engagements take place over the span of miles, between pilots who never see each other's face, it's the little personal touches that keep the whole affair from feeling like a training exercise. The melancholy cutscenes. The frantic radio chatter. The call signs and emblems and the way enemies sauntered onto the field of battle like WWE wrestlers...that was what made Ace Combat human.”

Yellow 13 crosses over the parallel line of the child and into the missions of Mobius 1, connecting player and child even if secondhand. First Yellow 13 appears as an invincible foe that forces you to retreat. You later strike back, wounding through the downing of Yellow 4, someone the player knows was dear to Yellow 13. It’s a moment of victory, in that you have shown Yellow Squadron is mortal, but also at great personal cost to an opponent you have empathy for. This complex feeling the child has is now shared by you, the player. The penultimate mission sees you coming up against Yellow Squadron for the final time, destroying them all, Yellow 13 included. All that remains of him is a handkerchief that floats back to the earth, buried by the child. The interludes end with the narrator revealing that all of these reflections have been from a letter written to you, the player as Mobius 1. By writing, and speaking, these words he continues to keep Yellow 13’s memory alive, just as Yellow 13 confided in the child about Yellow 4 after her death to keep her memory alive. 

“I know it must have brought him unexpected joy to have an opponent like you,  at the end of that meaningless war. At least that’s what I want to believe. Only you… the pilot who shot him down, can confirm this. And so I write to you.”

It was overwhelming to realize that all of these interludes being retold by the grown child have been intermixing with your own characters' recollections of their participation in that war, coming to better understand those that they fought and humanizing what would otherwise be another number on your long kill list. This reveal worked not only for players at the time of release, as noted by IGN “The ending would be criminal to give away, but it has a very neat O. Henry sort of twist to it, capping off a surprisingly effective bittersweet memoir.” (Smith) But it also worked for contemporary players as well, such as YouTube channels alter ego, Salokin, and oboeshoesgames, who all comment on the way the story touched them in their reviews. “...all culminating in a triumphant ending for Mobius 1 and ISAF, but a somewhat bittersweet ending for the narrator as he recollects on past events to the fighter pilot.” (McCoy)

The penultimate mission that ends with the death of Yellow Squadron also reveals the motivation behind the war, as Farbanti, the capital of Erusia, the opposition, was not protected from the falling meteors described in the introduction. Stonehenge, a series of cannons constructed to protect the mainland from the meteors, had Farbanti within the very edge of its range, and so the city, and country, suffered. As you fly around the capital you view the sunken portion of the city and the crater (a recurring geographical feature throughout multiple missions) that was the cause of such destruction. Erusia’s war was one of revenge, but to what purpose? It makes sense to take Stonehenge and turn it against its creators, the ones who either through ignorance or purpose excluded Farbanti from its umbrella. Erusia struck out and locations such as the child’s town, San Salvacion, places that had no real participation in their wounding but who benefitted where Erusia did not, suffered under the boot of occupation. What was accomplished by this war? Flying over Farbanti and destroying the last remnants of their armed forces, it does not fill me with the same feeling of victory as the sixth mission, “Invincible Fleet,” which ends with the allied radio joining together to sing the “USEA National Anthem (Hymn Of Liberty)”. Instead it is a feeling of, “What are we doing?”

Mobius 1, the callsign for the player character, is a silent protagonist, a trope often clung to by games attempting to avoid the difficulties of player character writing. A character controlled by the player provides a unique challenge for developers, who often side-step by having the player-character be an empty vessel such as within Half-Life 2, Dead Space, and The Legend of Zelda. Unlike in those games, Mobius 1 isn’t being addressed directly in conversation by any other character, and so more easily skirts around it. I find it also works here in favor of the game as there is no personality to inhibit Mobius 1 from becoming a legendary icon by the game’s end. This game’s sequel, Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, has your collective squad ascend to a similar status of godhood. Though your character in that game is given prompts to respond to your wingmen (and wingwoman), it is largely their burden to contemplate and engage in what it means to become an icon for your country, especially once betrayed by that country. Shattered Skies, by comparison, is a lonely affair. One in which the player is given the space to reflect on the effect they are having on morale on both sides, never being distracted by a scripted monologue or by one-sided conversations from allies.

Throughout the progression of missions radio chatter from ally and enemy alike begin to recognize your prowess and reputation as a fighter pilot, to the inspiration of the soldiers below you and the fear of the enemies around you. It all culminates in the finale, in which an extremist group of surviving Erusian officers have secured an experimental superweapon and are planning on launching it against any and all of their enemies. This mission is introduced by the track “Rex Tremandae” attributed to Keiki Kobayashi and followed by the main mission track “Megalith (Agnus Dei)” attributed to Tetsukazu Nakanishi. “Agnus Dei'' is traditionally in Catholicism the name of music that accompanies prayers to the Lamb of God. Its use here is representative of the collective prayers of the USEA nation for Mobius 1 to succeed in their current mission, insinuating they have ascended from being just another individual to something much more. Even without that context, it is a track that ascends above all the others for its choir vocals and imbues your final mission with a much grander scale and risk than any previous one, and is a fitting end cap.

I have attempted to write about Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies multiple times since I first played it so many years ago, but I do not believe I will ever be able to communicate how hard it hits me every time I replay it. Here I sit, twenty-two years after its release and I’m still finding new insights into how it affects me. Tracks from Agustin Barrios bring a warmth and longing to the interludes in a way no other composer could. Despite having sold over two million copies, discussion about this game is lacking. All those who have played it find it affecting like so few games are, especially one that falls under the arcade flight simulator genre. For how it continues to touch me to this day and for continuing to be a source of new script, Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies is Literature.

[azertyrobaz]

Dank Farrik Drabble #48

Spoilers for the end of Season 3! I want to thank snowtheup on ao3 for giving me this idea. I guess I couldn't resist some Mandomera to kick off a new batch of chapters to celebrate the end of the season. More prompts to come soon! :)

Please enjoy Marketplace/Curious, and here are the rules if you want to participate!

************

It was Grogu who spotted the stall first. Which was no wonder, the little boy’s head always swiveled in every direction when they visited Nevarro’s marketplace, keen to discover if there was any new food he hadn’t tried yet. He thought his son had simply seen Karga at first, and wanted to say hi. Then he started paying attention to what the high magistrate was buying – spotchka, it looked like, which didn’t surprise Din. The saloon might have closed on the main street, but the man still liked his drink.

It said a lot about him that the first thing he noticed was the rifle on the woman’s back before he recognized the woman herself or the teenager next to her. He could give you the exact reference number of the manufacturer’s model. Tell you how precise it was and how long it could be used for before it needed to be recharged. Which parts were required to fix it should it break down. Where to get them for cheap. He used to own that rifle. It was a very good rifle. And he’d given it to someone who’d meant a lot to him.

But this was years ago, so surely –

Grogu jumped directly on the stall as soon as Greef’s back was turned. Din had only frozen for a couple of seconds, but it had been enough for the quick child to take matters into his own, tiny hands. Literally, it turned out, as he was now babbling like crazy and raising said hands over his head towards his old friend. The girl must have been fourteen or fifteen now, but her smile was just as wide as Din remembered, and she squealed in delight when the boy jumped again, this time straight into her arms.

“It’s you!” Winta said.

“It’s you,” Omera copied, more demurely, looking at him instead of his son, with an expression he couldn’t quite decipher.

Din nodded, since this didn’t exactly require a verbal answer, and it had the welcome effect of making her smile. What now? He’d never expected to see her here. She and her daughter should be safe on Sorgan where he’d left them all those years ago. That place he’d often thought about with fondness and longing. That place he’d unwittingly recreated here, in his own way, for him and his son.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

And it was nice. Having a house of his own. A kitchen. A bed. A garden. A pond. Somewhere for Grogu to be a child. A place that they could both call home. A place that they could always return to, no matter what happened.

Din knew one of the reasons why he couldn’t say anything to her right now was because she’d been right all along. It was exactly what he’d always wanted. He just hadn’t been able to see it then. So he mentioned the one thing he could instead.

“How’s that rifle been treating you?” he asked, gesturing for the weapon with his head.

“Very well,” she replied, unfazed. So maybe she didn’t mind his strange ways too much. “It’s brought me luck in the past, so I always take it with me on our travels.”

“You travel much?”

“Now that Winta is older, yes. Our village has grown, our production of spotchka as well.”

“I’ve never seen you here before,” he noted, observing how happy Grogu and the almost grown girl looked together.

“First time in Nevarro,” Omera explained. “We’ve only tried a few small marketplaces in trade ports on the Hydian Way, and we heard the town was safe again.”

“It is,” Din confirmed immediately.

“Good,” she nodded. They did seem busy enough Din thought, with prospective clients lining up behind him already. They should really be on their way, and he urged Grogu to let Winta be, but this wasn’t proving very successful as neither child was paying attention to the adults.

“Are you planning on coming back then?” he found himself asking her after he’d extracted the kid from Winta’s arms – he hadn’t even told her that they lived on Nevarro, maybe he should have started there. But again, she didn’t show any surprise at his unconnected questions.

“Next month,” she said, handing change to a woman who’d just bought several bottles and was now eyeing some of the clothes they were also selling with interest.

“So see you next month then?” Winta asked hopefully, the little boy cooing against his side.

And Din nodded, because all things considered, this was a pleasant thought. And something to look forward to. Maybe it would even give him enough time to figure out what to say to her.

[ruleofvee]

SBIWhumptober Day 3: Dehumanization + Day 12: Enemy to Caretaker + Day 20: Restrained

“Go give it water, Blade.”

At the prospect of water, blessed water, Phil can’t help but look up. His throat is parched, his body weak, his feathers dull and broken and the self-soothing croons he tries to make seem to burn up his vocal chords. At this rate, he’s willing to take what he can get, dignity or no dignity.

Besides, he’s long accepted that his leverage options are…limited. It’s hard to bargain when you’re on the wrong end of a heavy set of iron chains.

His captors spared no effort. His hands are bound, his talons filed, his ankles given the same treatment. His wings have been twisted and flattened down to his back, tied painfully in place. Even if he got free, he wouldn’t be able to fly, or fight, or run, or - 

Or escape. 

Priorities. Think about the hopelessness of his situation later. For now, water.

The person that approaches is…decidedly not human, not like the others. He’s tall, and muscled, and piglin shaped in some ways and human shaped in others. A hybrid. Phil wouldn’t normally care, but…

“Any day now, Blade.”

…but it’s an opportunity. Hybrids have to stick together, don’t they? And this person is clearly at the bottom of the proverbial pecking order.

Blade flinches at the sharp words and hurries his footsteps. Phil keeps a careful eye on him. Good balance, knows how to carry himself. There’s a smoothness to his movements that can only come from combat experience. 

He nears Phil’s cage, passes a water canteen through the bars with uncharacteristic gentleness. Phil’s fingers brush against his, and he can feel callouses. A swordsman’s callouses. That confirms it. 

He could be a powerful ally, Phil thinks. It’ll just take time to befriend him. Time I might not have.

“Thanks, mate,” he says hoarsely. He downs the water in three quick gulps, then hands the canteen back. “Blade, is it?”

Blade flinches, again. “Technoblade,” he corrects. “Or just Techno.”

“Alright.” He tries for a smile. It feels only a little manufactured. “Thank you, Technoblade.”

Something changes in Techno’s gaze, some miniscule softening, some hint of compassion, and Phil’s heart soars - 

“Blade, get over here!”

- only for the softness to vanish as quickly as it came, for Techno’s gaze to go hard and cold again.

Still, Phil knows now how to tackle him. Knows how to be the things Techno’s so-called ‘friends’ aren’t.

Operation Escape is a go.

[albertswitch]

Ruth

At fifty-two, Andrew was a serious and hard-working man, his career had been going well, and he had reached an important and prominent position in the company he worked for. Now he had been sent by the headquarters to that remote country village to oversee the renovation of the local manufacturing facility. Being divorced and childless, he had willingly accepted the move to that uncomfortable countryside.

Looking for accommodation and since there were no decent hotels around there, Andrew ended up renting a room with a lady who was looking for a tenant. The house was an old two-story house, well maintained and surrounded by a large garden, Andrew had a spacious room with a bathroom for his exclusive use just beside his room's door, as there was another one that the landlady and her daughter used.

The landlady in question was Ruth, a widow who lived there with her sixteen-year-old daughter Jennifer. She was born in that house and went back to live there once her husband died after a car accident two years prior and her parents left in her early thirties. At forty Ruth was still a pretty woman and Andrew found her attractive from the day he got to know her. She was not tall and usually kept her hair tightly encased in a chignon, the traditional dresses she mostly wore could not hide her generous forms and her still firm flesh, and when she dressed more informally such as for working in the garden, her very womanly bottom filled stretched the fabric of her jeans, and her bosom wobbled attractively under the tee shirt.

Going to live there, Andrew was a bit worried about his privacy, especially because of the presence of a teenager. Coming from the city he imagined loud music from her room, girls and especially boys coming and going around the house, and maybe some animated discussion between her and her mother. None of this, Jennifer who was the young version of her mother, was a nice and animated girl, but at home, she was very quiet and always respectful towards her parent.

It was a few weeks after he had gone to live there that Andrew sensed the reason for Jennifer's good behavior. It was late afternoon and he came back home from his job when he found Jennifer seated at the living room table doing her homework. That alone was unusual as she used to study in her room where she had a desk, but even more strange was that she was sitting on a fluffy pillow and had puffy eyes as if she had been crying.

"The miss here thought it was a good idea to go to school for a whole week with her homework not done," Ruth said noticing Andrew's puzzled expression, "I had a call from her math teacher and I had to put an end to this."

And she underlined her words with an unmistakable hand gesture. Poor Jennifer blushed red and put her head in the book to avoid Andrew's look.

That event confirmed Andrew’s feeling that Ruth was definitely an old-fashioned lady with quite conservative ideas. He had already noticed that all the furniture was old-style, and even Ruth's way of dressing was more like that of a woman of the fifties than that of the new millennium. And now it was clear that her view on domestic discipline matched her way of dressing.

Given that, it didn't surprise Andrew too much to discover one day when he was looking for some laundry soap, a leather strap hanging on the wall of the closet at the back of the kitchen. It was a broad and heavy strip of thick leather attached to a wooden handle. It looked like a fearsome tool, clearly built to inflict a lot of pain without causing too much physical damage. He wondered if that was what Ruth used to correct poor Jenniffer, being this the case it was clear why she had had problems sitting down that afternoon.

But that was not the case, as he discovered sometime later when he stayed after dinner to converse with Ruth on the porch on a quiet summer evening. It was then that he came to learn that the only bottom that had felt the caress of that strap was that of his landlady.

That evening after talking freely about amenities Ruth, helped by a couple of glasses of red wine, started to talk about her life. She was the only daughter of the local pastor and grew up in a very strict, conservative environment. Her parents were caring and loved deeply their only daughter but were very strict, especially her father, and believed firmly in the old bible saying 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. So as a child, any time her behaviors were not at her best, she had become accustomed to bare-bottomed spankings and after she had turned a teenager, to severe whippings with that large, thick leather strap. For regular spankings, she had to lift her long skirt, the only garment she had always to wear, up above her waist and pull her panties down to mid-thigh before going over her father's lap. When she was going to get the strap, she had to lower her panties and hose, again raise her skirt up above her waist, and bend over to obediently present her tender young buttocks to her stern father's punishing leather.

"He really blistered my poor rear end with that," she said while one of her hands went unconsciously to caress her swelling bottom through her skirt. "I was a blubbering mess when he was done. That's why I never used the strap with Jennifer, it hurts far too much, so when I have to correct her I use just a wooden spoon."

"So how come it still keeps hanging on the wall in the closet?" It was the question that came naturally to Andrew.

"OH...did you see it...well, I don't know. I guess that is just something that must be there in a decent home. To keep discipline, you know," she said while a blush colored her pretty cheeks.

Andrew was puzzled by that answer. If she didn't intend to use it on her daughter, who else needed to be disciplined in that house? But noting her blushing he didn't say anything, not wanting to create further embarrassment for his landlady. Nonetheless, Ruth, as if reading his mind, turned her head to avoid eye contact.

That discussion aroused in Andrew's mind fantasies long time forgotten. His parents never spanked him, but as a kid, since an early age, he had been strangely interested in the subject. His interest started with comics and cartoons, and later in old movies, western especially, where the female heroin often found herself on the receiving end of that old-fashioned discipline. Every time a scene depicted that correction he felt a kind of strange and funny feeling running through his body. This interest developed till his late teenage years when it began to fade, but even now just at the word ‘spanking’, he felt kind of embarrassed and excited at the same time. So from that night, he started to look at his pretty landlady under a new light. The awareness that till her early twenties she had been corporally punished ('till the day I got married' she had said) and the assumption that she kept the instrument of her punishment in remembrance of it and, who knows, maybe even because at some level she thought it still could be used on her, elicited in Andrew a turmoil of emotions.

In the next few days, he started to spend more time with Ruth, looking for opportunities to bring the discussion back to the topic of discipline. Sometimes he would make comments, between the serious and the facetious, about how 'women of all ages need a firm hand applied where it does most good' or even more directly 'try to behave yourself or I'll have to take the strap off the wall.'

Ruth had had a twofold attitude toward those approaches. On the one hand, her manner was warm and inviting, it was clear that she liked Andrew, but on the other hand, she never openly answered those allusions that she still required discipline, but she never denied it either. Her usual reaction to those suggestions was to furiously blush and try to change the subject.

All that went on till one day when coming back from work at dinner time, Andrew found Jennifer leaving the house, and Ruth was not there. That was quite unusual as till then he had seen mother and daughter always eat dinner together in the house. "Mother has gone out," the girl told him, noticing his puzzled look. "She will be back late because tonight is the annual reunion of the ex-students of her school. I'm going to Aunt Amanda's to spend the night."

Keep reading Ruth at, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D58HNRT6