#engagement gifts for her

[ghouljams]

Hey, your Regency!Price…I hope we get more of him but you inspired me to mess about with some pics. I couldn’t resist!

Foaming at the mouth for this man and his stupid ass shoes.

You like him in his uniform. A man of Price's station hardly needs the backing of a military uniform to hold importance, no he carries that in the proud set of his shoulders, but you like him with all the bells and whistles. You like the way the dark coat looks against his skin, the way the high collar seems to strengthen his jaw, and all the golden accents that make his eyes sparkle. The only thing you can find to dislike about it is the way it draws other women's attention.

Price holds your fan, waving it in brisk motions to keep the both of you cool as you snag two glasses off a passing tray. You offer him one and he takes it graciously. It's funny how easily you fall in with his motions, how easily he falls into yours. You reach for your fan and he snaps it shut, your own bad habit mirrored back to you. You bite down your smile and try to be more dainty when you open it again.

"You're rather popular," You note, your eyes drifting to the crowd of women glaring at you. They exchange quiet but pointed words behind fans, you're sure if you were closer they'd raise their voices so you could hear what they called you. Nothing creative you're sure. Peacocks, the lot of them.

"The uniform is popular," Price responds.

"Not the man?" You raise a brow, catching the twitch of his smile, "Pity, I rather like the man."

"He likes you."

You hum, smile over the rim of your wine glass. You enjoy flirting more than you'd thought you would. Enjoy the way Price makes your stomach flip and your skin heat with only three words. You like the way his voice rumbles low in his chest when he says them. 'He likes you.' You smile a little more despite yourself, your teeth edging against the rim of the glass.

"You like when I say that?" You can hear the smile in his voice, feel the gentle pressure of his hand low against your back. It's a fleeting touch but it leaves you burning for more, improper in the best of ways.

"It's nice to hear," You tell him, flashing the warmth of your smile his way. There's no sense in hiding it when he already knows. Here's another thing you like, the way Price's eyes wrinkle at the corners when he smiles at you.

"It's the truth," The sincerity of his tone makes your heart ache. Nothing could have prepared you for this man, for the desire he churns in you. Longing for things you never let yourself dream of: love, marriage, children. Propriety says you're never supposed to seem too interested lest gossip spread about your virtue, but-

"A mutual one," You tell him, assure him with affection on your lips. You're sure after your first meeting with him your reputation is tarnished enough, you may as well be honest with the man that ruined it.

"Be still my heart," He rumbles, his smile as wide as you've ever seen it, "you'll kill me before we ever reach the alter tellin' me that sweetheart."

[hitlikehammers]

there is a tree as old as me

rating: teen tags: future fic, outside POV, trespassing, established relationship, engaged steddie💍 ✨for @kallisto-k at my BIRTHDAY MONTH PROMPT FEST for the prompt: To Build A Home—The Cinematic Orchestra: 'and now, it's time to leave and turn to dust // out in the garden where we planted the seeds // there is a tree as old as me

She catches the trespassers by chance, really.

She’s awake early even for her routine, age doing nothing for the capacity to sleep in on a good day but her hip’s been a trial, and she needs buy a new mattress but Richard’s insistent he can’t bear to sleep on a stone slab, Patricia, good god—she wants to get one of those Select Comforts that splits their settings between two sides as a compromise; he argues those are for lesser mortals, which she’s long learned has evolved in recent years to mean not just that he thinks he’s above something in general, but more now that he thinks he’s better than technological advances.

And Patricia Harrington has standards, certainly, but she can also recognize when

She’s also old enough to remember when ‘new’ was an opportunity to throw her Black Card and gloat a little in the rush of the novelty, the momentary shine until the next new thing appeared to repeat the cycle.

She might be feeling her years, but she doesn’t understand when her husband got so damn old.

At least he’s still savvy enough to the time that they’ve got an airtight security system for the house itself, given the trespassers—more likely would-be-burglars, given the evaluation they’d just paid taxes on for the property—that she spies out the window, hears where she cracked the window in the kitchen to light a cigarette as she brews an early coffee.

Maybe Richard will agree to motion sensors for the yard, if she tells him about these…miscreants.

They’re moving carefully, like they don’t want to be seen, or more likely caught—suspicious, obviously—but they’re also moving like the know where they’re headed, as if they’re familiar with the space they’re traversing even in the pitch dark: even more suspect, really, and she wonders if they’ve cased the home, adds full-property camera surveillance to her list of proposals for reevaluating their security.

“I can’t believe you convinced me to—“ she barely catches the hiss from one of the criminals from across the yard, but it doesn’t last.

It doesn’t last because the second party drags the first close and: the lighting’s horrible, the moon’s crescent at best, but there’s really only one thing to be doing when two bodies press close, and then break apart with a pop she makes out on the breeze and, well. She was young, once.

“Believe it, baby,” the second trespasser rumbles low, and, oh, good god: “we gotta hit all the landmarks.”

They’re men. They’re both of them men and they were just—

“Landmarks?” the first one hisses sharper, this time, and Patricia…she doesn’t care nearly as much as Richard does about what people do in their bedrooms that she personally doesn’t agree with.

But this isn’t anyone’s own bedroom. This is her lawn.

“Of our story,” the second one, he—he—has got such curly hair she likely would have assume it was a very tall women, if it weren’t for the voice; “all our highlights.”

“What, exactly, was—“ the first man, he sounds a little exasperated as he whispers, but…fond. Fond like Patricia hasn’t heard in…well.

A very, very long time, at least.

“Here,” the curly haired fiend traipsing her property stops at a redbud tree Richard had always despised, said it looked tacky, common. Patricia canceled every removal service he’d had whichever secretary he instructed to send.

The second man turns, moves slow toward the tree before reaching, placing a hand on the trunk almost carefully, reverently. There’s something…familiar about him. The shape of his face, the way the the coif of his hair catches in shadow—

“My nanny used to tell me this tree was planted the year I was born, that it grew up with me,” and oh, oh, that’s, he’s—“so that I’d have to eat my vegetables and stuff, if I wanted to see it grow.”

He sounds so nostalgic, so soft at the edges; Patricia doesn’t know if she’s ever heard her son sound like that.

Because that’s who it is; why he seemed familiar even at a distance.

Even if she hasn’t seen or heard from Steven in nearly twenty years.

“And look at you both,” the other man, with the curly hair, he’s holding Steven by his arms, and the motion, the body language is…tender even before she hears the words filter over:

“Big and strong,” the man says, and then he’s cupping Steven’s cheek and Steven leans in so quick, like he trusts deeply, here: “fuckin’ beautiful.”

She can’t see it, not in the dark, but something tells her Steven’s smiling for the words. It makes her feel…uncomfortable.

Because it’s not as if they hadn’t seen it; she doesn’t know where Steven’s moved, where he ended up when he moved out while they were gone, left his key and a simple, terse little note about the furnace needing looked at—she only knows he’s nowhere near here, anymore, and she suspects there are some, like the former police chief and his wife, who know where he went but she never asks. She’s too proud for that.

But the point is: Steven doesn’t live in Hawkins anymore, and likely lives nowhere near Hawkins. But when The Post ran the engagement announcement it had only been implied, she’d never have been able to place is, but: when and S. Harrington and E. Munson announced their happy news in print, in a town that didn’t house people by those initials, even if it still housed residents by those family names?

Well. Patricia had suspicions. And she remembers the Munson boy largely because his hair was an unmistakable mess.

Apparently some things didn’t change.

“This,” the Munson boy, because that’s who it is, that’s who’s still cradling her son so close and so gently: “this was the first place I knew you wanted me.”

Steven’s head, she sees, still tilts just so when he’s baffled.

“What?”

“I knew you loved me like I love you, I knew that way before but you,” and the Munson boy, he pulls his hand across his face like the night isn’t doing the hiding for him. Preposterous, really.

“The urchins were inside, we were going to grab more pop to bring in and you pushed me up against this very tree,” and the boy—man, they’re men, they’ve long been men and Patricia doesn’t want to pry up the implications of how she saw no part of the becoming part of that process with her own eyes—but the man’s voice is so warm, so…smitten.

It should be nauseating. Another thing she doesn’t want to pry at is why it…isn’t. At least not quite.

“Couldn’t wait, you said, couldn’t keep you hands off me,” and he’s turning Steven, walking him back against the tree as he speaks the words, like he’s reenacting something nigh-sacred.

“And I knew that I was out of my mind with wanting you like that, on top of loving you more than fucking life baby, but,” and Munson, she can see the way he breathes in his deep for the heave in the line of his back, and she can see the way he…brushes the line of his nose back and forth against Steven’s.

Who still has her father’s nose.

“You were hard as soon as you pinned me,” and Patricia frowns at the glass, when she hears that; and she barely hears is, in fairness, it’s pitched low even as they think they’re alone which is the least they can do but they are not alone and Patrician does not need to be subjected to—

“And it was like a light switch, or a lightning bolt,” the Munson boy—they’re boys they are still boys—but the Munson boy whispers it, and sounds like he’s wondering at it;

“He loves me,” he breathes, the line of his back breathing so deep again; “and he fucking wants me.”

And no, Patricia does not need to hear that at all, but.

There is a part of her, buried somewhere, who…does miss the idea of wanting. Of being wanted. In the abstract.

“You’re absurd,” Steven snorts and oh; oh, she remembers that tone, that testy little snark that always riled Richard enough that he’d largely stomped it out of the boy but oh: Patricia did love when Steven failed to rein it in.

Because it always reminded her that Steven was her son.

She doesn’t intend to start rubbing at her chest, but it…it feels kind of tight, there, just now.

It aches, there. Just now.

“I love you,” and Steven’s voice, she’s never heard him speak with that much feeling, and it’s difficult not to…to react to even just overhearing, to eavesdropping, though in fairness: it is, again, her property.

“And I want you,” Steven leans in, and kisses at Munson’s cheek with such affection, a devotion that’s obvious, near-blinding even in the dark; “just as much now as then,” and then Steven, Steven—

He laughs.

He laughs and it’s such a light and carefree sound and it’s so foreign to Patricia’s ears that it almost makes her anxious, or something of the like.

“But then so much more, baby,” and the warmth in those words: those are foreign too.

Those feel strange to hear, not least in Steven’s voice which…

She thinks she may not have recognized, if the first thing she hear were these words, in this tone.

She’s not wholly sure how to sit with that suspicion.

“Ten days,” the Munson boy’s hands go to Steven’s hips and he rocks them back and forth a bounce in the motion, a levity.

“Ten days,” and Steven…no.

No: she would not have recognized that voice.

She would not have known her son.

“You’re gonna be my husband,” the Munson boy whispers, Patricia only hears because she’s trying to, now, she…she wants to even if it hurts unexpectedly, the tightness under her hand in her chest a pain, now, a small little stab when this man cups her son’s cheeks, cradles him so careful and so…so loving, undeniable even like this, and says what she suspected from that notice in the paper.

Steven is getting married. Steven is getting married and he is proud enough to flaunt it in a town who could never prove it, where he no longer has tied; to a a partner who is proud enough to do the same just as brazen, and she doesn’t know if she’s proud or put-off, but she does know here, now—

Steven is in love. And he is loved deeply in kind. And the person who loves him sounds in awe at the idea of pledging forever not as a contract, but maybe more as a privilege.

She wasn’t paying attention for a strand of seconds as she acknowledged this, and decided ultimately to stop trying to do anything deeper than just that.

But she sees them pull apart; they’d been kissing the entire time she’d been thinking it through.

She isn’t even interested in acknowledging the…niggling little feeling of that kind of prolonged affection, let alone the way they reach for each other, steady each other in the coming apart, as if they have no desire to wholly come apart.

The idea of trusting another pair of hands like it looks as if they do, in the dim of these early hours, is…another foreign thing.

“Okay, okay,” the Munson boy laughs, no, giggles; “let’s get out of here before the owners notice.”

And he turns, would meet her eyes if he could see her; she knows he can’t, knows she’s standing just beyond the capacity to be caught and how absurd, caught inside her own house.

But then he’s turned away again; the house, and whatever it holds, far less compelling than the man at his side.

“Wayne’s place?” Steven’s asking and the Munson boy grabs his hand, lifts it to his mouth.

“Yeah,” the Munson boy says so low, so soft and sweet; “we can hit some more landmarks before that bagel joint he likes opens, we can take him breakfast.”

“More landmarks?” Steven sounds baffled, but so very fond and his partner doesn’t let go of his hand once, reels him in to peck his cheek.

“Of course, sweetheart,” the Munson boy nearly…purrs, how ridiculous; “so many. Because we’ve got one hell of a story.”

But ridiculous or no: the moon shifts out from the clouds as they make to scamper off the lawn and Patricia sees her son’s face for the first time in decades, now, and oh.

Oh: she’s never seen him smile like that. Not…not once.

She turns away, because the sting in her chest burns behind her eyes, a little; because the joy on Steven’s face is…

It feels private; like something she’s not meant to see.

She goes to pour herself the coffee she’d largely forgotten, and, well.

She’s still going to talk to Richard about security, but maybe…

Maybe not just now.

permanent tag list (comment to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 

[kingkatsuki]

Mother Mitsuki, who despite Masaru’s pleas, is way too invested in Bakugou and your relationship.

[talesfromthebandgeekmafia]

Every time Aabria Iyengar steps into the dome she creates something that makes me fall in love with the wonder and possibility of ttrpgs all over again

[alch-emi]

Happy Valentine’s Day to them specifically

[thesmithsoniancollection]

karlie speaking a bit about what jewelry means to her, that it’s significant to her, cartier jewelry, etc☺️

[thatswhatsushesaid]

the fool 🤝 jin guangyao being easily the most dynamic and compelling characters in their respective canons, likely for reasons that were substantially if not entirely unintentional on the part of their respective authors

[squiddlyarts]

Art compilation! All in one post because why not!

[mimashjewell]

Best friends and lovers, that describes you and me. These promise rings express our love for the entire world to see.

[nerdygirl2023]

The original poem of the Persephone and Hades myth went out of its way to tell its audience that Zeus was the one that told Hades to kidnap her and Hades was pretty much blameless for everything except the pomegranate trick and I think that is very underutilize in pretty much every interpretation

[gimelisjewelstore]

5.0 TCW Slanted Marquise Diamond Band 14K Solid White Gold Promise Band For Her Engagement Band Anniversary Gift eternity band wedding band

[liminal-zone]

can I hear a little commotion for the dress

Black Panther Wakanda Forever spoilers:

SO, when kidnapped Princess Shuri is handed a stunning bespoke white dress lavishly adorned in priceless stones as sent by her captor Namor, the very wise Riri is all (paraphrased) "this is a marriage proposal if you put it on youre engaged now stop have you watched any film ever, do not accept dresses from strange men in authority" and then this gen z bbgirl says "have you see leia in star wars, beauty and the beast, or raiders of the lost ark."

FIRST OF ALL.

The gift of a bespoke dress from a villain to a captive hero is one of my top five favorite tropes. I'm a pile of ash in the movie theatre rn. Let's be very clear that I loved this.

SECONDLY:

What Gen X/geriatric millennial screenwriter gave a Gen Z baby the examples of RETURN OF THE JEDI, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, AND RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (yes, they're all disney properties and she's right to say it, I get it). I laughed and laughed in millennial. Target audience reached.

anyway. it was lovely. 13 out of 10.

[mashmouths]

EVERY DAY I AM THANKFUL TO BE GAY

[fluffypotatey]

Rewatched "The Sword in the Stone" and God, Tristan and Isolde are just so.....

Aside from the rare display of balls from BBC, to completely do away with their tragic love story and make them both bicons and full criminals, damn, it's so rare for a TV het couple to be so Valid, and yet. Them. Crime-married, running a smuggling op, they get swept up into a Clusterfuck by the very king they are stealing from, and Tristan still brings the bae flowers just 'cause and straight-up says he don't give even half a fuck that he lost cargo as long as Isolde is safe. Like. Damn. Respect.

Also, Isolde is just fine, she passed out from pain, Gaius and Merlin fixed her right up, and now her and Tristan are running a Vaguely Legal Business in which now they just smuggle stuff from other kingdoms, which Arthur politely ignores in exchange for nitty-gritty details on the state of trade, like the strangest, most well-meant form of political corruption ever.

Arthur: Tristan, Isolde, good to see you both again, I trust you're staying out of trouble......and not illegally transporting those three crates of Mercian spices I see in your wagon.

Tristan: *pulls an oilcloth over the crates* Spices? I don't see any spices here, do you, Isolde?

Isolde: *holds up a sheaf of trade details from Mercia, Essetir, and Gwynedd* No, Tristan, I certainly don't.

Arthur: .........

Arthur: *takes the papers* You have got to stop doing this.

Tristan and Isolde: Doing what?

Arthur: *leaves*

(Also, no, I'm not having Crime Ring AU thoughts, pfft, no way.)

*sighs* *cracks knuckles* how dare you somehow know all of my weaknesses when it comes to headcanons

listen,

Tristan and Isolde are Arthur's unofficial spies. they created the camelot spy network. they weaved those webs like Arachne herself. the trade papers? just the beginning.

sure, sure, Tristan always tells Isolde that their business with camelot is a short one, that they'll only stay here for a little bit then get back to what they do best, that he only agreed to another month because Arthur turns a blind eye to their dirty money.

Isolde only rolls her eyes because she knows better. this is her husband we're talking about, someone she knows inside and out. Isolde has memorized his mannerisms until she could see them without even looking at him. Isolde could time how long her husband will deny ever caring about the "foolish king" and admit that he had grown fond of the young man.

Tristan as he is arranging a bouquet for his wife: "All I'm saying is that the kid needs a better system for information. He relies on us too much despite our stay being temporary."

Isolde mapping out Essetir's new trade details: "Maybe he enjoys the company."

Tristan: "He's a blue blood, darling. I highly doubt that we would be someone he'd loved to hang out with. Now, daffodils or lillies?"

also: Tristan called Arthur son once, and Arthur just about cried on the spot ("it's the DUST!"). Tristan begins to realize that he has basically adopted Arthur and realizes that he quite likes parenting the kid.

[bi-leth-eisner]

tbh i did not expect that characters would react differently in any single way on their birthdays