#even if the other person seems super uninterested or even resistant to the idea

[9hikers]

the fatal flaw with my friend-making strategy is treating people like feral cats that need months of coddling before they can feel safe around me

the more i realize how unrealistic that is the more a lot of my past relationships make sense

[katehuntington]

Title: I Can See Clearly Now Fandom: Supernatural (season 1) Characters: Dean Winchester (POV), Sam Winchester, Y/N Pairing: Dean x female feader Words: ± 5550 words Description: After a falling out, the Winchester brothers are on the road trying to find Y/N, who has taken on hunts alone. Then Dean gets a disturbing phone call and he needs to move fast if he wants to save the her life. Warnings: Angst! Adult language, canon typical violence, description of blood and injury. Speeding/on the phone while driving. Panic, crying. Description of medical procedures. Possible character death. Author’s note: This is a rewrite from an earlier one shot. I changed it to Dean’s point of view and I hope it captivates you all even more! Thank you, @mrswhozeewhatsis for being my super skilled Beta and helping me with this story. Thanks to you it really came full circle.

      “I just don’t understand why you can’t pick up the phone and call her.”       I ignore Sam, keeping my gaze fixed on the road ahead, as raindrops run up the windshield, trying to find the way of least resistance. Unintentionally, I clench my jaw, after which I sigh, frustrated. It’s not the first time he brought it up. Apparently my pain in the ass little brother can’t take a hint. You would assume that ‘college boy’ is able to pick up on my annoyed glares and awkward silences, or maybe he just chooses to dismiss them. I’m not sure which one is more stupid. 

      Trying to come off as casual and uninterested, I stare past the window wipers, which squeak every time the blades unblurs the glass. Then I shake my head slightly, both disagreeing and as a warning.       “We talked about this. I’m not calling her,” I state. “She made it clear that she needs to be alone.”       “Are you that blind?! Don’t you know her by now?!” Sam exclaims.       “No, I don’t, Sam! How can I if she keeps lying all the time?!” I can’t help but to raise my voice and I bite my tongue afterwards. It happens a lot these days, that I’m unable to keep my emotions in check, especially now that she ran for the hills.

      Over the last couple of months, Sammy and I grew closer to the young huntress, closer than we should have. Not that she made it easy for us, because she acted like a total bitch at first. In the beginning I thought she hated my guts, with her fighting me on every decision I made. But fate would have it that when shit hit the fan, Sam and I were there to catch her. So we teamed up and hunted together. The Three Stooges, the Musketeers. The good, the bad, and the ugly, Sam being the ugly one of course. We became more than just colleagues, more than just acquaintances. We became friends; we became family.

      I let that fundamental word echo through my mind as I ponder. It means a hell of a lot; I don’t go around calling anyone that. You gotta earn that title. Bobby Singer once told me, ‘Family don’t end in blood.’ I don’t think I fully understood what he meant, until Y/N became a part of our team. Sammy found a sister he never knew he wanted, a study buddy, a fellow nerd who he could get excited with over serial killer hauntings and prehistoric books. 

And I... I found someone I never expected to find: someone who brings out the best in me and makes me feel things I thought I wouldn’t be capable of, not after all the literal horror I’ve witnessed in my lifetime of hunting. I found a goofy kid who laughs at my lame jokes, a girl with an appetite of a trucker and the ability to drink me under the table. I found a rock chick who loves Zep and AC/DC and adores my car as much as I do. I found the woman who puts family first, is kind and generous, and never ceases to help others in need.

     You know what? I’m just gonna say it: I found the woman I’m in love with.

      Things were good between us. It must have been a month ago when I first kissed her. I downed five shots before I could muster up the courage, and still I found shooting a charging werewolf the night before less scary. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve kissed plenty of girls, but she isn’t just any chick. This was Y/N, and I really didn’t want to fuck it up. We hooked up several times, and it was always either epic or awesome. Despite that we were taking it easy, I fell hard for her.       Deep down, I always had this itch that she didn’t tell me the whole story. There was something she kept hidden. Little things gave her away. Short, almost unnoticeable hesitations. Starting a sentence by questioningly calling my name, and then dismissing it with a ‘never mind’. I never really pushed her, figuring that she would tell me when she was ready. It never got to that point, though. A week ago, the unthinkable happened.

      After almost a year of searching, the one person who we’ve been looking for stepped into our motel room: Dad. But the air in the room changed the second he laid eyes on Y/N, who didn’t hesitate to pull her gun on him. After a heated discussion with weapons drawn like in an old spaghetti western, the truth finally surfaced. Apparently Dad was working with Y/N’s parents, when a plan backfired and killed them both. Even though Dad was her guardian, he left Y/N at an orphanage. Since then, she had made it her life-long mission to get revenge. The easiest way to find Dad was to latch on to his sons. Every hunter has a justification to sign up for this life; John Winchester was hers.

      “She had a reason,” Sammy mentions, as if he could tell what was on my mind just now.       “You mean Dad?” I assume with a tone.       “He shouldn’t have left her like that. That’s all I’m saying.”       A silence follows as we both continue to stare into the darkness beyond Baby’s headlights.       “No, he shouldn’t have,” I agree, after several quiet seconds.       Surprised by that conclusion, Sam frowns. I can almost hear him thinking: did Dean just admit that Dad did something wrong?       “I’m not saying that what she did was a-okay. She still used us,” I correct.       “I don’t think she did,” my younger brother disagrees. “Y/N desperately tried to stay away from us, remember that? She was mean, you two were clawing each other’s eyes out...” The both of us smile faintly at that. “But somehow, we still stuck together, and it’s a good thing we did, because we all would have ended up dead without each other.”

      Sammy isn’t wrong there. Even two weeks ago, Y/N only just saved me from getting hanged by a poltergeist in an old hotel in Gold Canyon, Arizona. I remember waking up in the dust, noose still around my neck and her beautiful face above me, scared tears in her eyes after which she kissed me deeply.

      “Y/N wants us there, Dean,” Sam snaps me from my thoughts. “We need to back her up.”       “She’s the one who left, Sam,” I remind him, burdened.       A semi rushes by on the other lane. Its headlights blind me and illuminate Sam’s face, after which the light fades again as the Mack passes. The wipers shoot from right to left and back, offering me some kind of visual.

      “She thinks we’re still mad. She held Dad at gunpoint. I kinda get why she doesn’t think we can get back to how things were.”       “Who says we can?” I bring to mind.       Sam stares at me, his jaw dropped.       “You’re still holding a grudge? Seriously? He left her at a fucking orphanage, Dean! She grew up in seven different foster homes!”       “Does Dad sound like the kinda person who would just up and leave a kid he was responsible for?” I argue, feeling the anger starting to boil again.       “He did the same to us.”

      Sam eyes me coldly from his corner between the front bench and the door of the Impala. He has his arms crossed, his hair hanging before his eyes and everything about him says that he’s not going to agree with me. For a second I consider stomping the breaks and giving my brother a lecture, but instead I shoot him a glare.

      “Watch your mouth, Sam,” I warn, my tone low. “Dad never left for longer than a month. He did the best he could.”       “You were ten, Dean!” Sam exclaims. “And he expected you to take care of a six-year old kid!”       “And it didn’t turn out so bad, now did it?!” I shut him up. “Have you considered that maybe he wanted to spare Y/N this life? That that’s the reason why he left her at the orphanage?!”       “Bang up job on that,” my brother huffs.

      I hate it. I hate that a part of me agrees with Sammy. And so I don’t respond and let him win this argument, if there is such a thing as winning today. Contemplating, I grip the steering wheel a little tighter, pressing my prints into the leather. I’ve always lived in a black and white world. Monsters are evil, people are innocent. Kill the evil, save the innocent. Simple rules, straight-forward orders. I do what Dad tells me to do, because he’s the leader of this pack and he’s always right, right? 

     That’s the thing, I don’t know anymore. Dad forbid us from hanging with Y/N, because the girl they care so much for, holds him accountable for her fucked up childhood. No matter how you look at it, it’s an shitty situation that is forcing both me and my brother to pick a side.

      “Maybe creating some distance ain’t a bad idea. This business doesn’t allow us to be social. The more people we care about, the more people die,” I say, breaking the awkward silence.       “So what, you wish we’d never met her? That’s what you’re saying?” my brother scoffs.       “No, Sam! I’m saying that I’m worried. I’m worried that this - this, whatever this is, will split our family up!”  Frustrated I accelerate, despite the slippery wet asphalt.

      “Look, Dean…” Sam lets the air flow off his lips, struggling to ease it on me. “I know there’s more going on between you and Y/N--”       I roll my eyes. “Oh, here we go.”       “I know that Dad got in your head when he ordered us to stay away from her. I heard him say that she’s an enemy of this family… She isn’t, though. She’s a part of this family. She’s more to you, I can see it in the way you look at her. Plus, motel walls are thin.”       I can’t help but to smirk at that. Seems like we woke someone up after I snuck to her room on several occasions.       “All jokes aside, you love her, Dean.”       I freeze, then manage to open my mouth in order to respond to that, but Sammy beats me to it. Thankfully, because I’m sure ‘I do not!’ would have gotten a good laugh.       “You don’t have to say anything, I don’t need a confirmation from you to know that it’s true. But before you close that door, think about how precious that is,” he explains. “I had that kind of love with Jess and I lost it. I would do anything to get that back. Think it through before you let her go, that’s all I’m saying.”

      “We’ll locate her, make sure she’s okay, then we go from there. Who knows, maybe we can work this out. But you can’t expect me to choose her over Dad, Sam,” I add, when I see a hopeful spark in my brother’s eyes.       “I‘m not. But I do think that now would be the time to start having a mind of your own,” he suggests.       “I’m here trying to find her, ain’t I? Dad would kill me if he knew,” I remind him.

      Our father was against this little rescue mission and I knew that going down this road will put a big dent in his trust. On the flip side, letting Y/N run off in the state of mind that she was in, feels wrong too. What if something snatches her and we’re not there to back her up? I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.       Suddenly my Metallica ringtone reverberates through the car; someone is ringing my cell. Who the hell would call at this hour?        I take my phone out of my pocket and check the display, then my heart stops. An eerie sensation fills my stomach and creeps up my throat. She wouldn’t casually call, not after that clash three days ago.       I pick up hastily. “Y/N?”       “Dean…”       It’s her all right, but a peculiar fear causes the hair on the back of my neck to stand up when I hear her say my name. The fear that surfaces whenever Sammy’s in trouble, or Dad is. Hearing the sound of her voice isn’t as comforting as I hoped it would be. It’s weak, trembling, almost a whisper. I immediately know something is off.

      “Are you okay?”       “No – no, I’m not,” she cries. “Dean…”       I close my eyes for a split second, then stare down the road again. Fuck. She just admitted that she’s not okay. It has to be bad, otherwise she wouldn’t… Fuck! I swallow down a lump in my throat and glance aside at my brother, who stares back and instantly reads that something bad has happened.       “Are you hurt?” I ask, worried.       She doesn’t actually answer my question, but I can hear her respiration, breaths hitching with every inhale; she’s in pain.       “I need your help.”       “Where are you?” I ask quickly, not wanting to waste any time.       “Lincoln… 1722 Tremont, in an empty warehouse,” she answers with difficulty.

      I look over my shoulder and only need a split second to read the sign beside the road; Lincoln is the other way. With my phone pressed between my shoulder and my ear, I hit the brakes hard and turn the wheel completely to the left with both hands. Baby slips and makes a 180° as Sam holds on for dear life. When we’re facing the road to Lincoln, I push the gas pedal down completely. With shrieking tires my car catches grip on the slippery asphalt again and races away, fishtailing, leaving a trail of burned rubber. I take the phone back in my hand, speeding up to a hundred miles an hour.       “Listen to me, Y/N. You’re gonna keep talking to me, okay? Whatever you do, don’t close your eyes, understand?” I beg her.       Whimpers from the other side; she’s crying. I’m mentally kicking myself for letting her go in the first place, my heart breaking as I listen to her despair.       “Hey now, it’s okay… It’s gonna be okay, sweetheart. I’ll be right there,” I hush her, trying to tone down my own anxiety to a minimum.       “I’m sorry, for leaving and… and the fight with your dad.”       “That doesn’t matter right now, don’t worry about it. We’ll figure this out, just like we always do,” I promise.

      It’s quiet on the other side, but I can hear the blood rushing through my veins. As I push Baby to her limits, I send up a short prayer to the God I don’t believe in. Anything that helps.       “Dean, if this...” she sobs. “If this is it, you need to know that I--”       “- No, no, no, no, no. Don’t you dare start that goodbye shit, you hear me?” I interrupt, harshly, but regretting my tone the second I can practically hear the tears fall. “You can tell me later, alright? It’s gonna be fine. You’re gonna be fine.”       My eyes have filled with tears over the course of the conversation, but I blink them away, nowhere near ready to admitting that this might be the last conversation I ever have with her. She has to be okay. There is no other option, I’m not gonna accept an outcome that is anything less.       “Please hurry.”       “I’m going as fast as I can, sweetheart. Only ten minutes behind you,” I tell her. “Did you call an ambulance?”       “No, I can’t…” Her voice fades, getting weaker by the second, but she’s able to whisper. “They’re still here.”

      It feels like someone just knocked the wind from my lungs. Holy shit, this won’t be just a rush to hospital. Is she kept hostage? Maybe they left her for dead, for bait maybe?       “What are they, Y/N?”       But she doesn’t answer. The only thing I can hear is the constant distortion from the phone connection.       “Y/N?”       Nothing.       “Y/N! Answer me!” I yell into the phone.       Not a word, not even the sound of respiration. Frustrated, I throw my phone in the back seat and step on the gas even harder, although Baby can’t go any faster.       “FUCK!!!” I cuss out loud as I slam the steering wheel.

      The Impala dangerously speeds up I55. Anxiety is jolting through every nerve, mixing with multiple feelings I can’t even begin to explain. Sam watches me, I can feel his gaze burn in the side of my head. Only for a moment, I glance at him, about to explain to him what’s going on, but I can’t. If I say it out loud, I acknowledge that this is happening. 

      Sammy’s eyes are wild, apparently not sure what question to ask first.       “She got caught?” he asks, scared.       “No, she called to make me an offer on better cable!” I snap sarcastically, going out of my mind. “Yeah, she got caught!”       “You know what snatched her?” he interrogates.       “I would have told you if I knew, Sam!”

      From the corner of my eye I can see Sam swallow hard. It’s doesn’t happen often that I lash out like this, I hope he understands. I’m glad that he doesn’t push any further, because a lump the size of a brick obstructs my throat as my mouth runs dry. 

     You stupid, stupid idiot. 

     How could I have let her go like that? Lecturing myself won’t help her, but I can’t stop the guilt from boiling over inside of me. I need to save her. It’s the only way to make this right.

      Without switching on the turn signal, I take the exit and skid through the tight corner. At the following intersection I run a red light, a station wagon swerving out of the way, but I don’t give a shit. I don’t care for a speed bump either, but when the exhaust pipe hits the asphalt as my car bounces off the damn thing and leaves a spray of sparks in our wake. I give the dashboard a pat. Sorry, Baby.

      “What do we prepare for?”       Sam looks at me, waiting for my lead. It’s a solid question, because I have no idea what we’ll be facing. I go over the handful of clues: cattle mutilations, several dead, bled out bodies. They are all omens, but we weren’t tracking a case, we were tracking Y/N. I didn’t study the signs well enough to judge them, so I shrug desperately. Fuck, I wish I had paid more attention.       “I don’t know… uh, werewolf, demon?” I shoot, panicky, but then I remember something that she mentioned. “They are still here.”       “What?”       “The last thing she said; they are still here,” I repeat. “We’re talking about more than one, that gives us something. Whatever this is, they’re working as a team. Demons? Vamps?”       “Holy water and dead man’s blood it is,” Sammy concludes, as I take a left, barely slowing down.

      We approach a more remote section of town. Old rigs and factories tower over us, some of the buildings still in use, others empty. Tremont, it says on the corner of the narrow street; this is it. With no time to lose I reach over in the glove department to get my flask of Holy water. Sam quickly opens the door, the pouring rain hitting him as soon as gets out. My wise little brother heads to the trunk to get armored up, but I can’t wait for that. As he digs through the weapons, I bolt towards the factory.       “Dean! What the hell?!” I hear Sammy exclaim.       “You take everything out of the trunk that might come in handy, I’ll go find Y/N!” I tell him, without awaiting a response.       “Wait! You can’t go in like that!” my brother objects.       But I don’t listen. I don’t give a rat’s ass that I don’t have back up, that I’m going in blind. With my gun pulled out, I approach a door with white numbers; 1722. My own heartbeat drums in my ears, fast and restless, as I hold my weapon in front of me, finger off the trigger, but ready to point and shoot at anything that isn’t Y/N. With a fierce kick I free the door from its hinges and scan the place, holding my flashlight above my pistol.       “Y/N!!”        No answer, just the echo of my own voice sounding through the high empty spaces, only disturbed by the rain on the roof. In a fast, yet careful pace I move further, but then halt, startled. On the floor, only a few feet away, the light shimmers on a body, motionless, just a pile of human. The sound that erupts from my throat is one I don’t recognize to be mine.       “NO!!!”

      I hasten towards her and crouch down. I knew she was in trouble when I heard her fragile voice, but her state shocks me to the core. She lays face down in her own blood, and I force myself to stop shaking as I carefully turn her over. In her left hand I find a cell phone, 911 is still on the line. Quickly, I take the device and put it to my ear.       “Hello? Anyone there?”       “This is Ali from 9-1-1 emergency. There’s an ambulance on its way over to the Tremont intersection, sir. Can you tell me who you are?”       Smart girl. She called for help, but made sure we would find her first, not wanting to lead the helpless first responders into this dangerous place. I wipe her hair out of her face, cupping it with my left hand. Fuck, she feels cold. It heightens my fear to a new degree.       “I just found her, hurry up!” I tell the woman on the phone, desperately.       “A medical team is on its way, sir. They are just a few minutes out.”       “She doesn’t have a few minutes!” I exclaim.       “Does she show any signs of life?”       I check her pulse, but the outcome almost stops my own heart.        “No, no, no. She’s not breathing…” I notify the dispatcher, in shock. “C’mon, Y/N… Not like this.”

      I want to panic. I want to shake her, yell at her to wake up. I hear 9-1-1 emergency in the background, instructing me to perform CPR if I know how. But as I look down at her face, I notice something out of the ordinary. The operator’s static voice fades out as a beam from the streetlights outside is interrupted. I looks over my shoulder, watching Sam rush towards me.       “Vampires!!” I shout, my hand blocking the blood flowing from Y/N’s main vein through a set of bite marks.

      Just in time, because my younger brother can only just intercept an attack from above by one of the creatures, right before it releases its teeth on him. A second and a third appear from the dark and Sammy pulls out his machete. We both look around in disbelief while more vamps show themselves. I swallow hard; we walked right into a fucking nest!

      “Get her out of here!” Sammy shouts above the noise of struggle.       Not wasting time, I pick up her lifeless body from the ground and carry her to the exit, while my brother covers us. I try to ignore the blood that is dripping down my arms when I run out of the factory, the soaking rain drenching us the second we’re exposed to the elements. As fast as my legs can carry us, I hasten towards the main street. I have to get her to that ambulance. They can get her to the hospital and doctors will save her, right? I have to try. 

But when I glance down at that gorgeous face under the dreary skies and cold streetlights, I stop. By the sight of the girl I lost my heart to, I know. She has turned stone cold, there’s no blood left in her body, eyes slightly opened and pupils dilated. Her head bobbles over my arm limply, her messy hair stained with blood, hanging sadly in the rain.

      “Y/N?”

      Honestly I don’t know why I call her name. I know she can’t hear me, I know she’s… I pull in a shuddering breath, the glint of hope I had crushed by reality. I’ve seen death from up close plenty of times before, I know its face. And right now as I’m holding her in my arms, I see it, too. I swallow apprehensively while my bottom lip trembles as I exhale.       “No, no, no…” I whimper. “God, please no… Y/N, please!”       I just stand there until my knees buckle, with my girl in my arms, dead weight. Helpless and broken I close my eyes and look up at the sky, hoping for a miracle, a sign from above, anything. I’m so desperate that I’m even asking God for help, the man upstairs who has never done me any favors. Nothing happens, nothing changes. And so I pull her into my chest as I let my tears run free, resting my forehead to hers.

     My sweetheart, she’s gone… And I didn’t even get to say it, how much I care for her. On the phone earlier, I shouldn’t have interrupted her when I got too scared of what possibly laid ahead. Jesus, why didn’t I let her speak? Why did I let her go? This is all my fault.

      I rake my fingers through her hair and pull her into my chest for the last time, when a familiar sound catches my attention. Sirens grow louder, and when I direct my attention to the road ahead, an ambulance speeds around the corner and stops in front of us with shrieking tires. Two paramedics get out.       “Sir, I need you to lay her down,” one tells me, as he positions the backboard. “Did you find her?”       “Yeah, she was in the middle of the street.” I lie, continuing her plan to keep the first responders away from the danger in the warehouse.       The paramedics work fast, quickly hooking her up to a monitor.       “No pulse. No respiratory sounds.”       “Push 1 milligram of epi,” his partner responds as he starts compressions.

      It hurts to watch them work her chest so hard, putting in lines and drugs to get her back. She can’t feel it, I know she can’t, but it seems wrong. The monitor shows a flat line and a continuous beep interrupts the silence on scene. I back out and let them work, although I slowly begin to grasp that it’s pointless. Then I glance over my shoulder at the warehouse, torn between Y/N and my brother. I know I need to get in there and back Sam up, there’s nothing I can do for her anymore.       “Where you taking her?” I ask before I leave, my voice broken.       “Lincoln Medical Center,” the paramedic answers, before I make a run for it. “Hey! Where are you going? Sir!”       I don’t have the time to linger and hasten back to the warehouse. As I run, I take the bullets out of my Colt M1911, rubbing them in my bloody hands; that should teach those fuckers. With every step that I move away from Y/N, hate and anger multiplies, racing my veins like a deserted road. I’m gonna kill every single one of those bloodsuckin’ bitches, even if it’s the last thing I do. 

     Determined, I reload my gun and enter the large building, right in time to shoot one of the vampires from Sam’s back before it sinks its teeth into his neck. While I march in, I take out a knife, swipe the tip across the ground though the puddle of blood that Y/N left behind, and bury it in the guts of a creature who was coming at me. The thing looks me in the eye in shock, her injury stopping her mid action, choking with her mouth open and teeth visible. Driven by revenge I push the knife in deeper, fury causing my lip to twitch as I stare her down.       “Dead girl’s blood, bitch,” I snarl and then pull out the knife.

      The vamp falls down on the ground and tries to crawl away, but she can’t get far, completely paralyzed by the toxins running through her body. Another vampire picks her up from the floor and quickly flees. Sammy - out of breath and covered in blood splatters, caused by the messy beheadings - picks up the machete that he lost in the fight, ready to chop off heads if anything dares to come closer. Two well-armed and skilled hunters are enough reason for the rest of the nest to pull back and get the hell out of dodge. In a matter of seconds we are the only ones in the abandoned warehouse, alone in the dark.

      With questioning eyes, Sammy seeks eye contact, but I avert mine in time. Instead I stare down at my bloody hands, still holding the knife. Silently I put it away as my gaze freezes on the puddle of blood left by Y/N, watching my own reflection. Her blood worked, it intoxicated the vampires and turned out to be highly effective. Only the blood of the dead can do that. The fact that it harmed our opponents means only one thing. When I finally dare to meet my brother’s gaze and let him be a witness of the devastation, Sam knows. 

      Staggered, shocked and unable to act, Sammy folds his hands behind his head as he turns away from me. When he has gone full circle, I can see the tears shimmer in his eyes through his brown hair. I can’t stand the sight of my little brother being so upset, so I wander a few steps away. My hands are clenched in fists of rage, but it is not just anger I feel. Guilt, helplessness, desperation, sorrow. And this gaping hole that only grows larger with every loved one I lose. I lost her... I fucking lost her!

     Furious and out of control, I take my frustration out on two garbage cans. Raging, I kick them over and let out a loud tormented cry. I can feel Sam’s eyes on me, unable to respond. He’s speechless, but the sorrow in his expression tells more than words could ever say.

     I calm down, but only because the outburst doesn’t help me one bit. And so I place my hands in my side and swallow with difficulty, out of breath from boiling over. I can feel my eyes glaze over, but I don’t bother to turn away from Sam. I try to be his tough brother, someone he can look up to. A grown man crying doesn’t fit into that picture. But right now, I couldn’t give a shit who sees the tears that begin to roll down my cheeks, as I stare at the crimson pool in front of me.

      My younger sibling snivels, breathes in deeply and collects himself.      “We - uh…” his voice fails him completely, catching him off guard. He swallows and clears his throat. “We better clean this mess up, before the police get here.”       I just nod, numbed by the pain.

      It takes a couple of extra seconds before either of us actually gets to work. Without saying another word we cover our tracks. A thousand questions dwell on my mind, but those questions will remain unanswered. Hundreds of ‘what if's’, even more ‘if only’s’. What if I had stayed with her? Would she be smiling opposite of me in a small booth of the local diner right now? Did she love me? That was what she tried to say over the phone, wasn’t it? Why the hell did I cut her off? Why the hell didn’t I tell her first? How could I promise her that it was gonna be okay? I didn’t say enough and yet too much, unspoken words and broken promises. Did she know how I felt?

     You fucking coward, I think to myself. This is exactly what you deserve.

      These are only a handful of thoughts that cross my mind as we clean up the carnage. The lack of answers will weigh on my shoulders for as long as I live. Not knowing is horrible, but the reality that is her death, makes it all so much worse. I can’t find solace in self-hatred, not in the vampire corpses as we get rid of the bodies, not in the sudden change of the weather when we exit the building. 

     I’ve reached my car already when I realize that the rain has stopped falling. I take a moment to look up at the stars that peek from behind the passing clouds, bright against the dark night sky. Minutes ago it was pouring, but now everything is clear. Tonight, Sammy and I lost our friend, our family. Tonight, I lost the woman I love.

      There, I said it: I love you, Y/N.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate every single one of you, but if  you do want to give me some extra love, you are free to reblog my work  or buy me coffee (Link in bio at the top of the page).

[pigballoon]

Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood

(Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Quentin Tarantino's latest effort is one of his most ponderous. Don't let the movie stars, historical setting, absurdly gruesome climax, or rose tinted recreation of Hollywood half a century ago throw you off. Rippling beneath this bloated behemoth of ideas is all manner of intent, set then, but seemingly every bit as applicable in its creators mind to the here and now.

Indeed, if you go digging none too deep into Tarantino's conservative fairytale you'll find many of the directors oft discussed talking points, the clinging to ways things have been done, the good old days, the resistance of, or rather bemusement at, the new way of doing things. It's about a countercultural phoenix risen out of the ashes of a fire started by those of the future, not of the past.

Of course given it is a work of fantasy, a man choosing to print the legend rather than the facts, you sort of have to be willing to accept that point of view for it to work, to not get too hung up on the idea that Tarantino has built a sort of social lament without much social scope, totally uninterested as he is in even contemplating how or why all of those pretty young people came to be on that ranch.

Couple that lack of angles to the story with the sort of bloat in the writing, the fact that were it not for Tarantino’s clear adoration for crafting scenes he probably envisioned in his dreams, whole scenes here, and snippets of scenes could have easily been excised from this movie without much being lost, furthermore the inane use of voiceover lacking either in consistency of insertion, or seeming necessity, and still further the number of points conjured up then never touched on again or further developed, and there seems to be a lot of laziness mixed in you really have to ignore en route to enjoyment. Not that economy has ever been the mans strong suit, so nobody even passingly familiar with his work should be surprised by that sort of thing at this point. If you’re the sort of person who loves wallowing in Tarantino universes half of that stuff won’t remotely bother you.

And of course once you do forgive or overlook those issues there really is plenty to revel in here. Furthering his fantasies and social laments, Tarantino, that supreme defender of all things cinematic, builds this sort of revenge fantasy reading for the movie as a super effective ode to the little guy in the industry. The sort of people too often overlooked when folks consider film piracy a crime perpetrated only against the super rich. Further still the fine host of performances in single scenes from everyone from Bruce Dern, to Margaret Qualley, Julia Butters, Nicholas Hammond, and Dakota Fanning, to the polar opposite leads - Brad Pitt in strong silent type mode, having his movie star wattage used about as well as it has been in close to a decade, and Leonardo DiCaprio doing the kind of tragicomic thing he's proven himself such a dab hand at in days gone by. 

The two of them build a hell of a bond too, you never doubt their history together. Still, probably the highlight of the entire movie is the midsection where they’re split up, and one finds himself on a ranch, the other on a movie set, and their respective dramatic days intertwined with Margot Robbie's virginal, dreamy visit to the movies proves probably as strong a stretch of cinema as their director has ever put together.

It's a damn shame then that the swerve of a finale comes off for me as such an absurd misjudgement, and one more wholly unnecessary addition to a movie of such highs dragged down by its revelling in monstrous excess. It ensures QT's thoughtful, dreamy self pleasuring ode to Tinseltown of old ends up in a ruined orgasm as it climaxes in what I can only describe as the cinematic equivalent of the time Mark Wahlberg declared 9/11 wouldn't have gone down like it did if he'd been on that plane. 

[lastarabesque]

Best Friend Surprise (3/4)

"Who's breaking up with who?" Your heads turned to see a dumbfounded Seungcheol. He barged in to check if you arrived safely or if you arrived at all. He doesn't want to cut the conversation but he heard it clear and he can't just let it slide. You look at your mom for help, you can't face him as early as now.

"Mom, I—"

"I understand. Just go to your room, honey. I'll settle this." She approached him at once so that he can't get near you. You stood up from your seat to take the opposite way upstairs to your room. It's the only escape you have. "Um, Seungcheol. Would you come with me for a while?"

"Fuck! Are you crying??" He shouted when he saw you wiping your tears, completely forgetting that your mom is right in front of him. "Hey! Did that asshole make you cry?"

"Come on, honey." Your mom tried to stop Seungcheol from running to you. But he is a bit pushy, he still charged forward. Seungcheol may seem so uninterested at times but he's still super attached to you. He'll never allow a single tear escape your eyes especially if it comes from pain.

"Who did that to you? Tell me!"

"Seungcheol!" Your mom voiced out, firm and clear that Seungcheol had no choice but to shut up and calm down.

"Sorry, mom."

"Follow me." She motioned to the garden so that he really won't have a view of you by any means. Everyone needs to breathe too.

Seungcheol felt a bit nervous over the anger he feels but your mom has always been calm and soft spoken. She surely wouldn't get angry at him for causing you to be like this because none of this is his fault. She just wants to help him think as you also sort yourself without him.

"How are the two of you?" She asked not wanting to give any pressure to him. "You barely come over, I feel bad."

"I know, I'm sorry." He kept his answer short. "Is she okay? Did that asshole make him cry? Oh- sorry for my language."

"I don't mind, I understand how you feel. We both don't want her to get hurt, right? But she is. She's not okay and there's nothing we can do so far. We have to give her time and space for now." Until you are ready to tell him everything.

"What is it about now?" It was supposed to be an inner thought but he accidentally muttered it out loud.

"Whatever it is, I hope you'd still stay with her. This may be a selfish request but I wish nothing changes between the two of you because I really admire the friendship the two of you have." She put her hand over Seungcheol's as if putting you upon his care. "It's my sole selfish request as a mother."

"About that, I have something to tell you."

***

Things aren't getting any better. You found yourself even more alone after breaking up with your boyfriend but you do not regret anything for you still believe that it is the best move for the two of you. This way, everything would be fair. As for you and Seungcheol, still no progress. He's just right in front of you during class but he never looked back to check on you, kind of better since you want him away as you sort yourself out. You have no update on his personal life specifically his love life and you couldn't care any less. Knowing it would just either confuse you or hurt you.

"Can you hand this to Seungcheol? I can't find him anywhere. Thanks."

"Jeonghan, wait—" You didn't get the chance to reject him after he shoved the envelope to your face. It's a mail for varsity members. "How the hell would I give this?"

You walked and stared at it as you think of all the possible ways you can give it to him without interacting. Should you just leave it on his table? Or ask his seatmate to give it? Maybe you could just slip it in his locker? Well, whatever way you think of just makes you irresponsible for not doing such a favor but if you have to give it personally, it has to be super natural. Which is somehow impossible since you haven't talked for weeks. With all these thoughts, you bumped to a person's chest along the way.

"Sorry."

"It's okay. Atleast you're talking." You looked up and it was him. You immediately turn the opposite way. It's still difficult to face him. "Hey, are you not supposed to hand me something? Jeonghan said—"

"Here." You walked back, pulling the envelope from your pocket. "Jeonghan asked me to give you this. It's for the varsity players. Well then," You are ready to leave him there again after finishing the hardest task assigned to you today but he stopped you when he spoke.

"Do you really have no plans of talking to me? I even asked Jeonghan to ask you to give me this and this is all I hear." He's been dying for a proper conversation but you don't give him a chance. You won't talk to him first and he doesn't want to bother you so he thought of that plan.

"You what?"

"Can we just talk?" He says talk like it's the simplest thing to do.

"Sorry, we still have a class." You started walking away again but he was quick to grab your wrist by that time.

"The bell rang 10 minutes ago." You're too preoccupied to even hear it. He handed your bag that he's been carrying since you bumped at him. "Let's go."

You can't even resist when he started dragging you to the bleachers around the field where you cried last time. Of all places, here? You chuckle a sad one.

He's really one clueless person.

He still has no idea of what you saw, of how you felt, of how hard you cried and how broken you were, you still are. Seungcheol will never know if you wouldn't let him so you should just confess everything. It's hard to pent it all up. He's your bestfriend and being best friends means hiding no secrets from each other. Afterall, he has every right to know even if the things you'll say might change your friendship afterwards. It's right for him to know simply because it concerns him.

"So how's my bestfriend?" He began. "I miss her."

Seungcheol couldn't believe that he managed to give you space and time that lasted longer than a week. He normally won't last not talking to you or even not seeing you for long but he miraculously did. It may sound weird but everyday when you go to school and return home, he follows you just to make sure that you arrive safely. But over than all those, he misses you incredibly. The way you speak, touch and look at him, even the simplest things you do when you let him sleep on your shoulder as you hum about random things, he misses every bit of it. Every bit of you.

Seungcheol was a very sweet bestfriend before everything between you changed. He may be straightforward and brutally honest at times but most of the time he's the touchy and clingy guy who whines for your attention and affection. He surely became cold at some point and it was the coldest you could expect from him.

It just hit you. You miss the old him too.

"What?" He creased his eyebrows. "I don't get it."

"You don't have to. Just leave." Seungcheol felt extra fired up by that. You're trying to push him away again instead of talking things out.

"Come on! You have to tell me what's wrong for us to fix this! I can't even understand a single thing." He raised his voice and you responded in an equal tone.

"I don't understand either! I haven't sorted it out yet!"

"Then maybe we have to sort this out together because when will you be done of sorting out yourself? By the time I'm tired of waiting for you?" He will never get tired of you and he knows that because you trained him so hard for it and you alone can push him through. He just feels like he needs to wake you up by it. "What the hell is wrong?"

"Seungcheol, you won't understand! This is all my issue." You are so frustrated with yourself.

"How can I understand if you wouldn't fucking tell me? I waited for you to be prepared but you're taking so long!" Now it's his turn to explode. It frustrates him that he doesn't have a single idea of why you're avoiding him. He doesn't care whatever the root of all this is, he just wants to know where to start stitching it up. He wants you back, badly and he'll make sure you realize that. "Come on! Speak!"

"I like you, Seungcheol! That's it!" It silenced him, leaving his mouth half open. "That's my fucking problem and it's plain bullshit!"

+++++

[smollandtoll]

HC: ICY

OKAY imagine an AU Sid's goddaughters aka Flower's kids having that pupper, but the pupper turning out to be like rambunctious and y'know having a few health problems (purebred problems) and like someone in the family is allergic to him or something. It was a good idea in theory, and it made the girls really happy, but he was just a little too much work for their young family. And college friend Sid has been around through early days and he likes dogs and the girls love him - tons of history there!

So when they move (SOB) they give the dog to Uncle Sid because he'd be safe and good and looked after with Sid, and they could ask for pictures whenever they wanted, and if they visited they could play with him as much as they wanted.

Sid of course bargains a favour with Flower for taking in the dog and when Flower drops him off with all his doggy accessories Sid finds himself with an armful of bone-patterned doggy bed, watching the French Bulldog waddle excitedly around his foyer. "You know, this is legitimately a ridiculous dog, I always thought I'd get like a golden retriever, or a husky, maybe a german shepherd. Y'know something to run with"

Flower shrugs and grins, “Well now you have Ice Cream. He has asthma, he farts and he snores.”

“I can’t re-name him can I?”

“The girls would never understand your betrayal.”

So Sid has a french bulldog named Ice Cream, his best friend moved to Las Vegas, and everything seems like it’s gonna be shit, but in a strange turn of events it’s actually great. Icy (Sid immediately starts calling him Icy and kind of likes it) often gets hot and needs water and attention and to take a break from even the chillest runs, but Sid adapts and just carries him a lot, he’s great resistance/ weight training honestly. Sid’s been thinking about getting a puppy-papoose or something for even weight distribution. Hear us out just DEDICATED DOG-DAD SID.

Icy snorts awkwardly at squirrels and pants snuffily and randomly headbutts couches. He’s not super bright but he’s always happy, always excited to see Sid no matter how short a time they’ve been apart and he soon becomes the bright spot of Sid’s days.

Icy suddenly becomes his phone background and lock screen, they spend a lot of time cuddling on the couch as well. Being raised from a puppy by two little girls Icy is always up for petting, snuggles, kisses, belly scratches, and ear stroking and Sid is always up for indulging that lil face.

Sid just absently clicking around on his laptop, kissing his pup between the eyebrows while they chill together on the sofa. Or like just stroking his ears while they snuggle and watch food network. Or Sid like making dinner for one and tossing bits of pepper and carrot for Icy to gobble.

Sid laughing as much as Icy is grinning while they struggle through a puppy bath

That dog being so happy that Sid is home! When he jumps up to say hi his front paws barely reach Sid’s knee! That dog running full tilt after the ball Sid wings for him and then getting pooped after the 8th time and just sitting there panting and grinning with it in his mouth until Sid comes and scoops him up.

When it gets cold outside Sid caves and is definitely that person, and Icy 100% has a selection of warm little hoodies that go under his harness, and even a rain jacket that is so cute he sent about 800 photos of Icy in it to Flower...for the girls...of course.

And like, no one expects Sid to have this adorable french bulldog named Icy which is genuinely several very silly decisions compiled into one adorable furball that clearly makes Sid extremely happy. Taking him for walks and going to the dog park and stuff becomes the highlight of Sid’s days. Suddenly people are coming up to him and girls smile at him a lot and coo over the dog and give him long up and down looks like they want to give him their number if they don't outright just give him their number.

You see, Sid’s a personal trainer, and after getting Icy he starts making his routines a little more flexible, trying to find ways to train his clients outside the gym. Besides his mantra is a lot more about feeling internally good and having self-confidence and inspiration rather than looking like something particular in a mirror. So he makes his own schedule and sometimes takes his clients to the park depending on who they are and what they need so sometimes he takes Icy with him.

He's a great tool, because he needs water and needs special care because he has limitations and people need to learn their own limitations and know that there is no shame. Every body type is different, just like every dog breed is different. Just because Icy isn’t a greyhound doesn’t mean he can’t run, it just means he can’t run for as long or hard or as fast.

In this universe Geno is a dog walker who frequents the same park/dog park of course. He and Sid have chatted a few times, just pleasant greetings and amused exchanges about how whatever dogs Geno has that day are excited to see Icy, and Icy is excited to see Geno (he carries treats, all dogs are excited to see Geno). They don’t know each other’s names because somehow people always introduce their dogs but never themselves.

"What's this one name?"

"His name? Ice Cream. I call him Icy for short."

So Geno thinks of Sid as “Icy’s Pretty Papa” and Sid thinks of Geno as “The Nice Dog Walker”.

Wait for that moment whenever Geno passes Sid and a client in the park, doing fast feet or going through an obstacle course, Sid being Hot™ and Encouraging™ and Woke™ about body image and health with the cutest goofiest dog while Geno is like sweaty and gross and has dog puke on him and definitely smells faintly of shit.

See Geno is like ESL and gay and this was the job he could get and y’know life isn't always super sunshine-y but Sid seems so nice? Geno definitely daydreams about Icy's Papa maybe too much, but Sid always looks so beautiful and put together.

He 100% falls in love with Sid the day that he's chilling and the dogs are taking a water break in the shade and he's just like watching Sid roll up his yoga/pilates mats and saying goodbye to his latest client, putting away his things. Then he turns to Icy and Geno is too far away to make out what he's saying but it seems like he’s congratulating Icy on being a good boy and being helpful. And just when Geno doesn't think his heart could get any bigger Sid is suddenly chasing Icy and then catching him and getting into the grass with him to tussle and roll him on his back and give him a load of belly kisses. He’s beautiful and wonderful and loves dogs. Geno is so screwed and doesn’t even know how to say it in English.

In this universe he's really struggling with English, like he has no constant media pressure or really a lot of English speaking friends or an immediate automatic support group/team of hockey bros so like, he doesn't have as much immersion as he could y'know? But the dogs still understand him mostly, and he knows English dog commands so he can at least yell at them to sit in their usual format.

But other than that dogs just need just big smiles and stuttered words and gentle hands. They respond so much to tone and body language, it’s easy with the dogs.

ANYWAY he's working on it, but yeah he's STRUGGLIN’ and thinks about moving back to Russia a lot, but he's gay and it’s like his heart is broken in both directions to think about it. America means English and being away from his entire family and friends and life but Russia means the inability to live his life freely with love and he's such a romantic he just can't live with the idea of being alone forever so he's working as a dog walker and figuring it out and drooling over personal trainers in the park.

On the flip side, Sid definitely thinks Geno is like HELLA HOT and super good with dogs and like...the Russian accent DOES THINGS to him. But Sid doesn't want to approach or bother Geno, he clearly spends all day outside and walking and running and hanging out with dogs, he doesn't need personal training and Sid doesn't at all see the potential to just be friends, because almost every time they've interacted it's petered off into uneasy silence. So he thinks that Geno is just nice but very very uninterested in talking to him but in actuality that's mostly one part Sid being awkward and mumbling and one part Geno going omg he's talking to me omg omg! and then going SHIT I WASN'T LISTENING I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HE SAID AND EVEN IF I KNEW WHAT HE SAID HE SAID IT IN ENGLISH FUCK. So there's just a lot of awkward smiling and waving and Icy doing interference.

And that’s the status quo, until Icy gets lost.

It’s a normal day like any other, Sid turned his back for, he swears, A SECOND to put away some gear and suddenly Icy was just gone. He called for him and whistled and looked in all the bushes nearby but he just wasn’t turning up. And Sid genuinely was trying not to panic, but his mind was immediately jumping to the idea of his dog having run into the road after a squirrel or something, or maybe even someone dog-napped him - he was a purebred french bulldog after all.

He couldn’t even stomach the thought of any of it, he was entrusted with Icy’s care, Flower’s girls were going to be heartbroken to find out Sid had carelessly LOST their dog. Sid was going to be heartbroken, that dog somehow had become his best friend. He cancels his next appointment citing a family emergency and then starts to slowly circle the park, asking other regulars if they’ve seen Icy, feeling more and more heartsick as they confirm they haven’t and express their sympathies. He calls every shelter and vet and animal hospital in the city from the park, none of them have reported Icy.

He really starts to panic as the sun starts setting and he returns to the spot he always trains in, and sits in the grass defeated, realizing pretty soon he’s just going to have to go home, and make some really depressing posts about his lost dog on facebook and try looking again tomorrow.

And that’s when he hears a faintly familiar "Go! Go to Papa!" and then Icy is all squirmy in his lap! and licking up his tears! God when had he started crying, that’s so embarrassing but he’s just so happy to have his dog he breaks into a fresh wave of tears in relief.

There’s a hand on his shoulder and kind eyes in the setting darkness beside him. Cue Sid thanking Geno profusely, embarrassingly blubbery and unable to get it together but just so grateful for his dog.

Geno is so confused he can’t make out at all what Sid is saying, and he’s talking so fast and looks so happy/sad/beautiful he finally manages to spit out: "OK. Slow. My English...bad. Not understand."

And then everything just like CLICKS for Sid and he's like ohhh he doesn't understand English...it's not ME.

“Oh.” he’d hiccup. Geno would cringe and smile sheepishly, stroking Icy’s soft ear.

“Sorry.” he’d chew on his lip for a terrible minute and then huff greatly, “My name, Evgeni.”

“Oh, Evj- Yvg-”

“Geno.”

“Geno.” Sid would smile at him, “I’m Sidney...Sid.”

“Sid.”

So they probably start talking more and getting to know each other a little better  and Sid like downloads the Russian language section of google translate so he can lookup words without internet to clarify vocab when they’re chatting sometimes. Geno rededicates himself to his English learning, doubling down on his study, actually working wholeheartedly on his homework.

And then they just start to have little meetups in the park when they’re both out walking dogs/Icy. There would be pining for so long while they work out the kinks in their communication. Sid holding himself back from being inappropriate because like Geno might not know, he might not understand the whole situation or Sid’s intentions if he just springs a date request on him! He might not know the implications- it gets very regency very fast.

So that’s the story of how Geno and Sid and Icy fall in love one summer~

[spideychelle-romanogers]

I Doubt Myself

Making of Michelle Jones - Prologue, Chapter 1

Start from the beginning || Series Masterlist 

After catching Michelle stealing jewels, the new mystery she brings into Peter's life defines his next adventure. There are new dangers coming to NYC and Michelle is playing a bigger part in Spider-Man's mission than Peter ever imagined.

T/W: none  Beta: Splendid_Splendont  Tags: spideychelle, pan!Peter, demi!Michelle, slow burn

Peter never knew just how complicated high school was going to be. Everything you saw on TV and in movies was relevant, yes, but it didn't quite cover all of the conflicting feelings on the subject. Yes, it was scary. It was nerve-wracking really. It was full of beautiful girls - like Liz - who distracted you at every turn. Then it's full of fat mouthed bullies that don't know what's coming to them in their sad, sad futures. That was all to say without mentioning the drama and conflict going on behind the scenes, pressure from parents - or in Peter's case, his aunt.

It's not that being in high school was just terrifying - but when you'd been through all he'd been through, it was boring. That was the scariest thing about it. Perhaps he never let his feelings bubble to the surface, but inside he couldn't help thinking about just how much else he wanted out of his life, out of this bubble full of cliques and locker room scuffles. He had fought the Avengers - he still couldn't believe it himself. He had been evaluated by Tony Stark's people. He had a costume designed for him. He had training. He faced off with Captain America.

His dreams were coming true, he was becoming a real superhero and he couldn't tell anyone. Stark tried to relate to him but always missed the mark. Peter was alone in his experiences. He had no one to tell about just how isolating it was to get everything you wanted and then be expected to go back to a life where all you looked forward to was running away. He scribbled furiously into his notebook during physics, trying his best to drown out the four walls around him. He tried to ignore the teacher berating the football players in the back and the girls painting their nails in front of him. He drew himself again, reimagining Spider-Man in an image that maybe he would be able to stomach.

He didn't think that going back to his old life would feel quite so green. High school life was nothing like the real world. Out there, he was a hero. How was he supposed to go back? He couldn't understand why he had to go through with returning, why Stark couldn't find a way around it for him. All Tony would talk about was the value of enjoying your youth while it lasted but Peter didn't think he had anything to enjoy.

"Parker, stop doodling," he heard his teacher quip over his head. He stopped immediately, slowly snaking his arm behind him and ignoring the chuckles from his classmates. Peter wasn't one to think he was above anybody, no, but he was over it. Over it was just the best way for him to say it. He was tired of being alone and feeling felt like no one except his best friend Ned could understand him. Ned was a sore subject too. Peter was grappling with whether to tell him his secret. Really, the only person stopping him was Tony Stark, and Peter knew he wasn't going to fight him on that point. He heard a snort from next to him and saw Michelle just as she turned away from his sketchbook, returning to her reading.

"Got a problem with superheroes?" he asked as bored as she looked. She shrugged, continuing to read her book.

"Spider-Man is cool," she breathed out, uninterested in pursuing the conversation further. Though her words had no investment in them, they were enough to make him smile briefly. He wished he'd had a moment to ask something but he knew it wasn't worth it with Michelle. No one could really call her out from her reading.

Peter had this problem with staring. He realized this when he saw her look him in the eyes just moments later. He had been thinking about the look of her, how exhausted she seemed as she smiled into her book, when she caught him. She raised an eyebrow, as if ready to take offense to whatever insult he looked like he had been gearing to send her way. He knew she was quite used to them. Occasionally throughout the year, he'd hear guys give passive notes about her looks. The one time Peter tried to jump in to her defense, she'd yelled at him, so he knew better than to try and save her. Now though he was tempted to apologize because he knew she was expecting the worst of comments.

"Sorry, I was trying to read over your shoulder," he lied. He used to be a terrible liar, but habits build steady hands. She brightened at that, like hearing about someone taking an interest in her books was a radical idea she could get behind.

The school bell interrupted them. Peter had to say he regretted that a bit. He almost never had a chance to connect with Michelle and it would have been nice to connect to one other person at this school. He didn't know why but the girl always made him curious. She seemed like a very decent kind of person. He didn't know much about her despite their years at school but something in the way she acted was particularly confusing to him in a way he wanted to solve. Perhaps his interest stemmed in that she was just about the only other person at this school who looked as tired and bored as he felt all the time.

"See ya," she mumbled as she picked up her books and walked the other way. He was swiftly reminded they couldn't be friends, because she never really liked him. She tolerated him and Ned more than the other kids at this school, but never by much.

Lunch was its usual routine with Ned. Ned was talking all about his new Captain America comics and Peter had to admit even he found them super interesting. Meeting the real thing is really no form of satisfaction when you're a fanboy. He tried to withhold his own personal gut wrench at knowing the events passed between Captain and Tony. He'd heard the rumors while he was at the Avengers Institute. Looking at Ned as he grinned at the illustrations, Peter wondered about what kind of joy he'd get out of telling his best friend the truth about his summer.

Michelle sat alone at the table next to them again. It was where she always sat. Occasionally the table would be full when the cafeteria was overflowing with people, and on those days, Peter and Ned would sit with her too. However, the cafeteria was bare, and that gave her the time she needed to seclude herself into a cave of hardcover books. Peter didn't know what had possessed him to interrupt her, but he found himself suddenly standing up and walking to her.

"Hey, so," he started lamely, already forgetting what he'd had to say. She was staring at him expectantly, sipping her school-supplied chocolate milk. Though he'd seen her sit down minutes ago, he noticed all the food was already gone from her tray. She must have eaten fast. "What do you like about Spider-Man?" he asked lamely.

"I think the general concept of any man being able to swing from a string attached to buildings is pretty impressive," She answered briefly, clearly still wondering what he was doing there. To make matters worse, he couldn't stop himself.

"Yeah, I guess," he tried, looking again to her tray. "Do you want my food? I'm not going to finish it. My Aunt May made me a sandwich-" he was talking too much and it was so hard to stop. She looked at him, as though debating something.

"Sure, I'll take it," she said, a hint of a question in her acceptance. He picked up the food from the tray in front of Ned's own, and he collected it in his hands before bringing it over to her, carefully putting each individual item in the right tray slot.

"Enjoy." Peter asked himself very sternly in his mind just what he thought he was doing. The entire day, he felt like he'd been overthinking everything. Knowing that Michelle thought Spider-Man was cool provided a kind of self-indulgent distraction that he needed. He didn't want to keep thinking about secrets. He wanted to talk about Spider-Man. And yet, having had this realization he turned away from her and went back to Ned who was looking as confused as Peter felt.

Peter had to find a better grip on this secret. At this rate, he was doing some desperate things just to get distracted.

It took everything in Peter to resist approaching Tony Stark again. It was easy enough to get on the roof of his tower. That was one way the teen could always outsmart the billionaire. Tony often used him as a way to test his security mechanisms and Peter was still outperforming his inventions when it came to home security.

Peter knew he couldn't keep running to Tony with his problems though.

Deciding perhaps he could let off some steam, he broke one of Tony's rules for him. He quietly locked his bedroom door and slipped his limbs into his costume, tossing himself out of the window and escaping into the night. Uptown, his best bet was watching over the neighborhood and hoping something would happen. He knew if he headed downtown, he was a lot more likely to find something to do.

Crawling by a strip mall, he arrived just in time to watch men running. Where there was once a glass storefront display, the shattered glass was sign enough of what had happened and he took off in the direction of the men running away. Before long, there were 4 culprits tied to an alley wall by his net and police sirens in the distance as he flew his way back, knowing no one was around. He saw jewels strewn along the ground in random places from where the thieves had dropped them. He left most of the jewels stuck to the thieves' hands so the cops would have the evidence they needed. However, he had learned the hard way that despite reports of theft, the police were not always diligent about returning all of the stolen property, especially not once it was reported as 'lost'.

So there he was, probably a comedic sight, walking down a sidewalk and picking up every pearl and gem he could see. By the time he made it back to the jewelry shop, it was probably just 10 minutes later. He used his web to seal up the glass wall, and he used the front door to enter. The store was dark, empty of people. There were mannequins strewn across the floor, easy to assume that they were there after the thieves did their business. As the door chime jingled out its tune, his hairs stood up when he heard a slight stumble. Had he missed someone?

He crept through the store slowly, hearing a scramble accompanied by the jingle of necklaces colliding. He stuck himself up on the ceiling hoping that he could use the element of surprise. Seconds later, he was above her, a small framed girl hard to make out in the light. She pocketed the necklaces and quickly zipped her bag. One hand to her purse strap, she rushed her way to the door. Peter was about to stop her when he saw her turn just as she reached the door, looking to see if anyone was following her.

She opened the door, and Peter reached his arm out. Simultaneously, the cheaply made ceiling tile he was on caved to his weight. Not even by an inch, the web missed her arm and hit her purse instead. She pulled once to resist her arrest and the purse fell open. Peter, meanwhile, was trying to catch himself, his mask pulled off by the sharp corner of one of the shelves. Picking up what she could she raced again out the door before Peter could even hide his face and reach her. By the time he got to the door, she was already a block away. He couldn't even glance at his mask before hearing the police sirens go off. Running away was more important than catching her he decided. Looking down at what she left behind, he saw a wallet and brightened. He had a chance!

Before he even opened it, he made sure to plant himself on the mall's roof. He watched the police make their way around his web before he finally got through the wallet. It was a simple purple zip-open. He could have sworn he'd seen it before. Making his way through the very little cash and many different business cards, he finally found something incriminating - a school ID.

The style of it was perfectly familiar. The purple edges, the white stripes, the graduating year labelled on it in big yellow letters. It was almost as familiar as the girl in the picture.

Michelle.

Peter felt sick to his stomach.

Had he seen anyone else (except maybe Ned), he wouldn't have been quite so surprised. There were plenty of kids who got themselves into trouble all the time at that school. Michelle had never been one of them. She was the girl in grade school who'd threaten to rat you out no matter how small the rule you were breaking. She was a stickler and a studious one at that. Peter couldn't remember the last time she was without a book in her hand. He remembered seeing her read during their middle school graduation, and he remembered how much he made fun of her for it.

Michelle wasn't a thief.

The next day at school, he wasn't quite sure how to deal with Michelle. He still had her wallet. He didn't know what to do about it, but he hoped that he wouldn't see her at school so that he wouldn't have to think about it. The whole day could've been a good one. He was briefly distracted during gym, when Liz talked to him about her new sneakers. Peter couldn't remember a word he had said, but he made Liz laugh at some point so he called it a win. He'd managed to avoid Michelle all day until he was back in physics class. She sat next to him when she arrived at class, looking exhausted like always. He wanted to believe she looked even more tired than usual but he couldn't actually confirm that. Maybe he was just wanting to see guilt where there wasn't any.

As she sat, he resolved he wouldn't say anything about it.

"Are you drawing flying men today or will you actually be paying attention?" she asked, not a hint of malice in her sarcasm. He couldn't believe she was making conversation, but he supposed he'd deserved it.

"I'd rather give the hero thing a rest," he mumbled, gluing his eyes to the board as their teacher continued talking. He hadn't been listening ever since Michelle entered the room.

"I thought I'd just pick partners randomly, but it seemed a lot easier to just make you work with your neighbors," the teacher explained. "And don't forget this project is worth 50% of your midterm grade."

"What?" Peter asked quietly startled out of his thoughts.

"We're partners," Michelle answered in her usual bored tone. They were partnered up often on in-class assignments, but never anything significant. He looked at her nervously. She noticed his stare after a few minutes, whispering so she wouldn't interrupt their teacher. "Is there a problem?"

"You've got something in your teeth," he lied calmly. He never thought he was a very passive aggressive person, but he couldn't feel guilty about it long, considering Michelle's quip back:

"You stare too much."

Maybe he was being aggressive, but he spent most of the day stomping around the school, trying to figure things out. He had no one he could tell, but Ned had picked up on something being wrong. Peter typically didn't get so angry, not for this long. He'd been moody for ages now, but it seemed like something about this had really set him off. He just couldn't imagine that even someone like Michelle could be a letdown. There were really so few truly good people out there. He was used to living in a city full of crime and people who made bad choices. He knew whatever prompted Michelle to steal could have been significant, but he couldn't imagine how. All during lunch he found himself glaring in her direction and trying to figure out whether the crime was one of greed or one of impulse.

Before long, lunch was over and Peter was still debating whether or not he was overreacting. His feelings were getting the better of him lately. He spent an entire week ignoring Ned once when he wouldn't stop asking why Peter disappeared over the summer. Maybe it was time to check his attitude.

School let out and he looked to his phone for the first time all day. Two hours ago, he had received what was just a brief flash of text. It was Tony Stark, but he put the man's number under a false contact 'Anthony'.

Anthony: Don't forget to keep your head low.

Peter scowled. It was time to get Michelle her ID back, he decided just as he ran home to suit up.

Get on the Tag List |  Updates | My Masterlist | Next Chapter

[xxleondraxx]

Evfra De Tershaav (not so salty?)

(Spoilers for some plot points)

Ok. So since a friend and I are wanting to write some Evfra fluff/ smutt, I decided I needed to go back to the game proper and get a feel on his personality.

He isn’t what I thought he was going to be.

Going into planning for this fic, I expected Evfra to be super salty just... all the time. He was made of salt in my head. And this was probably because I hadn’t actually paid that much attention to him past his introduction the first time you meet him.

But after you save the Moshae, he softens up considerably. So I did more digging. I went through his repeatable dialog several times just listening to the sound of his voice and watching his face, since the angaran facial animations are not actually that bad.

It seemed like Evfra was very... matter of fact. His tone was a bit aloof, cold or bored and he didn’t emote much. There just wasn’t a lot of emotion to his words. Occasionally his voice would get a little lighter with certain topics, but for the most part he sounded like he was just reciting a recipe.

This wasn’t quite the Evfra I’d built in my head. Where was the salt? I admit I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to him, so how much had I missed?

I started loading saves. Listening to his ambient dialog, listening to the tone of his voice, doing plot point specific dialog with him, and also finding out after the Moshae was returned that Evfra had given Ryder permission to buy weapons, against the quartermaster’s wishes, and was even letting Cora record a few angaran training exercises.

That doesn’t sound salty.

Talking to Jaal after the first vidcom with Evfra he says that Ryder has earned Evfra’s trust, to which Ryder can respond, “Yeah, but I still don’t think he likes me.” Jaal assures her that that’s just his way. So Evfra trusts that you mean what you say because your actions have spoken for you, he just doesn’t like you.

So I dug into the codex to see what it had to say about him. What it said was very enlightening.

To keep it a little shorter than reciting the whole thing, the Resistance 10 years ago wasn’t able to keep Evfra’s family safe from the Kett so he stepped up to lead. His single minded dedication to the cause rose it into a unified force and he proved what he and his Resistance could do when they raided a kett labor camp, saved hundreds of imprisoned angara, and killed an entire battalion of kett reinforcements.

The codex also says that according to Jaal, Evfra is feared by those under him and respected by those above, but he remains an isolated individual. By design he lets nobody in close to him. He knows that everyone in the resistance is expendable and understands too well the pain that comes with losing the ones close to him.

And the tapestry reveals itself.

Evfra isn’t salty. Well, a little, but not much. Mostly he is extremely analytical. He talks very matter of factly because this keeps him distant and cold toward others. This keeps them from getting too close and keeps him from getting attached to anybody. He strives to inspire either fear or respect in everyone he meets.

Evfra doesn’t want to put himself through the pain of losing anybody he cares about ever again. The fear and respect he instills in others and the distance he keeps between them and himself is his way of protecting himself while remaining the figurehead the Resistance needs to stay organized.

Being the man of fear and respect he is, Evfra respects anybody that can stand up to him without flinching. Such as the governor. But with Evfra, he seems to largely stop at respect. He can have a conversation with someone he respects, but he keeps his tone aloof and relatively uninterested to avoid becoming invested in others. He also doesn’t talk about himself much outside his duties; another mechanism to keep people at arm’s length.

Even the Governor of Aya admits that she has no idea how to get on Evfra’s ‘good side’ and she is probably the one person on Aya that interacts with him the most. She is, after all, the governor of the place the Resistance calls home and the two of them clearly butt heads over policy with her stating that Evfra believes secrecy and isolation are the key to keeping their people safe.

To further prove his lack of salt and disapproval, after you save the Moshae if you go downstairs in the resistance HQ and talk to the quartermaster she says that Evfra ok’d you to buy weapons against her wishes. And you might even hear Cora say that Evfra is letting her record a few angaran training exercises. If he really was salty, and really did approve of these aliens so much, why would he let them buy guns and record their training.

Well the simple answer is he doesn’t like them, but he respects them.

When you first meet Evfra, he isn’t even as salty or as disapproving as I remember him. You walk in on him saying, “Kadara be damned, I won’t lose Voeld.” His voice sounds angry and determined. It shows more emotion than he seems to in most situations. Keep in mind, also, that Voeld is the angaran world that Evfra is from. It holds a special place to him. He already lost his family to the kett because the resistance couldn’t help. Now, with himself at the reigns, he’ll be damned if he watches his whole planet die.

When Ryder asks about the vault, she doesn’t have to squeeze the information out of him. He freely tells her about the vault and that it is sealed. He then sighs and says that they cannot help. His tone shows his sadness at this. Having been in a situation where he and his family needed help but none could be provided in time, he empathizes with her. I’d even go as far to say as he’s upset to feel powerless to help when he has based the entire Resistance on helping where before no help could be found.

In his own way he then tries to dissuade Ryder from pursuing the vault and his tone turns hostile. Perhaps trying to instill fear in her like he does with those around him, because if she fears him, she’ll listen. He doesn’t believe that Ryder can save the Moshae. With his knack for keeping people at a distance, he has likely already resigned himself to her loss. The Moshae was just another casualty of war.

When Jaal speaks about trusting Ryder you can see some actual emotion on Evfra’s face. His face starts to twitch a bit around the nose, like he’s getting irritated. When Jaal stops talking he tells Jaal talks too much. Possibly because he doesn’t want Jaal’s words to reignite any spark of hope in him that the Moshae can be saved.

Despite everything, he is quick to let Jaal go with Ryder and simply warns him to be ready to strike first if Ryder tries to kill him and then walks away. He keeps such a distance between himself and those he works with that it seems in that moment he has already accepted that Jaal is going to die and has chalked him up as just another soon-to-be casualty. Or is at least preparing himself for that to happen.

Being the man he is, Evfra seems to prefer professional or logical answers over emotional and casual ones. Often it seems you get more emotion out of him when using logical/professional responses. Such as him saying “The more I learn about the kett, the more I want to hurt them,” when given a certain logical answer, his tone giving you a flash of something other than disinterest and stoicism.

And after you save the Moshae, for a single sentence you can even hear what sounds like awe in his voice when he says, “You saved the Moshae.”

Hell, you can even get Evfra to outright thank you on more than one occasion if you chose the right options. And he doesn’t sound bitter about thanking you. Mostly he just uses that same, dry tone.

Another interesting nibblet I found that suggests that Evfra is not as salty and disapproving as he seems comes in an email.

Evfra will email you after you do the ancient AI mission on Voeld. If you took the AI and let it stay with SAM he informs you that the Governor of Aya was so angry she was going to shut down the embassy. However, Evfra, of all people, manages to convince her to keep it open. He then ends the email with, “Please try not to be so stupid next time.” Doesn’t sound like a guy that disapproves of the aliens as much as he seems to on the surface.

Also, I don’t believe that Evfra is coming from a place of angst, as is common with Bioware characters. Evfra’s insistance on having no close personal ties comes from a place of duty. He’s in charge of the entire resistance. Every day he sends his people to fight and die. He’s a leader and a tactician. He knows casualties are unavoidable. He also knows that what he’s doing is too important for him to be bogged down with emotion.

Because should a friend die, his judgement could be compromised by grief. Not only can he not afford to have his mind clouded by such things, but he just chooses to remove the risk of ever feeling that kind of grief ever again.

[wanderingthroughwickford]

Thank you! My responses are super long (especially for M asdflkasdfjkasdf) so most of them will be under a cut.

A – How did you come up with the title to [insert fic]?

Since no fic was specified, I think I’ll just go back through some of the ones I’ve got up on FFN. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory, to be honest. ‘Eternity’ is so named because Myrtle is stuck at Hogwarts, in her teenage form and mindset, for, well, eternity. ‘And Then There Was One’ (a probably discontinued Hunger Games/Nancy Drew crossover) is also fairly obvious; it’s the Hunger Games so it’s inevitably going to come down to one person, and I also couldn’t resist shoehorning in a completely unnecessary reference to And Then There Were None since it’s also based off a mystery series. ‘Unstained’ refers to Wiress’ promise in the game to not ‘stain’ herself by committing murder in the games, and if I ever write its sequels they’ll follow the ‘Un’ formula – I’ve always intended the final fic in the prospective trilogy to be called ‘Unchained,’ but we’ll see if I ever get there.

I think the one that actually gave me the most trouble coming up with a title was ‘Goodbye,’ a Pirates of the Caribbean one-shot I wrote way back in 2009. I couldn’t seem to come up with a clever enough title for the fic, until I asked my mom for help and she suggested simply ‘Goodbye.’ I decided that in this case, less was more, and so the title stuck.

C – What character do you identify with most?

The ones that I’ve written for, I guess this means? I suppose I’ll have to go with Myrtle and Wiress. Although they definitely both have more tragic lives than I do, I still put a lot of myself into them – I outright headcanon Wiress as having Asperger’s Syndrome and being uninterested in romance, so I find her quite easy to write in that way, and a lot of her moralistic, somewhat self-righteous attitude at the beginning of Unstained (which she’ll eventually grow out of, fortunately) draws a lot from how I now see myself as having acted as a young teenager. Her somewhat morbid obsession with past Hunger Games and their victims has roots in my own (sometimes borderline depressing) fascination with shipwrecks such as the Titanic and Lusitania. 

Myrtle I headcanon with some sort of unspecified mental illness, or at least deep insecurities and oversensitivity, and having trouble making and keeping friends. Her friendship with Murcia draws on some of the tentative friendships I had with girls in older grades, and – though this didn’t come through in the story for various reasons that would take a whole other ask to explain, and which I’m not entirely satisfied with but anyway – I definitely see Myrtle as having had a complicated crush on her, but never fully recognizing or accepting it for what it was because she wasn’t raised in a time or a society where girls loving other girls was normalized. Which, again, big part of my teenage years. Plus, the social awkwardness, introversion, and anxiety that both girls have is something I definitely relate to in general.

F – Care to share a favourite hurt/comfort fic?

Oh boy, that’s a tall order as there are so many, but the two that jump to mind immediately are Intersection by yadon/Copernicus Jones/Jake-Marshall and Pity the Child by Tanglepelt/Bookworm555. Intersection holds a very special place in my heart as it was written by my friend Leanne, featuring one of her favorite Ace Attorney characters, Jake Marshall, interacting with my OC Denise Swallow. Pity the Child was written by my friend Becca and involves two more of my faves – America and Latvia from Hetalia – having heartwarming interactions. Both are very good fics.

M – Got any premises on the back burner that you’d like to share?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahaha

Well

It’d be easier to list fics I’ve actually completed than fics that are in various stages of planning

But if you insist

(This is the super LONG part and gets a little emotional towards the end) 

The fic that I’d most like to complete within the foreseeable future is ‘Unstained,’ my story about Wiress’ Hunger Games. I’d say it’s about half-finished now, and I haven’t updated it in almost 4 years. That might change in the future; I’d like to get at least a few more chapters done this summer, but I don’t think it’s humanly possible to get it finished before I leave for Ontario, and then I’ll be so busy for a solid year that I doubt I’ll be able to write anything. And that’s not even counting the two prospective sequels I’d like to write. But even finishing this fic would be a major life accomplishment for me, as it’s one of those that I’m proudest of.

Then I have at least three fics about my Ace Attorney OC, Denise Swallow, which I’d like to write, though they’ll probably all be one-shots. Two of them are partially written, one isn’t even started yet. One of them would be a brief overview of the few times she met Dahlia Hawthorne, the infamous culprit who ended up murdering her brother. Another one, the longest and weightiest of the three, would involve her meeting Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey, who channels the spirit of her brother so that she can properly say good-bye. The last one would involve her meeting up with Dahlia’s sister, Iris, and coming to some sort of closure there.

A lot of my fic-writing is taking a backseat to a much more personal fic-universe-of-sorts that I’m working on, involving practically all of my favorite fandoms thrown together into an incredibly complicated storyline. It’s completely self-indulgent and not something I’d really want to share a lot about here, but one of the major plotlines I’m constructing in it would involve a villain-to-anti-hero redemption arc for Lucy Bauer from Agents of Shield. I’ll admit that I have toyed, very briefly, with the idea of converting this into proper FanFiction if and when I ever complete it, but that’s honestly very unlikely because 1) I’d have to remove it from its crossover context, 2) I’d have to insert it into either AoS season 5 canon, which hasn’t even been filmed yet, or an alternate version of season 5, and 3) it seems completely implausible within the story’s canon. Plus, there’s the inevitable ‘no one would read it’ problem. 

In the past couple months I’ve considered writing an And Then There Were None Hunger Games AU, as well as a brief oneshot about Soldier Island being haunted by the ghosts of the ATTWN victims, but I’m very unlikely to do anything with those. There’s still my Nancy Drew Hunger Games AU left unfinished, but if I get back to that, it’ll be entirely as a way to blow off steam, rather than to try and write anything especially good. Just today I was attacked by the idea of writing a Lord of the Rings fic about Aragorn returning Boromir’s arm braces to Faramir and telling him how his brother died, but again, just a passing fancy that I’m very unlikely to write.

And that’s just the tip of it. There are so many FanFiction ideas I’ve considered writing and abandoned. The 8 fics I have up on FFN are the few lucky ideas that actually came to fruition, even though a good deal of them are unfinished as well. I’m honestly amazed that I was even able to finish ‘Eternity,’ or get as far as I have on ‘Unstained.’ I have an X-Men Evolution fic up that was originally supposed to be a multichap of 10-15 chapters, and it hasn’t been updated since 2011. When I was in high school I planned out a whole series of Pirates of the Caribbean fics chronicling James Norrington’s life, from childhood until his death, but I only ever got the first chapter of one written and never posted it. (Partially because I sort of balked at the HUGE amount of research I’d planned to do on 18th-century naval life for that fic). I’d like to go back to this one idea I had for a Hetalia fic, a series of one-shots about times in which the characters have wished they were humans rather than nations, but again, research would be necessary and it’s so draining.

That’s the problem. I love thinking up ideas and planning stories and having them finished, but at the end of the day, the act of writing itself is such a chore for me. And I hate that. I wish I could write effortlessly, like I used to as a kid, but I haven’t been able to do so since I was 12 or so. Which, coincidentally, is the time my depression started to majorly set in. I don’t know if the two are connected, but I can’t help but wonder if mental illness robbed me of a pastime that I dearly loved, and of countless fics I could have written by now.

(I know this is long and cheesy and overemotional, but cut me some slack, it’s almost 1 am) 

O – How do you begin a story – with the plot, or the characters?

You know, this is strange, because when I first saw this question I thought, of course I start with the plot, who would just say “I want to write a story about [character]” without even having any idea of what the plot would be yet? And then I realized that that’s exactly what I do – start with a character I want to write about and come up with a plot based off that. In fact, most of my stories aren’t even plot-driven much as just general looks into the lives of certain characters.

Y – A character you want to protect

Hah, it seems like the characters I want to protect and the characters I end up putting through torture are exactly the same. The two that jump to mind right away are – my sun and my stars and everything, the one and only APH Latvia, and my precious ghostly daughter, Myrtle Warren (Moaning Myrtle). And yet I endlessly read fics in which the former, and wrote a fic in which the latter, suffers. Whoops.

[mulder-isms]

Green - (Thorcid fanfic)

A\N: This short fic was inspired by the 420 picture and pot gummies so it’s a mess. Because if it ain’t green, I’m not interested *in Laganja’s voice*  

But seriously, green is my favorite color I’m obsessed.  💚 💚 💚 💚

Tell me what you think and save this poor “author” of the anxiety of writing words and give me the boost so this ship must go on. Or just send anon hate (  pls dont tho)

The snake patterned fabric got stuck in the sewing machine. It was enough to make Thorgy curse all the versions of The wizard of Oz and having a breakdown to stare at the void. It happened many times before in the workroom, where the pressure is so high that people are inclined to shut down. The emerald fabric was glistening bright green shades on his face but inside it was all blue. He missed Acid’s smoothing voice lurking on his back telling ‘get it together, girl’. It was a surprise, he didn’t know he would miss Acid Betty for any reason.  

Acid was the glue that was sticking team NYC together during the whole competition. This challenge was making everyone on edge. Including unbreakable Bob. He snapped out of the motionless state because time was running with no intention to stop, ever. Betty would have rolled her eyes profusely at the puddle he was.

Thinking about Acid was comforting, it set his made in the right place, wherever that was.

X

“I guess we’ve reached that point”

Shane was having breakfast on his kitchen table, and by breakfast it meant just pure black coffee (a post Jamin renewed addiction) with some old crackers. Alvy on the other side of the table, eating cereal from a big bowl and had a plate of fresh fruits by his side. The lifelong friend offered some for Shane but he just “Ugh” and grimaced. Because coffee was the proper meal for an empty stomach.

“The last weeks he’s been travelling a lot, you know, and no news here. We’re used to the travelling periods now” Shane continued talking as he was eating some crackers in between. Alvy continued chewing calmly as listening to his roommate with faint interest. “It’s that point where nothing gets on our nerves? Like last week I stayed over because we haven’t seen each other in ages and we fell asleep watching TV… I mean the sex is still great, but sometimes we’re just not in the mood that much”

Alvy shook his head wishing to be spared of the details.

“But I-I…” he stuttered trying to find the words. “I mean is this normal? I know it’s normal but under our circumstances? Aren’t we supposed to be all over each other yet? Am I being dramatic? Don’t answer that! ” Shane blurted out in the speed of light concerned.

Alvy just cleared his throat and started eating an apple slowly.

“For someone that has been a whore for such a long time your lack of knowledge about relationships is astonishing.” Alvy replied in uninterested tone.

“Right?” Shane confirmed laughing and gesticulating with his hands. “That’s because I’ve never been in a relationship for this long with someone I actually care about and that cares for me?” he realized waving his crackers.

“True… and sad. But on a lighter note, yes Shane, it’s normal. Couples stop having sex like rabbits after a while. Thank god. These walls are damn thin and I can’t with you guys thinking you’re doing a casting for Cocky Boys” Alvy assured his friend as he was finishing his bowl.

Shane had no idea what Cocky Boys were but didn’t care anyways. He took a deep breath, but still a little bit of worry hanging on his sleeve.

“Last year on Drag Con we fucked in a bathroom with people coming in and out at 8 am, it was fucking hot”

Alvy closed his eyes and put down his spoon and now that he was recollecting the memories from Drag Con he remembered that Thorgy and Acid were always together, the fugitive glances and ear by ear talks.

“I know I’m crazy, but I keep thinking he is tired of me or this whole situation. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m starving” then he shrugged and grabbed a banana that was in plate and started to peeling it.

X

The concert with Eliot was a blast. He was so pumped with the musical gigs he would have in May too, it was his dream coming to life, and the fact that people appreciated so much when he played made him overwhelmed with happiness. Jamin was on the road and he was constantly sending messages of how tired he was with the whole Roast tour. Jamin had a curious nature, it was easy for him to be excited about going to new places and clubs but touring was draining. You can only tell the same joke so many times.

But Shane knew everything was going to alright. It was 420. He was wearing his Grinch pubes wig and a dress that Jamin could easily take it off.

“Good Luck on your gig, I’m sure you’re gonna kill it. Alotta’s auction is tonight and I’ll see you in her apartment after? Save me some pot gummies, bitch.”

Shane laughed as he stared at the screen. He was high and relaxed from the pot gummies. Bach was still playing on his head, a whole orchestra of Emerald City citizens as he was conducting. The walls melting in green.  He had to see Jamin.

X

Shane loves to see Jamin’s back in the morning, his muscles and shoulder blades contracting, as he is leaning in the kitchen balcony doing the dishes wearing just briefs. He loves how Jamin’s skin is beautiful and soft and he doesn’t even know the devil’s pact he did to have that ass. He loves to see him completely bare of his layers of colors.

But the same time, nothing makes him happier than watch Acid Betty in all the sass and hyper colors. Tonight, she was wearing a green structured dress and the lizard prints all over her neck. They hugged tight and briefly, it was the break from the auction and a queen was doing a number on stage. Thorgy snapped one pic of them together to post on IG, because he could never resist.

“How many gummies did you have?” Acid asked laughing at how far way Thorgy seemed browsing through her phone, trying to post the pic.

Thorgy took teen long seconds to answer with her finger pointing up as if she was actually able to count. “Enough” she precisely answered after giving up and holding a laughter. Acid noticed Thorgy had her backpack in one shoulder and the violin case on the other. A queen was calling Acid back to the stage, she nodded half smiling to Thorgy pulling the sleeve of her green coat and whispering on her ear.

“You look cute”

And she winked her glitter lashes making Thorgy’s stomach swirl.

Acid and pot was a good combination.

X

Jamin didn’t even know how he got in Alotta’s apartament. The auction was a complete blur. The place was full of all the underworld creatures that were lurking dazed and confused in the Metropolitan. He wanted to take a shower to sober up.

He looked down at the bathtub, the dark green water washing away his makeup, his green attires hanging on the top of the curtains hanger. When he opened his eyes, after rinsing the shampoo off his hair he noticed someone was in the bathroom and he yelled hastily. He completely forgot to lock the door.

“It’s occupied!”

The person’s figure was undefined but the green top of hair and the height could be only one person. Before Jamin knew Shane was joining him under the shower, his Thorgy face still on. He urgently kissed Jamin, their make up being destroyed by the running water and the friction of their bodies. Jamin enjoyed then sensation of having his boyfriend all wet in his arms forgetting about the opened door. When Shane stopped to catch a breath Jamin picked some liquid soap and place on his hand to wash his face.

“Close your eyes, you nut” he asked as Shane was giggling looking positively crazy and super adorable. Shane closed his eyes and Jamin washed his face. First he rubbed the glue of his thick brows, and Shane’s features were appearing slowly again, his light skin red with the temperature and the contact, the small nose, and his squinted gray-green eyes sparkling again behind the black eyeliner residues.

Jamin took a second to appreciate the face that was forming in front of him. Then he turned around to wash his own hair, since he was in the process of doing it when Shane interrupted him.

“You still have lizard scales” Shane pointed rubbing Jamin’s neck from behind.

“Thorgy?”

Alotta’s deep voice was inside the bathroom already. Jamin and Shane froze but it was too late to do anything and they were too high to even function.

“Bitch, who are you blowing in this bathroom?” he asked suspicious noticing the two silhouettes.

“I’m with Acid. I was trying to get her to fuck me but we are pouring green and I’m seeing leprechaun violinists”  

“She really is!” Jamin went along.

Alotta squinted his eyes holding the doorknob and then she cackled screamed.

“You Ru Girls are fucking disgusting.  I want you two out my tub in five minutes” Alotta replied unbothered and too high to care too. It wasn’t the weirdest thing he saw tonight.

They both laughed and got off the the shower quickly. They put some clothes on fast and joined the others in the living room, they got lucky but they wouldn’t want to draw any attention. There was a cloud of god knows what forming in the living room. Nobody noticed they both had wet hair.

The night continued with lots of drinks and different many items of cannabis haute cuisine. Shane was almost passed out on the couch observing Jamin playing cards with the rest of the men and drag queens. Everything was fading away slowly…

X

When Shane woke up he was still on the couch. He was afraid he was going to be stuck in a green sunrise but everything looked colored enough for his relief. His eyes searched for other bodies on the floor but there wasn’t anybody in sight, just a low electronic music playing in the background.

He wondered if Jamin left without him, but right after his brain formulated the question Jamin appeared from behind and joined him in the couch. Shane made room for him, so he could hug him by the waist and he could rest his chin on the top of Jamin’s head.

They stood there in silent, still sleepy, Jamin’s hot breath on his chest, making his shirt damp. He played with the curls of his dark hair.

“God…how I missed this….” His voice coming out muffled squeezing Shane tighter and placing kisses on his chest. Shane breathed, as he could finally breath again, kissing the top of Jamin’s head and putting a leg over him. He thought about following his old patterns, saying ‘I thought you were getting tired of me’ because that what was on his mind the whole week. But it would just ruin what shouldn’t be a doubt. Not with Jamin in his arms like that.

“I love you”

The simplicity of the words were taking him by surprise too. Shane was many things, but never simple. Jamin responded kissing him gently, with no hurry, breathing in his morning warmth, the smell of soap still on his skin. Shane slid his hand inside Jamin’s jeans quickly, rubbing his length lazily.

“And I miss your cock inside of me fucking me hard” he whispered on Jamin’s ear making Jamin laugh and almost lose his balance out of the couch. He positioned himself again and started placing kisses on Shane’s collarbones, encouraging him to continue.

“And I thought romance wasn’t dead” he replied under his chin, pulling Shane closer by the hips and biting his ear lobe, making him let go a soft moan.

Shane continued rubbing him, and he was growing solid with each stroke, circling the tip of his head making him let go soft ‘fucks’. Jamin inserted his hand inside Shane’s shorts, craving his nails on Shane’s ass, thrusting in and out and he kept fastening the pace, the panting of their breathing getting uneven…but then they heard one door creaking in the back of the corridor.

Jamin jumped out of the couch fast closing his fly and Shane moaned in frustration putting his hands on his temple frustrated.

Alotta was there, half naked, in seconds.

“Betty how are you even up…” Alotta was walking by dragging his limbs across the room and Jamin was holding a pillow in front of  his crotch.

“Pot has a reverse effect on me” he justified throwing the pillow on the floor and sitting on the armchair crossing his legs. Shane was pretending to be sleeping. Alotta sat on the couch, next to Shane’s face, and drank from the bottle of water that was resting on the coffee table. Acid observed all his movies tense. Alotta looked down at Thorgy and shook his head.

“This bitch doesn’t even move”

Jamin just nodded in agreement looking at his boyfriend swollen lips, and his eyes twitching pretending the fake slumber. Alotta got up again and proceeded to the kitchen clueless about the hot make out session that was going on seconds ago.

Shane opened his eyes not controlling his laughing anymore, he gave up the act, sitting up straight. He was all messed up, the oversized striped blouse falling all crooked exposing his shoulder, the zipper of his bermuda shorts still open. He started putting the lose dreads up again. Jamin was observing him from the armchair. He wondered when he would stop finding that gesture so alluring.

“I can’t wait to mess you up all over again at home” Jamin commented with eyes fixed on him still in awe, biting lips.

“Bitch, please do” Shane answered with an exasperated sigh and giggling.

[ablogofourown-blog]

last pizza

My first thought was to write a short story that didn’t have a twist ending. I immediately imagined a woman who knew she was going to die going out for pizza. Then I sat on it for a week and my brain started poking holes in the premise which I rushed to try to fill in within about three days of writing. I think the real lesson here is when I have an idea for a story, I need to write it right away, or at least email it. 

Also I thought of at least three twist endings that I could have written for this story and some of them were very difficult to resist, I’m just saying.

...Alex

On the day she died, Thália went out for pizza.

One Eye Pizza Parlor had been at the end of her block for as long as she had lived there.  It was the sort of place she noticed on her walk home when she had already eaten or just wanted Thai take-out for the night or didn’t have any money. The kind of place she always made a note to visit but never did. That was the first reason she went to it now, but it was not the primary reason.

It was 11:00am when she arrived.  She ordered a large chicken alfredo pizza for herself and took a seat at one of the smallest tables in the corner.  While she waited, she took out a notebook, and as she ate, she began to write.  She stayed this way well into the afternoon, scarcely lifting her head above her notebook except to eat or order a refill of lemon lime soda. The three times she got up to go to the restroom, the staff must have thought with relief that she was finally leaving. But she always returned to her table and to her notebook.

At 4:30pm, her server, whose name tag read “Chinonso” made his last round before ending his shift. “Ready for your check yet?” he asked with a polite smile that only slightly wavered with his impatience.

She shook her head. “Actually, can I get a taco calzone and some cheesy bread?”

“Just for you?” She looked around the table and nodded. “You sure you’re not going to explode?” His laugh strained and his face pinched as he realized the awkward and potentially insulting joke he had just made to a customer.

“Anything’s possible.” Thália shrugged. “But it’s my last day alive, so I thought I might as well stuff my face.”

His smile twitched and he stood uncertainly for a moment. “Hah,” he said flatly, as if it might have been some joke that went over his head.  “I’ll get that right in.” He walked away a little more quickly than he had arrived. Thália had always been cautious and private.  She rarely told people about even her normal thoughts.  Now it seemed silly to worry whether a stranger thought she was weird or crazy.

A few minutes later, a new server returned with the food, and Thalia pushed the empty pizza tray that Chinonso had forgotten away to make room.  Before she could start writing again, he was back at her table, now in jeans and a hoodie for some sports team she didn’t recognize.

“Listen,” he said, sounding almost out of breath. “Are you…I don’t know you, but are you…okay?”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” she answered. “If that’s what you were wondering.”

“Oh.” His shoulders relaxed. “So, you’re…”

“Psychic.”

He blinked. “Are you the one that told my mom that a blue car would put her aura back in balance?”

“Maybe,” Thália answered, not because it was true but because it was funny. “You have an interesting name.”

“It’s an Igbo name,” he explained. “What’s yours?”

“Thália. Brazilian, not Greek.”

“Thália. Cool.”  When he didn’t move, she gestured to the seat in front of her, and he sat.  “So, you’re saying that you had a premonition or vision or whatever that you were going to die, and you…decided to go out in a blaze of thick crusts?”

She snorted. “No.  I decided to get pizza because I had a vision of myself eating pizza on the last day I was alive.”

“So wait, you didn’t have a vision of yourself dying?”

She took a bite of the calzone, made a face, and waved it. “This is terrible.”

“You ordered it. After you started off with a pizza that’s meant to be a pasta, I might add.  I don’t think your culinary preferences are very sound.”

“Not the actual event, no,” she explained. “Just a snippet of the pizza.”

“Okay, so how do you know this is your ‘last day alive?’”

She sighed and broke off a piece of cheesy bread.

“Was that insensitive? I don’t know psychic etiquette.”

“What do you care, anyway? You think I’m making this all up.”

“Hey, I never said that.”  He leaned back and scratched his close cropped curls. “Let’s just say I’m invested in the narrative.  And if it’s all some desperate cry for attention, well, someone should actually pay attention, right?”

“Gee, thanks,” Thália retorted with her mouth full. She waited a moment before speaking again.  “I’ve always had these…senses, just this vibe of how things are and what will happen, without any logical explanation. Visions are more rare.  It doesn’t matter how insignificant the vision seems, if I have it, something’s going to happen. And when I had the vision of myself here, at this table, I just knew.”

He waited, considering her story. “So look, this isn’t some elaborate way of getting out of paying, is it?

She reached into her pocket and brought out the wad of cash that she had taken from her bank account that morning.  It wasn’t enough to give bequeath to anyone, but it was more than enough to pay for pizza. She placed it on the table.

“Okay. So if your vision happened here, and it made you think you were going to die…why not go somewhere else? Why not just stay home?”

“Whatever’s going to happen will. Trust me, I’ve had this forever. You try to do something else, and you end up in the same place.  It’s better to just go with it.”

“To go with…untimely death?”

She shrugged, arms crossed.  You didn’t see me yesterday, she thought. Afraid to move, curled up in a ball, then, by turns,  tearing her room apart because it obviously didn’t matter now.  It was good to get it out.  She wasn’t calm today so much as emotionally drained. “You don’t have to believe me. I shouldn’t have told you, but you asked, and I hadn’t really said it out loud before.”

“I didn’t say—wait, not to anyone? Family? Friends?”

She shook her head.  “I don’t talk to family anymore, and I’m not going to start now. My friends are kind of spread out and I didn’t want to bother them.”

“Maybe you should have. I mean, if you really think…”

“Yeah, maybe.” She felt a lump rising in her throat and shook her head as she pushed it down.  A pitying look flashed across Chinonso’s face and it made her feel worse.

“And I take it your accuracy rate…”

“It’s pretty spot-on.” She looked at her notebook and started writing again.

Chinonso was quiet for a moment, and then asked, “What are you writing?”

“Just some memories.”

“For your friends?”

“Maybe. Mostly for me, though.  I just spent so much time focusing on the future, and now all I want to do is think about the past.”

“Makes sense,” he said.  “Like what?”

She flipped back to the beginning.  “One time when I was six, I found a baby bird alone and tried to take it back to its nest, but I dropped it.”

Chinonso pulled back and raised his eyebrow.  “That’s…sad.”

“I didn’t say they were all good memories.” She flipped through a few more.  “My first concert. That’s a good one.  I didn’t actually have tickets, but they played on the waterfront and I sat on the bridge, and at one point, when they played my favorite song, I could have sworn the keyboard player looked up at me. Which was stupid, because I couldn’t see their faces, but that’s how I like to remember it.”

“Who was it?”

She knit her brow. “Some art punk band I used to like.  They broke up and I don’t remember the name.”

She didn’t need to look at the notebook to reference the most recent. “And I ran away when I was twelve.  I was gone for a year before anyone found me.”

“Where did you go?”

“For a while, I just camped out in the woods, but then I met these…they weren’t good people. They usually had me play their daughter and we went around conning people until the police found me and assumed I’d been kidnapped.  And I let them, because no matter what I said, they’d just tell me I didn’t know what I was saying, that I’d been manipulated. Which is probably true.  But it was better than home, you know?” She frowned and closed the notebook. “Or you don’t. I don’t know why I’d assume you just know that.”

“It’s okay. I know.”

Thália looked out the window.  She hadn’t noticed the rain before, but now she saw it coming down so heavily it was hard to make out anything else.  Maybe it’s a storm, she thought, and that made her more calm than she had been all day. “I’ve always liked storms,” she said out loud.

“Me, too,” Chinonso admitted. A smile tugged at the corner of her lips.  “It’s okay to be upset. That’s…I mean, that’s human.”

She leaned back and leveled a narrowed-eye look at him.  “Don’t you have anywhere to be after work?”

He sighed.  “I don’t know. You’re the psychic.  Do I?”

“Please don’t.”

He chuckled.  “My video games and ramen packets can wait. Just for a couple hours, though, because the games get jealous.”

“You’re funny.”

“I really, really try.”

She snorted. When she looked outside again, the rain was already easing.  So much for that.  “I just mean, you don’t have to babysit me or sit with me and hold my hand. You don’t even know me.”

He shrugged. “You had a vision of the place where I work. Maybe I’m supposed to be here, too.”

“I hope not.”

“No offense, but I kind of hope not, too.”

“So, leave then.”

“Hey, no one’s holding a gun to my  head.” He winced. “Was that in poor taste?”

“I didn’t even notice until you said something.”

“Sorry.”

She ran one hand through her hair while the other tapped at the table.  “Well, look, if you’re going to stay, and I’m not asking you to, can you just…talk about something that’s not me? The trials of food service industry? Your childhood? Literally anything?”

“I’m not that interesting of a person.”

“Good. Ramble to me about as many uninteresting things as you can think of.”

So he talked about work (“Customers can be assholes sometimes, but my boss is super chill, so it’s cool,”), his family (a dramatic imitation of his grandmother’s Nigerian accent when she was  drunk, and his favorite dog that died the day after he finally moved out), his favorite games (“Games that are all shooting and combat are too much for me, I actually like the ones that are just a story, you know?”), and what he went to school for (business, but he just didn’t have the connections to get into anything yet, and anyway how is he ever supposed to get experience if people only hire applicants with experience?).  She nodded and laughed and sometimes she stopped tapping against the table as she listened. By the time he ran out of things to say, it was dark outside and Thália was scraping cheese off the empty tray where the bread once rested.

He leaned forward a bit, but he hesitated before he said, “You know they’re going to close eventually.”

“I know.” Her throat was dry and her voice was quiet.  “I thought something would have happened by now.  It be so much easier if I just knew what was going to happen, so I could expect it. Shit.” She fell back against her chair hard enough that it rocked.

“Sorry,” he offered in a mumble. He knew it was insufficient.

She sighed. “It’s just…I know whatever happens happens, but if I leave, then it becomes real.  Probably. Maybe you’re right.  Maybe I got it wrong, and I’m making a big deal about nothing.” She tried to make herself believe it, but her veins were tense with dread.  

“You don’t have to leave yet. We can stay here and talk for as long as they’re open.”

She shook her head. Chinonso waited, but her jaw was tight. She worried that if she said anything, it would just sound even more pathetic.

“Do you have anywhere else you need to go?”

She nodded. At length, she said, “I want to mail this to someone.  Just want someone to have it.”

“I know a late night post office. I can give you a ride.”

She gave him a wary look.  At this point, it seemed silly to wonder whether he was a serial killer, although the thought of dying that way was still terrifying.  He seemed honest enough, but that was not her main concern. “You’re not going to want to see that. Especially if something happens to you, too.”

“Whatever happens happens, right?” He stood up and held out his hand to her. “If you want.”

She closed her eyes and swallowed all the insufficient thanks she could have offered. She placed her hand in his.

[storyunrelated]

Jessica Dresses Like a Dragon #3

Now hear this.

Alright, so, things get a little muddled here.

See, up until they both collide, the first portion of this story is meant to have two narratives. You got the teenage bullshit on the one hand (which is this) and on the other you have the people who kill dragons. Specifically, you follow one of them who is woken up and learn how he is being told to come down to where Jessica et al live and murder the fuck out of her and her parents (who are – spoilersnotspoilers – dragons).

The first bit like that is meant to go here. But it ain't done yet. It's super-fiddly to get right, in my estimation, and needs much work. But I want to post this bit.

I doubt anyone cares anyway...

It took the journey up the stairs for Will’s mood to slip down a little bit. As exciting as it was having a mysterious redhead drag you up your own stairs in your own house by your own hand – and if nothing it was a novel experience – the practical concerns were settling in onto his brain. They had a habit of doing that. It felt like touching the curtains when you were in the shower: an unwelcome sensation.

Namely, he was filling with utter terror at being an embarrassing disappointment the moment she actually started learning about him. He was pretty sure the only reason Emy put up with him was because she was too polite to ditch him and now it was simply too late for her to escape. Jessica had no such obstacles, and could (and likely would) drop him like a bad habit the instant he opened his mouth properly. This fear only grew the higher up the stairs they got, and became much worse as they moved down towards his door, him taking the lead as Jessica slowed, lost in an unfamiliar house.

Will was a little reluctant about letting Jessica into his room. It wasn’t that he had any particular reservations about letting stinky girls into his personal space – Emy wouldn’t stand for such reservations anyway – it was more than his room had a few items in it which would unmistakably constitute nerdy. Normally this wasn’t an issue, and normally he wouldn’t even have thought about it, but again all his initial assumptions about Jessica bubbled up to the surface. The sort of girl who would spot his interests and feel nothing but scorn. Most people felt that way, but he imagined girls would feel it far more keenly. Girls of Jessica’s obvious calibre doubly so. He had no evidence to back up this gut feeling, but it was a strong feeling all the same. Will was suddenly and deathly afraid she would enter his room, cast her eye around, laugh derisively at him and promptly leave never to be seen again.

He knew this was irrational. What was far more likely to happen was she would either feign interest and nod along with anything he said just to keep things going, or else would show no interest at all and things would be painfully awkward. On reflection, neither of these options seemed that great, but keeping the door shut in her face wasn’t really a viable alternative. With her close on his heels, he pushed his way into his room, heart in his throat.

“Wow!” Jessica said, which came as a surprise. It had sounded genuine. Will looked back to see if it was just really, really deep sarcasm. The kind of sarcasm that ran so deep it popped out the other side and sounded completely earnest. The most lethal kind. It could sneak in undetected. Looking at her, he wasn’t sure. She did look completely earnest, and was gawping around his room with what could only be described as wonder. But that would be ridiculous. Certainly, there was nothing he could see that was wow-worthy.

“Wow?” He asked. She nodded enthusiastically, hair flapping in a less than dignified manner, not that she cared in the slightest.

“You have so much stuff! What’s this?” She was pointing to a figurine balancing precariously on top of his chest of drawers. It didn’t belong there. Emy had probably put it there because it had been in her way sometime and Will hadn’t fixed it yet. Emy seemed to rearrange the place quite a bit. To be fair, she typically had a better idea of how Will’s life should be put together than he did.

The full and proper explanation and the one brewing in Will’s head was a long-winded one. It wasn’t just a robot, despite looking like one. What it was, in fact, was a small resin model of a Dominion Armour-Walker from the Attrition-verse, a fictionalized science fiction universe of which Will was quite enamoured. His explanation would go into depth from there, perhaps touching on how awesome it was, the weaponry it might have (were it real) and maybe something about the Dominion itself, which Will liked quite a bit. But this would be too long, and she would ask him to stop. And then leave. And then never talk to him again. And his world would be just that bit darker as a result.

Best to keep it short, in which case.

“It’s, uh, just a robot,” he said with what he hoped was a silent sigh and an unnoticeable deflation of the shoulders. Jessica frowned and narrowed her eyes at the model, bending to get a closer look.

“Are you sure? It looks kind of like one of those things from that Attrition…thing…” she said, straightening back up again and waving a hand at it. Will goggled.

“You know about that?” He asked, awed. She smiled, which just increased his awe-factor, though for different reasons. It was like standing in front of a window when the sun broke through the clouds. That this was the image his brain chose worried him immensely for reasons he could not put his finger on.

“Only a little bit. I think I read a thing one time. Walker or something?”

“Armour-Walker!” Will blurted out before he could stop himself. Jessica’s smiled widened in recognition. The sun shining in a cloudless sky.

“That was it! Cool! Uh, what is it though?” She reached out to poke out, glancing to Will to see if it was okay. He said nothing negative and so she followed through. The figurine was unyielding, to her apparent delight. They built them solid, they did.

“Cool!” She said, again.

“Do you want the, uh, long and boring version or the, uh, short and…boring version?” Will asked, grinning and scratching the back of his head. Some part of him still thought this was some sort of elaborate trick to out him as a dull and uninteresting boy, which he knew he was. That part of him was a large part after all.

“Ooh! The long and boring one, please! I want to know as much as possible! Just let it all out!” Jessica said. She was now holding the figurine for some reason, turning it over in her hands and taking it in from unusual angles.. As far as Will was concerned, this constituted surreal. Emy had always handled the things as though they were made of something she’d have to wash off her hands afterwards; Jessica was handling it like a wounded bird that she was also entirely fascinated with.

“Well…” he started, taking in a breath before plunging onwards.

No details were spared. Even when it looked like things might be getting far, far too nerdy Jessica was there to nod earnestly and egg him onwards. In such a way, he gave what was possibly the most meandering, slow and least concise summation of what an Armour-Walker was, how it figured into the military of the Dominion and, of course, what the Dominion actually was in the context of Attrition itself.

It does not bear repeating here. Suffice to say, Will had rarely had such an open opportunity to hold forth about the merits of a fictional, war-heavy science fiction universe involving lots of made-up things blowing up other made-up things. Neither had he ever had such a receptive audience. It was like the stars had aligned, which seems oddly appropriate.

And that was just the beginning. Jessica, it turned out, knew a little bit about most everything that Will did. Every object she pointed to in his room for an explanation she had heard of somewhere sort of kind of at least once, and what she didn’t know she was eager for him to fill in for her. It was alarming, but also refreshingly good fun for Will, who finally had someone to gush to. Emy was resistant to gushing, as she knew what she liked and knew just about all there was to know about it and unless her interests shifted she was stony-faced on things she did not care about. She did not even feign interest, which Will could understand, but it did leave him with a lot of stuff to say and no-one to say it to.

Until now, at least. Jessica soaked it up, no matter how trivial it was or how tongue-tied Will was in getting it across to her. Every so often his brain would get ahead of his mouth (which could only work so fast) and he had to spin around and try to remember where he’d got up to, mangling his sentence in the progress and coming to a sputtering halt. She seemed to actually rather enjoy when he tripped over himself, as it gave her the opportunity to come in and verbally pick him up off the ground, which just made him go further.

Every so often in the whirlwind tour around his room they would come across something Jessica had more than a passing interest in and the conversation would deepen, often quite to the point of being completely impenetrable to any normal person.

To an outside observer – were someone observing from the outside, for whatever reason – such conversations would come across as rather tedious and fiddly without really adding much that couldn’t be succinctly summed up, but to the pair of them they were probably the most fun they’d had talking to someone for as long as they could remember. Neither of them could stop smiling.

It was the rawest and purest form of conversation. The sort where there was simply no time for pauses, awkward or otherwise. It often came down to a race between the two of them for who could chime in first when their interests were about equal. Usually, both of them were racing to say the same thing as the other one, as they repeatedly found out.

“That’s what I was going to say!” They both said, more than once. She turned out to be the only other person he had met who had actually watched The Seven Samurai. She went even further, too; having seen some things he had not, yet wanted to. She even had them as physical, tangible copies and was willing to lend them to him! This was without precedent. They were about midway through actually arranging how a swap of sorts would take place when there was a knock at the door.

Will’s mother poked her head in, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“Canoodling?” She asked. Will’s jaw dropped.

“Mum! No! No canoodling!”

Her eyes swept around the room, taking in the complete lack of anything approaching intimacy. She then nodded.

“Alright. I accept this,” she then straightened and actually came in through the door, pointing to Jessica. “Your parents are lovely. They are also leaving, so you should probably go with them. School tomorrow and everything.” Her eyes flicked to Will.

“Jessica is going to Foster Academy as well, dontcha know,” she said. Will turned to look at Jessica.

“You are?” He asked. He wasn’t sure why this was a surprise. All things considered, it should have been pretty obvious. Where else was she going to go around here? But he’d asked anyway. Maybe some part of him had refused to believe it possible.

“I am!” She said, beaming. He beamed too. Couldn’t really help himself.

Exchanging loose schemes about the exchange of films Jessica went downstairs and re-joined her parents, who were waiting in perfect order by the door. Will even got another hug, which was less of a surprise, but no less pleasant. He even hugged back this time, which was exotic and quite astonishingly warm. They then left, Jessica giving the tiniest of tiny waves as the door closed behind her.

Wordlessly acknowledging his mother saying that if he wanted to eat he would have to deal with it himself because she was far too motherly and important to sully herself so Will floated back up to his room and sat down to just stare into space for a while. His brain seemed to be a little fuzzy and food – like all other concerns at that moment – seemed distant and unimportant.

For reasons he could not adequately explain even to himself, Will found that he was actually sort of maybe kind of looking forward to school tomorrow.

There was a first time for everything.

[theconservativebrief]

The world doesn’t make sense anymore.

The wrinkles in the simulation were inconsequential at first. The Chicago Cubs won a World Series. La La Land was the Best Picture for about two minutes, until it wasn’t. The Atlanta Falcons gave up a 28-3 lead and lost a Super Bowl. These events — which all happened within six months of each other — were weird, to be sure. Unless you were directly involved in one of the aforementioned properties, however, you probably just enjoyed the oddness of it all.

But the wrongness of the world has turned more sinister, to many. The exit of the UK from the European Union, the rise of alt-right nationalism, the election of Donald Trump — these are things that aren’t supposed to happen. And yet here we are, in a world that feels like it’s tearing itself apart, a 2-year-old caught in an eternal temper tantrum.

If you spend time on Twitter or Facebook, this voiceless howl becomes all the more inescapable. If you doubt me, click on literally any tweet announcing major political news from a media personality and watch as the chasm deepens the further down you scroll. The message is clear: There has to be a failsafe. There has to be a button to press, a piece of footage to find, a magic word to speak, to put everything back on track, to get back to the world as it was — safe and predictable and a little taxing but largely fine, right? Largely fine.

Enter Tom Arnold, the ’90s comedian and ex-husband of Roseanne Barr, who’s going to find that magical bridge back to the world we thought we lived in, or utterly tank his reputation trying.

What’s a show like this without a giant wall of evidence? Viceland

The most 2018 thing about Viceland’s new series The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold is how impossible it is to tell which portions of it are self-promotion and which parts of it are sincere. On some level, I really do think that Arnold wants to take down Donald Trump, by any means necessary. On another level, though, I don’t understand why he thinks he’s the guy to do it beyond the fact that it will get him back on TV.

I’ve only seen two episodes (out of a proposed eight), and each of them is at once 22 minutes and 13 years long. In the course of watching the first — in which Arnold tracks down tapes of Trump’s appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show, tapes that he gets from clandestine operatives in a motel room in the middle of the night, but which he probably could have just torrented if he really wanted them — I was pretty sure the episode was just wrapping up, only to realize it hadn’t even reached its first commercial break.

Yet there’s something oddly watchable about Arnold throwing himself against the rocks of reality, trying to wear them down. He possesses the same lack of shame that Trump boasts, which means he’ll do anything for his show, or to promote his show. And he at least targets not Trump directly but those who enabled him on the way to the presidency, men like Apprentice producer Mark Burnett, who is rumored to possess a bunch of footage of Trump saying racist and/or sexist and/or homophobic things on the set of that show. (Now Arnold is reportedly claiming this footage has made it into the hands of Ronan Farrow, the New Yorker journalist.)

But it’s here where things become even murkier, because Arnold and Burnett had … some sort of confrontation at an Emmys party over the weekend, which Arnold claims involved Burnett attacking him, while Burnett’s wife (Roma Downey) claims the reverse. (Arnold, at least, has filed a police report.) And presuming an altercation happened (and there are enough witnesses to suggest one did), it’s not clear if Arnold got into a fight to promote his show, if Burnett did so because he feels rattled by Arnold’s irritating persistence, if one man was goading the other, or if it was some combination of all of the above.

Having watched the series, I find it possible to assume any of those scenarios is true. It seems at least plausible to me that Burnett has something to hide. (Rumors of Apprentice outtakes that contained jaw-droppingly offensive statements from Trump predate the man’s run for president.) But watching Arnold in his show is like being cornered by a Trump-hating relative at a family barbecue on one of those long, hazy days in August. He has his hand on your shoulder, and he’s in your space, and he’s talking at way too loud of a volume. And even if you agree that Trump has to go, boy, you wouldn’t mind talking to literally anybody else for a while.

This is Arnold’s “strength” as an “investigative journalist,” I guess. He keeps chiseling away at the wall he’s certain separates him from the truth, using his lack of shame and too-big personality as his tools. But the best moments of the show come when he tries to enlist others in his circle — his wife, his millennial writing partner — into his adventures, and they seem uniquely uninterested in whatever it is he’s doing, hitting their marks for the camera but little more.

Perhaps the most telling sequence involves Arnold staking out the favorite restaurant of his old True Lies costar, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the second episode. When Schwarzenegger appears, Arnold tries to get him to open up about Trump, to say something inflammatory on camera, but he forgets to ask Schwarzenegger if he heard anything from the crew during that one season when the former governor hosted The Celebrity Apprentice.

There’s something approachably sad about this whole sequence, about Arnold trying to be best pals with someone who’s still so much more famous with him, about how he forgets his core mission in that moment, perhaps because he still longs for fame, too. Schwarzenegger became governor, and Trump became president.

But what happened to Tom Arnold? He disappeared. And now he’s returned to rebalance the scales of justice. Honestly, if he did, it would make about as much sense as anything else that’s happened of late.

Tom Arnold (left) and executive producer Jonathan Karsh discuss The Hunt for the Trump Tapes at the 2018 Television Critics Association summer press tour. Jesse Grant/Getty Images for A+E Networks

In its own way, The Hunt for the Trump Tapes underlines a certain brand of the anti-Trump #resistance, a brand that believes Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime aberration, a nightmare that can be stopped if the right piece of information can be found to wake everybody up — and not, instead, a manifestation of a certain American id that has always and will always be there. These arguments seem, to me, to ignore that the right piece of information has been found over and over and over again, and yet those who support Trump continue to support him because he has no shame.

Maybe this makes Arnold the ideal person to bring Trump down, then, because someone with a similar lack of shame might be just the person to fly into the maelstrom, Captain Ahab style. (This ignores, of course, that Captain Ahab dies, and he drags nearly everybody else on his ship to the bottom of the ocean, too, while Moby Dick presumably escapes.) Maybe if Arnold turns the end of a presidency into just as big of a sideshow as its birth was, everything will revert to normal.

I’m not holding my breath, though. The Hunt for the Trump Tapes is illuminating in that it underlines how much Arnold’s qualms with Trump stem not from policy differences, but from the thought that Trump is just kinda, well, gross. He doesn’t want to find the tapes of Trump saying racist and sexist things on the set of The Apprentice because he deeply believes those things should not be said — though that’s one of his motivations. No, he first and foremost wants to find the tapes of Trump saying racist and sexist things because he believes that’s the easiest way to end a presidency.

As with much of the knee-jerk, anti-Trump stuff that floats around social media, there is a kind of grief in The Hunt for the Trump Tapes: a grief that never got past the bargaining stage, that never could accept the idea that so many citizens voted for a man who bragged about committing sexual assault, who made fun of a reporter with a disability, who early in his campaign called Mexicans rapists.

It is a grief of a man who seems to believe that if just the right piece of footage is found, if just the right sequence of images is exposed, Trump voters will cower at the sheer, bright, dazzling light of its truth, then be forced to admit they were wrong.

But throughout Trump Tapes, Arnold runs into people who say, “Well, uh, what could you possibly find that’s worse than [insert damaging piece of Trump footage here]?” and Arnold admits that he doesn’t know, but he has to keep going. He has the TV show, sure, but he also has his certainty. He must know, on some level, that even the worst footage he finds would be rationalized away by Trump supporters within a news cycle and that Trump’s vilest behaviors are treated as added value by many of his supporters.

But he keeps going, because at some point, he’ll bump into the thin curtain that separates this reality from the one that must exist elsewhere, where no Chicago Cubs World Series victories exist and where the president is some boring woman everybody complains about, and then he’ll be able to pass through and maybe bring the rest of us along with him. Tom Arnold wants to ditch Trump, sure, but what he really wants is a sense that the world he once thought he lived in wasn’t a lie.

The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold debuts Tuesday, September 18, at 10:30 pm Eastern on Viceland, which is a cable channel you might get. I didn’t mention that every time the show cuts to commercial, you get to see some old-school VHS tapes getting splashed with a yellow-ish liquid, so presumably there’s going to be a Very Special Pee Tape Episode. Get excited, America!

Original Source -> The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold, explained

via The Conservative Brief

[schultz290]

Wolfenstein 2′s Biggest Flaws Mirror Those of Halo 2

From the moment I finished Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, I’ve had an uneasy feeling about the game and especially its second half. I was torn between an amazed glee at the game’s strongest moments and a confused disappointment that that glee didn’t really sustain itself until the credits. By the end the game felt cramped, and a lot of the best ideas mentioned in dialogue or in readable pickups didn’t leave that space to be interacted with or even seen. At the same time, boy were those ideas really strong! The KKK running the south? Can’t wait to see that! A Nazi Venus base? How alien and weird will that look, I bet it’ll be way more than just corridors!

What I didn’t realize until just recently is that I’ve felt this way before. Thirteen years before, playing another highly praised but at the same time controversial shooter sequel. My hands gripped the Xbox controller tightly in excitement as Ron Perlman’s voice boomed: “Master Chief, you mind telling me what you’re doing on that ship?” to which Steve Downes dutifully responded: “Sir, finishing this fight.”

At this point it would be hard to describe anything I feel for Halo 2 at this point to be anything other than pure nostalgia, it was a game that gobbled up more hours of my childhood than I can even begin to remember. It was a revolution in online gaming for the time, and was a sequel to a game that I loved and still love. This is to say that the conflicted feelings of disappointment and enjoyment that I had on finishing it had largely faded to the back of my mind until very recently. While watching Lucas Raycevick’s Halo retrospective videos I noticed that he was pulling from a developer’s commentary that had been recorded for Halo 1 and 2 and immediately had to seek them out for myself. Upon watching the Halo 2 commentary (and watching Raycevick’s thorough retrospective) I remembered just how strange and disappointing the second half of Halo 2, and ultimately the game in general had felt to me. The Developers point out contrivances they invented to replace entire cut levels, like characters teleporting to exactly where they’re needed for no reason. The infamous ending was one of these contrivances, a brutal heartbreaking compromise Bungie had made with themselves to get the game released. 

The disjointed and strange second half of Halo 2 now reminds me of the disjointed and strange second half of Wolfenstein 2. In the same way that Halo 2 does Wolfenstein tells instead of shows, teleports characters to where they’re needed, and generally lacks the coherent sense of pacing that makes the first half so strong. The problems begin immediately after B.J. gets his new body. Why do you go to New York to get a Nazi dossier on Horton if Anya and everyone is talking about how the Nazis are purging New Orleans right now. They repeatedly mention how the Nazis are moving in right now and we need to hurry to get to New Orleans immediately or else people will die. But for some reason despite being very invested in saving the people of New Orleans Grace decides it more prudent to stop in New York and have Blazkowicz obtain intelligence on Horton that serves no real purpose in the story. Blazko just shoots his way towards whoever is left in New Orleans after the several hours have passed and most everyone is dead. It turns out that by the time the resistance got there that, what do you know, only Horton’s crew was left anyways. Horton was also found standing on a balcony loudly taunting the Nazis and shouting “Hey I’m Horton I’m resisting the Nazis wouldn’t it be great if someone came and rescued me”, so was it really necessary to gather whatever spotty intelligence the Nazis might have had and sacrifice thousands of otherwise savable lives? It’s less that the game doesn’t care about the people of New Orleans or that the characters don’t, it just seems like suddenly the writer forgot how space and time work.

This is especially jarring considering how the game uses travel to explain certain scenes well. For example, Blazkowicz stops at Mesquite because it was on his way back to the submarine off the coast of Galveston. The game does make this mistake a few times in the first half, take for example the jump from New York to Roswell with just an animated map to show the journey and the strange contrivance of the tunnels under Spesh’s restaurant that lead very quickly into the Area 52 base. But in the second half it becomes truly endemic and begins to seem like it’s covering for the absence of something. This happens again for the player getting to Venus. To go to the Moon in the first game took obtaining a specific Nazi uniform, a task that entailed an entire level. In this game, one jump cut separates Anya suggesting Blazko disguise himself as the actor and the actor being tied up in their back seat as they arrive at the Nazi space airbase. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a stealth level kind of like Roswell wherein you and Anya are sneaking around the milkshake bar looking for Redfield? It would have been another chance to explore the warped combination of Nazi iconography and Americana that is pretty much the game’s raison d’etre. But instead nope, Anya and BJ are teleported (as far as the player is concerned) to the point in time where pretty much their entire plan has gone off without a hitch. In gameplay terms, the player puts down the controller in New Orleans and picks it back up in the audition scene on Venus. It feels totally disconnected, like Master Chief going from the ground on the Halo looking up at High Charity to being teleported deep inside of it.

This then brings us to the Hitler scene, which I feel incredibly conflicted about. On the one hand, it’s an amazingly acted, written, and directed scene that features my favorite depiction of Hitler in any medium. On the other hand, it serves absolutely no purpose in the story and feels totally disconnected from the levels that came before and after it. Wouldn’t it have been great if Blazko said “Drop fucking everything, we’ve gotta kill Hitler” once presented with the opportunity? It could have been awesome to chase Hitler through a fast paced level where you get to see his personal living quarters and those of the Nazi elite, and then continue to chase them onto the surface of Venus for crazy low gravity high heat gunfights. All the while the game could keep cutting back to Hitler and his security detail, with the Nazi henchmen getting increasingly frustrated with the demands of their shitty old man leader they’re forced to protect. Instead, he gets secured offscreen while we fight Nazis through more generic empty corridors.

Venus in general feels like the biggest missed opportunity. Instead of feeling truly alien like it’s theremin laced soundtrack implies, it feels like more rote metal corridors the likes of which have been seen in the New York Bunker, the three separate missions inside the U-boat, the beginning of the New Orleans segment, the entirety of the Area 52 segment, and the both of the Ausmerzer’s missions. In general the levels feel like flat gameplay spaces when they aren’t serving as explicit narrative corridors like the town of Roswell or the Mesquite section. Raycevick points out something similar about Halo 2: while the developers promised massive environments, most of the environments in Halo 2 are small, boxy, and heavily overused in long attrition battles.

The final level is perhaps where the game falls apart most profoundly. First, it reuses a variety of environments from the earlier Ausmerzer level, and second, its new environments are more generic steel corridors. The Ausmerzer doesn’t feel like a giant flying ship, there’s nothing to distinguish it from the underground areas the player has spent almost the whole game traversing. Remember the Return to London Nautica level in Wolfenstein: The New Order? It’s full of moments like when you fall off the roof and catch a rope to swing into a lower floor and onto a Nazi, or when you scramble along the scaffolding on the side of the building as the snow gently falls on Nazified London. It had a sense of verticality and scale to it that pretty much all the levels in Wolfenstein 2 entirely lack. Imagine if you had fallen off of the Ausmerzer only to be rescued by Wyatt/Fergus flying the Helicopter, and then got dropped off on a different point. Imagine if you had to engage jets and flying drones scrambling to try and stop you. The end of the level almost approaches this feeling as you rush across the top of the Ausmerzer while being bombarded by drop pods full of super soldiers, but you still feel like you’re on a grounded structure. As well, in my experience the lackluster music almost always bugs and cuts out in the last few fights, and with little ambient sound you end up fighting the climactic battle in silence. This climactic battle, a brawl with a huge number of soldiers and three imposing (but uninteresting) robots doesn’t feel climactic. It feels like kind of a tough fight, but it feels as perfunctory as the tough fights that proceeded it. Nothing about it says “grand finale” in the way Wolfenstein: The New Order’s amazing last level and fun last boss fight did.

Then you have one last brief Wolfenstein moment in which you kill Frau Engel, and the game ends. The revolution that you’ve worked all game for is placed on the other side of the screen the characters are speaking to, and the only glimpses of it we see are a slideshow of trite photos set to the worst credits song of all time. This is perhaps the game’s biggest mistake, and here it closely mirrors the feelings engendered by Halo 2′s ending. Sure Master Chief has escaped High Charity, but now he’s gotta take the fight back to Earth to save humanity just like the whole game has been building up to! But nope, you don’t even see the slightest glimpse of besieged Earth, just a quick shot from space that cuts to the Master Chief in a dull gray corridor. On this boring shot of the Chief in an unfinished looking asset the game cuts to credits. Just like Wolfenstein, it didn’t even begin to live up to the amazing ending of its predecessor in which the Chief soars out of the Pillar of Autumn just in time for it to explode and tear the Halo apart in a jaw droppingly action packed sequence. Wolfenstein: The New Order and Halo both end on bangs, Halo 2 and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus end on whimpers.

Of course it is impossible for me to know if Machinegames were under the same pressures to cut content that Bungie was in 2004. It could be that exactly the game Machinegames wanted to make, disjointed narrative and weak second half and all, was what we got. And there are deep narrative problems with the game that aren’t solved by adding in the “cut” content that I conjectured about above. For example, the game would still have the naive doublethink that America is both horrifically corrupt but also fundamentally worth saving at its core. Frau Engel would still be a one note villain who pales in comparison to Deathshead, and her daughter Sigrun would still be supposed to earn our respect by choking a black woman and screaming in her face. Bombate’s characterization would still be a mess, the shirtless scene with Anya on the Ausmerzer would still be a trip too far into pulp absurdity, and I doubt any draft of the game’s storyline would fully explain what the stupidly named “God Key” is. However, if you cut the fat of challenge modes, perfunctory DLC, and assassination side missions, and replaced it with more levels that were of the quality of Roswell or Mesquite, Wolfenstein 2 would feel more whole and less compromised.

Part of the characterization of Wolfenstein 2 as the new Halo 2 is also about hope for me. Halo 2 was a sort of nadir in the series for many fans, but what followed is, in my opinion, still the best Halo game ever released: Halo 3. Halo 3 delivered on the promise of Halo 2 in many ways, including by making static scripted sequences like the Scarab fight into massive dynamic battles. If Wolfenstein 3 is the same leap from 2 that Halo 3 was from Halo 2, then we could be in for a really massive treat. A game with the unique and intelligent creative perspective of Wolfenstein that was also firing on all cylinders in terms of polish, level design, and gaudy spectacle could await us. Obviously it could also be a massive disaster, but Machinegames making the same missteps as Bungie could mean that they have learned many of the same lessons. Here’s hoping!

[stompsite]

indie bundle cruft death match volume two: the revenge of the revenge

this is how it works: I install a bunch of bundle games on my computer, and then I play them until I decide whether they stay or whether they go. Hopefully you get some entertainment out of the process.

Let’s get started.

BRIDGE IT (Plus): This is a game where you make bridges. It follows the same mechanics as the last bridge building game I tested. Like... basically, just a different art style, otherwise apparently the same game. I couldn’t even finish the tutorial because every time I clicked the “simulate” button that you need to click to continue the game, the program switched to my desktop as if I had clicked my clock instead. No thanks. GOODBYE.

BRIDGE PROJECT: Virtually the same game, based on the tutorial, as this and the other bridge game. Same fundamental “make a bridge by snapping things on a grid and then running cars across it” gameplay. Not funny like those gifs I see of other, funnier bridge building games. Weird how this is the only game made by this dev, and the other game was the only game made by that dev. My working theory is that there is a small industry of devs who make a bridge game, die, and then try to remake the bridge game, thinking they’ll get it right this time.

They never do, because it’s a game about building bridges.

I didn’t take a screenshot of this one because it looked just like the other one. PASS.

AGENT AWESOME: This game’s sense of humor is “let’s be as referential as humanly possible.” Like, maybe it gets really good later, but the poor initial showing combined with a weird “sort of real time, sort of turn-based, there’s not a lot to it” gameplay isn’t really interesting to me. It’s got a 70% positive rating on Steam, though. If it’s your thing, it’s your thing. It’s not mine. ADIOS.

A FISTFUL OF GUN: I’m a sucker for Westerns, and I’m intrigued by twin-stick shooters, though I don’t like many of them. Turns out I like A Fistful of Gun. A lot. Super cool aesthetic, neat weapons. Biggest issue I had was that I didn’t really understand the controls; the game kinda explains them, but its super minimal UI doesn’t do a great job making things clear.

My Big Game Design Belief is that a game’s controls should be invisible. The barrier between thought and action should be as minimal as possible. I like this game, but I definitely wish I understood how things worked early on. There are a ton of little tweaks that, I think, would have made this game a lot better.

But you know what? I had so much fun I played it for like 30 minutes, and I’m gonna keep playing more. IT LIVES.

A GAME OF DWARVES: Alphabetically, this game was sorted under G, but it was installed in the folder, and I saw it, staring at me, brightly, against a sea of uninstalled titles. I couldn’t resist installing it. Then I ran the game, and I was told “fatal error! this application must exit immediately.” I couldn’t use a mouse to click “okay.” I had to jam “enter.”

I looked on the Steam community discussions for answers, and found this thread, which indicates that the developers went out of business and would not continue supporting the game.

I did eventually get the game to work. What I played was pretty interesting, as management sims go, but I mean... look at that screenshot. The colors don’t blend well, the repeated tiles are a bit too much, the dwarf faces look... not great. That and the fiddly controls made me question if I really wanted to play it. I almost said yes. We PARTED WAYS.

RELIC HUNTERS ZERO: It’s a fun little twin-stick. Free. Not sure why, they probably could’ve made money on this. There’s nothing making me go “wow, this is special,” but it does seem, from what I played, like an exemplary example of the form. BACKLOG.

TUMBLESTONE: Okay, I’m breaking from the norm. I jumped on my Xbox while I was cleaning the apartment in preparation for a move, and I played a couple games there to see if I’d keep them around, or download something else. Tumblestone is a puzzle game. You have to ‘shoot’ three cubes from the bottom of the puzzle space, but you can only eliminate the cubes if they are of the same color. It was fun, but I didn’t see myself sticking with it. I forgot to take a screenshot. BEGONE.

KILLER INSTINCT KOLLECTION: This Xbox title is a fighting game. I still don’t find myself enjoying fighting games. I MOVED ON.

NO TIME TO EXPLAIN: Another Xbox game, this is a platformer that did not feel particularly great to play, but that’s true of all platformers and me. I’m just not that into the genre. IT’S NOT YOU. IT’S ME.

SUPER MEGA BASEBALL: EXTRA INNINGS is an Xbox game about baseball, but it kept throwing menus like this at me, and I don’t swing that way. Get it? A baseball pun. I didn’t play very long because I just wasn’t having a lot of fun, and I get the impression this is best played with friends. None of my friends like baseball. We’re strictly curler fans where I come from. STEE-RIKE.

Right. Back to the PC.

AI: RAMPAGE might be a good game, but I’m a very picky person when it comes to controls. This is a top-down game where forward movement is wherever your cursor is aiming. Also, the main menu is literally just every option available--settings, levels, you name it. One single massive screen. I tried to take a screenshot, but it came out black. NOT MY THING.

AIRSTRIKE HD appears to be a phone game (imagine how big that pause button in the lower right of the screenshot is on a 27″ monitor) made in unity where you fly back and forth dropping bombs on a civilian populace. You might drop them on more deserving folks than civilians later in the game, but I was so busy not having fun that I didn’t stick around to try out. There aren’t enough steam reviews to give the game a proper score, but most of them are negative. CRASH AND BURN. 

ARMORED FIST 3 is presumably a sequel to Armored Fist 2 and its maximum resolution is 640x480. I picked this one up because it was cheaper to buy the Novalogic complete bundle on sale with the money I’d earned from selling trading cards than it was to buy all the Delta Force games that I wanted. The controls are strange; I’m suspicious of games that tell you to use the arrow keys, but when it asked me to switch to F9 to change my camera, then didn’t tell me how to switch back, I knew we wouldn’t be getting along. Why this tank simulator from 1999 doesn’t use more modern controls or resolutions, I’m not sure. The reviews are “mostly positive” right now on Steam, but I don’t think I can enjoy this. TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.

AVENCAST, according to Wikipedia, was made by a developer that “had little or no formal education in game development field.” It took them four years to make, and they initially set out to create a Diablo clone. This game does not really control like Diablo at all. It also spends a great deal of time in menus like the above. Too many words, not enough “go do stuff.”

It’s not a bad game, though. Like, there’s nothing here that makes me go “ugh, wow, this is terrible.” It just doesn’t pique my curiosity. It doesn’t make me want more. The controls aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either. The premise isn’t that interesting--it literally starts out by telling you that this is the story of the greatest mage ever, or something like that, effectively killing the stakes--it just kind of feels old and uninteresting to me.

This is coming from someone who likes the Gothic games. What I’m saying is, your mileage may vary, and I almost kept Avencast around, until I decided that, quite frankly, I probably won’t be spending much time with it. Besides, mages are so much less interesting than rogues.

AX:EL’s menus make no sense. No, really, look at this. What does it mean? What does any of it mean? There is a ship, but what kind of game is it? I have no idea. The tooltips aren’t that helpful. One button says something like “patrol,” and if you hover over it, the tooltip says “patrol mode.”

Anyways, turns out there’s a campaign in here, if you dig long enough. Briefly, I suspected this was some kind of multiplayer only game. It is not. There is a campaign. It involves dogfighting. Turns out this is basically an Ace Combat style game, which is neat, but it is easy, there’s no tutorial, and the assets look like something I could make, and I’m not an artist at all.

AX:EL wasn’t unfun from what I played, but it puts up so many barriers to the gameplay that it can be needlessly frustrating. SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY.

BLOODSPORTS.TV sounded cool until it asked me if I had ever played in the “top down hero game” category or somethin like that. I tentatively clicked yes. IT’S A MOBA.

BLOOP RELOADED is just Bloop with nicer graphics. And writing like the above. You drag lines between things and make liquids go down those lines into the things. The end. Quoth the raven, NEVERMORE.

CALIFORNIUM: Imagine PKD’s walking simulator. Mysterious enough to keep me going. Has people to interact with, to a small degree. Would I like a game that actually has mechanical depth and complexity? Sure. But... I’m gonna finish Californium. THIS IS GOOD STUFF.

CHRONICLES OF MYSTERY: THE SCORPIO RITUAL has nothing to do with the Xbox One X. It is a point and click game. I’ve never seen the appeal of these games. You just click on stuff until people do what you want them to, or you do weird things to solve puzzles. Old Man Murray explained this at length so I don’t have to.

I love when Steam’s game description character limit gets overrun. INTO THE FLAMES.

DEFENDERS OF ARDANIA gave me a black screen and wouldn’t quit when I tried to alt tab or anything. I tried lookin for solutions, but found none. I CAST YOU OUT.

20 games. 3 survived. 17 were condemned to purgatory.