#fries first into the quicksand

[poppy-metal]

hmhmhmmm how do we feel about being patrick’s secret girlfriend-not-really-girlfriend? like, when you guys first start “dating”, he asks that you keep it private, and you’re fine with that— you aren’t exactly fond of having people all up in your business either. but eventually it starts to feel like he just…doesn’t want people to know the two of you are involved with each other at all. and at first you push all feelings of doubt down, tell yourself that it’s not that big of a deal, that you’re lucky to even have a chance with him in the first place. you aren’t okay with being a secret though. you want people to know that you’re taken, that he’s yours and you’re his. you want all the gross pda and mushy dates. it’s bad enough that you barely see him anymore with him having gone pro and whatnot. you’d never say that to his face though, never that. you’ll never make yourself look that desperate. until. until, until, until. until you see what can only best be described as a horde of googly-eyed girls surrounding your not-quite-boyfriend, a million questions thrown at him per second. he doesn’t see you. how could he in all this chaos? the topic of dating comes up.

“is it true? that you have a girlfriend, i mean.” you subconsciously pray that he says yes, that he shuts down any chances of any girl other than you getting to be with him. instead he hesitates, and only responds to say “nah. you interested?” with that stupidly charming smile. your heart breaks. there’s no way this could get any worse, you think. you shouldn’t stay for a second longer. it feels as though your entire lower body is paralyzed, though. you can’t leave despite how badly you want to. the same girl— you assume— speaks again, saying something along the lines of “what about that one girl you’re talking to? what’s her name again?” she rattles off one, two, three names similar to yours, but not quite right. she’s talking about you. “uh…she’s a sweet girl, don’t get me wrong— but i wouldn’t say we’re a thing.“ patrick responds with ease. he doesn’t even seem guilty. oh. oh oh oh. you want the world to open up and swallow you whole. you want to sink into quicksand. you can’t even get “a thing”? that’s like, the bare fucking minimum. now you seriously can’t bare to hear anymore. not without crying. if this is what a relationship is supposed to be, you’d rather not be in one at all.

just a silly thought!

cries it probably goes sm like this

and then you block him again. its not the first time you've blocked him over a fight, but its the first time you've been committed to it. you dont unblock him, and you change your route the next day to avoid seeing him. you miss him though. its an ache in your chest. your friends will tell you you're better off, that he was just fucking around with you, but it wont make the hurt lessen. they dont know patrick like you do. they dont know that he bites his bottom lip when he finds something you said funny like he's holding in a giggle, they dont know how warm he is or how it feels to be held by him and rocked back and forth. they dont know how it feels to have his fingers tracing patterns on your back, tucking your hair back for you. they dont know how his voice softens and lowers when he's being gentle with you. they dont know how he has your favorite snacks memorized and your favorite order and he always speaks for you in the drive-thru because he knows what you want and he always hand feeds you his fries. they dont know how good it feels with his hands in your hair and his lips on your skin and his cock inside you - thick and stretching. they dont know the things he whispers in your ear when he'd close to coming, the way he grips you closer like he wants to melt inside you and stay there forever. they dont know he likes to lay his head on your lap and have his hair played with. they dont know you're in love with him and you dont know how to not be.

you end up seeing patrick a week later. he's on TV and he's holding the passenger side of his door open for a young woman. she's smiling shyly and he's grinning at her and you just think about how a month ago he fucked you in the backseat of that car - legs splayed as he gripped your ass and bounced you on and off his dick. how hot and steamy it got and how he'd licked the sweat from your throat and sucked your skin into his greedy mouth as he fucked you, how he groaned as you clamped around him like a vice and said "fuck, i think i love you -" right before he came.

obviously just something he'd said in the heat of the moment. obviously it meant nothing. you turn the TV off and debate unblocking him just to pour out all the hurt you feel. make him see how he's ruined you. but you know that'll do no good. he wont care.

you think you'll try your hand at moving on yourself. didn't he an art have an argument not too long ago? a falling out? wasn't art nursing his own broken heart from that tashi girl? maybe you could help eachother.

(what you dont know is that patrick does care. that he's spent everyday talking himself out of making a new number just to text you on, that he can barely get off when he's with other women because they dont feel like you do, they dont talk to him the way you do - he just feels sick after, like he cheated and hes the worst person in the world and he just wants to come crawling back to you and press his face into your stomach and tell you hes sorry. hes sorry tashi fucked him up so bad and he just doesn't want to trust again and hes sorry he's taking it out on you and hes sorry he thinks hes in love with you and he can't do anything with that love because his love isn't enough - it ruins people. it ruined art and it ruined tashi and he doesn't want it to ruin you. hes not built to be a boyfriend. all hes good at is hitting a ball with a racket)

[philipkindreddickhead]

100 Fiction Books to Read Before You Die

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks

The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Passing by Nella Larson

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion

The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Power by Naomi Alderman

The Street by Ann Petry

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskill

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Small Island by Andrea Levy

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

The Price of Salt/Carol by Patricia Highsmith

Room by Emma Donoghue

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Wise Blood by Flannery O Conner

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsey

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

House of Incest by Anaïs Nin

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Corregidora by Gayl Jones

Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Democracy by Joan Didion

Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates

The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O Connor

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I Must Betray You be Ruta Sepetys

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

City of Beasts by Isabel Allende

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

The First Bad Man by Miranda July

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston

Disobedience by Naomi Alderman

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

The Narrows by Ann Petry

The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir

Under the Sea by Rachel Carson

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones

Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

@gaydalf @kishipurrun @unsentimentaltranslator @algolagniaa @stariduks @hippodamoi

[kyber-crystal]

all i needed || benji dunn

summary: you’ve always cared for benji, but it takes him teetering on the edge of death for you to realize how much you truly loved him

words: ~2.7k

warnings: some angst, mentions of violence, two oblivious pining idiots

a/n: HI HELLO! finished writing this while sick bc i wanted to get it out of the way before i got my wisdom tooth out. to anon that requested this, please note that i haven’t seen rogue nation in FOREVER so forgive me if some details seem off! i had to go back and look at the script to make sure i got the general timeline right. ALSO if the time skips seem weird…ignore that LOL. i tried to modify some scenes (btw any and all movie quotes included are not MINE, creds go to MI:5). the first part of this is pretty benji pov heavy—i’ve never tried this before 😅

Benji’s not hopelessly in love with you. Definitely not.

“You know I’d spend the rest of my life with you if I could,” you had drunkenly admitted to him one night in a bar somewhere in Eastern Europe. “Just you and me, forever…sounds like a dream.”

If only it wasn’t.

He doesn’t get attached. He knows better than to get attached. But it’s entirely his own doing; he tells himself—you’ve been glued at the hip since the day you first met. Ever since you swore to him that you’d never let him go, he knew he would be in deep.

Now, he was sinking…fast. And he hated quicksand.

(He definitely hasn’t almost gotten caught in some before. The only reason why he didn’t drown in sediment was because you were there to save the day.)

Casablanca was far too hot for his liking, but he’s standing in the scorching heat anyway because you’re here. You effortlessly glide through the glittering water like a mermaid and he can’t help but stare a bit.

Somehow, you sense his presence and emerge from the pool, dripping wet. “What are you doing out here? It’s 100 degrees and you look like you’ve been deep-fried.”

“I needed some sun,” he responded quickly. (Great excuse, he internally smacks himself.) “Need a towel?”

“Oh, yeah.” You flash him a gleaming smile and take the fluffy towel from his hands, quickly drying yourself off. “Thanks a bunch.”

“The sun is treating you pretty nicely,” he tries to compliment. “You look great.”

Your face lights up at this. “Really?”

“You always do.”

Doing a little spin, you smile again, “Thank you!”

“Man,” Ethan chuckles as you push the sliding glass doors open and walk back inside the house, “it’s almost painful to watch.”

“Quit it,” Benji mutters. “I don’t want to hear any of your nonsense.”

“You are aware that what you’re doing won’t get you anywhere.

“My personal life is none of your business.”

“Except it is,” the agent grins, “since most of the time that you’re not busy working is spent talking about her.”

Benji opens and closes his mouth, but no words come out. He knows he’s right.

“But it’s funny,” Ethan continues, “because she can’t see it. You’d think that a woman that smart would be able to tell, but she can’t.”

“Then let’s keep it that way. This conversation is over,” he feels his face burning a bright red that he knows has nothing to do with being sunburnt. “Agent Dunn, out.”

“She’s going to be the death of you one day,” he hears Ethan call out as he turns around and walks inside. “Watch your step.”

Benji isn’t the jealous type. Definitely not.

But all that registers with him when he glances in the rearview mirror at you and Brandt is fifty shades of green. You’d just finished laughing at something he had said, and envy spills over him like boiling hot oil. You were supposed to be laughing with him and him only. He told the better jokes (right? Right?) and you spent far more time together. So who was winning, really?

But nothing he tells himself seems to make him feel better.

Noticing Benji’s clenched jaw and tight grip on the wheel, Luther decides to break the tension. “That was a damn good stunt you pulled back there.”

“Effortless.”

“Wait, Benji…” you pause mid conversation. His grip immediately loosens the moment you open your mouth to speak. “Please tell me you still have a copy of that disk.”

He holds up the drive. “Yup, still got it.”

“Where to now?” Brandt asks as he hands the handcuff key through the glass to Ethan.

“London.”

It’s daybreak when you board the plane to Heathrow. Nobody on the team is even trying to hide the tiredness on their faces.

Even with heavy dark circles under your eyes, you still managed to look so beautiful, Benji thought to himself. He didn’t understand how you did it—you could run on twenty minutes of sleep and still walk straight.

“Let me help you with that,” Brandt offered and you gave him a grateful look as he put your duffel bag into the overhead bins.

Benji held his tongue (miraculously enough).

You sat down in your seat and stretched your arms in the air, letting out a loud yawn. “I can’t do this today. I want to just…give up and do nothing.”

“Can’t we all,” he replied.

You made eye contact with him and motioned to the empty seat on your left.

“Do you want me to—” he began, and you nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”

Almost immediately, your head lolled against his shoulder. You looked up and offered him a sleepy smile, and he swore he’d self-destruct at that exact moment.

“Tired?”

“Very,” you yawned again. “I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours.”

“Then get some rest,” he squeezed your shoulder. “I’ll let you know when we land.”

You hummed in reply and allowed your eyes to flutter shut. “You’re my favorite, Benji Dunn. I hope you know that.”

“I do,” he murmurs after you’ve fallen asleep.

He watched you in a trance-like silence, your chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. You were still wearing the tan woven bracelet on your left wrist—it had become battered and stained from prolonged wear, but you refused to take it off because he made it for you. One ATV ride, two hours, and three shots later, that was what he’d come up with as your latest “souvenir”.

His heart aches in more ways than one. Here he was following you around like a hopeless romantic and yet, you were completely oblivious to all his signals. And he doesn’t have a single clue as to why you stick around at all—with your beauty that he believed could rival Venus herself, you could have anyone you wanted. Hell, you could have Brandt in an instant if you tried.

But you insisted on sticking by him—the exact reason, he probably won’t ever figure out—and he’s grateful for it. Even though he feels as if you deserve better…a lot better.

“As promised, I have a job for you,” you heard Lane’s distant voice over the phone as he spoke to Ethan. “And for the sake of your friend, you’ll do it.”

“I’m listening.”

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring me the unlocked disc by midnight tonight. Now say the words.”

Ethan paused.

“Say the words,” Lane repeated.

“...I accept.”

“I knew you would.”

The call ended and you went back to fiddling with the bracelet on your wrist, trying to fight against the growing lump in your throat.

“Y/N…”

“Ethan, if you’re going to tell me to stop moping around, then I don’t want to hear it.”

“No, that’s not it. You need to listen to what I’m about to tell you.” He sounded more serious this time. “We need to get him back. And to do that…”

“...We need to unlock the disc,” you finished. “And to do that…”

“We have to take the Prime Minister…”

“Wait, think about this for just a minute—”

“It’s the only way to get Benji back.”

“Just think. It’s exactly what Lane wants us to do.”

“Which is why it HAS TO HAPPEN!” he raised his voice. You swallowed hard, and, noticing your sullen expression, he softened his tone. “This is how we beat Lane. This is how we make everything right.”

You could still see the image of Benji’s unconscious body being dragged away—it was fresh in your mind as if it happened only a minute ago. “Yeah. I know.”

If he noticed the longing look in your eyes, he didn’t say anything about it, but he could tell you cared about Benji much more than you were letting on.

“I’m going to find him, and he’ll be alright,” Ethan added after several minutes of silence had passed. “I’m not letting anything happen to him for your sake.”

“And why am I not coming with you?” Your blood began to boil.

“Because it’s not safe, Y/N. I care about your safety, and if both you and Benji want to live, I have to go alone.”

“That’s such bullshit.”

“You need to trust me on this one.”

You grumbled something under your breath. “This is the last time I’m letting you throw your ass on the line with barely any backup.”

He grinned. “Ma’am yes ma’am.”

Meanwhile, Benji had just stirred awake to see a dark figure walking over to him, something heavy in hand.

Maybe Ethan was right, he realized. You would be the death of him someday. And that seemed particularly likely now.

“Where is the disk?” Lane questioned.

“You’re looking at it. I am the disk,” Ethan replied, voice cold, “I memorized it. All two point four billion in numbered accounts. If that vest goes off, you get nothing. And without this money you’re nothing. Without me you’re nothing.”

He stared at Lane through the screen, watching him grow more irritated. The timer continued to count down

“Right now you’re thinking it’s a bluff. I’d never let my friends die. I couldn’t possibly memorize the entire disk. There’s only one way to be sure. Let Benji go.”

Lane stood and paced around the room before finally pressing the button, stopping the timer at just :03. Benji and Ilsa let out loud. long sighs of relief.

Vinter and his goons stepped closer.

“If they come any closer, shoot me.”

Ilsa smiled and slid her seat next to him, planting the barrel of her gun against his ribs.

“Stop. STOP,” Lane demanded, and Vinter and the others stopped what they were doing,

“Remember when I said some day you were going to take things too far...and that’s me speaking—not him,” Benji reminded Ethan.

“The only way this ends is you and me, Lane. Face-to-face. Only this time I won’t be locked in a glass box or half-dead on some highway.” Ethan leaned closer to the camera lens. “You want your money…the bone doctor’s gonna have to beat it out of me... Now let Benji go!”

Finally… “One three nine…”

Benji looks down at the keypad on his chest and nervously punches in a series of numbers. The light on the timer dies and the five-point harness springs open. He sheds the vest as discreetly as he can, wrapping it in his overcoat.

“Go.”

“Ethan—“

He slid a phone across the table to him, “Y/N’s waiting with Luther and Brandt. Go.”

It was far too cold in the office building. Add on the fact that you’d been in there for what felt like hours, and you felt like you were being tortured. You knew Ethan always kept his promises, but were still unsure if Benji would be coming back alive at all.

You had bitten and picked at your nails until you drew blood. The stinging sensation had stopped bothering you a while ago. So did the crimson stains on your skin.

But then you heard a lock click and a loud ringing noise, and suddenly, he’s standing there. Panting and sweating and looking burnt out, but very much alive.

You froze in place for a second, unsure of what to do.

“You’re real, right?” you asked, hesitation in your voice as you gingerly cupped his face in your hands. “Please tell me this is real. I don’t want to wake up and not see you in front of me.”

“It’s real. I'm real,” Benji reassured you as he gripped your forearms. That was all the confirmation you needed before you threw your arms around his neck, hugging him as tight as you possibly could. You were trembling, holding on so strongly because you were so afraid that he’d slip away if you let go.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” you repeated over and over. You pressed your lips to his, hard, before pulling back to stare at him again. His cheeks turn pink as he barely has time to react and kiss you back. “I’m so glad you’re alive, I don’t know what I would’ve done if you—“

“Did you—“ he stammered, suddenly at a loss for words. “Did you just—“

“You know I loved you all along,” you explained breathlessly. “It just took me a while to realize the fact.”

“Well, I love you too.”

One of his hands steers the wheel, while the other holds yours and absentmindedly rubs circles into your palm. You’re sipping your ultra-specific go-to coffee order that nobody—unless they were Benji—would bother to remember. It feels so normal—like something that has been routine for a long time.

The team tries their hardest to pretend not to notice the newfound closeness. (“But these idiots have been like this for ages, they only just realized it. Let them be,” Luther had said. He shared the team’s singular brain cell 50% of the time, which meant that he was always the first one to catch on to things. Ilsa shared the other 50%, she was very cunning.) But it’s hard when they almost crash because Benji keeps glancing at you out of the corner of his eye.

It’s hard to get a moment alone when 90% of your job consists of you jumping as a group from place to place. So you’re grateful for the few in between that you’re lucky enough to steal.

This time, you found yourselves in a quiet townhouse somewhere in Strasbourg. Ethan wasn’t snoring tonight—maybe it was because Ilsa was next to him this time. Luther was upstairs, probably filing and cleaning out mission reports with a croissant you’d bought him. He never slept, and he never made a sound.

The place was quiet, the only thing you could hear being the chirping crickets outside and the quiet crackling of the fireplace in front of you. You hadn’t felt this kind of peace in months.

“It’s cold at this hour, isn’t it? Meanwhile I thought France would be a bit nicer this time of year.”

Benji comes out from the kitchen holding two mugs of tea, as well as a blanket around himself. The amber flames illuminate his face in a way that makes him look almost angelic, and your heart skips a beat.

He sits down on the plush rug right next to you and offers you one of the mugs, and you accept it gratefully. After taking several long sips, you set it down on the small coffee table in front of you and lean back against the couch.

“You’re staring,” you say suddenly.

“Sorry…can’t help it,” he replies with a sheepish grin, then holds part of the blanket out—an invitation. You shift closer, allowing him to pull you in and wrap the rest of the soft fleece around you. “You’re very…breathtaking.”

This elicits a small laugh from you, but you can feel your cheeks heat up. There’s something different in the air—maybe it’s because those feelings are finally out in the open, or maybe because this moment feels so domestic and it’s both unfamiliar but comforting at the same time.

“Y/N…”

“Hmm?” You’re starting to drift off at this point, getting comfortable in his presence.

“I always wondered, you know…”

“Wondered what?”

“How we’re always ending up together—why you decided to choose me,” Benji admits.

The words come out of your mouth so easily. “What do you mean? You’re my person, Benji. I looked at you and I just knew you were right. You had to be.”

“I don’t get it. I thought you and Brandt—“

You shook your head and smiled, tracing patterns on his leg. “Don’t be silly. He was actually—he was the one who made me realize I was in love with you.”

“Wait, what?”

“Oh, Benji,” you laughed, “don’t tell me you were jealous.”

“O-of course not!” he spluttered, face turning bright red, “All I want is for you to be happy!”

“Well…you know how I told you you’re my favorite, right?”

“Uh huh…”

“That hasn’t changed, you know. I love the Benji that knows how I like my coffee, and the Benji that carries me to bed when I’m too drunk, sick, or injured. And the Benji that always has my back. Especially the Benji that sits in front of the fireplace with me at 3am because he knows I enjoy his company more than the 387 crickets outside.”

He presses a kiss to your temple in response, unable to stop the corners of his lips from turning up in a grin.

“You know I’ve always got your back.”

tags: @kenobismullet @ilsastrenchcoat @voguesir @fl0ating @lady-elena-adeline @the-multiverse-of-fandoms @joyfullyswimmingface 

[daryascurse]

TROPETEMBER 1: "Love at First Sight"

♥ 𝘈𝘬𝘪 𝘏𝘢𝘺𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘸𝘢 𝘹 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳

pov : second person, she/her pronouns, no physical description; ~pre-canon Chainsaw Man ☆ rating + tags: SFW: rated PG13 for cursing and violence, grossness as per the CSM universe, love at first sight, fluff ☆ word count: ~2.4k ☆ author's note: welcome to the first day of my Tropetember event! no promises that everything will be prompt daily but my goal is to complete them all.. eventually! :) ☆ ao3

Your first day working with Public Safety had been terrible; even worse in retrospect as you piecemeal the day together, lying half-draped across your dining room chair and aimlessly drawing streaked images in ketchup with Family Burger fries.

The morning?

The morning, you had dropped your pen, failed to recover it, and instead used the narrow end of a highlighter to mark down anything important. Naturally every note became thoroughly, immediately, illegible. The morning, you had met tens of new coworkers whose names you tried to burn into memory. All but a handful are already forgotten. The morning, spent on a facility tour with a small cohort of other silent new employees. The morning, you had accidentally locked yourself in the bathroom that only the most frantic jiggling of the door could unstick.

You were contemplating tendering your resignation by that point.

“This sucks,” you heard someone in the group mumble during the training videos. Thus far you’d been inclined to agree.

In the morning, you had first seen him, too; just a hand raking through the underside of hair swept up into a top-knot, a middle finger bending to hook through the elastic hair tie and the shift of a starched collar as he shrugged in some response.

“Do you have a lighter?” was what you had heard as you walked past in hasty tandem with the tour guide, and you almost drew your hand to your purse. In that moment you would have given anything to that gentle voice. You don’t even often carry a lighter.

And now you think of the afternoon and groan, breath condensing into the table and ketchup spattering like blood as you throw your hand down.

Fuck.

“Fuck!” came the scream of another Devil Hunter. Her convenience store lunch slipped from her hands. The bag burst as it broke across the street and your own remnants dropped seconds before.

“What is that?” you breathed, eyes wide as the saffron yellow, gelatinous thing engulfed another street sign, the pole bending forward and red triangle refracting light across the road as it melted. It convulsed, the form parting in something that could best be described as opening its fucking mouth, revealing decaying black innards in the churning mass beyond.

“Quicksand Devil,” she said, and you looked wildly to her, as she spread her hands helplessly. You had recognized her from the morning tour, another novice straight out of completing the intake paperwork. What was her name?

Even now as you frown at your Family Burger you can’t remember it.

The Devil’s sludge had splashed heavily through the windows of a 7-Eleven. You looked back at her and found her eyes wide, still stuck to you.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Do something!” she said, voice growing more shrill with panic.

“Do what something?” you asked again, even as your hands patted desperately empty pockets. No weapons strapped to your back or up your sleeve like the more experienced Devil Hunters. All that rose under your fingers were the useless coins left after paying for this wasted lunch.

“Don’t you have any Devil contracts yet?”

You shook your head. “I’m new.”

God, I wanna go home.

She grimaced. The freckles on her face seemed to rise to prominence with just how pale her face grew, eyes luminous and fixed on the Quicksand Devil. It lurched down the alley towards the two of you, some boggy rotten stench wafting nauseatingly with it. It made your eyes water, and you lifted your arm over your nose to desperately block the putridity.

The Devil recoiled at your sudden action and rose high into the air. It made some grating guttural screech, like nails echoing down a chalkboard. You took a step back in alarm.

It twisted and began to turn down, angled straight at the two of you.

“Don’t antagonize it, fuck!”

“I’m not trying to?”

The other new Devil Hunter only screamed in hysterical laughter. “I want to go home!” she yelped, echoing your own panicked thoughts.

I’m fucking quitting.

And then came back another voice from behind - “Kon.”

This voice was strong, sharp, bidding forth an enormous pair of snarling jaws that erupted from the air around you, eliciting another scream from the girl. The pure shockwave through the wind knocked the air clean out of you, and you doubled over, clutching a painfully empty stomach. The Quicksand Devil still spiraled down to your bodies, as these terrible teeth bared, snapped open to bisect it.

“Move, move!” the girl screamed as your fingers knotted into each other and you struggled to stand upright again.

But he stepped forward first, the outstretched hand the first to enter your field of vision – and you looked up - clean, groomed, square nails, up to the pale wrist highlighted with tense tendons, crisp black suit jacket – and up. You weren’t looking at the Devil anymore, at that putrid incoming death twisting down between the jaws of a giant fox head, but at the hair swept up at the napes of his neck. Up to a top knot that seemed so instantly familiar, as it spiked up with strands caught in the winds of motion.

He was standing before you, other hand reaching back with broad fingers for the katana strapped along his shoulder blades, and in an instant you remembered what the training videos had so childishly laid out on a static-fuzzed screen. The little animation of a jeering Devil had slipped closer, closer, to a cartoon Hunter. The figure waited patiently for it to come within reach before slashing out with a knight-in-shining-armor beam of onomatopoeia and special effects to slay the Devil, head rolling with X’s for eyes as everyone cheered.

Then there had been the follow-up version with frowning emoticons where the Devil Hunter had moved too slowly, arm moving out of time, and the Devil bit the little cartoon head clean off with a fountain of blood in its place.

The man with the top knot gripped the katana handle.

“Steady,” he said, and it took a second to realize he was talking to you. “I’ve got this, I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

These moments as tar rained down could have been his last, and here he was comforting you. Your clammy hands relaxed from your abdomen, and you watched yourself reach out, reach for him. In that instant, there was another roar of wind as those fox jaws snapped clean through the Quicksand Devil.

The Devil’s decapitation was gruesome. The tarred sludge those teeth burst into popped like a sickly balloon. It came down hot, rancid, and your empty stomach convulsed in an unsatisfied urge to dry heave.

“Disgusting,” came a growling voice somewhere from above. You agreed.

“You don’t want to eat?” the top knot Devil Hunter called sardonically up at the teeth dripping with black.

“Disgusting,” the voice repeated, a shadow slowly fading as the sun seemed to make its way back between the buildings into the alley.

You remembered the other Devil Hunter only when she emerged out of a doorway, out of harm’s way and clean of the sludge. She coughed.

It made you break your gaze from him at last. Like the snapping of a cobweb, he slowly drew away as well, hand relaxing down from his grip on the katana as he stepped forward to examine the mess of Devil remnants. You walked towards her with shaky knees.

“I know him,” the girl said under her breath, her eyes narrowed on the man with the top knot. “Oh, they mentioned him during orientation. Remember? He’s the best, he’s one of the best, Aki Hayakawa.”

He turned back then, wiping the back of his hand against his mouth, smearing that rotted blackness across his starkly pale skin.

“The Fox Devil only enters contracts with those it finds attractive,” she had whispered. “He’s hot.”

He’s perfect, is what you had to keep yourself from saying.

Aki had, with those eyes of stone, not unkindly sent you back to the office, told you to clean up in the locker room. He had stayed behind and you heard him tell the other girl to start cleaning; she had howledin dismay.

The late afternoon went a little differently. And this was…

You lift a French fry under the harsh light. The afternoon had been better than the morning.

You had walked with determination down the hall, clutching papers in freshly washed hands hard enough to crease, and in front of a window you had seen him again. But this time you saw him properly, and even thinking now with a fistful of cold French fries filling your vision, you can see the green of his eyes as the sun cuts across his face, amber light setting a portion of his skin aglow.

And you had swallowed, finding your throat dry.

“Who the hell does she think she is?” someone had muttered behind you in a manner clearly meant to be overheard. There’s a tittering sound of agreement, and all the fears of earlier hours began to beat in your ears, so loud it became hard to know if the words came from something churning in your mind, or other lips in the hallway. The events of lunchtime had spread faster than you’d imagined they would.

“He stepped in front of her?”

“She went up to it alone?

“He’s so good.”

“Aki’s just such a good person.”

“Shouldn’t she know to be armed? What are they teaching those fucking rookies?”

That other novice Devil Hunter from lunch looked at you in silence cowardice, her only sound the snapping of readjusting her barrettes. Aki had fought. She had fled. You had merely frozen, that worst option of all, about to be nothing left but a sad face emoticon on next year’s training video. Just as Aki could have been if he had moved too slow to your defense.

And was he circulating the rumors too? He was watching at the end of the hallway, his footsteps stilled as you approached.

You clenched your hands, squeezed in fists and crinkling the paper.

Perhaps the best approach would be to be defensive, hostile, here in these halls where polite smiles get you nowhere and the crisp professionalism only extends as far as blazers buttoned over slumped shoulders. You felt those eyes burn on you, and you steadied your grip as you walked towards him down the hall. Yes, you would steel yourself. You hadn’t asked for this Aki Hayakawa to come rescue you. It was as much his fault for being down that road at the same time you were. And who does he think he is right now, impassive and waiting for you to come to him?

If he has a problem, like everyone else has a problem - then, well, it’s a problem.

So that’s how you had walked down the hallway, prepared to speak with a biting tongue, but Aki had spoken first.

“Hello.”

The word comes soft. It’s softer than you’d expected. His tone is gentle, and your bluster goes out the window. You had prepared for battle, not for kindness. And your face flushed hot, blood beating behind your ears.

But there was no time to regroup when Aki looked right at you. And you stared back, shamelessly, in an instant memorizing his face within the framed window light. His eyelashes caught in the sun, casting spiking shadows across his cheekbones, an echo of the hair sticking up from the back of his head. His lips pressed together for a moment, the corners of his mouth tight, and then he let out a soft puff of breath.

“It’s your first day here, right?”

You nodded, opened your mouth, and words didn’t come.

Aki waited.

“You…” It felt lame to say you saved me, so you swallowed and tried again. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” he said, as if he knew the words you had choked down. “You can’t die on your first day.”

“Well. They do say you’re a good person,” you said.

Aki frowned – a gesture that wrinkled his nose, his eyes at last breaking their confident hold.

“I don’t think any of us are good people anymore.”

Your lips twisted, but Aki wasn’t smiling.

“I think saving someone’s life counts,” you said. “I think it makes you a good person.”

Aki hesitated and shrugged. “I don’t want to watch anyone else die,” he said, as if it were just that simple.

You pursed your lips, and looked past him. The papers felt too stiff in your hands. Eyes were on you from the cubicles behind. And Aki stood there still, for some reason not moving any further down the hall.

The words you had swallowed, all the frightened emotions of the day, came back in a burst, a second wind of bravado. You angled your body back to him.

“Do you remember the training videos you had to watch? If you remember your own first day. Or, I mean, if you even had to watch training videos when you started. I don’t know how long you’ve been working here.”

Aki opened his mouth. You saw, and kept speaking.

“Anyway. There were these animations we watched this morning. The Devil Hunter character looked like one of old British fairy tale knights, with the clunky armor, and he had a little sword like it, too. I didn’t really get how it would work in real life. I didn’t know what to do when I saw a Devil. But you were like that knight. You – you saved me, you were my knight. My knight in shining armor. Um. Or something.”

The spirit left you with the wind, your lungs tightening as your sentences rambled on to a stammering, embarrassing conclusion, but that’s when Aki did it as you nodded your head and muttered, “anyway,” and scampered down the hall clutching papers like your life depended on it.

He smiled at last.

And that’s how the evening crept on. Every time you looked at Aki you caught his eyes already on you. It’s instinct, the way you promptly looked away, flushing hot again with fingers shaking. And Aki never averted his eyes. The last hours of that nightmare first work day melting into a beautiful dream.

You think of him now, and feel your lips turn in a smile again.

You were not prepared for this. None of this is what you signed up for with the Devil Hunters. And for what it’s worth, at this point, you don’t know what you had been expecting. But somewhere along the way today, with each piece of Aki that came across your path and left him standing dazzling before you, it became something worth signing up for.

Because –

“Oh,” you say out loud to yourself. “Oh god damn it. I’m in love.”

Ketchup spatters across the table again as you spin a cold fry in the air. Maybe you won’t quit after all.

♥

[hp-fanfic-archive]

Harry/Ron Fluff Masterlist | Works With Less Than 5k Words

find the masterlist directory here

last updated: 07/30/24 | links last checked: 07/30/24

*A Crown of Lilac Fingertips by wickersnap [T, 3k]

When they’d shaken hands on the train and Harry had pulled back with a bright, grass green imprint on his hand, he had gasped, excited, and asked Ron what it was. At thirteen years old green becomes lilac, and at fourteen lilac becomes red. At seventeen it's both, and they wouldn't have it any other way.

*a mother's love by playitagain [T, 2k]

Molly stumbles upon her boys sharing a bed after a long day of training.

A Little Like Always by GoldenTruth813 [T, 1k]

Ron's always been the most important thing to Harry and he always will be.

*a real thunderbolt by wheezy weasley [T, 4k]

“Who said you were leaving?” Ron questions. “I think you deserve a bit of a break, sure—honestly, mate, if I thought I could get you to leave for a while, I would make it happen, but I know you’re not going to let the rest of the world clean itself up without your help. I’m just suggesting getting some sleep first. After all, you’ve been through the most, out of everyone here. I say you deserve the rest.” “No, I—” Harry finds it difficult, putting it all into words. “I haven’t got the right,” he settles on, a moment later. “People died, Ron. I didn’t.” “Didn’t you?” the war is over, but that doesn't mean they're done.

*Adventures in Potion-Making by static_abyss [T, 3k]

Ron smells like broomstick handle polish and the oddly generic shampoo scent that Harry's been used to all his life, something clean and soapy, indistinct and easily overlooked. Though Harry doesn't only think of broomstick handle polish and generic shampoo when Ron's around. It's a combination of things, like fried eggs at breakfast and the scent of roasted sausages, treacle tart at The Burrow, and the crisp linen bedsheets of the Gryffindor dorms. It's the citrusy cologne Fred and George give Ron on his birthday, the way Harry inhales deeply when Ron wears it the first time.

*Brass Ring by Innibis [T, 3k]

Harry has dating issues

*but I still come back to you by CreatePeaceFromChaos [T, 3k]

Ron Weasley and Harry Potter were best friends, practically attached at the hip. It was rare for anyone in Hogwarts to see one of them without the other close by. They were close, too; closer than most, and Harry was the only person Ron would ever willingly shared food with. Was it any surprise that practically everyone thought they were dating? (Or: Five times people thought Ron and Harry were dating, and the one time someone thought they weren't.)

Cold Floors and Quicksand by Memori_wanderis [G, 1k]

"For the third time, the sound of furniture being moved in the living room woke Ron up."

Felix Felicis by UnusuallyZealousBurgette [G, 1k]

Harry and Ron have been dancing around each other for five whole years. Maybe all they need to get together is a bit of liquid luck.

Follow the Butterflies by DragonHoardsBooks [G, 3k]

“Why did it have to be spiders?” Ron moaned. “Why couldn’t we follow the butterflies?” Harry privately agreed with his best friend, but if there was anything Hogwarts had taught him, then that if he didn’t do something, no one would. “I promise the next time we have to follow anything, it will be butterflies.”

*friends just sleep in other beds by intertwiningwords [G, 1k]

harry has nightmares. ron helps.

Fuck It by me_i_and_this_guy [G, 1k]

Ron never thought it would end up like this when he first started helping Harry with his nightmares.

Harry and Ron and Yule Ball by Lillymoid [T, 1k]

One-shot: Ron asks Harry to the Yule Ball.

*i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) by hotcuppa [G, 2k]

harry can’t sleep, and ron comforts him the best way he knows how.

i'll keep you safe. by celinalia [G, 1k]

harry is nervous about competing in the triwizard tournament. ron is trying to calm him down (and lowkey just as nervous as harry)

*it’s you, the wash of starlight, the old paradox. by blessed_image [G, 1k]

They look at eachother properly, it was sad, maybe a little lame, but it wasn’t too early or too late, and perhaps they could work something out. Something just for the two of them, something no one else could come between, something only they could have a say in- because that’s how it could’ve been, all of these years, they could’ve had it all.

*late night conversations by quiescents [T, 1k]

Harry realizes that best friends can make the best boyfriends too.

Mushrooms by Pumperkins [G, 1k]

Ron and Harry go for a walk and stumble upon some mushrooms

No More Regrets by Headcanonsandmore [T, 1k]

Harry Potter never seems to have any luck with romance. After enlisting the help of WWW’s latest romance products, however, it becomes abundantly clear as to why he never has any luck with love.

peace, he begged by hyacinth4maria [G, 2k]

Harry is tired. He is tired of the fights and the mysteries. He is tired of the blood and the scars. He is tired of struggling to live. He is tired, and that is the simple truth. (Harry finds his peace.)

Pumpkins by Pumperkins [G, 1k]

Harry and Ron go to visit Hagrid and end up in his pumpkin patch

*Puzzle Pieces by wickersnap [G, 2k]

“A pillow fort is an essential part of living,” he explains, “and we’re going to build one right now.” “Now?” Harry asks. “In here?” He grins. “Where else?”

Renovations and Revelations by TheCheshireBat [M, 1k]

After a long day of renovating Grimmauld Place, Harry and Ron are filthy, tired, and hungry.

*Stripped Bare by GoldenTruth813 [T, 1k]

Harry’s fought so much, Ron doesn’t know why he’s still fighting his own happiness.

subtext by Mathilda_Selem [T, 3k]

In which Ron learns about gay subtext in media, is very tired and finally cracks the case. Also Harry basically lives at Ron's flat and invites friends over to Ron's place instead of his own. Something, simple and sweet about my boys being oblivious and not noticing they are basically husbands.

*that’s how i know my heart is his by madgexal [T, 2k]

So Ron kinda, maybe, sorta had feelings for his best friend. Except he was definitely in love, absolutely no doubt in his mind.

*The Complexities of Muggle Machinery by This_Time_I_Wont_Regret_My_Username [G, 1k]

Harry bought a refrigerator. Then it was a microwave. Then a blender. Thursday was the coffee brewer. Ron really liked that last one.

to have and to hold by lilypadwriter [G, 1k]

Ron touching Harry throughout the years.

*Until It's Old and Comfortable by FleetofShippyShips [T, 1k]

Sometimes there are things that bear repeating.

*Walking me home by fanthyng_mego [T, 1k]

Harry has always known the roads that lead to home.

What's in a Scent by TheCheshireBat [G, 1k]

The Weasleys have a new product they need Harry to test.

*denotes personal favorites

[strawwritesfic]

MCU One Shots and Other Short Stories Master list

The Marvel Christmas Collection

Avengers Taking Care of You Headcanons

Bruce Banner

Beautiful

Bottle

Cooldown Hug

Creep

Dead End

Desire

Disease

Enough for Now

Entertain Me

First Impressions

Humanity

It’s Personal

Left Behind

Pioneer

Postcards

Quicksand

Quiet

Rankled with a Chance of Coffee Stains

Silent No More

Sleepwalk

Strip

Tease

Telephone

Trigger Warning

Wine

Bucky Barnes

Clarify

It’s a Small World After All

Lies

Torture

Clint Barton

Back Around

Conceive

Factory

Forever and Almost Always

Never Look Back

Nothing Personal

Peace Offering

Positive Tension

Pusher

Railroad

Sometimes I Wish

Strut

Sunbeam

Sundown

Word on the Street

Phil Coulson

Addiction [Pt. 1] and Haunt [Pt. 2]

Desperate [Pt. 1] and Time Bomb [Pt. 2]

Disorder

Guard

Hollywood

Hyperlink

I Don’t Want to Know

Ignorance

It’s Getting Easy

Love Letters

Overdose

Squee

Venom

Visit

Want

Warm Me Up

Leo Fitz

Current

Happy

Loki Laufeyson

A Bird in the Hand

Addlepated

Burdened with Glorious Sacrifices

Cups

Division

Don’t Deny It

Fantasy

Firecracker

Fresh

Friends (With Benefits)

Ghost

Give In

Hypocrisy

Like Knives

Nothing to Lose

One of Those Nights

Reliance

Sunrise

Superman

Tulip

Winter

Pietro Maximoff

Guilt

Matt Murdock

A Matter of Sanity

Thor Odinson

Arctic

Back Against the Wall

Band of Brothers

(Closet) Pervert

Cosmos

Division

Don’t Walk Away

Female Gaze

Glowing

Hot (Like Wow)

Insane

Jumped at the Call

Last Chance

Never Said It was Right; Never Said It was Wrong Either

Only Hope

Out of Place

Shock

Slow Down

Soaked

Taken

Together

Tornado

Peter Quill

Fades

Recipe for Disaster

Vice Is a Taste That Lingers Long

James Rhodes

Part of the Package Deal

Steve Rogers

Bounce

Butterfly

Cynical

Date Night

Don’t Worry

Dreamers

Enlightened

Ice

I.D.G.A.F.

Linoleum

Not Sorry

Oath

Outside

Seduce

Thank You

Torture

Two-Faced

What If?

Brock Rumlow

Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Fried

Johann Schmidt

Challenge

Tony Stark

Angel

Broadway

Chainsaw

Don’t Forget: Lock the Door

Heights

Hide-and-Seek

Hush Money

Innuendo

Masks

Mine

Nudity

Secrets

Self-Defense

Taking Control

To Infinity

You [Pt. 1] and The Devil in Me [Pt. 2]

You Can’t Break What’s Already Broken

Stephen Strange

In the Blink of an Eye

T’Challa

It All Tastes Like Acid

Sam Wilson

Tremble

[appleciders]

Rachel + Leah + Water, the Director’s Cut!

Okay, so I made this gifset exploring Rachel and Leah and the ocean, but because there’s a ten gif limit and a major point of gifsets is for them to look nice, I had to sacrifice a lot of the behind the scenes thoughts and initial versions that came along the way. I still wanted to talk about them though, because I found a lot of them really cool, so I figured I’d stick all that in this post. It’s gonna get long, so you can find the rest under the cut!

So first up, we have Leah as we first see her in the water. (I’m using shitty screenshots because tumblr has a 2mb limit for gifs on text posts and I don’t feel like compressing these down lmao.) Here, she’s face-down, unconscious, floating on a fragment of the plane. This is the first time we see any of the girls in the water.

As Leah gives her dramatic speech talks to the detectives, we see flashbacks to the girl’s lives pre-island. There we see that one of them already has a very strong relationship with the water already, in her before-life: Rachel.

Rachel, as we know, is a diver. We see her take a magnificent tumble into the pool, but when she surfaces, her coach is sternly head-shaking. She corrects Rachel’s form, and after she walks away, Rachel echoes the correction, clearly frustrated with herself. 

Back to Leah. We next see Leah waking up on her lil chunk of flotsam. When she realizes what the hell’s going on, she does what we all would do and starts screaming in terror.

Her panic gets interrupted by Jeannette’s classic Raise Your Glass ringtone. (This was my alarm for two years in high school, and when I watched this for the first time I did have an out-of-body experience). She swims her way over to the Hello Kitty suitcase and—irrationally—unzips it, but we’ll cut her some slack because she’s in some serious shock. As she tries to get the phone, it slips through her fingers and starts spiraling down to the bottom of the ocean. She dives after it.

Unfortunately, she quickly runs out of air and has to give up. She then spots Jeannette floating nearby, checks her out, judges her to be “just a little roughed up,” and then sees land and has a big oh-thank-fuck moment. Because we saw Gretchen’s team placing all of the girls, we know that Linh and Leah were the only two that were put out in the open water. The other girls were put in the beach, or, in Martha’s case, near the shore. This was probably done to quell some of Leah’s suspicions about the crash, but it does give me a couple questions about how they got the other girls wet—did they hose them all down? Pour a couple buckets over their heads? Bob each of them up and down a couple times in a big net like fries in a fryer?? 

Anyway, not important. 

Next that we see, Leah has pulled Jeannette/Linh in from the water. (My Australian parents, who can never pass up an opportunity to give ocean safety tips, chimed in at this point in our first watch to say “See how she’s doing it! You always want to hold someone from behind and pull them in that way. Good job, well done.” So there’s some approval for you, Leah.) As Leah nears the shore, Dot and Toni come tearing in and they help pull the two of them out. 

The rest of the episode after that really only concerns fresh water—Toni and Shelby set out in search of it, to no avail, and Nora helpfully plugs Diet Coke reminds us multiple times that sugar’s heavier than water, so “sugar sinks.” We do set up a goal for the next couple episodes, though: Rachel says, “I'm gonna swim out to the plane tomorrow. See if I can find anything,” and Leah volunteers to come with. Rachel gives her a nod of respect.

Moving on to episode two, we have Rachel and Leah’s (iconic) first real conversation. Rachel says she’s still going out to the wreckage. Leah looks out and looks back at her, incredulous, and says, “Rachel, the water’s insane.” Here’s a big recurring association—the water and “insanity.” (I use insanity here because that’s the language they use, along with psycho/crazy. In no way does that reflect my actual beliefs about their behavior nor am I condoning the way they use those words.) Leah points out the rip current (“well done,” said my mum), and explains her very brief stint as a norcal surfer. Rachel still looks set on going, but then Leah says:

Turns out, Leah can be as ripe with foreshadowing as Fatin. This marks the appearance of their second main association with the ocean—death. After she says this, Leah turns Rachel’s attention inland, and the two agree to climb a big hill to scope out their situation.

Episode two is also obviously Rachel’s episode, so we see a lot of her relationship with diving. 

We see her plunge over and over and over again, drilling technique and form, but despite all her hard work, we learn her coach advised her to quit the team. Instead, Rachel throws herself in twice as hard, and ends up with an eating disorder. By the time the nationals come around, she’s too physically weak to dive safely, and she ends up hitting her head as she goes down. She surfaces in the pool with blood flowing around her.

She refuses to see that as the end of her diving career. She says she’s gonna “get back out there” and “be fucking great again” and she tells Nora at the end of the episode that she needs her to let her believe that.

In episode three, we finally see Leah and Rachel’s trip out to the plane! Nora comes along with them, her relationship with Rachel smoothed over after the events of ep two. “Nora’s a good swimmer,” Rachel explains as she invites her, “We were both water babies.” Water’s clearly been central to Nora and Rachel’s identities since they were really young. 

The three of them make their escape from the rest of the girls as the topic of building a shelter comes up. “Not interested in putting down roots!” Rachel calls. In keeping with the elements theme, Rachel isn’t looking to be grounded. She climbs super high into the air and she dives deep into the water, but earth isn’t her thing. (See: the quicksand scene. Whoops.)

Anyway, the three of them paddle out into the water. Rachel dives down, scopes out the plane, tells Nora she doesn’t expect her to “fucking free dive in open water,” and then looks to Leah and asks if she’s ready. Leah reluctantly agrees. 

We get our first shot Rachel swimming down into the ocean and our second shot of Leah (first the phone, second the plane). In the wreckage of the plane, they discover the black box, affixed to the wall. They keep trying to wrench it free, but it’s stuck, and Leah—who’s primary activity is, like, reading—keeps having to surface for air. Rachel gets frustrated and grabs her leg, holding her down. 

Leah screams and fights, but Rachel doesn’t let go. We cut away, and when we see them again, they’ve emerged victorious (Rachel) and drowned as dogs after a bath (Leah and Nora) with the black box in hand. Later, Leah mutters the above line to Fatin, calling Rachel a “psychopath.” For those keeping score at home, here’s where we refer back to the association between water and “insanity.”

In episode four, the ocean benevolently bestows a bag of takis upon Nora, and we have our whole shelter-building shebang. It’s all very land-based until Leah and Fatin go head to head, which ends with Fatin smearing her blood all over Leah’s face. Leah, with her usual flair, strips off her clothes as she walks into the ocean. She stays down there, passively letting the water wash the blood from her face.

This shot parallels a couple things. First, the drifting blood visually parallels Rachel in the pool after her diving injury. Second, we have Rachel staring out at the water where Leah’s disappeared and going, “Man, that is some real Virginia Woolf-type shit.” Dot has no fucking clue what she means, so Fatin interprets: “It means that bitch is crazy. She said you were the psychopath of the group.” Now it’s Leah who’s done something in the water that’s been deemed insane. The water and “insanity;” the water and accusations of insanity within their relationship. 

Those accusations pop up in episode five, but the episode is pretty focused on the inland search for Fatin, and revolves around fresh water, not salt water. (That could be a whole nother post lol.) It’s in episode six where we again see these two return to the ocean. 

Rachel is diving in the ocean! For fun! She’s picking up pretty shells (which granted isn’t the safest thing to do in the pacific, cone snails are not our friends), and she’s grinning, and she’s generally enjoying herself. With the, uh, finale situation, we’re probably not gonna get to see her smile for a bit, which is sad, because she should get to do this more often! This shot visually echoes her diving for the plane and Leah diving for the phone, except she can be in a better mood because there is no end goal. 

So she goes diving, ends up finding a bunch of mussels, gathers ‘em up, and brings ‘em back to camp. They all chow down, but wind up with serious food poisoning. Martha and Toni ring death’s doorbell a couple of times. Rachel blames herself—she’s the one that went swimming out there, she brought the mussels back. Again, we see that connection between the ocean and death.

And that association comes back bright an early in ep seven! The tide surges higher than they’ve ever seen, taking down their shelter and leaving them all scrambling. 

While Leah convinces Fatin that her life is more important than her suitcase, Rachel is left with a decision: help Nora, screaming to her from where she’s clinging to a rock for dear life, or grab the black box. In a move that contrasts Toni’s immediate and unquestioning aid of Martha, Rachel picks the black box. 

After, when they’re debriefing, Nora’s quick to bring it up. She doesn’t hide her hurt. “It happened so fast,” she says, “we all acted irrationally. Like Fatin, who jumped into a rip current to save her toothbrush. Or Rachel, who left me for fucking dead.” I think this counts as a double whammy for the “insanity” and death count—I think “acted irrationally” is as close as Nora gets to calling anyone crazy, and is honestly a better descriptor of all the other instances of “insanity” that we’ve seen, and the ocean was the source of the very real risk to Nora’s life. 

(Honestly, I think Rachel thought she was making a rational choice here—just with some grim fucking calculus. Still, given that nobody’d responded to the black box by then, I think it was a decision fueled by the need to keep hold of hope more than actual rationality.) In a fun contrast to the rest of the episode, it’s Leah that keeps a level head in this situation. 

The rest of the episode is low on water scenes, though Leah’s paranoia about Shelby is fueled by her sneaking off to the water, which could fall under the “insanity” category. It also marks where Nora begins to take an active role in breaking apart Rachel’s fantasy about diving again. 

Ep eight has one of the best montages in a series of great montages, with the playing in the water scene! A plane has seen them, they’re gonna be saved, and they all get to get high and act like kids. 

I have this lingering and probably irrational concern that the entire water play scene is choreographed and that it’s chock-full of foreshadowing. Like I know to some extent they likely were just like “yeah guys go goof off in the water,” but like...the wave pulling Rachel and Nora apart here...I mean.... (Rachel is probably gonna get more blood on Dot in the near future, too. ) That aside, their horseplay gets interrupted when Leah notices some blood on Dot, which Rachel realizes is her own period blood.  

Fatin then chimes in with her ever-gleeful foreshadowing: “Shark week for Rachel.” So while this whole encounter with the water actually seems mostly good for a change, it’s colored by the tie-in to what we know is coming.

In ep nine, reality has set in that rescue isn’t imminent. Everyone’s starving, Leah has started to spiral, and Rachel’s unusually skittish. By the tide’s edge, Nora asks for her help fishing, but Rachel refuses, saying that she’s weak. Nora flicks water at her, and Rachel flinches, clearly scared.

Starvation seems to have triggered Rachel’s trauma around the water leftover from her diving accident. In response, Nora reaches out a hand and says, “Let’s go for a walk.”

Meanwhile, Leah’s spiral has reached critical. She starts ranting about the ocean and the water and pushes past Dot, sprinting into the waves:

And so she’s taken to heart the way they think Jeannette’s body “escaped” the island—the tide—and it’s been spun like cotton candy in her head. She’s right, technically—Jeanette/Linh’s body was moved off the island by boat, and there’s definitely an argument that if they really did all swim out Gretchen’s team would save them, or at least try to. This is also a very real suicide attempt. So it’s kind of a culmination of the threats of death and mental health issues that’ve been wrapped up in the ocean since the start.

On Rachel’s end, Nora has taken her up to a cliff. Rachel calls the whole thing “borderline insane,” walking up when they’re so low on energy, but Nora tells her she needs to make a truce between herself and the water. 

“You’re afraid of it now,” she says, and Rachel replies that, “All it ever did was make me sick.” Nora immediately surges forward to say “That’s not true!” Rachel, incredulous, says, “Isn't this what you want? For me to hang it up? For me to forget the whole fucking diving game?” Nora says, “No. I don't know. I don't want you to forget you.” She then tells Rachel she should dive off the end of the cliff, that she marked it to make sure it’s safe. Rachel says she can’t.

There’s a lot here. First, there’s the first time we’ve seen of Rachel explicitly call herself sick. In episode two, even in a treatment center, she still denies it, says she’s just an athlete who knows what it takes. But now she’s reached a place where she acknowledges her eating disorder—and also probably her recent illness with the mussels—and ties it directly to the water. It’s the reason she’s sick.

Nora’s fear that Rachel will forget herself also just hammers home how central the water has always been to Rachel’s identity. Cutting herself off from the water would be cutting off a core part of herself. (...whoops) And we’ve seen that it does bring her actual joy, when she’s allowed to relax with it, but she’s had such traumatic associations rolled up into it now. Nora doesn’t want Rachel to do diving as a sport anymore, because of how badly it’s hurt her, but she does want Rachel to keep diving and swimming as like, a form of unevaluated personal expression.

At the moment that Rachel’s refusing to jump, she and Nora hear shouts from the mainland. They see Fatin and Dot screaming after Leah. Confused, Nora asks, “Where is she going?” but Rachel understands immediately, with absolute certainty, without needing to be told—“To fucking drown to death.” Seven episodes after Leah called heading into the water a death wish, she’s finally proving it true. Rachel squares her shoulders, takes a few deep breaths, and sprints into a dive. 

Unlike all her other dives high altitude dives we’ve seen her do, this dive isn’t qualified based on aesthetics. This dive matters because of what it will do, not on how it looks. And what it does do is bring her into the ocean, where she needs to be for her friend. So with strong strokes, she swims out towards Leah.

When she reaches her, she takes hold of her, pulls her into her chest from behind. She begins to swim with her back to shore. This rescue directly parallels Leah’s rescue of Linh that we talked about above. It also, as the Out in the Wilds podcast insightfully pointed out, really calls Rachel and Leah’s relationship back to the beginning. Whereas Rachel had initially held Leah down in the water, putting her in danger of drowning, Rachel here pulls her out of the water, saving her from drowning. Together, they make it all the way back to the shore.

Finally (and, like, if you’ve made it all the way down here? bless you. thank you), we have episode ten. The ocean doesn’t really figure into episode ten until the very end. Rachel has had a long episode of healing—she’s happy to be full and she’s in a good place with her sister and things seem to be going pretty okay. She decides to heal her relationship with the water, too. She heads out, telling Nora that she’s “Just gonna float, Nor. Just float.”

Just floating. After all the times we saw her plunging into the water, purposefully, with frustration, with drive, with so much to prove and with so much sacrifice and self-abuse to prove it with, Rachel finally just wants to float. She wants to let herself relax. She wants to let the water carry her.

Of course, that means there has to be, like, a massive marine carnivore waiting to mistake her for a seal.

Visually, this shot really parallels the opening shot of Leah on the fragment of plane. Instead of being face-down, though, she’s face-up, and she’s conscious, just not of the threat from below. 

The shark bites.

In a horrible parallel to Leah’s Virginia Woolf moment and Rachel’s diving accident, we see blood pool in the water. Rachel is pulled under. The girls on the land start screaming and running toward her. We know Rachel doesn’t die, but this is still a near-death experience, one that probably cost her her arm. Leah, covered in dirt and her own blood after crawling out of the pit Nora led her into, can only stand and watch, shocked and horrified.

So that got! Way longer than I meant it to! And honestly most of this was condensed into very concise tags in a post I made a few days ago! But if you made it all the way down here, you’ve now seen everything I wanted to fit into that gifset but couldn’t. Thanks for sticking with me, friend <3

[adultswim2021]

Robot Chicken #33: “Sausage Fest” | October 15, 2006 – 11:30PM | S02E15

I didn't mind this one as much as I thought I would. Huh.

The first sketch of length is the CEO of Burger King is being stalked by THE Burger King, which at the time was a television ad campaign featuring a guy in a creepy plastic king mask showing up places to give them burger king or stuff like that. I have no idea if they're still doing this in commercials. Anyway, the sketch briefly references the scene from Psycho where the dude falls down the stairs. The CEO shoots the Burger King and unmasks him, only to find out that it was his own son. It ends ironically as an supposed actual Burger King ad, featuring live-action, seemingly real Burger King displayed. It's the only reason anyone should buy Burger King: as a joke. Just look at those fries. They be droopin’.

The next sketch of length is about a guy in Heaven reading the book of his life, which is blank. But St. Peter or whoever explains that he has to ask the book a question about his life and that the answer will appear. He asks less-than-meaningful questions, like how long a 6-foot-tall brick wall made out of bricks of all the shit he ever shit out in his lifetime would be. I remember a similar sketch on SNL that I like a little better.

Li'l Hitler is a running sketch where we see Hitler as a school child, taking over other children's desks. Not as egregiously cringey as most Hitler jokes, at least it's sorta satire I guess.

Then there's Heathcliff suing Garifled the cat, which turns into a brawl for some reason. Jokes are lopsidedly about Garfield sucking. There are almost zero references to actual Heathcliff lore. Come on, have the Cadillac Cats show up or something! Have him strap on a Ham hat before he uses one to club Garfield with! JEEZ!

There's a sketch about a giraffe sinking in quicksand and we get a little title card explaining each stage of grief he's going through. This is almost like an animated Far Side cartoon. I did a cursory search for “Far Side giraffe quicksand” and found plenty of quicksand and giraffe comics but none with this specific premise. Good for them! They came up with a Far Side!

The show-stopper is a parody of the X-Men movie where all the X-Men are killed so they have to get the recruits from Police Academy to fill in. They got the real Michael Winslow because what the hell else would he be doing? They also got Marion Ramsey to reprise her role. She died last year. Nobody told me!

Anyway, this episode isn't so bad. I don't love Robot Chicken and none of it makes me laugh out loud, but this one has some better-than-average stuff in it.

EPHEMERA CORNER

It’s been a while since I gave you a youtube to chew on, yeah? I kept coming up dry when I searched for stuff. This is actually from last week’s [AS] but let’s roll with it. It’s fun!

MAIL BAG

did you ever watch spongebob squarepants? I hear the guy who made it dropped on the deck and flopped liked a fish (died).

I liked the first season but wasn’t a regular at all, and now I find the amount of it so daunting. Plus, I don’t wanna flop like a fish! I like my fish

[gatheringbones]

I've been rolling around this question in my head for a bit and another anon asked basically about the same topic so: do you have any advice for killing the little voice in your head that says you /should/ be writing for an audience? I've gotten better at ignoring it, but I still get those flashes of "if your protags are this mentally ill/your romance isn't slowburn/you focus on so much on X instead of Y, then no one will want to read your writing" and I would like to hit mute on them forever

couple of things off the dome while kind of stoned and very disregulated and barely gimping through thanskgiving weekend 2020: 

the dynamic you’re describing, the one with you as the writer writing to appease the conglomerate hivemind that is the audience, is disempowering and abusive if only because that figure, that hivemind, isn't a person or a collection of people as much as it is a big hazy churning cloud of your feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. And there's no pleasing that, because there's nothing there: that person/force/voice that you’re trying to please is quicksand that you can never write your way out of; there will always be a buzzing demon above your head ranting on and on about how you need to swap out the painstakingly assembled third course in your ten course meal for french fries and ranch, and the minute you do it’s gonna change its mind and start harping at you to mutilate something else in the name of what general tastes and trends dictate until congratulations, you’ve written a marvel movie. 

and there's all sorts of these demons on your shoulder when you're writing, especially in genre fiction, because most of us are all already well on our journeys of realizing and unpacking just how many sci-fi and fantasy and literary conventions have their roots in white supremacy, misogyny, colonialism, etc. We know on an intellectual level that we need to be careful about how we build our fantasy and science fiction worlds because we know there was something deeply and terribly wrong with how the orcs worked in lord of the rings, just as there was something incredibly vile about the relationship between friday and robinson crusoe. And you have to be able to pin down where that demon is in your own writing and deny it residence on an integrated intellectual and emotional level. 

which brings me to homophobia, because while I can't be depended upon to talk sensibly or intelligently about expunging any number of other internalized -isms from your work, I can talk about the need to identify where your internalized homophobia intersects with your writing, because unless it's talked about and examined and pulled apart and identified as an influential force, it will continue to do what it wants, which is to get inside your words and filter everything you say through what is appropriate for someone like you to say. And I want you to put all the venom you can into that use of the word you, so you can notice it. So you can hear what it truly sounds like, and start to piece together just how much that fucker keeps yammering in the background while you try to communicate something vulnerable about your experience. And then I want you to kneecap it and bury it under the underpass and get on with your work.

it's another hazy conglomerate hivemind just like that imaginary audience. It's impossible to please and it's an incredibly limiting and abusive force to align your efforts with. And it's distracting.

there's things you don't have time or space to think when an abusive mental audience and an abusive internalized homophobe are allowed to dominate the airwaves. there's ideas that don't get explored, territories that don't get mapped out, and plotlines that never get to become their fully realized bonkers selves because everything has to go back to them and what they think is palatable. 

and that's nonsense, and it's good to look at it and call it nonsense, because at least then you’ll spend a second or two not subconsciously humoring its demands, and sometimes that’s all it takes to start tearing this sort of mental horseshit apart. 

you have time to edit, you have time to rephrase and rework and gently transform something gleeful and unhinged you wrote in one mad burst of pure enthusiasm that doesn't resemble anything sensible in the light of day. But I want for you to be able to sift what is truly valuable and worth saving and cultivating and exploring from those clumsy first drafts free from the influence of the inner homophobe, the inner white supremacist, and the inner abusive parent. that’s it. 

[seesgood]

She should have known from the first second that he brought her home that disaster was looming. But she’d been young ( younger, by like, two years, but that made a difference, right? ). She’d been enamored by the appeal of a big, complex, dysfunctional-yet-loving family dynamic. They’d been wild and crazy and recklessly in love and she’d been a little drunk on the idea of having parents again. Siblings. A partner who adored her and drove her crazy with how much she loved him. She should have known then and there that she was being sucked into a pool of quicksand. Strangled by a boa-constrictor. Suffocated. Smothered. Indoctrinated into a freaking cult. But by the time she realized, it was too late. The wedding was half planned ( well, more than half, because she’d long since given up trying to battle Esther on the differences between canary yellow and sunset yellow ). The ring he’d given her ( branded her with ) was a permanent fixture on her finger. The entire freaking town had taken to calling her Mrs. Mikaelson as if it didn’t make her want to puke in the middle of the street.

The family aspect wouldn’t have been so bad, if it weren’t for him. When they’d fallen in love, she’d fallen hard. He was headstrong and confident and reckless in all the ways that she wasn’t. He said what he thought and he made no apologies. And for a girl who had spent half her life apologizing for breathing the very air surrounding her --- that was intoxicating. Except now all those qualities were the things she hated more than anything. Well, maybe not hated. She loved him. A little. Kinda. The way she loved her Mom’s old sweater. She loved him 20%, on a good day. On a bad day she fantasized about how freeing life would be when his family murdered her and hid the body and she could freely haunt his ass as a ghost. 

Fiancé-Kol and Boyfriend-Kol were entirely different people, that was for certain. She’d been conned. Duped. Scammed. She’d gotten the Nigerian Prince of reality checks. Fiancé-Kol had what none of his other siblings had now --- potential. Finn ( evidently ) didn’t count, because Sage ( her hero and role model in all things Mikaelson-related ) had dared start a boxing gym, of all places, and punch out red-haired children that had most certainly not inherited the Mikaelson trait of looking as if everything in the world had displeased him. Elijah was single-handedly running the family businesses. Klaus was a mess. Rebekah was even more of a mess. But Kol was engaged. And suddenly the continuation of the proud Mikaelson line was on them. Caroline was pretty, in a way that both stood out but did not overshadow. She was plain enough that Esther had no problem imprinting every bit of Mikaelson Cult Ideals onto her. And she was too god damn terrified of disappointing anyone to bite back.

He wasn’t happy about it either. It had her way too long to realize, but she had. They were both miserable. And prideful. And moronic. If he broke it off, he’d be let off the hook. Mother Dearest probably wouldn’t give him nearly as much grief for his habits. The pressure would turn to one of his brothers. He’d be coddled for a few months, a year maybe. She’d be the stupid harlot that had missed the opportunity to be A Mikaelson. But if he broke it off --- she’d be free. Sympathetic gazes, inclusion on the gossip about what They were really like. People would give her free coffee. And French Fries. She could keep their house ( he’d feel too guilty to, obviously, he was already breaking poor orphan Caroline’s heart ). And the bill for the wedding would be entirely on him. And thus, their stalemate was born. Well, it was really more of an active warzone than it was a stalemate. But alas, the apathetic, wallowing alone in self pity, berating herself for expecting too much out of life chapter was over. Now it was just a matter of whoever broke first.  ❝ Baby? ❞  Her tone was sickeningly sweet as she called out to him, pointedly moving the dirty dishes around in the sink to fill a pot with water to make herself dinner ( the mess was killing her, but cleaning would give him yet another point, and he already had too many to his name ).  ❝ I forgot to tell you, but Damon and Elena said they could make it after all, their trip got cancelled, or something. ❞  She’d begged. Because at this rate, their guest list was almost entirely his family’s friends. And any mixture of Salvatores and Mikaelsons was bound to end in disaster. Especially if Damon was involved.  ❝ I know seating will be tight but I figured we could just put them at Bekah’s table. ❞  With her date. And Stefan. And Matt, maybe. Just to see how quickly the whole thing would implode.          /          @polymusepotion ! 

[patriciasage]

the tune of coffee

Author: Patricia_Sage

Fandom: Stranger Things

Pairings: Joyce Byers / Jim “Chief” Hopper / Bob Newby

Summary: 

Bob hands Joyce her coffee and kisses her gently on the lips. She smiles.

Then Bob walks around the bed and hands Hopper the other mug. Before the police chief can figure out what to say, Bob leans down to kiss him as well.

[posted in full under the break, or you could read on AO3]

Hopper fights through quicksand into consciousness. His thoughts are sluggish, and his mouth is dry. Slowly, he becomes aware of his body. There’s sun warming the back of his head and the sheets are soft. Not his place. He hears soft snoring behind him. Not alone.

The first sight that greets his eyes is Darth Vader. A Star Wars poster hangs above the dresser. There’s a ‘fun fact’ daily calendar on the bedside table. There’s faint clattering in the kitchen and a low voice humming. He knows where he is.

Hopper is grateful for his police training when he does not immediately leap out of the bed and wake the person sleeping behind him. Instead, he lays still and tries to think of an escape route.

His bleary headache flares as he slowly rolls over to face the ceiling. His arm touches the other person’s back. Joyce doesn’t stir. Hopper can’t help but smile a little as she continues to snore quietly. Her dark hair rests on the white pillowcase like ink.

Moving under the sheets makes Hopper acutely aware of his nakedness. Joyce seems to have put on pajamas before sleeping, but he had not. He rubs his free hand over his eyes as hazy memories of last night arrive. He chuckles quietly and then looks for his pants.

He expects them to be crumpled on the floor but instead he sees his clothes folded on a stool across the room, his hat perched on top. He carefully sits up.

Joyce wakes at the movement with a little snort. She mumbles a question and turns to face him at the same time that the bedroom door opens.

“Oh, wonderful, you’re awake,” Bob says. He enters the room with a radiant smile, holding a steaming cup of coffee in each hand.

Joyce pushes herself up to rest against the headboard while Hopper remains frozen. She reaches out for the coffee with an insistent groan. “How are you so –” She gestures to Bob’s general state. Bob chuckles.

“I didn’t have nearly as much as you two wild things. I get dizzy after a few drinks.”

Bob hands Joyce her coffee and kisses her gently on the lips. She smiles.

Then Bob walks around the bed and hands Hopper the other mug. Before the police chief can figure out what to say, Bob leans down to kiss him as well. The press of his lips sends flashes of memories behind his eyes of Bob’s soft body beneath him and Joyce’s breath in his ear. His skin feels cold when Bob removes his hand from Hopper’s bare chest.

“I made pancakes, come and get ‘em!” he says jovially and leaves the door open when he exits the room.

Joyce offers her coffee mug and Hopper automatically touches them together in a toast. She follows her boyfriend out into the kitchen. Music from the radio travels down the hallway and Hopper assumes they’re dancing from the way they laugh.  

Breakfast isn’t awkward, to Hopper’s surprise. He leaves the Byers-Newby house with his stomach full of food and his head full of thoughts.

*****

The next time they hook up, they’re much more sober.

The kids are out, sleeping over in a tent in the Wheeler’s backyard. Hopper is flipping through channels trying to find a movie to watch. He considers some of El’s favourite programs, but it wouldn’t feel right to watch without her.  Hopper is no longer used to being alone. He tries not to consider how it will feel when she grows up and moves out.

His phone rings.

“Can we come over?” Joyce asks.

He doesn’t think before answering. “Sure.”

Hopper doesn’t have wine at his place, so he offers Joyce and Bob a beer. They get through about half of their drinks, chatting about the kids and town gossip. Then Joyce climbs into his lap and Bob walks around the couch to rub his shoulders.

This time is infinitely better without whisky coursing through his system. They’re more precise, better at communicating, more responsive. Hopper has slept with women and men in the past, but never both at once. And never with people who somehow manage to make him laugh during sex without ruining the mood. It’s exhilarating and satiating in a way he’s never experienced. It feels right.

*****

They begin to go on dates, but it takes Hopper a while to realize this.

The three of them would often spend time together as friends and as parents of kids who are pretty much inseparable. But since they’ve started sleeping together it’s been different. Joyce sneaks fries from his plate and Bob puts his hand on Hopper’s thigh when he tells him stories.

Often, Joyce and Bob invite him back to their house afterward. Sometimes they mess around. Other times, Joyce and Hopper agree to let Bob kick their asses at his brain teaser games and Hopper leaves with a kiss for each of them.

Any time he thinks to define it, he pushes the thought away. It doesn’t matter. They’re adults. They’re having fun.

*****

Everything falls apart when Mike Wheeler sees something he shouldn’t have seen.

“Cheating!” El says forcefully, slamming the front door. Hopper looks up from the stove.

“What now?”

She stomps up to him, brow furrowed. “You are cheating.”

The hamburgers are done frying. He takes them off the burner. “It’s kind of hard to cheat at scrabble, kid, and you kicked my ass, anyway –”

“No, not games cheating. Relationship cheating. Mike told me.”

Hopper sighs and rubs the back of his neck. He had not expected to have this conversation with his daughter today. “You can’t cheat if you’re not in a relationship. And why does Mike have somethin’ to say about me, anyway?”

“He saw you kissing Mrs. Byers!”

Hopper’s hands still in the middle of putting hamburger patties into buns. He takes a breath. “I don’t know what Mike thought he saw – hey!” El pokes his arm forcefully. He doesn’t need her to speak to know what she’s going to say. He sees it in her eyes. Friends don’t lie.

“Look, kid. It’s complicated. Adult stuff.” Her mouth tightens and he puts up a hand. “Which I will explain to you in the amount of detail you need to know. Just not now, alright? Can we eat first?”

She looks over at the hamburgers, then nods. They have their meal in silence.

El finishes eating before him. She pushes her plate away and stares expectantly. Hopper rolls his eyes and wipes his mouth, chewing. “Okay. So what, exactly, did Mike tell you about…cheating?”

“When a person is in a romantic relationship with someone and then kisses someone else.”

“I mean, sure, that’s usually the gist of it. But he’s missing a key detail. Cheating is a secret that those people keep from the other person.”

She shrugs. “Okay. It’s secret. And it’s bad.”

“You’re right. But.” He sighs. “Listen, me kissing Joyce is not cheating because it’s not a secret to Bob. He is okay with it. So, it’s not bad.”

El looks confused. Hopper wishes this conversation wasn’t happening. “Adult relationships are complicated –” He’s saved by the telephone ringing. He gets up from the table gratefully.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Hop. It’s Joyce.”

“Hey.”

“So…Will told me that Mike saw us kiss.”

Hopper rolls his eyes. Great, all of the kids know.

“Yeah, I’ve got a similar situation happenin’ over here.”

“I- Look, can we meet up tonight and talk? The three of us?”

Hopper glances over at El, who looks like she’s trying to solve a very difficult math problem. “Yeah. Let’s clear things up before I confuse my daughter any more than I already have.”

*****

Hopper is talking before he sits down on the porch steps. “Alright, so, we tell them that it was a mistake. Maybe that you just wanted to see what it was like to kiss me and Bob gave you permission. One kiss. That’s it. A mistake. I know it’s still a little unconventional, but –”

Bob interrupts him. “But it’s not a mistake.”

“What?” Hopper looks over at the two of them. Their expressions are illuminated by the porch light, Joyce nervous and Bob resolute. “I mean, of course it wasn’t a mistake. It was fun. But that’s probably our best explanation.”

Joyce takes Bob’s hand and offers, “What if we tell them the truth?”

“The truth?”

“That we’re dating.”

“We are?”

There’s nothing but hope emanating from Joyce and Bob. Hopper feels something warm in his chest at the thought. His brain tries to push it down. It fails.

“Fuck,” Hopper says, “This is going to be front page news.”

*****

Hawkins already thought that they were a little strange. You can’t go through multiple alien attacks without appearing a little suspicious. Seeing the three of them publicly dating is prime gossip for a few months, but eventually it gets boring to most people. It’s just Joyce Byers, Bob Newby, and Jim Hopper spending a lot of time together. It takes Hopper’s coworkers much longer to stop teasing him.

The kids eventually get used to it, too. El and Will begin to act like siblings. Jonathan overcomes his embarrassment when he realizes how happy his mom is.

They’ve always been a bit of an unconventional family.

[argentdandelion]

HorrorTale Papyrus: Neither Insane Nor Sadistic

SourAppleStudios' comic, HorrorTale, is set eight years after the Empress Undyne Neutral ending. The CORE, which makes the magic for all/almost all the Underground’s food supply, stops working. Nobody can fix it, and the Underground faces an extended famine. Sans, having received a gruesome head injury, tells Snowdin residents Undyne’s new “policy”: any humans that fall underground will be “harvested” for food, not SOULs.

Sans believes this is the only way for Snowdin’s people to survive, but kind, compassionate Papyrus refuses to go along: he’d rather starve to death than eat human flesh. So Sans tricks him into cooking and eating a human organ. Papyrus makes it into “crooked spaghetti”, causing his teeth to become long, jagged, crooked and bleeding, and his mind to apparently warp to that of an insane, sadistic person.

Except...he is neither insane nor sadistic.

Behavior

Some of Papyrus’ behavior seems to support the idea Papyrus has gone insane and sadistic. In brief, Papyrus’s behavior is disturbing not simply because he kills, but how he kills, how he acts as he kills, and how he interacts with others outside of killing. Unlike other characters, Papyrus tries to kill Aliza in an indirect, orderly way through his “puzzles”. He gives very basic information about each puzzle, saying nothing of each puzzle’s danger, and acts as if running kids through a gauntlet of death traps and sickening choices is a normal, cheery occasion.

The first puzzle is an oversized bear trap that decapitates Aliza. (she comes back with Determination) When Aliza sinks into the tar-like quicksand-snow of the second puzzle, Papyrus’s full face isn’t seen, but he seems to be smiling and he doesn’t respond to her screams. For the third “puzzle”, Aliza must make a seemingly harmless choice between hot dogs and spaghetti. The correct option, spaghetti, has Papyrus feeding her human meat, and she only realizes the ingredients after solving the puzzle. The fourth “puzzle” has Papyrus telling Aliza to go to Grillby’s, telling her the patrons are friendly. Yet, after hearing their sad tale of starvation, the patrons try to fry her alive, and Aliza only escapes by using one of her “freebies” (ability to pass a puzzle) to escape what was secretly a puzzle. As she does so, Papyrus gives a big, suspicious grin.

His prolonged, rule-bound, impractical methods can be contrasted with Toriel and Sans’ methods. When Toriel knows Aliza is escaping the Ruins, she calls out for Sans, who instantly kills Aliza through bones springing out of the ground past the Ruins door. On different occasions, Sans horrifically injures or kills Aliza: just for kicks in a warped joy-buzzer prank, because she made the wrong choice the third “puzzle” (selecting hot dogs instead of spaghetti), because he suspects she cheated in a puzzle (due to reloading), or because he couldn’t resist trying to eat her when she was half-fried and smelled like food.

Outside of killing, Papyrus seems odd in easily catching Aliza, but letting her go anyway. Rather than hiding behind a lamp, as in-game, Aliza hides behind a corpse suspended from a branch. Papyrus joyously, easily captures her, but then he gets suspicious, believing her behavior is part of a devious plan to outsmart him. To this, Sans says: "Whoa paps. sweet deduction skills. might be wiser to, uh. skip the puzzles...and take her straight to #5." However, Papyrus believes it's too risky to progress to Step 5 in his plans, and goes through his puzzles as usual. Papyrus also seems to forget what a “freebie” for a puzzle is, that he made up the rules, and why he chose three. He even argues with Sans that giving three freebies is much too high (confusing “freebies” with “frisbees” in the process), making Sans remind him the number was adjusted up because no one got to the "grand finale".

Rebuttals

Based on these deeds, it’s easy to describe HorrorTale Papyrus as “insane” and “sadistic”, and explain his behavior by those properties. Yet, that’s neglecting one crucial detail: anyone can become messed up in such awful circumstances. Believing Papyrus’s actions are only possible if he were estranged from reality or found inflicting pain pleasurable shows ignorance on how people act in horrific situations. Certainly, if Papyrus had a good life with plenty of food and acted the same way he did in HorrorTale, he probably would be insane and sadistic, but he had to endure eight years of famine, and the deaths of humans ensure his and his neighbors’ survival.

Papyrus is Not Sadistic

According to Merriam-Webster, “sadistic” means “taking pleasure in the infliction of pain, punishment, or humiliation on others”. Although Papyrus is willing to kill humans, and uses painful traps to do so, and most of the evidence for his sadism is lacking (since Papyrus’s face isn’t seen) or doesn’t match up. Only one piece of evidence, Papyrus smiling as Aliza dodges being fried alive, suggests he enjoys suffering...and it could be that it’s just his neutral expression, since Papyrus often smiles. While Papyrus also seems to be smiling as Aliza screams as she sinks in the second puzzle, his face is not fully visible. He may simply have been spacing out, or using his default expression of a smile as Aliza sinks. If anything, it’s Sans who’s sadistic, due to his methods of killing, inflicting pain, and punishing.

Furthermore, it’s not necessarily sadistic to offer humans human meat. One explanation for Papyrus giving Aliza spaghetti with human meat is that he feels sympathy for her: he knows what it’s like to be very hungry. (and human meat is the only food he has) It’s not out of the question he would want to minimize her suffering, even if he’s trying to eat her. After all, when slaughtering animals, people often care that the animal does not suffer unnecessarily. It’s also possible he wanted the human-hunt to be “fair”, even if he was desperate, and he believed Aliza couldn’t properly “compete” if she were starving. Papyrus doesn’t seem disappointed when Aliza survives puzzles, though he was annoyed she (apparently) did not even try the second puzzle. Papyrus even compliments Aliza on her "exemplary performance” before the third puzzle.

Papyrus is Not Insane

If one defines "insanity" as meaning "unable to understand reality", then HorrorTale Papyrus is not insane. He fully understands what is going on, and the consequences of his actions. He surely added “freebies” to his puzzles because he knows his puzzles are lethal, and adding freebies is the only way to make them hypothetically survivable and therefore “fair”.

One might suggest he is insane to not kill Aliza as quickly as possible, as he is very hungry. Even Sans, who’s somewhat less patient now, suggests skipping most of the puzzles in favor of going to Puzzle #5.

Furthermore, it might seem insane (or sadistic) to not kill her painlessly. When Aliza is about to escape the Ruins, Toriel signals Sans to kill her. Sans’ bone attacks spring from the ground, and Aliza dies near-instantly. This quick, unexpected death would surely minimize Aliza’s suffering: it shows Toriel’s harsh but merciful choice to keep Aliza’s SOUL out of the war-obsessed Empress Undyne’s hands.

Although Papyrus could quickly and painlessly kill Aliza by sniping her from afar, he may have such a strong sense of integrity and self-control as to delay eating a delicious meal (to him) for several hours, even in famine. His sense of integrity may override his compassion...if he’s even thoroughly thinking about his motives at all, as his hunger may have clouded his thinking.

Perhaps one thinks the very fact he’s resorting to killing and eating sentient beings (and a harmless child, no less!*) shows his insanity. However, even humans have eaten other humans in extreme situations, regardless of insanity or sadism. Often, this is after starving people have tried every other option. Given Papyrus’s compassion and the fact HorrorTale takes place eight years after the Empress Undyne Neutral ending, he’s surely had time to try everything else.

Red Herrings

Some of Papyrus’s behavior might seem to support his insanity, until one realizes he had strange personality quirks at the start. He seems more forgetful than in Undertale, as he debates his freebie system and confuses it with “frisbees”. Still, his immense hunger over the years may have worn away at his memory. In-game, Papyrus bizarrely believes Frisk is insulting him so he can feel better about fighting Frisk, and that the insults hide a hidden affection, making Frisk an “emotional cactus”. Thus, Papyrus’s belief Aliza was suspiciously easy to capture isn’t out of character for him, and not a sign of insanity.

Papyrus defends his use of puzzles, rather than directly killing humans, by saying: “But then how would we pass the time?" As bizarre as this seems, even people in horrific situations may try to find games to play, such as playing card games or making chess sets from crumbs, stones, wood or candle wax. After all, it’s not as if Papyrus can control when humans arrive, so he’d need to do something while he waited. Since he spent so much time setting up puzzles before the Empress Undyne ending, he may very well be trying to cling to normality by configuring his puzzles.

Conclusion

The Drunk Bunny NPC at Grillby's claims "years of hunger have gnawed all the kindness right out of [Sans’] bones”. The same may have happened to Papyrus, if not so thoroughly, for although Papyrus is undoubtedly messed-up, he is neither insane nor sadistic. Rather, the horrible situation probably tipped Papyrus’s psychology into whatever helped him (or others) survive, and so drained his empathy and made him more numb.

As the HorrorTale character sheet (made in 2016, but still relevant) points out, he “Doesn't dislike humans, but is highly motivated in feeding his friends one way or another”. While it’s possible Papyrus would rather starve to death than kill humans, he might kill anyway to feed his friends. His impractical methods are surely caused by conflict between his principles and motivation, rather than sadism. Rather than being insane, he might be strangely principled: a HorrorTale character sheet even emphasizes he’s “the only character with some sense of morality.”

Those who have been forced to kill, and those who have eat human flesh out of necessity, can eventually recover and become functional (if not quite psychologically intact) individuals. Should HorrorTale's Papyrus ever get to the surface, his sheer self-control and principles should give him the happiest fate of all the characters.

Related Reading Reasons Papyrus Would Kill a Human

[kingofdirtandnothing]

@polyfacetious big ass Christmas Drabble Extravagaza: Day Five

There’s flour dusted all the way up to Diego’s elbows, splattered across the front of his black shirt. There’s even hints of white against Klaus’ cheekbones and the soft fanned edges of his short hair. 

Tortillas were a mess even when you knew what you were doing. When you had a guy in there with you who was enthusiastic but not the most kitchen oriented, it made things kind of a disaster. A fun, flour dusted one but still a disaster. 

“We need the right-” Feel. But Diego can feel the word sticking in the back of his throat. So he does the only other thing he can think of. He grabs Klaus by the hand and jams his hand down into the dough they were working on. 

Tortillas were deceptively simple, especially flour ones. All you needed was flour, a little salt, a little water and some kind of fat. Diego had scoured recipes on the internet while he was waiting to hear back on his loan for this place, and he must have tried a dozen of them. Vegetable oil. Butter. But none of them came close to the way his mom used to make them. With lard. 

So Diego made them with lard. The trick with the lard though, was trying to figure out just when you had the right consistency to get the dough where you needed it to be, for the tortilla press. And even if Diego could have words falling off of his tongue without any chance of stuttering, he was still pretty sure he wouldn’t have the words for this. 

But his mom, she didn’t even follow a recipe. All the cooking she did, she did with her senses. She used to tell him that all you needed to cook were your eyes and your nose and your ears. That it didn’t even matter what the ingredients were, if you knew how to listen to your nose and your heart, that you could make anything. And make it good, too. 

“Feel?” It takes effort to get that one word out, with Klaus’ long, bony fingers beneath his hand. Diego has to press his tongue against the roof of his mouth and work it out slow, the same way he was going to do with the dough. 

She used to tell him that too. That words could be just like food, if he thought about them hard enough. That sometimes, the special ones, they took care and time and work, just the way that good food did. 

Diego missed her like a fucking limb sometimes. But she was happy up in Maine, and despite the fact that he did not get it at all, she was happy as hell with her new husband. So Diego wasn’t going to cause her any trouble. Any more than he already had, at least. 

Klaus nods, and Diego can feel the thin press of his back against his own chest when he breathes outwards. It’s only then that he realizes he’s bracketed Klaus in between both of his arms, the metal mixing bowl on the table in front of him. 

Deep breath. Picture the word in your mind. Diego closes his eyes, and it’s easier to keep talking that way. 

“We don’t want it to feel like sand. Or quicksand. It needs to be tighter than that. Where you squeeze it in your hand and it leaves all the indentions against it. Like the handle of a knife.” It’s the only way he can think to picture the consistency of the dough they need. 

“It’s still too dry.” Diego can feel the dough clumping in between their almost laced fingers. He reaches past Klaus with the hand not in the mixing bowl and splashes a little water from a measuring cup into the bowl again. 

The wooden spoon is picked up left handed, not because Diego is left handed but because he don’t want to let go of where he’s got hold of Klaus’ hand. So he stirs it, slow and clumsy until the dough starts to come together. “Try again.”

This time, it’s Klaus who catches a handful of dough and gives it a squeeze. He opens his hand, palm up and in between them, a clump of white dough sitting right across his life line. (The only reason Diego knew anything about that kind of shit was because Klaus had a palmistry poster up in his shop.)

And there it was. The perfect consistency written into the edges of the dough, like parts of Klaus’ personality or his destiny or something had been imparted into the very dough himself. “Now we got to roll it into a ball.” For that to happen, Diego needed to get the hell out of Klaus’ space. But his feet weren’t going anywhere. 

Klaus looks back over his shoulder at him, and Diego could swear that he could count every fleck in those pretty green eyes. Or maybe every line on his lips. Did people read lips the way they read palms? Would he be able to count every indent, every crack in Klaus’ pretty mouth and know his history?

Diego? He hears his name distantly, like it’s coming through the depths of water or a couple of closed doors. Diego has to swallow before he turns his eyes back to the dough in Klaus’ hand. Plucking it from where it rests, Diego rolls it deftly into a ball between his flour dusted palms. This part was easy, at least. 

“Now we gotta flatten it out.” And now Diego had no more excuse to stand so close. He drops his arms and steps away from Klaus’ back, feeling the cool(er, it was still hot as hell in this tiny shop) air hit his chest in the place that Klaus just vacated. “You can do it by hand, but that shit takes too long.”

Diego points to the ancient, slightly rusted tortilla press that took of place of pride on the prep counter. It was his mom’s, sent on her insistence when he called to tell her that he got the loan for the place. 

She kept telling him that he could ask her new husband for the cash to start the place up. Apparently he was flush with it. But the last thing Diego wanted was to owe anybody money, least of all his brand new stepdad. So he sucked it up and went to the bank. And tried to tell himself that he wasn’t carrying the old man around in the back of his head like a safety net in case his shitty credit wasn’t enough to get him through. 

“We use the wax paper to keep it from sticking. It’s a pain in the ass when it sticks.” Diego points to two circles of wax paper, freshly cut from the industrial sized box of wax paper sitting on a shelf overhead. With the first circle down on the bottom of the tortilla press, the slapped the dough ball down on it, and then more carefully placed the second circle of wax paper on top. 

“You do the honors.” This was always his favorite part when he was a kid, and there’s something fucking dumb about how it makes his heart race to share this with Klaus. But Klaus wasn’t looking at him like he was dumb. Klaus was watching him with bright glass eyes and pink flushed wide across his cheeks. He was fucking beautiful. 

Klaus curls a hand against the lever, and with a sweet hesitance, he pulls the lever down, pressing the two metal plates together. Between them, the sheets of wax paper held everything together as the dough was pressed into an even, neat disc. 

“Nice. Good job.” Later, when it was all said and done, Diego would realize just how many words he got out without even thinking about stuttering. About just how fucking magic being in the kitchen with Klaus was. “Now we’re ready to cook.”

Almost. They were almost to the best part, and Diego could feel the anticipation starting to prickle at his scalp. Next to the flat top where he fried his meat and onions and peppers, there were two gas burners. This was where he blackened the chiles for his sauces, right on the flame. But for the moment, he had a big black cast iron skillet. 

Diego turns the flame down to low, watching the ring of blue cling close to the burner. “With cast iron, you gotta be patient. It takes a minute to come up to temp, but this shit runs hot. So you don’t want to rush it. Otherwise, you’re going to burn your stuff and you’ll have to start over.” It was better to do shit right the first time, then waste the time doing it over.

Another lesson from his mother, though her version was a lot more PG. She was a classy lady like that. Diego had never even heard her say a word like ‘crap’, let alone a real curse word in either language they both spoke at home.

Holding a hand out over the surface of the pan, Diego feels the heat like pressure up against his palm. Yeah, it was ready to go. He turns to Klaus, and is pleased that he doesn’t have to say anything. Klaus waits for Diego to pull his hand away and then he puts his own right near the bottom of the pan. Klaus even pulls it away with a playful hiss, blowing on his palm.

“So with a tortilla, you cook them straight on a hot, dry pan. No oil, no butter, no nothing. Bring me the wax paper.” Like a good sous chef, Klaus hurries over to the tortilla press, springing the lever open so that he can get a hand above and below the sheets of wax paper, carrying them over to Diego still trapped between his palms.

Klaus hands over the two discs of paper gently but with a flourish, like he was on the Price is Right or something, and Diego peels the top off, dropping that side down onto the pan with a sizzle. Once it’s settled, he peels the other piece of wax paper away. He drops them back on the counter to be used again. No reason to let that shit go to waste. 

“We’re looking for bubbles. That’s how we know to flip.” Sure enough, within a few seconds, Diego is able to point at where a bubble has swollen up on the surface of the tortilla. Klaus nods, hands carefully out of the way of the stove, though he was still leaning in close to get a better look at the action. Diego grabs a wooden spatula, flipping it over onto the other side. The fresh side of the tortilla hisses and sizzles when it makes contact with the hot pan. “Same on the other side. But we’re listening here. Smelling, too. You’ll know when it’s done. Watch.”

Diego waits out the tortilla, until he can smell the first singe of heat against the dough. He taps his nose, and Klaus lights up, delighted. I smell it! He’s so damn handsome that Diego thinks he might be dizzy because of it. Or maybe that was the heat of a kitchen used all day, and the leftover heat of the summer sun baked into the bricks of the building. Either one.

The tortilla is slid from the pan onto a waiting plate, a real one, actually from Diego’s apartment and not the paper shit he serves customers on. It was as fancy as he got. A pat of butter is smoothed across the freckled surface of the fluffy tortilla, leaving a golden sheen that he sprinkles with just a little salt. 

Diego hands the plate over to Klaus, his heart sitting high and fast in his chest like a hummingbird. He’s never cared so much about what somebody thought in his whole damn life. But now he needs to know.

“How is it?”

[cartoonfangirl1218]

EoA Appreciation Week Day 1: Adventure



So I'm going to flashback to season 2 with two of the greatest adventures that I think changed the show. The first is Song of the Sirenas. So much had happened but I think the biggest part was that Elena straight up killed Shuriki. No questioning her decision, no "Is there a better way?" She did it because as princess she had to protect her people from this external threat and also give herself closure from the constant fear and death of parents. But it may not have given her the closuee she thought she needed but that's more analysis than I'm prepared to do. Another awesome thing was how the rest of the amigos really showed off how in sync they were and how they truly work as a team. They all had grown a lot and it shows with the confidence they had in fighting and relying on their strengths to take down three notorious malvagos.

The other game changer I think was Naomi knows best. Less so from the main plot with Naomi but with how Carla and Ash freaking almost kill Elena by draining her life source. While it is also a great display of what the amigos can do together it shows how Elena was wrong about Shuriki. She was wrong that Shuriki was the final darkness or final threat to her kingdom. Shuriki may be gone but more are coming after her, and are even more powerful. Another game changer was the little line about Naomi replacing Esteban as chancellor. Now it was a joke but we all know how sensitive Esteban is about his position in his family and especially protective of his job considering all he has done. So it was a joke but it is a reminder to Esteban of his insecurities which we see in season 3, he still isn't able to fully face them or owe up to his actions. Furthermore, it was the episode that laid the ground for Ash neglecting Carla's wants and more telling, disregard for Victor. And we all know how that turns out....

On a lighter note, some hcs! While Naomi was sailing on her own, one memorable adventure was in Hectoria. She had been running out of money and King Hector offered a reward for anyone who could catch the monkey who escaped his menangerie. It took three days trekking through the ocean, getting mud and certain other monkey execremengs thrown at her face, mosquito bitten, and nearly dying in quicksand before she got that damn monkey. And her reward? Not money as she assumed. But an afternoon with King Hector because what greater reward could there be?

One of Gabe's more peculiar adventure was when he was in an encampment with his fellow soldiers and since they ran out of rations they went to town to taste some local cuisine. And one of those treats was fried geckos. Gabe tried. He truly did because he had to be the brave strong guard captain in front of his men but it was too much. He felt it in his throat but he couldn't swallow and so dignifiedly walked from the fireplace and threw up in the bushes.

Whenever Elena visits Coronando, she takes Marisa and Marzel out to Nueva Vista to get in touch with their human sides. Which is always an adventure in itself. The most memorable one being when she took them to one of the fanciest restaurants. She made the mistake of going to the bathroom and so theh to order the finest drinks. Alcoholic drinks to be exact. It seems alcohol affects Sirenas more quickly than humans and by the desserts came around, Marisa was trying to lead the fish in fish tanks to a revolution for freedom and Marzel had lost control of his balance while talking waay too much of his personal dislike for some human things and Elena was running between them trying to get them out of the restaurant.

[katedoesntexist]

Stay-at-home journal 11/8/20

Yesterday:

Had a nice lunch w partner

Played piano

Looked around at the back yard

Played zootr

Worked

Today:

Work

Usual sunday chores

Call mom

Shower

Maybe use the fireplace in the back yard

Free space:

I missed yesterday's entry. Fri was more work, then hung up some cards from a kids game in picture frames. Watched both mamma mia movies for the first time and tbh i think theyre over hyped but they were alright.

At the end of yesterday's zootr session i got a warp song and used it, not realizing that id get stuck out there. ;_; went to the desert as a kid before i had done any gerudo stuff, and after an hr of meticulously trying to make my way back thru the wasteland w no lens AND pulling off a speedrunner trick to get over the quicksand river, it was all for naught. Turns out the gate is locked and they dont let you through. So next play session ill have to load from an older save and try to make all my progress back. I feel like thats prob a lesson everyone learns on their first randomizer hahhhhh.

To help combat the physical issues ive had lately i ordered a sit/stand desk. It was hella expensive but hopefully worth it. Also order two foot rests that came yesterday and im going to try them and return one. Maybe i talked abt this last time? Anyway, foot rests came and i like both for different reasons. One is cheaper and better for if you wear shoes, would be the clear choice if i were working at the office. The other is foam and softer, so better for socked feet at home. Its way more comfortable but doesnt rly adjust height. Also not sure how it holds up over time or if itll squish down more and more.

The cards I hung up were from my childhood. The deck has animals on one side and a verb on the other, and the idea is you shuffle it and create a silly random story thats nonsensical. I hung up six and figure i can swap them out when i feel like it.

[artificialqueens]

Mateo's Eight, chapter three (Branjie)--athena2

Summary: Previously: Brooke agreed to work with Vanessa Now: Vanessa goes through the plan of the heist as her team meets for the first time

A/N: Thank you so much for your feedback on this so far! I would really appreciate it if you could comment on this chapter. Your support means so much to me and helps encourage me. A thousand thank you’s to Writ for being the best beta!

Vanessa is up at the crack of dawn her first full day as a free woman, hoping she’ll return to her old ways of sleeping until 10 soon, especially now that she no longer has her job at the makeup store. Going to prison doesn’t help in the job department, and it makes her feel even worse that her mom is working a double shift today. Sometimes she would be so exhausted she’d fall asleep still in her nursing scrubs, and Vanessa wants more than ever to make things easier for her.

Her bed is too soft to leave, like a giant marshmallow beneath her. She’s buried under so many blankets it makes her sweat, but she’s too cozy under their fluffy softness to kick them off.

She eats her cereal with an eye on the clock as her mom rushes to get ready, each minute dragging like time itself is stuck in quicksand.

The second her mom leaves for work, with more kisses heaped on Vanessa’s cheek, she shoots up from the table and gets the place ready. It’s like how she used to wait for her parents to go out for the night so she could have friends over, right down to the soda and chips and pretzels she sets out for Yvie, only this time they’re discussing a million-dollar heist instead of post-prom plans. Hopefully the apartment won’t be trashed after, but you never know with Silky.

A’keria and Silky arrive first, lugging boxes and bags of Vanessa’s stuff that they had taken from her and Brooke’s apartment. Vanessa tears through them, grabbing her fuzzy slippers and running her hands over the smooth jewelry box, like she’s regaining part of herself in the clothes and jewelry and dog mug.

She digs up a gray sweatshirt much too big for her, because of course one of Brooke’s things got mixed in. Vanessa used to steal the sweatshirt from Brooke’s dresser and wear it to bed in the winter, the thing so warm and oversized it was like being wrapped in a giant blanket. She’d tuck her arms inside the sleeves and bury her nose in the soft fabric, breathing in the smell of Brooke’s lavender body wash and another calming, cozy scent that was just Brooke, no way to describe it or how safe it made her feel. Vanessa wonders what it smells like now–

A knock on the door tears her away. Yvie and Scarlet try to hide grins as they stand together, mumbling that getting here at the same time is a coincidence, but Scarlet has purple lipstick in the corner of her lip when no one wears purple lipstick but Yvie.

Nina teeters in with a box of donuts that she passes out to everyone like a white, suburban Oprah, refusing to sit until she makes sure everyone has been fed.

“Is anyone else coming?” Yvie asks. “These are good chips, by the way,” she mumbles, pulling the bowl from Silky’s lap into her own.

Vanessa meets A’keria’s eyes. “Just one more,” Vanessa says, pacing around the living room. Brooke said she was coming. Vanessa’s careful combination of money and threats had gotten her, like she knew they would. If not for the money so Brooke could take care of those bills just as big as Vanessa’s, then to cover her own ass.

“Hi.” Brooke appears out of nowhere, still graceful as ever, her steps silent on the creaky apartment floor.

Vanessa digs her nails into her palms to stamp out the rage. Brooke is here. She’s in Vanessa’s apartment, standing there, and it’s all she can do not to punch her in the face.

“What the hell?” Silky asks.

“Sorry I’m late.” Brooke squeaks.

Vanessa scoffs. It was impossible for Brooke Lynn Hytes to be late. She had probably been born on her exact due date clutching a watch in her little fist, motioning for the doctors to hurry up. It was why, as much as a pain in the ass she was about it, their cons always worked, Brooke timing everything with perfection.

“You weren’t late,” Vanessa shoots back. “You were the first one here, but you went around the block a million times ‘cause you’re a coward and didn’t want to show up first.”

A’keria chokes on her soda and Scarlet whacks her on the back.

“Donut?” Nina offers Brooke.

“I’ll take another,” Yvie says.

Out of the corner of Vanessa’s eye, Silky tries to casually sweep up the chocolate donut crumbs she got all over the couch.

Vanessa just sighs, because this is her team, for better or worse.

“I’m here now,” Brooke says cautiously, cheeks tinged pink.

“Yeah, you are.” Vanessa allows herself one look at the person who betrayed her.

She looks good, as much as Vanessa doesn’t want to admit it. Brooke still manages to make skinny jeans and a black sweater look like they came straight off the runway, making Vanessa’s heart lift as she forces it down. Brooke’s tired, though. Vanessa can see it, knows to look in her eyes, where she couldn’t hide the exhaustion that makeup and her perfect posture concealed. Her long fingers play with her sweater cuff and her lip is chewed-up, both signs of nerves. Good. If Vanessa’s caused Brooke sleepless nights and fidgety fingers and burning lips, it’s only what she deserves.

Brooke sits on the couch and pulls out her notebook. That damn notebook. It’s covered in little cartoon cats, because Brooke loves cats, had wanted to adopt one eventually. Who cares what she loves, Vanessa reminds herself. She certainly didn’t love you. But that doesn’t matter. Brooke is in her debt now, and Vanessa is in control.

“So,” Vanessa begins, feeling like a teacher in front of the class, especially as she turns on the TV connected to her laptop, “I have a plan.

“In three weeks, the Met is hosting a ball for their new historical costume and jewelry exhibit. Place is gonna be crawling with money. And I want to steal. Not the Met, but one necklace.”

“A necklace?” Yvie asks in confusion. “What are we, ten-year-old’s in Claire’s?”

“Hold all questions for the end, please,” Vanessa snaps.

She brandishes her arm for dramatic effect and clicks the next slide on her laptop. “The actress Plastique Tiara will be at the event, in a dress designed by Scarlet–” Scarlet waves to the room like a Disney princess on parade, “–who will convince Plastique to wear this 112 million dollar diamond necklace.”

Everyone blinks in confusion as Vanessa brings up a slide featuring the necklace, but she plows on. “Using our combined skills, we will get in the ball, take the necklace, replace it with a worthless copy, and leave with 16 million dollars each.”

Vanessa grins smugly in the chorus of gasps that ring out and fade into awestruck silence. She can see everyone’s heads spinning, comprehending a number they–and most people–have never seen, taking in the freedom that number will give them, freedom they’ve never had. The freedom to live where they want and do what they want, to never have to worry about medical bills or loans or home repairs or emergencies.

The only sound is the scratching of Brooke’s pen. The glide of her pen used to be like music to Vanessa’s ears, and she could trace the gentle curves of Brooke’s neat handwriting for hours. Now, it just sets her teeth on edge, makes her burn with aggravation.

Nina is the first to speak. “Pardon my French, everyone,” she says, “but holy fuck.”

—

It only takes Vanessa about ten minutes into her date with Brooke to see that beneath her cool, calm exterior, she’s really just an adorable dork.

That easy grace Brooke had moved with in the department store flies out the window as she nearly trips over her own giraffe legs to open the door for Vanessa, and she gasps in excitement when she finds out the diner serves breakfast all day.

“You a breakfast for dinner person?” Vanessa asks.

Brooke nods eagerly. “Why, are you a dinner-foods-for-dinner person?”

“Nah. I’m all for eating whatever I want at any time of day.”

“Exactly!” Brooke’s eyes sparkle and it makes Vanessa’s heart soar. “Like, what makes bacon and eggs only breakfast food?”

“Yeah! If I want pancakes for dinner and pizza for breakfast, who’s gonna stop me?” Vanessa claps eagerly as their plates arrive, French toast and bacon for Brooke and grilled cheese with fries for Vanessa.

Vanessa grabs the ketchup and drenches her fries.

“You put ketchup over the fries?” Brooke asks in horror.

“Yeah, why?”

“You have to dip them! There’s no control over how much ketchup you get per fry when you put it on top!”

“I just want to put it all on at once, Mary!”

Brooke shakes her head. “Unbelievable. Next you’ll be telling me you put the milk in before the cereal.” But she grins around her mouthful of bacon.

“Of course I don’t put the milk first. I’m not an animal.” Vanessa laughs and holds a ketchup-soaked fry out to Brooke, which she pulls from Vanessa’s fingers with her teeth. Vanessa can’t even breathe at having Brooke this close to her, close enough to see tiny flecks of gray in her green eyes, which only popped out in certain lighting.

“So, um, where do you work?” Brooke asks.

“I do makeup at one of the beauty stores,” Vanessa answers. “Most people tip pretty good, but it ain’t enough to pay the bills we got, y’know?”

“Is that why you started conning? If it’s okay for me to ask that?” Brooke says.

“It’s okay. And yeah. My dad, he was…he was sick. Insurance barely covered anything, and the medical bills just kept piling up. He died a few months ago, and we still got the medical bills, and the funeral bills, and…it’s a lot.” Vanessa just shakes her head. She and her mother both work full-time and hardly make a dent in the bills after rent and utilities. She doesn’t understand how her father getting sick, through no fault of his own, could result in almost $100,000 worth of debt. It’s like trying to bring down a mountain one pebble at a time, with the mountain growing each day, too big to see the top.

“I’m really sorry,” Brooke says. Her hand hesitantly slides across the table, and Vanessa doesn’t even think of whether she should, whether they’re at that point yet, before she grabs it. It’s cool and solid and soft, helping her focus on something besides bills and dead fathers.

“It’s okay,” Vanessa says. She and her mother have helped each get through his illness and his passing, and she feels awful for thinking it, but it’s made them closer, united in the memories of the man they both lost.

“It makes me mad, you know?” Brooke’s eyes flicker with intensity. “That we still work and have to do this just to get by. I have medical bills too, and the heat broke in my apartment last week and I had to do a scam just to pay for the repair, even though I teach full-time at a dance studio. Some people don’t have to worry about that. Some people–”

“Some people buy freaking yachts ‘cause they’re outta shit to buy,” Vanessa says.

“Yes!” Brooke exclaims. “You really get it. Get me.” Her eyes shine in surprise, like she can’t believe what she just said, but Vanessa has already thought it.

“Yeah,” Vanessa agrees, reaching over to snatch a piece of Brooke’s bacon. “And if you ever have heating problems again, my place is really warm. Maybe you could even show me some dance moves.” She bats her eyelashes.

It’s a risk to throw something like out there, especially on a first date, but Brooke’s smile is all the reward Vanessa needs.

—

Vanessa stands tall in her living room, everyone on the couches still recovering from her announcement, hisses of 16 million slipping into Vanessa’s ears.

“Can I talk to you?”

Vanessa sighs. Leave it to Brooke to interrupt her moment of blissful triumph for questions. Vanessa leads her down the hall, grumbling about buzzkills under her breath.

She crosses her arms and stands expectantly in front of Brooke, raising an eyebrow to show that she’s not giving an inch in this, that Brooke better stop raking a hand through her hair and speak.

“So, do they know?” Brooke begins.

“Know what?”

“What the real mark is,” Brooke says. “I know you. I can see the bigger target here.”

I know you.

Vanessa can’t help but feel that rush of warmth at Brooke knowing her so well, remembering that connection she and Brooke once had, when they could look at each other and have entire conversations with eyebrow-raises and smirks. Brooke always knew her plans, always got what she was trying to do like no one else. It had been a relief back then, to have someone she could trust, who just knew her, knew her coffee order and favorite movies and how to cheer her up when she was upset. A comfort to know she wasn’t alone, that she had someone.

But now, it’s infuriating. That she had given all those parts of her to Brooke, and now Brooke would always have them even when Vanessa wants to take them back. Like no matter how clever she thinks she is, Brooke can see right through her. Vanessa can never free herself from that connection they had, a connection Brooke severed clean in a police station six months ago.

“They don’t,” Vanessa admits, “And I’m not gonna tell them. It’s safer that way. Less chance of someone giving me up.” She spits the last three words at Brooke with the strongest death glare she’s ever managed. If looks could kill, the whole street would be dead. Brooke at least has the decency to look embarrassed, a wrinkle forming between her eyebrows.

“Vanessa, I never meant–”

Vanessa raises her hand to shush Brooke. “Don’t. Just don’t. Go over your notes, tell me if it’ll work. You do your job, I pay you, and I don’t want to see you ever again.”

“Okay.”

Now it’s Brooke’s turn to stand, still as a statue, notebook outstretched in a gloat. Her face is impassive even though Vanessa knows how much she needs this money, and steam nearly comes out of her ears. Brooke can stand here all day, with those stupid dancer legs of hers, and Vanessa needs to move this along and get back to her group before Silky and A’keria have a repeat of last year’s pillow fight.

“So, tell me. Is this gonna work?” Vanessa finally cracks, ignoring how Brooke’s smile makes her own lips twitch up, a muscle memory.

“It can work, yes. But…”

“But what?”

“This is risky. It’s risky, and intricate, and if I’m sticking my neck out like this, I want to be involved, so I can make sure this is done properly.”

The words slam into Vanessa, filling her with rage. Brooke didn’t trust her to do this, when Vanessa had planned the entire thing herself, foresaw every possible conclusion and solved every possible problem while behind the bars Brooke put her in. Brooke didn’t trust her, when they had once trusted each other with everything.

“Pretty rich of you to not trust me when you’re the one who ratted me out,” Vanessa says.

Brooke sighs. “Vanessa–”

“Whatever. You want to be involved how? You’re gonna be there the night of the ball, what else do you want?” Vanessa demands, certain she doesn’t like where this is going.

“I want to be there when you make most of the moves,” Brooke says.

“Hell no! I’m not lettin’ you breathe down my neck the whole time!”

“You have a lot to do,” Brooke argues. “You need to schedule a meeting with Scarlet and Plastique to make sure Plastique wears the necklace. Vogue has already starting hiring ball assistants and I’m assuming you’re gonna send Nina inside, so you need to get her an interview–”

“I know what I have to do!” Vanessa snaps, reluctantly impressed at how fast Brooke’s mind works, how quickly she put the pieces together. Brooke saw cons as puzzles, each step an interlocking piece to build the picture Vanessa dreamed, her focus more on the goal and how her charm could get them there.

“Then you also know you need me,” Brooke states. No emotion, no hint of desire, just pure, hard fact. “The organization this is gonna take, the scheduling…you need me.”

Vanessa clenches her fists. She had tried to downplay her desperation on the phone, but obviously Brooke picked up on it. Vanessa might be able to do this without Brooke, but can she take that chance on something this big, this important, this life-changing?

“Fine.” Vanessa sighs. “Meet me at the Met Friday at 10. Yvie’s working on a blindspot in their security cameras and I’m gonna test it. Can you get Nina that interview?”

Brooke nods. She looks at her shoes before pulling a piece of paper from her pocket, the familiar motion making Vanessa dizzy. “This is my new number. Just thought you might need it.”

Vanessa shoves the paper in her pocket and heads back into the living room without waiting to see if Brooke is behind her. She used to walk without checking because she knew Brooke would always be there, would always have her back. Now she does it because she just doesn’t care.

Vanessa stands in front of them, forgetting her annoyance of having to work with Brooke in favor of the pride and riches she would earn after this.

“Okay, everyone,” Vanessa says, “welcome to Mateo’s Eight.”

“There’s only seven of us.”

Vanessa huffs in exasperation. “Damn it, Yvie, c’mon, this was my big moment!”

“Well, there is.”

Vanessa bites her lip and makes a quick head count. Math never was her strong suit. But Mateo’s Seven just doesn’t have the same ring, so she scoops up Riley from where he’s latched on to Brooke’s ankle–the traitor; he always jumped on Brooke when she walked in the apartment, even if she had only been gone an hour–and hoists him into the air.

“Riley’s number eight. I don’t want to hear arguing.” She straightens her posture, trying to get back her earlier confidence, wishing there was some heroic music in the background.

“Welcome to Mateo’s Eight.”