#hey fun fact this has been in my drafts since August as well (I say knowing I scheduled the other thing to post after this)

[outeremissary]

From a while ago. @mountainashfae's Chloe :) I love his colors so much...

[jennifersylvesters]

birthday wishes

pairing: spider-man x fem!reader (?) word count: ~4.2k warnings: none A/N: this has literally been sitting in my drafts for about a year or so? i decided when i made this blog / wrote this fic that i would release it on august 10th. fun fact: mcu peter parker and i share a birthday which inspired this. hope you enjoy reading!

There wasn’t much you wanted for your birthday except one thing. One simple thing really. No material gifts compared to what you hoped for most. Keep the fancy gadgets and nice clothes. All you wanted was to meet Spider-Man. 

Except birthday wishes like these weren’t really simple, were they? Despite how simplistic it sounded, this was a huge deal. It was on par with asking Iron Man to fix your internet connection. Well, perhaps not so grand but quite unrealistic. No one could package up a hero and present them at a person’s door. 

So perhaps your birthday wish was more complicated than it sounded. Still you didn’t want to give up complete hope. Not when you knew someone who actually knew Spider-Man. Not when you knew Peter Parker might help make your birthday dream come true. 

You and Peter got along fairly well. Being lab partners helped you realize how nice he was. Though he was clearly the smartest kid in class, he never made you feel inferior about your abilities. The two of you were Facebook friends but that didn’t mean much. It was only a simple click to accept an online friendship; it was an entirely different thing to casually ask for a huge favor especially when it came to Spider-Man.

Despite Peter’s friendly nature, he clammed up when conversation turned to superheroes. He never engaged in Flash’s goading that there was no way he had met Spider-Man. Even in amicable conversations about favorite Avengers, he just shrugged and kept quiet. Everything about his Stark internship was kept private, and you wanted to respect his boundaries. 

The connection between Peter and Spider-Man never would’ve crossed your mind if it hadn’t been for your friend, Tyler. He was the schemer who insisted you ask Peter about the hero. “C’mon! I’m sure Peter would help us! It’d be so cool to see Spider-Man at your party! Can you imagine? No one else could pull that off!” 

You avoided asking your classmate - both out of shame and embarrassment - and the excuse of summer break helped immensely. You chalked it up to needing to speak with Peter in person for this sort of thing and that he’d be too busy with his own summer plans. That was until you ran into him and Ned at your favorite coffee shop. 

Immersed in your book, you glanced up hearing a familiar voice call out your name. You looked up from your table, spotting Ned and Peter at the cream and sugar counter. Ned waved enthusiastically while Peter politely smiled.

A nudge in your shoulder prompted you to turn towards your friend. While you came to the cafe to work, Tyler was there to goof off under the pretense of “moral support”. “Perfect timing. Ask him” Tyler encouraged. Shaking your head, you ignored your friend’s suggestion. Instead you just smiled and waved at the two boys. “If you won’t do it, then I will.” The smile vanished as Tyler stood up and headed towards the pair. You followed him, begging for him to let it go knowing he would do what you wouldn’t. 

“Hey! What’s up, guys?” Tyler greeted the duo, doing an intricate handshake with both of them. You stood slightly behind, marveling at how these boys could complex handshakes yet couldn’t remember basic math. 

“Hey, Tyler. Hey, Y/N. What’s up?” Ned grinned before taking a sip of his drink. 

“Well, Y/N is here trying to finish the summer reading while I’m enjoying this nice day and my Instagram feed.” You rolled your eyes as he nudged you with a laugh. “Personally, I think she needs to have more fun and excitement, don’t you?” The boys shrugged casually, unaware of Tyler’s plan. Your friend clapped his hand on your back, and you dreaded the next words to come out of his mouth. 

“So...Peter. Y/N has something they want to ask you” Tyler began mischievously. You smacked his arm, but his plan was already in motion. You glanced at Peter who wore a confused yet curious expression. “In case you didn’t know, Y/N’s birthday party is coming up. You guys got the Facebook invite, right?” The boys nodded in unison. “Not sure if you know, but there’s only one thing she wants for her party. And she’s been wanting it for a while.” 

You couldn’t help but roll your eyes again. While you knew Tyler could be dramatic, he was taking this to the next level. 

“There’s only one person she really wants to see for her birthday. And she thinks they’re totally cool and amazing...And it’s Spider-Man!” At Tyler’s words, Peter froze up as his mouth dropped open in surprise. “You know him, right?” 

Despite his open mouth, nothing came out from Peter. Ned nervously glanced at his best friend before turning to you, back to Peter, and then to Tyler who seemed unfazed by Peter’s shock. Ned shook Peter gently, which seemed to break him out of his thoughts. 

“I, uh...I guess I know him?” Peter managed to finally stammer out. Ned began looking around, avoiding eye contact with you and Tyler. 

“Right! And we were hoping you could make Y/N’s birthday by having him swing in.” 

You elbowed Tyler at this. He made it sound like you wanted Spider-Man to just stop by briefly for an appearance and then leave once photos were taken. That wasn’t the birthday wish you had in mind. But you knew it was difficult enough to even get in contact with the hero that you kept quiet at your friend’s plan. 

“I, er...I don’t know? I don’t see him that often, you know? You know how it is...Spider-Man. He’s...Busy...A busy guy...Man. Guy man.” Peter looked uncomfortable with the whole situation, his hands fidgeting as he bounced slightly. Either Tyler was blind or he really wanted Spider-Man at your party. 

“And that’s why Y/N was hoping you’d help her out. Dude, you gotta admit it’d be dope seeing him there!”

Peter nervously glanced at you. During this whole ordeal you kept quiet letting Tyler lead the conversation. His look seemed to ask your opinion, wanting you to say something.

“I mean, I know it’s probably crazy” you admitted slowly, feeling the blush spread on your face. “But that would be really awesome if you could do it, Peter.” Everything about this scenario was a long shot. You braced yourself for the rejection. Instead Peter’s answer surprised you.  

“I’ll ask him.” Ned’s eyes widened, almost dropping his cup. 

“Really?” You and Tyler asked at the same time. Peter nodded tensely. Tyler whooped while a smile spread on your face. 

“I mean, he might say no. But I can ask him” Peter added, but neither of you cared. It was one step closer to Spider-Man that you wouldn’t have accomplished without his help. 

“We’ll take that. You’re awesome, man!” Tyler beamed as the two of them exchanged in another handshake. The tension hadn’t lifted from Peter’s expression, but he managed to force a smile.

With your excitement at an all time high, you couldn’t help but throw your arms around Peter. Though initially startled, he hugged you back. 

“Thanks! I mean it. You have no idea what this means to me. You’d be my hero” you gushed before pulling away. 

“In more ways than one” Ned whispered so that only Peter could hear. His face turned red from the comment, but you and Tyler were too busy freaking out to notice. 

Within mere days everyone began asking if Spider-Man really was showing up to your party. No surprise Tyler’s big mouth was to blame. It was difficult to respond since you genuinely didn’t know. The last thing you wanted to do was get anyone’s hopes up, especially your own. You hadn’t gotten any confirmation about Spider-Man, and you were beginning to wonder if you ever would. 

There hadn’t been any updates from Peter that you wondered if he only said he would ask to get Tyler off his back. You knew how persistent your friend could be that it wouldn’t be surprising if Peter lied to him. Yet that attitude didn’t seem like Peter.

Drumming your fingers on your favorite sofa chair, you wondered if you should message Peter. You didn’t want to bother him, but everyone had been pestering you for a definite answer. Turned out you didn’t need to message him as he walked into the cafe. 

While you were nervous about his response, you decided to bite the bullet. Once he grabbed his drink from the bar, you rushed over. “Hey there” you greeted him from behind. Peter, clearly unaware of your presence, yelped and spilled his iced coffee.

You winced at his reaction. “Oh, sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you!” 

He placed the cup down, grabbing napkins. “It’s fine.” You grabbed a couple napkins as well, offering them his way. The boy shot you a grateful smile. 

“So how are things? I mean, besides this spill.” You chuckled nervously as you watched him dab the coffee on his shirt. Maybe you shouldn’t have approached him until he finished capping his coffee. “I can get you another cup if you want” you offered but he shook his head. 

“Really, it’s totally fine” he insisted. Tossing the used napkins in the garbage, he surveyed the mess. It wasn’t too bad with his dark shirt, but it was definitely still damp. Peter let out a sigh, before dabbing napkins on his shirt once more.

As you watched him, guilt washed over you. Not just for the coffee spill but for putting Peter in a weird position. The two of you weren’t close so he wasn’t obligated to help you out. Yet you and Tyler used Peter’s kind nature to your advantage. Something about that felt, well, selfish. You didn’t want to use him this way, not even if that meant meeting Spider-Man. 

“I’m sorry about me and Tyler” you burst out. “He, well, we shouldn’t have done that.” Peter glanced up from his shirt at your apology. He looked like he wanted to say something, but you continued. 

“I mean, he knows it’s the only thing I want for my birthday this year. And I just wanna meet Spider-Man so bad. He shouldn’t have involved you though. I know you don’t really like talking about that stuff. I think we were just getting desperate about the whole thing, y’know? We shouldn’t have done that. I’m really sorry again!” When you finished, you took a deep breath. It hadn’t been your intention to apologize, but the words rushed out. 

“Y/N, it’s fine. Really.” You opened your mouth to apologize again, but stopped when he waved his hand. “I mean it. You don’t have to apologize.” 

Peter glanced away, staring down at his shirt before looking at the counter. He looked so lost in thought, fighting certain ideas in his head. You weren’t sure what to make of the situation. 

“Peter, are you-”

“He’ll be there” he cut you off as he finally looked up. 

“Huh?”

“Spider-Man. He’ll be at your party. Sorry, I...I should’ve told you sooner.” 

“Really?!” It was hard for you to contain your surprise and excitement.

“Yeah. I, uh, talked to Spider-man, and he said he’d definitely swing by.” You squealed happily before jumping up and down. Spider-Man was going to be at your party. You were finally going to meet him. Your birthday wish was coming true.

You stopped jumping upon feeling people’s stares before gently holding Peter’s forearm.

“Thanks. I mean it. And, hey, you’re coming too, right?” you asked. As excited as you were for Spider-Man, you wanted Peter to be there as well. 

Peter scratched the back of his neck. “I dunno. My Aunt May kinda has this...Well, it’s this thing. Don’t know if I can miss it. 

“Oh.” You heard the disappointment in your voice. “Well, you should definitely stop by if you can. I think it’ll be a lot of fun!” Pulling Peter into a hug, you rested your head on him. “Peter, thank you so much!” You felt his breath in your hair as he told you not to mention it. You knew that you wouldn’t forget this favor ever. 

You waited for Spider-Man to show up. In fact, everyone who came showed up excited to see the masked superhero. No one cared about the cake or music when he’d be swinging in soon. 

After an hour, you had a sinking feeling that something was amiss. Someone turned on the news to see if Spider-Man was busy saving the city. Nothing. Someone commented he might be in space. But it didn’t make sense for him to be there when he said he’d be in New York. When he’d be at your birthday party.

Two hours later, it was clear Spider-Man was a no show. Your heart sank knowing he wouldn’t be coming. You had been so excited, so ready. You wore your favorite outfit, thinking it might even impress him. But now there was no one to impress. 

While no one said it to your face, you overheard some party goers grumbling about the false promise of Spider-Man. You weren’t sure which stung more: their comments or the truth that Spider-Man wasn’t there.  

You tried to have a good time despite everything. No one brought up Spider-Man to you, afraid that you might cry at the mention. No one wants to see the birthday girl sobbing on her special day. 

Eventually people left when it got late. They wished you a happy birthday, telling you they had fun. Whether or not that was the truth, you had absolutely no clue. But you knew they hadn’t been as miserable as you. Tyler was the last to leave, hugging you tightly and insisting your birthday party had been amazing. 

As you stood in your backyard, you sighed at all the food left on the table. People ate most of it but a couple slices of cake and an array of cupcakes remained. You began slowly cleaning, wondering where Spider-Man could’ve been that day. 

“Hey there.” You screamed, frightened by the surprise voice. Turning around, you gasped. There he was. Spider-Man, shifting awkwardly between poses, stood on the other side of the yard. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you!” Clutching your chest, you tried to relax your heart rate after being almost scared to death. 

“Y-You’re Spider-Man” you stammered out, taking in the sight of the super hero. 

He cleared his throat before nodding. “Yup. That’s me. Spider-Man.” His voice was considerably deeper than before as if he was trying to conceal himself. 

“You’re really here.” Even as he stood in front of you, it was hard to believe that the masked hero was really in your backyard. 

“I am.” He nodded again. “I just...Wanted to apologize for not showing up sooner.” Spider-Man was standing in front of you apologizing. That definitely didn’t happen every day. 

“It’s...It’s fine.” 

“If it makes you feel better, I, uh, wasn’t hanging out with Peter either. I was just...busy.” You wondered what he was busy with before realizing it wasn’t your business. Even if he wasn’t on television, it didn’t mean he wasn’t doing other superhero tasks.

“Ah, yeah. Saving the world. You know - the usual.”

He laughed, and you couldn’t help but smile. You managed to make Spider-Man laugh. How many people could say that? “Yeah, the usual.” He paused, before scratching the top of his head. “I figured I should at least stop by and say happy birthday since it’s a pretty special day.” 

“It’s midnight” you mumbled. You hadn’t meant to say anything, but you wanted to get it off your chest. 

He turned his head to the side, almost as to stare at you quizzically. “It’s midnight” you repeated, voice slightly louder. “It’s just...It’s not my birthday anymore. It’s the day after.” You felt like a spoiled child, whining to someone who saved people. He wasn’t some entertainer who could show up whenever. Still, the emotions of how rotten you felt during your party bubbled to the surface.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, Y/N." He reached out before pulling back, seeming nervous to touch you. That you might lash out. That you might yank away from his grasp. That you might fall apart. 

"Don’t...Don’t worry about it" you attempted to brush off your slight bitterness and sadness towards the situation. At this point, there was nothing you or the superhero could do. Not like either of you could turn back time like Doctor Strange. 

“But I made a promise. I should’ve kept it.” All you could do was shrug. 

This wasn’t how you envisioned meeting Spider-Man. In fact, you assumed you’d be shrieking about his presence. Yet you felt strangely calm around him, like you could say what you wanted. Maybe that’s why you pointed out it was no longer your birthday. 

“This looks like it was amazing though” he insisted as he gestured to the backyard. It did look great. You spent the day getting everything into place, hoping to impress the superhero. Twinkling lights were strung around neatly with balloons tied up. As he pointed out how great the details were, you blushed. 

“I mean, look at this. Cupcakes and a cake? That’s-Well that’s really impressive!” Unable to stop yourself, you laughed at his comment. He took one of the cupcakes, peering at the decoration placed on top. "Happy birthday Y/N...And Peter?" he read off slowly.

"Oh. Yeah. It was Peter's birthday, too. Did he not tell you?" You assumed if Peter was close enough to Spider-Man, his heroic friend would know that detail. 

"I mean, I knew. But I didn't know that you knew...His birthday. I didn't know that you knew about that" he stammered out.

"Yeah. Found out freshman year. Plus it’s on his Facebook profile. I figured after his party, he might drop by mine with you" you shrugged, trying to remain as nonchalant as possible.

“I-He never said he was having a party.”

“Huh?” you asked, face scrunching up in confusion by his comment.

“Well, Peter said he didn’t tell you he was having a party. He figured...You might feel bad if you knew.” 

“Not sure why he’d feel bad. It’s his birthday too. Or, well, was. If he’s celebrating his own way, who am I to stop that?”

"Oh." Spider-Man stood still before falling into a nearby seat. “Huh.”

“Are you okay?” He seemed a bit off by your admission. Was it something you said? Was it something you did? Or maybe he was just parched from crime fighting?

“No...Yes! I mean, yeah. I’m fine!” He waved his hand, assuring you he was alright.

A silence fell over the backyard as the two of you nervously stared at the ground. 

“I just wanted you to know...” you started, trying to figure out how to phrase your words properly. This was why you wanted to meet him so badly, why you wanted him for your birthday. You wanted to express yourself properly. 

“Yeah?” You looked up to see Spider-Man looking at you. Even with the mask, you could feel his gaze on your face. 

“Um, I just wanted to thank you. I know you probably don’t remember, but you saved my dog a couple months back. And before then, you helped out one of my neighbors. You’re just...You’re this amazing person and I just think you’re awesome for everything you do. It just...It really means a lot.” You let out a breath, your face heating up. 

He didn’t say anything, just gazed back down. You copied his action, hoping he would break the stillness hanging in the air. 

“Ah, well, it was nothing. Just doin’ my job” he finally concluded. 

“Well, it wasn’t just nothing to me.” You weren’t sure how he could just disregard how amazing he was. Putting his life on the line to help others wasn’t easy yet he did it every day. It was comforting to know someone was looking out for the community. Looking out for you. 

You weren’t sure if it was the rush of the emotions or just plain rashness, but you walked over to where he sat. Placing your hands on his shoulders, you leaned over and kissed his cheek. As you pulled away, you realized how insane this was. You had just kissed Spider-Man. Your eyes widened and you stepped back. 

He placed his hand where you kissed his masked face.

“Just a way of showing my thanks” you explained, your face heating up. Oh. Maybe you shouldn’t have done that. 

“Oh. Okay.” He seemed dumbfounded, like he was still trying to process what just occurred. “That’s a...That’s nice. Or, well, that was nice. Nice thing.” The corners of your mouth tugged up as he began babbling about the kiss. 

“I should go. It’s getting pretty late so...” He stood up and stumbled back before rubbing the back of his head and chuckling. The sound made you smile and giggle. He gave you a thumbs up, which made you giggle harder. 

He wished you a good night and one final happy birthday before swinging away from your backyard. The smile on your face lingered as you buried your face in your hands The moment hadn’t been what you expected, but it was everything to you. 

As summer winded to an end, you couldn’t help but repeat the moment in your mind. You scrutinized about every detail. Maybe you shouldn’t have pointed out it was midnight. You should’ve offered him cupcakes to take home. Was he alright with you kissing him even if it was on the cheek? Or did he think you were some huge weirdo who couldn’t even thank a person normally? But he seemed to have liked it? Maybe even enjoyed it?

These constant thoughts bombarded your mind. In fact you had been at your favorite cafe shop for an hour and still hadn’t progressed with your book reports. 

A gentle tap on your shoulder snapped you out of your thoughts. Looking up, you saw Peter standing next to you gently rocking on the balls of his feet. You smiled at your classmate who clutched his drink tighter. 

“Hey, Peter. What’s up?”

“Hey, Y/N. Uh, nothing much. Nothing much.” Despite his attempt to act casual, his words rushed together and could barely make eye contact with you. 

“So...” you started, hoping he would say something. 

“So...” he mirrored you, still avoiding your gaze. 

“Well, happy belated birthday.” You studied him carefully, how his ears turned pink before he nodded rapidly. 

“Oh. Uh, thanks. You too.”

“Thanks.” Usually conversation with Peter was fairly easygoing yet this one was like pulling teeth. 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to your party” he finally spoke, an apologetic look on his face when he made eye contact.  

“Hey, it’s no biggie.” You waved off his apology. Since it was his birthday too, he had no obligation to attend your party. You didn’t hold it against him, not when he helped deliver one of the best gifts of all time. 

“I mean, I should’ve shown up” he insisted. “I heard it was nice.”

“Well, if a couple complaints about Spider-Man not showing up is nice, then I guess it was.” Seeing panic in his face, you quickly continued. “But he showed up in the end. It was after the party, but I’m just glad he came at all.” Thoughts of Spider-Man flooded back that you couldn’t help but blush. 

“Yeah...He said you were really cool” Tom casually mentioned despite his face reddening. 

“Really?” You perked up at this news before realizing how excited you sounded. Was that too desperate? 

“Yeah, he said...He said you were really awesome. And he apologized for showing up late.” You glanced down, smiling to yourself. You were glad to know that you left a good impression with him. 

“It was the best gift I received.” Thinking about how you kissed Spider-Man’s cheek, you wondered what it would be like to kiss the man behind the mask. How the hero might kiss you.  

“If that was the only time I’ll get to ever talk to Spider-Man” - you paused, letting your words sink in before continuing- “then I don’t care about his timing. I’m just happy that he showed up.” 

“You’ll see him around again.” Peter sounded confident in his words. You smiled sadly knowing that it was true. But you wanted to see him the same way you saw him that night. You wanted that personal moment, not just a brief stint shared with other New Yorkers. 

“Probably not as close as before though. And I’d hate it if we only met again because I was being robbed or something” you laughed. 

“I mean, you never know. He’s always around the neighborhood. Probably, uh, closer than you think.” There was something in Peter’s tone, encouragement not to give up hope. And you wanted nothing more than to take it. 

“Maybe you’re right.” You and Peter shared a smile before he cleared his throat and looked away. It escaped your notice that his cheeks were tinged pink. 

“Well, uh, just wanted to say hi. And happy belated birthday. That too, yeah” Peter fumbled out as he raised his iced coffee up and then took a sip. You wished him a happy belated birthday again and he grinned widely. 

“See you at Midtown Tech next week.” He bobbed his head repeatedly before giving you a wave and heading out. As you began working on your revisions, you had no idea how right Peter was about Spider-Man’s presence.

tags list: @sleepybesson, @sophiatomlinson23, @supernatural-girl97, @tomhaz

[sienna27]

Me / My Writing

Once again, faithful, patient, readers, I will be putting up a story that is not what you’re looking to see.  I am genuinely sorry for that, and because I honestly don’t know when/if I’ll be able to get back to my TWD stories, I felt like I should explain what happened because it wasn’t the usual ‘hey, life happens’ bullshit which led me here.  Some of you might have noticed that I’ve hardly been on Tumblr this year, and it’s all related to the following.  In brief, in the early spring my mom had a psychotic break, and she tried to kill my dad.  Started with verbal abuse, escalated to physically hitting him, finally went after him with a hammer.  A hammer.

He’s 86, she was 84.  

Weeks and weeks of hell, with her in and out of hospitals, back home on new medication, all to deteriorate to violence again and again, finally after the fourth time she had to be removed by emergency services we all, my dad included, accepted that after 63 years of marriage, my mom was going to finish up their remaining time together in a psychiatric ward.  So that’s where she’s been since May.  My dad, the stress has nearly killed him.  Literally.  He’s been in the hospital five times, in August he had a heart attack where he was technically dead for 28 minutes.  Only alive now because our neighbor who was with him was a paramedic and started CPR immediately, which kept oxygen going to his brain.  But the call I got at work was basically my sister sobbing, ‘dad’s dead.’  Fun drill!   And my mom isn’t my mom anymore.  The medication does nothing.  It’s some kind of organic dementia presenting as psychosis.  She has no affection for any of us.  She is hateful and cruel (told my oldest brother that his birth ruined her life) and suicidal, and her brain is completely broken.  I haven’t talked to her since July.  I miss her.  Sometimes I sit and sob I miss her so much, but the exasperating, ‘crazy,’ woman that I loved and hated and argued and fought with for forty years, isn’t the person that lives in that brain anymore, so cutting off contact is all I could do for my own sanity.  I mail her cookies and send my love along with the family who still visit, and that’s all I can do.

And then in October, my cat died.  My Stevo.  It wasn’t sudden because I had about a week to prepare, and yet it was sudden, because it was just over and he was gone.  Sixteen years he was my boy.  Sixteen years he ran up to greet me at the door when I came home, and slept next to my pillow on the bed, and now he’s just not here anymore.  And it’s killing me.  It’ll be two months next week and I still sob uncontrollably, randomly, for about five minutes every day.  Then I get my shit together and go on with my life like I’m supposed to be doing.  And the five minutes of sobbing is completely separate from random ‘normal’ crying or tearing up.  I’ve been doing that every single day, since the spring.  I have literally cried every day for the past eight months.  There is no medication to make that better because it’s not simply an ‘imbalance’ (which I had before all this anyway), this is now just my reality as it currently exists.  It’s a constant grieving for everything slowly falling apart in ways that you just don’t really imagine happening.  And it sucks.

So, that’s my life, right now.  And as such, with this never ending shitstorm of 2019, the characters and fandoms that were previously offering me some ‘respite’ from real life, have ceased to do so.  I don’t know why that is, but I haven’t been able to write in anything I had going.  And with life as it has been, and still is (literal, never ending pit in my stomach - my dad is back in the ICU as of last night so I’m listening to Chopin and stress eating Christmas cookies) I needed to find something to break up the emotional maelstrom before I hit a complete breakdown.  To my surprise, it ended up being the Harry Potter fandom that has kept me from slipping off the cliff.  First the books, then the movies, then the fanfic.  I devoured this world that I had felt only a casual affection for in the past.  And when I say that I tried SO hard to ignore any flutters I had for story ideas here, it was ridiculous.  I didn’t want to start writing in a new fandom when I have unfinished stories over in TWD, but the brain does what it does.  And once the spark came, and the story began to flesh out in my mind, inevitably, I had to start writing it down.  Once I had ten thousand words I realized it was coming into existence whether I wanted it to or not.  It’s helped some as a distraction, so in that respect it has done its part, and beyond that I hope it will bring some diversion to others as well.  So if you want to stick with me for a little longer, I do have this new story.  It’s focused in nature, maybe seven chapters I’m thinking.  I have the first two done, third drafted and final fleshed out, so it’s a project I believe I can complete.  You know, barring some other horrible event happening which splinters my world in another fun, new way.  

But anyway, it’s an AU where Snape survives and something happens that brings Hermione back into his life a few years later.  There is a specific plot, and romance will also ensue.  To be clear, this is an ADULT Hermione/Snape story because don’t be gross.  If you aren’t locked into her as soulmates with Ron, Hermione with Snape actually makes a lot of sense with them getting together post war.  And I realized that the pairing fits for my own pattern of writing couples with the Emotionally Repressed/Brooding Male and the woman who brings an unexpected bit of light into his life.  Historically, it’s the Mr. Darcy/Elizabeth Bennett template, in case you hadn’t noticed.  So stepping back, after the fact, I realized how logically I fell into this Snape/Hermione ship that I had given zero thought to prior to three months ago.  

And that’s all folks.  Hope your lives are well, and if they’re not, I hope they get better.  I’ll be around ❤️

cc: @sesamesquirrel​ cpmv71

[theonyxpath]

Over a month ago, I was talking about Onyx Path‘s sales venues and things like that. Just kind of getting folks caught up on where they could find our stuff and which projects you could find there.

A different, but similar, thing that I wanted to touch on today is some of the other sorts of projects we have to offer beyond book-shaped things. Specifically, because Mighty Matt McElroy sent me some pics of the proofs for a couple of card projects, I’m going to touch on those today.

(Never mind that I haven’t received my card proof samples yet…sob.)

The Realm illustration by Yiyhoung Li

There are two types of card-based projects that we have been creating. The first, are card games. We don’t do a lot of them, as we need to see a clear connection to whatever TTRPG they are derived from or it’s tough to put effort towards them when there are books to be created.

Right now, we have Justin Achilli’s Prince’s Gambit for Vampire: The Masquerade, which we saw as a fun political machinations game that is waaay shorter than a VTES match. Something to play while waiting for your RPG or LARP session to start up.

And Fetch Quest for Realms of Pugmire, which has shipped to Kickstarter backers, should be available to order and in stores in May, and which we are waiting for the PoD proofs for. This is a cooperative card game set in the wilds around Pugmire that complements the TTRPG.

In fact, we’re looking to have the option for folks to make their own cards via DriveThruCards, so folks can play their TTRPG characters.

You might have noticed that the part of DriveThru that deals with these sorts of things is DriveThru Cards, which is a different Print on Demand company than the one who does our books. Everything still all goes through DTRPG, or OBS as it’s corporately known, but the card guys have their own little differences in how they proof, etc.

We’ve been really happy with the quality of their cards, and that’s one of the reasons we have made both the games, and the second type of card projects we put together: roleplaying aids. These can be the extensive selection of Charm Cards for Exalted 3rd, or Condition Cards for our CofD games, or Trick Cards for Pugmire, and more.

Pugmire also has Spell Cards, and right now we are proofing Spell Cards for the Scarred Lands that can be used for a SL campaign, or worked into any 5e fantasy roleplaying session.

If you’re saying, “Hey, what is this here Scarred Lands you keep going on about, Mr. Rich?“, then you should give a listen to last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast where our terrific trio take a Deep Dive into the Scarred Lands setting, and highlight the things that they think really work. Link below in the Blurbs!.

They do a fantastic job of conveying what they love and are intrigued by in Scarred Lands, which is actually really interesting to me, as a guy who helped create it way back in the crazy d20 Rush days. None of our Trio were around then, so to hear them go over the parts that compel them about our new edition and the first one, is kind of like hearing a whole new generation finding it.

Makes me feel both old and proud, by crackee!

C20 Players Guide illustration by Brian LeBlanc

Finally, to wrap up the Scion Errata situation I touched on the last couple of weeks, Neall, in his non-real-world-job time, was able to assemble and create a list of the corrections that he had made but which hadn’t stuck. We turned that into a downloadable PDF (in both full-color and easy to print versions) for any and all to get ahold of, and input the corrections and the backer credits into the PDF and the upcoming PoD files.

When all was said and done, there is a page of Scion: Origin errata, a page of Scion: Hero errata, a page for a FAQ Neall put together, and ten updated pre-generated character sheets. For perspective, Neall’s original list derived from backer input from all over the internet was well over 300 entries (many of them duplicates) across the two books so the vast majority of the fixes worked – except for a page per book’s worth.

While we wanted all of the errata we painstakingly gathered and collated to have stuck as we intended, and we’ve changed a couple of processes to try and make sure that when a change is made it by-gum sticks, we’re just glad that none of them were so bad that they wrecked the books and made them impossible to read and play.

As Neall noted in a message to the backers, we’re disappointed that the projects aren’t as polished as we intended, and we apologize to all involved for disappointing you too.

We will do better, as we continue to create:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Our next Kickstarter starting in several weeks will be for Pirates of Pugmire!

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Illustration by Charles Bates

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast is our 50th! So please join Dixie, Matthew, and Eddy, as they look at Fun! What is “fun” in gaming? Should games even be defined by the fun they provide? Come hear them answer these and other pressing questions of our time on: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

Here’s last week’s Onyx Path News, in which Matthew talks a little about the conclusion of the Contagion Chronicle Kickstarter and the movements on our schedule: https://youtu.be/UGERLK6nFQc

No Contagion Chronicle actual play this week, as our audio failed! We do however have a wonderful Scarred Lands actual play, run by Matthew for the Red Moon Roleplaying folks. Here’s the link to episode one: https://youtu.be/1xmU0HvT1Bw

If YOU have a podcast, YouTube or Twitch channel, or talk about games on a blog or other website, and want to perform actual plays or make reviews of our games, please reach out to the Gentleman Gamer on the Onyx Path forum. From there we’ll share emails and get you started, so when you do start producing content we’ll be able to promote it on our blog and YouTube channel!

Here’s the Story Told Podcast‘s superb Dragon-Blooded actual play, for all of you who are audio-inclined: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/fall-of-jiara-episode-4

As well as Occultists Anonymous, which ventures into ghost territory with their Mage: The Awakening chronicle: https://youtu.be/_rMd7rda2a0

We’re never not going to promote the superb folks at Devil’s Luck Gaming, with their excellent Scarred Lands actual play: https://www.twitch.tv/DEVILSLUCKGAMING

The Dramatic Failure Podcast ventures into Mage territory over here with a big, big story arc filled with inspirational ideas: https://dramaticfailure.podbean.com/

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here’s an update from the App devs:

Onyx Dice!  We’ve recently released the Changeling: The Lost, Trinity Continuum: Aeon dice, and now the Geist dice.  Next up on our radar is: Demon: The Fallen,  Mummy: The Resurrection,  Kindred of the East, Vampire Dark Ages, and Mummy: The Curse.

We have a serious issue on the Pixel and Motorola phones that prevent the user from using the app correctly.  A fix is coming shortly.  A temporary workaround is to minimize the app without shutting it down, and then restore it.

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio 2: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can now order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we’ll be offering the Advance PDF of the Changeling: The Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition Players’ Guide!

CONVENTIONS

UK Games Expo: May 31st – June 2nd From the US comes Eddy Webb, Matt McElroy, and Rich Thomas to join with Matthew Dawkins, Steffie de Vann, John Burke, Chris Allen, and Klara Herbol! Gen Con: August 1st – August 4th Save Against Fear: Oct 12-14 GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd We’ll also be back at PAX Unplugged later this year.

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Redlines

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

DR:E Threat Guide (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Let The Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Blood Sea: Crimson Abyss for 5e (Scarred Lands)

TC: Aeon Ready Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Manuscript Approval:

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Editing:

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Post-Editing Development:

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Indexing:

Trinity Core

Trinity Aeon

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Ex3 Monthly Stuff  

Chicago By Night

They Came From Beneath the Sea!

EX3 Lunars

Hunter: The Vigil 2

Contagion Chronicle

VtR Spilled Blood – Hiring artists.

M20 Book of the Fallen

Dark Eras 2 – Getting the rest contracted out.

CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel

Pirates of Pugmire – KS art contracted, sketches and finals coming in.

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant – KS art started contracting.

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – With Josh.

Shunned By the Moon

Scion Jumpstart

C20 Novel: Cup of Dreams

Proofing

The Realm

Book of Oblivion – Inputting last corrections.

Signs of Sorcery – Dev comments back to layout.

Trinity Core and Aeon Screens – Prepping for printing.

Aeon Aexpansion

At Press

Scion Hero – Shipping to backers, PoD version processing.

Scion Origin – Shipping to backers, PoD version processing.

Scion Dice – Shipping to backers.

Scion Screen – Shipping to backers.

Fetch Quest – Waiting for PoD proofs.

In Media Res – PDF out to backers, gathering errata with new sheet.

Geist 2e – PDF out to backers, gathering errata with new sheet.

Scarred Lands Spell Cards – Waiting forPoD proofs.

Adventures for Curious Cats – Errata.

Tales of Excellent Cats – Errata.

Dragon-Blooded – Deluxe at printer.

Dragon-Blooded Screen – At printer.

C20 Player’s Guide – Advance PDF on sale this Wednesday!

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: 

On this day in 1429 – Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orléans. (And then she got screwed over. I’ll leave the message you may derive from that to you.)

[timelordthirteen]

And Then You

Nicholas Rush/Lacey French, Explicit

Summary: On a forced sabbatical from teaching, Nicholas Rush heads for the tiny town of Storybrooke, Maine, hoping for peace and quiet and the chance to work on his research. What he finds instead is Lacey French. Lacey's in a dead end job as a waitress with a abusive husband when Rush walks into her life. Over the course of his summer sabbatical the two become friends, and eventually lovers. There's more to their relationship than either of them want to admit, but Rush still has the specter of his late wife, Gloria, holding him back, and Lacey's way too good at lying to herself.

Notes:  This is for the lovely @anonymousnerdgirl, who prompted a Rushacey Waitress (the movie) AU. I didn't get to put in all the things I wanted, but I hope this still suffices. I am the worst Santa ever, in case you didn't know. I put in some timeline references since most of this story is flashback, but jumps to the present as well. This is only my second time writing Rush, so forgive my horrible characterization. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  Posted in three chapters on AO3, but one big pile here. (11,752 words)

[AO3]

Late August

The duffel bag bounces unceremoniously onto the backseat of the rental car, the door shutting after it with a thud. It seems too loud and sharp for so early on a Sunday morning, and the lack of any passersby or any other sounds save for a few chirping birds and the wind has a strange finality to it.

He glances up at the pink Victorian house, with a small smile. Mal’s family home is definitely not his style, but he’d gotten rather comfortable there in such a short time. Crossing to the mailbox, he opens it and drops the keys inside, then turns back to the car and bends to climb into the driver’s seat.

There is no one to see Nicholas Rush off.

There is no one on the street, no other cars, and he doubts anything except Granny’s diner is even open down on Main Street. The house is clean and the few personal items he’d accumulated during his stay are in the trash bin in the kitchen. In a few minutes, it will be as if he’d never been here at all, as if he’d never disturbed the quiet little town of Storybrooke, Maine.

He knows it isn’t entirely true, at least one person is probably forever changed by his presence, and he is quite sure it isn’t for the better. Lacey French is never going to be the same again, not with her husband in jail and a local lawyer drafting divorce papers. Certainly not now that she is essentially homeless either. He made sure to leave his name and address for Midas, slipping a piece of paper under the door of his office before he packed up the car. Paying her legal bills and helping her leave her arsehole husband is the least he can do after upending her life.

Go home, Nick. It was fun, but it was never going to last.

Her words ring in his ears, making his neck burn and his chest ache. None of it was supposed to be permanent, and it’s probably a miracle it lasted more than a couple frenzied, adulterous nights. Inside he’s a jumble mess of feelings he doesn’t want to deal with, and knowing that he’s heading back home to California, having them at all feels like even more of a betrayal. A betrayal of whom though, he isn’t sure anymore. Both Lacey and Gloria have every right to hate him, he is an absolute bastard after all, and it’s a small favor that he’ll never have to look either of them in the eye again.

The discovery he made about his work, about what went wrong with Icarus has made him restless. It’s something that can’t wait, not if there’s a chance to resurrect the project and give it new direction. If the result of the university board’s inquiry is that he’s terminated, then so be it. He will still have a purpose in Icarus, and that’s what he needs now. Purpose and distraction.

Rush sits behind the steering wheel for a long moment, watching the first few drops of rain splatter and trickle down the windshield, before starting the car. The weather mirrors his dark mood. He keeps his eyes on the road, but as he passes the last shop on Main Street and heads out of town, his mind is elsewhere.

Late May

His so called sabbatical is probably just a formality on the way to firing him. While there are moments where he resents Mal for forcing him into it, it’s ultimately his own fucking fault. In hindsight, he hasn’t been handling things well since the abrupt termination of the Icarus project, but telling off the head of the department and then throwing a chair through a window is always a bad career move. He’s lucky Mallory stepped in and offered this chance for some time away, even if it was on the condition that he actually go away.

Once he is out on the road heading north, crossing from Massachusetts into New Hampshire, it starts to feel almost freeing. He doesn’t have to worry about preparing new syllabi or grading exams. There are no meetings, no office hours, and hopefully no distractions. He glances to the side at his satchel, the pile of papers and his laptop stretching the leather to its limit. If he’s very very lucky he might make headway on something, publish a paper in the spring, and be somewhat redeemed. At least academically. There are things he carries which cannot be forgiven.

The tall, dense trees loom over the sides of the road and cast strange shadows. It reminds him of the drive he and Gloria took up the coast to Washington one summer. It was the first trip they’d taken in years, and later would turn out to be their last. He hated everything about traveling in general, but something about his wife’s bright smile and her hair shining in the sunlight made it more than worthwhile.

A sign up ahead announces another S curve, and Rush squints. The setting sun piercing the windshield of his rental car as he rounds the first corner, hitting him right in the eyes. His head is starting to hurt, though he supposes that’s more from the hours of flying, driving, and lack of caffeine than the glare of the sun. He glances at the clock on the dashboard and sighs. It’s just after eight and he’s already knackered, but his destination is only a few more miles away.

Another green road sign welcomes him to the town of Storybrooke, and he slows the car as the highway gives way to a quaint, traditional Main Street, lined with storefronts. Ahead on the right is a glowing red sign that says Granny’s Diner, with an arrow pointing towards a light gray building. Diners always have coffee, and even bad coffee sounds like the best thing in the world right now.

The place is empty when he walks in and the interior looks like something right out of the 1950s, complete with a chrome soda fountain behind the counter. The white formica tables have a slight sparkle and the vinyl booths shine red in the bright fluorescent light. A woman comes out between two swinging doors with a stack of plates in her hands. Her uniform is comprised of a white button down shirt that’s tied off instead of tucked in, showing off her navel, and the shortest red shorts he’s ever seen. He can’t see her feet but the clicking against the tile floor suggests heels. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, the mass of brunette curls swaying as she walks along behind the counter.

Rush blinks. The whole thing is surreal. If it wasn’t for the scandalously short skirt, he would think he’s gone back in time.

The woman sets the plates down and shivers, her whole body shaking as she rubs her hands up and down her arms. “Hey there, welcome to Granny’s,” she says, stepping up to the counter. “Can I get you something?”

“Coffee?” he replies, his eyes widening as they meet hers. They’re very blue but tinged red at the edges with dark circles underneath. She looks like she’s been tired for a long time, a feeling Rush knows all too well.

“Sure thing.” She’s already turning around to the set of tall metal coffee urns behind her. A few seconds later she facing him again and setting down a plain white mug. “Milk, cream, sugar?”

She nudges a small dish of sugar and sweetener packets towards him. Next to them is a collection of half and half cups mixed with some kind of flavored creamer.

Rush glances up at her as he moves to sit on the nearest stool. “Nothing, thank you.”

He blows over the rim and takes a small, quick sip, biting back a groan at the sensation of the hot coffee gliding down his throat. It’s actually really good coffee, and he’s very thankful because there’s probably not a real barista for fifty miles.

A little while later, after she serves a few more late evening customers, workers from the local mine he overhears, she comes back to offer him a refill. He nods and doesn’t look up from the calculations he’s been using to distract himself from watching her walk around the place. The sway of her hips was becoming entirely too mesmerizing, and he’s not sure why. He chalks it up to feeling out of his element, and being so far away from home and anything remotely fucking familiar. His brain needs to focus on something, so it picked her. That’s all.

He notices her name tag says Lacey, which ends up drawing his attention to her chest. He lifts the mug and takes a small, cautious sip, trying to avoid any further realization about just how small her white blouse is and how few buttons are holding it closed. He can feel his face flush a bit, but silently insists it's the scalding hot coffee and not the fact that he’s actually noticing a woman for the first time in - well, a very long time, anyway.

Rush sighs and sits back, his spine pulling and popping in three different places as he stretches. He’s supposed to pick up the key to Mal’s place from a woman named Martha Lucas, but he was too tired to track down an old woman right now. His headache has mostly abated, but it’s left a lingering stiffness behind in his neck and shoulders. Caffeine had not been the answer. “Is there a place to stay the night?”

“Sure,” Lacey says, flatly. She jabs a thumb to the side as she straightens. “Right next door is Granny’s inn.”

“How convenient,” he mutters, flipping his notebook closed. He slides off the stool and pulls out his wallet, tossing a few bills on the counter. He’s sure that’s more than enough to cover his two cups of coffee, and he supposes that young women stuck in small towns, working at diners after nine o’clock at night should get decent tips. “Thank you for the coffee.”

Lacey snatches up the money, moving to the register to close his tab. She peels off the singles and tucks them in the pocket of her apron. “Yeah,” she says, giving him a small, tired wave. “See you around stranger.”

It’s three days before he sees her again, and by that time he’s already mostly settled into a pink Victorian that’s entirely too big for one person.

“Black, just like your soul?” she quips, the corner of her mouth curving as she sets a mug on the counter.

Rush picks it up, smirking. “Aye.”

Lacey leans forward on her elbows and watches as he scribbles some annotations in his little notebook.

“What’s that?” she asks, stretching her torso over the counter.

Rush looks to the side, spying her through a curtain of his shaggy hair. She’s wearing a wedding ring and he can’t recall if he noticed that first night or not. He pauses with the tip of his pencil touching the paper poised to draw another integral sign. “Math,” he says shortly.

She snorts and shakes her head. “Yeah, I can see that. Thanks, Einstein.”

She moves down the line to another customer, and he resumes working his way through his notes with a slight smile on his face.

The next day when he sees her there are marks on her right arm and a spot above her eye that appears swollen. His eyes keep darting to the ring on her finger, a small, round diamond solitaire with a plain band behind it, and he wonders what kind of arsehole she’s been saddled with and if that’s the reason why she hasn’t said more than four words to him.

Rush isn’t an idiot. He may not care for people in general, but he has no tolerance for men who would abuse a woman or a child. But he also knows it’s not his place.

He’s counting out money to leave on the table for her, when a man comes in. Lacey goes to him immediately, and though their voices are hushed, he can see they’re arguing. The man grabs her arm roughly, and Rush watches, digging his nails into his palm as he stares daggers at the back of the man’s head. Lacey catches his eye as he goes to leave, and he pauses with the door half open for a moment before stepping out into the summer heat.

The look in her eyes keeps him from falling asleep that night.

Early June

Granny’s becomes something of a routine for Rush. He’s been in Storybrooke for three weeks, and for most of it he’s kept to himself. There was a point last week where he was hit with another headache, and he realized that he’d been living off coffee and cigarettes for three days. He figured coming to the diner for lunch would ensure he ate at least one real meal a day, but staying until Lacey’s shift ends at three has become an inexplicable habit.

It’s not as if he gets a lot of work done, or that he likes to be around people. It just feels better being here than hanging out in a massive, old house all by himself. He thought it would be ideal, at first, but the place has started to feel oppressive and the strange creaks and noises keep distracting him. From the corner booth at Granny’s he can work on parts of his research, keep up a steady stream of very palatable coffee, and occasionally people watch.

Mostly, he just watches Lacey.

The man, who he assumes was her husband, hasn’t appeared again, and it seems that she’s just moved on as though nothing happened. Eventually the bruises fade, but her ring remains.

She likes to sit across from him sometimes, on her break just after lunch. She talks about nothing in particular, the weather, movies, or the small town rumormill. He chimes in now and then, if she pauses to pop another onion ring in her mouth, or if something completely ridiculous. Yesterday she went on about the purple elephant shitting on his car until he stopped and looked up. He knows she does it on purpose to see if he’s paying attention. If he ever says something incongruent she never mentions it, and the whole thing is strangely comfortable.

“So where’s your wife?” Lacey asks on a rainy Thursday.

Rush stops with his pencil halfway through drawing a sigma symbol. The tip breaks under the slight pressure and he swears. Her fork clatters to the plate, and he lets his head drop as he takes a steadying breath.

“She’s gone,” he manages.

He hopes she knows what that means, hopes it’s enough for her to drop it and never bring it up again. He imagines this is what she might feel like too. There’s a fresh bruise on her thigh, just at the edge of her skirt.

She doesn’t meet his eyes. “Oh.”

Mid-June

The Rabbit Hole is Storybrooke’s only bar.

Rush blinks and rubs his eyes as he steps inside. There’s a haze to the air in the place and a tinge of something burnt, despite there being no smoking allowed.

He has no idea why he’s here. He could just as easily buy a bottle of something passable at Clark’s drugstore or the grocer. It wouldn’t be the fine whiskey that Mal keeps in her office, or the expensive wine that still fills the nook in his kitchen at home, bottles that Gloria bought ages ago. But it would definitely get him drunk.

He spies Lacey bending over a pool table at the far end of the room. Her blue blouse gapes open as she lines up her shot, and a dribble of condensation runs over his thumb and drips to the floor. He watches her clear the table in ten minutes, her opponent never getting a chance to even touch the cue chalk. She laughs and looks around at the small crowd that’s gathered, then saunters to a nearby table to down a shot of something.

Lacey takes the money from Keith, making a point to snatch it from his fingers and count it in front of him. His glare is really all the payment she needs, but the extra cash is good for her emergency fund. She's got a decent amount in there now, but she knows leaving won't be easy. When she turns to head back to the bar, she spies Rush across the room. His eyes are fixed on her, and the corner of his mouth is curved slightly.

She licks her lips and gives him a wave, which he returns, surprisingly. He’s so hard to read sometimes that she can’t tell if he actually likes her, or if she could just as well be Leroy sitting there nattering on about whatever. There have been moments where she wondered, where she thought too long about his eyes, his hair, his mouth. There have been nights too, recently, but she isn’t ready to acknowledge that just yet, not even to herself.

They meet at the bar, and he smiles. “That was quite a show.”

“Thanks,” she says, feeling oddly elated that he was there to see the whole thing. “Not that Keith’s much competition, but he has a problem with his mouth writing checks the rest of him can’t begin to cash and I’m happy to teach him as many lessons as he’d like.”

Rush laughs. “What are you drinking?”

“Whiskey,” Lacey answers, and she realizes in the month he’s been here she’s never heard him laugh before.

He orders their drinks and they move to one of the tables against the wall. It’s a spot she likes because she can see most of the room and still be in the shadows. He’s talking about something, something about a friend and a billiards tournament in college, but her gaze is lingering on the open buttons of his shirt, distracting her. His voice is nice though, even if she only catches every third word, his accent thicker than usual. It might be the alcohol or he might just not care anymore if he sounds ridiculously Scottish.

She kisses him first.

He seems surprised when she pulls him against her in the short hallway leading to the men’s room. His hand fists in her hair as he presses her into the wall next to a poster for the library fundraiser. The floor’s dirty, the wall’s dirty, everything about this is dirty, but she likes it, likes how hard and wet his mouth is and the scrape of his teeth over her neck.

The vague sound of billiard balls clattering and the strained tones of Springsteen mix with the low rumbling of his voice in her ear, asking if she's sure she wants this. She hisses a yes against the skin of his throat, loving the way he gasps as she teases it with her tongue.

“Your place?” she asks, and the question lingers between them like their hot, panting breath.

He swallows, and knows this is it, one of those moments he can’t take back. “Yeah.”

He moves first, running a hand through his hair as he steps out of the shadows and walking over to the bar to close out their tab. She counts a full minute and then follows, striding quickly to the table where she left her purse.

Rush leaves the Rabbit Hole, his stomach in a knot. It was one thing to kiss her in the dark, in the back hallway of a bar, where they can both pretend that maybe it was just the alcohol. It’s entirely another to agree to take her back to his place. They’re both - well, he’s not married, not anymore, even if he sometimes feels like he is. But she definitely is, to a man who clearly mistreats her. Later he’ll wonder if that was it the whole time, if she latched on to him to get her out of a bad situation.

He’ll be wrong, of course.

She comes out a few minutes later, and they take his rental to the stately, pink house. The drive is quiet, but her hand doesn’t leave his thigh, the motion of her thumb burning through his jeans and making him half hard by the time they get there.

Rush shoves her against the wall inside the door, kissing her until she's practically climbing him, wrapping her legs around his waist while she claws at his shirt. They make it to the bedroom mostly clothed. Their shirts are lost somewhere between the top of the stairs and here, and they spend a few anxious, wordless minutes dispensing with the rest. She sits on the edge of the bed, watching him push his jeans down, and then his boxers, licking her lips at the sight of his cock. He steps forward to stand between her open legs and she looks up at him, waiting.

His hand cups her cheek, thumb brushing her lips before he says. “Turn around.”

Lacey nips at the pad of his thumb and grins, then scoots back on the bed, turning over until she’s on all fours.

The tip of his cock pushes inside her and she wiggles her ass, begging for more with her forearms digging into the mattress. Rush groans and slips inside her in one smooth stroke. She gasps, and he presses his palm flat against her back, pushing her forward a little bit more so he can go even deeper.

She’s wet and sticky and tight, much too tight, and he can feel her stretch around him, little squeaks and gasps falling from her mouth when he starts to move. It’s slow and steady at first, but then she’s moving too, faster and harder, slamming her ass into his hips, showing him how she needs it, and Rush is happy to oblige. He needs it this way too, needs it to be rough and angry, nothing like it should be, or that she deserves. It has to be different so he can lock it away and keep it separate from how it was before.

Lacey bites her lip and digs at the sheets. Her ring feels tight on her finger, heavy, and she can’t look at it. She’ll be raw and sore in the morning, but then she’ll remember how he feels right now, touch herself and ache for him all over again.

His fingers are biting into her skin, holding on as tight as he can while they move at an almost violent pace. There will be bruises, on both of them tomorrow, evidence that this happened, that it was real. But they’ll fade, as these things do.

He leans over her; reaches around to rub her clit until she cries out and clenches around him. The sensation makes him come too, whispering sweetheart over and over against her sweaty skin.

It’s the first time he calls her that.

Early September

Lacey sighs and leans over the table to grab an errant fork, dropping it into the plastic bin with the other dishes. Then she frowns and folds her rag over the end of a finger to scrub angrily at a crusted splatter of ketchup that’s probably been there since last night. Ruby’s always a little sloppy with the last clean up when it’s near closing time. With a quiet grunt, she hefts the bin onto her hip and strides around the counter to head back to the kitchen.

The lunch rush is over and she has time to think again, time to replay things in her mind and wish the outcome were different. She sets the bin down in the big sink and squeezes the rag in her hand. Her nails dig it, squishing dirty water over her wrist before throwing it down on top of the dirty dishes. With another sigh, she turns on the water and washes her hands. Most of the bruises are gone, and in another month or so this chapter of her life will be behind her.

She’s not sure what she’s going to do after that, where she goes from failed marriage in a dead end town. There was a moment when she thought she knew, when she was laying in a soft bed with the sunlight streaming in through the sheer curtains, his burr in her ear, soft and low as she orgasmed. But now -

Lacey huffs and pushes through the doors back into the dining room. Rush has been gone almost a month. He left her, and there’s nothing she can do about it, no matter how much it frustrates her. It’s not like she didn’t encourage him though. He showed up at her apartment, trying to apologize, and she didn’t want to listen. It had seemed so clear then, that it was all a sham, a way to pass the summer and fuck up her shitty life. Of course he was always going to leave, of course she’d always be stuck here. It had felt like anything else might unbalance the whole fucking universe or something.

She’s wiping down the counters and tables when she finds it. She had missed a couple dollars on one of the tables, left by Mr. Clark who owns the drug store. Her hand slid into the front pocket of her apron and there it was. The creases are worn from being opened and refolded a few times, and the paper has lost most of its crispness leaving it slightly yellowed and soft. She swallows and unfolds it carefully, laying it on the table and smoothing it flat with her palms. Her eyes close for a moment and she can’t help the smile as a memory comes flooding back.

Early July

Rush tears a sheet off her order pad and flips it over, his pencil moving quickly over it, letters and numbers and symbols. She understands little of it. His shirt is the same one he wore yesterday, and he looks like he hasn’t slept much.

“What are you doing?” she asks as he nears the bottom of the small piece of paper.

He sighs and frowns. “I thought I had something, but -”

“But?”

He crumples the page in his hand and makes a frustrated noise. Then he throws it towards the tray of coffee mugs. It bounces off the edge and lands in one of them, but he doesn’t notice.

“Nice shot,” she mutters. Then she fishes out the paper and unravels it, smoothing it against the counter.

Rush is nattering on about gravity fluctuations, and she has no idea what that has to do with his foul mood, but he’d been this way for the past week. They haven’t said anything about what is happening between them, and she’s not even sure what could be said. They meet up at the Rabbit Hole, they have a drink or two, they go back to his place and fuck. It’s simple.

They don’t call it what it is, an affair. Adultery. Cheating on a memory.

She looks down at the wrinkled paper and tilts her head. “Did you lose a y somewhere?”

Rush lifts his head and blinks. “What?”

Lacey pushes the paper towards him. “Look advanced calculus is obviously not my thing, but I did set the curve in my algebra class, and, well, you had a y here and then you just like lost it?”

He stares at the paper for a moment and then shakes his head. “Fuck,” he mutters as he leans back against the booth. “I’m a fucking idiot!”

His outburst draws a few stares, but luckily at two in the afternoon there’s hardly anyone around.

She shrugs. “You’re tired. You need to take a break.”

Rush rubs his eyes and then runs a hand down his face. His cheeks feel scruffier than usual, and he probably needs a shower, but he was on a roll last night and success has been hard to come by lately.

“Yeah,” he sighs. Then he scowls down at the paper and makes a note with his pencil. “You’re right though. I just lost the variable all together like some first year moron.”

Lacey laughs. “Well, I’ll try not to let it go to my head that I found a mistake in the great Dr. Nicholas Rush’s work.”

Rush gives her a look, and then glances around before reaching his hand across the table to touch hers. She turns her hand over and slides her fingers through his, giving him a squeeze before pulling away.

“Did you ever think about going to school?” he asks tentatively. He knows that she’s smarter than she lets on most of the time, keeping her wit to cutting sarcasm and billiards. She’s capable of so much more than this, and he hates to see good minds wasted.

She huffs and purses her lips, picking at the chipped blue polish on her nails. “I did,” she admits, “but, you know, school costs money.”

“I do know,” he says. It’s not like he could have afforded it either. “But there are scholarships. You’re smart, Lace, you could -”

“I did,” she interrupts. “I, um, I had a scholarship.”

Rush sits forward. “For what? Why didn't you go?”

“It was for dance.” She keeps her eyes on the table as she says it, glancing at him only briefly to see his reaction. His head tilts slightly, his brow knit. “I thought maybe - I don’t know.”

“Thought what?”

His voice is soft, and she bites her lip. When he sounds like that she wants to tell him everything.

“I thought I wanted to do something artistic,” she explains. “Like fashion or design. But the dancing, the performing, to keep my scholarship? It was all just too much. I didn’t love it anymore once it felt like a job, you know?” He was still looking at her, his dark eyes piercing through her, like he saw so much more than she wanted him to.

She rolls her eyes. “Besides, the world doesn’t need another art or music major, right?”

“Nonsense.” Rush frowns. “Everything has value. Every occupation. Not always in the same situations, you wouldn’t want a writer trying to redo your plumbing, but that doesn’t make what the writer writes worthless. And I happen to know there is a great deal of skill in dance, just like there is with music. Timing, counting. Harmonics as well. It’s all math, right?”

Lacey’s eyes are bright and there’s a lump in her throat blocking the words she wants to say. He shrugs, and she can’t help herself. She slides out of the booth and comes around to his side, pushing him towards the wall so she can sit. He’s staring back at her, wide eyed and surprised.

She kisses him and it’s different. The few times before has been hard, rough, all teeth and tongues and pushing each other against walls. This is soft and full of - something. Her mouth catches his bottom lip, pulling gently, her tongue brushes it once and then it’s gone. She’s gone. His eyes open and he is alone, the door behind the counter swinging back and forth on its hinges.

Early September

The paper crumples under Lacey’s hand, her nails digging in and tearing the middle. She doesn’t stop until it’s shredded all the way down, and then she balls it up in her hands, angrily squeezing it against her palm.

She throws it towards the trash can by the register, and misses.

“Fuck,” she breathes, leaning forward on the counter. Her breath is suddenly ragged, her heart slamming in her chest and grabs for the stack of napkins, wrinkling them as well and throwing them in the trash.

“Fucking fuck him!”

Granny ducks her head out through the order window. “You okay, Lacey?”

Lacey sighs and her shoulders sag. Granny’s face is nothing but kind concern, and for some reason that stings. She doesn’t want to feel this way about Rush at all. She doesn’t want to care, and she doesn’t want pity for it either.

A tear slips from the corner of her her but she wipes it away. “Fine,” she says, turning to Granny and forcing a smile. “I’m fine.”

The old woman doesn’t look convinced, giving Lacey a small frown before she goes. Lacey sinks down to the floor and buries her face in her hands. There’s no one in the diner right now and if she pops up unexpectedly she’s sure she can play it off. Plenty of people in this town already have a low opinion of her anyway. Who cares if they think she was sitting on the floor crying.

Just like that the front door opens and she hears Leroy and Mike chatting as they come in from their swing shift at the mine. She smoothes her hair back and rubs her eyes. No one said anything about bruises on her arms and face for the last two years, what’s a little red eye?

Later, as she’s ringing up Leroy’s bill, her foot kicks the balled up paper sending it bouncing across the floor. Leroy frowns, then bends and picks it up.

Lacey’s left hand clenches into a fist while she holds out his change with the other.

What’s this?” he says unfolding the paper. It’s torn in several places and almost as wrinkled as his shirt, but it’s readable. He blows out a low whistle. “Damn, sister. This looks complicated.”

She lets out a short, humorless laugh. “That’s an understatement.”

Mid July

“So, you’re married,” Rush says.

Finally, she thinks, giving her ring a cursory glance. Most days she doesn’t even notice it. Putting it on in the morning is habit. “Yeah.”

He doesn’t say anything else, just continues to work the numbers across the page. He’s got a bigger notebook now, three subject, having filled up and ruined the smaller one.

“And I’m sure you’ve noticed he’s a fucking asshole.” She twirls the straw in her glass of iced tea, watching the liquid swirl around in a little whirlpool.

Rush makes a half laugh, half grunting noise. “Then why are you with him?”

She sighs and sits back. “Same reason most women are, I suppose. He used to be sweet, I thought he was the one. Plus he owns our apartment and once my dad found out I wasn’t a pure little virgin perfect daughter anymore, he kicked me out. So I stayed with Garrett and just - never left I guess. He’s out of town a lot for work so it’s been easy to do whatever I want without him knowing. Neither of us have any friends in this town.”

He frowns. She knows as well as he does that none of those are good enough reasons, but he can see how a lot of people in Storybrooke just pass her over, look at her without really seeing. There’s a bruise by her eye again and he wonders how many of them have even noticed it.

“I’ve got a stash though,” Lacey says quietly. “I'm - I’m going to leave.”

Rush lifts his head and sets down his pencil. She’s staring at him, and he swallows. There’s an unspoken question between them.

She gasps when her back hits the wall just inside her apartment door.

It’s the first time she’s brought Rush or anyone other than Ruby here. It’s small but cozy, and she cleaned it that morning. Garrett’s in Florida for the week, and she wonders why she hasn’t done this before, why she hasn’t brought another lover home and fucked them in their bed. It feels like the ultimate fuck you, and she smiles.

Rush’s hands are in her hair, fingers curling in the strands and pulling just a little, and his body is pressed flush against hers. His lips drag over hers, open and hot, teasing a little before he kisses her properly, and she moans into his mouth, the lingering taste of coffee rolling over her tongue. When he pulls back, his teeth catch her bottom lip, scraping lightly, and he must like whatever noise she makes because he’s smirking down at her.

She raises an eyebrow. “So is this some like student teacher thing?” she asks, grinning. Her hips lift off the wall to push against his and she can feel his erection heavy against her thigh.

He laughs, low and a little dark. “You’ve never been my student,” he replies.

His hand moves to her thigh, lifting it until her leg is almost wrapped around his waist, and then he pushes hard, grinding the seam of his jeans against her and making her gasp with the friction.

“But I could be,” she says, smiling, her fingers pulling at his shirt. “I think I’d fucking kill it at physics.”

Rush presses a kiss to her cheek, then her jaw. “I’m sure you would.” He means it.

“Would you like that?” she asks, undoing the last button and running her hands up his bare chest. “Me sitting in the front row of your class every day? Short skirts, no panties?”

He groans and laughs at the thought because he knows what sweet torture that would be. “I do have some self control, you know.”

It’s her turn to laugh because they both know it’s a lie.

She remembers the last time at his place, just a couple of nights ago. She loved the sound he made when his cock slid in her mouth for the first time, the living room rug biting at her knees when she pushed herself forward. He swore when the tip hit the back of her throat, and she came hard to the movement of her own fingers when he pulled her hair.

Neither of them have any self control when it comes to each other and this. And that should scare the hell out of her.

He presses against her again and she bites her lip, letting out only the tiniest of gasps before he lets her leg drop. Then his hand is yanking the zipper on the side of her skirt down, and she sighs as he steps back, the cool air of the room hitting her fevered skin. He kneels, pulling down the red skirt and her panties with him, until she’s bare and her clothes are tossed over by her couch. He stops a moment, palms rubbing over her thighs, easing them apart as his thumbs touch the sticky wetness clinging to her folds.

They haven’t moved from the door yet, but he’s on his knees between her legs, tongue sliding over her clit. Her hand fists in his hair, her back arches, and she wonders what she tastes like to him that he likes doing this so much. He hums against her cunt, the vibrations shuddering over her sensitive skin as his tongue curls into her briefly, darting in and out a few times just to drive her mad with want. It makes her want him inside her again, spreading her open and seeing how deep he can go, but then there are his fingers, two of them, pushing into her.

Her hips roll against his mouth and hand, and he sucks on her clit, slipping a third finger inside, wanting to make her come. He loves that he can do this to her, and that she lets him, that all it takes is a lingering look for them to know what comes next.

Her hand tugs at his hair and he knows she’s close, slows his fingers and pulls his mouth away, licking the tangy sweetness of her off his lips.

“Fuck, Lacey, I love how you taste,” he says, working his fingers deep into her. “Love how wet you get for me.”

She cries out in frustration, loving and hating it when he keeps her on edge like this.

“Are you like this for him?” he wonders out loud.

It’s been bothering him all these weeks. If she’s seeking him out because her abusive arse of a husband can’t or won’t satisfy her, because she has no other options, or if there’s something more. He can’t decide which he’d rather it be, but there’s a tight, sick feeling in his gut that maybe this means nothing to her, even as he tells himself it’s nothing to him.

She bites her lip and wants to resist answering, doesn’t want him to know how badly she needs him, how no one else has ever made her this crazy. “No,” she gasps, “for you.”

He grins against her thigh and his hand speeds up again, thumb rubbing her clit until she comes. He laps at the moisture spread on the inside of her thighs, and then stands, offering her his fingers. She moans around them as she sucks them into her mouth, her hands already working at his belt.

Early September

Rush sighs and picks at the frayed patch of denim on his knee. He’s been replaying every conversation, every moment with Lacey in his mind since he got back to California. It's like a humming in his head, drowning out the gentle sounds of the breeze and the rustling leaves in the garden. He can tell it had taken a lot of courage for her to even ask, and he was a bit surprised it hadn’t already come up in all his time in Storybrooke. Of course he’d done the stupidest thing imaginable, the worst possible fucking thing he could have done because he was, basically, an arsehole who fucked up everything that wasn’t math.

Well, he fucked that up too sometimes, but this was worse.

Something had struck him in that moment, and it was like every word he ever knew, including all the curse words he so readily flung at his walls of calculations, fled his mind. He’d stammered and waved his hands, paced back and forth behind her sofa, and then he’d just - left. Like a coward. He went back the next day to try apologize, but she told him exactly what he needed to hear. It meant nothing. It wasn't going to last. So he packed everything up and left Storybrooke.

Now he's sitting on the back steps of the house he’d shared with Gloria for over a decade, staring out at the garden like he has almost every night since he arrived home. She had designed and taken care of it since shortly after they moved in, up until she’d been confined to the hospital. He's been paying a sizable monthly fee to a landscaping company to maintain it like some kind of memorial to the past. His head feels fuzzy, his mind unable to focus on anything but the scent of roses wafting on the breeze.

It’s been four years since Gloria died. Four years in which he’s gone from the depths of grief and depression, to nearly losing his job, to meeting Lacey and feeling like he was finally himself again. Maybe better. Maybe he’s actually come out of the other side of the worst day of his life a better person. Somehow. Or maybe he’d just finally given enough of a shit to try.

Rush snorts and kicked a smooth oval rock off the bottom step. It skitters across the paving stones and lands in the grass. He sighs again.

“Will you tell me about her?”

How are you supposed to describe the person you thought was your soulmate? How do you explain that they understood you better than you did yourself? How do you talk about the destruction they left behind by their leaving, the shards scattered around that used to be you?

And how the hell do you tell that to the person who wasn’t afraid to approach you, who accepted all your rough, angry edges, and who put you back together piece by piece without even knowing that’s what they were doing?

Some people live their whole lives and never find what we had.

He can hear Gloria’s voice like it was five minutes ago, like he’d just walked out of that hellish hospital room. He sniffs and swallows, swearing that he can still smell that noxious sterile scent. It smelled like people waiting to die, like hopelessness and loss.

Rush takes a deep breath and closed his eyes. Nothing about this summer was normal, and now he’s just supposed to go back to work on Monday, back to class and teaching and research. Back to his life, such as it is. He has to present his new findings on Icarus in a week, and he should be in his office going over every calculation for the tenth time. But he’s here, staring at some plants and trying to sort out his fucking life.

“She was -,” he says out loud. Then he frowns and looks around into the small yard thoughtfully. A crow cocks its head at him and then flies off. He sighs again. “She was a force.”

Rush smiles.

Yes, that was the best way to describe Gloria. They had enough similarities that they got on well, but to most they looked like complete opposites. He was - is - always a barely approachable misanthrope, while she was polite and thoughtful. They were both intense when it came to their work and very focused, but where he knows he can be too single minded when he gets into something, Gloria was more steady and even. She could obsess, certainly, but it was metered out over days and weeks of practice and contemplation instead of 36 hour binges with too much caffeine and no sleep.

Gloria was beautiful, smart, and funny. She was light and happiness in his otherwise dark, mundane world. The house still feels empty without her. It has become a place he existed, occasionally, and slept, sometimes. The couch in his office at the university probably gave him more good hours than his expensive memory foam mattress here. The house is just here, just a remnant, a memory best left in its fucking box.

The time he’d spent in that pink Victorian had started to feel comfortable. It was strange how in just four months he’d gotten so used to the trees and the clean air and the warm glow when the sun hit the windows in the study. If he closes his eyes he can see Lacey there on the sofa while he worked, her nose in a book, or sitting across from him at the diner, smirking about some joke she’d made at his expense and stealing fries off his plate. With Lacey everything had felt lighter and more vibrant again.

With Lacey, he felt - alive.

Just thinking about Gloria weighs him down and leaves a hollow ache in his chest. He’d gone to the cemetery yesterday morning after not having been there since the day of her funeral. He’d taken flowers and stood there staring at the headstone, not really knowing why. It seemed like the thing people did when they lost the love of their life, but it was an empty gesture. The walk back to the house was long and by the time he made it in the door his whole body hurt from trying hold in his tears.

The worst part is all he can think about was Lacey and how he’d left things. How he’d just plain left. She’d reached out to him, tried to understand him and the burdens he carried, and he’d just fucked off back to California, to the university and a job that his heart wasn’t in anymore. He rubs the back of his neck and tries not to think about that first time, how he’d pushed her against the wall, her smell, and the feeling of her legs wrapping around his waist.

The pain only seemed to dull when he was with Lacey. He had let the empty places full up for a while with her bright eyes, her laugh, and that endearing way she would bite her lip when she was thinking. She probably hates him, but he needs to talk to her, to explain if he can. He owes the truth to her, just as he’d owed it to Gloria when she lay there hooked up to so many machines. He hadn’t been brave enough to face things then, not really. Now maybe he can keep his shit together long enough to say what needs to be said.

Rush exhales and stands up, pulling open the back screen door and stepping inside. It snaps closed and he pushes the inside door shut as well, turning the deadbolt. He has come to some sort of conclusion sitting on the steps, like working back through the lines of an equation to find an error, and now he needs to get back to Lacey as soon as possible. It will mean flying across the country again, and driving up those winding roads to Storybrooke. It’s madness, but he has to try, he has to make things right. If she’ll let him.

Two Days Later

Lacey slumps against the couch and angrily jabs her thumb at the channel button on the remote. The paper she’d found in her apron pocket a couple weeks back is sitting on her coffee table next to a letter from her lawyer. A lawyer Nicholas Rush is apparently paying for. She pawned her ring yesterday for a lousy 500 bucks, and she has to be out of the apartment in a week. All part of the requirements for a quick divorce and a restraining order, but she has a voicemail from Mallory Vincent that a certain pink house is available if she needs it. Rush is responsible for that to, she assumes.

Fuck him, she thinks.

She sniffles and then swears, pushing up off the couch. She moves towards the kitchen to refill her wine glass, but stops when she hears a knock at her door. It comes again when she failed to move, but she stands there, staring.

“Lacey?” comes Rush’s voice.

She nearly drops her glass. She never thought she’d hear that sound again, and her feet take one, unconscious step towards the door before she stops. She closes her eyes and turns away.

No.

“Lacey!” he calls out again, thumping his fist against the door three more times. “Please open the door.”

She swallows and turns back, crossing the space and putting her hand on the deadbolt before she knows what she’s doing. Her forehead leans against the wall beside the door, but her hand doesn’t move. When he knocks again, she can feel the thudding vibrate through her palm.

“C’mon, Lace!” he pleads.

Then his voice drops. It was still louder than normal, but only so she could hear him through the door, like he knows she’s standing there undecided about opening it.

“I want to tell you about Gloria.”

His voice breaks a bit on her name, and Lacey feels her chest tighten again. She knows how hard it is to open up about these things. Sometimes she can barely say her mother’s name without wanting to cry, which is pretty unfortunate considering the new girl at the diner is named Collette.

“She was beautiful, and smart, and amazing,” he continues. “And I loved her, very much.”

Lacey squeezes her eyes shut, refusing to cy. She wants to scream at him to shut up and go home. It’s okay that he still loves his dead wife, she just doesn’t want to hear about it. She wishes Garrett was dead, that he was her great lost love so she can understand half of what Rush must feel. That might make it better, she thinks, it might make it hurt less.

She’s always been excellent at lying to herself.

“But she’s not you, Lacey,” Rush says, hoping his voice is making it through the gap in the door.

Hoping that the shadow he saw a few seconds ago is really Lacey and not the curtains fluttering or a trick of the light, hopes he isn’t talking to an empty room like a fucking idiot. Then there is a sharp click, and he steps back. The door swings open partway and Lacey moves into the space, looking like she’s barely holding things together.

Rush feels like shit. He wonders if he should have come at all and opened wounds that hadn’t even healed yet. “Hey.”

Lacey wraps her arms around herself, her hands pulling back into the oversized sweatshirt. “Hey.”

Rush looks her up and down. She looks so small and fragile, and all he wants is to hold her. “Can I come in?”

Against her better judgement, she nods and steps aside, and Rush follows after her, shutting the door behind him. She takes a seat at one end of the sofa and clicks off the TV before tossing the remote on the coffee table.

“So,” she snaps, “you’re in.”

Rush rubs his palms against his jeans, unsure if he is welcome to sit closer to her or not. He opts for the middle cushion, halfway between the other end of the sofa and her legs.

“Look, I’m a fucking asshole -”

Lacey snorts. “Yeah, that’s a word for it.”

His lips quirk and he nods. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry, alright? I should have brought it up sooner, but it’s -” He waves a hand and then ran it through his hair, falling back against the sofa.

“Hard,” she sighs, fiddling with the cuff of her shirt. He looks good in his white shirt and dark jeans, and that annoys her. “I know.” Then she shrugs and met his eyes. “My mom.”

He nods again. “Gloria was a force in my life. Like gravity. Steady, inevitable -,” he pause and huffs. “And fucking complicated.”

Lacey gives a short laugh and then wipes at her eyes. “I’m sure she was great.”

Rush smiles. “Yeah. But she’s not here anymore, and I - I didn’t even realize I’d come to terms with that until I left. I went home and - “ He shrugs. “It wasn’t right. It didn’t feel like it used to.”

He reaches out, hesitantly, and puts his hand over hers. After a few seconds, Lacey looks up and turns her hand over, letting him thread his fingers through hers.

“What did it feel like?” she asks.

Rush swallows hard and closes his eyes as his vision blurs. He feels himself squeeze Lacey’s hand and hers squeeze back. It grounds him in the moment and the lump in his throat eases.

“Nick?”

He opens his eyes and shakes his head. “Like a house,” he says simply. “Just - a house.” Lacey frowns at him. “I always used to think of it as home, our home. Mine and Gloria’s. Maybe even more hers than mine sometimes, but - it’s gone. She’s gone.”

Lacey squeezes his hand again. “It’s okay, Nick. I know you love her, and I’m - I’m not -”

“No,” he snaps, shifting abruptly so he is facing her, his leg pulled up on the cushion between them. “No it’s - it’s not that,” he tries to explain, his hands clenching and opening in the air between them as he fights to keep them and himself still. It won’t do to start pacing and waving his hands now.

He shuts his eyes and takes a breath, opening them again as he exhales between his lips. “I mean, yes, I love her, but - she’s not you.”

She feels like she’s sinking into the couch, like her very existence is unraveling because nothing matters. Next to the specter of Gloria she is nothing, she is not enough. Her bottom lip trembles and no sooner does she open her mouth to speak than Rush’s lips are on hers. He kisses her firmly, his hands cupping her face, and his lips opening just enough to catch hers. She feels the very tip of his tongue and shudders. When he pulls back his eyes are dark and wild, and she’s pretty sure she’s stopped breathing.

“And you’re not her,” he adds. “And you don’t have to be, so put that out of your head.”

Lacey scoffs. “Yeah, I’m not fucking gravity or whatever.”

Rush shakes his head again. “No, you’re - “ he pauses, his eyes staring into hers, like he wants to fall into them. “A supernova.”

She laughs, and Rush sits back, taking her hands in his as her body shakes slightly. “Right, okay,” she says. “I’m a catastrophic and destructive astronomical event. That sounds about right.”

Fuck if those words from her lips don’t do things to him, but somehow he doesn’t think she really understands. He’s shit at this. This is why he wasn’t able to face the hospital and the doctors and the inevitable. Sure there was Icarus to bury himself in, but that was always just an excuse.

“No that’s - that’s not - fuck.”

Lacey snorts. “I get it, Nick.”

“No,” he sighs. “You don’t. You’re -” His hands flail at bit as he struggles for words. “Unstoppable.”

Then he brings his fist down on his thigh and takes a breath. “And I love you.”

Her mouth gapes. “What -?”

He loves her. And he thinks she’s unstoppable. Nicholas Rush thinks she's un-fucking-stoppable, like an explosion from a collapsing star. And somehow that’s the best thing anyone had ever said to her or about her.

A lock of hair comes loose from her hair clip as she looks up. “Nick, I -”

He raises a hand and she stops. “You don’t have to say it. It’s - I just needed you to know, and if you don’t, that’s fine. But I went home, all the way back to fucking California, and - and it wasn’t anymore. It wasn’t home.”

He’s jumbling everything now, his brain rapidly trying to catch up to the fucking leap his heart had apparently made without permission. But he barely has a chance to say everything that’s trying to rush out of him before Lacey launches herself into his lap and kisses him, pushing her tongue in his mouth as her legs squeeze his sides. One hand goes in her hair, pulling the clip loose, while the other holds her face and tilts her head to a better angle.

When they finally came up for air, Lacey is grinning. “Shut up, Nick.”

Rush smiles. “You’re distracting me, sweetheart.”

She shrugs one shoulder and bites at his bottom lip, pulling a lovely feral sound from his throat. “Oops.”

He moves to kiss her again but she leans back, pressing one hand to his chest.

She closes her eyes, briefly, and takes a breath. It’s all so obvious now. “I love you too.”

The talking part of the evening is clearly over as Lacey starts unbuttoning his shirt, cursing as she goes.

“Why do you have to wear these fucking button down shirts all the time?”

“I’m a professor,” he snarks, slipping his hands under the hem of her sweatshirt. His fingers dance up her sides until his thumbs are brushing the underside of her bare breasts. No bra. “Fuck.”

She pauses, her fingers holding the second to the last button and gives him a look. “And here I thought it was because you looked so fucking sexy in them.”

He lips quirk and he cups her breasts, making her lose her grip on his shirt when he rubs the pads of his thumbs over her nipples. “I think you’re the only one with that opinion.”

“Mmm,” she hums and arches into his touch. “Does it matter - oh - if I am?”

Rush stops teasing her nipples, and brings his hands to her waist. “No,” he answers softly. “Yours is the only opinion I give a flying fuck about.”

Lacey grins and pulls the last two buttons of his shirt free before pushing it off his shoulders. “Damn straight, Nicky,” she says, smirking at the way he rolls his eyes.

“Hate it when you say that,” he replies, half smiling. Then he shifts and settles back against the couch, pulling her with him, and groaning as her hips roll into his.

“Obviously.”

She smiles at him, her heart soaring when he grins back, and leans in to kiss him, cupping his scruffy cheeks in her hands. His fingers curl around her hips and pull her closer, his mouth slowly slanting over hers. Her arms slide over his shoulders, one hand coming up to thread through his soft hair as she sink into the kiss. His tongue probes at her lips, seeking entrance, and she gladly opens, letting their tongues slide together.

After a moment, she moves one hand, skimming it down over his stomach and then the bulge in his pants. He moans in response, the sound reverberating straight through her. He pulls her to his chest as his mouth breaks away from hers to run his lips over her jawline. She lets out a small gasp and squeezes her knees on either side of him.

“Nick,” she breathes, and he hushes her gently.

Lacey is lost in the anticipation, heat burning between her thighs, screaming to be sated. They should go to her bed, she thinks, they should do this properly or something. It isn’t every day someone declares they loved her. In fact, it hasn’t ever been any day at all. Everything Garrett said was a lie to get into her pants or get her to stay with him. She can’t say that she’s ever really, truly been in love before right now. That should be sad, given that she’s about to turn twenty-six, that she’s been married. But she doesn’t feel anything except a stupid, flippy feeling in her stomach and an almost overwhelming desire to fuck Nicholas Rush into her lumpy, old couch.

She leans back and reaches down to pull up the hem of her shirt, twisting a bit to get it over her head. Her pelvis grinds against the hard ridge of his cock, her thin leggings no barrier to the wetness between her thighs. His breath hitches and he grunts out a little ‘fuck’ that makes her smile.

Rush’s fingers dip down to the waistband of her leggings, feeling her muscles tremble beneath his touch. Lacey French is fucking amazing, and he’s still reeling from the fact that she said she loved him too. Given how bleak everything has seemed for the last month, he hadn’t expected such an ending. Especially from himself. But the revelation of his feelings was too much to keep in, like when he knew without a doubt he had the right answer. Oddly, it feels just like it had when he realized he loved Gloria, and there is a strange comfort in that, a rightness in his mind and heart.

Lacey gasps out his name as his hand slips beneath the waistband of her pants and underwear in one deft move. Her fingers curl around his wrist, the other grabbing at his shoulder as his fingers slowly explored her. She can feel the callous on his thumb, created from the pressure of his pencil, as it rubs against her clit. There’s something so erotic about the little rough spots on his hands and fingers as they stroke her sensitive flesh. It reminds her of the scrape of his whiskers when he licks her to a frenzy. Rush has a lot of rough parts, but she loves every one of them. They made him feel so real, so human, like she’s really connected to someone.

“So wet,” Rush hisses close to her ear, his breath dancing over her as he circles her clit.

She cries out as he presses a single digit into her, hips moving earnestly in response to the mounting pleasure.

“Fuck,” she pants, letting her head fall against his shoulder. “Please, please, please!”

She’s close. Her pussy is already fluttering around his finger and then he adds a second, drawing a long moan from her.

“Oh -” Lacey bites down on her lip, her eyes closed tight as he thumbs at her clit just right and rocks his hand against her, fingers thrusting shallowly.

That is all it takes.

She cries out as her orgasm hits, her whole body tensing all at once as white dots flash behind her eyelids. It was always intense with Rush before, but this is different. They’re different. Everything is fucking different now that they are officially in love with each other. As the pleasure dulls to a quiet roar in her ears, Lacey smiles and kisses his bare shoulder. Rush is in love with her.

She’s going to have to repeat that to herself a lot.

After a long moment, Lacey lifts her head and looks down at him. “Hey.”

Rush smiles softly. “Hey.”

Then he pulls her down for a kiss that quickly turns desperate and needy. Her hips start moving against his, tormenting his aching cock as she moans against his lips. He feels her hands sliding over his arms and down his chest to fumble with his belt. Eventually she yanks it open, and starts tugging on his zipper.

He grunts and pulls back, lifting his hips so she can eased his jeans and underwear down, watching as she stands up to shuck her leggings. Then she straddles him again and takes his cock in her hand, stroking him firmly and tearing a long, low moan from his throat. The need he feels for her isn't new, but it is different. Before it seemed like only she could fill those hollow places he’d ignored for so long. Now he feels whole, renewed, and free. He feels like he can try giving back what she has given him, that he can let himself love her without reservation, and without the past holding him down.

His head lolls back against the sofa as she twists her hot little hand, smearing precum along his shaft. “Fucking hell, Lace.”

Lacey grins and then kisses him, desperate and messy. She raises up on her knees, breaking the kiss, and guiding his cock to her aching center. She lets the head slip back and forth between her folds until he keens. She gasps against his lips and he licks at her, flicking his tongue over hers, teasing as he lifted his hips. She lets her weight drop and they press together slowly, savoring the slow slide of his cock inside her, and moaning in each others mouths as skin meets skin with nothing between them.

“Are you sure, sweetheart?” he asks, panting, and she nods

Lacey bites her lip and moves back just a little, feeling him shift against her slick pussy. He pulls on her hips and slides back in, and she whimpers. Oh, it feels just as good as she remembered.

Rush breaks away from her lips, and presses his forehead to hers. His eyes gaze into hers as he rolls his hips up, lifting her and letting gravity draw her back down. Everything hot and tight, wet and soft.

“More,” she begs, running her fingers through his long hair as she rocks into his movements. Her knees push into the sofa cushions, the textured fabric biting into her skin, but she ignores it and moves her hips as faster.

Rush picks up the pace of his thrusts, using his arms to lift her as best he can, drawing out and slamming into her over and over.

“So. Fucking. Good,” he gasps, dragging his lips along her collarbone.

Lacey’s hands scrape over his chest, and curl around the back of his neck to hold him close.

“Oh, Nick,” she moans, her head falling back. “Yes. Yes!”

She’s close again, teetering on the edge. Her nails dig into his shoulders as she holds onto him, biting down on her bottom lip. Then she feels his hand between them, his thumb seeking and finally pressing against her clit. Her mouth falls open in a silent scream, everything so intense she can’t make more than a squeaky little gasp. The pulsing of her cunt brings him over the edge just after, and the look on his face in that moment is enough to make her tremble all over again.

He looks relaxed for the first time since she met him. Not even a whole six pack of beer, or the exhaustion after 30 hours in his office scribbling on the whiteboard has made his jaw go slack like that. When he looks at her, his eyes are dark, but glowing in the low light, more open than she’s ever seen. In that moment, Nick Rush is an open book to her, and she feels tears well up in her eyes.

“So, you love me, huh?”

Rush nods. “Aye, I do.” Then he gives her a lopsided grin. “Maybe next time we’ll make it to the bed. Or even out of our clothes.”

Lacey laughs and kisses, her thumbs stroking the soft whiskers on his cheeks. “Maybe,” she says. Then she turns serious and sighs. “Where do we go from here?”

He brushes her hair back from her face, the corner of his mouth curving up. “I don’t know,” he admits. “But I’m not leaving again, without you.”

“Would you stay?” she asks. “Here?”

He shrugs, his thumb brushing lightly over her neck. “Yes. If you wanted.” Then he smirks. “But have you considered moving to California?”

Her head tilts as she considers his offer. “Is the weather nice?”

“Nah,” he scoffs. “It’s shite. In the winter it rains for five days at a time, there’s fog every other morning, and the summer’s too hot to breathe.”

She shakes her head. “Sounds lovely.”

“It is,” he says softly. “The people are nice too, sometimes they even remember to use their fucking blinker before they cut you off.” Then he sighs. “But I have to start class on Monday or Mal really will fire me. I have a return flight tomorrow morning, so if you’re serious -”

She giggles and wraps her arms around his neck, shutting him up as she presses her body against him in a tight hug. It’s a good thing she doesn't have much she cares about here, there will be less to pack. “Yes,” she whispers into his neck. “Fuck this place.”

His arms come up to hold her, marveling at how perfect everything feels. Gloria was right, some people never had what they’d had, but somehow Nicholas Rush has been lucky enough to find it twice. And he’s never letting it go again.

[tslyricx]

14. EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED (ft. Ed Sheeran)

“Everything Has Changed” is a song about realizing your life has flipped upside down after falling for someone new. The track appears on Taylor’s fourth album, Red, and features vocals from her close friend Ed Sheeran.

The music video for the song follows a day in the life of two young children in the same elementary school class. They are both misfits and become good friends, but their platonic feelings turn to something more. At the end of the video, it is revealed that the girl is Taylor’s daughter and the boy is Ed’s son.

Moving futher into the song, Ed Sheeran explained to Zane Lowe how he and Taylor had a bit of a dispute over the first pre-chorus: “She pretty much had the verse, bridge and chorus done but we argued about that one chord. She didn’t like that but I forced it upon her. It was quite a funny situation though, ‘cause her place, it’s like surrounded by Grammys—she’s got like seven or eight, and like Billboard awards and Songwriting Guild and stuff like that, and I’m like, 'this chord, huh?’”: “ I just wanna know you better Know you better, know you better now I just wanna know you better Know you better, know you better now I just wanna know you better Know you better, know you better now I just wanna know you, know you, know you”

The second verse, which Ed and Taylor sing together says: “ And all my walls stood tall, painted blue And I'll take 'em down, take 'em down And open up the door for you” Putting up “walls” between yourself and other people symbolically represents creating distance in order to protect yourself, in this case from previous relationships. Although Sheeran has his blue walls up (a color typically used to describe sadness), he sees something in this specific girl. He’s willing to let her come into his life – aka take down his walls/open the door to his heart.

A fun fact about this song is that Taylor had written it before joining Ed and finishing it together. Here there are some differences between the original lyrics and the lyrics written for the record: “All I’ve seen since 18 hours ago” / “And all I’ve seen is everything you are” Some other lyrics are: “ And all I feel in my stomach is butterflies The beautiful kind, making up for lost time Taking flight, making me feel right” Swift’s handwritten lyrics reveal that this section was originally: “All I feel in my stomach is butterflies/The beautiful kind, falling for a Gemini/This feels right, making me feel like.” Another draft went: “All I feel in my stomach is butterflies For a Gemini who’d never tell a lie The beautiful kind, saying ‘this feels right’.” Also, the bridge was originally written: “When you caught my eye The look said you’d missed me all this time Meet me there tonight So I can know it’s not all in my mind”

What have Ed and Taylor said about the song?

After writing this duet with British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, Swift recalled to MTV News: “We, for real, were sitting on my trampoline in my backyard cause we had been writing a song and I was like, ‘Hey, I just got a trampoline. You want to see it?’ And so, he brought the guitar for some reason. We ended up writing an entire song out there. For portions of the song, we were bouncing around, ‘cause it’s a trampoline and it’s fun, and the combined maturity level of both of us is 8 years.”

Sheeran told MTV News their partnership worked since they have a lot in common: “Well, I don’t really write so much with other artists. Like the Taylor session, when we got together and wrote was the second time I’ve ever gotten with another singer/songwriter and written a song with them. So it wasn’t actually too hard of an adjustment. We’re very much alike musically and it worked out well, I think.” 


Ed Sheeran is one of several songwriters that Swift reached out to write with her on Red, her fourth studio album. She told Billboard magazine that the people she chose to collaborate with were ones who inspired her: “You look at someone like Ed Sheeran. He comes from such a sincere place as a writer, and his songs move you in every direction emotionally. That’s something I was so inspired by I ended up calling him.”

Regarding the song’s meaning, Taylor told Digital Spy: “It’s about falling in love. It’s about meeting someone and all of a sudden your entire perspective on the world changes – you’re thinking for two, instead of one.”


Asked by The Sun how Sheeran and her originally met up, Swift replied: “We had both reached out to each other’s camps at the same time. I showed up at his hotel in Arizona and we just wrote songs all day. Then he came and hung out at my house in LA and we spent all night sitting on the kitchen floor laughing, writing songs and harmonizing.”

According to Sheeran, it was Swift who did most of the work when they penned this tune: “She pretty much came with the song and was like, ‘Which bits would you change?’“ I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.'”



How did this collaboration come about?

Taylor said during an August 2012 livestream: ”When I was touring in Australia I saw his [“Lego House”] music video on TV, and I was just blown away. […] I got back to the states and I heard from someone that he wanted to work with me and we ended up getting together and writing together, and we wrote a song while sitting on a trampoline that was so much fun and we loved it so much that we actually ended up recording it as a duet. So, it is going to be on the album and I’m so excited because I’m such a huge fan of his.”

Favorite lyrics: “And all I feel in my stomach is butterflies/The beautiful kind, making up for lost time/Taking flight, making me feel right”

Album: Red released on October 22, 2012.

Witten by: Taylor Swift & Ed Sheeran.

Hidden message: Hyannis Port.

Picture: Photo from the Red booklet.

Source: https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-everything-has-changed-lyrics

[flauntpage]

DGB Grab Bag: Players' Weekend for the NHL, Salty Blue Jackets, and Buckets

Three Stars of Comedy

The third star: The Columbus Blue Jackets – Somebody's feeling a little salty about going all the way from one game to two on NBC's new schedule. (More on the new schedule in a bit.) It's the eyeroll emoji that really sells it

The second star: I has a bucket – Not sure what was funnier, the original photo or the fact that literally everyone Twitter made the same joke about the bucket getting signed by the Oilers.

The first star: This SHL video about rule changes – I can't stop watching this. It's the fist pump that gets me every time. If Tom Wilson starts working in this move every time he blindsides somebody a half hour after they touched the puck I'll admit he's worth every penny.

Be It Resolved

We're closing in on one of the weirder moments on the MLB calendar, as the annual "Players' Weekend" is almost here. The event debuted last year, and its main highlight is that players get to wear their nicknames on their jerseys.

That's… different. You have to give MLB some credit here, as they're basically offering up an open invitation for players to cut loose and show a little personality. It's fun for the players, and everyone gets to sit back and try to figure out what some of the nicknames even mean.

If you've been reading this column all summer, and god bless you if you have, then you're probably figuring that this is the part where we play our weekly round of "the NHL should steal this cool idea from another sport." That's been kind of a theme all offseason, and this feels like a great time to break it out..

But here's the thing. Ultimately, we try to be realists around here. Sure, we'll propose things like radically changing the way powerplays work, or having a special draft where everyone picks Jaromir Jagr, or letting every champion legally kidnap somebody for their Cup parade. But those are things that could actually happen someday.

NHL players volunteering to put cool nicknames on their own jerseys? Never. Zero chance. There's no point even thinking about it. Every player would just use their regular name, while old-school types swooned about how winners don't have personalities. A few players would probably insist that they didn't have a name back there at all, because the team is the only thing that matters, dammit. It would be awful.

Besides, even if the NHL stole baseball's idea and forced the players to take part, the result would just be depressing. Can you imagine an entire weekend of guys skating around with names like "Smither" and "Jonesy" and "Other Jonesy" on their back? It would be embarrassing.

So here's my proposal: We steal MLB's good idea, but then we improve on it. Be it resolved that once a season, we have a player's weekend where every team gets to force one player from another team to wear a specific nickname on their back.

Which player? That would be up to them. They could take a vote on who the victim would be. And then they'd get to choose the nickname that the player had to wear. If I know hockey players, they'd probably spend more time figuring this out than they do on special teams.

Admittedly, we'd have to iron out a few kinks. For example, we'd need some sort of tie-breaking system for when 30 teams all submitted different insults for Matthew Tkachuk as their first choice. And there would probably be some team every year that would use their pick to say something nice about some veteran opponent because they wanted to be "classy" or whatever. We'd deal with that by immediately relegating that team to the ECHL.

Still, how much fun would it be to see who each team in the league decided to target with an embarrassing nickname? And how quickly would you line up to buy an officially licensed Bruins No. 63 jersey with "Rat Face" or whatever on the back?

Maybe we can't steal most of baseball's good ideas, like "not having a salary cap" or "interesting free agency" or "replay that mostly works" or "actually noticing when defensive strategies are out of control." But we can steal this one. After we're done improving it.

Obscure Former Player of the Week

This week's Obscure Player honors go to Swedish goaltender Tommy Soderstrom, for no other reason than reader Nate wrote in to suggest him. Thanks Nate.

If you're like me, the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions Soderstrom is the brutal game-winning goal from center ice that sent Belarus to a stunning upset over Sweden in the 2002 Olympics. That's unfair, for a couple of reasons. First, even the best goaltenders gives up the occasional bad goal, and it's wrong to remember any athlete for their lowest moment. But more importantly, that wasn't Soderstrom—that was Tommy Salo. What can I say, Sweden produced too many 1990s goalies named Tommy S.

In addition to not being Tommy Salo, Soderstrom was picked way down in the 11th round of the 1990 draft by the Flyers. He played for Team Sweden at the 1991 Canada Cup, then made his NHL debut in 1992, splitting the Flyers' starting duties with Dominic Roussel. He played reasonably well, but struggled badly as a sophomore, winning just six times in 34 appearances while posting a GAA of 4.01. It didn't help his numbers that his own teammates occasionally scored on him.

Somehow, that made him worthy of being dealt to the Islanders straight up for Ron Hextall in a trade that probably happened mainly because nobody has any recollection of Hextall being an Islander in the first place. Soderstrom would spend two years as the Islanders' starter and wasn't bad, and to this day many fans probably remember his big white Jofa facemask. He once got into a fight with Corey Schwab.

As you can see, he didn't do all that well. But for the record, he didn't get destroyed by Dan Cloutier. That was also Tommy Salo.

Soderstrom would play a single game for the Islanders during the 1996-97 season—according to hockey-reference.com, his appearance lasted all of ten seconds—and that was it for his NHL career. He'd head to the IHL, and then back home to Sweden for several seasons.

According to his Wikipedia page, he apparently appeared on a Swedish reality show in 2014. I don't read Swedish so I don't know what the show is about, but I'm going to just assume it featured him and Tommy Salo living together while doing the Spiderman pointing meme and trying to figure out which one of them it was that Mike Milbury made cry during an arbitration hearing.

Outrage of the Week

The issue: NBC released their 2018-19 schedule. The outrage: Your team isn't on it enough. Is it justified: Kind of, in the sense that fans are fans, and you're supposed to want your team to get as much airtime as possible. Even if it doesn't really affect you—and let's face it, it doesn't, because you still have your local broadcast—it feels like a respect thing. Your team is great, or at least better than everyone thinks, and NBC should love them as much as you do.

Of course, in the real world it can't work that way. There are only so many games to go around. And while it would be nice if the games were handed out based on merit, ratings still matter and some teams do better than others. So sure, the Blackhawks are the most heavily featured team, as always, even though they missed the playoffs last year. And no, you won't see struggling Canadian teams like the Canucks or Senators at all. That's not fair, but life's not fair, and hockey fans know that better than anyone.

Still, the overall schedule is… not bad? I'm going to go with not bad. NBC made some smart moves, including the decision to scrap the Wednesday Night Rivalry that sounded great in theory but never really worked in reality because there hasn't been a good NHL rivalry since 2012. And while they're still giving you the Blackhawks out of a firehose, they've done a better job of spreading the love around. We've even got a game between two Canadian teams on the schedule, as the Leafs and Jets face off in October. That's the sort of matchup the league should want to see promoted, since it features two teams packed with young stars who should be good, and could even end up playing in a Stanley Cup final someday.

We're also getting more of fun teams like the Capitals, Predators, Golden Knights, and Lightning, and less of traditional teams like the Red Wings and Canadiens who figure to be iffy or worse. It doesn't all make sense, and nobody can quite figure out what's going on with the Kings, but it's a decent effort. So yeah, not bad.

Will "not bad" be enough to keep hockey fans from complaining? Of course not, because it's August and the only other things to talk about are Andrej Sekera's achilles tendon and Max Pacioretty's golf tournament. So we squabble about the TV schedule, if only to remind ourselves that meaningful hockey will return some day. That's as it should be. At least until the Senators and Canucks are playing in the Stanley Cup final and NBC can't figure out why the ratings are so low.

Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown

Hey, who wants to close things out with a bizarre short film about hockey, made by a Canadian celebrity, and aired at a late-night talk show hosts film festival? Why not. Let's get weird.

I'll be honest, I don't have a really strong grasp on what exactly this is or why it exists. Let's cover the basics. This is a short film that was produced by Michael J. Fox for David Letterman's 2nd Annual Holiday Film Festival, which aired in 1986. The film is called The Ice Man Hummeth. And yeah, it's going to get strange.

Why yes, David Letterman apparently did have his own film festival, or at least a TV special that was presented that way. He had two, in fact. The first aired in 1985, and this one followed in 1986. You can watch the full thing here.

So on to the film. We start things off with Fox arriving at a rink, looking suitably badass given he's fresh off of Back To The Future and is pretty much one of the biggest movie stars in the world at this point. But that doesn't last long, because once he gets to the door he's suddenly a mild-mannered guy in a suit. But he's in a hockey dressing room. But he's not. We've got some sort of Westworld-style dueling timelines deal going here, with Fox as both a hockey tough guy and a classical musician. He's basically David Schultz with slightly more high-brow tastes.

We cut back and forth between the two scenes, including a shot of Hockey Fox's locker, complete with an autographed Letterman photo. That gets the first laugh from the audience, albeit a confused one, as they're clearly waiting for some of that Alex P. Keaton magic. Where's Uncle Ned and his maraschino cherries when you need him?

The next joke gets a better reaction, as Fox has to return a jock strap for something larger. Because the other didn't fit his oversized junk, you see. Look, it's his movie and Back To The Future made $210 million, he can write himself a big package if he wants to.

We get more juxtaposition, until we finally arrive at game time. That leads to a reasonably clever transition from pucks on ice into musical notes on paper as the orchestra warms up. Then it's back to the rink, where Fox's team has been joined by their opponent, who are very clearly wearing Winnipeg Jets uniforms with just enough strategically applied tape to prevent a lawsuit. Players from both teams are constantly threatening to kill each other in that way that happens in 100 percent of 1980s hockey movies, but only like 80 percent of actual 1980s hockey games. OK, fine, 95 percent if it was the Norris.

Also, a mid-80s goaltender makes a save, which is the least realistic part of this whole film.

One note about all of this that's kind of neat—in the comment section from the video, someone shows up who claims to have done the music for the film and explains that he actually had to compose a song that switched back and forth from classical to heavy metal and time it exactly to the final cut. That's kind of cool, and I'm going to assume it's true because I'm pretty sure it's illegal to lie on YouTube.

The referee, who is like eight inches taller than any of the players, drops the puck to start the game, and we instantly go full Rangers/Devils.

The benches empty because it's 1986, and at one point Fox seems to take a swing at the referee. More importantly, careful viewers will have noticed that we've now got a fully classical soundtrack, meaning the clean separation between timelines is starting to break down.

Sure enough, Hockey Fox looks up and realizes that Violin Fox and the rest of the orchestra is now in the stands. That somehow turns our bench-clearing brawl into an ice-dancing spectacle. There's a joke here about going from mid-80s hockey to the 2018 version, but I'm too mature to make it.

Meanwhile, Violin Fox is getting crowded by a fellow musician, and you can probably guess where that's headed. Soon enough, the orchestra is brawling while the hockey players tut-tut about unnecessary violence. Up is down, left is right, Harold Ballard does something nice, and we're done.

In the full version of the show, Fox gives a little more information about how this was all made. The entire project took four weeks, the shooting lasted just two nights, and it all cost less than $40,000. And best of all, he tells a great story about how the musicians couldn't wait to fight each other. It's well worth a watch.

And there you have it: Quite possibly the best artistic interpretation of the marriage between hockey and music every filmed that didn't involve Neil Sheehy.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com .

DGB Grab Bag: Players' Weekend for the NHL, Salty Blue Jackets, and Buckets published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[junker-town]

A timeline of Jalen Ramsey’s hatin’ ass trash talk

The NFL’s best young cornerback isn’t afraid to speak his mind, which makes things fun for everybody who is a fan of the game.

Jalen Ramsey is one of the NFL’s best young cornerbacks and trash talkers. Anybody can talk some trash, but having the skills to back everything up makes for a lethal combination.

That’s Ramsey, making him a big part of why the Jaguars have gone from a dud team for the past decade to one of the NFL’s most exciting teams to watch. And since he entered the NFL, Ramsey has showed no sign of ever biting his tongue. That’s good news for everybody — except perhaps NFL wide receivers and other targets of his.

Keeping track of all of Ramsey’s hatin’ ass trash talk can be a tough, however — there’s a lot of it. For that, we have you covered. Below is timeline of all of his best moments since he entered the NFL in 2016. We’ll be updating it, so that you can keep up with Ramsey, his trash talk, and everything else that comes with it for as long as he’s producing.

Sept. 25, 2016: “Who got in who head?”

We knew Ramsey was a dog early in his career, because one does not simply talk trash to or about Steve Smith. And yet, he did — just three weeks into his career!

Smith approached Ramsey after the game and got in his face. After the game, Ramsey told reporters about Smith: “The game over with. You still mad because I was locking you up? Alright, go sleep on that.”

Safe to say Jalen Ramsey and Steve Smith are not going to be friends. "He's a good player.. but I don't respect him as a man."#Jaguars pic.twitter.com/2sSypS02XD

— Alyssa Lang (@AlyssaLang) September 25, 2016

“Any time I lined up on him. Hmm. You’re done,” Ramsey said. “Y’all go watch that. Y’all go watch that. Y’all tell me who got in who head.”

The fact that it took Ramsey just three weeks into his NFL career to give us a signature quote, “Y’all tell me who got in who head,” is perfect. If that’s not in your vocabulary, add it.

Aug. 16, 2017: “6 quarterback options to replace Blake Bortles”

Blake Bortles is high up on the list of NFL Starting Quarterbacks Who Get Shit On Constantly. Jokes get tossed around about pretty much everybody nowadays on social media, but things are bad when your own teammates start going in.

That’s basically what Ramsey did by liking an Instagram post of a Big Cat Country article on potential Bortles replacements.

Bruh pic.twitter.com/wZs1zPEFtQ

— Dilla (@E_Dilla) August 16, 2017

This is basically the NFL equivalent of openly talking shit about a coworker, but not knowing they’re around the corner. Bortles wasn’t exactly around the corner on this one, but the internet was there to relay the message.

Bortles got some love after not playing as poorly during the postseason, and Ramsey has backed him up since. But we can’t forget this one. It also serves as a great reminder that people can always — always — see what you’re doing online.

Nov. 5, 2017: When he got in A.J. Green’s head

A.J. Green is a fairly quiet and laid back guy, as well as a spectacular wide receiver. But Ramsey brought out a side of him we had never seen before when the Bengals and Jaguars met up in Week 9 of the 2017 season.

Ramsey was in Green’s head the whole game, and after a shove that sent Green to the ground, it was on. Green went from a seven-time Pro Bowler to a mixed martial artist:

Both players were ejected for the scuffle. Later in the year, ESPN’s Darren Woodson showed Ramsey a picture of him and Green, and asked what came to mind. “Soft,” Ramsey said. “Charmin Soft.”

Woodson then asked what he could have possibly said to Green to make him go off like that. “I told him he was soft,” Ramsey said. “I just kept telling him he was soft, he’s soft.”

“He just got fed up,” Ramsey added. “That was it.” Unfortunately for all of us, the Bengals aren’t on the Jaguars’ schedule this season.

Jan. 12, 2018: Ramsey doesn’t know who Mike Mitchell is

Ahead of the Jaguars-Steelers AFC Divisional Round game, Ramsey was asked about comments made by Pittsburgh’s Mike Mitchell. Mitchell told SI, “We’re going to play [the Patriots] again. We can play them in hell, we can play them in Haiti, we can play them in New England. ... We’re gonna win.”

When asked if that comment was dismissal of the Jags by focusing on Steelers-Patriots, Ramsey said, “Who’s focused on them? Y’all focused on them?”

What do you think about the Steelers vs Patriots match-up? pic.twitter.com/J46eDj4KfV

— MadeByTim (@MadeByTim) January 11, 2018

After a reporter clarified there had been talk of that matchup, Ramsey asked, “Who?” The reporter replied, “The one Leonard trucked in the game.”

Then, the memories came back. “Oh,” Ramsey said, “I don’t much know him.”

June 26, 2018: Ramsey says Jimmy Garoppolo doesn’t belong in the NFL’s Top 100 list

The NFL offseason can feel like a never-ending drag, which the league combats by putting out a list of the top 100 players in the game. Most of the time, athletes make headlines by being outraged over where they think they should be on the list.

But leave it to Jalen Ramsey to take a jab at somebody else instead, and start something that way. Ramsey told NFL Network that he felt Jimmy Garoppolo didn’t deserve to be in the Top 100.

“Not yet,” Ramsey said. “What he played five games? He has good potential, I think he’ll be a good player. But in my experience playing him it was a lot of scheme stuff, it wasn’t like he was just dicing us up. It was a lot of scheme.”

That’s not some super burn, or even his best trash talk by any means. But the fact that Ramsey is OK with putting that out there as opposed to giving the typical cordial answer and moving along says everything about him.

July 4, 2018: His NFL Mount Rushmore that was him, him, him, and.... him

Hey! Another fun offseason thing bored media outlets like to do is ask people to construct a Mount Rushmore. NFL.com asked that question with an NFL slant, and Ramsey had the best answer by far:

“My Mount Rushmore is me with four different expressions.”

When you’re Jalen Ramsey, that’s the only answer. It’s not so much “hate”, but when you have the chance to put some of the game’s greats on a hypothetical Mount Rushmore, and you just choose yourself, that’s worthy of being on this list. Ramsey is also the standard for confidence goals.

Aug. 15, 2018: He just... vomited hella gems to GQ Magazine

Shouts out to Ramsey for replacing your morning coffee with zinger after zinger in his GQ interview with Clay Skipper. Here are all of the best bits of trash talk, condensed.

On Bills rookie QB Josh Allen:

I think [Buffalo Bills draft pick Josh] Allen is trash. I don’t care what nobody say. He’s trash. And it’s gonna show too. That’s a stupid draft pick to me. We play them this year, and I’m excited as hell. I hope he’s their starting quarterback. He played at Wyoming. Every time they played a big school—like, they played Iowa State, which is not a big school in my opinion because I went to Florida State, and he threw five interceptions, and they lost by a couple touchdowns or something like that.✞ He never beat a big school. If you look at his games against big schools, it was always hella interceptions, hella turnovers. It’s like: Yo, if you’re this good, why couldn’t you do better? He fits that mold, he’s a big, tall quarterback. Big arm, supposedly. I don’t see it, personally.

On Ravens QB Joe Flacco:

And just being honest about it, [Joe] Flacco sucks. I played him two years in a row. He sucks.

On how 49ers QB Jimmy Garoppolo might not be all that great:

They were like, “He beat the number one defense.” It was all schemes. He didn’t beat us. It wasn’t like he diced us up. It was literally all schemes. They were doing flat routes to the wide open fullback, and he’s running for 20 yards down the field four times during the game... So he didn’t really dice us up. It was their fullback and their tight end on over routes. But if you know how to work within your scheme then it means your good. I guess you could say he’s good.

It took a lot of him to call Rams QB Jared Goff good:

Jared Goff, he’s average to above average. He reminds me of Jimmy Garoppolo a little bit. Year one, he wasn’t good. He wasn’t even good enough to earn his own starting role. Like, if you the number one pick, you expected to start now. Period. He wasn’t ready to do that. He wasn’t able to do that. Then when he did get in, he didn’t really do that good. But in his second year, they got a new offensive coordinator. Your offensive coordinator is just your brainiac. When we played them, it felt like his offensive coordinator was drawing up perfect plays and then he was hitting the open man. For what his team ask him to do, yeah, he’s good.

On Giants QB Eli Manning:

Eli [Manning]... It’s not really Eli. I think it’s Odell [Beckham, Jr.]. I won’t say Eli’s good, I’ll say Odell’s good.

On Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger:

Big Ben [Roethlisberger], I think he’s decent at best… It’s not Big Ben, it’s [Antonio Brown]. Big Ben slings the ball a lot of the time. He just slings it, and his receivers go get it. He has a strong arm, but he ain’t all that. I played him twice last year, and he really disappointed me. He’ll be in the Hall of Fame and all that.

On Colts QB Andrew Luck:

Andrew Luck—I don’t really think he’s that good.

On Falcons QB Matt Ryan:

I think Matt Ryan’s overrated. You can’t tell me you win MVP two years ago, and then last year, you a complete bust, and you still got Julio Jones? There’s no way that should ever happen. I don’t care. You know what that tells me? That tells me [Offensive Coordinator Kyle] Shanahan left, went to San Francisco, got Garoppolo, made Garoppolo this big thing. And now Garoppolo is a big name—and now [Matt Ryan] has this bad year? Alright, well, was it really you, or was it your coach? He was doing what was asked of him and it was making him look really, really good.

Aug. 30, 2018: More players who aren’t good!

In an interview with ESPN the Magazine’s Mina Kimes, Ramsey added people to his extensive list of players who Aren’t Good.

Danny Amendola:

In general, Ramsey continues, fans underestimate the effect that quarterback play has on wide receivers. For example, he says, look at Danny Amendola, who just signed with Miami. “Or is it Edelman?” he asks out loud. He mulls it over. No -- he’s thinking of Amendola. “He just got a brand-new contract and he is terrible,” he says. “People think he’s so great. No, he’s not. Tom [Brady] made him look good. Tom could take me as a receiver and I’d be a first-team All-Pro.”

Rob Gronkowski:

When I mention that the Patriots still have All-Pro tight end Rob Gronkowski, he makes a face. “I don’t think Gronk’s good.” Registering my involuntary blinking, he course-corrects. “Let me say -- I don’t think Gronk is as great as people think he is.”

[...]

I ask him what Gronk did in the AFC championship. “Literally nothing. He may have had, like, one catch,” he says. (Ramsey is correct, though Gronkowski left before halftime because of a concussion.)

This timeline will be updated for more hateration throughout the 2018 NFL season, and Ramsey’s career.

[flauntpage]

DGB Grab Bag: Players' Weekend for the NHL, Salty Blue Jackets, and Buckets

Three Stars of Comedy

The third star: The Columbus Blue Jackets – Somebody's feeling a little salty about going all the way from one game to two on NBC's new schedule. (More on the new schedule in a bit.) It's the eyeroll emoji that really sells it

The second star: I has a bucket – Not sure what was funnier, the original photo or the fact that literally everyone Twitter made the same joke about the bucket getting signed by the Oilers.

The first star: This SHL video about rule changes – I can't stop watching this. It's the fist pump that gets me every time. If Tom Wilson starts working in this move every time he blindsides somebody a half hour after they touched the puck I'll admit he's worth every penny.

Be It Resolved

We're closing in on one of the weirder moments on the MLB calendar, as the annual "Players' Weekend" is almost here. The event debuted last year, and its main highlight is that players get to wear their nicknames on their jerseys.

That's… different. You have to give MLB some credit here, as they're basically offering up an open invitation for players to cut loose and show a little personality. It's fun for the players, and everyone gets to sit back and try to figure out what some of the nicknames even mean.

If you've been reading this column all summer, and god bless you if you have, then you're probably figuring that this is the part where we play our weekly round of "the NHL should steal this cool idea from another sport." That's been kind of a theme all offseason, and this feels like a great time to break it out..

But here's the thing. Ultimately, we try to be realists around here. Sure, we'll propose things like radically changing the way powerplays work, or having a special draft where everyone picks Jaromir Jagr, or letting every champion legally kidnap somebody for their Cup parade. But those are things that could actually happen someday.

NHL players volunteering to put cool nicknames on their own jerseys? Never. Zero chance. There's no point even thinking about it. Every player would just use their regular name, while old-school types swooned about how winners don't have personalities. A few players would probably insist that they didn't have a name back there at all, because the team is the only thing that matters, dammit. It would be awful.

Besides, even if the NHL stole baseball's idea and forced the players to take part, the result would just be depressing. Can you imagine an entire weekend of guys skating around with names like "Smither" and "Jonesy" and "Other Jonesy" on their back? It would be embarrassing.

So here's my proposal: We steal MLB's good idea, but then we improve on it. Be it resolved that once a season, we have a player's weekend where every team gets to force one player from another team to wear a specific nickname on their back.

Which player? That would be up to them. They could take a vote on who the victim would be. And then they'd get to choose the nickname that the player had to wear. If I know hockey players, they'd probably spend more time figuring this out than they do on special teams.

Admittedly, we'd have to iron out a few kinks. For example, we'd need some sort of tie-breaking system for when 30 teams all submitted different insults for Matthew Tkachuk as their first choice. And there would probably be some team every year that would use their pick to say something nice about some veteran opponent because they wanted to be "classy" or whatever. We'd deal with that by immediately relegating that team to the ECHL.

Still, how much fun would it be to see who each team in the league decided to target with an embarrassing nickname? And how quickly would you line up to buy an officially licensed Bruins No. 63 jersey with "Rat Face" or whatever on the back?

Maybe we can't steal most of baseball's good ideas, like "not having a salary cap" or "interesting free agency" or "replay that mostly works" or "actually noticing when defensive strategies are out of control." But we can steal this one. After we're done improving it.

Obscure Former Player of the Week

This week's Obscure Player honors go to Swedish goaltender Tommy Soderstrom, for no other reason than reader Nate wrote in to suggest him. Thanks Nate.

If you're like me, the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions Soderstrom is the brutal game-winning goal from center ice that sent Belarus to a stunning upset over Sweden in the 2002 Olympics. That's unfair, for a couple of reasons. First, even the best goaltenders gives up the occasional bad goal, and it's wrong to remember any athlete for their lowest moment. But more importantly, that wasn't Soderstrom—that was Tommy Salo. What can I say, Sweden produced too many 1990s goalies named Tommy S.

In addition to not being Tommy Salo, Soderstrom was picked way down in the 11th round of the 1990 draft by the Flyers. He played for Team Sweden at the 1991 Canada Cup, then made his NHL debut in 1992, splitting the Flyers' starting duties with Dominic Roussel. He played reasonably well, but struggled badly as a sophomore, winning just six times in 34 appearances while posting a GAA of 4.01. It didn't help his numbers that his own teammates occasionally scored on him.

Somehow, that made him worthy of being dealt to the Islanders straight up for Ron Hextall in a trade that probably happened mainly because nobody has any recollection of Hextall being an Islander in the first place. Soderstrom would spend two years as the Islanders' starter and wasn't bad, and to this day many fans probably remember his big white Jofa facemask. He once got into a fight with Corey Schwab.

As you can see, he didn't do all that well. But for the record, he didn't get destroyed by Dan Cloutier. That was also Tommy Salo.

Soderstrom would play a single game for the Islanders during the 1996-97 season—according to hockey-reference.com, his appearance lasted all of ten seconds—and that was it for his NHL career. He'd head to the IHL, and then back home to Sweden for several seasons.

According to his Wikipedia page, he apparently appeared on a Swedish reality show in 2014. I don't read Swedish so I don't know what the show is about, but I'm going to just assume it featured him and Tommy Salo living together while doing the Spiderman pointing meme and trying to figure out which one of them it was that Mike Milbury made cry during an arbitration hearing.

Outrage of the Week

The issue: NBC released their 2018-19 schedule. The outrage: Your team isn't on it enough. Is it justified: Kind of, in the sense that fans are fans, and you're supposed to want your team to get as much airtime as possible. Even if it doesn't really affect you—and let's face it, it doesn't, because you still have your local broadcast—it feels like a respect thing. Your team is great, or at least better than everyone thinks, and NBC should love them as much as you do.

Of course, in the real world it can't work that way. There are only so many games to go around. And while it would be nice if the games were handed out based on merit, ratings still matter and some teams do better than others. So sure, the Blackhawks are the most heavily featured team, as always, even though they missed the playoffs last year. And no, you won't see struggling Canadian teams like the Canucks or Senators at all. That's not fair, but life's not fair, and hockey fans know that better than anyone.

Still, the overall schedule is… not bad? I'm going to go with not bad. NBC made some smart moves, including the decision to scrap the Wednesday Night Rivalry that sounded great in theory but never really worked in reality because there hasn't been a good NHL rivalry since 2012. And while they're still giving you the Blackhawks out of a firehose, they've done a better job of spreading the love around. We've even got a game between two Canadian teams on the schedule, as the Leafs and Jets face off in October. That's the sort of matchup the league should want to see promoted, since it features two teams packed with young stars who should be good, and could even end up playing in a Stanley Cup final someday.

We're also getting more of fun teams like the Capitals, Predators, Golden Knights, and Lightning, and less of traditional teams like the Red Wings and Canadiens who figure to be iffy or worse. It doesn't all make sense, and nobody can quite figure out what's going on with the Kings, but it's a decent effort. So yeah, not bad.

Will "not bad" be enough to keep hockey fans from complaining? Of course not, because it's August and the only other things to talk about are Andrej Sekera's achilles tendon and Max Pacioretty's golf tournament. So we squabble about the TV schedule, if only to remind ourselves that meaningful hockey will return some day. That's as it should be. At least until the Senators and Canucks are playing in the Stanley Cup final and NBC can't figure out why the ratings are so low.

Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown

Hey, who wants to close things out with a bizarre short film about hockey, made by a Canadian celebrity, and aired at a late-night talk show hosts film festival? Why not. Let's get weird.

I'll be honest, I don't have a really strong grasp on what exactly this is or why it exists. Let's cover the basics. This is a short film that was produced by Michael J. Fox for David Letterman's 2nd Annual Holiday Film Festival, which aired in 1986. The film is called The Ice Man Hummeth. And yeah, it's going to get strange.

Why yes, David Letterman apparently did have his own film festival, or at least a TV special that was presented that way. He had two, in fact. The first aired in 1985, and this one followed in 1986. You can watch the full thing here.

So on to the film. We start things off with Fox arriving at a rink, looking suitably badass given he's fresh off of Back To The Future and is pretty much one of the biggest movie stars in the world at this point. But that doesn't last long, because once he gets to the door he's suddenly a mild-mannered guy in a suit. But he's in a hockey dressing room. But he's not. We've got some sort of Westworld-style dueling timelines deal going here, with Fox as both a hockey tough guy and a classical musician. He's basically David Schultz with slightly more high-brow tastes.

We cut back and forth between the two scenes, including a shot of Hockey Fox's locker, complete with an autographed Letterman photo. That gets the first laugh from the audience, albeit a confused one, as they're clearly waiting for some of that Alex P. Keaton magic. Where's Uncle Ned and his maraschino cherries when you need him?

The next joke gets a better reaction, as Fox has to return a jock strap for something larger. Because the other didn't fit his oversized junk, you see. Look, it's his movie and Back To The Future made $210 million, he can write himself a big package if he wants to.

We get more juxtaposition, until we finally arrive at game time. That leads to a reasonably clever transition from pucks on ice into musical notes on paper as the orchestra warms up. Then it's back to the rink, where Fox's team has been joined by their opponent, who are very clearly wearing Winnipeg Jets uniforms with just enough strategically applied tape to prevent a lawsuit. Players from both teams are constantly threatening to kill each other in that way that happens in 100 percent of 1980s hockey movies, but only like 80 percent of actual 1980s hockey games. OK, fine, 95 percent if it was the Norris.

Also, a mid-80s goaltender makes a save, which is the least realistic part of this whole film.

One note about all of this that's kind of neat—in the comment section from the video, someone shows up who claims to have done the music for the film and explains that he actually had to compose a song that switched back and forth from classical to heavy metal and time it exactly to the final cut. That's kind of cool, and I'm going to assume it's true because I'm pretty sure it's illegal to lie on YouTube.

The referee, who is like eight inches taller than any of the players, drops the puck to start the game, and we instantly go full Rangers/Devils.

The benches empty because it's 1986, and at one point Fox seems to take a swing at the referee. More importantly, careful viewers will have noticed that we've now got a fully classical soundtrack, meaning the clean separation between timelines is starting to break down.

Sure enough, Hockey Fox looks up and realizes that Violin Fox and the rest of the orchestra is now in the stands. That somehow turns our bench-clearing brawl into an ice-dancing spectacle. There's a joke here about going from mid-80s hockey to the 2018 version, but I'm too mature to make it.

Meanwhile, Violin Fox is getting crowded by a fellow musician, and you can probably guess where that's headed. Soon enough, the orchestra is brawling while the hockey players tut-tut about unnecessary violence. Up is down, left is right, Harold Ballard does something nice, and we're done.

In the full version of the show, Fox gives a little more information about how this was all made. The entire project took four weeks, the shooting lasted just two nights, and it all cost less than $40,000. And best of all, he tells a great story about how the musicians couldn't wait to fight each other. It's well worth a watch.

And there you have it: Quite possibly the best artistic interpretation of the marriage between hockey and music every filmed that didn't involve Neil Sheehy.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com .

DGB Grab Bag: Players' Weekend for the NHL, Salty Blue Jackets, and Buckets published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/