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amphtaminedreams · 3 years

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Why Ethical Fashion Doesn’t Need to be Boring (In the Words of a Shopping Addict): Lookbook no.14

Hi to anyone reading,

Arghhhh.

I never know how to start posts when I literally just uploaded the other week because I tend to follow the very formulaic approach of summarising what I’ve missed due to sporadic posting…I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m still posting sporadically, it just so happens I’ve had more content to get up recently-sometimes lightning strikes twice, ya know, and I have a brief, if chemically fuelled, reprieve from the permanent state of exhaustion. It’s not like there isn’t stuff to talk about- the last month has seen a horrific murder and public outcry in response. There are a lot of important conversations going on about women’s safety and misogynistic violence that I really cannot do justice to in a paragraph and feelings that have been brewing for a long time that I can’t articulate yet and will not attempt to offhandedly do so in this post. Right now I just wanna say that I stand in solidarity with all those with histories of experiencing violence at the hands of men, those who aren’t here with us anymore as a result of that violence such as Sarah Everard, and those marginalised women whose stories don’t make national news. It’s very telling the way Sarah’s vigil was responded to by the same police force that have allowed mostly male anti-mask protests to go ahead with protestors unscathed, and solidarity with the women who were treated with such an unjustifiable amount of force at the vigil too.

That being said, women’s rights are something I wanted to talk about in this post, with regards to the way it ties into ethical fashion. None of us are perfect and it’s easy living in a first world country to detach yourself from the issues stemming from fast fashion, especially when you don’t have the time or money yourself to be selective about where you buy from. Don’t get me wrong, I do treat myself to some new clothes from fast fashion companies like ASOS and Urban Outfitters a few times a year so this is NOT coming from a place of preaching, but I have drastically reduced that to buying about 90% of my new clothes either second hand from Depop or charity shops or clothing stores that are upfront about their outsourcing practices. I love putting outfits together and updating my wardrobe and I don’t want to abandon that as a medium of self-expression because it does bring me joy, but to continue to update my wardrobe with the frequency I do by buying from fast fashion retailers on such a regular basis I accepted was going against the things I care about; around 80% of textile workers on poverty wages in developing countries are girls and women (opensocietyfoundations.org), and whilst fast fashion companies in the West continue to outsource manufacturing to said countries to cut costs and there is little regulation enforcing employers to pay women the same amount as men or even adhere to a minimum wage, they will continue to be forced into these roles where they are subjected to horrific working conditions, impossible production targets and frequent abuse (according to an article published in the Guardian in June 2018, 540 incidences of abuse, often of a sexual nature, were reported by women working in factories supplying the retailers GAP and H&M when they were interviewed on the subject). There is no denying that the fast fashion industry depends on and perpetuates the subjugation of women and systematically prevents them from making steps towards gender equality in their countries, be it through greater financial independence or the freedom to pursue higher education; the popular current practice by western fast fashion companies of outsourcing manufacturing to factories unhindered by workers rights and gender equality laws by association condones the sexual and physical violence that occurs as a means of punishment for not meeting targets, the exploitative pay which affords women little independence from husbands and families dominated by patriarchal values, and the long, exhausting hours which women have little choice but to take in order to avoid their contracts being terminated and to put food on the table. No, one individual completely abandoning fast fashion isn’t going to put an end to these unethical practices but if all of us make a conscious effort to reduce our consumption at least a little and make it clear why we’re doing so, we put greater pressure on fast fashion companies to act in a more responsible way. There isn’t going to be any kind of miraculous change of heart, so to force them to change we have to hit the industry and the people at the top who benefit from such practices where it really hurts: their profit.

SO, for this post I thought I would highlight some of my favourite more ethical online clothing companies to buy from; the more popular these more socially responsible brands become, the more apparent it becomes to fast fashion companies relying on an exploitative business model that how they treat their workers is of growing importance to consumers. It’s all very well and good Missguided and PLT talking about empowering women and making “girl boss” slogan tees but we need to make it clear that we’re aware of the hollowness of the gesture, and that we want less hypocritical talk and more action to actually enhance the lives of the women that work for them, not just the ones they show in their flashy offices on TV. I’ve included my favourite Depop shops too, because if you can shop second hand, that’s even better; though I like to treat myself to new clothes now and again, I’m aware that the impact the manufacturing process in general, whether or not the company acts in an ethical way with regards to their employment practices, has on the environment is more often than not detrimental. Depop has really been my saving grace this past year-if you know what you’re looking for and have the time and patience, you can find so many gems, and at this point the balance of my wardrobe is tipped firmly in the favour of the reuse and recycle approach to shopping. In the vein of reusing fashion, I thought I’d also include a mini lookbook for a cardigan I got from one of my favourite online retailers, The Ragged Priest, just as a reminder that 1). The best way to be sustainable is to rewear and 2). That with tweaks, one piece alone can give you multiple completely different outfits. Like honestly, outfit repeating doesn’t have to be a literal repeat. Sometimes it’s worth spending a little bit extra on something that looks good with everything, and making that investment into your ability to fool people that you’ve got your shit together by wearing something cool as fuck.

Quickly before I get into it, I’m aware that some ethical companies are a bit out of the average consumer’s price range, and so I wanted to sort them into price point categories which will work as follows:

£= most of their stock is £40 & under ££= most of their stock is between £40-£100 £££= most of their stock costs upwards of £100

Now, in no particular order (and starting with online retailers before moving onto Depop shops), here’s the list!

1. THE RAGGED PRIEST

PRICE POINT: ££

Using recycled fabric to construct their pieces where possible and releasing clothing in small drops designed to sell out rather than following the typical fast fashion model of outsourcing the production of vast amounts of clothing overseas, the Ragged Priest is my absolute favourite clothing brand out there. It’s *semi* affordable and because they are all about those bold, in your face, your-grandma-will-probs-think-it’s-ugly kinda pieces, just one can do SO much for your wardrobe.

I recently bought this cardigan from their The Simple Life drop and had so many outfit ideas for it that I thought I’d put a few of them together for this post just as an example of how you can take the same piece over and over again and still make it interesting, even when you don’t feel like straying too far from your personal style preferences. While we’re at it, I also wanted to use this mini lookbook to point out how fucking great Depop is! Literally everything in these outfits is from there apart from the shoes and the jewellery, the leather blazer on the right I bought a few years ago and then the top and skirt in the outfit from the far left which are both from Ebay. The shoes with that outfit are from Koi Vegan footwear-I didn’t include them in this list because I wanted to keep it consistent and focus on ethical clothing companies rather than retailers that focus on one specific thing such as shoes or jewellery, but they are my favourite place to buy shoes from and focus closely on ethical production too so definitely recommend.

2. MINGA LONDON

PRICE POINT: ££

Towards the lower end of the ££ price point, Minga is probably the closest you’re gonna get to an ethical version of the Dolls Kill Deliah’s range. Their focus on being a socially responsible business is a huge part of their ethos and their pieces are put together in Portugal, where they're based, by a small in-house team; the majority of their fabric is sourced from local Portuguese businesses and even more amazingly, they recycle the fabric of the pieces they don’t sell in new designs. They are just a generally amazing company and I wish more people knew about them because their pieces are fucking adorable and wouldn’t be out of place (or overpriced) in your local UO.

3. ELSIE & FRED

PRICE POINT: £

A small, black owned business set up by 3 siblings from Coventry, Elsie & Fred have earned themselves a reputation as a staple provider of the festival season wardrobe. Being an independently owned business, they have strict standards that their manufacturers must adhere to and a close working relationship with the owners of the two factories who oversee production in Guangzhou, China, to ensure fair wages and a safe working environment. On the environmental side of things, Elsie and Fred are working to incorporate recycled fabric into their designs as much as possible and have this year introduced compostable mailing bags.

4. HOUSE OF SUNNY

PRICE POINT: £££

Follow enough British instagram fashion influencers and you are bound to have heard of House of Sunny in 2020-snagging what is probably my all time favourite coat from there in 2019 before all the hype is a humble brag I will allow myself on the basis that I haven’t been able to afford anything since, lol. Along with kooky, one of a kind designs, being decidedly anti-fast fashion is a huge part of their branding; HoS only drop 2 collections of limited stock a year, thoroughly screen suppliers and on their website you can find a tonne of information on how they’re working to offset their environmental impact too. If you can treat yourself to a piece from there at any point, the quality of the garments truly make the price point worth it.

5. JADED LONDON

PRICE POINT: ££

Similarly to The Ragged Priest and House of Sunny, Jaded London go the route of dropping limited collections on a less frequent basis intending to sell out (particularly popular pieces are occasionally restocked) rather than needlessly manufacturing vast quantities of garments to flog for whatever they can get and cutting corners with fair employment practices to offset any losses. By employing independent staff in the manufacturing plants with which they liaise to ensure fair, dignified working conditions and also by working closely with charities such as the Trussel Trust and Stand Up to Racism, Jaded London demonstrates a level of commitment to corporate responsibility that set them apart from a lot of similar online retailers. They are at the top of their game when it comes to daring and experimental yet wearable pieces and so it’s cool that they recognise the need to conduct their business in a considerate way too.

6. THE HIPPIE SHAKE

PRICE POINT: ££

Owned by UK based bohemian queen Naomi Hession, the Hippie Shake is not only a great small independent business to support but is also the definition of slow fashion. With a limited number of opulent 70s style pieces, I have always wanted to purchase something from here. I’ve yet to do so but I’m gonna make it my mission eventually.

7. VINTAGE HEARTS

PRICE POINT: £

An affordable, gorgeous array of quirky handpicked vintage pieces that would probably take you forever to find in a charity shop or that you’d be charged a small fortune for if you found it in a high street second hand store, Vintage Hearts is where you should go if you want a timeless statement piece that may have otherwise ended up in a landfill. The added benefit of vintage clothing is that it is, by its nature, great for the environment, but you can also look fab and groovy as fuck as you do your bit for the planet<3

8. WE ARE COW

PRICE POINT: £

Offering both original vintage pieces and reworked pieces using recycled fabrics, We Are Cow has both basic branded second hand items but also handmade streetwear style original designs all for a fair price. You can tell that it’s all high quality stuff consistent with their modern, functional aesthetic and it’s clear that the team behind the shop has a real vision in mind when they’re designing.

9. OUT OF THE ORDINARY CLOTHING

PRICE POINT: £

In the words of Corrie Davis, founder of OOTO "I start with the belief that fashion will be always be worn differently by the individual that wears it. Every collection from Out of the Ordinary is different to the last but undeniably Out of the Ordinary. I champion flamboyancy and embrace the cultures I've experienced around the world, merging the two and creating popular style trends in exciting textiles, prints and techniques to bring to you something a little Out of the Ordinary." That pretty much sums up the vibrancy, vivacity and bold elegance of the brand’s aesthetic perfectly, which is reflected by Davis’ commitment to ethical manufacturing based on relationships forged between the founders and family artisans and the sourcing of fabrics from textile markets around the world. Everything you need for a boujie summer holiday in the Mediterranean-when leaving the country is finally allowed again, lol, EVERYBODY GET YOUR FUCKING VACCINE-is here.

10. WILD THING

PRICE POINT: ranges from £-£££ depending on the brand

Probs the closest thing you’ll get to an ethical ASOS, Wild Thing brings together a host of sustainable and independent clothing brands and puts them all in one place to present to us all a collection of the sickest festival style fashion out there. Whilst it’s super cool that this already exists and a slice of humble pie for myself to remind me that I am not in fact the revolutionary marketing genius I thought I was, I’m bummed to know that my idea of said ethical ASOS style website is already out there. Fingers crossed for the next grand money making scheme that comes to mind that I can use to distribute some wealth (yeah, there probably won’t be any because very few original thoughts enter my head, clearly, tehe) xoxo

11. SHOPFLUFFY

PRICE POINT: ££

I know it’s 2021 and we all kind hate the idea of girl boss feminism and the connotations of privilege and exploitation that come with it but can we bring it back when we’re talking about women who embody what it was actually all supposed to be about? Because the owner of ShopFluffy, @lulutrixabelle embodies everything good about the term. Somebody who genuinely does (cue Ramona singer voice here) empower other women through her celebration of powerful female friendship and free spirited sense of personal style that should inspire every one of us to wear whatever the fuck we want (clashing patterns and over-accessorising be damned), Lulu handmakes all the designs on her site and very much places an emphasis on slow fashion by releasing only a few collections a year which you can clearly tell a lot of painstaking effort and talent went into. ShopFluffy is on the pricier side but the adorable crocheted coords LuLu specialises in, reminiscent of carefree childhood days and picnics in meadows picturesque enough to be the backdrop of a Jacquemus runway presentation, are a bold and beautiful expression of playful femininity worthy of departing with a bit more than you’d usually spend. After all, if you are gonna spend that money on a piece of clothing, supporting an ethical, independent woman owned business clearly built on carefully honed skill, passion and authenticity is the way to go.

12. SHOPEASYTIGER

PRICE POINT: ££

It feels correct to follow up the ShopFluffy mention with ShopEasyTiger given the friendship between the former’s owner with Tigerlilly Winfield (is that not the most wonderfully storybook character sounding name of all time?), owner of Easy Tiger. Up there with my most revered style icons, Tigerlilly’s designs are as flamboyant and glamorous and daring and dramatic as her own personal style, and again, they are ethically made! If you want to get that psychedelic rock n’roll groupie that’s actually way cooler than the band itself kinda energy too, her shop is the place to start.

13. HOTTTRAMP

PRICE POINT: ££

Founded by the incredibly hot Belle_hott_tramp on Instagram, HottTramp is a collection of both handmade pieces and carefully selected vintage finds that blur the lines between 90s Courtney Love style grunge and 70s summer of love hippy that make me want to start my own all girl rock band and hire a camper van to paint black and road trip through the American desert. Given my complete lack of hand eye coordination, I’ll most likely never have the instrumental skills to do that but I never said it was a realistic fantasy, okay?

14. LAZY OAF

PRICE POINT: ££

Is it just me that always thought Lazy Oaf was within the same kind of price range as The Ragged Priest? Because it’s a lottt more expensive than I thought. That being said, if you’re going for a playful, toned down Molly Goddard kinda look, anything bright and youthful, Lazy Oaf’s clothes 100% fit that brief. You are paying more, but part of that markup is reflected in their transparency when it comes to their ethical code, which includes ensuring that statutory minimum wage laws are adhered to in the supply chain as well as that all workers are of the legal working age for their countries and that their working hours do not exceed the legal limit. They are also steadfastly committed to donating a portion of their profits to charities dedicated to improving mental wellbeing such as Mind, Rethink Mental Illness, and Young Minds, something that is hugely important to me given my own experiences and the line of work I want to go into.

15. NEVER FULLY DRESSED

PRICE POINT: ££

Similar in their aesthetic to Out of the Ordinary, Never Fully Dressed is big on colour, print, and elegance. They have both specially selected second hand pieces on offer and original designs too and the about us section of their website clearly states how passionate they are about their ethical manufacturing process, which takes place both here in the UK and in China.

16. TUNNEL VISION

PRICE POINT: ££

Offering the dreamiest, one of a kind vintage 90s pieces, Tunnel Vision could just as easily be a grunge girl band come the craft themed moodboard as it is an online retailer. If the 90s isn’t for you-I mean, I don’t wanna question anybody’s taste levels but…-they also have the option of shopping by era, which I think is a really cool feature I wish a lot of irl vintage shops would incorporate.

17. LOVE TOO TRUE

PRICE POINT: £

Everything on Love Too True is fucking gorgeousss and it is no surprise that they manufacture their garments here in London because I feel their brand totally encompasses that stereotypical 90s East End punk vibe perfectly with a shit tonne of chunky boots and show stopping plaid pieces that makes my heart ache for a riot grrrl renaissance. Yes, when it comes to feminism’s place in mainstream culture, making sure the political goals and structural changes we’re aiming for are visible to all is by far the most important, but let’s have a resurgence of the grunge girl’s armour along with that and PLEASE let’s leave athleisure in the 2010s. No more Kardashian nude leggings, I beg (I AM being lighthearted, wear whatever you want! We’re not policing women’s clothes in this neck of the woods).

18. NINE LIVES BAZAAR

PRICE POINT: £££

Eurgh. Nine Lives Bazaar. I want it ALL. Their clothes give me all the Etro, Zimmerman, Torey Burch, modernised Stevie Nicks vibes on a slightly more realistic budget, though unfortunately for me said budget just isn’t realistic enough. You would think pieces being ethically produced is just a given when it comes to clothes within this price range but that’s not necessarily the case and Nine Lives Bazaar is one of the ones you can trust to actually be considerate of their employees needs when it comes to their approach to business. To anybody who can afford to shop here, I am insanely jealous. The rest of us, for now, can just browse the website n feel the fantasy, channel a Valentina level of delusion and pretend it’s just the import taxes from Australia that’s holding us back from making a purchase.

-DEPOP SHOPS-

1. @HOUSE_OF_EROTIQUE

PRICE POINT: ££

Everything handmade and latex and form fitting to make you the baddest bitch in the room, I’ve got myself a few pieces from this shop over the past couple of years. Customer service is a bit hit or miss and there’s been times when I’ve had to wait a while for my purchases to get to me but because they’re all one of a kind and custom made to fit, it’s worth it, and when they have messed up they were kind enough to add something to my order for free.

2. @SACREDHAWK

PRICE POINT: ££

If you picture raiding the wardrobe of a biker gang, snatching the Coachella bound suitcases of the Revolve ambassadors at Palm Springs airport, and then jumbling all those clothes together, that’s probably your best bet at getting an idea of Sacred Hawk’s aesthetic. Formerly an ASOS concession, the brand is now available on Depop and is a collection of the most lavish glam grunge pieces, all vintage or reworked vintage. Some things are a bit on the pricey side but I would say they are all priced fairly considering how unique and ornate a lot of the pieces are, and I reeeeally wanna be able to say I own something from there one day.

3. @IDENTITYPARTY

PRICE POINT: £££

I struggled with how to categorise this Depop shop in terms of price point because although there are some fairly low-priced pieces, the standouts are the vintage coats which are understandably a lot more expensive-if you want to fully immerse yourself in the Almost Famous Penny Lane fantasy, you’re gonna have to fork out a little bit.

4. @RETRO_RAIL

PRICE POINT: £££

Retro_rail is of a similar vein to IdentityParty, in that the standout pieces are the vintage coats which are usually upwards of £100-if you’re looking for one-of-a-kind statement outerwear to invest in, I can’t recommend this shop enough. If you’re like me and you’re looking for something more within the £ to ££ price range, Retro Rail is still worth a browse as inspiration for the kind of styles you might wanna try and find elsewhere on Depop.

5. @5THSEASON

PRICE POINT: £

Most of the quirky vintage pieces you’ll find on offer on this Depop shop are within the £25 to £40 price range and though you’ve got coats similar to those you’ll find on Identity Party and Retro Rail and they are sill slightly more than the tops and trousers and dresses on sale etc., they are more modestly priced than the other 2 listed.

6. @DREAMERSREBELS

PRICE POINT: £££

Another v pricey one, dreamersrebels specialises in the daintiest, most whimsical 60s style co-ords I’ve ever seen. Handmade upon purchase, which in turn guarantees little textile waste, you can find the kind of pieces you’d expect to see on a 21st century incarnation of Audrey Hepburn, all the soft pastels and timeless, retro silhouettes you could possibly wish for. I mean, wishing is pretty much all I can do rn but anyone with a near minimum wage retail job knows you need something to aspire to, lol. I managed to budget enough to treat myself to a Selkie dress so I’m manifesting that same level of self-discipline to get me a dreamersrebels piece next.

7. @AWKWARDPHASE

PRICE POINT: £

Very affordable vintage pieces that range from cutesy mid-century style dresses and coats to grungy 90s jackets, perfectly styled and presented too in a way that will have you wanting to order something for yourself to replicate that modern spin on old staples and give them a second life.

8. @EVIEHALLOWS

PRICE POINT: £

Another Depop shop where the clothes are styled so well, it’ll have you thinking you can make anything from a floral 1950s housewife style cardigan to a lycra jumpsuit look very intentionally on trend.

9. @JAHOOLI

PRICE POINT: £

There’s also Jahooli, which I will just say ticks all the same boxes as the other two aforementioned stores to avoid repeating myself.

10. @LOVELYANDLOVELESS

PRICE POINT: £

In terms of price, I would put Lovely and Loveless into the same category as Jahooli, Awkward Phase and Evie Hallows, the difference being that the clothes available are more on the dainty, classically feminine side. People who have a Pinterest board dedicated to the cottagecore or light academia aesthetic (whew, the gen Z is showing), this one’s for you.

11. @CHLOESTJOHN

PRICE POINT: £

Finally, we have the ChloeStJohn Depop shop and it’s definitely a good one to end on; picture the wardrobe of Carrie Bradshaw if she’d lived in Camden instead of New York in the 90s and hung out with a slightly edgier crew than Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha and there you have it, the vibe of the pieces on offer. Does it belong to a girl who probs lives near Primrose Hill and has access to all the boujiest second hand clothes shops available which she most likely routinely raids to resell on Depop? Potentially, but hopefully not because I am very here for this whole red wine in one hand and a cigarette in another back when people were allowed to smoke inside bars aesthetic. I’m sorry that the gen Z part of me once again jumped out in such an aggressive fashion with that last sentence, but I know you know what I mean.

And that’s everything!

I did wanna close off the post with a reminder of how nuanced a discussion this is-having the time and money to be more conscious about your ethical footprint when you’re buying clothes is in itself a privilege; fashion shouldn’t be an interest reserved for only those who have the means to pay extra or spend time scouring the internet. It’s also important to be aware of the lack of size inclusivity-a lot of the “trendy” sustainable fashion brands tend to not stock anything larger than a size 14 and attempt to deflect attention away from this by categorising clothes as either XS, S, M, or L, which is in itself a bit of a pisstake considering that 12-14 is the average clothing size here for women in the UK, and so in no way large. Shopping from Depop and Ebay is hard too when so many brands fail to understand how to fit a non-straight size body which in turn necessitates trying stuff on before you buy it, something that isn’t possible when you’re shopping second hand. A lot of Depop shops fail to offer returns and even with those who do, chasing up that return can be a time-consuming and generally all round frustrating process.

Basically, when we’re having these kinds of discussions it’s important to consider everyone’s situations and avoid sitting on some kind of high horse. I feel like things have become even more complicated lately- with the recent closure of once popular high street stores such as Topshop and Miss Selfridge, it has got me thinking a lot about just how many people’s income here in the UK is dependent on fast fashion retailers too and their popularity. The job scarcity resulting from these kind of closures, which are often all that is available to a lot of people with the demands of the job market seemingly becoming more and more impossible each day even for those who have been in higher education, is clearly an issue when the kind of support you can expect from the government as someone out of work is so woefully inadequate and likely to become even more so as the conservatives push for further cuts to UC and PIP. The past year has really shown us just how shaky the ground that an intensely capitalist society stands on is and how quickly everything can go tits up when we don’t invest in a safety net for those who are struggling. People seem to have realised more than ever the extent to which those whose jobs we deem “low-skilled” are actually the backbone of society, and yet even here, whilst the situation may not be quite as desperate as it is elsewhere, we still haven’t seen pay rises that reflect that. Turns out all the clapping WAS an empty gesture, who’d have thought it (for fuck’s sake)? Fair wages really are a global issue that starts with paying people enough for them to comfortably live on and in time should lead to a shift in consciousness away from the concept of profit before everything else and towards an equal playing field for everyone, something we should take every opportunity to speak up about and demand from our “leaders”, however shit a job so many of those leaders do. It’s frustrating how the focus on making ethical purchasing choices is so often on the overconsumption of things that women historically are more actively interested in such as clothes and accessories and make up when the reality is that the wealth of every industry titan on this planet, NOT just the ones who dominate the fast fashion sphere, depends on them continuing to get away with exploiting people-we should be looking at how we can show our dissatisfaction in all areas. Maybe I’m perpetuating that with this post, since a lot of the online retailers I mentioned only sell women’s clothing, but that being said, I’m not about to do men’s work for them, lol-they should make the effort, if possible, to research into sustainable clothing alternatives too.

Anyway, that’s the end of this post! If you read to the end, thank you so much! If I’ve made any errors in my research or there are more sustainable clothing brands that I could’ve mentioned, feel free to inbox me them too, and I can add them to this post if Tumblr allows. It’s usually a little bitch when it comes to editing long posts but I’ll try my best:) Again, thanks for reading! And if you are, I hope you are safe and well!

Lauren x

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anthropwashere · 4 years

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Phic Phight: it’s all downhill from here (honey don’t be scared)

Prompt from @aggressivelyclueless: Halfa Valerie AU: Valerie becomes half-ghost. Apart from that being a total nightmare, this also leads her to discover Danny's secret as well. How is she going to handle it?

@currentlylurking @phicphight

Word count: 7,825

Mr. Heppenheimer, the latest in a long line of chemistry teachers that have come through Casper High since actual, real life ghosts have begun treating Amity Park like their own personal Las Vegas retreat away from the rigors of whatever normal life is like for ghosts in the Ghost Zone, gives Danny a lingering stink eye. Clearly the last teacher, Mrs. Jamshidi (who barely lasted a month, and submitted her two-week notice while recovering in the hospital after an admittedly memorable encounter with Ember), had left notes behind for her successor. Danny doubted a single word of it was in his favor.

"This practical's worth a quarter of your grade this semester," Mr. Heppenheimer says in his usual droll way. "You're not going to make me regret handing you glassware, are you, Mister Fenton?"

Danny, still a bit sore and off-kilter after another Jack Fenton-approved growth spurt, grins down at him. "No, sir."

Mr. Heppenheimer hums doubtfully. Clearly Mrs. Jamshidi had left extensive notes. "Don't make me regret this."

"Short of a ghost attack, I doubt you will," Danny answers truthfully. He really has gotten a much better control on his powers since the last time any science teacher let him near anything fragile, well over a year ago now. Mrs. Gorman hated him from the start for reasons he never figured out, anyway. He's looking forward to a fresh start.

Of course, worryingly enough Danny’s been sensing a pretty powerful ghost lurking around Casper High for over a week now. Along with the usual big green beasties that like to come sniffing around crowds of humans, which he’s had to dip out to handle three times now. No one’s noticed his on-going ghost sense, though it helps that he’s long-since gotten into the habit of keeping one hand cupped lazily over his mouth—just in case. That’ll be harder to pass off here in a practical lab, but there ought to be a lot of things bubbling and steaming soon. He just has to be careful until he’s got some cover.

Mr. Heppenheimer hums again, more dismissive than doubtful, and lets him approach the counter. His partner in this practical is Star, which is—randomized, definitely. Whatever, also definitely. He and Star have as much in common as him and an actual star, which is to say—nothing. He doesn't even generate heat anymore, not really. He's got a modified Maddie Fenton-approved belt buckle that lets him fake it, but it's not remotely the same thing, and not a

ll that convincing at close quarters anyway. Star, at least, knows him well enough that she's been bringing a mint green cardigan to class ever since they were assigned project partners.

Danny, well-aware he’s only good in the eyes of his peers for a laugh and anti-ghost tech, smiles thinly at Star and gestures at her to take the lead. She sniffs pointedly and does just so, which is fine with him. She's well on her way to valedictorian, whereas he's just trying to graduate. If deferring to whatever she wants gets him a passing grade, sure! He'll do whatever she says and accept whatever belittling comment she tacks on along with it. No skin off his back, right?

About twenty minutes into class there's a magnificent crash of glass that puts Danny 110% on edge; it's only Sam appearing at his left with a reassuring hand on his arm that keeps him from blasting a hole through the wall out of pure reflex. Which, maybe, possibly, likely says something about his state of mind after three straight years of fighting the kind of monsters that don't have any place outside of his very worst nightmares, but—whatever. Point is, thanks to Sam, he doesn't trash the lab or draw any unwanted attention to himself, both of which are good things! Another point in his favor: it’s finally somebody else’s turn to destroy a whole tray of beakers.

"Miss—Gray!" Mr. Heppenheimer shouts after a brief glance at the clipboard Danny hasn't seen him put down in the two weeks since he took the job. "What's the meaning of this?!"

"S-sorry!" Valerie stammers, her eyes firmly on the mess at her feet. Her project partner, Wes, is scowling at Danny. Likely because he believes the mess is entirely his fault. Wes can believe whatever he likes; just because he's the only one not fully in on The Big Secret who figured out The Big Secret out doesn't make him automatically right 100% of the time. Case in point: now. Danny's only touched his notebook, where he's got three pages of dutifully written notes on what Star's tasked him to write as she did all the metaphorical heavy lifting. He could swear on a stack of Bibles that this latest chemistry accident doesn't have a thing to do with him. It’s kind of refreshing, honestly.

Mr. Heppenheimer hums again. It seems to be his default over all the loud swearing he'd obviously prefer to be doing. "Clean it up. And do be careful, Miss Gray. I'd prefer to avoid sending anyone to the nurse's office today if I can help it."

"I—yeah. Yes, sorry." Valerie dashes off to the closet where all the safety-slash-cleaning gear is stashed to fetch cat litter, broom, and dustpan. Star scoffs on Danny's right, while Sam, hand still firmly squeezing Danny's bicep, has a worryingly thoughtful scowl on.

"Valerie has been such a mess since her dad lost his job," Star remarks in the usual scathingly cruel A-lister tone.

"He got his job back." Danny points out as he tries to shrug Sam off without making a big deal of it.

"So?" Star's tone has shifted from scathing to incredulous, which means she somehow didn't know something Danny's known since the tail end of their freshman year. It's admittedly bizarre to find himself able to lord some classmate gossip over an A-lister, but—with a glance at Sam to confirm it is, in fact, cool to lord this gossip over an A-lister—he gives Star a slow, sly grin as he gestures her closer. She leans in without an ounce of self-restraint or disgust, which means Danny's moved higher up the food chain since the last time he bothered to pay any attention.

"Valerie's dad used to be some bigwig in Axion Labs," he says, one eye on Sam and the other on Tucker, both of whom in turn are watching the teacher and the rest of the class. Just in case. "After Vlad—uh. Vladco, I mean—took over the company, Mister Gray got his position back despite Phantom screwing him over, and it's been smooth sailing for him ever since."

The sound of Valerie sweeping up broken glass gets discordantly loud, somehow. Danny doesn't have to look at her to know she's glaring daggers at him. He sets his shoulders and sticks the angle of his nose twenty degrees snootier, mostly to spite whatever murderous and/or weepy glower Valerie might be trying to laser into his soul. Which, whatever. He knows the shape of his own soul by now. He knows it's Phantom, plus or minus some degree of fiery white hair and green-tinged skin.

A bit of the old guilt niggles in the back of his head though. Accident or not, it was Phantom who cost Mr. Gray his job in the first place and Vlad who gave it back. And Vlad only did it at all once he realized his favorite little ghost fighting minion would be a better thorn in Phantom’s side if she didn’t have to work a part-time job at the Nasty Burger. Which—well. Danny’s glad she doesn’t have to deal with that anymore, for all that it does make her a better thorn in his side.

But—guilt. Dumb guilt, but on his plate all the same. He manages to edge the conversation to some other Gossip with a capital G that even Star's not aware of. Oh the things a guy can hear when he can literally turn invisible. It's kind of fun, honestly, to fill her in. The rest of the hour is spent hissing old-as-shit hearsay that still manages to make Star's eyes light up like she's watching Paulina’s favorite cabin burn down again. They do, somehow, manage to get their project pushed along to step three, which will pick up with the rest of all the normal and unobtrusive partnered projects tomorrow. He's not sure which of them is to thank for that, but he is more than a little pleased with how neatly he wrote their notes. It's the most like a regular student he's felt in months. It's honestly pretty great!

"We have a problem," Tucker hisses no less than five seconds and no more than ten after the bell rings. It's that perfect middle ground time of everyone shoving all their shit into their bags so they can bolt out the classroom door as fast as normal-humanly possible, so it's also that perfect middle ground time of nobody paying the three of them the least bit of attention.

"You noticed too?" Sam asks with her usual omniscient scowl. Danny truly and whole-heartedly wishes she'd stop with that, but he's yet to find an opportunity where he can say that to her face without coming across as a total shitheel, including now, so he grits his teeth and raises a pointedly baffled eyebrow at the both of them.

"Noticed what?" He asks with a patience he hasn't actually felt since junior high.

"Valerie's—" Tucker does a casual look around to see if anyone's close enough to eavesdrop, intentionally or no, which means this is a Phantom Thing. And if this is something Phantom and Valerie related? Yeah, no, he's in too good a mood for whatever latest gadget or trick Vlad might be cooking up via Valerie.

He holds up a hand with a sigh he automatically pretends is a yawn to cover up the blue wisp that escapes with it. "Can this wait? Better yet, can we just—not? At least for today? I'm really not up for counter-scheming."

"No need for that," Tucker assures way too quickly. The nervous laugh he follows it up with really doesn't help.

"Right," Danny says wryly, but motions to let them talk. Sam and Tucker share one of those weird non-verbal psychic looks where they have a whole conversation in the span of two seconds that goes right over Danny's head. He wishes they’d stop doing that, but if he called them out on it they’d deny it loudly, and it’d be a whole thing, and—ugh.

"Valerie's acting weird," Tucker says once they've finished. "As in, 'we definitely need to intervene' weird."

"Possessed?"

"No. But this might be worse."

"But this isn't the first time she made a mess in class,” Sam says.

Danny slips his one (1) notebook and one (1) pencil into his bag. He's learned the hard way to pack light and get real good at shorthand, as well as keep all his textbooks down in the Fenton dungeon where they're least likely to get torched in a ghost fight. Again. "Isn't it?"

"Nope," Tucker says as they make their way to the door. Danny's sure to give Mr. Heppenheimer some ever-so-slightly iridescent stink eye of his own to make him flinch, and then doubt himself for flinching. One good turn, and all that. "Seventh actually. Third a teacher noticed, but she's been weirding out a lot of the other students."

Danny grunts, more interested in shouldering other people out of the way to make it easier for Sam and Tucker to squeeze out into the hall. Hey, may as well get some mileage out of being one of the tallest guys in school, right?

Sam touches his elbow to make sure she's got his attention while they make their way to their next classes. She's got sign language, Tucker's got photography, and Danny's got a free hour to nap in the auditorium ceiling. "She's constantly dropping things, she's always shivering, every lie I've heard her tell a faculty member has been total nonsense, she hasn't gone after a single ghost in almost two weeks—"

"Well, that would explain why there's been an uptick in my fifth period snake-wrangling," Danny remarks dryly, then grins nastily at some girl giving him a serious case of side-eye. She squeaks—actually squeaks!—and ducks behind some broad-shouldered guy in an eye-wateringly neon football jersey.

Tucker wacks his other elbow, scowling up at him. "Dude, this is serious."

"I haven't heard a reason to care yet."

He doesn't have to look to see they're doing another round of psychic Concerned About Our Bestie back-and-forth. Sam's the one who trips him—damn her preference for steel-toed boots—but it's Tucker who shoves him into a nook between two battered banks of lockers. "Danny," they both snap.

He blinks down at them expectantly, staying quiet. Hey, they're the one's worried about the badass ghost fighting black belt who would love nothing more than an opportunity to strap Phantom down to an operating table and go wild with a cattle prod. He's just trying to graduate. Preferably with all his teeth.

"Valerie is acting just like you did freshman year," Sam hisses. "Right after the you-know-what."

Danny barks laughter. "Yeah, right."

Sam and Tucker remain stone-cold serious. Worse, they look worried.

They wouldn't suggest something so crazy without a lot of thought put into it.

Fuck.

It's another two days before Danny gets a good—"good"—opportunity to talk to Valerie one-on-one. During that time he sees first-hand no less than 37 incidents of irrefutable acts of half-ghost-hood. How nobody else—including that ass, Wes!—has caught on yet is nothing short of a miracle. Valerie cut ties with every other person in their graduating class after some disastrous party embarrassment Danny never cared enough to find out the details of secondhand. She's kept her head down and her teeth bared at anybody who’s tried to meet her halfway, and it seems everyone's accepted the fact that Valerie Gray is the second worst delinquent in the entire school.

(The first is him, naturally.)

He corners her three minutes before the bell to end lunch will ring. He's got calculus next—an unexpected good turn in his life that still makes him giggle every time he actually has time to do his homework—and she's got English. They can't afford to skip either class, but hey, you only half-die once, right?

She scowls up at him, twitching her head out of a habit she's not yet broken. She only shaved her head a month ago. He's still reeling over how good she looks, and also how much it makes her look like the awesome older Valerie from the horrible future where he and Vlad ghost-melded and murdered a dismayingly large number of humans. If that future is still somehow lingering out there in the tangled fabric of spacetime like a bad hangnail, he’s pretty sure that Valerie died, fullstop.

He’d like it if he could do something to help this Valerie not die, fullstop.

She scowls up at him harder. "What do you want?"

He allows himself another couple seconds to just—bask. Yes, she's hot as hell, and if they were both normal humans she could easily break him over her knee like a fistful of kindling. He's not yet gotten an inch of the Fenton width. He's basically all elbows, and it's now all but impossible to find shoes in his size. It's great, really, just super.

Mostly though, he holds his breath and lets his ghost sense settle in a chilly, wriggly knot in his lungs. How the hell did he not realize she was the cause before now?

He smiles down at her. It becomes immediately apparent that this is the worst possible thing he could have chosen to do. He stops smiling. Somehow that's worse.

"We need to talk," he says, and immediately wants to hit himself. Has daytime television not taught him anything? That's the worst thing he could have said!

"I don't think so," she says, and tries to edge past him. He catches her elbow—

—and she's got him smashed up against a classroom door before he can even blink.

"Uh," they say at the same time. He feels one of her hands go ice cube cold against his skin. Since it's him and not a normal person, it's far more likely her hand just dropped to some negative three-digit temperature. If he were human, he'd be at risk for frostbite. As he's not, it's more like a refreshing breeze. He swears he even gets a whiff of the Ghost Zone off of her; like a hard shock of static on his tongue in a midnight snowfall. It's... nice. Is that what he smell-feels like?

Hmm. Distracting himself. Best to stop doing that.

She realizes after too long a beat of awkward silence that one of her arms has gone full-ghostly, and springs back with a half-hysterical yelp. He turns around to look at her again, rolling his shoulder out of a long habit of pretending that Dash trying to rough him up actually feels like anything. She looks—

Well. Kind of like some kind of frazzled toy dog that's had to deal with way too many idiot humans manhandling her, and like she's pissed that all the finger-biting she's tried has only gotten her a bunch of braindead cooing. Danny finds himself sympathizing, and also like maybe he needs to vent to somebody else aside from Cujo on their 3 a.m. Thursday walkies. He considers several facial expressions he could make at her, dismisses all of them, and settles on upping the grimacing and shoulder-rolling. It sort of works? She looks guilty, which is honestly one of the better reactions she could be leveling at him right now.

"We really do need to talk, actually," he says, feigning an apologetic tone while pretending very hard he hasn’t noticed her left arm suddenly stops at the elbow.

"Pretty sure we don't," she retorts.

He makes a show of rolling his eyes, and then a show of looking pointedly at her invisible arm. She looks down at herself, does a double-take, yelps again, and hides both of her arms behind her back as she makes several stammering attempts at a believable excuse. Danny winces, torn between sympathy and secondhand embarrassment. Sam was right; this is exactly how he stumbled his way through the first six months of figuring out his powers. At least he had the benefit of a couple of friends and eventually Jazz too to help cover his tracks. Valerie's on her own. She's going to get found out at this rate, and accidentally or not she will drag him and Vlad down with her.

"It's okay," he says calmly.

"Everything's fine I don't know what you're talking about!"

He looks at her, unimpressed, until she looks appropriately embarrassed. "Let's try this again," he says, and puts both hands up to stall when she goes to retort. "Please?"

She purses her lips, huffing through her nose, but nods. Good enough.

"You're not okay," he tells her. "You're freaking out because something crazy happened to you, and you don't have anybody to turn to for answers without risking everything. You think you're a monster, or that you're dead, or you're dying, or some shitty combination of all of the above. You're scared because you can't control what's happening, and you're scared because you know you're gonna get caught at this rate, and you're scared because you know exactly what the GIW does to the ecto-entities it manages to get its hands on, because you're the reason half the ghosts that frequent Amity Park have done time in a GIW containment cell. Right?"

Valerie stares.

She keeps staring.

Eventually her mouth starts making some feeble attempt at protest.

A while after that she musters up the stamina to stammer out, "W-whahaaat are you talking about? I think you've got—ha! The wrong idea! Yeah! I bet you're thinking I'm, uh. Um. Possessed! Yes! I'm definitely possessed! You caught me, oh fuck, I'm definitely just another one of Walker's goons—nobody important though! No nefarious schemes going on either, honest! I just, uh, wanted to take a human… out for a spin? Yes, that’s what I’m doing. You definitely don't need to say anything to your parents—"

"Valerie," he says.

Her mouth snaps shut so hard her teeth click. She looks terrified, furious, and miserable all at once. She looks like she knows she's cornered, caught red-handed, and like she fully expects Danny to rat her out. Does she really think so little of him?

He winces inwardly. Of course she does. She's kept him at arm's length since freshman year because he never owned up the truth to her. She's been protecting him from himself all this time by staying away. She only knows the front he puts on for everybody else.

The bell rings. In a matter of seconds this hallway is going to be packed with students, and this is not a conversation to risk anyone overhearing. He looks around. Their options are to either continue this wedged in a janitor's closet (she'd probably shoot him), ghost her up to the roof (she'd definitely shoot him) or duck into a classroom. Luck's on his side for once. He'd cornered her just outside the wreckage of the wood shop; it's not going to be fit to teach in until after they graduate, and even the other, regular delinquents know better than to hang out anywhere with that much Fenton ectobiological hazard caution tape.

He nods toward the door. "Please?"

She looks like she'd much rather go toe-to-tail with Desiree, but the sound of a crowd surging their way decides for her. She bolts for the door, Danny at her heels, and they're in and hidden out of sight before anyone could see them go. He watches through a small hole in a stretch of opaque plastic sheeting, patiently waiting for the rest of the school to disperse into their various classrooms. There're too many holes in the wood shop's walls to risk talking even with all the noise out there.

Eventually the hall outside quiets. The late bell rings. It's about as safe as it'll ever get to have this talk.

"I can explain," she begins, her voice quiet and shaken.

"You don't have to," he says, and turns on the scary eyes as he faces her.

Three years of fighting nightmare monsters hasn't done Valerie the right kind of favors either. A metal cube materializes over her shoulder and flares brightly as it powers up a shot. She in turn steps smoothly into a defensive stance, light humming up and down her as she... doesn't pull her ghost-fighting suit out of the spectral hammerspace it sloughs off to whenever she doesn't need it. He blinks. He looks at the cube properly once it becomes clear she isn't going to shoot him. The light coming off it isn't pink anymore, but the same ghost-green as his own powers.

"Explain," she growls.

Probably not a good time for jokes. He keeps his serious face on, scary eyes and all. "I was in an accident freshman year. My parents couldn't get their ghost portal to work. They got lax about not letting Jazz and I down there unsupervised. I took Sam and Tucker down there one afternoon while they were out. One thing led to another, and I accidentally got their portal to work. While I was standing inside it."

She winces. Not like Jazz or Wes did when he stammered out the story to them just so they'd stop asking. Not in sympathy as they tried to imagine what that would have felt like and falling a thousand miles short (not that he ever said so). She gives him the same look he's seen in the mirror every time a bad dream of that day grabs him by the throat and shocks him awake. She knows.

"Don't shoot," he jokes weakly, and reaches for that cold spark that shares the same illogical, impossible space as his heart.

Another three cubes appear in a neat arc over her head when he changes, not that he blames her. She's just found out she dated her sworn enemy once upon a time. He's definitely surprised she doesn't shoot. She does go a bit deer in the headlights again, but more like a ghost deer that's just as likely to shoot lasers as it might bolt into traffic. "I," she tries. "You. You're. The whole goddamn time?!"

"Okay," he says. "Point of order. Cujo really wasn't my dog yet when I got your dad fired. That was an accident and I'm still very, very sorry about that."

Her eyes go ghost-red. "You wanna try that again?"

He sucks air in through his teeth, sighs out another blue wisp. She's doing it too. Has been the whole conversation actually, and plenty of other times before. He wonders if she's figured out what it means yet. He adds it to the list he's mentally compiling, keeps his hands up, and starts running his mouth as contritely as he can.

The sun's almost set by the time Danny's really, truly, fully convinced Valerie not to turn him into the half-ghost equivalent of Swiss cheese. He's so hungry he feels like he's nursing a gut wound, but he thinks it's the smart choice to not suggest talking all of this out over dinner. It's not like his allowance (and black hole of an appetite) would pay for more than clearing out the dollar menu at Jack-in-the-Box, and no way is he stupid enough to suggest Valerie pay. So he remains perched on one of the few remaining tables left in the wood shop, still in Phantom mode mostly to watch Valerie grind her teeth. She's sitting cross-legged on another table, cubes and scary eyes gone. She's reached the fun sort of balance between bone-tired exhaustion and impotent frustration with no good outlet that isn't the kind of violence that will draw a lot of unwanted attention. She sits there and stews awhile, turning over everything he's told her.

He pulls out his phone—tossing her a wry grin when she flinches—and lets her stew. He shoots out a "safe, taking longer than a thought it would" into the group chat he's got with Sam, Tucker, and Jazz. Tucker lets him know he's rooting for him, and also they handled the Box Ghost's usual afternoon showing with a game of checkers, and Wulf's in town avoiding Walker again. Sam reminds him to work on his book report if Valerie doesn't skin him alive first. He shoots back a neutral affirmative to them both, then pulls up Bubble Blaster to kill time until Valerie feels like talking—

"It was two weeks ago," she starts.

Danny resists the urge to sigh and pockets his phone again. Well, he mimes pocketing his phone. It sort of phases into that weird imaginary skin between his halves with a buzz of protest. When he changes back it'll be in his back right pocket, fully charged.

"Mister Masters," she pauses to make this really complicated grimace, like she'd sort of prefer calling Vlad something like Captain Fuckface but she's too polite to do it aloud. Danny makes a mental note to call Vlad exactly that the next time they run into each other. The fruitloop'll make a hilarious noise, he just knows it. "Mister Masters sent me info on another job. He told me some of his employees at Axion Labs had reported some ghost sightings, and my dad had mentioned seeing some weird stuff too, so. So I snuck out and went to go check it out. It didn't sound like anything bad, just. Y'know. Another ghost."

Two weeks ago her tone would have been one of complete, dismissive disgust. Two weeks ago she was still human though. Danny stays quiet, which is probably the smart thing to do.

"There was something on my radar when I got there. I thought it was gonna be you, honestly—" She glares, a flicker of red coloring her eyes. He shrugs and gives her a charming grin that's all, Who, me? She doesn't buy it for a second, not that he expected her too. Two weeks ago Vlad was being a real prick though, setting all sorts of nasty ghoulies he'd Frankenstein'd in his super gross secret lab loose in the downtown area. Danny's honestly not sure if he got any sleep for like, four straight days. There was a lot of doctored coffee involved, by which he means the kind of coffee a regular human couldn't drink without requiring a fairly immediate trip to the ER.

(Tucker Foley tested.)

"Most of the reports were from some department I've never heard my dad talk about, and it's all three levels underground. If Technus hadn't juiced my suit up again I don't think I could've gotten down there—"

That's an alarm bell Danny super doesn't like the sound of. "Again?"

She waves her hand dismissively that's all, So last year, honey, try and keep up. "Doesn't matter. Point is, I got down there, and it—well. It looked like the Fen—uh. Your parents' lab. Kind of identical, actually. In a kinda creepy way."

Yeah, that's Vlad all over. Kinda creepy and not all that original. Oh well. He raises his eyebrows pointedly.

"Uh. Well, my radar went crazy down there, but I still couldn't get a real bead on anything. So I went poking around and found the framework of this—well, portal. I didn't realize it was a portal though, since it didn't look like the one in your parents' lab. It was standing on its own in the middle of the room, covered in cables—"

"Ours is a mess too," he points out. "You can't tell unless it's off though. I'm not really sure where all those cables and weird hunks of tech go while it's on...."

She gives him a look like she's regretting not shooting him earlier. He does the smart thing by not pointing out that shooting him is still very much on the table, and that if history's anything to go by she's a huge fan of shooting him. He can't help but think that opinion might, just possibly, if he's very lucky, have changed in the last couple of hours. Fingers crossed? Those cube cannon things hurt like a bitch.

"I was looking around that thing because it was freaking my radar out when Plas—Mister Masters showed up."

He reels a bit. She must've expected it, because it's her turn to raise her eyebrows pointedly. "Wait," he says, holding his hands up in a time out T. "Wait a minute. You knew he's Plasmius? The whole goddamn time?!"

"No," she snaps. "Only after Danielle."

"That's nearly the whole goddamn time. What the hell, he's been lording you over me as a reason not to blab the truth for years. For fuck's sake, Valerie—"

"You wanna maybe shut up and let me finish, ghost kid?"

He scowls. She scowls back, plus scary eyes. He's pretty sure she's not doing it intentionally, so the effect's not as impressive as it could be. Red continues to be a great color for her though, not that he's dumb enough to say that.

"Plasmius showed up, blasted me into the portal, and hit the switch before I could do anything," she bites out, hunching in on herself like she's wishing the ground would swallow her whole—aaaand there she goes, sinking through the table. He clears his throat loudly, she realizes what's going on and ends up flailing around like an idiot for a few seconds until her body gets physical enough to stay put.

"Sam was right," he muses. "This is entertaining."

"Fuck you," she snaps without much venom. Mostly she sounds tired.

He sighs, hating himself a little for reasons he's not gonna explore right now. He's too hungry for introspection. "Did he evil-monologue why he did that to you?"

"A little. I was kinda out of it, after." She grimaces, gesturing at herself. "I didn't catch all of it. Something about being a distraction for you, though I didn't know that he meant you at the time."

"Oh goodie, this evil plot has layers, and ruining your life is apparently a fucking footnote." He scrubs his face with both hands and changes back into his plain Jane self. Valerie twitches badly, eyes flashing red and a fun eye-watering white shimmer shivering up her whole body. Huh. "Hey, have you tried changing back since that asshat zapped you?"

"Of course not," she hisses, looking at him like he just suggested she go streaking through the administration office. "I'm trying to keep a low profile while I figure out a way to fix what he did to me."

Ah, hell.

"I'm sorry," seems the smart thing to start with. He hops off the table, hands up where she can see them as he approaches her. He takes a risk at reaching for her hands. She surprises him again by continuing to not shoot him. "I'm really, really sorry. But there's no fixing this. You just get—better at being this." He squeezes a little when she starts shaking her head and pulling away, amping up the 'I'm sorry for your loss' face he's had to get way too good at. Superhero, he ain't. "I'm serious. Vlad's been like me—like us—since like, '85 or whenever he got zapped by a proto-portal, and he got really sick after."

Her eyes go big and laser pointer red again. "S-sick?"

"Ecto-acne. Ever hear of it?" She shakes her head. "You'll probably be okay, if Axion's portal is based on my parents' portal, or even Vlad's."

"He has a portal?"

"In Wisconsin," he confirms grimly. "He's been trying to build a second one ever since he moved here, but I kept messing with him. I didn't think to check the basements of any of his evil companies."

"Axion Labs isn't evil," she retorts instead of doing the sensible thing and blaming him outright for the shit she’s mired in for keeps.

He raises an eyebrow. "Sure. And Invis-o-Bill really is hellbent on establishing a ghost-human empire capital in Amity fucking Park."

She winces.

"Wait. You didn't actually believe that, did you?"

She winces harder.

"Ohhhh Valerie," he sighs, dropping her hands to melodramatically sag against another table. "I'm wounded. Honestly, truthfully, hurt that you'd think so highly of fucking Invis-o-Bill. Haven't you been paying attention to the shit the gossip mags shill about me? I'm either a ghost blob with delusions of grandeur in a skinsuit or the ostracized son of Pariah Dark and Desiree. You don't think my evil ghost parents have been around enough to teach me how to be a good evil emperor, do you?"

She's trying—and failing—not to laugh. "Shut up. How was I supposed to know what to believe, huh? None of the ghosts ever say shit about you."

"Yeah, 'cause they're cool with keeping my secret!"

She presses forward to jab a finger in his chest. She's still kind of flicker-y at the edges, like she hasn't quite decided she isn't going to go full ghost hunter on him, so it sort of feels like another hard burst of static. Goosebumps break out all down his skin; it's all he can do not to shiver. "What's with that, anyway? Most of 'em are so hellbent on destroying you for stopping them again and again, but none of them have ever come blabbing your big life-ruining secret to me or your parents!"

He shrugs. "Honestly? I don't think it's ever occurred to any of them. I'm pretty sure Skulker's the only one who knows like, for sure that Vlad's the same as me, and that's only 'cuz he likes to take jobs from Vlad now and then. The others?" Another, more expansive shrug as he slides sideways out of her range. So she makes him uneasy. What about it? She's only shot him point blank like, five hundred times if she's done it once. He'd really like to get out of this whole situation without any new burns to hide.

"Huh," she says. "Seriously?"

"Yeah. It's not—I dunno. I think it'd be like cheating for most of 'em to go blabbing to some humans or even Vlad. They wanna take me down, sure, but they wanna do it on their own steam. I'm definitely not complaining."

"Course you're not, because you are ludicrously overpowered compared to most of the ghosts out there itching for a little world domination."

He grins down at her, big and sloppy. "Hey, give it some time and you'll be OP as fuck too."

She reacts to that little nugget of wisdom just like he expected her to; retreating halfway across the room and shrinking in on herself like she's dearly wishing for a bit of time travel to undo what Vlad did to her on a selfish whim. Well. A conversation with Clockwork is an option still on the table. He'll give her a few more days of adjustment before suggesting a fun little jaunt into the Ghost Zone. He's honestly not sure if Clockwork and her are properly acquainted. That should be good for a laugh if nothing else.

"Hey," he says companionably. "I mean it. You're gonna be okay."

She scoffs. He pretends not to hear the dampness to it. "Oh, sure. So long as I do exactly what you say, right?"

"This isn't blackmail," he says, injecting as much calm as he can to his voice. "Honest. I mean, I won't lie and pretend I'm not hoping you listen to me. If you get found out it's both of our necks on the chopping block. Sure, I'll make sure Vlad takes the fall too, so that's some nice revenge wrapped with a bow, but it's not like we'd be around to really appreciate it, y'know?"

She makes another, slightly damper noise. He considers the risk of hugging her against the risk of walking away with all his parts where they ought to be, and he decides the smart thing is to stay put and pretend right along with her that she's definitely not crying.

"I want to help you, Valerie. I've been where you're at. I know how much it sucks. And I had Sam and Tucker helping me while I tried to figure it all out. You... you need somebody to help you. Trust me on this much at least, okay? This isn't something you can do alone."

Her various damp noises evolve into an outright sob. "Fuck."

Yeah. That about sums it up.

"Fuck," she hisses out again, pawing roughly at her face. "This. I didn't want—all this time and you never—I coulda killed you but you didn't—and now I'm—!"

Okay. Yeah. Superheroes don't leave anybody to cry so miserably on their own. He's hardy. Even if she shoots him he can hang out, make sure she's okay to get home on her own. And they both skipped their last two classes. He ought to go rummage around their teachers' desks and try to figure out what tonight's homework is. She's got every reason to burn her textbooks and scream fuck it at the moon (Danny's sophomore year was a personal low point), and it's just as likely Skulker will pull some new scheme to try and skin him tonight as any other school night, but it's the principle of the thing. They're both just trying to graduate at this point, and they're so close.

It might seem so incredibly, completely stupid, to care about graduating with all the other bullshit in their lives. Most days, it is stupid to care. But there are some days that stupid, pointless piece of paper is the only reason Danny chooses to get out of bed. He chooses to remember that he's still human enough for human consequences. He needs that diploma to get into college, and he needs to get into college so he can earn his bachelor's, and he needs to be stable enough to earn his pilot's license, and then somehow net 1,000 hours as pilot-in-command in a fucking jet, and on and on and on, because there's still this stupid, stupid, stupid little voice in his head that won't shut up about how cool it'd be to actually manage to become an astronaut despite—

—everything.

He wants to ask what Valerie wanted to be when she grew up, but that's... not now. That's a conversation for later, if he's lucky enough that she'll trust him with that little, foolish dream every kid clings to even when they're loudly proclaiming how stupid it is. Everybody grows up and realizes how stupid the dream jobs they wanted when they were kids was; it's the real dreamers that grit their teeth and keep working despite—

—everything.

He takes the risk, the leap of faith. He closes the distance between them and plays a pattern across her shoulder to warn her he's coming in for a hug. No cubes or guns or accidental ecto-rays materialize to blast him into next week, so he calls it a win and finishes the deed. She's all hunched shoulders and hard fingers knotted in his shirt, hot tears and probably some snot at war with how neutrally temperature-wise the rest of her feels. Everybody else—everybody human—feels hot as a sunburn if he gets too close. Ghosts are still too cold, though thanks to his handy-dandy ice powers none of them are ever cold enough to hurt like humans do.

Here and now, hugging Valerie and whispering soft, pointless bullshit into her frizzy hair is the closest to human he's felt in—

—in too long.

"I'm sorry," she says.

"Don't be," he replies, instead of Me too.

"Thank you," she says.

"Nothin' to thank me for," he replies, instead of You should be blaming me for this.

"I'm scared," she says.

"It's going to be okay," he replies, and means it.

It's almost nine by the time he makes it to Sam's house, and he's so hungry he tunnel visions twice on the flight over. Lucky him, his friends and secret keepers know how bullshit his anatomy is, and there's a veritable buffet awaiting him when he gets there. Luckier him, his friends and secret keepers know better than to try and hold a Serious Conversation when he's like this, and leave him alone for the better part of 20 minutes before they both start loudly clearing their throats.

He slows his flawless imitation of a combine harvester long enough to muster a, "Hngh?"

Sam and Tucker waste precious moments he could be upping his calorie count with another psychic conversation that they're clearly both enjoying. He scowls, for all the good it'll do him.

"How'd it go?" Sam asks.

"Well," he says, setting his fork down to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. Manners, schmmaners. "She didn't shoot me."

"Damn it," Tucker says loudly, and pulls out his phone.

"Seriously?" Danny asks.

"He owes Jazz twenty bucks," Same explains as Tucker begins a furiously-typed text. Danny suppresses the urge to shudder. Something about the haptic feedback on cell phones really sets him on edge. He genuinely doesn't know if it's a pet peeve or a ghost thing. Either way he always has to squash the insane urge to pitch Tucker's phone at the nearest brick wall, and right now that is an honest struggle.

"Seriously?" He repeats. "You bet against me?"

Tucker pauses long enough to level an incredulous glare at him. "Dude."

...yeah, okay. That's fair. Danny would've bet against himself too, if he'd known to.

"Rude," he says anyway, on principle.

Sam and Tucker both make a huge show of rolling their eyes, but at least Sam pushes another three slices of pizza in his direction. They even ordered in, so there's actual meat and cheese on it. He has the best friends a guy could ask for, even if Tucker is an ass nine times out of ten. Serves him right to lose 20 bucks, voting against him against his sister of all people.

"Details," Sam demands. "How's she doing, what happened, is she gonna stop trying to kill you, et cetera."

"Vlad happened," he manages through half a slice of pizza. Sam and Tucker both wince; Tucker hard enough he actually drops his phone.

"Fuck," Tucker hisses. "Why?"

"Dunno yet. And I dunno about you, but figuring out his latest scheme has definitely become number one on my honey do list."

They both nod. Tucker's the one to ask the important follow up. "And Valerie? How's she doing?"

He makes a seesaw motion with one hand. "Again, gotta stress the whole 'didn't shoot me' thing." He grins real sleazily while Tucker groans. "She's not great though. I foresee the next like, two months helping her out taking priority over all the usual ghost bullshit. Short of like, apocalyptic ghost attacks, of course."

"Fair," Sam and Tucker both say. Sam gives him a pointed capital L Look, going so far as to pull his plate a few inches away so he can better direct his instinctive growl at her. "She's not gonna rat, is she?"

"No," comes out more snarl-y than he means it to, but—pizza. Sam takes him at face value at least, and gives him his plate back, with an extra slice of meat lover's for good behavior. She's his favorite.

"We're gonna co-op," he adds, and pretends not to notice the Extraordinarily Concerned Psychic Look Sam and Tucker share over that bit of news. Whatever. They can stress over the idea of Valerie being included in their group. Him? He's gonna polish off the rest of this pizza, pull his one (1) notebook and one (1) pencil out of his bag, and he's going to get as much of a headstart on his homework before patrol as he can. If he actually manages to finish his two pages of grammar problems he's going to call it a great day. Anything else? Well, that's gravy so far as he's concerned.

He grins to himself a little, thinking of Valerie's new phone number burning a hole in his pocket. If anything toothsome decides to show up tonight he got the okay to text her. And honestly? For all that she's in the same bullshit hell as he, Vlad, and Elle are....

Well. It's probably shitty of him, but it's still nice to have an ally and friend in this half-ghost bullshit hell.

#danny phantom #my writing #valerie gray #gray ghost #phic phight 2020

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scarlet-it-was · 4 years

Text

folklore for evermore: the ruby x christina edition

combining two of my favorite things: taylor swift and fandom. here are the lyrics and headcanons that are giving me life from the summer/autumn sister albums; reylo & msr editions to follow

cardigan

you drew scars around my stars

but now i’m bleeding

but i knew you

stepping on the last train

marked me like a bloodstain

i knew you

tried to change the ending

peter losing wendy

...you put me on and said I was your favorite

I’d be remiss not to include this as the first in the list considering I’m writing a fic and using specific lyrics as the fic name and chapter titles. If you’re interested, you can find it here: You Drew Stars Around My Scars

my tears ricochet

I didn't have it in myself to go with grace

And so the battleships will sink beneath the waves

You had to kill me, but it killed you just the same

Cursing my name, wishing I stayed

You turned into your worst fears

When I think of the...distinctly disappointing end of the series, these last lines come to mind. Even though I don’t really believe that Christina killed Ruby—but if she had, she definitely turned into her worst fears, which was ultimately being as much of a failure as her father.

this is me trying

I've been having a hard time adjusting

I had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting

I didn't know if you'd care if I came back

I have a lot of regrets about that

Pulled the car off the road to the lookout

Could've followed my fears all the way down

And maybe I don't quite know what to say

But I'm here in your doorway

Headcanon: Christina has been resurrected in some fashion, perhaps by the Mark of Cain, or a secondary magic trap she set just in case things went to hell. This finds her regretting her choices, contemplating her next steps, if she even wants to take them, but ultimately, ends up finding Ruby.

And my words shoot to kill when I'm mad I have a lot of regrets about that I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere Fell behind all my classmates and I ended up here Pouring out my heart to a stranger But I didn't pour the whiskey

Headcanon (cont): Ruby proved time and time again in the show that she knows exactly how to cut right to the center of a person with her words, and I’m sure over the years, she’s said some regrettable things to her sister (not that they were undeserved). Ruby also put in the effort to take the classes and make herself as an attractive candidate as possible for her ‘dream job’ and when she finally is ready—she finds a thin, light-skinned Tamara has been hired. And the rest of the story in the little bar scene—she and William didn’t stay strangers for long.

mad woman

And there's nothing like a mad woman

What a shame she went mad

No one likes a mad woman

You made her like that

And you'll poke that bear 'til her claws come out

And you find something to wrap your ***** around

And there's nothing like a mad woman

Really applicable to both parties who were both oppressed by patriarchy (both) and whiteness (Ruby). I censored one of the words because I’m not comfortable using that word in reference to a POC, but the Swifties know what it is. Anyway, you end up with two women who are willing to ‘go the distance’ so to speak to get what they want and not be interrupted because of the bodies and skin they were born in.

peace

But I'm a fire and I'll keep your brittle heart warm

If your cascade, ocean wave blues come

All these people think love's for show

But I would die for you in secret

The devil's in the details, but you got a friend in me

Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?

Headcanon: In spite of her money and magic, there’s a certain amount of peace that she’ll never be able to give Ruby in part because she can’t (and doesn’t want, nor does Ruby want) for her to take away her blackness. The flip side is that Christina’s ambition will likely always put them in harm’s way to an extent. But at the end of the day, in spite of Leti’s accusations that Ruby is being used, Christina is the only one who is up front with her 100% of the time regardless of how it comes out. She always comes through for Ruby.

Hoax

My best laid plan

Your sleight of hand

My barren land

I am ash from your fire

Stood on the cliffside screaming, "Give me a reason"

Your faithless love's the only hoax I believe in

Headcanon: a sadder and more cynical take on if Ruby had betrayed Christina in the finale (which I still don’t think she would have, but it wasn’t my show and I didn’t write that ending) which did in fact wreck her best laid plans with Ruby’s bait and switch of seducing Christina in her natural body instead of William’s—leaving Christina dead at the end of the series.

willow

Life was a willow, and it bent right to your wind

They count me out time and time again

Life was a willow, and it bent right to your wind

But I come back stronger than a '90s trend

Including this lyrics specifically because it reminds me of one of my favorite AU fics, Leave It To The Davenports – if you haven’t checked out this WIP, it is a ride you don’t want to miss.

gold rush

Gleaming, twinkling

Eyes like sinking ships on waters

So inviting, I almost jump in

I don't like a gold rush, gold rush

I don't like anticipatin' my face in a red flush

Walk past, quick brush

I don't like slow motion, double vision in rose blush

I don't like that falling feels like flying 'til the bone crush

Everybody wants you

But I don't like a gold rush

What must it be like to grow up that beautiful?

With your hair falling into place like dominoes

I see me padding across your wooden floors

With my Eagles t-shirt hanging from the door

At dinner parties, I call you out on your contrarian shit

Headcanon: The last line specifically reminds me of Ruby snarking at Christina about being late and in return being called demanding. But also, overall, it captures the feeling of Ruby initially being distrustful of William’s affections towards her specifically when there are any number of women he could be with.

no body no crime

Headcanon: The whole damn song is my murder wives anthem.

happiness

Past the blood and bruise Past the curses and cries Beyond the terror in the nightfall Haunted by the look in my eyes That would've loved you for a lifetime Leave it all behind And there is happiness

I can't make it go away by making you a villain

I guess it's the price I paid And I pulled your body into mine Every goddamn night

There'll be happiness after you

But there was happiness because of you Both of these things can be true There is happiness

In our history, across our great divide

There is a glorious sunrise

Dappled with the flickers of light

Headcanon: Misleading song title in a way. This is what I’m dealing with in chapter 3 of my fic in the wake of Christina’s death and the process of Ruby moving on and finding happiness on her own. The writers Lovecraft Country tried really hard to make Christina a hateable villain, and I suppose through the lens of straight up hating white people, they may have done that for some viewers. They failed to give her any real Big Bad qualities though outside of manipulation and apathy—which while those aren’t shining character traits for her, it doesn’t make her the best (worst?) option for being the overarching antagonist. We had villains literally chopping people up and sewing them together, but Christina was the bad guy? Nah, I think not

long story short

Fatefully

I tried to pick my battles 'til the battle picked me

Misery

Like the war of words I shouted in my sleep

And you passed right by

I was in the alley, surrounded on all sides

The knife cuts both ways

If the shoe fits, walk in it 'til your high heels break And I fell from the pedestal

Right down the rabbit hole

Long story short, it was a bad time

Pushed from the precipice

No more keepin' score

Now I just keep you warm

No more tug of war

Now I just know there's more

And my waves meet your shore

Ever and evermore When I dropped my sword

I threw it in the bushes and knocked on your door

And we live in peace

But if someone comes at us, this time, I'm ready Long story short, I survived

Headcanon: based on the idea that Christina survives, but does in fact have her magic stripped from her and is reflecting on the time period and going forward how she will protect her and Ruby’s relationship going forward by critics (like Leti) who would make Ruby choose between them.

Evermore

Hey December

Guess I'm feeling unmoored

Can't remember

What I used to fight for

I rewind thе tape but all it does is pause

On thе very moment, all was lost

Sending signals

To be double-crossed

And I was catching my breath

Barefoot in the wildest winter

Catching my death

And I couldn't be sure

I had a feeling so peculiar

That this pain would be for

Evermore

And when I was shipwrecked (Can't think of all the cost)

I thought of you (All the things that will be lost now)

In the cracks of light (Can we just get a pause?)

I dreamed of you (To be certain we'll be tall again, if you think of all the costs)

It was real enough (Whether weather be the frost)

To get me through (Or the violence of the dog days) (Or the violence of the dog days)

(Out on waves, being tossed)

(I'm on waves, out being tossed)

I swear (Is there a line that we can just go cross?)

You were there

And I was catching my breath

Floors of a cabin creaking under my step

And I couldn't be sure

I had a feeling so peculiar

This pain wouldn't be for

Evermore

Headcanon: Specific to You Drew Stars Around My Scars and Ruby’s grief in the early chapters and how she feels that the grief is impossible to move past when she thinks back about the months that the two of them spent getting to know each other as friends and lovers. She uses magic to connect with Christina even when she’s not there.

#text post #long ass text post #ruby x christina #lyrics #tswift for every occasion #all my problematic ships #we could have had it all

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harryshouse · 4 years

Note

$100 on supplies for a cardigan that sells for over $1000 isn’t bad; those gross profit margins.

no i know it’s the average price of a knitted sweater here but if i were to make it for someone i’d have to take the cost of supplies into consideration

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detective-anon · 4 years

Text

gift of the jinmo

a gift for elle @minflix! I hope you will accept this humble offering as a sign of my friendship. c is the oc from tip143 (it was too challenging to write around her name).

The juicery was unusually quiet today. It was Sunday morning on a long weekend, which in a college town meant that everyone was either travelling and having fun or sleeping in and lazing around. Only sad, broke college students like Momo and her coworkers were stuck here working at seven-thirty in the morning. They’d had a handful of the regulars come in since opening—some of the athletes, a couple of the frazzled grad students who were mid-dissertation—but otherwise the shop had been mostly empty. Momo rested her chin on her folded arms, slumping over the counter where she sat next to the cash register. Even Jin, who usually took shifts with her, was off today.

Speaking of Jin…she sighed deeply.

“What’s wrong, honey?” C collapsed into a chair, dragging the mop she had been halfheartedly swiping across the floor with her. A faint wet spot began to form underneath it.

“My 100-day anniversary with Jin is coming up, and I don’t know what to get him,” she replied, forlorn. “How do you usually find gifts for Hoseok?”

C sniffed. “Well, you know Hoseok. He’s a closet hypebeast, so whenever there’s a Supreme drop I’ll try to get something for him and just save it for the next time I need to give him a gift.”

“That’s true. You always find the best-quality knockoffs. No one would ever be able to tell they’re not the real deal. I don’t know how you do it.” Both C and her boyfriend Hoseok were great at finding counterfeit luxury goods. Just last week, C had given her and Doyeon matching friendship keychains that were exact Burberry replicas. (She’d gotten really good tips the week before, she’d explained. Momo was happy for her friend but also sad that she hadn’t taken those shifts with her—those keychains had to have cost at least $20 apiece!)

“Ri-ight.” C laughed nervously. “Knockoffs…”

“Anyway,” Momo continued sadly, “I don’t think Jin really cares very much about brands. Even if he did, I don’t think I could afford any luxury items…I just paid rent and my bank account is crying.”

A sudden screech filled the air. They looked over at Jungkook, who had slipped on the puddle left by C’s mop. His eyes were wide as he scrambled upright and looked left and right to see if anyone had seen. C stifled a giggle as she went to help. “Are you alright, Kookie? Maybe you should put some ice on that.”

They disappeared into the kitchen to get ice. Momo sighed again. “I’m a bad girlfriend.”

“You’re not a bad girlfriend.”

Momo jumped, startled. Taehyung had come in from the back, where he had been washing spinach. He’d been uncharacteristically serious and quiet recently, and Momo was worried about him. Even though they bickered often, he was still one of her closest friends, and she didn’t know why he had suddenly started acting so strange.

“You’re a really good girlfriend,” he stated, jaw set. “You’re always taking care of Jin and worrying about him. I’ve never seen him so happy before.”

She paused. “I think Jin takes care of me more. He’s so thoughtful—he even takes shifts on Wednesdays so that he can bring me a smoothie when he picks me up from class on my long days. And I can’t even think of a good gift to get him for our anniversary.”

He blew out a breath and smiled wanly. “You two bring out the best in each other. I don’t think that the gift thing makes you a bad girlfriend. It just means you care enough to want to get him something meaningful.”

“Thanks, Tae. You always know how to make me feel better.” She smiled at him.

He rubbed absentmindedly at his chest. “Don’t you two have that vlog channel together? Why don’t you make him a video?”

“Hmm…that’s actually a great idea!” She gasped. “He spends so much time filming and editing for our videos, so maybe if I learn how to do it I can help him out in the future. But…he also has all the equipment. I don’t even have a camera…”

“I have a camera.” C reemerged from the back, a blank look on her face. “You can borrow it.”

Momo furrowed her brows. “I think I’d need a DSLR or something…”

“Yup, I have one.” She remained expressionless. “I needed it for…a video project. But I can borrow Hoseok’s in the meantime. Since he also…had a…video project.”

“Oh, great!” Momo replied brightly. “Do you think you could show me how to use it, too?”

“Of course,” C replied. “Did you hear that noise? I should go…check on Jungkook in the back!”

She disappeared, leaving Momo alone with Taehyung again.

Momo hesitated. “Tae, are you okay? It seems like something has been bothering you lately. You know that you can talk to me about anything, right?”

An indecipherable look came over his face before he softened. “Everything is fine. I just realized that I did something stupid with the girl I liked, and I’m trying to get over the regret.”

“With Sooyoung? Are you sure it’s not fixable?” She fretted. “It’s not like you haven’t done, er, questionably embarrassing things in front of her before. Maybe Hoseok could talk to her for you.”

He smiled. “It’s okay. I think things worked out the way they were supposed to.”

“Hi everyone! Welcome to the jinmo channel,” Momo said brightly. She and Jin both paused to wave to the camera. “Today is Saturday and we just got off of work.”

There was a loud whoop! from behind them and Jin turned the camera to get C and Hoseok in the frame. Hoseok flashed an easy grin, fiddling with the camera in his hands as C playfully punched his arm, telling him that he was too loud.

“We’re going to go on a double date with these two. Hoseok is helping us film B roll today—thanks, man!” Jin reached a fist backward and Hoseok bumped it with his own. “I didn’t know this until today, but he’s actually done some camera work before!”

Hoseok wiggled his brows. “You might say I have intimate knowledge of amateur videography.”

C made a choking sound. He turned toward her and stepped into her space, tugging her into his chest with one arm and patting her on the back with the other, laughing. She blushed after he whispered something in her ear, melting into him as he leaned down for a quick kiss.

Momo leaned closer to the camera and stuck out her tongue. “They’d be gross if they weren’t so cute together.”

“You say that like you and Jin weren’t cuddling on the streetcar on the way here!” C retorted.

“Guilty.” Jin smiled, raising their intertwined hands into frame for a few seconds. “Anyway, we’re here at the mall,” he turned the camera toward the building façade, “because Momo and I wanted to pick up a few things at MaiDo after lunch.”

“We’re getting sushi!” Momo beamed as they made their way inside.

Hoseok went to put their names on the waiting list. C linked arms with Momo, tugging her away from Jin. “Jin, can you take our OOTD photos?”

Jin let out a dramatic sigh. “Again, I don’t know why you’re always wearing couple outfits with my girlfriend.”

The girls were wearing matching fuzzy cardigans today, and despite his protests, even Jin had to admit that the two of them looked extra soft and cute. His girlfriend looked like a teddy bear, and he had to resist the urge to hug her and not let go.

“You stole her from me!” C whined, clinging closer to Momo.

Jin grumbled, but obligingly put down the camera on a nearby bench in favor of C’s phone, crouching down to take photos as they tried out various poses. C inspected the shots over Jin’s shoulder as Momo walked over to the camera and whispered, “Get you an Instagram boyfriend like that,” holding finger hearts over her eyes.

By the time C had finished editing the chosen photo, their table was ready. Momo set the camera on the ledge next to her, checking the alignment before turning her attention to the menu.

“Should we get a spicy salmon roll to share?” Jin asked.

“Wasn’t your stomach feeling weird a few days ago? Maybe we should skip the spicy…and also the raw fish.” Momo frowned. “We should get one of the baked rolls instead.”

“They’re your favorite, though,” Jin murmured back.

She shrugged, shoulder gently nudging his. “We can always get it another time.”

“Why don’t you just order separate things?” Hoseok asked, confusion evident in his tone.

“Jin always steals bites of my food anyway,” Momo explained.

“Hey! I resemble that remark.” Jin chuckled at his own joke and Momo couldn’t help but join him.

They put in their orders and made silly faces at the camera while waiting for their food to arrive. The rest of lunch passed in fun conversation and laughter, fast-forwarded in the video as an instrumental track played in the background.

After they paid the bill and left the restaurant, the four of them headed to the stationery store. Inside, they checked to make sure no one was looking before Momo skipped down the washi aisle, arms outstretched as she spun in a circle, giggling. When Jin caught up to her, they explained their mission for the day.

“When we posted my desk tour, a couple of people asked about some of the items I showed. The painting above my desk was actually a gift from C!” Momo turned to blow a kiss at C, who was trailing behind them with Hoseok. C caught it in her hand with an exaggerated motion and put it in her pocket. “Her friend Sana painted it, and I love it so much! We’ll put a link to her Instagram in the description so you can check out more of her work and support independent artists.”

“Some people also asked about the star jar on my floating shelf. That actually belongs to Jin! Whenever he has something important coming up, like a presentation or an interview, I fold some stars and add them to the jar for good luck. He had a shoot that week so I took it to fill it up.”

Jin kissed her cheek, the look on his face unbearably fond. “It went well because of you.”

Momo blushed, stammering, “I-it went well because you’re talented! Anyway, since there were a few requests for it, I’ll be making a tutorial on how to fold the stars into a rose shape like the ones in the jar, so today we’re going to buy paper for the video.”

She picked up a sheaf of letter-size patterned stationery and showed it to the camera. “For Jin’s stars, I actually use letter paper so that I can write longer messages inside before cutting them into strips. But for the tutorial, we’ll be using regular star paper. A little wider is better, because we’ll be folding them in half lengthwise.”

“You write messages inside the stars?” Jin asked. “What do they say?”

“Oh, just little things. Good luck wishes, reminders, things like that. Sometimes I write ‘remember to eat’ or ‘don’t drink too much coffee.’” She shrugged, then giggled. “I think last time I wrote one that said, ‘starfish pose: you are the most powerful person in the room.’”

Jin set the camera on a shelf facing away from them, not wanting to record the next moment.

“Thank you,” he whispered, gently pulling her into a hug. She wrapped her arms around his waist, humming as she laid her ear against his chest.

Filming picked up again with Momo holding two packs of star paper in her hands, brow furrowed as she contemplated them. Jin zoomed in to focus on each of them.

“Which one do you think is prettier?” she asked him.

“Hmm…maybe the one on the left.”

“I was thinking that, too. Okay, let’s get this one.” She held it up and waved it toward the camera, putting the other pack back on its hook. “You can buy a cute jar if you want, but I recommend reusing any glass jar you have—it’s environmentally friendly and good for your wallet! For this project, we’ll be using one of our limited edition mason jars from the juicery. We’ll be randomly selecting one of our viewers to send these stars to, so please stay tuned for the tutorial video for info on how to sign up!”

“Before we check out,” Jin said, “I want to go take a look at some pens.”

The camera zoomed in and out at the wide range of pens on display in the next aisle.

“I have a lot of trouble with writer’s block, and there seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to dealing with it: write through it or wait for it to go away. I don’t think either approach is exclusive of the other. I’ve started thinking about it like a muscle that you’ve pulled—you’ve just got to feel it out and see if you can stretch it or if you need to let it rest. And like any other muscle, when it feels fine, you should exercise it so it gets stronger.” He waved his hand dismissively. “All of that to say, I’ve taken up daily journaling recently, and I want to get some new pens.”

He wandered down the aisle, examining his choices carefully.

“Ah-ha!” He exclaimed triumphantly, holding up a package of ink refills. “This is what I wanted. Momo got me a Jigglypuff gel ink pen from Japan that I think takes this refill size. I really like the ink quality from this brand because it comes out smoothly and dries quickly. I usually write in black ink, so I’m going to get this pack instead of the assorted blue and black one.”

They window shopped for a little while longer, looking at puffy stickers, magnets, stuffed animals, and small desk planters. Momo and C squealed over the Gudetama display and pouted at the prices. Hoseok silently picked up the Gudetama plushie that C had been hugging and added it to their basket.

As they stood in line to check out, someone tapped C on the shoulder. “C-cherry? And J-Hope?”

All four of them turned around to see a tall, bashful looking guy in line behind them.

“Lucas!” C’s eyes were wide. “Uhh…how are you?”

“Oh, hey, bigho—oof!” Hoseok winced as C’s elbow made contact with his stomach. “Big guy. Good to see you again.”

“This is so cool! Sorry for last time, I didn’t realize that you two were—wow, and Jin and Momo, too! I’m such a huge fan.” He beamed.

Jin reached over to shake his hand. “You look familiar—didn’t you apply to work at Greenhouse Juicery before?”

“Ah, yeah, but the owner said she wasn’t hiring at the time.” Lucas looked at Jin’s hand in awe, holding on for a bit longer than was perhaps socially acceptable.

“Bummer, man.” Hoseok shook his head. “But I’m sure Boss Juice is also doing well.”

“Oh, you work at Boss Juice?” Momo smiled brightly at him. “That means you’re our number one competition!”

Lucas’s brain was malfunctioning. “C-cute. Yeah, uh, I work there. You should, uh, come check it out sometime. Um…can I get a photo with you all?”

“Sure!” They all huddled together and smiled as the woman behind Lucas helped them take a photo.

“Next!”

“I think that’s us.” Jin said, giving Lucas another smile. “It was nice meeting you.”

“L-likewise!” Lucas replied. “Bye!”

Once they’d gone through the checkout and stood outside, Jin remarked, “It really is weird that you’ve got this famous doppelganger couple out there. Even your names are kind of similar, I mean, J-Hope and Jung Hoseok, and Cherry and—”

“HAH-ha-ha-ha,” C’s stilted laughter interrupts his thought. “I know, right? And since we’ve been appearing on your channel, I wonder if they’re getting mistaken for us, too.”

Realization dawned, and her eyes widened with panic as she grabbed Hoseok’s sleeve. “What if people online think we’re the same people??”

“Oh my gosh!” Momo gasped. “I read a story online just like this! Someone had an evil doppelganger who went around being mean to people and running out on restaurant bills, and she had to pay their bill and got blacklisted from her favorite restaurant!”

“I’m sure we don’t look that alike.” Hoseok said, his relaxed demeanor completely at odds with his girlfriend and Momo’s growing agitation. “What are the odds? Plus, no one’s as pretty as C. Sorry, Momo.”

C blushed, and Momo grinned at her slyly. “I’ll forgive you for that only because you two are so insufferably cute.”

Jin nudged Momo. “I think you’re prettier,” he whispered.

Jin’s phone buzzed three times in rapid succession from its place on the bathroom counter as he pushed his bangs up and back, working hair wax into his roots. He examined his work with a critical eye, giving it one last swipe before turning his attention to the texts that had come in.

Momo <3: Sorry, give me 30 more minutes! I forgot to press cook on the rice cooker. >///<

Momo <3: Looking forward to dinner!! :)

Momo <3: A gift for the best boyfriend ever: https://youtu.be/5tXJDTBbYf4

Curious, he clicked on the link. It loaded an unlisted video on the jinmo channel titled “reasons to stan kim seokjin.”

Chatter filled the air as students headed out of the lecture hall. Momo stopped behind a pillar, lens aimed at the breezeway, where Jin leaned against the wall, scrolling through his phone with one hand and holding Momo’s favorite tumbler in the other.

“How dare he…” she whispered to the camera, “How dare he be so perfect? It makes me want to punch him…in the mouth…softly…with my mouth.”

She giggled. “Doyeon taught me that.”

Onscreen, Momo launched herself at him, and the scene cut to the library.

Jin was journaling, the sleeves of his sweater folded up. The camera panned to Momo’s notebook, where she had written, alongside several doodles of his name, “So handsome when he’s concentrating :(”

When the camera panned back up, the light was dimmer and Jin was asleep, resting his arm and head on top of a stack of books.

“Thank you for keeping me company even when you had a paper due yesterday,” Momo whispered. “I promise I’m actually studying.”

She moved the camera to show her neatly color-coded notes in front of her.

The cheerful interior of the juicery came next.

Momo positioned the camera on the table in front of her as she took her break. There was a long line of customers, but Jin had a smile on his face as he listened patiently to the old woman in front of him, who was having trouble reading the menu. He carefully explained all the options to her, pausing after each one to give her time to think. Namjoon came out of the back office and patted him on the back, opening up a second register.

you are so considerate TT__TT, the caption read.

Next were clips from Hoseok’s “B-roll” from their stationery date: Momo, nestled into Jin’s side on the cable car as he played with her fingers. Jin hugging Momo close at the stationery store. Their intertwined hands swinging back and forth as they walked to the train station. Momo asleep on Jin’s shoulder as he gently covered her with his jacket. Jin lifting Momo onto his back to piggyback her to her apartment.

It cut to an afternoon in Jin’s apartment.

Momo carefully hid the camera on a shelf, angling it to face the tiny kitchenette before stepping back and putting on the apron that Jin had left for her. Jin came out of the bathroom wearing the same apron. She was his sous chef today, peeling potatoes and cutting vegetables as Jin boiled chicken in a stock pot. There wasn’t enough space for both of them at the stove, so once she had finished with her tasks, she sat at the tiny kitchen table, watching as he chopped and stirred and tossed.

“Taste,” he requested softly, blowing on a spoonful of soup before extending it to her. She sipped obligingly and nodded.

“It’s really good.” She kissed his cheek. “Thank you for making lunch.”

Doyeon must have filmed the next segment with her GoPro while they were at the beach.

The three of them were longboarding on the boardwalk, heading toward the ocean. They stopped at the surf shop to rent boards and a locker. The angle shifted as the camera changed hands. Doyeon and Jin were looking out at the water, watching waves break. Jin nodded at something Doyeon said, then reached back to pull his t-shirt up and over his head.

Behind the camera, Momo sighed dreamily. “Wow…I totally have a crush on him.”

She trudged over to them and Doyeon took the camera back, hanging it around her neck.

“Ready to try this out?” Jin grinned.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Momo said.

Doyeon filmed them as they went out on the water together, Momo on Jin’s board. Once they had paddled out far enough, Jin crouched, holding his hands out for Momo’s. Shakily, she stood up with him. They managed to balance as they rode a small wave, but fell right after, laughing and sputtering as they came back up. From where she sat on her own surfboard, Doyeon yelled encouragements at them. They tried a few more times until Momo felt brave enough to try it on her own. Jin stood chest-deep in water next to her as she attempted to balance, holding the board steady when she wobbled. After some small thrills and small spills, she declared that she was ready for a break, heading back to shore. On the water, Jin and Doyeon had paddled farther out and were starting to catch bigger waves.

After a few shots of Jin doing tricks, the video cut to a view of the sun setting over the ocean.

happy 100-day anniversary!

Jin smiled, an almost unbearable warmth in his chest. He tapped back to his text thread with Momo.

On Momo’s kitchen table, her phone vibrated, playing the familiar tune of Jin’s ringtone. She wiped her hands on a dishcloth and answered the phone.

“Hey,” she said breathlessly.

“Thank you for the video. I loved it.” His voice was tender. “There’s something else I want to say to you, but I want to say it in person.”

“Me, too,” she replied quietly. The unspoken words hung warm in the air between them.

After they ate dinner and washed the dishes, Momo settled on the couch, queueing up a movie on her laptop. Beside her, Jin reached for his coat, rummaging through his pocket for something.

“I have a gift for you, too,” he said, handing her a small box.

She lifted the lid to find a folded letter (“Read that later, when I’m not in the room,” Jin requested shyly) and a delicate silver bracelet with a single envelope charm attached.

“Wow, Jin, this is so beautiful.” She breathed, tracing a careful finger across the charm. “Thank you.”

He helped her fasten it before pressing a kiss to the inside of her wrist. Tugging back his sleeve, he showed her the matching bracelet that he was wearing. “It’s not fair that C is the only one who gets to match with you all the time.”

She giggled. “She complains about Hoseok’s style, but the other day I saw her wearing those paint-splattered jeans of his that she hates so much. They’re definitely rubbing off on each other.”

Jin entwined her fingers with his. “What I wanted to say to you on the phone…I know it might be a little early in our relationship…but it feels like the right time to say it.”

He took a steadying breath in. “I love you.”

She blushed. “I love you, too.”

He pressed his smile to hers.

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nike-shawn · 4 years

Text

Bookstore AU (2k)

Taking requests from this list-- ask away!

This one was fun to write but is strictly fluff, so I hope you like it!

Camp Counselor AU

Bookstore AU

It’s already noon.

You glance down at your watch again, just to make sure you read it right. Yep. Noon.

You shake your head and continue restocking the shelves. The shipment today wasn’t exactly what you thought it would be—classics, mostly, and some obscure book someone put a in a large order for. It was most likely for a high school class or fancy book club.

You don’t really care. It’s already noon and Shawn has yet to come in.

It’s not that it’s a big deal or anything. He doesn’t come in every day, and sometimes he’s late. He did tell you, though, that he would be by today. He has some project to complete for work, he said, and you told him you would save that spot for him in the corner, the table bathed in sunlight and surrounded by the hanging plants your mother takes care of. You pitifully look at the handmade sign you posted on the tabletop: RESERVED. “I’ll be here, like,latest 10:00,” he had said, flashing you that impossibly white smile.

God you’re so pathetic.

You abandon the cart you had been retrieving books from and briskly walk to the café. The sign is staring at you, telling you exactly what you didn’t want to happen from this little friendship with Shawn. He got what he wanted and probably won’t come by again.

It’s already noon. Of course, he’s not coming in today.

You crumple up the sign and dejectedly return to your work. Your mother has been stuck in the back office all day dealing with a new author signing next month, so you’re working the front of the store alone. It’s quite empty on weekday mornings, so you try to keep yourself occupied by humming along to the top 100 pop hits playing through the old, tinny speakers in the ceiling.

There’s the familiar ding of the door opening. You call out “welcome” and don’t bother turning away from straightening out the spines of the children’s books. Those kids tear through this space like elephants in a china shop.

The clearing of a throat. “Well, it looks like we both failed on our promises for today.”

You almost jump out of your skin. “Holy sh*t,” you gasp, putting your palm to your chest to slow the pounding of your heart. “You scared me.”

“I can tell,” Shawn laughs. “Sorry.”

Judging by that certain tilt of his smile you can tell he isn’t all that sorry. Amusement plays out on his features handsomely: his eyebrows have slightly risen; his smile is wider than normal and there’s a twinkle in his eyes hinting that he’s having a great time. He must be on his way to the gym judging by the running shorts, tank top and tennis shoes. Shawn usually is running from meeting to meeting when he stops by, always dressed in that hipster chic way that your generation tends to admire. Rounded glasses, pressed white shirts, pastel pants and some type of cardigan or overcoat to pull it all together. But today he must be getting a break from the duties his family business puts on him and is getting away for a bit.

“You’re late,” you tease, all the anger from earlier melting away the moment your eyes met his.

“I know, I’m sorry. I got caught up at home—my mom was pestering about everything this morning. I guess I messed up the payroll for someone?” He shakes his head in annoyance. “I don’t know. But I’m here now so… do I get my table back? Or have I permanently fallen from your good graces?”

Part of you wants to hold out on him for making you worry, but instead you purse your lips together to keep from smiling and grab his forearm, leading him to the table you referenced earlier. He sits, takes out his work from the briefcase he carried in and starts to get everything organized. You say something like “enjoy” or whatever and start to leave.

“Y/N,” he prompts. You stop and turn back around.

“Hmm?”

“Would you wanna join me?”

Your stomach twists with nervousness and you start to pick at the dead skin beside your thumbnail, as if the little cut there has suddenly become all you can be interested in. “I have some stuff to do. My mom is trying to organize this author signing…” you trail off.

Shawn’s mischievousness from earlier seems to just melt from his expression in front of your eyes. “Yeah, gotcha. I understand.” He picks up that enthusiasm he briefly lost and opens up his laptop. “Thanks again for your help yesterday, with Daniel’s book and everything. I don’t know why my parents wouldn’t take the deal themselves but—”

“No problem,” you interrupt. “See ya.”

You turn on your heel and escape into the back room, cursing yourself each step of the way. What is wrong with you? For some reason you feel like you betrayed your parents by helping out what is technically their main competition. Bookworms, Shawn’s family’s store, is a chain that has their headquarters in your hometown. Comparatively, your parents’ store opened as a passion project of your grandmother’s after her husband passed away and, on a good day, you see around ten customers from open to close. Only around half of them will purchase something, and the other half will leave with only a wave and a promise to come back again soon.

No wonder Shawn is Bookworms’ head salesman. He’s just so charming. He talked you into entering a contract with his friend from high school, buying up a couple shipments of his new novel and putting it on your shelves for a limited time. According to Shawn, his parents refused to enter into any contracts with friends due to any complications that may arise, so he offered it to you, claiming to want to help smaller businesses. But his direct competitor? You feel your eyebrows knit together in confusion. It just doesn’t make sense. Your mother thought the whole thing sounded fishy, a bit too good to be true, and you are starting to believe her.

But he’s just so convincing. And handsome. God is he handsome.

Throughout the rest of the stores’ hours, you peek around the corner and check on him. He has been helping himself to the complimentary lemon water that you make every morning, and you realize that he drank almost the whole pitcher. Damn. An empty pitcher means that, somehow, it needs to be refilled. And with your mother preoccupied, you understand that it must be you to do it.

You approach him with a soft, close-lipped smile and intend to just get in there, grab the pitcher, fill it up in the back and return it, no words exchanged.

Of course, that isn’t what happened.

“What would you say to someone who just cancelled a lucrative deal on you?” Shawn asks you as soon as you start to walk away with the pitcher. “I mean, he’s a nice enough guy, but he ditched us right before signing the contract.”

You shrug. “I’m not really sure.” You take a few steps away from him, trying to signal an end to the conversation.

“It’s a tough situation, you know. I want to keep everything civil with him in case he thinks about us for the next book, but chances are he’ll just sign again with the seller he already signed with.” He takes his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger, staring at his computer screen. “What do you guys do when something like this happens?”

You want to say that nothing like that has ever happened to your tiny store because no one ever signs exclusive deals with you. But instead, to save him some embarrassment, you tell him that “we usually just say good luck and send them on their way.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

You wonder if he can smell the bullshit from the distance you’re keeping from him.

You should’ve walked away in the pause he instills between you, but you can tell he wants to say something else. He’s still looking at the screen of his laptop, but you can see the gears in his head moving.

“Would you wanna go to dinner tonight?”

Your mouth goes dry. You’re floundering, feeling like you’re about to drop the pitcher when you, in an effort to get this terrible nervous feeling to go away, say “we’ll go after closing.”

***

Your mother left about twenty minutes ago, shooting you a look saying be careful before she walked out the door. You had already swept everything there was to be swept, cleaned off every table, put each book in its place, and you have absolutely no excuse but to close the store and get to dinner. Shawn has been waiting patiently, never once getting up from his seat at the table you saved for him, only occasionally smiling at you when you glanced over.

You collapse into the chair opposite his. “Where’re we going?”

“I was thinking maybe The Pearl? My friend owns it and I feel like maybe we’ll get the star treatment,” he says, a little emphasis on the ‘star’.

“Seems like you’ve got a lot of friends in high places.”

He blushes. “Nah, just have been lucky.”

You wonder if that’s code for ‘I went to a private school with a bunch of people with a lot of money.’

The two of you lock up and chat as you drive downtown. Shawn’s life becomes increasingly more interesting the more he talks—his little sister has been interning at Penguin publishing with their head editor; his parents are divorced but still get along swimmingly, running the store together and continuing to keep the family close-knit. The business was started by his grandmother, much like yours was, and he has a knack for singing and playing the guitar. You say you would love to hear him sing, but he brushes you off with “maybe someday.”

You arrive at the restaurant and conversation flows even better, now having topics to branch upon like “wow that guy over there is so drunk” or “these booths are so comfy.” Shawn is an excellent listener. He leans in close to hear you talk in a way that encourages you to speak quieter, as if you two are the only ones in the entire place. Somewhere in between the appetizer and the entrée, you find your hand covered by his.

The check comes and of course you offer to split it, though both of you know full well that Shawn is the only one in the financial position to cover the cost. He says thank you for offering, but then encloses his credit card in the book. Before you leave, you notice that he left a crisp $50 tip on the table.

The night air is chilly, and you huddle closer to Shawn, your hand finding his once again. He lifts his arm so you fit perfectly underneath it. You wonder if it’s his winning personality and looks or the fact that he’s just a little off-limits, just a bit forbidden, that your heart races every time he talks to you.

“I had fun tonight.”

His voice interrupts your thoughts, and you realize that you are back at the store, Shawn’s car sidled up to your embarrassingly old Honda Civic, now the only vehicle in the lot. His hand finds your thigh and you smile sheepishly, hoping that he doesn’t notice the paint chipping off the side of your car or the ratty sweatshirts that have piled up in your backseat.

“Me too,” you answer.

“We should go out again. Saturday?”

You’re shocked at his boldness and can really do nothing but nod. Your eyes dart between his lips and his eyes, searching for permission to do what you think you’ve always, at some level, have wanted to do.

And when he leans in, you do too.

Did you like it? Tell me!

Here’s my masterlist

#Shawn Mendes imagines #fluff #Shawn mendes #nike-shawn #AU Prompt Request #Bookstore AU

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this-is-allison · 6 years

Text

Hawkins Affair - Chapter 3

I’m not 100% sure how ass play got involved in this, but here we are.

1, 2

Joyce freezes completely lost on what to do or say, “why don’t you go to the kitchen for a snack? I’ll be there in a minute,” she reaches over to kiss her sons cheek then pushes him in the direction of the door. He slowly makes his way out, stopping every few feet, looking back at his mother for encouragement. Will has never been good with strangers. Apparently unconscious ones were no different.

Once he’s gone she gets up to get dressed. She throws on jeans and a t-shirt, looking at Hopper sleeping soundly. Glancing at the clock she decides to let him be for now.

Joyce goes down the hallway to find Will standing there staring back at her. She picks him up, balancing his weight against her hip. “Morning, baby,” she kisses his cheek.

“Who in bed?” he plays with her loose hair.

“Mommy’s friend. He was visiting and didn’t feel good so he laid down.” she feels terrible for lying to him and worse for what comes next, “can you keep this a secret?” questioning, she looks at him hopefully.

“Okay, mommy.” he lays his head on her shoulder still a bit sleepy.

“Good. How about some lunch?” Wills head shoots up. She can tell it’s not because of the prospect of food. That could only mean one thing. Turning around she sees Hopper poking half his body into the hallway. Seeing he’s been caught he slowly makes his way towards them, casting apologetic eyes at Joyce the whole way.

“Hey, bud,” he smiles at Will. His warm tone causes Will to relax which Joyce has to choke back tears at.

Joyce tilts Will’s chin up to look at her, “Secret, remember? Mommy’s friend is leaving now.” She puts him in his booster seat at the table and places a Lunchables in front of him, kissing him on the head before leading Hopper to the door. The two don’t dare to speak until out of earshot.

“I’m sorry,” Hopper isn’t sure how she’s going to react to being caught by her youngest son.

“It’s not your fault. I’m just thankful it wasn’t Jonathan...or Lonnie.” she shivers at the thought, “we should probably cool off for a while though,” Will is so young he doesn’t understand, but it won’t be hard for Lonnie to figure out if he does say something. Her bogus excuse may have worked on her son, but her husband wouldn’t be fooled.

“Joyce, I….” all he can see are images of Lonnie abusing Joyce with those damn cuffs, but he can’t tell her how he feels. Hell if he even knows. “I think you should divorce Lonnie.” That definitely wasn’t the right thing to say.

“That’s none of your business,” she crosses her arms protectively around herself.

“You’ve made it my business,” he argues keeping his voice low.

“Yeah well you don’t get an opinion,” she holds open the door for him, “please go.”

“I can’t keep doing this, Joyce.” And with that he’s gone.

What she doesn’t realize is when Lonnie hurts her, it hurts him too.

The next few days go by without a hitch. Joyce honestly thinks Will has forgotten about Hopper so she starts to relax a little. They’re settling down to dinner one night when Will’s curiosity gets the better of him.

“You friend come?” he asks from the table, tilting his head at his mother in wonder. He liked the man. He was nice. Not like his dad. His dad never paid any attention to him.

With her back towards him her eyes widen. She takes the pot of sauce off the stove, composing her face before turning around towards her family.

“No one’s coming, honey.” she puts the sauce on the table, watching Lonnie out of the corner of her eye.

“The man? I like him,” Joyce puts some pasta on Will’s plate successfully distracting him for the time being. Lonnie drops his fork onto his plate making a loud clattering noise.

“What man, Joyce?” Lonnie talks hard and slow, his grip tightening around his beer bottle.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s talking about the repair man from the other day,” she shrugs as she sits down.

“You didn’t tell me anything was broken.” he snaps back. Jonathan listens to his parents as he eats.

“It was just a precaution. I thought something was wrong with the plumbing.” she lies.

“How much did it cost?” he rubs the bridge of his nose already stressed about money.

“Nothing. It was an old friend doing a favor.” His eyebrows raise at that, eyes widening.

“Oh and what kind of favors did you give him in return?”

It takes everything in her not to launch herself at him, “you’re a bastard.” she says so softly only he can hear. She stands up, “boys finish dinner. Daddy will help you get ready for bed tonight.”

She goes to her room, pulling out clothes and makeup and gets to work. She doesn’t get the chance to do her makeup, or even her hair for that matter, very often so she settles on smokey eyes and loose curls. Something different.

It isn’t long before Lonnie comes barging in. His rage only intensifies when he sees her getting ready, “where the hell you goin’?”

“Out,” she answers not looking up at him.

“The fuck ya are. The boys?”

“Well they’re half yours and I’m with them all the time while you’re gone. Besides, you have a few days off. I think you can manage one night with them alone.” She goes to walk past him to her closet, but he grabs her arm. Tight. “And who the fuck’r you meeting?” his accusatory eyes bore into her.

“Karen,” she snatches her arm away, “she’s been begging me to have a girl’s night for the longest time. She’ll be thrilled.”

“Are you fucking someone?” he finally asks.

She laughs as she looks through her clothes, “I’m not the one of us that needs to worry about that.” she doesn’t have any proof that Lonnie’s ever cheated, but she has enough suspicion to practically confirm it. She slips on an old dress from the back of her closet she’s rarely worn while she’s talking to him.

“You’re wearing that out with Karen? I don’t think so,” his eyes look her up and down disproving of the length and general tightness.

“Yeah well all our money goes towards bills, food, and your booze. I haven’t got to buy new nice clothes in a long time. I’ve had two children since then.” Let him find a way to argue with that. She’s not usually this fired up, but his comment at dinner had sent her over the edge. She steps into a pair of plain black pumps she thinks are from high school. Her feet were always small. Even when she was pregnant they only swole up a little, but had went right back to their original size afterwards.

He goes to the closet, grabbing the first cardigan he sees, “put this on.” he demands. She stares him down for a minute before taking it. Not because she wants to, but because she knows he won’t let her leave if she doesn’t. And things will only get worse from there. She puts it on before grabbing her purse and brushing out past him. Joyce kisses each of the boys goodbye, Lonnie following her every move, before going to the door. “Don’t wait up.” she smirks at him before closes the door, separating them. She throws the cardigan on the porch swing.

Hopper has been cooped up in his mom’s house ever since his tryst with Joyce. He can’t get a grip on his feelings. There’s so much hatred stemming from the past, but at the same time he wants to protect her. He may be fucking falling in love with her for all he knows. His head is a fucking mess. He’s almost out of Tunial, but doesn’t want to bother with the pharmacy or people in general. He decides he’ll be okay for a few more days. Going to the fridge he retrieves another beer. That’s about the only thing he’s stocked up on - the only contents of his fridge. Opening it he tosses the cap on the kitchen floor. His head is swimming under the cocktail of alcohol and pills, but he continues with the mixture.

When he hears a noise outside the front door he swears his inebriated mind is playing tricks on him, but an unmistakable knock follows shortly after.

Normally he’d just ignore it until the person gets the message, but his curiosity gets the better of him. He makes his way to the door. Opening it he finds a barely recognizable Joyce on the other side. Her hair is in loose curls, her dress is tight, and she has makeup...on. He can’t remember the last time he’d seen her wearing makeup. If ever.

“What the hell is this?” His words come out harsher than he intends. The small smile she had been displaying instantly turns upside down.

“I, um… I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she shakes her head, starting to turn around.

“Wait. I’m sorry.” he rubs his beard at his knee jerk reaction to just her appearance alone, but to be fair she’d never shown up looking like this. As if his mind wasn’t in shambles as it is. She turns back so she’s fully facing him again, waiting for his next move.

“What’s wrong?” he needs to keep her at arm’s length until he can figure things out.

“What makes you think something’s wrong?”

He sighs, “I don’t wanna play games,”

“Me either,” she slowly moves closer to him

“What are you doing here?”

Tilting her head up to maintain eye contact, “Lonnie is watching the boys for the night. I thought we could…” she nervously plays with the buttons on his flannel. He puts his hand on top of hers, stopping her.

“I told you that I’m done,”

“So what, you want me to up and leave my family just like that?” she crosses her arm underneath her chest. This pushes her cleavage even further out of her dress making it harder for than it already is for Jim to focus.

“What you have isn’t a family. Lonnie’s like a live-in deadbeat dad. And if you don’t think you deserve better you know those boys sure as hell do.” his eyes flicker back down to her protruding cleavage again before looking back up just as fast.

“Why do you care so much all of a sudden? You hate me, then you’re hate fucking me, and now you want me to leave my husband for you?” she tries to make sense of his actions.

“I never said that. And I hated what you did to me, but I never hated you. Could never.” he looks into her eyes trying to show her he loves her without having to say the words.

Not breaking eye contact she bites her lip, standing on her tiptoes, she pulls him down by the neck to kiss him. It’s soft before quickly turning frantic. Hopper picks her up, her short dress riding up her thighs to bunch at her waist. Moving his hands to her ass he’s met with bare skin. He groans realizing that she’s not wearing underwear.

“Fuck,” he’s missed her, but he can’t vocalize that. Worried too much about what will happen if he does.

“Please,” she rubs herself against his member still tucked in his jeans. He carries her to his room, kissing her the whole way, and throws her on the bed. He takes a minute to look down at her spread across his sheets.

“You are fucking unbelievable,” he throws his shirt and pants off keeping his eyes trained on her the entire time. She blushes not used to any form of a compliment.

Starting at her toes Jim kisses his way up her body. When he gets to her pussy he plants a light kiss against her clit before pushing her dress up and taking it all the way off. He takes note of the cuff marks from Lonnie and takes time to kiss around each wrist.

Not able to take it anymore Joyce pulls him down to crush her lips against him. She wraps her legs around his waist and grinds herself against him. Hopper pushes his boxers down and grabs her hips thrusting himself inside her, eliciting a loud moan from Joyce.

“Fuck you feel so good,” Hopper lets her get adjusted.

“Your cock is so big I’m never gonna get used to it,” Joyce begins riding him once she’s ready.

“S’will if we fuck more,” he smirks pulling her up with him so they’re in a sitting position, “Oh that’s the spot,” Joyce throws her head back moaning. Hopper takes the opportunity to push the cups of her bra out of the way and sucks on a nipple. He moves his finger down to swipe across her asshole. Joyce stops kissing him, eyes opening wide at this.

“And I thought your pussy was tight,” he whispers in her ear causing Joyce to shiver from anticipation. Hopper keeps fucking into her as he asks, “can I finger your ass?” Joyce nods nervously. She’s never experimented with her ass before, but she knows Hopper would never hurt her. On purpose at least. She hopes.

He sticks his middle finger in his mouth fully coating it with saliva before working it around her hole. He slips just the tip inside to start stretching her and she screams out at the slight pain mixing with pleasure. Once he moves the tip around a bit he slips his finger in little by little until it’s fully sated inside her ass, still pounding her pussy with his cock. Joyce screams out at the simultaneous feelings as her orgasm brings her to her peak. Hopper comes right after her. The feeling of her coming around his cock and finger too much to handle.

Regaining their breathing they slip under the covers, Joyce lays her head against Hoppers chest as he strokes her arm.

“Can I spend the night tonight?” she looks up at him.

“You can? Lonnie, the boys….”

“Karen’s covering for me,” she explains settling back against his side.

Hopper holds onto her for dear life. Not sure when he’ll be able to again.

Lonnie makes Jonathan bathe Will before he lets his oldest run off to his room. What Will had said earlier aroused suspicion about what his wife’s been up to and he intends to get answers. Even if they were from his four-year-old son. Grabbing another beer he heads to Will’s room for story time.

Will jumps into bed as soon as he sees his dad. He picks up a book, holding it out nervously, hoping Lonnie will read to him like his mother does.

Lonnie takes the book, “I was hoping you could tell daddy about mommy’s friend.”

“The big man?”

#jopper #jopper fic #stranger things fanfiction #hopper x joyce #stranger things #joyce byers #jim hopper #writing

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youknowwhatelseyouare · 6 years

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Fool for Love 2/?

“This better work,” TJ grumbled to Buffy as they watched Cyrus and Andi walk towards the theater.

“Trust me, it will. Just...don’t be yourself.”

“Gee, thanks.”

TJ looked over to see Cyrus waving his arms over his head at them. God he was adorable. He crossed his arms over his chest and tried to look nonchalant. But judging by the look Buffy was giving him, he was failing.

“I’m surprised you two didn’t kill each other while I wasn’t here.” Cyrus exclaimed, giving each of them a hug. Was TJ imagining things, or did Cyrus linger a little bit before letting go of him?

“It wasn’t that hard. Buffy’s...really nice.” TJ said, hoping Buffy would play along.

She nodded. To a passing observer it would seem genial enough, but TJ could tell she couldn’t speak out of anger. Apparently Buffy was a lot better at holding onto grudges than he gave her credit for. He wondered how many more apologies it would take to get her to believe he meant it.

“Aw, two of my besties have become each other’s besties! It’s everyone’s dream!”

TJ quickly turned his snort into a cough. Buffy and him, besties? Never in a million years.

“Shall we head in?” Andi asked, giving TJ a conspiratorial wink.

He glanced at Cyrus to make sure the boy didn’t notice, but Cyrus was oblivious as ever. They walked into the theater, and made their way to the ticket booth. The movie had been preselected (by Cyrus, of course) so all they had to do now was buy the tickets.

TJ turned to Cyrus and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, uh, it’s on me.”

Cyrus lit up.

“Really? Thanks TJ!”

“Yeah, I-“

“Yes, thank you TJ for offering to pay for all of our tickets. It’s too kind.”

TJ shot Buffy a panicked look. This wasn’t the plan at all. But Buffy simply gave him a shiteating grin, precisely the type of grin that was TJ’s specialty. Unless he wanted to look like an asshole, he’d better pay for everyone’s tickets.

“Four for “Love and Other Diseases.””

TJ squinted up at the board. It was exactly the type of movie Cyrus would gravitate towards, judging from the title. He paid for the tickets and tried to annoy Buffy’s smirk.

Tickets in hand, they strolled over to the concession stand. TJ fell back next to Cyrus.

“So, uh, what kind of snacks do you like? I take it they don’t have chocolate chocolate chip muffins here.”

“Sadly, no. But who doesn’t like popcorn? And also,”

He said, fiddling with the hair behind his ear.

“I like those chocolate covered raisins.” Cyrus added in a stage whisper.

TJ stumbled back, clutching his hand to his chest in fake horror.

“No, surely not.”

“Unfortunately yes. I’m a grandpa, I know.”

Just when TJ thought Cyrus couldn’t get any more cute, he did. It was brutally unfair.

TJ picked up a box of chocolate covered raisins and took out his wallet. And before he could protest, Buffy and Andi appeared, depositing twizzlers, starbursts, and Reese’s pieces on the counter.

“Also, two slushees, one cherry and one cola. And a jumbo popcorn. We’ll go grab the seats.” Buffy called as she and Andi made their way over to the entrance.

TJ’s mouth dropped to the ground. Was this part of Buffy’s evil plan? Bleeding him dry? True, he had socked away a good amount of money from babysitting, but buying this much stuff at a movie theatre could bankrupt a billionaire.

Before TJ could empty his wallet, he felt a small tugging at his sweatshirt sleeve. He looked down and saw Cyrus staring up at him with those soft brown eyes. F U C K.

“I- if it’s not too much trouble, could I get a slushee too? Mixed, please.”

TJ nodded dumbly, then turned to the cashier.

“Right, so I’m taking all of this, two jumbo popcorns, and four slushees, one cherry, one cola, two mixed.”

“You got it. That’ll be $53.97.”

TJ fumed inwardly, but he counted out the money and handed it over to the cashier. He drummed his fingers down on the counter. He had spent over $100 on this day alone. He shuddered to think how much something like prom would cost with the good hair crew.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.”

TJ looked down at the sheer amount of calories sitting before him and sighed. He shoved the candy into his front sweatshirt pocket and grabbed two slushees and a popcorn.

“Cyrus, would you mind...” TJ asked, nodding towards the remaining items.

Cyrus beamed at him and complied.

“Anything for the muffin man.”

“What did you just call me?”

“The muffin man.”

“The muffin man?”

“You know, the muffin man, who lives on drury lane.”

“Yes I know that I just- never mind.”

They walked over towards the entrance to the theater and showed their tickets to the lady working the stand. They were in theater 30, all the way at the end. TJ groaned inwardly, fighting the urge to just dump Buffy and Andi’s slushees out right then and there. He looked over at Cyrus to see if he was okay with carrying all that stuff and saw him practically skipping down the carpeted hall. TJ sighed, and jogged to catch up. As he got closer, he could have sworn he heard...humming?

“Hakuna Matata, right?”

Cyrus looked up at him, startled.

“Right. I didn’t take you for a Lion King fan.”

TJ shrugged.

“I mean, everyone’s seen that movie.”

“You’d be surprised. The other day while I was in The Spoon, I ran into this guy who-“

TJ smiled as Cyrus dove into the story. Even though he couldn’t gesture with hands, the animation of his voice and expressions got the point across. TJ almost didn’t notice that they had reached the end of the hallway.

“Oh, we’re here.” Cyrus struggled to open the door, and TJ stepped forward to assist them.

“Score! Empty theater!” Cyrus exclaimed as they walked through the aisles to where Buffy and Andi were sitting.

“Look, we saved you two seats right at the end.” Buffy said, her voice devoid of emotion as she pointed to the two aisle seats. She wasn’t even trying to sound convincing! TJ could just strangle her.

“Thanks Buffy! You’re the best!”

Ok, maybe the strangling wasn’t necessary, but still.

Cyrus plopped down into the seat next to Buffy, leaving the seat at the very end for TJ. TJ handed Buffy and Andi their slushees and candy and popcorn before settling down into his seat with a sigh.

“You ready for this?” Cyrus whispered as the lights of the theater dimmed. TJ nodded, and tried to pay attention to the ads flickering on the screen. But it was hard to concentrate when Cyrus’s hand was just inches away from his own.

The movie was enjoyable enough, TJ supposed. A basic story of a cynical doctor falling hopelessly in love with her friend’s ex. It was perhaps a touch too contrived for TJ’s taste, but Cyrus seemed to be eating it up. He would laugh at some parts, audibly gasp during others. As it was nearing the end, TJ thought he heard a sniffle.

He looked over and saw Cyrus blinking back tears.

“Hey, uh, you ok dude?”

“It’s just- so beautiful.” He said, rubbing his eyes with his cardigan sleeves.

TJ didn’t know what came over him, but he reached out and took Cyrus’s hand in his.

“Hey. It’s gonna be ok.”

Cyrus looked up at him, his mouth slightly ajar. If it wasn’t for Buffy and Andi thirdwheeling, TJ would’ve kissed that boy right then and there. But he managed to control himself.

He stroked his thumb over Cyrus’s hand and felt the boy shiver. TJ fought back a smile. He hadn’t realized how much of an effect he had on Cyrus. And he loved it. He didn’t know how he had ever lived without holding this boy’s hand. With any luck, he would never have to go without holding it ever again.

#andi mack #tyrus #cyrus goodman x tj kippen #so this might actually be finished #except for maybe a lil epilogue #BUT i have a new idea for a longer story so buckle up buttercups

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meghernandez · 6 years

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Collective Thrift Haul

Finally, a haul and a good one, too! This is something new for me, as I’ve previously blogged about a few of clothing/book hauls before but those are new and not as exciting as this one, right? Or is it just me? Recently, I found myself inspired by the thrift hauls roaming around YouTube and even on Facebook. So, I’ve been thrifting for the past couple of months, so this is a collective thrift haul. It’s not much but I don’t think I’d drop by the thrift store anytime soon, given that classes are about to start in a few weeks.

If you’re wondering where I thrift, me and my boyfriend, Karlo go to this thrift shop in Pacita. I’m not sure what the store name is but there are only a couple of thrift shops there, and some of those are good, so it’s definitely worth checking out. He stays with me as I go around the store, asking him to help me out which he never does, I think he’s just bored, and that happens every time I shop-- even in malls! But still, him being there is all I need!

I’m not a good “thrift shopper” because I don’t go there often, but when I do I still fail to look around the store. I usually check out the racks that are on sale, especially the top and cardigan sections. I can’t give out tips but when I shop for thrifted items, I keep in mind that it should be something that’s worth the price. I never, NEVER buy something beyond a hundred because I think that’s too much for a used clothing So I’ll do my best to remember the prices, but nothing in this haul costs over 90 pesos!

Let’s start with the cardigans which are probably my favorite staple! If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time now, then you’d know my obsession with cardigans, and how I always wear it with my uniform no matter how hot it is. Although, sometimes, it gets convenient since I get cold within a snap of your fingers.

The pink one is my recent find and the blue one is quite an old piece that I bought, maybe around late last year?

Pink cardigan: 75 pesos

So cheap, right? My usual caridgans costs much, much more that 75 pesos sounds ridiculous! When I go thrifting, I don’t look at the brand, although I consider myself lucky if the one I picked up had a brand. For this cardigan though, the quality is good, even enough to keep me warm. It’s ribbed which is a plus since it looks expensive in a way, plus all the button are still in place; not loose or anything. I don’t have this color yet in my collection, since I usually have cream colored ones-- so I’m happy that I got this.

I remember when Karlo told me that this cardigan doesn’t look good on the rack but when I wore it, I guess he changed his mind. I always ask for his second opinion when I buy something-- even if he always tell me that everything I try looks good on me. Maybe I should start doubting his words?

Light blue, J.Crew cardigan: 75 pesos

This became a personal favorite of mine because it goes so well with my white uniform since it’s light blue, it makes my overall look as delicate. Plus, look at the size, it fits me like a glove! The fabric is so soft, and it’s a brand I know that’s why the quality is as expected. It’s also long like the previous one, a perfect length since it ends about 2 inches before my skirt does. Such a steal!

Now, for the tops; which are the ones that I loved wearing since I bought it. They are mostly white and one is in navy. These tops are like a dream, it goes with any outfit. I noticed that I when I go thrifting, I am inclined to buy clothes are basics and I’m sure would go with my style. Unlike when I’m in the mall, I just pick out any clothes that are on sale-- so most of the ones I buy are rotting in my cabinet. Since thrift stores are so cheap and the fact that I always think about the worth of the item, I guess I’m a wise thrifter but not much of a shopper in general since I devour red tags, ask Karlo, he knows.

H&M longsleeves with ruffle details: 25 pesos

My cheapest find! I know, I’m speechless myself!!! I’m quite proud of this item since it’s so cheap, it has a brand, in good quality, long sleeves, and a major plus on the ruffle details!! Am I right? It looks big since it’s 3 sizes up of my usual size but I’m not kidding when I say that it is an okay fit. It’s loose and I like that on blouses like this.

I honestly missed blogging like this. Talking to you guys feels so comforting, like my kind of comfort zone-- my introverted self craved for this!

Structured navy blue top: 65 pesos

Definitely, one of my faves, for real this time! I’ve been looking for a top like this since forever! When we were in Qatar, I looked for a top like this in Mango and Zara, and there were none! Can’t believe I’d find it in a thrift shop. I swear, this top makes me feel 100% classy. I could wear it with anything and look like I’m put together. I know it looks like a simple shirt but trust me it is a good staple piece to have in your wardrobe since it is so versatile.

Embroidered collar: 85 pesos

Another item in the great and unique finds bin! I super love this top, especially the embroidery found at the collar. The pattern is so simple which makes it easier to style with any bottoms. Pair this with a simple light washed jeans, sneaks, and you’re good to go!

H&M, turtle neck + bell sleeves = my kind of top: 85 pesos

I don’t know how I would stress this to you enough, how could I tell you guys how in love I am with this top? It’s so classy when worn and can also be dressed down. When I saw this, I was so sure I’m going to buy it, and I can’t believe that it’s in my size! A match made in heaven, me and this shirt that is. Plus, it’s in pristine condition!

I can’t believe I found this kind of top in a thrift shop. This is what I love about thrift shopping, how an item can make you feel like it’s the greatest achievement you’ve had in your life, haha. A thrift store is like a hidden cave filled with treasures in disguise of junks about to be thrown away. Making this post makes me want to drag Karlo and go thrift shopping with me, ASAP.

I want to make a look book with these thrift finds, I hope the blogger in me kicks in this weekend so I could ask my insta boyfriend to do the honors of being my photographer, hehe

#shots #thrifthaul #haul

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burberrycanary · 7 years

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Riverdale: Ethics & Archetypes

Cultural Signals and Actual Behaviors

@onceuponamirror has a fantastic meta that points out how Betty is held to such high standards as a character because she’s “literally several angelic tropes come to life, particularly in her appearance and demeanor.” And my brain went, Holy shit. That.

I’m fascinated by the intensity of some of the reactions to Betty blackmailing Cheryl in 2.02 and how, for some, this has fundamentally changed their view of Betty as a character.

I’ve said it before, but Betty’s behavior in 2.02 is in keeping with a long track record of similar actions, most memorably breaking into Ms. Grundy’s car to steal her gun and drugging then assaulting Chuck. She’s never been an Ideal Hero who always does the right thing for the right reason. From the start of the series, she’s been a pragmatist who, while generally well intentioned, is willing to do illegal or unethical things and prone to letting personal attachments drive her behavior.

I want to focus on two of Betty’s most problematic actions as examples: Betty drugging and assaulting Chuck in 1.03 and Betty blackmailing Cheryl in 2.02. In both cases Betty is acting to protect others and to right what she perceives to be a systemic injustice. And in both cases Betty’s actions have the primary intended effect of harming someone and forcing them act against their own interests. Both, too, are illegal.

So why such different reactions from the audience?

One simple answer for this difference is that many people like Cheryl and nobody likes Chuck.

(Sorry not sorry, Chuck.)

Or that the girls Chuck hurt were blameless while FP certainty isn’t that, whatever you think of the harsh 20-year sentence.

However, I think the way Betty is presented in these scenes is the key difference to understanding this gap in audience reaction. My take is that viewers react differently to Betty doing unethical actions that cause direct harm when her appearance and demeanor invoke that angelic, good girl archetype that @onceuponamirror identified as an important factor at play. How Betty looks and the cultural signals she’s projecting at the time she takes an action influence the standards that her behavior is held to.

The problem doesn’t seem to be Betty taking harmful, ethically problematic actions. The problem is that she looked like the angelic girl-next-door while she did it.

So let’s talk about Betty when she isn’t appearing so angelic.

Dark!Betty

I’ll just get this out there. I don’t like Dark!Betty: the black wig and pinup BDSM imagery that manages simultaneously to be lazy, shallow, confused and frankly a little offensive. (A++ overachieving there, show.)

However, these visuals shape audience expectations and reactions in interesting ways. The Dark!Betty costume and “Betty couldn’t make it” line let people who identify with many of Betty’s genuine character traits like kindness and selflessness and self-destructive performative femininity disassociate Betty, the character they like, from repeatedly pushing a drugged person’s head under hot water.

With the Dark!Betty framework, viewers (like Betty herself) could posit her illegal and morally repugnant behavior to Chuck within a safely contained alter-ego. When Betty metaphorically pushed Chuck down onto the tracks (to borrow @onceuponamirror’s Trolley Problem framework) to protect Veronica and all the other girls Chuck had hurt and would’ve kept on hurting, the viewer could tell themselves that she wasn’t quite herself and therefore not as culpable for her actions. Oh don’t worry, this framework whispers, That was just a mild psychotic break. We will now return to your previously scheduled Betty.

During the confrontation with Chuck, Betty was projecting a huge number of bad girl visual and cultural signals to go along with her ethically compromised behavior. That concurrence is all very soothing to our internalized cultural norms. Bad girl does as bad girl looks. Of course someone who looks like that is going to do terrible things. Maybe she just needs to be punished, goes the cultural narrative. Or fucked all better. Or both. Culturally, we know what to do with Dark!Betty and what to expect.

Dark!Betty was trying for seedy, pulp fiction porn and her behavior is judged by her genre.

You’re Judged By Your Genre (Betty vs. Cheryl)

Betty is judged by certain standards because of the archetypes she outwardly resembles. And this goes for Cheryl, too. But the standards that Cheryl is judged by operate along a different set of dimensions. Because Cheryl is a collection of gothic horror tropes come to life. I mean, that hospital entrance though:

Cheryl embodies the visual and cultural archetypes of gothic horror while she performs cruel, unethical, sometimes even senseless actions. But Cheryl is judged by the standards of her genre. Who expects a character that looks like Cheryl and evokes these cultural patterns to act ethically? We, as the audience, understand the rules her character is playing by. You can like Cheryl or not like Cheryl, but you can’t be surprised when she bullies and blackmails.

Any genre that ultimately rolls up into Romanticism is going to center around the intensity and authenticity of an individual’s feelings. Anything Gothic doubles down on the inherently over-the-top aspects of the genre, tosses in a bunch of terrible suffering and proceeds to get hung up on death—and Cheryl delivers all of these things in spades. Ethical behavior is not a standard a character like Cheryl gets judged by.

Since Cheryl’s behavior and cultural signals are reassuringly in alignment, nobody gets that upset about her unethical behavior so long as it's ultimately an intense outpouring of her spectacularly Extra feelings. And, boy, does Cheryl have an abundance of constantly changing but consistently authentic feelings she wants to fashion into a pointy object and go stab somebody with.

I think this drives the inconsistency in many people’s responses to Betty and Cheryl taking similar actions. When Cheryl threatened and blackmailed someone, she didn’t violate her genre’s standards or the expectation for her archetype.

But, in 2.02, Betty did. Her behavior and her cultural signals didn’t line up. And this creates an uncomfortable dissonance.

That Angel Face and the Mirage of Perfection

Betty: the perfect girl-next-door with good grades and a good reputation who you can count on to always say yes.

That’s the archetype Betty is governed by, visually and culturally.

Except, however hard Betty tried and however much she hurt herself, she never could get her behavior to live up this cultural ideal of angelic (toxic) femininity.

Betty has a lot of genuine character traits that makes her resemble the perfect girl-next-door, as long as you ignore all the little things that don’t quite fit. She’s kind. She’s polite and soft-spoken and has those ironclad upper-middle class manners. She’s modest, pretty but not overtly sexual. She’s an underdog who doesn’t always get what she wants but accepts these disappointments more or less passively at least at the start of the series.

Betty has been trained to put other people and their needs ahead of her own—to put other people’s wants ahead of her own needs—while still being expected to excel at everything. She’s been told she has to be oh so perfect even if it kills her. And whatever Betty is, she’s no quitter. So she’s spent years tearing herself to pieces over this endlessly retreating mirage of perfection.

There Is No Dark!Betty

Betty’s good girl cultural framework is one ceaseless reminder to just shut up, nod and smile. You’re so much prettier when you smile and no one that’s interested in hearing about what you’re feeling or thinking anyway.

So what happens when Betty stops doing that?

Dark!Betty in 1.03 worked like a get out of jail free card, for Betty and for the audience, by providing a cultural framework for Betty doing horrible things while giving the audience a way for it somehow to not really count.

This leaves me in a somewhat contrarian position: I’m fine with Betty’s blackmail scene in 2.02 as an example of a female character I like having moral failings and uncomfortable complexities—Betty made a tough call in a bad situation and now she has to live with her choices. But I continue to despise the Dark!Betty scene in 1.03 and the whole Dark!Betty framework because it feels like a cheap, bizarre cop-out with a nasty kick of a whore-madonna complex lurking in the background.

What we’ve seen all along is just Betty, a character who can be sweet and dutiful, upper-middle class polite and wear pink, pink cardigans—and also drug and physically assault a bully into saying what she wants to hear because he hurt her friend. Or go on a date with a decent-enough seeming guy to pump him for information about Jason. Or encourage her best friend to accept dodgy favors so she can contact her sister. Or blackmail a person she doesn’t have much reason to like in order to save the father of one of the people she cares about most—as her boyfriend, as her childhood friend, as someone who’s really been there for her and who just can’t catch a single fair break in a world stacked against him.

What Betty did to Chuck is a hell of a lot worse than what she did to Cheryl by any reasonable ethical standard. And, regardless of which is worse, they are both morally objectionable actions.

But this time Betty didn’t bother to put on the black wig first, so nobody could kid themselves that this wasn’t 100% Betty Cooper, the not-so-perfect girl-next-door.

And you know what? I like Betty. I still like Betty. As long as Betty keeps on being the person who fights too hard, who draws a line in the sand and then holds that line no matter what the cost, who cares immoderately and obsessively about things most people want to ignore as too inconvenient, I’m probably going to keep on liking her even if her behavior continues to be morally compromised. This is the Betty I’ve liked all along, someone who can roll up to a booth in Pop’s and use how people see her, that angelic blonde naive good girl front, to manipulate a teenage boy into agreeing to do something that’s obviously dodgy and off by making him think with his dick—all while using the amazingly over-correct phrase of “only in so far as I want to be more like her.”

The world needs more problematic female protagonists who deconstruct and undermine the toxic cultural archetype of angelic, infinitely accommodating femininity. This is also why I don’t want to see Betty in a leather jacket. She doesn’t need one. She’s a dangerous, problematic badass in white keds and a pink cardigan. I love Betty looking like someone who should sweetly and passively accommodate everything life throws at her, just lie back and take it—but actually no. She doesn’t. She won’t.

She can fix this. She will fix this.

So, as V would put it: atta girl, Betty. Go out there and keep on making people uncomfortable.

#betty cooper #riverdale #riverdale meta #character analysis #fyeahriverdale #meta #cheryl blossom #ethics #toxic femininity #the suburban greek tragedy of Betty Cooper #betty cooper closet avenging angel #I have a lot of feelings about this #commentary #my meta #mine #by burberrycanary

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transarterrified · 6 years

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top surgery

I wanted to write up my experience as a reference for others who are interested in getting top surgery or who want to learn more about it. I’m going to write it kind of like an advice/what I wish I had known or done before. There are a few sections: fundraising, before the surgery, the surgery, and early recovery.

Fundraising

As you may have seen, I did a fundraiser with help from several people, including rgr-pop and start-anywhere, who donated items and labor to the fundraiser. You can still donate if you want the mixes and/or a tarot reading from me, haha. Here is my advice about fundraising:

If possible, make your own website instead of using YouCaring or GoFundMe. If you do want to use a donation site, pick one that doesn’t take a cut of the money. I built a website with Wordpress and purchased a plan that took that ads off the page, which I did more because I needed to do that for my professional website when I go on the job market. I found that it gave me more room to talk about my budget, I was able to track the analytics more tightly, and I think it may have been more rhetorically effective. It might even make sense to use something like Squarespace with a store feature – I think Merritt Kopas did this for her fundraiser.

Offer tangible benefits, but pick ones that are easy to accomplish. For me this was important because I didn’t want people to just give money to me for a variety of reasons. I also was able to do a thing I do all the time anyway and share a skill I’m developing. It helps you reach people who don’t know you, and also encourages people to give more money. It took me a long time to pick two things I wanted to give. I had all kinds of ideas, like screenprinting a cool shirt (I still want to do this), and making a queer tarot zine (I also still want to do this). But at the very correct urging of beneaththeleaf, I narrowed it down to two things that take less time than those crafts. So, briefly, pick benefits that are easy to distribute, easy to make, and free/cheap to make. If you don’t have to ship things, you’ll be able to keep more money.

Let others help you. If your friends have a skill, ask them to contribute something your donors can give for more money. Let your friends help you with managing the contacts you have to make post-donation and with sharing and promoting the fundraiser. It will have more of an impact if you can get ten friends to share or reblog your fundraiser than if you share or reblog your own fundraiser ten times!

Don’t expect fundraising to cover the whole cost. And don’t compare yourself to other people raising money. I wouldn’t have been able to have the surgery without the money I raised. But I also wouldn’t have been able to do it without the money I saved and the money I borrowed. Among my friends who have raised money, the average is about $2000. And you will be fundraising the same time that your friends are, which is awkward. I was fundraising for a surgery the same time as another friend in my extended network, and he raised all $9000 that he asked for. He deserves it! Another friend got top surgery the same week and paid for it all out of pocket. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have fundraised! You have to just let other people’s surgeries be their surgeries and their fundraisers be their fundraisers. Boost yours and other fundraisers you don’t see getting traction as much as possible. It’s shitty and it sucks. But that’s how the internet works.

Let yourself get some money. It took me MANY therapy sessions to accept that I could and should do a fundraiser. I didn’t think I was worth it! I felt like I was taking resources from other people. But that’s not really how it works. As my friend Cass has described to me, being trans on the internet is basically part of being in a huge circle of friends constantly giving each other $30. It feels bad to take that money. But if it’s the only way you can do it, you need to do it! You can give it forward later.

Get ready to feel weird. Asking for money will lead to some weird social circumstances. I got several unexpected large donations and some of those I had to talk with the donors about. Some of your friends are secretly rich, which is weird.

Before the Surgery

Take care of your health. I panicked the week before the surgery because I was convinced I would get sick and then they couldn’t perform the surgery on me. One night, I got off the bus 10 stops before my house because the guy sitting next to me was coughing without covering his mouth. I sucked on so many zinc tablets my taste buds are still fucked up. I even called the surgeon to assuage my fear that it would be ok if I had a cold, and they were very firm with me about not being sick at all being very important. You should think about this before scheduling a surgery a) at the end of the semester or a more stressful period at your job, b) during cold and flu season, and c) during the holidays. I was fine! But it triggered my deepest compulsion and it made me way crazier than I needed to be before getting surgery.

Let other people help you. I didn’t do this as much as I should have, but ask people for help with getting prepared, cleaning your house, whatever will help you be less stressed at least the week before your procedure.

Try to avoid going down the internet rabbit holes. I read A LOT of surgery result stories and felt like it was going to either be me feeling 100% two days later or being bedridden for two weeks. I think there is value in reading people’s stories, but remember, they are stories and sometimes are embellished, and also aren’t the only possible outcomes. I felt like since I hadn’t been working out, taking supplements, etc. etc. it was going to be bad and my long term recovery would be bad. It’s just not true! There are things you can do to prepare, and you should do what makes you feel the most confident. But don’t listen to the advice of every musclebro out there.

Try to R-E-L-A-X. I know this is pointless advice, but try to be calm, meditate, do breathing exercises, etc. Get your blood pressure down. Also, doubt and guilt are totally natural feelings. If possible, I highly recommend reaching out to someone who has had top surgery to talk with them about these feelings if you can. It was really helpful to know it was normal to feel guilty and doubtful, and to also know that those feelings would reside with time.

If you smoke tobacco, they will ask you to stop at least two weeks before surgery. Just keep this in mind!

Day before/of surgery

Pack button-downs only and lots of sweat pants. If you need sweaters, go with cardigans and zip ups. You won’t be able to raise your arms over your head.

Go shopping before you get the surgery. Here’s a list, if you don’t get a package of stuff from your surgeon. I recommend getting these items prior to your procedure:

Two post-surgical binders—you will be provided one most likely. Get another if possible, or even two

If you are doing open drains: thin, wingless pads and extra large bandages. The thin pads will be nicer than the maternity pads they’ll give you to drain into, and eventually you can switch to bandages.

Sleep aids – it can be hard to sleep, even on pain meds.

Ibuprofen or other pain medicine – go off the hard stuff as soon as you can, because you’ll feel bette

Fiber pills – you won’t want to eat a lot, probably, and fiber will help your digestive system get back on track.

Stool softeners or laxatives – see above

Benadryl for itching

Neosporin

Lots of things you like to drink – I got two big bottles of Gatorade, Diet Coke, and cherry lime fizzy water.

Straws

Appealing snacky foods

Baby wipes and/or flushable wipes – I used these for everything and way more than I expected to

A massage ball (e.g., lacrosse ball) or some kind of massage tool for post-surgery massage. I just couldn’t deal with the feeling of pressing on my own incisions and chest; having a massage ball helped.

Laundry detergent--especially if you can bring no-rinse stuff like Soak

You won’t be able to eat before the surgery so eat when you can.

Don’t drink 24 hours before surgery. Some surgeons have harder rules on this. I tried to limit myself to one drink max per day the week before surgery.

The Surgery

This is what my experience was. We got to the surgeon’s office. I had my friend/care partner come in with me. We looked at before and after pictures in the waiting room. There was champagne, but I couldn’t drink it. It’s very strange if you get your surgery at a plastic surgeon’s office!

Very shortly, the first nurse led me into the consultation room. She weighed me (and made a weird comment about me losing weight). I did a bunch of paperwork. The nurse asked me which song I wanted played as I went under. I said something by Reba McEntire. She took my temperature and BP. My BP was 150/90 or something terrible – I told her I had white coat syndrome, and she told me it was relatively normal to have a high BP the day of surgery. I had to take off all my clothes in the bathroom after that, then put on surgical underwear and socks.

After that, she gave me a Valium and some other drugs. She took pictures of my chest from several angles. We waited for a long time. My friend caught some Pokemon. I freaked out. The Valium kicked in. I met with the surgeon. We talked for a long time about what my goals were (which we had already discussed over the phone). Mine were as follows: I didn’t want my nipples to be too close together, and I wanted my chest to look normal for someone of my size. I brought a “wish pic,” but I didn’t give it to anyone and I don’t know if they used it. She drew on my body with a medical marker. She took a lot of measurements and we tried to eyeball where my nipples would go. She rubbed nitro ointment on my hand. Then she left.

We waited more. The anesthesiologist came in and asked a ton of questions and had me do paperwork. She smelled like cigarettes. We waited even more. Then, very quickly, I was ushered into the surgery room. I was swarmed by nurses and the anesthesiologist. I couldn’t tell what Reba song was playing. They put compression pumps on my legs and strapped me to the table. Then I fell asleep and woke up with a new chest. I apparently told everyone Cass was my smartest friend, but only to tell him that he was one of my five smartest friends so he wouldn’t get a big head.

My Procedure

I had a buttonhole done, which is similar to a double incision but it retains a pedicle of nipple tissue, which purportedly increases the chance you will retain nipple sensation. So far, I have some feeling in one of my nipples, which is very rare for top surgery. So I guess that is a good sign.

Early Recovery

You will need more help than you think. I had a pretty fast and smooth recovery. Even with that, I really relied on my care partner to help me dress my drains, rebind, etc. I was also really depressed and lonely after surgery, and he being there was really helpful.

Find some activity you can do that feels productive. We played SO MUCH Pokemon Go and Ingress while I recovered. This was fun for both of us!

The pain may be less than you think. You’re coming off of anesthesia when you are recovering, and your pain might feel less intense as a result. Often you don’t need to take as many pain meds as you are given. For me, the most terrible sensation is…

ITCHING

THE ITCHING (FOR ME) IS TERRIBLE. The nurse told me that opiates make the itching worse (!) and it’s also just part of the wound healing process.

When ready, try to walk and move around. It will help you feel better! But don’t overdo it. I walked a little the first and second day, then a whole lot after that.

Make time to sleep and don’t expect to get work done. It’s really hard for me to envision not working, but for once, I was able to get exactly no work done for a few days. For the first two days, I also slept >12 hours at nighttime and with naps.

I may come back to this and add or remove as I keep recovering!

#top surgery #trans

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sunken-standard · 7 years

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Yet Another Drabble Ask Meme Fill

Requested by @mychakk [I'm sorry I forgot] : Ok, I think I'll go with those numbers, feel free to combine them or do them alone or just pick one that fits your fancy anything for sure will make my day :) 9 (Is a chicken really a bird if they can’t fly?), 14 (Fire! Fire! Fire!), 15 (You watched 4 seasons today?), 42 (This cost a thousand dollars?!), 43 (Foreigners…pffft), 102 (Buy me chocolates and tell me everything’s going to be okay), 107 (This house isn’t even haunted) My top favourite 'verse is the Holmes Family Function (the best), Tom-verse and Vegas. But I'll love anyhting ;) Huge thank you :) looking forward to them :)

This is the list for round 3: https://prompt-bank.tumblr.com/post/146525402053/drabble-challenge

Filled: 17, 95, 72, 84, 105, 41, 28, 69, 90, 95, 46, 100, 104, 81, 18, 24, 108, 99, 25, 61, 66, 52, 80, 73, 54, 89, 26, 32, 71, 16, 20, 27, 45, 57, 89, 32, 44, 64, 102, 27, 57, 6, 2, 70, 5, 7, 93, 9, 14, 15, 42, 43, 102, 107 Yet to be filled: 86, 96, 2, 14, 20, 21, 22, 94

"Is a chicken really a bird if they can’t fly?"/ "Fire! Fire! Fire!"/ "You watched 4 seasons today?"/ "This cost a thousand dollars?!"/ "Foreigners…pffft"/ "Buy me chocolates and tell me everything’s going to be okay"/ "This house isn’t even haunted"

Molly walked into her lounge and screamed.

It wasn't as common an occurrence as one might think, even when taking into account that Sherlock Holmes had taken over her flat as an annex of his own a few years before; she was used to all manner of things greeting her at the door when she returned home from work. Two dogs (on separate occasions), a monitor lizard, a pathetic Sherlock covered in fly paper, a pathetic Sherlock covered in bee stings, a pathetic Sherlock covered in marmalade (as was half her kitchen that time, though she'd got a much nicer kettle and a new blender out of the deal, so she hadn't complained much), a shirtless Wiggins and Sherlock with a tattoo gun, The Night King himself (okay, yeah, just Mycroft, but with a codename like Iceman [which she wasn't supposed to know, but Sherlock also used her brain as an annex for things he didn't want to keep in his own] the comparison was just begging to be made), and now the corpse of Sherlock's ex-girlfriend in rigor on her sofa.

Except, no, that wasn't a corpse. It was a sex doll. Wearing one of Molly's cardigans and a pair of her pyjama bottoms.

She supposed it could be worse. It could be a sex doll that looked like one of her exes.

"You're out of Fairy and if you have to use the loo, which you always do because apparently riding the bus is just too much excitement for you, don't look in the bathtub," Sherlock greeted as he tramped down the stairs to the kitchen. She added Marigolds to her mental shopping list as well, because he was wearing hers (and goggles, oh lovely) and she was sure she didn't want that pair to ever be near anything that would ever be near food again.

"So, um... Why? And why is she wearing my clothing?"

"Really more of an 'it.' I had to put something on it, it was—" he wiggled his fingers "—weird, and wrapping it in a blanket made it weirder. If it makes you feel better, I used clean clothing so none of your DNA will accidentally be transferred."

"Wait, is this evidence? We talked about evidence in my flat."

"It's not evidence per se, at least not in a criminal capacity. Well, it could be, should my client choose to press charges, but she won't, considering she's technically dead—"

"Your client," she said flatly.

"Whose name I can't reveal because I adhere to the strictest professional standards of confidentiality—"

"Oh for shit's sake, I know who it is. Why is it here?"

"Mrs. Hudson would evict me if she saw it. And it is rather creepy in an uncanny valley sort of way. Its eyes close when you tilt it past a thirty degree angle and the mouth is, ah, motorized. Wiggins accidentally bumped the 'on' switch when we were carrying it inside and I've actually never heard a grown man scream like that before."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "You're not keeping it here."

"It's only a few days, she's making shipping arrangements."

"Shipping arrangements."

"She said it would be a waste of a prop to destroy it entirely. She's ah, left me with the task of disposing of the... peripherals, though."

"Peripherals. Going to go out on a limb and guess that's what's in my bathtub."

"Yes."

"And you're cleaning them because...?"

"DNA," he said as though she were daft.

"Uh huh. I'm going upstairs because yes, fine, I actually do have to wee and it's not because the bus is exciting, it's because I time my last cup of coffee so I don't fall asleep on the way home and miss my stop and a side-effect is having a full bladder by the time I walk through the door. Whatever. When I come downstairs, you're explaining this to me from the beginning and leaving out no detail. Then we'll figure out what to do with your Stepford Girlfriend."

"So she has her face trademarked and copyrighted and all that stuff, and she sent you to fetch her intellectual property."

"More or less. There may or may not be multiple blackmail components."

"Oh even better. Did you shatter a few kneecaps just for fun, too?"

"What are you implying?"

"Nothing. I mean, I'm sure pimpin' ain't easy."

"So because I took on a case for someone in the sex industry I'm a pimp?" he asked slowly.

"You're actively helping a whore blackmail one of her clients, from whom you just stole a sex doll."

"That bears the exact likeness of my client and falls well outside the scope of her contract with the party I reclaimed the property from. Honestly, you're a feminist, you should be championing this. Imagine if Tom had a sex doll made that looked just like you."

Ugh, he had a point. Of course he had to go and humanize Irene Adler.

"Fine," she relented. "But you really should wear the fur collar for your coat more often. Maybe put some bling on John's cane and start carrying that around when you wear the hat."

At least she could still amuse herself with that image.

"You're actually logging these?"

"She wants to know what he's been—ahem—using it for so she can charge him accordingly."

"I can think of a pretty short list of what he's been using it for," Molly said, fishing yet another of the doll's vagina inserts out of her tub. Which Sherlock was going to sanitize repeatedly before her next bath (the tub, not the vagina; those were about as clean as they'd ever get thanks to the boiling water and bleach).

"And I'll thank you to keep that list to yourself," Sherlock said, taking the insert and turning it around to look for the serial number. He was really putting on a good show of not being flustered, but the colour in his cheeks gave him away.

"Is this real human hair?" Molly asked, squinting down at the next piece. She was tempted to take her gloves off just to feel it, but then they'd have to re-sanitize it because he had some weird hang-up about DNA all of a sudden.

"Mmhmm. That one costs fourteen thousand Yen. A thousand pounds, give or take."

"This cost a thousand pounds?! A fake fanny? Wh—oh. Oh God, it's moving. It's moving and I don't know how I turned it on."

"How—?" he began, side-eyeing her. He rolled his eyes and shook his head, then put down the insert he'd been holding. "Oh for—give it here, there's got to be a switch somewhere."

She watched as he examined it from all angles, then started poking and prodding at it with his gloved fingers; she wasn't sure if it was sexy, absurd, or just weird, but she knew she was the one blushing now, too (which was ridiculous, considering how often she examined actual genitals belonging to an actual person in any given week). She thought she was going to choke on her own saliva when he used two fingers to check inside. She really hoped he didn't make that face when there was a real woman involved.

"I can't... I can't turn this off. I have no idea how to turn this off," he said, sounding like he couldn't believe what he was even saying.

"Batteries! Just take the batteries out!"

"I don't know where the compartment is."

"Google it."

"You google it, I've got my hands full of—thing."

"Maybe it's on a timer. Just put it in the box and maybe it'll stop on its own."

Sherlock shrugged and withdrew his fingers, then set the insert into the box.

"Oh God," he said, staring down into the box.

"What?"

"It set another one off. And there goes another, it's a chain reaction."

"It's just like in The China Syndrome," she said peering around him to look into the box, which had begun to vibrate its way across her bathroom floor.

"The what?"

"Have you never watched a film?"

He didn't dignify that with a response.

"I can still hear them," she said, looking up at the ceiling.

"I'm sure the batteries will die soon," he said, eyes on his phone as it moaned another text. It was beginning to sound like a bad porno soundtrack. "Ah, good. Her people will be here on Monday to properly crate it for its trip to Hong Kong. Which is not where she is, so just completely forget I said that."

"Today is Tuesday. This thing is going to be here a week?"

"Six days, yes."

"It's so creepy."

Sherlock tipped his head in agreement. "Trust me, it was worse when it was naked."

"Can't you at least move it somewhere?"

"It weighs eight stone, it's like moving a water heater."

"I want to watch telly and I don't want to sit next to it."

"Fine, I'll sit next to it, you sit on the other side."

"Maybe if we just put a bag over its head," she said, leaning forward to look past Sherlock at the doll. He'd inched his way nearly into her lap, pressing her into the corner of the sofa like they were on a Twister ride over the course of the last half hour. She didn't mind, really, except for the doll being there.

"No, that's worse, take it off, it looks like a murder."

"You like murders," Sherlock said from just behind her.

"No, you like murders. I like my job, which is only tangential to actual murder."

"Potato, potato," he said. "What about a mask? You have one in the spare room from Mary's hen do."

"The one with the willy on it?"

"The one with the feathers," he said flatly. "It's bigger, it'll cover more of the face."

"Oh my God, that's horrifying. Why is that so horrifying? Take it off. Take it off."

"You take it off, you brought it into our house!" She realized too late the slip she'd just made. Thankfully, Sherlock didn't seem to notice, as he was tentatively sliding closer to the doll again to remove the mask. She didn't know why, but she kept expecting it to turn its head in her direction and start singing 'Non, je ne regrette rien' or some Marlene Dietrich song or something equally and unexpectedly creepy.

Sherlock used the back of a pen to flick the mask off the doll's face and they both relaxed a bit.

"Okay," he said. "I have an idea. What if we just put it in the corner where the lamp is that you never use? That entire corner is an oubliette, we'll just put it in your desk chair and wheel her over there for the rest of the week."

"Nope," she said simply, her hair standing on end.

"To be fair, I didn't say it was a good idea."

Sherlock's phone moaned a text and they both jumped.

"I'm never going to sleep again. This house isn’t even haunted! Or, it wasn't, until that thing showed up."

"You don't believe in ghosts."

"And you don't believe in wearing pants under pyjamas. What's your point?" she snapped. She wanted that thing gone.

Sherlock simply narrowed his eyes at her while pulling out his phone.

Molly hefted her overnight bag on her shoulder and Sherlock shifted the still-vibrating box of fannies as they waited by the kerb.

"Least it's not raining," Sherlock said conversationally.

"Is a chicken really a bird if they can’t fly?" Wiggins said, one hand on the wheel and the other out the window doing that uppy-downy swimmy thing people usually stopped doing once they were old enough to drive. "They're closer 'a dinosaurs anyway, I saw it on telly."

"They have feathers and beaks—taxonomically, they're birds. And chickens can fly, only not very far," Sherlock said, bored. They were both stuffed into the back seat because there was a suspicious stain on the front passenger seat and neither of them wanted to sit there. The box of fannies was secure in the trunk.

"Did you know—"

"Oh God, here we go," Sherlock muttered.

"—some paleontologists stuck plungers on chickens' bums ta figure out how T. Rex walked?"

"I did not not know that," Molly said, because how else does one respond to that? It wouldn't be very polite to ask their driver, 'how many mushrooms have you ingested today?'

"Spent'a day watchin' Natural World, din't I? Last four series."

"You watched four series today?" Molly asked incredulously.

"Well, only'a ones wi' Sir David Attenborough. He's'a only one I really like."

Fair enough, she thought.

"I'm going to be deleting useless trivia of dubious accuracy for hours," Sherlock grumped while Wiggins filled the tank with petrol. "I'm going inside to get... Something, anything, I don't really care, I just don't want to be in the car any longer."

"Buy me chocolates. And tell me everything’s going to be okay. I mean, we're halfway to Slough with a box of sex toys in the boot and it's almost midnight and I'm pretty sure Wiggins is high."

"And somehow I'm the dramatic one. Wiggins isn't high, that's just how he is. Everything is going to be fine, it's just a quick trip to an abandoned brickyard, we'll be back at Baker Street where there are no bloodthirsty Maschinenmenschen waiting for us to fall asleep to murder us before you know it."

"Maschinenmenschen?"

"Now who's the one who's never seen a film?"

"Just go and buy me a bloody chocolate bar."

"So you keep an arsonist on retainer for special occasions?" she asked, watching as Sherlock situated the box in the centre of the hastily-constructed pyre.

"Former arsonist. It was only once and he's a very successful builder now. Care to do the honours?" he asked, holding out a disposable lighter and a rolled-up copy of The Sun.

She took the newspaper and let Sherlock light it. "Oh! Fire! Fire! Fire!" she chanted as she bustled around the pile of cast-off wooden pallets and construction scraps, lighting the bits of cardboard sticking out here and there.

"So if we were just going to burn them, why did you bother cleaning them?"

"I was actually going to sell them on eBay. It seems he had some 'limited editions' and you wouldn't believe what they're worth. We're burning potentially £8000 or so."

"Are you serious? Why are we burning them? Is this some kind of ridiculously expensive catharsis?"

"Wh—catharsis?"

"Like, burning them in effigy. She was your ex-girlfriend. Or is this some kind of noble gesture, like, protecting her honour or something? So no one can defile her silicone bits."

"Noooo," Sherlock said slowly. "They're just extremely unsettling and I didn't want to leave them to roam about the flat like... demonic caterpillars in case they escaped their box. I'm beginning to suspect they're powered by nuclear fuel rods. Really, we should probably step back, actually. Or leave, and rather quickly, since the fire department is on its way. Run."

"I'll get Wiggins to help me move it tomorrow," Sherlock said after they were settled in his bed.

She'd never slept in his bed before. It was weird. He'd slept in hers dozens of times, and often those times overlapped with her own occupancy, but this was... weird. "Though you could just stay here for the rest of the week."

His suggestion was a bit too casual.

"You don't actually want to move it, do you?"

"It's very heavy. And unnerving. And I will deny that with my dying breath if you ever tell anyone I said that."

She couldn't help herself, she giggled. "Perish the thought. No one would ever believe me, anyway. Just like that time I met Bill Murray. Not John's friend Murray, the Bill Murray. It was in an Indian takeaway in Hackney and he knew I recognized him and he just leaned into me and said, 'No one will ever believe you.' No one did, either. But it was him."

"Who's Bill Murray?"

"An American actor. Caddyshack, Ghostbus—"

"Foreigners…pffft. Boring."

"We really need to work on your cultural literacy," she said, then yawned.

"I've seen every film I'll ever need to, and for the rest, there's Wikipedia."

"We're watching Groundhog Day tomorrow night."

"It's a punishment, isn't it?"

"Yes. You'll take it and you'll like it. Now go to sleep, I need to be up in four hours."

"Make it five. We'll take a cab. I need some teeth for an experiment I've been thinking about, tomorrow is as good a day as any to start it."

"I won't argue. Still can't believe we burned £8000 worth of fake fannies."

"I still can't believe they exploded like that. I should hope they come with warning labels on the package."

"Maybe that's part of the allure. Like playing penis Russian roulette."

"Molly."

"Hmm?"

"Go to sleep. And please never utter the phrase 'penis Russian roulette' again."

"You're no fun."

"I'm lots of fun. Tonight was fun."

"Yeah, it kind of was. Night."

"Night."

"Sherlock..."

"Hmm?"

"Are you sure we got rid of all of them? Did you, ah, remove whatever was in the doll before you dressed it?"

There was a beat of silence, then, "Bollocks."

#drabble ask meme round 3 #sherlolly #sunken's secret stash

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allenmendezsr · 4 years

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Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever ~ 9.5% Conversion Rate!

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It occurs when your body produces excess keratin, a natural protein in the skin, which then surrounds and entraps the hair follicles in the pore.

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And of course, it affected my love life massively.

I shied away from getting too close to men because I was TERRIFIED of what they might think, and whether they’d want to date a girl who looked like she had some kind of nasty skin disease.

Because of my Keratosis Pilaris, I was single for years, while all of my friends were either married or in relationships…

Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t let my Keratosis Pilaris control my life any longer.

So I promised myself that I was going to do everything I could to get rid of this horrible condition for good, whatever it took.

“How I Ended my

Keratosis Pilaris Nightmare”

I’d already wasted huge amounts of money and time on lotions and creams which didn’t work, so I decided to start looking into NATURAL REMEDIES.

I researched the subject extensively.

I visited practically every website and forum there was on Keratosis Pilaris, and bought every book there was to buy.

And I tried every available product I could get my hands on; sprays, scrubs and creams until my bathroom cabinet could hold no more!

I even tested them on my own skin – often with painful consequences!

“But then after almost 8 years, I finally hit upon the

MAGIC BULLET

”

I discovered an incredibly effective natural remedy that produced the most amazing transformation in my skin that I’ve ever seen.

Within just minutes of using this breakthrough remedy my skin became noticeably clearer, smoother and a lot less “bumpy”.

And after a few days the redness had totally disappeared!

“For the first time in my life, I felt as though I finally had

CONTROL

over my skin”

In fact, I was so confident in my new skin that I went into town with a little strapless top on – no cardigan, jumper or jacket in sight!

No one stared at my arms, or inspected my face with suspicious eyes.

No one backed away from me in disgust as if I had some kind of contagious disease.

In fact, no one even looked at me at all.

For the first time in my life, I actually felt NORMAL!

And now I want to share my secret with YOU…

Introducing…

Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™

The Natural Home-Based Remedy To Get Rid of Keratosis Pilaris Forever!

HERE ARE JUST A FEW THINGS YOU‘LL DISCOVER IN Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™

My step-by-step and 100% NATURAL system proven to defeat Keratosis Pilaris and give you smoother, clearer skin.

How to achieve the most dramatic, confidence-boosting “SKIN CLEANSE” you’ve ever had – and do it from the comfort of your own home!

A home-made face scrub that costs pennies to make, yet works better than the most expensive exfoliator brands on the market!

REVEALED! My special “Keratosis Pilaris” diet plan (stick to this simple nutritional regimen, and your skin will be reborn!)

PROVEN WAYS to stop your Keratosis Pilaris from flaring up (most sufferers fall into these traps every day, which makes it virtually impossible for them to control their symptoms. Are you making these mistakes too?)

SPECIAL INGREDIENTS you should look for in any moisturizer you buy (these ingredients will greatly help in stopping your keratosis pilaris permanently).

Skin revitalizing ORGANIC ingredients that you can find in your kitchen pantry, which are proven to cleanse your skin and relieve the symptoms of Keratosis Pilaris in a matter of hours!

Eliminate Keratosis Pilaris FAST – start seeing results in as little as a few MINUTES.

My most powerful “KERATOSIS PILARIS BUSTING” BEVERAGE (drink this and your skin will be clearer, smoother and less inflamed in no time – and it will boost your overall health too)

And much more!

Below you can find some of the results that Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ has achieved for my customers…

“I FEEL SO MUCH MORE CONFIDENT!”

“I’ve suffered from keratosis my whole life and it wrecked my confidence. I was always paranoid that people were staring at me, wondering what was wrong with me and whether they could catch it. Since following your program my skin has improved way beyond my expectations. I am much more confident now and feel like I can finally be myself.”

Jackson Barnes, 28 – Minnesota, US

“I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER WITH THE RESULTS!”

“Hello, I just wanted to write you a quick message to say thank you for your help. I am 25 and I have had Keratosis Pilaris for as long as I can remember. I have tried every steroid cream and ointment under the sun, but none of them have worked. I have noticed a huge difference within just 2 days of using your system. My skin is noticeably less red and bumpy and looks much clearer. I couldn’t be happier with the results!”

Chloe Janes, 25 – Manchester, UK

“MY SKIN IS VISIBLY BETTER”

“I am so happy at what has happened. My skin is now visibly better and my friends have commented on how much it has improved. To finally know that there is a way to get my condition under control and feel good about myself again makes me very, very happy. Thank you”

Angelique Schaeffer, 35 – Maine, US

“SOMETHING THAT ACTUALLY WORKS!”

“FINALLY! Something that actually works and does not burn my skin with chemicals! If keratosis pilaris was not bad enough, my skin is very sensitive which makes all the prescription creams very painful to use. I have been looking for a natural way to relieve my symptoms for many years and finally I have found it. Your system is the best!”

Angelo Bonnicci, 29 – Sienna, Italy

* Testimonials Published With Customer Permission.

So the next question you‘re probably asking yourself is this…

“How much will it cost me to get my hands on Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™?”

Well, before I answer that, let me first ask you a question.

How much would you pay to be able to look in the mirror and for the first time in years, see clearer, smoother and blemish-free skin staring back at you?

How much would you pay to be able to stand face-to-face with someone, and NOT feel paranoid about what they are thinking?

How much would you pay to be 100% confident in your own skin, and proud of the way you look?

How much would you pay to FINALLY BE FREE of your KP nightmare?

Would you pay $1,000 to achieve such transformational and life-changing results?

What about $500? That’s an absolute bargain, right?

Well don’t worry, because I’m not going to ask you to spend anything like that kind of money!

Because I genuinely want to help you…

Having lived with Keratosis Pilaris my entire life, I know how embarrassing and upsetting it can be…

I know what it’s like to feel like you’re being punished unfairly, and to experience that sense of hopelessness, frustration and anger at not being able to fix the problem, however many dermatologists you see and expensive creams you buy.

Believe me, I’ve been there.

I must have screamed “WHY ME?” at the bathroom mirror 1000 times!

And I don’t want you to feel like this any longer.

So for that reason, and for a limited time only, I‘m making Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ available for only…

NOTE: Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ is a digital product. You will receive access to the entire system immediately after you order – even if it’s 2am!

That‘s right…

JUST $37 to get your hands on a safe, natural and PROVEN way to banish Keratosis Pilaris for good, achieve smoother and clearer skin in a matter of days, restore your confidence, and look and feel better than you have in YEARS!

Finally, there will be…

NO MORE outrageous dermatologists’ fees

NO MORE wasting money on expensive “miracle creams”

NO MORE slathering dangerous chemicals all over your skin

NO MORE being ashamed of the way you look

NO MORE worrying about what people think

NO MORE letting your Keratosis Pilaris symptoms control your life

NO MORE having to face rude or embarrassing questions like “what’s that on your face/arms/legs?” … which makes you just want to curl up and die.

Nope… Just all-natural, smooth and revitalized skin that you can be truly proud to show off!

“

FACT!

You don’t have to suffer from the embarrassment and humiliation of Keratosis Pilaris

ANYMORE!

”

Instead, you’ll be able to look in the mirror with a massive smile on your face, and leave the house full of confidence in the way you look, possibly for the first time in your entire life.

And the best thing is, you don’t even need to step outside your front door in order to achieve such life-changing results.

That’s why this is such a no-brainer.

But that’s not all…

As a thank you for ordering…

I’m also going to give you these Bonuses,

Absolutely Free!

BONUS #1: Perfect Skin Care & Anti-Aging 4 You – VALUE: $67 (YOURS FREE!)

To make sure your skin is perfect and beautiful for many years to come, I’m going to include this special bonus,

absolutely free.

Perfect Skin Care & Anti-Aging 4 You reveals

how to keep your skin in perfect condition

, and includes advice and guidance on how to slow down the ageing process, ensuring that your skin stays radiant and beautiful!

BONUS #2: Lifetime Updates Guarantee – VALUE: $37 (YOURS FREE!)

I’m always looking to improve The Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ program, because I want to make sure that you get the best possible results both now, and in the future too. So when I update the system and add new techniques that I’ve discovered, you’ll be the first to know! In fact, I will send you the new, updated edition straight to your inbox, absolutely free!

BONUS #3: Unlimited Customer Support – VALUE: $37 (YOURS FREE!)

And if all that’s not enough, I will also be on hand to provide you with all the advice and guidance you need, and answer any questions you may have about the Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ program. So feel free to send me an email (address provided with your order) whenever you like, and as often as you like, and I will get back to you as soon as I can!

And I‘m still not finished!

To show you that I‘m genuine, and that I really do want to help you, I‘m going to sweeten the deal EVEN FURTHER, by including the following…

Rock-Solid 100% Money-Back Guarantee!

If you are not 100% satisfied with Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ you will receive a full refund!

It’s as simple as that…

My system is tried, tested and proven, having already worked for thousands of Keratosis Pilaris sufferers all over the world, so I’m more than happy to put my money where my mouth is and provide a rock-solid 60-day money-back guarantee, so that you can put it to the test in your own time and at absolutely no financial risk to yourself whatsoever.

And if for

ANY reason you’re not 100% satisfied, or you simply change your mind, I will refund every single penny with no questions asked and no hard feelings!

So go ahead, order now, and try out “Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™” for a full 60 days on me…

You risk absolutely NOTHING!

NOTE: Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ is a digital product. You will receive access to the entire system immediately after you order – even if it’s 2am!

“So why continue to suffer from the misery of Keratosis Pilaris?”

And why continue to let Keratosis Pilaris control your life, when right here, right now, is a proven ALL-NATURAL SOLUTION for just $37?

Not only will your skin start to clear up and become smoother and less bumpy, your self-confidence will grow too.

You’ll start to ENJOY going out again.

You’ll start to wear clothes that make you look and feel GREAT.

And you’ll no longer feel like hiding from the world ANYMORE.

How does that sound?

Look, I know you’re sick and tired of dealing with Keratosis Pilaris.

I know you’re fed up moving 1 step forward only to fall 2 steps back over and over again.

And I know you’re tired of trying to gain control over a condition that you feel you shouldn’t even have in the first place.

… Which is why I’ve put years of hard work into creating this program for you.

I promise you that this will be the last purchase you ever have to make in your fight against Keratosis Pilaris.

The war ends today – and from this moment on your life is going to get so much better.

“Ok, it‘s decision time…”

And you have 3 options…

OPTION #1: You can continue on as you are, letting Keratosis Pilaris

CONTROL

your life and your happiness. You can carry on hating the way you look, forever feeling “ugly” and constantly paranoid about what people are thinking and saying about you.

And let‘s face it, that‘s not really an option is it?

OPTION #2: You can carry on wasting your time on dermatologists and doctors, spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the latest steroid creams or ointments that do nothing for your skin, but pump your body full of dangerous and toxic chemicals.

OPTION #3:

Or you can be smart, and take the safe and 100% NATURAL OPTION

The only option.

And invest in Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ – The Natural Home-Based Remedy To Get Rid of Keratosis Pilaris Forever!…

NOTE: Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ is a digital product. You will receive access to the entire system immediately after you order – even if it’s 2am!

So I urge you to make the right decision…

To make the best investment you will ever make…

… An investment in yourself, and your future happiness.

Best Wishes, Alison White Creator of Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™

P.S. Remember, this is the EXACT same system that transformed my own skin, and my life and it has already helped thousands of people around the world to achieve similarly life-changing results!

And all you need to do to get the same results yourself is follow my system!

P.P.S. Please bear in mind that despite the incredible value present in this system, as well as the free bonuses, the price of Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ is incredibly low, and has been deliberately kept low to help as many people who suffer from the inconvenient, embarrassing and sometimes humiliating effects of Keratosis Pilaris. However, I cannot guarantee that the price will remain this low on a permanent basis. So if you come back tomorrow and the price has changed to $77, $97 or more, you have been warned!

P.P.P.S. Being sceptical is natural, but I’ve made that there’s absolutely no risk to you! When you order Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™ you’re fully protected by a rock-solid 60-day money-back guarantee.

You risk absolutely NOTHING!

“Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™” Now >

“REDUCED MY SYMPTOMS BY AROUND 90% so Far!”

“I’m a man and I know a man isn’t supposed to be vain or self-conscious about his skin, but I definitely was! I work out a lot and I like to show off my body. But the KP on my back and arms made me so insecure, I didn’t want to take my shirt off in front of anyone. Your program has worked wonders. It reduced my KP by around 90% so far, which is way better than I even hoped for.”

Rob Cairns, 29 – Adelaide, Australia

“I’M AMAZED DERMATOLOGISTS DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS”

“I’d visited many dermatologists in the last few years and I don’t know how many creams I’ve tried out. None of them did very much but irritate my skin and if anything, make the situation worse. Within days of trying your program, I’ve had better results than I’ve had in 10 years of seeing dermatologists. I’m amazed they don’t know about this. Or do they?”

Jasmine Housden, 18 – Detroit, U.S.

“I CAN ALREADY SEE THE DIFFERENCE”

“Hi, this is just a quick email to say thank you. I honestly didn’t think this would work so good. But after following your advice I can already see the difference. Last night I wore a strapless dress for the first time in years. I honestly can’t explain how pleased I am with the results.”

Fiona McIntosh, 28 – Hibernian, Scotland

“MY SKIN HASN’T BEEN THIS GOOD IN YEARS!”

“Wow! I did not expect to see such improvements but I have tried pretty much everything so I thought there was nothing to lose! The improvement on my cheeks and arms has been amazing and my boyfriend can’t stop complimenting me on the difference. My skin hasn’t been this good in years!”

Sarah Webb, 31 – Alaska, U.S.

“Keratosis Pilaris Remedy Forever™” Now >

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