#i could either take that as extremely heavy handed metaphor or write it off and guess what i choose

[kennabeth]

the biggest letdown of the color of revenge for me was the way cornelia hyped up the "who will save the world, age or youth" thing when the most that happened was nyame and dustfinger throwing their backs out and the kids going "what are you catholic" to the adults when handling orpheus

[finelinevogue]

Thanks can you write something about one of the kids getting hate online from jealous people and how it affects them and what Harry and Y/N do

hello!! so this one is going to be about isabelle getting hate (😔), which you will find out why. i’m also changing the age gaps between them because it’s so hard to write with larger age gaps. so here isabelle is 16, felix is 19 and oli is 21!!

“Mum!”

You had been busy ironing the clothes downstairs, whilst watching ‘Call the Midwife’ on the TV, when you heard Felix shouting you from upstairs.

“What?” You shouted back, moving from the lounge to the bottom of the stairs to hear better.

“I think you should see this.”

When your children say things like this you either roll your eyes when you find out they wanted to show you a meme, or panic because some rumour has been spread all over the internet of them.

“Just hang on a minute!” Your attention diverted to the front door being opened harshly. Everyone else was already home but Belle, so it must’ve been her. It was a Wednesday today and Belle always had study group in the library after-school on a Wednesday, although today she was back a little earlier than normal.

You moved the latch off the porch door and opened it to welcome Belle home, watching as she threw off her high-top converse aggressively.

“Hiya love, you alr—” You didn’t get to finish before you saw that her eyes were red and puffy, tears streaming down her face like a cascading waterfall. Her mascara was smudged and made it look like she hadn’t slept for weeks. “Woah, hey, Belle?”

Belle didn’t listen to you though, instead she stormed past and ran up the stairs and a minute later you heard her bedroom door slam shut.

What the fuck was that about?

“Minute too late mum!” Felix shouted again, making you roll your eyes in annoyance. However, it did confirm that something had happened to Belle on social media or over the internet and you had to get Harry on top of this now.

You walked down the stairs, into your basement - which Harry had converted into a sound-proof studio - and saw him sat with a guitar on his lap and pencil between his teeth, playing around with chords on repeat.

“Babe?” You knocked on the door as you spoke, Harry looking up from where he was sat to you and smiling as bright as ever.

“You alright love?” He asked sweetly, taking the pencil out of his mouth first.

“I am yeah, but Belle’s just come home crying and shut herself in her room.” You furrowed your eyebrows, trying to work through everything that had happened and wondering whether you’d done something or not done something.

Harry instantly got to his feet, putting everything down so that he could come over to you. He placed his warm hands on your cheeks and kissed your lips once just because, “I know what you’re thinking, so stop it. Something’s probably happened at school. Let me go talk to her, okay?” You nodded in agreement and sighed in thanks.

Belle had always been more of a daddy’s girl than a mommy’s girl, and that was okay. It just meant that she was more open to her feelings and her heart with her dad than you, not to say she never talked to you about things like that. Harry always filled you in on things, though, and would prompt you to talk to her if he thought extremely necessary. Belle liked to work things out by herself normally, not liking to be a burden to anyone - a lot like you actually.

Harry walked out of the room and climbed the stairs two at a time until he made it outside Belle’s room. He knocked before entering, but Belle made no sound for him to enter.

“Belles?” Harry asked softly, shutting the door and walking over to her bed which she was curled up on. She had obviously flopped on the bed and began crying, because there was no sign of effort to get under the covers or get comfortable.

“D-dad?” She mumbled roughly, her choked sobs holding her back.

“Yes sweetheart, i’m here.” Harry sat down on the edge of her bed and sat their patiently. He didn’t want to invade her space or make her feel claustrophobic, so he waited for her to come to him and that didn’t take long. She sprang up and hugged him with her head buried against her dad’s chest, sobbing so violently that Harry’s heart cracked in two. He hated to see his baby cry. It was his biggest weakness.

Belle made an attempt to speak but Harry couldn’t understand due to the shear heaviness of her cries.

“Belles, y’gotta calm down for me, my heart. Gotta breathe it out before you make yourself sick.” He smoothed his hand over the back of her hair, like he’d always done. Her breathing ever-so-slowly coming back down to a normal and healthy pace. “That’s it, thank you.” He kissed the top of her head and held her tightly still.

“Dad?” She shakily started.

“Yes love.”

“Do y-you know?” She sat up so she could face her dad, bur Harry didn’t let his hands leave hers.

“Know what, sweetheart?”

Harry genuinely didn’t know and Belle could see that in his honest, kind, eyes.

“T-that…” Belle started tearing up again, her bottom lip wobbling like sailors legs.

“Hey, calm down. You’re okay. Breathe and then talk to me, okay?” Harry ordered her, not caring if this took all night. He was here for his baby girl whenever and wherever, no exceptions. If she didn’t ever tell him, that was okay as long as he helped her build up her happiness again. A few deep breaths later and she was feeling more comfortable.

“I..,” she paused momentarily to collect her words before letting them flow out beautifully, “i’m gay dad.”

Warmth spread through Harry’s heart as if he were torch that’d just been set alight. He could only put the way he felt into one word; proud. He was so proud that his daughter was turning into the loving and open and beautiful woman she was always born to be. He was also just so happy that she had the confidence in him to tell him something so important to her.

“I’m so proud of you, Belle.”

“Really?” She sounded surprised, which made Harry take a step back in confusion.

“Yes of course,” Harry squeezed her hand just a little tighter, “have I ever given you a reason to think otherwise?”

“No.”

“Then where’s this doubt coming from hey?”

Belle began to cry again at his question.

“T-the media found out and i-it’s been published everywhere a-and I w-was worried I wouldn’t b-be able to tell you myself b-before they could. They’re being s-so rude too.” Her cries broke Harry all over again. As much as he was proud of her for coming out so bravely, he was incredibly pissed off that the media thought it was there business to pass around before Belle was even comfortable admitting it first. It’s Belle’s right to come out when she wants and how she wants and Harry could understand how frustrating and upsetting that must be to have it all taken away. He had to keep calm for Belle though, pulling her back into his chest to hold her safely.

“What are they saying?”

Anger bubbled through Harry’s veins as she began to speak.

“That i’m only gay to promote the values you stand for or that you’ll be disappointed that not all your children are straight.”

Harry’s fingers curled at her words, not understanding how much of a low-life you have to be to genuinely type and publish these things about a child, let alone his child. He was furious and he was going to burn - metaphorically - the people responsible for this abuse.

“How did they find out?”

Instead of her saying anything she pulled up a picture of the article online - released by ‘The Sun’ unsurprisingly as they were the worst for paparazzi stalking - and it all started to piece together.

The article headlined a picture of Belle and another girl, kissing outside of school. The study group mustn’t have been exclusively studying. Harry didn’t focus on the shitty article, he instead focused on how the smile on Belle’s face was the widest he’d ever seen.

“You look very happy.” Harry tried to make light of the situation for his daughter.

“I am. They make me very happy.” Belle blushed and Harry caught on.

“And they’re called?”

“Megan.”

“Megan,” Harry repeated the name, getting a feel for the way it sounded for future use, “well they seem lovely.”

“Dad you’ve only seen them through a picture of us kissing.” Belle rolled her eyes and Harry reached out to dab the tears away, not minding that his sleeve was becoming heavily damp.

“Shut up you,” he laughed causing a smile to leap onto Belles face too, “do we get to meet them?”

“Hopefully,” Belle smiles, before looking down to her lap with furrowed brows, “that is, if they still like me after this whole media shambles.” Belle let out a breathe of shaky air and Harry caught her anxiety before she could let herself run off with it.

“Let me take care of that, don’t worry yourself over it, okay?” Belle nodded.

“Do I have to make like a statement or anything?”

“You do whatever you want to, Belles, and i’ll love you no matter what.”

And with that Harry left the room, a smile on his face for feeling like the proudest most happiest parent on the planet. It only lasted a few minutes though, because now it was time to make some phone calls and sue a few people.

[what-is-love-babey-dont-hurt-me]

The Haunting of Thomas Sanders 

> Part 1 < Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Summary: Nico was beginning to think his new boyfriend was haunted by ghosts. He never planned to bring it up until the ghosts themselves came to him asking for help.

[AO3]

CW: food mention, alcohol mention, past breakup

Notes: Based off this text post I made. 

.

Nico had come to the mall for inspiration.

Anything to get out of his office would help him at this point, really. The meetings he had to go to were stifling any new ideas and the nosey, pompous co-workers were worse. The writer did not know what he was looking for, but what else brought people to malls? Maybe a new outfit would uncover confidence , maybe indulging in greasy food would be that final click he seemed to lack, maybe people-watching would offer the right story. Nico's bets were not on the last one.

The mall was not as busy as it once had been. When he was still a teen it was a lively place bustling with a constant traffic of people. Walking through shops offered hours of new stimulation and the hallways were towering, intricate skylights the crowning jewel. As time went on Nico got older and things changed. Online shopping is easier than anything and a fair few of the shops were closed down for good.

Nevertheless it was his favorite place to write if he had to choose. The buzz of energy helped him focus on work. Nico found peculiar security in being an irrelevant face in a crowd of hundreds, and knowing that each person had a life he could never even imagine opened floodgates of inspiration. The 'What if's?' and 'Why's?" he asked himself when people-watching could get the ball rolling.

Now there were less faces, less stories. Nico did not appreciate the way this shift reflected in his work. The difference was noticeable, and he struggled more with deadlines, but he worked with what he had.

He learned to pay attention to individuals more. However, currently what he had was waiting for his food, because at this point he might have more luck finding inspiration in eating then in others. There had only been a toddler throwing a tantrum, a teen scrolling on their phone, and a man who sat down across from him at the food court-

Oh hello, inspiration.

If Nico was staring, the only reason he got away with it was his laptop blocking his line of sight. He saw all he needed out of the corner of his eye. The floral shirt was extremely flattering, and if he wasn't mistaken he could see the outline of muscles. That brown hair looked fluffy, and what he would give to run his fingers through it while- Okay, Nico, you might be gay but that thought isn't for a stranger .

He could not even see his eye color. And the man in the floral shirt was eating, interrupting his meal would be rude. Maybe there was a way to make this still work? As his waitress got to his table and dropped off his food, he subtly turned his pinned-covered backpack in the direction of the stranger. If Mr. Handsome did not answer his silent plea then he would move on.

He tossed a fry into his mouth instead of letting himself think.

Maybe he had got his hopes up when the guy came in his direction, only to walk up to a Karrot King line. When the writer saw the man in the floral shirt inspect the plant, he wondered if he liked botany. Finally the same useless hope happened again when they made admittedly awkward eye contact for a few seconds. So he has brown eyes. The guy turned away rather fast so Nico dropped it. Maybe showing a pride pin made the guy uncomfortable and it was to good to be true.

Only when he heard a CRASH and saw somebody fall into a garbage can, did he finally get an idea about what to write. That was a metaphor he could spin into a story. Certainly it was not at all because he felt trashy for a missed opportunity. Nor was it due to that cute guy having disappeared, leaving his food uneaten.

Wait . You can still make this work, Flores.

He scarfed down the rest of his food and discarded the trash. Nico's fast pace to get to the table with the food turned a few heads, but he ignored it. Greasy bag in hand, he browsed the crowd for that familiar pattern. Every person wearing a floral shirt was either an older lady or a child. Nico swayed on the balls of his feet as he contemplated what to do next, but then he saw him coming out of the restroom.

Bingo!

None of what happened after went as planned. Serves him right for letting his overactive imagination create unrealistic expectations.

He should have known trying to do small talk with strangers would only backfire. After Nico had called out after him to return the food, he had tried to ask what made him leave in a rush to forget his food. Then the guy asked what was wrong with him and Nico dropped it. He gave the stranger his well-wishers and left afterwards. He would honestly rather head back to work then be here right now.  

No matter if he was admittedly cute, Nico Flores probably would have been mad at the man if he did not look like he was on the verge of a public anxiety attack. He was probably starving, too, if he had forgotten his lunch.

The man in the floral shirt hesitated behind him, running after Nico.

When they actually sat down to talk together, the man in the floral shirt - Mr. Sanders, Thomas - was quite charming. And funny. And intelligent. Oh, when he had called Thomas an inspiration earlier he had meant it. He just met a singer and an actor, is there a more perfect match to a writer and poet?

Leave it to his imagination to think of a man he just met reciting the poems and lovingly singing songs he writes.

The two had talked for over two hours without noticing. They had bounced ideas off of each other and Nico made an impressive amount of progress. He felt so giddy with just this one interaction! Nico was sad that they had to leave; Thomas seemed just as reluctant to part.

"Well you didn't get to eat much today at lunch right?"

Thomas fiddled with his fingers, "Yeah…"

Nico did not let himself second guess himself , he offered, "Then let me buy you dinner tonight!"

As a breath caught in Thomas' throat, Nico was self conscious that he might have said something wrong, but the heavy blush across the other man's face was not of offence or horror at all. Thomas was smiling at him again.

Finding ways to make Thomas go speechless was going to be his new favorite pastime… if Thomas would give him a chance, he decided. Just that alone lit a fire inside him, and later when he finished with writing for work, he would write some more. All he would be writing about would be this, a collection of poems to free these butterflies in his stomach. Thomas seemed to look around for approval from anybody else and nodded quickly

"I'd love to go with you, Nico! Maybe we can uh- get to know each other better?" Oh man, it was flattering to have somebody so cute get so nervous at him of all people.  

"Only if I could get to know the digits on your phone number better," he confirmed with a playful grin. It might have been cheesy, certainly. But he was also the person who told Thomas that they would not waste this opportunity. Pretending he was not corny now would be a lie.

Thomas taking his cliché advances in stride only made him more hopeful.

.

.

They both later met at a local bar and grill close to the beach. A salty sea breeze tousled his hair and the palm leaves. The hour was close to sunset, too hot for the mosquitoes to bug them but not too hot for the two of them to eat outside.

"I'm looking for a table for two? RSVP'd under the name 'Flores'?" He asked. The waitress nodded, sat him down with a menu. Thomas was not there, and a part of him wonders if he is getting stood up. Nico, not particularly interested in looking at food yet, fiddled with his laptop. He sighed because even If that was the case, Nico would try to make the most of the night.

The waitress brought Thomas to the table a few minutes later. The writer's heart soared before worry took root. Thomas was wearing that same expression from earlier that day on his face. He anxiously explained. "I'm so, so sorry for being late. And i totally get if you don't want me here and would prefer to just call this all off. I didn't mean to show up late, but then as I was about to leave my apartment I- my keys just-"

Nico grabbed one of Thomas' hands and smiled reassuringly. "Hey, I'm not angry you got here late."

Thomas really did look cute flustered, but he did not let go of the hand. Instead he ran his thumbs along his knuckles. "I'm happy you're here with me. Wanna order a drink and maybe share an appetizer with me?"

They both chatted about foods they disliked while waiting. Thomas hated carrots with a passion as it turned out, and he made a mental note to tease him about going to a Karrot King. Nico in turn talked about his dislike for most seafood and mushrooms because of the slimy texture. The waitress came and both agreed on a sampler platter to share.

"Mimosas at sunset?" He inquired.

Thomas smiled nervously. "I usually save them for brunches, with friends. All the other options I like are too much if I want to drive home tonight."

Nico nodded, understanding.

Just like in the food court, Talking with Thomas made time go past without him even noticing. They tried out food together, talked about music, and that led Nico into telling a story about a Highschool band. Thomas was red in the face and giggling uncontrollably by the time they paid for the check and had to leave.

They left the building together when Thomas stopped him. "There's a park around the corner. We can feed the ducks some leftovers."

If Nico noticed that Thomas was not ready to say bye just yet, he did not say it. The last of the sun was behind the horizon by the time they went through a breadstick. Watching Thomas interact with the ducks gave him the idea that this man loved animals. They were cute, he would admit, but nature found other ways to ruin his mood.

Nico laughed at himself, pulling his arms closer into his body. "I almost wish I dressed up a bit more. I didn't expect the mosquitoes to be this bad."

"I know it's warm out, but I can lend you a jacket?"

Nico did a double take at what Thomas was holding up. It was black with plaid sleeves, already oversized so it wouldn't have a problem fitting Nico. It honestly looked very comfortable, and it would keep him from being bit, but comfort wasn't what he was caught up on.

"Being warm beats being eaten alive."

When the fuck did Thomas have an extra jacket on him? Did he really not notice it?

He hesitated, and then asked a whole entirety different question. "Are you sure I can take this? I won't be able to return it to you tonight."

Thomas insisted, "Please, I don't mind- I don't need it. And you can keep it for tonight, or until we see each other again?"

Nico put the jacket on and it was soft. And it smelled like the cologne Thomas was wearing. Oh this was nice. "When will that be, Thomas?"

Thomas let his eyes linger on Nico in his jacket. "Saturday I'm free, I think. We could have brunch together, even."

He smiled. "Saturday sounds wonderful."

.

.

When they first had met, being infatuated was easy. It came to the pair more natural than breathing.

Nico originally did not know if his relationship with Thomas Sanders would go anywhere. But the first meeting had been so promising. And then they had a brunch date at Thomas' place, then a second and a third. Maybe… maybe Nico was moving too fast. Things kept going well nonetheless.

Four, five, six, seven. They kept on hanging out. Going out. They wanted to see more and more of each other. Quickly they were amassing a horde of good memories together. During nights away, they loved to text and call each other. They never put a label on what they did, which was starting to bother him. It felt more intimate than friendship. Were these dates?

According to his family, yes. They had noticed his change in mood and lack of free time quickly and demanded explanation. He kept it vague, but got advice anyways. Mama Flores said it was ridiculous that he had not brought Thomas by to meet the famila. Hid Papa was more doubtful. Even though it has been years since Nico's last major failed relationship, his father was still worried.

Papa Flores was a proud man, so it left a bad taste in his mouth when he requested Nico to take more time before giving his heart away. He had to oblige. Nico was over it, he healed, but some of his family was not. Nico's ex was like a second son to Papa, and everybody was hurt by him.

Call him cliché, but Thomas was different.

Even when Nico was past the stage of infatuation, Thomas took his breath away.

Could you be infatuated by somebody you have not actually kissed yet? It felt like it. Sure, when they had met at that food court, he had his breath taken away, and that feeling intensified when they saw each other more. He knew infatuation could feel like love, but these feelings passed the test of time and matured into something deeper. With more meaning. He did not like just the idea of Thomas and what their future might look like, he liked Thomas for his presence and as a person.

Suddenly his worries that they were moving too fast turned into frustrations they were moving too slow. They were more intimate than regular friends, but they never got far enough to be considered partners. It was frustrating to figure out. Nico was ready for a relationship, he was certain. The three months he spent getting to know Thomas were blissful, and calling their dates only "hangouts" had begun to feel forced.

So they talked about it.

Thomas said he was also ready but his actions seemed more… hesitant. He mentioned somebody from his past, who he moved on from but never could forget. Nico wanted to ask, to find out what happened to his heart for him to be so afraid. He knew what it felt like to have scars that still hurt, he wanted to be there for Thomas as he healed.

But that was not the time for the conversation. Not when Nico was nearly on Thomas' lap and his arms hung around his neck. Not when Thomas met his eyes and Nico stared at them for too long. It could have been him trying to figure out what emotions they held, maybe Thomas' eyes were that beautiful. His friend -- boyfriend? -- got so anxious and trapped in his head easily, but Thomas seemed in control of his more scary thoughts in that moment. It brought a smile to his face, unnoticed between the way they were slowly moving closer.

Still, cautious and vulnerable, eager and loving, Thomas had let Nico kiss him. Finally getting to show Thomas just how much he wanted to cherish him was amazing. And receiving that same passion in return was intoxicating.

Getting an answer never felt so good.

Nico's more-than-friendly feelings were not the only thing that was starting to add up in regards to Thomas either. There were strange happenings, though were so minuscule he had nothing tangible to go off of.

Thomas might be really good at sneaking things past Nico's eyes, common sense would say. Intuition told himself not to doubt what he saw. Thomas did not have that spare jacket on their first date originally. It literally had to of appeared from thin air. And when Thomas invited him for brunch, he noticed that two of the mimosas Thomas had prepared with brunch had vanished. Sometimes he experiences ghost touches when staying the night. The hands were gentle and comforting, calluses on the fingertips just like Thomas, but when he opened his eyes nobody was there.

That was the most noticeable of things. Though he could list off a dozen smaller happenings. He had no proof for them, as they could be explained, but Nico listened to his gut here.

And Nico has no idea what he would want to do with this information anyways. Thomas seemed to have some supernatural force that followed him around. What a fantastic conclusion to jump to! It would be weird to bring up, especially after Thomas had denied anything when Nico subtly brought it up. And the ghosts - for lack of better term - did nothing to harm Thomas.

The information that Thomas was haunted by ghosts was, for all intents and purposes, useless.

(Except it was not. It was fantastic material to write from. When he first called Thomas inspiration, his first impression never proved to be wrong.)

(And if Nico had started a personal project dedicated to a story based on it, nobody needed to know,)

The difference between Nico's feelings for Thomas and his feelings about his ghosts is that one actually got addressed.

He would be content to let Thomas have that secret to himself.

NEXT PART >>

[idontblushsrry]

Yusuke Urameshi||SFW Alphabet

A/N: Writing for one of my favorite protagonists of all time? Don’t mind if I do. Slightest hint of spoilers for the end of the series and s3 but they’re really minor and and mostly non-specific.

Word Count: 1929

A: Affection (How affectionate are they? How do they show affection?)

Yusuke is affectionate in a kinda subtle way, like he’ll put his hand in your pocket (in your back pocket if you let him) or vice versa, he just likes touching you and being close to you. The clingiest he’ll get is wrapping his arm around your shoulder or waist and pulling you closer so he can kiss you. Aside from that, Yusuke’s go to with affection is teasing, like if he isn’t messing with you or yall aren’t bickering, he’s probably really upset.

B: Best Friend (What would they be like as a best friend? How would the friendship start?)

As a best friend, Yusuke is super rowdy. He’s always getting into some form of trouble or antics, and while this does calm down after the demon world tournament, he’s still always got that mischievous air about him. Your friendship probably started with you and Yusuke bumming around the same spots, namely the arcade, and you showing him how to beat one of the games.

C: Cuddles (Do they like to cuddle? How would they cuddle?)

Yusuke’s cuddles are very lax, he tends to just throw an arm around your waist and call it a day. He prefers being the big spoon but he doesn’t really like spooning all that much to begin with.

D: Domestic (Do they want to settle down? How are they at cooking and cleaning?)

Yusuke is actually pretty good at cooking and cleaning. Atsuko left him home alone a lot with nothing more than a will and a way (maybe a microwave meal when he was younger). So while Yusuke isn’t the best cook, he won’t go hungry, and he’s more than content to empty the cabinet before going back to the store. As for cleaning, he’s pretty good at that once he has a direction to go in. He doesn’t always know what all needs to be taken care of but give him something to do and he’ll do it.

E: Ending (If they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?)

Yusuke definitely breaks up with you in person. No matters the conditions of your break up, you mean a lot to him; even in breaking up, he feels it’s best that he tell you face to face.

F: Fiance(e) (How would they feel about commitment? How quick would they want to get married?)

Yusuke is a committed person who’s very casual about marriage. He’s not pushy when it comes to getting married, he already knows he wants to be with you as long as possible. It’s all really up to what you’d want, maybe he’d get married for the sake of being able to say he’s married but otherwise, he doesn’t feel one way or the other.

G: Gentle (How gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?)

Yusuke isn’t really gentle, at least that’s the way he wants to come off, but he really has a heart of gold. Yusuke is gentle with you in a way that he is with no one else. He speaks to you in such a gentle tone of voice, one that sets all your nerves at ease. The way he holds isn’t gentle, but firm, like he’s giving you the promise of safety and security without even using words.

H: Hugs( Do they like hugs? How often do they do it? What are their hugs like?

Yusuke doesn’t hug all that often. When he does hug you, it’s usually out of excitement, like he’s so overjoyed that he can’t help hugging you.

I: I love you (How fast do they say the L-word)

Yusuke just says it one day randomly and late as all hell. Like you and him could be together for a year before he just randomly goes “you know I love you, right?”

J: Jealousy (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they’re jealous)

You can’t take jealous Yusuke anywhere. He will act a damn fool and try and puff his chest out to try and intimidate the person he’s jealous of. The worst part is if Puu’s there, he’ll be copying Yusuke but trying to get your attention onto him instead. Together, the both of them are menaces.

K: Kisses (What are their kisses like? Where do they like to kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?)

Yusuke’s kisses are like a burst of sun after being inside all day, invigorating, exciting, and warm. The both of you have smiled into your fair share of kisses and often times Yusuke’s kisses leave you giddy and walking on air.

L: Little ones (How are they around children)

Yusuke is actually surprisingly good with kids. He knows how to look out for them since he’s used to taking care of others, plus his whole tough guy with a heart of gold shtick really endears him to little kids.

M: Morning (How are mornings spent with them?)

Mornings with Yusuke kind of depend; if he wants to open his ramen cart early, and you’re awake, it’s mostly the two of you getting ready and prepping food for the ramen cart. If he wants to open a little later, Yusuke buries his head into your neck, leaving lazy kisses along your neck and jaw while the both of you just hold each other sleepily.

N: Night (How are nights spent with them?)

Yusuke usually cooks dinner for the both of you, he makes a whole show of it too. He says he does it selflessly but he always wears his kiss the cook apron “coincidentally” whenever he makes dinner. Afterwards, when the both of you head to bed, you’ll both spend the night giving each other slow kisses until the both of you fall asleep.

O: Open (When would they start revealing things about themselves? Do they say everything at once or wait a while to reveal things slowly?)

Admittedly, it does take Yusuke some time to truly open up to you. All his life pretty much, he’s been told he was useless and that he’d never achieve anything beyond being a delinquent monster, so it takes him some time to be vulnerable with you due to fear of rejection. He’s especially slow to reveal information about his true heritage. But once Yusuke trusts you enough to reveal his insecurities, he’s in love with you. 

P: Patience (How easily angered are they?)

Yusuke, while having absolutely zero patience with anyone, is very patient with you. Sure you go back and forth with him but even then, he never raises his voice.

Q: Quizzes (How much would they remember about you?  Do they remember every little detail you mention in passing, or do they kind of forget everything?)

Yusuke comes off as not caring or remembering details about you, but if anyone knows you, it’s Yusuke. He knows you better than you know yourself, and it’s mainly because of his attention to minor details, ones that you might not even notice about yourself.

R: Remember (What is their favorite moment in your relationship?)

His favorite part in your relationship was when you went to the beach with the gang and you and him teamed up to prank Kuwabara. It was honestly the most fun he’d had in a while up to that point and the delight in your expression from being so devious made his heart skip a metaphorical beat or two.

S: Security (How protective are they? How would they like to be protected?)

Yusuke’s super protective of you, the boy’s got a lot of enemies. While he doesn’t really think any of his demon ones would step out of line, he’s got plenty of human ones who’d be willing to mess with you to get to him. Not to mention you could just plain get robbed or attacked in general, Yusuke trusts you but he definitely shields you from any danger. As observant as he strangely is though, he is still a bit dumb when it comes to the fact that you’re looking out for him just as much as he’s looking out for you

T: Try (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?)

Yusuke puts a decent amount of effort into your dates, it wasn’t always this way. Initially, Yusuke and you would just have dates that consisted of going to malls/arcades/bowling/etc. and it was all good, neither of you had a problem with it. However for the first birthday of yours that you’d both be spending together, he was just planning for the both of you to go to a park, something small, when Kuwabara and Keiko found out, they gave him an earful. Now, he still does “simple” dates, but he always tries to do something fun or unexpected for your anniversaries or special events 

U: Ugly (What are some bad habits of theirs? (I’m gonna add arguments here because they aren’t on the prompt list I found))

Yusuke doesn’t have bad habits as he has gross habits. Like this man will probably burp in your face at least once (on accident) and it’s kinda just up to you to deal with that. As for fights, post-end of the series, you don’t really argue about much, you and Yusuke just bicker, but hey it works for you. During the series though, your heavy fights consist of you getting upset at the way Yusuke is always so ready to sacrifice his life (he does this a looooot)

V: Vanity (How concerned are they with their looks?)

Not to be fooled, Yusuke is extremely concerned with his looks. No one who purposefully slicks their hair back with gel almost everyday from the age of 14 isn’t. He tries not to take too long, but if he can’t get the coif right, you’re going to be waiting for a long time.

W: Whole (Would they feel incomplete without you?)

It isn’t so much as he feels incomplete without you, he just doesn’t feel worthy of being with you. He spends as much time as you’ll allow proving you didn’t waste your time on him (despite the fact that he literally doesn’t need to do that)

X: (E)xes (Any previous relationship experience. How does that factor into your current relationship?)

The closest he has to prior relationship experience is Keiko. The whole thig with Keiko was initially something of a hurdle due to the fact that they were kind of each other’s first love and they’re still friends, however, you got through it together and now Keiko is a source of advice for you, along with Kurama and Genkai.

Y: Yuck (What are some things they wouldn’t like, either in general or in a partner)

In general, he doesn’t really like underhanded people. He sees the validity of the strategy, in the sense of outwitting an opponent larger or more powerful than you, but even then the thought of losing to someone or defeating someone in an underhanded way is disgusting to him (see the entirety of dark tournament arc to see why he hates underhandedness)

Z: Zzz (What is a sleep habit of theirs?)

Yusuke snores. Not all the time, but when he’s really tired, the man sounds like an old car engine. He is LOUD and if you aren’t a heavy sleeper or already asleep, good luck getting any sleep because just when you lay your head down to relax, he snores loud enough to shake the whole of your apartment complex.

[dahlia-coccinea]

Wuthering Heights - Chapter 3

This is a somewhat difficult chapter to discuss fully in a single post. It introduces so many important themes and has the first glimpse of the story of the earlier inhabitants of the Heights. Sorry if this is too long - I've tried to keep my comments concise. It is difficult for me to not mention every tiny detail I like lol 

We learn that Zillah has worked at the house a year or two and is aware that Catherine’s old room is off-limits but seems to know little else. It shows that despite the emotional unloading that Heathcliff does to Nelly he is very reserved about all that has happened in the past. 

It seems the house has been ruled by chaos for years and there is an instinctual need for the inhabits to defend themselves against it. We see this when Lockwood first climbs into the box bed and closes the doors he says he “felt secure against the vigilance of Heathcliff, and every one else.” The need to shut out the world and crawling into small spaces is repeated later in this chapter with Catherine's diary details how, with Heathcliff, in an attempt to avoid the cruelty of Hindley and Frances “made ourselves as snug as our means allowed in the arch of the dresser,” and closed off the world by fastening their pinafores together. 

We get some other interesting glimpses of Catherine and Heathcliff early friendship. It is quite popular to say that Heathcliff is Catherine’s whip and he is a blank slate for her, but I think this diary entry is another example of their oddly egalitarian relationship. First, we have this scene of Catherine lashing out against their ill-treatment:

I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book. Heathcliff kicked his to the same place. Then there was a hubbub! 

That Heathcliff swiftly follows her lead certainly shows a reciprocation of the other’s attitude and worldview - or simply that if one is going to get in trouble then the other will follow suit. Still, I do hold that he doesn’t just mimic her or do as she wishes. We get a number of examples that show neither play a clear leader in their antics with one happening shortly after this incident. Catherine's diary continues: 

I have got the time on with writing for twenty minutes; but my companion is impatient, and proposes that we should appropriate the dairywoman’s cloak, and have a scamper on the moors, under its shelter. A pleasant suggestion—and then, if the surly old man come in, he may believe his prophecy verified—we cannot be damper, or colder, in the rain than we are here.

Here Heathcliff takes the lead in coming up with more plans to get further into trouble and it seems Catherine is more than pleased to go along with it. 

There are other, now iconic, details of Catherine’s character in this chapter. Such as this description of the box bed from Lockwood:

The ledge, where I placed my candle, had a few mildewed books piled up in one corner; and it was covered with writing scratched on the paint. This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton.

And later:

Catherine’s library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose: scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary—at least the appearance of one—covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left. Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand. At the top of an extra page (quite a treasure, probably, when first lighted on) I was greatly amused to behold an excellent caricature of my friend Joseph,—rudely, yet powerfully sketched. An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began forthwith to decipher her faded hieroglyphics.

Catherine holed up in the box bed and writing on every spare bit of paper she can get her hands on and scratching her name in the paint, tell of someone who has no one to talk to. She’s alone and is compelled to at least make sense of herself with ink and paper. Nelly does say later on that “there was not a soul else that she might fashion into an adviser” beside Nelly herself. Which is a poor adviser, considering how Nelly disliked her throughout her childhood. 

Adding to Catherine’s loneliness is the endless abuse of Heathcliff and herself, at the hands of seemingly everyone in the house. In this short excerpt from her diary, we are told Hindley’s treatment of Heathcliff is “atrocious,” and that now he is the new master they are no longer allowed to play, and “a mere titter is sufficient to send us into corners.” Heathcliff has his hair pulled by Frances, Catherine’s ears are boxed by Joseph and they’re both berated and verbally punished by him. Finally Hindley “seizing one of us by the collar, and the other by the arm, hurled both into the back-kitchen” where she says that outside on the moors “cannot be damper, or colder.” Upon their return and proceeding punishment she says she’s cried until her head ached. Consistent with what we later hear her tell Nelly, that Heathcliff’s miseries are her own, it is not her punishment or ill-treatment that makes her so upset but the casting out of Heathcliff. She writes: 

“Poor Heathcliff! Hindley calls him a vagabond, and won’t let him sit with us, nor eat with us any more; and, he says, he and I must not play together, and threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders. He has been blaming our father (how dared he?) for treating H. too liberally; and swears he will reduce him to his right place—”

Critics that suggest Catherine is glassy-eyed and naive idealist really gloss over these excerpts in my opinion. There is a constant downplaying of her abuse compared to the other characters among those that seemingly think she’s the only character with moral agency and therefore the cause of all problems in the story. 

I love how strange the encounter that Lockwood has with the book “Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First,” and the following dream is when first reading Wuthering Heights. Hardly anything in WH is superfluous and when rereading it this makes much more sense. This is quite an interesting segue into meeting Catherine’s ghost, and later learning more of her life. Forgiveness is such an important aspect in the book and will come up many times. Notably, while on her deathbed, Catherine tells Heathcliff she has forgiven him and that he should forgive her. 

I think it is amusing and also very interesting how in Lockwood’s dream he’s walking with Joseph (in itself is very metaphorical) and Joseph tells him he should have brought a “pilgrim’s staff” and that Joseph’s staff is really just a “heavy-headed cudgel.”

It’s unsurprising the appearance of Catherine’s ghost is so iconic. It’s impossible to discern if it is merely Lockwood’s dream or him actually encountering her spirit. There are details about her that Lockwood, at this point, does not yet know. Still, he does make many attempts to logically explain what happens. Either way, the imagery of the scene is both frightening and tragic. 

We get some really interesting glimpses of Heathcliff’s character in this scene. Normally he is very collected and if his emotions are out of control they tend towards anger, but here we see him truly terrified and unable to maintain composure after finding Lockwood in the room.

Heathcliff stood near the entrance, in his shirt and trousers; with a candle dripping over his fingers, and his face as white as the wall behind him. The first creak of the oak startled him like an electric shock: the light leaped from his hold to a distance of some feet, and his agitation was so extreme, that he could hardly pick it up.

Even after Lockwood identifies himself Heathcliff is said to have found it “impossible to hold it [the candle] steady” and was “crushing his nails into his palms, and grinding his teeth to subdue the maxillary convulsions.” It is interesting that Heathcliff doesn’t become so angry that he throws Lockwood out. It’s another oddly humanizing moment for him. An overly dramatic author would likely have him behave like a complete monster, but he instead tells him to finish the night there and not to scream like that again. This is a scene that I wish we could have some perspective from Heathcliff. Not only is he startled by a noise coming from Catherine’s old room but then Lockwood adds to his distress by rambling about Catherine saying:

And that minx, Catherine Linton, or Earnshaw, or however she was called—she must have been a changeling—wicked little soul! She told me she had been walking the earth these twenty years: a just punishment for her mortal transgressions, I’ve no doubt!

This and Lockwood’s further talk which makes it apparent he has snooped and glimpsed a little bit of Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s past, does set Heathcliff off: 

“What can you mean by talking in this way to me!” thundered Heathcliff with savage vehemence. “How—how dare you, under my roof?—God! he’s mad to speak so!” And he struck his forehead with rage.

Lockwood doesn’t quite understand this reaction saying:

I did not know whether to resent this language or pursue my explanation; but he seemed so powerfully affected that I took pity and proceeded with my dreams; affirming I had never heard the appellation of “Catherine Linton” before, but reading it often over produced an impression which personified itself when I had no longer my imagination under control. Heathcliff gradually fell back into the shelter of the bed, as I spoke; finally sitting down almost concealed behind it. I guessed, however, by his irregular and intercepted breathing, that he struggled to vanquish an excess of violent emotion. 

And later when watching Heathcliff call for Cathy through the window:

There was such anguish in the gush of grief that accompanied this raving, that my compassion made me overlook its folly, and I drew off, half angry to have listened at all, and vexed at having related my ridiculous nightmare, since it produced that agony; though why was beyond my comprehension. 

At one point Lockwood also believes Heathcliff to be “dashing a tear from his eyes” during their conversation. Of course, he is confused because he doesn’t know that one of Heathcliff’s few fixations has been looking for signs of Catherine for the last 17ish years. 

I’ve mentioned this before, but something that doesn’t happen in the book because Heathcliff never narrates it, but I think if someone retold the story or made a film adaptation it could be interesting to explore, is how Heathcliff came to find Catherine’s writing on the wall. She must have written it shortly before she talks to Nelly since she’s already considering marrying Linton, and Heathcliff must still be living at the Heights since his name is there also. When Heathcliff returns three years later we know that he takes over Catherine’s old room so really he should have discovered it the first night there, probably after having visited the Grange. 

@astrangechoiceoffavourites has mentioned this in one their posts, but another great aspect of the book is the background happenings that are very realistic for the time and particularly farm life. Cats and dogs roam about, Heathcliff mentions that the house goes to bed at “nine in winter, and rise at four,” and there are mentions of chores, etc. The details create a realistic backdrop and ground the characters in reality. I feel like the novel is never overly sentimental because of this and it really strengthens it. 

After Heathcliff comes down to the kitchen where the household is starting their day, we are instantly reminded how terrible Heathcliff can be when he swears at and threatens to hit Cathy for not making herself useful and working for her keep. Ironically, he tells her, “You shall pay me for the plague of having you eternally in my sight,” when, as I’ve mentioned before he has her sit at the dining table with everyone else. He also could just send her away if he despises her so much. 

I see a lot of similarity between the glimpse we get of Catherine Earnshaw from her diary and the current situation Cathy Heathcliff is in. Their situations are certainly different but both are in a similar state of abuse and neglect and both are quite self-possessed and antagonistic towards those that try to control them. They also are associated with books (Catherine filling them up with writing and Cathy reading) and have an affinity for animals. In this chapter it is mentioned that while Cathy is reading she has “to push away a dog, now and then, that snoozled its nose overforwardly into her face.” There are other similar encounters, such as when the dogs at the Heights come to greet Catherine Earnshaw upon her return from the Lintons. 

I’m sure I’m forgetting points I want to make in these posts. I’ll probably to a larger summary after I complete the book and try to tie together some of the ideas I’ve mentioned. Its also difficult because I keep wanting to bring up things that happen later in the book and I want to make a note of it now - but I’m also trying to reread as impartially as possible. Which is really an impossible task lol. 

@astrangechoiceoffavourites

[aurorawest]

⭐️ ooooh! can you please give a "director's commentary" on chapter 2 from "Foundations" where Loki and Thor are in a pub and get confronted by these two awful guys??

Yeah! Gosh it feels like a long time ago that I wrote Foundations!

Some general commentary about this fic - one of my struggles with writing Loki was how to get into his head and make sense of the fact that in Thor 1, we have that deleted scene where he tells Thor that he loves him, and to never doubt it. Obviously that scene was cut, but Loki’s entire arc really does bear out that he loves Thor, so I really needed to find a way to reconcile, “Never doubt that I love you,” with Loki’s douchebaggery in Thor 1. So that really was the impetus for this fic - what are some things that have happened between them that could lead to Loki’s love for Thor never wavering, but would also convince him that keeping Thor from the throne was a good thing, so good that he should resort to fairly extreme measures to achieve it? I wrote this fic a bit out of order—chapter 3 came first, then 1, 2, and I wrote 4 and 5 more or less simultaneously.

The men watching him didn’t seem like a concern anymore, either. They were the princes of Asgard. Who would dare attack them?

“Drinking by yourselves, princelings?” a voice said from above them suddenly.

So in chapter 2, I wanted to show Thor’s hot-headedness, and I wanted it to involve Loki, because I wanted to show a conflict between Loki loving Thor for looking out for him...but also hating Thor for looking out for him.

Spoken too soon. Loki’s head snapped around much faster than Thor’s did. It was the two men who had been watching him. Surprise.

With a smile that he hoped was charming, rather than sloppy, Loki said, “Well, I wouldn’t say we’re alone.” Wait, was that supposed to be clever? The drink was getting to him. The drink had gotten to him.

Thor scooted his chair over and slung an arm around Loki’s shoulders. “Only because we haven’t found company yet!” he thundered. Loki tried to slither out from under his arm but Thor’s fingers clamped around his shoulder, so he resigned himself to his brother’s drunken clutches. “Join us, friends. And well met on this beautiful evening!”

I tried to mimic the dialogue patterns of Thor 1 and TDW for this fic much more than I typically do. Since most of my fic takes place post-Ragnarok, and I really love the tone of Ragnarok, I draw a lot of my style and tone from that. But I wanted to give this fic a feeling of being set in the past, long before Loki and Thor encounter 21st century humans.

[...] The men looked at each other and Loki felt another twist of uneasiness. One of them, his hair a fiery ginger that Loki couldn’t help letting his eyes linger on, 

This is a very subtle (like so subtle that I’m sure literally everyone missed it) reference to Theo Bell in the novel Loki: Where Mischief Lies, who’s a redhead. I have a head canon that Loki has a thing for redheads.

elbowed the other, who was brawnier and uglier, with a nose that looked like it had been flattened by someone else’s fists on more than one occasion.

Could I have just said his nose had been broken? Probably. I still kind of like the way I worded this.

“Perhaps if it was just you here, Your Highness,” the uglier one said. Loki stiffened, but Thor didn’t react. Either he didn’t get it or didn’t care. But Loki wasn’t so far gone in drink that he didn’t understand, nor did he miss the way the redhead’s eyes narrowed at him. It sparked a flash of irritation in him—he was the prince, they had no right to look at him that way. But he looked down at the table, a habit honed in court, where it was easier to bow his head and dig his nails into his palms rather than argue with Father.

Loki digging his nails into his palms hard enough to draw blood has become one of his tics, the more I’ve written of him. This...may have been the first time I referenced it?

With a chuckle, Thor said, “It is just us here.”

The man laughed too. It was much less nice than Thor’s dumb, likable laugh. “Aye, Prince. You and your greasy brother.”

Head canon: Loki’s hair looks greasy because he hates its natural curl and he dumps product on it. He would rather it looked bad in any other way than be curly.

The smile fell off Thor’s face and he removed his arm from Loki’s shoulders. “What?” he said, suddenly sounding far less drunk.

“It’s not the grease we mind,” the redhead piped up.

Loki raised his head, sensing danger. It was best not to be looking at your lap when you knew it was coming. His daggers were a comforting weight on his forearms, but Thor hadn’t brought a weapon tonight. Why would he? Loki went out into the city by himself all the time, and he never had any trouble. And if one of them was going to have trouble, it would certainly be Loki—less trusted, less loved. Too pale, too quiet. Unnatural.

Loki is definitely an unreliable narrator here. He sees hatred and distrust everywhere he looks. There’s obviously an element of truth to that (as we’re about to see), but on the other hand, he’s been drinking at this pub for ages with no trouble. He knows the bartender. Loki’s mind really prioritizes negative experiences (I guess most people do but Loki, anxiety and depression ridden Loki, really does).

“No, not at all,” the man said. “Who hasn’t skipped a bath now and then? No, the thing is, we don’t drink with faggots.”

I remember after I posted this fic, I went back a few days later and added the tag ‘period typical homophobia’ because of this line.

The room didn’t actually fall silent, but it might as well have. There was a loud ringing, and it took Loki a second to realize it was in his own ears. His chest felt like something heavy, like the hammer Mjølnir that was kept in the weapons vault, was compressing it to nothing, and he was fairly sure that his heart had stopped beating.

Thor hasn’t been given Mjolnir yet.

The man’s grin was practically ghoulish. “Probably thinks no one sees him going into that whorehouse, the one where they keep the lads—”

I purposefully left it vague whether this is true. But since this is the director’s commentary, I can tell you - it’s true! Loki does frequent a brothel with male employees. He actually has sort of a long term relationship with one. The guy is in love with Loki. Loki is...not. There comes a point where the guy confesses his feelings to Loki. Loki never comes back after that. Later, on The Statesman after Ragnarok, Loki finds out the guy was killed in Hela’s purge. He feels pretty awful.

The scrape of Thor’s chair on the wood floor was deafening. [...] “That,” he said in a dangerous voice, “was not a very nice thing to say.”

Kind of an understatement, Thor.

The redhead took a step back. The ugly one, who’d just aired Loki’s—dirty laundry? Skeletons?—didn’t. He was mixing metaphors. This was something he’d preferred to think of as simply a thing that he just didn’t talk about, but now that it had been announced to a roomful of people, it seemed like something he should have been much more ashamed of. Surely people didn’t stare like that otherwise.

Loki is...not exactly uncomfortable with the fact that he’s attracted to men. He knows, or thinks, that it’s outside the norm, but he doesn’t think that he’s doing something wrong. I have a reference in some fic...somewhere...I can’t remember which one, about how Asgardians live such a long time that most of them will try having sex with someone of the same-sex, even if they don’t really think they’re attracted to people of the same sex. It might be in one of my fics for the Loki Rarepair Bang? Anyway, later, Loki will come to understand that. At this point, he’s still kind of like...I don’t know anyone else who likes this. I was really trying to walk a line between him being ashamed and him knowing, deep down, there was nothing wrong with him.

Then again, they may have been staring because of the look on Thor’s face. “Apologize to my brother,” Thor said.

The man looked at Loki and grinned. Loki folded his wrists inwards and fingered the hilts of his daggers, but he said in a low tone, “Thor, it’s fine.”

[...] “Best listen to your brother,” the man said with a leer. “Or maybe I should say ‘sister.’”

Personally, Loki didn’t find this insulting, 

Probably because it’s a terrible insult.

but Thor clearly did. 

Loki isn’t entirely comfortable with this fact. Thor sends mixed signals. He doesn’t have a problem with anything about Loki, and yet, he still gets mad about an insult like this. Obviously, it’s meant as an insult, which is why Thor gets angry - it’s not the content so much as the fact that these assholes are attacking Loki.

[...] Loki knew that a normal Asgardian should be offended by all of this. The disrespect, if not the accusation itself. [...]

But all Loki could see were repercussions spidering out from this moment, repercussions from getting angry, from standing up for himself, for fighting back. An Asgardian was supposed to fight back. But Loki knew that he couldn’t win either way. If he fought back, his father would say he should have calmed the situation. If he didn’t, everyone would think he was weak. And in any case, the fact that there’d been a confrontation in the first place would be blamed on him.

At the heart of a lot of Loki’s issues is this idea that he can’t do anything right. He knows what he would naturally do, but knows it’s not acceptable. He knows what he “should” do, but he also doesn’t think that’s acceptable. He feels caught in this impossible place where it’s literally impossible to win the approval of his father...which is the one thing he wants.

[...] In a blur, Thor’s fist swung out, connecting with the man’s face with a wet crack of bone and cartilage. The man dropped like a stone, but when he hit the ground he tried to roll away. His red-headed friend stepped forward, bringing a fist up.

I remember really, really not wanting to write a fight scene here, haha.

In a second, Loki was on his feet, holding out a hand that was suddenly grasping a dagger. The redhead jolted to a stop as Loki extended it so the point rested inches from the tip of the other man’s nose. With an icy smile, Loki said, “I wouldn’t.”

I very much love writing Loki wielding his knives.

The redhead’s face twisted in a snarl, but he lowered his hands to his sides. There was that taken care of, at least.

Thor kicked the other man out from the table he was trying to crawl underneath, grabbing him by one of the pauldrons on his shoulders and hauling him to his feet. The man took a wild swing at Thor and missed. In return, Thor head-butted him, smashing his already ruined nose to an unrecognizable, bloody pulp. Then he slammed the man down on the table, one hand around his neck. The tabletop splintered and bowed with the force of the blow. Their ales splattered everywhere.

“Thor,” Loki said warningly. “That’s enough. He’s an idiot—let him go.” But Thor was too far gone. The rage of battle, he liked to call it. Loki preferred to think of it as dumb, animal bloodlust. The man’s face was turning red while he wheezed, and his attempts to hit Thor were growing weaker.

“Thor.” Loki took a chance, lowered his dagger, and stepped forward. He wrapped a hand around his brother’s shoulder and pulled him back, though of course his strength was no match for Thor’s. If Thor wanted to kill this man, he could, and Loki would be powerless to stop him with mere strength. Sorcery, yes. But that was what had gotten them into this in the first place. And besides, Loki didn’t think Thor would thank him for magicking him. “Stop. It’s not worth it.” Thor bared his teeth and squeezed his fist tighter around the man’s neck. The man’s eyes popped and his wheezing became a thin whistle, then the absence of anything in his gaping mouth as Thor cut off his air supply.

For a moment, Loki studied the man. He’d thought—he’d assumed—that he would feel a bolt of horror, of a desperate need to stop this so a life could be spared. But as he looked down and searched for that feeling, he just found a cold emptiness. What did he care if this man died?

I believe that Loki is a deeply sensitive person, who cares and loves with absolute abandon...if you make it to the very inner reaches of his heart. Otherwise, he probably doesn’t give a shit about you. I want to show that here, that Loki has this very cold-blooded side. It’s not that he likes killing people or inflicting pain, but it doesn’t bother him.

What he cared about was not causing more trouble than had already been caused. About making sure Thor didn’t do something rash and stupid. And about not getting the blame himself for something that he hadn’t started, because for his whole life, people had been ready to believe the worst of him.

Here’s some set-up for Loki’s eventual scheme to prevent Thor from taking the throne. Loki knows Thor acts without thinking. Here, he wants to stop it. Later, he’ll use it against Thor. Here, Loki is very much fighting against people’s perception of him. He wants to be loved. This flips for him later, where he embraces what (he thinks) people think of him and really tries to become the villain. It’s not a natural fit on him.

“Brother, please,” Loki hissed. “Stop. Think.”

This is an intentional echo of Loki’s dialogue to Thor on Jotunheim in Thor 1.

And why should this work now, when it rarely did? But Loki felt the tenseness go out of Thor’s shoulder, and after a second, he released his hold on the man, pushing him away. The force of the push slid the man across the table and headfirst onto the floor, but he was moaning, so clearly he wasn’t dead.

For the first time, Loki glanced around the alehouse. If there hadn’t been silence before, there certainly was now. Everyone in the place was staring, and not in a friendly way. The look in Birger’s eyes was unmistakable. 

I used the name Birger for the bartender because I figured I wouldn’t want to use it for a more important character.

[...] He [...] smiled as though nothing was wrong, met Thor’s eyes, and walked to the door. Spine straight, shoulders back, the half-smile on his face that he wore when he didn’t want anyone to know how much he was breaking inside.

Loki is a practiced actor. There’s far more going on inside his head than he’ll ever let on.

He didn’t even know why this, of all things, should crack one more piece of him. Certainly, it wasn’t the idea of gossip about him. There was already gossip about the fact that he liked men as well as women. Mother already knew, anyway. She’d sat him down one day, several months after she’d noticed his eyes following not just some of the attractive serving girls, but also boys, and had the excruciatingly awful Talk with him that he was sure Thor had gotten from their father, not from her. “You know to take precautions to prevent disease, not just pregnancy?” she’d asked, and he’d managed to stammer, his face bright red and burning, “Yes, Mother, of course.” Honestly he hadn’t thought much about it, but the only thing that could have made that moment worse was admitting ignorance.

“Will you be my fester-man?” has Loki remembering talking about his attraction to men with Odin, and how absolutely mortifying it was. Odin’s side of this talk is telling Loki that whoever he wants to sleep with is fine, but he needs to marry a woman and produce an heir.

But Thor was here to witness this, and maybe that was what made it seem so awful. Thor, who meant the world to him, but whom he worried saw him as lesser. Lesser than his friends, the Warriors Three and the Lady Sif, lesser than every other Asgardian. Lesser than Thor himself. Why wouldn’t he see Loki as lesser, when Thor was going to be king? When despite this display tonight, he’d receive no more punishment than a stern talking-to from Father?

Loki had kept his cool, Loki had defused the situation—they were walking away from this with everyone alive because of him. And yet he was the one who everyone would see as the one who hadn’t done things quite right, while Thor, who’d nearly killed a man out of anger, would have his actions waved away. Loki’s circumspection was a flaw, while Thor’s hot-headedness was a virtue. Loki would never hold the throne because he wasn’t Asgardian enough, and Thor was too Asgardian for his own good.

Really the core of this section and Loki’s bitterness—Loki can do nothing right, and Thor can do no wrong. Loki sees his outsider status as both a flaw, but also as an advantage. He does feel he did the right thing in this situation, but he knows no one else will feel that way. Thor’s reaction was maybe not good, but it’s what everyone would expect.

It wasn’t that Loki didn’t appreciate that his brother had almost killed a man to protect him. It was just, he didn’t need to be protected, and he could see the outcome of this writ large as though it was scrawled across the front of the palace. It made him want to scream. It made him hate Thor with such a scalding fierceness that it scared him. He couldn’t hate Thor. But nothing was fair, and Thor never did anything about it.

He hates Thor. He loves Thor. One thing this fic really taught me about Loki was how he lives with cognitive dissonance every moment of every day. He holds these massive contradictory feelings inside him and they just sit next to each other, totally irreconcilable. 

The two of them walked the dark streets of Asgard in silence, Thor’s heavy breathing quieting the farther they got from the alehouse. [...] “I suppose you want to know if what they said is true,” he said, staring straight ahead into the dark. His eyes found the palace, shining golden in the distance.

Thor made a noise. In his periphery, Loki saw his brother look towards him. “I know it’s true,” Thor said. “I mean, maybe not the part about the…um, establishment, but you liking men, I already knew that.”

Swallowing, Loki said, “And?”

“And what?”

Loki stopped walking and it took Thor a couple steps to realize it. As Thor turned back to him, Loki asked, “And… [...] Do you care?”

[...] “Why would I care?” Thor asked. And then, “Did you think I would care?”

“I…” Loki hugged his arms over his chest until he realized it looked childish, like he had something to hide, something to be ashamed of. Dropping his arms to his side, he said, “They cared in there.”

Thor snorted and shook his head. “They were fools. I’ve never known you to put any stock in the opinions of fools, brother.”

“So you don’t,” Loki pressed. It seemed of the utmost importance that Thor actually say these words. Loki needed him to prove it, not with his fists, but on Loki’s territory, by saying it. Out loud. Unequivocally. Plainly.

Loki needs to be told things verbally. He needs people to tell him, straight up, ‘I love you.’ ‘You’re worthy.’ Etc. Which I think is why Odin’s ‘No, Loki,’ is so devastating to Loki. Loki places so much important on words and doesn’t really look at people’s actions (Thor, incidentally, is the opposite).

Shaking his head, still looking befuddled, Thor said, “No. There’s nothing to care about.” Then he paused and took a step closer. Reaching out to put a hand to the back of Loki’s neck, he said, “Loki. Even if there was, you’re my brother. And I still wouldn’t care.”

I remember really wanting to get this right. I think when I first wrote this line, I had Thor say, “You’re my brother; of course I don’t care.” But I wanted Thor to just...not care. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Loki, Thor just isn’t a bigot. But I also wanted the sense of like, even if he did care, the fact that it’s Loki would make him rethink this.

Loki wanted to hug him. But that vein of resentment was still there and it stopped him. Instead, he swallowed hard and just stood there for a moment, Thor’s hand cupping the back of his head while he felt something inside him splintering.

And for the first time, he identified it. It was the feeling of his jealousy and love butting up against each other, two immovable forces that wouldn’t yield to the other. With a flash of insight that felt more like seeing into the future, like a faint hint of his mother’s witchcraft (none of which had been passed down to him), he realized this battle was going to shape his life.

He’s right.

And right then, he wasn’t sure love would win.

Nooooo Loki, it will!

“Loki?” Thor said, sounding unsure.

He forced himself to smile, and as he met Thor’s eyes, the resentment receded. Reaching up, he wrapped a hand around Thor’s forearm and said, “Thank you.” There was more to say, but it was beyond him. It was too much.

“Nothing to thank me for,” Thor said, sounding relieved. Then, he ruffled Loki’s hair, which he knew Loki hated. But this old, familiar argument was safe, and they retreated to it as they continued their walk back to the palace. Loki smoothed his hair down and wished he could do the same with the cracks in his life. Something felt changed, and it was frightening, and he felt in his bones that there was no going back to safety, no matter how much he might try.

Safety is an incredibly important feeling to Loki. I return again and again to it in my fics. There are certain people that make him feel safe, and these are the people he loves above all others. You can count them on one hand: Thor. Frigga. Stephen Strange. There’s an element of physical safety to this, but mostly it’s emotional safety. There are people who will let him be who he is, and he’ll do anything for them because of it.

Thank you so much for asking!! It was really fun to return to this fic.

Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

[zertzertzhang]

Stand and Deliver: My Life Turned Upside Down CH.3

A/N: This is my first time writing on Tumblr, so please bear with me! I am usually active on FFNet and AO3, but since this fandom is basically nonexistent except for here, I thought maybe I could post my works for this movie here. The story is a fanfic based on the 1988 movie ‘Stand and Deliver’ starring Edward James Olmos, taking a deeper look into the lives of the impoverished students in East LA.

Eventual Angel/OC, and warnings of racial slurs with some physical violence.

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Chapter Three: Living Skills

By the time she rolled into the second week of Garfield High, Vianne was sure she saw the school at its worst. Had she been honest with herself, she would’ve thought she was beginning to get used to the rioting students. It was a surprise that she became somewhat good at blocking the excess noise from them.

Hateful stares and whispered insults about her ethnicity waned as the week dragged on. The initial weariness she felt from the people around her dropped as she kept to herself. Call it paranoia or what, she could sense the heavy atmosphere boring onto her back as she passed the lockers. It was hard imagining a whole year of silence. 

Vianne never saw herself as a quiet wallflower, but the situation at hand forced her mouth shut for far too long. The need to talk to someone had been building up since the day she arrived. If this was going to stretch out any longer, she could see herself  talking to random objects within her peripheral vision. As if the students needed another excuse to deepen the ostracization. In her own way, Vianne was in solitary confinement.

Wait why do I need them?! 

She shook her head, angry at her own slip up. There was no need for her to make any contact with people like that. Loneliness must've been a powerful force for her, for she now wanted communication from the very people set out to destroy her life. And it tore her dignity to shreds.

Biting the fleshy pulp of her lips, Vianne exhaled. There were still two more periods before she could jump into her car and drive home. Living Skills was next on her schedule, so she had to trudge across campus to her destination. The signs pointing to her class became clear as she neared the hallway. 

With five minutes before the second bell, Vianne discovered the almost empty room. It was custom for things like that to happen. Usually, people were either late or scrambling in at the last second. To her, that was a blessing. Any area could be taken for her choosing.

She spotted Ana by the side near the windows. The bespectacled young woman turned her head to look at her when she arrived at the scene. A shy smile crossed Ana’s face, and she waved. Vianne quirked her lips in an awkward attempt to smile back.

Ana was friendly, not just to her. A pang of guilt vibrated along Vianne’s chest. She felt a bit extreme in condemning everyone in the school; at least Ana made an effort to make her feel welcomed. It was because of that Vianne didn’t pull out her hair during Math 1A, so she owed it to her.

“Hey.” A soft greeting slipped from Vianne as she approached the desk. 

Ana shuffled some books to the side, creating space for her. “Hi! How was your lunch?”

Vianne sighed. “I’ve had better. The heat melted my sandwich.” She left out the part where she sat by herself for two whole weeks, not wanting to sound like some loser.

Her metaphor made Ana giggle lightly. It reminded her of the bells twinkling on the front door back in Napa; Vianne thought it to be rather calming. A breath of fresh air away from the screaming students was a surprising luxury around here.

“I know a place where there's an air conditioner,” Ana said. “You can come eat with me if you’d like.” 

The invitation caught Vianne off guard, prompting her to nearly drop her pencil. Ana still held her hopeful smile, like a lost puppy. That and the desperation to find cold air sold the deal.

Vianne grinned. “That'd be great. I’ll catch you after math tomorrow.” A satisfied hum left her as she leaned against the chair. It was nice to have a lunch buddy. 

It didn’t take long for the starting bell to ring. Mrs. Flores entered the class with a large trunk, followed by a hoard of people behind her. Everyone fought for a seat, breaking the calm atmosphere in seconds. Both Vianne and Ana resisted the urge to roll their eyes.

Mrs. Flores was a cheery plump woman in her sixties. Her floral dress was matched with a mint green camisole, making Vianne think of daisies and dandelions in a summer field. A pair of reading glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, giving her a jolly appearance of a librarian. Viane would reckon she’d keep a hidden stash of toffee under a desk somewhere for the children. 

“Settle down, settle down!” The teacher’s chirpy voice broke through the crowd. “I have an announcement to make!”

An exasperated glance was thrown at them as Mrs. Flores shuffled to the front podium. Her arms came up, hands clasping together in enthusiastic excitement. 

“I’m happy to introduce you all to our project of the semester,” she began. “There will be two parts, with each section worth fifty points. This will be a partnered assignment, so I expect you all to be friendly with one another.” 

Mrs. Flores gave them another knowing look, as if to warn them against their funny business. A few students avoided her gaze, fidgeting sheepishly on the chairs. To the side, Vianne looked at Ana, motioning back and forth between them. Ana caught the drift and nodded; it would be best if they could choose who they wanted to work with.

It was still too early into the school year for Vianne to be comfortable with anyone on the premises, but Ana had been the only one to show acceptance. She’d take that over anything.

“Each pair will receive a doll.” 

The next instruction baffled the class. Vianne stared on with wide eyes as Mrs. Flores took out a raggedy dummy from the trunk. It was a dress-up doll, with the color of its skin ashened by years of dust coupled with torn bits of its dress. 

Mrs. Flores sighed with strange contentment as she continued. “This year, the health department wants us to learn how to be responsible adults. As we are nearing senior year, the closer you are all to adulthood. And one of the graduation requirements is to pass Living Skills.”

Vianne didn’t need to hear the rest of it. Playing make-believe house was one of the projects required in Sex Ed class back in Napa, only it was to be taken during senior year. It would appear that it was happening sooner for her. Praying to whatever deity that came to mind, she hoped that she was allowed to choose partners. There was no way she was going to be stuck with a haughty, nose-picking man-child. 

“The fuck ma’am?!” Another shout rang from behind. “Who needs this?!”

A wave of murmurs agreed to his outcry, with some joining in. Mrs. Flores huffed, using her index finger to push up her glasses before glaring at the mass.

“If you want me to teach sex, then the right thing for me to do is to teach you the aftermath of it, too.” A light smile danced around her lips, a brow raised along with it. The boys’ cheeks flushed bright red at the comment, while the girls took a sudden interest in their books. 

Vianne felt the same sentiment, her ears tingling with warm embarrassment. Mrs. Flores was a lot of things, and bluntness was one of them. 

“Can we pick partners?” one of the girls asked. 

Mrs. Flores shook her head. “I’ve already made my decision last night about the pairs.”

Vianne’s stomach twisted at the revelation; she was already having a shitty time adjusting to the new school, and now she had to deal with a hotheaded student who probably hated her guts. Dred pooled down her back, soaking her in fearful anticipation.

Before them, Mrs. Flores took out a sheet of paper. Her mouth moved to speak, but was interrupted when an ear-splitting crash came from the door. It sounded like a dense mass falling onto the lockers. All eyes turned to the source of the sound, Vianne included. Another bang followed the crash, before all was silent. She sucked in a breath.

With a crack, the door flew open, revealing none other than the very boy who made fun of her days before in Math 1A. It would appear that barging into class midway was his style of rolling.His eyes drooped in lazy discontent, and there was dust all over his bomber jacket. Upon closer inspection, Vianne could make out the beginnings of a bruise forming on the corners of his left eye. 

Great. She shared another class with him, too. Oh goodie. Vianne was starting to believe that she was cursed before she stepped foot in LA. Or maybe she fucked up really bad in her past life. Because no one could have this much bad luck in one month. Mrs. Flores, on the other hand, seemed way too surprised at his grandiose entrance.  

“Well, well, Mr. Angel Guzman,” she tutted. “It’s a pleasure to finally see you grace my class with your presence.” Sarcasm dripped from her voice as she stared him down, not bothering with formalities.

Angel rolled his eyes with a click of his tongue. Sauntering to the nearest desk, he slumped into the seat, angling his legs wide open. Without context, one might believe him to be a gangster boss overlooking his new crew. The relaxed stance in his posture gave away nothing about his mood, but the dark look in his eyes spoke for him. 

 If Mrs. Flores was miffed by his disposition, she didn’t show it. “Since you’ve expressed so much excitement for this assignment, I’ll give you the honor of knowing your partner first.” 

Scanning the paper, her eyes landed on the very bottom of the list, and she spoke again. “You’ll be with Miss Yang over here for the project. Now, Adeline, you’re with Thomas. Ana, you’re with Daniel, Clarise-”

Vianne didn’t take in anything else other than the first sentence. Her ears rang, and she could see her soul departing her body for the heavens. This was the final nail on the coffin, pushing her over the edge of sanity. Her worst prediction had come true; she had the most deadbeat partner she could ever find in this school.

Her instincts had her look over in his direction. Angel’s gaze caught hers as she did so, however his face still held their impassive stare. Breaking contact, he moved to pull down his beanie again, shielding his eyes; he was preparing for a nap. Vianne groaned into her hands, earning a pity glance from Ana. It was the I’m-sorry-but-you’re-kinda-screwed look.

Mrs. Flores was still speaking, thus rattling Vianne back to reality. “-come up and grab your supplies! Please make a line and wait your turn.”

Half of the class rose and made a beeline for the trunk. Ana had already gathered hers and was now sitting by Daniel, leaving her alone. Angel was leaning against the chair like he was by the beach with his hands behind his head, and that told her more than she needed to hear. Vianne pursed her lips, hoisting her body from the desk. 

The teacher smiled too brightly when she came up to collect her doll. “Congratulations! It’s a girl for you!”

Handing Vianne a bottle of cleaning solution and a hair brush, Mrs. Flores patted her with a good-natured smile. It made Vianne’s soul twist in its grave. She turned around with robotic stiffness, and headed back to Angel’s seat. The young man took no notice of her arrival, continuing to stew in his state of trance. A toothpick hung out from his mouth, giving more into the lazy fashion.

Shit. I’m going to carry us both. The grim thought crossed her mind, and she winced. 

“Uh, we need to fill out the form.” Vianne pointed to the paper left by the teacher, snapping her fingers to get his attention. It was a fake birth certificate for the doll; Mrs. Flores was going above and beyond for the final project. Had it been under pleasant circumstances, Vianne would’ve given her kudos for her creativity.

Angel canted his view upwards, staring at her with mild curiosity. It was only then she noticed the deep set of eyes, with equally thick brows to match. His hands refused to leave his head, but his lips parted ever so slightly. Nothing came out of them.

Right. The guy never brings pencils. Realization hit her and she slumped onto the chair next to his. This is gonna be so fun.

As she tapped her pencil onto the paper, Vianne ignored the bouncing of his legs to the side. It was taking her attention away from thinking of a name for the doll. After another few minutes of awkward silence passed, she noticed they were the only pair that had almost zero progress on the first section.

Open your mouth and get him to talk, damn it! 

Scowling, Vianne turned to the young delinquent, who was actually on the urge of falling asleep this time. Vexation burned her mind, and she shoved the paper to his side. 

“Come up with a name,” she said. The sudden movement jerked him from his slumber, causing him to blink several times before his eyes settled back to hers with a glare. Vianne was not about to back down from a glance alone, so she crossed her arms, huffing at the dramatic display of resistance.

“I know you understand me.” The memory from last week was still fresh in her brain cache. “So come up with a name.”

At that, Angel smirked. “You’re the smart one. What ya need me for?”

Oh the little shithead.

Vianne returned the remark with a scowl of her own. “Believe me, I’d love to work by myself given the situation. But I’m not gonna carry you across the semester.” If the brat thought he was going to get an easy A because of her, then he had another thing coming. 

Her hissy fit seemed to have gotten to him; his eyes narrowed while he bit down on the toothpick. “Puta, you’re so fucking annoying.”

“What did you just call me?!”

“Figure it out, smart one.” A lopsided grin appeared on his face, though it was miles away from friendly. His eyes flashed, almost like a warning. But like that would deter her.

She was about ready to slap the paper into his face when she remembered the way Escalante would handle him when he got up all over his ass. A slight smirk painted her lips as she thought of an idea; if he was going to be an ass, then she was going to be an ass back.

“Are you simply trying to hide your illiteracy?” Vianne asked, her voice filled with over-saturated innocence.

Angel nearly swallowed his toothpick. “What?” The stare he sent her screamed a thousand red flags, but she held a hand against her legs to keep them from shivering.

“Oh, y’know…” she began. “I thought coming up with names wouldn’t be too difficult. Seems like it is for you, though.”

The muscles of his jaws clenched, darkening his guise. Angel’s nostrils flared as he looked at the piece of paper before him. Vianne could practically see the gears turn in his head. They were in a classroom, so there was nothing extreme he could do even if he was pissed. The thought of trapping him between a rock and a hard place made her feel a little better after the previous taunts.

Just when she moved to retrieve the materials back, his hands slammed on the paper. She flinched at the action, but kept her eyes glued to the desk, not raising to meet his.

“Camilla.” His raspy hum sounded quietly in the background. Had Vianne been further away, she wouldn’t have caught it.

“What?” She peered up at him, opening her mouth to ask more, but he was already looking away.

“The name,” Angel said. “It’s Camilla.” He made it sound like he was talking to a five-year-old.

Vianne breathed a sigh of relief and took the pencil. She began to fill in the required information about their ‘daughter’. He still refused to write out his part, so she relented for now.

“Camilla Guzman it is then,” she spoke to herself.

Now it was Angel’s turn to be perplexed. “Camilla Guzman?” He stopped chewing the wooden stick in his mouth for a moment.

His partner scoffed from her seat. “Well, you’re the dad, Angel. Unless you want me to have full custody.” Vianne rolled her eyes at the thought of having a daughter at her age. Ms. Lin would have a heart attack and be driven to an early grave. 

When she didn’t hear anything else from him, she feared her jokes flew over his head. Vianne raised her head just in time to catch a light smirk tugging at his face. Sensing no real threat, she went back to writing.

A clap from Mrs. Flores turned both their attentions to the front podium. The teacher had gathered everyone’s eyeballs towards herself, and she cleared her throat. 

“Since class is coming to an end, I’d like to make sure everyone understands their part of the assignment.” She paused for a second, before taking out another batch of files. “One ‘parent’ takes care of the doll for a week, alternating with their partners over the course of the semester. By the end of each month, I’d like a report summarizing the difficulties of parenthood. The rubric is simple; if the doll ends up in tatters, or if it becomes lost, then you will be automatically given an ‘F’. Keeping your ‘children’ in pristine condition and well-clothed is the primary goal. That’s all for today. Now figure out who’s taking custody first.”

Vianne looked to Angel, and then back to their ‘daughter’. This was a tough cookie, and she wasn’t sure she trusted him with not losing the doll within the first few days. 

“Rock papers,” Angel offered.

She wanted to guffaw at the suggestion, but logic told her it was a fair method. “Sure. Loser takes the kid.”

It turned out to be a horrible move on her part. No matter what kind of tricks she threw at him during the sparring, he either met her with the same level, or defeated her. If she used rock, he met her with paper. When she went for paper, he countered with scissors. At last, on the third try, she pulled a rock again, only to be faced with another rock from him.

Two loses and a tie; it was a no brainer who the kid went with for the first week. Angel sizzled with smug pride as he counted the points against her, his wicked grin broadening.

“Guess you’re not so smart after all.”

Oh fuck you. Vianne knew nothing good ever came out of that smirk. There was no guarantee he was going to show up after her week was up. For all she knew, Angel could easily ditch her for the rest of the year with the doll on her own. It wasn’t like he cared about his perfect track record. Her heart sank at the thought.

“You are coming back next week, right?” Skepticism laced her words as she eyed him. 

Angel clicked his tongue, raising a brow. “Who knows?” It was the closest to an answer she would get from him. And it was not reassuring at all. 

Vianne glared, hoping that by her looks alone, he would get the message. But her efforts were in vain. Angel soon reverted back to napping for the rest of the class, not wasting a second longer on her.

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A/N: As per usual, shoutout to @classic80sand90smovieloves2 for encouraging and helping me get over writers block and whatnot ;) 

And thank you to all my followers who happened upon this piece in the sea of posts here on tumblr :p I love y’all and hope I didn’t disappoint!

[raysofcrosby]

LITTLE DO YOU KNOW PT. 9

"𝘐 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘩𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘺 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘺 𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦." ━ 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐬𝐨𝐧, 𝐒𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫

gif credit (x)

series masterlist

requested: yes | no

warnings: cussing and angst, but nothing else tbh.

word count: 5,294 [of un-proofread material lol sorry]

authors note: HI EVERYONE!!! First off, I just want to wish you all a Happy Holiday season! I honestly didn’t think i was going to get anything out, but work has been extremely stressful and i needed to write and voila, part 9 lmfao. there’s only three more parts of the series left and i can’t believe it’s almost over! thank you to anyone who’s reblogged, liked, sent in a message, written in their tags or even took the time to read any part of this series– i love you all. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all! I hope you all have an amazing day and enjoy part 9!

Avoiding Jamie and Tyler after the shitshow that took place in Tyler's house Friday night, was your number one priority. Thankfully, the Stars were out of town in Nashville and weren't due to come back to Dallas until early Sunday morning. You weren't sure if Tyler still wanted you to watch the dogs, so the next morning after everything happened, you took an uber to his place. When you walked inside to feed the dogs and take them on their walk, they were nowhere to be found. You walked around the house, whistling and even going as far as to squeaking Gerry's favorite toy– but no sound of paws against the floor or the jingling of their collars. When you went to leave, the front door opened and John walked in, holding onto the three dogs' leashes. He looked surprised to see you and the moment the two of you made eye contact, you realized that he knew.

And it was obvious that your dog sitting services were no longer needed, so you rushed back to campus and practically locked yourself in a library study room, throwing yourself into studying for your last final.

If you thought back on it hard enough, you weren't sure if that was the final straw that jutted the metaphorical knife deeper into your stomach or what happened Sunday night when Big Rig came over. You had once again, spent the entire day throwing yourself into studying for your finals and by the time you returned back to your dorm room, Kennedy was ordering dinner in for her and Big Rig.

You hadn't meant to completely shut her out, but you honestly felt a little embarrassed at how everything came crumbling down. Tyler had yet to reach out, he pretty much fired you from taking care of the dogs, you're pretty sure that your brother pretty much disowned you...and Kennedy, though not as straight-forward, had warned you of it all. The last thing you wanted to do was feel worse than you did now...though that logic isn't working, because well, you were feeling pretty shitty.

Kennedy was your best friend for a reason and she knew better than anyone that when you were ready to talk about it all, you would. So, unfortunately for her, but lucky for you, she was dealing with your sadness with grace– aka by not complaining when you had your playlist blasting through your headphones or not commenting on how you were watching the notebook one too many a time.

By the time Big Rig had arrived at your dorm, you had shut off your computer for the night, buried yourself beneath the covers, rolled yourself towards the wall and had been trying to fall asleep for almost an hour. You thought that you'd be able to eventually fall asleep, maybe while they were just going to watch Criminal Minds and eat some dinner, but the moment that their hushed whispers grew a little louder, there was no hope.

"How is she doing?" He asked, talking softly as he kicked his shoes off onto the floor and hopped onto her bed, his tall and heavy frame causing it to buckle beneath him.

"Honestly? Not so good. " Kennedy sighed and you could feel her gaze lingering on your back. "Neither Jamie or Tyler have talked to her. She's been either spending all her time studying, blasting sad breakup songs, skimming through The Notebook or sleeping."

"Oh shit...The Notebook?"

Kennedy was silent but climbed onto her bed as Big Rig shifted and unloaded the delivery bag. "I even called her mom earlier, just to give her a heads up before she came home for Christmas in case she notices that two of her kids aren't talking. And then right after, Jordie reached out to me because Y/N wasn't answering him and neither was Jamie. So, I filled him in too."

You couldn't even be angry at her for the fact that she told both your mom and Jordie about what had happened. Firstly, the two of them already had some sort of clue as to what was going on between you and Tyler. Secondly, once again, she was just being your best friend and looking out for your best interest– plus now you didn't have to have that awkward conversation once you went home.

"Yeah, Jamie's uh..." Big Rig cleared his throat and you could tell that he was either trying to avoid talking about something or just trying to figure out how to say it.

"Was it bad yesterday?"

"Horrible," he sighed and shifted on the bed again, probably lying back. "Everyone knows."

"Everyone knows?" She asked, the confusion in her voice evident. "As in...they know about Y/N and Tyler?"

"They know everything."

"Jesus Christ! Is Jamie that fucking petty and pissed that he went and blabbered about it to the whole team?" She caught her voice elevating and stopped, placing their food off to the side. "I'm going to kill him. What an asshole and to do that to his own–"

"It wasn't Jamie."

"Then who–"

"Well, I mean, Bish was with Jamie when he...walked in on the two of them, so Jamie told Bish– but he already kind of had a feeling because Jamie said something about it." Big Rig cleared his throat again. "But no, it was some fan account on Instagram for wags, I guess?"

"Explain, now."

You heard him sigh and you contemplated making it known that you were wide awake, but you had to admit to yourself that you were a little bit interested.

"So it some small fan account for wags of the team, I guess. Anyway, so they make a post and they have pictures of Y/N and Tyler from nights we all went to the bar, to pictures of him picking her up from A.B.C. and even his Halloween party. It was like... spam of almost 10 pictures and you can see how close they are and it's not hard to guess that they have something going on."

"Okay, and how does this tie into the whole team finding out?"

"Everyone got tagged in it. Players, girlfriends, wives, I think even Tyler's family and Y/N too. By the time the plane took off, it was kind of common knowledge."

Your heart was racing against your chest and it felt like it could explode at any minute. Everyone on the team and their significant others knew, which meant the coaches and training staff probably knew. How the hell were you supposed to show your face in the locker room tomorrow without wanting to just disappear into thin air?

"Shit, this is pretty much Worst-case scenario. How is she supposed to walk into a room and treat them all for their weak bones when they all know about her and Tyler?" Kennedy sighed her gaze on you.

"I mean...I don't think anyone judges her for it, because she's still Y/N to them, you know?"

"It doesn't matter, J. Even if she's still just Y/N, they'll still probably look at her and think– 'oh wow, she's been boning our teammate. there's another notch on the belt.' And I know they're your friends, but with Tyler's reputation and all males sharing the same brain– you can't tell me that it's not true."

Big Rig was silent for a few moments before deciding to speak again. "The game was even worse. He and Tyler are barely speaking, the tension between them on the ice was obvious as hell. Add in the confusion with Montgomery being fired and the Instagram was the cherry on top of a Sunday that nobody wants."

"Was it that bad? The two of them?"

"A few of the guys and I were talking on the plane ride back and we're all afraid that something is going to happen at practice or in the middle of a game or something and the tension between them with just make the two of them implode."

"And that would be another worst-case scenario come true," Kennedy sighed again. "God, this is such a mess."

That was all you were able to stand before you sat yourself up and turned towards the two of them. You took in their shocked appearances and you knew that they had thought you were asleep and that if you weren't they wouldn't have had this entire conversation with you in the room.

"I'm sorry," you said, your bottom lip starting to tremble no matter how hard you tried to fight it. "It's all my fault that everything is so messed up because I'm just some stupid little girl with a stupid crush and I ruined a friendship and your team chemistry."

Kennedy looked at Big Rig and got up off of her bed and walked over to your bed. "This is in no way, shape or form your fault, Y/N. I want you to get that through your head right now. " She grabbed one of your hands and tugged on it, causing you to look at her. "Tyler is a big boy, he knew what he was doing and he knew the consequences of his actions. So you are not going to put the full blame on yourself."

"She's right," Big Rig spoke up, sitting up in her bed. "Besides, I don't think that they hate each other. I just think that Jamie is probably a little bit embarrassed because he feels like everyone knew what was going on and he didn't. Especially since Jordie and Bish both had their suspicions about it."

"See?" Kennedy smiled, squeezing your hand again. "Your big brother is just letting his itty bitty man pride get in the way of his common sense."

"He probably also thinks that Tyler was taking advantage of you," he cleared his throat, and his cheeks turned a hint of pink at his insinuation of yours and Tyler's relationship. "Especially since he's older and that Jamie trusted him to be like a brother to you whenever he wasn't around."

As comforting as they tried to make their words, they did nothing but only make you feel worse and that you were responsible for everything that had happened. You sniffled and shook your head, looking at the two of them. "I don't think I can finish the internship, not when everybody knows."

Kennedy was about to say something, only to be cut off by the sound of Big Rig's feet thumping against the floor. He had hopped off of the bed and nudged Kennedy to the side, standing in front of you. He tilted your chin up and made you look at him, seriousness written all over his face. "Absolutely fucking not. You are not going to let some tatted doofus make you quit, okay? This is your dream and as your second best friend, I'll be damned if I let you quit, got it?"

"Got it." You smiled and nodded as Kennedy reached in and wiped a tear from your cheek.

Big Rig smiled and patted the side of your cheek. "Good, now come eat some of this food with us."

❒❒❒❒

It turns out that your little bonding night with Big Rig and Kennedy was exactly what you needed. It wasn't a magical cure to fix everything, but it made you fall asleep a little easier that night. And when you woke up the next morning, you were ready to take on your last final just before you'd head off to the arena for the game. When you sat down to take your final, you felt confident in yourself and slightly more relaxed and at ease than you had been the last two days. However, that all changed the moment your Physiology and Anatomy final was placed in front of you and the time to take your test began. It was smooth sailing up until halfway through when you came upon a question that brought out a memory from your many study sessions with Tyler.

For this particular question, you had to identify and label abdominopelvic quadrants, then their divisions, as well as the planes of the body. And the moment you stared at the outlined body and the lines waiting to be filled and identified, your eyes brimmed with tears at the memory of Tyler.

How when you walked into his house that afternoon and ready to study, he was already making the two of you lunch– 'brain food for my brainiac!' And when it came time to label the quadrants and planes, you realized you had forgotten the sheet your professor had given you, at your dorm. Tyler, being as brazen as he was, stood up off of the couch, took off his shirt, held out his arms to his sides, looked at you with a crooked, goofy grin and said, 'go ahead, paint on me like one of your french boys.' And when you corrected him on what the actual movie quote was supposed to be, he just stuck his tongue out at you and said, 'turn me into a masterpiece.' And it took every bit of self-restraint that you had in your body to refrain from telling him that he already was.

When you wrapped up your final and started to make your way to your dorm room to meet Big Rig so the two of you could head to the arena, your next big dilemma crossed your mind: all of the dorms were closing in two days and you had nowhere to stay. You were originally supposed to stay with Jamie and Katie at his place until the two of you were going to fly home together, but you doubt that's an option anymore. But that was another problem for another day and you weren't going to worry about it until later because your only important issue today, would be how you would carry on in the training room today.

When it came time to enter the training room, Big Rig offered to walk in with you, but you told him that if you were going to do this, you would do it yourself and then you ushered him off towards the locker room. You expected your feet to move towards the door and open it before walking inside, but the longer you stared at it, the more frozen you were. You could hear the muffled voices mingling together on the other side of the door, which only made your heart race and the knot in your stomach tangle and tightens. The locker room door opened behind you and you froze, hoping that it wasn't Jamie or Tyler.

"You're still standing here?"

You turned to look at Big Rig, who was now dressed down from his suit and wearing some shorts and a shirt. "You act like I've been standing here for ten minutes."

"Try five, Y/N." He sighed and walked ahead of you, pushing the door halfway open and turning to you, nodding his head towards the door. "Come on, if there's one person who's one-hundred percent on your side, it's me."

You wanted to run into him and hug him tight, but you settled with thanking the Universe for sending Jamie Oleksiak your way before you followed him into the training room. As expected, the immediate conversation stalls, but only for a short second before it picks back up again. And if you weren't so focused on noticing any kind of difference, you might not have noticed that it paused at all. One thing that was extremely obvious though, was the way that all of the boys were looking at you. Sure, they were friendly, that's their character– but you could still see it in every pair of eyes, the fact that they knew about you and Tyler.

And you couldn't help but feel like they were judging you for it.

Klinger was the first one to come up to you while you were preparing Big Rig for his stretches, and you just had an overwhelming urge to hug the swede, but you resisted. "How did your final go, Y/N?" He asked, stopping by and leaning against the table Big Rig was sitting on.

It felt like things might ease back into normality, just based on his normal question and the conversations going on around you– it was like a weight off of your shoulders. "I bet that you aced it," Big Rig said, poking at you with his foot. "You're the genius Benn after all. You and Jenny must have the brains because I don't know what Jordie and Jamie got."

Right, when you went to reply, the door opened and on instinct, you turned to see who walked in. When you saw it was Jamie, it was as if every eye in the room was focused on the two of you. Jamie didn't bother to look your way, making his way over to the cabinet to grab some ibuprofen. "How did your final go?" He asked, his back turned to you and his voice void of any emotion.

"I think I did pretty good," you replied, feeling awkward as he kept his back to you before turning away and walking over towards another table, not even bothering to reply. You turned your attention to Klinger and gave him a small smile. "Thank you for asking, Klinger." You spoke softly.

He gave you a nod and patted your shoulder before going off back into the locker room. Everything felt fine and the awkward tension eased slightly as you went on helping Big Rig with his stretches. Sure, because of Jamie's presence, there was still a slight stir on tension as if everyone was expecting the two of you to implode right then and there– but it wasn't anything that couldn't be easily ignored. However, when the door opened again, this time Tyler walked through and it was like the air was sucked out of the room.

You felt yourself freeze as you went to adjust the band around Big Rig's foot and he tapped his foot against your hand, causing you to look at him. He took a deep breath and then breathed out slowly before nodding his head. You nodded back, still feeling everyone's eyes switching between focusing on you and focusing on Tyler. After you adjusted the band, you went over to your desk, instinctively picking up athletic tape before sitting down in your chair, waiting for someone else to ask for help.

"Hey, John, how long do you think you'll be?" Tyler asked, barely brushing by Jamie to grab a heating pad before pacing it onto his shoulder.

"What do you want done?" John replied, looking up from a separate cabinet.

"My ankles?"

"Give me two and I can help."

Tyler nodded, adjusting the heating pad before walking right back out of the locker room, not even bothering to look in your direction. You were crushed and fighting like hell not to have it show on your face as you sat in your chair, gripping the athletic tape tightly. Soon, tapping your foot against the floor became another way to prevent yourself from giving in to your emotions and before you knew it, Bishop was calling for your attention at Big Rig's table as he hopped off. "Yeah?"

"Can you come over for a second? I need you to help me tape my thumb for me real quick." You walked over, your supplies already in hand and stood in front of the goalie. "How are you doing?"

"Good, especially now that classes are done," you smiled, exhaling lightly. "Now I get to relax...sort of."

"No, Y/N," he said, looking around the room before leaning in closer. "How are you really doing?" The way he raised an eyebrow slightly, gave you a hint as to what he was asking.

You were slightly embarrassed that he was asking you, but at least he wasn't being so blunt and loud about it. "Embarrassed, sad," your eyes lingered away from taping his thumb and over to your brother, who had a focused and zoned in look on his face. "Is disowned too dramatic?"

He laughs lightly, but his lack of answer lets you know that your feelings are completely valid. "I'm sorry by the way," you apologized, cutting the athletic tape. "For making things awkward around here."

"They're grown men, they'll figure it out," he shrugged, watching as you finished taping his thumb. "Don't worry about that, worry about you."

"Do you think I made a mistake?" You asked as he hopped off of the table.

He looks like he wants to say yes, or maybe you're just overthinking it. He shrugs his shoulders and gives you a half-smile. "Is it a mistake if it makes you happy?"

His reply lingered in your mind as you watched him leave the room before returning to your chair. You placed your supplies onto the desk and spun yourself around to face the wall, thinking about what he said and for once, not feeling all too guilty about your decision.

❒❒❒❒

You've never been happier at the fact that you had to stay in the training room during a game. You took solace in the quiet as the muffled music, announcements and cheers were on the other side of the door. Normally, you'd spend this time studying, but since you were done with all of your finals...you had nothing to do but play on your phone, make sure that the training room was clean and of course help any player who came in with something John sent them back to you for.

The game wasn't going so well the second period was almost over and Dallas was down 2-0. Kennedy was sitting with Katie and sending you updates on how Big Rig was doing, but other than that, you were too busy watching random videos on youtube. You're watching one of those astrological card reading videos when you hear the announcers muffled voices yelling about a hit, a fight and then bickering. By the time you were fully able to focus and take out the one headphone, they were done announcing it and the crowd was roaring– a mix of boos and cheers, you couldn't tell. Right when you went to go back to your video, a text message from Kennedy popped up.

"j took a high stick to the face, ty went to go fight the guy who kept trying to go back after j."

"j and ty arguing...it looks ugly."

You clicked on the message, ready to reply and ask for a more specific update when the locker room door swings open violently and Tyler walks in with a pissed look all over his face and blood on his jersey. You weren't sure if it was trainer mode, friend mode or that your feelings were coming into play, but you left your phone on your desk and ran over to him. "Holy shit, Tyler are you okay?"

He looked as if he was mumbling to himself, the anger still evident on his face as he ignored your question. "I'm just going to take your helmet off for you," you said, reaching up to grab his helmet. "Just to make sure the blood isn't coming from–"

As if he snapped back into focus, he stumbled back, looking at you. "Don't touch me!"

You were startled at how loud and angry he sounded. You've never seen him this angry outside of a hockey game, so seeing it first hand right now, was terrifying. But you needed to do your job, so you weren't backing down. "No, I need to check to make sure that your head isn’t bleeding, Tyler. So just let me–"

"Just– don't!" He said, this time glaring at you, the anger on his face still there, but the look in his eyes softening the moment they took in the slight fear on your face. "God, you're acting like...like," he waved his hand in the air as if the words he was looking for were there to catch. "Like some obsessed hook up!"

Your jaw dropped and as if he just understood the words that left his mouth, the anger started to fade off of his face and for a moment, he looked like he might apologize.

The door swung open again, this time Jamie walking in and stopping just a little into the room. His eyes took in just how close the two of you were standing together and he scoffed. "Of fucking course."

Tyler spun around and pointed at Jamie. "Oh shut the fuck up, Jamie. I stood up for your ass just now."

"You think fighting Draisaitl is sticking up for me when you're the reason why he made that fucking comment?" Jamie yelled, his voice getting deeper, something that always happened whenever he got angry. "You wouldn't have to 'stand up for me' if you were focused and knew where to pass the damn puck instead of daydreaming about getting laid!"

"Guys, stop!" You said, trying to move past Tyler to get in between the two grown men, a huge sense of deja vu washing over you. "Jamie, are you okay?"

"Oh, now you seem to care what I think? Where was this before you started sleeping with my best friend?" And there it was, the aggression pointing towards you– the real reason why he was probably upset anyway.

"I asked if you were okay, not for your fucking opinion column, Jamie." You sniped, reaching up and taking off his helmet before tossing it onto a table and going towards where the suture kit was kept so you could pull it out for whoever was coming in to stitch him up. "You have a cut on your forehead.”

"I am focused on this game, so fuck you, Jamie!"

"Really?" Jamie scoffed, shaking his head. "So you're not focused on the fact that you're gonna go home with Maisy and probably get laid tonight?"

You froze, just as you turned back with the suture kit and glue in hand– that one name sending you into a small panic. You looked to Tyler before looking at Jamie, who was just shaking his head. "Oh Y/N, you didn't know? Maisy's here. You know who Maisy is, you remember?"

Tyler shook his head. "What are you–"

"Don't even play coy, Seguin. Katie texted me before the game and said she bumped into Maisy, who coincidentally is sitting in the same seats that you got her last year."

At this point, you felt like you were going to be sick. You had asked Tyler about Maisy and he told you everything. How yeah, she was one of his main hook-ups last season, that he cut it off completely in the summer, it was never super serious and that they haven't talked since.

But Maisy was here in the same seats Tyler gave her last season and Tyler wasn't arguing back...so maybe he didn't tell you everything.

"Why is that, Tyler?" Jamie asked, raising his eyebrows. "Why is Maisy here? Did you get what you wanted from my little sister so you went back to–"

Tyler lunged at Jamie just as Craig walked into the room. "Whoa, whoa, whoa! What the hell is going on?" He asked, looking at you as the two fuming hockey players stood apart from one another.

Jamie and Tyler say nothing, only moving onto opposite tables as Craig points Jamie to sit down. "Y/N, can you help Tyler with gluing that cut? It shouldn't be too much."

It felt like your entire body was throbbing as you stood there, still trying to take in the information that Jamie just shared. You looked at Jamie who was fuming and glaring at Tyler. And when you looked at Tyler, his anger was written all over his face, but there was something else mixed in that you couldn't quite pinpoint. When you finally looked at Craig, you shook your head. "I think I'm going to be sick."

You pushed the kit into his chest before running out of the training room and down the hallway, finding the nearest restroom. When you locked yourself inside of a stall, you hunched over the toilet, the tears falling from your eyes and into the toilet bowl as the sobs wrecked you. Everything seemed like it would be okay, but what had just happened in the game tonight and in the training room– proved otherwise. There's no way you'd be able to complete this internship in one piece. You went to reach for your phone to text Kennedy, but only then did you realize that it was sitting on your desk.

There's no way you'd be able to go back into that room with Jamie and Tyler being there together– you wouldn't survive. And it turns out, bathrooms make pretty good hiding spots.

By the time you had deemed the coast to be clear, you made your way back into the training room once the third period started and you knew no one would be in it. When you walked into the empty room, you sent Kennedy a text, asking her to meet you in the hall after the game and then you spent the rest of your time wishing that the game would just end.

The Stars lost 2-1 and Tyler scored a goal in the third. Once upon a time, not too long ago, Tyler would've joked that he scored that goal for you– 'his number one fan beside his mom'– but now you couldn't help but let your mind wander over into if he ever told Maisy the same.

As promised, Kennedy met you in the hallway with Katie by her side. Katie was explaining all of last season of the Maisy and Tyler saga to you and Kennedy, but you wanted no part of it, so you zoned yourself out, staring at the end of the tunnel, wondering if you'd see her walk down this way. By the time both Jamie and Big Rig came out of the locker room, there was still no sign of Maisy and you couldn't help but wonder if she was waiting out there for Tyler or even if at all.

"Y/N, are you coming home with us?" Katie asked, giving you a friendly smile and ignoring the glare in her direction that was coming from your brother.

You weren't ignoring it though and though it was there, you knew how to read your brother and beneath that glare were hints of sadness. But you didn't care, you were still angry at him for the stunt he pulled in the training room and sad at the fact that up until today, he hadn't bothered to talk to you– and even then, it was aggressive. You looked at Big Rig and nodded your head in his direction. "No, they're just going to drop me off before they go to his place."

Your walk from the hallway and through security and parking to Big Rig's car felt like a blur as Kennedy and Big Rig were focused on their conversation. As you got into the back of the car, you leaned forward between the passenger and driver's seats. "I sent my mentor an email during the game tonight and I have a meeting with her on Thursday to talk about the required hours of my internship and see if I've met them yet."

Kennedy turned back to face you so fast, you were sure she was going to have whiplash. Big Rig, as clueless as ever, looked between you and Kennedy. "What does that mean?"

Kennedy kept looking at you, raising an eyebrow and you just nodded. She sighed and turned to Big Rig. "It means she's done being your trainer."

[siryaksalot]

Stealing from AI 

BOLD all that applies to your character I ITALIC all that somewhat applies to your character I STRIKE out what does not apply to your character

4th Wall Awareness: Some Cartoons have the ability to acknowledge that there is an audience or some type of people watching them, and they're working for a cartoon company.

4th Wall Interaction: Cartoons and users of this power can actually communicate and interact with the audience or people watching them, or the people animating them.

Accelerated Metabolism: Cartoons and users of this power can eat vast qualities of food but never seem to gain permanent weight as they lose it in later/certain events or shortly afterwards.

Acme Arsenal: Cartoons and users of this power are able to be creative and use anything and everything as a weapon.

Anatomic Construct: Caricature without any life-threatening effects.

Anatomical Liberation: Users may be able to detach their body parts.

Animation: Create soldiers, escape Portals, traps, weapons, etc. with art materials, like ink.

Antagonal Impairment: Violent rearrangements are impermanent.

Cartoon Constructs: Constructs out of cartoons.

Cartoon Creature Creation: The ability to create creatures out of cartoons.

Cartoon Materialization: The ability to bring cartoons to life either by creating them with the mind, or using an already created cartoon as a base.

Cyclone Spinning: The power to spin in a tornado-like manner.

Deflation/Inflation: Cartoon characters can be inflated, like a balloon, and then deflated as a result (possibly too much).

Destruction: In setting off an explosive, user can destroy a larger area than planned, possibly annihilating an entire planet. This often leaves only a piece of rock and a character hanging from a root.

Digital Form: User's may acquire this ability while going into the cartoon dimension.

Direct Anvil: Anvil will fall directly on a caricature whether they are still or in motion.

Dream Walking: Can see and jump straight into the dreams of other characters.

Dynamite Action: Dynamite (ACME) and possibly other explosives cannot cause any fatal injuries, while only causing the victim to be covered in black soot and surrounded by smoke.

Empathic Weather Manipulation: Manipulate the weather with your emotions, when your angry you make storms etc.

Elasticity: Stretch limbs or any other part of ones body to absurd lengths.

Extreme Inertia: Any subject/object falls at higher speeds than terminal velocity.

Fantastic Travel: User may freely travel between the lines of variant world faculties (i.e. picture frames, drawings, television, cyberspace, storybooks, reality, painted black dots).

Fat Expansion: User may become much fatter by eating lots of food.

Flat Body: May actually become two-dimensional, like a cartoon character.

Gravity Manipulation: Body suspended in space (i.e. air) will remain suspended until made aware of the pertaining situation of gravity. Also, sometimes gravity still works in space.

Hammered!: This is where a character is slammed by a heavy object (such as a giant POW hammer, or fat people) where they will then be slammed deep into the ground. This usually results in the character making a crater in the ground shaped just like the character and the object combined.

Helicopter Propulsion: The characters can use any part of their body to fly like a helicopter.

Information Viewing and Editing: To bring up and edit a person's information, such as removing powers, adding powers, or doing other wacky stuff with it, even edit their own.

Injury Immunity: User's do not die and are not truly affected by injuries that would otherwise be fatal, but will at least be annoyed or experience some pain from it.

Instant Momentum: Can instantly reposition their body in any location without moving, allowing something similar to teleportation.

Invulnerability: User's can survive situations that can be dangerous, like falling from a certain height or hitting hard surfaces.

Knowledge Manipulation: User can use events to manipulate the knowledge of other characters, leading one of them to take the fall.

Letter Generation: Just like in a comic book, in terms of using swearwords, symbols like @# or ! may appear above the caricature. This may also happen in surprising situations. Words like "BLAP!" or "BOOM" can also show, just like in a comic book.

Luck/Jinxed: Cartoon characters can either be infinitely lucky or infinitely unlucky, to the point that impossible outcomes happen to them either way.

Fictional Mimicry: Cartoon characters are often seen mimicking others from different forms of media.

Omnipresence: If the following someone, the user may happen to be anywhere the follower goes, possibly learning to fly for a moment.

Opening Fanfare: Appearance may cause music to be played.

Pain Suppression: Users can suppress pain until they notice it or until they need to let out a scream.

Parasol Flight: Using a mere umbrella to fly, glide, and hover to various destinations.

Pencil Warping: The user can grab a #2 pencil (Or another tool(s) that can write and erase) and play God.... within comical limits. (IE, Draw Tunnels, Holes, Erase such, mess with attacks, draw attacks, ECT.)

Physics Infringement: In the cartoon world, physics is messed within a lot of ways.

Pocket Dimension: Ability to draw out large objects from seemingly nowhere, usually behind their back or in a pocket.

Possibility Inducement: User can make impossible and illogical events happen.

Randomness Inducement: User can make very random and improbable events happen for seemingly no reason.

Regenerative Healing Factor: Recover from damage and regenerate lost limbs, organs, and other body parts. Some almost instantly. For animal cartoons, this is mostly seen only applying to tails.

Reversed Vocifery: When saying things like, "Nothing can go wrong," something wrong can happen. The character ultimately says "I could be wrong" just to prove it.

Ricochet Inducement: Users can cause people or object to ricochet in a cartoonish fashion. Enemies may also cause them to bounce instead.

Semi-Immortality: Cartoon characters never age. They stay exactly the same age over the years.

Sharp Jab: Slightest perforation implicates caricature to shoot skyward, screaming.

Shapeshifting: If the character is interacting with the animator, the animator can erase the body of the character and replace it with a new one - for example, Screwball Daffy.

Smoke Generation: When a fight is beginning, a gray cloud appears and covers the involved caricatures, with hands, feet and/or heads sticking out.

Spontaneous Musical Number: Users can break out into song and dance or cause one. As with some musicals, this can temporarily create a different world suited for the song, and have a variety of physics-defying effects.

Supernatural Condition: Be physically/mentally superior to humans.

Synchronized Movement: Cause another character to move in a way that is synchronized with that of the user, until someone secretly breaks the chain.

Targeting: When discharging a firearm, user can still cut through its target, even if it looks like that they missed by a long way (but not too far).

Tasks: Some cartoon characters are willing to go through a lot of trouble to pull off their personal missions. If they ever put these missions aside for any reason, they come back to them at some point.

Technology Manipulation: User can cause technology to do bizarre things. For example, the cherries on a fruit machine can turn out to be bombs.

Teleportation: Can go inside one tunnel or door and come out of another one. This usually results in two characters ending in different places, despite going through the same door.

Zip!: User may run away at very high speeds. Some cartoon characters, like Road Runner or Speedy Gonzales, have this as a natural ability.

Nature Manipulation: This can also apply to every aspect of nature, possibly causing volcanic eruptions, earthquakes or meteor showers when angry.

Flattened: In some cases the character will be made paper-thin. However, this can also be caused by being hit by large objects, like a train.

Wing Manifestation: In some cases, they can use two things or body parts as wings.

Energy Solidification: Sometimes, this applies to kinetic or emotional energy, making it appear outside of an impact area or a sudden change in emotion for a split second.

Magic: An idea that messes more with physics, and is believed to be magic, can be part of the cartoon's storyline.

Metaphoric Shapeshifting: The character will turn into something depending on the metaphorical situation like a lollipop emblazoned with the word "Sucker" (the character has just been tricked) or a donkey with optional braying (the character is stupid or being a (jack)ass).

Tagged by: NO ONE

Tagging: DO IT

[shoottomiss]

I kinda left this platform, but i felt like coming back to post this. I’m crossposting it from my reddit.

I don’t wish to reopen old wounds, but I need to get this off my chest. I hate Cleaved as much as the next person, but why the hell do we give Star so much crap character wise for the ramifications of destroying the magic? Everyone around her pushed her into making a decision no 15 year old girl should make.

Mina and her army keeping hostages within arm's length are obvious, and the two twits Omnitraxus and Rhombulous not caring who dies from their support of the coup were also overt culprits...

But why the hell do the rest of them get a pass from so many people? Moon stabbed her daughter in the back and completely lacked the foresight to see that Mina would take things too far. Yeah, sure, give the racist and her followers a legion of badass giant armor and Avada Kedavra swords. This clearly won’t escalate. Because of her, Star was put under more pressure, since Mina not only took hostages, but essentially inflicted many of Star's friends with an incurable poison- giving her far less options on how to fix things. Nice going, Moon.

And let's not forget the see-all, know-all jerk Glossaryck, who regardless of whether he's the personification or just the guardian of magic, clearly knew everything that was going to happen, at least to some degree. This all powerful being lets the decision of destroying magic fall to a teenager. Yes, Star probably should've have thought about more than Mewni when thinking of the consequences of destroying magic. But Glossaryck gave her no reason to think about that. If anything, he gave her less of reason by basically saying "the magic will know where to put everything".

But yeah, just let that responsibility fall onto a young girl. The ramifications of such a decision surely won't come back in her nightmares down the line after such vague hand-wavings of the consequences. God, I think I'd prefer a meeting with Bill Cipher. He'd probably give me more straight answers than the blue troll ever would. And at least I would know where he stands on things. Even if Glossaryck was trying to do good, he manipulated a teenage girl like she was a pawn into making a multi-world altering decision and didn't bat an eye or try to warn her against it. Yeah, he's "above good and evil" or whatever, but screw that. If anything that just means he's disconnected. Because he's so above it all, because he has become some nigh omnipotent god of sorts, that just means he no longer understands what it's like to be mortal, to fear to be killed by storms and sickness, to suffer from depression, and especially not the weight of a decision like destroying the magic, etc. He doesn’t understand the consequences of being human.

(though this is strictly about characters, I feel Nefcy was trying to tell us that societies weren't going to topple because the magic would... do something? Kinda like how seeing the ponyheads apparently means Star didn't kill as many people right off the bat. Both are hard to believe and require a heavy suspension of disbelief)

And then there's Hekapoo. Good god, Hekapoo is the worst of them. I don't care if she "begrudgingly" went along with the murderous coup, she still sat there and let it happen. Yeah, just wait it out in the Tavern Heka, it's not like you're the cause of all this or anything. She just saves the Butterflys to sate her guilty conscience and then calls it a day. She could've used her shadow clones and portal skills to save the hostages and injured, but nah. My work here is done! I did a good deed, so I don't have to worry about it anymore. And yeah, I know the Butterflys didn't even ask if she could help, but considering her attitude of "drink till I'm smashed and wait till this mess blows over", I think they knew it was a lost cause. It's not like it's out of character either, we knew she was a corrupt bigot ever since Eclipsa's trial, just like the rest of the council. If anything, I think she was okay with Star destroying magic because it meant a quick and painless death, rather than having to face the consequences of nearly getting a bunch of people killed.

The finale was crap writing, yes, but taking it for what it was, Star made the best possible decisions she was given, and was the most justified in her decisions, especially compared to everyone else.

Star was not in the right destroying the magic. But she wouldn't have been in the right if she hadn't either, because there were no right decisions to make. There was no third way out, not just beacause it was written that way (well, actually yes because of that, but I’m talking strictly in-universe) but because everyone's fuckups minimized her options.

Star, betrayed by people who were supposed to be on her side, coerced by higher powers like Glossaryck and that damn quilt (I mean it’s hard to choose not to when the big quilt of destiny says that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do), and pressured by extremist murderers, was forced to make a metaphorical split second decision. Either destroy the magic, killing the spells and magic council, and hoping everything else will be fine based on Glossaryck’s vague implications-but saving the monsters and stopping Mina now... or allow innocent people to die now and a murderous extremist with a nearly indestructible army to take over and fight a disadvantageous battle later on that will most likely resort in a lot more deaths- but keep the magic and not even take the risk of destroying it and keeping Eclipsa and Meteora (hopefully) safe. Neither of them were "good" decisions. Both had extreme consequences and grave risks. But, as the good doctor and my favorite character would say...

Also, P.S., neither Star nor Marco knew the magic would fulfill their "wish" as it died, especially not like how it did. Just... cut Star some slack on that one. Also, yes, Star treated Tom badly, but that's irrelevant to the finale, and a rant for another day. But to sum it up- why did Star turn into an asshole girlfriend when she selflessly swallowed her own feelings so Marco could date Jackie? Do Daron and her crew seriously not understand their own main character?!

[livlepretre]

for the writing ask! 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 30, 31, 32, 44, 48, 51, 53, 54 (any other advice?) - sorry for all the questions. im just really curious, lol

oh geez haha I will endeavor to answer!

8. Favorite trope to write.

obviously enemies to lovers 😈

9. Least favorite trope to write. can I list fluff as a trope 

12. How do you deal with self-doubts?

I hit publish the same way other people do impulsive things like jump off a bridge (I did that too once. woke up with nightmares about it for weeks). When you’re doubting yourself-- and I doubt myself all! the! time!-- the best thing to do is to steel yourself for like 5 seconds, take the leap, and then wait. Most of the time people are incredibly kind and receptive, and whatever plot point was causing the anxiety will either go unnoticed or will be appreciated by someone out there. I feel like so long as the writing comes from a place of honesty and isn’t about sensationalizing or taking advantage of anyone, then it will work out.

13. How do you deal with writers block? I let myself put the work down and don’t stress about it. I have a rule where I only write if I feel like writing. It’s a hobby for me, so if I decide I would rather watch The Office or go for a walk with my husband, I just do what I want instead. A lot of times that’s because I have writer’s block, but writer’s block can’t be pushed. 

If I am determined to write here are some strategies I employ: 

Chances are I’m stuck because I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, or I’m not certain of what a character would do. So I reread the story up until that point, make notes on anything I laid down earlier that is relevant to the part I’m on, and map out character motivations. Hopefully this helps me create a working outline that will push me forward. 

If I’m stuck because of trouble writing the story in a more profound sense, I put the story down and start something new and low stress. In other words, I intentionally start a project where the bar for publication is super low.  For example, both Love Bites and (The Stars Were Brightly Shining) are pretty much first draft stories. I would write the chapter and hit publish same day (most of the time). This gave me something fun to do that was still exercising the writing muscle but also gave me the opportunity for positive feedback and made writing fun again. 

If I can’t write at all, then I turn to reading. I read things that I really like, and I take notes on what I like about the story both from a narrative structure/plot perspective and in terms of the writer’s style and word choice. In theory we’re supposed to read a lot as writers, and writer’s block is a great chance to do so. 

And, eventually, I’ll be cooking or typing up something for work or in the shower and the missing puzzle piece will fall into place. It’s okay if that takes months. I’ve had 4 hiatuses on FE that have lasted 4-6 months each. So long as you want to finish the story, you will. 

14. What’s the most research you ever put into a book? ehhh probably watching seasons 1-2 of The Originals so I could figure out certain plot elements for FE. I do get sucked into research holes every now and then, but as they’re largely useless I try to scramble out of them as quickly as possible. (I say this with fear in my heart for the research I would have to do to write the 1492 time travel story I have in mind) 

15. Where does your inspiration come from?

Poetry, books I read and love, folklore, songs, my unhappy adolescence 

16. Where do you take your motivation from?

Honestly I get A LOT of motivation from everyone who reads and sends me a message. FE is a much bigger and much more arduous project than I anticipated, and the support has been a HUGE help. Also, for my other projects like SWBS, it’s such an inspiration to keep thinking about it and to get back to it whenever someone mentions it to me. I really do thrive on the community aspect of writing. 

Also, it’s turned out that the older I’ve gotten the more disciplined I’ve grown as a writer. I’m 30 now, and there’s a huge difference between my writing habits the last few years and what passed for them when I was 21 and writing After the Fire, But Before the Flood. 

19. First line of a WIP you’re working on.

Three broken ribs, a punctured lung, a broken collarbone, and a concussion, with bruising along her face, from where it connected with the side pillar, and along her throat and chest from the seatbelt. Two dead parents. A low buzz throughout the town: her name on everyone’s lips. - Nights at the Museum

20. Post a snippet of a WIP you’re working on.

Damon looks at her and cants his head to the side and he tells her, voice flip and unreachable as only his can be, “I see you’ve cheated death again.” He makes it sound like it’s him she’s cheated by not finishing the turn. 

She opens her mouth to respond, but what can she say? Death still sits heavy in her lungs. Smoke burns her eyes and blood clogs her nose. She could choke on the smothering weight of it all. On the weight of his expectation in her. His disappointment. 

“I never wanted to be a vampire,” she tells him, finally.

The look Damon gives her strips her bare. Somehow over the past six months she has let him in, and now that he is here, she cannot hide from him. “You never wanted to make a choice with your eyes open.” 

-Innocence 

21. Post the last sentence you wrote in one of your WIP’s.

well this is pretty spoilery for FE, so, reader beware: 

Rebekah has her pinned by an arm around her waist, her back flush to Rebekah’s front, both of them kneeling on the bed, while Rebekah reaches around and slowly fucks her with her hand. - Fairytale Ending

30. Favorite line you’ve ever written.

Right now I am very fond of this: 

Looking up into his face, into his eyes, gone dark and blue as the river back home when the moon was low in the sky, she finally admits the truth she's been hiding from herself for months. The thing she has been most afraid to ever, ever say, even to herself. Her gravest sin, which in this moment, feels like her redemption. "I love you." Saying it out loud is like the moment she drove the knife into her own side. - Fairytale Ending 

31. Hardest character to write.

Damon -- he has a very particular kind of humor and cynicism which I find really difficult to replicate (although I think I’m getting more confident) 

32. Easiest character to write.

Klaus-- literally there is nothing too extreme, it’s so much fun 

44. Best piece of feedback you’ve ever gotten. This will make like no sense but it’s from a creative writing class I took in high school, and the feedback was actually given to one of my friend, and I’ve remembered it ever since: “You have to use your avocado knives.” The context was basically he mentioned a pair of avocado knives sitting on a table and they never come up again. It’s the chekhov’s gun idea: when you put something down in the story, you have to actually use it. Everything in the narrative should have meaning if it’s mentioned, and work either functionally, metaphorically, or emotionally. 

48. Favorite genre to write in. Horror. 

51. Describe the aesthetic of your story _______ in 5 sentences or words. I’ll assume this is for FE: 

Gothic horror, where the blood is both in the grass and on the heroine’s hands. 

53. What does writing mean to you? It’s just something that I really, really like. 

54. Any writing advice you want to share?

I shared the bulk of it yesterday so here’s the rest: do what you want and have fun. 

[spnfanficpond]

June 2020 Pond LiveChat Recap - A Male’s Experience of Sex and Fan Fiction Part 1

@manawhaat​ (Mana) and @superfanficnatural​ (Mert) led a lively discussion about what it’s like to have a penis and how we can all improve our writing of the male experience! Shortly after Mert first joined, we asked him if he’d be open to answering frank and personal questions about what it’s like to have a penis, since he was our only (known) member to have one. He was enthusiastic to share his experiences and we are grateful he accepted our invitation! In the time we had, we didn’t come close to answering all of the questions that folks wanted to ask, so we will be continuing this discussion in a future live chat event! (If you have questions you would like to see posed, please either send us an ask or send an IM to one of our admins!) Because the most popular questions were specific to the sexual experience and how it is described in fan fiction, we moved the chat to the softcore-nsfw channel in the discord server. If you are a minor, you might want to check with your parents before reading this, as it is a frank and graphic discussion about sex. A rundown of the chat is below the cut!

Q: Mert, can you tell us a little about yourself and how you got involved with fanfic as a dude?

A: Welp not much to me, just an 18 year old penis-owning male that has been reading fanfic for almost three years. I first found out about fanfic from a friend that suggested it to me and ever since I first started reading, I've been obsessed! I didn't start writing until around early April this year, for I was too nervous, but ended up saying to myself, "You know what? There are no male reader fics on here so I'LL write them." Poof, my blog was born!

Q: In joining the fandom and Tumblr what did you see/feel as far as the fans being mostly female?

A: I'd have to say that I wasn't too surprised, but was a bit underwhelmed. While many female-presenting people seem to be attracted to the actors, first, and the story/content of the show second, the few male fans of the show seem to be the opposite. Although I love the show and all kinds of fans, it would be nice to find some other male-presenting gay fans to gossip with about how attractive the actors are. lol

Q: Have you been in any other fandoms that have had more guys present?

A: To be honest, no. Every fandom that I’ve been in was mostly comprised of female-presenting people.

Q: What’s it like being in a space that’s dominated by so many women?

A: I think that it’s a bit intimidating. I don’t share the exact same experiences as female-presenting people, so it makes bonding a bit harder, if that makes sense?

Q: What kinds of things do you think women in fandom could do to help make men - regardless of sexual preference, already in fandom - feel more welcome? We here in the Pond like to be welcoming to fans of all types of people in all fandom spaces, not just in the Pond. How can we make our space less intimidating?

A: In my experience, it depends on the man in question. Straight men are less likely to want to talk about how attractive the actors are, and more likely to be interested in the mechanics of the show. Gay men are more open to frank discussions about both the show and the actors’ appeal. Basically, just be aware of your audience and how invested in your conversation they seem to be, like you would be with anyone.

Q: Can you describe the sensations behind having a penis, and how it feels during oral sex?

A: Oral sex feels like a warm, heated blanket being wrapped around the penis, depending on how the giver hollows their cheeks or not, Usually, the penis isn’t very sensitive during oral sex, which is why porn is really fake. If the giver uses their tongue, then the stimulation around the tip of the head is what causes pleasure. The head is really the only sensitive part of the penis.

Q: So, emphasis on licking and sucking on the head is key, and deep throating is extra?

A: Playing with the balls, fondling them, or sucking on them is VERY pleasurable. Deep throating is hot, but mostly because of how the back of the throat constricts around the head of the penis. Like I said, playing with the head is the best way to tease. In fact, if it’s a male with a beard doing the giving, rubbing their stubble across the head is EXTREMELY pleasurable.

Q: So, just sucking on the tip alone, like a popsicle or lollipop, would give a man the most pleasure?

A: It is very pleasurable, but not quite enough to bring a man to orgasm. Men jerk from the base when masturbating because of the backwards and forwards motion. Think of it like a gear. The back and forth powers the gear, making the machine begin to work, and eventually leading to orgasm.

Q: The arousal and pleasure need to be built up, then. Sucking and stroking together with some fondling on the side if deep throating isn’t an option?

A: Yes. If you can’t take it to the base, just use your hand for the remaining amount and go back and forth at the same pace as your mouth. Fondling isn’t completely necessary, though it is very pleasurable.

Q: What is one thing you wish more women knew/writers would write about in terms of the male experience?

A: As a reader, it would be nice to have more writers writing about the male experience at all. The majority of writers and readers are women, though, so it makes sense that the majority of stories would be focused on the female experience, so I can’t complain.

For those who are interested in writing more from the male’s point of view, adding more description about how everything feels would be good. For example, when describing the female orgasm and arousal, there are all kinds of metaphors, like the string snapping and fires burning. Those things are representations of the orgasm and that same build up applies to men, too. Then when it finally releases, the feeling of an orgasm cuts off their breathing, even for just a second. We feel it in our toes, and can almost feel the semen transition from the testicles to the penis. Some men like to continue jerking off or thrusting through their orgasm until it becomes too sensitive and some men prefer to stop. Generally, our hips will thrust forward with each shot, but that’s not all the time or every male.

Think of it like breathing. Each shot of ejaculate is so powerful to the man that it's like during those shots, we only have the time to take mini gasps because we are so out of breath (once more, not all the time, and not every man). Pre-ejaculate does not always leak out of our tip; it's basically the equivalence of women getting wet. If we are hard long enough and it is straining, then pre-ejaculate will eventually begin to leak out. Yes, it is also possible for more pre-ejaculate to leak out DURING intercourse, though it is hardly noticeable due to the heavy amounts of wetness everywhere and they all mingle together and yeah. 

Onto the prostate. It is possible for men to orgasm without stimulation to their penis. The stimulation of our prostate for a long period of time can lead to an orgasm, regardless of if they are jerking or not, also kind of like women who can orgasm without clit stimulation (though difficult). 

Q: Do any of the stories you’ve read that women have written come close to the male experience of an orgasm?

A: I haven’t been able to read much M/M fan fiction, but most of them have been written by women, so they aren’t able to go deep into how it feels. All they can describe are the actions taken to get to the climax and what that looks like, which is understandable. But what “pleasure” are they feeling exactly when they orgasm? That is shown in a lot of female experiences and showing it in the man’s experience is one of the focuses I want to address and give answers to with this chat.

Q: Can you describe it for us, then? What are the sensations that happen in orgasm? Is it a whole body shiver? Is it the penis twitching slightly as the orgasm hits?

A: The whole body can convulse just like a woman can, though it’s more of a strong tingle than a whole body rock, depending on how strong the orgasm is. Also, the penis does twitch and swell, and usually when men “flex” their penis, the head grows in size slightly.

Q: How does that tingle spread, and how fast does it spread?

A: Think of the orgasm like the ocean. Wave after wave. When a man is about to orgasm, they know, much like for women. Every stroke gets them closer and they get to a point where they know how many more strokes it will take.

Q: Does the pleasure then spread from the penis out to the rest of the body?

A: It’s actually kind of the opposite. In the beginning, there is a tingle through the whole body. It’s like the nerves in the whole body pulse in the direction of the penis. Then, when it gets released, it’s like a bomb. The nerves in the penis fire off and it slowly spreads back throughout the body.

Q: For some women, it starts in the vagina and radiates outward, but it sounds like for men, it starts outward and radiates to the penis.

A: Yes! And when ejaculation starts, it all reverses back out into the body. (This information is not exactly the same for every single man on earth, but probably pertains to a large percentage. All men are different as all women are different. This is my experience though.)

Q: Does that mean that outside stimulation, like playing with nipples, scratching thighs, etc, would help a man orgasm more quickly as that outside stimulation radiates pleasure toward the penis?

A: Yes. This is why in porn, one person might suck on the neck of the other to add to the influx of pleasure and make the climax feel better. One reason why men love getting their backs scratched up is because that slight pain morphs into pleasure and it helps get closer to orgasm, much like women when their nipples are pinched.

Q: Can we follow up on the breathing thing? Are you physically incapable of breathing during each wave of climax? Or is it more like a winded feeling? Or is it more like the entire brain/body is so overloaded with pleasure that it’s just not on the top of the priority list?

A: It depends on the strength of the orgasm. We can breathe, it’s just not a focus.

Q: Can you pass out?

A: No, but you can be exhausted afterwards and fall asleep.

Q: Do you get blurred vision or anything like that?

A: No blurred vision, but it’s very common to squeeze your eyes shut.

Q: Do sensations change based on the strength of the orgasm?

A: They do.

Q: Is grunting really a thing that happens, or is that just in porn?

A: Yes, grunting can happen. Either it’s so hard that breathing gets cut off, or it’s so pleasurable that you groan or grunt out in pleasure.

Q: Do you come harder if you haven’t done it for a couple of days?

A: Much like some women, the longer we go without orgasm, the easier it is to climax (at least in my case).

This is where we had to stop due to time constraints, so we will be picking this topic back up in a future chat! If you have questions you would like to see posed in a future chat about this topic, you can either send an ask to the Pond, or an IM to any of the admins!

That’s it for this month! Don’t forget to submit your stories and your Angel Fish nominations! Want to know what’s happening in the Pond? Check the Pond Calendar to see what’s coming up! And, as always, if you have questions or suggestions, let us know! You can send us an ask, or send a private message to @manawhaat​ (Mana) or @mrswhozeewhatsis​ (Michelle) anytime!

[tanadrin]

Reordberend

(part 21 of ?; first; previous; next)

(BTW, as of this update, Reordberend is, by my count, a little over 45k words long, putting it in the territory of a shortish novel. That also makes it one of the longest SF stories I’ve ever written. It’s not the most popular thing I’ve ever posted on Tumblr, but it has gotten a steady trickle of notes. Knowing there are people out there who enjoy your work, even if it’s fairly niche, is the best motivation there is to keep writing. Thank you for reading!)

Katherine Alice Green The Guest Room in the Village Hall The High Settlement McMurdo Dry Valleys ANTARCTICA

to Dr. Eunice Valerie Gordon Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 IRELAND

Dear Dr. Gordon,

I am writing yet another letter I won’t be able to send, which, I realize might make me seem like kind of a crazy person. The only defense I can plead, I guess, is that the perpetual darkness of the winters here does funny things to you if you’re not used to it, and I’ve had a lot of down time lately that I need to do something productive with. I have already written to my parents, to a couple of friends, and to my cat, which leaves only you. And these letters seem to have a way of focusing my thoughts, so maybe it’s not an entirely useless exercise.

Where to begin? Well, first of all, I’m alive. That may come as a surprise. It occured to me not long after I was marooned here that perhaps nobody knows that. No one has come looking for me, and why would they? If any rescue parties did go looking for the Albatross, I doubt they’d come this far south. Not in winter. But I did in fact survive the ship going down. I don’t think anybody else did. The Dry Valleys People didn’t find anyone else on the shore, alive or dead. I try not to think about that too much, but, to be honest, it still has me kind of fucked up.

Oh, that’s the other things. I’ve made contact with the Dry Valleys People. I am, as the return address indicates, currently living with them. They have welcomed me, rather reluctantly, and I’ll be able to remain at least until the first sunrise of spring. This was not necessarily a widely popular decision, and I’ve come to learn that the political situation among the DVP is rather complicated. They have always guarded their isolation and their independence, and they’re keen to keep guarding it in the future, but there are some among them who worry how long that will really be possible. I think this is something Dr. Wright foresaw, and tried to warn them about in the letter he sent with me. But as you might expect, this is something a large part of their community doesn’t want to hear or even think about, and my presence here is definitely fraught.

As for my original mission… well, it’s an unqualified success, despite the difficulties. I’ve learned a lot. The language, to start with. You won’t believe this, but they speak Old English here. No, not thee and thou and maketh yon Old English. Not Chaucer, even. Older. From their books and what they’ve told me, their ancestors used the West Saxon dialect of Old English, as spoken about the year 1000 AD, as the basis for the language they taught their children. Dr. Wright knew this, of course. That’s how he was able to communicate them and win their trust; he showed an affinity for the same history and the same long-term perspective they cared about. If it seems weird that a bunch of people would move to Antarctica, forsake almost every modern convenience, and deliberately teach their kids a dead language that would be useless in the wider world, well, all I can say I guess is that humans have done a lot of weird shit for a lot of weird reasons throughout history. I think I am beginning to understand why the ancestors of the DVP did what they did. Some of them have tried to explain it to me, but there is a gap in our worldviews here that is difficult to bridge.

One of the DVP that I have befriended is a poet named Leofric. His sister, Leofe, taught me the language, but I’ve learned a lot more about their literature from him. It’s primarily an oral literature, although they do write some of it down. They like long, semi-narrative poetry that draws heavily on the imagery of the natural world, and I would say that it owes something to the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry they keep in their books, except that, of course, the environment here is nothing like the environment of England one thousand years ago. But there are still some poetic traditions they have inherited from those earlier examples. For instance, their world is harsh, and unforgiving, and from a certain angle looks like a world in decline. The ancient English (so I am told) were surrounded by great Roman ruins they spoke of as being the work of metaphorical giants; here, they have the ruins of two hundred years of scientific and industrial exploration of the Antarctic coast. And their world, too, is enclosed by a vast cold sea, although this one has penguins in it at least.

Aside from the language, the founders of the DVP don’t seem to have intended to recreate medieval English society. There are no kings. There is a semi-formal system of village headship by seniority, but the social hierarchy is very flat. Marriage, inheritance, and choice of occupation all take place on fairly egalitarian terms, and their strictest taboos surround the sharing of labor and resources, not sexuality or religion. I wonder how much of their customs are the result of gradual cultural evolution, or some deliberate effort at creating a planned community. There are lots of funny Utopian experimental communities out there, but most tend to fail after a generation. In a way, this one couldn’t fail, because they had no way to leave Antarctica. They had to make it work. Is this what a real utopian project looks like after six or seven generations?

But honestly, one of the most fascinating aspects of the DVP is their material culture. As you might expect, their day-to-day existence is profoundly shaped by the environment they live in. Their houses are all heavy stone, designed to trap scarce heat, and arranged around the village halls as a windbreak against the dry katabatic gales that sweep the McMurdo Valleys clear of ice. Despite this being one of the driest locations on Earth, it’s still a better habitat for them than the glaciers of the Antarctic lowlands, or the rough, icy terrain of the mountains--here, you can actually build, and you don’t need skis and snowshoes to get around. But, as a consequence, much of their most important infrastructure is underground.

I don’t know if the ancestral DVP brought the right tools with them or if they scavenged them once here, but they have accumulated a small stockpile of laser borers, ultrasonic chisels, and crystalsteel digging equipment that they use to carve out underground chambers in the hills as meeting places and ritual sites. But they don’t do their agriculture there; that happens in networks of buried trenches just below the villages, where they grow cold-resistant mosses and lichens to supplement a meat-based diet, and what seems to be a form of genegineered fibergrass they use to weave their clothing and tapestries, and to make books.

Their art is very beautiful. Their coats, books, and tapestries--even their stone carvings--all depict elaborate lineate forms of plants and animals, inherited I suppose from ancestral memory, since none of the organisms in question are found in Antarctica. They also make images depicting the mountains, of course, and the sea, and the animals that live on the coast; even some of the coastal settlements, as seen from far off. They’re often abstracted, but these images are geographically grounded: they’re not just “generic mountains” or “generic coastline,” they’re specific mountains, specific coastlines, and they add up--if you are exposed to them every day of your life growing up--to something like a conceptual map of all of Victoria Land. It seems that if you dropped an average adult DVP individual anywhere from Oates Land to the Queen Elizabeth Range, they could probably find their way home, even during the dark months of winter.

(Oh! And the dark months! You’d think they’d be depressing, but I never imagined in my life I would see such a sight as the aurora australis, or even the clear polar stars! I can’t describe it to you. Maybe Leofric could, if I could do justice to his verse.)

They’re very communitarian, and great emphasis is placed on making sure no one goes without, but the price of that is, apparently, extremely elaborate dispute-resolution mechanisms; for a culture without courts, government, or attorneys, they are remarkably bureaucratic. Each physical object seems to have its own laws attached to it. Some may be shared by all objects of that type--for instance, if you need an electric firestarter, you always go to the house windward of yours to ask if they have one. If they don’t, you go to the next, and so on; firestarters pass from house to house, as needed, but only in one direction. Other objects may have completely unique rules. There is a knife with an elaborately carved handle meant to be used only by left-handed people. I don’t know why; nobody I asked knew, either. But that was the custom, and it was scrupulously obeyed. As a rule, the more elaborately decorated an object, the more particular the rules associated with it, but the elaboration of the object doesn’t seem to connote anything about the rules. It only marks it out as somehow special. The rules themselves are transmitted orally. All of these rules at bottom are about making sure that resources are evenly distributed--making sure nobody has to walk too far in bitterly cold weather to find a firestarter, for instance--and even the ones that don’t make sense now probably were created for good reason. For instance, the southpaw knife. Their knives for carving meat all have handles that curve in one way, to help separate flesh from bone, and I suspect that one is the result of a left-handed steelsmith getting fed up with with tools he couldn’t use very well. The blade is that of a carving-knife, though the handle attached to it is straight. The handle was probably later replaced when it broke, and somebody needed the knife for a different purpose--but the custom attached to it remained the same.

This system of sharing is, if anything, even more scrupulously observed when there’s a windfall. We went on a salvage expedition a month ago and brought back some much-needed supplies, and they spent days working out what would go where, first to each village and then, once we got back to the High Settlement, each house in each village--and even then, this was just what went to who first. Anything that’s not a finite supply, like food, will get passed from house to house. Leofric tells me that a few years ago, a whale--an entire blue whale, actually--beached itself to the north, and they had to have a weeklong assembly (on the beach, next to the whale, natch) to decide what do with every scrap of meat and bone. They still talk about the arguments that went down at the Whale Parliament sometimes (for which their word is hwaelthing, by the way. Literally it means exactly what it looks like: “whale-thing.”). Funny thing is, they also very carefully manage arguments in these discussions. That’s not normally the case--if two people have an argument and what to physically fight each other about it, that’s considered their business. But when it comes to disputes about food or metal or tools, everybody is very keen to show how Not Mad they are, even if they’re actually seething about it on the inside. And if voices get raised, people get hustled aside, and the whole matter is dropped completely until everybody has a chance to calm down. This looks like a system that was either deliberately designed to keep fights from breaking out and feelings getting permanently hurt, or one that sprung up after some nasty experiences of actual fights. I suspect the latter. It’s all very informal, but there’s a lot of social pressure that enforces it. The price for division and discord in an environment this hard to live in would be death, and I think all their social institutions are built around that reality.

I will admit, this has not been the easiest experience. I mean, there’s the almost dying part, and the part where all my cybernetics are broken, and I had a bad bout of something flulike a few weeks ago and almost died again, but I don’t actually mean the physical hardship. It is a more isolating experience than I thought it would be, being the lone outsider in such a close-knit community. Everyone knows everybody and everything, except me. They all have their own jokes and stories and long-running feuds, and they can communicate a great deal to one another with just a glance, and I’m left wondering what just happened when everybody laughs at something, or a fight breaks out. I have struggled sometimes to learn the language. I mean, I’ve had no other choice, and it’s amazing what you can learn when your survival depends on it, but even now I still sometimes find myself struggling to communicate ideas, or staying silent even when there is something I might want to say, just because I can’t find the words. It’s infuriating not being able to express yourself well, and maybe for good reason I sometimes think they all see me as this hapless idiot who almost got herself killed, who they have to put up with until the spring as a result.

Okay, I mean, I kind of am that. But I am also genuinely interested in their society, in the DVP as individuals, in their stories and their history. But I feel like the best I can hope for is being kind of a mascot. Or a well-meaning but dim-witted pet. A Labrador or something.

Not that I haven’t made friends. I would say Leofric is a friend. The salvagers--Eadwig and Andrac--they’re friends. And I seem to have won at least the grudging toleration of the ones like Aelfric who initially wanted to leave me to die. But sometimes I think I’ve made a connection, somehow bridged the unbridgeable gulf between my life experience and the world of the DVP, only to find out I’ve done no such thing. I thought Leofe was a friend; but now she’s not speaking to me, and she’s left the High Settlement for one of the other valleys. I don’t know why, and the others just shrug when I ask them.

Ugh. This is turning into whining. Now I know I’ll never send it. Sorry. It’s been a long day. It’s amazing how tired you can get when your muscles can’t rely on your augs to help them do shit.

But I need to find a way to bridge that gap. I mean really bridge it. Because I feel like I’m starting to understand something the DVP aren’t ready to hear. Their ancestors came to Antarctica at a time when the rest of the world wasn’t much interested in it. It was a wasteland, so sure, let’s treat it as an international, shared territory. Nobody goes there but scientists and the occasional tourist. And during the Collapse, not even that--Antarctica was truly empty for the first time in a hundred and fifty years when the ancestors of the DVP came to its shores. But it isn’t anymore. And it won’t ever be a real wasteland again. Every year the mining consortia move a little further down the Transantarctic Mountains. Every year a new outpost pops up on the coast, more ships come to Port Alexander, more icebreakers cut through the polar sea. Antarctica is warmer now that it’s been at any time in the past. Heck, without some global warming, I don’t think the Dry Valleys would be habitable. But that means more exposed rock, more open ground to build on, more people coming to the continent to work on the mining platforms or the offshore factories, and one day, I think, they’re going to come here.

What will the DVP do when that happens? This isn’t North Sentinel Island, which nobody ever goes to because there’s no reason. There’s gold in the hills here--the DVP make jewelry out of it--and maybe other precious metals, and you could build a geothermal station on Mount Erebus and power a small town, if you wanted to build some autofactories. The Antarctic Authority exists to promote “science and industry,” but with a big emphasis on industry. And by science they mostly mean, like, watching penguins bone and building telescopes at the South Pole. Not soft stuff like anthropology. And certainly not protecting three valleys full of cessionist oddballs whose parents had an unreasonable fondness for dead languages.

I think Dr. Wright knew this. I think maybe he tried to warn the DVP when he was here, but back then the danger was even further away. And it’s hard to get people to pay attention to danger that seems far away, even if it might be an existential threat. And when dealing with that danger would require you to completely change the only life you’d ever known… well, that’s a hard sell. The DVP don’t really like change. I can’t blame them. But one day things are going to change here, and if they’re not prepared for it, it could get really ugly, really fast. It’s one thing to shut yourself away when the world is ignoring you. It’s another when the world comes knocking.

If I think I can persuade them, I’m going to talk to the elders here, Aelfric and Wulf. Some of the DVP have had very fleeting contact with outsiders before me. I think one of them should come with me in the spring, as a sort of emissary. I’m not sure who they should talk to, yet. Maybe the Authority. Maybe somebody in Port Alexander’s local government? Or maybe we should just try to tell their story directly to the world. That might bring the DVP more attention than they’d like, but better a little good attention now than a lot of bad attention later. I would have asked Leofe--she’s smart, she’s tough, she could handle the culture shock--but that’s not an option now. Something to think about, anyway.

Well. I hope this letter finds the imaginary version of you well, my love to the imaginary family &c, hope the undergrads aren’t giving you too much trouble this year. If for some reason you do find this letter--like I freeze to death on my way to the weather station in September and they find this document on my corpse--please forgive my stubbornness, my insistence on going on this stupid trip, and any worry I’ve caused you as a result. And if I really am dead, please tell everybody I died doing something badass, like, I dunno, fighting a polar bear. I guess those are extinct and they never lived in Antarctica anyway, but something along those lines. Make it good.

All the best,

Kate

[english-ext-2]

Hi Sophie! Based on your experiences, how hard do you think it is to get a perfect 50/50 both internally and externally for a short story in Extension 2? What kinds of stories and approaches to writing do you think/know get full marks? Additionally, if you were a marker, what features of your piece and others' pieces do you think made/would make them worthy of a 50? Thanks for all your wisdom!

Thanks for such interesting questions! My answers grew rather long, so I’ve thrown them under the cut.  

50/50 internal and external

The 50/50 external mark is certainly harder than a 50/50 internal. It may as well be in the hands of the gods for all the influence you have. Unlike your teachers, the markers haven’t seen the blood, sweat and tears you poured into your major. They don’t even know your name. Conversely, you don’t know who they are either, or what their preferences are. Your major arrives at the marking centre as a product that has to stand on its own merits against the entire state EE2 cohort - about which you know nothing - not the forms they’ve chosen, not their concepts, absolutely zip. You’re blind to the competition. This is of course without even mentioning the small but no less insignificant 10% weighting of the Reflection Statement, which needs to be outstanding too. (Scaling also plays a part, but I’m not sufficiently well-versed in that to offer anything beyond this advice: if you want that perfect external, make sure you’re ranked first internally.)    

The perfect internal mark is comparatively easier (which I suppose doesn’t say much considering how high I set the bar for the perfect external lol). But keep in mind that a 50/50 internal doesn’t make a 50/50 external any more likely. Some of my peers who did very well internally, with high E4s, were disappointed with their low E4s and sometimes high E3 external marks. Hard as it may be to swallow, it can end up being sheer luck that gets you over the line.

Doing well in the internal assessments comes down to a number of factors, including but not limited to your teachers’ marking preferences, your school cohort, and the effort you put in.

I was quite fortunate that one of the teachers who marked my draft in progress (the third assessment) historically liked my writing style. If possible, get to know the things your English teachers prioritise in their marking beyond what’s listed on the rubrics, and it may (or may not) make a difference in your final mark. As for your EE2 cohort, the better the competition, the harder you have to work. The quality of my cohort was extremely high, and the margins between students were tiny. To give you an idea: I got 9.5/10 on my Viva, full marks on the next two assessments, and squeaked into first in EE2 by 1 to 1.5 marks. It was a struggle the entire way to do my best for the second and third assessments, and I had to get the time management just right. Because yes, a lot boils down to the effort you’re willing to invest into a perfect mark. There’s no need to make a hard process even harder for yourself by not keeping on top of your writing and research.    

Stories and approaches that score well

People have all sorts of (sometimes cynical) opinions and hot takes on what stories appeal to markers, e.g. feminist, postmodern, counter-cultural, what have you. I don’t want to speculate on subjects that do or don’t do well, since that’s way out of my league. What I will say is that if you’re sincere and earnest in your approach, whatever the subject, you should be rewarded for it. (Not that you will, but writing in good faith speaks far better for you than cynically selecting a type of story in the belief it’ll maximise your marks.)

For actual evidence of things that markers like, you can’t go wrong with the HSC marking feedback (formerly known as the notes from the marking centre). Two examples from the 2017 cohort: 

“Students should avoid the overuse of adjectives and clunky visual descriptions”

Better responses “had a strong and authentic character voice that built and developed throughout the narrative”.  

As for approaches:

Originality

Around my time, I think convention had it that outrageously experimental postmodern stories were in vogue and tended to do well with external markers. That belief came in part from the short stories that made it into Showcase, which is a good time to reiterate that Showcase majors aren’t selected on quality alone; they’re a cross-sectional representation of what can be done in EE2. If anything, the postmodernity was not an end in itself but a good way of encapsulating the innovation, originality and “thinking outside the box” that markers like. It probably goes without saying, but clichés in the mould of teenage romances don’t play well. Markers are looking for fresh, interesting perspectives that ideally challenge, interrogate or otherwise question received wisdom. (Caveat: there’s nothing wrong with telling an old story well, though it would have to be technically mind-blowing to get you full marks.)  

Complexity

Your concept (and writing) should be complex, nuanced; something you could spend days unpacking. I’ve explained this before as developing a concept that’s deep enough to explore in detail, but not so broad as to be unmanageable. To use my major as an example - the umbrella concept was translation, but under it I explored a) the idea of translating reality into fiction, b) the translator/author relationship, and c) the value of translation in contemporary literature.  

As for nuance: black/white approaches to your subject matter aren’t going to get you full marks. To say “war is bad” through your major is fine, but if you’re going to hit your audience over the head with ham-fisted, heavy-handed metaphors and one-dimensional characters who suffer for suffering’s sake to make the point, then you’re not exactly endearing yourself to the markers. Didacticism in fiction can and will come off as condescending, and that’s the last thing you want. Nobody likes being talked down to, or having their intelligence insulted. It’s entirely possible to tell a nuanced story about the various horrors of war, from the immediate impact on civilians to the inter-generational trauma, without throwing characters into a stereotypical war zone and expecting the setting to speak for itself. You want depth and detail, because war is terrible in so many different ways. Don’t use your story as a megaphone to yell the same line over and over at people. Yell a series of images, characters and events that will move them to tears. (Anyway, this is treading onto the grounds of fiction-as-activism, which is another thing altogether.)

Ambitious

As the saying probably doesn’t go, if you aim for the moon you’ll hit a tree, but if you aim just for the tree you’ll never get off the ground. A short story that gets full marks will have vision and ambition. It doesn’t end where the story ends, but opens up a new world of possibility or way of thinking that the reader might never have considered before they read your story. The short of it is: say something!

It’s tempting to believe that ambitious short stories = stories that tackle “heavy” subjects like war, climate change, poverty, inequality, or any one of the social ills afflicting our world today. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing on those things. Choosing to do so would demonstrate your maturity and willingness to confront difficult issues. But it’s not a golden ticket. Writing about systemic racism alone is not going to get you full marks. It is entirely possible to pick something profound and butcher the execution. When choosing a concept, I would always prioritise things you feel most passionate about rather than their perceived legitimacy on some arbitrary scale of importance.

I wrote about translation, and literary translation at that. It’s not a hot button topic. But it was something very close to my heart; I knew that translation was not just about languages but also reality into fiction, and it was something I wanted to tell the world (or failing that, just the EE2 markers). So I did. A good short story can really be as simple as having something to say.   

If I were a marker

Authentic voice

If I were a marker, this would be the most important thing for me. I know voice can be a slippery concept for some, but what I mean here is the distinctness of a student’s style. It goes beyond the words they choose and the order they put them in; it’s the way the student expresses their ideas in their own words, and speaks through their major works. This is why I’m big on students choosing concepts they feel passionately or strongly about, because if you’re writing on something you love with all your heart, the more likely it is that feeling will come through in your particular voice. If you wanted another way to put it, it’s your “brand”, the set of qualities that makes your writing yours. Have you ever read an author enough times to recognise their way of writing? Like, you see a snippet of writing and think, “hm, that sounds a lot like Neil Gaiman.” That’s what you want with your major. Your subject matter might not resonate at all with me, but if through the boldness, clarity and passion of your written voice you can convince me how much you care about it, then I’d be putting you in a higher band.

Originality

To add to what I wrote above on originality, there are several ways to demonstrate original thinking: putting a new spin on or subverting old tropes, choosing to explore a more obscure field, telling historically marginalised and/or overlooked narratives (e.g. I once read part of a major that focused on Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth’s sister), even stories that resonate with the current social, political and cultural climate.

I think originality was what helped my major stand out. For one, I wrote about literary translation and translators, which wasn’t something that enjoyed much exposure in fiction. Second, most people think poetry when they think translation (the old adage of “lost in translation” most often gets applied to the vagaries of metaphors you commonly find in poetry), so for me to choose the short story form was an interesting subversion. Though tbh, I think people worry disproportionately about how original their stories are at the expense of telling a good story. There’s no need to push yourself into the realm of edginess for the sake of originality. At the end of the day, what you want is essentially a thumping good story. Sometimes it’s easier, and infinitely more fun to rework what you already have in front of you. I like to think of this approach in an Oulipian way - setting yourself restrictions within which you have to work. Surprising, I know, but boundaries can force you to be flexible.    

Authorial control

Something that I know markers look out for is authorial control - on the simplest level, they want to see that you’re able to keep your tenses and characterisation consistent; on a higher level, it’s about sustaining your metaphors and ensuring textual integrity. Put another way, your story needs to be coherent and consistent. A character you’ve associated with a crow isn’t suddenly associated with an eagle for no reason.

Another way I’ve heard authorial control described is keeping your story tight, contained. You’re not wasting words, the story progresses logically and smoothly; there’s a sense you know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. If you spend the first ten pages describing the weather and the main character’s appearance without any discernible introduction of a larger theme or concept, that’s a failure of authorial control. (Hot tip: your first draft doesn’t have to be controlled at all, and it’s better to allow yourself to be a hot mess than to get hung up over producing a perfectly poised short story from the get go.)  

Evidence of research

EE2 is about research and independent investigation, so naturally I’d want to see evidence of that in a short story that scores full marks. It’s one of those things that’s painfully obvious by its absence, but absolutely scintillating for its presence. For the former: if for example you’ve set your story in modern day Japan and have as your protagonist a typical Tokyo schoolgirl, but provide few, no or incorrect supporting details (e.g. landmarks, street names, the flow of a school day, cultural practices, etc.), then your story wouldn’t hold together and I wouldn’t be inclined to score you well.

Evidence of research usually entails great, sometimes painstaking attention to detail, and a comprehension of the subject matter that’s been fluently integrated into the story. To use my major as an example again, I did a lot of research into how translators related to their translations and to the original author, and incorporated my findings into my main character and how she felt about her translation.

Other posts you may find helpful:

An ask a while back about what I thought made my MW appealing.  

Another ask along the same lines as the one above. 

What I think the difference is between a 48 and 50. 

[jouchi-josei]

lot of feelings.

i managed to write this a couple weeks ago. (i don’t remember if it was before or after i ghosted everyone. hah.)

this is the raw truth of what i felt in those moments, writing what i’ve been so desperate to say. whether the sentiment behind all of this is still present now doesn't matter.

save your time from trying to help me: i’m kind of already a lost cause.

spend your time reaching out. to those who feel like they have no one on their side. to those who aren’t comfortable enough to speak up. to those who aren’t as lucky as i.

i was supposed to cover “Words Fail” from Dear Evan Hansen and post it, but lately, i can barely get out of bed without being in extreme pain, both emotionally and physically.

///// suicide & extreme hopelessness trigger warning //////

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKP9UdIcXFk

“Words Fail.” Not only the title of the song, but a reminder. A reminder that no matter how hard you wish to explain yourself through spoken or written word, there is only so much that can do to express your true self. As someone who is lucky enough to be able to explain themselves through words at a decently comprehensible level, not being able to do so is so disheartening. So exhausting. So… isolating.

Before coming to Japan, I rarely experienced that. I always had a particular metaphor or analogy that could help others understand where I’m coming from. When I looked at people, I could see it click in their minds: they understood me on some kind of level. Some kind of understanding was enough for me. I managed to do that through word alone.

But… I lost that. I couldn’t explain the crippling loneliness, the lack of motivation, the overwhelming insecurities, the inability to get out of bed. I couldn’t explain why my depression was so bad.

People kept asking me, kept advising me, kept… trying.

Long after I stopped.

Rather than taking the time to try and explain myself thoroughly, I merely answered with an, “I don’t know,” because trying to formulate a proper response was too fatiguing.

My suicidal ideation is as heavy as it was the weeks following my last suicide attempt. And I mean that: it is. People have been fighting to keep me afloat, and I do not want their efforts to be for naught, but it’s been real difficult when I have not only a lack of a will to live, but a strong desire to die. Lack of a positive + presence of a negative = overwhelming negative.

When I was physically separated from my amazing support system and suddenly couldn’t avoid my problems by sleeping, I was forced to spend more time in my own head.

I was forced to really see myself. Discover more about myself. And the longer that that happened, the more I realized how much I hate myself. How disgusted I feel when I think about my being. I merely avoided it by focusing on other people. But being here forced me to confront myself straight-on. And what an unsightly thing it is.

I mess up a lot. Over and over and over again. And I was forced to come to terms with: even if your heart is full of immense regret and you swear to never do it again, people still might not give you a second chance. And they’re not obligated to. You just have to recognize that you messed up. And decide to do better next time.

But I’m also at the point of: why should I forgive myself when they won’t forgive me either? Why should I cut myself loose so easily?

They’re good people. Amazing people.

I’m the mess up.

I shouldn’t share something people have told me in confidence. I shouldn’t betray someone’s trust like that. I shouldn’t... use "coping” as a fucking an excuse instead of just owning up to the fact that I messed up. I hurt people I care about. And I need to take whatever repercussions come along with that.

My friends have called me out on this, but I didn’t do anything about it until recently. Like, mad recently. And the only reason I decided to do something about it was because my defenses were so broken down, I was forced to recognize that, even if I had no ill-intention, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt others.

My mom would do the same exact thing to me. Air out my dirty laundry for everyone to see. And I mean, literally everyone.

Like mother, like daughter, I guess.

(Don’t want to be, though.)

There are times where I wish I didn't have my heart open for everyone to see, I wish I didn’t “lead with the worst of me”. I wish I could stay quiet and not be vulnerable with people. Because now there are people who have parts of me I wish I could take back.

But no. That’s not who I am.

Inauthenticity I despise more than anything else. Of course, I could always just keep my heart tucked away, for only a select group to see, but my extreme trust issues say, “Share everything with everyone all the time! So no one can talk about you behind your back and use it against you! Because you don’t trust anyone ever! And that’s why you’ll never really love anyone!”

And yet, part of me has been terrified to talk about it: my suicidality. Because I’m so scared of being pulled back to America. I’m scared of whether my efforts of fighting for Japan will end up being futile.

The main thing that I’ve been fighting for for my own sake was Japan. The opportunity to study abroad was actually taken away from me back in January. Due to my mental illness and my “risk factor” of being abroad, UT decided to pull the decision from me. They offered me to study abroad in the Fall semester (those of who know how studying abroad in Japan works know that that would be impossible). They asked me how I felt over the phone. Was I meant to respond in a chipper voice, excitedly accepting their choice? (spoiler: I didn't) And they didn’t even offer me any kind of chance to try and prove I was stable enough to go abroad.

I had to find the solution myself, without their help.

I don’t… want to prove them right. UT screwed me over. Took away the one thing I wanted for myself.

I fought for it still.

And now that I’m here in Japan: a country that has no easy access to mental health professionals, xenophobic towards any and nearly every kind of 外人, and where my voice is lost among the overwhelming crowds…

I question whether I should be here or not. But America also holds a lot of bad memories for me too. Which one is better to lean towards? Who knows? People ask me whether I want to stay or to leave? I don’t know what I want. All I know is that I want to die.

But I’m tired of faking it. Faking that I’m living a luxurious life in an amazing country. Faking that I’m having a good time when in reality, I spend more time crying and wanting to die than I don’t. Faking that I’m capable when in reality, I am so weak.

I’m done “pretend(ing) that I’m something better than these broken parts; pretend(ing) I’m something other than this mess that I am. ‘Cause then I don’t have to look at it, and no one gets to look at it. No. No one can really see.”

(Please do listen the song simply for that portion [^] Please.)

So, here I am: extremely suicidal in a country where I feel like I don’t belong. Here I am: too exhausted to try and carve a me-shaped space into this place. Here I am: having an identity crisis of who is Kamea versus KayCee, and questioning why it feels as though there is such a huge discrepancy between the two. Here I am: resisting the everyday urge to self-harm, not even for my own sake. Here I am: seeing all of the mistakes I made and wishing so badly I can undo all the hurt and pain I caused. Here I am: wanting so badly to just disappear and never return. Here I am: wishing I didn’t have an overwhelming love for my friends.

Because if I didn’t, I’d be long gone.

But no. No, I had to care about people and have a love cultivated and nurtured for them and have a desire to witness their lives with all their accomplishments and failures. Witness how far they go even if I may not be a direct part of their lives anymore. How badly I want to see my friends (all of you) go off and do great things. Because I know that you all will because you all already have. Pride swells up in my chest as I see all that my friends have done and do. And I love all of you, overwhelmingly so.

But.

I wish… God. I wish I didn’t.

I wish my heart didn’t burst every time I saw someone I loved. I wish I didn’t look at people and think, “Yeah. This is okay. This is worth living for.”

I wish I didn’t have that.

Because then this would finally be over.

But no. I had to care about people and have people care about me. They reciprocated in ways I never thought they would. My friends have made such strong efforts and put their trust in me even long after I begged them not to because I’m as ephemeral as they come. I am fleeting, and all I will do is leave destruction in my wake.

As much as I wish I could disappear in a puff of smoke, my friends would probably see my leaving as detrimental: a destructive explosion rather than a raincloud fading away to let the sun shine.

My friends held their hands out to me and I made the mistake of reaching back. And now, they won’t release me any time soon.

How badly I wish they would. Because I am a bomb with the timer counting down. Because I’ve shown such horrible sides of myself and yet they love me through all of it. Why? Is it because I’m a project person and humans feel this integral need to help/fix people and they are using me to fulfill that craving? Or is it because they care about me? Wholly and unconditionally?

God, I don’t understand at all. I don’t deserve their love or their trust, but I have it. I don’t… understand.

I don’t know what to do. I used to say, “I’ll figure it out” rather than saying, “I don’t know.”

But… I’m at that point. I don’t know. Nor do I think I will ever.

I know that talking about this is what's keeping me alive. Having this conversation, even if people aren’t “ready” to have it, is important. Because I never EVER want anyone to feel the way that I do. But I know that there are. Some of them may even be reading this. My heart aches for you.

Talking about it is my lifeline right now. Sharing my voice and my story just in case someone may need to hear it.

But... I’m also tired of talking about it.

I hope... that people can still do it. Be a leader in pushing mental health awareness. Be a leader in showing that talking about suicide is not taboo. Be a leader in fighting against those who try to silence you, including yourself.

Even though I won’t anymore. I am tired. Exhausted. Done. It’s a waiting game for me now.

10 years since my depression manifested. 5 straight years of everyday, non-stop suicidal thoughts. Some people may see that as a short amount of time. Yeah. You're right. I'm weak. And tired. And over it.

I put in as much work as I can. I’ll just cheer from the sidelines from now on.

Good luck to all of you. To all of you who still have that drive to continue forward. I believe in you. And I know you will accomplish great things.

I wish you all the best.

^

i wrote the ending of this post the day that i managed to complete my plan of suicide, details and all: i was... just waiting for the energy.

it never came.

so, i’m... still here.

[swedeandsour]

Ea Kaya on having a voice in the digital generation; the beauty of flaws and the importance of slowing down

Though she can certainly count her successes, making music is more than a numbers game according to Christine Kiberg, the Danish pop star better known as Ea Kaya. From her humble beginnings as YouTube cover artist to millions of streams on her Spotify page, Christine's story is one of resilience in an everchanging musical landscape. With her last record taking the heavy words "Fragile but Strong as Hell" in her title, Christine's sincerity serves as a rallying call to the downtrodden. Her music speaking a lyrical honesty rarely spoken, Ea Kaya believes that showing vulnerability isn't weakness, but rather something that demonstrates courage. But despite her successes, Ea Kaya's decided that maybe it's time for a break, to allow for her relationship with music to become intuitive again. Christine knows that she isn't perfect and neither is Ea Kaya, and that sometimes expectations whether business or personal can leave one becoming cynical and self-critical. Catching up online over Instagram memes and emails, Ea Kaya's Christine Kiberg gives us the low-down in an honest interview where she tells us about past successes and the importance of having a voice in an increasingly interconnected and rapidly-changing world. Keeping busy with her studies and reacquainting with nature to kick the Coronavirus blues, Ea Kaya caught up with us to remind ourselves the importance of slowing down and about seeing the beauty through the flaws.

Words: Peter Quincy Ng

Before Ea Kaya began, you were Christine Kiberg playing guitar covers on  YouTube. Although you didn't play your own songs back then, you obviously still  had to put your personal brand into it. Was there a selection process in the songs  you played and what you thought might resonate with fans and yourself? How has  the feedback you received as a cover artist shaped the way you are today as a  musician? 

Selecting the songs to post was quite simple: it had to be a popular, brand new song to catch the most possible viewers or just a song that I had loved. Because of my channel online, I frequently went to sites like Billboard to keep up with  International music just as much as I kept up with the music scene here in Denmark. I’ve been told countless times that my music doesn’t sound like it’s written by a Dane, and this is very likely because I’ve grown up listening to enormous streams of international pop  songs.  

By the way, congratulations on your Red Bull acoustic session of "4 AM" rolling  over one million streams on Spotify! Live sessions as we both know, were largely  exclusive to YouTube in the past, how have digital streaming platforms changed  your outlook as an artist in this new digital era of music consumption.

Thank you! The age of streaming is interesting. On one hand, I think it’s extremely exciting how everyone can release music at any given time. I also love how streaming can function like radio, in that it recommends you new music you haven’t heard before and that  probably wouldn’t find on your own. The streaming world does have a cynicism to it  though, in a degree the music industry hasn’t seen before. The supply of music is enormous, and the listener patience is decreasing. If it wasn’t for the revival of the vinyl, nobody would be buying albums anymore, and you can’t claim that there are big dollars in  streaming. We could discuss the many pros and cons of streaming for hours, but overall, I’ll say it saved the booty of the music industry from piracy.  

Ea Kaya · 4 AM

Anyway, with regards to your latest single, I love the flipping of the age-old adage, “sticks and stones can break my bones but words cannot hurt me” on "Skin and  Bones". As a person of the internet generation how important is it to realize that our online actions matter and the importance of mental health? 

Social media can be fun and we get a unique opportunity to connect with people from all  over the world. The internet is gigantic and it can seem so insignificant to write something  to a person you don’t know, who might even be sitting on the other side of the planet. The message still does reach the receiver though, and if you’ve written something that you wouldn’t tell a person face-to-face, of course your message can still hurt when it’s send in cyberspace. It’s hard not to compare yourself to what you see on social media, and many people already deal with low self-esteem. Nobody is immune to hatred, and only a fool will think their comments and messages are harmless.  

You directed your video Skin and Bones at home during quarantine, but for you,  nature was always integral to your well-being. Tell us about growing up by the water  and the woods, in Denmark and the importance of going outside.  

Everything is moving fast these days, and growing up I was taught how important it is to  pull the plug sometimes and go for a walk. The forest and the ocean therefore equal peace  to me. Besides finding calm, I find a lot of inspiration and happiness in nature. The sounds,  the smells, the beauty - it’s so genuine and fresh. I like the liveliness of the city, but living  far from nature makes me feel claustrophobic.  

The messages in your lyrics are always simple, direct and easy-to-understand. Is it  difficult putting sometimes very abstract topics into words?

Many years ago, I wrote songs that were full of metaphors and poetic descriptions; maybe to protect myself, maybe to sound artsy (laughs). I later found that it was a lot more giving to write songs that made people feel heard, understood and moved, even if it meant that I had to spill all my darkest secrets and deepest insecurities. As a songwriter, I think you  have to be willing to take chances and give away a little bit of yourself if you wish to get  something back.  

Ea Kaya · Cruel To Be Kind

One of the things I've noticed in your video especially "Remedy" and  "Cruel to Be Kind" is the topic of male vulnerability and gender fluidity. Why is it important to have these images? 

I feel extremely lucky to be a part of my generation, because we are more free than ever to love who we love, be who we want to be, express how we feel and believe in what we  believe in. Stereotypes and gender norms can be toxic, and even harmful. Telling somebody what they should do or who they should be won’t change the truth and nothing good  comes with it. For so long, standing out has been a negative thing, but we’re becoming  more and more accepting of each other’s differences. Individuality is becoming a positive thing and it’s just fantastic.  

Ea Kaya · Remedy

The title of your latest EP is "Fragile but Strong as Hell". The archetype of the  female artist is either one of female tenderness or the strong, independent, no nonsense woman. Why is it important to have that middle ground like you mention  in the title of your last record? 

Personally, I think showing weakness is a strength in itself. It’s easy to put up an armor  and only show your bright sides, but it takes courage to let people see when you feel  vulnerable. You can be fragile and strong as hell at the exact same time, and I think it’s  healthy to have both sides.  

Growing up in a musical family, music would seem like an obvious career choice.  But you're also a student in computer science, tell us how that's been and why  you've decided to do it on the back of a successful music career. 

I see why you think it’s an obvious choice. The funny thing is that all of the musicians in  my family are classical musicians, opera singers, to be exact. It’s two extremely different  worlds. It’s definitely a matter of perspective though (laughs)! Besides doing music, I recently  started studying Communication and IT. To be completely honest with you, I’ve felt trapped in a bubble for a very long time. In this business, everyone knows everyone, and most  people talk about the same thing, or about themselves or other people that you both know. Last year I decided I needed to learn something new and challenge myself. So far  it’s working out fine to do both!  

I heard you took your name Ea Kaya from "Ea" and "Kaya", both hypothetical  names you'd give your daughters if your music career never took off. Seeing that all  didn't crash and burn, what advice would you give to other young, female artists wanting to do things the Ea Kaya route? 

The Ea Kaya route is definitely the long, complicated route. If you start from scratch  without a network like I did, my advice for you is this:  

1) Practice! Then practice a bit more!  

2) Look for music offers and connections in your local area. There may be camps and classes that could be relevant. Write on music sites and social media that you are looking  for collaborators.  

3) If step #2 didn’t lead you to amazing partners that miraculously want to help you make  demos for free, then welcome to this step; get yourself a job and save up money to record  those incredible demos of yours!

4) Send your music to anyone you could imagine yourself working with. Be persistent and  if needed, pushy. Forget about modesty - if you’re on step 4, you’ve already worked your  ass off to get here.  

5) Last one: Remember why you do music. Yes, I’m bringing the cheese and the grease, but nevertheless you’re entering a strange, cool place with many ups and downs, so your  motivation is actually a very significant thing to keep in mind.  

You’re a very charismatic young woman and I don't think I can ever question your  success. But one question remains, how exactly how many popsicles did you go  through in your video for "Tied Up"? That's a lot of popsicles from what I see! 

(Laughs) That’s a quality question. I felt so bad about all those popsicles going to waste.  The cashier must’ve given my director some type of look when he went and purchased  that batch! 

Ea Kaya · Tied Up