#i just tend to mostly read at work on my phone so hard copies get neglected...

[lolitakirstein]

Hey Neighbor Pt 9

Part 8

WC: ~1.5k

AN: I'm so worried about writing longer chapters in case they are too boring. but I hate splitting things up when I'm on a roll. ha

You watched as the man you had run into exited Toji’s house 30 minutes later. Unable to hear what the two were discussing you relied on their body language to give you some hint as to who he was. The men seemed formal towards each other yet relaxed; Toji with his hands in his pocket or across his chest, the other guy casually lighting a cigarette while showing his back to toji. There must be some level of trust between them, then. Before the man leaves, you notice him gesture towards your house. You draw back further from the window, afraid of being seen.

Once the car is out of sight and Toji returns to his house, you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. Should you ask Toji who he was or was that being too nosy? Not like i’ll get a straight answer, he refuses to tell me anything, you think, settling on being nonchalant about it.

Fortunately, you had work to keep you focused. And most fortunately, your hangover was minimal. Nothing more than a slight throb thanks to the pain meds Toji had offered you. You become robotic as you scan, sort, and shelve books and answer the same boring questions from customers. 

Before you can notice, it’s your lunch break. You sit in the small cafe that the bookstore offers, downing a hot chai latte and checking your phone. One message from the work group chat and one from Toji that was sent a few hours ago

Toji: You ok?

You fight back the urge to send, “I can’t tell you right now, it’s not the right time,” instead, pocketing your phone and playing hard to get. You clock back into work, ready to start the second half of your shift. 

 Wait, am I wanting him to chase me or something? This guy who knows things but won't tell me? Why am I trying to act like this is a dude i’ve swiped on Tindr? This guy has secrets, deep ones. Ones I probably don’t wanna know—

“Excuse me,” a soft voice snaps you out of your internal monologue. You spin around and are met with a man. His dark auburn hair is close-cropped at the sides while the top fashionably brushes just above his deep brown eyes. A soft shadow of stubble peppers his strong jaw. 

“Oh, hello. Can I help you?” you quickly revert to the robotic motions of a customer service provider.

“Yeah, I was looking for your classical section.”

“Are you looking for anything in particular,” you ask after leading him to the designated section of the store. 

“What would you recommend?” 

A question every worker hates. “Well, can never go wrong with Doestrevsky.” 

“Ah, yes, I read Crime and Punishment in school. Incredible prose,” he responds. 

Your heart lifts at finally being able to discuss books with someone. “Indeed, if you like that, you might like The Idiot. Same themes of human nature and society.” You grab a copy off the shelf and hand it to me. 

“Well I’d be an idiot if I didn’t take the advice of such a beautiful, well-read woman,” he says coyly as you walk to the counter.  You internally groan but also can’t help but blush at the compliment, though the joke was indeed awful.

“Let me know how you like it?” you say after ringing him up and bagging his purchase. 

“How about we discuss it over dinner sometime,” he cocks an auburn brown.

“Oh,” you stammer, thrown off by the sudden offer. It’d been so long since you’d been on a date you forgot what it was like to be asked out. “Sure!”

“Great I’ll keep you posted on my progress,” the man who you now know as Connor pockets his phone after you exchange numbers. “I look forward to discussing it with you and hearing your beautiful thoughts.”

Ok, he was laying it on a little thick but you don't mind. The only interaction you had had with a man for the past few months had been with Toji. And those interactions were hardly civil, much less flirty. Though Toji tended to tease, it was mostly to throw you off the topic of his secrets. 

The rest of your shift goes by quickly and you arrive home before the sun goes down. As you get out of your car, you notice Toji sitting on his porch steps. You try to ignore him but ignoring him is like trying to ignore a bear about to devour you. You give a wave, walking fast to your house. 

“You ok?” Toji asks, still sitting on the steps. Damn, he either can’t take a hint or is just stubborn. 

“Yeah, thanks,” you respond fumbling your keys out of your pocket. You drop them. Cursing yourself for being so easily intimidated by him you stoop to pick them up. Toji’s feet appear in your line of vision. You look up at the giant man standing over you. You want to feel afraid, but you can’t deny the absolute feral part of your brain at the sight of him standing over you. 

“Why didn’t you text me back?” the possessive tone didn’t help dampen the submissive part of your psyche. Damn, why do I have to be such a whore for crazy men?

“I was working,” you squeak out, picking your keys up and walking to your front steps. 

“I wanna talk,” Toji says behind you as you march up the steps and unlock your door. 

“It’s fine Toji. Nothing to talk about,” you turn around, Toji is standing at the bottom of your porch steps. 

“There is,” Toji huffs a breath. “A lot, actually.”

You were not in the mood for this. Your day ended on a good note and you intend for it to stay that way. “Look, whatever it is. I don’t care.”

“Yes you do,” Toji takes one step up. 

You shake your head, even though you were screaming yes in your head. You will not let him win. “Nah, I’m good. I really couldn't care less what your little secrets are. I don’t even know you.”

“It’s not that, it’s just—”

The notification on your phone interrupts the moment. You reach into your pocket for it and notice a text from Connor. 

Connor: I hope you had a good rest of your day. I must say, you made mine :) 

Oh, the cringe was off the charts with this guy. But you can’t keep the stupid smile from appearing on your face. Followed by a giggle. Shit I’m giggling over a guy. I need laid 

“Who’s that?” Toji asks sharply.

“No one,” you shake your head.

“No one huh,” Toji takes another step up, finally standing in front of you. “‘No one’ got you smiling like a goof?”

“You have your secrets, I have mine,” you shrug.  

“You don't blush like that for just no one,” Toji teases, he steps so close you can feel the heat off of him. “Now who could possibly be making sweet little y/n blush so much besides me?”

You crane your neck up to look at him, refusing to show he’s affecting you. “I can’t tell you. It’s not the right time.”

Finally, you manage to knock him off his game by throwing his words back at him. He steps back, putting some distance between you. A scowl wrinkles his brow and his jaw ticks as he clenches his teeth. You smirk, pleased with yourself. “Good night toji.”

Toji

Toji stares at the door you slammed in his face, stricken dumb by the sass you dished out. He had expected this to be a moment of confession, finally getting it all out in the open. Now standing at your closed door, Toji has no choice but to retreat back home.

After dinner and tucking Megumi into bed, Toji collapses onto his king-size bed. He turns his head to the window, towards your house. The lamp on your bedside table creates a soft glow from your window. He watches as you enter the bedroom. Your eyes on your phone, smiling. 

Toji clenches his jaw. Here he was ready to start having an honest conversation with you, and you were too busy with this mysterious ‘no one.’ He hated being this way, but he couldn’t deny that he felt a sense of protectiveness over you. 

He watches you throw your phone on the bed, the giddy smile still on your lips—perfect lips, soft delicate lips he’s thought about kissing on multiple occasions. With your back to the window, you remove your shirt and toss it to the chair before you begin sliding your pants down. As much as Toji would love nothing more than to watch, he has enough decency to look away, he’s not THAT much of a pervert. 

He reaches into his back pocket, depositing the contents beside him. 

First is his cellphone which he text Shiu–I need to borrow a few of your tech geeks.

The second, is a sealed envelope. No address, no street names or numbers. Just 3 words written in delicate script:

il mio agnellino

[tomtenadia]

Remember Us - part 2

Double feature this week. Here we go with part 2. Rowan takes another step on the path of recovering his life.

Also, we get to meet the kids <3

------

When Aelin got home that night after her shift at the hospital, she was tired and not just from the long hours spent in OR. She was tired in her soul. Aelin had managed to keep her thoughts at bay while operating, but as soon as she was out they came back. It had been hard to fight the urge to go and see him again. He wanted space. That was clear so she just went home instead.

Once she crossed the threshold, laughter welcomed her. Her kids sounded happy.

She shed her coat and removed her shoes and followed the happy sounds.

Walking into the kitchen she found her mother cooking and Thomas helping her setting the table and little Freyja banging her plastic cutlery on her high chair. She was a shy girl but would become alive and loud when she was hungry. Just like her mum.

“Mama!” Shouted her daughter as she spotted her.

“Mum,” Thomas echoed his sister and ran to her, hugging Aelin at her knees “hi my darling, how are you?” She kneeled at his height and ruffled his blonde hair.

“Helping grandma cook.”

“Food.” Shouted Freyja who got agitated trying to get the attention of her mother. Aelin went to her daughter and lifted the wee girl in her arms “hi my love,”  and she snuggled her head against her mother’s chest.

“Hi mum,” said Aelin to Evalin. The woman stirred something in the pan and turned to her daughter “welcome back, darling.” She said and her gaze turned worried at her daughter’s tired expression.

Aelin shook her head, knowing what her mother was about to say “later,” she added. She did not want to talk about Rowan in front of the kids.

“Come on Tom, sit at the table. Dinner is ready.” On his grandma’s orders the boy climbed on his chair and started eating his meal.

Aelin joined them a moment later, all changed in house clothes and sat at her daughter’s side.

Thomas was three and had just started learning how to use a fork properly. They would cut the food for him and he would try to use the utensil. Rowan had been teaching him. A pang of sadness hit her and pushed back the tears, now it was not the time. She would feed Freyja who was only eighteen months old.

“Did you help grandma cook?”

The boy nodded while taking a bite from his fork and gave her a big smile. His green eyes lighting up with joy. Eyes just like his father’s.

“Aelin, let me feed Freyja. You have your dinner. You haven’t touched it yet.”

Aelin shook her head “I am fine. It can wait.”

Truth was… she felt nauseous and that feeling had nothing to do with being pregnant. It was fear. Terror of losing Rowan. Terror that he would never recover his memories and her kids would be left without a father and her without her soulmate. She almost lost him once. She would never forget the day she got the call from the hospital. Those horrible moments were forever etched in her memory.

Later on that night, once the kids were in bed Evalin joined her daughter on the sofa and brought her a chamomile tea.

“The kids are asleep. What’s troubling you?”

Aelin sighed and her hand went to her stomach “Rowan woke up.”

“Today?”

She nodded in confirmation and leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder “I had just left the OR when I got a page from his doctor. I went to his room and he was awake,” a loud sob broke from her lips “he does not remember me or the kids.”

Evalin pulled her daughter closer and hugged her knowing the pain she had been feeling for the past month “Yrene had told you it might happen.”

Aelin nodded slightly “I didn’t think it could hurt that much. He had no idea who I was. He doesn’t remember our kids.” Her sobs turned into proper crying “I am so scared, mum. So, so scared.”

“I know, darling.” Evalin kissed her daughter’s head “you will have to be strong a bit longer. Does the doctor think he will regain his memory?”

Aelin gave her a small nod “but it might take time and what if he realises that he doesn’t want us in his life anymore?”

“Rowan loves you and the kids madly. The road ahead might be bumpy but he will come back.” A ragged breath escaped from Aelin. She hoped her mother was right, because if she was not she doubted she would survive loosing him a second time.

*

Rowan woke up the next morning with an horrendous headache. He had a fitful sleep and his thoughts had been stuck all night on her. Aelin. His wife. At her side two small shadows representing their kids. In his mind he had this picture of him holding someone, the smell of lemon and verbena strong around him. But he was sure it was more a feeling than an actual memory. He had woken up all of a sudden and hadn’t been able to fall asleep properly since. His body recognised the other one. 

A nurse brought breakfast and of one thing he was sure. He hated hospital food. Which led to another series of questions. What did he eat for breakfast? Was he a good cook? What was his favourite food?

Reluctantly he finished the food on his tray and decided to kill the boredom by watching tv. According to the news it was January and the meteorologist were warning all the citizens of Terrasen of a snowstorm warning.

He was so bored watching the news that he felt glad when Aelin knocked on the doorframe “Mind if I come in?”

He shook his head “is tv always this boring?”

Aelin chuckled and for a second she saw a glimpse of him. He always hated tv. The only reason they had one in the house was because she had pestered him about it “yeah. You find reading more interesting.”

He switched off the television and faced her “I am…”  he sighed “yesterday… I was overwhelmed. It was… it still is too much.”

“I know,”said Aelin trying to suppress the instinct to touch him. Not until he was okay with it.

“Tell me something about me, about my life. Us… anything.” He started, eager to know more. He needed it “do I like breakfast?”

Aelin laughed “you do, and you are a great cook. On Saturdays you always make us pancakes and let Thomas help you flip them.” She smiled at the image. Thomas on his knees on a chair beside his dad.

“You are a healthy eater so you tend to scoff enormous quantities of fruit and veggies while complaining about my crazy dietary habits.”

She was dying to show him pictures of the kids but decided against it. One step at a time. Let him become familiar with the idea of being married first.

“You are a lawyer. A kickass one at that.” His green eyes were trained on her “you and Lorcan opened your own practice. After graduation you two got a job in a fancy company but eventually got tired of dealing with rich bastards and opened a firm that deals mostly with family law but also offers legal support to us common human beings.” She had been so proud of him. The big job had left him miserable and with very little time to live. He had been stressed and after two years he had realised that the huge salary was not worth it. Lorcan had followed him and together they had started their new adventure. They had started small snd simple, but slowly as they took in more cases they had to start hiring more people and the firm had gotten bigger and successful.

“You love hiking, nature in general and winter. We are both in love with theatre and on our first date you took me to a play.”

Rowan looked at her and that tug in his chest came back for a visit.

“We have been married for seven years and you proposed at my best friend’s wedding. We were dancing and you asked me what if we were the next ones to do that? Then you went on one knee and asked me to marry you.”

He kept listening, adding some more pieces of info to what he had gathered so far. And the more Aelin spoke the more that connection he had felt the day before grew stronger.

“What type of doctor are you?”

“I am the chief of paediatric neurosurgery and I work two floors above this.”

Rowan took a deep breath and asked a question that had been burning in him since she has appeared “do you have any photos of us, of the kids?”

Aelin felt like crying and extracted her mobile phone and scrolled through her huge quantity of photos “This is Thomas. He is three.”

Rowan looked at the boy and saw a blond mop of hair just as golden as his mother’s and two striking green eyes just like his. In the photo the boy was laughing while he held him in his arms.

Aelin swiped and the image of a little girl appeared and he gasped. There was no doubt that she was his daughter. Her hair was silver as his and even her eyes were the exact copy.

“She is so much like you.” He noticed the smile appearing on Aelin’s face. While she talked about their life her face had lit up and in front of him he had the most stunning woman he had ever seen. Probably. He wasn’t sure but Aelin took his breath away.

“Are we happy? As a family?”

Aelin nodded without even thinking about it. They were, she had no doubts about it “Yes. We wanted a family, kids. It was our choice.”

Rowan nodded and wanted to believe her, needed to believe the passion and the love in her voice.

“I need time.” He said quietly, averting his gaze from hers for just a brief moment “This is a lot that I need to process. I will need time but I want to hear more.”

Aelin sobbed and grabbed her backpack and extracted another mobile phone “this is yours. It survived the crash because you used a military grade protecting cover. I just charged it. The password is 0305.” She gave him the mobile “it has photos, texts. Everything is still there, maybe it will help.”

Aelin looked at her watch and stood “I have to go, I have a surgery in two hours.”

Rowan nodded.

“You can text me if you want. My contact is under Fireheart.”

He looked at the phone and then at her “will you come back?”

Aelin took a step toward him and kissed his silver hair as she did the previous day and then nodded.

She waved at him and disappeared through the door.

He moved his attention to the phone and tried to figure out how to switch it on. Once he did it asked him a pin code and he entered the digits she had told him.

Once the phone was unlocked he was welcomed by a picture of him, Aelin and the kids on a beach. He had Freyja on his shoulders and was laughing as she patted his head. Aelin was holding Thomas potato sack style and the boy was grinning. With his fingers he traced her face and then went looking for the photo album. Before opening he hesitated. His life, his memories were there and he was scared.

There were picture of his wife. Plenty of them and she always had an amazing smile. Of one thing he was sure:Aelin took his breath away. Photos of their kids and he spotted one of what he suspected was a newborn Freyja. He held the little bundle in his arms while Thomas was at his side staring at his sister. He saw happiness, he saw joy, but most of all he saw love. Deep love that bound the four of them. Aelin had not lied. They seemed happy. He found photos of what he assumed were friends but he could not tell who they were, he hadn’t covered that part yet. Accepting the idea of a wife and kids was hard enough. He was not ready yet to add more people. The mere idea made him feel dizzy.

He was getting tired again even if it was only morning, but he pushed through and found the app with the text messages and went to look at the ones from Aelin and he read the last one she sent him go and win your case and then tonight I will show you how proud I am of my sexy lawyer.

He scrolled back through the thread and read random texts between them until he went back a few months and saw a text with a picture attached.

You are away for work and I miss you. I went for my first proper check-up and I am proud to share with you the picture of the new member of our family. The image was greyish and grainy but the message was clear: Aelin was pregnant again.

He placed the phone on his lap and closed his eyes calming the sense of panic overwhelm him.

And with his eyes closed he tried to remember.

[letsperaltiago]

i love you and i like you

Based on @stars-my-darling's adorable post: 

“When Mac starts talking he will sometimes just randomly tell Amy that he loves her, usually at the end of an unrelated sentence. They later realise that he learnt to do this because Jake is always randomly telling Amy that he loves her and Mac is copying him." aka. 5 times toddler Mac Santiago-Peralta tells his mommy he loves her

Also includes prompt #101 from the 101 fluffy prompts-list: "…They just grow up so fast."

Read on ao3

Every like and reblog is appreciated <3

Amy Santiago has so far had a lifetime’s worth of great jobs, which, she knows, isn’t that hard when you love work and everything it implies. Everything from assisting her middle school’s librarian to that brief job at a small uptown museum her degree got her to being a respected sergeant in the NYPD. She’s loved every single job but, she’s now come to realise, nothing vill ever beat her most recent employment: Motherhood. With a capital M, yes.

Mac throws her and Jake’s worlds over like the tiny miracle of a storm he is and they’ve never looked back since. It’s brand new, it’s exciting, it’s scary, and though they’re not exactly religious, he’s the answer to their prayers. Parenthood turns out to be nothing like what they’d expected, like nothing they’d ever tried before and looking past some of the rough days, which are inevitable, it’s actually even better. They get to shape and watch a human grow; a human of which they’re both the genesis and they couldn’t be any more proud - both of each other but also their son.

Everything Mac does and achieves is a moment to remember, and they take nothing for granted: every new sound, even simple gurgles, every new movement, even the flick of a tiny finger? They beam, look at each other with wide, joyous eyes and celebrate their newborn addition to their little family. They hold on to everything they can, while they can although, they swear, every other day they’ll be lying in bed with him while he sleeps or watch him begin to explore their apartment on his own and they’ll take turns breaking the comfortable silence with what they’re both thinking:

“They just grow up so fast.”

Even if he’s merely grown a tenth of an inch since the last time they brought it up.

This fact aside, before they know it, their before so very tiny and helpless son can sit without assistance, sooner than later starts crawling and before they seem to have the time to catch up with the ladder he suddenly knows how to say “mama” and “dada” - and the day Mac takes his first steps, Amy filming on her phone while Jake is squatting to entice his son? Both parents guiltlessly shed a tiny tear rewatching the video that night after their little one, who suddenly seems so big, is put to bed.

With the walking comes the talking. Mac, like his dad, is an entertainer and seizes every chance he gets to chat with his parents, and anyone else who’ll listen for that matter, and hopefully make them laugh. Amy quickly sees through the fact that her son’s mannerism is definitely inspired by her husband’s, and Amy’s heart swells at every glimt of it: everything from Mac’s tiny ‘big dramatic movements’ to him attempting to crack small jokes (that sometimes are actually super funny but also mostly make people laugh because his delivery is beyond precious). Despite the fact that his personality is absolutely a solid blend of both parents, Jake’s genes definitely conquer everything else, and Amy doesn’t mind one bit. Although she could do without the short, Peralta-inspired attention span, which can be both very cute but also slightly maddening when you’ve told your barely 3-year old toddler 6 times to finish their meal meanwhile he’s to preoccupied by his father cleaning up the water said toddler spilled just seconds ago.

All in all, Mac is a copy of Jake, and in more ways that one Amy is grateful. Especially when the little boy starts getting a grasp of the word ‘love’ and what it actually means though his parents have showered him with it since before he was born. Jake and Amy will tell Mac ‘I love you’ on the daily and, besides this, his parents themselves aren’t exactly shy of telling each other, especially Jake who often tends to do it out of nowhere or any kind of context which the boy must’ve picked up on at some point.

It starts off quite naturally: the first time he says it.

One night after getting him washed down and put into his favorite firetruck-print pyjamas (the parents couldn’t deny him it even though they were far from thrilled), Amy’s sitting with Mac in his new so-called ‘big boy-bed’. Feeling her son’s curly-haired head nestled into her chest, one hand grabbing onto the fabric of her shirt while the other holds onto his best buddy Leo the Lion, Amy reads out loud from one of the many books she’s managed to accumulate for her son. Obviously worn out from the day Mac, as being almost 3 is very exhausting, stays silent and listens carefully to the sound of his mother’s voice, dutifully paying attention to the book’s colourful drawings and even sometimes pointing at them whenever Amy reaches a part of the story that’s been illustrated.

“Then the little puppy ran through the big big field and the big big forest to get back home-“

“Shee, Mommy,” Mac interrupts her with a lisp caused by the pacifier hanging from one corner of his mouth and points to the drawing of the running dog with his index finger. “Doggy runth!”

“Yeah, I see, baby,” she smiles before pecking the top of his head. Normally she’d ask him to remove his pacifier when he speaks. Her and Jake slowly trying to make the object something Mac knows he can use to relax rather than constantly needs, but when it’s this late and right before bedtime Amy can’t be bothered to reprimand him. For now she’s just proud of her tiny, smart guy. “Where is he running?” She pulls back to look at him, encouraging him to explain further.

“He’sh going home!” he smiles proudly to a point where his pacifier almost falls out, just barely clinging on for dear life.

“That’s right. He’s running home to his family - good job,” she chuckles sending him one last smile before skimming her wristwatch quickly realising bedtime is just minutes away. It’s not that they’re following a strict schedule that depends on every single minute and second of the day: something she’s actually glad Jake’s and his more laid-back lifestyle has transferred to their parenting-style. Although Mac, his parents have come to find out, will reach a point during the evening where it’ll be too late and he becomes overtired and impossible. Therefor 8 PM is the ultimate limit (on weekdays, that is) and Amy sees it quickly approaching so she quickly finishes up their story and shuts the book closed.

“That’s it for today, Mr. Mac. Time to visit dreamland,” simply not able to resist the feel and smell of her son’s newly washed curls, she places another kiss to the top of his head before climbing out of the small bed and hears him reply with a yawn which tells her that she’s probably timed bedtime perfectly. To the great delight of the now also tired mother (a high rank full-time job and a toddler will do that to you) she’s once more proved right when Mac gets under the covers without a trace of fight.

“Roshie?” he looks up at his mother with worried eyes as he hugs Leo the Lion a bit tighter. Those stupid beautiful brown eyes he’s inherited from Jake.  

“Oh,” Amy kneels down to the bed’s side and starts running her hand all over the duvet, mattress and bed-frame. “Where’s Rosie, bud?”

Rosie aka. the pink unicorn he’d gotten from auntie Roro back when he was still a tiny baby (though he’d always be Amy’s tiny baby) was missing and they both knew very well that there would be no sleeping without it. Suddenly her hand comes across a bump, to her relief revealing the stuffed animal once she lifts up the duvet.

“Yay, mommy!” her son smiles as if she’s cracked the mystery of the century and Amy can’t help but feel just a bit proud - anything she does that makes her boy happy will do that to her.

“There you go,” she smiles and places the unicorn in his arms right next to Leo the Lion. “All good, Mr. Mac?”

He nods profoundly, eyes suddenly clearly tired and droopy, which earns him a warm smile from his mother before she leans in and kisses his forehead tenderly, all at once running her hand fingers his curls as to get her one last fix for the day. Incredible how your child can become somehow addicting.

“Sleep well. I love you,” she pulls back to take him in, the declaration of love hanging in the air for a few seconds before, taking Amy by surprise, her son answers her.

“I wuv you.”

She knows ‘love’ is an abstract feeling that a toddler can’t really comprehend and isolate as an emotion, which is probably also why Mac’s never said it back before, and although she’s told him a million times before and has never awaited or needed an answer, him saying it back definitely throws her off in the most magical, proud, emotional way in a long time. She’s constantly proud of the little things he does on the daily, slowly becoming a tiny actual human with opinions and a personality, but this is a whole new level.

“Thank you for saying that,” she can feel tears forming in her eyes and throat, but doesn’t want to confuse the small child who’s just begun to understand ‘love’, and therefor doesn’t also need to be explained that crying can also be a sign of happiness. That is an oxymoron that will surely just confuse him when, currently, crying is Mac’s way of expressing and understanding sadness and anger.

“That was very sweet of you and I love you so so much too, baby,” she manages to say it one last time, without breaking, before getting up to turn on his tiny night light and leave. “Me and daddy will be just down the hall watching TV, okay?”

A slight movement from beneath the duvet lets her know he’s heard her before she allows herself to half-close the door and walk back to where Jake is cleaning up after dinner. There she is finally able to let out a few soft cries as she lets her husband in on the small, incredible moment she’s just had with their son. Of course, it instantly makes Jake feel like crying with joy too. Their baby is surely the best.

From there on it’s just one big mess of declarations, at the most random moments and Amy is very amused but also even more enamoured.

One night Jake is away on a stakeout which leaves Amy is home alone with Mac, and to the toddlers immense joy this means he’s allowed to sleep with his mom in her and dad’s enormous bed. Jake has told him to keep mommy safe while he’s gone and of course takes this task very seriously. It’s 3 AM, they’re both fast asleep when suddenly Amy is awoken by what seems to be quite some new weight on top of her chest.

“Mommy,” promptly breaks the silence slowly bringing Amy back to consciousness.

It takes her a second to collect herself but she instinctually reaches out to figure out exactly where her son is in the dark. It’s quickly clear that he’s stretched out stomach down across her chest. “Yes, baby?” she mumbles tiredly eyes still closed hoping that her son is just being restless and will go back to sleep.

“I need pee.”

“Oh.”

This, with a power that almost no other request from her son holds, immediately dawns upon and takes over her body pushing her to sit up. Mac is pretty much fully potty trained but only day-wise. During the night he still uses a diaper, and they’ve only just recently started easing him into the night-potty by telling him it’s an option. The boy showing initiative himself is an absolutely great start and even more importantly an opportunity she won’t let slip by.

“You wanna go use the potty?” she looks at him to make sure and he immediately nods. “Okay, lets go then.”

And so they scurry out of bed and make their way across the hall to the bathroom, hand in hand in the darkness, where once the light is turned on Mac’s potty awaits him.

With a bit of help from mommy, he pulls down his pyjamas pants and diaper before getting settled on the potty. There’s no hiding the fact that they’re both very tired, especially Mac whose head hangs a bit, almost asleep while giving in to his body’s need for relief while Amy sits dutifully on the floor besides him.

“Good job telling me, Mac,” she praises, smiling tiredly but the little boy is too tired to even react.

They stay like this for a while, in silence, Amy not wanting to interrupt a probably concentrated Mac, when suddenly he, to her surprise, is the one to break the silence.

“I’m peeing and I love you, mommy,” he mumbles tiredly almost fully asleep right there on the potty, messy curls hanging in whatever which way gravity will allow.

Then, as if she’d never been tired, asleep, woken up and feeling exhausted, Amy’s body rises to a much higher level of awareness. Warmth, one that completely makes her forget about the bathroom floor’s cold tiles, spreads throughout her entire being and if it wasn’t for the fact that he was currently trying to pee, Amy would’ve pulled him into the tightest hug right there. But she doesn’t, of course, and instead settles for a gleaming smile.

“Mommy loves you too, honey,” He’s her very own bedhead, she thinks to herself lovingly running a hand through his hair. “And I’m so proud of you for waking me up to go potty.”

It’s very faint, too tired to put much effort into it but there’s definitely a small smile growing on her son’s face, When he falls asleep on top of her chest a bit later after he’s done and has been put into a clean diaper, just to be safe, the smile is still there, Amy can tell even in the dark.

Another occasion, it’s safe to say, happens when Amy leasts expects it. They’re running on ‘tantrum from hell: hour who-even-knows-anymore’, this time triggered by the banal fact that, no, Mac wasn’t allowed to play with the big knife Jake had been using to cut vegetables for their dinner.

Everyone has their bad days, the parents are well aware, but this one of Mac’s was particularly bad. All day, from the minute he woke up and went straight to the living room instead of joining his parents in their bad, he’d been extra fussy thereby not feeling content with whichever way his parents tried to fix his mood. They’d been understandable and gone easy on him all day, hopelessly trying to please him while also not just giving in to his unreasonable demands. It appeared that this was very a fine line to walk, and so far it sure hadn’t offered them the intended results. Both parents were exhausted and Mac screaming was far, so very far, from their ideal way of spending the evening in.

Both Jake and Amy have tried experimented with different tactics, some that are known to work. Picking him up to soothe him; ask him if he’s hurting somewhere; offering him to choose one of his daily snacks like a glass of milk, yoghurt or a fruit; suggesting that they play a game…  But the little boy wants nothing. Nothing but that huge, sharp kitchen knife.

“Look, you can cry all you want, but daddy is not going to give you the knife. It’s dangerous, Mac,” Amy’s voice is definitely stern but nonetheless still calm well aware of the fact that screaming as well won’t get her anywhere. Besides that she also considers herself a structured, punctual but nonetheless also a cool mom: nevertheless enough is enough. She’s really had it by now, hands resting defensively on her hips  as she feels a head ache creeping up on her meanwhile her 3 year old, who’s now lying face down on the kitchen floor, lets out yet another scream.

“Listen to mom, bud,” Jake intervenes the best he can without interrupting his wife’s operation. “She’s super right, you know? The knife is very very sharp and in your small hands it can easily slip and hurt you. We don’t want that.”

Another scream is how he’s thanked for the explanation and Jake, even though he loves his son unconditionally, has to roll his eyes and sigh. Logic is not relevant when you’re working with a toddler, he has learned but nonetheless gives it a try every time they’re back in the arena - only to be disappointed.

They try not to be the kind of parents that scold or punish their kid unless it’s necessary and they but alas this is not one of them. Amy has had it and shares a look of confirmation with her husband before proceeding - she needs him to back her up on this.

“Okay, McClane Santiago-Peralta,” Amy says strictly. Full name? This is the point of no return, Jake knows.

“If you’re going to continue to behave like this then that’s up to you, but that also means it’s time for time-out, because daddy and I don’t know how to help you, when you keep screaming like that.”

God, she hates this side of parenthood and this shade of herself, though she knows it necessary.

“Knife!” Mac cries out rolling onto his back and hitting the floor with the palms of his tiny hands in protest of now both the knife and the time-out.

“I’m not going to keep discussing this with you,” she makes up her mind, picks up her son which results in him screaming/crying even louder while also putting up a fight by wiggling his entire body in his mother’s hold. “If you’re not going to go by yourself, like the big boy I know you usually are, then I’ll have to carry you there.”

And so Amy, knowing that the most important thing right now is that she sticks to her pledges, starts walking out of the kitchen and down the hall towards her son’s room. The wiggling continues, the crying doesn’t come to quit and he even adds kicking into the air as she carries him to the mess of it all. He really doesn’t want to go, even less have his mommy take him there since it’ll mean that he’s really pushed her to the limit.

Then suddenly the next wail he lets out suddenly sends the situation down a completely different path.

“I just want the knife and I- I wuv you, mommy!” her son screams loudly through his cry, face all red and scrunched up as if he was cursing her which by nature results in Amy freezing on the spot, left to wonder what the hell had prompted that outburst.

That one was new, she thinks, and how the hell do you handle this exact situation right? On one hand his previous acts, and the fact that he’s still hysterical, means that he deserves to be sent to his room; on the other hand he just screamed, bloody murder, that he loves her… Parenthood was indeed so confusing sometimes.

A sigh leaves her body.

“I love you too, Mac,” she figures he deserves, and always will deserve, to hear it back - no matter how frustrating and crazy the situation might be.

“And daddy does too, but it’s really hard for us to help you when you scream and cry like that, baby,” she gives explaining the consequences of his tantrum one last shot, and, to her surprise, the boy actually stills in her arms and buries his face into her chest. The cries die out before transitioning to small sniffles and alas Amy sees the opportunity to, perhaps, talk some sense into her son.

“We’d much rather have you use your words, tell mommy and daddy what’s actually wrong, rather than having you scream and cry like this. Do you understand?”

There’s silence but Amy can feel Mac’s tiny head slide up and down in nod against his chest, and relief, although it might still just be a false sense of safety, floods her entire body.

“So, what is actually wrong? Why are you sad?”

“I-“ Mac sniffles trying to mould his thoughts. “I just wanted help daddy make food.”

Of course, she thinks internally rolling her eyes.

“I see,” she nods. “And you can help daddy cook, but next time you’ll have to say it like that. Use your words, okay?”

He nods again before lovingly grasping onto a strand of his mother’s hair.

“Good,” she pecks the top of his head. “Now,” she cranes her neck to look down at her son’s face where it’s half buried into her tear-stained shirt. “Do you want to be in your room by yourself for a bit to calm down, or do you want to come help me and daddy clean the kitchen and set the table?”

“I wan’ help,” he mumbles obviously lacking energy after spending it all throwing the tantrum, but if he wants to be with them and redeem himself then Amy won’t be the one to stop him. It took a while, but Amy always tries to remember that he’s still very little meaning that it’s inevitable that some social skills aren’t fully developed. So whenever he can come to his senses, with his parents guidance or not, Amy will of course be the first one to endorse it.

“I’m glad to hear that,” she walks back towards the kitchen with Mac resting silently in her arms.

A third memory that pops into Amy’s mind upon trying to remember the many random moment’s where her son has shared his love for her out loud and of the blue (Peralta-stylez), is one time (of the many) they went grocery shopping together. They’d been wandering around the big grocery store, her and Mac, targeting the cereal aisle, hand in hand with a basket in Amy’s free hand.

“Okay, since you and daddy ate the last of the Fruit Loops this morning we need to get some cereal. You think you can help me with that?” she looks down at her son who’s already looking up to meet her eyes. Mac’s enchanting glimmering eyes instantly light up at the thought of responsibility, a trait he’s definitely inherited from her, and prompts an eager nod. Before she can even say or explain further, which he probably doesn’t actually need her to, he’s let go of her hand.

“More Fwuit Loops!” he exclaims happily as his tiny legs take him ahead, down the aisle, to reach the mosaic of colourful cereal-boxes.

“Sure, if that’s what you want, babe, but maybe…” she walks towards him, "we could try something else for once?” she tries to not be too strict about her son’s eating habits, especially when she knows Fruit Loops is usually the only straight up sugary stuff he eats daily, but also, she has to admit, secretly wishes she could perhaps trick him and Jake to eat something just a bit less… candy-like.

“What?” he stops and looks at her with a frown. “Something else?”

“Yeah,” she catches up with him and looks as the many options before him. “Like… bran-flakes, maybe? They look yummy, right?”

Either Amy is a really bad actor or her son simply too smart, but nonetheless Mac looks more than quite unimpressed when his mom pulls a boring, brown box out from the shelf to showcase it

“I donno want brain-flakes ew, mommy” and the face Mac makes, a face of utter disgust, would be way more solid proof than a paternity test if one was needed - he is definitely, without a single doubt, Jake Peralta’s son - and she definitely can’t help but chuckle at the similarity he constantly carries with him.

The tiny human’s hand starts dancing across all the different packages, probably gathering himself a good dose of various germs that in the moment Amy can’t make herself care about, and every now and then he’ll stop to study a cereal that’s caught his child-brain and eyes’ attention.

“There are so many to choose from, huh babe?” she encourages but keeping her distance as to be supportive of him doing something on his own, independent like a big boy.

First he stops in front of the Cheerios, which Amy can totally be content with, but alas he quickly, to Amy’s chagrin, puts them back in their spot. Then come the Frosted Flakes with their blue box and cute tiger cartoon (the perfect child-trap) which, if possible, are even worse than Fruit Loops. Amy unconsciously frowns at the thought of having to rip the box of cereal from her son’s grip when he in a few seconds won’t let go and instead grab the Bran Flakes. But to Amy’s great relief Mac’s finger continue their trip down past the tiger-trap, mindlessly mumbling small nothings to himself that she can’t quite make out. Then, all at once seeming way more determined than with previous ones, Mac throws himself at a bright and colourful box.

“These!” he exclaims jumping up and down on the spot with the held over his head in victory.

As soon as she gets a closer look, having gently grabbed the box from her son, it dawns on Amy that Jake Peralta being the father of her child isn’t exclusively beneficial. Not when their child is asking for Sour Patch Kids morning cereal and Amy knows it’s because he’s inspired by his dad as Jake will gladly share his candy with his son whenever he happens to have some.

“Oh, baby… “ Amy tries to keep up a neutral face as to not reveal how she dreads to get something that’s somehow even worse than the king of artificial ingredients, Fruit Loops, and sultan of sugar, Frosted Flakes, combined. “You sure you don’t just wanna get the Fruit Loops then? I don’t think you’ll like Sour Patch Kids.”

“Yes I do! I eat them with daddy all the time!”

Of course.

Her son is completely oblivious to her dread and shines proudly thinking he’s pleased his mom by finding something new (which it is - Amy can’t deny that) to have for breakfast. And Amy’s mom-heart can’t get herself to contradict her son’s persuasion of the fact that he’s accomplished the mission she set up for him. No way. Not when his face flows with pride like it does now.

“Okay,” she surrenders with a forsaken smile. “We can get these, but they’re very sugary so only for weekend mornings, got it?” she puts her hand forward as to shake on the deal.

Either it’s the handshake that takes his mind off of it, or her 3-year old actually somehow understands nutritional values, but he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t hesitate to meet her hand with his own, agreeing with her proposed deal. Immediately after she hands him back the box, it’s a mystery to Amy how such a simple thing can make her son that happy, he beams with excitement and basically hugs the box of sugary sweetness. Amy has to chuckle and then he’s off again to do his own little thing, prancing down the remains of the aisle chanting a made-up song, Amy guesses, to himself.

“Cereal. Breakfast. I love cereal. I love breakfast. I love mommy and mommy loves cereal and me and daddy and breakfast. Cereal, cereal, cereal!”

And to her, and Jake’s, sheer luck Amy manages to snap a short video of it for them to enjoy and fuss about for years.

That same night, Friday, they’re all lounging on the couch watching a movie. Tangled as per Mr. Mac’s demand because “Flynn Eugene whatever is really cool and the pretty princess hits him with a pan and the horse and green little thing are super fun too.”

So, needing no further arguments, they watch Tangled and snack on Sour Patch Kids (the candy, not the cereal) that Jake had bought on his way home from work after Amy had texted him about their adventure at the grocery store, attaching the video of their son singing.

Although, after a long day, by the time the lanterns in the movie light up the dark sky while Rapunzel and Flynn sing to each other, Mac is half, almost completely, passed out with his head in Amy’s lap and legs stretched across his father’s. Mommy stroking your face and playing with your curls turns out to be very soothing and sleep-inducing. Jake can also, if asked to testify, agree with this fact. Guess there’s something special about Peralta-curls Amy simply can’t resist.

“Ames, I think he’s asleep,” Jake whispers discreetly throwing his wife a knowing smile when he notices his son’s current state.

She, having not noticed being too busy watching the movie, looks down and sees, indeed, a sweet angel face with shut eyes and pouty lips that indicated that her son is, if not entirely, on the verge of being asleep. Nevertheless, every 30 seconds or so, his eyes will flutter just a bit, like tiny butterfly wings, as if he’s fighting to see the end of the movie - a movie he’s seen 134 times already.

“You want to go to bed, Mac?” she coos leaning down to peck his temple.

“Nu-uh,” he fights off the urge to say yes, Amy can tell.

“You sure?” she tries again.

He nods heavily in her lap, shuffling a bit in an attempt to get comfortable enough to, Amy knows, fall asleep. But he can’t seem to find the right spot, is surely overtired too and both parents can tell it’s a matter of minutes before he’ll give in to either fall asleep on the couch or demand to be put to bed.

And they’re right.

“Mommy,” he mumbles in the most exhausted and soft soft voice that makes Amy’s heart flutter time after time. “I love you but I wanna sleep - in my bed.”

Those three words, especially coming from Mac, will never seize to send a tiny jolt of joy and dopamine through her entire being. She chuckles softly stroking his back.

“That’s okay, baby. We’ve had a long day. Let's get you to bed.”

“Okay, I love you mommy. And daddy. Love,” he passes out before he can finish the sentence and won’t even notice his father carrying him to bed while Amy gazes after them with loving eyes.

Even three years in, four if you count the pregnancy, she can’t believe this sweet, beautiful and smart boy is hers. A bundle of love that is half her and half the man she loves the most (next to Mac himself, of course). Parenthood is an irregular graph with ups and down, but they have so much love that it’ll make up for the bad days and hard cases. In the very end the most important thing is that he, Mac Santiago-Peralta with his brown curly hair, tiny nose and deep brown eyes, is here and he’s theirs. Not only is he theirs but he is his own and he loves them, his parents, so much, every day. Plus, he’s so good at actually expressing it that Amy can’t help but feel like they’re definitely doing something right. She’s proud to know her son is surrounded by so much love that it has planted a seed that everyday blooms within him, making him spill over and spread his care and love to other people.

So, yes, Amy Santiago is 100% sure: she is definitely the luckiest, most loved mom in the entire universe. Mac Santiago-Peralta will always make sure of this.  

[dragons-bones]

Writing Process Meme!

Rules: Bold/color the things that you relate to and then tag some people to play.

Tagged by: @autumnslance and @frostmantle! Thank you both!

I write: daily | most days | a few times a week | a few times a month | random

I’m not great at keep to a consistent writing schedule, and sometimes it’s just difficult to get words out even with inspiration, so my schedule is best described as “sporadic.” I’d ideally like to work on this.

I write most often: when I first get up | later in the morning | afternoon | evening | the wee hours of the night | whenever

This is absolutely the result of my shitty, shitty commute, which meant I had only a handful of hours properly to myself in the evening, so evenings are when I did most of everything. (Taking part in FFXIV Write really compounded it. XD) For whatever reason, I now find it incredibly difficult to focus on writing in the morning or early afternoon; this is probably also related to my old night owl tendencies.

In one sitting I tend to write: a few sentences at a time | a few hundred words | a few thousand words | a complete chapter/section no matter how long | An outline | whatever comes

When in the moon is in the right phase and the gods are pleased, I can sometimes push out a couple thousand words; “The Bluebird of Ishgard” from FFXIV Write 2020 comes to mind. Most of the time, however, it’s a words, a few sentences, perhaps a paragraph or two. Sometimes it’s not even that, and I just edit what I’ve previously written.

I tend to write scenes: in chronological order with no skipping | mostly in order but with some filler/skipping | whatever scene I feel like | who knows what’s gonna come out????

Once upon a time, I used to only write in the story’s chronological order with no skipping. I don’t bother sticking with that anymore, elsewise nothing would get written now. Instead, I’ll write whatever comes to mind; sometimes that’s something in the story’s beginning, sometimes it’s somewhere in the middle, sometimes it’s the end. I can’t complain overmuch, as writing out of order seems to make it easier to connect the Part A’s and Part B’s I typically have a firmer idea on.

The things that comes easiest to me are: dialogue | description of senses | description of action | description of characters | exposition | other

I really, deeply enjoy character interactions, and dialogue is one of the best ways for me to do that, so I really enjoy letting my characters just talk. I also love to worldbuild, but I have to be careful with the exposition; sometimes I can stop myself, sometimes I can’t. In cases of the later, I’ll edit back (but save a copy of the original word vomit elsewhere for easy reference). I also really like describing how characters are moving or emoting; I actually really enjoy trying to describe hand gestures! (My mom’s off-the-boat Italian and live the joke that if you tied our hands we wouldn’t be able to talk properly.)

I do want to get better about describing senses or setting the scene or characters; with fanfiction, I can get sloppy because there’s the assumption that the audience is already familiar with most of the locations and the characters, and it bleeds over to both original things in my fanfic plus my original writing. Things to work on.

I tend to write: on a phone | on a laptop | in a notebook | on whatever paper I can find | with speech to text | in the blood of my enemies | it doesn’t really matter to me | on paper first and then typed up | old school typewriter | on a computer

My laptop’s my only computer, soooo yeah. I type much faster than I write, so it’s easier to just type out my thoughts; it’s also much easier to refine a sentence or phrase with typing, so I can very quickly and neatly edit. I absolutely fucking despise writing on my phone; the most I will use it is to quickly record in either the notepad or my diary server a one off bit of dialogue or narration if I’m not close to my laptop.

There’s something really fun and elegant in handwriting in notebooks, but ultimately they now feel super limited to me because I can’t go back and edit or embellish as I like.

When I take a break from writing, it usually: lasts a few days | a few weeks | a few months | it’s kind of random

This pretty much ties into question one. It’d hard to say when I’ll write, so I don’t plan breaks.

My favorite thing to do when I’m on a writing break is: recharge with other creative hobbies | read/ consume other media | do something physical | catch up with old friends | work on my WIP in other ways like with playlists or art | other | play video games | get lost in work

I like to knit, and listen to horror podcasts, read books, and occasionally watch movies, and also I actually like to play the video game upon which all of my fic is based. XD And also play other games: Hades is my favorite go-to mindless slaughter game, but I’m also very fond of messing around with Stellaris and Frostpunk.

In general, I think my writing habits are: pretty much what I need them to be | okay, but I’m working on making them better | non-existent | not great :/ | i’m excited to develop them further | totally random | perfect for me

I could stand to work on my writing habits, honestly, even if it’s just make the effort to write a couple of words a day. I would like to be more prolific, but therein lies the issues of having a traditional nine to five job; making time is a lot more difficult than it initially appears, especially with all that needs to be done in the day. Still, I think I’ve gotten better at it over the years; last year I did a couple more projects than usual outside FFXIV Write, and the same for this year, so let’s see if I can continue the momentum!

I’m not sure who’s been tagged yet/answered this... @gunbun, @punchelf, @to-the-voiceless, @efrmellifer, @scrollsfromarebornrealm, @msviolacea, and YOU. (Yes, you.)

[jawritter]

Broken Me...

Ch. 11

Summery: The Dallas Convention couldn't have come at a worse time for Jensen. His world fell apart earlier that morning, but was expected to just act like everything was normal. You and a friend were at the convention for her birthday. Life hasn't been that great for you either, but a forced meeting on stage changes two worlds. Will you be able to put this broken man back together again...

Series Warings: Cheating, shitty marriage, Danneel is a bitch, I unfortunately have to put that as a warning because some people tend to get turnt up about it if you don’t... Smut, Crying, Suiside Attempt, brief discription of suicide attempt and recovery, depression, hints of self loathing, language. I think that’s it... Suicide Trigger warnings will be placed over each chapter!

Chapter Warnings: Smut!! Prostate massage, hand job, anal play? Language, depression, crying, all the angst at the end.. Just read it..

Word Count: 2242

A/N: BINGE READ TIME!! As always all mistakes are mine! Please do not copy my work! Feedback is gold!! Hope you all enjoy this one!!

Want More? Check out my masterlist!!

****MASTERLIST****

Jensen insisted on flying to Vancouver when he got out of the hospital even though Jared and yourself tried to convince him to take a little more time off. 

He said he'd thrown filming behind enough, and that he needed the distraction. Neither of you really felt comfortable with arguing with him, given the uncertainty of his mental state… So you flew back to Vancouver the same day they released him from the hospital, even though you felt a little like Jensen was running from his problems back in Austin..

Much to his dismay though once you all landed in Vancouver they told him that he was going to be off for another week whether he liked it or not. 

They would just shoot scenes that didn't require him. 

He pouted most of the way to the apartment the two of you occupied in Vancouver. You were secretly glad they wouldn’t allow him to film... 

He had gone through so much, he needed to face it. Not brush it off, or hide behind his work to deal with his problems...

The outpouring of support from people everywhere was astonishing. Even the cast and crew of Supernatural had gone above and beyond to show him support, and help him with his recovery...

Jensen was scheduled for his first appointment with the therapist next week... 

He wasn't allowed to be left alone under any circumstances... 

Which suited you fine. You were honestly afraid to leave him alone. Almost having an anxiety attack when you couldn't have him in eye sight. 

He had told you over and over again that he'd messed up, that he wouldn't do it again. It was a mistake. Still you couldn't help the fear it created in you. The fear that you'd lose him...

"So what are we gonna do for a week." He said, flopping down on the couch dramatically. 

"Not a damn thing." You tell him, sitting straddle him so that you could rub his back. He caught on quickly, ripping his shirt off. Making himself comfortable. You start on his shoulders working your way down to his lower back. Working the knots and tension out of his back and shoulders. "We are gonna lay on our ass, order a ridiculous amount of takeout, bing watch scary movies, and do nothing that requires getting out of our pj's or that brings on any form of stress for you whatsoever." You tell him, still working on his tense back. 

My God the man was gorgeous. 

It was a sin to be this attractive, it had to be.

"Uh excuse me? There is one thing I can think of doing that would be a hell of a lot easier without our pj's." He said, looking over his shoulders. Wiggling his eyebrows at you mischievously. Earning a light smack across his jean clad backside.

Rolling over with you still hovering over him he tried to sit up, and grab your hips to pull you down to him, but you had other plans..

“No sir, you need to relax..” You hell him, earning the best pouty face he’d ever given you. His already mostly hard member straining against the dark blue jeans he was wearing…

“Easy there cowboy, I didn’t say that I wasn’t going to take care of you…”

The devilish smirk appeared back on his lips as you reached between the town of you, undoing his belt and jeans before sliding them down his long bowed legs.. Pulling his socks off with them, and throwing them on the floor. 

“What you got in mind sweetheart?” He asked you, as you spread his legs and settled yourself between them.. Reaching behind you in your bag that he’d dropped on the floor when you walked through the door of his apartment..

“Remember that thing you wanted to try last month? The one I said you were going to have to earn before I actually agreed to do it?” You asked, and he lifted his eyebrows at you in shock, knowing at first you didn’t want to do this at all… 

“Really? I had to nearly die to get you to try that on me?” Jensen said, shock still evident on his face.

“No!” You said, putting a generous amount of lube on your palm, and slowly starting to pump his quickly hardening member before putting some more lub on your two fingers of the hand that wasn’t working his member, reaching down running them lightly over his tight whole, earning a groan from him already..

“I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing before I did this to you, I didn’t want to hurt you, so I did some research, and I think I’ve got it now, but you have to let me know if I do something wrong.”

Starting with one finger, to make sure that you didn’t hurt him, you slowly pushed it into his rectum, pulling it in and out of him, stretching him slowly as you continued to stock his already rock hard member in your free hand, trying to be as gentle as possible, knowing he’d been wanting to try this for a while after reading about it on the internet.. 

He was already holding on tightly onto the couch cushions, his head thrown back, moaning lightly with every brush of your finger against his prostate, and when he finally relaxed around your hand, you slipped a second finger into him.

Putting a little more pressure against his prostate, fucking him slowly with your finger as you pumped him, running your thumb over his slit, collecting the precum that had gathered there. His hips bucked as he pressed back harder against your hand, your fingers buried nucked deep inside him as you watched his back arch off of the couch, his breath coming in sharp pants as you continued to work his member at the same time you stroked his prostate deep inside of him.

It was the single hottest thing you had ever seen in your life, the way he all but fucked himself against your hand as built him up higher and higher, fucking him with your fingers, pressing in to him until his body was trumbling under your touch, then pulling away some, leaving him wanting more..

His moans get louder and louder as you continue to work him with your hands, strings of sweat sliding down his shaft and your hand as you continue to milk his prostate with your fingers. 

Before long he was all but screaming under your touch, his hips jerking, the veins in his neck strained against skin, his face and neck read and you worked him faster. Harder. Sweat forming over his head at you brought him to the edge over and over again, until his body gave into you completely… 

His body almost sitting straight up as his ass clenches hard around your fingers, and he spills his load onto your hand as you work him slowly through his high, his body wound tight as he releases himself, giving everything he had to you, his trust completely in you to take care of him until his body all but went limp on the couch, little after shocks rolling through is body, his eyes still glazed and unfocused…

You pulled your fingers out of him as gently as you could, running to the bathroom and getting a warm damp cloth after washing your hands, and returning to clean him up.. His breathing finally returning to normal when he laced his fingers with yours sitting up slowly..

“You okay?” You asked him as he leaned his head onto your shoulder, his body still relaxed from his release…

“More than okay baby girl.. That was… Jesus we’re going to be doing that more often..” He said breathlessly.. Making you chuckle against him..

“Come on handsome let’s get you showered, and we can lay up with some pizza and a tv, I want you to stay relaxed, you're not allowed to stress over anything…”

Later that night. After a long steamy shower. Takeout pizza devoured. Hospital food is terrible. Both of you felt like you were going to starve to death before they released him. You were both sprawled out in your king sized bed. About an hour into the shining. You were lying between Jensen's legs. Leaning against his chest. In your favorite spot. Both are strong arms wrapped around you. One of his legs wrapped around yours.

You could tell by the slow steady rise, and fall of his chest that he was sound asleep without even looking at him. 

You were well on your way to being asleep yourself. 

Perfectly content when Jensen's phone vibrated across the night stand. 

Looking up at Jensen he was still sound asleep. Mouth slightly opened in a very deep sleep. You looked at the phone and saw it was Danneel. 

Debating for a moment whether to wake him, or not you decide to answer it, and deal with the consequences later. You did not want Jensen to get stressed out at all right now. Talking to her could only mean stress.

Rolling over with some difficulty because of his arms you grab his phone and answer it. 

"Hello?" You say quietly, into the phone. Trying not to wake Jensen. 

"Hello y/n? This is Danneel. Can I please talk to Jensen." 

How the hell did she know your name? You'd never meet this woman? Oh duh.. It's all over social media.

"No you can't." You tell her, knowing she called because she heard about what happened. "He's sleeping right now, and they don't want him under any stress." 

There was silence on the other end for a moment before she finally spoke again..

"Look I don't want to cause any trouble. Some little brat at JJ's school heard about Jensen's........ Accident... She's worried about him and wants to FaceTime with him. They all want to see their daddy." 

She sounded like she was being honest. It was their dad. If you didn't let them do this Jensen would never forgive you.

"Okay fine. Give me about 5 minutes to wake him then make the call to his FaceTime." You say, praying you weren't making a mistake.

"Thank you." She said, hanging up the phone. 

As soon as the lines go dead you turn around, shaking Jensen.

 "Babe come on wake up, you got a call you don't wanna miss coming in." 

He woke up looking at you confused. 

"What?" He asked you, completely lost. Still half asleep.

"Danneel called. JJ heard about what happened from a kid at school." You watched as he turned white. 

"No.... No... No she can't know. They can't know." He said, starting to panic. 

"Danneel said JJ wants to FaceTime you. She is gonna call." And with that the phone rang with a FaceTime. With shaking hands he answered the call. Facing the phone to himself as JJ and her siblings appear in the screen in from of him.

You don't know how long he talked with his kids. Assuring JJ that he was going to be just fine. That he was going to be around for a long, long time. 

You made sure you stayed far away from their sight. Sitting quietly in the background. Jensen keeping a tight hold on your hand. Trying to hide his emotions from his children.

Finally they tell him goodbye, then Jensen does something that shocked and honestly scared you a little. 

"Hey Danneel." He yelled, before she could disconnect the phone. 

"Jensen." She said, reluctantly turning the phone to herself. She also had been staying out of sight. 

"Thank you for letting me talk to them, but you know I wanna see them. They're my damn kids to Danneel. Please. Let's work this out like civilized adults. Without having to get the court involved. I'm not diluted, I know I can't get full custody of those kids. I'm never hardly around. I just wanna be able to see them... Maybe have a holiday with them everyone once in a while a sleep over. Is that too much to ask?" 

There was silence on the other line. You both held your breath. You watched Jensen carefully. Tears were silently slipping down his face now. You were seconds away from grabbing the phone and disconnecting it. Worried he was getting to upset when she finally spoke.

"Okay. That's fair. We can work it out. Between ourselves, but right now. Tonight. Jensen you need to recover. You're still not stable. You're still reeling, I can even see it. Let's give it a few weeks. Okay? Let yourself heal. Then call me and we will set up a date for them to spend the weekend with you guys. Right now. Go get some sleep."

"Okay. Thanks Danneel. Really." 

With that she hung up the call. You crawled back up to him. Put your arms around him, and let him cry it out. 

Something he hasn't done since all this started. Something he desperately needed to do. 

Tomorrow we will undoubtedly have to tackle another issue. This is gonna be a long healing process for him, but tonight. Tonight he got some answers that he desperately needed, and he got to talk to his children. That alone was more than you expected when that phone rang.

After a long time he finally fell back asleep. Peacefully. Snoring slightly next to you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[itsjackgilbert]

Situation Comedy

INSCRUTABLE MUSIC-VIDEO GENIUS MAKES MOVIE. IT'S VERY GOOD. INSCRUTABLE FILMMAKER DOES MAGAZINE INTERVIEW. IT'S VERY BIZARRE. A VERY SMALL GLIMPSE INTO THE INSULAR WORLD OF SPIKE JONZE, WHERE MAKING AWESOMELY STRANGE FILMS, WEARING FAKE PENISES, AND GETTING BEAT UP (SORT OF) ALL ARE PART OF THE SCENERY

BY ZEV BOROW

"He came to visit me once and when he first arrived I got a phone call that I had to come pick him up because his car had been impounded because he'd been chased by, like, ten cops on bikes after he drove his car onto these little fairgrounds and did a bunch of doughnuts. So, then I had to drive him around all weekend." — Three Kings director David O. Russell

"Actors are more consistent. They tend to land their tricks." — filmmaker Spike Jonze, on who is easier to direct, actors or skaters.

"He wanted his brother to be in Three Kings, so he shot an audition tape with his brother doing the Sharon Stone role in Basic Instinct, crossing and uncrossing his legs. It was the weirdest fucking thing I've ever seen." — David O. Russell

I meet Spike Jonze at the production offices of his new movie, Being John Malkovich, which is a bizarre comedy about a love triangle between three people who find a secret portal into John Malkovich's head behind a file cabinet in an office building where the ceilings are four feet high. John Cusack and Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener are in it. So is John Malkovich. It's really good and weird and funny, though not always in that order. Spike Jonze directed it.

Jonze is 29 years old and sort of famous for directing some of the best music videos ever made: the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage"; Fatboy Slim's "Praise You"; Weezer's "Buddy Holly"; Björk's "It's Oh So Quiet"; and other really good ones, too. He's also made some excellent commercials and two interesting short films. However, mostly because of the exceedingly cool videos he's done for, mostly, exceedingly cool people, Jonze has also become famous for being exceedingly cool. A wide and deep selection of the hippest people alive dig Jonze. They are his friends. This past July Jonze married actress, filmmaker, and fellow sort-of-famous person Sofia Coppola. Tom Waits sang at their wedding. Tom fucking Waits.

Jonze is small and wiry, with the body and demeanor of a skateboarder, which he is. He is relaxed, unfailingly polite, and has a voice suggesting a 15-year-old boy. When we meet he is wearing a T-shirt and scuffed-up $350 Marc Jacobs shoes. He tells me he's supposed to meet with Knox, an as-yet-unknown guitar player, to discuss ideas for his video and invites me along. But first we go to buy a big bag of cat food for his cat.

Jonze says Knox plays "sort of country-funkabilly-Prince-like music...really beautiful stuff." A friend gave him a tape, he says, and he fell in love with it. We get lost trying to find Knox's house.

When we finally arrive, Knox says he was asleep because Jonze was supposed to arrive hours ago. Jonze says he's sorry, that it must have been his assistant's fault. Knox is tall, with short, dark hair styled vaguely pompadour-ish. His apartment is small. Neil Young in on the CD player. An acoustic guitar rests in the corner.

"I'm the only one in the band, so I do the whole gig," Knox says. "My old man was a guitarist and my mother was, like...well, she was a capable pianist, not great. I'm from Tenness–Knoxville–that's why I go by Knox. My mother ahd a baby two years before me, a little boy, and it died at birth, and I am, like, the copy of that kid. And my little brother almost died at birth 'cause of me, so it's kind of all cyclical. But I'm still tweaking it. So, uh, what kind of ideas do you have?"

Jonze talks about making a video that's not very commercial, about something that's cool in and of itself.

Knox: "I just don't want it to be cute. Don't take this as an affront, but some of your videos are...cute. The 'Buddy Holly' thing was little fucking cute. I was thinking more of an early John Cugar-type of thing. Like 'Jack and Diane.' Maybe with some of the words on the bottom of the screen."

Jonze: "Uh, cool.... But it’s also cool to do something maybe not as literal.” He asks Knox if he wants to be in the video. Knox says maybe just his face, as a child.

Jonze says he could come over with a video camera and they could try some stuff out.

Knox: “Like what?”

Jonze: “Well, I don’t want to just throw stuff out.”

Knox: “Well, I’m not going to steal your stuff.”

Jonze laughs, sort of. There is an awkward silence.

Jonze: “How about a video with Xeroxes, just as a cool medium?”

Knox: “Yeah, well, that sounds schticky. Xeroxes are schticky.”

Jonze tries to say something about form. Knox says he likes “the Jazzercize” video Jonze did.

Jonze: “‘Praise you.’ Cool.”

Knox turns toward me and says he doesn’t think Spike looks very into it. Jonze says he doesn’t want to do anything he’s done already. He asks Knox if he saw the video he did for Sean Lennon.

Knox: “Nah. That guy’s too fuckin’ avant garde for me.”

Jonze: “No, I’m not saying that. It’s just I don’t want to make something silly out of your song, but at the same time....” He trails off.

There’s a tense silence, then Knox turns to me and asks if I have any ideas for videos. I tell him I don’t. Knox says “fuck,” loudly.

Jonze: “Look, I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, and if you don’t really like my stuff maybe we shouldn’t work together. I like working with people who are....”

Knox: “Yeah, well...fuck.... Well, if you come up with some ideas, any ideas, call, but I just...shit.”

Jonze: “I should go.”

Jonze gets up. Knox begins to pace. Then he screams, “Fuck!” and throws a small wooden chair Jonze had been sitting on against the wall. It shatters.

Jonze: “Dude, chill.”

Knox: “I think you better leave!”

Jonze: “I was just....”

Knox: “Just fucking leave!”

Then Knox pushes Jonze into a wall, hard. I think to myself: Spike Jonze is about to get his ass kicked. Then, like a panther (or jaguar), Jonze jumps at Knox. They hit the floor. Jonze is on top of Knox, throwing punches at his head. After about 15 seconds, I pull them apart. Knox gets up and screams, “Wait right fucking there!” and runs into a back room. Jonze looks at me and says, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” and runs out the door, fast.

Knox jumps out from the back room, glowering and holding a baseball bat.

DRIVING AWAY, JONZE MUSES ABOUT HOW “HECTIC” things got with Knox. He repeatedly pushes his face toward the rearview mirror and asks if I think his eye looks swollen. It doesn’t. He says nothing like that has ever happened to him before, except once “with Everlast, but it never got physical.” We pull into a 7-Eleven and he gets a juice and some Advil.

I try to ask some more questions about the movie. “I’m apprehensive about talking about it at all,” he says, “because I feel like it’s going to cloud someone’s opinion. You think about all the movies you had preconceived notions about, about all the ones you read stuff about until you were sick of them before you even saw them.

SPIKE JONZE’S REAL NAME IS ADAM SPIEGEL. He isn’t interested in talking about why, or when, he started going by Spike Jonze, or how much it has to do with Spike Jones, the 1940s band leader, but it’s probably related to the fact he grew up hanging out with a lot of competitive BMX bikers similarly fond of pseudonyms and alter egos. He was raised in Bethesda, Maryland, a well-heeled suburb of Washington, D.C., where his mother enjoyed photography and his father enjoyed being the scion of an extremely successful family-owned catalog company. Jonze is the middle child (younger brother; older sister) and was into skateboarding, photography, lots of Dischord-era punk rock, and, most of all, BMX.

In the mid-’80s, BMXing’s popularity was exploding, and Jonze was spending much of his time at Rockville BMX, a legendary retail and mail-order BMX shop in nearby Rockville, Maryland. At age 15, he accompanied the Haro pro-BMX team on a summer tour of the U.S., serving as part-time roadie, contest announcer, T-shirt salesperson, and using an old 35-millimeter camera, team photographer. By the time he was 16, he was writing and taking pictures for skate and bike magazines. At 17, immediately after finishing high school, he moved to Torrance, California, to work at Freestylin’, the sport’s preeminent glossy. There, he met Mark Lewman and Andy Jenkins, two kindred spirits.

“We were all living together in this apartment across the street from the magazine’s offices, in the Valley, which was like the epicenter of the skateboarding and BMX world,” says Lewman, who was 18 at the time and is now a creative director at Lambesis, a San Diego–based advertising agency that deciphers youth culture. “We’d skate to work, ride ramps, listen to Black Flag and Eric B. and Rakim, and get into adventures drinking Night Train, being weird, and stomping around downtown L.A.”

They’d also make zines. First, in 1991, Homeboy, then, two years later, Dirt. Clever and funny, they became popular with the 25-and-under, proto-extreme-sport, punk/rap-inclined hipster set. During this time, Jonze also started getting hired to take photos for magazines such as Details and Interview. And he began filming skateboarding videos, including one particular deft collaboration with ‘80s skate god Mark Gonzales titled Blind Skateboard Video.

One night, backstage at a Sonic Youth concert, Gonzales gave a copy of that tape to his friend Kim Gordon, who dug it so much that she asked Tamra Davis–who had just directed her first film, Gun Crazy, and had yet to become the wife of Beastie Boy Mike D.–to work with Jonze on shooting some skateboarding segments for Sonic Youth’s video for the song “100%.” He was 21.

Jonze has always lived in something of a rarefied world inhabited by bikers, skaters, emerging rock icons, and movie stars. Even so, he notes, he first met the Beastie Boys through his sister. She and Adam Yauch met in traffic school. The Beasties and Jonze share an appreciation for the absurd. Yauch and Jonze used to do things like rent police uniforms so they could direct traffic in Manhattan.

A few short years after “100%,” Jonze was established as America’s preeminent director of unusual music videos. This fact seemed to bore him. In 1998′s Fatboy Slim “Praise You” video, the one with the dancers in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Jonze credited the direction to Richard Koufey and the Torrance Community Dancers. To this day, Jonze denies having been a part of it. Earlier this year, a typed letter arrived at the Spin offices vehemently demanding Spin retract its report that Jonze directed the video. It was signed Richard Koufey and included a detailed résumé for Koufey that stated he was a dancer in the “Thriller” video, the “Love Shack” video, the film Dirty Dancing, and something called “Dancextravaganza” at the opening of a Dellamo Fashion Center.

IN ADDITION TO BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, Jonze has another movie coming out, one in which he acts. It’s called Three Kings and was written and directed by David O’Russell. The two met when Jonze hired Russell to help him write a script for Harold and the Purple Crayon, which was to be a partially animated adaption of the children’s book, and Jonze’s feature-film debut, but never made it into production. Jonze costars in Three Kings with George Clooney, Ice Cube, and Mark Wahlberg. They play four U.S. soldiers who try to steal a secret cache of Kuwaiti gold at the end of the Gulf War. It’s a different, very sharp war-genre picture. Jonze plays a redneck private who is the sidekick of Wahlberg’s more seasoned soldier.

“I’d never really acted before,” Jonze says. “A few little things with friends, but nothing serious. And it’s not like I really want to get into acting. But David was really into me doing it, and Mark was especially supportive. In some ways I feel like I had no right to do it. But it was a lot of fun.”

Russell recalls Jonze’s commitment to the project. “He stayed in character a lot on set, and I think he eventually regretted it because Mark started beating the shit out of him as if Spike was really his tagalong sidekick. We tried telling Mark to go easy on him, but he was in character too. I think Spike was upset that that was happening.

AMONG THOSE IMMERSED IN THE CULT of Spike Jonze, the Weird Al prank is infamous. As partially recounted in an issue of the Beastie Boys’ zine, Grand Royal, Mike D. and Russell Simins, the drummer for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, interviewed by Weird Al. During the interview, they got the conversation to come around to the Beatles. Precisely at that moment, they had Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono walk by and staged something weird and funny. No one at Grand Royal can remember exactly what happened, but it included Spike Jonze dressed up as a waiter.

I didn’t know of the Weird Al prank until weeks after meeting Jonze. As such, I spent a good portion of my evening immediately following the Knox vs. Jonze incident breathlessly telling friends all about their fight, until a friend, a longtime skater, looked at me and matter-of-factly said: “He staged it.”

Two days after the fight I go to meet Jonze for lunch, and, even though I’m not sure, I tell him I now that the afternoon with Knox was staged. Jonze demurs. “That would be gnarly” he says. “Maybe we should come back to this topic after lunch.

We pull into a Carl’s Jr. Things between us are slightly tense. I keep pressing him on the issue as we walk into the restaurant. Jonze doesn’t say anything until he’s just about to order at the counter, then he says we should walk outside. I follow him into the parking lot toward a parked black sedan. There is a guy in dark sunglasses sitting there, sipping on a Coke.

“Dude, it’s off,” Jonze says. “We’re busted.”

Jonze then reveals that he’d “planned something” for right there, right then, at the Carl’s Jr. We all had back inside the restaurant, where Jonze begins walking around the seating area and tapping on what appear to be lonely Carl’s Jr. diners on the shoulder. There are four of them, strategically placed; two have video cameras hidden on them, on has a regular camera. Two of them, including the guy from the car, who is Jeff Tremaine, the art director of the skateboarding magazine Big Brother, are wearing hidden microphones.

“This was going to be an all-out assault,” Tremaine says. “I was going to walk by and bump into Spike and my drink was going to fall all over me. And then I was going to get all jacked at Spike and knock some shit on him and get into a fight.”

“I was actually going to take a punch this time,” Jonze says, “but I was also going to bite down on some blood pellets.” He shows me two small capsules of fake blood. “I wanted the whole article to be about how I keep getting my ass kicked.”

“I was going to knock over the salad bar,” Tremaine says. “We were going to have the whole thing on tape. I twas going to be a turkey shoot, like Kennedy.”

“You are all extremely fucked up,” I tell them.

Jonze says he started planning for it late last night and tells everyone he’s sorry he didn’t go through with it. Tremaine tells Jonze that he was excited to punch him. Then, everyone tells me some stories of previous pranks, the best of which is described as simply the Hard-On One. It goes something like this:

The guy who played Knox yesterday–a friend of Jonze’s who also pulls stunts like getting himself hit by a car (for a Big Brother photo shoot) and shooting himself with a gun while wearing a bulletproof vest (for fun)–puts on a pair of flimsy gym shorts, out of which sticks a large, fake rubber penis. Then, he goes out and gets into a pickup basketball game. Next, he walks into a guitar store, where, when a salesman hands him a cord to plug in, the salesman is pulled toward the fake rubber penis. After that, he makes a quick stop at a karate studio, from which he is quickly removed. Finally, he goes to get measured for a tux, where, according to Jonze, the tailor exclaims [in a thick Indian accent], “What? You always run around with your dick sticking out?”

“It’s amazing,” Jonze says. “We’ve got the whole thing on tape.”

After Carl’s Jr., Spike lobbies me to concoct a wild, made-up story with him, one I could submit in lieu of the article. He’s got some funny, clever ideas for it, too.

“SPIKE DIDN’T GROW UP WATCHING A TON OF FILMS or even TV,” says Kim Gordon, who has known Spike ever since he worked on “100%.” “So he’s not tied to any sense of history image-wise, the way most people are. He just has a real instinctual feel for what people like. And he’s willing to try absolutely anything.”

“I think he kind of looks at everything like it’s a chance to take a golf cart and make it go 60 miles per hour,” says his old friend Lewman. “It’s always been about having a really good time.” Even so, by all accounts Jonze is meticulous, tireless even, whether it concerns a feature film, or taking down a Carl’s Jr. salad bar. His willingness to go to almost any lengths to maintain the integrity of any project–no matter how seemingly small, trivial, or twisted–is nothing short of spectacular. It is probably the one quality that best portends him making very good movies for a long time. A vast portion of Jonze’s creative energies are consumed by these tiny, hysterical performances that will never make any money, that are solely for the benefit of himself and his like-minded friends.

“But it’s not about being weird for weird’s sake,” Lewman says. “I mean, Malkovich is a movie that, at its heart, is about something everyone can relate to–desperately wanting to be someone else.... I think a lot of how [Jonze] looks at the world might come from skating and biking. You do that as a kid and you don’t look at things normally. You look at a hockey rink and see a place to skateboard. You look at a bench as a thing to do tricks off of.”

I SEE JONZE ONE MORE TIME. HE MAKES IT OBVIOUS he’d rather I not write about the Knox and Carl’s Jr. pranks. Further, he mostly turns off my tape recorder any time I start to ask him anything. He tells me he doesn’t know what to do because he doesn’t want to come off as a guy who is lucky enough to make cool movies with big stars but is all petulant about talking to the press. He tells me again how anything he says as far as explanation of his own work is less interesting than someone’s own interpretation of his, or any, movie. About an hour passes. I ask him to name some of his favorite movies and filmmakers.

“I like stuff that is unpredictable in terms of tone,” he says. “I like Tim Burton, The World According to Garp, Being There, all the Coen brothers’ stuff. I feel really lucky to even have the opportunity to try to make those kinds of movies.”

I ask about his movie, about what Malkovich was like.

“He’s just amazing. Really genuinely eccentric. He heard about the script and contacted us, loved the idea. It was weird because he plays himself in the movie, but it’s not really him, it’s the script’s idea of him. Whenever I see him do the Dance of Despair and Disillusionment, I’m like, this guy is my hero.”

The Dance of Despair and Disillusionment is reason alone to see Being John Malkovich. In the movie, John Cusack plays a puppeteer who enters the body of John Malkovich and forces him to give up acting for puppeteering. At one point, Malkovich acts out the dance he wants to be his ultimate master-puppeteer work, the Dance of Despair and Disillusionment. Just out of the shower, he acts it out in a towel. David Fincher, the director of Seven and Fight Club, fellow former music-video director, and close friend of Jonze, calls it “up there with Butch and Sundance jumping off the cliff, as far as greatest movie moments ever go.”

I try to get Jonze to talk about other things, videos, his commercial work. (Jonze often shoots commercials, the most recent being Lee Jeans’ “Buddy Lee” spots.) He won’t. A few days later, we talk on the phone. He asks how I’ve decided to “handle” the article, says he knows I’ll write “something good.” The next day, I call him back, ask him to clear up some factual stuff, dates he worked on things, how he first met certain people. He’s not into it. But, before we get off the phone, he does answer one question.

Me: Where did the idea for the “Sabotage” video come from?

Jonze: “Australia.”

[jo-kuron]

( LANA CONDOR, CISFEMALE, SHE/HER, VIRGO, 25 ) I just spotted JOSEPHINE KURON at the beach today. Don’t you know them? They live down by the TOWERS and usually hang out with the RICH KIDS cliques. From what I’ve heard, they can be CONTROLLING, but they’re also DETERMINED. I always think of them when i hear JUST LIKE MAGIC by ARIANA GRANDE and tend to associate them with parchment paper on a cookie sheet at 3AM, a worn copy of wuthering heights for annotations, sunglasses covering bags under sleep deprived eyes . ( bree, she.her, 21, est )

HI EVERYONE! So, this is one of my fave muses, Jo. She is an amazing and complex female who will constantly amaze, I PROMISE. This is mostly her backbone, there’s more headcanons to follow!

BASIC CHARACTER QUESTIONS

Full Name: Josephine Avila Kuron

nicknames: Josie, Jojo, Jo, Superstar, Dreamer

date of birth: September 20, 1995

age: Twenty Five

Star Sign: Virgo

Chinese Zodiac: Rat

PHYSICAL / APPEARANCE

hair style? Typically seen with a half-up do.

glasses or contact lenses? Black Tortoise shelled frames from time to time.

scars or birthmarks? a birthmark of a crown sits on the front of her right ankle.

tattoos? A small silhouette of her ex dancing, specifically a jump mid-air.  

physical or mental handicaps? Dyslexia.

type of clothes? Typically in Alternative clothing. Lots of ripped jeans and pleated skirts.

mannerisms? When nervous, Jo will tug at her sleeves or excessively push her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

PERSONALITY

are they more optimistic or pessimistic? Pessimistic now, the past self was optimistic.

are they introverted or extroverted? Introverted Extrovert.

do they ever put on airs? Sometimes, if she feels intimidated.

what bad habits do they have? Nail biting, and joint cracking.

what makes them laugh out loud? Silly dad jokes and situational humor.

how do they display affection? Gifting small items.

how do they want to be seen by others? Strong and put together.

how do they see themselves? Weak and a mess, irredeemable.

strongest character trait? Trusting

weakest character trait? Controlling

how competitive are they? Very, she loves a challenge.

do they make snap judgements or take time to consider? She takes time to consider the majority of the time, but she will make a quick decision from time to time.

PAST AND FUTURE

Jo was a miracle baby, she was her parents fifth time trying for a child. It wasn’t for lack of pregnancy, her mother couldn’t carry all the way through term. After Josephine took her first breath, nearly every breath after that  was in the vicinity of her mother. Although most kid would’ve hated that, Jo found it comforting. She was very nurtured. After her birth, Jo’s mother became a stay at home mom. This often led to her feeling like it would teeter on the side of helicopter parenting from time to time. However, the extra time with her mother led her to find her love of reading and writing.As a child Jo was a huge teacher's pet.  She always loved the idea of learning, no matter who or what was teaching her. Even when she hit the age of nine and learning became hard for her, she still enjoyed someone looking out for her and trying to help her be her best self.

Even though she overcame her disability, she shies away from compliments. She finds herself undeserving of them, and openly welcomes criticism. She knows that she isn’t perfect, but she wants to work on being the best version of herself she could be.

She grew up thinking she was poor, but her parents were actually well off because they never wanted her to grow up thinking that money made anyone better than anyone else.

All she wanted was to get into college to make her parents proud of her. Yes, she could’ve done anything and got their approval, but she wanted their approval to mean something. So she worked as hard as she could to get into the top education program in the nation. She wanted to pay the experience she had in school forward. She was on her way home to tell her parents that she had did something that would actually make them proud, her mother called her and told her the terrible news. Her father had a heart attack and didn’t make it to the hospital. She was ready to drop all of her plans to be with her mother and just do school at a local college. However, once her mother found out that she had gotten the scholarship she worked so hard for, her mother demanded that she went to Yates. That’s how she ended up on the green slopes of campus her freshman year of college.

TL;DR: JO WAS A MIRACLE BABY THAT WANTED TO BE A TEACHER HER WHOLE LIFE. SHE ALMOST DIDN’T GO TO COLLEGE BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO TAKE CARE OF HER MOTHER AFTER HER FATHER’S DEATH BUT HER MOM WOULDN’T LET HER GIVE UP ON ONE OF HER DREAMS.

LOVE

do they believe in love at first sight? Yes.

are they in a relationship? No.

how do they behave in a relationship? She likes to keep everyone at a distance except her significant other. She treats them like her best friend, and more often than not they are. She loves to have a friendly relationship so she doesn’t feel like she’s a totally different person in love.

has your character ever been in love? Yes.

have they ever had their heart broken? Yes.

what is their sexual orientation? Bisexual.

FAVOURITES

what is their favourite animal? Koala

what place would they most like to visit? Pasadena, California

what is the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen? The sunset in New York City. Her ex-boyfriend

what is their favourite song? Heebiejeebies by Amine

music, art, reading preferred? She prefers YA novels, loves Musicals, and isn’t the biggest fan of literal art. She just likes to look at pretty things.

what is their favourite color? She loved the color black for the longest, but now her favorite color is a sky blue.

favourite food: She loves all types of Italian food.

what is their favourite day of the week? Tuesday.

POSSESSIONS

what is in their fridge: She always keeps Apple juice and water bottles in her fridge to drink and enough random snacks to make it look healthy even though she has a stash of chips in the pantry

what is on their bedside table? She keeps a candle and wireless phone charger that looks like a glowing rune when her phone is charging.

what is in their car? She always keeps back ups to all of her bathroom items in her trunk. If you think about it, she has it in there. In her center console she keeps napkins, a reusable straw set, and a few pairs of chopsticks. In her glove compartment she has an extensive rotating collection of cds. She likes the nostalgic feeling.

what is in their purse? She keeps her debit cards, an old photo of her ex, a packet of tissues, headphones, an emergency twenty dollar bill, and a few packs of salt and pepper in a small pouch.

what is in their pockets? Her phone or her headphones

what is their most treasured possession? Her locket.

DAILY LIFE

what are their eating habits? Typically whatever is easily accessed. If it takes longer than an hour to cook, she probably won’t make it.

are they minimalist or a clutter hoarder? She would like to believe she’s a minimalist, but her closet would say otherwise.

what do they do first thing on a weekday morning? Make a cup of coffee and read a book on her kindle.

what do they do on a sunday afternoon? Yoga while their roommate watches.

what do they do on a friday night? Either hangout with her friends or play board games while getting drunk with her roommate.

what is the soft drink of choice? Dr. Pepper

what is their alcoholic drink of choice? Tito’s and crystal light. Old Fashioned

what does she do for work? An English Teacher to GED students. A Cam Girl.

[valkyrieofsmut]

Cowboy!Kurt’s Mail Order Bride

Cowboy!Kurt Wagner (Nightcrawler) x Mutant!OC

Descriptions:   Old westAU In about 1900 Germany, Kurt has heard stories about the wild west and dreamt about being a cowboy for a long time. When he’s brought over to America and sent to live with Logan he’s excited, until he learns what hard work a ranch actually is. Logan knows a woman will set him straight from his shenanigans, and brings one back. Kurt hopes for love, but they can’t seem to get along.

A/n- I watched the (1964) western movie “Mail Order Bride” and thought it would be hilarious to make a story and stick our favorite blue fuzzy man in! Also... He’s kind of a whiny brat in the beginning... because that’s where he had to be to have character growth! lol. 

Masterlist

Story!

Kurt laid in the back of the wagon, looking up at the night sky as they traveled toward the new place he would be living. 

New York. 

It was a large city in America, but he was hoping that it still had some of its western charm. 

A lot of books about the west had recently come to Germany for him to read, stories of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, wild outlaws, good lawmen, genteel ladies… 

He smiled as the thought came to mind that he may meet one of them. 

The smile turned to a frown, however, when he looked at the three fingered hand he lifted up to look at against the sky. 

Not only three fingered, but blue in the light, and invisible in the dark, except to his yellow-eyed night vision. 

He turned over and looked where Hank, a large man wearing a pair of glasses, was laying back, napping, and he wondered if it was something learned here, since he’d traveled all the time with the circus, but had never been able to sleep, since they all stayed awake in order to set up camp as soon as they landed. 

Or maybe it was the time difference since traveling across the ocean to America. 

He pulled his well worn German copy of “Tales of the wild west” from his bag and started reading. 

.

The sun shone down into Kurt’s eyes, waking him, and he saw that they had stopped moving. He sat up and looked around over the edge of the wagon, seeing a rather large spread of land, larger than what they’d take for the circus, even. He looked around further and saw Hank talking to a man in a wheelchair at the door of what he could only describe as a mansion. 

Kurt hopped out of the back and made his way to the door, knowing that Scott and Jean had probably already gone to “freshen up” or whatever it was city folk did after a journey. 

As he got to the door, Kurt had his eyes down and pulled on his hat so he didn’t have to see the shock/ disturbance in the man he was sure was the Professor’s face as he saw him for the first time, and followed the other two men inside. 

“Hello, Kurt. We are glad to have you here, are you excited to be in America?” The Professor asked. 

“Certainly,” he answered. “I have heard a lot of the cowboys here, and it has become my dream to be one as well.” 

The Professor chuckled. “We don’t have many cowboys around these settlements anymore, mostly settlers.” 

Kurt frowned, his hand holding his bag against him tightly. 

.

Logan was at the feed store, putting in an order when a woman came from the general store next door. 

“Oh, Mr. Logan, I’m glad you haven’t left yet, someone is on the line for you,” she told him, looking a tiny bit harried, but also interested in the happenings of whatever was going on. 

Logan looked up, wondering who it could be and threw two dollars on the counter. “Just load it up,” he told the man before following the woman next door. 

“It’s right back here,” she showed him, making sure the phone was working correctly before she left. 

“Yeah?” He asked into the phone. 

“Logan, thank goodness. It’s Xavier. Listen, I’ve taken in a young man- I’m not sure what to do with him.” 

“Sounds rough Professor, where do I come in?” 

“Well, I was hoping- He is very disappointed that there are no cowboys around here, he wants to be one desperately, I suppose.” 

There was a pause as Logan didn’t say anything. 

“I was thinking; your ranch is away from town quite a ways- he is affected physically- and it’s more like what he was hoping for-” 

The Professor’s voice was a little tight, and Logan knew it wasn’t for only those reasons that he wanted to bring the new mutant there. 

“I don’t know Professor, if he can’t hack it at city life, he ain’t gonna survive ranch life.” 

“I think he would enjoy it much more, Logan, just being there,” came the pressing answer. “And, I will, of course, help with expenses if he needs anything.” 

“Well… Suppose I could use a ranch hand. But I ain’t going easy on him.” 

Logan could practically hear the relief in the Professor’s voice as he said that someone would be around with him shortly. 

Shortly was a relative term when a simple trip to town could take a day, several hours, or just a few, depending on your mode of transport, and it was a mite bit farther from New York to where he was. 

Logan raised a brow, but shrugged it off as he hung up the phone. 

He finished his shopping around town and climbed back onto the wagon before turning his team back to home. 

He was surprised to see a figure standing on his porch, and only relaxed after he could tell that it was Hank. 

“Howdy,” Hank greeted. 

“Hey,” Logan responded. “How did you get here so fast?” He asked. 

Hank smiled his easy smile. “The new boy is a teleporter, and he was very motivated to come here. Took him a few jumps, but we made extremely good time.” 

“Yeah?” Logan snuffed, looking around. “Where is he?” 

Hank gestured to the other side of the house. “Out back. Your dog gave us a greeting.” 

“Hm. Get in,” Logan told Hank and they continued around the house to the back, stopping next to the barn. 

Logan saw his fluffy shepard mix chasing a lithe blue figure back into the herd of cattle that mooed and called to each other. 

Logan climbed down and stood on the fence for a moment before whistling to the dog and the young man followed the dog over. “Keel,” he told the dog and it laid down. 

The blue man stood next to the fence, a huge grin across his face. “Hallo,” he greeted with German accent. “I was just playing with your dog, he is very nice.” 

“He wasn’t playing,” Logan told him. “He was herding you.” 

“What?” Kurt asked in surprise. 

“Buck, tend,” Logan told the dog, and the dog jumped up and ran back to the herd. “He’s a herd dog. He protects them, and anything that’s not a threat in the fence that can be herded will be.” 

Kurt blushed a little and looked away in embarrassment. “Oh…” 

“So, you’re the one who wants to be a cowboy, huh?” Logan asked as Kurt easily slipped through the horizontal slats in the fence. 

“Ja, very much,” he enthused. “My name is Kurt,” he held out his hand as he greeted his new mentor. 

At least, he hoped he’d be his mentor, he certainly looked like a cowboy; a day’s growth on his face, muscles to spare from working his place, he had the boots, clothes, and hat. A real cowboy. He grinned at the man who was a little shorter than him, but he just got a grunt in reply. 

“There’s no time for messin’ around here, we have to unload this wagon.” 

.

Days passed and Kurt was exhausted. 

“But, I want to be a real cowboy,” he complained. “With the gunfights, and stampeeds, and cattle drives, and riding a horse everywhere…” 

Logan pounded on the horseshoe held by the other hand with a hammer. “Ain’t that romantic.” 

“I thought I was moved here so that I could be like a cowboy, but you all lied to me! You just wanted me out here to hide me from the town! I was doing fine at that in Germany, they promised I’d get to be like a cowboy!” He whined as he teleported around the shed rapidly in aggravation. 

“Knock it off,” Logan yelled, startling Kurt into stopping. “They sent you here because you need some training to be a man and not an annoying kid anymore.” 

“What? I’m not annoying,” Kurt denied. 

“Annoying me instead of doing your chores,” Logan told him. 

Kurt huffed and teleported to the ground to kick a rock. 

“Didn’t your mama teach you any manners?” 

“Nein,” Kurt snapped at him sullenly. 

“Hm,” he set down the things in his hands and switched tools to shoe the horse standing by the post. “Maybe that’s what you need, then.” 

“What?” 

“A woman to teach you how to behave like a man.” 

“A woman?” Kurt asked. 

Logan grunted in reply. 

“How is a woman going to teach me how to act like a man? Is she a crossdresser?” Kurt asked as he burst out laughing. 

“Think I’ll go find one,” Logan told him. 

“Really?” Kurt questioned, growing serious. 

Logan tossed his head yes as he finished with the horse. 

“A genteel woman?” Kurt asked a bit softly. 

“Yeah, sure. One that won’t put up with any cud from you,” Logan grumbled. 

”When will you go?” Kurt asked, his voice a bit surer, now. 

“Well, horse is shod. Could head out tomorrow, as long as you take care to milk the cow and don’t let yourself starve to death while I’m gone.” 

.

Kurt lay awake in the room he’d been told to sleep in, his hands unable to stay in one place for long, flitting nervously from his view to clutching the blankets to him to touching the book laying in the bed next to him. 

What would she look like? 

How would she react to seeing him for the first time? 

Would she be like the strict school marms he had read about, or more like a caring mother? 

How old would she be? 

His age, or older to be a mother figure? 

If she was his age, would she like him, or even be able to look past how he looked? 

Those questions and so many more rushed through his mind, unable to be quieted. 

.

The next morning he walked out to see Logan off, surprised at the amount of things he was loading onto his horse. 

“How long will it take to go into town?” Kurt asked. 

“Can’t go into town for this,” Logan answered. “No one is going to let their daughter go out to my ranch alone with me to live. Besides, we need someone who isn’t connected with the town so that it doesn’t raise suspicion.” 

“Oh… How far will you have to go?” Kurt asked. 

“Couple of towns. Should be back by the end of the month.” 

Kurt’s eyes widened. “What will I eat?” He asked. 

Logan shrugged. “There’s enough canned stuff, jerky and cheese to last for about that long, coffee, the well is good, milk from the cow, and some bread as long as you eat it before it goes bad. If you get real hungry, there’s always the horse feed.” 

Kurt looked irritated as Logan kicked the horse and took off. 

“Huh,” he grumbled, turning to the fence and jumping it easily, despite it being as tall as him, running to the dog and chasing it around, playing and rolling around on the ground. 

A/N-  For the next chapter, I also have to make a special note that the oc’s name is Bethilde (beth - ill - duh), because I named her, and then realized later that her name is spelled the same as Bethilde (bet- ill- duh). Basically, it’s just the pronunciation of the h, but Beth is short for (beth - ill - duh) and Betty is short for (bet - ill - duh) lol.

[unfolded73]

Husbands: Two Years In (1/5) - schitt’s creek ff

Hi, remember me? I finally wrote something new. This fic is complete, and will be posted over the course of the next two weeks. While I'm including it as part of the "Labels" series, the preceding fics are not required reading. Previous fics in this series: Boyfriends; “I Love You”, Partners, Fiancés 

Warning: This fic deals with depression as one of its major topics.

Rated Explicit, this chapter 5059 words. (ao3)

Thanks to @high-seas-swan for cheerleading and B13_MaybeThisTime for many valuable comments (and also cheerleading).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter 1: Winter

Patrick stuck his head behind the beige curtain of the storeroom at Rose Apothecary. “Bethany, can you cover the register? I’ve got to get to my council meeting.”

“Sure,” she said, leaving off from the merchandise she’d been unpacking and joining him behind the counter.

“I should be back in an hour and a half,” he said, slipping his laptop into his messenger bag.

“No problem. Is David planning to come back to the store today?” she asked.

“I doubt it. He’s gone more than halfway to Thornbridge to meet with potential vendors, so I expect he’ll be late getting back.” Patrick’s thumb strayed to the smooth gold of his wedding ring and he gave it a turn, an ingrained habit now after a year and a half of marriage.

“Okay,” Bethany said to him before turning to the customer who had just approached the register. “Find everything you were looking for today?” she asked in a cheerful, retail clerk voice.

Patrick ducked into the back again to get his coat and gloves and hat, pulling them on and zipping his parka up to his neck before braving the icy temperatures outside. Not for the first time, he wished the store had a vestibule and another set of doors to keep the cold from rushing in every time people came and went during the winter months. He made a mental note to add that to their wish list for a second Rose Apothecary location, when and if that ever became a reality.

David was certainly invested in the idea, spending more time out on the road these days, wooing new vendors or shoring up renewal contracts with existing ones. Hiring Bethany meant they didn’t need to be in the store at the same time, and while the flexibility was more than worth it in terms of the time it gave them to work on growing the business, Patrick had to admit he missed the old days sometimes. When it was only him and David at the store together, sneaking into the back to make out when things were slow.

On the other hand, there was probably something to be said for not spending every hour of every day together, he told himself. Marriages thrived on a little bit of separation. But looking up at the grey sky while he walked through town, it was hard not to feel lonely, the oppressive winter weighing him down.

Patrick ducked into the town hall, always drafty in winter, and pulled his hat and gloves off as he made his way to the desk he used during council meetings and during the one afternoon a week that it was his turn to be on duty, handing out permits and answering questions. It was a good system in a town too small to pay for municipal employees, and helping his fellow townspeople was probably his favorite part of serving on town council.

“Patrick,” Ronnie muttered as he passed by her desk. “Kind of you to grace us with your presence.”

Patrick glanced at his phone. “I’m literally one minute late, Ronnie.”

“One minute late is late.”

“Also, Roland’s not here yet,” Patrick said as he dropped into his desk chair and set up his laptop to take the minutes of their meeting. Ronnie had been quick to inform him that taking minutes always fell to the newest member on town council, although when he expressed his surprise at the idea of Moira Rose doing that job, she’d had to admit that Moira had never actually taken any minutes. Patrick easily agreed to take over from Bob, whom everyone agreed had been terrible at it.

Ronnie just rolled her eyes and waved a hand dismissively at him. She had sort of supported Patrick when he ran unopposed for Moira’s vacated seat (although he also suspected she was behind the whisper campaign to write in Ted the Turtle, Alexis’s former pet who now belonged to Roland Junior — Ted got thirteen percent of the vote), but that didn’t stop her from continuing to needle him at every opportunity.

Roland finally arrived ten minutes later, and they began working their way through the agenda as Roland wolfed down a sizable sandwich at his desk with table manners that his three-year-old son would have looked askance at. They voted on whether to have a stop light installed outside the café (2-2; tabled for further discussion after the next public forum), whether to confer historic landmark status on the old Hockley barn (1-3 nay), and on whether to finalize the calendar for the “Clean up the Creek” days in the summer (4-0 yea).

“What’s next on the agenda, Ronnie?” Roland asked, his mouth full of his lunch, as if he didn’t have a copy of the agenda on his desk. Patrick looked over, and noticed that Roland had emptied a bag of potato chips onto his agenda.

“The annual blood drive,” she replied, consulting the paper in front of her. “Canadian Blood Services is requesting six volunteers, as we’ve provided in the past, to log people in and to hand out juice and cookies after. We need to have the promotional posters printed and get the word out, and then a volunteer meeting will need to be organized by the end of the month. Patrick, you wanna take the lead on this?”

He looked up from his laptop. “On the blood drive?” His stomach twisted, and he considered saying no. “Uh… sure. Sure.” He typed that into the minutes, his fingers tapping sharply on the keys.

The rest of the meeting passed uneventfully, and they disbanded after another twenty minutes. Ronnie made her way over to Patrick as he was emailing the completed minutes out to the other members of council, a task he liked to do right away before he forgot about it.

“You didn’t seem thrilled to be put in charge of the blood drive. If you’re squeamish around needles—”

“I’m not squeamish about giving blood.” He snapped his laptop closed and shoved it into his bag. “I earned a lapel pin in college for donating blood,” he muttered.

“Oh. Then what’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem. I said I’d do it.” He stood up and shouldered his bag. “Be in charge of it, I mean. I won’t be donating blood because I’m not allowed.”

Ronnie’s eyes turned sympathetic. “Right.” She sighed. “The blood donation rules about gay men are outdated and discriminatory; you don’t have to tell me.”

Patrick shrugged. “It is what it is. I really don’t mind being in charge of the blood drive.” He did, a little, but not enough to make a fuss about it. If this was the only way he could contribute now that he fell into the ‘men who have sex with men’ category, then so be it.

When he was halfway to the door, she called out, making him stop in his tracks. “If our community always just said ‘it is what it is,’ then we wouldn’t have made the progress we’ve made. You wouldn’t have been able to stand in this room and marry the person you love. If it’s wrong, then we fight.”

Patrick turned and looked at her. “I kind of missed the activism part of the queer experience,” he admitted. “Although, I used to buy cupcakes from the GSA bake sale in high school.”

Ronnie rolled her eyes, heading out the door and leaving Patrick to follow her. “You are truly a pillar of the queer community,” she drawled, but there wasn’t any heat in it. She even patted his shoulder and said “see you around” as they parted ways.

Still, he felt unsettled as he walked back to the store. The extent of the time that he’d been aware of his sexuality, he’d mostly spent in a homophobia-free bubble. The people of Schitt’s Creek accepted him, his family (with a couple of notable exceptions whom he no longer spoke to) accepted him. He wasn’t used to being confronted with discrimination, and so even this relatively minor thing in his life, that he couldn’t donate blood — as anonymous and bureaucratic as it was, it was still painful.

The rest of the afternoon did little to lift his mood, and he dragged through the motions of closing up the store with Bethany, then drove home alone. He didn’t want to text David in case he was driving, so when he got home he checked the location of David’s phone and saw that he was still at least two hours away, assuming he was even on his way yet. With a heavy sigh, Patrick let himself into their quiet house.

It was almost nine o’clock when David finally arrived, the familiar sound of him knocking snow off his boots rousing Patrick’s attention from his phone. He flipped off the television, the hockey game he wasn’t really paying attention to disappearing into blackness, and turned toward the door as it opened and David came in with a swirl of snowflakes.

“It’s starting to really come down out there,” David said breathlessly, unlooping his scarf from around his neck and hanging it on the coat rack by the front door. “I’m glad I wasn’t running any later.”

“Me too. It’s supposed to be ten centimeters by morning.” Patrick leaned up and kissed David’s cheek, cold against his lips.

David grimaced. “Just enough to be annoying, but not enough to close the store for the day.” He braced himself on the wall and lifted first one foot and then the other to pull off his boots.

“Yeah.” Their front door tended to stick, not quite latching, so Patrick leaned over and gave it a little push, listening for the click of the latch before he locked it. “Did you eat?”

“I grabbed a burger on the road.” His winter coat off, David pulled Patrick into a hug, his long arms moving into their usual place over Patrick’s shoulders and wrapping around him. “Aren’t you going to ask me how it went?”

“How did it go?”

“I got the clover honey contract.”

Patrick grinned. “I knew you would. And the others?”

“The woman who crochets those little animals is still mulling it over. She might be a no. Belinda Jensen signed on to provide the larger supply of soap we asked for. A couple of others — I left all the paperwork in the car.” He kissed Patrick quickly on the lips. “How was your day?”

Patrick struggled to remember through the fog in his brain what he’d done all day — work and his council meeting and the leftovers he’d reheated for dinner and the hockey game he hadn’t been watching. “Uneventful,” he finally replied.

He felt a surge of irrational anger that David had such a wildly productive day, a day that materially benefited their business, while Patrick had… treaded water. He pushed the anger away — he had no reason to be angry with David. He should be proud of David, of the way he continued to work to make their business thrive, of how good he was with the vendors.

The remainder of the evening was quiet, David on the sofa intermittently reading and texting with Alexis while Patrick made a grocery list, and then another list of tasks he wanted to accomplish over the weekend. It only served to remind him of all things he’d meant to do this winter that he hadn’t gotten around to yet. He just kept getting paralyzed lately; going over and over all the things he needed to do in his mind, but not actually starting any of them.

“I’m ready for spring,” he muttered to himself.

David looked up from his phone. “What are you talking about, you love winter! Winter has hockey, which you love.”

“Yeah.” Patrick sighed. “I’m not really feeling it this year. I’m exhausted.”

Reaching over to rub his shoulder, David gave him a look full of sympathy. “Anything I can do?”

Patrick shook his head and stood up. There wasn’t really anything wrong, so what could David do? “I’m gonna get ready for bed.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you up there in a minute,” David said, distracted by another text from Alexis that made him smile down at his phone.

Patrick had dozed off into a light sleep by the time David crawled into bed next to him, but the dip of the mattress woke him. He rolled over toward his husband, lips against the stubble of David’s jaw, inhaling the scent of his moisturizer. “Missed you today,” he murmured sleepily.

“Missed you too.” David turned his head, brushing his lips against Patrick’s. “Mm, you’re warm.” He wriggled his body, snuggling closer.

Patrick pressed another kiss against David’s mouth, and then another, with softer lips — a little bit longer, a little bit slower.

“Thought you were sleeping,” David said, his voice syrupy and mellow.

“I’m kissing you goodnight,” Patrick said. Another kiss — longer still, slower still.

“That’s how it starts,” David said with a smile, his hand burrowing down and finding the jut of Patrick’s hipbone.

He had a point. There were times when they went to bed with no particular intention to have sex, but the simple press of their mouths together would ignite a fire between them. Patrick wondered if that tendency would ever fade. He hoped not. Especially lately, the physical intimacy he shared with David was one of the only things that made him feel good. It was the only time that he didn’t feel like everything was sort of disappointing and foggy, when he could ignore all of life’s recent shortcomings and annoyances. He could turn off those thoughts and feel the pleasure that David was an expert in drawing out of him.

“Do you wanna have sex?” Patrick asked.

David gave him a crooked smile. “I thought I was too tired, but I might be coming around to the idea.”

Patrick scratched his blunt nails across the back of David’s neck, humming into his mouth as their kisses got deeper and messier. His heartbeat accelerating, that good, fizzy feeling suffusing his body, Patrick shifted closer, enjoying the sensation of their bodies together through their pajamas.

Long before they were married, they established a pattern where Patrick was more often than not the one to take charge in bed, but tonight he wanted it to be David. He felt like he needed to be taken, and used, and useful.

“Can you…” he started to ask, then paused as he tried to figure out how to put what he needed into words. He still struggled with the vulnerability of that, sometimes. Of asking for what he needed. He found it much easier to let David ask for things.

“Tell me what you need, honey,” David whispered as they pulled off their clothes.

Make me forget that I’ve been feeling so shitty, Patrick thought. Show me you still need me.

“Can you hold me down and… fuck my thighs?” Patrick asked instead. The sex act was easier to talk about than the feelings that were underneath it.

“Mm hmm, I can do that,” David said. In the dark, Patrick couldn’t make out David’s facial expression, didn’t know if David was reading any of his churning thoughts. Couldn’t tell if David thought it was odd that Patrick was asking for him to be the dominant one. Not that he’d never been submissive in bed, he had, but he’d done it because it was something David was in the mood for. He’d almost never asked for it.

“Turn over,” David said, the liquid tone of his voice making Patrick shiver as he followed the direction.

Patrick reached over for the lube from the bedside table, handing it back to David before he positioned his back against David’s chest. David didn’t do anything with it right away, though, his mouth wet and sure against Patrick’s shoulder, hand running up and down his hip and thigh over and over, then coming around to gently scrape his fingernails across Patrick’s balls before taking his dick in a loose fist, stroking with a teasing lack of pressure. Patrick moaned, pushing back against David’s erection. He almost changed his mind and asked David to fuck his ass instead — having David inside him really would get him out of his head; it always did. But both of them were tired and the preparation would take awhile, and his original instinct was fine. He didn’t say anything, tipping his head to give David more access to his neck.

After a few more minutes of foreplay, David finally grabbed the lube, getting the inside of Patrick’s thighs and his own cock slick before positioning himself. Patrick clenched his thighs together and David groaned at the friction, fingers clenching on Patick’s hip briefly before his hand moved around and took hold of Patrick’s cock again, matching the rhythm of his hips to the rhythm of his stroking. He wasn’t trying to draw things out now; he was working Patrick’s cock to get him off quickly, and the sensation of it, the way it demonstrated how perfectly David knew him, knew his body, allowed Patrick to stop thinking and sink into the pleasure. He had just enough presence of mind to cup his own palm over himself before spilling over David’s fist, coming with a gasp and a bitten off moan.

David let him pause long enough to grab one of the little towels they kept a stack of on the bedside table to clean himself up, to keep the sheets unscathed, before pushing Patrick down onto his stomach and fucking more vigorously, his cock sliding between Patrick’s thighs and against his balls. Patrick closed his eyes tight and gripped his pillow and let David take him, let him fuck against him, his weight bearing down on Patrick’s back, his pelvis slapping against Patrick’s ass.

“Fuck,” David whispered, and then he lifted up, pulling away from Patrick’s body. “I need to…” he said, and then Patrick heard the slick noise of David jacking himself, and then very quickly the warmth and wetness of David coming on his lower back.

“Sorry for the unnegotiated cumshot,” David said as soon as he caught his breath enough to speak.

Patrick held the towel he was still clutching up for David to take, laughing. “You’re good,” he said as David cleaned him up. “I only need warning if it’s gonna be on my face,” he continued as he flipped over, taking the towel from David and tossing it toward the laundry hamper. While David went to the bathroom to wash his hands and then pulled his pajamas back on, Patrick considered doing the same, but then David was curling around him under their heavy duvet and Patrick couldn’t bring himself to move. He closed his eyes and let the drowsiness from his orgasm pull him under.

~*~

His alarm went off early, and it took Patrick a few seconds to remember why he’d set it so early: the snow.

Mournfully extracting himself from the warmth of bed, Patrick pulled on yesterday’s jeans and a hoodie, then made his way downstairs to don all of his winter gear. Opening the front door, he took a second to admire the pure, untouched snow that blanketed the world before he perturbed it with his boot prints.

Everything seemed preternaturally quiet, the snow dampening what little noise there was. Patrick thought there would have been a time when he would have loved this quiet, would have loved being alone with his thoughts while he did some meditative manual labor. This morning, he shied away from the contents of his own brain, electing to put his earbuds in and to listen to a podcast instead. Patrick fell into a rhythm of snow shoveling in the winter pre-dawn light — push, lift, throw, repeat — so he didn’t notice David until he was almost down to the end of the driveway where Patrick was working.

“David!” Patrick pulled one of his earbuds out, letting it hang. The cold had made the wire stiff, the angle of it unnatural. “I didn’t think you’d be awake yet.”

David had jammed his feet into snow boots, the joggers he’d worn to bed bunching up around his calves. A hat was jammed down on his head, covering his ears, and he shivered as he struggled to zip his coat with gloved fingers. “You not being in bed wakes me up sometimes. And I felt bad that you were out here by yourself.”

“You don’t need to feel bad — you’re covering the store today.” They each had a day each week when they worked the store with Bethany while the other had the day off, and today was David’s day to work. “The least I can do is dig your car out for you.”

David huffed. “Let me help.”

Patrick tilted his head to the side, regarding his husband thoughtfully. “Okay, David. There’s another shovel in the shed.”

David tromped away as directed, and a minute later he was shoveling in a parallel track to where Patrick had been working. It wasn’t something that Patrick could have pictured David Rose doing a few years ago, but David had seemed determined to meet the challenge of homeownership in a lot of ways that Patrick couldn’t have pictured before they were married.

When they finished and went back inside, David groaned as he bent over to pull his boots off. “Ugh, my back,” he whined.

Patrick tried to put a hand on David’s lower back, but his puffy winter coat prevented any contact. “Go take a shower and I’ll make your coffee,” he said.

Patrick put on water to heat up, rubbing his hands together to warm himself, and began getting things set up for breakfast: he ground coffee beans for David’s French press and got out tea for himself and eggs for both of them. He moved automatically through the morning routine, ingrained habits from their year and a half of marriage and from all the mornings before that, when David spent the night at Patrick’s apartment.

After making David breakfast and seeing him out the door with a reminder to drive carefully, Patrick curled up on the sofa with his phone. He had a list of chores he wanted to tackle, and he had a book he wanted to read, but he spent over an hour switching between social media apps, dipping into the first few paragraphs of news articles before dipping back out, not focusing on any one thing for more than a few minutes. He opened a couple of game apps, but closed them again just as quickly without doing anything. These days he’d been mostly avoiding Facebook — he knew the ethical thing to do these days was to delete your Facebook account, but he was afraid of losing touch with all the people he didn’t communicate with any other way. He opened the app now, scrolling through the posts on his feed, most of them family members and friends from high school and college.

He paused briefly on a candid picture on his cousin Sara’s page of her son Justin. “Justin’s last performance in Newsies was last night!!! Great job to all!!!!” Wrinkling his nose at all the exclamation points, he took a good look at his cousin’s kid. They weren’t at the wedding, but he had seen Justin very briefly at the engagement barbecue his parents had thrown for him and David. He’d been a gawky fifteen-year-old at the time, quiet, ghosting along beside his parents with the disdain for attending a family function that only a teenager was capable of. The boy in the picture was older, and something about the way he looked in the picture, his arms slung over the shoulders of a couple of his castmates, made Patrick smile. Congrats to Justin!, he typed into the comments.

Finally, he dragged himself upstairs to shower and get dressed in some clean clothes, regretting that he’d already squandered part of his day off. He could have gone into the store with David if the alternative was this, a day at home feeling adrift and empty.

A hot shower helped, and afterward Patrick started a load of laundry, settling onto the sofa with a basket of towels from the dryer to fold. He unlocked his phone and started one of his history podcasts playing. Most of the rest of the day passed by as Patrick did the bare minimum of household chores, interrupted by long stretches of lost time when he was doing nothing in particular.

Stevie stopped by at a little past five o’clock, flopping down at the kitchen table while Patrick looked in the fridge and tried to decide what he was going to make for dinner.

“Do you want to hear something hilarious?” Stevie asked as Patrick took a packet of chicken breasts out and checked the date. They were still good, and he figured they would do for dinner. A serviceable, boring dinner — the Patrick Brewer of dinners, he thought uncharitably. He also took out some mushrooms, and grabbed an onion from the bowl on the counter.

“Sure,” he answered.

“I saw Gwen yesterday.”

“Bob’s Gwen?” He pulled a chef’s knife from the block and sliced the onion in half.

“Okay, she hasn’t been Bob’s Gwen for a few years.”

Patrick huffed. “No, I know, I was just asking if that’s who you meant. Because she moved to Elm… somewhere. Elm Valley?”

“She moved to Elm Ridge, actually, but she was in town for some reason, and I saw her.”

He squinted at Stevie. “And?”

“And she asked how it was working out among the three of us, and it was clear she meant… like, she thought we’re a throuple.”

Patrick laughed. “We do spend a lot of time together, you, me, and David.”

“I know, but you’re gay.”

“Sure, but I can’t say I’ve ever explained the particulars of my sexual orientation to Gwen. Maybe she assumes I’m pansexual like David.” He blinked up at her. “Are you worried that people will think you’re off the market?”

Stevie shrugged. “The kinds of people I tend to hook up with wouldn’t care.”

“Fair enough.” Patrick felt the old impulse to reassure Stevie that she’d find the right person eventually, and he had to remind himself that he needed to take her at her word, that romance and love weren’t necessarily what she was looking for.

“Are you okay?” she asked with narrowed eyes, watching him carefully as he put dinner together.

“I’m just tired. Had kind of a shitty day.” He couldn’t articulate what made it shitty, though. It was the vague ennui that had been plaguing him lately, the pregnant rain clouds in his brain that were casting a shadow over everything, washing the colour out. “ You staying for dinner?”

“Yeah, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“It’s always fine, Stevie. You know that.”

“Thanks.” She walked over and grabbed a beer out of the fridge, opening it with the magnetic bottle opener that Patrick kept on the door.

“Maybe I just haven’t been getting enough sunshine lately,” Patrick said.

“Do we need to get you one of those light therapy things?” Stevie asked, taking a swig of her beer.

Patrick chuckled. “I don’t know, maybe.” He bit his lip, unsure if he should share more. “It kind of reminds me of the way I used to feel before I ran away and moved here. But back then, I had a good reason to be sad. I’ve got no reason to be sad now.”

“Depression doesn’t have to have a reason. I mean, it doesn’t have to be because you’re… engaged to the wrong person, for example.”

He knew that, intellectually. But he wasn’t sure he really believed it, deep down. “I guess.” He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “When’s your next trip?” he asked to divert the conversation onto another track.

Patrick cooked and the two of them gossiped for a bit longer until David got home from the store, planting a kiss on Patrick’s lips when he joined them in the kitchen. The easy banter among the three of them over dinner quelled some of Patrick’s unhappiness, and he found himself laughing through the familiar see-saw of their interactions, as they cycled through every combination of two-against-one. They finally settled on the sofa, David putting on the episode of Derry Girls that they had left off with the last time Stevie was over. Stevie sat between them, leaning against Patrick’s shoulder with her socked feet up on David’s lap.

“Can’t imagine why people think we’re a throuple,” Patrick said, lifting his shoulder and adjusting to a more comfortable position before gesturing for her to lean on him again.

Stevie snorted. “In your dreams, Brewer.”

“Nope.” Then he thought about it. “Well, there was that one time during Cabaret, but I’m not responsible for who turns up in my sex dreams.”

David turned and eyed him. “Who turned up in your sex dreams?”

“Me, apparently,” Stevie said as she poked David in the leg with her toe.

“Ew,” David said.

“Ted, a few times,” Patrick said, which got him an eye roll from his husband.

“I assume you mean the turtle,” David said, looking back at the television.

“Yeah, I’m so hot for turtles.”

Stevie started flipping through a dating app on her phone, her attention only half on the show they were watching.

“What do you think of this one?” she said, holding up the phone so that Patrick could see the blandly handsome shirtless guy on the screen.

“Meh.”

“He’s got nice arms,” Stevie said.

“He looks like an asshole.”

“Doesn’t mean he won’t be a good fuck.”

He supposed not, and it didn’t seem like Stevie really wanted his opinion anyway, even though she’d asked for it. He watched as she swiped right on Mr. Shirtless.

Patrick dozed off after a little while, existing in that place between wakefulness and sleep where he was still convinced he was following the story of the show they were watching even though his eyes were closed. He was distantly aware of the warmth of Stevie pressed up against his side and the smell of her hair, and of the safety of being with the two people who knew him best in the world.

(Chapter 2)

[hideyseek]

50 Questions You’ve Never Been Asked

tagged by @usersoup <3

What is the colour of your hairbrush?  it is .. black and turquoise, though i must admit that since i’ve cut my hair i rarely use it. 

Name a food you never eat? huh. caviar? i tend to forget about the existence of foods i don’t eat until i’m on the instacard website. chocolate ice cream, i guess. that’s like, a normal-person food i never consume.

Are you typically too warm or too cold? i am constantly too cold. as i type this i am in my apartment in sweatpants under a blanket and my roommate is in shorts and a tshirt.

What were you doing 45 minutes ago? mm i was reading a room of one’s own, at risk of sounding like the pretentious humanities major i am. i’m reading it out of desperation (we are in possession of the writer’s block and we would like to give it up as soon as possible), after having had it in my head to read since i came across a lin-manuel miranda tween in like 2015 telling all young writers to read it

What is your favourite candy bar? i don’t really like.. candy. twix or butterfingers, if i had to pick one at gunpoint.

Have you ever been to a professional sports event? yEAH u fucking bet i went to winterguard international championships twice in high school and bands of america championships once (both as part of my school’s winter/colorguard). i’ve never gone to a pro sportsball match though. 

What is the last thing you said out loud? oh, are you really out there alone? (at my roommate, who is on the balcony with a desk lamp rigged up for optimal dirtball making).   

What is your favourite ice cream? vanilla. or hazelnut. i fucking love hazelnut. 

What was the last thing you had to drink? not to associate myself with brands, but i am drinking sprite as i type this. 

Do you like your wallet? yes! i had my wallet nicked on a bus in the middle of the semester and my replacement is a lovely narrow black folding wallet that i am infinitely fond of.

What was the last thing you ate? the dregs of my cheezits, pepper jack flavor

Did you buy any new clothes last weekend? mm no, though during my phone call with my grandma earlier this week she told me i should buy more clothes no less than four times. she thinks i should own and wear more “pretty girl clothes” and i haven’t the heart to tell her that i think gender is fake. 

The last sporting event you watched? i participated in a harry potter pub quiz over zoom the other week, if that counts. otherwise, probably something televised and american football related, several months ago.

What is your favourite flavour of popcorn? KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN KETTLE CORN

Who is the last person you sent a text message to? oH thank god i have an interesting answer to this one -- my stage manager/playwright friend, whose recent play i am dying to get a copy of.

Ever go camping? yeah. my family used to go every august with some family friends. 

Do you take vitamins? mm just vitamin d. (fuck off this was not meant to be a dick joke).

Do you go to church every Sunday? nah.

Do you have a tan? not anymore... even during the semester i spend most of my time underground in a basement rehearsal space or in the on-campus computer labs. (hence the vitamin d)

Do you prefer Chinese food or pizza? these are?? not equivalent at all in terms of scope? chinese food, of course. 

Do you drink your soda with a straw? nah. can-to-mouth for me. 

What colour socks do you usually wear? depends on how cold i am: i have some very lovely warm purple socks and some red and black socks that my dear friend gifted me for christmas last? year? but otherwise i have just sports shoes height white socks and black socks.

Do you ever drive above the speed limit? i am gay, i do not drive.

What terrifies you? failure, mostly. i hate that that’s my answer, but there you go. failure, or being putting myself in a situation where i don’t really have a choice in what happens to me.  

Look to your left, what do you see? mm, i just moved from the study to bed so: the empty space in the loft bed railing where the ladder is, a blank wall, the edge and hinges of the bedroom wall.

What chore do you hate? none, really? i’ll get really passive-aggressive about some of the small apartment tidying things in my head, but not often enough that anything comes to mind now. 

What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent? how my linguistics prof last semester had folks self-identify if they spoke non-american english in the middle of lecture

What’s your favourite soda? hm, hm. oH. there’s a vietnamese sandwich place in my hometown that has the best lychee soda. (a handful of google image searches informs me this is elisha aerated brand)

Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive-thru? hm, most of the time when i’m going to fast food i’m going to in-n-out with either a pile of theater people or my high school friend group, so sitting. er, going in.

Who’s the last person you talked to? roommates, in person. 

Favourite cut of beef? i could not name cuts of beef if u asked me to really nicely. actually jk i know uh, ox... oxtail? i like oxtail soup.

Last song you listened to? am in the middle of listening to trenchh by cavetown but i’ve been alternating fob and cavetown and bastille on shuffle on spotify.

Last book you read? ella enchanted by gail carson levine, because it is my #1 comfort book.

Favourite day of the week? i like thursdays. they just sound nice.

Can you say the alphabet backwards? if i had like, several minutes, i probably could do it. but everything after w would involve me counting (counting? reciting?) from the beginning.

How do you like you coffee? i’ll drink it any way but black. i have discovered i do not like dalgona coffee. but i like the dark chocolate mocha that peet’s does in the winter a ridiculous amount.

Favourite pair of shoes? i have this pair of converse that’s grey stripes that always makes me feel like a Cool Arts Student, even though it’s actively terrible for my arches. 

The time you normally go to bed? to bed? midnightish. to being asleep? usually 1-2ish. 

The time you normally get up? eleven in the morning, apparently, since that’s what’s been happening now that i’m not setting alarms. during the school year, usually 7:30 or 8 because i work in the scene shop half the mornings of the week.

What do you prefer, sunrise or sunsets? conceptually? sunsets. aesthetically? also sunsets. metaphorically, though, i prefer sunrises.

How many blankets on your bed? i’ve got a blanket (duvet, maybe? comforter? i have never really vibed with these western concepts of bedding) and another knitted blanket. 

Describe your kitchen plates: black and square and slightly chipped because roommates and i get a bit aggressive with cramming them onto the drying rack. 

Do you have a favourite alcoholic beverage? i like hard cider. (i like soft cider better than hard cider, but the apple taste drowns out the alcohol taste enough for me to have a pretty good time.) 

Do you play cards? haha yeah. whenever i’m home i play 24 with my little brother and lose a lot. or my family’ll play 21. or BS, which i fucking hate because i cannot lie for shit.

What colour is your car? still gay, still don’t drive.

Can you change a tire? mmmmmmmmmmm no. i have a shocking lack of car-related life skills for someone holding down a job that mostly involves wrenches. 

Your favourite province? oh boy. hubei province, bc there’s no country specification and this feels less impersonal than if i were to just point somewhere in australia. 

Favourite job you’ve ever had? hm, let’s limit this to work i’ve done for money, just to narrow the field down. (i tend to like the work i do a lot.) i really really enjoy working as a sound technician, especially as a mic assistant (it checks my “meeting people” box and my “helping people with their emotions” box and my “storytelling for an audience” box because at the theater i work at, pre-show mic check is me talking about my day and has resulted in a handful of people telling me i should try standup). the hours and pay are kind of crap, though. you don’t get friday nights when your friday nights are spent backstage of the same show you’ve heard twenty million times at this point. i also enjoy teaching computer science, because i just fucking like computer science. christ, i just,, miss being at work :c the production of newsies i was gonna do this summer got canceled. 

How did you get your biggest scar? mm, pass. 

What did you do today that made someone else happy? i, hm. everything that comes to mind feels vaguely manipulative, since i can’t really tell if people were made happy? oh! i had an extended slack conversation with one of the academic interns for the cs class i help teach that was basically just us bonding over word humor. he seems like the kind of person who would have gotten a kick out of it. 

I tag: @kittog @wali21 @capt-ann @lemon-yellow @iamanonniemouse @raccoon-sex-dungeon @snakesonacartesianplane @eternalflarg @swimmingseafish (do it if u want! don’t let me bully u into anything)

[after-lauhgter]

Hey dude, I really like your music taste so do all the music questions that you didn't already answer 🌚

OK DUDE HERE THEY COME (except 1,6 & 14) ... ok lets do number 1 again  What's a song you've been listening to a lot lately? as the world caves in by Matt Maltese, if I get high by nothing but thieves, and literally anything off waterparks’ new live album, that thing makes me feel so ALIVE bc like LIVE MUSIC  Is there an album you recently discovered and are obsessed with it now? well waterparks live in the uk obviously but if the last 6 months count as recently, then the new abnormal by the strokes. its... absolutely breathtaking. I don't have words. 0 words. except these dudes know what the fuck they’re doing. and then I found the devil and god are raging inside me by brand new and jeeesus. literally Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ was my most played song in 2020 AS IT SHOULD BE bc its EVERYTHING this album is THE SHIT. every song is just *chef kiss* like there's limousine (omg limousine) and you won't know and not the sun and AHH listen to these albums omg  Put your playlist on shuffle and show the first 10 songs. No cheating. i assume “your playlist” means all my saved songs so Topography by Civilian (pls go listen its SO great) Na Na Na by mcr yees issa classic  Du schreibst Geschichte by Madsen omg geeerman  just saying by EDEN (pretty pretty pretty) Westerland von den Ärzten another classic  letdown by nothing,nowhere. sad but the good kind of sad  The Man by the killers making fun of toxic masculinity gives me LIFE  Graffiti by CHVRCHES YES  and death stranding by CHVRCHES too YES SO GOOD simmer by Hayley Williams, a queen  How do you tend to discover new music? If you do at all of course I do enjoy what Spotify suggests, like my weekly mix brought a lot of bops in the past, although sometimes it just sucks lets be real. I also like the artist- or album-radio, when I wanna find something similar to an album but not the album.  and another thing I lovvve is when artists I like recommend music, for example, have you seen dallon weekes instagram stories? THE TASTE? bc yes, someone who writes music like that MUST have a superior taste in music and he fucking does. 

What app do you mostly use to listen to music? Spotify :) Is there an artist that you feel ashamed of listening too? I can't think of anyone so probably not  What is your favorite album cover art? omg. I have to go with more than one. so there's where the mind wants to go/where you let it go by I the mighty, one of my favorite albums of all time, and I'm going to say it how it is, I LIKE THE COLORS. the blue-ish imagine with the red omg. look at it pls.  Also fandom by waterparks looks SO COOL. again the COLORS  and I love the art for Isola by Kent.  I recently discovered you wouldn't believe what privilege costs by civilian and I think that cover is pretty cool too.  well and then there's petals for armor by Hayley Williams, the cover art is so fucking powerful Jesus I get goosebumps just thinking about it. in case you don't know about it, long story short: there's been a lot of shit going on in Hayleys life in the past. relatable imo. then they made after laughter and its been like u know what fuck it we’ll just laugh and dance through the pain. together. and I LOVED the vibe omg it gave me so much. but for Hayley it kinda postponed REALLY dealing with shit. she came home from touring with AL and she also got divorced during the AL era and everything's shit and out of all that came petals for armor. and in it she reclaims femininity, being alone, being powerful, being a women, everything. and ah yeah we were talking about the cover art, the cover is her, having a line of squares on her face, three of these squares are tattooed on her fingers though bc its where her ex husbands initials used to be that she got covered up. WHAT A MOVE. THE POWER.  (if anyone is interested in hearing Hayley talking about/explaining all this, I really recommend watching her interview with zane Lowe. its SO GOOD basically free therapy) How much did your parents influence your music taste? a. lot. my dad listened to a lot of “dad rock” you may call it, I guess a lot of dads listened to stuff similar to this. Deep Purple, the police, simple minds, Green Day, Billy Talent, the scorpions and things like that. what influenced me the most tho was the beatsteaks (german band, very good), die Ärzte (german band, very good) and LAST BUT NOT LEAST the fricking blues brothers. my favorite movie (not the 2000 remake, go watch that in hell where it belongs), a great, charismatic band, unbelievable live performances. very big WOW from me.  Do you own any vinyl? don't get me started omg. I DO. I wish I could take a photo but my records are at my parents house so ill just name my favorites.  -after laughter and brand new eyes by paramore -violent things by the brobecks and their song boring on 7inch (this is very rare ok) -razzzzmatazzz by idkhow in gold :) -may death never stop you by mcr (my first one, I bought it first and then bought a record player for it, that's how it started lol) -omg the black parade is dead by mcr, this was never available on vinyl until record store day 2019 (?) and I hunted that bitch like idek what it was insane but I found a super cute small record store and the owner didn't have copies of it bc NOBODY DID but he fucking CALLED THE LABEL even though it was way too late and he asked if they'd send him a copy and THEY DID I FUCKING OWE THIS MAN  -and omg Isola by Kent (in Swedish tho bc the English version was never pressed on vinyl) this was intense. I searched for like 2 weeks and then, on google results page 8 or something, I found what could've been the only copy on the damn internet and it was very expensive but its MINE NOW -my signed vertigo vinyl by EDEN, its clear and on side D it doesn't have music but a little message engraved it the vinyl IT IS CUTe -Placebos MTV unplugged! I am so I love with this album. SO. in love. and one day, when I was in Berlin to see palaye royale, back when we had concerts, I walked by a random record store and they have like 4 records left bc they were closing or idk and the only one displayed in the window was this one. tell me about FATE  Do you own any cds? not many. sometimes when im at the store and I see ones I know or like, I just buy them and put them in me moms car bc I want her to listen to them. or when I find a cd by a smaller artist I enjoy, I buy it just to push the nachfrage. HI i am HERE and I WANT this music  Is vinyl really better than listening on a digital device? im not gonna be that middle aged white male audiophile that hates on our generation for using Spotify. bc its great. I think its just different. I mean im sorry I don't carry my record player on the bus with me, pls forgive me for using my phone? having immediate access to most of the music that is out there? wow. what a concept. I love the internet. YES TECHNOLOGY. but. vinyls are... different. I feel likes its a different kind of listening. I feel like youre rly LISTENING. and that way isn't better, or right, and im not saying it works like this for everyone. but when I put a record on, my only activity at that moment is listening to music, I sit down and I listen. to the entire album. so skips and no pauses, bc that's how it works. and I think that sometimes, that can do a lot for you. if you let it.  and besides that, physically owning a record makes me happy on a level nothing else really does. fuck I love music so much and when I fall in love with it, I fall hard. and then owning a copy of it, something I can touch, something that is MINE, putting it in my little shelf, looking at it every few days and just being in love? fantastic feeling.  What is a genre of music that you tend to go to for comfort? sad shit. I feel like I can get great comfort from the sad shit. or maybe just slow shit. and songs that mean a lot to me and have been around me for some time, they have this other level of comfort. like for Emma, forever ago by bon iver for example. I have a playlist, maybe I'll reblog this again and link it ;) Do you tend to like poppy upbeat songs, or more intricate and interesting songs? both. sometimes I wanna have complicated stuff and analyze the shit out of lyrics and instrumentation, sometimes I just wanna v i b e If you have a favorite band or artist, tell us about how you got into them I liked paramore before but when they posted the video of them performing last hope at reading? it was over. when Hayley sang the bridge it was over. now im a die hard fan and I never looked back Is there a song that came out this year that you like? maybe after reading all this shit you expected a list but somehow I can't. where do u even start. but the answer is definitely yes.  THANK YOU FOR REQUESTING I COULD GO ON FOR DAYS 

[rorybergstrom]

𝑫𝑰𝑫 𝑺𝑶𝑴𝑬𝑩𝑶𝑫𝒀 𝑶𝑹𝑫𝑬𝑹 𝑨 𝑩𝑰𝑺𝑬𝑿𝑼𝑨𝑳 𝑹𝑶𝑳𝑳𝑬𝑹𝑺𝑲𝑨𝑻𝑰𝑵𝑮 𝑺𝒀𝑵𝑻𝑯 𝑳𝑶𝑹𝑫  ???

            hello, it’s nora again…. hitting u with another child. a south london-born softboi who deserves tenderness. has a burner phone and doesn’t use social media. does techno dj sets. plays the synth loudly through the night if u live in gorham his room always sounds like a space ship just landed. deals weed around campus on his rollerskates. hates that he can’t get new light up wheels because ana coto made rollerskating cool again. as is tradition, here’s the pinterest board. this intro is recycled?? so if theres mistakes, sue me??? and be sure to like and subscribe for more unboxing content x

application.

『 FIONN WHITEHEAD ❙ DEMI-MALE』 ⟿ looks like RORY BERGSTRÖM is here for HIS JUNIOR year as a MUSIC TECHNOLOGY student. HE is 23 years old & known to be ECCENTRIC, FANATICAL, NITPICKY & DOGMATIC. They’re living in GORHAM, so if you’re there, watch out for them. ⬳ ooc name. age. tz. pronouns. 

aesthetics.

bed hair from a permanent state of slumber, calloused fingertips from strumming bass into the early hours and djing into the blacklit night, self-help books thumbed once and thrown beneath your bed, battered copies of choose your own adventure books, spliffs passed half-arsed across rooftops while light pollution obscures low-hanging stars, marxist literature in stacks against your bedroom walls, a burner phone twice-shattered and a stash of replacement sim cards.

tw ocd, anxiety, drugs

half-swedish, half-british. the swedish is on his mother’s side. he’s bilingual but thinks in english. only really speaks swedish around his mother. only child, and kinda put a lot of pressure on himself to be the perfect kid when he was young, but his parents are honestly, quite decent? and just want him to have a nice life, they don’t care if he isn’t successful or rich or anything, they’re honestly rather solid. (wow imagine having nice parents, a first for all my characters, im literally this meme)

grew up in peckham, a suburb of london. growing up, his mum was a model / actress / waitress who later retrained as a speech therapist and his dad worked in her majesty’s service at buckingham palace. his dad wasn’t allowed to tell his family what his job entailed but rory suspects it’s probably very boring and just involves a lot of…. logistics n security.

was bullied a lot at school. [cole sprouse voice] he didn’t fit in and he didn’t want to fit in. unironically wore a trenchcoat to school every day of his life. spent most of his lunchtimes in the library because it was his safe space. as a result he knows…. loads of useless information because 30% of his school years were spent reading anthologies on space and the vikings etc. would be good on a game show. obsessively recorded every episode of university challenge as a child.

middle-class and lowkey quite wealthy but rarely talks about money, one of those well-off people who still wears really old shitty shoes and only spends money if they absolutely have to

virgin who can’t drive

into star wars, not into the big bang theory. feminist. can’t watch horror movies

favourite film is where the wild things are. also loves the florida project. thinks kids are the sweetest thing and can’t wait to be a dad to some. right now is dad to one cat, whose name changes on a daily basis (identity is constantly shifting, duuuuude), but they were originally named ‘wheezer’

rory has been musical for as long as they can remember. first picked up guitar because he thought it would make this girl esther who he was in love with like him, but he just ended up falling in love with music instead.

formulated several different bands as a kid but ultimately had to give it up cos he was quite controlling and got fixated on making a certain sound so it wasn’t really fun for the others. got into electronic music because it was something he could do basically on his own and keep tweaking until he got it perfect

always drumming their fingers or strumming invisible guitar strings. tends to avoid parties bc he has quite has specific tastes when it comes to music and doesn’t like listening to r&b for eight hours while people throw up into plastic cups.

a techno connoisseur. has been making electronic music since he was about twelve.

after his parents divorce, when he was fourteen, rory & his mother moved to run-down suburban neighbourhood, pittsfield, massachussets.

big into photography. he mostly uses a canon 35mm camera, but occasionally uses disposable ones when he wants that more rustic feel.

moving to the states, their photography became more focused on suburban neighborhoods and are often quite dark and cinematic (think gregory crewsden). here are some shots of pittsfield i really like which rory has on his wall [1] [2] [3]

falls in love 12 times a day. never had a girlfriend or boyfriend. gets sweaty when someone cute looks at him. flirting?? what?? would prefer to idealise them from a distance

gender??? hm. doesn’t really know where he fits yet, sometimes he feels like a guy and sometimes they dont feel like anything at all. isn’t really bothered, cos they think it’s a social construct anyway. uses he/they pronouns interchangeably, but feels like ‘he’ is more fitting. won’t necessarily pull anyone up on it cos he knows having an identity that’s constantly…. in flux.. can be annoying for others … and doesn’t want to be a burden even tho it isn’t at all?? rory internalises guilt

everything is socially constructed. mirrors let you move through time. the whole thing’s a metaphor. he thinks he’s got free will but really he’s trapped in a maze. in a system. all he can do is consume. people think it’s a happy game. it’s not a happy game — it’s a fucking nightmare world, and the worst thing is, it’s real and we live in it

has ocd. tries to let it affect his life as little as possible, but obviously it’s incredibly hard to control a compulsive disorder. was teased for it at school when other kids started to notice. he was obsessed with the number five, would wash his hands five times, count stairs i groups of five, he could only use the corridors in one direction and always had to keep his hands busy. it manifests itself in hyper-fixations (trains when he was a child – specifically steam engines – then later he became obsessed with space and the patterns of constellations, and now he’s obsessed with synthesizers) and repetitive behaviours like counting stairs. doesn’t really affect his social life at all, he can jst get a bit locked-on n hyper-focused sometimes.

has insomnia. barely ever sleeps. finds it hard to switch off from work / writing / gaming / whatever’s preoccupying him in that moment. he’s always awake at 5am and quite often sleeps in through classes but still gets really good grades because he’s very good at his course. rarely attends classes. prefers to work independently. doesn’t really trust his tutors are intelligent enough to be teaching him, and is particularly suspicious of the lockwood tutors. a music snob tbh

secretly a small-scale drug dealer, only does weed n some party pills. rollerskates around campus dealing cos they dnt have a car

likes: techno, the webpage cats on synthesizers in space, allen ginsberg, vintage gramophones,  floating points, lcd soundsystem, marijuana, soft dogs that let you pet them, late-night strolls talking about the universe, independent films, cigarettes, herbal tea, gallows humour, long showers, brown eyes, tchaikovsky, dr. seuss, constellations, photography, late night jazz, vintage game boys and girls who could rip his still-beating heart out of his chest and use it as an ashtray. dislikes:  weddings, funerals, formality, button-up shirts that people actually button-up, bananas, hot coffee, social media, people who watch and play sports, rap music – especially of the misogynistic variety, indie wankers in wire-framed glasses that play ed sheeran songs at open mic nights.

plot ! with ! me ! i’d say all the usual “exes fwb hookups spiel” but rory… is very tender and tame… i feel like a deer in the headlights of love……. so give me

study buddies,

people who are also into techno and are music snobs about it,

people who love all kinds of music,

people who are in bands that maybe rory’s recorded and produced stuff for,

people he actually jams with (he plays bass and synth),

unrequited crushes!!

someone they met at a knitting club in freshman year and have remained friends with despite no longer going to it

people rory knows from open mic nights and gigs

library girlfriends / boyfriends that he stares at longingly while paging through leatherbound volumes

gamers !!! social recluses !!! hermits !!

people he deals weed to on his rollerskates (why r all my characters obsessed with rollerskates)

skaters. rory is really shit at skateboarding. like really shit. help the smol

hm now that rory has !Evolved! ig we can do hook up plots if u want but he’s not tht good at divorcing sex from emotion?? like he  hooked up w teddy once n felt hopelessly inlove so..... if u want soft plots b prepared for crippling sadness.......

stay groovy XD XD

[aseikh]

Late, but 9, 10, 11, 29, please? Sorry, I would copy over their questions to make it easier for you but I'm on mobile.

you’re okay!! and thank you!

9.  Which fic has been the hardest to write?

i don’t know if this really counts, but one of my current wips, i desire, has been ... super hard, mostly because of it’s heavy topics. but also The Ranger of Norgate. i’ve been working on this fic since 2016, and i’m still technically working on it. when i originally started it, it was just a simple AU that i thought was fun, but as i got further into it, i realized how much it actually meant to me. i’m still working on what would technically be the last chapter, but since i’ve known what happens at the end of it for so long, it’s even harder to write--one, because it’s not an entirely happy ending, and two, because it would be the end of something i’ve been working on since i first started being an active member of the fandom.

10.  Which fic has been the easiest to write?

probably literally any one of my one-shots, since i tend to write those when i’m excited about them and am able to just write down the story in a few days. like smiles, or moments like these, they tend to come from short, small ideas that i think others might like and just scribble them down quickly.

if we’re talking about chap fics, it would have to be To See the Stars. i was overall consistently invested in writing this one, and even though there were some spots where i didn’t update for a while, i was always interested in finishing it and telling the full story, even if some spots hurt to write.

11.  Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?

fuck i ... i really don’t? know? i love RA, and i don’t like calling my writing a hobby, so i guess that would mean it’s a passion. i write to share with others and also to just, force myself out there, lol, but calling it a hobby, i think, doesn’t really convey how important writing is to me. it’s saved my life before, because it would be where i put my emotions when i couldn’t handle them myself.

29.  If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

oooof, well, like i said, i don’t read much fanfic unless it really captures me, and that tends to be one-shots or short stories because consistently following a story is hard for me unless i get it all at once (like a book). however, doing a HUGE throwback, i used to be obsessed with this fanfic on fanfic.net called scarred, and it was never finished. when i was younger, i got my phone taken away because i was reading this fic rather then paying attention. so even though this isn’t technically answering the question, if i could finish that piece (but like, however the author intended to finish it), then i would be super happy. 

[lgcalec]

new challenge

a casting call 005 audition auditioning for a lead role

     when he hears that there’s a family sitcom on the horizon, he knows that he needs to try to get a lead role this time no matter what. there’s something about his general demeanor and sense of humour that he thinks will do well in a family sitcom, especially if he gets a character that will be part of the funnier scenes. if there’s anything that alec is pretty proud of himself for, it’s his ability to make other’s laugh, even if they’re laughing at his expense rather than with him. 

     he’s definitely not above body gags or anything. 

     and while a supporting role like namgil’s had been a perfect on-screen debut for him as an official actor under legacy, he really hopes that this time he’ll be able to land something bigger and better. 

     (go namgil, you’re forever in his heart!)

     the script reading goes by easily. in particular, the funny one gets him a few laughs from the staff on hand and it makes him grin as well. the romantic one is a bit harder, though he just keeps a certain someone in mind the entire time and it actually goes by without too much of a hitch at all. it’s a bit unfortunate that he doesn’t actually have a girlfriend to pretend he’s thinking about, but he has something close to that. he thinks. the family script is easy to get through as well, considering he mostly just pretends he’s talking to his sister for the most part, or his parents when the time calls for it. 

     all in all, alec is very pleased with how smoothly the audition has gone. hopefully, he won’t psyche himself out after when waiting for the results again. with cram school it was easy to just take it in stride because he wasn’t too concerned over what role he got, as long as he appeared in more than just one episode. 

     but, he really wants a lead role in this one. of course, if he ends up with a supporting role again, he’s not going to complain or be mad. he’ll just have to work harder next time as always. 

     that doesn’t change how much he wants the role though. the interview is something new to him though, considering he hasn’t really sat down for many interviews aside from job ones. there’s something inherently different about this one though—though at the same time, it’s just another job interview isn’t it? only, this time, he’s not just in it for a bi-weekly paycheck in his pocket. no, this time he’s in it for the sake of his future career. 

     and there’s something so much more harrowing about that. 

     he doesn’t allow it to change his perspective though, trying to think of it as just another really important job interview for a good position that he really covets. when the questions come, there’s no surprise that the questions are about family—it’s supposed to be a family-based sitcom after all. 

what is the meaning of family to you? 

     the answer is one that comes easily and he thinks he’s been very blessed to have grown up with a really loving family. “endless support,” he answers honestly, a smile on his face as he thinks of his little family of four. his parents have always supported him and his sister in whatever they wanted to do, and he thinks he’ll never not be grateful for them. it goes both ways too, because he knows he and his sister would support anything their parents did as well. 

     family relationships were a two-way street and he would always be grateful for how much support he’s been given so far. there had been a crazy amount of text messages from his parents when the fifth episode of cram school had come out and his first few scenes had aired and it brings a wide grin to his face as he remembers both the praise and the constructive criticism he had received.  

how would you describe your relationship with your family? 

     “ah,” he purses his lips, trying to think back the last few years and how he had called his parents pretty frequently despite their differences in schedules. “pretty good considering i don’t see them very often. it was a bit of a big change when i was signed to legacy—we went from seeing each other 24/7 to seeing each other rarely because of the training schedule. but i think it just made sure that our communication skills got better.” a laugh leaves him here as an errant thought pops up into his brain. 

     “my mom got really good at texting, and it’s funny because she was terrible at it before. she sent me an emoji when i first moved to seoul and i was so shocked i dropped my phone? i had never seen her use one before and now suddenly she sends me tons. but yeah—” back on track he goes. “our relationship is good. it helps that my sister is also a trainee though, under legacy, so we see each other every once and a while when our paths cross in the building.”

which word would you associate family to? 

     he blinks at that, thinking it was a bit of a similar question to the first one he had been asked but he doesn’t hesitate at all when he answers: “love.” it feels cheesy and dumb but it’s true, because he’s never known anything but endless love and support from everyone in his family. “this might sound really cheesy, but i really love my family and i would do anything for them, honestly.” 

if you were to describe your position/role within your family, what would it be? 

     there’s a pause as he thinks of the answer to this question. he’s not quite sure of how to label his role in the family since he’s both been the youngest of the family for a few years (before his sister was born of course) and then the big brother of the family once he was old enough to be trusted with taking care of a living human that was called his sister. 

     “i would probably consider myself the older brother slash eldest child role?” he says after a moment, trying to think of whether that was an appropriate trope name for who he was and what he did in the family. “like my parents don’t have a business for me to take over, so i wouldn’t technically be considered the heir or anything, but i did help out a lot at home and i took care of my sister when she was growing up! i think she still listens to me better than she listens to our parents because i was around her the most when she was growing up. she’s a bit of a brat, but i wouldn’t trade her for anything in the world.” 

     ah, maybe dongsaeng babo would be a better term for his role. oh well. 

what is your strongest family memory? 

     he, once again, has to think about this question for a moment before he grins. “we went to niagara falls for canada day pretty regularly, because admission is cheaper on national holidays even if it’s more packed and this one time we actually went on the ferry to go through the falls and whatever—anyways, i leaned over too far once and got fully sprayed and got soaked from head to toe. thankfully, they give us all ponchos before going on the cruis-thing! but, get this, my sister copied me immediately after and also got sprayed!” the memory brings a fond smile onto his lips as he thinks back to that day. 

     “i think i was like, ten. or something. my sister tends to just copy whatever i do, but i didn’t think she would do it since the repercussions were pretty obvious! my parents laughed so hard that they were both crying from laughter as they frantically tried to wipe us off. it was really funny, honestly.”

if your family was to be portrayed in a drama, what type of drama would it be? 

     a laugh leaves his lips. “probably a sitcom, honestly. my dad’s pretty funny when he wants to be, and he can always get me laughing if he times a joke right and his timing is usually really good. we have a lot of really good laughs when we’re all together.” he thinks it over for a moment before he grins. “it would be really funny to see my family portrayed as something dramatic though. maybe something like, literally a drama. you know the soap operas where everyone has secrets and everyone is lying to each other? we could never accomplish something like that, but i think it would be an interesting twist!” 

     once the interview is finished and done with, alec stands and gives a deep bow to thank everyone for putting up with him for the last however-long he had been there. “thank you so much for the opportunity,” he says politely, a wide grin on his lips as he bows again before leaving. 

     here’s to landing a good role! 

     (hopefully.)

[purplesurveys]

714

Do you have anyone you fully trust? Yeah, mostly my friends. I wouldn’t befriend them if I knew from the get-go they couldn’t keep a secret or be reliable. What kind of pants did you wear today? I usually wear shorts to keep myself comfortable during the warm April days. How old is your television? Our TVs in the living and dining rooms have been around since we moved in so that’s 12 years. My parents’ TV is around 8-9 years old, I’m not very sure. I don’t have my own TV in my room – I used to, but it got moved to my brother’s room when we realized he’d use it more since he has a PS3/PS4. That one is around 6 years old. Do you have a laptop or desktop? Laptop.  When did you last talk on the phone with someone? Not so sure. I think it was a couple of nights ago.

Are you currently sleepy? A little bit, which is why I have a cup of coffee beside me right now. ;) Have you ever deleted Facebook friends for a significant other? No, that’s so childish and obviously possessive eugh. I don’t like some of Gab’s friends but at the end of the day they’re still her friends, so I never feel the need to tell her to delete them. Have you ever had bad trust issues with someone? Yep. That’s why to make things easier for me I just stop talking to them entirely. What accent do you think is the most attractive? There’s a certain kind of British accent that I find very pleasurable to listen to... think the cast of Love Actually and how everyone there talked, haha. Do you own any television series box sets? I have an unofficial box set to the 1980s show Perfect Strangers that my dad bought for me. Other than that, no – I do have copies of some of my favorite shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, but they’re all kept in a hard drive.

Have you ever been in a fight with your best friend? I’ve been in numerous fights with Gab. My last fight with Angela was back in the 5th grade probs. Do you have high standards? Eh, for certain things but not everything. I have high standards for group projects and papers – my groupmates don’t just get away with writing in whatever style they wish or designing our Powerpoint however way they want if they’re grouped with me; I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to that. Which for me is an ok trait to have since more often than not I WILL see a grammar error or a haphazardly-made slide in a Powerpoint.

When it comes to food and vacations I also tend to be a bit uppity since both my parents have worked in the hotel industry for almost 30 years, so over time I’ve learned to identify which accommodations are good and which aren’t. When did you last receive a hug and who was it from? I haven’t received a hug in more than a month. I’m rottinggggggg. Do you take any advanced classes? No. I don’t think we can do that here, or if we even have that concept. What is your lucky number? I don’t have one. Do you own a book bag? If so, what color is it? No I don’t, I only have large backpacks since I tend to carry a lot of stuff for school. Was the last movie you watched a horror film? I didn’t watch it in full, but yeah The Shining is very much a horror flick. Do you own a lot of tee shirts? Yeah, both for outside and for home wear. They’re just comfortable and convenient to have lol. Do you plan your outfits ahead of time? Not always. I plan my outfits mostly if I’m going to be seeing my girlfriend the next day since I always want to look nice for her, and to look cute if we’re gonna go to the mall hahaha. Have you ever spent the night in jail? I have not. I’ve read Chris Jericho’s account of having to stay the night in a cell for a DUI and it sounds like a nightmare, though. Would you say you're a bad influence on others? No. If I do act like a bad influence it’ll always be jokingly - like telling my friends to cut class so we can have lunch together - but in the end I’ll tell them to go to their class, or at least to make their own decision. Describe your favorite jacket? It’s a UP-themed varsity jacket, and it’s maroon and has the name of the school in big letters at the back. Are you a colorful person or quite bland? I always try to be colorful, of course. I would hate to have to describe myself as bland. List one word to describe your significant other? Right now, annoying. In general, she’s understanding. Do you handle pain well? It’s one of the few things that I don’t. I can’t handle pricks to the skin, gashes, paper cuts, etc. Have you ever been so nervous you threw up? No, I find myself feeling barf-y only if I have a bad headache or, more predictably, if I’ve had too much to drink. Where is your favorite place to go when you're depressed? I like going to Skywalk because I can always count on the fact that at least one orgmate will be there at any time of the day, and my orgmates are my family and make me forget about my problems instantly. If Skywalk doesn’t help, I go to my car and cry as much as I need to.

If I’m not at the university I like going to our couch in the living room, because my bedroom only makes me more depressed and I have had particularly bad episodes when I had willingly stayed there in the past. Do you remember the first survey you took? I’ve always recorded my surveys on Tumblr so the first one is on my first survey blog, the one I got locked out of last 2016 haha. How many friends do you have on Facebook? I don’t feel like checking exactly how many but it’s in the 660s or 670s. Have you ever watched fight videos for amusement? No thanks, any video involving any kind of conflict stresses me out. In high school, were you in trouble a lot? Nah. My friend group were mild troublemakers but we all performed well in school, had good grades, and respected teachers at the end of the day so they didn’t really have a reason to penalize us. Do you enjoy your hairstyle? I like it a lot better than my boring straight hair, but with the lockdown making all salons close for the meantime, I have no idea what to do with my bangs that are growing too long now D:

Do you have long hair or short hair? It’s a lot shorter than before. How much make up do you wear on a daily basis? Zero. I only wear makeup for parties or formal events. What is your favorite television show? Breaking Bad and Friends. Do you have a leather jacket? No. I don’t really need that here either... I can’t imagine how hot I’d feel wearing that. Do you think anyone dislikes you for no reason? Sure. Don’t most people have one person they feel this way towards lmaoooo Do you have any children? Nope. Have you ever been interviewed on television before? Nah but we’ve had media crews visit our school before to look for interviewees for segments in news programs. I’ve always just said no and watched my friends from behind the camera. Do you have weak upper body strength? A little but it’s improved a whole lot from my fitness class last sem. What is the worst insult someone can call you? A failure.  Do you write on your hands a lot? Only back in high school. I have no idea what made me stop as soon as I started college but thank fuck I did because it was such a poor habit to have. Are you good at sketching? I’m no good at any kind of drawing or creating images. Do you think hugs are awkward? If it’s not with the right person or if I hugged someone who wasn’t a hugger then yeah, they can be awkward. Do you think facial hair is gross? No unless it’s neglected and has like gunk or food bits in it. But I don’t mind hair in general. Would you ever dye your hair an unnatural color? Sure. What color was the last cup you drank from? My coffee mug :) It has a black decor on the outside that turns bright blue when the liquid inside is hot, so that I know to be careful with it. Ever play Angry Birds? I did play it back in 2010 but I was already pretty old then (at least for those kinds of games) so I didn’t really enjoy it. We had it on the family iPad for a while though because my brother, who was 6-7 at the time, liked the game. Did you think it was annoying, like I did? The sounds were a bit annoying, sure. Have you ever been to the zoo before? No, but close. My old school has its own eco-park that we used to visit every now and then. What instruments do you know how to play? Just the recorder, which really shouldn’t count lol. How late did you stay up last night? Till 4 AM, I think. How late do you plan on staying up tonight? I have no idea. Definitely not now, though.

[tvntae]

heartbreak hotel 1

pairing: reader x ceo!jeon jungkook

plot: was sleeping with your boss really such a great idea?

genre: smut (eventual), angst, fluff

word count: 3.3k

You loved your new job, you really did but the days just seemed to drag on. You were kinda ready for new scenery, a load of fresh faces and just some newer air to breath in general. You wanted, no needed more creative freedom. You felt stuck, and you knew there wasn’t anything you could actually do about it. Unless you go to him. Now “him” was your boss, Jeon Jungkook. You hated asking him for things because he seemed so scary.  He was quite sweet, funny and even a little charming. But he intimated the living hell out of you, and you’ve never been able to pinpoint why. Maybe it was because of the look on his face during those redundant teamwork building exercise meetings that were held every 2 months. He seemed to despise them more than anyone else. To you, he was the big bad boss even though around here he was crucial and level-headed.

At least, that’s what you heard about him. Rumors must have been that mans last name because people loved to talk, and when you say to talk you mean gossip. Employees would either be discussing Mr.Jeon’s newest ride or the latest girl he’s screwing. Word got around that he was dating some new model on the scene, not that you really cared or anything, but last night Karen, the older lady who’s cubicle is to the left of yours, just wouldn’t stop yapping on and on about it.

“Did you hear about Jeon’s new girlfriend?” She squealed over the phone, entirely too enthusiastic over something that had absolutely nothing to do with her. You could barely get work done because of your unintentional eavesdropping. Seriously, it’s not like you actually cared or anything about Jungkook’s life it just... you know Karen and her very loud very exaggerated story over the phone with Suzie, that works a floor above you in HR were taking your attention away from all your important work.

That very night you went home you let your curiosity get the best of you, and you decided to do a little bit of researching your self.

Your laptop was filled with tab after tab after tab of articles about Jeon Jungkook. Things about his childhood, his family even his surprisingly healthy lifestyle. You didn’t know much of the guy, other than he was your boss and he was only a few years older than you. Oh, and also those ridiculous fables people made up about him, but other than that you didn’t really know him, know him. No one did, really now that you think about it. He tended to stay in his office most days, and he rarely came to the company parties, not that you were invited to them for you to obtain such knowledge, you just heard it from Soyeon and Erika from the sales department during lunch break a week back. You knew you shouldn’t have been listening to their private conversation but it wasn’t actually your fault, it just so happened that they were talking about that particular thing while you had paused your music to text your mom back.

You looked over at your clock on your computer and saw just how late it was. Almost 3 and a half hours had passed while you were snooping on your bosses life and you hadn’t even eaten yet. You opted out on cooking, even though in that article you just read about Jungkook’s healthy lifestyle said he always cooks his meals, you decided on ordering out instead. You didn’t have the luxury of making home-cooked meals every night and mostly ate out to suffice. With the salary you have, you do a lot more saving and budgeting than big baller spending. It’s hard enough to afford a place in Seoul, imagine how broke you would go if you started buying real groceries. Fast food was convenient, and it takes a lot less time to arrive at your doorstep than if you were to make a meal.

As you placed your order, you started to wonder if Jungkook was the type of guy to like a girl who could cook. With the luxurious and lavish lifestyle he lives, or at least what the way the tabloids paint his way of living, he’d surely be the type of guy to like a woman who enjoyed cooking for her man. You weren’t really that much of a cooker, a baker yes, but cooking wasn’t your forte. You could bake up a mean batch of chocolate brownies, or if you were in the mood you liked to bake apple pies but cooking actual dinner? Uh, that wasn’t a trait you could say you have.

Once your food arrived, you decided it was time to watch the local news. It was always something you did back home. You’d order some food and then flip to the news channel to hear the current events of the world. Old habits never die.

Oddly enough Jungkook and his new girlfriend were being featured. Typically, when the company you worked for was on the news Jungkook name was rarely ever mentioned just for the sake of not drawing attention to his name you’d guess. Nochu was notably known as a great company. Most people didn’t really know that such a young guy was behind such a successful business. Frequently, in cases you’ve seen young CEOs, mostly it’s because it’s a business that was handed down to them from their wealthy fathers and grandfathers. But that wasn’t the case for Jeon Jungkook. No, he started Nochu from the ground up, hustled his ass off even before college just to create a name for himself. You had a lot of respect for the guy. You didn’t see him much, but he was diffidently a diligent man. If you ever have the chance (and the balls), you’d try to conversate more with him. Get to know him as your boss, not really on a personal level but more as colleagues. 

If the news was anything to go by tonight, apparently Jungkook and his girlfriend were engaged. When you were doing your research about him a few hours prior there weren’t any mentionings of engagement nor was there any clear pictures of Jungkook with said, fiance. But the news seems to have evident photos of the couple together. And you were utterly blown away by the two. They were stunning together, hell, she was stunning alone. But together they looked so dominant. 

“The nations couple” was what everyone was calling them on Twitter. Honestly, you could see why. They’re perfect for each other, and they looked so content. You were sorta jealous, not because you had a crush on your boss or anything. I mean yeah, he is very handsome and the mysterious type. You’d be lying if you said he wasn’t your type. But it’s really the simple fact that you hadn’t been in a relationship for what felt like 15 years. Your last boyfriend was everything you ever needed, or at least that’s what you had thought. Once he got a job offer in another city, he dropped you so quickly and left without another word. So you being you, you ended up on the other side of the planet in Seoul to finish college and start an internship soon after. 

Your internship lasted for about 3 years and then you were offered a position at Nochu Corp. You thought you would be working for some old fat guy in his mid to late sixties. So to say you were stunned by Jungkook’s age and his smooth looking face was an understatement. You knew he could tell how flustered you were that day you accidentally ran into him with your high stack of papers. You were so sure he’d fire you on the spot, but he even offered to help you clean them up. He helped you that day, pick up all your papers, and you were so nervous you left without thanking him properly. To this day you’re still pissed that you made such a fool of yourself.

The morning dragged by slower than ever today at work, you were so ready to get out of the building and get home to your warm bed. Your uncomfortable office chair was starting to get old, you figured it’s never been replaced, and it’s been sitting at this particular desk for years. It often makes your back cramp up and spasm, and it indeed is a pain in the ass (like literally, it even hurts your butt to sit too long). 

From the corner of your eye, you could see your department manager, Jiwoo come into focus. You start to pray that she doesn’t hand you another task for today and instead hands it off to someone else less fortunate. You could not bear to stay sitting at this desk for any longer. 

“Hey, Y/n, how ya been?” Jiwoo asks you, a little too enthusiastically might you add. You could already tell you were a) In trouble or b) she was going to ask for you to complete another task for tonight. And God was you praying it wasn’t the latter. 

“I’m doing good Mrs.Choi, how are you today?” You maintained a smile through gritted teeth, trying to stay as positive as can be. Maybe, just maybe it was an audit and nothing too serious today. You had a drama to catch up on today, and you could NOT afford to stay any longer than usual. 

“I’m doing just fine, I was wondering,” here we fucking go, you think, “Youngjae called out sick for the week and we don’t have anyone to process the stats from this week and last well I need you to stay, maybe about I don’t know 3 hours after your scheduled time today.” The fucking bitch.

“But I-” you start, but Jiwoo soon cuts you off before you could protest.

“This isn’t a yes or no question Mrs.Y/n, I need coverage and your my only available person tonight. I know I can count on you. I’ll email everything that needs to be printed, copied and signed before I go and leave the papers on my desk, I’ll leave you my keys to open the copy room and, make sure you leave said keys with the papers you deliver. Have a nice night Mrs.Y/n.” And with that Jiwoo hands you her office keys and takes her leave, well not before giving you a hideous tight lip smile.

You truly hated that old hag. Out of all the employees she has in this department she chooses to always pick on you.

Night rolled by a lot faster than the afternoon, and you were finally able to stand up and stretch. Letting out a yell, since no one else was on this floor for the night you start doing the stretching exercises you learned from Youtube. The forward hang stretch would always be your favorite one. Anyways on to more important task, you grab Jiwoo’s keys and head to the elevator, since your department didn’t have a copy room you had to use the one a few floors above. 

The empty hallway to the room was dead silent and even a little creepy, you know most people here tended not to stay too late, yourself included. You hated this place sometimes, it was cold, dark and scary at night. And you always felt lonely here when you stayed overnight. 

Switching on the copy room lights, you mentally thank God that someone left the computer logged in because, for the life of you, you could never remember any of the passwords. 

You logged into your email, quickly, 3 hours after your ass. You were going to print these papers, sign them off and put them in Jiwoo’s stupid office on her big stupid desk. Oh, and along with her dumb stupid office keys. 

You were about 3 papers signed in when you heard a voice coming from down the hall. Your first instinct told you it was the custodial crew, so you brushed it off. 

“Yes babe, I’ll be home tonight don’t worry about it... Yes... Yes... Wait, I thought I turned those lights off, guess not, but yea see you soon, love you, k bye.”

“Oh. So it was you who has these lights on.” Too focused on signing you didn’t register anyone walking into the copy room. You nervously spin yourself around in your chair and get up to bow, but he motions his hand telling you it wasn’t necessary.

“How are you Y/n?” 

“I am doing well sir, how are you tonight?” 

“Same. Same. Choi has you working late tonight I see, you don’t normally stay this late.” He says as he squeezes past you to get to the small printer. You smile and nod as your response as he passes you. The room was cramped. There was one huge sectional desk that held all 3 computers, and on one side, a small printer on the other and then the copy machines were right next to the desk. For it to be such a big building, this room had to be the smallest one you’ve ever seen. You turn your chair back around to finish signing your papers, the only sound that was heard throughout the room was Jungkook printing papers and your swiftness with the pen as you signed. You rustle a few papers around, trying your best to not look like such an unorganized slob in front of your boss. 

It ended up taking your 2 whole hours to finish printing, copying and signing all 300 something papers. Jungkook had stayed in the copy room the entire time, mostly going through his email and answering texts. Wasn’t like you were snooping or anything, you were just surprised that man could type and text so damn fast. 

Jungkook looks at his wrist for the time on his watch. “You take the bus to and from work, correct?” Jungkook turns his chair to his left to face you. 

“Uh, yes sir, why?” You ask, bemused that he was asking such a personal question.

“Well, it’s late, and the last bus just ran 5 minutes ago, so I’ll be taking you home unless you have a ride tonight?” He raises his eyebrows. Jungkook knew you were new to the city and didn’t have many friends here let alone family. He only asked to see if you’d lie to him.

“That’s very kind of you sir, but you don’t have to-”

What was it with these people in higher positions cutting you off.

“I wasn’t really asking, it’s late, and I know for a fact you shouldn’t be walking this late, so I’ll be your ride tonight. Clean up, pack your things and I’ll be waiting for you outside of the building in the black Audi.” He starts to grab his things and leave, sending you a sweet smile before exiting the room.

It took you a second to process what just happened. Jungkook barely said 7 words to you when he first came into the room and then all of a sudden he’s offering to take you home? What parallel universe is this? For all he knew you could be a serial killer, hell he could be one. You were his next prey, and you didn’t even have a say in anything because he’s your boss.

Calming down your fast-beating heart, you pack up your papers and make your way to your department to drop everything all off. 

The inside of Jungkook’s car smelled terrific. Like pineapples and bananas but also with a hint of mint candy. It was strange but also quite pleasant at the same time. You heard around the office that he likes sweet smelling things. Opting to buy women’s perfume rather than men’s cologne. You had absolutely no problem with that at all. It just showed Jungkook cared a lot about hygiene. Which is why you’d rarely see any blemish or imperfections to his skin. 

“You know today was casual Friday, right”? Jungkook ask you while still keeping his eyes on the road. 

“Wait, seriously we have those? No one’s ever told me.” To say you were disappointed was an understatement, you loved causal days, and you never even knew they existed there.

You frown at the thought of it. 

Jungkook looks over to see the pout gracing your face, cute, he laughs to himself. “Yes, we have them a few times out of each month. There’s a lot we do there that Choi probably won’t tell you. It’s not as boring as you think it is.”

“I don’t think it’s boring.”

“Sure,” he draws out.”I can tell when someone is bored and you, Mrs.Y/n, are most definitely bored.” 

You laugh at that, “Maybe you’re right.”

Jungkook turns up the music to the radio and you two ride comfortably together. It felt weird but also right at the same time. You felt cozy and warm with him. 

You had dozed off about 10 minutes ago, It was a great thing Jungkook looked at your file for your address because you were in a pretty deep sleep. He honestly did not mind that you lived about 20 minutes away. It wasn’t that big of a deal to him. He could feel his phone blowing up with text after text from Jinah, his fiance. He’d just make up a little white lie and tell her he stayed an extra hour at the office. It wouldn’t kill her if he omitted the truth. He didn’t need her jealous rants, not right now, he was too tired.

You could feel Jungkook’s car coming to a stop. You knew it was time to wake up and in head inside your place when he nudged you awake.

“Hey, we’re here.” He tells you. You slowly lift yourself up, unbuckling your seatbelt and spreading your arms to stretch. 

“Thank you so much for this Mr.Jeon, I’m sorry I fell asleep here.” You awkwardly smile. 

He waves you off telling you it was indeed no problem.

“Just before you go Y/n I want to ask you something if that’s fine with you.

“It’s fine sir, go ahead.” You turn to face him. Figuring this must be something important.

“You see, I’ve been looking for a personal secretary for a month now and have been having trouble finding one I can trust. I was wondering if you’d like to be mine? You’d be getting paid more, get your own office but the flip side is you’d have to pick up more days. Is that fine with you?”

Woah, was he seriously asking you to be his right-hand woman? “Sir I-I don’t know what to say,” you were rightly left speechless, you had no secretary training, and he knew that, but he was asking you. You hadn’t even been at his company for very long, and he was already giving you a promotion.

“There's no need for formalities. You don’t have to call me sir or Mr.Jeon, Jungkook will do just fine.” He stifled a laugh.

“So do you accept the offer?”

“Yes, of course, of course! When do I start?”

“How’s tomorrow sound?” He asks.

“That sounds absolutely perfect!”