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disturbedbydesign · 3 years

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A Night At The Museum

Pairing: Loki x Reader

Length: 4K

Summary: Your job as a museum tour guide was growing tiresome until a mysterious stranger showed up to claim what was his.

Warnings: Dubcon (slight mind control), Violence (mild), Light Bondage, Explicit Sex (oral, vaginal). 18+ only, no minors.

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Your last tour of the day was about to start and all you could think about was getting off work and meeting up with your sister for drinks. You had always dreamed of one day working at the British Museum, but having been a tour guide there for the past year—doing the same thing, so many times a day, every single day—you found yourself growing tired of it and anxious to move on. Much as you loved art history (you did go to school for it, after all), you had grown thoroughly bored with your job. You wanted some excitement in your life. You needed it.

When you first started, you had been one of the museum’s most enthusiastic guides, always trying to engage all the members of your groups and fielding even the strangest of questions with grace and ease. These days, you were just going through the motions, especially for tours this late in the day. Over the course of the year, you had become adept at instantly identifying the one or two people in any given group who actually cared about the subject matter, and you found it simpler to focus on them and ignore everyone else.

As you performed your perfunctory scan of the last group of the day, you saw the usual suspects: a group of unruly children with intentionally oblivious parents; a travel group of obnoxious middle-aged Americans; an older gentleman, alone, who looked like he could be a professor of some sort (he was the one to pay attention to); and a young couple, clearly on one of their first few dates, who would have eyes only for each other.

And then you saw him.

You were immediately taken aback, struck by the fact that, for the first time in a long time, you couldn’t get a read on someone. The man was tall—really tall—with long, black hair slicked back. His skin was almost inhumanly pale and smooth, like he was sculpted of the same marble as the statues surrounding you. Despite the summer heat, the mysterious man wore a black suit and tie, a white dress shirt, and a long black coat with a scarf. He carried an ornately crafted cane, which seemed more an accessory than a walking aid. Compared to the rest of your tour group, he seemed a man out of time.

And then you saw his eyes—his impossibly green eyes. You could see them from across the room, almost glowing and staring at you, unblinking. your breath caught in your throat and all of a sudden you felt very, very cold.

As the hour-long tour progressed, you went through your practiced speeches about each artifact, moving across the room in the pre-established order and fielding questions here and there. As anticipated, the older gentleman was very engaged in the tour and asked intelligent questions, which you happily answered. Also unsurprisingly, one of the loudest Americans (probably trying to impress his friends) kept asking questions that he thought would make him sound smart and cultured but which, in reality, had the opposite effect. After one particularly ridiculous question, you had to turn your head away, pretending to be thinking about the answer but really trying not to laugh. That’s when you got caught in the emerald stare of the mysterious man with the cane.

He hadn’t taken his eyes off of you the entire tour—hadn’t so much as glanced at any of the art that he was ostensibly there to see—and up until then you had done your best to avoid meeting his gaze. Something about him absolutely terrified you, although you couldn’t pinpoint what exactly you were frightened of. He was standing completely still at the back of the group, but he was so tall that he towered over everyone and you could see his face as clear as if he were right in front of you.

His piercing eyes were locked onto you; they moved where you moved. His gaze was intense and menacing, but it was more than that: you could physically feel his eyes on you, penetrating you all over, making you feel naked. You wanted to look away but you felt like some strange power was holding your eyes onto to his. You stood dumbfounded and locked in a silent stare with the dark-haired stranger until the loud American spoke up, demanding an answer to his previous inquiry. You had never in your life been so happy to answer a stupid question.

You managed to make it through the rest of the tour without meeting eyes with the man with the cane, although there wasn’t one second that went by when you didn’t feel his presence in the room. You even went so far as to forgo asking if anyone had any final questions at the end that they wanted to stay after and discuss with you. You ducked out of the exhibit hall as fast as you could, feeling the man’s gaze boring into your backside as you exited the room, and headed for the staff room to gather your things. You didn’t notice until you got to the employee lounge that you had been holding your breath the whole time.

The museum was officially closed for the day, and as you left the staff area you couldn’t help but notice that the usual security guards posted around the building were nowhere to be found. In fact, there was no one around at all. The main lights were dimmed and the place was impossibly silent; the only sound you could hear was the echo of your own footsteps as you quickly made your way across the building to the exit. You were rounding a darkened corner when you felt an ice-cold hand reach around from behind and clamp over your mouth.

“Don’t be afraid,” hissed a smooth voice in the darkness. “You’re going to like what comes next.”

Before you could think to cry out, you were spun around and face to face with the dark-haired man. He wore the devil’s grin as he leaned down to you, his face barely an inch from your own. One hand still clamped firmly across your mouth, he brought his cane up with the other and traced a gentle line down from your temple to your chin. He let the tip rest under your jaw, pressing in on your throat just a little too hard. He put his lips to your ear and whispered, “Come with me, my pet.”

In one swift motion, he swung you up and over his shoulder and held you there with one arm, the other arm brandishing the cane, which clicked rhythmically against the marble floor, keeping time with his long strides. You were still dazed and breathless from the force of the cane’s tip on your throat and before you knew it, you found yourself in some dark recess of the museum basement, on the floor of a room you hadn’t even known existed. It was filled with strange artifacts the likes of which you had never seen in your extensive studies. There were no lights on but the room was bathed in an eerie shade of blue, which seemed to emanate from the relics themselves. You managed to mumble out a few words.

“Where am I?”

You saw the cane flip once in his hand as he strode toward you and then felt only searing pain as it came crashing across the side of your face.

“Did I say you could speak?” he asked.

You brought your hand to your cheek where he’d struck you, expecting to feel a bloodied gash, but when you took your hand away and looked there was nothing. The blow had left no physical mark, only an icy hot streak of pain. He reached down and traced the line of his blow with a long delicate finger, and suddenly the pain was gone and replaced with a pleasurable tingle.

“As you see, I can inflict both pain and pleasure,” he said, his voice like honey. “What happens next is entirely up to you.”

You should have been terrified, screaming, looking for some outlet or escape, but you found yourself completely paralyzed by his gaze. Going against every survival instinct screaming inside of you, you dared speak again.

“Please… please just tell me who you are and what you want.”

You closed your eyes and braced yourself for another blow but it did not come. You glanced up to see him looking at you inquisitively from the corner of the room, resting his long, lean frame on the tip of his cane.

“You are a bold one, I see. Deserving of my punishment, yes, but also worthy of the pleasure I can give you. I am going to ask you three questions and you are going to answer them honestly. If you lie, I will know, and you will suffer for it. Now tell me, do I frighten you?”

“Yes.”

“Do I excite you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to leave? And before you answer this last and most important question, know this: If you say yes, I will let you go. I will not harm you. I will not follow you. You will never see me again. But you will also never know who I am or what I am here for, the memory of this night will haunt your dreams forever, and no one will ever believe your story. Within a week, you will go mad wondering whether I was a dream or reality.”

In one seamless motion, he crossed the room and yanked you to your feet by your shoulders, holding you an inch from his face, which seemed to glow with its own light.

“Now answer the question. Do you want to leave?”

The final answer flew from your lips before you even knew what you were saying. “No,” you whispered, and he eased his harsh grip on your shoulders, a sly smile spreading across his lips.

You stared at him, motionless and feeling almost paralyzed as you waited for permission to speak.

“Well,” he began, “I suppose it’s only fair that I offer you the same courtesy you have allowed me, so you may ask me three questions and I will answer them honestly. Choose your words carefully, because you get only three.”

He released his grip on you and returned to the corner, watching you and waiting.

“Who… who are you?” you stammered.

“Ah, a good question and excellently phrased. Had you asked just my name, that is all you would have received. But who I am is much more complicated.”

He sauntered toward you and lifted his cane, pointing it in a sweeping circle around the room.

“You see these things here? I am not so different—I was just another stolen relic from another world, locked away until someone might have use of me. But I have broken free of my shackles, and I have come to claim what is mine. You as who I am? I am a God. I am your God.”

You should have thought him completely mad, but you believed him. For whatever reason, you believed him.

“What do you want?” you asked.

He shook his head and chuckled low. “That’s far too vague a question, my pet, for I want many things. I could tell you simply that I want a glass of water, and I would not be lying. But since you are such an exquisite creature and so well behaved, I will answer the question you meant to ask, which is what is my purpose here.”

Something was happening to you, something strange and terrifying and wonderful. You were mesmerized by the way he spoke and the way his long, cold fingers brushed your cheek when he had called you exquisite. You hung on his every word and could not take your eyes off of him.

“I am Loki of Asgard and I have come to reclaim what was stolen from me. This room holds all that I need to take my rightful place as your master and overlord—to claim humanity as my own and rule the people of Earth as your king.”

You searched your racing mind for the words needed to get the answer you so desperately wanted, but your brain would not cooperate.

“One last question, my pet. And don’t keep me waiting.”

Finally, the words come to you in the correct order. “Why have you chosen me?”

Loki smiled lasciviously down at you. “I could tell just by looking at you that you crave subjugation,” he said, his voice smooth and so deep you felt it everywhere. “You were made to be ruled, and you will be the first to kneel for me.”

In a flash he was on you, grabbing your hair hard and pulling you into a deep kiss. His lips felt ice cold but his breath was hot and moist as his tongue twined around yours. You raised your hands to run them through his hair when he abruptly pulled back and caught you by the wrists. He spun you around and bound your arms behind your back with his scarf, pushing you to your knees once he had secured you.

“I told you to kneel,” he growled.

He was behind you and you could hear his ragged breathing, the rustling of clothes, and the soft thump of fabric hitting the floor. When he spun you back around, he was completely naked and you drank in the sight of his pale skin and lean, powerful body. His cock was enormous and rock hard.

“Pleasure me, my pet. I know this is what you crave.”

He grabbed you by the hair and shoved the whole length of his shaft down your throat repeatedly, fucking your face until you almost passed out for lack of air. When you thought you could take no more, he yanked you off of him, tilting your head back and looking down at you with glowing green eyes.

“Very good, my pet. Now slower. Worship it as you will worship me.”

He grabbed the base of his cock, holding it at an angle above your face and willing you to lick it. You complied, running your tongue slowly from the base to the tip, feeling his blood throbbing in the veins that ran the length of his massive shaft; the blood was hot but the flesh was icy cold—a very strange sensation, but one that fascinated you. He let out a series of short, carnal grunts as you swirled the tip of your tongue around his head. You took just the tip into your mouth and began to massage it gently with your lips as he ran his hand lightly up and down his shaft. You could taste his leaking juices as you tongued the slit, and the taste of him was like nothing you’d ever experienced before—it was delicious, addictive even, and it made you insatiable and impossibly wet. You moaned onto his cock as you let it drip down your throat, sending vibrations of pleasure running through his entire godly frame and causing him to groan in ecstasy.

Before you knew it, you were on your feet and your wrists were freed from the scarf that bound them. Holding the scarf between gritted teeth, he ripped your blouse open and straight off your body. He cupped and squeezed your breasts in his icy hands, and your already hard nipples became almost unbearably erect against the lace fabric of your bra. He unclasped it and let it fall to the floor next to you as he yanked your skirt down around your ankles. One hand cradled the back of your neck and he let the other trace a line in between your breasts and down your stomach. When he reached the top of your thong, just above your mound, he stopped.

Your breath caught in your throat and you looked at him. He took the scarf from between his teeth.

“Turn around,” Loki commanded.

You did as you were told and he brought the scarf around your head, blindfolding you. You felt his strong arms lift you up and moments later you were bent over a cold metal table, facedown and arms over your head, gripping the steel. You felt his breath on your pebbled skin as he ripped your thong off your body with his teeth, and he pushed your legs wider apart with his knee as he traced down the length of your spine with two fingers. When he found your entrance, you were already soaked for him—an almost unnatural level of wetness that you’d never felt before in your entire life—and he plunged two long fingers deep inside you without ceremony. You cried out your pleasure as he moved them furiously in and out of you before he slowed and found your sweet spot with his middle finger, working it violently until he started to feel your walls tighten around him and your cries faded to jagged breaths. He stopped just before you found release and you whined loudly.

“You are ready,” he said—telling you not asking you. “Now we shall see where your loyalty lies.”

You were left wanting and stranded on the verge, and the absence of sight heightened all your other senses. Every inch of your body was buzzing and the sound of your own heart beating was deafening in the silent room. That’s when you heard the rhythmic clicking of the cane moving slowly toward you and then stop.

“Who is your God?” Loki asked, his voice cold and commanding.

“You,” you wailed. “You are my God.”

He brought the cane down across your bare ass with all the power of Asgard and you screamed out in delicious agony.

“I said, WHO IS YOUR GOD?”

You tried to answer but your mind could not form words. He brought the cane down on you again, three hard lashes in quick succession, and you made a noise that sounded inhuman in your own ears.

“I’ll ask you one more time: who is your God and your King?”

The sensations coursing through your body threatened to put you over the edge of consciousness, but somehow you managed to yell out to him through the haze of pain and pleasure.

“LOKI! Loki of Asgard is my God and my King!”

He laughed maniacally and you could hear the clatter of the cane dropping to the floor. You felt his magic fingers trace a line across the searing flesh of your ass and the white-hot agony turned instantly to a pleasure unlike any you had ever known. You almost achieved release just from his touch. He untied the blindfold and he rolled you over on your back, pulling you up to face him. His eyes seemed warmer as he leaned in and grazed your ear with his lips as he spoke.

“You have proven your loyalty to me, my pet. I know that you will worship me as I deserve. Now you will be rewarded.”

He stood between your legs and cupped your face in his hands as he kissed you slowly and deeply, more passionately than he had before. For the first time, when you went to touch him, he didn’t try to stop you. At last, your hands found his long black hair and you grabbed fistfuls of it as you pulled him down on top of you, the tip of his cock teasing your opening as you devoured each other. He pulled his face away and buried it in between your breasts as he massaged them, taking one nipple in his mouth and nibbling it lightly as he rubbed the other between two fingers. Every flick of his finger or tongue on your body dragged a sound out of you that you didn’t know you could make. You untangled one hand from his hair and found his massive cock, gripping it firmly and stroking it up and down as you rubbed it against your clit.

“Fuck me, my King. I beg you. Take me any way you want me.”

He lifted his mouth from your breast. “Not so fast, my pet. I must taste you first.”

He pulled you down to the edge of the table and threw your legs over his shoulders as he settled between your legs. He licked you slowly up and down a few times before latching onto your clit, holding your hips firm as he swirled the tip of his tongue around and around, faster and faster until you started to cry out and buck against him. He brought a hand down from your hip and teased your slick folds with one long finger as he continued to work your clit with his tongue and his lips. He brought another finger to your entrance, sliding the two fingers together from the top of your folds to the bottom, and when he plunged both fingers inside you, you came so hard you nearly fainted. His touch was godly, and you knew then he had ruined you for all mortal men.

You had barely recovered from your climax when he sat you up and took you all at once, shoving his cock inside you to the hilt, filling you with ice and fire. He grunted like an animal with each forceful thrust and you screamed with pleasure as you clawed at his back. Your hands found his muscular ass and you gripped it tightly as you screamed his name, keeping time with his rhythm.

“Loki… Loki… My God… My King...”

You brought your arms up around his neck as he lifted you off the table, his strong hands gripping your ass as he walked you over to the side of the room. You clung to him with your legs wrapped tightly around his waist and your arms at his neck as he fucked you senseless against the cold basement wall. The light of the otherworldly artifacts tinted his skin an inhuman shade of blue; it was beautiful, he was beautiful. He quickened his pace and then stopped, remaining motionless with the full length of him still throbbing inside of you.

“Such a good girl for me,” he whispered. “Such a good little pet. I think maybe I’ll keep you.”

He walked you back over to the table and laid himself down on it so that you were straddling him. You moved up and down on his cock slowly, almost teasingly, wanting to feel every inch of him inside of you. As you rocked up and down, he brought his cold thumb to your clit, circling it while you rode him and bringing you close to the edge again. He began to buck underneath you as you fucked him and you knew he was close, too. You leaned in and grabbed the hair at the back of his head as you continued to slam yourself onto on him.

The words fell from your lips—“Fill me with your God seed, my King, I want every last drop you have”—and even as you said them, you had no idea where they came from, almost as if they were planted there and forced from you.

That had Loki’s eyes rolling back in his head and he moaned deep as he sat up, grabbing your hips as you rocked back and forth on his lap. He tightened his grip on you and quickened his pace, pounding into you hard and fast. As the muscles of your tight walls rippled with pleasure and you cried out your reverence in his ear, Loki found his release. He held your squirming body tight against him, your muscles shaking uncontrollably as he came roaring into you. You felt his warmth spread inside of you—such a contrast to the chill of his flesh—and you stayed locked in his embrace, completely limp with exhaustion.

“Thank you, my King,” you whispered, and Loki brought his fingers to your face.

The last thing you remember is two cool fingertips pressed to your temple. When you awoke, you were naked and alone in the basement room. The artifacts that had filled the room were now gone and there was no sign of Loki but for a pile of clothing next to you on the table—new clothes to replace the ones he had destroyed in his lust—and a handwritten note that said only “Fit for a Queen.” You put them on, wondering if he would ever be back for you. You were nothing now without your king. You knew you were made to be ruled.

#loki x reader #loki x you #loki laufeyson x reader #loki fanfiction #loki smut #loki laufeyson #tom hiddleston

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beyondspaceandstars · 3 years

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While You Sleep

Chapter 7

Relationship: Bucky Barnes x Reader Warnings: fluff, mentions of violence Summary: Soulmate!AU - Throughout life, you’re given glimpses of your soulmate through dreams. As you sleep, memories flash in your mind showing you the life your soulmate has lived. Everyone around you raves about how their soulmate reads great books or volunteers in their spare time. But you can’t relate as your dreams end up being more like nightmares. Through initial images of death and violence, you come to learn your soulmate is the Winter Soldier.

(a/n: i know the ending is ehh but i promise more will be explored in the next chapter <3

Masterlist | Series Masterlist

Your giddiness from the morning carried into the afternoon. You felt like you were floating half the time. The orders flying in flew out too as you moved flawless and happily through your work. Even when some customers would come up insisting their drink wasn’t correct, you accepted the complaint and happily presented a fresh cup. It was impeccable. A combination of feeling rested and feeling like you had someone.

You were at the tail-end of a rush when Steve came into the shop. He didn’t get in line, though, and instead took the last seat at the counter, watching you float about cheerfully.

You glanced up from the espresso machine. “Good morning, Steve.”

“Good morning,” he greeted back, watching you froth some milk for the newly brewed espresso.

You started pouring the milk into the cup, moving your hand delicately attempting to create some kind of pattern. “No coffee today?”

Steve shook his head as you placed the order under the pick-up sign and called out the name on the cup. You had a second to breathe and placed yourself back in front of Steve.

“I actually came to see how everything was going.”

You playfully rolled your eyes, a little smirk tugging at your lips. “I may be new to the whole soulmate thing but I am not clueless when it comes to friends. I’m sure Bucky is sharing everything.” You turned to start wiping down your workspace.

Steve frowned, “Bucky hasn’t told me anything.”

Your movements stopped. Brows furrowed in confusion, you asked, “He hasn’t said anything about me?”

Steve shook his head. “I just think he’s nervous. Probably wants to keep you for himself right now. I hear some soulmates can get like that at first.”

“Oh,” you hummed. “Well I can try to fill you in but there’s not much to discuss really. It's only been like a day. Dinner was lovely, though. Thank you for that, by the way.” Steve smiled. You continued, “He walked me home that night which was very kind, and then this morning he surprised me. He was waiting outside my apartment building to walk me to work.”

Steve’s jaw went slack. “Bucky walked you to work? Here?”

You nodded, maybe a bit too enthusiastically but you couldn’t help yourself. “We had a lovely walk and chatted along the way.” He stared at you as if waiting. “Steve, I’m not going to tell you what we talked about.”

Steve let out a light chuckle, throwing his hands up dramatically in defeat. “Alright, alright,” he said, “I won’t pry but can you blame a man for trying? My best friend is finally learning about his soulmate. That’s big for anyone but for Bucky in particular...”

You couldn’t help the blush creeping up on your face for what felt like the millionth time today. It was one thing to hear stuff from Bucky but to get an outsider's perspective, well, that was a rush. You held a little bit of pride from it as well.

“Well, thanks for getting us together,” you smiled, turning to wipe down a coffee machine.

“You’re not mad at me for the ambush?”

“Oh, no, I’m very mad about that.” You said, pointedly, as you glanced over back at Steve. He still had a shit-eating grin on his lips, not even an ounce of sorriness came off him.

“Well, once again, can you blame me? How else was I supposed to get you two to actually talk? Besides, I’m not actually hearing any complaints from you about it.”

Darn. He got you there. You sighed with a small nod and faced Steve once more. “No, of course, I’m not complaining,” you admitted, “you’re just lucky it turned out well.”

“It was always going to turn out well,” Steve said, matter-of-factly. “You two are soulmates.”

You frowned, “I could’ve moved on.”

Steve chuckled, absolutely dismissing the idea. “That doesn’t actually happen now does it?”

No, it doesn’t, but you didn’t want to admit it out loud. Once you actually stood in the same room as Bucky, you knew there was no turning back. However it may have ended up, you were always to feel that pull towards him. You think you were hooked the second you saw him on the television, despite that initial onslaught of fear.

When a few seconds had passed and Steve was still met with no answer, he gave you a smile. “Have a good rest of your day.”

As he turned his back to you, you called out, “I gave him my number.” Once the words left your lips you felt a bit unsure of why you were telling him this. “That’s another thing that happened this morning. I just really wanted to…” What did you want to do?

“Open that connection?” Steve guessed but you realized quickly that was correct. You wanted a more direct line to him, to maybe establish more happenings and dates. It sounded so fucking childish in your head but this all was so new to you.

Once you nodded, confirming his assumptions. Steve said, “He’s probably very thankful for that.”

Now he was really done speaking. Steve promptly left after that without any more goodbyes or chances for you to blurt out ridiculous updates. Why, anyways, were you actually updating Steve? Maybe because part of you felt you owed him. He sort of deserved to know a little about the couple he aided along in bringing together. Or maybe he was living vicariously through you two seeing as his own soulmate was gone. Perhaps, though, at the end of the day, he was a friend and from your previous observations, this kind of chatter over soulmates and first glances was what other people did. It felt good to finally sort of be in on it all with everyone else.

***

It was late in the afternoon when your phone buzzed. You were just starting to make your way to your apartment. Slightly confused, you turned on the screen to see a text message written more in the form of a formal letter.

Good afternoon. Did this send? Xo, Bucky

Despite the silliness and him clearly dating himself (not like it was a secret, though), you were practically wooed by the little hugs and kisses at the end. It really reminded you of some old-timey letter. You swore, it was always the simplest things with this man that just pulled you in.

Quickly, you crafted your message back: It sent! Was that your first text message ever?

After hitting ‘send,’ you started on the path back home. While maybe not expecting an immediate response, you also didn’t expect to be halfway to your building before Bucky texted back.

Yes, the text read. Can I call? -Bucky

You chuckled at the continuation of the sign-off but quickly replied, telling him you were free to talk whenever. Within seconds, your phone was ringing.

“Hello!” you said, fairly a bit too cheerily into your phone. You could practically hear Bucky’s smile as he answered.

“Hello,” he greeted you. “How is work?”

“It was good,” you said, “I’m on my way home now.”

“What?” Bucky gasped. “You should’ve told me what time you got off. I would’ve walked you home.”

You giggled, “Well, you maybe you should’ve asked what time my shift ended. I think this goes both ways, Buck.”

There was a moment of silence. “I forgot,” he eventually admitted with a sigh. “Someone had to go and kiss my cheek so I really couldn’t think straight.”

You let out a loud laugh at his comment, feeling a blush creeping on slowly on your neck and cheeks. Bucky matched your laugh.

“I’m sorry I’m such a distraction, I’ll do better,” you giggled. “Was there a particular reason you wanted to call?”

Bucky let out a bit of a disappointing sigh as if he didn’t want to admit something. “I’m not too skilled at this texting thing.”

“Oh,” you frowned, a bit uncertain. “It’s just like typing on a computer.” Sure, you said it like it was so obvious, but then you sort of hit you, remembering who you were speaking to. You stopped in your tracks, wanting to bang your head against a wall. “I-I mean-,”

“It’s alright,” Bucky let out a breathy chuckle. “I have typed on a computer but my phone doesn’t mimic that. It’s one of those flipping phones.”

“Flipping phones?” It took you a second but then the lightbulb went off. “Oh, you have a flip phone. No keyboard, then.”

“No keyboard,” he confirmed. “I figured out how to use the little keypad but it’s not exactly efficient. Plus, calling allows me to hear your lovely voice.”

You continued walking, suppressing a ridiculous, dopey smile as you passed others on the street. “You’re such a flirt.”

He let out a thoughtful hum. “Yeah? You think so?”

You caught yourself nodding before realizing he couldn’t even see you. “Absolutely,” you said out loud.

“Glad to know I still got some game.”

“Oh?” You inquired. “Were you swooning all the ladies back in the day?” The second the words left your mouth, you realized where this conversation was going and a sharp twinge of jealousy ran through you. Your eyes began watering at just the ridiculous thought of a hopeless Bucky thinking he had no soulmate and mindlessly pulling in girls left and right.

Bucky must’ve picked up on the sudden shift in you - possible perks of the bond - because he spoke very carefully after a minute. “Past me certainly did some things,” he admitted, “but he didn’t know there was a beautiful woman waiting for him way down the line.”

Your throat tightened a bit at the threat of tears. You took a couple of deep breaths completely shocked by how emotional one little thought could make you. The conversation on the topic hadn’t even lasted a full minute and Bucky was frantically calming you down.

You wanted to change the subject. Possibly putting it back on you. “When did you first learn about me?”

Bucky went silent again. You pressed the phone to your ear with your shoulder, waiting, as you rifled for your keys in your bag when you saw your building coming into view.

“They… I… I went, or really it, went dormant and I don’t know how I remember this, usually, my brain went blank in those circumstances, but one day I got this vision of you. You were playing with this bright, white cat on the lawn with this little house right behind you.” Mittens, you realized as you began unlocking your apartment door. He saw you with your pet cat Mittens whom you had when you were just a kid. “I was really confused until I felt that tug in the soulmate line or whatever they call it. I knew it was real because you never vanished. No matter what they did to me, when I was put away, you were there. Like some sort of angel sitting in my head. They couldn’t take that from me. They could never take you.”

You thought you were going to start crying as you stood in the doorway of your apartment hearing the sadness mixed with faint hope run throughout Bucky’s voice as he recalled the dreams. You could practically feel it all, too, within you.

“Bucky…” you sighed. A light sniffle came through on the other end but he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, Bucky abruptly turned the tables on you as you probably should’ve expected. While you wanted to talk more of it out with him (Lord knows it seems like he needed it) you let him steer the conversation.

“I know you said we could discuss this later but I’m very curious,” Bucky began, changing the subject as easily as you had just prior, “when did you first learn about me? You said you’ve seen some things but I’m really curious what your first impressions were.”

It was like someone just stabbed in through the chest. You really should’ve known this was coming. The first memories of Bucky - the Winter Soldier - flashed through your mind chaotically.

“I really don’t-,”

“Please,” he begged. The tone in his voice now… You had made it all too obvious earlier that morning. Of course, this was bound to come back around and you had opened the fucking gates. “It doesn’t have to be detailed. Just… something.”

You sighed, running your hands through your hair in anger as you took a seat on the couch. “You weren’t really you.” That was all you felt you could say as your heart was now in your stomach and your throat felt like it was filled with razor blades.

“I wasn’t…” He sounded confused at first but then the words trailed off. You could practically feel the exact moment when it all clicked for him. You wanted to throw up.

“Bucky-,”

You were cut off by the line going dead and the sound of dial tone greeting your ears.

#bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes fanfiction #the winter soldier #bucky barnes #bucky barnes angst #bucky barnes fluff #mcu #mcu fic #marvel fanfiction #marvel #avengers #soulmate au #angst #fluff #writing*#fanfic #fanfiction

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tally-kiza · 2 years

Text

lil bruno imagine crossposted from twt that started out an x reader thing but just devolved from there

thinking very hard lately about convincing bruno into starting a community theatre, like putting on a lil play for the town once a month or something. he’s all nervous at first but u see how much he loves acting and writing out ridiculous plots and just kinda needle him into pursuing something youd know hed love.

helping him write out and troubleshoot a script, being his assistant producer/director, rehearsing his lines with him (cuz hes starring as the leading man ofc), even helping him convince his family to get into it too (which they do enthusiastically). mira makes some lovely costumes for the show, camilo dedicates himself into being everyones understudy/the occasional evil twin role, luisa helps out with some quick set changes between scenes, antonio even gets some of his animal friends to help out if a scene calls for it!

the community would be so trepidatious at first, like how good could it be?? but by the end of the show everyone’s gotten so into the plot that theyre clamoring to bruno for a sequel or at least another show and hes so flustered that he doesnt even know how to react. he’d be convinced that that show was just a fluke, that surely it wouldn’t go so well if he did another one... but cut to a month or two later and hes putting on his bravest face and presenting his next play. and then another one a few months later. and another. and another.

and then one day hes not Bad Luck Bruno anymore. hes not Creepy Bruno, Killer of Goldfish anymore. hes bruno the actor. the director. the one who lights up the community’s month with his incredibly well written stories, the one who inspires the town kiddos to get into acting and more creative pursuits.

and sure, the town had warmed up to him since hed left the walls, especially with how mirabel had been making his case to everyone, but Now. everyone loved him people actively stopped to chat with him on the street. waving him down and asking about the next play, or encouraging him not to overwork himself producing his next big thing. and none of its because of some magic or cuz of his status as a madrigal. but because brunos just. bruno. just creative talented bruno. and as proud as his family always is of him lately since he returned, as they all committed to each other, i think them seeing him finally thriving in town for the most he has in decades would make them beyond overjoyed and beyond proud of him.

and it would definitely make alma shed a tear or two, whenever she looks at her lil boy worrying over the next bit of dialogue in his script, and she remembers just how similar he is to pedro, the writer who had so many plans and dreams to write novels and stories just like bruno’s someday. and she knows that out of the whole family, pedro would be the most proud of bruno of all.

just arrhrgh head empty only bruno and his community theatre and his incredible shows come to life 🥺

also hey this started out as an x reader thing and then i got distracted so for bonus points i want to imagine that if bruno hasnt confessed his feelings for u by that first play he makes, the whole plot is just about the star-crossed romance between his persona and the one he crafted just for you. it makes his feelings very obvious when he bashfully tries to cast u as his co-star and during the rehearsal for the kissing scenes njhbjna.

but he has to change both his stars at the last second when he suddenly remembers his family is gonna be there and like hell is this anxious man gonna sweep u off ur feet in front of god and his family and the whole town 😂 he prides himself on putting his internal feelings aside when hes acting but he'll let the understudies take care of that awkward bit this time.

#bruno madrigal #encanto #bruno madrigal x reader #havent posted headcanons on here in like 2 years goodness #the urge to write this into a full fic is so strong someone pls stop me

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jessbakescakes · 3 years

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random prompt: donna’s niece/nephew has to stay with her for some reason and josh drops by her apartment randomly so they all end up spending the day together :) thanks!

This took me an age and a half, but here it is. Let’s call this sometime post-snowballs, pre-finale Season 4 Josh/Donna. Also, it got ridiculously long and I have no idea why, but... yay?

Josh tries to be productive on his first Sunday off in recent memory. He gets a few things done around the house, and then he finds himself feeling bored. That feeling is rare; he hasn’t been this bored since he was recovering from his injuries after Rosslyn. There’s no shortage of things to do in the office, but Leo has banned him (and Donna) from the property for the day after a 38-hour shift. Soon the feelings of boredom propel him out of his apartment, and he finds himself standing outside of Donna’s place about fifteen minutes later without a plan. There’s a part of him that wonders if she’d even want to hang out with him on her day off, but all the other people he would invite are at work.

So, Josh knocks at the door.

They could always go to the movies; Donna’s been mentioning a new movie she’s been wanting to see. The thought of the two of them sitting in the back of a darkened movie theater while she gets invested in some sappy chick flick isn’t exactly his idea of fun, though, so his mind wanders to other possibilities.

The plan is almost formulated in his head when she opens the door, but it all goes out the window when he notices a little girl run toward the door and wrap herself around Donna’s legs. “I can’t come into work today,” Donna insists.

“Hi, Josh, it’s so great to see you,” Josh says in his sarcastic ‘imitating Donna’ tone.

She sighs. “Hi, Josh. You shouldn’t be going into work, either.”

“I wasn’t gonna ask you to come in today. Who’s this?” he asks, glancing back and forth between Donna and the little girl, who looks like a miniature version of Donna, but with brown hair instead of blonde.

“This is my niece, Caitlin.”

“Francesca’s daughter?” Josh confirms, ensuring that his memory of Donna’s conversations about her nieces and nephews was correct. He vaguely remembers Donna telling him something about a political argument that her sister Francesca got into with another parent while she was chaperoning a trip for Caitlin’s kindergarten class a few weeks ago.

Donna nods. “She had a last-minute meeting with a client she’s trying to land for the D.C. branch of her company. So Caitlin and I get to spend the day together. Caitlin, this is my friend Josh.”

Caitlin gives Josh a toothless grin and a giggle. “Hi.”

“Hey, Caitlin,” Josh says to Caitlin, giving her a wave. He turns his attention to Donna. “I was thinking about how I owed you a new shirt after the coffee catastrophe. Figured I’d come by and ask if you’d like to collect on that today. But...”

“Well, you can help me babysit, and we’ll call it even,” she says, motioning for Josh to come into her apartment.

“Your sister won’t mind?” Josh asks, crossing the threshold and taking off his coat.

“She’s met you,” Donna reasons. “You work for the President of the United States. I think you’ll pass muster. And besides, I’m here for when you inevitably screw up.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he sighs.

He looks toward Caitlin, who has abandoned Donna in favor of what she’s working on at the coffee table. There are art supplies everywhere; markers are scattered across the table (and a few have rolled onto the floor), a pair of child-sized safety scissors sits on the corner next to some tape, and tubes of glittery glue in several different colors are gathered in a pile in the middle. “What’s your favorite color, Josh?” she calls, without lifting her gaze from her project.

“Uh… blue, I guess,” Josh answers, approaching the couch and taking a seat.

Caitlin reaches for a blue sheet of construction paper and begins to cut an unrecognizable shape into it. She pauses after a moment, then lifts the paper and wraps it around Josh’s wrist, attempting to ensure that the piece she has cut is big enough. “I’m making a superhero bracelet,” she declares, making a face when she realizes it’s too big. “You can shoot stuff out of it and get the bad guys.”

Josh glances toward Donna, suddenly conveniently busy in the kitchen, and then back at Caitlin. “Sounds… interesting.”

He’s never been bad with kids. In fact, kids seem to like him, as a general rule. He’s just never been entirely sure what to do to replicate that experience from one kid to the next. This is Donna��s niece, so there’s a little extra pressure to seem impressive and interesting.

Donna is a natural with kids, at least from Josh’s perspective. Working in the White House doesn’t really give them a lot of opportunities to spend time with kids, of course, but the few times he’s seen her interact with them, it seems to come easily to her. They’re drawn to her in an inexplicable way.

Caitlin returns to her work. “This can be your bracelet. I made Aunt Donna a crown. Wait! Do you want a crown or a bracelet? Boys can wear crowns, too. They can be princes.”

“I’ll take the bracelet,” Josh says, motioning to the mangled piece of paper she has in her hands. “Did you say you made Aunt Donna a crown?”

He says the last part loud enough for Donna to hear in the kitchen, so Donna looks up at him and shrugs. “I’m a princess, apparently.”

“Don’t you think you should be wearing it?” Josh teases.

“It’s drying,” Donna says, motioning behind her to the counter, where she’s placed a crown made of pink construction paper covered in glitter.

Josh darts into the kitchen and gingerly lifts the crown, poking at various spots with his index finger. “Hmm, seems dry to me. What do you think, Caitlin, should she wear it?”

“Yeah!” Caitlin agrees enthusiastically.

“You want to come in here and put it on her?” Josh offers, holding out the crown.

Caitlin shakes her head. “You do it.”

Donna slides a finished grilled cheese sandwich onto a plate and turns around. “Don’t you dare squish it on my head,” she warns under her breath, her arms crossed. “If you get any glitter in my hair…”

“Donnatella, this isn’t my first coronation,” Josh huffs.

She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling at him. “Where was your last one, Burger King?”

“Medieval Times, actually,” he says, gently securing the crown on Donna’s head. “There.”

Donna reaches up and pats her head. “He didn’t give me a bump in my hair, did he?” she asks, turning around to allow Caitlin to check.

“Nope,” Caitlin confirms, approaching Josh with his superhero bracelet and about a dozen long pieces of Scotch tape. She attaches it to his wrist and steps back to admire her handiwork. “Now you both have something!”

“We certainly do. Come wash your hands and we can have some lunch,” Donna instructs.

Caitlin, Josh, and Donna chat over grilled cheese and tomato soup. When they finish, Donna clears the table while Caitlin pulls Josh into the living room to clean up the crafting supplies. Caitlin is entertaining to talk to, as far as six-year-olds go. Of course, she’s not about to debate the intricacies of domestic policy with him, but she asks questions about the President - she seems primarily interested in the idea of him being funny. Caitlin also wants to know if the President has a dog (she seems disappointed when Josh tells her he doesn’t) and if he intends to get a dog (she seems even more disappointed when she hears this answer).

Soon there’s a lull in the conversation. Caitlin seems to be focused and hard at work, slowly gathering the art supplies to clean up.

“Your Aunt Donna told me that you went to the aquarium a couple of weeks ago,” Josh says tentatively, unsure of what topics are interesting for six-year-olds, but making an effort anyway.

“I got to pet a stingray. You do it like this,” Caitlin explains, holding up her index and middle fingers together and sweeping them in the air.

“Oh, yeah? That must have been cool. What did it feel like?”

“He was kinda slimy. But there was an otter that was swimming up near the spot where I was standing at the otter place,” Caitlin says, shoving some markers into their box. “I love otters.”

“Oh, really? Otters are nice. What do you like about otters?”

“Otters… the otters hold hands while they’re sleeping so they don’t float away,” Caitlin explains as she clears the last of the paper off of the table. “Then they would be sad and all by themselves.”

“That’s smart of them,” Josh answers. “Don’t want them to be lonely.”

Josh discovers that Caitlin knows a lot about otters. She explains that she checked out several books from the library about otters after her trip to the aquarium, and has done some extensive internet research. By the time the living room is clean, Josh has been informed that otters have the thickest fur of all mammals in the animal kingdom, and baby otters are not able to swim on their own.

Caitlin is about to explain the ins and outs of keeping a baby otter safe and secure while its mother goes out hunting when Donna enters the living room with a bowl of water in one hand and a Ziploc bag in the other. “What are we up to in here?”

“Otter discourse,” Josh says, stacking the newly collected art supplies in a pile.

“They hold hands,” Donna says with a knowing nod, as though she’s heard this piece of trivia before. “Okay, Caitlin, you wanted to look through my stash of tattoos, right?”

Caitlin nods and takes the bag from Donna’s hand. She dumps out the bag and looks through the temporary tattoos that Donna has acquired. There are flowers, hearts, butterflies, and various animals and characters to choose from. Caitlin flips over each tattoo, grouping them by color as she deliberates.

Josh looks to Donna. “Does this sort of freakish organizational skill run in the family?”

Donna pokes him in the arm and Josh yelps, rubbing the spot as Donna moves to expedite the process by flipping over the tattoos.

Caitlin finally selects several different tattoos, sliding one in front of Donna and another in front of Josh. “Those are for you,” she says.

Josh shoots Donna a look, but Donna rolls up her sleeves. “Where should I put mine? On my hand, or on my arm?”

“Hmm,” Caitlin says. “Your hand.”

“Do you need help with yours?” Donna asks.

Caitlin nods. “The last time Mommy and I did these, mine got all messed up ‘cause I pulled it off too fast.”

“Oh, well we can’t have that,” Donna insists, dipping a washcloth in the bowl of water. “Josh, start thinking about where you want your tattoo.”

“I think he should do it right here,” Caitlin says, tapping the inside of her forearm.

“You think so?” Donna asks.

“You have to do it on this arm though,” Caitlin says, grabbing Josh’s left hand. “That one has your superhero bracelet.”

Josh sighs. “Do I get a say in this at all?”

“No,” Donna insists, turning his arm over so his palm is facing upward. She grabs his left hand in hers and pushes up the sleeve of his sweater with her right hand.

“You’re holding his hand. Kind of like the otters,” Caitlin points out.

Josh is certain that what Donna was doing was entirely platonic, operating on instinct under the watchful eyes of an observant kindergartener. But he wonders if she can feel his pulse hammering the same way it did outside her apartment in the snow a few weeks prior.

“Well, we wouldn’t want him to float away, would we?” Donna teases before letting his hand go and removing the plastic cover of a purple butterfly tattoo.

Caitlin approaches them and supervises as Donna applies the temporary tattoo, impatiently waiting for the reveal. Donna is about halfway through peeling the paper backing away when Francesca walks in the door.

“Mommy!” Caitlin shouts, launching herself at Francesca.

“Looks like I’m interrupting the makeover portion of the afternoon,” Francesca says. “Hey, Josh, it’s good to see you.”

“Hey, Francesca,” he says. “It’s good to see you too. I didn’t know you were coming to D.C. this weekend, or I’d have given Donna a chance to spend some time with you.”

Francesca waves her hand. “It wasn’t planned. I had a thing come up, and I was going to leave both the kids with Chris, but Caitlin heard me mention D.C. and all bets were off when she remembered that’s where Aunt Donna lived.”

“I made Josh a superhero bracelet,” Caitlin says. “And Aunt Donna has a crown.”

“I see that,” Francesca smiles. “Why don’t you and I head back to the hotel for a little bit? I’ll take you swimming at the hotel pool before dinner if you want.”

Caitlin darts across the apartment, gathering all of the things she brought over earlier in the day. “Can Josh eat dinner with us?”

Francesca grabs Caitlin’s pink backpack that’s sitting by the door and turns to Josh. “You’re welcome to join us, I was taking Donna out to dinner as a thank you for spending some time with Caitlin while I was in that meeting.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I’ll let the three of you spend some time together,” he says.

“Next time,” Francesca says. “Caitlin, what do you say to Aunt Donna and Josh?”

“Thank you!” she says, nearly knocking Donna over with a hug and climbing onto the couch to give Josh a hug with equal enthusiasm.

“Thank you again. Both of you. Six-thirty?” Francesca asks Donna.

Donna nods. “Perfect. You don’t have to run off, though, I don’t mind --”

“No, no, I know,” Francesca interrupts. “It’s totally fine. We’ll see you at dinner.”

Francesca helps Caitlin get her coat on and Donna sees them out. As Donna says goodbye and Caitlin and Francesca leave the apartment, Josh can hear Caitlin chatting to her mom.

“Aunt Donna was holding Josh’s hand, like the otters.”

Donna shuts the door and turns to look at Josh. Her cheeks turn pink and her eyes dart to the floor. “She really likes otters.”

“I gathered that.”

“Probably should have warned you about that.”

Josh laughs. “You could have warned me that I’d be peeling pieces of tape off my arms, too, but you just threw me to the wolves.”

“Hey, now. You survived!”

His forearm is still stretched out as the temporary tattoo dries and becomes less sticky and more prickly-feeling. “I also wasn’t exactly planning on getting a tattoo today. Or… probably ever.”

“Not a tattoo guy, huh?”

“Why, are you a tattoo girl?” Josh pushes his sleeve down over his forearm.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Donna says, a hint of teasing in her voice.

Josh stands up from the couch. “Want me to, uh…” he gestures around the living room, not sure where to dive in to help clean up.

“I think I can manage,” Donna says. “Thanks for today. Caitlin had fun.”

“Yeah. It’s no problem. Just remember that next time when Aunt Donna isn’t the favorite anymore and she goes on and on about how great Josh was,” Josh teases.

Donna crosses her arms and lets out a laugh. “Like that would ever happen.”

“You underestimated me before,” Josh points out. “You’ll see how popular I am when Caitlin asks you about me at dinner tonight.”

“And you think if she did, I would actually tell you about it?”

“I know when you’re lying, Donna. Your mouth does this weird thing.”

“A weird thing?”

“I don’t know how to explain it, but I know it when I see it,” Josh insists, putting on his coat. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Donna says, opening the front door for him.

Josh stands there for a moment before he leaves, looking at Donna. The pink crown is still on her head, and her shirt has spots of pink glitter on it, presumably from aiding in the decoration of the aforementioned crown. For the briefest of moments, he wonders if this can’t be their future - if it can’t be their kid who tapes a superhero bracelet around his wrist with too many pieces of tape or insists on giving him a butterfly tattoo.

He pushes the thought out of his mind until later in the shower when he attempts to scrub the tattoo off his arm. He’s had more moments like this since he took a cab to throw snowballs at her window -- or more accurately, ever since Commander Wonderful and his thirteen buttons showed up. The images, oddly domestic compared to most of his fantasies, play on a loop in his brain.

He knows he can’t indulge them, can’t enjoy these fantasies. She’s his assistant; he’s her boss. They’re friends, and that’s all they can be for another four years. Of course, that’s assuming that some gomer doesn’t sweep her off her feet and give her what Josh can’t, at least not yet. But he doesn’t know how to stop them, and they’re coming with more frequency than the nightmares he’s grown accustomed to having.

The idea that she could have all this with someone else is more terrifying than the nightmares.

#josh x donna #my fics #this was almost finished for like a week and I finally got it done today #sorry it got super long #also #sorry it took me so long to do this

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aces-to-apples · 4 years

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Your Reputation Precedes You

A response to “On Fandom Racism (and That Conlang People Are Talking About)” because lmao that cowardly bitch just hates getting feedback from people that she can’t then harass into oblivion

i.e. God I Wish I Could Use The Tag Fandom Wank Without The Titty Police Nerfing My Post

To be frank, I'm not here because I think you or any of your little cronies are going to change your minds. If the 'name' wasn't a giveaway, your group of ~likeminded individuals~ have quite the reputation for espousing ableist, antisemitic, and, yes, racist views under wafer-thin the veneer of "calling out racism." I think we both know that what you're actually doing is using the relative anonymity of the internet and progressive language to abuse, harass, and bully fans that you personally disagree with. You and your group are toxic, hateful, and utterly pathetic, using many peoples' genuine desire to avoid accidentally causing harm and twisting it into this horrid parade of submissiveness to You, The One And Only Arbiter Of Truth And Justice In Fandom. Never mind that you have derided autistic people as lacking compassion and empathy, that you've used racist colonizer dogwhistles to describe a fictional culture based heavily on real live Maori culture, that you've mocked the idea of characters having PTSD, or that vital mental health services are anything more than "talking about your feelings with friends uwu." Let's just ignore that you have ridiculed the idea of adults in positions of power exerting that power over children in harmful and abusive ways, that creating transformative fan-content that doesn't adhere to the spirit of canon or wishes of the original author garners derision and hatefulness from you, and that you've used classic abuser tactics in order to gaslight people in your orbit into behaving more submissively towards you in order to avoid more verbal abuse.

Let's toss all of that crucial context aside in favor of only what you've written here.

What you've written here is nearly 3,000 entire words based on, at best—though, admittedly, based on your previous behavior, I am actually not willing to extend to you an iota of good faith—fallacious reasoning. You posit that a constructed language, to be used by a fictional religious group located in an entirely different galaxy than our own, is othering, racist in general, and anti-Asian specifically. This appears based in several suppositions, the first being that a language unknown by the reader will, by nature, cause the reader to feel alienated from the characters and therefore less sympathetic, empathetic, and caring towards the characters. That idea is patently ridiculous and, I believe, says far more about your ability to connect to a character speaking an unfamiliar language than any kind of overarching truth about media and the human condition. New things are interesting; new things are fun; the human brain is wired from birth to be fascinated with new things, to want to take them apart, find out how they work, and enjoy both the process and the results.

The second supposition this fallacy is based upon appears to be that to move away from the blatant Orientalism of Star Wars is inherently anti-Asian. While I find it... frankly, a little bit sad that you cling so viciously to the Orientalist, appropriative roots of Star Wars as some form of genuine representation, that's really none of my business. If you feel that a Muslim-coded character bombing a temple and becoming a terrorist and a Sith, a white woman wearing Mongolian wedding garb, a species of decadent slug-like gangsters smoking out of hookahs and keeping attractive young women chained at their feet (as it were), a species of greedy money-grubbers with exaggerated features and offensively stereotypical "Asian" accents, and an indigenous people wearing modesty garb based on the Bedu people and treated by most characters as well as the narrative as mindless animals deserving of murder and genocide are appropriate representation of the many, varied, and beautiful cultures around the world upon which they were "based," then that is very much your business. Until you pull shit like this. Until you accuse other fans, who wish to move away from such offensive coding and stereotypes, of erasing Asian culture from Star Wars. Then it becomes everyone's business, especially when you are targeting a loving and enthusiastic group of fans who are pouring their hearts and souls into creating an inventive and non-appropriative alternative to canon.

Which leads into the third supposition, that a patently racist, misogynistic white man in the 1970s, and then again in the 1990s, intended his universe to be an accurate and respectful portrayal of the various cultures he stole from. I understand that for your group of toxic bullies, the term "Death of the Author" holds no real meaning, but the simple fact of the matter is that George Lucas based his white-centered space adventure on Samurai movies while removing the cultural context that gave them any meaning, because he liked the idea of swords and noble warriors in space. He based the Force and the Jedi Order on belief systems such as Taoism and Buddhism, but only on the surface, without putting any real effort into into portraying them earnestly or accurately. He consistently disrespected both characters of color and characters coded to be a certain race, ethnicity, culture, or religion, and likewise disrespected and stole from the cultures upon which he based them. He was, and continues to be, a racist white man who wrote a racist story. His universe has Orientalism baked into its every facet, and the idea that fans who wish to move away from this and interrogate and transform the text into something better than what it is are racist is not only laughable, but incredibly disingenuous and insidious.

As I said, I am not writing this to change your mind, because I truly believe that you already know that "cOnLaNgS aRe RaCiSt" is a ridiculous statement. The way you've comported yourself in fandom spaces thus far has shown to me that you are nothing more than a bully who knows that the anti-racist movement in fandom can be co-opted for your benefit. If you tout your Asian heritage and use the right language, make the "right" accusations and take advantage of white guilt and white ignorance, you can have dozens of people falling at your feet, begging for forgiveness, for absolution. And I think that gives you a thrill. So, no, none of this will change your mind because none of this is genuinely about racism—it's about power, it's about control, it's about fandom being the only space where you have some.

So I'm writing this for the creators of this wonderful conlang, which has been crafted by multiple people including people of color, who don't deserve this nonsensical vitriol, and for the fans reading this manipulative hate-fest, wondering if they really are Evil Racists because they don't participate in fandom the way you think they should.

Here it is: fandom has a lot of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, etc. baked into it. Unfortunately, such is the nature of living and growing up in societies and cultures that have the same. The important thing is to independently educate yourself on those issues and think critically about them—not "think critically" as in "to criticize" them, but to analyze, evaluate, pick apart, examine, and reconstruct them again in order to come to a well thought-out conclusion. Read this well-articulated attack on a group of fans who have always welcomed feedback and participation, are open about their backgrounds, their strengths and weaknesses, and wonder who is actually being genuine.

Is it the open and enthusiastic group who ask for the participation of others in this labor of love? Or is it the ringleader of a group of well-known bullies who have manipulated, gaslit, and then subsequently love-bomb people who did not simply roll over at the slightest hint of dominance? The ones who spent hours upon hours tearing apart, mocking, deriding, and falsely accusing authors of fanworks and metatextual works of various bigotries and -isms, knowing that those evaluations were spurious and meant only to cause harm, not genuine examinations of the works themselves or even presumed authorial intent. The ones who made their own, quote-unquote, community so negative and toxic that even after the departure of a large portion of them, including this author in particular, that community still has a reputation for being hateful, toxic, and full of mean-spirited harassers who will never look critically about their own behavior but only ever point fingers at others. The ones who are so very determined to cause misery wherever they go that as soon as their usual victims are no longer immediately available, they will turn on each other at the slightest hint of weakness.

This entire piece of (fan)work is misinformed at the most generous, disingenuous at the most objective, and downright spiteful when we get right into it. The creators of Dai Bendu, along with various other works, series, and fan events that these people personally dislike, have been targeted because it is so much easier to harass, bully, and use progressive language as a weapon against them, than it is to put any effort into making fandom spaces more informed, more positive, more respectful.

As someone rather eloquently put it, community is not a fucking spectator sport. You want a better community, you gotta work at it. And conversely, what you put into your community is what you'll get out of it. This author and their friends have put a lot of hate into their communities, and now they're toxic cesspools that people stay well away from, for fear of contracting some terrible form of harassment poisoning.

Congrats, Ri, you've gotten just what you wanted: adoring crowds listening to you spout your absolutely heinous personal views purely to live out some kind of power fantasy, and the rest of us staying well away, because fuck knows nothing kind, helpful, or in good faith has ever come from Virdant or her echo-chamber of petty, spiteful assholes.

No love, bad night.

P.S. Everyone actually in the Dai Bendu server knows your ass got kicked because you didn’t say shit for a full thirty days and ignored the announcement that inactive members would be culled. You ain’t cute pretending like it’s because you were ~*~Silenced~*~ after ~*~Valiantly~*~ attempting to call out racism. We see you.

#fandom bullshit #fandom racism #fandom harassment #fandom ableism #fandom antisemitism #fandom misogyny #by apples

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forbiddenfantasies1 · 3 years

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JB Fic Exchange Recommendations (the completely biased but also truthful because I can't help it that my friends are stupid talented version)

I haven't read NEARLY the amount of fics from the @jaime-brienne-fic-exchange that I wanted to (yet), but there's a few that I'm gonna tell you to read anyway because they're fantastic and their authors are fantastic so you're walking into a sure thing here. I would've never survived this exchange without these two so I feel perfectly justified in hyping them up.

First on display are the many varied talents of @sdwolfpup who outdid herself with THREE fics, all completely different. You know how some authors have their niche and stay in it? Sdw ain't about that life unless her niche is wonderful characterization and heartfelt emotions in which case she excels. Her first fic is The promise of a day a post-book canon fic that is heartachingly beautiful. Jaime and Brienne are trying to navigate what their lives look like after the war, two young boys in tow, in an uncertain world. They don't know where they're going or how long they'll survive, but they do know that they will face it all together. This story is another that feels weary but hopeful, and so full of love and promise that certain pieces of it just randomly jump into my brain throughout the day, which is really quite rude.

Her second fic is a modern AU that is so, so full of pining that my heart could barely handle it. The beginning of devotion is a lovely 5 Times fic (that actually stayed 5 Times!) of Brienne and Jaime exploring the ruins of Evenhall after Brienne inherits it. Each "time" is a room and as they discover little bits and pieces of the OG Brienne and Jaime, it also becomes very apparent that they're very much in love with each other, with neither quite brave enough to take that step beyond friendship. If you want a Jaime who is moody and scared, and a Brienne who can't quite figure out what to make of her best friend and his heart eyes, you definitely don't want to miss this.

And finally (because why write one fic when you can write three?) is the super, SUPER fun and sexually tense 2 Hot 2 Horny, which is based on a reality TV show. Basically take lots of horny strangers, put them on an island, and then surprise them with the little detail that they can't touch each other (or themselves!) for the duration of the show. Brienne and Jaime are there for two different reasons, and are already one-kiss and lots of fantasies deep into each other before the rules are dropped on them like a cold shower. They want each other so freaking much, and watching sdw torturing them is ridiculously fun and delicious.

You know what's really fun about knowing what someone has written before their name is revealed? Watching people lose their freaking minds over it and getting that vicarious rush of satisfaction. @brynnmck busted her cute little ass writing show me where our skin begins and earned a marriage proposal out of it. She created an entire world (sci-fi!) and crafted a story where Jaime and Brienne are on opposite sides of a war, and slowly come to realize that they both deserve better than to be used as weapons. Brynn walks you through their journey of bondage from the beginning (where Jaime is Brienne's prisoner and thus tied up against his will) all the way through their inevitable demonstration of trust and vulnerability (with enthusiastically consented bondage AND pegging). If you've ever read any of Brynn's work you already know what you're gonna get: sharp banter, two characters who are treated with respect and care and love, and scorching hot tension. If you haven't read it, go do yourself a favor and fix that.

I subscribed to both of these women long before I ever became lucky enough to call them friends. They're both so extremely talented and insightful and clever and full of heart, and it shines through in everything they write. You can't go wrong with either of them, whether on AO3 or in life.

#jaime x brienne #jaime brienne fic exchange #sdwolfpup #brynnmck #two of my very favorite authors ever

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ginazmemeoir · 3 years

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so i was inspired by @h00man-bean and here you go with a fic about Kaz and Inej as the Devil and the Reaper.

tagging @h00man-bean @mango-pickle @carmen-riddle @the-fault-in-our-inquilab @momo-all-the-way @gopikanyari @aadyeah @reddish-green-personality @weird-u @holding-infinity-and-a-book @dragonfairy1231 @totallyforgotyouwerehere @a-dragon-under-the-stars @taareginn

I crash into consciousness. The sound of gurgling water and rustling leaves greets me as I stand up. Strange. The last time I was alive, I had arthritis and was confined to a wheelchair. All Nina could do was slow mine and Inej’s death. I remember the last breath I drew, the last thought I had, the last time I saw Inej smile. And then nothing. Just an empty void, just – not being anymore.

I look at myself, flex my toes. It appears as if death has returned my old skin back to me, but it still doesn’t look like mine. This one is clear as if it was tended to by a Grisha tailor daily, as if the man who bore it had never worked a day. I am wearing the suit I stole from Pekka Rollins, decorated with a genuine gold pin showing a crow with a lion’s head in its claws. My cane lies beside me along with my hat. Either I am in a coma and am dying a slow, painful death as many of my enemies wished, or I have woken from a dream and nothing that I know happened, never really happened. I would rather prefer the first. Then, I see Inej.

She stands there in her captain’s uniform, the teal coat Sturmhond gave her, coupled with breeches and boots. I bet her knives are still tucked there. Her skin, still the same gleaming bronze, is now wrinkle free. Her eyes are kohl rimmed, and her ink black hair spill onto her shoulders. She looks at me with confusion, her eyes searching. “Kaz?” she asks. I move toward her, and then run. Funny how a good leg is almost as useful as a grisha crafted cane.

I clasp her hands in mine, her breath caressing me. “Inej,” I whisper “What are we doing here?”

“You’re both dead actually.” says a voice behind me. I turn around to see a Fjerdan merchant approaching us. He wears a blood red coat with gold lapels. His blonde hair is slicked back, and he walks with the cool confidence of someone who just cracked a deal. The only thing differentiating him from a Kerch businessman that I once looted is that he’s surrounded by floating rocks. Inej immediately kneels beside me, and nudges me. “Sorry but I have a bad leg. Also I don’t bow to animated turkeys.” I say as I go and retrieve my cane and hat. The Fjerdan chuckles and replies in heavily accented Kerch, “I suspect that bad leg excuse is of any use to now, Kaz Brekker. Also, please get up Inej, you look extremely out of place bowing to me in a teal coat.” Inej gets up reluctantly, and when she does, she has… tears in her eyes?

“Sankt Demyan of the Rime, thank you for protecting me.” She says, and hands him one of her knives. “Ah. How poetic.” He says, and pockets the knife. That is when I realize that we, in fact are dead. And Inej’s saints, are in fact, real. Great. There goes my ten thousand kruge. Thankfully the rest of the Crows aren’t here or I would have ended up as quite literally, a bankrupt soul.

“How many times have I told you Demyan to let me welcome the visitors? You’re hardly a gracious host, let alone a good gambler,” says a Shu woman, as she walks in behind Demyan, along with a Suli girl. The Suli girl was surrounded by floating rocks as well. She looked at Inej, and smiled at her. “And now, I would like those gold buttons of yours.” Says the Shu woman.

Inej hastened to remove her own lapel, a dragon and a fox, when the woman stops her. “I’m not talking to you Wraith, I’m talking to Demyan. We had bet that Kaz Brekker would kick him in the balls when he first arrived. I however had gone for a scathing insult. So seems like I won.” She says, and takes the gold buttons that Demyan removed (albeit while grumbling) in her slender hands. “Sankta Yeryin of the Mill, and Sankta Marya of the Rock, I- it’s an honour to meet you.” says Inej, and proceeds to bow more times than she has apologized when she was alive. I am shocked to see the way these so called “saints” milk Inej’s “devotion”. She was the closest thing to a saint that people actually had down in the mortal realm, and I would rather have kicked Demyan in the balls than let Inej bow again. But I restrain myself for the sake of my jaan.

Inej gives two more knives to the women, and stands beside me. She looks like a ridiculous schoolgirl, all giddy as if she had met her favourite aunts, and I catch myself falling in love with her all over again as a dead soul. Demyan soon interrupts my thoughts with that sinuous high-pitched voice, and asks, “I see you’re unusually quite today Dirtyhands. What’s the matter?” “I’m sorry, it’s just I’m wrapping my head around the concept of not existing physically anymore. Also I’ve heard you carry your belongings with you to the afterlife, so where’s all my gold?” I reply. Yeryin chuckles, her slit eyes crinkling while Marya looks at me in disbelief. Her voice, booming like a mountain echo, repeats what she, and countless others back in the mortal world, including my wife, thought each day, “Have you no honour Kaz Brekker?” I just shrug and adjust my hat.

“Anyways, ah, back to the topic at hand.” says Demyan, as he walks towards a tree. No wait, the tree. It could easily be as tall as a mountain. Five springs gush forth from its roots, and a heart is suspended from thorns right in front of a tear in it. The heart with the thorns I remember from the most epic heist of my career, involving legends and the Ravkan monarchy. The tree I do not. Inej asks, “Mind me, O great Saint of the Dead, but could you please acquaint us with our surroundings?” Wow. That’s a lot of vocabulary from a woman whose last sentence, in my memories, is complaining how the medicine she gave me smelled like rat fart. “Oh yup that’s Djel. Or rather his ash tree. Quite popular with my countryfolk.” he says cheerfully. “And we’re here in a mountain in the Sikurzoi, in a different plane of existence. For you, are dead.” he continues, with that ridiculous smile of his. Marya then steps forward, her voice slightly less enthusiastic, giving me the feel that this is all probably quite rehearsed for a while now. “You are a long way from home my loves. Kaz Brekker, you died a natural death. Inej Ghafa, you also died a natural death. Both of you were a hundred and thirteen years old, with Inej dying within a year of your death. The form you have now, is the form you chose to be remembered as.” she says. Yeryin huffs past us, her robes billowing, and hands the buttons over to Demyan, raising up her hand to his face and showing a symbol that quite contradicts with the Saint of Hospitality. “I should have expected such from you, you merchant scum.” she says. She then turns to directly address us and says, “Enough introductions though. The real reason you’ve been brought here is for another reason entirely. You see, the souls of the dead…”

I roll my eyes as the Sankta prepares for another lecture about how our “feeble human brains can’t comprehend the world.” I regret having married Inej in this moment in the afterlife though. Dirtyhands would’ve conned them by now and found a way back to the mortal realm. Kaz Brekker on the other hand, sits on the grass like a five-year old listening a story. Inej sits beside me, her coat now lying beside her in a heap and her hair fluttering open. How I wish I could’ve seen her in the open sea like that.

“…are usually brought to the other sides of the tree.” Yeryin says, waving her hands in an elegant motion to summon up a throne made out of the river pebbles and rocks, confirming that the trio were all, in fact, Fabrikators. “There, they are all assessed in context with their deeds on earth. Everything that they’ve gone through, and everything they’ve done is all taken into account by the Saint of The Book.” She then points to a woman, invisible until this point, sitting near the tree. She bends over a desk, poring over a giant ledger and surrounded by thick books. Her thick blonde hair covered her face, her glasses perched on her wide nose, and her fair, plump skin flushed. “The three of us then decide their fate in the afterlife. Those, who we decide are ‘good’, enjoy the fruits of paradise for a while and then return to the making at the heart of this world. Those, who we deem ‘bad’, are impaled on the thorn wood until they are purged of their sins. They then bathe in one of Djel’s springs, and return back to merzost.”

“Yeah but why are you telling us all of this? We get it, we’re dead, so which way are we going?” I ask the Saints. Inej elbows me once again, scolding me with her eyes. I shrug, and stand up with my cane. “Unless you have something else to tell us, I would like to take your leave. Saints.” I start to walk, when I find myself tripping over. I right myself with my cane just in time, and see that my hands and feet are bound by vines, Demyan’s hands raised up. These saints want a taste of Dirtyhands? Fine. I will show them Dirtyhands.

I see Kaz’s demeanour change. He slips into the familiar garb of Dirtyhands, his eyes cold as flint, lips slightly pursed, standing like the King of the Barrel. I get into a fighting stance, my heavy coat no longer obstructing me. I feel the presence of my remaining knives, regretting handing over the rest. I respect my Saints, but nobody, and I repeat nobody, touches my husband and escapes alive.

Marya stands immovable, her eyes gazing at something in the distance. Yeryin clasps her hands, and states, “You came here at our wish Kaz Brekker. You leave with our wish as well. No need to reach for your knives Wraith they won’t serve you here.” I feel a tug inside me, as if someone is yanking on my leash. Before I know, I am pulled back, my breath knocked out of me, and I crash into a wooden chair. Kaz suffers a similar fate beside me, and I can see his anger barely in check. “Why are you doing this to us?” I ask Marya. She glances at me, her eyes tearful, and replies, “Because we’re tired Inej Ghafa. Because you’re now, the new gods of death.”

Great. We’re the subject of a cruel joke by the Saints and are being tortured for our sins. “We don’t want anything to do with you or your jobs. Just release us and march us over to the thorn wood, I’m ready to answer for my crimes.” “Oh you silly girl, we won’t kill our scapegoats, will we? Isn’t that right my fellow sisters?” Demyan says in his ridiculously cheerful manner. That smile takes me back to the West Stave, Heleen bartering over me with the slavers, her sinuous smile each time I resisted her. I eventually did track my slavers, although only Kaz knows of their fate, for he was the one who insisted on having them. Demyan then comes over to us, and the Saint of Death’s face becomes morose. He kneels in front of us, as if pleading with us, and says, “You see, we’re linked directly with humans and grisha. Death. Hospitality. Pathfinder. Our roles were fundamental to the balance of the world, to the smooth passage of souls and justice in the afterlife. However, seeing the Starless One return back to merzost, seeing Juris merge with the Dragonqueen, has made us realize that we thought impossible, was actually just – improbable. You would certainly know about that, wouldn’t you Dirtyhands?” Demyan glances at Kaz, his eyes moist, while Kaz looks at him unflinchingly. Weren’t the Saints destined to perform their duties? Then why are they looking for scapegoats? Demyan comes back to me, his tone rushed as he blurted out his plan. “We long to be free Inej Ghafa. We too long to return back from where we came. We too long to feel.” Yeryin and Marya then float over to us. “A Saint that dispenses justice, must have suffered injustice to be accurate in his judgements. He should be immovable, yet sensitive to the souls he receives. Kaz Brekker, you have shown us the resilience and fury of a Saint.” Yeryin says. Marya then glances at me, and begins, “Jaan, you’re one of my own people, and so I hold a special place for you. The Saint that is the Reaper, who brings over the souls of the dead, must kill without remorse. Must feel for each soul with all of her heart. She must be indiscriminate in her search.” “And you Inej Ghafa have shown us that heart.” Demyan finishes, clasping my hand. “The part is yours, should you keep it. However, remember, you must take it up with free will, for handling the deceased is a far more tedious and draining task than it sounds.”

I look back at Kaz. His eyes are focussed on the ground, his brain coming up with another wild scheme. I look at the Saints with disbelief. All this time, as I, as millions, prayed to them, honouring their martyrdoms with festivals and prayers, the Saints just longed to be human. Kaz finally speaks after what feels like an eternity. “I have a question. Are the Saints willing to answer that?” “But of course. That is the least we can do for you.” says Yeryin.

“You might’ve come across two souls in your eternal career. Jordie, and Pekka Rollins. What fate awaited them?” I ask hesitantly. I am both excited and afraid of the answer the saints hold for me. Marya looks at the Saint of the Book. She rises, and comes towards us, a small register in her hands. She hands it to Marya, and returns back, giving me a not-so subtle side look. Marya searches for the names I asked, clears her throat, and begins. “Pekka Rollins, the leader of the Dimes, a gang in the streets of Ketterdam, was impaled on the thorn wood. He was purged of all his sins, and then chose to return back to merzost. As for Jordie, your brother, he did not choose to stay for long.” I look back at Marya. “His soul… was tormented. Even though he was healed with the waters of Djel, even though we helped his soul discover his unknown gift as a Grisha Tidemaker, he kept searching this garden for you. In the end, he chose to take a single bite of Djel’s fruit, and returned back to merzost, finally at peace.”

Jordie’s fate stuns me into silence. Pekka Rollins snatched our life on Earth, but even in the gardens of paradise my brother kept searching for me. My vision blurs, my brother’s destiny opening a well of sadness in me, his peaceful return to merzost the only respite offered to him. This was the place where Jordie’s soul searched for me. Where he waited and waited for me, until he dissolved back into the heart of the world. And this is where I would choose to stay for eternity, the only place that holds my brother’s peace. I look at Marya, and nod.

Beside me, Inej grasps my hand, and smiles. She then looks down at Demyan, and says, “We will take up the mantel of your duties, O Revered Saints.” I roll my eyes. It’s as if Sturmhond’s vocabulary worms it’s way into Inej’s brain each time she talks to her saints.

The saints all look at each other, then smile and open their arms. “Our powers, are then yours, Wraith and Dirtyhands.” Golden rays, the colour of sundried wheat and barley emit from Yeryin. Ink black waves surge from Demyan while a shower of dirt erupts from Marya. The three slowly disappear, probably to a much better place. The knives Inej gave to them clatter on the ground.

Inej picks up her coat, dusts it off, and shrugs it on. She picks up her knives, touching them to her forehead, and wipes them on her sleeve. “So what do we now?” she asks me. “Well we’re here for eternity, alone, at least till you go off to bring our souls. Let’s have some fun.” I say and suggestively smirk. The Saint of the Book widens her eyes in horror as she looks at us. “Oh keep it in your pants, you perv.” I say, as I give a big shout and run towards the gentle slope along the riverbank, Inej’s soft padded boots following me, as we both tumble into each other and hurtle to the earth.

#soc #six of crows #kaz #inej #kaz brekker #inej ghafa #dirtyhands #the wraith #wraith #leigh bardugo #kanej fic #story time #vasu #sankt demyan of the rime #sankta yeryin of the mill #sankta marya of the rock #grishaverse

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let-the-dream-begin · 4 years

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In My Daughter’s Eyes Chapter 10: If Only My Dreams

Chapter 9

Read on AO3

December 22

Claire, Gillian, and Faith were on their way to the stables. Gillian had insisted on coming, wanting to “see Faith in action,” as she put it. She’d been spending quite a lot of time with her over the past week. Mrs. Lickett would come in the morning to give Faith her lessons and educational playtime, but then she’d leave around noon, so crafts, movies, and the like were all up to Gillian. Claire had left Faith in Gillian’s care all the time back in England, so she was quite confident they’d be just fine, and things had been going swimmingly all week. Faith was quite enjoying her time with her Auntie, and Claire dreaded the day she had to leave, and the meltdown that would probably follow.

But that was a problem for another day.

When they arrived at the stable, Faith insisted on holding both of their hands in the parking lot, giving Gillian the honor of holding Horsie.

“Don’t you let that thing out of your sight,” Claire warned. “If anything happens to it there’ll be hell to pay. And I don’t mean from me.” She eyed Faith, and Gillian nodded in understanding.

“He’s been left before, has he?”

“Indeed. Never making that mistake again.”

They shared a laugh, which intensified as Faith gave a strong yank on both of their hands to make them get inside faster.

“Eager, isn’t she?” Gillian said, smirking.

“She loves it here, you have no idea,” Claire said, her chest warming. “Just wait until you see her with the horse. It’ll make you cry.”

When they got inside, Faith was bouncing as usual, humming loudly.

“Really, I dinna think I’ve ever seen her this excited fer anything that isna Disney,” Gillian said.

“That’s exactly what I said,” Claire laughed.

“Beauchamp gals!” Toni called as they approached the desk. “And who’s this?”

“This is Faith’s godmother, my best friend from back home. Gillian Edgars.”

“Hi, I’m Toni. It’s great to meet you.” She gave Gillian her hand, then a firm shake. She was wearing an obscenely ugly Christmas sweater and a Santa hat. Erica was donning a Santa hat as well, but if she was wearing a sweater, it wasn’t visible under her coat.

“This is Erica,” Claire said. “One of the volunteers that helps Jamie with Faith.”

“Jamie’s the — ”

“Her main therapist, yes,” Claire interjected before Gillian could say anything bawdy. “Shall we?”

Erica nodded and led them outside, Faith holding dutifully onto both hands again.

“That one likes the lasses,” Gillian whispered to Claire once they were outside.

Claire gave her a confused look. “Erica?” she stammered, in shock that Gillian was speculating about a fifteen year old girl.

“No, ye numpty! Toni!”

“How on Earth can you tell?” Claire said.

“I’ve always had an eye fer those things, ye ken.” She winked. “Does this place only employ hot people?”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ…” Claire rolled her eyes and swatted her arm.

When they arrived at the stable, Faith’s excitement went through the roof, as always, and Gillian started laughing.

“She’s just the cutest damn thing I’ve ever seen,” she chuckled as Erica opened the doors.

Waiting inside with Pippi was the six foot Scot, wearing an equally ridiculous Christmas sweater as Toni’s, also donning a Santa hat.

“Ah, there she is! The wee princess!” Jamie exclaimed. Faith giggled at being addressed as such, and she tugged ever harder on their hands.

“And who’s this, then?” Jamie looked to Gillian.

“This is my best friend from across the Atlantic, Gillian Edgars.”

“A fellow Scot,” Gillian said, shaking his hand.

“Ah! That’s braw!” Jamie beamed, then turned to Claire. “This is the godmother then?”

“Yes, this is Auntie Gi.”

“It’s very fine to finally meet ye, lass. Jamie Fraser.” He finally released her hand. “Claire goes on and on about ye.”

“Didna realize ye talked so much,” Gillian said, throwing Claire side-eye. “About me,” she added quickly.

Had Jamie not been standing right there, Claire would have swatted at her arm again.

“Aye. Well, Faith, d’ye want to show yer Auntie yer horse?” He crouched down to her, and she nodded, letting go of their hands. Faith’s muscle memory took over, and she tended to the creature just the way she’d been taught. “This is Pippi,” Jamie said. “Princess Faith’s noble steed.”

“Princess Faith, he says,” Gillian whispered dreamily, and Claire inconspicuously pinched her thigh.

“Are ye excited to show Auntie Gi how ye ride, lass?” Jamie said, and Faith nodded enthusiastically. “Right then, off we go.”

Jamie hung back with Claire and Gillian while Erica led Faith and Pippi. He and Gillian conversed rapidly in Gaelic, leaving Claire feeling rather stupid as she looked in awe between the two of them.

When they arrived at the riding hall, Gillian and Claire leaned against the fence, Gillian amazed how Faith handled the helmet.

“Oh, that was quite a struggle,” Claire said. “Got bit for that one, remember?”

“Right, ye called me that day,” Gillian said, nodding. “She’s so gentle wi’ the horse. Back there in the stable, ye were right, I almost cried like a bairn.”

“Wait until she gets on,” Claire said warmly. “It’s just incredible.”

“And he…is so good wi’ her,” Gillian said in disbelief. “Could God have created a more perfect specimen?”

That earned her another swat on the arm.

“Hi, Claire,” Mrs. Beardsley’s voice had Claire turning around.

“Oh, hello,” Claire said. “Gi, this is Fanny Beardsley.”

They reached over Claire to shake hands.

“This is your wife?” Fanny said, smiling sweetly.

This immediately had them both sputtering, struggling to not disturb the therapy by howling with laughter.

“She wishes!” Gillian exclaimed, earning yet another swat.

“No, no,” Claire said, wiping tears of laughter away. “This is Faith’s godmother. She’s just visiting for Christmas. We’ve been best friends since college.”

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” Fanny’s face was bright red.

“No, it’s alright, really,” Claire said, though she was still wheezing.

“It actually happens a lot,” Gillian said. “Lots of rumors back in college. Sadly, this one is straight as a pin.” Gillian patted her shoulder, and Claire rolled her eyes.

They passed the rest of the time watching Faith, Gillian whispering in awe and squealing in delight, clapping along with Claire and Erica when Faith earned celebration.

“She’s braw, Claire,” Gillian said, teary-eyed as Faith dismounted. “I’m really proud of her.”

They embraced each other around the shoulders, Claire resting her head on Gillian.

“Watch this,” Claire whispered. “She doesn’t do high-fives like a lot of the other kids, so Jamie does this with her instead.”

They watched the weekly ritual of Jamie giving his enthusiastic thumbs-up, his lopsided grin warming the chill in the air. Faith returned the thumbs up, bouncing and grinning.

“That is the cutest feckin’ thing.” Gillian shook her head in awe, eyes watering again.

They returned to the welcome center, three of them hand in hand, and Jamie leading the way walking backwards. Toni was ready with three candy canes to hand them when they arrived.

“Merry Christmas Beauchamps, and Auntie Gi.” Toni winked.

“Ah, before ye go,” Jamie said, reaching around the counter and producing a little gift bag. “Merry Christmas, Sassenach.” He handed Claire the bag, his cheeks flushing red. “From the stables,” he added quickly.

Claire’s brow furrowed, but she couldn’t help the tiny smile that graced her face. “Thank you. Merry Christmas, Jamie.”

She peered up at him through her lashes, and her smile disappeared at the sight of the look he was giving her. It was that same look that she’d caught him sporting time and time again, yet she still hadn’t gotten used to it.

What is it?

And why does it take my breath away…?

“Ready to go?” Gillian snapped Claire out of her reverie.

“Yes, yes let’s go,” Claire stammered, smiling perhaps a bit too brightly. “Merry Christmas Toni, Erica.”

“Merry Christmas!” they called in unison.

“Say bye-bye, Faith! Say Merry Christmas!” Faith smiled and waved, then pulled on her hand.

“Onto McDonald’s,” Claire said to Gillian.

“Aye, another delicacy,” she teased.

As they sat in the drive-thru, Gillian’s phone went off, and a sly grin spread across her face.

“What?” Claire asked.

“She texted me already,” Gillian said.

“Who did?”

Gillian turned around the phone to show Claire the screen:

Hi there! It’s Toni!

Claire’s jaw dropped, scandalized. “When did you give her your number?”

“When ye were busy making heart eyes at the Scot,” Gillian smirked and then quickly composed a response.

“I was not making heart eyes,” Claire said vehemently, inching the car forward and rolling down the window.

“Keep telling yerself that.”

——

McDonald’s eaten and milkshakes empty, the three of them were sitting under a blanket again watching Lilo and Stitch. They all brushed their teeth together, and Faith insisted on being tucked in by Gillian. Once that was all settled, Claire and Gillian sat on the couch again together, knowing they could stay up a bit later since Claire didn’t work tomorrow.

“Well? Ye havena opened it yet.” Gillian nudged her head toward the coffee table, where the little bag that Jamie had given Claire was still sitting.

“Oh. I’d forgotten about it,” Claire said, which was a blatant lie. She hadn’t stopped thinking about it since the moment he held it out to her. Truth be told, she was scared to open it. She hesitantly took it in her hands and opened the bag, removing layers of tissue paper.

She couldn’t help the stupid grin that spread wide across her entire face as she pulled out the contents. A bag of Lindt truffles, and a large back of sour patch kids. There was a festive post-it-note stuck to the truffles that said:

To make up for the candy corn. Merry Christmas, Sassenach.

Claire felt her entire face flush red, and her pulse began to race.

“Candy corn? What does that mean?” Gillian prodded.

“He, uh…he made me try candy corn, Halloween week,” Claire stammered. “I hated it, and he asked what kind of candy I do like.”

“Oh my God.” Gillian shoved her shoulder roughly. “Oh my God, Claire! Holy shite!”

“What…? What? Stop it!” Claire shoved her back and put the candy on the coffee table. “It’s just a joke. Relax.”

Gillian gaped at her in disbelief, then shook her head. “I was joking — well, half-joking — when I texted ye back in October, but God!”

“What?”

“How’s the sex?”

Claire’s eyes widened, and she leaned back in shock. “What sex?”

“With Fraser!”

“Jesus bloody Christ! There is no sex!” Claire’s face was hot as hell again, her mouth dry. “There’s no anything! He’s Faith’s therapist!”

“He’s givin’ ye sweets and gifts and ye’re no’ even putting out?” Gillian leaned back into the couch, crossing her arms. “Christ, he must really like you.”

“For fuck’s sake…” Claire scoffed, rolling her eyes. “You’re mad.”

Claire threw the bag on the coffee table, but it landed a little faster than an empty bag should have.

“Is there something still in there?” Gillian said, snatching it at once and plunging her hand inside.

“Gi, stop, stop it! Let me have it!”

Gillian pulled out a hair bow, and her eyes narrowed. “What the Devil?”

“Let me see.” Claire took it from her, and her jaw went slack with realization.

“What?”

“It’s tartan,” Claire said. “The tartan from the clan in Brave.”

“What would ye want wi’ that?” Gillian scoffed.

“It’s not for me…” Claire said, her voice breathy. “It’s for Faith.”

Realization hit Gillian like a bolt of lightning. “Halloween. He wore tartan, and she dressed up from…”

“From Brave,” Claire finished with her.

“Bloody hell…” Gillian said. “He really, really likes ye.”

Claire swallowed thickly against the dryness in her throat, vainly attempting to wet her lips. Her head was spinning, and she could hardly breathe.

“Claire?”

“Well,” Claire said, her voice sounding more strained than she would have liked it to. “As much as I love the Disney movies, how about you and I watch a big-girl movie, hm?” Claire smiled, getting off the couch and retrieving a bottle of wine from the kitchen. “With some big-girl juice?”

Gillian giggled, apparently deciding to not push the subject any further. “Alright. But I’m picking the movie.”

——

Their first Christmas in their new home was nothing short of perfect. Claire had only requested two specific days off for the entire year: Christmas Day, and Faith’s birthday.

Gillian’s present to Claire had already been opened the night before, after Claire had showered from her long shift at the hospital. It was a matching set of Christmas pajamas, with a card that said:

Take this as a promise that we’ll always be together for the holiday.

They cried on each other for a few minutes before donning the pajamas, taking several pictures together in Claire’s full length mirror in her bedroom.

They slept in them and kept them on for presents, just as festive as Faith in her Disney Christmas nightgown. Claire’s present to Gillian was a Long Island t-shirt. Gillian had made a hobby of collecting stupid tourist t-shirts wherever she visited, and Claire had spent plenty of time finding the most touristy Long Island shirt she could.

Faith was beyond thrilled with every single Christmas present she received: her first dollhouse (from Santa), little sets of furniture and little dolls for the dollhouse (from Mummy), and a Merida Barbie doll from Auntie Gi. Claire also decided to give Faith the tartan bow on Christmas morning, handing it to her, saying:

“Look, lovie, another Merida present. This one is from Mister Jamie.”

Never one to be patient, Faith demanded that Claire put the bow in her hair at once, as Auntie Gi was struggling to free the dollhouse from its packaging.

Once Faith was satisfied that every present had been opened and arranged to her heart’s content, they moved into the kitchen to devour the edible arrangement of fruit that Gillian had insisted on getting for Christmas breakfast. Back in the day, Frank made festive pancakes for Christmas morning, and Gillian was determined to start traditions of their own.

Fruit eaten, it was time to start on the Christmas cookies. Claire had purchased several Christmas themed cookie-cutters a few weeks ago, so the three of them made a wide assortment of characters across a wide spectrum of colors. Claire had also bought food dye to use in vanilla icing, so Faith was free to let her creativity run wild, as if she were making edible crafts. All the while, Christmas music played from Claire’s phone, and Faith was humming along and bouncing all day.

Gillian was a slightly better cook than Claire was, so they tag teamed getting the small ham cooked all the way through, along with the green bean casserole (which Faith would not touch with a ten foot pole; she was fine with just ham and applesauce, thank you very much).

Mrs. Lickett had the rest of the holiday week off until the day after New Year’s, and Faith was more than happy to spend the extra time with Gillian. Mary Hawkins had sent Claire a Facebook invitation for a New Year’s party a few weeks ago, and she’d only recently responded that she’d be going. She was uncertain of taking Faith somewhere so crowded, but Mary made it very clear in the description of the event that it would be sensory-friendly. Joe had asked her one day at work if she had any plans for the New Year, surely meaning to invite her over if she didn’t, and Claire felt a strange sense of teenage-like pride in informing him that she did.

Claire’s shift ended at eight, which was exactly when Mary’s party started, so they were only about thirty minutes late. Mary was delighted to have Gillian as well. Despite Mary’s emphasis on a sensory-friendly party, Claire brought Faith’s noise cancelling headphones just in case. Despite the lack of noisemakers, music, or loud television, the constant hum of several voices was making Faith a bit distraught, so Claire put the headphones on her, and after a few minutes of getting used to her silence, she was content again.

Claire was pleased to see a lot of moms she recognized, including Fanny, Kezzie and Josiah running about with Thomas. She was introduced to Mary’s husband, Alex, almost as young as she was. Apparently, Thomas had been a happy accident when they were both still teenagers, and they got married right then. They were quite a sweet couple.

When midnight came, hats and silent paper party-blowers were passed around. The tellie was kept low, and the countdown was done in hushed whispers. The only sound to be heard as the ball dropped was the crinkling of the party-blowers, a few scattered “Yay!”s, and jovial “Happy New Year!”s all around. Faith was quite content watching the paper curl in and out as she blew, giggling every time.

It wasn’t long after that when Faith started falling asleep, along with most of the other kids, all except Thomas. He was still bouncing off the walls somehow. Mary had given Claire a heartfelt thank you for coming, as did Alex. Claire felt as giddy and fulfilled as she had when they’d left the Abernathy home after Thanksgiving.

“That’s a great bunch,” Gillian said as they buckled themselves in.

“Yes…it really is.”

——

The following day while Claire was at work, Gillian had started to pack, being that her flight was on January second, but she didn’t get very far. Evidently, Faith immediately registered that packing meant that Auntie Gi would be leaving soon, and she was quite irritable and weepy for most of the day. She was inconsolable for the most part, only content when she was hanging onto Gillian or sitting in front of the tellie for a few moments of respite with a movie. She hardly touched her food that night, and when Claire had tried to get her to eat, she’d roughly shoved her plate across the table. Claire had permitted Gillian to be the one to give her a stern talking to; eventually she ate enough to satisfy Claire, and Gillian sat with her until she fell asleep.

Gillian returned to the living room to find Claire trying to rearrange her suitcase so it would actually close. She spent a few minutes trying to help, before they both ended up sitting on it in order to zipper it shut.

Gillian sighed. "Puir wee thing thinks she's miserable. I dinna want to leave either."

Claire draped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her in until their heads were resting together, not wanting to speak how she felt, lest she burst into tears.

“Can I ask ye something, Claire? And can ye promise me ye’ll be honest?”

“Of course,” Claire said, releasing her so they could look at each other. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing wrong, or maybe there is. I don’t know.” She sighed. “Ye ken I’ve been seeing Toni, aye?”

Claire shook her head jerkily, blinking in shock. “Um, no, I don’t ken! When have you been doing that?”

“After you and Faith are asleep.” She shrugged, as if it were the most casual thing in the world. “I got an Uber and met her somewhere the first time, now she just picks me up and takes me right to her place. She’s actually quite — ”

“Please, spare me,” Claire interjected quickly. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for you, of course, but I have to see her interact with my child once a week for the rest of forever.”

“Alright, alright.” Gillian put her hands up in surrender, giggling. “That wasna the point anyway. We dinna just have sex, we talk as well.”

“Well, I should hope,” Claire said wryly. “Be rather awkward otherwise.”

“Och, enough, ye wee prude.” Gillian shoved her arm. “What I’m trying to get at is that you have come up in conversation.”

“Me? In what context?”

“In ‘the Scot has the hots’ context.”

“Oh, Christ, Gi, not this again…”

“I’m serious, Claire,” Gillian said, her eyes widening, no joking in her tone at all. “I brought it up as a joke, ye know me. But then she just rattled off all these things…I’m no’ the only one who sees it. That’s all.”

“Sees what?”

“Are ye daft, woman?” Gillian blinked in disbelief, and then sighed exasperatedly.

“You haven’t asked me a question yet, you know,” Claire said defensively, crossing her arms. “That’s how you opened this conversation.”

“Alright. Fine. Why did ye no’ tell me he was at yer bloody apartment?” Gillian said flatly.

Claire stammered for a moment. “It didn’t seem at all important! Toni told you about that as well?”

“Aye, she did. Didna mean anything by it, just came up in conversation.”

“Right, in conversation about me.”

“Dinna get all fiery on me, Claire. It wasna all about you. She talked as much about Jamie.”

Claire was about to fire back again, but she quickly realized that Gillian was right; she was getting overly defensive and angry, something Gillian was never shy about calling her out on.

“Really. Why didn’t ye tell me?” Gillian asked again, softly.

“It wasn’t conscious…it just didn’t come up.” Claire started picking at a cuticle, focusing her vision there instead of on Gillian.

“Because ye didna want it to come up. Right?”

“It seemed…private. I don’t know. It wasn’t…like you think. Or like she thinks.” Claire hissed in pain at what she was doing to her finger, and Gillian swatted at her hand to make her stop.

“Toni says he makes all these exceptions fer Faith, bendin’ over backwards to make her happy.”

Claire’s head started spinning. “He’s just…being kind.”

“Aye, Claire,” Gillian chuckled. “Because he likes you. A lot more than I even thought.”

“That’s…that’s ridiculous.” Claire shook her head. “My child is his client.”

“Toni says it’s no’ the same as a regular therapist — ”

“Gillian, please…” Claire interrupted, a bit more forcefully than she meant to. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do. Really, I do. You’re my best friend, I get it. And I love you for it. But this…” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her thighs. “I don’t need this. I don’t need you to play matchmaker like we did in college.”

“Claire…”

“It’s alright, Gi. I’m not angry, I promise. I just…” She sighed. “I don’t need…I don’t need to be rescued anymore. Do you know what I mean? These past few months, just me and Faith…god, I’ve never felt so good about myself. I mean, hell, I’ve had doubt upon doubt creep into my mind, and not every day is good. But she is thriving here, and so am I. I don’t have to explain myself or my parenting to anyone anymore. And…fuck, Gi, I love it. I finally feel like…like I’m doing right by her.” She was surprised to feel the tears in her eyes, and she swallowed to keep them at bay. “For four years of her life, I was this…shell of myself. And god damn it, I pulled myself out of that. I know I had your help, always, and now I have Mrs. Lickett, and the Abernathy’s, and the whole community at the stables…but I did this. For her…and now I realize it was for me, too.”

Gillian put a hand on Claire’s knee. “I understand, hen.”

Claire nodded. “Jamie is incredibly kind, and thoughtful, and he’s done a lot for us. But it’s not what you think, and I don’t need…what you think it is. Faith doesn’t need that. She needs me. I need me. Am I…making any sense?”

“Ye are. Ye dinna have to explain yerself to me, Claire. I’m sorry,” Gillian said sheepishly. “Ye know me. Canna keep my neb out of anyone’s business. Least of all yers.”

Claire offered a tiny smile, then laid her head onto her shoulder. “Will you be seeing your American lover for one final tryst before you depart?”

Gillian snorted. “Nae, we’ve already said our goodbyes. Keeping it casual, ye ken. She’s just out of a relationship and all that.”

“Right. Well I’m glad you had that, however brief. Been a while since you’ve been with a woman, hasn’t it?”

“Aye, ye’re right! I was feeling starved for female affection after years of male disappointment!”

Claire guffawed loudly, and they both dissolved into a fit of giggles that carried into the wee hours of the morning.

#outlander #outlander au #outlander fanfic #outlander fanfiction #jamie fraser #claire fraser #claire beauchamp #faith fraser #geillis duncan #gillian edgars

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prydon · 4 years

Note

oh i adore ur writing, do u take prompts by any chance? if u do, would u ever consider writing a fic inspired by the recent drunk juno and smitten peter art? thank u, have a nice day 💞

thank you for liking my writing!!! :D tbh i haven’t considered myself enough of a fic writer to take prompts in years, but i loved that art and i love writing jupeter so much that i just had to give this a go.

so here you go! inspired by this WONDERFUL art by @honeyjarr. you can read it on ao3 here or down below!

set post-man in glass but pre jupeter being in an established relationship. CWs for alcohol consumption, brief reference to sarah steel being sarah steel, minor injuries, and non-explicit talking/joking about sex.

----

Nureyev had never seen Juno Steel drunk before.

For all his insistence that he was ‘getting drunker by the second’ back in his apartment on that fated night when Nureyev had gifted him a name and kiss, Nureyev knew he had been far from truly drunk, then. Juno was a broad man, and one with a long history of drinking. Unlike Nureyev, he held his liquor well.

Now, on board the Carte Blanche, he had been trying to cut down on his alcohol consumption. It was part of his recovery, part of leaving behind the mess of poor coping mechanisms and bad decisions that used to make up Detective Juno Steel.

So when Buddy had pulled out the bottle, it was only with assurance from Jet and Juno that they were both okay with it- and when Juno had asked her to pour him a glass, he did so with the promise that he wasn’t using the alcohol to deal with any bad feelings that ought to be handled another way.

“Rita and I used to get drunk sometimes and watch the lowest-rated streams we could find,” he said. “It was…fun.”

Rita nodded enthusiastically. “Mistah Steel would always start yelling and throwing popcorn at the screen!”

“Very well, then,” Buddy said. “I trust your judgement, Juno.”

Nureyev kept one eye on Juno as he sipped his own drink, curious. What kind of a drunk was Juno? Sobbing? Angry? …Handsy?

He folded his hope for the latter away.

Nureyev seldom ever drank, and never on the job. It was too risky. Drinking meant losing your inhibitions, losing control over your emotions, and if there was anything that Nureyev desperately didn’t want to lose, it was that. His persona was perfectly crafted. He couldn’t risk letting a bottle of wine or liquor crumble it.

He was already tipsy after his first glass, which was embarrassing. He intended to stop there- to perhaps ask for a refill, but only pretend to sip it before surreptitiously dumping it. As soon as the second one was poured, however, he found himself actually drinking it.

Something about these people made him feel safe enough to allow some loss of inhibition. That realization terrified him, but he kept drinking nonetheless.

Juno had almost finished his third glass, and only now seemed to be feeling the effects of it. He was talking more loudly than he had been before, and his eyes were slightly unfocused. He shot Nureyev a glance and the thief took another sip, mostly just to hide the blush that was creeping up his face courtesy of both the alcohol and the sight of Juno, who was looking handsomely disheveled with his hair mussed and his sweater slipped down around his shoulders.

After Jet excused himself to bed early, they somehow ended up in a game of Never Have I Ever, which Nureyev had never heard of but Juno insisted was a staple among schoolkids in Oldtown.

“All right!” Rita said. “Never have I ever…done it in a public place.”

Nureyev raised an eyebrow. “If by ‘it’, you mean sexual intercourse…” He took a drink, and then nearly spat it back out when he saw Juno drink, too.

“What?” Juno said innocently. “You drank.”

“You’re both gross,” Vespa growled at them.

“Really? In all your life, you’ve never once given in to the heat of the moment?” Nureyev asked, trying to distract himself from his own brain, which was currently insistent on conjuring up artist’s interpretations of Juno on a park bench, or in a theater, or-

“It’s private! You do it inside!”

“Sometimes you just don’t have many options!” Juno protested.

“Ugh, whatever. Here, I’ll go next…”

Nureyev was very, very bad at the game, as it turned out. What could he say: he was an adventurous man, and one who’d lived a rich life. He wasn’t going to apologize for that. It didn’t hurt that Juno was drinking almost as often as he was, either. He carefully filed away all of the lady’s responses to the various statements, mentally marking some as being in desperate need of further follow up.

Juno Steel had never swum in the ocean.

Juno Steel had set a cop car on fire.

Juno Steel had participated in a foursome.

It was all very important information. Nureyev only hoped he’d actually remember it tomorrow. That was seeming less and less likely, the tipsier he got. He tried to take small sips throughout the game, but by the time it had ended, he knew he was gone. He’d regret letting that happen once he was sober, of course, but right now he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“I think that’s enough for this evening,” Buddy said after a while, seeming to sense that both Nureyev and Juno were looking rather worse for the wear.

“One more!” Rita insisted. “Never have I ever…almost fallen out a window ‘cause I was chasing after a love letter.”

“Rita!” Juno exclaimed. “I told you that in confidence! Plus, that doesn’t count. It’s targeting! That’s…against the rules!”

“There ain’t no rules, Mistah Steel!”

“Ugh, fine,” Juno said, and drank.

Nureyev couldn’t help being curious, and even- ridiculously- jealous. Who had written Juno a love letter? Who had Juno cared so much about that even he, acrophobic as he was, had been willing to nearly jump out a window to save a note from them?

By all means, it could have happened decades ago. There was no reason to be envious. Nureyev had realized that he was prone to envy when it came to Juno Steel, however, and the alcohol was likely just heightening the emotion.

“Mistah Ransom’s got a funny look on his face,” Rita commented.

“Yeah, ‘cause he knows it was his letter,” Juno grumbled.

“Really!? Mistah Steel, you never told me that!”

“…Didn’t come up.”

Nureyev froze, feeling something warm spread through him. Ah. “You…kept my note? I didn’t realize.”

“Don’t have it anymore. It got lost somewhere along the way. It’s been…a hectic past few months,” Juno said, sounding genuinely upset by the loss. Then he frowned. “What, Ransom, did you really not realize Rita was talking about your note?”

“I…”

A wide smile spread over Juno’s face. “Oh, my god. Your expression a moment ago…were you jealous of yourself!?”

Nureyev felt himself turn beet red. “N- no.”

“You were!”

Juno burst out laughing. Unlike his usual laughs, which on the rare occasions that they surfaced were quiet and restrained, almost as though he didn’t believe he was deserving of laughter, this one was loud and unburdened. It was a full body laugh, and it lit Juno up so beautifully that Nureyev could almost forget that it was at was at his expense.

Nureyev could guess, then, what kind of drunk Juno was. He was the kind whose current predominate emotion, whatever it was, was exacerbated by the alcohol. When he was sad, he’d end up crying into his drinks. When he was angry, there would be yelling and picking fights.

Right now, Juno was happy.

Even just the flickering, uncertain smiles he had shot Nureyev during their mission to retrieve the map had been enough to nearly bowl the thief over, and now here he was. Smiling a smile big enough to cut the moon in half.

“You know, one time Benzaiten won an award for having the Galaxy’s Best Smile. Can you believe that?!”

Nureyev had never known Juno’s brother, of course, and all he knew of him now came from those little glimpses that Juno gave him when he felt safe enough to voice them. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Benzaiten had deserved the accolade, though, if he had indeed had the same smile as Juno.

Juno definitely had the best smile in the entire galaxy. In all the galaxies, surely. And it made Nureyev feel emotions of an enormity that he had never before experienced. He wanted to live in that smile. He wanted to make a home in it. He wanted to lean forward, grab Juno by the face, and kiss him in front of everyone. He wanted to feel that smile against his lips.

It took every ounce of self restraint he had not to do so, and he gripped his glass, begging the last sober vestiges of himself to keep him from acting on any ridiculous notions.

He didn’t kiss Juno, thankfully.

He did do something else, though.

Crack.

“Oh. Dear,” he said. “These things aren’t very sturdy, are they?”

Before he could even realize what was happening, his glass had shattered to pieces in his hand, and his nice clothes that had surely cost the person he’d stolen them from several thousand creds were drenched in alcohol and littered with shards of glass.

“Nur- Ransom!” Juno exclaimed, immediately concerned, and in the moment all that Nureyev could think was how sad he was that the smile had vanished from the lady’s face. “What the hell happened?!”

“I believe I broke the glass.”

“Christ! Do you have the grip strength of a goddamn metal vice?” Juno’s voice sounded shocked and more than a little bit impressed. Nureyev couldn’t help feeling rather pleased about the latter. Then, suddenly, the ex-detective was back to looking concerned. “Ransom, you’re bleeding.”

He looked down at his hand. “Ah.”

“We- we need to get this cleaned up. Get you cleaned up,” Juno said. He swayed slightly as he made his way to Nureyev’s side to worriedly inspect his hand. If his drunkenness had been boosting his happiness before, it was now boosting his anxiety and fear.

“I’m all right,” Nureyev insisted. “Just a cut. Barely even hurts.” He didn’t want Juno to worry. He just wanted to see that smile again.

Vespa let out a long groan. “Ugggggggh. You two are the worst. I’ll go grab the nearest first aid kit. Ransom, Steel can get you your bandaid. I’m going to bed. You got this, Steel?”

Juno nodded. “I’ve patched myself up enough times to know how.”

“Great.”

She was back in a moment with the kit, handing it off to Juno before dragging Buddy off to bed.

“Good night, darlings,” Buddy said as she was pulled away. “Rita, I think you’d best leave them be, too.”

Rita frowned. “But what if they need my- Oooooooh. Okay.” She waved and winked comedically aggressively at Juno. “G’night, Mistah Steel and Mistah Ransom! Mistah Ransom, I hope you feel better soon!”

“Good night, Rita,” Nureyev said, feeling vaguely lightheaded. It wasn’t from the wound- that wasn’t nearly bad enough to warrant such a response. If he had to guess, it was from Juno being so close that he could feel his breath. From the soft, reverent way he was currently cleaning the cuts on Nureyev’s hands.

Juno looked up to watch Rita go. “What was that about?”

“No idea.”

Juno’s next words were softer and slightly slurred. “…Are you mad at me?”

Nureyev stared at him, completely lost. “What? Why would I be mad at you?”

“I was…I was laughing at you. Then you broke the glass. Did you break it because you were mad? Ma did that sometimes. I- I shouldn’t have laughed. Shouldn’t have done that. I’m so sorry-”

“Hush, Juno,” Nureyev said. “I’m not angry in the slightest. Really, it was rather funny. And I’m touched that you went that far just to rescue my note.”

“Then…why?”

“Why did I break the glass? I suppose I underestimated my own strength.”

“Why were you gripping it so hard, though?!”

What could he tell Juno? He studied his hand, not wanting to admit the truth. He couldn’t very well say, I found your smile so beautiful that if I hadn’t held onto something as hard as I could, I would have surely lunged forward and kissed you right there.

He looked up to find Juno staring at him, wide-eyed. “Really?”

“I…did not mean to say that out loud,” Nureyev said. “Apologies, Juno. I seem to be rather drunk.”

“You don’t say.” Juno snorted. A glimmer of a smile reappeared on his face, to Nureyev’s delight. “That’s really why, though? You wanted to kiss me?”

“Well, yes,” Nureyev said, flustered. “You have a very…nice smile.”

“Well, I’m not stopping you.”

Juno suddenly looked embarrassed, almost shy. Hopeful, too.

Nureyev had lost the ability to think coherent thoughts.

“Oh. Okay,” he stammered.

He gently took Juno’s face in his freshly bandaged hand as he’d imagined doing not much earlier, and pulled him into a deep kiss. The lady’s lips were as soft and warm as always. They still tasted like drink, but also something so purely Juno that Nureyev was certain he could have gotten drunk on that taste alone.

He shifted, moving closer. Juno mirrored his actions, shuffling across the carpet to reach him, and then-

“Ow!”

Juno swore and broke away, to Nureyev’s dismay. It took him a moment to figure out what was wrong: there was still broken glass on the carpet.

“Are you all right?” Nureyev asked.

“Mm. Just pricked me. We should really get this cleaned up.” He hesitated. “On second thought, picking up glass while drunk might not be a good idea. Let’s just…mark it off so no one steps on it and then go to bed. We can deal with it in the morning.”

They did just that. Nureyev hated that even though Juno had drunk much more than him, he was the one leaning on Juno for balance as they walked back to his room. He couldn’t stop thinking about that smile. He wondered what it would take to make Juno smile like that while sober, and decided that whatever it was, he was going to figure it out.

When they reached the door to Nureyev’s room, Juno paused.

“Make sure you drink some water before you go to sleep,” he said. “And don’t use your right hand more than you have to, so it can heal.”

“I know, I know.”

There was an awkward but companionable silence for a moment. Nureyev wanted more than anything to invite Juno into his room to stay the night, but he knew he shouldn’t. They weren’t there yet, and besides, that wasn’t a step that he wanted to take while under the influence.

“I can’t believe you really broke a glass because of me,” Juno said finally, smirking.

“Oh, shush. It’s your own fault. If you hadn’t…looked like that, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Well, I’m so sorry. In the future I’ll refrain from ‘looking like that’.”

“Please don’t,” Nureyev said immediately.

“…Okay. Then I won’t.”

Nureyev moved to open his door, then hesitated, chewing his lip. “Juno…there’s something I need to ask you.”

Juno immediately knit his brow, his shoulders tensing. “What is it?”

“About the time you had sex in a public place-”

The ex-detective groaned loudly and gave him a good-natured shove. “I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Could you at least tell me about the foursome, then?”

“No! God, I am never playing Never Have I Ever with you guys again. Good night, Nureyev.”

Nureyev grinned. “Good night, my dear.”

#asks #the penumbra podcast #jupeter #peter nureyev #juno steel #my writing #i'm working on several other writing projects rn #so if others send prompts i can't guarantee they'll get done #at least not as thoroughly/quickly as i got this one done lol #but you're welcome to send them and i'll at the very least save them for when i do have the time/inspo to write them!

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missorgana · 4 years

Text

a moment in time

pairing: karolina dean/nico minoru

fandom: marvel’s runaways

rating: general

word count: 2014

warning: swearing

summary: Nico accidently brings home the wrong suitcase. Annoying. The owner of said suitcase? Anything but annoying. (no powers meet-cute + luggage mix-up)

(a soft silly au right before femslash february comes to an end mwahhhhh! they’re superior girlfriends wbk. Cat / @inafaithforgotten beta read this as always AND as always u are an angel 💕✨ hope you enjoy!!)

read on ao3

“You talk to any of the others yet?”

Nico frowns at her friend, hoping the signal’s clear enough for the picture to show him, “No.” Of course, Alex laughs. Idiot.

“Come on, Nico,” he tells her, absentmindedly rummaging through his fridge, of all things, “You can’t just be alone in Sydney for six months.”

And of course, she rolls her eyes at his response, as always. Deep down, she knows he means well, but really, his social butterfly self gets on her nerves from time to time.

“Why not?” she huffs, but with a kind of smile that tells Alex she doesn’t care about his life philosophies, without fearing making him upset. Or him being scared she’s upset. Mostly the ladder.

A beep of his microwave oven sounds in her headphones, “Nevermind, dummy.”

Maybe she misses her best friend, but it’s not like she’ll admit it as long as she lives. Anyway, the hotel room’s better than she expected once she arrives, the cool air of the airport and crowds of students approaching her in each their own language became all too much, too fast.

Nico’s not exactly a people person, as Alex says.

But also, baggage claim is the absolute worst. Don’t try to argue with her, won’t change her mind.

There really is no way to avoid it, but seriously, absolutely no personal space. It’s like a warzone, almost, because her fellow passengers can’t fucking wait a minute or two, and be damn polite?

It’s whatever, Nico’s just glad to finally have arrived.

She may have a little airplane anxiety. It’s embarrassing, but Alex, like the wonderful best friend who cares too much, crafted her a self care kit (his words, not hers). Maybe the obligatory pre-takeoff text helped with her restless hands. Shut up.

Soon as Alex says his goodbye, door closed, she’s back on her background noise playlist, eager for a shower and some long-awaited sleep. At this point jet lag can kiss her ass.

A look in the mirror reveals the mess of eyeliner she made when she rubbed sleep out of her eye for whatever low budget action movie had played on the tv system (terrible selection, seriously), oh well, the little hot water she gets access to does wonders for her headache.

Another reason why she avoids traveling by flight at all costs.

It’s a comforting thought she’ll be here for a while, though. Alex made this sound like an all alone in the world thing, but Nico honestly doesn’t really mind.

With her parents, she’d been alone much of her childhood, anyway. Depressing, she knows.

She leaves the shower in a haze, hoodie and sweatpants right at her hand, and just catches Amy’s enthusiastic text full of heart emojis.

Ridiculous. But lovely.

Nico thinks that reply back is just about all she has energy left for, until the rumbling of her stomach clearly tells her otherwise. Fuck.

And, well, budget hotels infamous for exchange student parties rarely offer room service. It’s ten minutes of Nico panicking, almost going to the desperate point of having to leave the hotel room, find a vending machine, or some cafe nearby, which would require her to interact with people.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

It’s sort of embarrassing, or at least it would be, if anyone was here to see her. A small virtue.

But, hah, of course! The angel Amy truly is, Nico almost forgot the snacks her sister insisted on stuffing in her suitcase.

If she almost wants to cry of happiness, no, she doesn’t. She’s allowed to be a little overdramatic, okay?

Small emotional rollercoaster aside, she hurries for the luggage, surprisingly, struggling with finding the zipper. Not anything she takes time to think about much, given the circumstances, until she breaks it open and comes to a halt.

It does take a minute.

But this is definitely not Nico’s suitcase.

The exterior was familiar, but there’s absolutely zero doubt in her mind a mistake has been made when she’s met with a soft pink piece of fabric. With fucking lace.

Her stomach’s not turning with the thought of the outside world anymore, instead, she’s just weirded the hell out. Because she had never jotted herself down as easily distracted, but there’s a first time for everything, she supposes.

Nico simply shifts to a cross-legged position, staring at the pair of pastel colored scrunchies, white dress shirt, and brown tassel boots. She just wants to sleep, dammit.

But she can’t really ignore this kind of problem, really.

She’s got her carry-on, of course, but like, she wants her own things. All of them.

So, a careful investigation of the luggage is what she puts her mind to, trying not to mess up or pry too much in this stranger’s business. A postcard accompanied by a tiny silver cross pin causes her to snort.

Whoever this person is, by the looks of the suitcase’s content, is not exactly someone Nico would find herself hanging around with.

Whatever.

It takes way too long for her to find any sort of information on this stranger. Or, well, maybe just her sleep deprived mind missing the very obvious nametag on the back. Shut up.

The white laminated label tells her it belongs to a Karolina Dean.

Nico maybe stumbles over the address, the same state as herself, but who cares, it’s not like it’s any surprise. Her lucky stars also provided a phone number to the person, and she just can’t hurry enough.

What a mess.

...

Nico is stood in Sydney Airport at shit-o-clock in the morning, with a wrong suitcase and without sleep for fuck knows how many hours.

Needless to say, she can’t wait for this to be over already.

Funny enough, her strange companion got ahead of her, calling her at exactly the time she gathered the phone number. The voice was bright and a bit giggly, which would piss Nico off if she wasn’t so tired.

She’s still pissed, but mostly at herself.

So, of course, they agreed to meet back at the airport right away. This Karolina’s an exchange student as well, as she gathered, but located at another hotel. It’s probably decided according to their line of study, or something.

Nico would be lying if she said she knew what she was doing right now. She hopes she won’t have to explain this to Alex, he’ll only laugh his ass off, that’s for sure.

She’s been staring at the same five rerun commercials on the flatscreen, which surely won’t do any good to her burning eyes, when the voice from the phone call says her name. And honestly, she’s not sure what she expected from this meeting.

Nico stands up to a close to angelic girl.

Judge her all you want, but that’s about all the thought her brain’s forming right now.

Karolina Dean’s beaming a smile at her way too bright for this early in the morning, blonde braided hair and star-studded ears.

Fuck, okay, also, blue eyes nearly sparkling, or something.

Nico doesn’t have to force a smile back at all.

She soon realises the mention of her name was a question, “Uh, yeah, Nico. Karolina, right?”, to which the taller girl nods.

“I’m so sorry about this,” she tells her, sighing, sounding almost like she ran all the way here, “So easily distracted.”

Maybe Nico almost gets angry from this beautiful stranger taking the blame all for herself. Maybe she wants to roll her eyes, but she doesn’t. Karolina doesn’t know her, and for some reason, she’s the kind of person Nico doesn’t want to disappoint. Or offend.

Instead, she shakes her head and shifts her weight from one foot to another, “I’d say we’re both equally to blame here.”

She also tries to laugh, which sounds very wrong in her own ears, ugh, but her new companion maintains her sweet smile, too innocent and soft spoken, that Nico almost wants to cry again.

Anyway, she has to gather herself.

Status so far is that while she still desperately needs sleep, she is also faced with the problem of an extremely pretty girl in front of her. Pretty girls are somewhat of a weakness for her, as you can tell. Damn the universe for this.

So, what’s Nico to do about it?

Alex would most likely yell at her to get her number. Or, technically, she has the number already… but fuck, is this really the right time to flirt? Most likely not.

She’s admittedly also a very awkward flirter. Alex described her as such, which is a bit hypocritical when he’s just as bad himself. Scratch that, he’s worse, and Nico will remind him daily. A disaster pair of best friends they are, but Alex is right.

Luckily, Karolina seems a bit more cool-headed compared to the rut she’s stuck in herself, and the reason this meeting is taking place is handed over.

It’s hard to describe how much her body’s screaming for her to find her way back to bed as soon as possible, but even with her own stuff back, she hesitates.

The blonde still smiles, damn her, but takes on a wide-eyed expression, tugging on her fingers like she’s embarrassed, “I promise I didn’t mess up your stuff, I- sorry, I just. Your jacket’s really cool.”

Nico blinks.

And her companion seems to read her mind, cause she giggles, “I mean it! It made me want to know you.” Karolina soon after frowns at her own words, continuing with, “Sorry, that sounds… so weird.”

You’re so fucking adorable, Nico thinks to herself, and honestly, just wishes this angel would stop apologising. It’s sort of painful.

Of course, she shakes her head at her companion’s words, because that’s somehow the most ridiculous thing she’s heard today. The last two days. Man, fuck timezones.

But somehow, it takes her way, way too long to figure out why the blonde’s giving her a surprised face. And she blushes.

Because, of fucking course, Nico can’t keep her thoughts inside her head.

So she gathers she’s just called her adorable, and Karolina’s fidgeting with the handle of her suitcase now, seemingly not being in a hurry to go anywhere, and she’s biting her lip.

It makes Nico’s head spin. Mostly the fact that the angel girl’s not fleeing the scene.

“Did I just say that out loud?”

The blonde nods.

“Fuck,” she finds herself saying, because whatever, it’s not like she can say anything more embarrassing than what just came out of her mouth, “I’m sorry. Can you, uh. Can we pretend it’s my sleep deprivation talking?”

Karolina’s curious to her. She tugs the wispy locks of hair behind her ears and looks at Nico like she’s sincerely considering her words.

It’s here she notices how close they’re actually standing, and that she’s breathing a tiny bit faster than normal. She’d scold herself like a loser, if her companion didn’t answer her question in such an unexpected way.

“I guess,” Karolina chuckles, but she’s fidgeting again, staring at her scuffed white sneakers with a meaningful look.

And then it’s like she gains a new sort of determination, looks up at Nico, which definitely doesn’t make it easier for her to breathe. Her smile turns a bit mischievous. At this point, the lack of sleep might just make Nico hallucinate.

“But I’d rather have breakfast when we’re not sleep deprived. Heh, if- if you want to, of course.”

The blonde’s biting her lip again. Nope, Nico definitely heard that right, no sound hallucination or whatever.

Turns out this luggage switch was a blessing in disguise, huh. Fuck you if you accuse her of being cheesy, she doesn’t really care when a, yes, definite angel is looking at her expectantly, and maybe also has invited her to something resembling a date. Breakfast can be a date, right?

Needless to say, she’s never said yes to anything as fast as this in her life.

And, needless to say, Nico’s never looked forward to waking up again as much as she does when she finally goes to bed, either.

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emma-what-son · 4 years

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(Echee post) Emma Watson gets drunk and scales a fence naked

Posted on March 20, 2014

In her new interview for Elle Emma admitted something that correlates a tweet from a witness from in July 2011 on location filming Perks of being a Wallflower From snitchseeker.com May 2014, "Among her exploits: She dated a costar Johnny Simmons, and she broke into a swimming pool at 3 A.M. "It was at a hotel," she reports happily. "It had a gate around it. My friends turned around and basically, I was gone. And the next thing they saw was me seven feet up in the air, scaling this fence." This, apparently, is not as out of character as we might suppose. Watson says coyly: "I shouldn’t be able to get away with what I’m getting away with." Here is the tweet from July 2011 and here is a POST I originally posted it in at the time "@_MarieChristine $*MarieChristine; Saw @EmWatson get so drunk that she got naked n climbed the fence to go into the swimming pool at my friend's hotel......http://twitter.com/#!/_MarieChristine." So it was true. I'm not posting the quotes here (I'll link the posts with them below) but to generalize this is a girl that claims to be shy and doesn’t like to party and doesn’t drink to have a good time because it makes her really sleepy and she’s just so boring she says and blah, blah blah. She sucks people in with these statements are herself that makes people like her. It's not just about drinking and getting drunk but everything. Nothing about her is genuine in any shape or form. She is a fraud.

In a recent interview for Wonderland Magazine Emma admitted like she always has which has been one big lie that she's boring and doesn't like being the center of attention.

So in her Wonderland magazine Emma says she shy, socially awkward and a introverted person. For some reason I don't believe her. There are certain things about her that leads me to believe she is not shy or the least bit introverted. The first part of this question asked her straight out as she ever wanted to go off the rails and get drunk and she talked about getting a tattoo but never fully answered that question. The follow up question which is split below in two parts was, "But you’re not as puritanical as that, Emma" So let's look at some thing 1.) From wonderlandmagazine.com Feb 2014, "The truth is that I’m genuinely a shy, socially awkward, introverted person." Posing half naked

For years Emma has said she was shy. From topcelebrityheadlines.com June 2011, "I’m shy." From zimbio.com May 2011, "It's really hard to have a love story for me. I'm a famous actress. And I'm shy." From digitalspy.com October 2010, "Actually, I'm quite shy. I've never liked attention." From iheartwatson.net June 2011 “I still feel shy, but I feel more like I can accept it.” Her come hither looks which I limited for space reasons. There are many and I left out new ones from the Noah premiere. This is not a trait of shy and introverted people.

I doubt a truly shy and introverted people are going to say they'll strip to gain approval for anything. From mtv.com November 2010 (NYC Deathly Hallows) When we caught up with Watson just before she ducked into the theater, we informed her that 90 percent of our viewers had given her wardrobe choice — a specially made Calvin Klein gown — an enthusiastic thumbs-up in an MTV News online poll "Awww, really? Wow, that's such a high percentage!" she exclaimed. "Wow, I aced it, obviously. That's great." While 90 percent is definitely a high number, what might she do in order to get the full 100 percent of viewers' approval? "I don't know, take it off?" she quipped. Then there is her modeling which doesn't strike me as someone that is shy or introverted.

So shy and introverted she can tell a radio host some guy thinks she looks good naked From nudography.com 2008 'Harry Potter' film actress Emma Watson has said she would do a nude scene in a future film or stage role if the script called for it. Watson got on the topic of getting naked on BBC's Live Five radio "I think it's wonderful that Daniel is willing to be so brave for his craft. It's a big risk doing something like this while being so internationally known, but he's a true professional". When asked if she would ever bare all for her art, Watson replied, "Yes, absolutely. I would do it if the script called for it. I guess I would be a little nervous, but I've been told I look good naked, so I guess I've got little to worry about". When Shaffer asked Watson who thinks she looks good naked, she playfully said, "Now, now! I won't say. But I trust his expert opinion." Then there is her attention seeking along with her sultry poses and outfits she sometimes wears. Below is a series of photos from the Cannes for TBR. Everyone is walking up the steps arm and arm but Emma stops to grab the spotlight. Once she takes the arm of a cast mate she can't stop turning around smiling, giggling and waving. Once she gets to the top she hooting and hollering and then blows a series of kisses as her cast mates walk inside. This is not someone that is shy and introverted.

Claiming she wished she did more naughty things is yet another example of what a shy and introverted person would not say. From harrypotterfan.net Nov 2010, "I wished I’d done more naughty things. Three months ago I cut my hair and at that moment I felt I became a woman. I’m ready to start taking risks. I feel less girlish than ever." ... cough ... cough... From emma-watson.net September 2013 (GQ awards), “Given the perilousness in the journey from child star to adult, any award with ‘Woman’ in the title is frankly a relief!” <---- thought she, "I’ve never been in a terrible rush to be seen as a woman.” Then there is the choices of some of her outfits. If you're shy and introverted you're not going to show some flesh and you're certainly not going to show some flesh on TV or at a strip club. The last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself. You'd be more than happy to dress modestly. There are just a few and I limited them for space reason as well. I left out her recent plunging neckline outfit from the Noah premiere in Madrid and many others like her famed 2009 HBP premiere wardrobe malfunction outfit.

From Elle magazine April 2011 iheartwatson.net, "Does having short hair make you dress differently? ’I think it’s made me bolder in my fashion choices. It’s allowed me to dress more sexily.’” cough ... cough... From omg.yahoo.com W magazine May 2013, “I’ve never wanted to grow up too fast: I wanted to wear a sports bra until I was 22! The allure of being sexy never really held any excitement for me. I’ve never been in a terrible rush to be seen as a woman.” Never heard of a shy and introverted person want o dress more sexually because of a haircut. Then there is her constant blowing of kisses which she does a lot of which all the classic pin ups like Marilyn Monroe ands other used to do. I guess it has nothing to do with shyness but introverted people are not going to go around blowing kisses at people or into the camera.

Then there are moments like this. Who does this? Shy and introverted? I think not. This is begging for attention and just plain weird.

Blowing kisses, posing, giving that sultry look and just enjoying all the attention is not the trait of a shy and introverted person.

Now the only thing I believe her on is the socially awkward part.

Now to the second part of that quote 2.) "At a big party, I’m like Bambie in the headlights. It’s too much stimulation for me, which is why I end up going to the bathroom! I need time outs! You’ve seen me at parties, Derek. I get anxious. I’m terrible at small talk and I have a ridiculously short attention span." I doubt this is true. She loves to be the center of attention on red carpets. She loves the attention. So why would parties be any different? At Coachella (bottom left photo) she was moshing at some points on stage.

This video shows her dancing on stage but there is another I lost of a video shooting down from the stage over Emma's head and you can see she's in plain view of the thousands in attendance. When I find it I'll post it. Shy and introverted people that can't take all the stimulation like she says would not put themselves out there amongst strangers and onlookers. If so, what kind of shy and introverted person is that? To see her drunk/leaving clubs and to read her contradicting quotes about drinking click these links below Emma doesn't like to party Emma never goes clubbing Emma can drink like sailor Emma lied about not drinking at Brown So basically like so much I covered on this blog by exposing her BS this is yet another example One more thing and it's a quote I've posted many times but she keeps on changing her tune In this new interview I started this post off with she also said From snitchseeker.com May 2014, "I was being offered roles that I didn’t feel were very complicated," she says. "Women that were a bit one-dimensional. Roles that required me to be one thing. Real women never are." So, rather than embrace mediocre work, she hid out in Providence, Rhode Island, emerging only for projects that would both stretch her muscles and challenge her public persona." But yet she said something different during her time at Brown From aceshowbiz.com November 2010 She tells U.S. magazine Parade, "I get some amazing offers to act, and sometimes it's hard to say, 'No, I'm going to stay here and do my homework.' People are like, 'What do you mean she's not available?' This college experience is really important to me, and I won't give it up." And yet it was not about roles at all two years ago. It was about her studying From nytimes.com September 2012, “Why hasn’t she done more films before now? “I think at first I didn’t because I was always either studying or filming, I didn’t have time to go off and do other films or other things to sort of show people that, Oh, she is not just Hermione, she is an actress and she can go and do these other parts and roles." So which is the truth and which is the lie? So Sam in Perks and Nicki in TBR were complicated roles that she ended up leaving two Universities for? How about her small role in MWWM that took her a little over a week to film?

#echee #echee's posts

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purplesurveys · 3 years

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1192

Have you ever tried a colorful macaroon? Maybe you mean macarons? I’ve never seen a macaroon with food coloring before.

Do you say macaroon or macaron? It depends on what I’m referring to because they’re two different kinds of food.

Do you know what a macaroon is? Yes, they taste terrible.

Would you rather go to Paris or London? Both sound a bit too boring of a trip for me tbh, I’d rather go to other European cities.

Which national flag do you like the best? I’m not that into flags to have a favorite...I like how Nepal’s has a unique shape, though.

Name 3 celebrities people say you look like. Lucy Hale, Anna Akana, and a local celebrity you wouldn’t know about.

^Do you agree? I never saw myself looking like Anna but that’s actually the most common one I get, so I just might not know my face all that well. The only one that’s agreeable enough with me is the last celebrity I mentioned.

Do you know anyone who looks like Taylor Swift? No, especially not on this side of the planet.

Have you ever been betrayed by a best friend? Yes but that was like back in the fifth grade. I’ve been very selective of my friends ever since.

What color is the sweatshirt that you wear the most? Black.

Do you have a mirror in your room? No. I don’t really feel as if I need it.

What was the last thing you painted? I last painted on a paint-by-numbers kit, but it’s been a while since I took up the hobby. I want to get back around to it someday, but proably not any time soon as I find it a tad bit time-consuming.

Do you correct grammatical errors online? Not other people’s, but yeah I edit my posts whenever I catch a typo or grammar error. I also edit survey questions if they aren’t in proper grammar, just so other people who’d want to take the same survey won’t have to deal with it and point it out anymore.

What’s the last thing you made out of clay? I’ve only done pottery once, and that time I was taught how to make a vase. I wasn’t able to see the end result though since they still had to bake it and everything, and I was only staying in that town for a few days.

Do you go for days without washing your hair? No, I absolutely hate that feeling. My hair starts getting itchy after a day or so of not washing it and it feels irritating, so I feel the need to shower everyday.

When is the last time you had scrambled eggs and bacon? Maybe around a week ago? It’s something my parents make regularly for breakfast, alongside other local breakfast dishes.

Do you like bacon bits on your salad? I don’t really eat salad but sure, I’ll take some bacon in mine.

What is your favorite salad dressing? See above.

What is your favorite kind of soup? Not a big soup person either. I suppose I’m most enthusiastic about miso soup, if anything.

Do you eat a lot of soup? Not at all. I don’t think I ever purposely ordered it at a restaurant either; I only consume soup if it already comes as a freebie with my order.

Do you collect Mason jars to use for crafts? Nope, was never a hobby of mine. This reminds me that I have a mason jar filled with date receipts and love notes on tiny Post-Its from my last relationship, though...I literally can’t remember if I’ve since thrown it out, but I also haven’t seen it in a while...hm. I guess I’ll try looking for it later today and throw it away if I do find it still lying around in my room.

What’s a trend that you never caught on to? Remember when I said streetwear like, literally a month ago? Lmaoooooo I’m into it now. That’s why I’ll just skip over this question HAHAHAHA I always end up being obsessed with the things I swear off in the beginning :((((

What’s a trend that you haven’t caught on to yet, but you want to? Vlogging? It’d be nice to make a video or two of my own.

Do you type fast? Very. My co-workers recently started sharing this typing speed website that we’re all free to try out and so far I’m the official reigning champion haha. No one has beaten my WPM record yet.

Did you learn to type through a computer program for kids? Yes. I never adopted the ‘standard’ finger practice though; I type only with my index and middle fingers.

How many years were you homeschooled? I was never homeschooled.

If applicable, what’s a youtuber you would love to collab with? Louise Pentland.

Do you think you’re successful in life? Not quite there yet, but I’m comfortable with the way I’m working towards it for now. It’s nice to be doing things that I know will lead to something in the future.

What color is the tree outside your window? If you mean the leaves, then green.

What color is your rug, if you have one? (not carpet, rug) I don’t have one in my room but the main one we have in the living room is brown.

What do you take for pain? I take a Biogesic pill for headaches. If I get muscle sores/strains, I rub Katinko on the spots that hurt.

Which pharmacy do you use? I never need to go to those but I can always take a drive to the nearby Mercury Drug.

Do you reapply nail polish when it starts to chip? I don’t wear nail polish at all.

What is this month’s calendar picture? I don’t use a calendar.

What was the last thing you ate? Sushiiiiiiiii. I made a very impulsive and rash decision to buy THREE ORDERS of sushi yesterday. I hadn’t eaten all day and I also had a crappy at work, and my clouded judgment thought buying 24 pieces of maki was the way to go. I’m still in the stage of trying to convince myself I deserved it anyway.

What are your favorite things to put in tea? I don’t drink tea tea, but when I buy milk tea I always go for chocolate flavors. I also don’t like pearls in my milk tea.

Do you wish the Unicorn Frappuccino was a regular drink at Starbucks? I never go for customized drinks, so I don’t care at all about this.

Is there a coffee shop in your town that’s better than Starbucks? Possibly, but I may not have checked it out yet. For now, I like buying from Starbucks.

Do you frequent any coffee shops? Back in college I used to alternate between Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf; I’d go several times a week to either because coffee shops were the best place to study at.

What’s your favorite Lisa Frank character? I was never aware that there were characters lol. I thought it was only her.

Which Disney character looks the most like you? Raya for sure, but before her, I felt a big connection with Moana.

Did you go to Disney World or Disneyland as a kid? No, I haven’t gotten to go yet. It would be nice if my first time could also already be a trip with my own kid in the future :)

Do you live with a demon? Talk about creepy question lol. No.

Who has the best personality on youtube? Who cares? < I mean, same. I’m sure they all put up a show to some extent - I don’ think anyone would ever know the answer to this...but personally, those whose personalities I find really endearing would beeeeee Grace Helbig, Kelsey Impicciche, Kelsey Darragh, and Andrew Ilnyckyj.

What are some of your goals for this year? Stay employed, be better at my job, collect more BTS albums.

Does it feel like spring yet? We don’t have spring, so I don’t know what that would feel like.

What do you do to celebrate Earth Day? I don’t wait until April 22 to do something for the planet.

How do you celebrate Easter? I don’t.

Have you ridden your bike yet this year? I can’t ride bikes, haaaaa.

What does your bike look like? The family bike has some blue and grey on it. Not that I ever practice riding it.

What is your favorite place that you’ve lived? I like the house that we live in now. I like that we have a rooftop and that we don’t live with extended family.

Do you shop at Aeropostale? No, and I’m not sure we have Aeropostale shops here. The only reason we ever got Aeropostale items of clothing in the past was because relatives living in the States would occasionally bring home a box of pasalubong for us here in the Philippines.

What’s the last thing you wore from Aeropostale? Idk, probably a shirt. Have you ever been to a church that just wanted your money? Aren’t all churches like that? < Can agree and can confirm. My local parish has been undergoing a ridiculously extravagant renovation for years now and the thing is that the renovation is meant to be so fucking fancy they clearly can’t afford it, so they’ve been pooling money from churchgoers for years now as well. When we could still physically attend mass I used to keep myself from laughing everytime one of the church staff would come up on the podium and ask for money again.

Who is someone you are struggling to forgive, if applicable? I don’t struggle to forgive. I just don’t forgive. If someone does me wrong I just do my best to block them out of my memories, get into the mindset that they never existed, and live peacefully from there.

Have you ever had someone try to intentionally bully you to suicide? I don’t think so, at least not intentionally. My mom always did it unintentionally though, especially in my tween and teen years. She was always very harsh with her words and actions (she still is, but we don’t butt heads as often anymore). I didn’t have a very good emotional foundation mainly thanks to her and I had to claw my own way to get to be the much more stable self I am today.

What’s your favorite type of cereal? Sweet ones.

Who are your favorite kids that you’ve babysat? I never babysat kids outside of younger relatives.

Who is your favorite cousin? My eldest cousin from my mom’s side. I’ve always viewed him more as a brother than a cousin since we did live under the same roof for nearly a decade before my family moved to our own home.

Does one side of your family live in another state? My family is spread out everywhere, dude. I have relatives living in another town, another city, another province, another region, another island, another country. Idk about cultures but that’s generally how Filipino families are to begin with.

What states did your parents grow up in? I’m not saying that.

Do you want kids? If yes, how many? It would be nice. I just don’t know if I’ll ever be able to find someone I would want to marry and have a family with. It definitely seems bleak, but then again I’m 23 lmao. I’m not in a hurry.

What’s a craft that you’ve seen online that you don’t think will work? Most of the shit that that 5 Minute Crafts channel or whatever they’re called puts out.

What, if anything, are you severely allergic to? Grass.

Have you ever had an allergic reaction to an insect? Nopes.

How do you react to bee stings? I’ve never been stung and I hope that never happens to me.

Is there a good hospital where you live? I’m not so sure; I don’t take trips to the hospital frequently.

What’s your favorite kind of tea to drink in the spring? I never drink tea. Never been my...cup of tea? Hahahaha.

What are your favorite biblical names for girls? Elizabeth and Eden.

…for boys? Luke, Noah, Jacob, Seth.

What color nail polish do you usually wear in the spring? Again, I never put on nail polish.

What’s your favorite color that you’ve dyed your hair? I haven’t tried dyeing my hair either :( It’s something I want to explore, though.

Do you ever eat ice cream in the winter? We don’t have winter but yeah, I’m not opposed to having ice cream when the climate is on the cooler side.

How often do you wash your sheets? Every month or so.

What was the name of the biggest bully in your high school? No one got away with pulling that kind of shit in my old school.

^Did everyone hate her/him? -

^Were you his/her target? -

#survey #surveys

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omniswords · 5 years

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Chronicles of a Parisian Dumbass 5

a question for you lovely, lovely readers!

the arc of the story is pretty much outlined, but i'm really really interested in writing a social media AU over on twitter that follows luka, marinette, and other characters after the events of chronicles. you could get screenshots of text conversations, social media posts, and so on.

what do you think? would you want to follow it? let me know in your reblogs or replies!!

[Read Chronicles on AO3]

okay, so maybe i lied about watching this space for a clip. it’s definitely not ready yet

but it will be. and when it is, you’re going to love it.

There are flowers on Marinette Dupain-Cheng’s apron, and Luka wonders why he’s never noticed them before. Actually, considering how many times he’s gotten lost in those eyes, and thought about it, it’s probably not so surprising.

It’s not until one of those Just-So-Happenings, when he’s biking between houses for his meal delivery job, that he catches her waiting outside the bakery, her sketchbook open in her arms and her pencil twirling between her fingers. He might be mistaken, or it might be the mid-June sun, but it looks like her eyes light up when they meet his, almost like she wants him to stop. He does—because really, who would he be if he didn’t stop for her?—but he does stay mounted on his bike, as if to tell her he can’t stay very long.

“Slow day?” he says with a polite smile, drumming his fingers on his handlebars. There’s no point in taking off his helmet if he’s not going to stay long, no matter how hot he’s starting to get in this thing. He almost has to wonder how Mr. Dupain can stand being around an oven for so long.

Marinette smiles, and wishful thinking aside, it seems less like a Customer Service thing and more like she’s… genuinely happy to see him. “It’s the usual. Just on a break, and waiting for someone to come by for a custom order.” She tosses a glance behind her, into the shop. “Papa’s been working really hard on it, especially the decorating. He’s kind of a perfectionist when it comes to his craft.” She manages a laugh, and it’s probably the first time since that first day that she actually sounds… nervous? “I guess I know where I get it from.”

Luka’s brow furrows, and his gut turns excitedly, and he’s fighting back a smile that seems to have come from nothing. “What do you mean? Do you bake, too?”

“Well… sort of.” She shrugs. “I’m really only good at making macarons.”

He hopes his eyes aren’t as wide as he thinks they are. Oh, God. She has been putting them in his boxes. No wonder there’s a letter M on all of them. Okay, he tells himself. Play it cool. They’re just—well, they’re not just macarons. He’s seen enough video tutorials on his uncreative days to know that it takes a meticulous baker to get them just right. But they’re pastries. Not a phone number. Not a date.

He clears his throat. “You don’t say.”

Marinette hums, gives her pencil another twirl, and returns to her sketchbook—except she’s not doing a whole lot of sketching. It’s more like a whole lot of staring. The frustrated kind that always asks art why it’s not doing exactly what we want it to do, every single time we want to do it.

Luka’s basically married to the feeling; it’s why it’s so easy for him to put aside all the Cute Bakery Girl inhibitions, just for a moment, and ask, “What are you working on?”

She looks up then, stops the pencil with her thumb, and eventually closes her sketchbook with a resigned sigh, holding it close like a child she wants to protect from prying eyes. “Just keeping busy. Don’t want the creative machine to get rusty over the summer, you know?” She taps her temple with the pencil. “I kinda need it for school.”

Something in her expression changes, but it’s hard for Luka to name what it is. It can’t possibly be self-criticism—unless she’s as good at hiding it as he is. “Oh yeah?” he decides to say instead. “Where are you going to school? PCA? École des Beaux-Arts?”

Marinette’s eyes spark, and a smirk tugs at her lips as she leans back against the shop. “New York City.”

Luka blinks. Quite a few times. “Oh. Well. That’s… cool.”

“Yeah, it’s…” She laughs, and it sounds human. Not that over-the-counter giggle that comes with a can I help you or a have a nice day, but the genuine, modest kind. “It’s something. I didn’t think cities got much busier than Paris.”

“It’s big there?”

“Huge,” she says, and Luka wishes he could capture that dreamily enthusiastic look in her eyes forever. It already tells him everything she’s seen without words. “Everywhere you go, there’s something. And there’s always someone yelling about something, too.” Another laugh. “You wouldn’t believe how… angry and stressed people are over there. Always acting like there’s only five hours in a day, like they have to get everywhere yesterday.”

At that, Luka laughs along with her, and maybe this the first time that he feels something there, some connection to Marinette Dupain-Cheng as a person. And it isn’t because there isn’t a register or a counter or a box between them. “So,” he says after a moment. “What do you study there?”

“Fashion design.” She smiles proudly. “I mean, I worked hard any everything, but I guess it helped to have a couple of good recommendation letters.” She looks down then, tapping her toe on the pavement, squeezing her sketchbook a little tighter and wincing even as she speaks.

You must’ve worked really hard for the two of them to notice you, he wants to say, or even, I’d love to see your designs sometime if you’ve ever released any. Instead, all that comes out is, “I play guitar.”

And then he winces. That was the best he could come up with?

Marinette smiles, and her gaze flickers just past him. Right at his guitar. Which is right in front of him. In his basket. “I figured.”

Luka would love to know just how soon the earth can swallow him up. “I mean. I’m also. In a band. Like, a band band.”

Any minute now, he thinks. Any minute the earth wants to do its duty would be fantastic.

“Mm.” Marinette’s expression doesn’t falter, but she does look down at her sketchbook again. “You and every Vans-wearing, guitar-strumming New Yorker at every street corner trying to score a date or a dollar.”

“I’m not—”

“I know,” she says, and she looks caught in the middle somehow, between the Cute Bakery Girl who wants to keep him on his toes and the sunny sweetheart who… seems to like him. Seems to want to open up to him, wishful thinking aside. Between New York and Paris. “You’re nicer than they are.”

She pauses to wave at someone just behind him—probably that customer she’s waiting for—then works on tying her hair into a high ponytail and dusting off her apron. He looks at it more closely now: the pretty contrast of baby pink against the black and white of her overall dress, the spray of flowers decorating the corner, the elaborate capital M accompanying it. The same one, he realizes, that decorated the macarons. “Duty calls,” she says with a faint stretch.

“Ditto,” Luka replies, sparing a glance behind him. There’s no delivery box attached to his bike this time, but where he’s going, he won’t need it.

Marinette gives him one last up-and-down as she opens the door to the bakery and it looks like—he thinks it looks like—those blue eyes of hers like what they see. “Maybe I’ll hear one of your rockstar songs sometime,” she tells him, and the melody he thinks he needs starts to fall into place.

He grins, feeling the buzz of each new note in his chest, and raises a hand to salute her with devil horns. “Maybe I’ll get to see a Marinette Dupain-Cheng original in person one day.” It’s the first time he’s said the name to someone who isn’t himself, and it rolls off the tongue like soft water, and the music in his body swells to a forte in seconds.

Her eyes light up. “It’s closer than you think,” she murmurs, the door closing with the tinkle of the bell behind her, and as he stands there, dumbfounded and half-mounted on his bicycle, he’s stuck trying to decide if she meant her apron, her ambitions, or himself. If this is the sass she’s picked up from New York or just from growing older, or if she’s always been like this.

And if—this is the crazy thing—if she’s actually flirting with him.

Either way, the music in him demands to be written now, played now. And inspiration, he’s come to learn in all his years of composing, does not like to wait on people for very long.

So he speeds to the Seine before the song can leave him behind, his bike beside him on the riverbank, and he plays with nothing but his ears and his phone to capture every attempt. He plays until the calluses on his fingers protest, until that beautiful blue bleeds into background noise and tells him it will see him again sometime. She will see him again sometime.

When Juleka comes down the river from home, looking for him, she finds him still cradling his guitar, playing and rewinding and replaying every second of this new song from his phone. “You’re ridiculous,” she says with a smile, draping his gig bag over his head and bending down to right his back.

Luka laughs, and even that sounds like music to him. “Maybe,” he says as he resigns himself to zipping up his guitar. “But you’d better get to work.”

“Work?”

He’s still grinning, phone in hand. “We’ve got a new gig to find.”

it’s starting to be ready

CBG, this one’s for you and your cute apron.

#miraculous ladybug #lukanette #luka couffaine #marinette dupain cheng #fic: chronicles of a parisian dumbass #COME GET Y'ALL PINING LUKA BABES

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letterboxd · 4 years

Photo

The Package.

As the bonkers genre thrill-ride Shadow in the Cloud blasts into the new year, writer and director Roseanne Liang unpacks her love of Terminator 2, watching Chloë Grace Moretz’s face for hours, and the life lesson she learned from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Cheng Pei-Pei.

Roseanne Liang’s TIFF Midnight Madness winner Shadow in the Cloud landed with a blast of fresh genre energy on VOD platforms on New Year’s Day. It’s A-class action in a B-grade body, cramming plenty into its taut 83 minutes, including: a top-secret package, a freakish gremlin, a hostile bunch of Air Force dudes, outrageous stunts, dogfights and a fake wartime PSA that feels remarkably real.

Throughout, the camera is focused mostly on one face—Chloë Grace Moretz’s, playing British flight officer Maude Garrett—as she tackles all of the above from a claustrophobic ball turret hanging under a B-17 Flying Fortress, on a classified mission over the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

While the film’s tonal swings are confusing to some, schlock enthusiasts and genre lovers on Letterboxd have embraced the film’s intentionally outlandish sensibility, which “makes excellent use of its genre mash to create an unpredictable, guilty pleasure,” says Mirza. Fajar writes that “it felt like the people involved in this project knew how ridiculous it is and gave a hundred and ten percent to make it work. Someday, it will become a cult classic.” Mawbey agrees: “It really goes off the rails in all the best ways during the final third, and the last couple of shots are just perfect.”

Chloë Grace Moretz and her top-secret package in ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

To most of the world, Liang is a so-called “emerging” director, when in fact, the mother-of-two, born in New Zealand to Chinese parents, has been at this game for the past two decades. She has helmed a documentary and a romantic drama, both based on her own marriage; a 2008 short called Take 3, which preceded Hollywood’s current conversation about representation and harassment; and Do No Harm, the splatter-tastic 2017 short in which her technical chops and fluid feel for action were on full display, and, as recorded in multiple Letterboxd reviews, established her as one to watch.

Do No Harm scored Liang valuable Hollywood representation, whereupon producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones brought Shadow in the Cloud to her, thinking she might connect with the material. “It did connect with me on a level that is very personal,” Liang tells me. “As a woman of color, as a mother who juggles a lot.” She says Kavanaugh-Jones then went through the process of removing original writer Max Landis from the project. “He felt that Max was not a good fit for this project, or for how we like to run things. We like to be respectful and courteous and kind to each other…”

In several interviews, Liang has said she’s comfortable with film lovers choosing not to watch Shadow in the Cloud based on Landis’s early involvement. What she’s not comfortable with is her own contribution—and that of her cast and crew—being erased. While WGA rules have his name attached firmly to the project, the credit belies the reality: his thin script, reportedly stretched out to 70 pages by using a larger-than-usual font, was expanded and deepened by Liang and her collaborators.

Writer-director Roseanne Liang. / Photo by Dean O’Gorman

That team includes editor Tom Eagles, Oscar nominated for Jojo Rabbit, actor Nick Robinson (the titular Simon in Love, Simon) and Beulah Koale, a star of the Hawaii Five-Oh series. The opening newsreel was created by award-winning New Zealand animation studio Mukpuddy, after a small test audience got weirded out by the sight of a gremlin in a war film, despite well-documented WWI and WWII gremlin mythology. It’s an unnecessary but happy addition. The cartoon style was inspired by Private Snafu, a series of WWII educational cartoons scripted by none other than Dr. Seuss and directed by Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones.

But the film ultimately hangs on Chloë Grace Moretz, who overcame cabin fever to drive home an adrenaline rush of screen craft, in which the very limits of what’s humanly possible in mid-air are tested (in ways, it must be said, that wouldn’t be questioned if it were Tom Cruise in the role). Liang would often send directions to Moretz’s ball turret via text, while her cast members delivered live dialogue from an off-set shipping container rigged with microphones. “I just never got sick of Chloë’s face and I’ve watched her hundreds, if not thousands of times. You feel her, you are her, she just engages you in a way that a huge fighting scene might not, if it’s not designed well. Giant empty spectacle is less interesting than one person in one spot, sometimes.”

Ambitious and nerdy about film in equal measure, it’s clear there’s much more to come from Liang, and I’m interested in what her most valuable lesson has been so far. Turns out, it’s a great story involving Chinese veteran Cheng Pei-Pei (Come Drink With Me’s Golden Swallow, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Jade Fox), whose film training includes a tradition of remaining on set throughout filming.

Roseanne Liang on the set of ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

That meant that, during filming of Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, Cheng would stay on set when she wasn’t required. “In New Zealand, trailers are a luxury,” Liang explains. “I said ‘Don’t you want to go to the trailer that we arranged for you?’ ‘No, I just want to sit and watch.’ ‘Why do you want to watch it, you’ve seen it hundreds of times!’ And she said ‘I learn something new every time’. To Pei-Pei, the secret of life is constant education and curiosity and learning. Movies are her work and her craft and her life, and she never gets bored. If I can be like her, that’s the life, right?”

Speaking of which, it’s time we put Liang through our Life in Film interrogation.

What’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the movie that is at the top of the mountain that I’m climbing. To me it’s the perfect blend of spectacle, action design, smarts and heart. It poses the theory that if a robot can learn the value of humanity then maybe there’s hope for the ships that are us. That’s perennial, and possibly even more pertinent today. It holds a very special place in my heart, along with Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional.

What’s your earliest memory of watching a film? I have a cassette tape that my dad made for my grandma in 1981 (he’d send tapes back to his mother in Hong Kong). I was three years old and he had just taken us to see The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema. And he can’t talk to my grandma because I’m just going on and on about R2-D2. I will not shut up about R2-D2 and he’s like, “Yes, yes I’m trying to talk to your grandmother,” and I’m like, “But Dad! Dad! R2-D2!” So it’s actually an archive, but it’s become my memory.

What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not the sexiest, but it’s the most romantic. That last scene, those last words where she goes “But you’re gonna be like this forever and I’m gonna be like this forever…” and he just goes “okay”. That to me is one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen. It is a perfect movie.

And the scariest? If it’s a horror movie, the most scared I’ve been is The Ring. I was watching it on a VHS and I was lying on a beanbag on the floor and I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move, because I felt that if I moved she’d see me! Also, American Psycho just came to me this year. I caught the twentieth anniversary of that movie, which is a terrifying film, and again, possibly more relevant now than when it was made. The scariest film that’s not a horror is Joker. It scared me how much I liked it. When I came out of the movie, I was like, “I’m scared because I kind of love it, but it’s horrible. It’s so irresponsible. I don’t wanna like this movie but goddamn, I feel it.” Like, I wanted to go on the streets and rage. In a way we’re all the Joker, we’re all the Batman. That duality, that yin and yang, is inside everyone of us. It’s universal.

What is the film that slays you every time, leaving you in a heap of tears? This is a classic one, the opening sequence of Up. The first ten minutes of Up just destroy me every time. I also saw Soul a couple of days ago and I was with the whole family and I, just, if I wasn’t with the whole family I would have been ugly-sobbing. I had a real ache in my throat after the movie because I was trying to stop [myself] from sobbing.

Tell me your favorite coming-of-age film, the film that first gave you ‘teenage feelings’? Pump Up the Volume. Christian Slater! Off the back of Pump Up the Volume, I fancied myself as a prophet and wrote a theater piece called Lemmings. Obviously the main character was a person who could see through the façade, and everyone else was following norms. “No one understands me, I’m a prophet!” So clearly I have this shitty, Joker-style megalomaniac inside of me. It was the worst play, and I don’t know why my teachers agreed for us to do a staging of it!

Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis in ‘Pump Up the Volume’ (1990).

Is there a film that you and your family love to rewatch? We’ve tried to impose our taste on our children, but they’re too young. We showed them The Princess Bride—they didn’t get it. We literally showed our babies Star Wars in their cribs. That’s how obsessive Star Wars fans we were.

Name a director and/or writer that you deeply admire for their use of the artform. I have a slightly weird answer for this. Can I just give love to Every Frame a Painting by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos? They are my film school. I was thinking of my love of Edgar Wright, but then I thought of their video essay on Edgar Wright and how to film comedy, and his essay on Jackie Chan and the rhythm of action and then their essay on the Coen Brothers and Shot Reverse Shot. I must have watched that 30 times ahead of the TV show that I’m making now. I started out in editorial and Tony Zhou is an editor and he talks about when to make the cut: it’s an instinct, it’s a feeling, it’s a rhythm. I realized the one thing in common that I could mention about all the films I’ve loved is Every Frame a Painting. It’s their love of movies that comes bubbling out of every single essay that they made that I just wanna shout out at this part of my career.

Were there any crucial films that you turned to in your development for Shadow in the Cloud? Indiana Jones was something that Chloë brought up—she likes the spiffiness and the humor of Indiana Jones. Sarah Connor was our touchstone for the female character. For one-person-in-one-space type stories, I watched Locke quite a lot, to figure out how they shaped tension and story and [kept] us on the edge of our seats when it’s only one person in one space. In terms of superheroes, I came back to Aliens. Not Alien. Aliens. You know, there are two types of people in this world—people who prefer Alien over Aliens, and people who prefer Aliens over Alien. But actually I think I vacillate for different reasons.

Can there be a third type of person, who thinks they’re both great, but Alien³, just, no? Maybe that’s the best group to be in. We don’t need to fight about this, we can love both of them! I was having an argument with James Wan’s company about this, because there’s a rift inside the company of people who prefer Alien over Aliens.

Okay, program a triple feature with your film as one of the three. I don’t know. Ask Ant Timpson!

I’ll ask Ant Timpson. [We did, and he replied: “Well, one has to be the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. And then either Life (2017) or Altitude (2010).”]

Thank you Ant! I used to go to his all-nighters as a university student. He is the king of programming things.

Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Life’ (2017).

It’s strange that we never met at one of his events! Ant would make me dress up in strange outfits and do weird skits between films. (For those who don’t know, Timpson ran the Incredibly Strange Film Festival for many years—now part of the New Zealand International Film Festival—and still runs an annual 24-Hour Movie Marathon.) So what’s a film from those events that sticks in your head as the perfect genre experience with a crowd? It was a movie about a man protecting a woman who was the girlfriend of a mafia boss: A Bittersweet Life. Not only does it have one of the sexiest Korean actors, sorry, not to objectify, but also I actually screenshot a lot of that film for pitch documents. And, do you remember a crazy Japanese movie where someone’s sitting on the floor with a clear umbrella and a woman is lactating milk? Visitor Q by Takashi Miike. I remember just how fucking crazy that was.

Finally, what was the best film you saw in 2020? I haven’t seen Nomadland yet, so keep in mind that I haven’t seen all the films this year. I have three: The Invisible Man, which I thought was just amazing. I thought [writer-director] Leigh Whannell did such a great job. The Half of It by Alice Wu, a quiet movie that I simply just adored. And then the last movie I saw at the cinema was Promising Young Woman. The hype is real.