Harry is at a Quidditch game, and he’s having a dreadful time. There should be some universal rule that negates this possibility. It’s Quidditch, he’s Harry – it’s the perfect pairing. He should be watching the Wimbourne Wasps crush the Ballycastle Bats and munching on some delightful treacle Sugar Sweeps while enjoying his first date in months.
Except they only have the licorice-flavoured Sugar Sweeps.
Except his team is losing horrendously.
Except his date – Jeanine, or Jeannie; something with a J – is more interested in flirting with anyone other than him. She’d tried to catch the eye of the unfairly attractive man sitting on Harry’s other side for a good twenty minutes. When she made no progress, her attention shifted to orchestrating a threesome with her friend and Draco. Rude.
(And no matter how far they’ve come from the bitter rivalry of their youth, Harry still hates to lose to Mal– Draco. He’d feel worse about that if the other man didn’t feel the exact same way – and if the prat looked less bloody smug.)
This is the last time he lets the blond convince him to go on a blind double-date. Merlin, what was he thinking when he agreed to this?
The Wasps call a timeout to discuss strategy (not that it’s likely to help at this point) and that’s when the worst of it happens. Some genius decided Quidditch needed a kiss cam for the slower moments of a match. If Harry ever finds out who, he’s going to hex their toes off.
That’s the thought that runs through his mind as he sees himself and Jacqueline on each of the floating screens bobbing around the Quidditch stadium.
His eyes slide helplessly to the side, where Jasmine is already inching away from him. This is so bloody embarrassing. He can feel his cheeks redden in mortification and is sure his deer-in-the-headlights expression will be immortalised in tomorrow’s Daily Prophet.
He sure wishes he had a time turner – he’d go back to this morning and stay in bed the whole day.
He can hear laughter breaking out from the other spectators the longer the camera lingers on him. Why haven’t they moved on to another pair? Or at the very least shifted three feet to the right; Harry’s certain Jolene and her friend or Draco (or hell, all three, why not) would be happy to give the viewers a show.
And then he feels a tap on his left shoulder.
It’s not that he’d forgotten about the extremely hot man sitting to his left. But the reminder of the human perfection to his side while this debacle unfolds kind of makes him want to stand up and leave. Or blow something up.
He turns to Mr. Sex-on-Legs and smiles weakly. The man returns his smile, and while it’s a little sharp, it’s not mocking. Hurray for small mercies.
“May I?” Unreasonably Handsome Stranger asks.
“Uh,” Harry replies eloquently. May he what? Harry swiftly decides he doesn’t need more details. This man could be asking for his kidney and as long as it makes this whole situation less painful, Harry’s on board. “Sure…?”
Unreasonably Handsome Stranger tilts Harry’s face up and swoops in. Harry can’t stop the confused squeak from leaving him – so much for less shameful – and then he’s being kissed within an inch of his life. Holy shite.
This is awesome.
Harry kind of forgets why this man is kissing him and what’s going on around him, because it doesn’t matter. The most gorgeous person he’s ever seen in real life is pressing his lips against Harry’s with intent, with skill – is that his tongue? All higher brain functions have ceased in order to enjoy this moment to the fullest.
When they finally pull back for air, Harry finds his hands are gripping the man’s collar and holding him close. He figures that’s fine, considering the man has one hand wound through Harry’s hair and the other is still cupping his jaw.
“Wow,” Harry breathes, brain still taking a break from thinking. The other man smirks knowingly at him, and Harry would probably take offence to that if the man’s perfectly formed cheekbones weren’t flushed pink, showing he’s not as unaffected as he might pretend to be.
“Er. I’m Harry.”
“Tom.”
“Nice to meet you, Tom.”
This makes Smokin' Hot Tom chuckle, which in turn makes his eyes crinkle up adorably. Oh bother – Harry might be in trouble.
He’s aware, peripherally, that someone behind him is aggressively clearing their throat. He only bothers to care about it when Tom shoots an unimpressed look at the source of the noise.
When Harry turns to follow Tom’s gaze, he comes face to face with an irate Julienne, her glaring friend, and Draco, who can’t seem to decide whether he’s impressed or pissed off.
He shrugs, grinning dopily. “It just isn’t going to work out, Josephine.”
She gives him a baleful look. “My name is Petra.”
Whoops. Not even close. “Sorry – Petra. Have fun with Draco and …your friend.”
He sends a teasing salute to Draco and starts dragging Tom towards the exit. Speaking of having fun – he’s sure they can find an alcove somewhere around here to continue what Tom started.
—
Harry’s picture is indeed in the Prophet the next day. But he supposes that’s only to be expected when he’s caught publicly snogging the visiting ambassador from the French Ministry of Magic.
172 notes
·
View notes
A certain fisherman [...] went to the same place again to fish, and he put a row of hooks on his heels in case he met the Púca again; he attached them like a horseman's spurs. When evening drew near, he made a halter of the fishing-line for the Púca.
The Púca met him the second time. He himself caught the Púca, put the fishing-line over his head like a halter, and started to ride him. He drove him wherever he wanted to go, and he kept putting his heels with the hooks like spurs to the Púca's sides, so that the Púca was shedding blood from the pricks of the hooks.
Excerpt from "The Púca: A Multi-Functional Irish Supernatural Entity" by Deasún Breatnach
buy a print of this piece here :>
9K notes
·
View notes
Aight but look kids. I know you’re all excited about the potential UF reboot but I NEED you all to understand something very important. The way I wrote and engaged with UF… it can’t be like it was before. When I used to write UF, I strived way too hard to please everyone else to the point that I often found myself dissatisfied with what I was writing. It got to the point that I got burnt out with the fic because I wasn’t writing it for, well, myself, and because of that it became something of a chore.
With new UF, I plan on fixing that. I’m writing this fic solely for me this time around, making what I want it to be, which may not be what you want it to be. I’m going to take lengthy breaks when I feel like it, I’m not beholding myself to a stressful tight posting schedule, I’m going to be self indulgent and focus on the characters I want to focus on. I’m going to have fun this time around.
And if I end up writing something you don’t necessarily like, well, sorry about that, I can’t please everyone. I can only please myself. And hopefully this time, I will.
40 notes
·
View notes
ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".
like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!
on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.
returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body
literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence
28 notes
·
View notes
"Seven" Sentence Sunday
Tagged by @spotsandsocks. Thank you for the tag!
A little more of the jealous!Tommy fic because why not.
Because Christopher goes straight to Buck's other side, smile suddenly beaming for his dad and his Buck.
And it's so different how he settles in with Buck. All day, he'd been sticking close to Tommy, asking questions and showing off about his bond with his dad's cool new pilot friend. Asking for stories and telling the ones he already knew for anyone who would listen.
But now, with everyone gone and all the excitement of the day wearing off, he gravitates toward Buck. And it's something wholly different. Quiet and familiar, as Christopher tucks himself up against Buck's side. He doesn't snuggle in, really, but it's a close thing. And Buck's mentioned this before, bemoaning the way Christopher has started distancing himself a bit as a teenager, not quite as affectionate as he'd been in the years before. But Tommy can see all the quiet affection in the way Christopher settles beside him and gradually lets himself lean more into Buck's space in a way that's so familiar, it makes Tommy’s chest ache.
Not tagging because I think Sunday is over for most everyone, but consider yourself tagged if you want to participate.
29 notes
·
View notes