#i saw a video somewhere of someone using a clipping mask and i was like wtf. give me ur secrets

[nozomitojoyuri]

@freedfromortalcoil If you add a clipping mask to a layer it makes it so that it'll only show up if there's something there on the layer beneath it

[ I didn't think my explanation was that clear so I added a lil demonstration too <3 - The layers are depicted in the bottom right & the little arrow thingy shows which layers have clipping masks/what they're clipped to ]

I've found it pretty helpful when it comes to trying to add shading, so I only have to pay attention to staying in the lines once xD

[shokobuns]

– VALENTINE’S DATES (JJK EDITION)

ft. itadori yuuji, fushiguro megumi, kugisaki nobara, gojo satoru, sukuna ryoumen, nanami kento, zenin maki (gn!reader)

GENRE: fluffy brainrot/headcanons! (whichever you consider these to be ig)

WORD COUNT: 1.8k

WARNING(S): suggestive themes.

ITADORI YUUJI – he’s the type of person to record your date for memories. he has videos of you looking out into the sunset to you chomping down on a bunch of noodles like an animal. with that, you two would just go around and explore tokyo, taking advantage of any couples’ valentine’s day discounts. he’d probably ask gojo for advice (he hands him a condom), but it’s horrible and he’d probably figure that out from nanami. if it’s the first date, he’d be nervous as hell and it’d be noticeable considering how jumpy he is, but once you start getting comfortable with touching him, he’d relax more and adjust really quickly. if it lasts the whole day, by half the date, he’s kissing your cheek, holding your hand, and wrapping his arm around you. yuuji’s really sweet and he’s also a gentleman, holding the door for you and being mindful of if you’re having a good time or not. when you two finally kiss on the lips, he gets flustered as hell and hides his face into the crook of your neck.

THE GIFT – one of those bead necklaces that everyone makes at home. the colors are irregular and in no particular pattern, but your initials are on it with a heart. he doesn’t have much money with the exception of food, so he can’t afford a super glamorous gift, but you wear it with pride.

FUSHIGURO MEGUMI – would show up at your doorstep with your favorite flowers, but once he gets there, he’s debating on whether he should be there or not. he just wanted to do something nice for you on valentine’s day, but he’s also thinking “what if this is weird?” he’s another person that gojo gave advice to, but megumi tuned him out because he already knows to not trust him for this stuff. he’s all new to this couple type things, but he rings your doorbell anyways and he’s about to put down the flowers at your doorstep and run away, but it’s too late. you answer the door with a sundress on and this man forgets how to speak, so he just holds out a box of chocolates and the flowers without even looking you in the face. eventually, you ruffle his hair and go back into your house to gather some sandwiches, water, and a blanket for a picnic at a nearby park. you’d have to be the one to initiate the hand holding and his face gets so fucking red, too. at the park, he gets more comfortable, talking to you becomes easier and he lets you put butterfly clips in his hair because your face gets really close to his and he likes to give you little pecks on your nose when it happens.

THE GIFT – flowers and chocolate, letting you put clips in his hair without complaints

KUGISAKI NOBARA – she’s also the type to bring you around tokyo and spoil you on valentine’s day and she’s definitely more assertive on the date, too. she constantly has one hand on you, whether it’s on the small of your back or she’s holding yours, and she’s not shy about kissing your cheeks in public, either. nobara makes you try on clothes and if she really likes how the outfit looks on you, too, she’ll have no problem buying them at all. you two do that thing where you pick out outfits for each other and try them on at the same time. for most of the date, it feels like she’s the one with the bolder personality, but as soon as you tell her she looks like “the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen,” she gets really fucking flustered. your classic red cheeks and she can’t seem to stop smiling, but at the same time she’s trying not to seem too embarrassed even though she’s failing miserably. eventually, she’ll get over herself and you guys would find an empty balcony somewhere and make out for the rest of the night.

THE GIFT – an outfit consisting of those velvet track pants that she thinks make your ass look good (the ones that flare out at the bottom), an oversized shirt, and a bunch of scrunchies

GOJO SATORU – the first time he sees you that day, he tosses you a condom with a ribbon on it, does a backflip onto a table, then puts a ribbon on himself. he gets an “i hate you” because he’s dramatic as hell, but he pouts and it makes you feel slightly guilty because he’s just so cute. anyways, for the rest of the day, he wears his glasses because it feels more casual and for the most part, you’re hanging out at home watching movies, making out, etc. there are definitely no more condoms left in the box by the end of the night. although, you don’t stay in all day. he does treat you to a proper dinner where you both are a little more dressier than usual and he makes sexual innuendos in your ear whenever he has the chance which is about every five seconds. you’d also be eating dinner next to another couple and he’d say some shit like “we’re cuter than them” and you would get secondhand embarrassment whether the couple hears it or not. at the end of the night, you two walk to a park at night and there’s definitely a little moment where he goes “hey, can you hold this?” and you hold out your hand and he interlocks his fingers with yours (yes, he’s cheesy like that). you’ve probably had to slap him on the back of the head a couple times. once you two get to the park, he shamelessly does cartwheels throughout the whole space.

THE GIFT – a condom, sex, a homecooked meal, cat ears, and a sanrio plushie that yuuji picked out for him

SUKUNA RYOMEN – honestly, you weren’t even sure if you were even going to have a valentine’s day date with him, but he shows up at your front door at 6 am ringing your doorbell repeatedly with a bunch of flowers and you look like absolute shit when you finally open it. you’re still tired, so you drag him back to your bed for a few hours and sleep a little more before getting ready and going out for breakfast. he’s the type of person to stare down other people for no reason and you have to calm him down during your little breakfast date so that he doesn’t scare people. of course, he eventually gets a little bored and blows your back out in the restroom which has you limping for the rest of the day. he takes a lot of pride in it, too. later at dinner, he tries to cook for you, but this man sucks at cooking and has anger issues which is not a good combination because he’s so close to punching the stove since he somehow ended up burning the pasta noodles? your kitchen is still intact, so you don’t question it, and you’ve already ordered takeout because you’ve already predicted it. sure, he sucks at cooking, but it’s the thought that counts, right? after that, you two fuck, like you’ve already been doing all day, but this time, you give a little manicure after. you teach him how to take care of his cuticles himself and paint each other’s nails black after.

THE GIFT – a vibrator, handcuffs, a dead rabbit he found and stuffed with its legs cut off. he also got you a nice bouquet of your favorite flowers, but he had to bark at someone at the store to get them.

NANAMI KENTO – this man will take you off to your classic fancy dinner date with wine, a box of chocolates, a bouquet of roses, basically the whole cliche formula valentine’s date. although, you’d notice that something seems a little off about him so you kind of just ask “are you having a good time?” and he looks back at you with a blank expression all like “are you having a good time?” that’s when you get the hint that he’s indifferent to the whole thing, so you quickly finish dinner in order to get home as soon as possible. nanami is a little confused as to why you weren’t having fun, but it’s all explained when you head to your bathroom and hold up two face masks. he hasn’t used one before, but you just tell him to relax and “stop and smell the roses.” he’s just like “i already bought you roses?” and you just shake your head and instruct him to lay down so that you can put the sheet mask on his face. the night slowly becomes more of a self care type time where you two take a bath together, wash each other’s hair, and eat cake. surprisingly, he ends up enjoying the whole thing and asks if you two can do the same thing next time. it ends with a peaceful sleep, you head laying on his chest and his arms wrapped around you.

THE GIFT – box of chocolates, roses, and some diamond earrings. the best dick of your entire life, both in the bathtub and in the bedroom.

ZENIN MAKI – this girl gives you a home cooked meal, but she’s actually good at it. for breakfast, she’s making some omelettes and rice and it’s one of the ones where it’s a sanrio character sleeping in a blanket. you’re just admiring her the whole time because she looks really pretty when she cooks. for a valentine’s day date, you two would go on a cute picnic with some bento boxes and eat strawberries while the sun shines. her hair is down the whole time and you play with it because she never has her hair down even though she looks absolutely gorgeous like that. she’s just relaxed the whole time and you’re feeding her compliments while keeps on this cocky exterior, but she’s internally melting. she also lets you braid her hair, so you give her some french braids, but not without adding some pretty flowers to compliment her face. later that night, you two play a movie in the background and you give her a massage because she rarely gets some time to let go and rest and you really want to make her feel good. eventually, this escalated into making out until you two get tired and fall asleep.

THE GIFT – home cooked meals and pair of earrings she saw you eyeing the other day.

[geekgemsspooksandtoons]

The Mask 1994

*I finally wrote the whole thing. I finally watched the movie that involved something I’ve been talking about A LOT. I think this took about an hour since I finished the movie. Forgot to mention Charlie.*

I wanna make this clear, even before I watched movie or ever writing this. I am legitimately a stupid and lazy person. Because my mom told me about this, and last week, my dad rented A Quiet Place Part 2. When I was trying to go to sleep but was looking up movies...I literally forgot my tv can do that too...and that I can rent or buy a movie...I rented the movie this morning, and deleted it afterwards...after all that talk...I could’ve done that...wow. I should do that more considering some movies I wanna see or like. Not too much though. My tv has DirecTV. Just a heads up.

But a few or couple of minutes ago, I finally watched The Mask film from 1994. This post is gonna be filled with spoilers and it’s gonna get long. Gonna be kind of a review. My overall thoughts on it. This was my first reaction to the whole movie.

I’d just wanna talk about this too. I like comic books, I like comic book movies. Mainly my favorites are ones like all of Zack Snyder’s DCEU movies, Spider-Man 1 & 2, The Suicide Squad 2021, Wonder Woman 2017, The Dark Knight(Despite whatever issues I have with it), and Joker 2019. Yeah, those are mainly DC films and two Marvel related ones. I don’t even mind Spider-Man 3 as well. I also forgot Dredd 2012 is another one of my favorites. Along with Batman 1989.

I was hoping The Mask could make that list of favorites. Because I read the comics first. I don’t think I ever watch the movie fully as a kid MAYBE. I’m a fan of the comics, I know this movie was gonna be a lighter take on the series. 

In a nutshell...I liked it. It’s possible it will be on that list of favorite CBM’s...but I want to talk about it. I’ll also admit I think what got me interested in seeing this film and this series was me liking Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura...now, let’s get to the point.

Yeah, I liked it. I thought the movie was genuinely entertaining. Despite seeing some clips before. But also Ryan Hollinger’s video about it. Revealing the ending, the twist, and other stuff. But I didn’t wanna watch more more that I haven’t seen yet.

I will be honest, it still made me laugh. Even some scenes I already have seen. I will admit, the Cuban Pete scene is actually one of my favorites. XD But what also surprised me is that at times, despite being a funny film. It can genuinely be touching in a way. And I am mainly talking about the developing relationship between Stanley and Tina.

I just wanna talk about the characters right now. I’ll just admit unless I haven’t already. I’m a Jim Carrey fan. Mainly because of his more goofier roles. Particularly his roles from the Ace Ventura movies, Liar Liar, and especially Sonic The Hedgehog. I also will admit this, Jim Carry nails playing Big Head or who they call...The Mask in this movie...I’ll nitpick about that later.

But yeah, Jim’s entertaining as Big Head in this film. He does make me laugh. But I think another role he does well despite there are some sillier moments, which is fine. I feel like in a way, Stanley Ipkiss in this version, is maybe one of his more normal roles. But I know I’m wrong considering whatever other roles he’s in. He portrays a likable good guy who’s sadly mainly pushed around. Which is quite the difference from the comics, except being pushed around. But that’s another topic. Yet for this story, even if maybe Stanley’s name could be changed. But him being a genuinely kind guy works for this story.

Even before I saw the movie, learning more about this version about the character. I can relate to Stanley in some ways honestly. Which is something that I like. He basically shines as a protagonist. 

He portrays both sides well. Despite at times...honestly, this Stanley is wacky. I shouldn’t be judging. Jim does a good stuff with what he played, and he’s the highlight of this movie. He also delivers possibly my favorite Jim Carrey line of all time now. Sorry if I get this wrong. I was looking for a clip of it to help me.

“Daddy’s gonna go kick some ass”. A literal line from Jim Carrey in this movie and I love it. He even brings a pistol with him.

I also wanna admit Peter Greene as Dorian is pretty good as a villain. The dude can be threatening and he works with what he is given. And he’s effective as an antagonist. I just wanna admit that I swear, one of these guys. One of them could’ve Walter in a way and I just think that could’ve been possible. But I’m not sure. Just one of Dorian’s henchmen looked like a huge guy. It just got me thinking about Walter from the comics.

Will admit, I think Kellaway is fine. And I just found out Christopher Reeve was one of the actors considered for the role...damn. But again, Kellaway was fine. He’s more like a supporting character and again, this is like an origin story. I do feel bothered Lionel Ray wasn’t added but replaced with this Doyle character. I will admit that Doyle is silly, which is the point of his character. I guess the writers and director didn’t want two sensible cops or something. I like Kellaway alright, but I’ll always dig Lionel too.

I really wanted to get this point. I thought Cameron Diaz was good as Tina Carlyle and Amy Yasbeck as Peggy Brandt. I will admit, I do strangely like the subversion with Peggy in a way with it’s twist. I get the idea if that it was going for that theme of, “We all wear mask” and Peggy turning Stanley into the mob said a lot about her character. While Tina was genuinely the one that truly supported Stanley.

I think was surprised me more was the fact despite Peggy turned in Stanley for selfish purposes such as paying for her condo. Yet what surprised me more was she was actually concerned for Stanley being killed, and didn’t want him hurt...which explains even more why she stuck around in the cartoon. And honestly, it makes me glad the director took out that deleted scene of her getting killed. So she wasn’t that heartless.

Also...it made me think that...my ideas and changes towards her character...maybe hold some weight.

I’ll just put this out there too. Milo is great, one of my favorite fictional dogs maybe. Good dog.

Trying to think what else, the score was fine. But the licensed music was good or something. Overall, I think my negatives could be just...nitpicks. Such as the Big Head part I wanted to talk about. Listen, I understand this is a different version. I just feel it’s weird to call him, “The Mask” instead of Big Head. I know other characters mask in their name or something. But...some reasons, the name Big Head is there. I guess it’s because of the title or something.

Honestly, I think my negatives are more that it feels short. And maybe Stanley becoming Big Head a bit too early. I sound kind of stupid, I know. But this was the 90′s and whatever else. This was a different take on the comics. But I did genuinely like it. Maybe I’m just a bit attached to those comics. Despite knowing the changes they did.

But I will admit, considering the development for this film. And learning that it was meant to be a horror film. But the director Charles Russell found the violence in the source material to be off putting. So he made it less grim, and more fun. I’ve also read somewhere that trying to make comedy with that violence was difficult.

Back to the point, to be honest. I feel like for that time and age. A more light Mask film was maybe the best choice to go. And we wouldn’t have Jim Carrey in it. I do also wanna say, I feel like The Mask series, you can do a lot of it. You can have something dark with it, or maybe more lighter.

There are still some of those darker elements. Mainly considering the moments with the gangsters and all that. But I will admit, learning that Charles mostly directed horror films. I think it’s impressive he made a more family friendly film and it worked. 

I liked it, despite my love for the comics. I thought when writing this, maybe some folks reading this may think I sound like fans who read the comics who first experienced this movie. But the film isn’t bad, it’s just a different take and a pretty nice one at that.

And to be honest, as much as I would of loved to see an actual sequel. And not that bad film known as Son Of The Mask. I understand why Jim Carrey dropped out, and I would’ve loved to see Peggy back because the director planned to bring her back reformed. But I feel like this film works as a one off in a way. And there’s also the cartoon, which works fine as a sequel despite some differences. Yet...I’ll admit, I would’ve loved The Mask 2 if we got Jim Carrey as Stanley again fighting against maybe someone like Walter.

The Mask 1994 is a good film. Despite changes from the source material, but the changes for this vision work. It’s cool this film has a cult following, and the fact I have used elements and story beats from it for The Mask Rebirth stuff I’ve been talking about. Even before watched this whole movie.

It’s a genuine fun flick. But I’m hoping down the line, if Warner Bros stops being fucking stupid with how they run things. Maybe we’ll get a reboot or how about an animated film that seems more true to the source material. 

I know The Mask/Big Head doesn’t have a big legacy such as the likes of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. But I do think this series could be reimagined and expanded upon. Using elements not only from the original comics, but even the movie and cartoon. 

And...despite it was because of Ace Ventura...I would like to thank @kaijuguy19 for being such a supportive dude, and talking about this franchise with me. Including wanting to talk about this movie long ago when I haven’t seen it. But I want to say...no...he’s one of the big reasons why I’m a fan. Because he’s one of the only guys I know who’s a fan. It started with Ace Ventura, but it was because of talking with Kaijuguy that I guess things started to escalate. So thanks man for talking about this stuff with me.

Also, Charlie was silly and he was fine as a character. I forgot about that dude despite wanting to talk about him. Gonna tag him too in case. Charlie schumaker

[mldrgrl]

The New Addition

by: mldrgrl rating: PG-13 Summary: Hanella welcomes a guest for the weekend

Even more rare than a call from Becca was a FaceTime.  Texting was more her style.  So, when Hank picked up his phone and saw the incoming video call, he answered immediately.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“That’s how you answer your phone?” Becca said.  “Why does something have to be wrong?”

“Many apologies, Daughter, but the infrequency with which you grace us with your face from a remote location are rare as natural breasts on a porn star.”

“Do you think that’s an appropriate thing to say to a daughter, Father?”

“Fuck no, but surprise calls make me nervous.  What’s up, Kitten?”

“Don’t ever call me that again.  Is Stella there?”

“Yeah, I think she was grading some exams or something, hang on.”  Hank turned away from the phone and leaned over the sofa to try to see down the hall to the back room she was using as a study.  “Stella!  Stelllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

“Oh my god, why are you screaming at her?” Becca said.

“I like to take the opportunity to rehearse my Stanley Kowalski impression when I can.  Here she comes.”

Stella came down the hall with her hands on her hips and her brows raised.  Hank held his phone up so she could see Becca on the screen and she immediately dropped her hands from her hips and softened her brows, but she quickened her step.

“Becca, darling,” Stella said.  “What’s the matter?”

“This is why I only text,” Becca said.

“Well, if you called more, we wouldn’t think shit had hit the fan somewhere.”

Hank opened up his arm as Stella came around to the sofa and sat down.  She leaned against him and he adjusted his grip on the phone so they were both in the frame and so that she could also see Becca.

“I have someone I want you to meet,” Becca said.

“How the hell did you meet someone during a pandemic?” Hanks asked.  “Oh my god, are you online dating?  You know those people usually turn out to be serial killers.”

“Dad!”

“Darling, don’t worry, it’s still statistically a very low probability even if related crimes have been on the rise.  Give me his name and social security number and I’ll run a background check.”

“Or her,” Hank interjected.  “We’re still holding out hope she’s a lesbian.”

“This is the last time I am ever calling you,” Becca said.

“Does your mother know about this guy?”

“Or girl,” Stella added.

Becca sighed and rolled her eyes.  She leaned down and tilted her phone at the same time so the view was of her ceiling and then she came back into frame with a small, brown poodle.  “This is Ziggy,” she said.  “A friend of a friend of mine was giving away her dog’s puppies and I picked him up this morning.”

“Lovely,” Stella said.  “He’s very handsome.”

“I haven’t even met him, but I guarantee this is my favorite guy you’ve ever introduced me to,” Hank added.  “Now you’ll be far too busy for online dating.”

“I’m not online dating, but I’m wondering if you can do me a favor?”

“What’s the favor?”

“Next month I have the writer’s retreat scheduled upstate.  It’s just for a long weekend, Friday to Monday, can you watch Ziggy for me?  He’ll probably be housetrained by then.  Maybe.  Hopefully.”

“Of course,” Stella answered, as Hank also said “Not a chance.”

Becca grimaced slightly.  “It’s just that I’d really rather not have to put him in a kennel.  I guess I can call Mom and see if she can pick him up, but it’s so far.”

Stella squeezed Hank’s knee.  “You don’t need to call Karen,” she said.  “We would love to watch him.”

“Fine,” Hank said.

“Thank you.”  Becca smiled and held the dog closer to the phone.  “Ziggy says thank you as well.”

Hank ended the call and then turned to look at Stella.  She tipped her head back to look at him as well.  He tried to scowl and she smiled.

“Why did you say no?” Stella asked.

“Why did you say yes?” he countered.

“I asked you first.”

“I asked you second.”

“Because I don’t see a reason to say no.”

“Because I got her a dog once and where do you think that dog is now?”

“I wouldn’t know, where is it?”

“I have no fucking idea, that’s the point.  I went through all the trouble to steal the little fucker from the boyfriend of this woman I was...uh, actually it’s irrelevant how I acquired the dog, let’s just say I got a dog for Becca and fuck if I know what happened to the late, great Cat Stevens.”

“What in the world does Cat Stevens have to do with it?”

“That was the dog.”

Stella patted Hank on the knee and then tried to get up from the couch, but Hank pulled her back down.  “I have to grade papers,” she said.

“I just wanted to make sure you knew about the naked shower party I’m having tonight.”

“Wouldn’t any shower party be naked by virtue of being a shower party?”

“That’s a very good point, Sherlock.  I’d revise the invitation, but I’d rather just be redundant.”

“Mmhm.”  She pushed on his knee and this time he let her up.  “Text me the details, I need to get back to grading.”

“What, like a dick pic?” he called after her.

She glanced over her shoulder at him with one eyebrow raised.  He waited until she was back in the study to unbutton his jeans.

*****

Becca dropped the dog off on a Friday morning, bright and early.  Stella was awake to prepare for one of her classes, but Hank was still asleep.  He didn’t hear the drop-off, but when he woke up and wandered into the kitchen to make coffee, he tripped over the dog, stubbed his toe, and shouted a ‘motherfucker’ so loud he was pretty sure he was going to get scolded for it later.  The dog ran away.

“Yeah, you better run,” Hank mumbled, limping to the coffeemaker.  “Fuck.”

Stella startled him not a minute later when she smacked him on the ass.  He jumped and rubbed at his stinging backside, turning to her with a pout.  She was holding the dog in her arms and it was whimpering and holding on to her neck with its head turned away from him.

“What was that for?” he grumbled.

“First, for shouting expletives whilst I was on a lecture.”

“I’m sorry, Sherlock, I didn’t mean to.  Did they hear me?”

“No, fortunately, I was on mute.  There are student presentations today.  Which I must return to.”

“The damn dog tripped me and I stubbed my toe.  It might be broken.”  He leaned against the counter and lifted his foot up to show her his foot.  “See.”

Stella reached out and took a light hold on his toe.  He made a face at her and she gave it a rough tug to which he yelped and pulled his foot back.

“You’re fine,” she said.

“You’re mean.”

“Please don’t make enemies with Becca’s dog for the weekend.”

“He started it.”

Stella handed the dog over to Hank and gave it a scratch on the head before she walked away.  “I put the instructions on the refrigerator,” she said.  “Give them a read and then make yourself useful and take him for a walk.”

Hank pulled a sheet of instructions out from the magnet on the refrigerator and read through them.  They were very detailed.  Too detailed.  He wanted to crumble them up into a little ball and burn them.

“Ridiculous,” he said to the dog.  “When we left Becca with the babysitter the only unwritten rule was just not to kill her.  You’re a dog, you should be pretty self-sufficient.  Just don’t piss on the rug and don’t shit in any of my shoes and we’ll get along fine.  Deal?”

The dog twisted and wriggled in Hank’s arms to be put down and so Hank put him on the floor.  The dog sat down and then lifted a paw to scratch at Hank’s knee.

“Make up your mind, Zig.  Up or down, what do you want?”

The dog barked once and then sneezed.

“I don’t speak canine.”  

Ziggy whined softly and pawed at Hank’s knee again.  The coffeemaker beeped behind Hank and he turned around to shut it off.  He poured the coffee into a travel mug and left the cap off so it could cool a bit.

“Okay, Stella says you need a walk,” he said.  “I need to put some pants on.  Don’t lay anywhere where you blend into the floor.  I need my toes.”

The dog followed Hank into the bedroom and immediately jumped on the bed.  Hank shooed him off and undaunted, he explored from corner to corner, sniffing the walls and the furniture and the clothes on the floor.  Hank snatched up the jeans Ziggy was nosing and put them on.  He grabbed a fresh t-shirt from the closet and then went to dig through a duffel bag that Becca left for the dog’s leash.

It took Hank several attempts at getting the harness onto the dog.  Number one, because he kept stepping out of it as soon as Hank got it on one foot.  Number two, because he initially put it on backwards and didn’t know how the clip could possibly work when it was under the dog’s chest.  He finally figured it out though and it seemed secure.  He grabbed his keys, his wallet, a mask, and the coffee and headed to the elevator.

The half an hour walk with Ziggy made Hank understand the meaning of the term ‘boundless energy.’  If it wasn’t for the coffee, he couldn’t be sure he’d have made it.  When they got back, he unclipped the dog from his harness and even though it felt like they’d just run a marathon, Ziggy dashed across the room and hurdled himself onto the sofa where Stella was now sitting.  To Hank’s surprise, Stella laughed as she dodged excited kisses from the dog and didn’t scold him at all or tell him to get down.

“I am exhausted,” Hank said, collapsing onto the sofa beside Stella.  He grimaced and let out a pained ‘oof’ as the dog stepped on his crotch and up onto his chest.  “Fuck me, this dog is trying to kill me.”

“Have a nice walk?” Stella asked.

“That thing had to piss every five feet and terrorize all the squirrels and pigeons in the neighborhood.”  Hank pushed Ziggy away when he tried to lick his chin and the dog laid down on his chest, panting hot and heavy in his face.

“How’s your toe?”

“What toe?  Oh.  Not broken, I guess.”

“Lovely.”

“He is a total chick magnet though,” Hank said, waggling his eyebrows at Stella.  “Ladies were flocking to me like flies to honey.  Almost got a few numbers.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t worry I told them my wife would kick my ass before she let me take a hot girl’s phone number.”

“I think I might join you for this afternoon’s walk.”

Hank chuckled and nudged Stella’s leg with his knee.  “Kidding, Sherlock.  Some kid did ask me if Ziggy had an Insta and then had to explain to me that any dog who’s anydog has an Instagram account and we should get on it the sooner the better if we want him to be a doggie influencer.”

“A what?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Looks like you have a new nap partner.”  Stella inclined her chin towards the dog, who had dropped his head down to Hank’s shoulder and let out a deep sigh as his eyes closed.  She smiled a little and stroked the dog’s back a few times.

“I didn’t know you liked dogs so much,” Hank said.

“More of a cat person, really.  I don’t mind them though.”

“Did you read that list Becca left?  It’s more complicated than the Treaty of Versailles.”

Stella chuckled.  “It is a rather overly complicated schedule.  For a dog.”

“I say fuck the list.  I kept her ass alive for the requisite 18 years without a list, I can probably handle a dog for a weekend.”

“Tell that to Cat Stevens.”

“Oh yeah.  Wherever the fuck he is.  Okay, maybe we better stick to the list.  Though I would like to point out, Cat was Becca’s dog.”

“Maybe that’s why she made a list this time.”

*****

Ziggy was sound asleep when Hank turned off the lights in the main room.  The dog was passed out on his back, in his bed beside the couch, tongue lolling out of his mouth.  Hank tiptoed past him into the bedroom and quietly shut the door.  Stella was in the bathroom brushing her teeth.  He came up behind her and pressed her into the counter with his hips, sneaking his hands up her shirt to massage her breasts.

Stella grunted slightly through her nose and pushed her hips back into Hank’s.  She put her hand up to hold her hair back and Hank pulled his hands out from her shirt to do it for her.  She leaned over to spit into the sink and he held her hair with one hand and stroked her neck with the other.

“Thank you,” she said.

Hank finger-combed Stella’s hair up into his fist at the top of her head while she wiped her mouth and then he let it go and rubbed her shoulders.  She turned around and he held her by the hips.

“Where’s the dog?” she asked.

“Outside smoking a cigarette.”

“Do you think he should go outside once more?”

“He’s dead asleep.  He was like…”  Hank imitated the dog, rolling his eyes back and sticking his tongue out of the side of his mouth.

“You’re the one that was worried about him urinating on the rug.”

Hank pouted his lips and then nodded.  “Fine, I’ll take him upstairs.  But, you better be naked when I come back, or else I’m sleeping on the couch with the dog.”

“I don’t think that’s the threat you believe it to be.”

Hank narrowed his eyes and pinched Stella’s hip before putting his mouth to her neck and nipping lightly at the back of her jaw.  She laughed and pushed at his chest until he let her go.  He playfully slapped at her backside on the way out of the bathroom and she swatted his hands away.

The dog was still sleeping when he opened the door, but he whistled softly and Ziggy startled to his feet and then shook himself.  “Come on, hairball, we’re going outside.”  He snapped his fingers a few times and the dog followed him to the door to the roof.

Ziggy was hesitant on the stairs, taking them slowly and pausing every few steps to get his footing as he hopped up.  He ran around the newly landscaped deck, sniffing just about every nook and cranny and lifting his leg on half of them.  It had gotten chilly since the sun went down and Hank, in bare feet and a t-shirt, hopped up and down a few times and rubbed his arms as he called the dog back.

Hank was forced to carry the dog down the stairs when he wouldn’t budge from the top.  He made a few false starts, but ultimately sat down and wouldn’t move.  When he put him down, Ziggy stared up at him and then stayed closed to his legs as he went back to the bedroom.

“You, stay,” Hank said, pointing to the dog bed.

Ziggy sat down next to the bed.  Hank closed the door.  Stella was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine or journal, which she set down on her lap and took her reading glasses off.

“Did you really think that’s going to work?” she asked.

“He’s fine.”

Before Hank even finished, Ziggy was yelping and scratching at the door.  Stella raised her brows and Hank sighed.  He opened the door and the dog came flying through, jumped on the bed and leapt onto Stella with his paws on her chest, wagging his tail and kissing her cheek and chin.

“Settle, darling,” Stella said, turning her face away and pushing the dog back.  He gave a whining bark as he dropped down.

“Do they make ritalin for dogs?”

“He’s just a baby.”

Hank kicked the dog bed into the bedroom and then pushed it against the wall with his foot.  “Go get in your bed,” he said.

Ziggy laid down where he was, next to Stella.  He put his head on his paws and lifted his eyes up at Hank.

“Now he’s giving me puppy dog eyes,” Hank said.

“Shockingly, I believe that’s where that term came from.”

“Well, I don’t like it.  It’s too effective.”

“Resign yourself to the fact that we have a little guest for the weekend.”

Hank grumbled under his breath as he went to the bathroom to get ready for bed.  He stripped to his jockey shorts and snapped off the overhead lights on his way back.  Ziggy looked up from beside Stella like Hank was the intruder.  He even had the audacity to give a little growl when Hank leaned over to give his wife a kiss.  Annoyed, Hank flopped onto his back and the dog scooted closer and rested his head on his arm.

“Oh, now you want to be nice,” Hank said, reaching over to scratch the dog on the head.  “I’m surprised Becca hasn’t called.”

“What do you mean?”

“To check up on the dog or let us know she made it to the retreat.”

“She’s been texting me all day.”

“What?  What did she want?”

“Checking up on the dog.”

“She doesn’t trust us?”

“You didn’t question her motivations five seconds ago when you were surprised she hadn’t called.”

“I like to be fickle to keep you on your toes.”

Ziggy sighed and squirmed until he was on his back, all four paws limp in the air.  Stella chuckled and rubbed his chest before she closed her magazine and tossed it onto the nightstand.

“We’re letting this thing stay up here, then?” Hank asked.

“Yes.”

“I think I’m more of a cat person too.”

*****

Hank was surprised that the dog was no trouble during the night.  He woke briefly when Stella, always an early riser, got up and said she was going to take Ziggy for his morning walk and when she got back, would be entering in project results into her electronic gradebook for a bit.  He grunted in response and mumbled a reminder to leave him some coffee.

When he finally woke fully, left the bedroom far more cautiously than he had the previous morning.  Ziggy was nowhere to be found, but as soon as he started puttering in the kitchen, the dog appeared.  Hank crouched down and gave him a few scratches.

“What were you up to, hm?” he asked.  “Getting into trouble?”

Ziggy followed Hank as he went to the bedroom, most likely interested in the piece of toast in his hand.  Hank held the toast between his teeth, wiped his hands on his jeans, and picked up his phone from the nightstand to text Becca.

Morning sweetheart.  The furball is good.  Not to worry.  Haven’t shipped him off to a kennel yet and probably won’t.  Have a good time at the retreat.

Hank took a bite of his toast and then tore a piece off and tossed it to the dog.  Ziggy caught it mid-air.  About thirty seconds later, he heard Stella calling his name and he snapped his fingers at the dog to get him to follow him out of the bedroom.

“What’s up?” Hank asked, and shoved the rest of the toast into his mouth.

“What did you say to Becca?”

“Hm?” he mumbled, mouth full.

“She just texted me and said you’ve implied the dog has been sent to a kennel and wants proof of life.”

“No I didn’t,” he said.  “I said I haven’t sent the dog to a kennel so she doesn’t need to worry.”

“Why would you say that to her?”

“So she wouldn’t worry.”

“Well, she’s worried.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“I’ll send her a photo.  Ziggy, come here, darling.”  

Stella kissed the air a few times, but Ziggy thought trying to be caught was a game.  He bounded away from Stella and then stopped and bowed down, his hind end in the air and tail wagging.  She patted her knee for him to come, but he just jumped a few feet to the left and went back into the same pose.

“I’ll get him.”  Hank started towards the dog and Ziggy barked and then ran to the kitchen.  Hank ended up chasing him around the butcher’s block several times before he was able to catch him, but keeping hold of him was difficult.  “Stay still, Zig.”

Stella knelt down and quickly opened the camera on her phone.

“What’re you doing?” Hank asked.

“Taking a photo.”

“A selfie?”

“Do you have another suggestion?”

“I don’t know, I don’t do selfies.  Unless they’re dick pics.”

“Yes, I am aware, but we won’t be sending your daughter a photo of your penis.”

“Well hurry up, this guy is a bitch to hold onto.”

“Smile, darling.”  Both Stella and Hank smiled as she held down the photo button, but Ziggy wriggled and squirmed.  

“Anything usable?” Hank asked, setting the dog free.

“A little blurry, but they should suffice.”  Stella got up and texted the photos to Becca.  “She says thank you, and for you to never fucking text her again.”

“Brat.”

“You started it.”

*****

The day passed.  They took the dog to the park.  He napped when they got back.  Hank worked on his book.  Stella worked on a report for her class.  In the evening, they lit a fire in the new firepit on the roof and cuddled up on the daybed with the dog between them.

“Should we get a cat?” Hank asked.

“Do you want a cat?”  Stella countered.

“Not really.”

“Me neither.”

“It is kind of nice having this little hairball around though.  Not that I want him to stay.  He’s also annoying as fuck.  But, nice to have around.  For an hour or two.  When he’s asleep.”

“Kind of like you.”

“Hey!”

Stella laughed and Hank pushed her down onto the bed, rising to his knees to lean over and nuzzle her neck.  It was a ticklish spot for her, especially when caressed lightly, and it made her laugh harder.  Ziggy barked from where he was wedged beside Stella and under Hank.  He wiggled out from under them and then jumped on Hank’s back with his front paws, barking and growling.

“Relax, man,” Hank said, rolling to one hip off of Stella.  

“He’s being a good protector,” Stella said, laughing when Ziggy nipped at the blanket over their legs and tried to pull it away.

“He’s being a cockblocker.”  Hank wrestled the blanket back from the dog and then grabbed him under the chin, giving him a few firm scratches.  “You know what, Zig?  You be a cockblocker.  You be the best cockblocker you can be, at Becca’s place.  Cockblock the shit out of Becca, okay?”

Ziggy barked and wagged his tail.

“Good boy,” Hank said.  “Good little cockblocker.”

“Don’t say that to him,” Stella said.

“Why not?”

“One day you will need to face the fact that your daughter is a grown woman who deserves a healthy sex life.”

“Oh my god, I’m going to throw up.”  Hank groaned and flopped down onto the bed with his arm over his eyes.  “Consider me officially cockblocked.”

Stella moved up onto her hip this time and put her arm over Hank’s chest.  She kissed his chin and then pulled his bottom lip between her teeth.  He grabbed her around the waist and grunted softly into her mouth.  Ziggy trampled the both of them and stuck his cold nose into Hank’s cheek.

“Gah!” Hank groaned.  

The licked furiously at the both of them and Stella released Hank’s lip with a laugh and a scrunched face.  She buried her head down into Hank’s neck while curling into his side and Ziggy tried to wedge his snout down to keep licking her face.

“We are officially never, ever, ever, ever getting a dog,” Hank said.

“No argument from me,” Stella answered, sliding away from the dog and Hank and stepping off the bed.  “Meet me downstairs and I guarantee you won’t be cockblocked.”

“Oh?”

“Naked shower party for two in ten minutes.”

“The naked is redundant!” he called after her as she walked away.  He waited until she had started down the stairs to take Ziggy’s face in his hands.  “Listen.  This is a cockblock free zone, you got that?  Keep it up and you just may end up like Cat Stevens.  We good?”

Ziggy gave a short, gruff bark and then lifted his paw.  Hank nodded and they shook on it.  He got up and let Ziggy explore the roof for a few minutes while he folded the blanket up and put out the fire.  Not for long though.  He had a naked party to get to and he didn’t want to be late.

The End

[r3almellow]

MLQC Boys With A Famous S/o

Here we go! Thank you anon for this request I hope its to your liking!! Apologies for typos as always!

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Kiro (YouTuber S/o)

How did you meet ?

You were a YouTuber that had over 500,000 subscribers. During a Mukbang Q&A video you received a question in regards to your celebrity crush. 

“I think the big ass poster currently behind me kind of gives it away, but my ultimate crush is Kiro. I’d give anything to meet him at least once.” You went even as far as to give him a shout out. “Hey, super star! I heard you were a big foodie and since you like to eat and I like to eat, maybe we can eat together sometime? Okay, that was dumb, please ignore this!”

Little did you know, Kiro was a huge fan of your videos and just so happened to see your request. Next thing you knew a clip of you “shooting your shot” made its way to his social media page with a caption of “Its a date ;)” right above it. You just about died when you saw his post. You were only joking around! Well...not 100% joking, but you didn’t expect him to respond! 

You spent weeks talking to each other through private messages soon after. Your messages filled with gushing over your similar interests, playful banters and light flirting. He offered to be a part of your next Mukbang stating that it was better to have two people eating themselves into a coma on camera than one. You couldn’t argue with facts and took him up on his offer! Kiro only had one condition...you let him take you out on a date afterwards.

And the rest was history. 

Dating

The cutest couple to have ever existed! 

Both of your social media pages are filled with couple photos. 

You both get to dress up in disguise whenever you go on dates! A baseball cap, sunglasses, and face masks are your usual go to’s, but depending on where you’re going you might be required to get a little creative. 

Dealing with overly excited fans and even more persistent paparazzi was a bit new for you, since your interactions with people is mostly through the internet, but you handle it pretty well.

Interviewers practically threw themselves onto every opportunity to get information about your love life. Kiro was more skilled than you about these things, so you tend to just laugh awkwardly and let him take care of it. 

Kiro appears a little more in your videos whenever he’s free which the fans are grateful for. Of course, your channel doesn’t turn into all things Kiro and you never use him for your own personal gain. 

Dating Kiro did open up some opportunities for you, like getting to experience award shows and networking with other celebrities and content creators. Again, you refused to throw Kiro’s name around just to get the things you wanted. 

You both like to bounce ideas off of each other, whether its for his music or for your latest video. Having two creative minds come together does wonders! 

You’re almost always somewhere in the background during his live streams.  

Gavin (Actress S/o)

How did you meet? 

High school. You were a part of the drama club and Gavin was...well...forced into being a part of the stagehand after being threatened with expulsion from his last brawl. 

You were the first one to welcome him. You were kind, funny, and cute. And when you were on that stage? Mesmerizing was the best way to put how Gavin saw you. You were inspiring. 

After graduation Gavin lost contact with most of his acquaintances, but he never once stopped thinking about you. Gavin wasn’t big on celebrity news, but he actually kept up with your progress once he got wind of a newcomer taking the entertainment world by storm. 

Fast forward to a few years later and he was playing bodyguard for one of the most successful actresses in the world. You. This was just an undercover job that was going to last as long as his target was still out there. 

There was definitely chemistry between you. And while Gavin wanted to act on his feelings, his work had to come first. You respected that, but that didn’t mean you weren’t going to let him know you were interested. How could you not be? You had a huge crush on him back in high school and now that he was by your side practically every day those feelings came back with a vengeance! 

As soon as Gavin’s objective was complete he continues being your bodyguard stating, “Only I can keep you out of trouble.” Which you responded by kissing him.

Dating

Once word got out about you dating your “bodyguard”, it shocked many that you decided to be with someone that wasn’t a celebrity. 

Even so, Gavin doesn’t look like your average Joe. He has the body and face of man who could easily be on the cover of Vogue or Vanity Fair, but you know your man isn’t about that life. 

You’ve spent years being a private person, so when you and Gavin start dating not revealing much was easy. The public only knew what you wanted them to. 

There are a lot of at home dates filled with takeout and movie night. Just being in each others company is more than enough for you!

You work out together a lot! He’s really good about motivating you especially when you have to prepare for an upcoming movie. You honestly don’t need a personal trainer when you have Gavin. 

The paparazzi are afraid of Gavin. Like they won’t even get within six feet of you whenever he’s around. The last poor soul who got a little too close for your liking ate asphalt within seconds.

Gavin isn’t one for the limelight or the glitz and glam, which you appreciate. Its nice to be around someone that isn’t a part of the entertainment world. 

You don’t have to hide a part of yourself, in fear of judgement, whenever you were with him. You appreciated Gavin’s genuine nature. He was always truthful with you and he never gave the impression that he was only with you because of your status. 

Gavin does a great job with making you feel special. Whenever you feel like you don’t meet the standards of what the industry wants, he pulls you out of that dark hole and gives you the pep talk you need to get through the day.

You could walk around without an ounce of makeup on or trade in a Dior dress for sweatpants and a t-shirt, and Gavin still found you beautiful. 

Victor ( Famous Pianist S/o)

How did you meet? 

Victor was a fan of your work for quite some time. There was something about your raw talent that drew him to your work. He always made it a point to go to all your live shows whenever he was available, but has never met you personally. 

It wasn’t until you waltzed right into his office out of the blue. When he saw you enter his office with Goldman and two security guards tailing right behind you, he didn’t even recognize you. You looked as if you had just rolled out of bed with a messy bun, ripped jeans, t-shirt with some random cartoon character and thick rimmed glasses. His first thought as you stared him down with a frown was, “Who let this homeless person into his office?” 

When Goldman called your name as the two security guards grabbed your arms, Victor had to do a double take. The elegant and graceful woman, who commanded the stage with just pads of her fingertips, was...YOU?! 

Victor allowed you to stay, curious to know why you were here. You business with Victor was simple. You wanted funding to create music schools for low income families. You had sent countless emails to LFG with hopes to do business with them, but after being ignored the first few times and receiving a rude rejection email that morning, you were ready to take the bull by the horns. 

Surprisingly Victor found himself intrigued by you and thus started an interesting partnership. 

The more Victor got to work with you the more he became attracted to the headstrong, smart, and talented person who seemingly enjoyed ruffling his feathers every chance they got. 

You were also attracted to the blunt, detail-oriented man and it bothered you to no-end. What you saw in a man who probably would critique drawings from a toddler, you had no idea. But you appreciated his work ethic. He genuinely wanted you to succeed with this project and you couldn’t deny his heart was in the right place. 

The day the first school opened was the day Victor decided to stop tiptoeing around the mutual attraction and asked you out.

“We can celebrate your accomplishments over dinner.” 

Dating

The CEO of LFG and the child prodigy turned world famous pianist dating?!

CAN WE SAY POWER COUPLE?!

Whenever paparazzi get a picture of the two of you, you both look as if you just finished a professional photoshoot. You NEVER look bad in those photos. Never! 

And when you do professional shoots? It leaves people SHOOK. Magazines like Forbes have never had such a beautiful couple grace their covers before. Just wait until people see your wedding photos.

You always ask him to visit you during your rehearsals which he almost always declines but shows up anyway, if he’s not too busy. He’ll also bring a box of his homemade pudding because knowing you, you probably were too busy with preparations for your upcoming concert to eat. He’ll take you out to eat afterwards, but the pudding should hold you over for a bit.

Victor will never admit this to you, but your music helps him de-stress after a long day at work, so whenever he isn’t with you, your music helps him fall asleep. 

Victor also likes to watch you work. Seeing you so focused as you create your next piece was a sight to beheld. The pensive look in your eyes as you went over your music sheet, the slow nod of your head as your fingers danced across the keys as you intently listened to the melody, and the way your eyebrow twitched when you hit a key you didn’t like; all things oddly enjoyed seeing.

You’ll never catch him staring. He’ll pretend he’s working whenever you feel his eyes on you and if you try to call him out on it, he will most likely deny it. 

Lucien ( Novelist S/o)

How did you meet? 

You needed the help of someone knowledgeable with neuroscience for your next book. Someone recommended a Professor at Loveland University who specialized on the topic. That was how you met Professor Lucien. 

You two worked closely together once you started your manuscript, going over various topics under the neuroscience category. It wasn’t surprising just how intelligent the man was on the subject, but you were in awe about how much you knew.

Your meetings would often start at the university which led to you going home together once you found out he lived in the same building as you. You leveled up from the lecture hall to aquariums, movie theaters, restaurants, and his apartment where you had lunch or dinner. 

Your conversations never stayed on the topic of work. It often changed to your interests. You found that you and Lucien had a lot of similar interests like your taste in books and art. He also developed a love for teasing you. 

Seeing the look on your flustered face turned into one of his favorite pastimes.

When it came to the topic of your books, you learned Lucien has read quite a few of them and was very intrigued with your work. He asked you numerous questions, questions no one thought to ask. 

He admitted to you his favorite of yours was the first book he ever read titled, “The Boy Who Dreamed.” You jokingly offered to sign his book, but he declined with a smile.

“I’ll admit I do enjoy the book, but I’m more interested in the woman who wrote it.” 

Dating

More dates at your favorite places. 

Almost every other week, Lucien seemed to have tickets to art exhibits, festivals, or the movies. 

His teasing intensifies by a hundred! That man loves to tease you and you hate it! You love it. 

The closer you got to Lucien, the more you realized he didn’t enjoy talking about himself, so it takes a while to learn about him or his past. You never press him for information, but he does reveal things to you within time.

Lucien loves when you read to him. Its how he falls asleep and once you find out he has trouble sleeping, you always suggest what you call “story time.” 

In truth, having you by his side is more than enough to get him to sleep, but if you aren’t there hearing your voice will do the trick. You could be reading anything and he’d be fine with it. From Dr. Seuss to H.G. Wells, Lucien was fine with it as long as he got hear your voice.

You like to ask for his opinion on your latest projects. He does a great job making you think outside of the box which will make things easier or challenging during your writing sessions. 

Whenever you encounter writer’s block, Lucien will pull you away from your laptop and mountains of papers to enjoy a nice relaxing day with him. 

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Doooone! Please comment if you enjoyed this! I’d love to know what you guys think!

Want to read more of my writing? Check out my MLQC masterlist here!

[slasher-party]

Leslie Vernon’s Secret 2021 Short Film: Wait For It

J: Calling all Leslie Vernonites! This info is MUST KNOW for all fans of the Glen Echo slasher! So even if you already know about this project, please consider reading & sharing so more fans can get excited about this!  (This is a post I’ve been REALLY excited to make for a while, so I really hope you enjoy and spread the news!) Lace your boots up, kiddies; this is gonna be a looong post. I’m putting every step of my discovery path in here. That way you have access to all my sources:

We begin our journey on YouTube back in July. I was fooling around, watching some Leslie content, and was recommended  Joebizz34's 1/6 Behind The Mask Leslie Vernon custom figure video (tip: bold words from this point forward are most likely links). I thought it was super cool! And it had about 1k views. A small plug! But I scrolled down into the comments... and spotted a familiar face.

‘Nathan?!’ I thought to myself. Was this his actual YouTube account? That singular like is my own, by the way. So odds are, Joebizz34 himself hasn’t even seen this comment (or doesn’t realize who this is). Step One: Investigating Nathan’s Channel A natural skeptic, I assumed this was a fan account and set out to prove myself wrong. (Here’s the link: Nathan Baesel) At the beginning of all of this, this was the main task I was attempting to accomplish.

Pulling up his page, there isn’t much to look at. Just a clip from an old movie and a short video of someone who clearly isn’t Nathan Baesel. He also only has a handful of followers, but that didn’t deter me and I decided to look deeper. 

Popping over to his own subscriptions, another familiar face jumped out at me:

Ben Pace! Who you might recognize as the man who played Doug in Behind the Mask!

Double-checking this page as well, this is definitely his channel. 

And Leslie/Nathan fangirls will find a particular little treat in this pinned video of his, Hello Jogger:

Absolutely fantastic, the both of them. 

So this is a good sign, but Ben doesn’t follow him back, and I couldn’t find any interaction between them with this account. So this isn’t definitive proof.  Step Two: the 197 MPH Promo Going back to his channel, I checked out the first video he had up... with only 15 views on it. 

Now, this guy I didn’t recognize. So I jumped in to see if I could figure out who it was, and low-and-behold, you’re looking at David J. Stieve, the writer of Behind the Mask. And that man in the back? In the stripes? Well, check out the video yourself and you’ll see:

Now, there’s a lot to unpack here. Keep in mind - I was just trying to figure out whether or not this was Nathan’s actual YouTube channel for fun. Now I’m going nuts cause there’s apparently some short-film set in the Behind the Mask universe that I haven’t heard about?! At this point, I can’t say for sure this is Nathan’s actual YouTube account, but I can definitely confirm that that is Nathan in the video, and this main guy is David Stieve, the writer of Behind the Mask. (Also, can I just say, I live for Nathan’s sass? He’s just the best, guys.) But my goal had changed. Now I needed to find out what this Wait for It project was all about. Step Three: Discovering Wait for It I jumped on over to IMDB and there it is: Wait for It (2021)

Check out that unnamed boy. That’s right, folks.  You’re looking at a secret Behind the Mask project. (That little bit of trivia that says they’re linked was actually added by me. Sorry for the bad wording - I tried to fix it but IMDB wouldn’t let me, so, what can I do.) Now, talk about being hard to find! Without my addition, there’s nothing that points to this having anything to do with Leslie. Even with Nathan & David’s involvement. I checked Twitter today, and there are only a few tweets (with the #WaitForIt tag) that refer to this project and not Hamilton. David hasn’t said anything about it, Nathan hasn’t said anything about it. That I saw. I did an advanced search but if I accidentally misspelled something and they have mentioned it, please let me know. From this tweet:

I was able to find the IndieGogo for the project:

Which was closed a long time ago, with only 36 backers, where B4TM got roughly 300. One can only assume it was an exposure issue, but it doesn’t seem like they really advertised it. However, I wasn’t a Vernonite back in 2017, so I can’t really say that for sure. The last update was from 2018, which stated that things were in motion for the project: 

But then again, the last update on the B4TM Indiegogo is outdated, stating issue #6 is in production when I have it sitting on my desk right now. So who knows where this project lies. It could be even further along than the update suggests, and after all, the IMDB does say 2021. One last update I found poking around the official B4TM Facebook page: 

Now, this is a little strange. You have the Behind the Mask crew here, and given the title of the page this is posted on, one would assume this “screening” is for Behind the Mask. But looking at the date, and the now-familiar-to-us posters on the table, that might not be the case.

So, does that mean this short film is finished and unreleased? Does that mean we see Taylor and crew in the film? Or are they there to support the creators? I’m leaning toward the latter. A streaming party was also an incentive for backing the Wait for It fundraiser. I’m lead to believe they premiered a rough-cut of the short film, and that’s what we’re looking at in this photo. That may also be where the technical data on IMDB is pulled from, but that rough cut isn’t available to us, and the finished project isn’t either. If it is I can’t find it, otherwise it’d be part of this post.  I also did check the collector’s edition Blu-ray (which I’ve yet to get myself but I do want it for the incentive of extended/deleted scenes, the interviews, and the movie commentary), but Wait for It was not listed as part of the bonus features.  Now, this interview has the most information about the project’s details out of everything out there I’ve seen so far. It’s an audio-only over the phone interview a horror channel did with David Stieve back in 2017.

For details on what Wait for It is about, and how it fits into the Leslie universe, it would be better to listen to this interview than for me to write it all out.

Step Four: What now?

Well, I realized that I might have found something that maybe a lot of people don’t know about, but they should. So, I’m putting this together! While we can’t back the project monetarily anymore, we can support it, the creator, and the Leslie Universe by spreading as much awareness about it as possible.  With that said, this is all the information I’ve found, with the links included. Poke around and see if you turn up anything else! And if this project is available somewhere, even as a rough cut (but so long as it’s posted legally), please do share! I love Leslie, I love Taylor, and I love what the Behind the Mask universe stands for. I love David Stieve’s mindset, and if I won the lottery tomorrow, I would immediately call him up and tell him any Leslie projects he had planned were now completely funded. I’m really just that passionate about this franchise. 

Thank you so much for reading this!  I hope you found out something new, or you at least now have a post with all the information about Wait for It gathered in one place. Like I mentioned at the beginning, please consider sharing so all the Vernonites know about it! As always, much love to all of you, and the Slasher community!  XOXO, Mod Jess

[madamspeaker]

It’s not a “gate” - The hair/salon thing

I’ve addressed the salon thing in a couple of asks, but I wanted to take a moment to just go through the whole thing separate of those because what this saga has highlighted is a complete failure of journalists to do their work, and the undercurrent of misogyny that perpetuates both journalistic discourse, and how women must present themselves, especially if a public figure.

(This is long, so to spare your dashboards it’s under a cut)

Let’s start with the facts. Nancy’s usual stylist wasn’t available for Monday, so she/he recommended someone else. Nancy’s office contacted him last weekend (Nancy only returned to SF some time on Friday), and asked if it was possible to do her hair. The thing to note at this moment is that the rules governing salons in California started to change from last Friday. The governor had announced limited indoor openings, but to confuse matters some localities were still imposing tighter restrictions. Nancy’s office checked with the stylist, who told them that the rules permitted one person in at a time. He then asked the salon owner who he rented a chair from if he could go into the premises and do the appointment on Monday. The owner agreed to his request on the Saturday. Fast forward to Monday afternoon - Nancy gets her hair done before doing a television interview on MSNBC, and then on Tuesday the owner cries “outrage!!!” to Fox News, bringing along with her a seconds long bit of footage that shows Nancy with her mask around her neck. Naturally the whole thing explodes on Twitter and then across other media (several versions of the story made the top ten shared links on Facebook).

What followed was a failure of journalism to ask follow up questions about the clearly odd parts of the salon owner’s account as relayed by Fox News (a red flag in of itself). In her interview with Fox she admitted she had known about the appointment in advance, but no one thought to ask why she let the appointment go ahead if it so offended and outraged her - she did own the place afterall, it’s not like Nancy had keys or barged in. Likewise, no one thought to ask where the rest of the salon footage was. Why only release seconds worth which rather conveniently showed Nancy with her mask down, and partially hidden under her chin? Could it be that she had worn the mask the rest of the time. No one in the media thought to ask this. It seemed fairly clear to most sensible people on Tuesday night that something with off with the salon owner’s tale of outrage, but the media pretty much took the Fox News version of events at verbatim. Only USA Today raised the points I just did, but alas, they buried them in their write up.

Wednesday saw Nancy fight back, acknowledging that she took responsibilty for trusting the salon (when perhaps she should have had someone else verify what they had been told), but ask yourselves this, would you have verified it elsewhere? She had been to this salon before with a stylist, they were local, she trusted them, and in a situation in which the law was changing, it makes perfect and reasonable sense to ask the professionals in that industry what their status is. On this point there have been plenty of indignant people and bots on Twitter up in arms that Nancy didn’t apparently know the regulations in SF, but a) she didn’t make those regulations (as some seem to think), b) she spends just as much if not more time in D.C., and c) she has about 100 other things on her plate in any given hour, that salon regulations in SF are probably somewhere near 120 on her list after deal with Covid-19, Trump, win the election, save the USPS, try to get a stimulus bill, deal with the federal budget which will need a CR to prevent a shutdown (minutes after I hit publish on this it was announced she had reached a deal with Mnuchin to avoid a shutdown), restore in-person inteligence briefings, file an appeal in the McGahn case (again), Bill sodding Barr,, Russian bounties on US soldiers and so on. She has an insanely stressful job at the moment, her staff too, and it seems more than reasonable for staff/her to ask a professional in the industry about the regulations on salons, when such regulations were pretty confusing to most people last weekend anyway. Nancy’s only apparent “crime” in this instance was to trust the word of the industry pro.

Then of course we have the “she’s not wearing a mask” portion of this debacle. Not one journalist has asked where the rest of the footage is. We see Nancy walk from the bowl to another room, wet hair, phone in hand, and the mask around her neck (slightly hidden by her chin), but we never got the footage of her walking to the bowl, or any other footage from what was definitely more than a 4 second long appointment. Could it possibly be that she had indeed been wearing a mask the rest of the time - that she wasn’t just wearing it around her neck as some sort of foulard meets choker fashion statement. People have asked, “Why did she pull it down?”, and to that I will say, probably any one of three or four reasons. She uses a clip at the back of her neck to secure her masks rather than the ear loops. Maybe it was in the way and the stylist asked her to pull it down. Maybe she had trouble breathing with her face covered and head back. Maybe she didn’t want to get it wet. The point here is that it was around her neck, suggesting that she had been compliant until that fateful video captured moment. The media again though have run with the Fox News narrative that she had no mask. For one, it’s actually visible in the footage, and two, they are blatantly disregarding what they themselves know to be true - that Nancy has been wearing a mask for the last five months. We have the footage and photographs to prove it, not to mention the press also know that she takes down her mask to talk at her pressers etc. The press are playing stupid on this point to satisfy some both sides need in an election that so far has Joe Biden with a good lead. Their wilful obtusity is purely to inject some drama into things on the Dem side for clicks because nothing at present is sticking to Biden. All this leads to me to the misogyny.

I caught part of a radio interview yesterday in which two male hosts had to have it explained to them as to why a woman in the public eye might need a hair stylist more than once a week. One of the men had been perplexed as to why if Nancy needed her hair done she hadn’t just got it taken care of in D.C. were salons are open. It never entered his brain that no amount of hair spray is going to keep a hairstyle in place for at least 3 days (when Nancy was last in D.C.), or that she might need to lie down to sleep, or that hair does actually need washed. Likewise, it never occured to either of them that Nancy turning up to an television interview with anything other than styled hair would be a news story in itself, because here’s the rub, women are damned for makeup and hairstyling and thought vain and shallow, and they’re damned if they don’t put makeup on and get their hair done, especially for television (we all remember the “omg” reactions when Hillary turned up to an event days after the election in 2016 with a bare face). The last couple of days have been full of this crap, with men (looking at you Don Lemon and the SF Chronicle editorial board) especially saying Nancy should apologise for the salon episode. Why should she? She did what any reasonable person would do and asked about the rules. Her error was to take the salon at their word, but by today’s logic the salon’s lie is Nancy’s fault. I have seen more than one man on Twitter admit the facts of the case and still say “she should take the hit”. Would they say this of a man who had been lied to, framed, and the footage sold to a hostile media company? I think not.

And then of course there is the salon owner herself. The stylist released a statement last night backing Nancy’s side of events up. He also revealed that the owner, so “outraged” by Nancy’s appointment, had in fact been opening up illegally since April, had been forgoing masks, and been forcing stylists to work. What also emerged is that the owner had let her licence lapse on the premises back in May (so Nancy had not ended her business as she claimed), and was in the middle of relocating to Fresno -- something the press have gilbly ignored as they report how she has been hounded out of town because of Nancy, and forced to move. Let me say this, not even the IRA at the peak of The Troubles could get people to move that quick, and they had guns. And then there’s the gofundme - which popped up less than 24hrs after she handed the tape to Fox. Naturally the blurb is a sorry tale of woe, of a supposedly single mother forced to move because of the evil Speaker of the House. No mention that she owns three salons, that she’d let the licence lapse on one anyway, is opening one in Fresno, loves her guns (and those ain’t cheap) and took a PPP loan of $12,000 wihilst operating illegally. By the way, at the time of writing this, the gofundme has raised over $80k for her -- which shows you how Trumpers will buy into any bullshit, and how Nancy is a fundraising powerhouse regardless of your party affliation lol.

I appreciate this has been a rather long read, and if you made it this far, thanks! Nancy didn’t do anything wrong other than take the word of a salon in good faith. Should she have known the regulations herself? Maybe, but she has the kind of crazy and stressful life most of us can’t even begin to imagine, and unlike the Presidency, the Office of Speaker doesn’t come with personal maid services thrown in, or a whole West Wing of staff. End of the day, once out of that office, Nancy has to do all that normal life stuff that the rest of us do - shop, go to the post office, buy clothes etc., and now in the Covid era get ready for tv interviews herself rather than a studio stylist do it. Her mistake was to trust someone who has it turns out saw a chance to have a moment of fame, stick one to the woman she ignorantly blamed for the lockdown, and make some money from gullible Trumpers. I don’t know how this story will play out in the coming days. Ice cream lasted a week, spurred on by the far-left and then the far-right. This may have more staying power as Trump desperately seeks some kind of mud to stick to Dems, and with nothing sticking to Biden at present, his 2016 playbook (and the even older GOP one) of blame a woman (in this case Nancy) has been deployed. The problem of course is that Trump isn’t running against Nancy -- but as the press have so depressingly showed, that fact hasn’t stopped them from elevating one trip to a salon above 180k+ dead, Melania using a prvate email server (!!!, I mean come the fuck onnnnnnn, this after 2016!!!?!?!?), or Trump telling people to committ a felony and vote twice.

[itsallavengers]

Word of Mouth

“Let me speak to them.”

Natasha and Fury turned as Steve stormed in, both of their faces hardening. Nat stepped forward, a placating hand outstretched and telling him to stop, but Steve ignored her without sparing a second glance. His eyes were on the screen pulled up in the middle of the room, where two men were stood, semi-automatics in hand and ridiculous Vendetta masks perched on their faces. In between them, tied up to a chair and unconscious, was Tony. Steve gave him a visual once-over. He seemed okay. Bruised face, but nothing severe. 

“Captain,” Fury began coldly, but Steve turned to him and levelled him with such a glare that it made even the Director pause. He was going to be having serious words with the man for not informing him that they were in contact with the kidnappers later– Nat too, for that matter. But for now, he didn’t care about the other two people in the room. 

No. The only thing that mattered was right in front of him, thrown up on the holographic screen and showing his husband, alive and currently being ransomed by what Steve predicted were two young men that barely even seemed out of their teens, going by stature and build and professionalism. 

Seriously? Vendetta masks? That was just tacky. 

But tacky and unprofessional or not, they’d still managed to snatch Tony right from under all their noses, hurt him, and then demand a ransom without leaving a trace. Steve hated to admit that this wasn’t the first time it had happened, but it didn’t make it any easier. Every single occasion left him feeling sick to his stomach, and filled with a tension under his skin that would only be released when he either got Tony back safe, or got rid of whatever was hurting him. In whatever way he had to. 

Maybe that was why Fury and Natasha hadn’t informed him that the kidnappers had made contact. Luckily, JARVIS, who had been monitoring every network and recording on the planet for a glimpse of Tony, had been the one to let him know. Ever the reliable AI. 

Steve clenched his fists as he looked at the mask of the man stood one step in front of the other. Taking lead. Fine by him. “You have a name I can use?” Steve asked, voice clipped. 

“Steve, stand down, we are dealing with th–”

“Just call me The Investor,” the man said, and Steve felt like he was grinning behind the mask as he waved toward Tony, “and call this my investment.”

Steve smiled, but there was not a trace of warmth in it. He knew how he looked just then; standing to his full height of 6′4, muscles tensed and flexing against the hard lines of his uniform. He stared straight into the camera, eyes drilling into the mask through the deep furrow of his brow. He didn’t speak for a second or so, and the room was eerily silent. It furthered Steve’s belief that these people weren’t professionals, and this was at least one of their first runs. Trained ransomers never allowed there to be a power-play on the other end, which was what Steve was doing right now. They would simply fill the silence with words. These men, this organisation, whatever it was, were letting Steve stare them down. 

Big mistake 

“Okay, Investor,” Steve leaned forward on the table, keeping his face calm. Despite what Nat and Fury might think, he was good at this. He wasn’t going to mess up, not when Tony’s life was on the line. “Make your demands. Let’s hear them.”

The man cocked his head, triumphant that he had gotten Captain America to listen to him. “What we want, Rogers, is a simple transaction. We know Tony Stark has files on the Rendition Program. We know he keeps them on hardcopy somewhere. We would simply like to have them, and in return, once he has translated and decrypted them for us, we will give you back your Iron Man.”

Seemingly hearing the voices around him, Tony stirred in his chair, moaning gently as he came around. Steve watched, forcing his face to remain steady as Tony blinked in the harsh light and then glanced at what must have been a computer in which Steve’s face was showing through. Tony’s pained expression curled into a weak smile. “Good morning, sweetheart,” he mumbled, “bad morning to you two incompetent fucks. I was gonna get a manicure today. Marissa is going to be pissed–”

“Shut your mouth, bitch,” the one closest to Tony said, cuffing him across the temple and sending Tony’s head snapping sideways. Steve heard the glass table under his fingers shatter, and felt Natasha’s presence step close behind him, but he didn’t turn around or flinch at the pain. None of it was important.

Tony’s head dropped, and it didn’t come back up again. Steve watched through the grainy live feed as blood oozed down the cut that the man had put on his husband’s skin.

He turned his gaze to said man. “You shouldn’t have done that in front of me,” he said softly, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. He did not shout. He did not even change his tone to an aggressive one. But there was a promise in his voice, in the way that he held himself, and the man in question shifted just the tiniest bit. 

Nervousness. 

“Here’s the thing,” Steve continued, leaning a little further forward, “I understand you’re probably feeling rather proud of yourselves right now. Capturing Iron Man. Making demands to the Avengers. I’m sure you feel unstoppable.”

The two men looked to one another, and the front guy probably would have spoken up if Steve hadn’t cut him off with a small smile that projected a truly deadly sort of violence. It was obvious enough that some long-lost survival instinct within the two kidnappers kicked in, because Steve saw the brief flex of fingers against their guns. He just smiled harder. 

“We’ll give you the Rendition Program,” Steve said with a shrug, “we’ll meet at your rendezvous point, we’ll see to your demands. But let me just ask you this– do you think that this is the first time someone has tried to take my husband from me?” 

The front man stepped forward. “If you’re not careful, we’ll be the last, Captain.”

“No, you won’t,” Steve told them simply, “because you need him to decrypt it. You need him alive until we arrive, and when we arrive, I assure you, it will be the end of you. You’re smart kids. I assume you’re piggybacking the SHIELD network in order to send this recording. So do something clever, and look up the reports of every other attempted kidnapping or assassination of Tony Stark.” Steve gritted his teeth together, finally letting some of the anger seep into his voice. “Look up the Serum Replication Effort of HYDRA in 2012. The Sentry Guard Attempt of 2015. The Tower Siege, 2017.”

“You’re not the one calling the shots here, Captain–”

“No. I’m not. You are. And your orders just involved hurting my husband in front of me, and threatening his life. I don’t think that was your wisest choice. Do you want to know the common factor in all those previous attempts I just mentioned?” Steve grinned, all teeth, pointing a finger into his own chest. “Me. And would you like to know the survival rate of the people that I saw or knew were hurting my husband? Or can you guess?”

It was zero, in case anyone was curious. It was the only time when Steve never even thought about it. The only time he ever lacked a shred of guilt. People who touched Tony ended up dead, because Tony was not theirs to touch. And Steve would not hesitate for a single second to permanently incapacitate someone who threatened Tony’s life.

“I’m giving you one chance,” Steve told them quietly. “Take five minutes. Look up those reports. Look at what happens; and what I will do to you if I get my hands on you. Because I promise you, if Tony is damaged permanently in any way shape or form, there will not be a rock you can hide under. There won’t be a crevice you can squeeze into or a safe house you can scurry to where I will not be able to drag you from. And when I do?” Steve leaned back, turning his eyes back on Tony. “I will make you regret every single decision you ever made that led you up to this point. And that, Mr Investor, is a promise I will spend the rest of my considerable life committing to. So if you want to make your decision right now, by all means, go ahead. But I assure you, you’re signing your death warrant. I can crush steel. Your skulls will hardly be a fucking problem once I get them.” 

He stared at the two men impassively for another second, while they silently looked back through their emotionless masks. Then the lead man gave the smallest of cutting actions, and a moment later the video feed cut, leaving static in its wake. 

Steve stared up at the empty screen, hearing Fury begin to shout about misconduct and compromising the entire negotiation process. But Natasha at his other side appeared to be smiling slightly, something knowing and dangerously triumphant as she raised her eyebrow to Steve.

They’d both seen the body language on their two masked villains. They both knew that Steve had not been lying, and Tony’s kidnappers knew it too. 

Steve would rip this whole Earth apart to get to his husband, and after so many years, the criminal underworld had gotten that message too. Nowadays, if they were going to stage some sort of hostile situation, they either took both of them or neither of them, unless they were a very high profile organisation that had the resources to at least attempt to keep Steve away.

These Goddamn idiots were not HYDRA though, they weren’t AIM or SUBCON or any of the other well-funded domestic terror groups that had sprung up over the years. They were just criminals trying to catch their big break. And they’d just picked the worst target in the entire motherfucking world.

Steve sat down on one of the chairs on the conference table as calmly as he could, and he waited. 

–

Twenty minutes later, JARVIS flagged an alert.

“It appears that Sir has just been dropped off on the side of a road out in Waterford, Pennsylvania,” the AI declared, while Steve jumped to his feet immediately and began his walk toward the jet. “Setting coordinates into the Quinjet now. I suggest an immediate retrieval.”

Behind him, he could hear Clint talking confusedly.  “Did you say they just– they just dropped him? Why the hell would they back out now? They got through the hardest part!” 

Natasha grinned at Steve’s side, jogging into the jet and tying her hair up as she went. “Steve’s very scary when he wants to be,” she told Clint, “I think he may have persuaded them to try stealing the technology of a… less well protected individual.”

Steve felt their eyes on him, but he was too focused on the immediate task of getting Tony back into his arms to bother with banter. It all faded away into a vague hum, and he ran a hand back and forth over the rim of his shield absently as the jet took off. It was a comfort thing. He imagined ramming it down into the necks of Tony’s attackers briefly, but discarded it. If there was anything more than surface damage on Tony’s body, he might consider bringing the thought back again. But for now, it wasn’t important. 

The journey was faster than it would have taken for the Philly police or ambulance to arrive, so they didn’t bother to ring them up and ask for assistance. The trip was done in less than five minutes, and perhaps there were a few people who weren’t all too pleased at having a large jet land in the middle of the road and block their path, but Steve couldn’t really say he gave a damn. 

He saw Tony immediately, dumped against one of the posts at the side of the road and surrounded by a handful of people who were trying to help him. He was still cuffed, and Steve noticed the head wound still slowly oozing blood across his face as it fell to the Earth. The thoughts of killing whoever had put that there rose up to the surface again. 

He sprinted across the road, leaping over a car that didn’t stop and landing swiftly on his feet. He vaulted the metal fencing and pushed past the small crowd wordlessly, hearing Natasha’s diplomatic voice excusing his behaviour behind him. Getting to his knees in front of Tony, his fingers went instantly to the man’s neck to check the pulse. 

Slow, steady. He was simply unconscious. It didn’t seem to be too severe, but one never knew with head injuries. He looked up at the closest person; a man in his late fifties, probably. “Did you move him?” He asked, voice clipped.

The man shook his head, clearly a little shocked that he’d just seemingly gotten into the middle of some serious Avengers business. “I–ah, no. We found him like this. Didn’t wanna– in case of breaks, you know.”

Steve nodded and looked back down to Tony, his hands gently beginning an evaluation of his husband’s neck, his spine, checking everything was in place. “S’okay,” he murmured, even though Tony couldn’t hear him, “I’ve got you now.”

Seemed that those kidnappers had looked at the files after all. And they’d made the right call, it seemed. They valued their lives over their pride. 

Tony’s spine was intact, and there were no other serious injuries to contend with, so with a quick tug, Steve broke apart the cuffs on Tony’s wrists and then curled his hands underneath the smaller man, pulling him up off the floor and cradling him into his chest. He’d been gone 24 hours. Not the longest stretch by a long shot, but again, that didn’t mean this was easy. 

Steve shut his eyes and pressed his mouth softly against Tony’s temple, finally allowing something other than the razor-sharp focus on finding his husband cloud his mind. The rest of the team had silently taken on crowd control, thanking those who had stopped their cars to help and explaining the situation to the angry drivers whose passage had been blocked. Steve let it all fizzle away. There was just Tony, there, in his arms. Safe. 

And, as if to prove the statement, a second later Steve felt his husband stir slightly. Steve soothed him with his voice immediately as he rushed them back into the jet, keeping the tones low and comforting. “It’s alright,” he whispered, “I’m here, I’ve got you, it’s over. You’re on the jet. You’re safe.”

Tony’s eyes focused in on him blearily. Definitely concussed. He frowned slightly at Steve, before hissing in distress when he became aware of the pain. Steve lowered him onto the cot as the others jogged back into the jet, and his hand very delicately stroked Tony’s hair away from the man’s face. “I know it hurts, angel,” Steve told him lightly, “but we’ll get some painkillers into you, you’ll be fine.”

Tony was still looking at him. Then, suddenly, he began to giggle. Steve blinked at him, wondering how bad the concussion was. “Tony?”

“You…” Tony tried to find the words, clicking his fingers awkwardly and smiling as he shut his eyes and leaned into the hand on his face. “You made ‘em give… they gave me up without you even being in the room. You just glared at them. Glared!” Tony cackled again, even though it must have hurt, and Steve couldn’t help but smile back at his husband, leaning down to press a touching kiss to his nose. 

“It’s a very good glare,” he said with a shrug, “what did they do to you? Can you tell me now, or should it wait?”

Tony sighed and brought his hand up to his face. “Standard kidnapping fanfare,” he mumbled, wincing as he spoke, “Steve, my head hurts.”

“I know. But you’ll be okay.”

Tony nodded. “’Cuz you yelled at them, and they  decided it wasn’t worth you gettin’ mad at ‘em.” He dissolved into laughter again. “Steve, I love you. I love… lots.”

The jet engines started up again as Clint got himself into place and began to fly them home, and Steve’s whole body softened at Tony’s apparent calmness and relatively good health. Could’ve been a hell of a lot worse, Steve thought darkly, thinking back to the horrible month back in 2015. That had been… well- difficult was putting it lightly. 

But this– this was okay. These kidnappers, at the very least, had had the sense not to follow the team of 2015 down into the grave and had instead just run for their lives. Steve was glad of that. 

He sighed in relief, leaning downward until their foreheads were pressed delicately together. His hand rested gently against Tony’s cheek, and Tony’s hand came to settle around it, their fingers interlocking as they breathed one another in. Faintly, Steve heard the clink of their wedding rings, and the final nugget of tension released itself at the familiar sound. The world had righted itself. Tony was home. 

He figured those particular kidnappers probably wouldn’t try for a repeat performance.

—-

Ao3 // commission a piece // donate to my kofi!

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Not Killing Him

Orion Crown sat in his big, mean-looking SUV in the old parking lot. The dry heat of Vegas had ripped up the asphalt here over the past years, leaving it pockmarked and littered with potholes. His own car and one other vehicle in the lot were the only ones parked there, immobile, like silent steel corpses, cooling in the shadow of some abandoned warehouse.

The thick windows shielded him from the noise of traffic in the distance, so Orion sat in a weirdly muffled silence. Staring at the entrance of the derelict warehouse with its crooked, ajar doors. He felt sick to his stomach because he had slept little more than a few hours per night and his forehead was burning up.

He picked up his phone from the passenger seat, snatching it from where it was resting next to a loaded semi-automatic pistol. He thumbed through the display, checking his recent direct messages on your social media platform of choice.

Orion Crown, social media darling and super-giant of the statusphere. He flipped through business proposal messages from other influencers, something marginally important from his YouTube video editor, and an array of annoyed passive-aggressive texts from his producer-slash-partner. He let the list slide to a stop, with this finger hovering over the display. Hovering just over the message from “The Glass King” with the preview field only saying that it contained a GIF.

The internet star dithered. He could refuse to walk into that warehouse and refuse to use that gun. His career and life would be over, though.

The alternative was sucking it up, gripping the cold metal of the pistol in his palm, walking in there, and blasting away. Didn’t matter who it was. Didn’t know, didn’t care.

Even though seeing the message’s contents disturbed him every time he reviewed it, his thumb descended in slow motion. Like time almost ground to a halt, like the universe was trying to stop him from watching it again.

He tapped the message and it flicked onto full display on his screen.

The animated GIF flashed with disturbing imagery, all of it cut so quickly and abruptly that it became impossible to take it all in. Words and symbols displayed for fractions of seconds so that the mind could not really grasp what it read, and video footage that may or may not contain clipped recordings of overt violence. Violence he, himself, had authored.

The glare of his phone reflected in Orion’s glassy eyes, pupils dilating with dread and disassociation. Knowing that he recognized some of the things presented here so subliminally and viscerally, feeling guilt even though he had always rationalized the terrible things he had done in the past.

How was anybody better? How could anybody be better?

I am not a bad person, Orion thought. Nobody is.

After watching the animated GIF loop countless times, glued to the phone’s display as if bound in a trance, he put the phone back down onto the passenger seat, a hand’s breadth away from the gun. He barely registered the words that followed far down below the window of animation.

The threats. The instructions.

The sentences that had brought him to the locker where he obtained the gun. The address of this warehouse. And his mission, to kill anybody he saw inside this place.

Why didn’t this “Glass King” person just ask for money? Why this? How did the Glass King even get that footage? It had been destroyed long ago.

None of it made any sense.

No matter how many times he mulled it over, Orion Crown—born with the more unglamorous name of Kyle Howard—his sense of self-preservation, greed, and existential dread always won out. Always looped him back to doing as he was told as long as it served his own purposes. To get this over with, and walk away, and never let anybody know of his dirty secrets.

If the Glass King put any of that out—if they aired out any of Orion Crown’s dirty laundry—then he would be out of the game. Done. Probably also in prison.

Orion looked over to the gun. Stared at it, taking in every hard and unforgiving edge and angle of its sleek industrial design.

He had before, and he pondered it again, now: to just pick it up and stick the nuzzle right into his own mouth. Pull the trigger and end it right now.

But his vanity and pride, masked with religious guilt and eclipsed by copious amounts of doublethink, led him to believe that this was the only way.

He grabbed the gun and weighed it in his hand. Orion licked his lips and they felt funny. Not chapped, but uneven. Slimy. He bit his lip and chewed without realizing it, while his gaze swept up and down the crumbling building of this damned warehouse.

In one fluid motion, he got out of his car, slammed the door shut, and walked towards the entrance of the warehouse. The heat outside his car, even here in the shade—combined with the inexplicable fever he was running—made his head swim as if he had been drinking nonstop for the past day and night.

He gripped that pistol in his fist like his life depended on it. And as far as Orion was concerned, it did.

The rusted hinges on the big metal double doors squealed and he cringed at the sound of it, freezing in place. His heart raced, his pulse thundering in his ears. Eyes darted back and forth, looking for a sign of anybody in there. Whoever had parked the other car had to be in here, and Orion’s job was to gun them down.

Something heavy, like a brick hitting a pile of rubble, echoed through the decrepit and dingy halls.

Orion’s hand jerked and he pointed the gun out in front of himself, aiming at every dark corner and little thing he could perceive. With nobody in sight, the adrenaline pumped through his body, suffusing him with a quiet rage and driving the sweat to erupt from his pores, clouding his senses and sapping his reason.

He sidled through the entrance and crept through the abandoned place, twitching at any possible sound he thought he heard and any shadow he saw in the corner of his eyes, expecting someone, anybody, to jump out at him.

Something chugged and sputtered, causing him to freeze once more. He continued sneaking on when he recognized those sounds to be coming from a gas-powered generator, hidden somewhere deeper within the warehouse’s bowels.

He kind of hoped that someone would jump out at him from a blind spot. Thinking it would be much easier to pull the trigger if it felt like self defense.

Instead, he found a large, wide, pillared hall, awaiting him at the end of a long twisting and turning through claustrophobia-inducing corridors.

Someone had arranged seven door frames in a perfect circle, bolted down with plywood feet to support their weight, sawdust and power tools littering the dirty floors, and that distinct smell of freshly cut wood hanging in the air.

Each door frame held a door, closed and looking far too new to fit into this warehouse. An array of four construction site spotlights illuminated the doors from their center, connected to a tangle of bright orange power cord extensions, leading his sweeping gaze to the generator he had been hearing chug away all this time.

The doors were just standing there, out in the open, connected to no walls. Leading nowhere.

Orion gripped the pistol in both hands, holding it outstretched far in front of himself. He had never fired a gun before in his life. Without realizing it, he both wanted the thing to be as far away as possible from himself, but also wanted to use it and for things to be over fast.

But nobody was here. Right?

Wrong.

Arriving in the center of the seven doors, he blinked and inspected a small pile of objects heaped up in between the four spotlights.

A bunch of broken smartphones, a black wig, a small cracked hand mirror, a pile of about twenty credit cards that had been sloppily cut in half, a bunch of different keys that looked far too old to fit the locks on the doors here, and all of the objects rested on top of a local city map that someone had drawn all over with a black magic marker.

A pebble crunched underneath a boot. But not Orion’s shoe. He swiveled, almost getting dizzy at his own speed as he pointed the gun at the source of the noise.

Standing only steps away from the other person, he held the pistol out and swallowed. No matter how many times he had tried to mentally prepare for this moment, he hesitated and his index finger trembled instead of squeezing around the trigger.

Nobody jumping out at him. Just standing there.

She stared into the barrel of his gun for a split second and then met his gaze. A woman in her twenties, dressed like a man. Or—at second glance—androgynous, like she was in some sort of getup for a rock or punk band from the 1990s. Clad in a ratty leather jacket and dark jeans; covered in studs on her clothing, a chain hanging from her belt, and spikes protruding from a choker around her neck; way too much makeup on her face; and a poorly-cut hair-do of shaved sides and long top that could constitute as a fashion crime.

More distracting, however, was the hand she held in her hand. Orion did a double take on that before he fully absorbed what he saw there. A waxen hand with candlewicks sticking out from the fingertips, gripped firmly in her slender hand.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asked Orion. She squinted at him.

He squeezed the trigger. It didn’t work. The fucking gun refused to work.

Orion turned it over and looked at it and realized that it had a safety setting which he had forgotten to take care of before walking into the building.

Clink. Snap.

The woman flicked a lighter on and guided it to the waxen hand in her hand and he had flicked the safety and pointed the gun at her and the next thing Orion knew, his wrists hurt. And so did his neck. And his lower back.

Chafing against exposed skin, coarse rope and the smell of burnt candles still filled his nostrils. He began thrashing but found that his limbs did not obey his instinct to struggle against his bonds because of how tightly he was tied down. He scraped his skin against something like rough rock or rusty metal behind him.

Blinking and fighting the fever back down, the taste of iron clung to his tongue. His vision blurred here and there and reality caught back up to him with disjointed delay. She had tied him to something in sight of the circle of seven doors.

The woman crouched in front of one of the doors, her back turned to him.

With a loud PLOP, she opened something in her hands and whatever she was doing, it resulted in the door being splattered with something dark and red.

Hoarse, the words croaked out of his throat and left him sounding more like a toad. “Hey,” Orion emitted. “Let me go!”

The woman whispered something and it dawned on him that it was no response to him.

“What the fuck are you doing? You’re gonna get into so much trouble if you don’t let me go,” he said. But it really was just pathetic pleading, masquerading as feeble threats. “Police’ll be all over your ass, lady.”

She continued whispering and splashed more of the dark crimson liquid over the next door, to its left.

Something crunched. It drew both Orion’s attention, and that of the woman. They both stared at the thing crawling into the large hall, emerging from the corridors he had entered from. The way they paused, paralyzed with disbelief—and the failure of the human mind’s capability to process what they were looking at—took in the thing moving along the floor.

It looked like a pile of trash, like someone had kicked over a garbage can and the contents of four weeks of refuse had spilled out over the ground. With a stench to match. But parts of it looked fleshy, or sponge-like. Wobbling but staying whole, like a block of jello. Other bits, like stalks, or tentacles, tiny and too many to count, coiling and recoiling and almost like they were looking in every direction, but seeing without any discernible eyes.

Death and evil incarnate, crawling over the filthy floors. Hungry, but slow. Creeping. Part of the world’s abandoned things, coalesced and fused into something awful, something trapped in between the realm of the living and the realm of non-existence; a vessel to something worse, something spawned in the darkest recesses and the deepest abyss of human sin. Crawling, and more than one. Another pile of living muck and vomit-inducing presence followed. And another. And another.

Rejects.

They headed towards the seven doors with painful slowness. But one of them began veering away from the rest, inching closer towards Orion.

Thwuck. Shlack. Scrape.

Orion wanted to throw up. He started wriggling, thrashing, fighting against his bonds, but none of it helped. He looked back at the woman in desperation.

She breathed through her teeth, “Shit.”

Haste colored her every movement now and she haphazardly sprayed more liquid onto the doors. One by one. She whispered all the while, though the whispers had made way to hectic chanting. Orion had no chance in understanding it, for the words sounded nothing like any language he had ever heard before.

Almost matching the sounds made by the Rejects, creeping forth.

Scrape. Flesh. Shlef. Thwuck.

The Reject crawled closer. Ever closer to him.

Tears welled up in the corners of his eyes, first blurring his sight a little, and then a lot. Orion had no time or space to realize how that might have been better, he only felt the deep-rooted dread in his stomach. The certainty of death by this abomination, crawling up to him. Only an arm’s length away from his kicking feet.

The stench intensified as the thing got closer, robbing him of any speech, making him wretch.

Images of the GIF on his phone flashed in his mind. The violence he had inflicted, captured on camera—his own recordings, not meant for public consumption—sent to him by the Glass King.

Just like these monsters had been sent by the Glass King.

Orion screamed for help.

A figure in a long black duster emerged from the corridors, standing still at the edge of the large hall, staring at the seven doors. Orion screamed for help from him, now. But within just a few beats of his heart, pounding so hard that it wanted to burst from his chest, he knew deep down that this man was the master of the Rejects.

No—this man was the Glass King, and he cared nothing for Orion’s plight. Hell, he probably enjoyed it. Orion sensed that just much malice from the presence of his man, and his imagination ran wild in response to the evil emanating from his body, hitting his entire being like a truck.

“Will you even be you when you return from that place? If you return from the house?” asked the man, directing his words at the woman by the doors.

Cold and uncaring about Orion, who was now screaming at the top of his lungs. Because something cold and wet and slimy slapped against the bottom of his shoe. And slithered up it, tugging at shoe laces, wrapping around the leg of his pants by his ankle, and applying pressure. Pulling itself upwards.

Onto him.

The woman never stopped chanting, flinging blood at those doors and then sticking something white and misshapen into the keyhole of one of the brass knobs, exposed by the glaring cone of light from one of the spots. She stopped chanting.

“You can’t stop change. Everything changes. That’s all you’re really afraid of, isn’t it?” she shouted. Anger making her voice tremble. Also something insecure. Or fear.

She ripped the door open and ran through it and slammed it shut behind her, but she didn’t emerge from the other side.

Just gone. Vanished into thin air.

Orion had neither eyes nor mind for this phenomenon, however. He only felt the many tiny tendrils of trash touching, feeling, finding their way up his limbs. A path of disgusting discovery, exploring his body like an alien creature trying to figure out human anatomy, but in reality just so depraved and sinister that it pretended to be doing so when it fed on his festering dread and despair.

Was this what it was like to be helpless? To be used, and chewed out?

To cry for help, but be ignored?

He had no capacity left for clean, deep thoughts. Only terror filled his being. The Reject crawled up over him, exerting the weight of a full-grown person, pinning him down and amplifying his sense of helplessness.

Some part of him expected to feel tiny teeth from tiny mouths chewing away at him, but the slithering and worming motions only reflected the darkness in his own heart, mirroring the corruption that had always haunted him. His screaming died down, petering out into a hoarse unintelligible something that transformed into whimpering.

The man in the duster—the Glass King—clicked his tongue but ignored Orion, approaching the seven doors.

“You didn’t answer my question, Kimmy. You fear the answer, or you’d say it out loud,” muttered the Glass King.

Orion expected the sensation of cold metal to be cutting his flesh, but the wet something was more like saliva dispersed from tongues, oozing across his skin. He expected for those rubber bands and spongy stalks to wrap around his neck and choke the life out of him, but they only squeezed a little bit. Just enough to be uncomfortable, and just enough for the Reject to enjoy it.

It breathed on him. The Reject engulfed him, not killing him.

The man in the duster turned on his heels.

Eyes wide open, stricken with unnatural knowing accumulated from a thousand lives and a deep-seated and all-devouring madness—staring into Orion’s eyes. The Glass King’s stare reached deep inside, prying away at his secrets like a lunatic ripping away at the fabric padding lining the walls of a forgotten cell, for those crazy eyes had seen the same GIF as he had. Knew what he knew. Knew his every dirty secret.

Much worse was the grin plastered across his face. Toothy, sadistic, and stretched far too wide to look fun or what was natural for that human face.

“Oh, Kyle, my boy,” said the Glass King, with the grin never wiping itself off his face. “You had one job and you bungled it. But no worries, I still have use for you. Your name, your reputation—your face. Enough mojo there for me to milk for a far greater purpose. Good on you for at least coming here, huh?”

The Glass King took a few steps closer towards Orion. Neared. Menace echoing with each step of his boots thumping against the dirty floor.

Orion wasn’t even whimpering anymore. Before a sheet of paper with something cold and wet and fleshy clinging to its underside had fully crept up the side of his face and covered it—before he closed his eyes and lost sight—he wanted to protest.

But he had no words.

Some part of him, matched only by his urge to vomit, knew he deserved this. Every second of it.

The Reject breathed on him, hot and damp and unpleasant. It almost entirely engulfed him, satisfied with the almost.

Not killing him.

—Submitted by Wratts

[nika-the-hunter]

House of Mist [Ch. 11]

Central Seattle Ruins, Pacific Northwest. House Mist Territory +157 days 

Nicole and Rykis walked down the path that had been worn through the tall grass. The old road surface was clearly visible here under the dirt. It was cracked and crumbled, resembling gravel more than the flat concrete it had once been. The other trees, not the evergreens, were starting to get their leaves again, and were bringing brighter shades of green to the pale urban ruins. This was her first spring, and it was wonderful, everything was so full of life. 

 Her meeting with Fort Discovery had gone well; so well in fact that she was absolutely convinced that working with the House of Mist had been the right decision. She and Rykis had spent the remainder of the day walking around the small settlement named after the original park it was built on. There had been a fort there before at some point in ancient history, but its name had been lost to time. 

She met many Humans in the fort; over half of them had ties to the region that went back to before the Collapse. Those that had migrated over to Fort Discovery from elsewhere had interesting stories of the world outside the region as well. She had made it a point that return trips would be common for her. The children that her Ghost was entertaining followed him the whole time, trying to play tag with the mechanical ball. 

Pedro and Athena had ideas for expansion that Nicole could help with. They had been in radio contact with a group of people due east that were worried about a band of Fallen lurking around their town. The town had been cautious about Mist, but stories of the friendly Fallen out west had apparently made the journey to them. They were willing to move into Mist territory but had no way to do it without drawing the attention of the local Fallen crew. Pedro had planned to bring it to the Kell’s attention soon, but the campaign against the House of Devils had kept the Kell busy. Now that things were calming down, he would bring it up and suggest that Nicole help convince the others that Mist was extra safe. 

When Nicole finally left Fort Discovery, she found the Archon taking a video call with an Eliksni Vandal who wore a banner she did not know. Though there was a lot she did not know already. It was hard to tell the color of the armor with the screen glare from the angle they were at, but it looked green. Marakis had ended the call and turned to face the two who had approached. He briefly mentioned that he was speaking with the House of Exile, before asking about their tour. Later Rykis told her that the House of Exile was an Eliksni collective that lived up on the moon. Mist apparently had a trade deal with them regarding Ether. 

On the flight back to the Archons compound, they all talked briefly, Marakis was interested in how she and Rykis were getting along. He seemed really excited with a Guardian and Eliksni living together and seemed to read the subtext of what was really going on quite well. Sparing them the embarrassment of just saying it. 

The day was nearly over by then with the sunset lighting the sky in a bright gold. Their walk back towards downtown kept them in the shade already. Her Ghost spent his time orbiting around the two and occasionally flying off to scan something dangling in the old windows. The ruins were mostly empty, Mist Eliksni lived in the newer buildings that were further downtown. Those buildings were still old pre-Collapse construction, but they were in much better shape than the stone and steel skyscrapers that made up ninety percent of the city. Over the centuries after the collapse, those buildings had remained free of overgrowth and were still somewhat waterproof, unlike her hotel across the lake. 

“So, are we headed back to the Kell to catch that truck back, or are we walking home on our own?” Nicole asked.

“No, the Kell gave you the choice of living elsewhere now. You’re not restricted to Baron Acskis’ outpost.” He replied. 

“So... where are we headed then?” He did not really answer her question. 

“We’re headed to where I lived before. I think that you might like it.” She could see the edges of his face move behind his mask in what she recognized as an Eliksni smile, then he shrugged. “If you do not, then we can go to your hotel tomorrow, or maybe somewhere else.”  

“Oh, alright. It’s been a while hasn’t it?” 

“Mm, not as long as you think, I visit it whenever you’re busy around Bellevue.”

Nicole nodded. “Well that’s good; I’d hate to keep you from home.”

There was a bleep from her helmet that was clipped to her belt. She looked down and saw something flashing on her visor. “Oh hey, give me a second.” Her helmet slipped over her head, but she did not activate the seal. 

The blinking icon opened into a list that took up half of the view screen. The word Quests was in bold at the top, with little icons and what she guessed were the quests themselves listed on it. There were only a few entries. The currently highlighted ‘quest’ had a graphic of one of the metro trains she had seen in the tunnel over a banner for Umic. Memory Troubles was the name with the description “Locate Metro Security Records.” 

The chirp of her Ghost sounded from the helmet’s internal speaker. “Hey! You finally checked out the Quest tab!” 

“What is this?” She asked. 

“Well, you seemed to be getting a lot of things to do, so I decided to put together some of my own quests for you. Usually these come from the Vanguard at the Last City but given how we’re not planning on going there any time soon, I’ll do it for you for now.” 

“Okay... why did it just pop up now?” she stopped Rykis. “Hold on for a second.”

“Well follow the marker and find out!” the Ghost replied, at the same moment a diamond shaped marker appeared. He sounded excited which was very unlike himself. 

Nicole nodded in the direction the marker showed and started to go. “Sorry Rykis. My Ghost found something he wants me to see. We gotta’ detour.”

“Then lead on, Neh-cole.” 

The marker led back and over one block, to the front doorway of a tall office tower. The building's stone facade was crumbling in places, leaving piles of rubble underneath the trees. Once at the door, the icon appeared again further inside. It stopped at a stairwell leading down into the dark. “Alright, we’re here. What did you find?” 

Her Ghost appeared from inside the doorway and played his flashlight over the remains of a sign hanging on the wall. The letters had faded but most were still legible. -Metro Transit Authority. Regional Security Office.

“I found the place!” He did a spin inside his shell. At first, she was not sure what he meant, but the name of the ‘quest’ connected the dots. The camera down in the subway tunnel had been looking right at where her body had been. It was still working and sending the data back somewhere and something was still giving it the command to record. Robust systems were still working somewhere. But if she wanted to find out what had happened to her, all she needed to do was go down and find the network hub. It was not a priority; she had actually forgotten about it up until now. The discovery of her cause of death was more of a hopeful curiosity than an actual objective. However, there it was... at the bottom of the staircase were some answers about her previous life. Under the helmet she bit her lip and gave it a good two seconds of thought. The answer was obvious.   

Down she went. Quickly at first, but immediately slowing for caution; the stairs were slick and covered in moss. That was something she was used to seeing out there. Buildings, trees, rocks, and even growing on the side of Eliksni crates that had been sitting just a little too long; moss was everywhere. The bottom step was submerged beneath a few centimeters of water and somewhere deeper in the basement she could hear flowing water.

At the far end of the large open space, Nicole could see dozens of blinking green lights hidden behind a window. The working systems were a good sign that this was the right place. She stepped into the ankle-deep water and apologized to Rykis. He was not wearing any sort of water-resistant footwear, but he followed her anyway without complaining. Sloshing through the water, Nicole noticed that people had died down here fairly quickly. A few had died at their workstations, leaving their skeletons collapsed over keyboards and left computers in stand-by mode.

The sign on the side of the door said that it was the data-storage room. It was exactly what they were looking for. The blinking lights were the status lights for over a dozen large computer racks. The hum in the room was loud, and the air was warm. The doorway was raised higher than the water, someone had some forethought when they built the place in the basement, so there was no water inside. Once inside with the door closed behind them, Nicole could not hear the water flow anymore.

Nicole had no idea how to search all this for what they wanted, so she waved to the machines. “Okay Ghost, do your thing.” 

He chirped and flew over to one of the stacks. “This might take a while. These cameras have been recording for centuries...” The Ghost flew from stack to stack, an optical beam connecting with each tower. “Just have to find the feed from your station and trace where it goes. It was Olympic... I think?” 

“Well take your time, Ghost. It’s not like Rykis and I can do anything.” 

After a few minutes scanning through the various racks, he had found the data. “I got it!” he exclaimed with all his fins expanding out from his core. “Well, are you sure you want to watch this, last chance.” 

Rykis looked at the Ghost, and then to Nicole. “What did he find, what are we looking for?” 

“Well he found the recording of how I died. The first time.” Nicole grimly smiled. “I'm hoping it’ll give me something to work with. So yes, Ghost, start it up.” 

He floated over to a dormant computer station and interfaced with the monitor. The screen flickered and flashed to life. The multiple camera feeds from across the station appeared. There was even sound. 

Olympic Park Station  -28 minutes

Umic Security Officer Nicole Walker rushed down the escalator leading into the chaotic subway station. Her heavy plasteel ballistic vest almost knocked her off balance in the shifting sea of Seattle citizens. Thirteen hours ago, she had thought that the vest had been overkill; her regular uniform had woven strands of sapphire wire which was good enough to stop mid-caliber ammunition. But as the day progressed, she no longer felt that way, and was grateful for the vest. 

Gunfire at the top of the stairs brought her around with her rifle, aiming the carbine towards the odd colored daylight streaming in at the top of the shaft. The citizens and refugees parted and dropped to either side, clearing a firing lane to the doors. At the top of the stairs her partner, USO. Keane, fired out the door and onto the street. An explosion rocked the shaft and people fell, more pushed deeper into the station. “I’m gonna’ close the doors!” Keane shouted. “Get in here now.” 

He fired again, Nicole tried to get back up the escalator, but the parted sea had closed and everyone that was up near the top was making their way down whether she was in the way or not.

A cluster of blue energy shots peppered the wall above Keane. A large group of people finally made it through the doors, and he slammed his fist into the switch on the wall. The station’s storm shutters dropped from the ceiling and bounced once off their rubber seals. 

They were locked in, and the bad stuff was locked out. 

Another explosion from outside shook the ground again, more gunfire erupted nearby, it was all muffled by the storm shutters. “Everyone downstairs.” Nicole ordered. People that had remained on the stairs, even after the crowds fled, slowly got to their feet, and moved down to the station. 

The trains were still running, “Thank the Traveler...”  Nicole muttered. There were casualties and moving the injured on foot down kilometers of tunnel was just not going to work. 

“Please form a line! Cue up at the marked positions!” A Transit cop in a high-visibility vest was directing the panicked people to where they could board the next subway car. “We’ll get you all out of here as fast as we can. The trains are running double-time and filling up at previous stations!” 

Nicole walked over to one of the small coffee shops along the wall that had its lights still on. The windows were smashed, but two of the original employees were busy passing out water and snacks to anyone who came for them. She grabbed two bottles of water and a small bag of sugar cookies. Downing her bottle in one go, she headed back into the space between lines where Keane was wiping the sweat from underneath his helmet. “You alright?” She offered him the other water.

Taking the water, he also drained it. “Yeah... uh... just glad those doors are doing the job.” He nodded over to a group of Seattle Police Officers talking on the other side of the next line. “They got working radios. Military’s been trying to get up here for hours apparently. Something is bogging down the roads, and the weather is just insane.” 

She nodded. “We could really use the help. A bunch of street cops and some deputized, heavily armed, and highly skilled, security guards ain’t going to help everyone.” Nicole smirked; trying to add some humor into the situation. 

Keane returned the look with a thin smile. “Yeah, doesn’t mean we can’t try.” 

The ceiling chimed. “Train approaching... train approaching.” 

At the front of the lines, the Transit cop checked his wrist pad. “Alright people, this train is only two-thirds full! Stay in line and wait your turn. We’ll all make it out, just don’t push.” 

The sleek subway train slid into the station and squeaked to a stop. The cars were packed, but apparently only part full. Once the doors opened, no one got off, and the lines began to squeeze in wherever they could. With a blow of their whistle, the crowds stepped back and allowed the Transit cops to get the doors sealed and sent the train on its way. “Next train arrives in... five minutes,” chimed the ceiling. 

Two more trains came and went, but the population count in the station did not seem to be decreasing. People were just spreading out now that there was more room. 

Nicole noticed a lone kid standing in the middle of the station clutching a stuffed animal. It was covered in dirt, but she thought it might have been an Orca. The little girl could not have been older than five, but she did not look scared or sad. Nicole walked over and took a knee beside her. “Hey there kid, where are your parents at?” 

The girl looked at her and shook her head. “I dunno, mommy went to get daddy. She said to wait here.” 

“Well which way did she go?” Nicole asked. Hopefully it was not far. 

The little girl pointed the stuffed Orca up the stairs. “She went up there.” 

Nicole looked up that direction and frowned. That was not good. 

“Train approaching... Train approaching.” 

Unknown to Nicole, the station security system picked up a conversation going on down one of the maintenance corridors, coming towards the station. 

“Holy shit Sam, where did you get those?” Voice one spoke out, in audible surprise. 

“From nowhere. I ain’t telling.” Voice two was gruff, and noticeably angry. “Here, take it, it's loaded.”

Voice one huffed and had to hurry to follow “What the hell are we going to do with them?!” 

“We’re getting on that next train. I'm getting us out of this place.” A sharp click-clack sound was registered with the system. It was identified as the racking of a shotgun pump by algorithmic analysis. 

It would have alerted the authorities if there was anyone left to pick-up. There was not.

Back in the station proper, the next train was slowly gliding into the station. It was only one fourth full. Plenty of room for evacuees. The door in the backside of the station burst open and out rushed two men. One had an assault rifle, and the other in the front was carrying a large gauge semi-automatic shotgun. He fired it into the ceiling once. “Everyone fucking back off. We’re getting on that train, you hear me?” the man bellowed. Chunks of plaster fell to the ground around them.

People froze in place, some dropped to the ground. The traffic cops had their hands on their sidearms, but nobody drew their weapons; not with a threat like that in a crowd of civilians. “Hey now, there's plenty of space for everyone. Just put the guns down.” One of the cops motioned slowly.

“Nah, we’re going. Now. Get everyone out of the way.” The guy in front swept the gun across the station. “Stay the fuck back.”

Nicole eyed the gunmen, both the shotgun and the rifle had large drum magazines, however the guy with the rifle seemed put off by what was going on. That did not change the fact that he was still waving the gun around the crowd.

One of the cops that had been back near the coffee shop came around slowly and half crouched. He looked like he was going to try and tackle the shotgun wielder. If shots started flying, things would go bad very quick.

Nicole threw herself in front of the kid who was just out in the open, well in the line of fire. Too many potential targets had been behind the kid.  

The man with the gun reacted to Nicole's sudden movements and fired at her. Under normal conditions, if that shotgun had been loaded with buckshot, it would have just caused a few dents in her plate vest. However, that gun had been loaded with high-velocity solid slugs. 

At the range they were at, there was nothing that could be done. The slug smashed into the center of her plasteel plate, causing it to deform beyond its threshold. Her chest cavity was crushed. The plate had stopped the bullet, but not in any manner that would have saved her life. 

Central Seattle Ruins +157 days 

Nicole watched her original self crumple to the floor and die. The others, who she did not know or recognize, took down the men with the guns. They tried to revive her, but it was no use, she was already gone. Her fellow security guard was visibly distressed and started to kick the guy who had shot her while he was detained. However, the officer in the bright yellow vest pulled him off and shoved him away. The girl was loaded onto the train with the Umic guard and sent away almost immediately. 

The people that remained in the station pulled her body far out of the way, moving it to its final resting place on top of the mezzanine above the tracks. One of the people that helped carry her body placed her arms on her chest and draped a tablecloth from the store over her. He seemed to say a prayer and leave, but there was nobody else up there to witness it.

“Well there you have it.” Her Ghost blinked. “There is more to the recording near the end, but that's how you died.” The video sped up and the station eventually emptied, leaving her body sitting alone on the platform. Nobody else entered the station after the last train zipped down the track. “Huh...” She had expected some firefight with the cause of the collapse, not getting shot by fellow Humans. It did not change anything though, she had hoped that when she found the video of her death it would unlock the memories of that past life, but nothing came from them. No insight into who she was, or any of the people they had known. It felt almost like a wasted trip; the question of how she died was answered, but there was no extra reward. “I can tell you're disappointed. If you thought that it would help your memories, I could have told you that it wouldn’t.” The Ghost replied to the look on her face. “This bit at the end though might cheer you up a little.

Nicole sighed as the video clicked and moved on. With no movement it switched to an ‘extended event monitoring’ mode. There were only subtle indications on how fast time was passing in the station; a steady drip became a flood of water down the tunnels, drowning the track.  Dirt piles slowly grew across the floor from the corners, eventually enough for plants to grow and sprout under the steady station lights. Her body rapidly deteriorated on screen, becoming food for moss and other things that made the station their home.

The video would briefly slow when the occasional animal triggered the cameras, or some big event like part of the roof caved in. The system timestamp degraded into error symbols before the first lightbulb went out. 

When the station was looking similar to how it was when she was revived, the camera slowed down back to real time. Movement appeared from the other side of the platform and an Eliksni scurried in looking around the space. They were small and about the size of one of the Not-Dregs. 

Rykis made a sound behind her, like a squeak almost, but she continued to watch. 

The Eliksni on screen cautiously poked around the ruined metro station, digging through the shelves and boxes left in the cafe. They crossed out to the station mezzanine and came across the moss-covered remains of Nicole’s former life. The Eliksni knelt and picked up the old ballistic helmet, the skull still secured by the chinstrap. However now that it was disturbed the skull slipped free and fell to the ground with a loud thunk. A dull ache spontaneously formed on the back of Nicole’s head and then faded. 

Setting the helmet upside down, the Eliksni carefully returned the skull to its place on the remains. Then they pulled a backpack out from under the moss and ferns that laid beside her body. Digging through it, they pulled out a tablet and what looked like a small stack of notebooks. They put the notebooks back into the pack and threw it over their shoulder but put the tablet into another bag. 

 The image froze in her head as the video went on. She had seen that bag before. It was so familiar, still covered in paint brushes and other small tools. Her eyes slid over to Rykis watching from beside her. The same bag was slung over his shoulder, looking a bit smaller after all the years. If an Eliksni could look any more guilty, she doubted it. 

“Rykis is that you?” Nicole asked him. “Did you take my backpack?” She would not say he stole it; she was dead at the time after all.

Slowly, Rykis nodded. “Yes. that was me. Years ago.” His fingers tapped together nervously, and he seemed to think he needed to say more. “I still have your stuff; I was going to give it back when we got to my place.” 

Nicole raised her eyebrow. “Oh, really now? How’d you know it was mine before we saw this recording?” 

He nodded towards the screen showing the current status of the old station. “When we went down there on your third day. You stopped over where your body had sat for so long. I recognized it right away. Yours were the only bones in the station, and the only bones I had seen down there that day.”

“Well we just saw why. I hope that guy made it somewhere safe. We’ll never know though.” Nicole sighed and waved her hand in the air. “Alright, we found what we were looking for. It didn’t help me, but let's get out of this flooded basement. Rykis, lead on to your place.” “Yes yes.” he chittered. “Follow me.” 

They headed back up to the surface and into the early hours of night. The occasional streetlights continued burning brightly through the trees that grew around them. Some lights were still on in the various buildings, making the skyline an odd patchwork of light and dark. The walk only lasted a few blocks, not long at all. It was actually directly behind the Kell’s hall. Rykis had probably gone home after her last meeting there. She was mainly mentally exhausted, there was a lot that had happened today. 

The building Rykis called home turned out to be the old Art Museum. She smiled at that, of course the local artist would choose to set up shop in an art museum. The windows had all been patched over with metal scrap, just like he had done over in her building, and the door was sturdy and weather-proof. He held it open for her to go in. 

“Anyone else live here?” She walked in and found herself inside a small tunnel made of hanging tarps. The light was provided by the warm Eliksni tube lights that stuck up from the floor every few meters. Her question was nearly answered by voices from behind some of the curtains that broke off from the tunnel. “Yes actually. Many of Mist’s more artsy Eliksni live in the building. But there is more than enough space that I can have this for my own,” Rykis replied. He closed the door behind him and latched it shut. 

Taking the lead again, he took her up the stairs and through a set of double doors, to a half sphere structure in the middle of a room. Tarps and string lights spread out from the structure which was attached to the walls and ceiling of the big room they were in. Nicole could see faded and water damaged paintings hanging from the walls which had to be old Human art. The dome structure was obviously Eliksni construction with heat and light pouring out into the cold building from behind the curtain. “Come in, this is my... uh... home.” He pulled the curtain open and gestured her inside.

"It looks very cozy." Nicole followed him through the curtain and into the space.  He had probably left it to warm up while he went to meet her. 

There was a mix of Eliksni and Human furniture inside. In the center of the space was a table covered in small jars and brushes; she could see a few unfinished canvasses sitting around it. It appeared that Rykis was quite good at traditional painting. 

Rykis had walked over to a locker leaning up against the wall. "Take a seat, let me see if I can find it..." He motioned for her to sit at the table with his lower arms.

Nicole sat where he pointed and watched Rykis dig through the locker. From there she was able to get at a better look at the canvases he had leaning against the bench. 

She recognized the scene in the painting. The looming Spiderwalker in the snowstorm. Nicole had been standing a meter to the right when this had happened. It was the battle at the Pass, when Rykis had charged the tank with a flare to alert the artillery on the ridge. 

One of the other paintings was of the interior of her hotel tower, after she had done some cleanup of the swamp, and made it more like a pond. The light was captured perfectly, and the colors were wonderful. Her art viewing time was cut short as Rykis brought her attention back to him when he placed a hard-backed case on the table. It looked just like the one from the video, just a bit cleaner.

“So, this was mine? From before?” Nicole picked it up and looked it over. The case was made from a slick stretchy material, and the edges cracked when she bent it too much. The straps had rotted away at some point and their remains dangled haplessly at the side. 

“Yes, it should be everything.” Rykis nodded, sitting across from her. “I was young and looking for salvage back then, I had tried to trade your tablet, but it didn’t work and wasn’t worth anything. I did like looking through your sketchbooks though.” 

“Sketchbooks?” Nicole pulled open the bag and heard the rubber seal peel apart, still holding strong over the centuries. Carefully, she emptied the bag and found an old data-pad, and a few notebooks. 

“Yes, there were some really old, stylized drawings that I think you did. Just take a look.”

"Well if you say so." Nicole opened one of the old notebooks and slowly paged through them. The pages were remarkably well preserved; they were filled with drawings of places and things, as well as some random animals and creatures she did not recognize. They were not as good as Rykis' drawings, but they were fairly good. If these belonged to her, Nicole wondered if she had retained those skills as well as her warfighting abilities.

While carefully flipping through the pages, a small rectangle fell out from between them. 

The piece of plastic material was a photograph; it was not even faded at all. Five people were standing in a semicircle, and they were posing with bright yellow guns which looked really strange. She saw herself near the middle of the group in a Umic hat and leaning up against a man wearing a vest with Mars Tactical stitched onto the chest. On the other end of the group was the other Security guard from the recording.  

She flipped the picture over and found that it was not actually a piece of paper, it was something more advanced. The back flickered and began to form words across its surface. "11th Quinquennial Intersystem Defense Technologies Convention. SimFire Combat 3rd place team. Hosted by Clovis Bray"

"Huh," Nicole muttered. "Check out me back in the day." She passed the photo to Rykis and put the sketchbooks back into the bag.

The data-pad looked to be in okay shape, but when she tried the power switch nothing happened. At the moment, it was not really worth her time. She figured she could get her Ghost to fix it, but she should probably save it for later. A lot had happened today, and her head was a little fried. 

Setting the data-pad back onto the table, Nicole ran her fingers through her hair and let out a sigh. "Well... This has sure been a day. Wanna take me to bed and call it a night with the newest member of Mist?" 

Rykis let out more of a purr than a chitter. "Mmm... Yes Guardian." 

He dropped the photo on the table and came over to pick her up. By the time they reached the bed on the other side of the room, her armor and her Ghost had made themselves scarce. Hopefully the neighbors did not mind the noise.

--

[clubmudkip]

The final moments of Mixer - What happens at the end of all things?

There weren’t a lot of people online for Mixer’s final moments, and I feel like this should be documented somewhere. So here it is: what it was like to watch interactive livestreaming platform Mixer exhale its very last breath.

It was announced that Mixer would be shut down on July 22nd, 2020. So hundreds of users gathered to watch the few final streams. In the minutes leading up to 12:00 midnight PST, users watched a purple and orange confetti graphic fall from the banner at the top of the site, covering streams and chats in small circles. A celebration of the end, we waited for the clock to roll over. What does the End look like? What happens when a website ceases to exist? We all wanted to find out. 

For the final hours I watched Mixer user Magiccake62 (now on Twitch under the same name!) stream her usual creative art stream; on this night she chose to make clay figures to celebrate the release of indie game Ooblets. From her hands sprang small birds, mushrooms, and frogs; all collectible creatures from the game. Finally she said, “What are they gonna do, BAN me?” and streamed a movie from her childhood. Fortunately for Maggiccake62, no copyright strikes were received, and she was able to continue until the movie’s end. 

Midnight came, and then went. And it was uneventful. We were all still here. Streams were still running. I was confused, so I did what every person born into the Age of the Internet would do. I googled it. I found one single source. (https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/mixer-shutdown-reportedly-set-for-july-23-after-marketing-error) Gaming news website DotEsports was the only reporter of... a marketing error? Despite all official sources listing the 22nd as the true shutdown time, DotEsports insists the true shutdown to be 11am PST on the 23rd. Honestly, this is so on brand for Mixer, you wonderful garbage website. 

So we laughed and shrugged, some of us kept streaming, but most of us went to bed. 

I needed to see the End. What does it feel like when our provider provides no more? Where do you go when you are kicked out of your home?  How often does a community simply cease to exist? 

I set my alarm early. I woke up at 8:45 PST. Only a few streamers were active. Most were bots running pre-recorded content; facecams saying “Thank you and remember to follow me on Twitch.tv!”. Of the few active users, I saw gamers playing Miinecraft, Fortnite, and various first person shooters that I’m not familiar with. I saw one dude streaming porn (because what are they gonna do, BAN him?). Someone was doing a radio show entitled “Mixer’s Funeral” which featured a looping gif of Gibby from iCarly playing a trumpet in front of a coffin, accompanied by various ‘80’s popular music titles. At 9:00am PST Halo Infinite was announced; many users livestreamed their reaction to the title. 

Around 10:00am PST I stumbled upon a co-stream hosted by users DigiDuncan, Gambiy23, and DB05 (all can be found on Twitch under those same names). Each streamer did their own thing; Gambiy23 streamed sitcom King of Queens right from Netflix (because what are they gonna... you know the rest), DigiDuncan scrolled through Mixer watching bits and pieces of others’ final streams, and DB05 watched Youtube poops. On a Discord call together, they wanted to stream until the very end. So this is where I stayed, tuning in and out of chat, laughing along at the long-forgotten sitcom. I got cozy, and waited. 

At around 10:40am PST, Gambiy23 received a copyright strike from Mixer and was banned, ceasing the King of Queens stream. I guess even at the End of all things, there are still rules. 

[First Screenshot] Knowing that the end was near, DB05 began playing a cutscene of the moon falling to the earth from Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The building music made my heart pound. At 10:54am PST, Mixer pushed notifications reading “So long, and thanks for all the fish :)”, a quote mentioned before the planet Earth is demolished in order to make way for the hyperspace bypass, featured in the book series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy written by Douglas Adams. When I hear this quote, I think of it as a goodbye to the universe itself; an acknowledgement of the many wonders one has experienced in their life; one last expression of gratuity for the world they inhabited and the gifts they received from it. It was fitting. Mixer, unafraid, gazed into the void and shouted a final “thank you”. At the same time as the push notifications, MixerBots spammed chats with emojis of goldfish, prompting users to do the same. We sent to chats our final “i love you’s”, “thank you’s”, sent emojis and encouragements, “goodbye’s” and “goodnight’s”. DigiDuncan scrolled through the front page of Mixer, and we watched the streams start to blink out, leaving a blue Mixer “X” logo in their place. The confetti showers returned. The site began to lag. Finally, the clock struck 11:00am PST. 

And the moon fell. 

For a few seconds, the streamers laughed. “Is that it?”, “Is it over?” DB05’s moon had fallen, and the cutscene continued to play. A brilliant flash of white, and Link awakens in the past. The streamers look on, “We’re still he-” Silence cut them off. 

The voices of 10 million users, silenced in an instant. 

I think we expect the End to be deafening, chaotic, and frightening. Like an Action/disaster movie, filled with explosions and screams and panic. But instead the End was peaceful. Quiet. Almost comforting. It was like sitting atop a hill in the morning before the birds start to sing, watching the sun rise over the horizon. Alone, yet serene. 

[Second Screenshot/Third Screenshot] Almost immediately, I realized I could still click around the site. The confetti continued to fall. At 11:12am PST, I returned to the userpage of my friend. All the streams had ended, but the content was still there. User’s “About Me” pages were still active, along with all of their clips, previously recorded streams, and other things like “Stream rules”. I was able to watch the tail end of Magiccake62’s stream from the previous night. I scrolled through Mixer’s homepage, clicking on names to read their bios and watch the stored video clips. It felt like wandering through a neighborhood evacuated before a storm; no time to bring your possessions with you. Houses left unlocked, devoid of life and frozen in time. 

[Fourth Screenshot] by 11:13am PST Chats still remained active as long as you did not navigate away from the page. I continued to talk with some of the users that had been watching the stream. Just a few remaining voices, alone in this huge, empty city. 

[Fifth screenshot/Sixth Screenshot] As I continued to look through the abandoned homes, I caught the tail end of DMacAttack12’s pre-recorded finale stream from the previous night. He was playing indie game Celeste: Farewell. The main character, upon reaching the top of the mountain, experiences a dream where she sees a long dead friend. She apologizes to the friend for not attending the funeral, and the friend laughs. “The Funeral wasn’t for me. It was for all of you, stuck living on without me,” she chortled. The main character awakens from her dream, and takes the time to reconnect with her friends in the present. Perhaps Mixer’s last day was always meant to be that; not a goodbye, but a way to reconnect with each other. 

[Seventh Screenshot] At 11:30am PST, the majority of the streams’ “offline” screencaps had vanished. Chats continued to function, but you could not join new ones. Trying to visit a new stream would result in the chat section loading forever. The voices were dwindling. As far as I could tell, it was just myself and DigiDuncan. We talked about the future and exchanged Twitch handles, and thanked each other for being here - at least we could watch this noiseless sunrise together. We wondered if we were truly alone, if anyone could hear us. We wondered how long this would last. How long did the two of us have, in the End? 

[Eighth Screenshot] At 11:38am PST, chat function disconnected. I could no longer send messages to my new friend. Error messages began popping up in place of streams. DigiDuncan told me they were using chat via OBS, a client that helps you set up and organize your stream (I was just using in browser), so their world was completely different from the one that I was experiencing. I worried about DigiDuncan. I was forced out, and I don’t know if they were left to experience the End alone. 

[Ninth Screenshot] At 12:10pm PST, All mixer URLs began returning this error message. The End was no longer a void, but a brilliant blinding white light. But as quickly as it came, it vanished. 

[Tenth Screenshot] I returned to the Mixer homepage at 12:11pm PST to find it completely empty, but still stylized with the Mixer logo and signature blue backgrounds. The booming voice of the error message notifies me that something has gone wrong as the homes filled with memories I had been visiting vanish around me, leaving endless winding pavement streets and empty grass lots in their wake. What was once a bustling community was now nothing at all. Any presence of the people who once lived here, their culture, their love and their stories, had simply evaporated into the sunrise. With no other words or pictures to advertise streams, everything is quiet. It is peaceful. It is the End.

[Eleventh Screenshot] By 12:16pm PST, all Mixer URLs displayed a graphic of a blue robot with hearts for eyes. This continues to be the case at the time of posting. With no users and no staff, Mixer itself is Alone, yet serene. In this graphic, at the End of all things, Mixer sighs a final “thank you” to the diaspora.

Goodnight Mixer. So long and thanks for all the fun :)

[perkoform]

SKITS

Title:

The WHOLE-SALE

Characters:

Shipping God

Middle Man

Customer

Plot:

Okay so middle man is on the phone to shipping God the whole time. Customer is trying to buy a beauty product that makes you look EXACTLY like Grace Kelly, through this shipping company. But middle man keeps refusing.  It is one act.

*note on recitation: watch youtube video called: Zuikin Girls – take anything you want! For tonal value.

Dialogue:

Shipping god: we can’t sell that. Tell her that.

Middle man: I’m sorry ma’am we can’t sell you that product today.

Customer: come on, I have the money. (Pause). Trust me sir, I know about the side effect, how it makes you look EXACTLY like Grace Kelly.

Middle man: (turns away from customer) she says she has the money and that she knows about the side effect, what do I say.

Shipping God: don’t tell her anything. Say we do not sell this product.

Middle Man: I’m sorry ma’am we do not sell this product, you will have to try somewhere else.

Customer: (to audience) contrary to popular cinematic convention, (whips out giant gun) I’m not going to whip out a giant gun and threaten the guy, because I can’t get what I want. (throws gun over shoulder)

Customer: it’s a beauty product! I mean, can’t I for a moment take my own health into my own hands…?! (scoff)

Shipping God: tell her, it’s her health.

Middle Man: it’s your health, ma’am.

Everyone laughs

*Someone holds up a sign to the audience that says, ‘LATERS, ON…’

On stage is a girl with her hair in a towel, wearing a GRACE KELLY mask.

    Title:

I ordered ‘The Rest of Eternity’ Online

Characters:

Shipping God

Customer

DIALOGUE: Customer: hi, I ordered ‘someone else’s life to live’ the other day from your company, but some part of the product was still a drag to experience, and I’d like my money back please.

Shipping God: I’m sorry sir, there must have been some kind of mistake. I would like to inform you that we have just received a new shipment of, ‘Krishna’s Own’ Good Karma, ‘Corrupt Cops’, ‘Colonial Values’ and ‘The Original Scapegoat’ that comes in ‘the body and the blood red’,‘Twin Towers were an inside job grey’, and ‘the dingo stole my baby blue’. The blue one comes with an ‘assumption’, on the house. Would you like to try one of these products today sir?

Customer: Why thank-you, I might try ‘Corrupt Cops’. Do you still stock Solipsism? Yes? Thank-you, I’d like to order 22 of this product if that’s possible.

Shipping God: Okay sir, the items will be shipped out just in time for the next mention of a social revolution.

Customer: tank-you.

             Title:

The Punch-Up: Season 1

Characters:

Fred

Jim

(played by women)

Plot:

Fred and Jim are having a rational conversation about how they do not get along at the moment and about how they used to be friends.

*NOTE: Jim and Fred both wear one boxing glove each. Fred is holding a beer can the whole time. Jim is holding tongs and wearing an apron.

Dialogue:

Fred: oh my god I hate youuuuuuu…(said like, hi how are you?)

*throws a punch

Jim: you have no idea (said like, its been a while how are you? Using fake smiles.)

*throws a punch

Fred: I’m going to kill you over that incident with my wife.

*punching each other

Jim: haven’t you heard of polyamory, maybe you should branch out and actually live a little.

*remove their punching gloves and stop punching

Fred: you know…you make a good point. I actually can’t fight you there…I agree, but you see I’m channelling Barbara, (turns to crowd and says, ‘she’s my wife’) and she needs me to be jealous, so you are gonna fuckin’ pay for what you did. I am pissed.

*put gloves back on and start punching again

Jim: tell her I’d knock her up, that’ll do it. .  

*cease punching for a moment, jim and fred grab each other by the shoulders and say

Fred: we should all just have kids withal the wimmin. Leave no womin unimpregnated. 24/7.

Jim: yeah, what kind of society is this? What are we even doing here, I mean why isn’t 24/7 baby making like, the norm??

*resumes punching. Jim continues punching as Fred stops to contemplate

Fred: I’m gonna try and answer that. Perhaps it’s just not the right time in earth’s geological cycle to support that kind of reproduction, the food plants are not growing enough. They are sending us an internal, instinctual message that this is kind of life is not supportable at the moment.

Fred continues punching as Jim states

Jim: very logical, I think that’s the reason. So again, why do you hate me? Because Barbara needed you to be jealous so that she feels valued?

*fight stops for a second

Fred: I’m not the type to say to her, ‘but hey Barbara, you scored me and Jim!’

- maybe I should say to her, ‘you’re an individual’, that wouldn’t go down that well, maybe ‘you’re special, there’s only one of you’.

Jim: try saying, ‘you suit me uniquely’

Laughter from Fred and Jim

*resume punching. They punch for a while. Jim goes down cold, Fred states

Fred: it’s just like I don’t even know, there’s no one like her or anyone for that matter. Even twins are different. So like, I can’t value her anymore at the moment.

*Jim is lying on the ground, he states

Jim: I get it you have to like, show her that you value her, without getting into a brawl, show her that jealousy is not the answer! Free love is the answer!

Fred: I don’t know how that’s possible, all reason aside.

Jim: okay Fred, okay.

 PROPS:

Boxing gloves

A moustache (for Fred)

Face paint (to paint a beard on Jim)

Beer can

Tongs

Misogynistic apron

*note must be wearing wife beaters and short shorts

    Title:

Get A Way With It

CHARACTERS:

Jimmy

God

PLOT:

*Jimmy is reciting the following text, while doing the following things:

 Jimmy shoots Satan

Jimmy shoots God

Jimmy dowsing the Great Barrier reef with bleach.

Jimmy cuts down the oldest tree known to man.

Jimmy dressed as Captain Cook, shooting Aborigines

Jimmy dressed as Bob Marley, shooting the sheriff.

A baby born doll with giant lollipop. Jimmy steals the lollipop.

Jimmy is wearing a shirt that says, ‘Get-a-way-with-it’

 DIALOGUE:

*Jimmy smokes a bong.

God: And so it was told, (Jimmy shoots Satan)

Jimmy: (said with an efficient air) Shit in one hand, wish in the other and see which one gets full quickest. (shoots God)

This is what my mother used to say. (Shoots aborigine)

Because everyone knows that if you can get away with it, (bleaches the reef)

it’s legal. Because, well, it happened. (steals candy from baby) No one stopped you right?

and so, It. Is. legal. (licks the lollipop, then throws it away)

So, aim for the heart, stab once, and tell ‘em, down the street. Because (shoots the Sheriff)

you only get one chance, and if you fuck it up, it’s your head on the chopping block. (cuts down the tree)

 PROPS:

Hitler moustache

Bandana (for aborigine)

Face paint – black and white

boomerang

Fork and horns

Toga and beard

Captain cook hat

A map

20 Litre storage container/round fish tank with coral statue in it. (to label with a sign that says ‘the great barrier reef’)

Bottle of bleach

A bong

Baby born doll

Giant carnival lollipop

Dreadlock wig

Sheriff badge

Potato gun

Potato

Cardboard cut-out of a tree

A saw

A t-shirt

Black marker

          Title:

Poignant Sculptural representations #1: The Winning Diorama at the Primary School Fete

Plot:

20 litre storage container full of black water with a layer of dirt and astro-turf stuck to the lid. Jimmy sticks a pump in the turf and pumps out the “oil” into a jerry can, by sucking on the pipe. Meanwhile, an automated voice reads out geological facts about oil and its lifespan and how it’s the nutrients for the forests of the future.  (in a really poignant way.)

Title:

Poignant Sculptural Representation #2: The Prospective Sculpture

Plot:

On a table is 30kg of clay with a scroll in a canister, hidden inside. Participants have 5minute to search through the clay for the canister with the scroll inside. If they find the scroll they get a free beer. This will be on stage by the way, in the interval.

              Title:

Track Marks and Pigeonholes

Characters:

‘Main Character’

‘Other people’

Plot:

*this is a video work

‘Main character’ is not a heroin addict.

‘Other people’ believe that ‘main character’ is a heroin addict. ‘Other people’ won’t stop treating ‘main character’ like a heroin addict.

‘Other people’ are constantly trying to catch ‘main character’ in “the act” of taking heroin but ‘main character’ actually never takes heroin so they will never catch them.

‘Other people’ cry and wail and state “when do you do it, I know that you do!” and grab him by the arm, to check for track marks.

‘Main character’ always begs ‘other people’ to believe that “I don’t do that, seriously. I don’t know what else to say.”

SCENARIOS:

‘other people’ bust in on ‘main character’ and accuse him of taking heroin:

-          On the toilet

-          In the shower

-          In bed asleep

-          At the corner store at 11pm

-          Driving

-          Praying in an empty church

-          Helping an old lady across the street

-          While watching television, the people on the television are accusing him.

-          Running from crazed fan grrls.

-          In china from inside a bowl of rice.

-          After he drops a hanky and a crowd swamp him ‘Perfume-style’. He blurts out over the top of the crowd, I don’t take heroin!

Haha

 *ALSO:

Idea: Making Mighty Boosh Into a SERIOUS DRAMA about father-son bonding psychology

Title:

Initially Undetected

Story:

“You’re Not allowed to Draw Me While I’m Raping you emotionally with This Other Girl,” he said, sounding a bit annoyed. “it totally ruins the point.” He got up and pulled out his dick, no no, he pulled it out then got up and walked over to me. He grabbed the computer I was using to draw him with (on paint) and clipped me in the head, with the computer. I went down cold, hah hah. Funny story.

 Title:

Last in Winning Backwards #1

Plot:

A girl wakes up in her backyard one morning. She is lying on her back on the grass. She thinks, “it’s a beautiful day, I might go for a walk”. She goes for a walk in the park. As she’s walking she contemplates life. The end.

Dialogue:

*Birds twitter. The sun is shining.

Girl: hmm I think I might go for a walk.

*Cut to park. Girl is walking

Girl: I think that I might believe today that I was born along time ago. And it was before anyone I know in this life were ever alive. I had decided shortly after I was born that, I would never fuck and live forever. So I guess it makes sense that larger society marginalise me. I ignore it when they marginalise anyone else, really it’s just me. The point being, for the third time, they marginalise people. They hate. They are murderers. They don’t get shit. They don’t honestly do it with the same vengeance to everyone else, and and, hell is hierarchical. Not heaven. So I’m the top dog around here. Do you get shit? Hah hah respiratory I fucking will wake up in this bed cunt tomorrow morning. You will NOT get me out of bed, CUNT.

[kevinhaas]

Lost Little Verse: FutureRefused2Change.

FutureRefused2Change

Videos: 25 Run Time: ~2 hours First Video: “ warningvideo.wmv  ” (February 22, 2011) Latest Video: “ Return “ (October 31, 2012) Media: Youtube

Status: Discontinued.

Welcome back to Lost Little Verse! This time, we’ll be taking a look at FutureRefused2Change, a series about a man who finds an odd little video, and whose life subsequently goes to hell!

[Spoilers below the cut]

Stack, a man who most certainly has perused an r-slash forum in his day, is one day checking his old VHS tapes for a copy of Candle Cove an old “pirate show” from his youth. Instead, he finds a tape with “thirty minutes of static” (all of which he watches) and an eerie/cryptic message at the end.

Thinking it a prank by one of his friends, he retaliates by attempting to prank them in return and weaseling a confession out of them. When this falls through, he spends the next several videos trying to uncover the mystery of the tape, while starting to feel the traditional symptoms of a Slenderman Haunting. Occasionally the Slender Man himself will show up to wiggle ominously.

Things continue to go downhill as it’s revealed that several of Stack’s friends have also had encounters with the Slenderman (despite the fact that none of them recognized or had any strong feelings towards the Slenderman “puppet” Slack makes in the prank video).

From that point on a whole lot of nothing happens. There’s some cryptic messages, some coughing up blood, some dudes in masks, and a whole lot of the Operator symbol. There’s a lot of attempts to sound deep by using theoretical physics, but it seems so hamfisted coming from the main character.

Towards the end there’s a “hijacking” of the channel by a masked man who has no idea how to enunciate. He posts his student art film (which seems to be cross-posted to another channel, TheBoneCreekStory, which I doubt I’ll look into) and then promptly fucks off.

The series ends with the main character informing us that there will be plenty more updates. Seeing as that video was posted over five years ago... yeah, I doubt it.

--

So, what is there to say about FR2C? Well, if my sprinklings of cynicism didn’t clue you in, I’m not especially fond of this. It was a slug to get through, despite its rather low runtime.

There’s just nothing to really latch onto. There’s no really original concepts, no interesting characters, no likable characters, no tension, nothing. The biggest conflict you’ll encounter in this series is trying to hear what everyone is saying, because the audio is just God-awful. Half the time I was watching I had my volume cranked up to max and I was still straining to make out conversations.

What’s endlessly obnoxious is that the main character can’t stop making Nerdy References. When he’s not making allusions to EMH, he’s calling back to literally every mainstream “nerd” property you can think of. Outside of his vaguely Alt-Right-looking nerd persona, Stack has nothing going on. The creator tries to set up some Tragic Backstory by having him talk vaguely about “The Accident” and “His Grief” but nothing ever comes out of it.

The only thing I can really give to FR2C is its title. There’s a bit of behind-the-scenes that states that the world will be decimated by Slenderman unless he’s destroyed before he’s unleashed. (I’m torn between believing that the series implies either A.) he was sealed up somewhere in Iraq, where Stack’s friend was stationed and saw him, or B.) the thing we know as “Slenderman” isn’t actually its whole being, and it was to be released in the year 2015.) Along with the title, there’s an audio clip in “Phantom Call” where future-Stack and a friend attempt to take the Man on themselves, but this apparently ends in their deaths(?). Hence, it seems, the future will refuse to change.

At the end of the day, I hope the creator had fun. That’s all I can hope for for anyone who wants to start a webseries. I want to critique in the hopes that someone can learn and become a better artist as they have fun! I’d also like to save all of you a few hours’ time, if I may.

Until next time,

Kevinhaas.

[lausscribbles]

‘I’m a cute psycho killer, isn’t it obvious?’ x Dan Howell

yes, this is a halloween one shot, YES I KNOW IT’S ONLY SEPTEMBER LEAVE ME ALONE. anyway, enjoy xx (side note : Y/F/N = your friend’s name)

You never were a big fan of dress up parties, especially when they were Halloween themed. All the fake blood, open gushing wounds and other way too explicit make-up just made you nauseous. And all the people who decided to be an absolute douche and dress up as a killer clown, didn’t make it any better. But, you never had a choice when it came to whether you’d go or not go to a party. Your best friend, [Y/F/N], just knocked on your door, basically threw an outfit in your face, and dragged you along. (That was one of the reasons you always made sure your phone was on full battery in the evening in the weekends.) Tonight was yet another one of those nights. [Y/F/N] had texted you, saying she would be at your apartment in ten minutes to pick you up for some Halloween party somewhere on the other side of London. And now you had to improvise some sort of Halloween attire. Something that wasn’t too obvious, since you weren’t really about going all out with costumes. So you decided on wearing simple jeans, some boots and a shirt that had an embroidered text on it, saying ‘cute but psycho’. A small bow clip in your hair and some plastic knife with red stains made your outfit complete. But when you saw [Y/F/N]’s outfit, you immediately felt quit underdressed. ‘Oh, c’mon, [Y/N],’ she sighed, rolling her eyes that looked plain white because of the contacts she was wearing. ‘Couldn’t you try a little harder?’ I raised the knife I was holding in my hands, grinning sheepishly. ‘You know I’m not that into Halloween.’ I shrugged, and then looked, a bit disturbed, at the fake blood that covered half of [Y/F/N]’s face. ‘The only thing I like about it is that I can watch ‘Nightmare before Christmas’.’ ‘I really don’t get why we are friends,’ [Y/F/N] sighed, but then smiled, which looked really upsetting because of her ripped mouth. ‘Let’s just go, maybe I can convince you to get some fake blood here and there.’ ‘Not going to happen.’ You smiled at her, taking your phone and keys, and following her outside. You had no clue how someone got away with a house party in a London suburb, but they had made it happen. Loads of people were dressed from head to toe, fake blood was seen on almost every visible body part, and there was a wide range of creepy masks. And, of course, those damn killer clowns. You suddenly wished you had brought a real knife, just to feel a bit safer around the pale faced and red painted lips demons. And the pounding music that seemed to raise your heartbeat even more, didn’t quit help with the whole situation. So, you quickly followed [Y/F/N] inside, avoiding eye contact with everyone while clinging tightly onto your plastic knife, that felt really stupid compared to the really realistic looking torture instruments. Why couldn’t people just dress up as cats and pumpkins like in the good old days? The music only got louder as you got closer to the house, and it seemed almost unbearable once you were inside. But you couldn’t tell if it was really the music, or the nauseous making smell and creepy faces staring at you. (Or that was what they did in your imagination. In reality, they were all laughing, drinking, and dancing. An odd combination with the masks and make-up.) [Y/F/N] handed you a blue cup, smiling. ‘Drink up, I know how nervous you are. And don’t worry, I’m not drinking so we’ll get home safely.’ You smiled thankfully at her and took a careful sip, glad that it was one of your favorite drinks. ‘I’m going to say hi to some people, you’ll be okay?’ You just nodded and smiled again. You’d became pretty good at being alone at parties this big. But this was better than to tag alone with [Y/F/N] and have to go through all the awkward introductions. And she knew you preferred staying behind. With a quick wave, she disappeared in the crowd of dancing costumes. You found a good spot in the kitchen, right next to the snack table, where the music wasn’t too loud. And you didn’t seem to be the only person that was searching for company in food. He was awkwardly shoving a handful of crisps into his mouth, when you made eye contact. He looked to say at least horrified that I had ‘busted’ him, and wanted to say something, but when he opened up his mouth, half of the crisps fell out his mouth again. You tried really hard to not laugh at him, but it was kinda hard not to. ‘I’m sorry,’ you said, apologizing for laughing at his awkward moment. He quickly munched away at the remaining crisps, while walking over to you. ‘That’s okay. Guess we’re in this together huh?’ He grinned, pointing at his ‘outfit’. He was wearing a black jeans, along with a black, long sleeved shirt. ‘Are you dressed as an emo kid?’ You frowned, looking at his hair that clearly once used to be a fringe. ‘I guess,’ he shrugged. ‘And you are?’ ‘A cute psycho killer, duh.’ You said, dangerously swinging your plastic knife around, while pointing at your bow in your hair. ‘Obviously,’ he chuckled. ‘Hi, I’m Dan, the emo kid. And what is your name, cute psycho killer?’ ‘[Y/N],’ you smiled. ‘What’s your excuse for not wearing a costume?’ ‘Partly didn’t get the memo it was supposed to be a dress up kinda thing. Kinda played video games until the last minute and got too lazy to put on something else. You?’ Dan smiled, rolling up his sleeves ‘till they reached his elbows, leaving some left over crumbs of the crisps on his sleeves. ‘I don’t really like Halloween.’ ‘What?!’ Dan said, gasping dramatically. ‘But the Spooky Season is the best season! I’m sorry, but we really can’t be friends.’ ‘Spooky Season?’ You laughed. ‘That sounds way cuter than Halloween really is. I mean, look at the people around you. They all look like they are murdered, or are about to murder someone. That’s not spooky anymore. That’s straight up psycho.’ ‘Says the girl dressed as a ‘cute psycho’.’ Dan grinned, pointing at my bow. ‘Damn, you got me there.’ You laughed. ‘Anyway, if you hate Halloween, why are you here?’ ‘Because my best friend basically drags me to every party. I know what you’re thinking, what a cruel friend, but otherwise she’d go alone, so I’d rather go with her so at least I’m here if she does something stupid.’ ‘That’s actually really nice of you, … For a psycho killer.’ Dan added, laughing. You just roll your eyes and take a big sip of your drink. ‘It doesn’t look like you’re having the best time either.’ You raised an eyebrow at him, and quickly glanced at the dancing crowd, to see if [Y/F/N] had returned yet. ‘Once again, kinda in the same situation.’ Dan smiled, and then looked behind him when someone shouted his name. ‘It looks like my friend is ready to go. But hey, give me your number. Maybe I could convince you that Spooky Season in fact is very fun.’ ‘I’d doubt you could do that, Dan, but I’m willing to give you a chance.’ You laughed, motioning him to give you his phone so you could add your number. ‘I’ll text you,’ Dan said, winking and snapping his fingers at you, in an obvious ironically way, making you laugh. ‘Don’t kill to many people, cute psycho.’ ‘And you don’t cry too much over My Chemical Romance. Watch out, or I will play that one note.’ ‘Nice one,’ Dan laughed, going for another grab in the crisps bowl, waving with his other hand, while walking away. And of course, he stumbled against someone, spilling all the crisps on the floor. You chuckled, while he looked back at you, hoping as if you wouldn’t have seen it. He shrugged and then quickly walked out of the house. ‘Hey! You okay?’ [Y/F/N] stood suddenly in front of you, smiling. ‘Yeah, I’m okay.’ You smiled back at her. ‘What happened?’ She asked, looking suspiciously at you. ‘Nothing special.’ But you couldn’t stop smiling for some silly reason. And when you felt your phone violently vibrating in your pocket, that smile was there to stay. Maybe ‘Spooky Season’ wasn’t that bad after all. If you’d count out the creepy clowns, bloody make-up and masks, and kept in the awkward, tall, emo guys.

[parkersenses]

Patience is Key

Fandom: Marvel Ship: Peter Parker x Reader Requested: Yes (if you're looking for a quick drabble may I request a peter x reader but in a soulmate au) Genre: Fluffyish Soulmate!AU  Warnings: Mentions of Injuries, Food, Violence, Blood

You had never been an impatient person. You could wait in long lines without getting antsy, and packed highways of traffic didn’t bother you. You weren’t an impatient person.

But when it came to your soulmate, well, the feeling overcame you.

The bruises that appeared on your body nearly every day bothered you, but not because they were difficult to cover up. It was because you knew they weren’t yours. Having the knowledge that your soulmate was receiving these injuries in who knew what ways made you worried.

Sure, you didn’t know the person. But you were destined to be with them. That had to mean something. Every time a new bruise or scrape or cut showed up, your impatience grew. You couldn’t help but worry that one day, the injuries would stop. They’d stop appearing on your skin, and then you wouldn’t have a sign that they were alive anymore.

So you were impatient. You wanted to find your soulmate before it was too late, and you sure as hell wanted to confront them about the injuries they were receiving. You knew you were going to give them a firm speech when you met them. Whether they were just clumsy, or had some kind of bully after them, you would chastise them.

Leaving you worried sick every hour of every day wasn’t alright.

And besides the occasional bruise that would appear when you bumped into a corner of a table, or a paper cut on your fingers from filing through some homework, you didn’t think you ever worried your soulmate as much as they worried you.

You were suddenly an incredibly impatient person when the biggest bruise you’d ever seen showed up on your ribcage. The blue and purple marks spanned across your whole side, small cuts accompanying them throughout random places of your skin, and you poked at them as you looked in the mirror. As usual, they caused you no pain.

You sighed as you thought of what, or who, brought these upon your soulmate, and you didn’t want to imagine how painful it must be for them at this moment. You could barely stand looking at it, but to have to feel it as well? It seemed unbearable.

You dropped your shirt back down, unconsciously rubbing over the bruises. You plopped back onto your bed and turned on your television. A flashing ‘Breaking News’ appeared on the screen, interrupting any and all other programs. Your eyebrows furrowed as you watched the television hosts explain a grueling fight between local hero Spiderman and a villain you had never even heard of.

“The battle has finally ended, but not gently. The villain is in the custody of Queens Police Department, although he did manage to destroy multiple stores and buildings in the process of the fight. Even Spiderman didn’t come out clean. He seemed to have suffered some quite painful injuries as he was thrown around. Here’s a clip of the battle. Viewer discretion is advised,” the anchor finished with a nod, and a poorly shot video came on screen.

You furrowed your eyebrows as you watch the superhero get thrown about, lifted high into the sky and dropped to the ground harshly. You looked closely when you noticed him fall on his side, and as he stood up, he rubbed at it over his suit. The eyes on his suit were small, squinting, and you knew he was in pain.

You knew it was a longshot, and it could’ve been something completely random, but it was the same spot where your bruises had appeared. And you were impatient about this, so naturally, you weren’t going to leave the suspicion alone.

More bruises and cuts formed, and each time they did, you checked the news for anymore information on Spiderman's battles. And each time, you watched footage of him getting hit and thrown around; he always seemed to rub the spots where your fake injuries where.

You grew more suspicious, and more impatient. It couldn't just be a coincidence that the superhero on the television and in your city was getting hurt in the same spots that marks showed up on your body. You had seen him so many times on your walk home from school, swinging from building to building or disappearing into alleyways with no trace of him ever being there. You had never thought you'd eventually have the opportunity to know him, or let alone belong with him.

But you were getting ahead of yourself. You were too caught up in your mind, in your impatience, to think logically. There were billions of people in the world who could be your soulmate. Just because the boy under the Spiderman mask seemed to be receiving injuries that appeared on your body, it doesn't mean you belong together.

Besides, why would you be paired up with a superhero? It doesn't make sense to you, for the world or whoever was in charge of assigning soulmates, to have you belong with someone like that– someone who seemed so important.

So the bruises and cuts kept appearing, and you didn't try to track down Spiderman to confront him. You kept silently worrying every time you noticed a new mark, and you couldn't help but turn the television on, because you had the feeling you would find a video of a new battle including the city's superhero.

And each time, you did. Whether it was a bank robbery or a villain trying to take over Queens, Spiderman stopped them. But still, he took a few punches or blasts from mysterious otherworldly weapons, in the exact same spots your bruises and cuts would be.

“I think it’s possible,” your friend said from next to you, smirking before taking a bite of her sandwich.

“Oh, come on,” you rolled your eyes, although hearing someone else say it made you happy.

She waited until swallowing to continue. “Dude, if he’s getting injured in the same place your soulmate’s marks are coming up, then I wouldn’t doubt it.” She put her sandwich down, turning to face you fully. “You’ve been waiting for this for a while now, (Y/N). Take your chance.”

You frowned, contemplating the risks of trying to find the vigilante. Technically, he was breaking the law. Sure, the police didn’t mind his presence as he had saved so many of them, but still.

The rest of the school day passed with you unthinkingly rubbing at a bruise on your wrist. You weren’t sure how it had even gotten there, but you knew it was your own when you pressed down to feel a small twinge of pain. You scrunched your nose up, not used to having the bruises actually hurt. There were too many for you to find one that was your doing.

You wondered if your soulmate could see it. They had to, if it was on their wrist. But you weren’t sure if they knew it was yours, considering the tens of other bruises they received on a daily basis.

You hoped they did, so they knew you were still here on the other side of them.

You still thought about going after Spiderman on your way home from school. It could be risky, going into the action of a fight. You weren’t sure if finding your soulmate at this moment in time was worth it if you could get physically hurt in the process.

As you walked, looking down at your feet and thinking, you felt something sharp poke at the back of your neck before you were being pushed against a building wall. You gasped as your head whacked against the bricks, and you grimaced in pain. You knew a bump would form there. You looked in front of you with wide eyes, staring at the man in a black mask who had a knife to your neck. A very big, sharp knife, you noticed. You breathed out deeply, trying to keep calm.

“Don’t scream, or you die,” he said, and you quirked an eyebrow at him. 

“That’s a bit of a cliché line, don’t you think?” You responded, and maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea to speak so wittily at him, but it was the only way you could distract yourself from the situation at hand.

He tilted his head at you, although his eyes––the only part of his face that wasn’t covered from the mask––didn’t look angry. He hummed as he pressed the knife slightly closer into your neck, and you tried to pull back, but your head was already compressed against the wall. You clenched your jaw, working to breathe evenly.

You would be fine. Someone would see you. It would be fine.

“Don’t be difficult with me,” he grumbled, and you kept silent this time as the knife still dug into your skin. You worried it would make you bleed. “Give me all the money you have.”

“I don’t have any money,” your voice shook when you spoke, and you held back a whimper when he brought his face closer to yours. “I just came from school. I don’t have any money with me.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said harshly, and your noses almost touched when he leaned forward. “Give me your money.” 

“I think you already got your answer,” a voice said from somewhere above you, but you couldn’t lift your head up to look as the mugger gasped and yanked you from the wall, turning you around so your back was pressed against his front. He held the knife to your throat again, but this time, his arm was wrapped around your neck. His strong grip nearly cut off your airway, and you struggled to take short breaths.

“I’m not afraid to use this knife,” the man said, although his shaking voice contradicted his statement. You still looked around for the mystery voice.

But you already had an inkling of who it was before the arm around your neck disappeared and you heard a groan. You quickly turned around, taking a few steps back. Your eyebrows rose on your forehead when you saw him, his red spandex suit looking freshly sewn from when you’d seen him on the television yesterday, rips scattered up his arm where a new trail of cuts were found on your body– and you were sure his as well.

The mugger was quickly webbed to the wall you were previously pressed against, and Spiderman was moving to face you. You stared at him with wide eyes as he asked, “Are you alright?”

“Uh, yeah,” you replied, looking him up and down. You thought you saw his mask’s eyes widen.

This was your chance.

“Can we, uh,” you stopped, motioning to the alley a few feet away from you.

“Sure,” he said slowly, and you turned around to walk into the secluded space. He followed behind you. “You’re not leading me here to kill me, right? Because I did just save your life.”

He laughed nervously, and you chuckled along with him. “No, I had a question for you,” you said, and he nodded. “Um,” you didn’t know how to approach the situation, suddenly. He looked patiently at you. Or at least, you thought he was. You couldn’t quite tell over the mask. 

You took a deep breath before speaking. “I need you to take off your suit.”

“Excuse me?” He sounded affronted, and his eyes widened. You held back a smile at his tone, sounding so shocked. “Why would I- Who- Excuse me?”

“Look, can you just,” you sighed. You didn’t think he would cave quickly, and you just wanted to know. You pointed at a part of his suit, at the part where he would have the same bruises that spanned across your side. You saw his eye’s on his suit shrink, and it looked like his eyebrows were furrowing. You thought it meant that he figured out why you were asking.

He sighed after a few seconds. “Fine,” he said, pulling his suit out from where it was tucked under his mask. You saw his skin slowly be unveiled as he pushed the suit slowly further down his body. First his neck was exposed, then his chest, and then he pulled it down to his waist. 

You breathed out shakily when you saw the bruises, identical to your own.“Oh my god,” you let out with a breath, and you saw him take a step back when he heard the words. To stop him from running away scared, you lifted your shirt up slightly to reveal your side and the bruises that covered it.

You heard him breathe in quickly. “You’re-” he said and stopped, tilting his head at you as he examined your face. 

You burst into a smile. You had found your soulmate. And you were right. It was the city’s superhero.

He pulled his suit back up to cover him, but he kept his eyes on you. “I’m (Y/N),” you said, sticking your hand out for him to shake. You realized it must have been dorky, and you could feel your cheeks heat up, but you didn’t retract your hand. He laughed lightly, taking your hand in his own and squeezing it. You held onto his hand for a few seconds too long before letting go, but you didn’t care. 

He was your soulmate. It was okay. 

“Um,” he hesitated for a moment, and you knew it was because he had never revealed his identity to anyone– his identity as Spiderman, and who he was under the mask. Then he lifted a hand, and you didn’t have enough time to process it until his real face was met with yours. He dropped his hand, clutching the mask tightly. “I’m Peter.”

You grinned at him, taking in his face. He was beautiful, and you didn’t know how to handle the fact that your soulmate was standing in front of you. And then you smacked his shoulder with your hand, hard. He stumbled backwards, looking at you with shocked, wide eyes.

“What was that for?!” He exclaimed, and you stared at him with furrowed eyebrows.

“I have been worried sick! I’ve had to deal with your bruises and cuts appearing on my body for months now, and I didn’t know how you were getting them! You’ve been risking your life! This is unsafe!”

He exchanged his surprised face for a small smile that was growing bigger by the second. “Sorry?” He said with a squeaky voice, and you broke, smiling back at him.

“You should be,” you responded, and the two of you stood there, staring at each other with stupid smiles.

And suddenly, your impatience disappeared from your body. You could go back to being patient. Your soulmate was finally here, and maybe you would keep worrying, knowing the job he had. But it was okay, because you knew who he was, and you could get to know him as much as you’d been yearning to for as long as you could remember. 

********************** Here you guys go!! I think I really like this one. Please let me know what you think of it, I’d love some feedback!! Requests are open :)

~e

Tag List: @quokkatrash @avengersgirllorianna @gdmora @sachiparker @chocolatekittys @thumper-darling @deans-angel-of-thursdays @vegeterianbassist @itsssmichelleee @frappichino23 @themilkface @shannonxbarnes @watchitburr @captain-sherlockomg @superwholockian5ever @teacher-crushed @duquesarosa @peter-my-parker @buckysberrie @neverlands-outcast @thespidersman @andreagracing @ketterdame @cat-in-a-hoodie @galacticamidala @kassidydem @radicalstars @lilyannez 

[amaranthinecanicular]

It’s Christmas out in space, and Lance has made it his mission to smooch everyone. (ft: one person who smooches back.)

For @tentwoten! I’m your Voltron Secret Santa! I’m sorry this is late, and I’m also sorry this got so out of hand?? Happy (belated) holidays!!

The meeting runs long, which isn’t a surprise. It runs long because the team bonding exercise was a failure, which also isn’t a surprise. Pidge loves her weird space family, she really does, but she’s ready to hole up with her laptop and her video games far away from the rest of the galaxy for a few hours.

Technically they haven’t been dismissed, but she can’t imagine that the situation is going to repair itself anytime soon. Shiro, Kuron, and Lotor have been arguing for the better part of an hour, while Allura and Coran valiantly attempt to mediate.

“I mean no offense, but hear me when I say this: these exercises are pointless.” Lotor is lounging on a couch, arms spread across the back. He removes his headset and shakes out his hair. “I am no Paladin. While your pilots sit here bonding, I should be strategizing ways to end the war.”

Shiro and Kuron, who are sharing a smaller, more cramped couch, reach up to squeeze the bridges of their noses at the exact same time in the exact same way. When the whole can of worms labeled CLONE SHIRO first opened, Pidge had feared–well, a number of things, and one of them was that they’d never be able to tell the two apart. Now that the theory has been put into practice she’s hard pressed to believe that she ever mistook one for the other. Shiro is patient, gentle, and kind; Kuron is more temperamental, has a shorter fuse. He’s also more honest and easier to relate to. They’re both damaged and good.

Shiro folds his hands together and says, “I understand that you’re eager to defeat Zarkon. We all are. But this is as necessary a step to that end as any other.”

Kuron has yet to let go of the bridge of his nose. “For the tenth time, Lotor, we’re stuck with each other, like it or not.”

“And for the tenth time, Project Kuron, why can’t you be as charming as the original model?”

Kuron’s hand flashes and Allura steps in, eyes hard.

“I know this is more than any of us bargained for,” she says. Coran nods vigorously over her shoulder. “But Shiro and Kuron are right, Lotor. If we are to defeat Zarkon we must learn to coexist and cooperate as a proper team, and you are one of us now.”

Surprise echoes through Lotor’s features, as it has for the past six months whenever someone implied that he was part of the group. It comes and goes so fast that Pidge isn’t sure if anyone else catches it, but it always makes her heart ache, a little. Which sucks, because Lotor is still a jerk who she doesn’t want to sympathize with, even if he’s become more tolerable with time. Barely more tolerable, anyway.

There is a brief but hopeful pause in which it looks like they might actually be getting somewhere. Pidge dares to wonder if her escape plan was premature.

Lotor points at Kuron. “He started it.”

“Oh, really? Because as I recall you started it–when you made me,”

So much for diplomacy. Negotiations devolve once more and a series of Morse code foot taps tell her that Hunk is just as ready for a tactical retreat; another series of foot taps spell out GOOD LUCK from Matt, who is sitting in the armchair across from them, watching the drama unfold with a bag of substitute space potato chips. Pidge executes a stealthy military roll into an army crawl for the door.

“Lance’s bathroom trip was such a good call. Bail out of this crazy before it starts,” Hunk says, crawling behind her.

“Bathroom? He didn’t go to the bathroom. He went to call Keith,”

“Uh, no,” says Hunk, with more sass than Pidge appreciates. “He was all bummed yesterday because Marmora had a mission and they weren’t going to be able to talk today. He has their schedule memorized.”

“Well, he told me he was making a call. And anyway it’s been way too long for a trip to the bathroom, unless–”

A prickle of cold comes over her. She’s only a few feet from the door, and as it senses her and slides open, she sees it: a sprig of green, dotted with red berries. She freezes.

“Pidge? What’s up?”

“What day is it on earth?”

“Huh? What does that–”

“What day is it, Hunk?”

Hunk looks like he’s going to say something else but then his eyes catch the poisonous plant fixed to the doorframe. Horror morphs his features. “Oh, no.”

From across the room Matt says, “It’s December 25th–oh, it’s Christmas. Huh.”

That catches Shiro and Kuron’s attentions. “It is?” says one, and the other says, “It’s Christmas?”

Lotor, looking annoyed at being ignored, flips his hair over one shoulder. “And what, pray tell, is this Christmas?”

“Oh yes, do tell,”

Dutifully, Shiro and Kuron give them a rundown on Christmas.

“That sounds lovely,” says Allura. “Actually, it sounds a little like the Altean celebration of life, love, and light, Moktkrii.”

Coran sighs wistfully. “Ah, Moktkrii. Truly the most wonderful time of fourteen solar cycles.”

“Cool, Space Christmas,” says Matt. He crunches a chip.

“Focus!” says Pidge. “This is not the time for peace in space and goodwill toward all sentient lifeforms. This is war.”

“The green paladin gets it. We should be focusing on defeating my father, not Moktkrii or any such childish things,” says Lotor. Lotor is ignored.

Coran strokes his mustache thoughtfully. “That sounds like rather the opposite of what Christmas is about. Granted, I just learned about it two seconds ago,”

“That’s because it’s not just any Christmas–It’s Christmas the way Lance celebrates it.”

The lights go out, for just a moment. They flicker on in a faint, eerie glow of red and green.

“Oh god, it’s starting. Keep away from the doorways!”

Pidge, standing now with her spine lined up against Hunk’s, taps the light on her tablet. She sweeps it across the room in slow circles, heart pounding. “In the Garrison Lance told us about this tradition his family had on Christmas. They’d hang mistletoe all over–” Shiro and Kuron quickly explain mistletoe, “–and then they’d try and surprise each other. The last person to get kissed was the winner. He said it got competitive.”

“Like, insanely competitive. There were war wounds. He had pictures.”

Pidge sets her mouth in a grim line. “Lance was the champ four years running.”

Kuron opens his mouth–Shiro beats him to it.

“Okay, there are two exits in this room, and both have mistletoe. He can only be behind one of them. If we keep together in one or two large groups we’ll survive the night.”

He sounds…happy, more engaged, than he’s sounded since they got him back. In the low light he looks years younger, and it’s so exactly like old times that Pidge feels an echo of his smile on her own face.

Kuron sees it too, and looks blindsided. He deflates, all at once with one quiet sigh.

“Have fun, guys,” he says, and tries to muster a smile. It doesn’t look anything like Shiro’s. “I don’t think I’m feeling up to it.”

Before Pidge can stop him he passes under the door–and nothing happens.

“Kuron–Kuron, wait,” Shiro stutters into action, following at a brisk clip. Pidge watches them go, and then, from behind her:

“Well, this does seem like a charming pantomime of war, but I’m afraid I have more important things to do.”

It happens in slow motion. She hears Lotor make for the other door and she can’t turn around fast enough. The light swings in one smooth arc and just before it comes to rest there’s a thump, and an ungodly shriek. And there, hunched over Lotor’s fallen body, is–

“Holy crow,” cries Matt, tripping out of his chair. Chips go everywhere. “Is that a gremlin?”

If it is, it’s a large, feral, and blue one. Lance pulls his lips from Lotor’s forehead with a loud smack.

“Welcome to the family, L'Oréal!”

He beams Lotor’s face with a package and scampers off. Coran gives his stunned form a solemn solute.

“The first casualty of war.”

Fleeing through the other door, Pidge wonders if anyone else saw the look of awe on Lotor’s bruised face as he unwrapped a jar of Lance’s homemade mud mask. “Family,” she thinks she hears him mutter, but the door slides shut behind her and she can’t be sure.

Call it intuition, call it an educated guess, call it clone telepathy. Maybe it’s just dumb luck. Really it doesn’t matter how Shiro knew that Kuron would be in the motor pool, among the ships and escape pods all lit up red and green. The point is that he’s there, staring up at one of them, dressed in his Voltron suit with his helmet tucked under one arm.

“You’re not going to say goodbye first?”

Kuron doesn’t turn at Shiro’s approach and he doesn’t turn when he says, “Would you?”

“Yes.”

He laughs. It’s a hollow sound. “Another way we’re different, I guess.”

“Kuron…” A muscle twitches in Kuron’s jaw at the sound of his own name and it stills the words in Shiro’s throat, turns them sour. He would call Kuron anything else if he could, would give up his own name, but after he got back and the truth came out, Kuron was the name his counterpart decided for himself and all Shiro could do was respect his choice. Right now that feels a lot more like being helpless.

“If you really want to leave, no one will stop you. But you already know that.”

“We told Keith and Pidge the same thing.” Kuron winces. “You told Pidge the same thing.”

“And you told Keith.” He takes a breath and chooses his words carefully. Hopes he’s not making a mistake. “What I’m afraid you don’t know is that no one wants you to leave, either. You and I might share genetics and memories but we’re not the same person, and I think that’s okay. They’re not asking us to be. They just want us to be us, and they’re happy with that. Maybe we should try to be too.”

Kuron closes his eyes. “If I’m not you…then who am I?”

“You’re mine!”

Lance’s voice echoes in the motorpool and it’s only pure instinct that saves them. Shiro dives behind the pod and drags Kuron with him, blasters hot on their heels. “I thought this was a mistletoe thing, not war,” says Kuron, grimacing and rubbing a bump on the back of his head.

“They said it was that too.” But as soon as he says it he sees all the mistletoe he had missed before, hanging from the prow of every ship, every pod. Kuron says, “If Lance took this determination to Zarkon I think we’d have won the war already,” and Shiro has to agree. If he wasn’t impressed before, he is now.

They assess and they strategize: Lance has them pinned but there’s no way he can get in close enough to kiss them. If Kuron keeps him occupied with return fire, Shiro can flank his position. Scaling the side of the ship that Lance is perched on is easy, even in the dark; he can barely make out the lanky form stretched on the roof but he doesn’t need to. He’s about to attack when Kuron’s voice reaches him, a revelation:

“Shiro! Those blasts aren’t from a bayard!”

And all at once Shiro realizes that they aren’t. He knows what Lance’s bayard looks like, knows how it fires–this isn’t it. This is the discharge from a training rifle, in the hands of a training dummy. He whips around, too slowly, his hand bright and hot–

To see nothing. No one’s there.

One slash of his hand puts the dummy out of commission and then silence descends on the motor pool. He sees Kuron’s black-helmeted head poking out of cover to be sure the coast is clear. Heart pounding, Shiro returns to their position, walking backwards into cover. Over his shoulder he says, “He might have been using us as a distraction while he went after the others, but keep your guard up–”

He turns to have two lips smushed into his visor.

“Ha!” Lance pulls off Kuron’s helmet, a kiss mark printed on the black, and grins so wide Shiro wonders that it doesn’t stretch right off his face. “The student becomes the master!”

“Took me by complete surprise,” says Kuron, coming to stand with them. Pride radiates from his every angle, he practically glows with it. Shiro understands–he’s proud too. All thoughts of identity and escape pods are forgotten.

Lance gives them consolation prizes in the form of Christmas presents, which unfold into the form of matching sweaters, green for him and red for Kuron. Kuron’s dumbfounded expression is a mirror of his own, he’s sure, and Lance laughs in delight to see it. He dips into a quick bow.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go smooch some Holts. Merry Christmas!”

With that he darts off, before Shiro can even muster a thank you.

“I don’t even understand this,” Kuron says, exhaling a laugh as he appraises his sweater. Maybe it’s just the lighting that makes his eyes look damp. That doesn’t explain why Shiro’s eyes feel damp, too. He puts a hand on Kuron’s shoulder.

“I guess it’s who we both are.”

Knitted into the fabric of both sweaters are the words: BEST SPACE DAD IN THE UNIVERSE.

“You’re making a mistake, Matt.”

There’s a good chance that Pidge is right. Maybe they really do need to work together to take Lance down–it’s only the three of them, now, since Allura and Coran branched off to formulate their own battle strategy. But if he wins then he might reclaim some big-brotherly pride at having lost so many spars to her before, and if he loses he gets to be even more proud of her than he already is, so it kind of sounds like a win-win.

He expands his staff and grins. “Sorry, sis. Lance isn’t the only one with a competitive family.”

He lunges, and Pidge, predictably, dances out of the way. Her bayard flares to life, crackling as it whizzes by his ear. She retreats and he keeps pace; her whip is long range, so as long as he keeps close he has the upper hand.

“No, you can’t fight! You’re tearing this family apart!” Hunk wails, in what Matt suspects to be a stellar attempt to ham up the drama. Matt really likes Hunk.

This is a good place for this, very cinematic: Lance seems to have rigged the holo room to respond only to him, and he left it in this nebulous starry space, with sprigs of floating mistletoe overhead and a mirrored surface of water underfoot. Walking across it is like walking across the ocean, or a salt flat, more likely. Matt bets this fight looks awesome from the outside.

He swings the staff in low and sweeps it around for a second strike when Pidge leaps over it. This time it hits home, but she rolls with the momentum and doesn’t let go when Matt tries to yank the staff back; he realizes too late that she let him hit her. Her bayard zips back to her side and he can’t dodge when she jabs for him–she has short-range too, right–and the zap of electricity paralyzes him just long enough for her to blow a wet raspberry into his cheek. His brilliant little sister.

Defeated, Matt sprawls out on the floor, one arm thrown over his eyes and the other clutching at his heart. He wheezes a death knell. “Betrayed…by my own sister…!”

“You started it, genius,” laughs Pidge, and Matt can’t suppress a grin. He peeks out from under his arm.

A shadow is looming over Pidge’s shoulder.

“Pidge, look out–!”

She spins around too late. Matt hears a loud, wet smooch, and then Pidge staggers back, back, scowling and sporting a visible kiss mark on her glasses. “Eww.”

Matt flops back onto the floor, laughing too hard to stay upright. “Sorry, Pidge, he wouldn’t have gotten the drop on you if I hadn’t distracted you.”

“Yeah, no duh,” Pidge grumbles. She drops back next to him on her behind, pouting. Lance’s smiles down at them; the expression could, charitably, be described as triumphant. Shit-eating, less charitably.

“Sibling rivalries, am I right? So tragic. You guys might have beaten me otherwise.” He dons a sober look for all of two seconds before he cackles. “Who am I kidding? I’m the winner of Christmas. No one can beat me!”

Hunk nearly does, right then. He claps Lance in a bear hug while he’s distracted and lifts him clean off the ground. “Challenge accepted!” he cries, puckering his lips but just before he can dethrone the king the room winks out, and all mistletoe vanishes with it.

“I know I’m very kissable, Hunk, but keep in mind that nothing counts unless it’s under the mistletoe.”

Scowling, Hunk sets him down on the floor and he skips out of arms length as soon as his feet touch down. He grins at them over his shoulder. “Before I forget, a present for the losers.”

He whistles once, sharply, and in through the door rolls a robot shaped like a garbage can, with one digital eye. He’s seen it once before and he loves it already, which, admittedly, is basically indifference compared to Pidge’s love for the little thing.

“Beezer!”

“Nyma and Rolo let him by for a weekend playdate. I figured this would count as a good gift for both of you.”

He’s right and he knows it. Matt hasn’t seen Pidge this giddy since the last time they saw Beezer, and they thought they might be about to die then. Lance stretches and pats his stomach like a large blue cat, self-satisfied.

“Man, all this winning is making me hungry. I think I’m going to…have a Christmas snack.”

He says it with strange intent. Matt doesn’t understand, but Hunk does, apparently. His eyes go narrow. “You wouldn’t.”

“Except how I totally would.”

He saunters out, flipping them a two-fingered salute before the door shuts behind him. Hunk squares his shoulders, and Matt suspects he missed something vital.

“Hunk, you can’t,” says Pidge, still hugging Beezer. “Facing him alone, it’s a suicide mission,”

Hunk tilts his chin up, proud and regal. “The kitchen is my territory. My haven. My sanctuary. Lance is holding it hostage and that will not stand.”

Ah, he can understand that. Hunk marches off to battle and Matt snaps off a salute as he passes. Pidge’s salute isn’t quite as snappy, but she gives one. Beezer can’t salute but he makes some encouraging beeps and whistles, and Pidge squeals with delight. His ribs go soft to see her like this–it’s rare, now, that she gets to act her age. Lance really did outdo himself.

Hunk finds Lance in the kitchen, waiting for him. He’s standing at one end of the food dispensers with a goo nozzle holstered at his hip. Mistletoe is hung above the line of dispensers between them.

“So.” Hunk takes up his stance across from him, drawing the farthest nozzle slowly. He lets it hang by his thigh, grip loose, finger balanced on the trigger. “No more sneaking around, huh?”

“You’re my best bro, Hunk. The least I can do is face you head on.” Lance’s fingers flex around the handle of his own nozzle. “Prepare to get smooched.”

It’s a close call, but Lance claims the title the sharpshooter for a reason. Hunk doesn’t get to see if his shot hit the mark before green slime hits him full in the face. He’s still rubbing goo from his eyes when wet lips smack into his nose.

“Aw, did I get you at least?”

He blinks green gunk out of his eyes to see–more green gunk, and also Lance’s face. “Ha! I did get you!”

“That you did. And as a reward…”

He pulls out a box from under the counter, wrapped in pretty red paper–Hunk does appreciate good wrapping–and hands it to him. Hunk doesn’t really believe it at first.

“Is this–is this what I think it is? Ohmygosh it’s a Cooking Mama 5000! Designed by master chef and aeronautical engineer Lori Liu, it’s the perfect blend of engineering and art! Lance, these cost a fortune at home, how did you get this?”

Lance preens a little, food goo and all. “Found it in the Space Mall for a steal. I don’t get what the big deal is–it just looks like a fancy blender to me.”

Hunk gasps, scandalized, and covers the Cooking Mama 5000’s hypothetical ears. “Don’t worry, baby, Uncle Lance doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

Lance rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. Hunk had worried, when he heard that Keith wouldn’t be calling. He worried more when he realized Lance was getting this let down on Christmas. He knows the things Lance misses, knows how it hurts him to be so far from home. Keith’s departure came as a blow that none of them were prepared for, and though they sent him off with their blessing–what else could they do?–Hunk knows, too, that his absence wounded Lance more deeply than anyone else.

But here, bathed in food goo and Christmas lights, he looks happy. Relaxed. It’s cheesy, but that’s probably a better Christmas gift than anything else.

He slings an arm around Lance’s shoulders and pulls him close. “Merry Christmas, dude.”

“Aw. Merry Christmas, big guy.”

Lance has to remind himself that the night isn’t over. It feels like it should be; Hunk made some bomb desserts with his new cooking whatchamacallit, and everyone came together for a proper Christmas card moment to enjoy them together. Shiro and Kuron were wearing their sweaters; Pidge was sliding cooking into a slot of Beezer’s to disappear forever, apparently. Even Lotor was present, sporting a black eye beneath his mud mask. Lance felt a little bad about that, but Lotor assured him that the mud made up for it, and even gave him a Christmas present in return. Or Moktkrii, that’s what he called it, and handed him a bottle of his shampoo, along with a bruising punch to his shoulder. So. He guesses they’re even now.

Allura and Coran showed up, too, but they slunk away while Lance wasn’t looking. Which is why he’s patrolling the castle now, late though it may feel–he can’t sleep until Christmas is over, and it’s not over until the last person has been kissed and gift-given. Gift-gave? Same difference.

He remembers when he told Hunk and Pidge about the mistletoe thing. They had been waiting their turn for a training simulation, chatting about holiday traditions–it was his first Christmas away from home–and when it came Lance’s turn to share he gushed about sibling rivalry and kisses. It’s not a lie, not really. His family did it every year, smushed painful and sloppy kisses to cheeks and hair and noses and it was one of his very favorite things. It was also not the first thing that jumped to his mind and mouth, not the thing he wanted to say.

“Being together,” he says now, and swings his bayard onto his shoulder. There’s no reason for that, it just makes him feel cool, and that makes him feel better. His real favorite tradition, if it can be called that, was always the reunion. His big messy family crammed into a little messy house. There wasn’t a single thing he loved more about Christmas than that.

He’s still homesick–he thinks he’ll never stop being homesick, thinks it will always break his heart. But he’s grown up enough to learn to live with it. He just didn’t think he’d have to learn to live without his new family, too.

“Stupid Keith.” Off being a super cool alien ninja with Marmora, on Christmas. He sounded genuinely remorseful when he told Lance about the mission, not that Lance cared. It’s not like he had to muster all his courage to ask him to come back for Christmas. It’s not like Lance misses him so much it aches all over.

He realizes he’s humming I’ll Be Home For Christmas, and okay, that’s too far. “No moping on Christmas!” he says, very loudly. One of his mom’s rules. He still has two people to kiss under the mistletoe. There’s no time for pretty mulleted distractions that he may or may not be head over heels for. He creeps past the airlocks, humming the Mission Impossible theme instead and pricking his ears–

And he hears something. Beeping. And hissing. Very suspicious beeping and hissing that sounds just like a ship boarding their ship, and someone entering one of his mistletoed airlocks.

He flattens himself against the wall. It’s probably nothing, he thinks, a little wildly. Allura is connected to the ship, wherever she is, and no alarms are blaring. It’s probably nothing. Probably just Rolo and Nyma checking on Beezer. He brings his bayard to bear.

The airlock depressurizes, the door opens, and in walks–

“Keith?”

Keith freezes, only half out of the airlock. He’s still wearing his Marmora spandex. His mullet is mussed all funny from the helmet. He looks goofy and awkward and caught out, and he looks too beautiful to stand.

“Hey,” says Lance, super smooth and not at all squeaky and breathless.

“Hey,” says Keith, very breathless. Then he blinks. “Do you have food goo in your hair?”

Lance shakes his head, shakes away the goo and the question itself, because seriously, there are more important things to focus on, Keith. “But you said–the mission–”

“Marmora can survive without me for one mission. Kolivan understood when I explained–”

“Explained what?”

A wash of red rises up Keith’s neck into his cheeks. He rubs the back of his head, twists up one corner of his mouth, looks away–he’s illegal levels of cute, for real–and points one finger above them. Lance has never loved and hated the little plant as much as much as he has that moment.

“This is important to you, right?”

“Yeah.” He takes Keith’s hand. “Yeah, this is important to me.”

And then Keith is kissing him, and tears are springing to Lance’s eyes so absurdly fast that he almost misses the way Keith smiles, all soft and sweet.

“Merry Christmas,” Keith says. Then Coran tackles him and thank god, really, because otherwise Lance thinks he might have died of being so in love.

“What the hell!” Keith shrieks, too shocked to fight Coran off. Over his shoulder Coran shouts, “Now, Princess!”

Allura dives into the fray, wrestling Keith’s mullet into position to place a dainty peck on his cheek. Lance, observing the debacle from above, thinks now he might die of laughter.

Allura stands and smooths her hands over her hair, triumphant and beautiful. She addresses Lance.

“Since Keith kissed you and I kissed Keith, I believe the win is ours.”

She high fives Coran, and Lance thinks that he doesn’t mind losing, as he pulls a confused and grumpy Keith to his feet and kisses his other cheek. Just this once.